(Continued from Part 1.)
I wish I had space to relate all I learned. And I wish that my brush were more subtle because some aspects of it can only be painted with subtle colors.
One thing I learned is that my anger was not only on the surface. It’s also subterranean. It flavors every experience, not like I saw that before the Tsunami began flushing it up for me.
Anger was what allowed me to survive my childhood. It influenced the jobs I took. In my years as a human-rights decision-maker I used it to face scarey torturers and criminals on whose refugee cases no one else wanted to sit.
After learning about 9/11, I used it to name the cabal’s crimes or to call for an end to the mistreatment of Muslims who were innocent of causing the fall of the World Trade Center. So it had its usefulness.
I’ve had to go through phases with my anger. In the growth movement I was encouraged to express it. But expressing it today is no longer appropriate.
It also doesn’t work to simply swallow it either, as Jesus said. (1) And when others are transitioning to loving, it’s definitely a huge inconvenience for me and those around me.
Over the Spring break, I saw that I used to consider anger as normal, whereas it’s not normal. I watched myself one night move from surface anger, to subterranean anger, to beyond anger. And I looked at what emotional territory I ended up in. And I’d call that territory “normal.”
So “anger” and “normal” (and I’m speaking existentially, not normatively) do not exist in the same territory. If you’re in the state of anger, you’re not in the state of normal. I saw that experientially (that is, down to my bones) and it had a tremendus impact on me.
I saw that, most of my life, I haven’t been “normal,” so to speak. Merely saying that doesn’t describe the impact of really experiencing it. I’ve never before gotten it that way.
Once before, in an enlightenment intensive, I’d gone through a huge piece of work only to end up in the territory I called “normal.” I remember how deliriously-happy I was at the time to be able to say: “I feel normal.” How I laughed! As did everyone else.
Finding myself in a “normal” space was revealing. I found that I definitely preferred normal and was oh so tired of being outside it.
There’ve been times, such as in the growth movement, when being in my anger was regarded as reclaiming my power, a feat or accomplishment. And now it’s no longer a feat. Now it’s the next stage to be transcended.
I saw at a deep level the tremendous cost that anger had brought me and continues to bring me today – the discomfort, the distancing, the tentativeness. I saw that it doesn’t bring me what I want and never has.
As recent as Thursday morning, I saw that I use my anger to get my way. I know that sounds like such a basic learning that most people would hear it and wonder at my not getting it till today.
It isn’t that I didn’t get it before now. It’s that I got it at a deeper level than the intellectual. I saw it at the experiential level, which is the first level deep enough to cause us to shift. (The heart level would be deeper still. But I’m not there yet. I wish I was.)
Once I saw it at the experiential level, I was able to call myself on my own number, as the growth movement would say.
And I was able to rechoose. Simple intellectual knowledge is not powerful enough to allow the kind of rechoosing I’m referring to.
Finally. The rest of my life is a bonus.
OK, I’m spent. I may not be able to post daily. My workload these days includes more matters than just writing. And I need to take the 500 watts I’ve been burning and reduce it to 120 if I’m going to be able to stay the course.
Barring the Reval, I’ll be down in Seattle mid-month and am considering a meet-up. Let me know through “Contact Us” if you’d be interested.
Footnotes
(1) “Jeshua via Pamela Kribbe: The Third Way” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/01/26/jeshua-the-third-way/.