This should be my last post on inner change, and I have thought for several days whether or not even to write this part because it touches on some very esoteric (sensitive) topics. What is the problem with inner change?
The problem is that we are protected from witnessing inner change by our own social conventions, by what is called "sanity" and, for that matter, social sanitation. We do everything we can not to come into contact with our conflicting emotions, and all of the rest of the stuff that may be festering in our psyches. In reality, our internal worlds have no fixed boundaries and can include more than a little chaos and all manner of undigested experience – paradoxes that we have come up against but have failed to assimilate, especially relating to our "self." The "Self" does not like to be embarrassed.
We habitually just ignore and tune out what we don't understand or fear, and try to keep it at arm's length. We close our eyes to it all and then we keep them shut. I am surprised how little western society knows about its own inner life, about what goes on in there just beneath the surface veneer. This post is just touching on that. I won't probe.
On the inside, mostly connected to our self-image, we literally experience mental earthquakes, as the great tectonic plates of our fabricated-self move and rearrange themselves within us in response to change, mostly in an attempt to keep change from reaching us. After all, the self is the ultimate conservative, ever afraid of change.
And our own self is very protective of its existence and functions as what is called (in esoteric literature) a ring-pass-not between itself and our actual mind, a filter that we can't (or won't) easily see through. The self, at least in this society, is not transparent, and that apparently by design. As the great German philosopher Hegel so aptly put it:
"We go behind the curtain of the Self to see what is there, but mainly for there to be something to be seen."
That is how much we fear awareness or what is sometimes called "emptiness." The "Self" is like our own private ventriloquist dummy and we the ventriloquist, although we have managed to fall into the unfortunate habit of taking orders and direction from the dummy rather than to get to know our true nature, a simple twist of fate as Dylan put it.
It is the 'self' that's responsible for most of the difficulties we have in recognizing and incorporating inner change at times like these. Like the fury of a sudden summer storm, our inner worlds can (and do) collide, and we are hurled through a space and time that we cannot stand to keep in mind, and are just too happy to forget. And when this inner turmoil passes or quiets, we settle down to living once again, with scarcely a memory of what took place, of what we just lived through. But there are sometimes telltale signs left behind.
Like magnets that oppose one another, parts of our inner psyche are reflected in the mirror of the self and we sometimes can catch a brief glimpse of truth in the corner of the eye, and we are overwhelmed. What is it to be overwhelmed? What happens that we just shut down and crawl off to sleep through it?
Our day-to-day outward busyness may or may not reflect the psychic storms raging within. Some days we are just tired. What do you think gets us so tired? What do we go through that we are mostly unaware of? Have you ever had such an embarrassing or difficult thought that you found yourself spontaneously saying something out loud, despite your "self," in an attempt not to look at it? That is what I am pointing at here. And this happens a lot.
You may feel that I am magnifying the effects of change (and the self) here for dramatic effect, but am I? When change emerges in the mind (like during eclipse times), everyone takes it personally. We all experience it (all humanity) at the same time, but we seldom realize that all present in the world share this same energy at the same moment.
We each tend to turn inward and experience it (or so we think) privately. Imagine a garden of flowers all closing at once and then opening back up again, when the change has passed. No one saw anything. In fact, we do this all the time.
Anyway, enough about psychological disturbances that we endure because we can't manage to look our own self in the eye. Change itself is nothing less than a shot of pure energy into space and time that allows our great constipated inner worlds to move, to expand and contract as they will, and neither you nor I can fully control it. We can hunker down and ride change out or we can learn to take advantage and use it creatively.
In a very real way, our sense of time is a social convention lived by the majority - a mere consensus. We don't always remain within that social convention, but in times of change, in odd moments, days, and hours of our lives, some of us may wander (or be thrust) into more unusual (altered) states of mind and time. We don't remember it because we find it too hard to grasp, much less sustain any awareness of. We just shut down in there. And this is more the rule than the exception.
Eternity does not exist somewhere out there in our future, at the live-long end of history and linear time. Eternity exists right now, of course, deep within (or without) time. Time does not just extend to some linear end as we may like to believe. Instead, as individuals, we extend (stretch) time. We are stretched and endure for the length of our effort. We last until then.
In other words, we go between the moments of clock-ticking time. We stretch time, make time for the things we care about, and extend ourselves. In moments of great change, we leap between the seconds (beyond time) to the day of creation itself. We become co-creators if we can keep our eyes open. Eternity is always found just in time.
By becoming more and more aware of the actual nature of the self as something we habitually fabricate, we can increasingly be aware of what change is and participate creatively (consciously) in shaping our own life and destiny.
Is this too weird to consider?
[Photo of a daffodil in my front yard taken yesterday.]