the devil inside

"Regardless of the outcome, you feel so much better about yourself when you do what you think is the right thing. That alone is worth the risk." 

- Bruno Bettelheim

As I was falling asleep I awoke with a violent start, feeling like someone had drop kicked me from the unconscious to the conscious realm. I carried with me an image of a young female prostitute sitting on an old, ratty brown couch.  As I watched from somewhere in the ethers, she crouched away from the fist beating she was receiving from a handsome, professional looking man who stood behind her.  He beat her on her shoulders, back and head. She was beautiful and indifferent, even as she was beaten. She was imbued with a real natural beauty of the most enviable type that she was obviously fighting against.

Some dreams just resonate.  They come from the most unacknowledged areas of existence. They open the door to those hazy, buried bits of experience that didn't suit us and ended up packed away where we forgot we'd had them. And here, right here, was a room, door flung open, waiting to be cleaned, emptied and sorted out!  I'd been searching for this place for months.   I excitedly noted that I should write this down to consider it further in the morning. That thought was interrupted. The interrupter was loud, persuasive, genderless: "it's not important to remember that".

Who was telling me not to remember?  Who thinks they know what's important and what's not? Will there ever come a time when the unconscious is not provocative?
I went back to sleep. I did not write it down.

The hours passed uneventfully. Thirty minutes before my alarm was to go off, I awoke again. I had been dreaming the same dream again.  I had been dreaming the same dream again. Repetition increases importance and draws the attention.

The girl was slightly different, as was the scenery and the appearance of the man, but the theme was still the same: a beautiful, desperate girl being subdued with force by a strong man, shamelessly acceptable even as he acted so vile.  The woman was curling into herself, not fighting back.  She had no fear, no pain.  Without a sense of self-worth, it's not so shocking to be treated as if you are worthless.

And now, the ground is filling with a rumble. The change is reaching the shoreline. Can you feel it coming your direction?  It is palpable if we let it work its way into us.  Love is our right.  No fear.

The Rose Captain

This part's for my love of old
How the rose in your heart you hold
Still all the water in your wells won't make it grow
Oh, the call of the nightingale
How I love beneath the ghostly sails
We move like gypsies 'neath the mist and beneath the gloom

This part's for my love of new
How the bulbs in my heart are true
They send the shoots through my fingers into your bones
Oh, the call of the collared dove
How I long to be your one true love
We'll move like gypsies 'neath the stars and beneath the moon

Oh, how the river flows under the ice and snow
The keeper of the flame
The rose captain knows our names
His perfumed breath we breath
For you my dear, my love will never leave

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

(art by the luminous spirit, Paul Laffoley)

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two contradictions...
For the god wants to know himself in you.
-Rainer Maria Rilke


Surrender yourself to death, return what was loaned to you.
Give up your pleasures, your pains. Give up your friends, your lovers. Give up your family, your past.
Surrender what you hate, what you desire. You will know nothingness.
It is the only reality.
You will no longer want to possess.
Possession is the ultimate pain.
-Jodorowsky


Transition is all around us. All that you count on will change. It is an amazing blessing to watch the lotus unfurl and amazingly painful to watch the petals decay back into the mud. These concepts are not so hard to grasp, yet it still feels like a shot to the heart when we lose things we thought we would always have and gain things we didn't even know we were missing. We are unfortunate to live in a culture that buries so many fundamental elements of reality- anger, death, evil, intimacy, altruism. Here in modern America, we are not allowed to see these things, instead they must be hidden under our masks and we are trained to be terrified when they ooze out into the light.

Something must die, if anything is to live. Every decision involves excluding the non-chosen options. I believe that energy and matter are finite, cycling back into themselves at all times. When we let go we aren't really letting go, per se, but more likely performing some energetic alchemy, some psychomagic. Transformation is undoubtedly a healthier, more connected process than banishment, repetition or repression.

We all resonate in each moment with a specific vibration that is only attractive to some. Sometimes our vibrations are out of tune and the result is that we don't resonate with any other energies or beings that actually compliment us. Defeated, some of us recognize our mistakes, take the time to clue into our true selves and try again with a clearer heart. Others among us have never been in tune, born with the karmic debt of learning to expect dissonance in relationship with others instead of harmony. These people walk the gray line between blessing and curse and may feel destined to be either alone or surrounded with people that block them from cultivating the very areas of their soul that need to be watered most. The possibility for each path lies within each one of us. In the eyes of God, we are all equal.