A Questionable Path

“Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. “
Rilke

Mother’s molds:
Our mother and father normally provide the mold that our brain automatically shapes women and men out of.   At first we crammed everyone into their shape, and over time we were able to stop grabbing the mold unless they did something that reminded us of them. When we see similarities in people we automatically shove at least a part of them back in the mold.  This ignores what is cut off and doesn’t fit in there and then we move towards or against it in the same ways we used to do with our parents. We don’t see them as a person but an object. Our brain constructs that mold from not only our parents, but the archetypal roles that a mother or father carries.  The Mother complex is so powerful in children’s minds as we are normally completely dependent on her during the first 12 or so years of our lives, and the vast majority are dependent far longer. The child must eventually break away from the mother, and this is caused by emotionally wounding the child in a way that shows the mother cannot save them and nurse them back to health, and that they no longer need the saving.  They have grown strong enough. Realizing and testing this is terrifying not just for the child but also for the mother, who might resent the child or the necessary wounding, and do everything she can to prevent it as it causes her to face her unlived life. This all sounds harsh, but it is just a phase of life that must be gone through if we are to stand on our own two feet.

We must be wounded in an emotional and spiritual sense to break with our parent and truly enter the world, as James Hollis says, “to quicken consciousness and remove dependency.”  What we have to do is turn around and reject the hand that feeds us. Switch from dependence to independence. Passing this threshold of life is most easily done by experiencing a wounding of the soul. Just like an actual physical wound, like a cut from a knife, emotional wounds must not only be clean and bandaged but you also can’t keep moving in ways that will tear it back open. These things require you to look into them and scrub them clean, and also to quit doing things that make it worse. Bandaging a wound allows you to see that it is a double-edged sword, as they can crush us and misdirect or warp our energy, as well as prompt and guide us on growing and transitioning life stages.  The tear in ourselves we take from separating from our mother figure is necessary and emboldens us into life.

Warts and all:

Before modern civilization, communities and families worldwide knew that separating from a parent, and from your childhood to adulthood, required a rite of passage.  In ancient times this was done in a ritual manner to help initiate the youth into the next stage of their life, as well as keeping it safe and uniform. These initiations were often physical as well as emotional, although they don’t have to be.  This opens a wound that the mother cannot heal but the child can persevere through, which shows the youth that they can go through obstacles that they did not think they could. We aren’t trying to turn from childhood to adulthood, although stepping more into that if we haven’t already will definitely help us.  What we are doing with this is stepping into who we, as individuals, truly are.

Who we are is truly unique and different from everyone else, and that includes our warts and imperfections. We must, however, attempt to turn our warts into ones we are not ashamed of. This attempt is more important than actually improving them, and it allows us to acknowledge and integrate parts of ourselves that we feel shame for, which improves ourselves. It is those misshapen parts of us that give us beauty and character, and facing and accepting them is what allows us to see that.

We all are wounded and continually wound others and ourselves, but so much of that is senseless, and is no rite of passage to  help us widen our life. So many of these tears to our soul do not teach us anything and bring only “meaningless pain” as James Hollis calls it, they are wounds that we feel are only there only to remind us that we don’t measure up.

I am writing this because I see how throughout my own life I pushed away things that mattered so much to me and grabbed on to things that I knew I didn’t want.  I was afraid to admit this to myself, and while I could hate myself intensely for my choices I never went into the reasons why I was really doing them. I sequestered myself with denial, and we cannot heal wounds to our soul and psyche with denial.  It is forced to fester.

Proper teachers:

We are not taught to examine all of this. The people that are tasked with teaching us, our parents or teachers or mentors, might have been similarly unlucky.  Who can, as Nietzsche said, “teach the teachers?” In our time there is no systemic myth for everyone to follow on understanding themselves better. No truth we can all attach to that can psych us up to go into our why’s and how’s and what to do about it.

This means we must do it for ourselves; we must learn the secrets we wish were told to us and then shout it aloud so that others can hear and speak it.  What I have encountered with so many people, especially men, is that the problem is “out there”. This projection keeps us in denial, as we avoid the fact that the problem is in us. Almost all of us do it, which means that initiation and facing these truths is on us.  James Hollis says that “we must renew the hero journey of old and dive into our depths. This is the proper work of man, the work that saves”. This goes for everyone, as putting off this work sabotages the other work you are doing.

Questions & Connections:

Everyone is built and conditioned in different ways, and I know that stepping into myself really helped me, but I’m the only me around.  We’re all at different points on that going inward line, and I think you don’t have to be on it too far in order to reap its benefits (being as abstract as I am is not always, amazingly enough, helpful at all), just keep some precepts in mind.

Rilke said, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves”.  Not seeking an answer brings us face to face with uncertainty. When we are shown that great abyss it is terrifying, as it is both savage and beautiful.  We have to make sense with the immensity of reality using only our minuscule viewpoints. That reality is that we are all made up of the same stuff and everything is only that stuff, just each thing is expressing their “stuffness” a little differently. We’ve created these lines around things to help us not have to deal with that. We are all still the immensity of all that is but we are just crammed through a specific viewpoint, and so is every other person or thing.  Everything comes out of this because what else could it come out of?

This humbling idea of connectedness has been amazingly empowering for me, but I am not able to hold on to that for long, and some days I can scarcely glance at it.  I am not sure if it is something that we are even designed to keep our eyes on, like we don’t need to stare at the sun to collect it’s benefits. We all know the line of “it is the journey and not the destination.”  The problem is that in order to even start journeying we have to get the obstacles out of our path, or actually we have to realize that going through those obstacles is our path. Having a dialogue with the boulders that come out of myself, the things that block change, shows me often that they have nothing to say and that I can disregard them. I have taken their energy.  Doing this allowed me to build myself up to go on a journey, and it also was the only way for me to see the questions that Rilke was talking about are where the actual journey is.

Understanding that it is the act of searching which is improving me, not receiving an answer – I would talk myself out of being right even if I heard it.  I don’t think the road is even really tangible until you can sternly and lovingly look at your doubt’s and fears and reactions to them. The “completely right” answer isn’t going to be something we can fully understand even if it is alarmingly simple. So any belief we have that is supposed to cover everything is going to have some holes no matter how we really look at it. We should try to account for all the holes in our understanding of the world and ourselves and fill the ones we can.

Life is too big for one tapestry to cover every hole, and sometimes you have to fall in if only to see the other side. Sometimes you will confidently step on that tapestry and fall through like Wile E. Coyote. We are all going to fall in some holes in life, ones we see and ones we don’t; avoiding and falling and climbing out is only a reminder you are living. All of this, good or bad, is shaping you.  You must let yourself grow and regress, your life cyclically grows more narrow and then widens. Recovering from falling is difficult and sometimes takes a lifetime, but the difficult things are the things that grow us the most. That butterfly at the top of this post was once a caterpillar, and it was only through struggle it could grow its wings and break out of the cocoon. To become itself. When you realize you not only survived but are better off for it, you are then gleefully urged to live into yourself.

Well this started as a summary of James Hollis’s book on men, Under Saturn’s Shadow, but after the second post I felt I tied up most of what I was trying to say on the topic, and anymore would need it’s own series of posts.  I wrote way too many pages to get to this discovery, and tried to scrap it all yesterday to come up with what I think is the most important lessons I’ve learned over these past few years.  These lessons, along with Hollis’s, Jung’s, and others teachings, have brought an amount of depth and competence to my life that I never thought I would feel, and writing this is a little way to pay tribute to that.  

them pics by our Gentleman