Bottoming out again...

How can this be? After such a spiritual rush the past few weeks, it seems odd that I am feeling so low now. Has my perception changed? Am I being an ungrateful brat again? Were the past few weeks an illusion of the ego, a rush of emotion high on intellectual stimuli?

I really don't know.

All I know is that I feel lower now than I have in a long time. I suppose it is a step better than being completely numb, a state I had been in a for a long time previously. Maybe this is a necessary step of the epurging of the ego, a stripping of desire, not just to be free of stuff but to be free of attachment that makes us slave to emotions whether or good or bad. After all, there is a payoff to being in a bad mood, a reason to isolate ourselves, to crave attention and comfort either from others from whom we seek sympathy or solace or channeling these feelings into various forms of distractions.

We could channel the energy into positive things such as washing the dishes or exercise but how often we thrive on the mood itself because it gives us feeling.

Given the choice between being numb or in a bad mood, which would we prefer? Which makes us feel more alive?

Every so often, a single line from a song contains a universe within it, open to many interpretations. One of my favorite song lyrics ever is from the Goo Goo Doll's Iris:

"When everything seems like the movies, you bleed just to know you're alive."

Not sure what it means within the context of the song and am not sure it is about literal bleeding, even going so far as to analyze it in the context of cutting, as such, but it certainly captures the surreality of modern life. It's about numbness, certainly, but it seems to me to be more about the fact that most of us live our lives not here, not now, but in some illusion we buy into that is a work of fiction created from within and without.

Personally I hate being in a bad mood but I suppose I should listen to the energy of the mood and dig more deeply into why it is so. It isn't the event that put me in the bad mood necessarily as there was something already there triggered by the event.

That is the level we must get to in order to really move beyond being slave to the emotions. What lies beneath the veneer? Why am I so agitated, my mood so altered, by something that in the course of things really doesn't matter?