You know, in spite of all my failings–and they are sundry–I really feel I do have a warrior spirit in me, something relentless, fierce, and which is so focused on the task it forgets to feel fear. There is something in me which loves the fight, which excels at it. It is simply wrapped in a roll of blubber, hesitation, indecision, and weakness. It is my job to unwrap it.
And I feel my work is not just healing, and not just healing myself. Ultimately, the reason this is taking so long is that I am learning to drink the spirit of the age, and to spread myself out wide and inherit it, internalize it, and heal it, too, within me. That will be the medicine we all need. Every time needs its own blend.
As far as integrating multiple selves, I have realized that their main source of conflict is in anticipation. They stand in relation to one another roughly like this: / and . They are not pointing directly at each other, and can be squared to stand parallel to one another, and moving in the same direction.
Where conflict exists, though, both “sides” are trying to occupy the same space, and occupying it imaginatively in advance. For example, the gut/dark/animal energy is afraid the higher social/human/peaceful consciousness will allow it to be betrayed. So it plants paranoia and mistrust.
Feeling this paranoia and mistrust, the higher consciousness feels a sense of self loathing in interacting with other people, because it knows some part of us is already committing violence to others somewhere in our inner recesses. It is, at least, pushing them away, gating them off.
But in turn, this process can lead to both rage and depression. It is a suppression of energy. We naturally want to trust our fellow humans. More: we naturally need intimacy with them, closeness, community, belonging.
So two basically benignant processes–the desire to protect oneself is healthy, after all–cycle into patterns of conflict which are very hard to resolve. Both start from healthy places. Both have healthy intentions. But the net result is self hatred, ineffectiveness, and in the end, a cessation of useful intuition which would allow us to know who to trust and who not to trust, which is a faculty I think we are all born with. We are born with the ability to see everything we need to see, in my view. We simply fuck it up with internal games like this.
I developed a tool I am calling Tom Riddle’s Diary, in which my waking consciousness communicates with my shadow, dark side. The intent is to focus on shared interests, and more generally to initiate the process of communication. You may be surprised what you find your hands writing if you simply invite this voice to express itself.
Janet, when he was working with hypnotism, found he could generate many discrete “operating systems” within individuals, each running its own path automatically. There was no spontaneity in each subroutine, but they could exist in parallel.
I am tempted to speculate this aspect of the human nervous system must be as aspect of survival. If habits are learned instincts, then we are born with the capacity to learn many instincts, many of which we do not even know we have learned. We see this in hypnosis. It is occupying that space, those shelves in our psyches.
The task of integration is ultimately expansion, to become a large cloud of a personality, to expand the sKum, at least with Kum Nye. When you are a large cloud, you can see there are no small bubbles of darkness within you. Those would prevent the expansion. They would show up in your practice. The goal is to eliminate all subroutines.
If you think about it, there would be no internal conflict if we allowed things to play out, to actually happen. There is a place for the part of us which mistrusts some people for specific reasons. Gavin de Becker, who knows something about violence, called this the Gift of Fear.
And in my own case, my protective part wanted some attention. I am going to read some books on threat assessment, and probably take my gun to the range and fire enough bullets to feel like I could do it for real. And some other things.
But the key is I am listening to it. Regardless of our need to believe otherwise, we all still live in a sometimes-dangerous world. There is physical violence, of course. But there is also a lot of emotional violence, of which emotional dissociation–not genuinely interacting with others at an emotionally honest level–is the most common. And it is hard to see, and easy to learn to see as normal. It is not normal. Being cold is not normal.
Our birthright is happiness. We are all wired for it. We simply have to find our way there.
But the first thing we have to do is befriend ourselves, and this process starts with listening. This is a very important insight.