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| Edgar Allen Poe's Raven by Gustave Dore |
The practice of remembering dreams is one way to practice deep, inner self-awareness. The subtle energies of dream arise from the Source of Emotion. Both destructive and creative emotions are based on momentums of conscious action. Thought begets thought, and action begets action. As the Poe quote reads, so the psychological, subtle phases of our lives seem as dreams within a dreams.
Emotions are also based in psychological development through various phases of life. As a child, emotions are indistinguishable between self and other. The emotional vulnerability of a child rests in the experience of lacking discernment between “what is I” and “what is not I”. When a child experiences trauma, they are unable to separate the trauma in their environment from their own thoughts and feelings, which are not yet recognized as theirs. By adolescence, the human being is naturally predisposed to reflection on the content of one’s inner life, forming and recognizing their unique thoughts and emotions. This phase is often marked by the difficulties in attaining psychological independence from the collective emotions shared by family and community. If the person passes from this stage, they are able to maintain a strong sense of self, and so go out into the world, learning but not assimilating, acting but not capitulating. These three stages can be summarized as sight, thought and action.
At the fourth stage, there is a marked shift in consciousness. All the previous three stages become indelibly present in life, yet they all become partial to completion through a conscious manifestation of love. In the process of developing a love relationship, the emotions go through the three phases before they are actualized and fully recognized as the enduring experience of love. In the beginning, the emotional phase of the child returns, where individual emotions become indistinguishable within the love relationship. From that stage, thoughts are dominated by thoughts of love, and all action is cautioned by the fact that everywhere one walks now, they are not alone, but with their love.
As with the mystical hierarchy of seven energy centers in the body, known in such traditions as the Hindu Chakras or the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, these four phases represent the involuntary (feeling), creative (thought), power (action), and compassion (love). In the fifth stage, the love emotion resonates outward to engage a greater sense of love for a community, nation or people. In the sixth stage, the focus is clear, and the way aligns with a specific practice of devotion to service in light of the accumulated energetic septet of emotional phases of psychological development. In the final phase, sight, thought, action, love, community and devotion unites every phase of emotional development. The completion of self-awareness is actualized from the inmost depths to the outmost limits of human potential.
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She rushes ahead. Into a rigid cube of wooden frames and metal housing. Rusting chains fall over the marginal impasse of domestic space. The outdoor heavens collapse over the head of my lover.
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| The Face in the Pool (frontispiece) by James Allen St. John |
Brilliant orange tigers growl and laugh with the insatiable greed of bestial hunger. She is engulfed under massive wingspan of the jungle predators. She submits to death, agog with passionate surrender.
Related post: Eye of The Other Tiger: Borges and the Dreamer Within
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Filmic mind, braving theatric kingdoms
Weighed heavily by the German cross
Over western shores, blonde
With sightless camaraderie
In the sociopathic gaze of mindless pain,
Order & god for trade
At the bedside, nude
Binging before a final restitution,
Breathing in dream-talk laughter nightly,
Not for escape,
Only to tread the unfulfilled urge
To let go of body into an act of base movement
excerpt from "think IN drink"
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