Last night was the first night in awhile where it was cool enough to keep my bedroom door open. Delight!
And!
It also led to me waking up quite a bit during the night. This led to experientially connecting with a question that came up in a recent gathering:
What can I do when waking up in the middle of the night?
A few years ago, during the bedraggled final tatters of our relationship, my ex-partner and I were out walking our dog when we got into yet another heated argument. I can’t even remember now what we were disagreeing about, but as he asserted his view I asked, ‘But how do you know that’s actually the case?’
He replied, angrily and brim-full of conviction: “I know that’s how it is, because I AM RIGHT!”
History was my favourite subject at school. Until I was seventeen, I assumed that everything I read was fact. Just as the dates and names of kings and queens were beyond question, so too was everything else I had learnt. So it was profoundly shocking to read Edward Hallett Carr’s book What Is History?
Nearly ten years ago, my life fell apart suddenly and catastrophically. I ceased to be able to function in the outside world, was physically ill and was engulfed by feelings, sensations and memories that—up until then—I’d been successfully avoiding or suppressing. Fortunately, I recognized that this was far more than a nervous breakdown. It was the beginning of a long dark night of the soul. Very early on I realised that, over the years, I had become disconnected from my deeper self. My soul was now calling me home and I was willing (if totally ill-prepared) to heed its call.
Looking back, I recognise that I was anxious from a very young age, but the extent of the anxiety didn’t become apparent until I was in my late twenties and started having panic attacks. A close friend of mine had dropped dead in tragic circumstances a few days before they started, and very soon I found myself facing the suppressed horror and grief of a previous loss, the death of my best friend in an accident when we were eighteen.
Denial runs deep in our various cultures, and seems particularly prevalent just now. Climate change deniers are turning their backs on worldwide scientific consensus. There are those who deny that well-documented events – including the Holocaust – ever happened. Some even deny that the earth is round. The human mind, it seems, has an extraordinary capacity for denial, even of the most obvious facts.
A few days ago, my dear friend and I went to Grenfell Tower. She frequently makes this pilgrimage from her home nearby to speak the names of those who perished on that awful night. For me, as an infrequent visitor to London, it was the first time I had set eyes on the blackened building. We walked the surrounding streets, past the church which hasn’t closed its doors since the fire broke out, bedecked with yellow ribbons, knitted yellow hearts, photographs of the missing and dead, teddy bears, and handwritten cards and messages.
Lately, I’ve been reading about certainty addiction (or bias). Our brains are apparently wired to perceive uncertainty as a potential threat to our survival, so we go looking for certainty wherever we can find it. We prefer certainties – however painful or uncomfortable – to the unknown and uncertain. We will ignore facts, reasoning and arguments – however compelling – that seem to threaten our sense of certainty.
Many spiritual teachings refer to the illusion of the separate self; the belief in being an isolated and deficient self seems to lie at the heart of our suffering. When we assume – or when life circumstances have led us to conclude – that we are unlovable, wrong, damaged or inferior, we are bound to suffer for as long as we continue to believe that assumption. Many of us know that suffering intimately, just as we know the relief that comes when we realize that we are not the person we have assumed ourselves to be.
During the nineteenth century, phantasmagoria – or theatrical horror shows – became a popular attraction throughout Britain, Europe and the United States. The creators used lighting, projectors, smoke, sound effects and electric shocks to conjure all manner of apparitions and frighten audiences. Sequences of terrifying images played on screens and theatres were often decorated accordingly. There were even rumours of patrons being drugged.
