Is That What These Extremes Offer?

By Amaya Gayle Gregory —

There’s been a protest going on inside my body, the inner is mirroring the outer. Not a pretty picture. I’m letting it be as it is, not needing it to be what it isn’t. It wouldn’t be what it’s not even if I didn’t let it be, so what’s the point of resisting?

This day’s been kinda tweaky, tired to the point of falling asleep followed by bouts of being gently present, interspersed with unraveling loose ends. Something’s brewing inside. I don’t know what, because whatever it is hasn’t happened yet. When this occurs it means something is getting ready to pop: snap, crackle, fizz, bang, bam, wham.

What’s funny is that I rarely know what’s afoot until it sticks its foot in my ass and kicks me into a heightened understanding.

Today’s been like that. Same with yesterday and the day before. It’s building like the tight edge of an almost orgasm but without foreplay, just showing up without warning, without any reason at all. At least, not one I can see.

I often find when I write stuff down whatever it is shows up. I have no clue what’s going to appear, but here I go.

I’ve been puzzling cruelty, and why people seem to get high on it.

Collectively, we have let ourselves be made into a nation of victims, so much so that we are decisively out of the closet, our victimhood on display, although I doubt most would call it that. That in and of itself wouldn’t explain the cruelty, wouldn’t be self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, or would it?

It might account for the glee, the sideline cheering and jeering. Victimhood is a head trip, trippin’ frickin’ disassociation from our experience, an hour, a day, a lifetime we reject, never to get back, but it’s not enough to keep the train of spite rolling along, unless not having to feel one’s life as it was is enough reward. Perhaps for some, it is.

Our full-on all-in precious beyond belief aliveness can be totally dismissed, physically missed, mentally misplaced, when we believe we are victims. We build a wall between our experience of life, our intense sensations, triggered emotions, our tender hearts, sort of a firewall to keep from having to feel our lives.

It feels safer for a time but eventually we realize that while we are safe from what’s outside, we aren’t safe from what we brought inside the walls with us. While we damned up our direct experience of our feelings, we still feel our resistance to it, our anger at being wounded, our hatred of those we believe hurt us, our thirst for revenge. Walls wall us in with our inescapable stuff.

We unintentionally locked ourselves inside a cage with what we feared most.

This is the moment when many choose to face their demons. Seeing what’s happening, they realize that feeling the real thing couldn’t be worse than living with the riled-up resistance, the seething anger, the building rage. But many living inside that rage, don’t see it. They can’t yet admit they are complicit. They feel it (it is unavoidable) but feel it unawares.

Every issue that divides us involves victimhood, a betrayal of self, the giving up of our sovereignty, willful or not. Whether we strike out physically or emotionally doesn’t really matter. We may desire to make someone pay or make someone change. It is still violence.

If we feel disrespected we may feel better, for a moment or two, feel a little relief from the rage, watching as people are rounded up, split apart, spit on, kicked when they’re down … made to experience what we feel. If we see the cruelty and feel unable to fix it, to make it stop, it’s one slippery step to blaming others for their cruelty, the damage, the sickness.

It’s easy to demonize people. It feels righteous. It’s been trained into us to think we are right while those who don’t see it the way we do are so obviously wrong … and doing so we slip unwittingly into the role of victim, victims of the system, the evil doers, the times, the insanity, the fallout of the story being played out.

Directing our feelings outward, against someone, something, allows us to feel something, instead of being numb to our experience, instead of blocking out the terror, the inadequacy, the impotence. We step out from behind the steel walls we built to protect ourselves when we toss our grenades, be they words or rubber bullets and we feel.

Is any feeling, even cruelty, for the perpetrators and the victims, not to mention the powerless or vicarious bystanders, better than not feeling anything at all? When we feel, we are present, even if we don’t realize that we are. Shocks to the system pop us out of our mental cages. Instantly we are present to the cruelty, present to the insanity, present to the shock. For a little while, for a little reprieve, we are locked out of our heads.

Is that what these extremes offer? Is that the fatal attraction of this mess?

Life is precious, every damn breath, each emotion, every sensation, and yet, it seems rather than feeling our experience, which I admit can be intense, we’d rather not. We think it is less painful to give ourselves away entirely, if even for just a moment, to abdicate responsibility, to be a victim, to reach out and hurt others, to wound them, to rip them from their loved ones, to soothe the savage ache within by whipping ourselves into a frenzy of righteousness, regardless of which side our particular story puts us on.

Victimhood is mental guesswork layered onto life’s ills, a rejection of the way life is that is then projected onto others, any others, all others, for life not turning out the way we want it to, the way we think it should. And it’s total fantasy, fancy mesmerism, self-aggrandizing make-believe. It’s a fu*cking story spiraling deeper and deeper into the annals of storyland.

It’s all story. There’s nothing here, nothing in the land of duality, that isn’t story. It doesn’t really matter at all, and yet it matters absolutely if you have any impulse whatever to discover what life really is.

And that’s what’s been building up inside of me, an intimate dissection of life’s magnetic pull. It pulls us into its depths without hesitation, if we can be pulled, if we are attracted to the fight, the battle, the holy wars. Right now, it is demonstrating ever so cleverly how it works, how new stories are written, how quickly the attention can be pulled one direction and then another. The tail is indeed wagging the dog. Life is in control and it is showing off.

So I am left wondering what does that look like in my world … mine, of course … yours is yours, not mine. It feels like feeling is all, my in and my out. I don’t want to miss even a tiny breath of this life so I shall slow down and feel whatever is here, even if I don’t know what it is I am feeling, even if it feels scary, even if it feels impotent, powerless, at a loss.

Feeling opens into revelation. It is a direct connection. For me, it is an opening into grace. It’s how the dam broke and I wrote this. I felt what was here, was simply present, present simply, and infinite aliveness, this we are when we aren’t convinced of our story, revealed what was mine to see.

Amaya Gayle is the author of 6 books, the latest Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY