Shaming In The Land Of The Free

Brisbane, 2009

Tragic newspaper headline: A Four-year-old child dies after swing

set collapses

The little boy’s father hit the nail on the head when he said, “A 4- year-old’s not heavy. Swings are made not to collapse, so it feels like we’re missing part of the story.” Sure! There is always an essential part missing from the understanding of how the astral/quantum field impacts our physical lives. l There used to be a time when the people believed that God gave life and that God took life and that only He had the right to do so. That said, several times a day across the globe, the media break the news that yet another person has died or been killed unexpectedly as the result of some form of human negligence. They raise the alarm about the possibility of wrongful death. l These days, more than ever, unless someone dies in his or her bed from the natural and observable causes of very old age, it is quite likely that, in the disbelief that this person ‘had’ to die on that particular day someone, perhaps aided by an investigative current affairs program will be demanding justice. Not from God, but from fellow humans, be they parents, staff, employers or a political party. l Seen or unforeseen, anyone’s passing is the final, hidden milestone of that person’s physical destiny, and it is intended as the catalyst for the upgrading of our path. Still, the common subtext is that men, women and children become so distracted by their affairs that, they often cause not only their own ‘accidental’ death but also the ‘wrongful’ death of fellow human beings. l ‘You have left us while doing your chosen dream. Now, you forever soar above the clouds. You dared to dream. You dared to dive,’ wrote the stricken daughter of a woman we shall call V who died during a skydiving accident. l According to her daughter’s testimony, skydiving over the sea and experiencing the minute of adrenalin-fuelled freefall had been on her mother’s bucket list for many years. So, to celebrate V’s 50th birthday, several family members and friends organised a road trip to a beach well-known for its 5000- meter skydive drop. The $279 skydive gift voucher which included a personalised certificate of achievement had been V’s surprise birthday present. l Four tourists jumped in tandem with an experienced instructor. One parachute got tangled and failed to open. V’s body, as well as that of the instructor, crashed on the beachfront esplanade. V’s husband is suing the skydiving group for negligence. ‘My wife should never have died from my birthday present,’ said V’s husband. ‘There should be rules and regulations to prevent such tragedies. Even if they are rare, it still amounts to occasional deadly carelessness.’ l Internalised from that angle, Death, then, is no longer deployed by divine power or an irrevocable karmic decree released from the quantum universe. It is not orchestrated by a greater cosmic intelligence but by mere carelessness that creates ‘bad luck’, a tragedy. Disappointment, sadness and even grief and trauma are robbed of their authentic purpose as our personalised rites of passage. l Oddly, the modern mindset seems to be that most deaths could be postponed, if only all individuals took their responsibilities seriously; if a new or different law had been passed earlier; if all inhabitants of our suburbs and cities were placed under a meddling net maintained by a sort of Orwellian domestic control. Equally dark are the assumptions of some that technology is either about to make death obsolete or that technology is about to make humans obsolete. l Mind-meandering tangentially, although, for now, the west is free of overt authoritarianism, there exists a pervasive, prying, small- town mentality, fortified by the media machinery and its distinct lack of empathy for the individuals it targets. It is fed anonymously by people’s obsessive interest in the family, personal and professional lives of others. Seldom has the ‘voice’ of obscure and invisible citizens been so powerful – so destructively powerful. l That voice of mostly unbudgeable, ego-based opinions is allowed the right to humiliate, at times destroy, people and organisations with a shoot-first/ask question later approach – though not taking any notice of eventual answers. When public shaming holds people and organisations responsible for bad behaviour that is positive, of course. However, this little mind-meander is cutting a corner to glimpse the energetic flipside of cyber shaming, a social menace driven by men, women and children of all ages that shows no signs of abetting. l As things stand, our worst moments, often relatively minor errors of judgment, can be recorded and, depending on our relative popularity, sold to the media or directly uploaded to the blogosphere. Most confronting for those who find themselves exposed is seeing their ‘sin’ flashed on their screens –in the home, a place that should always remain one’s inner sanctum. Whether the ‘noise’ is someone’s idea of a joke, a revenge act, or finger-pointing with intent to hurt loses importance. Once the damage is done, it cannot be undone with a deletion. l Parental skills deemed deficient by an outsider when a child has a public meltdown tantrum, one’s work ethics questioned, one’s appearance devalued, aspersions cast about an individual’s mental state or character or a little secret revealed – all are considered fair go. l On those who binge on such denunciations, all have the same electrifying effect as the pulsating notes of the hunting horn when dogs and hunters smell blood. Under an authoritarian regime, a fascist or theocratic state, as in ancient times, the anonymous probes and denunciations would lead to arrests, to being paraded through the marketplace and, possibly, to behaviour-modification therapies. l In the Lands of the Free, when facts are ignored and replaced by righteous outrage and, at times, furore, a growing majority of us, men, women and children live in fear of being branded as ‘less than’ or ‘not up to it’, the fear of being cut loose and so on. The resulting threat of ostracism and its implications settle in our heart and grip our thoughts. l Some agitators, armchair politicians and self-appointed guardians of morality, short on genuine factual research seem focused on the importance of ‘getting it right’, of ‘setting the record straight’, of ‘telling it like it is’. Others point the finger via social media and shrug dismissively. ‘I’ve spotlighted you and now get over it,’ is the best they can suggest. Be that as it may, the rest of us know that when moral fortitude is compromised, integrity, acceptance and empathy are absent from our own and our culture’s ethos. l Kneejerk measures adopted privately to answer a personal need or hurt or adopted publicly in response to an imagined fear and outrage seldom fix in the deepest sense of the word any complication. They have been too often known to make matters worse. Yes, of course, well-articulated laws and regulations are necessary here, there and everywhere. They should be further refined and clarified as needed. Still, no method of human control is as effective as coherent, personal accountability. l For example, in a bid to assist the15 million Americans who provide unpaid care to a relative or a friend suffering from Alzheimer’s, should we encourage the notion that young blood may have anti- ageing properties that may assist dementia sufferers in the performance of daily tasks? The short-term benefits might be obvious to some but how potential complications might spin-out in the fullness of time cannot be entirely clear to anyone – not just yet. Karma – Rite of passage Instigator True, life is the real thing. No dress rehearsal but, at least, we get to choose the personality of the character in which we are cast in this lifetime. The ability to do this – the power to do this – we always have once we hit our teen years. From there on, we have them on tap, ready to activate at any moment of our choosing. The aim of this type of karmic rite of passage goes well beyond challenging the persona’s comfort zones and testing one’s survival instinct. Apart from testing our mettle, it wants to ‘move’ us beyond the point of no return to our old self. It wants to spare us any regrets. Seriously, I do understand the theory which spells out that, regardless of our persona’s trigger hotspots, mindset and physical habits, we can maintain elevated emotions that keep us steady: even as a new crack opens up underfoot, we give ourselves the emotional oxygen needed to push ahead, high on resilience. Our default mindset is cluttered by insecurity, fear and anxiety – stress by any other name. Even in the absence of any perceived danger, the flood of stress hormones released by our adrenal glands fuels our thoughts emotions, reactions and inactions. Be they tedious, tiring, unrewarding, intimidating, physically or emotionally challenging, the sooner we find a way to respond from the point of resilient calm and openness to the content of these moments, the healthier we will be. The happier, too, all other things remaining equal. Perhaps, to contextualise a major source of my anxiety which gets repeatedly triggered by my mother’s antics over the past 20 years, I need to share an entirely different episode that occurred a few weeks before I turned 21 and while in my last year at the University of Texas at Austin.  Cher, my first and only roommate, was 22 and we had been in a committed relationship for the previous 3 years. The week before the Homecoming (football) game, always a momentous event in American college life, something came up for Cher. She wouldn’t be able to make it to the game. OK, not a problem missing out on the game. A few days later, no idea why, really, as I was not really a football fan, I agreed on a ‘buddy’ date with a bland and burly guy, a Vietnam veteran, Cher and I had bumped into a few times at our local hangout. Like, why not? To my surprise, the guy [let’s call him G – short for guy] arrived late to pick me up.  He was dishevelled and unkempt. He had just returned from a hunting day out with his pals, he said. Yikes! Had I known such was his ‘sport’, I would never have accepted a buddy- date with anyone who killed animals for fun. Bad energy. Anyway, as G was driving me home after the game, my first spike of adrenaline was triggered when he overshot my exit on the expressway. He calmly said that he just wanted us to have a quick nightcap before driving me back home. I told him very clearly that I preferred to go straight home, as planned, but he left me only two choices – jump out of the moving car or humour him by sitting as calmly as I could while he had a quick drink – after which he would drive me home.‘You’ll be home within the hour,’ he promised.  So, not wishing to create a situation when there really wasn’t one, I shrugged -whatever. As we walked in, G went down the corridor to go to the toilet, he said. Not yet seated, I casually looked around the living room. It is then that I noticed a big, ugly hunting rifle leaning against the sofa. I began counting the minutes, keen to get back in the car and home. Eventually, G called my name. From the hallway, his voice was insistent. He wanted to show me something, he said. Grumbling to myself, I followed that voice, determined to speed things up, so I could go home. I remember walking down the hallway past an unlit room. Next thing I know, I’m gripped from behind by my long hair, knocked down to the ground and straddled – his forearm bearing down and crushing my throat, his foul alcohol breath hot on my face. No need to be explicit about what happened next. The second most horrible series of moments that night began with being pinned under his heavy body, as he eventually fell asleep on top of me.  More than from the rape itself, it is from experiencing what ensued, a series of acute heart/brain reactions, from which my nervous system never quite regained equilibrium. Though the violent abuse was over, I was literally ‘scared to death’ – scared out of my brain – terrified that even the tiniest of movements, as I tried to inch away from under him, would wake him – that he would rape me again – or … even worse …. that he would grab the hunting rifle I had noticed in the living room. From the corner of my eye, high up on the nightstand, I could discern the red digits of an alarm clock. Minutes turned to hours.G snored intermittently. I was so afraid to die right there and then that, torn between the fear that he might wake of his own accord the longer I waited and the fear that my movements would wake him, it took me three terrible hours to free myself from under the weight of his body. Then, suddenly, I made a run for it.I groped for what I hoped were my clothes, and with that bundle under my arm, I ran to the living room and slid a window open. Its screech ripped through my ears. Heart thumping, I jumped out naked, crash landing into a flower bed below. Crazy-high on adrenaline – fearing G could have heard the window slide open and come after me, I hid behind parked cars, slipped on the clothes I had scooped up in the dark, his pants, my top, and ran for my life down the street. Back home, Cher had been sick with worry, as I should have been home on time for dinner hours earlier. She came to collect me. I remember half-lying on the curb after having called her from a 7 Eleven store, leaving the store attendant to give her the address. One look at me, she guessed what had happened. ‘You were there, slumped on the ground like a broken doll,’ she said later. Once safe, did I feel shame? No. Not then. Not ever. Like, why would I? Did I feel the urge to press charges and know that the one who had violated me would be adequately punished? Yes, definitely. Absolutely! In the aftermath of that buddy-date gone nightmarishly wrong, did I feel anger? Yes. Definitely! As much anger and outrage as my 20-year old self could muster. I immediately pressed charges – G was found ‘not guilty’. That was 1974. He was a returned Vietnam veteran. The bruises on my throat, the diagnosed pulmonary contusion, and the scratches on his face could all have been ‘exchanged’ during a domestic argument, I was told. What I did was go ‘dark’. I dropped out of all my classes for 3 or 4 months. Then, one day, from something Cher was saying, I realised the end of term was nearing. There would be final exams that I had to pass. I returned to my classes and crammed and crammed some more. That year, for the first time, I scored Cum Laude/Honours – a perfect 4.0-grade point average. That man had not broken me. This specific rite of passage challenged my persona and tested my survival instinct, it was not of the sort that is rewarded by inspired, conscious evolution of the persona. The thing is, some 40 years later, I am still experiencing several symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder like ‘hypervigilance’ – a jumpiness at unexpected thuds, sharp or dull sounds from inside the usually quiet house or street.  In the quiet of my study, the phone ringing suddenly creates a nasty spike of adrenaline and increased heartbeat. Perhaps, such side-effects get more seared in the brain when the violence is suffered in a state of total lucidity. Beyond the chronic fight/flight-inspired racing heartbeats and the sharp spikes of adrenaline that come from the set of emotional reactions that were fired up so long ago, nothing that man did to me altered my life in any way. I was gay before and was still gay after.I had been studying for a B.A. in English Literature, and a teacher of English Literature is what I became. I did not deviate from any of the plans I had made prior. That said, the anxiety embedded in my psyche from way back, has made my mother’s unpredictable, volatile personality more difficult to actively accept that might otherwise be. Of course, once fear and insecurity become natural ingredients in our emotional brew, not unlike a faulty home alarm system, the twin amygdalae tucked inside our temporal lobe get overly sensitive in response to our unconscious thoughts. They pump up our heartbeat. They slow down our breath and squirt our solar plexus with adrenaline.  In short, our amygdalae trigger anxiety. They rule the roost to the point where, even when legitimately entitled to feel good about a timely break in the pattern, the joy of that moment remains trapped between the ghost of memories past and the spectre of imagined complications to come. They leave tracks to which I am drawn again and again. The stickiness of these regressive, sabotaging impressions makes it difficult to generate and grow moments of peaceful, active acceptance essential to measure progress. The trick, then, is to give ourselves either the command or the permission to think differently. To shoo the ghouls. Which is much easier said than done while the terrain remains unpredictable. That’s because our five senses, what have come to be rooted in our temporal lobe, our persona’s likes and dislikes join forces against us, against the low end of our ego-persona.  They spiral and draw our life force energy outward, depleting our inner core. Peaceful or painful, not unlike Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ introspection, lies in our coherence of the choice we make. Abraham Maslow, the psychologist, had a name for that most ambitious of undertakings: Self-transcendence – a state of being more evolved than self-actualisation – the realisation that we are one small part of a greater whole, and we adjust our behaviour accordingly. Put simply, aiming for self-transcendence is merely the ambition of ‘getting over ourselves,’ as the colloquial expression has it.   Soul – The Neshama factor Most intriguing for one like me who had never had any previous interest in anything remotely religious or spiritual and who was happy ‘managing life’ one ego-centric move at a time (What? Isn’t that the privilege of adults?) was Yudit’s immediate insistence that there was no such thing as ‘the future’. My amateurish argument that Matthew, the gospel, had long ago stated that the meek had been earmarked to inherit the earth – presumably in a very distant future – did not carry much weight with her. “CC, there’s only the moment connected to your breath,” Yudit repeated, “and it’s only by being awake and aware inside these moments that you can create better thoughts for yourself in the moment. What you think now creates what you do next and that next moment is the only future there is. There is no future beyond the next moment and the next one after that.” Yudit was equally adamant when it came to our purpose in this lifetime. “Simply accept that, in one way or another and far beyond the reach of human understanding, each moment you like and each moment you don’t like pushes you to jump out of your rigid mindset. They’re intended to shift you out of the ongoing playback of past moments which, you already know, cease to exist the moment you choose to blow out the memory of them like a flame. Up to you whether you blow or don’t blow.” Sure but, surely, it’s easier said than done. “Don’t fall back on good karma or bad karma,” she added, “because it’s not about that. It’s not about good luck and back luck either. These things don’t exist. They’re like urban myths. We get from life exactly what we need to grow, to become genuine persons who are resilient and coherent. What does exist is a cosmic cycle that expects us to produce better outcomes in this life than produced those who were our soul’s vehicles in the previous ones.” Past lives? Is this getting a bit woohoo-ish? I frowned but read on. “Moments of nothingness when nothing seems to be happening are good,” Yudit had gone on explaining. “They allow your nervous system to rest. You should not see them as boring. Don’t shorten them by seeking thrills. The next push forward out of lazy thinking will come soon enough.” In the follow-up mail, Yudit had resumed the conversation in progress about the ‘blow to the head’, as she called the nudge or strong push we, humans, need every so often to challenge our ego-persona’s default program in favour of generating more authentic responses, such as the potential for positive divergence and genuine free will. So, what to do if a new disappointment or setback conjured out of our energy field, out of our same-old/same-old modus operandi, materialises once again in the moment underfoot? Whether our storm could be contained in a teacup or whether it was a full-on drama or devastating trauma, we are now alert and full of misgivings. We gnash our teeth. Anxiety clouds over and tightens our solar plexus. Perceived through a mere keyhole understanding of the world immediately in front of us, difficult moments often produce an experience that feels uniquely personal.      We are overcome with a pronounced feeling of unfairness. Yudit’s message was a daunting four-pronged approach: Make a whole-heartedly peace with the situation and with those who may have enabled it. Shift your focus to shift your pattern of reaction. Breathe with awareness.Present yourself shining from the inside. “Anything else is poison for your heart, CC,” Yudit had typed. “Think about this. Even if an angel told you that you were invited to accept a severe setback, a trauma or a loss because it would, in the fullness of time, send you in a better direction or make you a much better person, would you volunteer now for that failure, pain or sorrow?” no. I would not. I scare easily.  Yudit had continued on her tack, “There’s a flipside to everything and the flipside is this: few persons would volunteer even for a breakthrough or a big win if they knew that, in time, this outcome would directly or indirectly cause a circumstance that would affect them, personally like a poisoned gift. Ken?” Yes, ken … agreed. But … I expressed my qualms regarding this belief system, and Yudit replied, “CC, this is a good time to ask yourself what’s this impulse that’s pushing you to communicate with me daily, three weeks already without skipping a day, although you are a very busy high school teacher with personal life and other responsibilities. Think about it!     You are not a simpleton, and so you know well the danger of getting close to strangers on the internet. You don’t know anything certain about me. You don’t even know what I look like. You only know of me what I say in my emails, and you trust that to be truthful, including that I am a woman and that I live in Jerusalem. Why?      I’m not a trained spiritual teacher. I don’t have a website, and nothing comes up under my name. Me, I saw pictures of you on your website, and I know what you do as a writer, so I’m not completely in the dark. I read your bio. I know you find all this strange, of course, you do, so ask yourself from where comes this urge to seek a different truth about life beyond the one you think you know?” I held my breath and read on. “Don’t feel your emotions from the past. Trust your soul in the present,” Yudit had typed. “Your neshama loves you. She is devoted to you. Neshama is your guide in this lifetime. Her voice is your intuition when you are open to hearing her whispers. Nothing distracts her from you because she has been assigned to you even before you were born. She knows your energetic thumbprint.” Neshama, Soul in Hebrew, was Yudit’s constant protector and companion. Neshama was her intuition. Neshama was her Queen. Neshama was the captain of her life. Working from home, Yudit led the solitary life she had chosen for herself after her husband’s premature passing at the age of 40. She only had herself to rely on for all her needs. Yet, no matter what complications popped up, Yudit never fretted about ‘tomorrow’. Most amazing was her conviction that though, on the surface, all might not end up necessarily as she had hoped, it would always end as it should and that, once strengthened by the experience, she would be better ready for the next ‘thing’, always safe under Soul’s wing. The absolute trust Yudit had in her neshama, her soul, was inked on her psyche. Yudit never tried to influence or manipulate a situation to bring about an outcome that, outwardly, might appear to carry the solution to one of her problems. Instead, she trusted Neshama to work her magic as long as she, herself, refrained from generating energetic ripples that would belie her trust in Soul. Thus, Yudit did her best to remain conscious and placid in each moment underfoot. “Look, CC,” she would explain, “if a little angel whispered in your ear that you could achieve beyond your wildest dreams, what would you choose to have and to do on the spectrum of abundance?” Good question, I thought. What would I choose? Which line of work would I pursue? Where would I choose to live? With whom? Why? How to know for sure that what I might take for healthy intuition would not, once again, be the whisper of that overwrought brain of mine? “Whatever you would think is the answer to your dreams and whatever you would reject as not right for you, it will always create energetic ripples. These ripples will always create new sets of circumstances, tests and challenges. They will go on doing that till your last breath. So, CC, little blind mouse that you are, what would you willingly choose for yourself?” Seen from that angle, it seems that the way we pick and choose, even if from a somewhat re-wired mindset, amounts to little more than a game of chance influenced by our emotions which influence our thoughts. As long as Yudit did not deviate from the belief system that she had slowly distilled to maturity like a comforting, heady homebrew, she trusted Neshama, the essential part of her that was as much a part of the universe as of herself. As the keeper of Yudit’s karmic blueprint, Neshama would always provide her with everything she needed, on a needs basis. Nothing more. Nothing less. And so it was until the precise second when, one morning just before dawn, Neshama suspended Yudit’s breath forever. “From above, in the astral realm,” Yudit continued, “our neshama has the overview of our life. She knows where we should be headed and how we could get there faster. She sees how we repeat the same wrong turns and how we allow the past into the present. Don’t you see? Wrong decisions made from anger, resentment or poor me feelings, they’re all created by our ego-persona because that’s what our brain has evolved to do since the days of the cavemen. CC, if you can tap into your real heart, the other aspect of that organ that’s keeping you alive, Soul will move heaven and earth to bring you joy and well-being right where you are.” My … soul? Voices in my head? My real … heart? Joy and well-being. OMG! Like, seriously? That’ll be the day!