TRANSCRIPT
I remember somewhere along the way in my life, I heard the phrase. The person who told me attributed it to Jesus: “that I have come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” I later learned that actually this really wasn’t anything that really was attributed to Jesus. It was actually written by a journalist, I can’t remember his name, but a journalist in the early 20th century, 100 or so years ago or more. Regardless of who wrote it, I loved that. Just something about it really stuck with me.
When I thought about it, it kind of makes sense for what I’m doing. I like to think about more what does that mean to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable? Well, what I think about that and how it’s also worked for me in my life—people doing that to me. I have been very afflicted in my life in all sorts of different ways, and certain things have brought me comfort. One main thing that has been the main comfort in my life is hearing the truth. Receiving the actual truth. The truth about what happened, the truth about how things really work, the facts—not fantasy, not BS, not lies, not manipulations, not a distorted version of reality—but to hear the clear and unvarnished reality about whatever it is.
Something about hearing the truth, about hearing reality for me, being able to really know what reality was, was incredibly comfortable for me. It comforted me in my affliction because my afflictions in my life, the traumas that I had suffered, all came through lies, through manipulation, through dishonesty, through distorted reality, primarily from my parents. So when I was in my 20s, when I started escaping the orbit of my family system, I gravitated toward the truth. Yes, it was painful. Strange to think that actually something painful could also be comfortable, but I knew it. I knew it’s like in the same moment that I was feeling pain, feeling pain about hearing the truth, about hearing the unvarnished reality, learning even about the unvarnished reality, the painful afflicted realities within me about who I was, about who I’d been made to be, manipulated and broken and distorted to be. It was painful to hear the truth, but I knew that this was my salvation. I even used that word then, not in any religious sense of the word, but I loved the truth.
The truth was going to allow me to orient myself toward a healthier life, to move in a healthier direction, to make healthier decisions, to really know who I was, to fight for myself, to become a better person. And then I think about the truth also in terms of afflicting the comfortable. I was raised to strive for comfort. That was my goal in life. That was what my parents raised me to be: to be a happy person, to be a very sick person, a troubled person, a screwed-up person, an afflicted person who had a thin layer of lies on top of myself. In this lying relationship with the world, I was supposed to manipulate the world, manipulate my feelings, manipulate everything around me, manipulate my environment so that I could become comfortable. Get a better education, get more degrees, become fancier, build a better resume, get better external relationships of all sorts of different varieties—personal, romantic, friendship, work relationships—so that I could position myself to become more comfortable in life.
For quite a while, I mean this is starting when I started being aware, “oh my god, I have a future I have to build toward it,” starting when I was about 11 or 12, and all through high school, even into my late teens in college, I was working really hard to build this comfortable exterior—a comfortable, dishonest, disassociated, out-of-touch interior that connected, that melded with the very troubled, disassociated, screwed-up, dishonest outside world. And I was going to fit in, damn it! I was going to fit in well, and I was going to fit in at a high level. I went to a fancy college, and all my friends were doing this, and all my classmates, even people who weren’t my friends, sometimes the people who were less my friends because there was something about them I didn’t like—they were even better at it, better at manipulating the world, manipulating their image in the eyes of the world, becoming really comfortable.
What I started to find is that the more I started really being confronted with the truth, with reality—real reality, not fake reality—when I started to orient myself toward what reality really is, when I started really not faking it anymore, really writing down, conceiving of, being aware of, fighting for real observations about what was really happening so that I could grow, so that I could save myself from this inner torment and pain, that I had the sense of despair and hopelessness. The more I did that, the more that my life, my fake life, that everything in my family and my society, my school system, professors, teachers, classmates, friends—even a lot of them—they were all preparing me for orienting for themselves. It didn’t work anymore. Reality was killing it. It was breaking it. It was like it was an incredible internal conflict, and it was very painful and confusing. This was the downside of truth. This was the downside of reality.
Suddenly, I no longer fit in in my world. I didn’t fit in in my life. I didn’t fit in in my academic circles. I didn’t fit into my classes. I didn’t fit into my biology major, biology science—the search for truth, truth about life. Well, it wasn’t about that. It was all about fakeness. It was about building a career and figuring out little areas where you can sort of pretend to be true but miss the bigger picture. It didn’t suit me anymore. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know who I was. Who was I in the midst of this world that didn’t accept truth, didn’t like truth, was uncomfortable with truth? So I was afflicted. My disturbed comfort was afflicted.
I hadn’t yet heard that phrase about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, but along the way, in the midst of my pain, I heard that somehow. I heard it: “Oh, Jesus said this.” I was like, at that point, I think I read the Bible the first time. I was like, “What a strange and interesting book this is.” Not what I expected in a lot of ways. There was some stuff that I actually liked in there, a lot of stuff that wasn’t really for me, didn’t really make sense. But certain things, I was like, “This is an interesting story, at the very least. This is a very interesting piece of literature worth reading. I’m glad I read it.” I’d put it off for a long time because I was like, my family wasn’t religious, we weren’t into that. Well, I never really did become super religious in any way. I’m not now, but it was interesting.
So when I heard it was attributed to Jesus, it was like, “Okay, hmm, what is this for me?” And then realizing there were other people in the world who were striving for truth, sometimes at great sacrifice. I should look up more about this journalist who actually wrote that phrase because I think of what is journalism? Journalism—the job of a journalist is to tell the truth, to tell the unvarnished reality, to not spin it for a political goal, for an economic end, for manipulation, manipulating the public. It is to tell the truth—that self-sacrifice, sometimes with consequences.
And I think about my life now, my life now, age 49, almost 50, making videos like this—videos that are relatively, I think, considering the quality of my content, they’re not that popular. Why? Well, my goal, I believe this is the reason: my goal is because it’s to tell the unvarnished truth, to share reality—a painful reality for some people. I think people who are really oriented toward really growing, really knowing who they are, really knowing what reality of the world is, this can be very comforting. It can be comforting to know the truth, to feel it, to see it, to live it, to hear more of it. It’s a wonderful thing. This is why I share it. This—if there is such a thing as leaving a legacy, this is my legacy: to share this truth with people. Not necessarily this video, but the consciousness that gets transmitted, the consciousness that I’ve fought like hell to…
Be able to hold on to and live and see manifest in my life. So in a way, I am providing comfort to some from what I observe. But also, I think for a lot of people, this is a big turn off of a message. This is like, “Oh, I don’t want to hear this. This is ugly. This is nasty.” And then a lot of people, from what I’ve seen, I’ve certainly known a lot of people directly. I’ve seen a lot of comments on this channel where people just say, “You’re crazy. This is nuts. This is wrong. You’re sick. You’re twisted. You’re blah blah blah blah blah.” A lot of psychological defenses, from what I’ve seen, a lot of defenses to defend against this message.
Because what I also see that I’m saying is something that very much does afflict the comfortable. I want to afflict the comfortable. I actually really value it that my comfort, once upon a time, was afflicted by reality. My comfort. So I want to do that. I mean, I don’t want to hurt people. I never liked causing anybody pain. But I also know that the truth sometimes is painful. And for those who are able to handle the pain, they will be able to handle more truth. And so I say it. That’s why I talk about such politically stigmatized concepts, ideas like breaking from your parents.
Like, your parents may be actually very sick. Your parents, who are supposedly your best allies, might actually simultaneously have been your worst enemies. Twisted you, screwed you up. That it’s okay to get away from them. That it’s okay to think about your own freedom apart from them. That you don’t owe them anything. That if you feel guilty breaking away from them, often that’s the guilt that they implanted in you so that you wouldn’t break away. That guilt that they should have felt.
Things like this, this is uncomfortable for a lot of people. And I think of our world, so living for comfort. I think about this. Here’s an interesting one. Recently, I was taking some continuing education classes in palliative medical care. Palliative care, meaning making people comfortable as they are dying. All the different drugs that they give people to keep them comfortable. How to let them know that they’re dying. How to deal with their family members. All about comfort, comfort, comfort, comfort.
Well, I’m not dying now, not at least as far as I know. I mean, not in the short term. Obviously, we’re all going to die. That’s how life ultimately is fair, because we all end up in the same place sooner or later. When I’m dying someday, would I like to be comfortable physically? I don’t like the idea of being in horrible pain. So I kind of am okay with that. You know, the idea of not suffering terribly in bodily pain.
But then I think about a lot of people who are dying. I think, I think, I wonder. I think, well, I think of some of the people I know who have died, and I’ve been able to be intimately involved with their dying process. And from what I’ve seen, a fair amount of their pain may actually have been emotional pain. Undealt with emotional pain. Sometimes they got psychologically translated, somatized into physical pain. But at other times, it was just direct emotional pain that they were feeling.
And I think the palliative care people, the doctors and the nurses and whoever came in, gave them drugs to quell their emotional pain too. Kind of like drug addicts. It’s like, “Hey, I’m feeling emotional pain. Life is overwhelming. I can’t handle that pain. I’m scared of my emotional pain. I’m scared of my feelings. I’m scared of my true self. Let me drug it to death. Let me give it all sorts of different drugs, opiates and this ones and that ones, anything to block out the pain. Alcohol even.”
And I think about that, a whole field, palliative care, that doesn’t really even talk about this. That just talks about pain is bad, take it away, make people comfortable. And I talk about this not so much to critique palliative care itself, though I could, but more as a metaphor for our world. That our medical system, our psychological system, our mental health system. Oh, someone comes in and they’re crying. “Oh, you’re depressed, you must take a drug.”
Well, maybe they’re grieving. Maybe they’re feeling lost. Maybe these are exactly the feelings that they need to feel. And that’s why I see so much of our world, our mental health system especially, that I worked in intimately for, well, a little more than a decade. I really got disgusted by it because I saw often they were trying to comfort the comfortable. Make the comfortable people who were feeling a little ounce of something that could save their life and help them grow and know themselves better. They were trying to push that down, and I’m not into that.
So for me, what I found is yes, to really grow, there is pain. Pain is inevitable. I heard that once upon a time: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Well, I don’t know about that because I think suffering is not optional. Also, part of waking up from dissociation is suffering. The goal is to turn that into grieving. Grieving is also painful. But when you grieve, then you wake up. Then you get yourself back. And to me, that’s the goal of all this. All this pain and suffering, all this affliction, it’s to get a true self. To be able to know external reality, know internal reality, be connected with who you are, be conscious, be aware, be self-actualized, and then to be able to share this with others.