I’ve been walking around triggering myself for a while now.
And if I walk the trigger back, I find that I’m disappointed in myself (Mother). I’m disappointed because I reacted to some forgotten thought with irritation, anger, aggressiveness, or some negative attitude (Father).
I have my Father and Mother endlessly arguing in my head.
The passive aggressive posture I adopt is the residue of years of family bickering. Oh gawd, I’m so tired of it. But it was my lot too. I became my Dad.
It was the Mother part of me that kept me sane and plowing onwards. It was for the flip side of Mother’s disapproval: her approval.
Be that as it may, I need to get out of the anger/disapproval cycle.
I need to make peace between my internal Mother and Father, even if they never succeeded in doing so in the flesh, and restore the balance inside me. (I’m sure the two of them made peace on the inner planes years ago.)
I need to lavish transformative love on both sides of me, in order to release the trapped positive kernel from the dross and have the issue as an issue disappear. The released energy, I imagine, will reunite with me.
***
One of the things I’ve learned since June 7, 2021 is that I need to drop all issues, for my own sake. I was commenting on this a while back. (1)
The cost of holding onto them is love, bliss, ecstasy, aliveness, confidence, self-expression, etc. And that cost remains in place as long as I latch onto issues. And I keep latching onto issues, hoping for a different outcome.
I keep on doing the same thing, as Einstein pointed out, hoping one day things will change. But things never change. The outcome never differs.
Stop the camera. All of what I just described happens on the intellectual level, not the experiential or the realizational levels.
Most of it is about right and wrong, good and bad. A great deal of it is ultimately self-serving and it doesn’t produce very much happiness. I compare it to eating dry oatmeal.
When people have sampled what the higher dimensions have to offer – peace and love, bliss and ecstacy – when they’ve had a strong enough experience of the divine qualities (at the experiential level) that the latter have impressed themselves upon them, they tend to be able to pull away more easily from the right/wrong cycle, preferring at that point being happy to being right.
Happiness and its vehicles like laughter and gift-giving are inclusive, unifying. Good/bad and right/wrong are divisive.
The ones trapped in right/wrong may experience only a very few moments – as I did – of happiness a year and so not really know what you’re talking about or what they’re missing.
***
Werner Erhard, following Martin Heidigger, spoke of us having an “always already listening” as the reason we continue doing what doesn’t work.
To illustrate, when I look at myself, I see that I just expect to hear a certain outcome. I’m “set up” to hear it. In fact, I ignore whatever is not what I’m anticipating hearing, waiting to hear what I expect to hear and recognizing it when I do. When I hear what I’m expecting to hear, I get to say, “I told you so.” (2)
Others would call this our conditioning or programming. With infallible accuracy, we fall into the same pothole again and again.
My always already listening, when I turn my attention to it, is “you can’t trust anyone. You have to watch your back at all times.” (3) This guardedness makes for very unhappy people, I can confirm. No signs of intelligent life here.
So I’m not out of the woods yet.
Footnotes
(1) “Drinking the Poison, Hoping They’ll Die – Part 1/2,” Drinking the Poison, Hoping They’ll Die – Part 2/2,”
(2) I started my spiritual journey reading Games People Play by Eric Berne in 1974. It was possible to say something spiritual and intelligent about behavior! Now here I am, back again with games people play.
(3) I’ve also called this my Grand Motif. “See The Grand Motif,” October 13, 2019, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2019/10/13/the-grand-motif/