But ponder a baby who is yelled at for crying, for wanting attention, for craving some sense of connection between how it feels, and how the world reacts. A baby who has been shouted into silence, by a mother who is tired of being a mother, and vastly prefers chatting with her friends on the telephone? Imagine this child is sensitive, and highly intelligent.
I got to that feeling today. And it is like a wall which rises to the sky. I cannot imagine a way around, under or over, or through it.
What I have learned though, is that such feelings are not walls at all. They are knots. And some part of our unconscious knows how to untie them. It is not something which does, or could, happen in the conscious domain. So I’m feeling this terror that perhaps I am going crazy. My rational mind says: you have been here before. You have endured this before. What you feel, now, you will not feel in twenty minutes.
And so it was. The monster has to get close enough to you for you to feel its breath, before it finally loses interest, and begins to wander away.
And what I felt is that evil is the result when the sense of self is tied to a tension which never eases. When, to let go of the tension, you have to lose your sense of self for a moment, without having any way of knowing if “you” will ever come back, or who you might be.
Evil is this, and it is a habit, a habit of violence. You get them before they can get you, but they are only getting you before you can get them. I watched this video on stress last night, and found it interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYG0ZuTv5rs
About two thirds of the way through, they tell the story of a pack of baboons who underwent a period of death from disease. They went from being typical baboons, which is to say a set of assholes bullying and torturing everyone with less status around them, to being what we might in some respects describe as a peaceful, Christian community, all within a short period of time of perhaps less than a year. They lost one habit, and gained another.
Identity is such a mutable and odd thing. In some respects it is the habit of “being” who you think you have always been. But I am finding that faith in something we might call the Inner Healer, as they do in Holotropic breathwork, and perhaps other places, is useful. You have to let go, fall, and let something else take over.
You may find it interesting, or something else, to know that I put some mustard seeds on my little altar.
And the mountains Christ referred to: those are within us. Sometimes mountains need to be moved. This is the hard work, the long term work, the backbreaking, terrifying work.
But it is THE work, and no less.