Mirror of Zen Blog

Why I Don’t Socialize

3D95C227-13FF-4FC4-A41C-37B63B734FFE

I have never enjoyed chitchat. It actually makes me nervous and edgy. It always has. While I can certainly do some level of performative socializing, to get through an event or situation, I have preternaturally recoiled from things that require this performance to happen on any basis.

And then, since I started practicing meditation quite intensively, I noticed the invisible subtitles of nearly every conversation that happens when human beings gather together in some disposal space. (Full disclosure: Years ago, I began to notice even my own tendency sometimes — quite often! — to add some rejoinder which was primarily engineered, verbally and intellectually, to establish some flickering neon-sign pointing back to myself – – to my supposed intelligence, to my experience, to my “importance” or ”relevance”, to peoples’ need to acknowledge or highly evaluate me: simply to me.)

Real conversation and real exchange and real connection are something else all together. They can be and ineluctable dance and swim of two souls together in a spontaneous interaction of moment. I never privilege the fake value of some misanthropic arrogance, some excessive valuation of solitude or singularity, merely through the disdain for common human speech and intercourse.

And yet… And yet if you turn on the “mind light“, of most conversations you swim in together with other people, you will notice that nearly all the opinionating and evaluating, the exchanging and the importing – – they are nearly always the reflexive referencing of the prefrontal cortex back to the assumed image of self, sometimes called “Ego.” In the very flow of opinionated, I AM creating the shadow space of some hologram self, and calling out – – like a clown-barker at a circus – – for the crowds to gawk and clap for.

Begins As It Ends As It Is

85FB4085-7556-48F3-92D6-D427CC3A182E
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth -- look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

Søren Kierkegaard