The Final Frontier

For a time there it felt like I couldn’t stop writing, like some sort of word volcano was continually erupting in my psyche and it was all I could do to type fast enough, which I can barely do at any rate, I’m a terrible typer. It’s because I lived in Iran during the years in middle school when they teach you how to type and they never taught us typing in Iran. We learned Persian calligraphy instead. They made us write out famous Persian poems over and over again until we memorized them. Repetitious writing was such a perpetual teaching method that over several years of schooling in Iran, I developed a rather large bump on the left side of the middle finger of my right hand where I hold the pen. And I wasn’t even a good student, I was very flaky at school. I hated school. I hated everything about it, but nothing more than having to wake up when it was still dark and cold and drag myself out of bed during wartime Iran when there was barely any heat and definitely no hot water. While washing my face in the morning, the cold water somehow always got onto my arms and trickled up my arm into my armpits practically and it made my school uniform — my Islam-compliant school uniform — wet. For some reason this always made me angry. The anger would eat away at me for hours, as though the fact that my arms and school uniform got wet every morning during wartime was associated in a very intimate, very personal way with all the injustice in the world.

I was always late to school, and I was very melodramatic. I was the student who lived the farthest away from school which meant the school bus picked me up first. It wasn’t an official school bus, mind you, it was just one of those Mercedes Benz mini-buses you see decorated with all sorts of velvet frill and pompoms and passionate invocations to Allah for safe passage written in Arabic on the sides that you often see on dirt roads in India or Pakistan. Anyway, this peasant bus would pick me up while it was still dark and I would sit way in the back, all alone and cold and sad for what felt like hours until the next girl in the blue Islamic uniform got picked up. These early morning bus rides to a school I hated with all my heart somehow always gave rise to deep feelings of resentment. In the blackness of the cold winter mornings, I would see lights on in the little windows of the houses we passed and this always made me so melancholy. I would imagine children — safe and warm and snuggly — fast asleep in their mother’s arms and I would feel how much this sense of safety and security was absent from my life. How it had always been absent, even when I was too small to go to school. By the time the bus was filled with other girls, though, my class-clown side was hard at work, busy dispelling the gloom of my inner world, busy hiding away all the accoutrements of early childhood depression with my famously excessive behavior — my too-loud voice and my laughter that was just a little too hearty.

I would then spend the next several hours each day entertaining the entire school with my excessive behavior. I would yell at the dumber students, calling them names in English that they couldn’t understand. I would sing Madonna songs and show everyone my fancy posters and pictures of Madonna and Billy Idol that I brought back from Germany during my stay there when we went to get a visa for me to come back to the U.S. but were denied. One time, I pushed this girl off a ledge and she broke her front teeth and I was expelled for three days. Another time, I was expelled, then forced to sit in the classroom opposite from my own which contained all my arch-enemies. In Iran, you have one class each year and it is the teachers who come and go. The students stay put so you develop a psychological bond with about twenty-five other girls where each person knows their place and their role in the group. Oh, and school is not co-ed since Allah would disapprove. So being forced to go to another class meant having to be in class with natural rivals. I got into trouble virtually every single day. You could say I was a troubled child and that I was acting out but of course child psychology was not a thing in Iran, I don’t think it’s a thing even today. In Iran, as a kid, you are told to shut up and stay out of the way. You are told not to express yourself or your emotions. If something bad happens to you, you have no one to go to because all of the adults are completely untrustworthy. They are the kinds of people who will always belittle, devalue, and de-fund your problem of all its vitality and make you feel like whatever it is, it’s your own fault anyway.

At least here in the U.S., when you are a kid and you go to an adult with dark bags under your eyes in a distressed state, they take you seriously. In Iran, everyone is too busy partying, or gambling, or childishly praying for money at the ornate tomb-side of some dead mullah, or chasing after a shady scheme that will give them money or power or a competitive edge over their nearest social peers. I’ve never known a more shallow set of people.

My best friend and I both have serious gripes about the way we were raised and by serious gripes I mean lasting wounds we have to contend with in deep adulthood and by deep adulthood I mean we’re halfway to the grave already and we still have to see shrinks, do yoga and breathing exercises, eat magic mushrooms and consult with shamans, and a million other things besides just to hang on to some semblance of well-being and a sense of inner safety.

I realize that many people are in this same boat. “Almost everything around us inspires despair,” writes Lionel Corbett in the introduction to his 2007 book, Psyche and the Sacred (p. 2), and I’m inclined to agree. I think we’ve reached the final frontier where spiritual detachment from the world of humanity is the only way out of an increasingly dangerous life devoid of joy and meaning. I can no longer hold faith in humans. “Men are weak,” we are told in The Lord of the Rings, and again, I’m inclined to agree.

I reach for beauty and truth and love and music and art, not for camaraderie with humans. I have every reason to distrust my fellow creatures and to turn away from them. After all, together we have destroyed an entire planet and we continue to ravage it and its most innocent, most powerless inhabitants all day long. To turn away from ourselves is therefore the only intelligent and compassionate thing we can do. This means obliterating the ego and merging entirely with the will of the divine which, in turn, requires serious work since the divine must be sought, found, and integrated into a consciousness that is currently too rigid, too stupid, and too selfish to know what’s best for it. Just like those untrustworthy adults who think they know everything, who are so dismissive of any incoming information that doesn’t automatically fit in with their limited views.

They must all be rejected from the inside out.

In a way, we have to clear the house of every item that connects us with our human ancestry.

We have to reject humanity so we can accept divinity.

This is precisely the next frontier.