I was dreaming last night about a client of mine, reimagined in my dream as a sort of cult, where everyone was happy, everyone was cared for, and everyone had glazed eyes and an agenda.
In America, our religion in many ways is work, isn’t it? Do you leave work at work? Most of us don’t. Most of us lay awake at night sometimes, worrying about this or that, this unsent email, this email that might ought to have been worded differently, how we are going to solve some specific problem, which will be replaced in short order with some other problem, and another after that.
But work is givenness. It is a place of focus, where our mental and emotional energies can go and live, and in no small measure take us away from the pains of our individual personalities, the love we did not get, and are not getting, the pains of confusion about Life generally, the anger at other people for not loving us, fear of the future. You can make your own list. It will be similar to, but not identical to, my own.
And as always I like to look at my dreams as both descriptions of realities “out there”, but also symbolically reflective of deep processes within myself.
Cultishness and dissociation I think go together. The cult is the place where you lose your own emotions, where they go into a common pot. You lose your positive personal feelings–say, of personal loyalty and integrity as an individual–but you also lose the “bad” ones, like alienation, bitterness and hostility to an often cruel world.
It is so hard to stand on your own feet, to feel confident feeling your own feelings, to feel confident finding your own way. In my own self, I constantly default to my image of the expectations of others. This is cultish, in a way. It is HUMAN, to be sure, but we all seem to have emerged from the swamp as little creatures with a need to be told what to do, and how to feel about what and when.
But this is a stage through which we need to pass. There is no need to continue living there.
My work is hard. I get tired often, with all that floats around and in me. I have immense reservoirs of stamina and physical strength, so I keep going. This is the work. This is the game.
And I do think of Rupert Sheldrake, too, and his ideas about Morphic Resonance and morphogenetic fields, for which vastly more evidence exists than is realized by skeptics who lack the scientific integrity to look at it or for it. Once one person has found a new way–or new to this time and place and culture–then the next person has an easier time of it.
I am alone. No one is helping me. I may be surrounded by like minded spirits, each thinking the same thing, but it is not obvious to me. My task is to brace myself and head into something better. To work, to learn, to grow, to move, to forge; in my own case, always in the face of an inner voice screaming “NO, YOU CAN’T DO IT.”
I would like to get rid of that voice. I haven’t figured out how yet. But I think I’m making progress.