I love the feeling of learning. Of unwrinkling a crumpled corner of my brain. Unfurling a little thread of understanding, tender and new and open to exploring.

Or the complete opposite, when your former mental model is pulled out from under you so fast that you don’t know what’s going on and have to reorient yourself on the fly before you break something.

Getting my chest bashed in last week was the latter. Since then, it (and I’m not even sure exactly of what “it” is) has been like drinking from a firehose.

• Like I said in that blog post, I’ve been sidling up to a confrontation with Gnosticism for quite some time. My understanding of spiritual warfare has been developing slowly over time, starting with the election in 2016. Over the summer I felt like I had finally climbed to the top of a tall ladder and had just peeked my head over a new threshold of reality, like climbing to the top of a mountain on a foggy day. I was just getting my bearings, and could barely recognize other mountains and landmarks but not any of the valleys or plains under the fog.
• Reading Jordanetics was like a wind rushing through, revealing a landscape that was a mottled jumble of lush, green growing things and glittery, hardened sediment. Fog still clings to much of it. I’m gazing out, trying to get my bearings, and realizing how just how much I don’t know. Then I look down, and see the fog clinging to my shoes. I feel it sticking to my hair like cobwebs. Another hiker passes by and points out the fog that’s settled into my pack. There’s a lot of work to be done.
• This week at work has also been A Week ™. Some of the roadblocks and learning opportunities with my boss dovetailed with what I’ve been learning (GREAT SCOTT, a THEME!) but I realized something even bigger: I wouldn’t have been in a position to learn all this stuff without having worked for my boss. Despite, or because, of him being…not the bess boss ever…he has taught be an immense amount about a certain type of person and why that type of person operates in the the ways that he does. My boss is very much an NPC, the epitome of bleeding-heart liberal, and working with him in the context of a well-established organization has been illuminating.
• It doesn’t hurt that I see a lot of similarities between my boss’s personality and Jordan Peterson’s personality—likely INFJ. But, MBTI is based on Jungian philosophy so I’ll have to rip that apart, too.
• Other things that are now on the anti-gnosticism radar: Harry Potter, The Neverending Story, and all the fantasy literature that I devoured as a child. The occult symbolism surrounding the k-pop act Red Velvet. Persuasion, hypnosis/neurolinguistic programming, and marketing techniques. The REAL problem of the university (it may not be communism). The allure of wanting to find the secret that changes your life, instead of recognizing that you know exactly what to do—it’s just hard to do it.
• I’ve always felt that this blog is somewhat of a rambling, incoherent mess. It was important to me to continue, despite it being a mess, but still a mess. Events from today indicate that maybe it’s not so much of a mess as I’d thought. (It’s still a mess, tho.)
• At my first job, I experienced my first bout of understanding what was happening as I was in a period of “leveling up.” I found myself in a period where I had more responsibility but wasn’t competent enough to fully handle it. I was hanging on—barely—and realized this is what growth feels like. This week has felt a lot like that, only in a different domain and scale. I pray that I have the grace and the courage to follow through, wherever it leads.

I don’t really know how to react to this day, or to this week. It’s more than I can handle at this time. I also know, in the way that you can feel down to your bones, that there’s an answer to prayer in here somewhere. I’m note entirely sure what, and I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s clear that I’m on the right track.

There’s a crazy amount for me to process, and years of intuitive frameworks to rip apart, but this is only the start of the fun.