Part 1(a) of Storytelling Species
The Storytelling Species: Makers & Players of Reality Bubbles (Continued)
The death of a father is devastating no matter when it happens in a person’s life or how old the father was at the time of death. Civilizations have fathers too. Civilizations are nothing more than of millions of individuals who contribute some of their individual currents of consciousness to the collective. This consciousness can then be projected by the larger container of the civilization in which the individuals exist. It is supposed to be used to sustain the good of all beings living inside the civilization. However, just like individuals, collective consciousness is complicated and has many aspects that translate into power potentialities. Some are good, some are bad, all when bundled into a collective state have an outsized impact on the shared reality of human beings and all other living beings. We don’t make reality, but we certainly can chip away at it.
Here I will only talk about my individual experience of losing my father who was an unusually kind, compassionate, and inordinately empathic human being. In ever sense of the word, he was the Benevolent Father. Western Civilization contains the image of a father too; however, it is fracturing and shattering in a very dangerous manner. I have written about this previously in my blog: It Feeds on Fear and Sadness. Thus, if you are interested in the death of the Benevolent Father of Western Civilization, please refer to this blog and go down to Death of the Father. Also see the section above, specifically my links to Contagion written by Barry Kort.
In the video above, Blue So Deep — Pulling Back My Power, I document the day when I understood how I have been losing essential interal energy by projecting good parts of myself onto others (e.g., the deep thinker, the doer, the seer, the dreamer, the successful one, the popular one). All these parts of myself were cast onto others around because to continue to play the part in my current mind narrative, I could not be them. But not being them were causing me to go in circles on the endless sea I had been cast onto due to no fault of my own but rather circumstance way beyond my control.
Indeed for a long time my only option was to float and hope someone would offer some random act of kindness or comfort like my dad used to do for people in pain. Slowly, very slowly, I healed from the hole left behind by his death. I lost all my resilience and strength when he died. I would catch glimpses of it once in a while, but I knew I was descending. I was going down into a Pit of Depression that would suddenly become much deeper and wider than I ever believed possible. I could not see the bottom. It was an abyss and if I could even reach the bottom, I knew there was a dangerous watery crossing I would have to make before being able to climb out on the other side. Turning back was not an option. Circumstances that were well beyond my control had pushed me too far down. I had collapsed. The only way out was to keep going down towards the raging unconsciousness currents deep inside of me. Currents so ferocious, so wild and beastly, I had hid them from myself my entire life. There was a good chance, they would be unsurvivable.
This was a descent into what in former times might have been called the Dark Night of the Soul. I sought professional help but found it insufficient and unaffordable. So, I stopped it and continued the journey alone. It grew very dark. I became suicidal. That is when I lost sight of myself inside myself. I no longer see my decent into the canyon. Nor could I feel any more where I was. I was lost in the dark. Somehow I held onto a slim and fragile memories–things that had made life meaningful and precious before.
Memories of my father’s love were particularly powerful. But these were accompanied by rage over all the circumstances that had lead to his sudden death and how I was treated afterwards. As I moved through this terrible place, I began to realize dad had been like a sun for our family. Everyone, most of all me, depended on his gravity to hold our course in life. This gravity of course was his love. He also held a great deal of our community and extended family together, after all he had been a pastor and hospital chaplain. He was the man who rushed in to help someone when tragedy struck–be it a job lost, sickness, accident, or death. He was there for a person or family suffering from some tragic reversal or lost. He did not try to minimize or explain the pain away. He held it with them. He knew he did not know why terrible things happen to good people. He knew there are no simple tropes or memes or words that magically take such pain away. He knew the only way to heal from this type of pain was to go through it, which often meant going down–descending into depression, deep grief, regret, remorse, desolation, torment, agony and unrelenting anguish. He knew people could get lost down there. So, he stayed near by as long as they needed him. He knew he could not make the journey through pain or grief for them, but he could listen, especially when the pain got so bad it made a person wail in primal agony. He did this for me–that is how I know he did this. Nothing about pain or suffering scared him. He knew it was energy that had to find an expression, sometimes he knew it needed a reflection or a witness. So he was there to do this for people who were suffering through their darkest journeys. No one is spared these journeys. If you are alive, you will hit a moment of great darkness inside yourself–often you will be pushed there by external circumstances–but the darkness you confront lives inside you. It is as real as the circumstances that pushed you to this extreme inner voyage.
Recently, I saw this picture and contest to caption it. To my great surprise I won the contest.
For me, there were many points on this journey where I almost gave up. I knew no one was coming to help. Then, just as suddenly as I had lost my way descending into the great canyon, I re-emerged. Somehow I had ended up underwater. It was not just the water of raging river at the bottom of the canyon. I was underwater in the middle of a Primordial Sea. I don’t know how I got there, but I was swimming to the surface. And, I was bringing something with me. This experience occurred near the first anniversary of my father’s death. I saw and felt it in a dream that I wrote down and then drew.
This year, 2020, the journey continued, but due to outer circumstances, high among them the novel Coronavirus, I am aware my energies have been redirected more externally. It remains difficult for inner turbulence remained challenging to navigate, but in a way, being pulled to my outer realities has allowed me to gain balance needed to move forward. For example, during 2019, I had to recognize and pull back dangerous and terrible aspects of myself that I had lost due to projections. It is very hard, even traumatizing to see the evil inside one’s self, but it is there inside every human being.
There is power in taking back your projections, but in the first year after my father passed, I had only taken back the dishonorable and nefarious parts. This was good, but it created a significant internal imbalance that I remained unaware of until this year when I encounter external circumstances that forced me to recognize and reclaim the magnificent, holy, and superior qualities of myself that I had also lost due to projection onto others. I needed them as well to maintain inner balance so I could move forward instead of in circles as I realize now I have been since reclaiming some of the devilish parts of myself. With these parts, I had managed to cobble together a little raft, but I needed their equal and opposite energies to move forward, and these I had bestowed onto others through my projections. I am still trying to bring them back. For some reason, these are harder to pull back in and reclaim as myself than the terrible ones. Perhaps that is due to the narrative that I tell to that part of myself that is aware about myself and what has happened to me during my journey through time and space. I know that I need all of them (the good, the bad, and the ugly) to finish writing the story about Climate Change and Consciousness that I began in 2012. It is a magnificent story. I know there are readers who will love it, if I can finish it.