Dancing With My Fate Digital Edition: A Handbook About Life and Death

By Samuel Aydlette

The book Dancing With My Fate is the culmination of many years of investigation of the world, sometimes slow and deliberate, more often manic and compulsive. The questions that I have asked, the classes I have taken from the school of hard-knocks, and finally, the insights I have discerned. A survival guide, yes, but more than that - the documentation of my philosophical, spiritual, practical metamorphoses into a creature that is uniquely at home in the toxic and seemingly nonsensical environment we find ourselves in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781105625572

Book preview

Introduction

---

That which is ready to fall, shall ye also push!

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche¹

For most of my life, I intuitively felt that something was off.  Although I sometimes felt alone in this, I also had an intuition that there were others, potentially many others who felt the same way that I did.  Growing up, observing the popularity of films like The Matrix served as a testimony that validated my intuitions.  The feeling of something being off started when I was very young.  My personal experiences seemed to contradict the messages that adults taught to me as just ‘the way things are.’  Multiple times when I was still a vulnerable young person, authorities in powerful institutions such as the church, the education system, and the medical system abused me in various ways, escaping any accountability.  These experiences informed my trajectory towards a deep skepticism, a mental and emotional resistance towards simply accepting the narrative that the authority figures provided me about themselves and about the world.  At nineteen, like my father before me I became an Airborne Infantryman in the U.S. Army.  I deployed to Iraq for one year in 2008, where I gained even more direct experiences that contradicted the messages of nearly everyone who claimed the mantle of authority in any capacity.  Once I returned from Iraq and left the Army, out of necessity and survival-instinct I found myself dedicating more and more of my time towards seeking the truth.  I hoped that by looking for the truth I could find some answers that would help me find some semblance of comfort in what felt like a hostile world.  In my search, I gradually came to understand that while many ideologies that are critical of the mainstream were initially appealing to me due to their ‘truth to power’ stance, most were also deceptive in their own ways.  I came to the realization that, if I wanted the truth, no pre-built ideology would give it to me.  I would have to find it for myself. 

The book you are holding is the culmination of many years of investigation of the world, sometimes slow and deliberate, more often manic and compulsive.  The questions that I have asked myself, along with practical knowledge I've gained along the way from the school of hard-knocks, and finally, the outlook that I’ve adopted based on the answers I’ve found are all recorded in the chapters below.  A survival guide, yes, but more than that - the documentation of my philosophical, spiritual, practical metamorphoses into a creature that is uniquely at home in the toxic and seemingly nonsensical environment we find ourselves in. 

I count among ‘us’ anyone who is attempting to authentically engage with the world.  Since you are bothering to read this book, you are likely to be this type of person too.  Unfortunately, it is also likely that you, like me, have experienced uncertainty, confusion, emotional pain, detachment, or possibly even more extreme challenges such as depression, addiction, or crippling anxiety.  Maybe you cope with the uncertainty by putting blinders on and just focusing on the things closest to you such as a career, family, or a hobby, ignoring everything outside that scope.  Maybe you cope by imperiously believing that you possess the ‘Truth with a capital T’ and look down at all the ‘sheeple’ or ‘crazy people’ whom you feel threatened by.  Regardless of how you cope, first and foremost, please understand that you are not alone.  I relate to your fear of uncertainty, your anxiety, your pain.  I relate because I have experienced the same emotions, as so many of us have.  However, I have found that without the correct strategy, life can feel very difficult.  To simply adopt a life-strategy based on the messages that the authorities provide us is misguided, even dangerous.  For example, regarding mental health, while I do believe that the application of psychological methods for healing can be a very fruitful exercise, it would be naive to ignore the fact that many of the top authorities providing solutions for how to maintain mental health are incredible, unabashed hypocrites.  It is a disturbing fact that some of the most highly regarded psychologists in the U.S. assisted the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense in designing and conducting torture experiments on innocent victims in Abu Ghraib Prison during the war in Iraq, the war I served in, all while attempting to conceal these activities within the broader psychological community.  Many of these psychologists are still members of the American Psychological Association today.² Clients whose therapists are secret torturers might be in for a real... shock (pun intended - on a side note, if you are offended by gallows humor, you may want to stop reading now, as this book is full of it).

In the effort to craft my own strategy, I attempted multiple approaches towards finding a theory that explains my life-experiences better than either the mainstream ideology or the competing ‘counter-cultural’ ideologies, both of which I have found to be hollow.  The methodology I settled on was to apply a homeopathic dose of reason against the paradigm itself.  Homeopathy is the art of curing founded upon resemblances; the treatment of diseased conditions via the administration of substances in minute doses which in larger amounts are capable of producing symptoms closely similar to the condition itself.³  Since the official, state-sponsored ideological narrative that justifies our entire social framework is largely centered around the human capacity to reason, I decided to take this logical reasoning to its extreme ends, in search of a homeopathic therapy that would clarify a satisfactory theory of life for me.  In the spirit of challenging all that I had been told to accept as ‘just the way it is,’ I summoned the courage to banish my fear of uncertainty and answer with absolute honesty five basic questions: 

Discerning truth via asking the questions of who, where, what, when and why, the ‘5 W’s’ originates in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,⁴ an appropriate source considering Aristotle’s enormous influence on the understanding of reason as a human characteristic.  Reason is the foundation of