I was saying earlier that I regarded this as a time of Deep Cleansing. (1)
However that works, I personally find that deep issues are arising.
I’m now following the deep despondency I’ve felt in the background of my consciousness for what feels like all my life.
And at last I’m connecting with an utter despondency early on in my life because my access was denied to my Dad.
I’ve been through it a million times. I don’t need to go through it again.
But I do need to experience it again. I see a very young child seeking love, affirmation, protection, from my Dad and being denied those gifts.
We look at generation after generation and talk about progress being made in science, physics, space travel, etc.
What we don’t look for is overall progress in loving.
I don’t mean “progress” as in a measure of virtue or something. I mean it as “unfoldment.” Our unfoldment is not a straight-line story. It has its highs and lows.
My Dad was fresh from the Second World War. Why would I expect so much from him as to be able to love another, even his child, after the constant shock of wartime activity?
He’d been cooped up in a tin can, a target for the enemy for some time, in a part of the ship that was the least survivable (the boiler room). I think that would affect me as well.
Our individual unfoldment is also a matter of social conditioning. In the Sixties our social milieu (the flower children) allowed love to flow and grow, which nurtured unfoldment. It continued into the Growth Movement of the Seventies, All that ended with the Recession of 1982.
Today, the cabal has pretty well marketized and weaponized sex, music, the news. Here’s an example of our fall in ethics from the music industry: We have written testimony that the music industry invested in private prisons and then pushed rap music on the industry because they felt it boosted prison numbers. (2)
The effects of corruption are probably about the only things that trickled down to us from above in our society. That culture of corruption has to affect us as well and is a factor in our development.
So our collective life is not “a majestic story of orderly progress.” (3) It isn’t straight-line progress, forever. Sometimes we devolve and, since 9/11, we’ve been almost constantly, in our institutions, in my view, devolving.
At an individual level, of course, we’re expanding, unfolding, blossoming.
Returning to my own deep cleansing, I need to get that the way it was was the way it was. Nothing can be done about it.
But I can assume responsibility today for reparenting myself. I can encourage myself. I can reassure myself. I can love myself. The mind is capable of doing things like that. (4)
I’m missing a file of memories on Dad doing that with me and so I need to supply those memories myself. It calls on my balanced adult state to take center stage and act as my surrogate father. (5)
That’s one way of handling it. But it isn’t the only way. Anyone who loved a doll or a pet when they were young or who was good at make-believe will have others.
Things are moving so quickly in the world around us that I don’t require my techniques of recovery to be elegant right now. I just need them to work.
Footnotes
(1) “Can You Imagine?”
(2) “The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation,”
(3) My thesis title.
(4) I’ve called this “creative dissociation.”
(5) XXX was also a surrogate father.