I have been making a lot of internal progress lately. Changing qualitatively is a very odd thing. Old things, things you know, patterns you know, come to seem new and interesting. I feel like I am turning 90 degrees, like I have been walking parallel to the proper, best direction for me my whole life, and while I am accustomed to walking in this direction, useful movement requires me to stop moving in one direction, turn, and begin anew.
Imagine a realm of light to your right or left–or let us say both sides: a realm which becomes brighter and brighter as your view travels into the distance, and the road easier and easier until the movement does itself. Most of us spend our entire lives blind to this light, blind to the possibilities that are RIGHT THERE. They are not distant, they are RIGHT THERE. And yet we walk perpendicular to them across a lifetime.
Turning is difficult. What these Saw movies have done for me is bring evil directly into my awareness, to begin integrating it. I was driving somewhere the other day, and the hate that was directed at me as a child swept over me. It felt like a slow motion panic attack. I realized, though, that I can now take that heat. I can now stand that pain. I can now sit without flinching while waves of terribly unpleasant emotions sweep over me, until they are diminished.
It is a terribly difficult thing, facing suffering you had erased from your memory, but which continues to create massive character flaws in you. Most “sin” is an accommodation with painful emotions that person cannot process. You lie, cheat, and steal not because it is easiest–it usually isn’t–but because something is driving you in that direction, something you can’t see, something in the darkness.
We identify this something as the demonic. Now, I believe beings exist which are properly termed demonic, but even they are hiding from themselves. They have simply run farther than most of us from truth, and the light which facing the truth enables you to manifest.
I can feel this sense of utter helplessness I felt as a child. I remember a dream in which I was being muddled into a bloody and completely crushed mess at the bottom of a cauldron by my mothers dual personalities (she is not a clinical psychopath, but in shifting modes comes close at times). I feel the helpless rage and the tears that fell with no comfort. All of this before I was 4 years old.
And I look at how I raised my own children. I consciously mimicked them. When they would say or do something, I would respond, so they could see that they were a part of the world, and that the world responded, and responded in a loving, happy, playful world. What I realize now is that I was unconsciously helping elicit their best them. I was training them not to be me, not to do what I say, not to acculturate to what would appear to a small child arbitrary and incomprehensible standards–in short, not to be raised the way I was–but to feel a sense of empowerment within limitations to be who they were born to be.
The opposite of this is to expect from a child that they imitate you, that they do what you do, act how you act. In my own case, I was spanked and hit often for crimes I didn’t understand. Apparently I was even spanked for being too quiet, again from about age 1 to age 3.
And in my case the effect has been, when combined with two narcissistic parents throughout the rest of my childhood, a sense that I do not have the right to exist, to achieve, to dream, to be happy.
I pursue personal growth because nothing satisfies me. If I were to find out that I personally stopped a war with Syria, it would elicit something close to nothing; not at the moment anyway. This is what I am trying to change, this is what a 90 degree turn looks like.
As far as the post title, we think of “letting go” as holding on to something, then letting it drop. We have a deathgrip on something, and release our hands. One analogy I’ve used is that of the monkey traps in South and Southeast Asia, in which a bottle is tied to something, then something is put in it which a monkey would want. The opening is big enough to allow an open hand, but not one closed, holding something. Many monkeys will literally never let go of their prize, and thus trap themselves. This is a good metaphor.
But what occurred to me today is that it can also be heard as letting things go, as letting things progress on their own, without interference. So often we feel this need to interfere with others, to interact with others didactically, even when our own affairs are not in order. We direct others as a means of obtaining a power which we cannot exercise over ourselves.
Is it not funny that many of the most messed up people are the ones who seek out positions of influence? Is it not a stereotype that psychologists study psychology because they are less stable than others? Were Frazier and Niles Crane not made funnier because of the ironic juxtapositions of their neurotic behavior and their positions as mental health “professionals”?
On the Left the hippies say “live and let live”. They more or less mean this, but then they support people who make us less free, who want to limit what we can do and say.
Letting Go is a conservative–or I should say, classically Liberal–position. This is more or less the direct meaning of “Laissez-Faire”.
Lot of stuff here. Again, I am not congenitally a psychological exhibitionist, and I am certainly not fishing for sympathy, but I think there is material here which is common to many people, and this may thus prove helpful for some.
In particular, I would like to posit as a likely fact that the dominant mode in most traditional cultures–which survive throughout Asia, Africa and elsewhere–is the child copying the parent. You break the child in order to fit them for your social order. You guide them away from who they are naturally, and fit them into a place they are assigned to. This has all sorts of deleterious psychological effects.
In my own case, the principle problem with how I was raised is not that I was hit, or broken, but that I was not given a coherent cultural model to inherit. If these same tactics had been used on me to become a good Hindu, or Muslim, or Chinese businessman, they would have succeeded. I would have been an unhappy, psychologically repressed, somewhat angry, but largely acculturated man. I would have lived a lifetime without questioning my role. Many, many people live like this. Most human beings for most of history have lived to some greater or lesser extent like this.
In most of history, the need for individuation, for self expression, for following an individual but sincere spiritual path so as to reconnect with the Light, has been suppressed. For most of history people have been broken, then placed in slots. If as adults they rejected those slots, they were literally beaten, imprisoned, tortured, and killed.
In America. of course, we go too far in the other direction: we pander to our children, we pamper them, we enthrone them. I am DEFINITELY not advocating this. I am more or less in agreement with Russell Peters on this one. This video is worth the watch. It’s quite funny, at least to my sensibility.
Moderation in everything, including at times moderation. There is no substitute for being awake.
If I may say so, I believe there is some deep wisdom here, worth pondering carefully.