The Teeming Brain: The Resurrection

Maybe it’s because I accidentally caught a few minutes of Dan O’Bannon’s wonderful Lovecraft adaptation The Resurrected on TV a few days ago, and the title struck a chord.

Maybe it’s because of the changing weather: the spring season here in Texas is rapidly transitioning to an epic summer (with our historic drought showing no signs of letting up), and the light and heat are invigorating.

Maybe it’s because of the influence of Dark Powers and Mysterious Forces that Man Was Not Meant to Know. Yeah, that’s what I’ll go with.

Whatever the case, the psychological spell that withdrew me into a half-involuntary retreat from blogging and social media and much of the Internet in general for what I thought would be all of 2011 has broken early, and suddenly I find myself blinking and looking around and feeling good about venturing out into the cyber-world again.

So what did I do with all of my extra time during the past five months? Lots of reading and studying. Lots of meditation and contemplation. Lots of cultivating and developing ideas for new creative projects. Lots of resting in the here and now without any sort of plan or goal. This last made for a particularly rich and satisfying experience of home life and day job during the spring semester at my college, since I was fully present for people and circumstances without any ulterior motive or nagging desire to be doing something else — such as, for instance, wasting time on the Internet.

A word of advice from me to you: If one day you come to your senses without any memory of having fallen asleep, and you find that your thoughts and moods, your energy and focus, are being drawn like gravity toward some activity or object of attention without any conscious intention on your part, and in such a way that the rest of your inner life and outer focus are distinctly suffering from this sucking-away of your presence, you should take it as a sign that you need to recenter and reground yourself. That kind of outer-directed, unbalanced psychological situation is dangerous, and also distinctly unpleasant. The specific locus of that spiritual black hole can be any number of things. For me it was social media and the Internet in general. To paraphrase (mangle) Thoreau, I wasn’t riding Facebook and Twitter, they were riding me.

That negative energy feels like it’s gone now. So I’m diving back in while maintaining my center of gravity, because I really do find all of these tools to be pleasantly useful when they’re not playing the role of possessing demons. Hello, everybody. Nice to see you again.