16 Comments

Humans are so incredible. Out of this massively distorted world, we find meaning, often post grinding misery, and constantly rewrite our stories and our understanding and then whops, let's do that again.

It's impossible to be a healthy sovereign being in this world without creating all kinds of by-passes, check-outs, and all the rest of it. We don't know what we don't know but proceed because we must.

I think of Nicola Tesla and Vincent van Gogh. So much brilliance and feeling and commitment in a world that couldn't really receive them, wasn't set up for them, yet beautiful, sad legacies.

Somewhere inside I think most of us know this is a temporary experience, (what's really ours can't be lost) and that embodied life is both precious and fragile yet so confining compared to our larger selves, we battle these two things and all try to find a way to be responsible here while holding it lightly.

You weave so well, Guy. I will go back now and listen to your playlist. Best.

Expand full comment
author

lol! exactly. "We don't know what we don't know but proceed because we must." yes, although i would edit out 'must' and replace that with ' ... is the condition of being born into somatic experience.' (Or something like that.) People do drop out of the system on a pretty regular basis, and so i applaud the many who have the courage to continue to choose to continue on in whatever stage of narrative they find themselves in. it does seem that a key energy of human existence is to expand awareness of ... i don't know what, exactly ... by the experience of everything.

you're examples are right on point, thank you.

"You weave so well, Guy." gracias! that is such a pleasure for me to read. and i do hope you enjoyed the playlist! thank you for mentioning it.

all the best in this crazy amazing 'thing' being human means/is in this even crazier thing we call 'life' - whatever that is! good night.

Expand full comment

Good edit!

"...in this crazy amazing 'thing' being human means/is in this even crazier thing we call 'life' - whatever that is!" yes & I think we can likely assume more surprises incoming. 😊Best to you, too.

Expand full comment

What a journey, Guy. You're hard on yourself for not making the right choices but it's hard to see what good choices were there to make. The divorce process is a major part of the dysfunction in our economic system. Curious that Canada doesn't make alimony deductible. Trump made that change here, that it wasn't, for divorces after 2018, when mine was finalized after 30 months of negotiation. That was a bonanza year for lawyers because everyone, even those on the fence about getting divorced, suddenly needed to do it that year. The lack of deductibility makes no sense. I've really puzzled over what benefit it has to the overseer class. Glad you made it through to the place you are now.

Expand full comment
author

hola.

i will edit the essay to include that morsel about deducting the payment. yes it is. i actually had forgotten about that because while i did the deduction in my taxes i didn't see it directly because it went against my back taxes. i will clarify that once i'm near a computer and not thumbing on a jerky bus.

i don't think of myself as being particularly hard. simply clear eyed now in a way i wasn't before. and now i wonder where i am now that doesn't see clearly something else. what other by-pass is there to root out? lol. now i have an awareness of signs of by-pass in language and reactions versus responses and in story telling. of course the challenge with the unconscious is that it really is **unconscious**. i know now that maybe the biggest life-energy direction or guidance is towards more consciousness. and that inner energy or direction/directive doesn't let me remain too unconscious for too long anymore. infinite patience? [shrug] lol ah, the sense of life humour.

all the best.

Expand full comment
author

hola, tereza.

it came to me today that when i mention you in this post it would be really great to point to one of your substack posts within which you describe your take on economic change. i could link to 'caretology'. i thought that maybe you could pick the one you would like to see included. please let me know. all the best.

Expand full comment

That would be very kind of you to link to an article. I think caretology would be great because it has your joke in it, for one, and it links back to other episodes that link back to others, one twist in the rabbit warren after another ;-) Or Dreaming & Scheming, which I saw you just read. Your time zone and mine often sync up so you're my first comment.

Expand full comment
author

link is done. (last night!) and i think it is effective and supports what i'm writing and points people to your challenging ideas and points of view. gracias.

Expand full comment

Thanks, Guy!

Expand full comment
author

yes, i like very much caretology and honestly didn't even think of my joke as an interconnection. okay. will do in the next few minutes. gracias.

Expand full comment

It is interesting that you were taught that " money was powerful and evil and that poverty is the gateway to authenticity and salvation". I was taught the opposite, coming from a wealthy family with every priviledge and have subected myself to poverty in order to learn things about myself, including the fact that I remained compliant to a narcissist father in order to stay 'in the will' 😂 Fascinating how we create our complex stories in order to learn what we need to learn. In my case even giving away a house to an unfaithful ex-boyfriend in order to remain 'untainted' by the grasping greed of solicitors battling it out over money! Including rejecting the pension of an ex-husband who had behaved badly and bringing up two children without his financial assistance to 'prove' something to myself. As well as not owning anything in order to discover this authenticity and salvation of which we speak. Ha ha. Maybe it would have been better to just constantly beat myself with a stick? It might have been more honest! Yet I still see examples of rich people being arseholes and I would like to be shown an example of someone who was wealthy and also generous, aware, compassionate, without believing that their generous altruism made them god like! Remaining un vaxd was the final straw that has cast me out of the will and into true poverty so seems like I have manifested everything I dreamed of ha ha Life has an amazing sense of humour.

Expand full comment
author

hola, april.

wow! yes, the stick would have been more direct although likely less honest because it would be spirituallly by-passing the real demons!

somehow when i was in my teens i recognised this hypocrisy in my parents and the anti-racism form of racist hypocrisy they also blared out loud! i think that came in part from the wide-ranging book and items i read voraciously from 6 years old. and perhaps a certain temperament that saw beneath the superficial words of people like twain.

yes, we manifest our lives. as seth (and many others) have pointed out: to see how your mind-spirit is, look at the conditions of your bodily-life.

my parents held poverty up as a kind of inherited moral superiority. so much so that i was embarrassed to be caught wearing new clothes. and so whenever something was new i quickly aged it by whatever means i could.

i trust with your greater awereness of your natural power and the shadowing bits doing their best to thwart it, you are seeing changes!

great comment. thank you for sharing your wonderful experiences. all the best.

Expand full comment

Also really enjoying the playlist. Abba is my daughters' go-to karaoke so Money money money is very familiar. So far I found Cleopatra the danciest but maybe because belly dance is one of the genres we study in Worldanz. And 9 to 5 is funny, my youngest just started her first office job and the oldest got her a mug that said, "Pour yourself a cup of ambition." I've still never seen the film but I might need to.

Expand full comment
author

hola, tereza. i'm so glad you commented on the play list. i do often think that i might be the only one who enjoys them and then you comment and reset that. maybe it is just tereza and me who enjoy them.

so funny you you specifically mentioned abba because earlier this morning a real deep dive studio musician, in a synchronicity around the rule of threes, which seems to apply across many fields. often my essays are three day things, for some reason.

in a comment he noted abba as masters of that and the absolute pop masters of using the chord changes of bach and mozart.

as to 9 to 5. i'm not sure that i would recommend it too highly. it is a fun enough romp with some pretty good satire. now with hindsight now i would consider it a kind of re-inforcement of the greatness of women and the foolishness of man. (Edward de Vere (Shakespeare) did a much more masterful job of that by filling *The Taming of the Shrew* with a literal panoply of simpering emasculated foolish moon - absolute male degradation. He did this while at the same time getting everyone to see only Petruchio as evil and sexist and that this play because of that character is reviled. I've not seen anyone say that the play needs to be banned because it's filled with caricatures of men as weak fools.) Between TotS and 9t5, TotS hands down. if possible find one that includes the whole play because, in case you didn't know it, liz and rick's production cut out the set-up with the drunk and the wealthy playing a trick on him that allows de vere to play with the what he did as a kind of dream. the one version, set in the park that opens with a female narrator has included that scene in a clever way. it does something to adjust the energy of the play and its meaning: something about, perhaps, allowing us to question the reality of the events and by that, the reality of our life-events.

"Pour yourself a cup of ambition." sigh. i sighed even as a laughed at the youthful ignorance that that encompasses and at the same time, without all the youthful energy moving, what would we be structurally building that will psychological ask us to reconsider when we get older.

now for sleep. i've been awake for 35 hours. night.

Expand full comment

Sweet dreams, Guy. Hoping sweet is okay in this context.

And yes, love TotS. I've seen Shakespeare Santa Cruz do it live so I think it's the whole thing.

Expand full comment
author

even live productions often omit that meta-structure of the play, so no guarantee that they did. the 'official' de vere critics have put this into one of the problematic aspects of one the problematic plays.

Expand full comment