Wednesday 13 July 2011

I find the following words quite interesting. I think I and others, have fallen into the trap of the said, below:
'So yeah, it's maddening, to me, to be living in a world where much of human behavior seems transparent, and you wonder why the other person isn't acknowledging things that seem pretty obvious. But when you push, it comes off like you're being superior, like you have all the answers. When of course it's pretty much the opposite, that you've seen just how few answers you actually do have.'
Though I believe the following words make sense towards the ethics behind trying to enlighten people.
'We are talking about sides of ourselves that are seeking fullness, seeking to come into being or come into fullness. Rather than focus on the "I" at the center of things, we realize that we live in a nexus of many emerging selves. For me, for instance, there is the musician and the woodsman and the solitary one, and the lover and the friend and the writer. And some of these personalities are unpleasant; they seek to dominate, to destroy, to take; they are uncivilized and animalistic. There is in me the arrogant, imperious one who seeks to know all and slay all rivals. There is the one who seeks to break all fetters, to tear out of the classroom and run free. There is the one who wants to rip up the room and expose all pretense and get everyone drunk...

We tend to acknowledge the parts of ourselves that we think are good. But the parts we think are not so good, they get irritated when neglected, and they come around too, nudging us, wanting recognition.
I do not know what this kind of therapy is called. I only know that for quite some time I would regularly sit on a rug and be asked, "What is most present right now? What is most alive?" And  this question was an invitation to these archetypes to express themselves. And as a consequence I became more friendly with parts of myself and more attuned to their requests to appear.
So it is a kind of organizing method, akin, I suppose, to the tarot: a set of archetypes.
And the beauty of it was, for me, to see myself less as the master of all around me, responsible for everything, and more as a kind of hapless dad, powerless over several vibrant and emerging lives: responsible for their needs but powerless over their ultimate shape. That is how I view myself today, as the water boy for a strange team.
So I buy instruments for my musician self. I give him lots of practice time. Etc.
Also on that strange team is, of course, the one I call "me." But the "me" is increasingly a mystery.'

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