I feel afraid...again. Why? Why should the next day torment me? I'm just going downtown. Just riding the bus...sharing the bus. And the you get up, walk a bit to another point; wait, get on a bus. Wait...possibly with another person nearby. Get up, off bus, walk, in station, down station, on subway, off subway, walk. Sit.
Just doing this, this exercise, I can feel in me a torrent of feelings. Why? Why are you afraid? Because of the weakness you feel? Because of the fears that arise - fear of more pain? More shame? To feel isolated, alone, and unable to cross the divide?
Those feelings, so real, so ME. It is me. A hurt me. A suffering me. Challenged. So different from other people, so focused in different ways; existentially aware. Constantly living in this zone of empathic awareness and understanding of others. Understanding - or sensing - meanings in actions, because actions, my actions, hold so much meaning for me.
I am me. An astronaut - someone who maintains an 'etheral' sense of relatedness with others. I read this. Explore this. Find in me these stirrings of conviction - of power - and yet side by side is this timid, feckless little boy. Curled up, eyes averted. Shaking with the awareness of watching eyes.
This is me -------> This character <--------, this reality, lived, embodied, known. I feel him because I am him. And yet I am not him, because here I am, talking of myself, holding myself, watching myself, and above all, understanding myself. This blessed capacity to know and suffuse experience with a feeling of lightness, calm, or a removed, silent awareness, piercing the darkness, as it were, its knowing.
The language and evocative imagery of chaos theory has meshed with my perceptual experience of myself. I am that which I want to change: my brain, the "stock" whose inflow/outflow's I must contort.
Repeat a behavior, because behavior is the flows, and the brain, and it's molecular micro-structure, is the stock that needs to be changed. Will 'silences' arousal. Calm. Focused, related. Faces all around, faces just like me, people - knowing as a being in their world - but not knowing the strangeness of it, or more magnificently, the awesomeness.
I am saved by Awe. Awe. It's as if compassion and awe are two sides of the same metaphysical coin, each giving reference to a different vantage point: Awe, reality, knowing you are a knowing knowing; looking around, and experiencing not mere static phenomena, but the dynamic interplay of mutually supporting realities. And compassion - for oneself - for the pangs of others.
I am not as compassionate a person as I like to think. I consistently pull away in interactions; when I pass by a homeless person, I look away; do I not care? Or am I more preoccupied with the social discomfort of talking with someone? I live in myself, away, and apart, a lot of the time. It's still with me, at this point.
But it's moving eastward. It's pulling. I'm growing, My mind is becoming more tolerant of certain realities. The shocks - of awareness - pumping into my mind with incredible force - I need to stay calm and aware of these experiences; experience them, note them, and letting them go - say "bye bye" - a little, loosen your mind, and the fear that cripples a sense of openness.
My brother frequently evokes out of me feelings of insecurity. A pompousness of sorts; not conscious, but embedded, or encoded within his personality, is the types of adaptations he has had to make at his job. The persons he works with - and their arrogance - trickles through in the form of his own attempts to survive in that environment; I see this mess in his mind, but he's mostly blind to it; or even worse, indifferent to it's presence. It is far easier just to "Be in the flow", live, in being, or rather, in the stereotypical narratives he ascribes to his day to day activities.
Because of this he can be removed; blank faced. I speak, and I see not merely a lack of response, but a resistance, or hesitance, directed at me, about me. I've had this underlying feeling that there exists between us feelings of mutual loathing, contained in 'self-states' that are not always present in our relationship, but which can be called into being by either of us, and when it enters, it typically drags the other one with it.
I've resisted these patterns, or at least I am trying to. But I still have to live with this person, with his distance, his tepid sense of intimate relatedness. And a deep, dower sense that my brother is to strongly on the dissociative side to ever really command the type of attentional focus needed to relate at a more compassionate level. There's two mutually enforcing drawbacks; his pride, or the degree of pleasure he gets in eliciting positive feedback for himself, something he's always felt naturally equipped to feel power in (thanks to his timing of birth i.e 6 years after me). And then there's his intense sensitivity to negative emotions; his mind dissociates them with tremendous fidelity; he can move between states with relative 'amnesia' for what he did before. He can persist in a silence, unable to communicate, stricken by alexythemia, I can talk forever, but inside his own mind, he cannot 'get over the upset' created by a powerful emotion. Not being a very compassionate person (or tending to be cynical) he cannot inspire himself to communicate openly. And, again, regardless of whatever health effect that accompanies his behaviors, it seems far too 'immaterial' - in his "mind" - to really strike him as simultaneously exerting a dysregulating force on energetic balance between systems in the brain and body.
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