March, 2006 - I just reread my previous Personal Statement dated March 13, 2004, nearly two years ago. My God nearly two years. And the first thing that strikes me, painfully strikes me, is how similar my struggles today are to what they were then.
It does feel like I’ve been around the block a few times since then and it seems my struggles are on a subtler and deeper level now than they were then but the similarities... well, they disturb me.
I do lean less toward the dramatic now than then, though lean that way I still do.
I guess the big thing I’m now coming to see is how thin and constant and convincing the veil of pathology is for me. I related a big dream in that previous statement, a profound and powerful intervention by the Animus and I surrendered completely and chose him over the temptations I was offered throughout the dream. I have a current big dream to relate, this one too involves my surrender and a powerful reunion with the Spiritual Father. Both dreams sent great ripples through my daily life, through my process, through my dream work. Both faded.
I am, it is clear to me, a difficult case.
These dreams were great gifts, full of passion and love and connection to God yet most of the time in my daily life I am content to feel merely okay, content to wander half asleep and alone, content. This is the place to which I’m now turning my attention. To see how the pathology is always with me in a quiet way. To see that I am always on the brink of being taken out, an accident waiting to happen. To see that when I look at this subtle, deeper layer of pathology I have a difficult time not believing that I am the pathology. To see that I am content to live as a beggar in this world and in God’s Kingdom. To see that I am alone, that I live in a desolation of separation from God and that I accept this terrible place and figure it’s not all that bad really.
I do see more clearly now that my struggles in my job are of my own making and I do struggle there less.
I don’t know what’s going on with my book but I haven’t worked on it much lately. I don’t much care for the earlier writing. I tried for quite a while to fix it, make it somehow better, more true, but I couldn’t. Finally I gave up that repair job and returned to writing new material but that too has faded. Right now I feel shame welling up in me, as if I’ve failed, as if I am a failure. I know this isn’t true. Can I watch this shame, feel it and not believe it? I can, just barely. Can I feel the pain of my separation from God without believing that I’m doomed to be alone always, without sinking into hopelessness? Barely. Can I wake from my comfortable semi slumber and look hard at how shallow and unfulfilled my life is? Only with great effort. And again can I continue to look and to feel without falling into despair? Yes. These are my finger holds on this mountain I’m climbing.
Here’s that newer big dream I mentioned earlier:
I’m on a vast ship. The Captain tells me to go to the big sinks and wash dishes. I do. Liquid splashes out of the sink and begins burning through my clothes and eating into me, it hurts and I’m terrified. I run to the Captain and tell him. He tells me to go back to the sinks. I scream I want to go to the infirmary and see a doctor, he says no. I run away. For most of the dream I’m trying to escape from the Captain and his huge crew which includes my wife, Ellen. Then I’m caught on surveillance cameras. Everyone is closing in on me. I know I can’t get away. I want to turn myself in to the captain, not be hauled in front of him by others. I break through everyone, run to the captain holding my hands over my head saying “I give up”. He brings his huge, rough face close to mine and says: “I love you best of all”
We worked this dream at our summer NOE retreat, and I was able to spend time in my tears and pain and surrender for a long time in the reenactment of my dream, I was able to go on from where the dream ended. It was a huge release and dropping down and dropping in for me. I felt so held and loved by the Captain, the Spiritual Father and I had so many things to say to him. I was the boy, my boy. alive, supported, joyous, surrendered. It lasted four days.
Now, five months later, I’m struggling to see and separate from an insidious pathology that lies close to the bone. I’m currently involved in a group of NOE student teachers who are training to become mentors and teachers of this work. My work in the group is now remedial because I can’t really learn to help others until I’ve been healed myself in this very deep place. My pathology is good at making me seem healthier to myself and others than I really am, so my work now is to see just how sick I am and expose that sickness to others.
I’ve long wanted to be saved by a big sweeping dream, or feeling or experience. To change suddenly and irrevocably. To walk through a door and into the Archtypal realm. I’ve been there but it doesn’t last. It’s as if this pathological carapace is blasted off of me, shattered into dust but then with time, unseen by me, reassembles itself on a deeper, finer less detectable level and before I know it, I’m lost again.
In another recent dream I’m at a big party. Several of the women in Noe are handing out cake and I’m afraid to ask for a piece. That’s how I live most of the time, afraid to ask for my piece of life’s banquet, feeling somehow that I don’t belong.
My current homework is to hold my five year old Ian as I did in a dream and not put him down when the authority figures tell me to. In the dream I say “I don’t care what the consequences are, I’m not putting him down.” I say this not for Ian’s sake but for my own, I feel such love and strength and passion and heat pouring from him in the dream, there’s no way I’m putting him down. If only I could live like this. But I can’t yet. The pathological shell is in place so I’m doing my work, seeing and feeling the shell, the pain of separation, remembering that that is not me, them feeling the vital boy in my arms and remembering that that is me. Back and forth. See the lie, feel the truth, see the lie, feel the truth.
Stay awake.