The living dream and the living nightmare....

There were some undeniable experiences in my spiritual life and the subsequent inner work that followed that proved the universe a mysterious place, ripe with alternate realities somehow withheld from the mundane thinking brain that led me on this exploration into the variety of screens demonstrating the wealth of different realities. It was a time of awakening in my life that somehow proved to be a remedy for all the hardship, all the trauma, providing a meaning to the abhorrent life experiences I seemed to continually be met with and offering a ray of hope that it was these experiences that had given me a glimpse of a different reality rich with respite from the darkness i had always known. It was a time of excitement over new possibilities and a naieve assumption i had somehow found answers that may lead me to a potential end. A discourse i could add to my work within a system full of corruption and human and ecological devastation. I had an answer, a remedy, an argument to fight for to call out the sinister power puppeteers and finally provide a way to freedom for the oppressed like me that i had pledged my life to serve. It was a long awaited answer that came just in the nick of time. My mission: do the inner work. Remove the obstacles that clouded my being so as to make my channel to the other worlds clear and fluid. Create a strong relationship, where continual answers may arrive and then fight for it's right within the spheres i once beleived were there to educate me.

Four years later, i find myself with a pretty severe case of apathy for both the good work i conducted in social work once bursting with passion and also a keen cynicism about the work of spirituality. I've read all the books in both arena's. They proved to be a variance of ideologies i fed my brain with the intention of growth awareness, yet i fear they instead have acted as some sort of poison, an other delusion serving to obstruct my view from reality. Informing the mind in my view is a decision to proceed with some sort of brain wash it's just a matter of which form of poison you wish to feed it.
There is still a gap between what both arena's of information feed me and what i have actually experienced in my lived experience. At this point, the safest bet is to allow my lived experience to be the clearest channel of truth. Yet, i am also confronted with the idea so common in many spiritual practices and orientations to the world, that my lived experience is simply a part of my story, a living dream, isolated to the realm of further delusion to which i have grounded myself. It is between these spaces, this conflict i continue to wrestle in which i find myself, apathetic, passionless, directionless and curious as to whether this will remain to be my continued sense of self despite my greatest efforts to temper it, or if in fact this is another chapter of the seeding which at some point will burst me forward into another realm of full bloom. I suppose all of it is a mystery.

I continue to see my life through a spiritual lens and continue to study shamanism providing a grounded approach to working with my inner being, my own life experience and relating to the cosmos, despite my thinking brains skepticism and sometimes cynicism about what it is exactly that i am doing there. Am I entertaining another fairytale, a hope to escape the terrors i have seen in this world and malignantly going through the motions of another realm of bullshit serving as a good distraction from all of that which many parts of myself feel no longer strong enough to see? Or am i continuing to entertain an actual truth, a pearl of wisdom within my being that continues to drive me forward despite my blindness to the purpose/meaning of it all, with hope that somewhere within all of it, the rabbit hole will open up again and i will be reminded of those many realities i once saw glimpses of but now seem only a product of my imagination. In any case, it still seems a valid enquiry, despite that i wouldnt dare lay any truthful claim to it and bring it to the world at this point. I;m not sure anymore of what truth is really truth and so i continue to lie within the abyss while moving through the motions of creating a should be life.

There is still a perpetual dis-association, a looking for some kind of mirror in the world and continually comign up short handed. The world of the spiritual, the intellectual debates and fancy language that happen there, sometimes feels no better than the joke of wisdom pranced around in academia. Sometimes it appears as if greek to me, where i have lost an ability to interpret, although i have this memory of when i was so versed and able to fluidly protaganize the best of arguments. Then there is the world of academia, also once a close friend of mine. A place where my sense of passion and self-empowerment was fueled, also a sense of meaning/purpose was created and i had a mission in the world that i cared deeply about and felt my voice/knowledge would make an impact. I naievely entered this world and brougth great harm to my being. People don't really understand what they're doing there, the system continues to wreak havoc and great abuses against mankind and operating as a part of it, made me feel little more than a co-conspiritor, a position i could not live with.

There is a definate reality to that part of the world. The corruption, mind-fucking and continual abuse, that if your recognize will simply make you a target of some form of delusion. How could i continue to support and rehabilitate the clinically insane, delusional and paranoid, when most of their accounts of reality, often delusional to the unaware mind, seemed more an accurate perception of the reality i had witnessed in the system that those who were in charge of diagnosing and treatment. |It was after all the clinically insane that in many ways helped me to realize how distorted my own interpretations had been or how i had bought into the dogma that was fed to me about my own imbalances. There is that world where police officers abuse and beat women and racial minorities and are continually curtailed from being exposed to the general public or any sense of recourse for their injustices. There are the feminist organizations that treat women as uncapable and mentally ill, delusional and crazy, yet claim to be in the buisness of advocating for their equality. Whose equality? The middle class, that remain sheltered and unscathed from the horrors of the street, or being sexually tortured and abused by your father and brothers that will continue to manifest in the victims coping skills as an adult. There is a reality to the pathetically corrupt and injust game of criminal justice, that protects the criminals and punishes the victims and offers neither of them any route of healing to cessate the violations in the first place. There is a reality to the underworld of all these things being manifested in the entire ways in which we do things, the systems of operation we create and have founded our societies upon and that are often present in the very people we have given the authrotiy to make our decisions for us.
Finally, there is a reality to how we have consturcted a system that silences, kills, diagnosis or medicates any one of us who may be aware enough to recognize these crimes against humanity and ecology and deems us the crazy ones, rendering our insight unvalid, our rights limited, our deaths more than a possibility. |These dark reflections that continue to live and breath inside me, i still remain afraid to speak aloud as a result of all of the aforementioned factors, so here for the first time i make my voice known.

As much as spirituality and inner work offer a new way, a fresh paradigm or living entity that creates new avenues of hope, i wonder sometimes if it also acts as a blinder, a way to pretend these ugly scars are no longer there, a white washing of everything real into some better intended reality, especially when we can just chalk it up to someone's projections within their living dream. How do the two unite? Or better yet, how do i begin to bridge these divides in order to carry forth the truths that remain important to me. As much as i would like to, i still carry a strong resistance to sitting on my meditation cushion and chanting away my pains in the midst of these everyday realities that continue to be experienced by so many. For now, i am a bit immobolized and realize that before anything can ever be brought forward from me, i need to heal some of the far too open, far to bruised and annihlated parts of self, build the resiliency neccessary to walk forward in wisdom and not naiveity, that i may walk in confident knowing as opposed to offering myself up as the sacraficial lamb. The work has to be done carefully, meticulously, with the wisdom of the white owl indeed.