Reality escapes me
People around me seem so grounded, so aware of what is real to them. If you ask them for moments of reality they talk of encounters with poverty and prostitution, or of awareness of their own being – skin, flesh, bone, hair, sinew and the environment around them – textures of cloth, the dimensions of space, natural/artificial light.
In contrast to this very real world, peopled by very real people is my strange, very unreal world. I feel, almost all the time, that everything is unreal, that I am not quite there. I have to struggle to be present. I feel completely detached from my environment and the people around me. These moments of unreality have become more intense lately at certain times. Once in class, when I was participating wholly, asking relevant questions, but I could almost see myself doing this, everything seemed like a delusion - the class, the professor, me asking those questions. Then there are times when I am describing an incident to someone, my voice is modulating appropriately, my facial muscles are aligning to give the accompanying expressions, but while this is all happening, I am following a completely different thought in my mind, thinking on a completely different track, and I suddenly become aware that my body is conversing completely on auto-pilot as it were, while my mind is sorting out a problem or making a connection between memories or elaborating on an interesting concept or tracing images or simply drawing up a to-do list. Such situations, when the world seems totally unreal and I seem to be living in my mind have really started to scare me, I really think I’m losing it, truly I am scared I might be going off my rocker.
I’ve tried to talk to two people about this. RM nodded sagely and though this was comforting I know that let alone know how I felt, she could not even really comprehend what I meant. Then the other day at a friend’s place I suddenly got overwhelmed by this feeling of unreality again and tried to explain it to him. He told me to lie down and relax and gave me a back rub. Later he said he had no clue about what I had been talking but that it had scared him.
I tried very hard yesterday to think of a moment that would be completely real for me, like those that other people find so easy to detail. I knew that it had to be something personal, and not in the environment outside. Could it be when I sit on a hill and absorb the beauty of nature? No, that is unreal for me. How about when I play sports and can hear my heart beat, feel the blood rush through my body? No, nice sensations but still unreal. What about when I feel love or am kissed? Still unreal. I kept dwelling on this, thinking of various moments and then discarding them till I realised that perhaps the only moment when I truly feel grounded, when I feel I am connected to the other person completely is when I feel anger towards him or her.
I know that this is very self central. But often my feeling of unreality is not directed inwards, in such cases it’s as if my self has blurred into the universe. When this happens I see everything in extremely sharp focus, sharper than possible with normal visual acuity. On reflection, I see that this happens in times of great emotion. For example, a few weeks ago I saw Helma Sander-Brahms’ ‘No mercy, no future’. One of the most disturbing films ever made. I was terribly moved and shaken up by this film, and as I walked back from the theatre to my room, everything attained complete sharp focus, the stones on the gravel path were really well-defined and I could see every plane, the stones seemed to leap out at me, the focus was so sharp. And then when I entered the hostel, I saw a tomato on the mess table. A table I see everyday, but suddenly I saw its blueness so clearly, and as with the stones I could see every plane of the tomato distinctly, the contrast of the orange and the pale blue table top was so vivid – all this at a distance of twenty feet or more.
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The plant died. Gloria’s husband said there was too much earth in the pot and so when I had been watering it, the water had simply rolled off. He replanted the pot, and cut away the defective parts of the root but seems to think it won’t survive.
I think this is a sign that I shouldn’t get involved in relationships for I do not know how to love or care for another person selflessly.
posted by cactusjump @ 6:40 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
Enjoyed the read. ps: think you're spot on about your detachment. Sakshi bhav, they call it. Nurture the gift. :-)
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I get the feeling occassionally, but def not all the time. And unlike you, I get the feeling only when I'm alone -except when I'm stoned ;-)
I don't know whether you are capable of caring or loving another person selflessly, but think that when you are suffering, your suffering is so total that you forget about how other people feel - that they may be worried about you, that you may be making them feel helpless by refusing to accept help. Or is it that you are afraid that by accepting it, you will be obliged to them? That you don't want to start caring back?
ubergeek, the
Cactus,
your description about a feeling of "unreality" and mental detachment from your physical surround, is very nicely expressed and interesting to read. Such experiences are, I believe, quite normal and commonplace; or at least, they are oftentimes described in the literature of mysticism. If you were to read from the lives and experiences of such figures as Paramahamsa Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Aurobindo Ghose, and others of this sort, sooner or later you would perhaps turn a page that touched on familiar experiencs -- though your narrative puts me most in mind of views encouraged and cultivated in the context of Buddhism.
As you are in Pune, you could do much worse than to pay a visit to the Samadhi of Meher Baba, near Ahmednagar -- and perhaps pick up a book or two of his, e.g. at the nearby bookstore called Meher Darbar. One such book, for example, is a simple little volume entitled The Secret of Sleep. I myself paid a visit to that tomb-shrine (samadhi) recently. Some people report a sense of being put naturally & effortlessly in touch with a basic grip on reality, or of clarification of existential questions, or other such ways in which the feeling of internal confusion is quite efficiently processed and eased. That has been my personal experience as well.
This is a small, local, practical suggestion in case it may happen to find some point of interest or appeal. The overall important point, in any case, is that your experience strikes me as a perfectly alright human thing to go through; -- it's described with a fine sense of precision and an interesting narrative quality.
I don't know if this line of "contextualizing" may make sense to you immediately. It might require some investigation. Thanks in any event for the fascinating-to-read (even if perhaps difficult-to-pass-through) experience shared.
best,
d.i.
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