You gotta start with the big. You take the piece and see what you’re working with. Remove the rust. You can’t start with the small scratches. Removing material, removing rust. Then shaping. Smaller and smaller scratches until you have something clean and clear to reflect the world.
This is what I think I am doing with my life. Removing material. Seeing where we are. Rebuilding. The roots are the new understanding of my self; how I don’t fit the textbooks. Anyway.
Identity. That’s the problem.
I’ve always been confident I had some kind of identity because I wasn’t surrogating it out to a political party or whatever. But maybe my identity was just beating people at their own game; furiously showing them that I was ‘more normal’ than them. More likes. More achievements. Never my own.
I’m growing a tree. The art last year was like a furious removal of branches to see where the rot lay. I found it. It was at the fucking roots. No wonder all those fixes did nothing; new personas and new goals, new things to hunt. But never my own, in hindsight.
I think this is what the buddha talked about when he mentioned the extinguishment of self. Each time I have adopted one of these new personas I have optimised it (because of my neurology) to the point where I am one of the best, and then I have immediately lost interest. The steel wool spins, there is no more optimisation viable, it hurts, and some kind of defence mechanism encodes that activity / persona as repulsive.
I think this is what happens when someone has a religious awakening. Each time I have ‘woken up’ from a previous persona - eg. alcoholic; businessboy; athlete, I’ve kind of… stuck my head up and looked around like I’ve just come out of a dream.
But those were branches and this one feels like the trunk. It feels like I have smashed the ‘global mask’ and when I was high as fuck recently (that’s what it was guys!) I realised a lot of the quirks of my roots.
So first things first: a trunk. A persona. A real one, I guess. The Buddha said ‘there is no self’ but maybe he was referring to the global mask when he talked about the self. And maybe the ‘理’ or divine spirit or guiding force or whatever which we all - autistic or not - feel on some level is actually pattern recognition working in the background and planning on our behalf; some more than others.
Maybe I’m talking out my arse.
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