Last night I had one of those dreams that felt cleansing, where my subconscious was able to process some of things that have been marinating below the surface for a while. I woke up feeling positive, feeling love and acceptance. Most days, I have not opened my eyes in the morning feeling this way.
One of the characters in the dream subscribed to a philosophy of which I cannot remember the name, but had "Greek" in the title. So I pulled up dream Wikipedia to learn more about this philosophy. The gist of the article was that humanity has a dark side, that there's no way around this. It's only through accepting this dark side that there's any chance of finding peace and happiness. This dream character had accepted their dark side and was now preaching the gospel, so to speak.
Later, I found myself at a bar drawing a colorful blue and white scene on a large piece of paper. Those around me remarked how dark the image was and upon closer inspection I see there's some horrible stuff going on: torturous, demonic types of things involving pool cues in places they're not usually put. But this doesn't scare me at all. In fact, I feel OK with what I've drawn and say this aloud to my dream companions. And they seem OK with it, too. It's just an image and, well, we all have a dark side after all.
I've been struggling with this a lot in waking life, recently. Humanity just feels so dark and horrible. I mean, we have and we do some really shitty, horrible, unimaginable things to each other - consistently, on a daily basis. It doesn't help that the news media is tuned into this frequency. It doesn't help to constantly read about this stuff on Facebook 30 times a day, either.
But, for me, it's more than that. I've realized recently that I'm particularly sensitive to peoples' energies. Some would call this being empathic. What I mean by this is that I can literally feel what someone else is feeling just by seeing them for an instant at a distance, or by passing them on the sidewalk, or even catching a sideways glimpse of their "eye energy field."
I was out to dinner Friday night with a good friend and we were sitting outside. Streams of people were passing by and I could literally feel the agressiveness of a lot of folks (mostly male) as they walked by. That's how the world feels to me: aggressive and uncaring at best, and absolutely horrid and hellish most of the other times.
I mentioned this to my friend later and was surprised and relieved to hear that he felt the same way, that he could feel those things, too, as we were dining. It's great to be able to relate to people on this level because for so long I've felt alone in it and at times, crazy.
The fact is that as a white male I don't have to deal with a lot of the things that other groups do have to deal with on a daily basis. I can walk down the street and be pretty sure that no one will harass me. I'm not going to be discriminated against or killed because of the color of my skin.
But the thing is, I can see and feel that these are realities for a lot of people and it kills me inside. I can see that there are a lot of atrocious things happening in the world right now and it scares me to death. Donald Trump is fucking running for president. The climate is getting more and more fucked up as time progresses. It doesn't take any special skills sit down and look at the state of things and see that what we have going on is not sustainable. We're dealing with finite resources and eventually those resources will run out.
And, well, forget the environment for a second. We as humans treat each other horribly on both the micro and macro levels. The Dakota Pipeline issue really underscores how power and money are what drive things and how people with that money and power really don't care about other humans.
Brock Turner gets three months in jail for raping a woman who will feel the effects of that "20 minutes of action" for the rest of her fucking life. It's absolutely insane.
And, yet, there's still part of me that's like, well Brock Fucking Turner is a person, too. The pipeline building fuckers are also humans. How does one reconcile that fact, that there are horrible things done to other humans by humans.
It feels like maybe I got some sort of resolution or answer to that question in my dream. And that is to accept that humans are horrible to each other, it's a baseline fact. Humanity has a dark side. I have a dark side by virtue of being human. To deny my own dark side in some way contributes to the overall denial of humanity's dark side. And to deny these things only gives them power.
I often wish I didn't have to feel so many things. I wish I wasn't so damn sensitive. I'm a fucking sponge sometimes. I can be feeling perfectly fine one minute, then go outside and walk around the block and now I'm feeling all the anxiety and fear and whatever that is the bedrock of this fucking culture. And then it becomes hard to differentiate what I'm feeling and what I've picked up from others.
But, as my therapist says, and what I'm slowly coming to recognize, this is also my superpower. I haven't really become comfortable with it yet, or figured out how to use in a positive way, but it's there.
I guess if there's one thing I'm absolutely sure of, it's that I don't want to hurt anyone. I can fucking feel the pain of the world just by walking down the street. I can feel the aggression and the hatred. And I don't want to contribute any more to the negative pool of humanity that's swirling itself faster and faster around the drain of self-annihilation.
I think about it this way: if the sum total of human suffering is composed of the suffering of each individual who is alive at this moment, then by suffering myself, I am contributing to the overall total. So the only thing I really can do here is to choose not to suffer myself. If I contribute less to the suffering footprint of humanity, if I can break my own cycles, then maybe that'll have a small impact on the overall picture. Maybe if enough people can do this, things might look up. Maybe that's naive. What other choice do I have?
It's fucking slow and fucking painful and very imprecise, but I will not be complicit in adding to human suffering, as much as I can manage. I will own my dark side, because it does exist. The kingdom of hell is as much inside of me as the kingdom of heaven.
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