Quiet the Voices? 

Is quieting the voices that different than silencing them?   Yes, I hope so.

Imagine a round table with seats available for those who are willing to suffer the formality. At the table are patient selves willing to place on hold all other matters if necessary, to hear out the rants, raves or reasoning of those in need of a hearing.  But there is no "audience" granted... only a seat at the table, and with the seat comes responsibility.

Sixteen years ago....

    A man lost his apartment.

    A friend had put him up for a few nights in a hotel then another friend allowed him to stay at their place for a few nights. Then he was asked to leave.  He had the keys to the bar and hung out ... too restless to sleep.    His Jeep was parked somewhere, maybe out of gas?   He wasn't exactly hungry though he needed food, as he wasn't exactly sleepy, though he needed rest.  That night was as though he had died, I think.  Maybe this is how it is when a small community casts a member out?

    He didn't feel missed.  Death would have been incidental. Was he a ghost?  Perhaps he  had already died and just didn't remember the passing.

    The next day the police picked him up for acting strange. Medications at the hospital quieted hostile voices. They may have aimed at peace, but the result was
    a loneliness the depths of which he had no words for.

So, no.  I don't seek silence.

Is quieting the voices a type of settling for something less that what we strive for? Settling?  No. Rather it's about and endless series or all or nothing.  Whatever I am-- predestined or by choice, that is what I am--through and through.  There is a piece of myself committed to every cause.   For every monster in the world there is a monster in myself, true by every characteristic to the original.  How else can we fight the monsters in the real world without a piece of ourselves willing to play (no... be) the monster in the internal struggles?  A pitiful struggle it would be if I were to face a tiger in real life if I hadn't wrested real tigers in dreams and in the deep sub-conscience.

Settle?  No.  Compromise maybe.  But compromise is an action carefully negotiated.

Are you familiar with St. Anselm's "proof of God?" The ontological argument defines God as "that than which none greater can  be conceived."  So too with the monsters, I think.  By necessity any true internal struggle must be with the  greatest opponent we can conceive, else the "struggle" is merely playacting--good for catharsis, maybe, but of little practical value.

So too the struggle to reconcile a traumatic experience with life post trauma.  The replayed experience must be real--indistinguishable from experience in the outer world--else  the overcoming of it is a shallow victory, and of no real use should the trauma ever be repeated, or the monsters ever be faced.

Yet... the monsters are not just foils against which we fight, they can be a strength as well.  When facing the  attacking tiger, unleash the dragon.

Yet if we have patterned the horrors in ourselves, surely the benevolent strengths in this world are adopted as well.  For we do not house the monsters except by necessity.

The problem is that the greatest conceivable monster is the real one.  And once fully realized there is an alienation from the whole self.  Once cast out, what use can such an unleashed monster be? 

So the terrors.  There are the ones in which we struggle against the foils, the monster playing the part.  Then there are the ones where, good or bad, players are cast out,
the worst death conceivable.  Here we fight real fights and die real deaths in a struggle for possession of the  soul. 

I suspect.... that there is a recycling possible for those splintered selves.  In an old paradigm, there were selves who played their roles so thoroughly, they did
not know the difference between internal struggles and external.  The were cast out and driven underground.  But this does not have to be the way of it.

Here is the invocation:
     Shadows Indistinct

Here the offer for a return to useful service:

       All These Echoes...

The poetry is the allegory.... a reference to the internal struggle.  But how to define this in practical terms? Dunno.  Except by telling... and in that perhaps the various voices will find the way to cooperate.

If it were "merely" a personal journey, the drive would not be so strong I think.  Settling could be an option, though a sad one.  I think, rather, that a few of us get the opportunity to look behind the curtain of perceived experience and see perhaps a few of the strings pulled and how the parts move.

Would such a perspective not be of use to the tribe... to those who may have such experience yet not at the level of consciousness to be aware?

Now... do we try to explain this foreign bizarre world with
inadequate vocabulary?

       Broken Crayons

Dunno.  But in the trying, perhaps there will be something
useful, even if the end goal is .....elusive.
 

Mike

12-1-2010

 

Quiet Voice