The Pangs of Time Lost

On Saturday, June 10th, 2023, just weeks ago, I had the honour of attending the official screening of the documentary The Professor: The Man They Call the King of Teaching. The film follows my mentor, Dr. Aiman Hanna, in a heartfelt exposé of the twisted twin-headed duality between career dedication and its downstream effects on family life; a theme that is of interest as I stagger out of the darkened cave of my prior life bred by fear, exhaust, and emotional incoherence, limbs ashake in locomotive disorientation, into the pupil searing sun of realization regarding the significance of positive, growth-oriented affection transmitted from parent to child, of familial closeness, and the fruit of absolute responsibility for those we claim to love. Without this, our offspring are damned by the plague of internalized trauma. Confucius explains the significance of this absolute responsibility and accountability in his Analects, formally referred to as “the rectification of names”.

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

Confucius, The Analects, Chapter 13

Claiming to carry a title (or “name”, in Confucius’ words), be it “parent”, “partner”, or “student”, one must act accordingly. It may sound like neurotic categorization, conservativeness, or the boxing-in of human potential, but I disagree. One may be a parent, but one is not only a parent; one may be a partner, but one is not only a partner; we are not limited to a single title in this existence, but multiple simultaneous ones. Under a proclaimed title, one must adhere to its requirements. Why is this important? Imagine the scenario where you have proclaimed the name of student, spending thousands, but without exerting the effort in study; not living up to the name. Be it through drinking, partying, avoidance, binge watching, fucking around, the question becomes, what and who are you under such a title, really? You are but a lie. You are a lie to your culture, to your friends, to your family, to your partner, and most importantly to the very essence of your being. Your title is in complete discordance with your actions. The truth is split on the threshold of your body; internally one thing, and externally another. Many of us, including myself, struggle with this challenge. This sentiment is echoed by Hawthorne, and included in a shot from The Sopranos (below).

The first 24 years of my life were a complete waste of positive human potential. Those who claimed to be my “parent”, “grandparent”, “uncle”, and “aunt”, were no such things (some were saints, however). Their actions encompassed a minimal subset of their true titular duties. They left these responsibilities in the titular drawer; dusty, unopened, and unexposed to even marginal reflections of light. They did not live up to their title. Painful and shameful to admit, and I would assume, to read, for those who have failed. My heart is filled with forgiveness, but we are here, reading together, to understand such significant concepts, and not hide them for fear they may hurt someone. The very incapability of living up to their title is what caused the unrelenting damage that slowly cut me down, detracting from my original unimpeded mental and bodily state.

Some consider it “dwelling” to consider and speak of the past. I beg to differ. You can neither “escape” nor “forget” the past; it requires iterative review and contemplation to recover from. Review of the past is akin to present action. What do I mean by this? Reviewing the past requires a mental posture that draws forth into the present the memory-fumes of the past, like the smog above a graveyard. Similarly, present action action is molded by the memory-fumes of past experience. Both situations require the summoning of memory-fumes, though in the former it is through forced recollection, while in the latter it occurs implicitly. Thus, regardless of our resistance to drawing-forth the past, it is nearly always carried into our present posture.

According to the Bhagavad Gita, experience and action that is ego-centric, whether it be to show off, protect itself, or fight for its survival, leaves imprints on the mind. I find this idea so startling that I will repeat it. Ego-centric action leaves imprints on the mind, staining the pristine surface of unencumbered human potential. We must find ways to clear out prior stains and prevent new ones. To act in the present under a neglected past, stained and reeking with the stench of ego-centric behaviour, with an inconsiderate nez en l’air attitude, is prison. The present must be freed, as much as possible, from the grips of the past. The stains of ego-centric action must be erased. Paradoxically, to free up present action of the past, it cannot be neglected, but rather considered and contemplated. An important caveat is that present action, once freed from the past (to the degree this is possible), must be oriented in the direction of neutral or positive ego-free action. Why? These actions will become your newer “past” experiences, and ego-free actions do not leave behind stains. Continue performing ego-centric action, and you will return to old ways, requiring additional work to free up these newly accumulated mental stains.

This concept is clearly defined and explained in Hindu philosophy by the term “vasanas”. This term depicts the stains upon the awesome unobstructed glimmer of existence available to all of us, tainted by certain types of experiences. These stains become the filters and fumes through which new situations emanating from the outside word are tainted, and an output subjective response generated. Ego-centric action produces these stains, and the more that are piled atop each other, the more heavily influenced by your past will your present response be. Over time, your response to immediate situations will increasingly distance itself from the origins which generated it. In other words, your response at time X is derived by experiences from 0 to X. The larger the X, and the more stains accumulated from 0 to X, the more likely your response at time X will be completely inappropriate, tasting of the rotting ancient memory-fumes roaming the halls of your mind. As a simple example, imagine experiencing betrayal at the hands of your beloved partner at 25 years of age. Your ego will be shook, trauma experienced, registering the delta between expected and actual reality, and your mind becomes thus stained by this experience. Days, months, or years later, you meet a new partner. It is now increasingly likely you will be hyper-vigilant to possible betrayal, offloading trust issues developed at 25 onto your new, innocent, undeserving, and unsuspecting partner. The objective world now becomes betrayed by your subjective response.

In the video below, and through his legendary teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, the late Swami Chinmayananda explains that the tendencies we develop through experience are as powerful and deep-seated as the roots of a tree. We cannot simply pluck them away at will. We cannot clear up our Vasanas, or our past experiences (and current tendencies), by simply forgetting or escaping it, by travelling to another country, by drinking, or by living unconsciously. They run deep. You and I have no idea what it means to forget the past. Your memory of certain past events may even be consciously inaccessible, but have nevertheless been registered with your being in the form of Vasanas. You and I are the least bit cued in to how they manifest through our actions. All that we can acknowledge is that our past taints our present.

Although each day is an attempt to grow in a new direction, you at Day X is the sum of experiences from Day 0 to X. Null is Day X otherwise. You cannot reinvent yourself daily. You cannot be a drastically new reinvention each day. Even the idea of daily reinvention is a carry-on idea borrowed from the past. You cannot escape the past through the direct approach of forgetfulness, either. To use a simplistic but revealing example in the “physical realm”, a lost limb cannot be renewed by merely forgetting the past moment when it was severed. It is gone because it left in the past, and you must carry this fact forward. Life is physical, even if unobservable by our immediate senses. The brain stores experience in memory, not through some mystical ethereal process, but physically, in its fabric (i.e., storage and activation involving neurons). It is a physical process, and it involves endless physical state change. Thus, past events accumulate physically in this way to create your present state of perception and reaction. If we make no effort to review it, if we neglect it, we absolutely cannot understand who we are at this moment, and cannot further improve. We must know what damage the past has caused to correctly unravel and spring forth into the bliss and blistering of redemption.

At the close of the documentary, a film-theatre worth of students and alumni stood in line to grab a photo with Dr. Hanna. During this time, a prior student whom I encountered years ago pulled me aside for a conversation. He immediately began to enumerate his seemingly infinite accomplishments. I was initially astounded; prior Spartan race athlete, author of nine books, maintains three undergraduate degrees, engaged to a beautiful fiancée, and altogether fearless. As his accomplishments and experiences echoed through my head like a pinball, striking my ego in a ferocious riposte, I began to burn inside. Though I outwardly demonstrated pride for this person’s accomplishments (which is how I truly felt), I immediately began to reflect on time lost to my traumatic upbringing.

The first twenty-four years of my existence were spent in a blur of time endlessly folded upon itself, amounting to nothing but an over-encumbered survival-mind that is hyper-aware and perceptive to human emotion. I have been implicitly trained to sense certain human emotions as easily as hunger is startled by the smell of baked croissant. These are the imprints collected as vasanas, and mark my burden. There were days where I could sense an argument that I had not been present to witness by simply walking into the home. After years of such a life, the very air reverberates with emotional evidence.

I moved out of my home at the age of 24, finally grasping my first breath of “free” air, and it wasn’t three years (27 years old) until my mother took her own life. Physically leaving my home was the first step towards making room to begin emotional recovery, but this event knocked me down and dragged me back into darkness for some time. Here I am now, at thirty, flailing my arms in a feeble attempt at treading the waters of life. So many have experienced an unencumbered childhood, and further an unencumbered early adulthood. They have experience and learnt to socialize, to move their body freely in dance, to let loose in a club, to be a fish and swim, to feel the majesty of skating, the heartbeat of jumping rope, to indulge in the spontaneity of travel, to express themselves, entertain positive experience, develop athleticism, foster powerful and lasting friendships, find a suiting partner, raise children, study music, write novels; the list goes on. In contrast, my entire existence was tied to surviving the shithole within which I had been “raised”.

As I neared 16 years of age, my body began to reject this life, and would spend many hours in slumber of avoidance. I could not face the world anymore. I was running out of strength, and chose to reject living by sleeping through it. I did not have the skill to rise above it. This is when I began to experience anxiety attacks marked by the incapability of feeling the registration of breath. Though I was fully capable of regenerating the oxygen supply to my blood through breathing, it did not feel as if the body received the breath. At about 18-19 years of age, this caused the conventional mounting cyclic anxiety attack, peaking at an experience which led me to the emergency room (ER).

While packing tomatoes at the grocery store I worked in at the time, I could no longer feel my breath and I completely panicked. I broke down in-front of my boss, explaining how I could no longer handle the stresses of my living situation. My parents were alerted and I was brought to the ER. I remember my mother helping me change out of my hospital gown after a scan in which iodine was slowly released into my bloodstream to highlight the blood vessels in my lungs. My body shook uncontrollably with fear and fatigue. Thinking back, it must have scarred her memory, realizing this familial situation was slowly devouring her son. After hours of tests and scans, they concluded no lung issue, and the doctor quickly explained I might have had an anxiety attack.

To keep matters concise, the majority of my life up to now, at 30, has slipped through my fingers. At the sight and sound of youthful accomplishment, my brain short-circuits. The thought of time lost immediately appears like a deer jumping out of surrounding forestry. I swerve, trying to avoid it, but the consequence is inevitable collision. That is not to say I haven’t had opportunity to improve my situation. I had taken a number of incremental steps since 2018. I have gone to therapy, worked on improving my behaviour, relationships, experience, mental clarity, and conquering of basic fears. If I explained the fears I have conquered to a child, it would likely giggle and mockingly fling its feces at me. I couldn’t blame them.

Nevertheless, I seem to continually forget the improvements gained through conscious effort over this time. I incorrectly focus on time lost. This is the ungrateful veil. The true, fundamental root of the issue, the one that causes me to burn up inside at others’ accomplishments, does not stem from regret, shame, comparison to others, nor time lost, but from pure ingratitude. I am incapable of basking in the glory of my improvements because I firmly believe satisfaction with one’s current state can prevent further growth. On the other hand, the ego is a fuck of a voice that tells you you’re never good enough. It paradoxically blocks awareness of, yet needs to be shown and digest, evidence of the very improvements it attempts to bring out by this internal burning sensation. The ego is ungrateful, like the forever unsatisfied parent that requires perfect grades of its child but never to congratulate upon achievement. The ego does not care what was accomplished, but what it perceives as needing to be accomplished. Through the veiling of prior accomplishment, the ego leads us to believe we are a complete and utter failure.

The solution to be enforced upon the burning pangs of time lost is to recall the miracle of improvements sought through conscious and ego-free action. I began as a person with null social intractability, incapable of creating a loving atmosphere, constantly spewing hate and anger towards others, spitting on their accomplishments, sabotaging the emotional wellbeing of partners, mocking and belittling friends and family, to transforming into a more gentle, understanding, compassionate friend, lover, brother, and teacher. I have reclaimed and rectified these names (to a degree), and associated appropriate behaviour to them. Whence I claim to be the boyfriend of my partner, my actions are oriented towards living up to this title.

We can never forget how grateful we ought to be. We are alive to turn the page unto a new day, refreshing the opportunity for improvement. An arduous, painstaking, nerve-wracking, and exhausting process, there is no alternative for people like us. We must reclaim through conscious ego-free action and continuous gratitude. This is the salve, the redemption, and the remedy to the pangs of time lost.