Monday, November 11, 2024

Boundaries reimagined (and Goshen, UT reimagined)

 Honoring someone or something establishes a separation or boundary between you and them.  This may work to your advantage, their advantage,  or be mutually beneficial.   By contrast, to hate, dislike, or dishonor removes all boundaries and separateness.  Good luck.

Now to mix apples and oranges.  I think this not only works with people,  but with ideas, beliefs or concepts as well.  Take my last podcast for example, where ideas like trauma, inner child, betrayal are involved.   In a sense, to say "I have trauma" is a way of identifying a concept which in some ways creates a similar energetic separateness.  Instead of the somatic trauma that may be inside you, when you create the concept of "I have trauma" then you have created something else perhaps that the phenomenal experience of trauma.  That concept can now be interacted with.  The act of this form of identification is a similar energy to me of honoring which in some ways may create a separation, for good or bad.  If you honor the trauma, perhaps it allows you more of a space to work with it.  However, to have a different relationship to the trauma concept, it might, analogous to dishonoring someone, have a different effect.  

Then I was with my father who was driving a semi in Utah.  The small rural towns that I remember in my youth we much more developed, almost like resorts.  I remember steep hills and lots of road construction.  When we arrived at Goshen, which is apparently where I spent my early days with my aunt while my mother was at school, i remember being started about how much it (and perhaps myself :-)) had developed.  I remember thinking that I should retire in Salt Lake City, but then how it would not be a good idea because of the mormons.   And how someone local like Judge Noll would always be fair not swayed by religious prejudice.  Anyway....lol  



Saturday, November 9, 2024

Imagination vs. Materialism

 One of the many views of the world suggest that we are animals with drives and molecules floating around our bloodstream that control every thought and action that we engage in.  If we experience something that makes us unhappy, we can simply take other molecules from a large pharmaceutical company and it will alter our brain chemistry and make everything ok or allow us to sleep or whatever is ailing us.  That world view of what we are seems by its nature lacking vitality and energy.  The world is reduced to words and concepts.   It takes all the fun away, literally and figuratively.  Life becomes lifeless.  We sit and home and watch TV.  We become cold and detached because we lose our connection to the environment.  

By contrast, if we can step into the animistic/imaginal world, the world comes alive, literally and figuratively.  We reach out and literally connect with spirits and energies surrounding us.  We feel the dark contractive energies and they become fuel for the fire of our transformation.  When everything around us is alive, we can embrace it, and that connection fuels our vitality and the so called imaginary realm comes alive.  Think of the difference in language you use to describe the embrace of living objects, versus the dead world of materialism.  Materialism = depression.  Animism= connection and embrace.