It has been a strange few days. Freezing rain causing a city wide power outage during the full moon. I was thankfully spared. My friend and her cat are now living with me for the time being. We are being very domestic (making banana bread and reading on the sofa because there’s no wifi). That night of the freezing rain my dreams were intense and vivid, something happened that I can only call astral projection. Reishi has been making my dreams wacky, but this was stranger than usual. As I drifted off to sleep, I had the strangest sensation of peeling myself up from my body. There I was floating over my sleeping self, and my friend sleeping next to me. I only had a moment to consider this, then I shot out the window and began flying across the city. It is hard to say what happened after, it got stranger and stranger until I desperately wanted to wake up.
In the last part of the dream, I was in the backseat with my friend, and I realized no one was driving the car. I rushed to the front in a panic, and took control of the car to bring us to safety. All of a sudden, I felt as if we were being chased, a truck in the rearview mirror looked particularly threatening. Now that I think about it, perhaps this was my brain's subconscious homage to Spielberg’s Duel. I was driving in a panic, desperate to get away from the assailant, but then, suddenly, a calm came over me. It is the same feeling every time I become lucid in a dream. Oh this doesn’t matter, I thought. I swerved off the road, careening off a bridge. We were free-falling in slow motion, all I could see was blue, then I woke up with a start.
If there is one thing I know about life, it is this:
Everything is expanding away from or collapsing into nothingness. I was talking about this with my friend, sitting on my couch that I got for free from the vintage furniture store downstairs because the owner is kind and I caught them at the right time. The afternoon light was perfect, the first inklings of spring were making themselves known, we could all feel the change that was in the air that day. For the first time in a long time, I was feeling utterly and totally blessed.
Everything is going like this, or this, I explained to them moving my hands out and in from each other:
This oscillation is mirrored on numerous scales of reality. The in and out of the breath, the expansion of summer and the contraction of winter, the expansion and then collapse of a life on earth, the curve of the sun across the sky and the return of the moon. Expanding till the sun is right above your head, then collapsing back to the center when it is all said and done. Endings are always calling for a flight back home, a beloved animal taken to the dirt, buried in the backyard. What happens next is for the earthworms to decide, but whatever form it takes expansion will soon be its destiny. The body breaks down, and something new will emerge. Nothing can be nothing forever.
Contract is what happens after expansion, expansion is what happens after contraction. I stare at kids playing in the alleyway outside of my window next to a pile of snow, the mucky kind that stays around for most of the spring resisting the sun's new found agency, they will get older and so will I and life goes on like this. Expansion, contraction and expansion again.
The spiral as a symbol is always abundant and giving. As an emoji, I feel as if it signals the users pledge not only to spirituality, but to the mystical. When I’m on instagram and I want to say GOD IS LIT! I just use 🌀, it is far less loaded.
The spiral is a spacious symbol, it is complex, yet simple, and of course ubiquitous in nature. Shells, hurricanes, galaxies, sunflower seeds, the structure of the DNA molecule: in the microcosm and the macrocosm. When symbols are so readily available in such a way it is hard to not think that reality is winking at you. That it wants you in on the joke, it is not enough to just be laughing by itself.
In the spiral we find something innate and contradictory about the way energy moves, both pushing outwards and pulling in simultaneously. In it is both the infinite capacity to expand and the intimate pull towards the centre of it all.
In many ways, what keeps us pushing outwards is the very force that keeps us tethered to that central point. It reminds me of highschool physics, my bright and brief career as a woman in STEM. A ball on a string is rotating around a central point, its velocity is directed straight ahead, perpendicular to the centripetal force and centrifugal force. Yet, as it appears you are moving straight these opposing forces seem to be acting on you at once, as the centrifugal forces desperately tries to retreat from the centre, as the centripetal force keeps you tethered to it. They are absolutely contradictory movement, and yet one could not exist without the other.
The more expansive I become, the more I feel that tug drawing me back to the centre of it all.
~
Often, I think to myself “I’ve been here before.” It is a sensation that visits like a point of clarity, even for just a moment taking me out of whatever internal drama or delight that I’m experiencing. It’s like swimming in the murky recesses of a dream as you’re pulled along by whatever part of your subconscious is driving the plot, and then suddenly, you look around and it hits you. Perhaps, I have already felt all there is to feel, and learned all there is to learn. Every new experience invites an old sensation, a truth that shines differently in moonlight than it does at high noon, or as the sun is just skimming the horizon.
And yet when I’m so in it, it feels like I’m hurtling forward, I love the feeling of forward momentum. On balmy summer nights when you feel cradled in the hot palm of the evening, I often leave early from parties, or events just so I can ride back on my bike alone, feeling the wind whipping through my hair as the final truth of my freedom. It feels like I’m handing myself my own aliveness and granting myself the sensation that I’m moving somewhere in this world. And yet, as I move straight on ahead I am continuously brought to the same point again and again, but with a difference.
~
A few days after the power outage I invited people over to my place for a movie night, shortly realizing that the freezing rain had cut the wifi. A few drinks in, a friend started lecturing on the evolution one makes in a lifetime. That when we meet the denser experiences of reality, doubt, fear, loss, disappointment, we often think we have returned to the same place we were when we last experienced such a sensation.
They explained evolving is not like this:
But, like this:
Different points mirror each other, this spiral is not a circle, but perhaps more closely mimicking one line of our dna.
Carl Jung (psychologist, mystic, intellectual ancestor?) expresses in a dream analysis seminar that “The spiral in psychology means that when you make a spiral you always come over the same point where you have been before, but never really the same, it is above or below, inside, outside, so it means growth.” We think we are back where we started, but, in fact, the echoes are just resonating across time. We are always different, each resonating point seems to be an opportunity if not an invitation to show up differently.
I have come across Jung many times, I can hardly remember when and where, though the last time was on a beach in Costa Rica reading Joseph Campbell’s reflections on the art of living. Campbell reflects on the first time he met Jung in Germany, how he was struck by his kindness and intellectual generosity.
His dream analysis became intriguing to me. It seems he too had pledged himself to synchronicity and symbols, dreams seemed to be another medium in which to write a story.
To follow Jung’s train of thought, maybe my dreams were signalling something to me.
When the dream script would start to get scary I could run, but I could never hide. The more desperately I would try to escape the more I could feel this often faceless assailant close on my tail. If I’m lucky, I get caught up in it until I remember my agency. It is always a sigh of relief. I don’t need to play along with the script, I can leave if ever I want to. Sometimes I fly away, sometimes I careen my car off a bridge, one time, that I have mentioned in a newsletter before, I stopped running and proclaimed “you can’t kill me in a way that matters.”
Every fear might perhaps be a fear of death. The primordial unknown, the mother that all the little unknowns of life get their namesake from. If the conditions of our existence on earth is the self constituted through separation with everything else, merging is death.
Okay flashback with me again, we are with my friend on the couch, let me re-establish the scene. Perfect light, the smell of sour patch kids on your tongue. At this point in the conversation they were graciously a sounding board for every fly away philosophy of life I had considered.
I have this theory that there is only one relationship, I said. There is you and me. The different variations of this one relationship that happens between the other and the self rotates in a dizzying amount of iterations with the so-called animate and inanimate alike. Although, it has always been just me and you. You the river, and I the valley. You the sun and I the moon. Things go on like this. My desire and my fear of you, might be one in the same. The condition of life on earth is a you separated from a me.
Okay, I promised myself I would save you from psychoanalytic theory, but I promise I would not have brought it up if it wasn’t of the utmost importance.
Jacque Lacan talks about the mirror stage. The point in a young infants life when they look in the mirror and recognize themselves. Before they were an amorphous blob, perhaps no different from the mother in which they got their care and nourishment, but something shifts when they recognize themselves in the mirror. They become a self.
When the infant sees the self in the mirror the ego starts to emerge as an unconscious construction. This is the first rupture, the discovery of the I and the not I. This is always a mis-identified I, a fragmented image of the body. Separation takes hold, the body is no long porous, but individuated and separate. There are many processes of meaning making that follow. It starts off with, I’m not my mother, I’m not the wall, and then get more complex as they are brought into subject formation (I am a “girl” not a “boy”, and so forth).
We start like this:
Then become this:
Then return to this:
(I think this is called ~drawing parallels~, okay, okay stick with me).
We start merged, we learn something about separation through the self, and in death we merge again. (contraction, expansion, contraction again)
The self is perhaps, as buddhism reminds us, the primal illusion. And yet it feels so real. This body, this vehicle I must move through reality with. I understand that I’m supposed to have an experience with this medium that is the self, this finite experience of separation from the other. To experiment with the performance. To learn something about expansion.
And yet, *turn to the audience*
How can I not yearn the other? Every break up, every crush just out of reach becomes a reminder of the infinite distance that exists between me and the other. Obsession digs itself a new hole here, attempting to tear itself back to the centre of it all.
In high school, visa vi my short career as a women in STEM, I was astonished to learn that the space between atoms makes it so we are never really touching anything, not even our own bodies. The electrons of the self and electrons of the other (chair, wall, lover) offer an illusion of sensation (heat, friction, pressure), but in fact, they are repelling each other. The separateness of it all, can really be unbearable, felt so acutely at the peak of loss and grief. How can one not yearn under these conditions. It reminds me that I am having this human experience, one that is temporary but so, so real.
Every fear of merging with the other, might be a fear of death. Every desire of merging with the other, might be a desire for death.
I have known moments of total peace, when the infinite part of me that I will return home to someday becomes the total and lasting truth. I can oil my hair and braid it in my room alone and feel this, and I can walk with the sun hanging low and feel this, I can turn the peanut butter upside down in my fridge and feel this. Feel the part of myself that is a part of everything else. I don’t need to return to the arms of death to commit myself to the merging.
In my dreams, I have been facing death again and again, refusing to fear it. Death is hardly the end of the world ;) I remind myself, in moments when the fear feels final and absolute. Contraction is my destiny, as much as expansion is.
Everything is expanding away from or collapsing into nothingness. And I have always been right here, watching it all go down.
I told you it was just you and me, we’re in this together… Talk soon!
-Thai xx