The night before this happened, I had dreamed incidentally of him. He was there, but not in a contextually important way. Anyway, I was thinking about the need to INTEGRATE him, to get in touch with my dark side, establish open communication, and eventually to clean the place out with good clean light.
I had stopped to gas up. This thought occurred to me between getting out of my car, and reaching the pump. The moment I got to the pump a huge spider lowered itself from the top. It is the biggest spider I can recall seeing outside the zoo since I was a kid when we saw a tarantula in Arizona. It was at least 3″ from (let’s call them) spidertip to spidertip, and probably 4-5″. I don’t have a particular fear of spiders, but when they get to a certain size the thought of them crawling on me still freaks me out a bit. It came down, hovered a moment, then scampered back up. It felt like a synchronicity to me, but of course it can be interpreted in any way a person desires.
I have been activating and encouraging a feeling of hatred and anger in myself. I am looking at it. We all want to view such feelings as foreign to us. Towards this end one of the most common strategies is to project outward, then blame inappropriate, unhelpful, or unnecessary reactions on factors at work “out there”. Criminals had to react the way they did: what other choice did they have? You would have done the same thing in their shoes. Maybe, maybe not.
I look at people like Oprah Winfrey and Al Sharpton, and they have inner spiders. They have ugly, repulsive, slimy, clinging, violent content in their characters. We all do, but in their particular cases, this has more generalized consequences.
Oprah, for example, wants to live in the past. She wants to run what was once a thriving media empire, without EVER engaging black people in the places that REALLY matter to them. Her shows have always been for white people. She doesn’t want to deal with ghetto violence, or the fact that the kids in these places grow up in hellholes. She wants to gloss all that over, and return to a time and place of clearly recognizable stereotypes and roles.
In my view, leftists in general uses political talking points–I can’t grant Leftism the status of a philosophy, outside of the moral imperative of conformity–to avoid dealing with the darkest aspects of their own psyches.
They can hate the Right for allegedly hating others, usually with ZERO evidence. Psychologically, though, this works. I think this trend is most pronounced in the post-cultural–those who have offered up all shreds of inherited identity–but is clearly present everywhere.
On the right, as an example, does the charge of being cold not sometimes carry truth with it? Is it not sometimes true that we DON”T care about the sufferings of others? Or being excessively intellectual: is this not a form of violence?
At any rate, this process is helpful for me. I have found the whole Saw series very therapeutic. I have in the last few days identified with the Detective Hoffman of Saw V. It is an evil, but it is an evil I need to see, since I “have it” too. We all do, and can only innoculate ourselves against it by seeing it, accepting it, then building light around it; by allowing free perceptual motion, and allowing our inner healers to do their work.
I’m about to watch Saw VI. As always, I am a bit squeamish, but actually have grown to look forward to these “experiential” exercises, to see what flows. I have learned that if hate flows, to accept it.
I will add, in this regard, that the most active hate-mongers are precisely those who think they are not proffering hate at all, but fact. Rightists do not hate leftists, in general, but they sure as hell hate us, and view the whole process as something close to “scientific”. Communists actually use that word.
As an end note, it would be interesting to see Oprah–who might actually consider it–do a few Holotropic Breathwork sessions, if she approached them with sincerity (you can “come down” at any time just by avoiding the breath for a few minutes).