A relative question

When my therapist asks how I'm doing, there is always a long pause before I respond: "I don't know." And then I launch into my 20 minute soliloquy, bitching about the various things that have been pissing me off since our last session. 

I don't know why I always feel compelled to start every statement with some version of this. I'm not a politician trying to evade taking a definitive stance. But that is exactly what I'm doing. "I don't know" is my mantra, and I cling to it as if it were an actual core tenet of my beliefs. Look back at the beginning of this paragraph for proof.

Part of it may come from my experience with the cult. In the 80s, I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the dogma of a particular Christian based sect. Individual thought was suppressed, verboten, and anyone who expressed any deviance from the statements and claims of Pastor Robert Leon (yes, I'm going to keep calling him out by name) was met met with rebuke, if not immediate expulsion. 

"We have The Truth," he would admonish, and he could back up any of his claims with a flurry of scriptural references before you could say "boo." After a while, his claims were just accepted as gospel, and references weren't even checked. 

His power lay in our acceptance of the idea that there was an actual truth with a capital T, and that it was contained in the Holy Bible, New American Standard version, to be precise. That was the most correct translation, after all, and he had done the research, so we might as well acquiesce, or there'd be hell to pay. Literal, eternal torment, with fire and brimstone. The whole bit.

I swallowed the pill, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth. Eventually, I found that this wholesale abandonment of critical thought and the unquestioned belief in a particular set of ideas to be untenable. Like a cat with a hairball, I vomited up the pill before it could fully take effect. Apparently, the Word of God was not agreeing with my sentient intestinal guidance system, so I quit the cult, leaving after a paltry 6 years of service. 

It didn't take to long to get back to the life I'd left behind. Back to the familiar hedonism of my teenage lifestyle, pot and alcohol and trying (unsuccessfully) to get laid. Except that 6 years had seen a lot of changes in my social circles and the world at large, and I'd missed most of the 80s. Oh, well, I didn't much care for Madonna or hair metal anyway. 

Why am I tangentially revisiting this period? I don't know. Ha. There it is again. But I do know. To give context for why I don't claim to know anything. For one, I don't want to be like that cult guy, so damn cocksure about everything, convinced that everyone who held an alternate belief was going to hell.

Fast forward many years, many experiences, a marriage, a career, the illness and death of my wife, and a brief but intense spiritual quest for answers, and I landed somewhere in the camp of non-dual philosophy. Here, everything is one, and nothing lays claim to being The Truth. For my descent into "I-don't-knowism," I blame Adyashanti, Alan Watts, Eckhardt Tolle, and others of that ilk.

Within our particular realm of existence, perhaps, some qualified, definitive statements can be made. (Insert your favorite truism here.) As for other realms of existence, I don't know. I'm living in this one. Your reality might differ. It's a shared experience, perceived differently from different angles. I wanted to trust science and physics, but then they came out with quantum mechanics, and we are back to fairy tales.

So how am I doing? I don't know. It's a relative question, at best, isn't it?

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Definitive statements for the day: My right upper eyelid is swollen, red and painful. It has been this way since last Wednesday. It is the same eyelid where I had a chalazion, which is a kind of blockage of the meibomian gland that leads to chronic inflammation. See Oct 2020. I am only making this note so that later I can reference a start date. The last time, the condition persisted for months before it seemed to resolve after a steroid injection into that eyelid.