Nihil Obscurus

Let's talk forgetfulness and about a few edges of remembrance. One most common area of personal malfeasance is willful ignorance as a via for unresponsibility, negating personal responsibility by pushing a thing out of mind and pretending at freedom from what one still carries around. This is a similar process to avoidance, since a-voiding a thing is placing a void on top of the thing; but carpeting over shit doesn't make the smell go away forever. 

In some sense, this is similar to inversions paraded by trashy people, such as being proud of what one should be ashamed of, and ashamed of that for which one should be proud: garbage-covered gold is still gold, and gold-plated garbage is still garbage.

Basically, pretending that a thing isn't there is not a functional long-term strategy. This is why addictions don't work, like drugs or porn, using distracting sensation to "get away from" overwhelming restimulation, to get space away from a thing. The next step down, of course, and into which such self-treachery tends to resolve, is actively not-being there or actively not-being you. The things people end up having as a substitute for self can get pretty rough.

Placing nots on things will make you heavier. Disagreement sticks things to you, which is partly why people tend to become what they protest. Covering this all up with lies, justifications, and negations sets up future loss and failure, because delusions won't protect you from cars if you're dressed all in black, walking across a busy highway at night. 

The kicker here is that these activities snowball: Loss and failure contribute to increasing levels of endemic pain, loss, hostility, and overwhelm. People void this worsening even more aggressively, smoking more weed, watching more porn, drinking more liquor, smoking more cigarettes -- refusing to confront their growing malfeasance, their chosen blindness begetting even more to turn a blind eye to, until cumulative life ruin and fear concomitant with irresponsibility collapses into hostility that career politicians hungrily displace onto political or religious outgroups.

Misery loves company.

Untangling this ball of yarn requires a being to turn, to "about face," and to choose the hero's path of willfully confronting that which is obscured. As mythology descries, such a one must descend into the underworld and revivify his fallen god cast down from grace, reintegrating light and shadow, reemerging whole and complete. In the end, we must either work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, or careen toward spiritual death and absorption into part of physicality itself. (Or did you think matter/energy in the physical universe came from nowhere?)

The alternative to heroic action is cowardly, decadent decay, forgetting ever more while drifting further unto spiritual dissolution. Refusal to confront increases blindness, and the consequent amassment of reactive content leads to more acting-out of other places and times, more losing, and more crazy. On this road *more* traveled, disruptive effects potentiate as unconsciousness grows; more overstimulation and overwhelm results in more pain and unconscious, sticking more reactive content to you. 

In this cyclical pattern, a person's active assignation of responsibility away from self presages his becoming even less capable and coming to suck at life even more. Usually, if he's completely unoriginal, which is the norm at this point for such a guy, he starts pretending at being false things, enforcing fractured realities via computations in last-ditch efforts to hide and pretend at winning. Thus, he becomes smaller, miserable, addicted to sugar and other drugs, and even respected by other career losers. He might even get a college degree and the respect of his fellow men to finally prove to the Wizard of Oz that he has a brain or a heart. He could also become a career criminal or some other horrible, dumb thing that testifies his stupidity and insufficiency. There's really no telling how low such a catastrophically non-achieving washout can fall.

So, there's a continuum of authentic free creation at the one end to sub-death automation at the other -- bodies cannot drop below death, but spirits can and do -- and the content of a person's reactive mind is a decent proxy for chronic locations on that continuum.