Saturday, April 14, 2018

November 3, 2017; Seeing the End of Inauthenticity

It's 2:30 A.M. The moon is almost full.  Personally, I am feeling disheartened, isolated, stuck, and unmoored, with the belief that I have a destination but no compass.  It's the belief in a predetermined destination, in "I should be going there" that is most negatively impacting my well-being.

So many pieces about what we really are and how things could really be keep coming up, and it's so beautiful.  It's so beautiful.  It's changed my perspective of everything, deepening the level at which I sense other people.  I used to think about people on their mental level, overlooking their emotions for the rational truth behind them.   I had teaching moments as a result; I learned, I grew, I recognized in others what it took me too long to see in myself.

Now that I understand that I am moving toward the type of being that I've always wanted.   The pieces are coming together.  The world that I want cannot come from people as they are now.  We cannot fully realize ourselves as one until we feel our connection to one another.  That is something that cannot be dictated, regulated, or enacted into law.  You cannot force someone into unity.

I disregarded the idea that healing was the answer, and in a way, it isn't, because we are infinite and eternal.  We can really lose nothing.  We do, however, deny ourselves over and over and over.  We turn parts of ourselves away because we don't know how to deal with them.  I don't think I really understood this before.  Considering it a preprogrammed, knee jerk reaction rather than a mindful choosing, I was still neglecting the part that allows the programmed, conditioned response to exist in the first place.

Our emotions are communications to us from deeper parts of ourselves.  When we are desensitized (I am very desensitized), we have buried our feeling about something so much that our awareness is programmed to skip over it.  We don't want to feel the horror.  We don't want to feel the betrayal.  We don't want to be afraid or in mourning.  And so, when I hear about the latest tragedy, or some heinous act of senseless violence, I don't register a reaction.  It's par for the course.  It's become normalized.  I'm not afraid, I'm not upset, I'm not affected.  It's not even news anymore.

When I was a kid, I imagined myself in every horrifying situation I saw on T.V.  Many of my earlier memories are not good ones.  I remembered people dying, baby Jessica in the hole, the Challenger explosion, the San Francisco earthquake where the overpass had fallen on the people below, bodies floating in the water after a plane blew up over the ocean, old footage of the Civil Rights movements where fire hoses were turned on people crouched against a building.  There was also the Easter I spent with chicken pox and a raging fever watching (and feeling) Jesus getting nailed to a cross.

And because I just naturally tend to do this, I imagined myself in those situations.  I laid in my bed trying to contort my limbs to match the body floating in the water, imagining what it was like to have my body crushed beneath tons of concrete and cars from the road above, being blown apart, burning as I fell from the sky in pieces.  I'd try to imagine what it was like to have a dead body, to have everything so quiet, no breath, no heartbeat.  I remember trying this while I was still in my carseat.  My heart stopped for a moment (maybe it just skipped a beat, but it certainly felt longer) and I still think about it when I pass that part of the highway.

One night I laid awake in tears because I was asking God to give me all the pain in the world so no one else would have to ever feel it.  I totally believed that God would do as I asked.  I was bracing myself for it.  This perfectly kind feeling came over me, calmly, assuring me that God wouldn't do that to me.  I thought about heaven a lot.  I never believed in hell, not actually.  Not as punishment.  I didn't believe God got angry.  It wasn't the idea of God I had, anyway.  If I could understand other people, certainly God could.

I went to church camp when I was 12 or 13, and they did this passion walk that left most of the kids in tears thinking about what Jesus went through during the Crucifiction.  And then there was me, with the totally numb and desensitized reaction of "are you kidding?  Yeah, it's awful, but there are -way- worse things people have done to each other." 

The world is full of people who want us to be afraid.  We are afraid of being afraid, of being weak, of being emotional.  We bury our emotions.  We don't tell other people our feelings because we've been taught that our feelings don't matter, that we're wrong, that something is wrong with us.  I was having a conversation with a man once, who was in his 70s, and I, this 23 year old kid, was telling him that I was not afraid of anything, and his response was a furrowed, confused brow, and the response, "That scares me."

People's thoughts about things can be mistaken, persuaded to change.  Our feelings about something are instant and true to ourselves.  We deny them, bury them behind masks, layers, and more fear.  We paint over them with a collection of other feelings (perhaps more acceptable ones), concepts, distractions, intellectual reckonings.  We are all hiding ourselves from ourselves.  I know it sounds totally cliché, but I mean it in total seriousness:  I -get- it now.

We see people making fun of the idea of "getting in touch with our emotions" but that's all out of insecurity and fear.  We are hiding from ourselves, layers and layers because we have a genuinely unhealthy way of viewing ourselves, of elevating intellect as superior, of making our feelings only selectively permeable.  It's getting worse.  People wouldn't run around killing other people without trying to escape from their own pain.  People wouldn't get road rage if they could process feeling powerless or being treated as less than human.

I know it's super obvious, and I know it's rote for a lot of people, but I had a relatively good childhood with a Moma I love and who loves me.  I've had a comparatively uneventful life.  I can't imagine how much pain and hurt is being carried around in everyone else.  How can I help people?  This seems like the most obvious problem with the most obvious solution.

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