Bilateral Rodeo Relations
Morning Thoughts #26
Today, I needed to stop thinking. I could feel my brain rattling dry, thirsting for creative purpose and meaning. But alas, the skies were clear and the forecasts repetitive. It seemed that not a drop of perceptive rain would be had for some time to come!
Friends, do you often experience moments where consciousness reaches acute levels and seems to have colonized your whole body and all of its instincts? If so, let me share with you the best cure I've found so far: I go outside of myself and my shelter, removing the "I" from my mind's radar.
Here, it is possible to conceive of the self as permeable soil and to remember that everything we see, feel, and experience pours so much more than our conscious mind is able to catch! And all of this runoff means that there is always an excess of well water to be had whenever we are able to feel our way down to our unconscious doors. Deep down, we are all like lakes and ponds, muddied to an inevitable degree but still transparent enough in the right conditions! How often do our uphill climbs in life also lead us deeper and more accurately within ourselves!
Because they are within us, we call these depths ours, but that is not quite accurate. They are ours as much as anything we can see, but our claim on them basically ends there. Just as climbing a mountain doesn't grant ownership of it, understanding our own depths doesn't make them fully ours either. Likewise, to own beachfront property does not give one control of the tides! Within us is more than us!
It is cause for celebration when I say: We contain within ourselves horses too wild for our conscious minds to ride! And to understand oneself is to accept a degree of fatalism. But self-understanding can also be such a beautiful rodeo! Great epiphanies, bursts of creative or personal insight, are not the products of slow and safe pony rides. No, they are born on the backs of furiously bucking broncos continually throwing us off and sometimes forward!
Friends, sign up for this rodeo because it may very well help your body resist the colonization attempts of your mind! Let us work as diplomats forging good relations between our minds and bodies, our conscious and our unconscious, so that they may become allied border states! An empire of realized self! Yes!