It’s ironic that I should emerge from a lifetime of dissociation (1) and then willingly choose to partition my consciousness again as a growth strategy.
What do I mean by that?
The way I see my mind, it operates in parts, sometimes roles, sometimes voices, but always a multitude. And, often, an unruly mob.
Recently I so disliked the direction I was headed in that I the watcher came forward and assumed command of myself. And the “self” that I take command of … well, it’s all the other voices, really.
I can’t believe I’ve gone through my life leaving its direction in the reins of “sides” of myself that can often be misguided, inept, superficial, etc.
I have an angry mob inside my head and they’ve been running the show. At best they rises= to intellectual self-righteousness. At worst they’re headed in the wrong direction.
I the watcher have not played a role in my life since … before memory. But somehow the origin of all this doesn’t seem to matter as much these days as it used to. It’s the presenting behavior that I the watcher needs to assume control over.
I know that I “made my living” as a very young child out of lacking self-control. I’d become a number one stick-in-the-mud. I was adept at slipping the stick into the bicycle wheel. And I just got better as the years went by.
Then I studied karate and applied a fresh coat of varnish to my already-dead statue. Then I became REALLY justified as a Member of the IRB. (2) Dead-right, Werner would have called where I ended up.
Just as the world finds itself, at the end of the Kali Yuga or dark age, (3) ready to nuke each other and destroy the planet, so I find myself at the end of my own personal Kali Yuga in a dead end of self-righteousness. I the watcher surveys the state of my inner world left in the stewardship of voices other than me.
Everything about my situation in life makes it no longer valuable to roll downhill in life like a snowball gathering more mass. Someone needed to take charge of this operation I call “myself.”
But I do see the irony in my solution to the puzzle.
Whereas the answer once lay in fusing myself back together after dissociation, the answer now lies in I the watcher identifying yet another part of the mind and ceding to it command over all other perceived or imagined parts of myself. For the sake of taking myself forward, I go further into voluntary or wilful dissociation.
No matter what I do, I the watcher remains aloof from it. Nevertheless, such is the infinite flexibility of the mind that I the watcher, who does not descend into action, can still deputize yet another area of the mind to rein in the rest, this time under the watchful eye of me, the eternal observer, the aware scrutineer.
It just shows the need for flexibility; what hampered us yesterday could come to our aid today.
I’m shifting my focus from the parts of me that nearly caused a trainwreck of self-righteousness to the heart-informed direction of I the watcher.
All of this to me – new to the field of self-control, as I am – shows up like an exercise in using the mind in a productive way.
Footnotes
(1) I dissociated after my Father yelled at me from just inches away from my face. I was around 7-10 at the time and didn’t completely fuse back together again (the Humpty Dimpty man I called myself) until age 58.
The symptoms were intellectuality, no deep experiencing, a lack of self-confidence, a lack of feeling grounded, shyness at public speaking, having to watch for zealotry, resentment, aggressiveness, etc.
(2) Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. I was tasked with making decisions on who was a U.N. Convention Refugee and who not.
(3) In Hindu cosmology, we’re leaving the Kali Yuga or Dark Age and entering the Sat Yuga, Age of Truth, or Golden Age.
