What a powerful and honest and vulnerable account, Guy. I was thinking of the term 'devouring mother' just before I read it. Bandersnitch is great. I don't know the psychiatric definition but I think of a narcissist as someone so wrapped up in their own ego, they see other people as bit players in their drama. I think of a sociopath as someone who actively wants to hurt others. I can see why a narcissist would be harder to change.
In one way we had the same childhood--living in books. In all other ways, likely the opposite. That's not to say warm and loving but not manipulative. More boring, a word I appreciate more and more reading your account. My family left me with little baggage to deal with.
I can see now why there are certain ideas of mine that you answer with "No." Curiously, your mother's nickname was mine for my first 20+ years. I forget if I became a Teresa in college or after I came to California. And not a Tereza until 20 years ago, perhaps. 'Terry' was likely a Teresa too.
Thanks for sharing this personal journey with me. I'm glad for whatever made you who you are but sorry it has been such a painful process.
Yes, your name was a final 'synchronicity' in the formation of the epistle. In our extended dialogue I noticed that I had been triggered by your rejection of my argument and how you closed the door on the discussion. That caught me by surprise. I've done enough yoga now and work on being triggered to recognise it and then to be able to allow it to be without reacting. (And in another small way, because Terry is also a name shifter. From Theresa, to Terry and finally Terri.)
It was when I was writing to my number two sister about that, when I began writing your name, that the your name being her name hit me. Not once before had I made the association between your name and hers. Fascinating how our minds work. Now that is a synchronicity for me.
Sister number two commented on how amazing the Universe expresses synchronicities. She has done a lot of healing work, especially art, somatic and constellation therapy. When I commented on her having had enough self worth to actually go to therapy — something I wanted to do and never carved out enough value to do it — she laughed, shook her head and said "O God No! It was therapy or suicide!' She added, 'Isn't it amazing, though, that none of us did do suicide? Somehow Terry had managed to put into us so much fear of shaming her, that to have killed ourselves would have been shaming her, and so we didn't kill ourselves.'
Have you read Erich Neumann's great and important book, *The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1282241.The_Great_Mother. I consider this to be one of the top 10 most important books I've read. And perhaps more so now, with the protracted attack on masculine energy and a total denial of the existence of anything that could be considered worthy of attack in the female energy.
In a way, that was an introduction. I'm not sure how I'll write the next one. If I will write it. We'll see. Sister number two, who did a lot of therapy, was told by the people there, that her story was the worst that they ever heard. And her story is not the worst in our family. Sister number four went through absolute hell after I left home.
Oh I was guessing it was sister four who had commented. I don't remember if you've said where you are in the birth order? What a powerful thing your sister said about therapy or suicide, and that not committing suicide was a final manipulation from the grave. I'm thinking of Yoshiko as your sentry to not allow the hungry ghost back in.
I made the opposite transmigration. I may have been Terry when very young but was Terri in Catholic school where every class had at least four versions. Then I became Teresa. My parents thought to name me after the Little Flower but spelled it wrong, so I'm named after the formidable Teresa of Avila. Theresa, belying the 'little flower' bullshit, was a sado-masochistic bitch hell-bent on sainthood. There's a biography I have of her by Monica Furlong, who wrote some children's books I like called Wise Child, Juniper and Colman.
Anyway, I thought it was a very revealing biography that she was very twisted and made herself a martyr to get attention. Her 'visions' contradicted themselves when questioned. I personally think she was a total fraud. FWIW.
You and I are definitely in each other's lives for a reason, Guy, you with the name of the generic male, EveryGuy's Journey. Me with the name of the devouring mother, your tormentor, belittler, cut-you-down-to-sizer?
And because there's a reason beyond our topic, I'll say that I didn't see me as rejecting your argument and closing the door on the discussion. At least not until a very long way in. When I reread our comment thread, I was surprised at the conviviality of it up until the end.
If I may, let me give a tennis analogy. I hit a ball to you and asked you to play. The ball was my question, "What if we collectively are co-creators of Reality with God?" My ball had the spin on it that this world was therefore not Reality. You (in my perception) declared my ball out of bounds and substituted your own, which was presenting the collective self as the undifferentiated self. After fetching my ball a few times to try to get it in play, I called for a referee.
To speculate, I think your triggering came before and my closing the door on the discussion came after. I think there was something in the language of my question, maybe the OneMind that you associate with a certain New Age narcissist by a similar name. So instead of engaging with the ball I bounced over, you dodged it. And perhaps added some weight to your return ball that wasn't meant for me.
For instance, you said that Terry spouted platitudes and lacked nuance. You also said her (or her mother's) idea of projection--what you see in others you reveal in yourself--particularly irked you. And why wouldn't it? It's passive-aggressive as hell. Yet all three of these things you sent my way that put me on the defensive, that I was not New Age, not lacking nuance, not projecting. So it seems like it became a different kind of game.
I am thinking this is very provocative and yet another doorway to another room or space to investigate. So I am in the process of exploring what is behind door number 10, which in binary means 2! LoL.
I'm digesting your comment and will respond after a time. Thank you for sharing and your continuing the quest for ... the bandersnatch? Or the holy grail? Is there a difference? [Headshake, laughing.] (Von Franz and Emma Jung's book *The Grail Legend* is another of those important books in this largely Christian-based cultural morass. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/572302.The_Grail_Legend.)
Birth order is: Guy, eldest, #1 sister born about 16 months later with enough triage counselling to live a 'good' life; #2 sister born about 15 months later fully awake with lots of deep somatic and creative non-verbal therapy; #3 sister, born 25 months later, fully asleep, deeply traumatised only recently entered some kind of therapy; #4 sister, adopted at the age of 2 or 3(?) from teenage cousin when I was 18 and was basically tortured by they bully tag team of #3 sister and mother. (I am worried about her and she is in my prayers as she hasn't replied to my contact efforts since 2017.)
Hola Tereza. My quest into the cave of your query has given life to another substack essay. Muchas gracias. I'll put it up on Monday morning. All the best.
(And, OMG, you have been busy! I'm not keeping up.)
Truly LOVED this essay Guy - your experiences echo my own and add to my own learning also. I learnt through separation for the last 3 years from my father and step mother to appreciate my own growth and understanding, to recognise their lack of growth, and to be accepting of both. It was also interesting to read your story as I contemplate my relationship with my son. We realised that we had a co-dependent relationship but neither of us knew how to break free from it. As i have stepped back from all judgement about how he lives his life and accepted that he needs to follow his own journey to healing and who knows whether that will involve separating himself from me too? We currently share our sense of humour and friendship and I hope that continues but I recognise the damage that my ego did to him and I have been able to apologise to him before I leave (whenever that is). Two weeks ago I met with my father and step mother for lunch. I felt compassion, but no greater compassion than I feel for anyone suffering. I asked myself if I was heartless, how could I not care more about them? I did not feel anything that triggered me. I understood that they are not able to apologise for their actions and I see how it has manifested in their own health. I took away from that meeting some more learning and I hope that I will see more clearly the things that I need to apologise to them for. I did not have contact with my biological mother for 30 years and then we had contact for about 15 years but we both understood I think that neither of us cared all that much and we just let it go again. People are in our lives to teach us and when we have learnt the lesson we can move on and them from us also. Thank you again for openly and honestly sharing your thoughts.
I'm so glad that this resonated with your own experiences and, it seems, has helped to clarify some things about your journey, or perhaps clarified the questions.
Your concern about being heartless with your parents is an interesting one. Our western ideas of 'romantic', by which I mean more than that between lovers, has been totally contaminated with the idea of being lost and unstable. Our music, our literature, our religion, our news, all extoll love as something that shakes your earth, unbalances you in some way. True love, as I've come to understand it, is the ability to remain absolutely true to your spirit and experience, without becoming emotionally, psychologically or physically imbalanced under any circumstances. Equanimity with rich and poor, with mother and daughter, father and son, friend and stranger. Your own appropriate eccentric action at all times wih all people. That is love. So, by your description you have moved from the 'fake' love of controlling people and cirucmstances or being controlled by circumstances or people. That is to be a yogi expressing the love that is the foundation of existence. I bow to you in deep appreciation. Namaste.
All the best with your son. Very challenging. I have no idea if it would help or not. You may find
this book a great resource: *The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype* by Erich Neumann. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1282241.The_Great_Mother. In one of the books in Joseph Campbell's mythology series talks abou this too. I'm sorry, I don't remember which.
You may find my "Dear Claude" epistles interesting as well, as providing perhaps a glimpse into masculine energy that may help with expanding your relationship with your son outside of the restrictive covenants that are associated with co-dependency.
All the best. Thank you for reading and for the great comment.
Also.. regarding the last part of your comment. I will do that. My son is continually trying to separate that part of himself and explain how he felt as a young man in a house that was all women. I was a single parent to him and his sister and most of my friends were women. I really did not understand the differences and realise I was also very sexist, the conditioned beliefs of the age I grew up in were very very confusing regarding feminism.
Have you and/or your son and daughter explored Jordan Peterson at all? He talks very powerfully to being male in a misandristic society. Misanthropic doesn't describe how we have constructed ourselves! Yes, we are largely misanthropic and yet it really comes down to true split between misandry and misogyny. We extol the latter and are oblivious to or deny the former. Horrific psychological damage being done to both our young women and young men. [Shudder.]
For some reason I am tempted to share an interesting interview, a public apology to Jordan Peterson from a woke misandrist feminist. Really quite revealing to how ... fractured our culture is.
So, April, I would like to introduce you to Jordan Peterson, via his daughter Mikhaila and Africa Brooke.
Yes we know about Jordan Peterson. I discovered him in 2018 and he has very much enabled me and my son to start our conversations about this deep split between the chaos of my upbringing without a mother in times of feminist extremism and his upbringing without a father and his depression and autism. I will look at this interview though, thank you.
You may find the interview he did with British MP (ex?), Alex Story on eugenics as an unconscious foundation of our society interesting as well. It explores one of the cultural shadows that has been a key part of the acceptance of the tyrannical nature of our social construct.
Eugenics: Flawed Thinking Behind Pushed Science | Alex Story | EP 294
I am very excited by what you have described here Guy. You have given me something 'brand new'. Yet another conditioned belief that I am able to start chipping away at. What I could not understand was this:
The other morning I went to pick up my son for an early morning swim. He was waiting outside his house sitting on a wall, talking to his elderly neighbour. I have spoken to this neighbour of his before, he lives alone in sheltered housing, like my son, except he doesn't have someone to wash his clothes like my son does. He supports the same football team as my son so when I talk to him I usually ask him how the team are doing because he seems to feel less awkward than if I ask him how he is. The other morning at 5.30am he was drunk as the football team had won the night before. I felt the same love and compassion for him that I felt for my father. I have been thinking that there must be something wrong with me. Why did I not care more for someone biologically related who I had spent so many years knowing and had so much history with? Why did I feel an equal level of care for his lonely football fan? As usual I turn on myself and say 'It's you! There is something wrong with you!" Except that I don't FEEL that there is something wrong with me ha ha. So your comment has given me (as always) new avenues to continue exploring and for this I thank you once again.
Interesting question. And so glad I am giving you new crumbs into the back alleys of mind-spirit-body previous unexplored.
In a nutshell it sounds like you have knowingly or not begun walking the deep path of what Gautama Buddha taught with the 4 fold truth and the 8 fold path. To be fully free, as a human, is to have full compassion for all people and, ultimately, all life. If you are asking why you felt more 'caring' for the old man than your son, it may very well have been that your son didn't 'need' your compassion at that time, and the old man did.
The phrase I use that describes this, as a kind of synthesis or focused description of Gautama's principles, is Appropriate Eccentric Action. You were totally free within your Self, meaning your spirt/mind/body were integrated and gave you perfect freedom to be spontaneously you. The old man's loneliness called to you, and you gave him compassion. Wonderful.
Have you explored Gautama Buddha at all? It turns out that *Buddhism* has largely perverted some of the most important aspects of what Gautama taught. At the core of the split is that GB taught and advocated that mindfulness OF THE BODY is the path to being free - nirvana. The BODY is the path by which we live in this life and when we are fully in the body, instead of dreaming or imagining how to become spirit despite being stuck in an egregious, dirty, foul body, we act appropriately in all circumstances, with compassion the tangible manifestation of love.
As a corollary to that GB also taught that thinking or arguing about manifestations of God, reincarnation and other metaphysical 'talk', are distractions that keep us trapped in maya, the delusion that life as we see it is unchanging and the truth. The more we focus on God as out/up there and us as trapped down here, the more *trapped* we are.
So, it seems that you fallen into your own Appropriate Ecccentric Action in a manner I understand as being a Buddha's (or Bodhisattva's) way. Freedom. Beautiful.
Does any of that make sense?
If you are curious I can suggest some reading about this. This has been a very recent discovery for me, that my path has been to be surprised that what I have been thinking and acting on was what the Buddha actually taught. In the 1980s I dismissed Buddhism because it didn't honour the body in a way similar to what the Christian religions did. Now I see that my path to freedom through honouring and respecting the sacredness of the body was what Gautama more accurately taught. I suspect that that what Jesus may have taught as well. I haven't done the research yet to confirm that.
If you want, it may be easier to explore these ideas via email. You can email me via gduperreault@protonmail.com.
Thank you Guy. I am excited by this comment and I will email you. I thought I had discovered a new door to open in my brain where my body was 'talking' to me very directly - sounds weird - but now, no so much since reading what you have said. I had no frame of reference with which to explain what has been happening and to be honest found it a bit confusing and to some degree a bit scary! My brain tells me that I am far too late to reverse the damage that has been done to my body. But my body laughs at that suggestion??? I am swimming in a sea of confusion ha ha
Full optimal healing of the body is available to us at all times, and begins at any stage of life! The body is PRESENT in the present, and spontaneous healing is likewise present.
Something that may help is to practice the Ho'oponopono prayer method with your body. "Please forgive me for all the ways that I have hurt you. I am sorry. Thank you for listening. I love you."
I practice a muscle testing technique, a tangible form of body awareness to guide my own healing of mind and body. So I eat foods my body wants and do not eat foods my body does not want. Everything is energy, our body and our food. How does our body know what food in our stomach, this mush of stuff, to keep as nutritious and what to send out as unnecessary at this time? Think about that. No eyes, etc. How does it *know*?
Energy. So, before eating, use that energy awareness with food, supplements, physical activities, and even yoga and meditation practices. It is a true prayer to the body as sacred.
Sea of confusion! Lovely. Often that is a beginning of the awareness of expanded awareness: the old patterns don't work, and so the new is ... well *new*. So unknown, so often confusing otherwise it would have been known. Peterson describes that well.
As to the feminazism, like woke: a key marker to their inappropriateness, is the denial of individuality, now to the point that gender doesn't exist so that we will physically de-gender / re-gender children in order to confirm that genderless is real! Now, that is *real* confusion-delusion!
All the best! Welcome, fellow-sister traveller! To 'truth, the pathless landscape' to paraphrase Krishnamurti.
I started reading this two weeks ago. I was interrupted by my day job and stepped away. I got far enough to know that I needed to wait until I had ample mental space to pick it back up.
As you well know, I struggle...well, struggle is dramatic...let me say it differently. Sometimes I find the practice of maintaining a healthy balance between knowing what is happening, and having a peaceful, positive presence in my day to day life...that feels good in my body.
Over the past two weeks I noticed a building of "stuckness" in my heart chakra - that's often where the energy of processing the world gets snagged. I have done my work to get it moving again, and felt ready to read about Terry, who unsurprisingly, shares much with Suzanne.
"Co-dependency often knows no limits. For me to survive that leaving I had anticipated a truce that would allow our dysfunction to continue, to limp along more or less as it had been before I smashed the family unity by leaving against your authority. You had so successfully dissociated me from my self..."
Although Terry and Suzanne are not the same person, in many ways they are...and the fact that we have found ourselves sharing this journey is remarkable to me.
"Terry, your reading-practice modelled my future behaviour, of course. It contributed to firmly establishing in my nervous system what I now understand to be, but at the time was completely oblivious to, the frequency of addiction to books as dissociation. Thereby I became a prodigious and prolific reader who, for many years, carried two pocket books in his pockets at all times. And ‘he’ would, like you, re-re-read the ‘good’ books, in other words, the most distracting books, the ones that helped drug my mind in some way."
"With all that crap, I say now with honesty, that my experience of life with and without mother is all a part of my process, or journey, from darkness into light, from near total delusion to expansive awareness. With that awareness I move, now, from apologising to you for having hurt you to thanking you for having lived this hard path. Its darkness has given me an awareness of how to live a life more fully alive. I can see where I spent much of my life living platitudes and parroted truths, mostly from great books of wisdom. No more. Your hard path prepared the ground for me to see through the façade of the tyrannical truths, even those disguised with the emptiness of fear-based or manipulative good intentions, those that have become nearly ubiquitous and de rigueur in our age of masked covid tyranny."
Guy, this post was poignant and incredibly relevant to my own experience with Suzanne. Just as I knew it would be.
What a powerful and honest and vulnerable account, Guy. I was thinking of the term 'devouring mother' just before I read it. Bandersnitch is great. I don't know the psychiatric definition but I think of a narcissist as someone so wrapped up in their own ego, they see other people as bit players in their drama. I think of a sociopath as someone who actively wants to hurt others. I can see why a narcissist would be harder to change.
In one way we had the same childhood--living in books. In all other ways, likely the opposite. That's not to say warm and loving but not manipulative. More boring, a word I appreciate more and more reading your account. My family left me with little baggage to deal with.
I can see now why there are certain ideas of mine that you answer with "No." Curiously, your mother's nickname was mine for my first 20+ years. I forget if I became a Teresa in college or after I came to California. And not a Tereza until 20 years ago, perhaps. 'Terry' was likely a Teresa too.
Thanks for sharing this personal journey with me. I'm glad for whatever made you who you are but sorry it has been such a painful process.
Hola, Tereza.
Yes, your name was a final 'synchronicity' in the formation of the epistle. In our extended dialogue I noticed that I had been triggered by your rejection of my argument and how you closed the door on the discussion. That caught me by surprise. I've done enough yoga now and work on being triggered to recognise it and then to be able to allow it to be without reacting. (And in another small way, because Terry is also a name shifter. From Theresa, to Terry and finally Terri.)
It was when I was writing to my number two sister about that, when I began writing your name, that the your name being her name hit me. Not once before had I made the association between your name and hers. Fascinating how our minds work. Now that is a synchronicity for me.
Sister number two commented on how amazing the Universe expresses synchronicities. She has done a lot of healing work, especially art, somatic and constellation therapy. When I commented on her having had enough self worth to actually go to therapy — something I wanted to do and never carved out enough value to do it — she laughed, shook her head and said "O God No! It was therapy or suicide!' She added, 'Isn't it amazing, though, that none of us did do suicide? Somehow Terry had managed to put into us so much fear of shaming her, that to have killed ourselves would have been shaming her, and so we didn't kill ourselves.'
Have you read Erich Neumann's great and important book, *The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1282241.The_Great_Mother. I consider this to be one of the top 10 most important books I've read. And perhaps more so now, with the protracted attack on masculine energy and a total denial of the existence of anything that could be considered worthy of attack in the female energy.
In a way, that was an introduction. I'm not sure how I'll write the next one. If I will write it. We'll see. Sister number two, who did a lot of therapy, was told by the people there, that her story was the worst that they ever heard. And her story is not the worst in our family. Sister number four went through absolute hell after I left home.
Thank you for reading. And commenting.
Oh I was guessing it was sister four who had commented. I don't remember if you've said where you are in the birth order? What a powerful thing your sister said about therapy or suicide, and that not committing suicide was a final manipulation from the grave. I'm thinking of Yoshiko as your sentry to not allow the hungry ghost back in.
I made the opposite transmigration. I may have been Terry when very young but was Terri in Catholic school where every class had at least four versions. Then I became Teresa. My parents thought to name me after the Little Flower but spelled it wrong, so I'm named after the formidable Teresa of Avila. Theresa, belying the 'little flower' bullshit, was a sado-masochistic bitch hell-bent on sainthood. There's a biography I have of her by Monica Furlong, who wrote some children's books I like called Wise Child, Juniper and Colman.
Anyway, I thought it was a very revealing biography that she was very twisted and made herself a martyr to get attention. Her 'visions' contradicted themselves when questioned. I personally think she was a total fraud. FWIW.
You and I are definitely in each other's lives for a reason, Guy, you with the name of the generic male, EveryGuy's Journey. Me with the name of the devouring mother, your tormentor, belittler, cut-you-down-to-sizer?
And because there's a reason beyond our topic, I'll say that I didn't see me as rejecting your argument and closing the door on the discussion. At least not until a very long way in. When I reread our comment thread, I was surprised at the conviviality of it up until the end.
If I may, let me give a tennis analogy. I hit a ball to you and asked you to play. The ball was my question, "What if we collectively are co-creators of Reality with God?" My ball had the spin on it that this world was therefore not Reality. You (in my perception) declared my ball out of bounds and substituted your own, which was presenting the collective self as the undifferentiated self. After fetching my ball a few times to try to get it in play, I called for a referee.
To speculate, I think your triggering came before and my closing the door on the discussion came after. I think there was something in the language of my question, maybe the OneMind that you associate with a certain New Age narcissist by a similar name. So instead of engaging with the ball I bounced over, you dodged it. And perhaps added some weight to your return ball that wasn't meant for me.
For instance, you said that Terry spouted platitudes and lacked nuance. You also said her (or her mother's) idea of projection--what you see in others you reveal in yourself--particularly irked you. And why wouldn't it? It's passive-aggressive as hell. Yet all three of these things you sent my way that put me on the defensive, that I was not New Age, not lacking nuance, not projecting. So it seems like it became a different kind of game.
What do you think, Guy, my friend?
I am thinking this is very provocative and yet another doorway to another room or space to investigate. So I am in the process of exploring what is behind door number 10, which in binary means 2! LoL.
I'm digesting your comment and will respond after a time. Thank you for sharing and your continuing the quest for ... the bandersnatch? Or the holy grail? Is there a difference? [Headshake, laughing.] (Von Franz and Emma Jung's book *The Grail Legend* is another of those important books in this largely Christian-based cultural morass. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/572302.The_Grail_Legend.)
Birth order is: Guy, eldest, #1 sister born about 16 months later with enough triage counselling to live a 'good' life; #2 sister born about 15 months later fully awake with lots of deep somatic and creative non-verbal therapy; #3 sister, born 25 months later, fully asleep, deeply traumatised only recently entered some kind of therapy; #4 sister, adopted at the age of 2 or 3(?) from teenage cousin when I was 18 and was basically tortured by they bully tag team of #3 sister and mother. (I am worried about her and she is in my prayers as she hasn't replied to my contact efforts since 2017.)
Hola Tereza. My quest into the cave of your query has given life to another substack essay. Muchas gracias. I'll put it up on Monday morning. All the best.
(And, OMG, you have been busy! I'm not keeping up.)
Truly LOVED this essay Guy - your experiences echo my own and add to my own learning also. I learnt through separation for the last 3 years from my father and step mother to appreciate my own growth and understanding, to recognise their lack of growth, and to be accepting of both. It was also interesting to read your story as I contemplate my relationship with my son. We realised that we had a co-dependent relationship but neither of us knew how to break free from it. As i have stepped back from all judgement about how he lives his life and accepted that he needs to follow his own journey to healing and who knows whether that will involve separating himself from me too? We currently share our sense of humour and friendship and I hope that continues but I recognise the damage that my ego did to him and I have been able to apologise to him before I leave (whenever that is). Two weeks ago I met with my father and step mother for lunch. I felt compassion, but no greater compassion than I feel for anyone suffering. I asked myself if I was heartless, how could I not care more about them? I did not feel anything that triggered me. I understood that they are not able to apologise for their actions and I see how it has manifested in their own health. I took away from that meeting some more learning and I hope that I will see more clearly the things that I need to apologise to them for. I did not have contact with my biological mother for 30 years and then we had contact for about 15 years but we both understood I think that neither of us cared all that much and we just let it go again. People are in our lives to teach us and when we have learnt the lesson we can move on and them from us also. Thank you again for openly and honestly sharing your thoughts.
Hola, April.
I'm so glad that this resonated with your own experiences and, it seems, has helped to clarify some things about your journey, or perhaps clarified the questions.
Your concern about being heartless with your parents is an interesting one. Our western ideas of 'romantic', by which I mean more than that between lovers, has been totally contaminated with the idea of being lost and unstable. Our music, our literature, our religion, our news, all extoll love as something that shakes your earth, unbalances you in some way. True love, as I've come to understand it, is the ability to remain absolutely true to your spirit and experience, without becoming emotionally, psychologically or physically imbalanced under any circumstances. Equanimity with rich and poor, with mother and daughter, father and son, friend and stranger. Your own appropriate eccentric action at all times wih all people. That is love. So, by your description you have moved from the 'fake' love of controlling people and cirucmstances or being controlled by circumstances or people. That is to be a yogi expressing the love that is the foundation of existence. I bow to you in deep appreciation. Namaste.
All the best with your son. Very challenging. I have no idea if it would help or not. You may find
this book a great resource: *The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype* by Erich Neumann. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1282241.The_Great_Mother. In one of the books in Joseph Campbell's mythology series talks abou this too. I'm sorry, I don't remember which.
You may find my "Dear Claude" epistles interesting as well, as providing perhaps a glimpse into masculine energy that may help with expanding your relationship with your son outside of the restrictive covenants that are associated with co-dependency.
All the best. Thank you for reading and for the great comment.
Also.. regarding the last part of your comment. I will do that. My son is continually trying to separate that part of himself and explain how he felt as a young man in a house that was all women. I was a single parent to him and his sister and most of my friends were women. I really did not understand the differences and realise I was also very sexist, the conditioned beliefs of the age I grew up in were very very confusing regarding feminism.
Have you and/or your son and daughter explored Jordan Peterson at all? He talks very powerfully to being male in a misandristic society. Misanthropic doesn't describe how we have constructed ourselves! Yes, we are largely misanthropic and yet it really comes down to true split between misandry and misogyny. We extol the latter and are oblivious to or deny the former. Horrific psychological damage being done to both our young women and young men. [Shudder.]
For some reason I am tempted to share an interesting interview, a public apology to Jordan Peterson from a woke misandrist feminist. Really quite revealing to how ... fractured our culture is.
So, April, I would like to introduce you to Jordan Peterson, via his daughter Mikhaila and Africa Brooke.
"Leaving the Cult of Wokeness with Jordan Peterson | Africa Brooke - MP Podcast #120" https://youtu.be/qU7iXtHTVtI?si=voop8i5jH4VBQQiy
Well, it is late, here. Time for bed. Good night. All the best.
Yes we know about Jordan Peterson. I discovered him in 2018 and he has very much enabled me and my son to start our conversations about this deep split between the chaos of my upbringing without a mother in times of feminist extremism and his upbringing without a father and his depression and autism. I will look at this interview though, thank you.
Great!
You may find the interview he did with British MP (ex?), Alex Story on eugenics as an unconscious foundation of our society interesting as well. It explores one of the cultural shadows that has been a key part of the acceptance of the tyrannical nature of our social construct.
Eugenics: Flawed Thinking Behind Pushed Science | Alex Story | EP 294
https://youtu.be/ZAaY0gbis4s?si=QiwjyYR_dqjo3StS
All the best!
I am very excited by what you have described here Guy. You have given me something 'brand new'. Yet another conditioned belief that I am able to start chipping away at. What I could not understand was this:
The other morning I went to pick up my son for an early morning swim. He was waiting outside his house sitting on a wall, talking to his elderly neighbour. I have spoken to this neighbour of his before, he lives alone in sheltered housing, like my son, except he doesn't have someone to wash his clothes like my son does. He supports the same football team as my son so when I talk to him I usually ask him how the team are doing because he seems to feel less awkward than if I ask him how he is. The other morning at 5.30am he was drunk as the football team had won the night before. I felt the same love and compassion for him that I felt for my father. I have been thinking that there must be something wrong with me. Why did I not care more for someone biologically related who I had spent so many years knowing and had so much history with? Why did I feel an equal level of care for his lonely football fan? As usual I turn on myself and say 'It's you! There is something wrong with you!" Except that I don't FEEL that there is something wrong with me ha ha. So your comment has given me (as always) new avenues to continue exploring and for this I thank you once again.
Interesting question. And so glad I am giving you new crumbs into the back alleys of mind-spirit-body previous unexplored.
In a nutshell it sounds like you have knowingly or not begun walking the deep path of what Gautama Buddha taught with the 4 fold truth and the 8 fold path. To be fully free, as a human, is to have full compassion for all people and, ultimately, all life. If you are asking why you felt more 'caring' for the old man than your son, it may very well have been that your son didn't 'need' your compassion at that time, and the old man did.
The phrase I use that describes this, as a kind of synthesis or focused description of Gautama's principles, is Appropriate Eccentric Action. You were totally free within your Self, meaning your spirt/mind/body were integrated and gave you perfect freedom to be spontaneously you. The old man's loneliness called to you, and you gave him compassion. Wonderful.
Have you explored Gautama Buddha at all? It turns out that *Buddhism* has largely perverted some of the most important aspects of what Gautama taught. At the core of the split is that GB taught and advocated that mindfulness OF THE BODY is the path to being free - nirvana. The BODY is the path by which we live in this life and when we are fully in the body, instead of dreaming or imagining how to become spirit despite being stuck in an egregious, dirty, foul body, we act appropriately in all circumstances, with compassion the tangible manifestation of love.
As a corollary to that GB also taught that thinking or arguing about manifestations of God, reincarnation and other metaphysical 'talk', are distractions that keep us trapped in maya, the delusion that life as we see it is unchanging and the truth. The more we focus on God as out/up there and us as trapped down here, the more *trapped* we are.
So, it seems that you fallen into your own Appropriate Ecccentric Action in a manner I understand as being a Buddha's (or Bodhisattva's) way. Freedom. Beautiful.
Does any of that make sense?
If you are curious I can suggest some reading about this. This has been a very recent discovery for me, that my path has been to be surprised that what I have been thinking and acting on was what the Buddha actually taught. In the 1980s I dismissed Buddhism because it didn't honour the body in a way similar to what the Christian religions did. Now I see that my path to freedom through honouring and respecting the sacredness of the body was what Gautama more accurately taught. I suspect that that what Jesus may have taught as well. I haven't done the research yet to confirm that.
If you want, it may be easier to explore these ideas via email. You can email me via gduperreault@protonmail.com.
All the best!
Thank you Guy. I am excited by this comment and I will email you. I thought I had discovered a new door to open in my brain where my body was 'talking' to me very directly - sounds weird - but now, no so much since reading what you have said. I had no frame of reference with which to explain what has been happening and to be honest found it a bit confusing and to some degree a bit scary! My brain tells me that I am far too late to reverse the damage that has been done to my body. But my body laughs at that suggestion??? I am swimming in a sea of confusion ha ha
Wonderful!
Full optimal healing of the body is available to us at all times, and begins at any stage of life! The body is PRESENT in the present, and spontaneous healing is likewise present.
Something that may help is to practice the Ho'oponopono prayer method with your body. "Please forgive me for all the ways that I have hurt you. I am sorry. Thank you for listening. I love you."
I practice a muscle testing technique, a tangible form of body awareness to guide my own healing of mind and body. So I eat foods my body wants and do not eat foods my body does not want. Everything is energy, our body and our food. How does our body know what food in our stomach, this mush of stuff, to keep as nutritious and what to send out as unnecessary at this time? Think about that. No eyes, etc. How does it *know*?
Energy. So, before eating, use that energy awareness with food, supplements, physical activities, and even yoga and meditation practices. It is a true prayer to the body as sacred.
Sea of confusion! Lovely. Often that is a beginning of the awareness of expanded awareness: the old patterns don't work, and so the new is ... well *new*. So unknown, so often confusing otherwise it would have been known. Peterson describes that well.
As to the feminazism, like woke: a key marker to their inappropriateness, is the denial of individuality, now to the point that gender doesn't exist so that we will physically de-gender / re-gender children in order to confirm that genderless is real! Now, that is *real* confusion-delusion!
All the best! Welcome, fellow-sister traveller! To 'truth, the pathless landscape' to paraphrase Krishnamurti.
🙏❤❤❤
I started reading this two weeks ago. I was interrupted by my day job and stepped away. I got far enough to know that I needed to wait until I had ample mental space to pick it back up.
As you well know, I struggle...well, struggle is dramatic...let me say it differently. Sometimes I find the practice of maintaining a healthy balance between knowing what is happening, and having a peaceful, positive presence in my day to day life...that feels good in my body.
Over the past two weeks I noticed a building of "stuckness" in my heart chakra - that's often where the energy of processing the world gets snagged. I have done my work to get it moving again, and felt ready to read about Terry, who unsurprisingly, shares much with Suzanne.
"Co-dependency often knows no limits. For me to survive that leaving I had anticipated a truce that would allow our dysfunction to continue, to limp along more or less as it had been before I smashed the family unity by leaving against your authority. You had so successfully dissociated me from my self..."
Although Terry and Suzanne are not the same person, in many ways they are...and the fact that we have found ourselves sharing this journey is remarkable to me.
"Terry, your reading-practice modelled my future behaviour, of course. It contributed to firmly establishing in my nervous system what I now understand to be, but at the time was completely oblivious to, the frequency of addiction to books as dissociation. Thereby I became a prodigious and prolific reader who, for many years, carried two pocket books in his pockets at all times. And ‘he’ would, like you, re-re-read the ‘good’ books, in other words, the most distracting books, the ones that helped drug my mind in some way."
"With all that crap, I say now with honesty, that my experience of life with and without mother is all a part of my process, or journey, from darkness into light, from near total delusion to expansive awareness. With that awareness I move, now, from apologising to you for having hurt you to thanking you for having lived this hard path. Its darkness has given me an awareness of how to live a life more fully alive. I can see where I spent much of my life living platitudes and parroted truths, mostly from great books of wisdom. No more. Your hard path prepared the ground for me to see through the façade of the tyrannical truths, even those disguised with the emptiness of fear-based or manipulative good intentions, those that have become nearly ubiquitous and de rigueur in our age of masked covid tyranny."
Guy, this post was poignant and incredibly relevant to my own experience with Suzanne. Just as I knew it would be.
Thank you.
🙏
You're welcome.