["Numb" by Infinite705]
A new essay from Robert Masters in his January newsletter, The Crucible of Awakening. Interestingly, this article offers the antidote to the "culture of optimism" problem in the previous article (below). We need to stop settling for positive thoughts and actually live positive, fully awake lives. We need to stop finding ways to numb ourselves. We need to denumb.
I can't resist posting this key passage here at the top, in hope that more people will see it.
So what to do?Now read the whole article.
Denumb.
Cease distracting yourself from your pain. If doing so breaks your heart, you are on the right path, even if you are on your hands and knees. Let your heart break open enough to become whole, expanding to include more and more, with no dilution of its depth and bare care. Befriend your grief, giving it full-blooded expression, letting it carry you into and through your deepest woundedness, not so as to get stuck there, but to allow a healing that brings you into the present with enough power and presence to shake up what needs shaking not only in your world, but the world at large.
Denumb. Thaw until you are raw. Cease numbing yourself to your numbness.
THAW UNTIL RAW
(WHAT TO DO NOW THAT IT’S CRUNCH TIME)
The future is far from what it once was. Its once rosy, reassuringly distant horizons have become something far less pleasant, something too close for comfort, something right in our collective face. Tomorrow is closing in on us with accelerating intensity; and time itself seems more and more compressed, leaving us in one hell of a squeezeplay.
It is literally crunch time.
Having the precipice within sight takes the fun out of looking ahead; and having the mess we’ve made looming up right behind us takes the fun out of looking back. So as we back away from both the future and the past, we find ourselves squeezed into a very shaky present, shrinkwrapped and disoriented, with very little solid ground and an abundance of psychic distortion from all the freaking pressure.
No wonder so many are enamored of teachings that extol and promise ascension, upliftingness, consoling spiritual popups. No wonder so many are eager to find immunity from such dark uncertainty, such instability and relentless compression. It doesn’t matter if the lemmings are
thinking positive thoughts or asserting that they are all one as they go over the cliff. The future doesn’t appear to have much of a future.
We’ve arrived at the edge and most of us know it, but all too many of us continue numbing ourselves to that knowing, reducing it to just more information, more cognitive cud, more data to scan and file and gather electronic dust in the unlit outbacks of our mind, even as we engage
(however passively) in various potently stimulating activities that numb us to our numbness, dumbing us down on our way up.
Like those who build their village on the slopes of a recently active volcano and get used to (or comfortably numb with) the fact that a massive eruption is never really that far away, we have gotten used to being at the edge (at least conceptually), making our stay there as comfortable as possible, with plenty of perks for the tiny minority who have the majority of the money.
But we can’t buy our way out of this one, though we can deny it, lie about it, minimize and marginalize it, reframe and intellectualize it, projecting it way into the future, outfitting ourselves with the latest accessories, surgically reconstructing not just our dying flesh but also our horizons, dewrinkling and recoloring them, pushing them away from us, thereby creating the illusion that we are not really in danger, not really in crisis, since the edge appears to be so far away, somewhere past that oh so distant and dreamy horizon.
So what to do?
Denumb.
Cease distracting yourself from your pain. If doing so breaks your heart, you are on the right path, even if you are on your hands and knees. Let your heart break open enough to become whole, expanding to include more and more, with no dilution of its depth and bare care. Befriend your grief, giving it full-blooded expression, letting it carry you into and through your deepest woundedness, not so as to get stuck there, but to allow a healing that brings you into the present with enough power and presence to shake up what needs shaking not only in your world, but the world at large.
Denumb. Thaw until you are raw. Cease numbing yourself to your numbness. Journey into and through that frozenness, that wasteland, that aching loneliness, recovering your capacity for transparency and integrity and deep feeling. You may feel as though you have awakened from a semi-narcotic dream populated by dysfunctional aspects of you.
Denumb. Feel the suddenly crisp, invigorating air swiftly and dynamically circulating through your whole body as you inhale as deeply as possible. Feel your belly loosening, widening, softening, energetically connecting your torso with your pelvis and legs. Feel your heart cracking and stretching open, radiating out more and more. Feel your entire body taking a stand, stepping forward with such electric presence that you can feel the micromovements generated by each step.
Tomorrow’s jaws may be snapping at us, and yesterday’s fears may be hounding us, but we’ve got a deeper today to give ourselves to, a today seeded with evolutionary imperatives that resonate with who and what we truly are.
Denumb. Thaw all the way. Let your heart remain raw. Stop expecting sex to make you feel better. Stop expecting anything to make you feel better. Such expectancy keeps us neurotically dependent, marooned from the kind of autonomy that plugs us into our true authority. Get in touch with your out-of-touchness. Get comfortable with your discomfort.
Denumb, thaw, unravel the knots, don’t just settle for positive thoughts. The stakes are very high, perhaps the highest they have ever been for us. So let us do what it takes, both together and alone. We are worth it.
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