Notes from the Underground📜

24. 11. 2017
I think this was the Shadow breaking through (out of disappointment or loneliness). The same breakthrough showed up again in 2019 and on Jan. 2, 2020. One thing was always the same: before it happened, I had been living an exclusively bright life.

🌑 02. 07. 2018
I despise evil; I despise myself for having let evil in, for having shown weakness. Not every experience is useful. Some things are better never experienced at all, because the memory of what you did will keep tormenting you.

🌕 Then came Artek, three months of reading, digging into myself, and no Shadow at all… until saturation set in: “even the moon and stars no longer stir my spirit, because I see them every night.”
And yes, you live alone out in the middle of nowhere and it feels good — but everything passes. Once you have absorbed wisdom, you want to give it away, and so communication is inseparable from loneliness, just as Shadow is from Day, laughter from tears, knowledge from sorrow. Such is life: beautiful and terrible in the very same instant!
And then thoughts like these:

18 October 2018
Is my life turning to dust? Or am I really, as S. once said, “flighty — I give in and let these passions carry me away”?
But if complete knowledge is impossible, if the bridge can never be finished and the endless running in circles is only vanity and torment, then the Shadow is something alive in me! We live for passions. For their sake we go nowhere. Everything is nothing — only a game; I gave passions the meaning of life.
And yet I feel passion while learning, reading, studying too. So there are passions on both sides. Can they really be split into bad and good? Base and sublime? Will suppressing one kind make the other stronger? Or will suppressing some passions weaken the others too?
If the Shadow has its passions and the Day has its own, then staying permanently in either one will make it habitual, devalue it, weaken it. There is power precisely in opposition, in alternation: something new is born between two opposites; and the stronger one pole becomes, the stronger it makes the other!
Or does one still suppress the other?
No. I think it makes the other stronger. That is why we need night: so that day can be richer. It is struggle itself that makes us stronger.

🌑 And then in Dec. 2018 — Shadow again! Here I’ll call it “failing physiology in the third term.” Again the soul-pain, again the sadness, again a swing to the opposite pole, and then
🌕 dawn → writing out the entire history of philosophy and psychology on a huge sheet of paper and going full autodidact until April.
🌑 Then another crash on April 4, M. from the Khibiny… it wasn’t enough anymore… the sinusoid got steeper. My heart is pounding, the fear is unreal… even here I’m not safe, there’s nowhere to run from them. All I can do is live through it and write it down so I can analyze it later. Heart pounding. Crushing anxiety, like I’m suffocating. A brutal low…
🌕 followed by an eight-month productive stretch. I wrote my thesis; there was nothing but training and reading, eight books 📚, and I didn’t even eat junk food. I felt the Self, saw the Anima. One of those days ↓

25 September
An even more intense day. Spoke at a philosophy circle. I opened up so much and got past my embarrassment, and then there was a training session on meaning and finding yourself.

But as I understood only later, something was already ripening inside. The unconscious was sending messages. Night was coming….🌔

Entry from October 7, 2019:
“The sweetest honey / Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, / And in the taste confounds the appetite.” (W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)

16 October
Dream: I beat up a girl (she was very cheeky) and got accused of indecency; a letter arrived saying what a terrible person I was. At first I felt horribly ashamed, but then I actually wanted to make it public and post it on VK… Grandpa despises me, and I’m convinced I’m right….

19 October
Slept in a delirium. Don’t remember the dream, but it was something about “good” and “bad” periods and some kind of connection between them. Couldn’t fall asleep…

25 October
What a painful loneliness hits here, standing in a field in complete silence — stronger, more painful than the physical exhaustion at the end of every day in the city. Now I understand: better to keep yourself loaded with tasks every single day and get tired, just so you don’t have to feel, don’t have to become aware of this painful, inward, inborn, purely human ache of loneliness….

10 November
Fourth day in a row of hard training.🔴. My whole body hurts. I’m doing massage. Today on the way back from training I listened to Erich Fromm (“Faith as a Character Trait”), and I get this feeling that here my principles are hanging by a thread, that I’m being thrown from side to side — and by some miracle I still hold on to them. Though the line is getting very, very thin…

30 November 2019
🌖 Yesterday I could have… But I’m here in the laboratory! How many times have I fallen and got back up? I kept walking toward the goal no matter what. It is unbelievably hard right now, but this weight will make me unbelievably strong.
I simply believe it!
I swear I will become who I want to be! Those passions that were raging in me last week are already weaker. More precisely: I redirected them into research.

2 December.

Something changed in me!
I noticed that I used to experience both positive and negative feelings only inside myself, whereas for roughly the last three weeks I’ve learned to let them out.
Dec. 19. “Evil f*cking sadist” — that’s where it began… through that act of behavior, what I wanted first of all was to see myself as someone who could be different. I’m not only the “good Samaritan” serving life; I’m also an animal that growls… Dec. 20. Night. Fantasizing about causing pain. “Strong feelings — words can’t carry them. There is good in me capable of helping, but there is also evil capable of tearing all of you apart”…..

🌑 And then another crash, so bad I was on the edge of my consciousness coming apart… Again the same pattern: a huge rise, no concessions for rest, something accumulating in the background (the Id, maybe, in Freud’s terms?), and then the fall — and the higher the rise, the harder the fall….

And after January 2, 2021 — 16 months without a severe crash!!!

🌕 Sixteen months not just of growth, but of a radical change in my entire living space. Enrollment, leaving Eden, a massive shift in my life script! The “Shadow theory” partly forgotten, attention switched to the “mindset of overcoming”🌟

Who among us on a mighty deck
Has never fallen, puked, or cursed?
Few are those with seasoned souls
Who stay steady when the ship is tossed.
And so did I,
Beneath the savage noise,
Knowing my work with sober judgment,
Go down into the ship’s hold
So I would not have to watch people vomit.
......................
I was like a horse driven white with foam,
Spurred hard by a daring rider.

I was like a horse driven white with foam, spurred hard by a daring rider. — where the rider is the Super-Ego, and the horse is the Id….

❓❓❓❓❓❓❓❓
But what are these circadian cycles of good and evil?
What is a human being? Why are Beast and Creator joined inside us?
And what does personal growth actually consist in? Suppression?
Permission? Or direction?
❓❓❓❓❓❓❓❓
Because there was another 🌑

📖📖📖📖📖📖📖📖

Heraclitus proclaimed that people “do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.”

🌓 “Every act of creation is preceded by an act of destruction, as Picasso was fond of saying” (p. 92).

“Good people, as we have said, have a capacity for evil that balances their goodness. The saints throughout history have declared — and there is no reason to doubt their judgment — that they were also great sinners…

❗As one becomes sensitive to one’s greater good, one also has the potentiality for greater evil…❗
📖✔ The higher we are able to go, the lower we can sink.” (Rollo May, p. 149)

But now there is a new stage:🔮

These are Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in my own Cirque du Soleil,
I don’t need an auto-da-fé; the spirit of epics is my frontispiece.

Ananke whispered to me that this too is part of the road,
Neither hamartia nor fugue, but a mighty sine qua non.

If you want to sing a barcarolle like the finest gondolier,
Don’t turn into a Langolier — rise instead like a Montgolfier.

Watch the related VK videos on the same theme — they carry the mood further and unfold the motifs of the text:
👉 Video 1, “Falls”
👉 Video 2, “Not Alone”
👉 Video 3, “Faith and Understanding” (excerpt from the film Stonehearst Asylum)
👉 Video 4, “The Outcome” (TV series Vikings)