Night at the Museum

My inner work continues.  I saw, in what I will call a meditation, that people often settle into what amount to fixed displays.  They take on a static quality.  They get stuck somewhere.

You become a museum display.  Maybe you move around, like in the Zoo.  But you exist behind a glass wall, confined.  You have a place, and a time that never changed.  There is no flowing water. There is no evolution.

Except in the dark.  Even those tied up in chains move in the darkness, when the lights go out.  I would suggest this is in part why the Night at the Museum movies are more deeply evocative in some respects than outwardly apparent.

But this movement is confined, too, to the Museum, to the place where fixed displays happen.  There is no there, there.

I see this.  The most repressed, uptight person you know tends also to be angry and judgmental, perhaps from an allegedly Christian perspective.  All the emotions that are not daylight emotions–the hate, the rage, the anger, the sexuality, the fear, the sense of horror–they don’t go away.  They percolate in the unconscious, in those parts of our bodymind that we cannot consciously access, which indeed our participation in the museum display program requires us to keep hidden from ourselves, and until they are seen and processed, we, too, must live a large part of our lives in darkness.

This is of course a psychological truism–and I’m repeating myself, again–but this metaphor feels powerful, at least for me.