I charge into life because I’m a man of great enthusiasm with frequent delusions of grandeur. I see these visions where I am a great man and they intoxicate me and make me forget all of my shame.
I want to charge ahead because I feel so full of myself. I feel confident, arrogant, untouchable. I’m the new sheriff in town.
I get all these pre-programmed ideas for what I’m going to say and do when people have no choice but to be in my presence.
So when I finally get the opportunity to interact with people, much of the time I’m acting. I’m not real. I’m spouting all these memorized lines that I thought were just so funny when I was at the peak of my bipolar cycle.
And then I slam into the wall and crash and burn.
After I fall flat on myself, I sober up. I pull myself together, get real quiet, and pay close attention to details so I can rebuild my life from my latest humiliation.
I realize my arrogant attitude isn’t going to work. I have to stop looking down on other people and jawing at them.
I don’t think so much, oh, I’ve been selfish. This behavior is forbidden by God and Torah. Oy, what would Dennis Prager say?
No, rather, I just realize that the things I’m doing are not working.
That’s how I approach life. I throw myself forward until I hit walls and then I lie in the gutter for a little while and observe life around me and resolve anew to be sober.
Then I’ll get these visions in the night of hilarious things to say. I try to memorize remarks about crack cocaine and striptease to drop into casual conversation the next day at school.
I’m just dying to drop my jokes on people and then, if I am not in the moment, they fall flat. All conversational humor has to be in the moment or it doesn’t work.
I hate it when people say to me, “Did you memorize that?”
Greg Leake emails:
Hi Luke,
if I may reference the Kaballah for a moment, Assi’ya is not Yetzirah, and certainly it is not Briah.A model that has been helpful to me when trying to understand the situation that you present to us comes from ideas about the four worlds.
Often in life, in the process of receiving inspiration or getting an idea from brainstorming, or in the face of some other manifestation of a similar nature, we unknowingly float up into the influence of the worlds of Yetzirah and occasionally Briah. However, when we come back to the place where implementation is required, we necessarily fall into the laws of Assi’ya.
One translation for Assi’ya is simply “doing.” And obviously a world defined by activity is not a world of thinking or being inspired with some higher idea. In the world of Yetzirah, sometimes translated as construction, a blueprint can be elaborated. And in the world of Briah, sometimes translated as creation, an idea can be originated. Our experience with ideas at these deeper levels of cognition is entirely without the limitations that physics and psychology impose on us in the world of doing. A tremendously fascinating theory or hypothesis can be formed, and yet as soon as we move back into the world of doing all the constraints of the physical, psychological universe are imposed on that idea. Whether it’s a joke or a business idea or some other flight when we are touched by the inspiration of some other dimensions in time and wave length.
So the world of physical matter acts as a discipline with rules and constraints that make it tough to put the idea into practice.
Another of my favorites, Carl Jung, writes about psychic inflation. We have to walk between the pillars of inflation and alienation. And often when we have some tremendous inspiration, it is actually coming from a place of inflation designating the area where our psyche is weaker than another area. (This is true for everyone.)
The usefulness of psychic inflation is that it directs our attention to the place where our psyche requires more adaptation. It is a bit like a balloon, and where the fabric is thinnest is where one will feel the greatest effects.
So the idea is to realize that these different levels (for lack of an immediately better word) all are part of our functioning, but one level is not suitable to perform a function that is the proper sphere of a different level.
This is often seen in romantic infatuation when the emotional level co-opts the intellectual level. And suddenly because these levels have been confused, you have very smart people driving around some girl’s house all night honking the horn and screaming things out the window.
I was taught that the proper way to avoid these matters was to realize that first, there is the intuitive level, and then the intellectual level, followed by the emotional level, and finally the world of doing — the physical level. And as long as one kept the levels from interfering with each other, you were operating in a pretty sane relationship with your ideas and how those ideas can come into physical manifestation.
Please forgive me if I sound like I’m preaching. These are ways I’ve come to view the dilemma that you outlined, and it is impossible for me to know whether it is helpful for you or not.
