GRACE

The issue with our subconscious seems to be the fact that we stuff everything that we don’t assimilate or feel comfortable with immediately into it.

We break our experience into two categories, likes and dislikes.

Likes are accepted and dislikes are resisted. That’s at least fifty percent of our experience going resisted, but what if that were not the case, what opportunity is available here that we are unconscious of?

Ninety five percent of our brain activity is unconscious. Forty percent of our behaviour is habitual. We make a life it seems from our patterns and our historic traumas, no need to make an issue of it other than to be aware of it.

We see evidence of a collective unconscious in our inability to break from our habitual societal patterns that mirror our own patterns. What you can’t see, cannot be seen, what you can’t hear, cannot be heard, what you are not aware of, cannot be known.

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. His idea of personal healing was to bring the subconscious slowly into the conscious, to make the human whole, to bring the equal parts of dark and light into consciousness and to break the patterns of habitual unconscious dysfunction.

But what is a dysfunction? What is truth, a half truth or a barefaced fabrication, lie or delusion?

To know a truth, we need to isolate our bias, isolate our mental conditioning, our bigotries, our national identity, our collective ideas of who and what we are, and peer deeply into the murky shadows of the places we don’t want to go. Otherwise we look out onto the world through stained glass windows, and judge reality to be what we think, instead of what is actually present.

So we take some inner action and make the decision to walk alone, isolated and vulnerable in our own shadows to find truth.

I imagine from the outside this looks like what some would call a dark night of the soul, I know in my own wife’s case, watching me tread these areas over the last 3–4 years has not been easy. I suffer, she suffers and vice versa, perhaps this is why we all shy away from our own darkness, in respect of our beloveds, but is it respect, does it protect or shelter us a from a deeper truth that we need to experience for growth?

Perhaps in normalising the darkness somewhat we can alleviate our resistance to it and the suffering as a consequence, or we could look at it in a different context.

Is it darkness? Or is the dawning of the light beginning to shine onto the corners of the personal psyche that have been hidden for years, or lifetimes?

The first thing one becomes aware of in the lack of association with objects and collective ideas is how we repress, oppress, suppress and compress, well, at least that has been my experience, not a comfortable place to tread, but indeed an awakening one.

It brings with it an avalanche of realisations and a myriad of shadows that are not comfortable, both in terms of personal history and the growing awareness it brings of the collective dysfunction of human society.

However, like all shadows, for them to be seen there must also be light. The negative aspects are not a solid, they disappear into the subconscious because we individually and collectively are unwilling, or unable to look at it.

Standing back, becoming impartial, looking at humanity and the self without bias, one can see plainly the dysfunction, and as a consequence the awareness of ones own behavioural, habitual dysfunction.

What good does it do?

Looking at the world with fresh eyes, even for short periods of time brings into clarity what is true and what is illusion.

We repeat the same atrocity’s against each other out of habitual bias and bigotry that spans well past this current incarnation, our lack of trust in ourselves is reflected in the collective because we haven’t a clue who or what we are.

We collectively cannot know truth while ever we are unwilling to look at our own shit. Our shit will always be projected onto others until we can look at it, impartially, with acceptance and compassion. I imagine this is Jung’s idea of making the unconscious, conscious.

Imagine a utopia, where we first and foremost were accepting of ourselves, compassionate to the suffering and the mistakes we have made in our past, forgiving of the suffering we have caused in others and ourselves. Does that not sound like healing?

There are only two modalities of function, resistance and acceptance, they are the two sides of the very same coin. They can be brought into each other’s light and shadow when we can allow them both to be present, when they are present we can become aware of the areas that we are blind to, both in ourselves and our dealings with others.

Now, imagine a society that can become compassionately aware of its own dysfunction, a society that can move from resistance to flow, from conflict to understanding, from bias and bigotry to acceptance, from hate to love.

This idea of utopia cannot come from the collective, it begins and ends with the individual, the change, the shift and the subsequent benefit comes from forgiving ourselves and by extension realising the benefit of forgiveness for others.

It means refusing to speak against ourselves and then refusing to speak against others, seeing clearly that because I am human, you are human, healing the rift between what I think, what I know and what I understand.

Refusing the projections, the judgments, the bias and the bigotry to open up and surrender to life itself.

To see the ultimate paradox, that I am in fact solo, my consciousness is all there is to this experience, and at the very same time intuitively feel my lack of separation between my state and yours, the willingness and the reflection of seeing myself reflected in you.

The path of self discovery is bumpy, uncomfortable and humbling, but it is after all perhaps the most profound of all the journeys we can embark on, it’s a lifelong processing that one comes to intuitively understand as perhaps our key purpose for being here.

To make life primary as it already is, to see life for what it actually is, not the filtered version, but the authenticity and the truth in it.

Then how does this become the state of the collective?

Through doing nothing other than being authentically yourself, surrendering to what actually is, instead of wanting it to be different, or breaking into likes and dislikes, in that act of accepting, true power, you give others the authority to do the same.

This is what I call grace individually and opportunity collectively.

Gilesy ❤️