Just one seemingly small example: my youngest does not like the volume control on the radio to be on an even number, and I indulge her in this. There is no good reason for it. I could easily just demand she stop being irrational, but I go with it. It is small, and seemingly important to her. I tease her, of course, but I let her get her way. If I clamped down on her, I would not just be clamping down on that one thing, but many things.
It sounds perhaps like an exaggeration, but it is not: my singular gift in parenting is in knowing what to do by doing the opposite of what my own parents did. I was crushed, absolutely, ruthlessly, and with no remorse.
We all have to get to our Real Selves. This is the part that, definitionally, is real, and by contrast everything else is some degree of lie. Most anxiety, failure, depression, anger and other negative emotions come from being out of touch with this vital, mutable, emotional place.
In my own case, I am beginning to arrive. My Real Self is an electrical hurricane; it is Fear itself–not “fear of”, but Fear. I think I discussed my vision of needing to hug a giant rotating circular saw. I pulled it into my chest in my “dream”, and it killed me. As I mentioned, I have been doing this repeatedly. This morning I looked into the eyes of a demon that used to haunt my dreams as a child. It would hover over me, while I was in a state of sleep paralysis, and I could not open my eyes. I could feel it breathing though.
This demon symbolizes many things. This is one area I will not discuss in detail, but I finally saw it this morning, and it scared the crap out of me. But I kept looking, kept going there, over and over and over.
I inhabit my Real Self and it is a bloody red pancake. It has no height. But I truly, really do have faith in the Inner Healer, that rectification, reorientation, renewal are an integral part of being human, if we simply keep moving. If we “go there” things happen, things organize, light starts seeping in, and what needs to be fixed, gets fixed.
Many would question my capacity for rational or scientific thought in saying this, but I truly do believe there is something to astrology. There are many ways to interpret charts, but in all of them I have an extremely prominent Mars. Whatever the source, there is something in me that will not quit in the pursuit of learning how to live and how to learn. It throws me against the rocks over and over and over, breaks me over and over and over, but I keep going.
All of this, all of this introspection and examination, is in the pursuit of learning how to achieve effectively in the outer daylight world. All my life I have had constant eruptions of unwanted and inappropriate emotion, had constantly to use willpower to keep myself on task, and I truly believe I am on the verge of ending this.
And I will say that I would much rather learn how to learn that be born with knowledge. It is much, much more useful.