kitia973
Member
- Dec 24, 2024
- 95
Note: the following is an entry from my journal and a very personal reflection on my own experiences or values, not meant to romanticize or endorse suffering, also not meant to speak on the behalf of anyone else with their different experiences. It also contains graphic descriptions of pain, suicide, and psychosis.
2025.5.6
I believe the true opposite of human nature (人性) is real, raw, inexorable suffering that destroys all ego, all illusion, even the concept of thought. True suffering is not just pain or despair, but a falsely unending Hell that is both infinite, unbearably real, and illusionary at the same time. The suffering that warps all perception of time, identity, self and other, thought and world, is all reduced to a mere vessel for pain. Where torture is not simply pulling out fingernails or having chemicals injected, but when the method becomes irrelevant as the mind imposes all Hell so terrible that each second is stretched into eternity, and every torture method is inflicted at once, both internally and externally, with not the even possibility of escape, when death becomes a mercy that will never come.
True transcendence, which can only be achieved through suffering, is another key of my spiritual worldview. That during suffering, "transcendence" does not exist all; that inescapable spiral of doubt and despair is precisely what makes suffering, suffering. True transcendence, beyond death and beyond life, is only achieved when everything has burned to ash, even the illusion of false meaning or belief.
Neither suffering nor transcendence are conventionally "good" or "bad"; I do not believe in a simple, dual morality. Instead, suffering and transcendence are states, experiences, and transcendence especially is a revelation that is rarely able to be articulated into words, the unknown is part of the mysticism. Naming conventions are especially difficult, for the Absolute that can be thought is not the true Absolute.
There is, definitively in my personal worldview, something "larger than the universe", God or divinity or the ultimate reality, in my worldview I call it The Absolute.
I have experienced much suffering, and I have a very extraordinary past of surviving ordeals that should have killed me: suicide attempts, month-long fasts, severe alcohol poisonings and overdoses that were well past the lethal amount. I never received any treatment for those ordeals and near-death experiences in my past. I have also experienced traumatic brain injury, which involved a terrifying distortion of consciousness. Many, many people try to lump my spiritual beliefs into a simple mental illness or a category, but those metaphysical beliefs, axis of reality, are forged through real suffering that I have genuinely experienced, without false comfort. Pain etches marks into the mind that words cannot.
It is true that my beliefs come from my own experiences and intuition, as well as personal reflection. I do not usually obsessively devote myself to one external philosophy or religion, but I do read and analyze much of them and there are striking similarities between some of my thought and some of their writings, similarities that seemed like extraordinary coincidences, but surprisingly pleasant to find. But I read religious scriptures and philosophical texts to observe, analyze, and maybe absorb or reflect, but not for performative value, I dislike it when people try to reduce my suffering or beliefs into a box of mental illness or worse, "teenage angst" (this was a few years ago), which is quite invalidating for all genuine trauma survivors or those who haved lived through unrelenting psychosis.
Suffering itself, real-world suffering, is not absurd or meaningless or "bad" because suffering is a lived experience, not just a thought, and such extreme experiences are difficult to label or compartmentalize without diminishing its real-world value. One can call a mass-murder tragedy "absurd" or "senseless" but that does not change that the tragedy has already happened and people have lost their lives. A lot of existentialist and nihilist philosophers have this problem where they label all suffering as meaningless or absurd but have not lived through too much real-world suffering, childhood trauma, or a literal mental hell where reality itself is unraveling with the mind. Nihilist and absurdist philosophers often over-intellectualize pain, which diminishes its real impact. If Nietzsche or Camus were having their fingernails pulled out they probably would not be thinking "wow, this is so absurd" or "wow, this is so meaningless", they would probably only feel pain. And true, unrelenting pain bypasses rationality in a way that Orwell predicted a long time ago in chambers of Room 101, extreme, involuntary pain and torture bypasses all ideology and rational thought, any attempt to intellectualize suffering can only vanish into the void. But sometimes suffering goes even more extreme, there is not even a thought or will for the pain to end because the mind has lost the capability to form rational thought or even impulse in a hell where there is no boundary between self and other anymore.
Yes, during some of my most painful episodes (psychotic or brain-traumatic, where all boundary between thought and reality collapse) I would lose all perception of time and be half-paralyzed for hours that seemed like centuries while my mind flashed through hundreds of torture methods that I could viscerally feel on my own body and mind, in those times there were no "I" anymore, my body or psyche ceased to exist in any meaningful way and I would become a half-transparent vessel of infinite suffering. I could not just declare suffering as meaningless or absurd because I was suffering itself, without rationality or coherent thought.
People tried to label me as "fragile" or "broken" but I know that I am not, and neither are other trauma survivors "fragile" or "broken", because we still exist after falsely-infinite suffering that had lasted for subjective eternities, I have survived multiple suicide attempts that would kill the average human biologically or psychologically but I still exist and think in moments of clarity, and I am still writing and documenting my reflections. I believe existence and the natural unfolding of events to be Fate itself, Fate is not any predetermined script, but a divine way that unfolds naturally. Most people cannot fully understand us and I do not necessarily try to seek validation or complete understanding either, I am aware of limitations from both parties, and I have tried in the past to speak about my thoughts, but the institutions did not understand too well outside the scope of mental illness so talking to them was quite futile.
I only really care about transcripting my thoughts from the intuitive, ineffable sensations onto coherent words on paper, it is not about who reads it or not, but the act itself, meaning (or the lack thereof) is inherent in everything, as Fate, as the Absolute, as suffering and transcendence and this journal entry to an extent.
2025.5.6
I believe the true opposite of human nature (人性) is real, raw, inexorable suffering that destroys all ego, all illusion, even the concept of thought. True suffering is not just pain or despair, but a falsely unending Hell that is both infinite, unbearably real, and illusionary at the same time. The suffering that warps all perception of time, identity, self and other, thought and world, is all reduced to a mere vessel for pain. Where torture is not simply pulling out fingernails or having chemicals injected, but when the method becomes irrelevant as the mind imposes all Hell so terrible that each second is stretched into eternity, and every torture method is inflicted at once, both internally and externally, with not the even possibility of escape, when death becomes a mercy that will never come.
True transcendence, which can only be achieved through suffering, is another key of my spiritual worldview. That during suffering, "transcendence" does not exist all; that inescapable spiral of doubt and despair is precisely what makes suffering, suffering. True transcendence, beyond death and beyond life, is only achieved when everything has burned to ash, even the illusion of false meaning or belief.
Neither suffering nor transcendence are conventionally "good" or "bad"; I do not believe in a simple, dual morality. Instead, suffering and transcendence are states, experiences, and transcendence especially is a revelation that is rarely able to be articulated into words, the unknown is part of the mysticism. Naming conventions are especially difficult, for the Absolute that can be thought is not the true Absolute.
There is, definitively in my personal worldview, something "larger than the universe", God or divinity or the ultimate reality, in my worldview I call it The Absolute.
I have experienced much suffering, and I have a very extraordinary past of surviving ordeals that should have killed me: suicide attempts, month-long fasts, severe alcohol poisonings and overdoses that were well past the lethal amount. I never received any treatment for those ordeals and near-death experiences in my past. I have also experienced traumatic brain injury, which involved a terrifying distortion of consciousness. Many, many people try to lump my spiritual beliefs into a simple mental illness or a category, but those metaphysical beliefs, axis of reality, are forged through real suffering that I have genuinely experienced, without false comfort. Pain etches marks into the mind that words cannot.
It is true that my beliefs come from my own experiences and intuition, as well as personal reflection. I do not usually obsessively devote myself to one external philosophy or religion, but I do read and analyze much of them and there are striking similarities between some of my thought and some of their writings, similarities that seemed like extraordinary coincidences, but surprisingly pleasant to find. But I read religious scriptures and philosophical texts to observe, analyze, and maybe absorb or reflect, but not for performative value, I dislike it when people try to reduce my suffering or beliefs into a box of mental illness or worse, "teenage angst" (this was a few years ago), which is quite invalidating for all genuine trauma survivors or those who haved lived through unrelenting psychosis.
Suffering itself, real-world suffering, is not absurd or meaningless or "bad" because suffering is a lived experience, not just a thought, and such extreme experiences are difficult to label or compartmentalize without diminishing its real-world value. One can call a mass-murder tragedy "absurd" or "senseless" but that does not change that the tragedy has already happened and people have lost their lives. A lot of existentialist and nihilist philosophers have this problem where they label all suffering as meaningless or absurd but have not lived through too much real-world suffering, childhood trauma, or a literal mental hell where reality itself is unraveling with the mind. Nihilist and absurdist philosophers often over-intellectualize pain, which diminishes its real impact. If Nietzsche or Camus were having their fingernails pulled out they probably would not be thinking "wow, this is so absurd" or "wow, this is so meaningless", they would probably only feel pain. And true, unrelenting pain bypasses rationality in a way that Orwell predicted a long time ago in chambers of Room 101, extreme, involuntary pain and torture bypasses all ideology and rational thought, any attempt to intellectualize suffering can only vanish into the void. But sometimes suffering goes even more extreme, there is not even a thought or will for the pain to end because the mind has lost the capability to form rational thought or even impulse in a hell where there is no boundary between self and other anymore.
Yes, during some of my most painful episodes (psychotic or brain-traumatic, where all boundary between thought and reality collapse) I would lose all perception of time and be half-paralyzed for hours that seemed like centuries while my mind flashed through hundreds of torture methods that I could viscerally feel on my own body and mind, in those times there were no "I" anymore, my body or psyche ceased to exist in any meaningful way and I would become a half-transparent vessel of infinite suffering. I could not just declare suffering as meaningless or absurd because I was suffering itself, without rationality or coherent thought.
People tried to label me as "fragile" or "broken" but I know that I am not, and neither are other trauma survivors "fragile" or "broken", because we still exist after falsely-infinite suffering that had lasted for subjective eternities, I have survived multiple suicide attempts that would kill the average human biologically or psychologically but I still exist and think in moments of clarity, and I am still writing and documenting my reflections. I believe existence and the natural unfolding of events to be Fate itself, Fate is not any predetermined script, but a divine way that unfolds naturally. Most people cannot fully understand us and I do not necessarily try to seek validation or complete understanding either, I am aware of limitations from both parties, and I have tried in the past to speak about my thoughts, but the institutions did not understand too well outside the scope of mental illness so talking to them was quite futile.
I only really care about transcripting my thoughts from the intuitive, ineffable sensations onto coherent words on paper, it is not about who reads it or not, but the act itself, meaning (or the lack thereof) is inherent in everything, as Fate, as the Absolute, as suffering and transcendence and this journal entry to an extent.
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