The world sometimes feels like a child’s drawing. Everything is crudely drawn in basic outlines, neatly categorized into simple objects. Sun. Grass. Tree. Car. Person.

When I allow it, though, those black-and-white outlines into full, brilliant, multidimensional detail. The grain of bark on a hickory tree. The shades of red and yellow that the sun bleeds as it sinks low in the sky. The posture, the expression, the feeling of a person who’s half-facing you and has something to say.

I really can’t stand the chaos of detail sometimes. It’s too much information, it gets overwhelming. I have to remind myself that I’m just someone blinded by light after stepping out of a dark room.

That serves as an apt metaphor for certain themes in my life up to this point, actually. It’s a little bit like I’ve been imprisoned since childhood. Mind you, I wouldn’t characterize my prison as the type filled with overt abuse or even threat of abuse by anyone in particular, but one made of subtler and broader stuff still. It’s rooted, perhaps, in a relatively fragile physical constitution combined with precocious intellectual development and unusually high emotional sensitivity. I’m small and weak. I feel things strongly. I get pushed, other people might push back, other people might shrug it off, I’ll cry.

In some ways, imprisonment protects me from the consequences of my own fragility. It has encouraged development along certain trajectories and not others, incubating and confining simultaneously. If you’ll notice, many of the things I talk about on this blog, and many of the ways I write, are intellectual, or mystical, or both. I’m the guy whose mind has developed well, whose spiritual inclinations have been given free rein to progress. I’m very pleased about that. I’m smart, I have a little bit of wisdom, and I know it. Nonetheless, as I grow I start to see where I’ve been stunted, where my body and soul have been warped by confinement.

I can feel the prison lurking in so many things. It’s not only my own weakness and ignorance that constitutes the prison, but also the consequences of other people’s ignorance. I can’t walk out the door and smell the fumes from a passing car without wanting to run back inside. I can’t walk into a loud place without feeling it hit me to one degree or another. If my imprisonment has its roots in my psychic constitution, it’s certainly not helped by the daily violence of civilization.

Thing is, I perceive a lot of little details in everything, and that’s what I’ve been calling Mystery. Sometimes it’s so overwhelming that I just want to shut down; and that’s certainly what I’ve done in the past. Now, as I’m doing things like improving my vision — doing things that increase my sensitivity to detail — the whole reason I fuzzed it out in the first place is coming back to say, “Hey, remember me? I never left.” The more I grow spiritually, the more I meditate, do qigong, etc., the more clearly I can perceive the world as interacting fields of energy, as subtle patterns of ever-shifting relationships, as pure meaning. It’s exhilarating and damn frightening, because not all of that is benevolent.

One of the scariest things in my limited wing chun and tai chi experiences was being just attuned enough to what my opponent was doing to know what was going on, and not being able to do anything to stop it. My sensitivity was one-sided and outpaced my training. Looking back, I suppose one reason I took martial arts was really a psychological need to feel in control in the midst of conflict and chaos. I don’t think most martial arts instructors bother with addressing that. I think I kept burning out because going to class every week simply meant putting myself consistently into situations where I was not in control, and I didn’t have the stamina or the perspective or the guidance to see how necessary that was. Kind of applies to a lot of other things too.

So now here I am, struggling like a prisoner given freedom, like a butterfly fighting his way out of his chrysalis, trying to figure out just what the hell is going on in this noisy, chaotic world that is so much crazier and nonsensical than anything I could make up.

The chaos, the Mystery, is the raw stuff of direct, primary experience, and I think I’m safe in saying that everyone else is scared by it too. So we all look for ways to buffer ourselves, to channel and organize and create order, to mediate that experience. We find systems of belief or practice that organize all that information for us, and if we can’t find adequate systems, we make them up. We gravitate toward people who look, talk, think in ways that help us to feel like we have a grip on it all.

I don’t know where I’d be without the systems I’ve found. Systems take me so much deeper than I could go on my own. Teachers make a tremendous difference.

But then there’s the dark side of it, which is that you can get too attached to mediation of experience. You can be so scared of primary experience that you cling to your system like it’s a life raft in a raging river, and it’ll carry you right over the waterfall. I find myself doing that sometimes, just wanting to crawl into my safe little shell with my safe little set of ideas and beliefs and practices, the hell with the way the world really is. Or, I’ll just keep looking and looking and looking for some system that will solve my problems for me, and all this time passes while I’m looking and using up my energy, when what I really need to be doing is just being here with it and living it and figuring it out.

I’ve gotten so used to mediated experience that sometimes I feel like I’ve lost the knack for figuring it all out myself by trying like crazy and making tons of mistakes. The tried-and-true method of trial and error that gives so much richness. The relatively few things that I have accomplished that way — for instance, making fire using the bow drill method — I feel like I know, I feel proud of, I feel like I’ve earned it, in a way that having gotten it quickly and in some canned fashion would not at all have given me. But still, mediated experience is so much easier. It’s predigested. It’s safe. Someone else has already figured it out, all I gotta do is follow along in the book.

But don’t you see? That leads you right back into prison. The more I rely on other people’s wisdom, on mediated experience, the more I wonder, “Well, who am I?” When I’m expressing myself within the confines of a system, am I really myself or just what I’ve been trained to be?

There’s only one way to find out.

So here I am, standing, as it were, on the precipice — on the edge of grace, perhaps, but certainly its dark cousin, damnation, as well. I’m staring into that multidimensional chaos, contemplating how to advance in this whole dance-with-the-hurricane business, how to retain my sense of identity in the midst of that.

Shit.