Introspection

Obstacles to development: I've had a series of events happen to me at a young age that effectively destroyed a lot of self-value. I say this not as an excuse, but as something I am confronted with almost daily; a severe inability to be proud of who I am. Not that pride is necessarily a good thing, but in my heart of hearts there are things I despise about myself. Other than that I've always been very creative, and functioned as something of a creative center to my childhood friends. School was easy. I was lazy, uninspired, felt unable to apply my creativity to the tasks at hand. The hard, abstract subjects became a confirmation of my self-sabotaging thoughts and feelings of valuelessness: “not smart enough, not good enough”. Much of it under the surface, or 'subconscious’, to be sure. The easy subjects, those I enjoyed, were unchallenging, and I avoided them as legitimate choices. I was not going to allow myself to pursue an intellectual development that would be so easy; that would readily provide me with success. For me always the hard way; a recurring theme in my life. Avoiding the fun easy stuff was a way to avoid success, and provided a confirmation of a something that became a basic ground rule, induced by the trauma, which implied that I had no value.

At the university the pattern continued. I was lazy, yet passed the exams, excelled at subjects I would soon abandon (political and oriental philosophy), and sought out subjects (mathematical logic, proof theory, thermodynamics), that were too abstract and specialized to fulfill my strong need for integrated knowledge, thus re-confirming the internal destructive mechanism.

Seeking out experience became a driving force in those years, manifested in a profound interest in consciousness altering drugs (marihuana and hashish, later on LSD and psylocibine mushrooms), and sense numbing substance like alcohol and herion. This same drive for experience pushed me away from home, to an American college campus, to Amsterdam, Edinburgh and later Hungary.

All the while I kept developing myself intellectually, reading myself into whatever knowledge domain I was unfamiliar with, never specializing, always moving on to the next domain. During my studies I provided myself with a decent basis in science, philosophy of science and 20^th century European literature (notably Kafka and Celine). I was into Russians for about a year (Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky), and was especially struck by Solzhenytsin. His writing inspired me, describing a cruel world which struck a snare with my own internal dark dominions in which fear, shame, anger and other demons raged continually in the nether regions of my consciousness.

After my M.A. in logical semantics I stopped reading philosophy and got into literary theory and psychology, digging deep into deconstructionism and the postmodern controversy. I discovered Chaos theory and felt that there was finally a formal system, or something resembling it, that would be able to integrate all the fragmented knowledge domains. I did some writing during the period, fragmented in terms of subject matter, although acceptable in terms of quality. Still not in touch at all with the true mechanisms behind my desires and behavior. Existence seemed to oscillate between limitless ambition and a despondent frustration with a cold hard ungiving world.

Even in my music the pattern played on. I challenged myself to learn to play Jazz, pursuing the highest standards, and failing to achieve them. My attention waned into other genres: rock, classical, and experimental avant-garde.

When I was 25 a good friend and fellow musician, he played didgeridoo in our avant-garde project, introduced me to a life altering set of practices: sexual Kung Fu and Chi Kung. I feel that only since the time I started out practicing these esoteric and martial traditions of chi cultivation has my life found a direction. They had a profound impact on me from the very start, that is, the sensation of chi flow literally knocked me off my feet and blew my mind. In fact the years preceding this discovery were a time of tredding on the edge of the abyss. In hind sight a path of inadvertent yet consistent self-denial and destruction.

Do these historical facts explain my feeling of disappointment in my achievements, in myself? Am I able to continue walking the path towards beauty love and self-acceptance? Am I seeking out some kind of justification or excuse for my own self-accusations?

This story is not finished. I have not made peace with myself yet.