This year’s end, next year’s beginning…

Let me share something with  you. A bit of an epiphany to me and at the same time, something that I’d heard or seen countless times, in so many ways.

I reminded myself in very real terms that I could relinquish my need to control. Put another way, I was exposed to a whole new level of acknowledging my helplessness and forgiving myself and others.

Or, simply put; there was nothing I could do or say to alter the outcome. It would be what it would be, and I had no control. I could only witness, and when in that witness, free myself of that bear trap; conditioning.

When you’re in it, it seems that it will never let  you go. Yet, if you can see yourself in it, non-judgmentally, dispassionately from your witnessing self, your consciousness self . . .see yourself suffering from anger, you can then make a choice to acknowledge all the pain, don’t try to make it go away . . . or do anything with it, or to it. Just let it know that your watching it, and identify the other part(s) of you that don’t feel that bad at all, and from your witness, know that you can choose to be, not to suffer.

I got to thinking about anger. What is anger?

We all know how it feels, hot and red, riddling our bellies, choking our chests, making us smaller, denser, tighter. There’s definitely a constriction that goes on, like when you disturb a sea anemone and all its tentacles retract  from a perceived threat. I say ‘perceived’ because the line that separates what’s real from what’s an illusion is invisible. (Is that where thought becomes matter?).

So there’s this part of us that is definitely animal. Eats, propagates, dies through the entire evolution of man. It constricts in the presence of danger: a threat to its existence. That’s a reaction that the animal in us knows. That is also the reaction that the mind employs when it perceives danger . . . real or imagined.

How about remembered? Not always consciously, sub-consciously mostly. Those things that happened as you grew from infancy, those things that scarred you, taught you to protect yourself from. Tighten a muscle often enough, it will become tight, hardened in order to protect.

I may not be able to recall those incidents, but my mind, my subconscious, and my body remember. They store those memories of yearning and helplessness in my physical being, weave them into secret histories, untold stories that evoke the feelings of love and security as well as those of yearning and helplessness.

The latter, yearning and helplessness are not only seemingly unbearable because when we’re in them, it feels that it will be forever – - – our minds, our perceptive abilities signal ‘danger,’ and when fear raises its head, we defend against it with anger. And as much as it feels as if we’re  being angry at someone or something else, what I believe we are truly angry with is ourselves and our perceived inability to affect our helplessness.

So, if I can accept that at the end of the day, or of my life; that I am helpless, why cannot I accept that now? I’m not saying I’m being helpless, I am saying that my true being has nothing to do with being helpless. My true being, my consciousness, my awareness and witness can acknowledge my feeling of helplessness, and in that act of acknowledgment, I am not helpless to make that choice – to acknowledge.

Not only am I not helpless to make that choice to acknowledge, witness, not judge or evaluate,   when I so choose, I experience the realization that not all of me is contracting and in fear, just my animal and all its conditioned and learned behavior inherited not just from my parents and their parents, but from the whole history of man.

What is the level of development of consciousness in the animal world? I don’t know. The yardstick we use to measure it is calibrated to our world, our human way of thinking, controlling, communicating. Whose to say, for instance, that the dolphin consciousness isn’t ‘beyond’ ours? Just because they don’t have arms and legs, don’t drive cars and aren’t rapaciously eating our planet and all its resources?

What I do know, is when I know, when I am. All the other behavior, learned and developed has only to do with my animal’s self’s procreation and survival, and to that end, ordering and controlling the world and the inhabitants of the world, usually by whom ever’s got the biggest stick.

My mind would have me measure, but my heart knows.

Have a conscious holiday. It’s the end of a year, of a cycle…a ‘death’ if  you will, and a rebirth of a new year. That cycle of death and life is mirrored in our breath, in the beat of our hearts, in each moment of night and day. If we can remember that, then we can see how much our ‘animal’ is evolving with the loving over-standing of the hu-man side of us that is reminding us that beyond everything, we are.

pmg