Brendan Monroe
"We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related." -Henry Miller, Sexus

I often find that the deadly combination of independence and psycho-productivity (an ingrained consequence of social/cultural brainwashing) take a toll on my ability to realize the absolute brilliance of Henry Miller's quote from Sexus. I've had the sensation lately that a lot of my long term goals for self-work/progress have to do with a chiseling process. Instead of the idea of gaining more the older you get, I find myself in the midst of the opposite sort of phenomenon of chipping away at excess, brainwash, what I've been taught to believe about the world. I remembered randomly today that back in oh, 2nd grade or so (all the grades sort of mush together in my mind in one big abstraction called my 'youth') I was given an assignment in class where we were given a list of short sentences like, "The sky is blue" or "Grass is green", "Unicorns are real". Next to each statement, we were supposed to write "F" for Fact, "I" for Fiction. I remember this really distinctly because I got confused about what a fact exactly was- the sky is blue, but the sky can also be red, or orange...so why does the statement "The sky is blue" get irreversibly branded as "fact" with no asterisks? So we are literally taught iron binary oppositions from a really young age when our minds are arguably at their most flexible stages. Or think about the fact that when we are babies, we are put into cribs to sleep. By even a couple of years old, it is considered childish and innocuous to sleep with your parents purely because you want to, or you're scared not to. So we are taught to be independent from the cradle.

And yet we crave the other being, we crave for others to know us, we crave to be cradled in times of sadness, invigorated in times of apathy, directed in times of tangle, and validated in times of self-doubt.

To be anti-ego and rather collective is such a contradictory compulsion...it is both counter-intuitive and completely instinctive at the same time. But necessary, absolutely necessary.