Monday, May 31, 2004

SOUL ENTRY

I can’t help but acknowledge the vulnerability I feel in trying to establish and maintain a healthy personal culture in the mist of others who are not doing likewise. Without there so doing there is the probability that the culture of healthy knowledge that I try to communicate and exemplify will be misunderstood, distorted—in fact-lost in its translation into the terms of the dominant culture. It sometimes seems likely that healthy knowledge itself will be used on behalf of sick knowledge and that I myself will ultimately succumb to the culture of sick knowledge; of fear, shame, alienation, and fragmentation, by—among other things—accepting and internalizing its valuations and dysvaluations of me. I already feel entangled in others conditional validations of me. Some part of me responds to gestures of praise and “respect” that are simply projections of others arrogance and ignorance. I feel already that my so-called standing in the community is a “mis-understanding” and would be whether it was positive or negative. Yet I still, in my vanity and attachment to the approval of others, feel sensitive and vulnerable to these valuations even though they are based on confusion.

Its seems to me that such a situation is not sustainable and must inevitably reach some critical point in which either I will succumb to the sick knowledge and confusion of the community (whether of Twin Oaks or elsewhere) or the community will be transformed by healthy knowledge and the culture of Friendship. I suppose that as I progress in the culture of togetherness this healing crisis (which paradoxically has always been going on in a less acute way) will progressively become more intensely promising and dangerous. Part of me feels afraid and not ready for this. I feel that I shall lose and that the world shall lose, because I do not have enough love. I feel afraid of confusion, shame, exposure, looking bad and wrong and phony. I also resent being tied to the confusion and the lame and phony evaluations of others. I know that it is the phoniness in me that respects the phoniness in them but how do I—in the moment when it needs to happen—be real and welcome them and there judgments and phoniness as well as my own without succumbing to either. It seems inevitable that they will hurt me.

I suppose a first step would be to acknowledged this hurt and vulnerability to my self and to others. Otherwise I would be just compounding my own vanity by pretending it didn’t exist. I feel already shame from the community from what I think it “knows” about me already and what I think I “know” about myself. Why do I not want to feel this shame, why is it unwelcome? Why can I not publicly welcome it—along with my difficulty in doing so? All of this is sick knowledge in me. It is connected with a fear of being controlled by others that is paradoxically leading to—is already an aspect of—just that situation psychologically. I’m already controlled by others through fear to some extent (though to a greater extent I am not).

Who are these “others” anyway?

Am I the only vain person in the world? The only "phony"?

What is the big deal?

I suppose I think that some how the progress of integral science depends on me maintaining some kind of Image of integrity as defined by others. But how could that possibly be the case? On The contrary, its clear that that progress depends on me challenging that static “image” of integrity and replacing it with a dynamic example of integrity as a living, paradoxical and imperfect process of integration, based, not on perfection and mastery, but on inner and outer Friendship. This is really the only thing that will be sufficiently edifying to bring any healing to anyone, including myself. And I must welcome the process of myself with others at Our worst and most phony and Our most inhospitable. I must welcome our failure as well as our success. At some level I do welcome us and always have and always will. This “Us” seems to be a key. Somehow this “Us” needs to become a part of how I refer to and think about myself, as myself-and-others, as an “Us”, a “We”… yet somehow with out a loss of individuation. And not just to talk like that to others and myself but to feel like that...

[the following was written much latter:

The whole thing seems to turn around my fear of vulnerability, victimization, and Humiliation. Will humiliation bring me HUMILITY? No, that must come from insight and deep willingness. The experience of Humiliation is just an exacerbation of the experience of VANITY. The bright side of this realization is that I can actually use the feeling of humiliation or, more mildly, embarrassment, as an opportunity to “photograph” and get insight into my own vanity and arrogance. Trying not to be humiliated or embarrassed is probably just a way for me to stay arrogant and vain without overtly experiencing and acknowledging the consequences. Challenging my fear of humiliation is the same as challenging my arrogance and vanity. Such challenging doesn’t mean trying to feel humiliated (which seems crazy), but it does mean being willing to risk it on behalf of Truth, and to learn from it when it happens. I guess that this is really the whole point of this posting, and, in a more generalized sense, the point of the soul-dance itself…

posted by: piankhy | 00:33 | comments