"God!"

"What?"

"I used to eat there.  Really good noodles.  I have all these memories from my life.  But none of it happened.  What does that mean?"


I'm on a precipice.  I've been given the option by my Vocational Rehab counselor to consider opening a file at Mental Health and going on SSI.  My family is no longer willing to help me, and I cannot survive on my own with the difficulties that I have.  I have made huge improvement over the last 3 years, but not enough to impress the people who are helping me and not enough for me to make it.  As I've mentioned in other places, the size of the invisible boulder that my limbic system is trying to push uphill is just too big.  I am strong.  If you were trying to heft my boulder, I doubt you could do it as well as I have for as long as I have.  But I'm not strong enough. 

If it were just about me, then I think I would just let it all go.  So what if my family and friends have thought that I was just lazy or stubborn or stupid and now they are going to see a different projection.  I would just call "time of death" and wash my hands and walk away.  But there's way more at stake.  If all I wanted was to have my Disorder and be left alone, then I could cut my losses.  But I want more than that.  In fact, it's prolly partly the nature of my Disorder that makes me want more than that.  It's quite a trap.  And I think I see now that there is no way out.  Not, at least, in time to make enough money to pay for a roof over my head and food on my table.  Lets look at this as objectively as we can:

I have no We-space in my local life. 

Well, work has potential, but there's no actual yet. 

I don't have anything that holds me in the loving arms of it's awareness while I do things that risk failure.  I actually never have.  This has badly damaged my nervous system. 

For some reason I don't yet understand, I want it repaired.  I don't just want everything to feel better.  I won't take meds, and I don't self-medicate on a regular basis - only on occasion when it gets really bad.  Maybe that's because the nature of my Disorder causes me to want to be a good enough person to deserve to be here.  I don't know.  I can't shut it "off".  It's "on" and the handle's been broken off of the switch.  At any rate, it has lead me to some really beautiful, good and truthful places, so I'm not really complaining.

I think it's reparable, but the quickest means to do that is ridiculously costly and it seems to be only considered for children.  Adults are apparently closed off from that kind of healing.  I'll prolly never have that available to me.  If I ever do, then I will take it. 

The most likely way forward is to find my own way.  This means I will necessarily have to continue repressing the fear about taking Risks.  This will also mean that I won't respect people who don't take Risks in life, and that will keep the whole vortex of indifference and anger and hurt and fear that surrounds me spinning.  At least for a while.  Maybe I can find a way to heal. 

But I think the struggle to find a way to keep my limitations from wrecking the projections that my Tribe has for me in it's collective limbic system is over.  The show's over. 

Is there another kind of Tribe?  People who really understand that this is a drama that the limbic system is generating, and that there is more to being human than our deep triggers?  It's not that this projection isn't "real", it's that there is more about me that is real.  It cannot contain all of me.  Who am "I"? 

"The Matrix cannot tell you who you are."

Will I or won't I step over the edge?

~Ww

So, meditation practice on Monday was inneresting.  But before I talk about that, I should talk about what happened the week before. 

Last week, I came to understand that there is a difference between the awareness you might have by using your senses and awareness of the consciousness sort.  I hear the cars outside, I see the light coming in a certain way, I smell the air, and I feel the temperature on my skin.  All these things tell me that it is morning.  Okay.  But consciousness awareness is distinct from that.  For a very brief few seconds, I realized that I could be aware of  more than what my senses could take in, and that my senses were limitations of what I could be aware of as long as I only lived from inside of them.  Like a tin-can phone.  Once you put the can to your ear, the surrounding sounds are cut off, and you can hear only what comes through the phone wire.  That is what our sensory hearing is like compared to the consciousness awareness of sounds. 

After I went home and thought about this, I realized what that meant.  I could hear Obiwan saying to me, "Luke! Use the Force!" and see why he shut off the machinery in the cockpit and closed his eyes and nailed it.  That made me laugh. 

So, this week's lesson was more complicated.  I am still distracted by the religiosity of it.  I can feel my spiritual small self swelling with eagerness and pride about how talented she is at understanding the "Mindfulness Practices".  Holy crap!  I've been a Christian, for Christ's sake!  I get that stuff!  They may say that it isn't about Judging ourselves or others, but most people don't really get that.  I do.  And the only way to accomplish so much mindfulness is to have first expanded one's circle of care to include one's self and Shadow, otherwise, the ickiness of what we're becoming aware of overwhelms us and we contract over it.  Oh, blah, blah, blah!  I get this stuff.  More than most.  I could go on and on. 

But that is not enlightenment. 

The spiritual small self is not going to make the final journey so it doesn't really matter how much I understand this stuff or how skilled I am at groking mindfulness. 

There is a children's book by C.S. Lewis called, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader".  And in this story, there is a mouse.  I wonder, seriously, if Lewis really understood what this was saying in this context or if this theme really is shared equally in both camps.  Either way.  This mouse was part of the crew on this ship which was on a mission to explore to the edge of the world.  There were others on the crew - humans.  But this mouse was special.  He was very small, but actually had the most courage and understanding about what honor was.  He was always properly respectful and also properly offended at all the right things.  His deep love for beauty, truth and goodness kept him sane and safe from the corruption that any of the other crew-members may have fallen prey to.  He was very pure.  Except for a tad bit of vanity that naturally accompanies such purity.

So, as they got closer and closer to the edge, strange things began to happen.  When the Sun would rise or set (I forget which) it was HUGE.  Obviously, they were getting really close!  And the seawater became sweet instead of salty, and when everyone drank it, they became strong and healthy and calm and didn't need to eat food.  Everyone's character changed so that they had no more fear, and they stopped having arguments and didn't need to sleep.  Also, it became possible to look at the Sun without suffering injury. 

Finally, when the end of the world was reached, and they realized that the whole crew couldn't really approach it, but only one, and the ship would have to return with the rest to tell the tale; while they were discussing who it would be, the mouse was already over the side and on his way in a little tiny coracle. 

To him, it was obvious who had to do it.  It was the only reason he had been born.  So, with silence and tears of joy that are reserved only for those perfectly matched to their Ultimate Calling, he paddled his tiny coracle to the edge...   and tipped...    and went over.  Gone.  Bliss.

This is a children's book, remember.

That's what my small spiritual self is like.  Its the one who will get me to the edge.  But no one lives to tell the tale of what is over the edge.  That is reserved for another kind of Being altogether, that even the noblest small self cannot really sustain.  The small self can be transformed to the perfection of form all the way up to that point.  Then it must be allowed to fall. 

The one argument I have with people who are into "killing the ego" is that they are so vicious about it.  This body is not the enemy.  It has carried you all this way, and should be set aside with love, respect, honor and gratitude.  Like the ideal mindset one should have when one kills an animal so that one can eat and survive.  It has sacrificed everything for you.  Treat it with the appropriate respect.

St. Francis got this in the end.  I think its one of my favorite things about him.  His process was so fantastic.  In the end, after a long period of abusing his body as if it were the enemy containing all the forces which keep him from being with his Beloved, he realized that he had broken it, but not really freed himself of his resistance.  Then he was left with a body that had to be cared for by others, becoming a burden to them, and still had the same limitations to his inward freedom that he'd always had.  He repented mournfully. 


But all that is distraction.  The most valuable thing I got out of this weeks practice was the sense of what my limbic system is all about.  This week, our teacher had her dog there in the room with us.  A giant poodle, I believe.  That strange pink color that some dogs have.  He took an instant liking to me, and while we were doing the walking meditation, came up to me and nuzzled my hand.  It was so sweet. 

Our job as students that afternoon was to be mindful of the breath and the body as it walked.  So, I fought a little bit with my impulse to be mindful of the dog.  But after I got what I needed to get, I was very grateful.  The dog was aware too, in it's sensory and limited way.  His entire nervous system was alert to sounds and sights and smells which might indicate anything that was of interest or concern to him.  So was mine.  This is what we shared.  When he became alarmed about something he heard and got up and trotted out of the room I realized exactly what my limbic system was doing.  This was the part of me that was animal.  I too can become alerted to something outside and my awareness will dwell inside that sensory limitation and be carried out of the room.  This is what we all were struggling with.  And at that moment it became clear that there was something more that we could do, as humans, that the dog could not.  This is what I was here to learn about.

So, while I kept struggling, I could easily have been overwhelmed with frustration.  But I wasn't.  I knew there was something ahead of me on the road and that I wasn't there yet, and that I would know it when I got there, but that I couldn't describe it yet.  So, I was okay with letting myself take time to learn. 

For the rest of the session, I realize how much better I was at focusing on the breath than I was when I first walked in there.  A flood of gratitude came over me so that I wanted to cry out and hug my teacher and thank her with tears.  But I just smiled and restrained myself.  My heart opened wide. 

It is again, just remembering.  I'm so grateful.


But, I gotta tell ya!  The kicker was last night when I read an article in WIE? magazine for this month.  It just came in the mail yesterday.

Pages 72-76 are about Integral Feminism.  Pages 78-84 are about Andrew Cohen's group's experience with feminism.  The difference between the two are hugely important to me. 

While I occupy the body, I see it as my duty to dwell within form with integrity.  I do not see it as my duty to try and transcend/reject/leave behind/set aside or in any way not be respectful to form with all it's necessary limitations.  There is a very real distinction between the relationship to form from Wilber's crew and that relationship from Cohen's crew.  Cohen sees the solution to women's stuckness as involving some kind of non-identification with the form of "woman".  Wilber's crew is more fully embracing the entire package - both non-identification as well as identification. 

I have "smelled" this distinction for years now, and am EXTREMELY relieved to find that I am not alone, nor "wrong".  I see how and why Cohen is doing what he is doing.  But - to put it bluntly - he is using a certain aspect of form without acknowledging it and at the same time wishes he could help people escape from it, but can't as long as he's unconscious about this.  I can see why he doesn't want to acknowledge it, but he is necessarily trapping himself and his students in a vicious cycle of Shadow Boxing. 

The amusing irony is that he is a man and a teacher.  And his women students are going to respond instinctively to him in such a way that they will be trying to please him.  If he were to lead the way and stop denying that his male animalness triggers this deep response in the female animals around him, and that this is part of what his effectiveness as a teacher depends on, then they could all relax and stop struggling.  But no.  He needs to hang on to the power he has as a teacher - one of the aspects of form - and this is the natural toll you have to pay the piper for dancing to this tune.  In order to hang on to that kind of projection between student and teacher, everyone has to suffer though the fear involved in evoking that kind of people pleasing. 

Innerestingly the men students are at a disadvantage.  They don't get to see the distinction clearly between their projection and their own ability to transcend.  It's all mixed up together.  But for the women, the ability to transcend disappears as soon as Elvi - oops, I mean - Andrew leaves the building.  Those who have an Eye, let them see.

It's frustrating for me to watch this community keep sniffing around and around this thing, but never finding it.  But, I guess the truth is that it's my small, separate, "spiritual-self" that is frustrated.  Which is fine.  My goal is to make peace with form, and to inhabit it with integrity around issues such as this.  So, I'm okay with that.  It's a relief to finally see that I'm not crazy when it comes to this.  I may be crazy in other ways, but....

Blessings upon them.


So this article was basically 3 prominent women in the Integral community responding to the question of, "What would a new feminism created through the lens of integral theory look like, feel like, and be like, embodied by women?"  Excellent! 

Relief #1
Sophia Diaz:
"Right now, there is a preference for masculine forms of information, and we are trying to break into that with a feminine sensibility.  My personal motivation for this is actually suffering.  There is a certain level of unanswerable suffering, a bodily felt reality that there's something that hasn't been addressed, something that doesn't make the realization you once had present all the time.  It has to do with a prioritization of information over the emotional and psychic health of embodiment.  We want to help women cultivate a profound trust of the good, the true, and the beautiful that is inherent in a woman's heart, to bring out the vulnerable part of us from which all our energy comes...  So we're basically talking about something that is invisible because it is so present all the time..."

Hallelujah!  Fish are wet!  Hello!!  Imagine if all the fish in the world suddenly realized that!  LOL

Yes, we are Shadowing things and those things have a very strong gravitational pull as long as they are beneath the surface of ordinary consciousness.  Once they are above the surface, they lose that pull, and we are no longer stuck to them like we are to this planet body.  We can ascend or descend according to our choice.  The prioritizing of information necessitates that we put a judgment on absolutely everything.  It can be anything from a moral judgment to a simple categorization.  When we do that, we are doing a certain kind of violence to that thing.  It merely arose out of the depths, minding it's own business, and all of a sudden it's being told that it can go here but not there, and it can only be this but not that.  But the innocent mind responds to that kind of violence by forming a gate-keeper who pushes the thing back underground.  It doesn't respond by forming lines and obeying orders.  That gate-keeper becomes the Conscience.  The Shadow Master.  And the Innocent mind becomes passive, and forfeits it's power.  From that point on, the Gate-keeper takes over such moral jobs as telling the "truth".  That is counter to its real programing, but that is one of the demands we place upon it. 

And when Integral or Shadow Work comes along and requests it to answer to Sophia's "bodily felt reality", it is in quite a pickle.  If The conscience tells the real Truth, it puts itself in line for being laid off.  It must choose between pushing the impulses down below deck, or confessing that they are there and they are in pain.  If it chooses to confess, we will require it to allow them to emerge and speak for themselves.  That is the 3-2-1 process.  Then it is out of a job.  Unless, of course, we rewrite the job description as: telling the Truth, instead.

Paul the Apostle uses many words in the opening chapters to the Romans to describe why we cannot be free from problematic impulses by empowering the Conscience to push them below deck in the name of standards of behavior (Law).  Rather, it is the standards of behavior which make us aware that those impulses are down there because they are trying to come up and the conscience is always kept busy holding them back.  He maintains that a person is Good apart from constantly pushing the "Bad" impulses below deck.  It is Grace that makes this possible. 

So at that point, we bring the Innocent mind back online and allow it to help hold the space for new instructions.  It is this Innocent mind that floats free above the surface, not stuck, and is able to ascend or descend at will.  It is now informed by Good, Truth and Beauty, so it is not Ignorant, but neither is it is stuck like the conscience was.  It simply allows things to arise as they are.  Sophia describes it like this: "The Feminine Principle is being itself - literally the nourishment force of existence, because it is existence itself." 

Bless her.

Relief #2
Diane Musho Hamilton
"Enlightenment knows no gender, yet it manifests in the body and mind of this woman practitioner.  Enlightenment is empty of all particularity, and at the same time, it is the full unfolding of distinctions in the manifest realm, including feminine sensibilities.  Enlightenment is not bound by time and space but, paradoxically, is realized through consciousness occurring in our time and place, in this culture, and under these conditions in which the question "What is Integral Feminine?" comes up.

...You could say that she is a manifestation of evolutionary consciousness, embodying development with a particularly feminine flavor.  To the extent that she is aware, to the extent that she learns and unfolds, she has the innate capacity to expand and open into greater and greater identification with all things.  This unfolding requires her intention, devotion, and will, and she is ultimately an integral spiritual practitioner.  As an Integral practitioner, her most outstanding feature is the ability to take different perspectives on who and what she is, without being limited or constrained by them.  In other words, the Integral Feminine is aware of herself arising in four quadrants of experience - the individual interior, individual exterior, collective interior, and collective exterior.  Using the integral map, she is able to take perspectives easily and fluidly, without becoming fixed, dogmatic, or demanding in her viewpoint, realizing that all perspectives are inextricably related and partial..."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, "greater and greater identification with all things".  Period.  Fuller and fuller, even though emptier and emptier.  Female represents all people, and that means no one is going to be enlightened while retaining pure non-identification with all things.  Sorry.  For thousands of years, in every religion, this has been the dream.  Time to wake up.

"Moreover, her loyalty is to both sexes and to supporting men and women in manifesting more beautifully who they are...  "

This and this next bit, more than anything, supports the strangeness of my experience of pursuing a Restraining Order on my Boyfriend whom I love and who loves me. 

Relief #3
Willow Pearson
"I am love, I am lovable, I am loved, and I love.
We are that Love.  Not just when we feel happy, not just when we're temporarily graced with health, not only when we find ourselves in relationship, or finally find ourselves by getting out of one.  That Love is the very ground of our being, even when we feel like a raging thunderstorm that will never end or an impenetrable fortress of fog where the sun won't shine through or a proverbial wet blanket.  Even then, we are that Love...

...Through the power of identification, valuation, and affirmation that comes from practicing among women, we are increasingly able to both deeply include and freely transcend our femaleness and other characteristics of our embodiment."

[sigh]
Yes, now I can relax so many muscles that have been so tense for so long, trying to wrestle with the illusion that I have been wrong.  The fight is over.  The solution is at a level above the problem.

"THE WAR IS OVER!  ZION, THE WAR IS OVER!  The machines, they're gone!"

Later on, I will engage the fight again as I lose consciousness again.  And then I will gain it back again.  The more I experience the losing and gaining and back and forth, the more I will know the pathway between those two worlds and be able to get myself back and forth at will. Even in the Dark.

~Ww

Oh, what a mess!

It's terribly traumatizing to talk about this, but I have to learn to integrate it.  It is a necessary perspective amongst many - however partial.  My life is marked by abuse from this perspective, so my nervous system is telling me that I am under attack.  I have to take that into consideration when I write about it.  It's necessarily going to be goey and confusing for me. 

Yes, I am awake to all that. 

I pray that you awaken to your own relationship to objectification as you read.

Ken Wilber's 'splanation of the 1-2-3 Process saved me from being forever trapped by my malinformed idea of what meditation and "enlightenment" was.  I have to continuously recall it when I am listening to/reading some people's ideas about it all, because so many people use meditation as a way to get away from various emotional situations and distress, and this "getting away" is what was done by my Primary Caretaker when I was having emotional distress as a small child.  She emotionally withdrew and didn't reflect my emotional responses to the world back to me.  I was left alone with my enormous feelings about things and had no idea whether or not the pain or fear would stop or whether anyone cared or thought I was okay while having those feelings.  It was just an emotional, infant me against this cruel and hard world.  As I got older, I repressed such feelings as terror, rage, pain and many forms of enjoyment - 1 to 2 - because whenever I experienced them, my Caretaker would emotionally withdraw from me.  So, those emotions and the accompanying impulses were projected - 2 to 3 -and acted out on unconsciously.  I developed personas to have those feelings in private moments when no one was around, and other personas to have only acceptable responses to my Caretaker. 

My Caretaker responded to my emotional life by pushing her own emotional reflection of my feelings away - 1 to 2 - so that she could talk to me about my feelings.  Then she pushed them away even further so that she talked about them to others - 2 to 3.  I distinctly remember being told that I was "pouting", even though my own memory of those times was of holding in and suppressing overwhelming rage and hurt.  I was damned if I did and damned if I didn't.  There was no one who seemed to relate to my feelings and I became isolated and contracted into a very tight ball.  People around me talked about me, within my hearing, and I heard her tell them that I was a pouter.  This elicited sympathy for her, while I was set apart as having the problem.  I was prolly very small when it started, but I remember it well into my older childhood.

I've been accused by another family member of historical revision according to my contracted view.  But then I saw her respond to my own children.  And I knew. 

So, I'm clear about my own participation in the problem of not being this or that - 1-2-3 - but only after many years of being totally blind to it.  I'd say, it's only been in the last 4 or 5 years that I've seen my own identical impulse to push away the emotional responses/reactions of others when I could not handle it.  Up until that time, I had spent many, many years and tons of energy being righteously indignant towards people who do that, and who act indifferent to others' emotional distress.  My limbic system is totally programed for that.  It can be changed, and it is being changed, but I have over 30 years of strong programing and reinforcement to overcome. 

I hope you'll pardon me if I don't just "get over it".  If not, then ...  well, don't provoke me.  That's all I can say.  Just please don't.  If you feel the urge to poke me, which some do, well then you'd better check yourself.  You've got a problem too.

So, objectification was a huge problem for me in my young life.  But it didn't stop there.  As a teen and young adult, I got some attention from guys.  Something which many young people now might not understand is that this kind of attention was not welcome for most girls.  Sexual attraction was okay, but women were trying to have sexual experiences with healthy respect for their entire personality.  Women were trying to test guys to see if they were going to be respectful, and guys were trying to trick the girls into thinking they were respectful so they could get in their pants.  The sad game of predator and prey seemed intractable, especially since it was not talked about openly.  Polite people acted as if young people met and fell in love and dated and then got married, or it didn't "work out" so they "broke up".  That's not really what was happening, but since the prior generation didn't allow women to want sex in the first place, the reality was still taboo, regardless of our victimization.  If we were exploited, we were a slut to begin with.  There was no recourse. 

In the generation before me, it wasn't okay for women to want sexual experiences at all, so it was a real improvement for the guys that we put ourselves out there.  But most of the guys didn't seem to want to reciprocate value for value.  For the most part, they just took their trophy and ran.  So, considering that we wanted real respect, the attention that the guys were giving us girls was dripping with pretense and pathetically shallow and it was just really insulting to women's intelligence. Then when they were done with us and kicked us to the curb, there was no where to take the pain or rage without being outed to our parents as whores and such.  Plus, the guys took advantage of our need to be respected and talked trash about us just to silence us.  And so did the Alpha Females who wanted the attention of the Alpha Males.  This only reinforced the sense of threat for me.  Alone in a dangerous world. 

But things are different now, aren't they?

In the WIE issue that I talked about yesterday, there was a special section under the Feminism heading called "Freedom & Choice in Pornutopia: Why Girls Are Going Wild". 

It was quite a feat to connect the dots all the way from First Generation Feminism to the current incarnation as Feminine Exhibitionism.  I confess; as a little girl, I was told that Feminism was really great because it meant that Women could do the same great things that men could do!  My Mother; always encouraging the "doing" and "accomplishment" aspects of life.  And all the other female role models in my life were pushing the same thing.  But as I grew older I began to hate Feminism for exactly that reason.  And sure enough, by the 80's women were expected to carry the same unreasonable work-load that men were carrying!  And the anger with which they defended this "right" seemed absurd to me.  Especially since the other "right" which they seemed so concerned with was the destruction of what looked to me like a very vulnerable little creature indeed: the unborn.  Wow.  Women have the right to kill themselves and their young.  Far out!  So, I took my hard-won birth-control pills and left them in the dust.

About the only thing that I could see that was really worth keeping around unchanged was the right to be viewed as a person worthy of respect, "just like a man".  I watched as this culture tried to integrate this fought-for "right" as a commonly shared value.  I watched as men suffered the humiliation that came from angry women during this struggle.  It was painful.  I hoped that the period of adjustment would come to an end and that we could all finally respect one another and get along.  But I guess it wasn't meant to be.

Instead of developing actual respect for women, many men seemed to be mainly hiding their disrespect just as always.  Then, eventually repressing it, as it became less and less okay to express it out loud, even in the company of other men.  And seemingly at the same time, women seemed to be caving in from the pressure to be like men in the workaday world and just fell back to the position of wanting to be taken care of.  Only, we had to repress that as well, because it became taboo to express that, even in the company of other women.  So, we started hiding our schemes to find men who would take care of us.  Some of us hid in the Church, and the Evangelical world swelled with women who wanted to have babies and be taken care of.  Other women totally gave up on men completely, and pushed their way out of the game as lesbians.  This pressure cooker had to pop eventually. 

Now, says the article in WIE?:

"Feminism wants you to be whoever you are - but with a political consciousness.  And, vice versa: You want to be a feminist because you want to be exactly who you are"

It goes on to explain:

"By being pro everything - pro-sex, pro-homemaker, pro-career, pro-motherhood, pro-trans-gender, pro-queer - Third Wavers managed to philosophically elevate the exercise of women's choice over the substance of women's choices themselves, avoiding the need for discrimination or morality altogether."

The article drips with sarcasm and disappointment in the choices women are making right now about porn and the objectification that it entails.  We've struggled against so many obstacles to go higher.  Why are we throwing it all away?  And, I would normally agree.  But reading it helped me see another dimension that I hadn't seen before. 

Over the last 100 years, humans - well, mostly the common, everyday man - have just not wanted to evolve.  Prior to that, the Industrial revolution and the myth of Progress and Manifest Destiny and all that sort of swept them up in this dream of Human-improvement.  Men especially seemed to be seduced by the idea that we could mechanize everything and make everything work better!  The Aquarian Age popped this overinflated dream and we awoke hungry for the Goddess and Her Organic Salvation.  But She couldn't operate while the machines left over from the previous age were still in place, and they continued to grind us all into meat.  Patriarchy and Welfare kept on making their expensive demands and we couldn't free ourselves no matter how much we tried.  With the Advent of AIDS, sex had to go back in the cage, and our government was suffering from senility as it forgot why it was taking care of us in the first place and tried to shrink itself back down. 

So we went back to exploiting one another.  And it was awful.  There was a new generation of Sex Objects and Security Objects as the Trumps became our Role Models by default.  We were literally beside ourselves with incredulity and self-loathing by how much we wanted what they had.  We tried to sweep our envy under the rug, but we couldn't.  We had driven our cars towards Yuppie-Utopia as far as we could, then when we ran out of gas, we set up camp out in the middle of no where.  Exposed and hollowed out.  There was nothing to be done but let it rip. 

Our own shame did this.  Our own humiliation at not being able to create the world we knew we wanted.  Our kids took our shame and created a sling-shot out of it - as they always do - and they shot themselves as deeply into conscious materialism and shallow objectification as they possibly could.  We are revolted. 

Precisely.

But the good thing that is coming out of this is the opportunity to integrate what has been Shadowed for such a long time: our lower instincts.  The primal ones.  By making themselves into commodities, these young men and women have generated a critical amount of awareness about exactly what our limbic systems are driving us to do.  They've gotten it down to a science.  Literally. 

Recently I've become aware that in the Quadrants, the stuff on the left side - the Interior - is totally connected to value and the personal.  The stuff on the right side - the Exterior - is totally disconnected from value or the personal.  A cell is just a cell.  It is a solid 3  It is a thing.  We have power over it because we put it in little boxes with labels and such.  But a feeling is much more.  It belongs to someone.  And that someone is inside the box with the feeling and becomes labeled along with it.  This is a solid 1.  When we label a cell, no one gets hurt.  When we label a feeling, it can be a disaster.  People who prefer to deal with the world from the right side, typically don't like involving themselves with all that "personal stuff".  They normally like things to be "Objective". 

So, now that sex has been ripped out of the left Quadrants and dragged off into the right side, it has lost it's personalness and the only value one can place on it is a dollar sign or the value it is to us as a commodity - it keeps us warm at night, turns us on, keeps us busy, amused, distracted, comfortable, whatever.  Paul the Apostle noted this phenomenon as "their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.", not because it had to do with sex (!GASP!! ) but because it had been totally taken out of the realm of human value and objectified. 

Our instincts and primal drives are just toys now.  To be played with like our genes and our brains.  I can give you a hard-on in 1.8 seconds.  I can make you squirt in 35 seconds flat.  You can bed her in 2 hours or less.  You can make him ask you out in 2 minutes or less.  I can handle being throat-fucked, butt-fucked and fisted all at once - AND - I can make it feel like you're really raping and hurting me.  I can look like I'm 11 years old.  How much are you willing to pay for that?  Apparently it's getting cheaper and cheaper.  And easier and easier to access. 

The science involved in triggering all the deep predatory and victim impulses that turn one another on at the cellular level is exact.  The mystery is gone.  This quaint website that I frequent describes how much of it works, and why many of us have a hard time trying to break away.  But it also describes how all the deep protective and nurturing impulses are triggered as well and suggests that as the sane and evolved alternative.  Isn't that just the same developmental level of evolution only less offensive to the shared value in the We-Space?  Is that really going forward, considering most of the foundational literature was written in the supposedly non-sexual Victorian era and earlier?

Okay, now take a deep breath.  The worst part is over.  To those of you who are Shadowing all that stuff, I'm sorry about that.  Be conscious of your reaction.  And be kind to yourself.  We are spiritual beings having an animal experience.  It's all very confusing.

So, speaking of the Spiritual stuff...! 

Apparently it is an important part of meditation to objectify what is arising.  Everything that is arising, and look at it instead of being it.  If we are conscious of something, we can objectify it.  In fact, we already have.  Putting value judgments on things tends to repack them in Anti-consciousness, both as individuals and collectively and then they slink back into the 1st Person position.  I think keeping everything on a constant cycle of 1-2-3, then 3-2-1, then back and forth will prevent us from submerging too deeply into it, staying asleep to our impulses and/or becoming slaves to them.  What seems to be of great value in this Third Wave of Feminism is choice.  And while being a slave to impulses doesn't sound like choice, being able to choose to or not indulge in them is.  I think these Wild Girls have given us all a gift of awareness whether we've followed their leads or just watched them with embarrassment.  And with more awareness comes more choice. 

More choice would be good. 

Considering that an old family friend was just booked into the local jail in June on 4 different charges of child molestation.  He used to hang out with my ex-husband and kids.  We went to church with him and his family.  His wife went through hell trying to have babies before she finally adopted this adorable girl...   It went on for years.  I had a profound Spiritual Satori Experience at Church once because of this man.  I can feel the heart of the entire community breaking.  I don't know if my ex-husband knows yet, but when he finds out it will devastate him.  They were close. 

[A moment of silence for those who still suffer...]

~Ww