My first name can be translated as "the Gift of God". My middle name can be translated to "Sorrow". I don't think my parents knew what they were gifting me when they picked these two names.
My first name is a variation of my brother's name. He died a year or two before I was born. He was still an infant. It was a car wreck and my old man was driving. My pops was court ordered to go to treatment for his alcoholism after the accident. He wore dark tinted glasses his entire life. I've always had a feeling that it was to mask a sense of guilt.
My middle name, Deloria, was chosen, not because I am related to Vine Deloria Jr. as some people think, there is no relation. No, I was named Deloria after my mother's uncle. She told me that Deloria and his people would soak alcohol pads in a cup of water, then they'd drink said water.
To top it all off I am a native american.
So there was a lot working against me.
Now, I wrote an abbreviated version of this in /r/jung and was asked to post something similar here. The Alcoholics Anonymous crowd might be familiar with him via Bill W.
Jung was a psychoanalyst. He had a former patient by the name of Roland H. Jung was a good doctor, though a bit morally gray at times. When Roland relapsed Jung admitted defeat and told his analysand that if he does not have a spiritual experience then there would be no changing his situation.
Roland would leave analysis and eventually join the Oxford Group. From what I understand, it was through this network that Roland had a psychedelic experience, which led to his recovery. This is, essentially, the basic gist of what I'll be talking about. It's an issue I've run into with other recovering alcoholics, and that's the "acceptance of a higher power".
I remember a while back I found myself in a dark spiral. It lasted about two hours. I pulled myself back together .Turned on the bedroom lights and found that I had a message from someone I hadn't talked to in nearly a year. She too was trying to stay sober at the time and was attending A.A. meetings. The issue she was having was that she had grown up in what we'd consider a Christian cult. So for her the "higher power" aspect of this nonsense was tainted, and to bow to this higher power was to lose a part of herself, to lose her autonomy.
I remember another time - I was gonna work on a painting. I was going to paint over it. I didn't. I did go into another depression spiral, I had some bad times in my first year of sobriety. And when I came back I had been messaged by a friend and sometimes customer. He sent me a picture of the very same painting that I was going to destroy, asking if he could buy it.
Life's strange that way. Synchronicities are a mother fucker when you allow them to exist, when you work with "the Tao". Though arriving at that point takes a few losses, a few defeats, the ego needs to be broken a bit, needs to become humble.
I've had dreams that shook me, literally. I've had dreams that trapped me until I saw what I needed to see, or until I answered "their" riddles properly. I've had big synchronicities that fucked with my head, that made me rethink my place in this life. I dreamt once that I was in a car heading south. The window cracks and a gust of wind blows this large leather bound manuscript open in my lap. The pages stopped on a picture of a skeleton in black armor. The car then drives up a steep hill that turns into a mountain, When we make it to the top the outside of the car falls off. The driver also falls, and rolls into the snow, lifeless.
The next morning I found myself very much worried about my mother, grandmother, and aunts. Well, it wasn't long after waking up that I was informed of my brother's girlfriend's death. She had froze to death in a trailer house that night. She passed out before she started the wood stove. At least that's how I think it goes, I might have the details a bit mixed up.
So... I'm talking to this lady about her recovery and how this "higher power" doesn't have to be some dogmatic Christian father figure. For me, it was "the way", it was "the Tao" - though I had and have very little connection to Eastern mysticism. I think what those traditions speak of is universal, however. So we talked for a while and she disappeared again, and from what hear she's been sober since.
This is essentially my entire point - but we'll draw it out a little bit. We'll get a brief background of where I came from and how much of a monumental struggle this addiction thing was for myself, for my family, for my community.
I started drinking at eighteen. I held off for a long fuckin' time before I got into it. For good reason, I saw the bullshit that came with gettin' shit faced. I grew up on an Indian reservation. My community was isolated. Out of twelve houses there were about five or six that belonged to members of my family, both on my father's and mother's side. That's a lot of people. Lot of people.
Back in the old days, the before days, my grandma was a drinker. I vaguely remember her being a loud drunk broad a few times. Reservation communities. Yeah. Lot of people lived at grandma's house and most of 'em were drunks. There ain't many of us sober these days. Most of my family are what you'd call bums. Street people. Drunks. And it's been that way for a long time.
There was a lot of us. Grandma kept a few of her sons and daughters, and a good handful of her grandchildren as well. When I'd spend the night up there we'd all be sleeping on the floor and the couches. Every room was taken. Four bedroom house, I might add. It was cramped. My uncles were drunks, my cousins started drinking around middle school age, a good handful of them would ultimately end up in prison, or in extended jail sentences.
Life was tough.
And my family was poor too. Small family. My parents, a revolving door of relatives who would stay for a few years and then move on, and a few siblings.
Right now, my house is free of alcohol, I've watched the place change throughout the years. Now we have nice used cars, we have a nice television set, we have an air conditioner, and a swing set out back for the youngsters. But that wasn't always the case. I remember what it used to be like, all too well.
Cigarette smoke, drunken cackles, a father who drank a pint of Everclear to himself every night, empty walls, empty bedrooms, small black and white television with no cable. We grew up on food stamps, and when those weren't available, commodities - free food via the tribe. Canned meat, canned vegetables, few bags of fruit, flower, macaroni, rice, and rez gold - commod cheese.
You can still sell a brick of commod cheese for anywhere between ten and thirty bucks.
My parents used to get shit faced a lot. My dad was always drunk, and my ma would get plastered on the weekends. And it'd always end the same, with them screaming at each other. Someone always got miserable, every fuckin' time. And that became my job in the family. I was supposed to keep them from getting too fuckin' rowdy, I had to get good at reading a room. That's too much of a burden to put on a youngster. But that was how it always went.
Ma never really got over my brother's death. I imagine there was a lot more hiding under there too that she had to work through.
We call it "getting miserable". It's got symptoms. Always starts when the party's dying down, when the music gets sad. The person about to "miz" will get real fuckin' quiet. They'll hunch forward a bit with their eyes closed. And when that song was over there'd be a mushed mouth freak out.
That's the way it was.
One of my first memories was of my dad in a coma. He fucked around with that Everclear a bit too much. I remember the drive up from home to the city. I remember him on the ventilator. That would become very common as life went on. Dad would drink himself into withdrawals on a fairly regular basis. At least once a year, but two times, maybe three - that wasn't uncommon either. And as he got older his body couldn't take it as much - it was dt's at first but now it was lack of potassium, and elevated ammonia causing mental nonsense - and for a short time there, rage.
A relative got alcohol poisoning when he was still in middle school.
That same relative got his head stomped in when we were older. I remember the door knock, remember my dad answering it. I remember the silhouettes of three people. One slouched over and unconscious in the middle, one on each side of him holding him up. It was supposed to be my relative but he didn't really look human anymore. They got shit faced off mouthwash, one of 'em stayed sober, stayed sober and beat the living shit out of the guy.
The next morning we followed the blood trail up to where everything happened. Found the attacker's shirt covered in blood. Noticed that they tried to ditch him in one of our cars, luckily the damn thing was locked. One of 'em got a conscience and they brought him to the door. He might have died if the thing was unlocked.
The one who drank with him - he died not long after. Turned to a mass of body parts alongside the highway. Stepped out in front of a semi.
I knew all of this when I started drinking.
All of it.
I was eighteen.
I would drink for the next six and a half years.
We'll keep this short and wrap it up.
A wise man said that we are not in a patriarchy. We are in a puer-archy. What he meant by that is that we are in a society composed of men with adolescent psychology, boy psychology, and this psychology is poisoning the well. We grew up without fathers, without mentors. We grew up ourselves. Our friends grew us up. Our addictions grew us up. Our fathers, our brothers, our mentors, our elders - they were non-existent. Non-existent, or simply, not good enough.
Where I'm from - it's the women who straighten up. Men don't. Women get their shit in order. Women make the money, women buy groceries, women pay rent. It's not the men. They have a biological imperative towards maturation that men are simply lacking. Now that's not to say that there aren't mothers who are pieces of shit, I'm not saying that at all, but what I am saying, is that on average, women figure their shit out before men do.
I personally think that this has something to do with rites of passage, and I think the birthing process itself is one big initiatory rite that simply isn't available for all of us.
And this is where I think we need to look, I think this is what ol' Bill W. intuited when he tried to introduce LSD therapy as a part of A.A. - it's something that I had to experience myself over a long, long, long time in order to break my old habits, in order to find sobriety.
I started drinking on January 3, 2011. I sobered up around June 18, 2017.
It was a rough go.
It started with a book. Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. I was eighteen at the time. I was attending community college for the Pell grant. That's the hustle around my area. Go to the tribal school for a few weeks until that grant comes in, cash your check, then get shit faced. Which is exactly what I did. But before I left with my cash I found this book. And this book spoke to me. It answered questions I didn't know I had. It was the first book I ever read on my own, and now, some eight years later, I have a nice book collection.
Campbell says in that book that if the society one belongs to doesn't have initiatory rites then the psyche will attempt to compensate via dreams and visions.
And that's what happened to me.
It was a long, miserable, drawn-out affair that lasted the duration of my alcoholic years.
Now I am not saying that I simply dreamed and everything was better. That is not what happened.
Instead my alcoholism conspired against me, fate conspired against me, fate saw to it that I'd break down, not once, but many times. That I suffer a death and rebirth, not once, but many, many times.
We do not have time to go into this in detail so I will highlight this journey.
There are a few ways to induce a metanoia in oneself - to undergo a spiritual rebirth. They are:
Ordeal poisons - ordeal poisons bring you to the brink of death. Datura is a good example. The initiate would be sent on his way to death's door, and he'd learn a thing about mortality, about his own resolve by poisoning himself. I did this a few times. Whether that was via alcohol, via K2, hash, or Hawaiian baby wood rose. I went overboard each time in each substance, spice being the worse. And each time I found myself in that space I pushed on through, no matter how miserable it made me.
I remember rocking back and forth on my floor. I remember scolding myself for smoking spice. Remember telling myself that I wanted it, so I had to suffer through it. And I did. For a long goddamn time.
Pulled out alright but it was fuckin' rough.
Trial by ordeal - the initiate is subjected to painful ordeals - scarification, fasting, bullet-ant-gloves, getting your hair pulled out clump by clump, tattooing, etc.. etc..
I got drunk and drove to the city. A storm hit. White out storm. I made the choice to walk to a friend's house. I didn't know that she lived six/seven miles away when I left my car behind. I didn't know I wouldn't see anyone for the whole duration, and I damn sure didn't know I'd lose my mind for a few moments through sheer panic, didn't know I'd find a serene center, that I'd find an acceptance of fate, of my likely death.
Another time I blacked out and came to in the middle of nowhere covered in vomit with no shoes. I walked miles on stones as big as my fist. I was miserable the entire time but I made it to a ranch house eventually, with broken and cut up feet. I found a hidden well of resolve out there that I had previously been unaware of.
Lot of hangovers too. Lot of hangovers and alcohol poisoning as well - but those are stories for a different time.
Psychedelics - the initiate experiences the totality of the psyche, he comes into contact with the unconscious in a more concrete form and undergoes one of his most important life experiences.
No one's trafficking psychedelics onto the reservations. No one's sneaking acid or dmt out here. Our drug choices are set in stone. Meth, pain pills, red meat, sugar, and alcohol. It's very, very, very difficult to have a proper spiritual experience with such a pitiful set of tools.
When I was young I was a spiritual tourist. I wanted to try everything. Thing was - shit never worked out. Never. I wanted to do all of these crazy substances, I wanted that five dried gram Mckenna ride - but it never worked. When I set out to change reality, when I attempted to find this shit - nothing.
When I gave up - that's when a mushroom was delivered to my door step.
I got up to take a piss but someone was in the bathroom so I pissed outside. Before I went back in, a friend I hadn't seen in years shows up, we catch up for about ten/fifteen minutes before he invites me to eat some boomers with him.
And that's exactly what we did.
Now - it seems to be fairly common that users of mushrooms report their experience as being one of the most, if not, the most important experience of their lives - and I'm no different.
It was a long night - the crescendo of the trip showed me a few things all at once.
-
A black spiral of extinction with a singular point of light at the center. I was "told" that mostly everything that has and ever will live - are dead, dead or not yet born - and my purpose in this life was to protect love and wisdom like a candle in a windstorm, and to give it to the next generation.
-
I saw a three dimensional energy coming out of my paintings on my walls. I was "told" that I leave a part of my soul in my art and that I would live on through my work.
-
I saw the ceiling split open by gold and green sunlight. The sunlight was made of love and forgiveness. It occurred to me then and there that I had never felt loved, or forgiven.
At that point I looked down and saw that my body had reverted to that of an infant's. As I basked in this divine glow I hugged myself and asked to be forgiven for what I had done to our life.
I thought about that everyday for years. I held on to it is tight as I possibly could because proper entheogens are very, very hard to come by - a mystical experience induced via entheogens are even rarer.
I think what I went through, through my alcoholic years, was one long and painful initiatory experience. I think the inner and outer worlds conspired to break me, to break me so that I could be rebuilt.
I think these processes were created and perfected in passed generations - when it was possible to create a ritual structure that worked, when a living myth still existed, when tribes and an authentic state of "participation mystique" could still be felt. When liminal space was still available.
I think we lost that somewhere and until we get it back we'll fall further and further into degradation and decay.
I want to speak briefly about dreams and then we'll wrap this thing up.
Dreams: “Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: "Nowadays there is now longer anybody who can bow low enough."
"This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche."
- C.G. Jung
I am a loner. I live in a town of 500. I am always a five minute walk away from total isolation. My friends have all moved on.
I am an artist. I am a writer. I am a creative person.
I want to make sure that this is clear from the start because the nature of dreams - it's a fleeting and often times confusing realm to find yourself in as the dream speaks in visual metaphor, and often times you simply won't have an archetypal, that is - mythic and numinous dream.
I heard a wise man say that the psyche only gives us these sorts of dreams when we are at our lowest, that the psyche has to be disoriented and split off, or as the alchemists knew - the philosopher's stone is made from the dunghill. Or rather, it is through suffering that one can find meaning again, and without this suffering, you may not find anything.
Thanks to Joseph Campbell I knew that it would be wise to pay attention to my dreams. That's lucid dreaming 101 by the way - to strengthen dream recall you have to keep a dream journal. You have to bow to the dream world in order for it to respond. It's a living relationship. If you don't approach it from a humble stance it will give you nothing.
At least that's what I've seen.
It started slowly. I saw a tree that pulsed a low rumble through my body. Then I saw myself caught in a tree, too high to jump down, not strong enough to get any higher - and then a river flooded and took me with it.
In Jungian psychology the oceans and water generally symbolize and activation of the unconscious. I wish I could elaborate on that without having to go through my book collection - just keep it in mind as a rule of thumb.
They got stronger.
They got way stronger.
Over time they would leave me with just enough consciousness to realize that I was no longer in control. Not only was I no longer in control, but the dream had something to show me, it either had something to show me or a riddle, and I had to figure it out.
I got trapped in hell for a long time. I talked to these disembodied spirits, they told me a priest was coming to bless the house. He comes and fails. I go to the back room and see the devil. Not only do I see the devil but I see his foreskin retract, revealing an eyeball that stared directly at me.
We could compare this to Jung's initiatory dream of the phallic eye-creature and the chapel that got shit on but that's it's own rant.
So I see the devil and run back into the kitchen. My old man keeps sage there in the real world - and in the dream world it was the same. So I burned this sage and prayed. And as I prayed everything was enveloped in a white light - I was then allowed to leave.
And I left knowing that I wasn't the atheist I thought I was.
Not at all.
This went on for years.
I saw many, many things.
I was an ugly mother fucker, and a pretty lady found me anyway. And I became a drunk and she disappeared forever. I couldn't get over that. Not for years. I thought about that mushroom trip everyday, but I thought about her more. It hurts losing a friend. Hurt losing her.
So I humbled myself. I asked the dream maker to help me. And he did.
What followed was a three stage dream. Each stage had something to say. The first stage showed her mocking me, I put up with it for a long time before finally saying "this is you is it?" - the dream let me move on. But what it really said was that something in me had hijacked this lady's image, hijacked her image and was berating me, taunting me. Second stage was of myself in a band room. With a guitar, a microphone, and an empty drum set. I saw a lady sitting there and asked her to play with me. She smiled and the dream moved on. I was asking the dream maker to work with me, to help guide me - because in music if you get lost you follow the drums.
The third stage was of myself getting fused to the concrete in front of a mutual friend's house. The sky turned blood red and tribal music started playing. A wave of zombified young women came over the horizon. Dancing an erotic dance with blank stares. They surrounded me, suffocated me. That's when an old native's hand reached through and pulled me out. He said to me "don't ever let this happen again".
I was fused to the concrete because we used to hang out there - not only that, but when we knew each other my future was undecided. I could have gone anywhere, could have become something worthwhile. So this lady became a symbol of a life unlived and this tribe of zombie women meant that I was being haunted and choked by youthful emotions.
I think we need to see something in order to fully grasp it.
And she faded from my memory, or at least, that same feeling dulled a lot after that.
We call that an Anima possession - that too, is a story for another time.
```````````````````````````````````` I've had a few big dreams. Big dreams.
I walked around a pillar and tapped it with a staff as an old medicine man prayed. An energy shot out of his mouth and eyes and into the stone, and the from the top of the stone to the moon. I fell to the ground.
I stood up and saw that I was no longer on the earth, but on the moon. And there was life up there - there were animals shaking off the dew of a long night, there was green grass between my toes, there was a wind and the presence of a divine feminine being, and I stood up there on the moon staring back at the earth in silence, taking in all of the beauty of this once in a lifetime experience.
And then I'm back on the earth.
I see the medicine man staring over the pillar at a younger version of himself, and behind that is an army of people that he had wronged in his younger years.
I feel that in examining my own path now, that I am doing something similar.
```````````````` I saw the sky split open by an eyeball made of numinous light - it was an outline of moving color with hands for wings. From it fell a spaceship, and from that spaceship came a brother and sister, they were angels, and I knew that one day they would kill me.
````````````````` A couple give me a scroll to eat and I eat it. They lead me to a body of water. I lay down in the warm sand and stare at the stars. There's a living eyeball made of a calm blue light and it dances on sky as if it were projected onto a glass ceiling. I watch it, observe it, it gives off the same feeling of love and forgiveness as the height of that my only mushroom trip.
And when I wake up I lay still, thinking of it over and over, over and over, I run it through my head as many times as I possibly can before I sit up - and then I cry, I cry and say prayer to the dream maker for allowing me to see this with my own eyes.
```````````````````````` These are only a few dreams that I keep with me at all times.
Conclusion: I dreamed of a native woman. She gave me a fetus. I understood it to be a cherry seed. She said to plant it and in five days it will bloom.
Five days later I had a second dream. In this dream I am pushing a wheelbarrow. In the wheelbarrow is a dead lamb. Up ahead I see a gathering of Jungian analysts. They are lit in sunlight. From the crowd comes C.G. Jung himself. He walks over to me and says "say it's name". I say the name of this lamb and it comes back to life. "Say it's name". The lamb is stronger. "Say it's name". They lamb can run now. "Say it's name". The lamb grows wings. "Say it's name". The lamb comes back to me.
When I stopped drawing and painting I started drinking. I gave up on the arts after high school. I regret giving up the arts when I was younger. I think if I kept to it then I might have escaped without becoming a miserable drunk.
I was unemployed at the time of this dream.
Not long after having it I got a job for the first time in two years.
I didn't have to drive in the morning and I worked alone all day. Which meant that I drank before, during, and after work.
See it's a "darkest before dawn" type of a thing.
And so that time of my life came and went. I was drinking a jug of vodka every day after work. I would drink a few forties before my morning shift, and have a few cans of Hurricane while working.
Well - with the money I made I got a camera and three large canvases.
And I started painting again. And those paintings sold. And sold.
I was selling artwork regularly. I was a "professional". Not only that but I didn't have to clean motel rooms everyday.
That all ended on June 15th, 2017.
I got in a car wreck. Blacked out after band practice. Came to, beat up, in the passenger seat. My drummer yelling at me, telling me to wake up. He rolled us doing seventy on a dirt road. All the windows were broken. It was obvious that the exterior was fucked beyond repair too.
I broke my collarbone and cut open my leg.
I spent all day in the hospital and within an hour of getting home I was at the beer store buying myself some Joose.
I drank for two days and ran out of money.
I ran out of money and the atm's were down so I had no clue what I could afford. So I came home and pouted. I pouted and quit. For good. I had no idea that that's what I was doing at the time. But here we are - two years later.
I was stuck in bed, moving hurt, pissing hurt, shitting hurt, coughing hurt -everything fuck hurt.
But I had something that I didn't have before - painting.
I had a responsible way of alleviating the mental nonsense that led me to alcoholism in the first place.
So I was sober and there was no withdrawals - I credit my jump over to a case of beer a night minimum from a jug of vodka for that one.
I think what's fucked up about alcohol is that it is an anti-anxiety medication.
Booze makes bad decisions a no brainer.
And I had nearly seven years worth of bad decisions living in my psyche.
Nearly seven years of fuck ups.
Seven years of mistakes playing on loop - all day, every day, for months on end.
But I had something that I didn't have before, and that was painting. I had a means of catharsis. I could bleed myself regularly without having to drink myself into a stupor, without having to fuck myself over even more.
Was rough all the same.
I fell into these bleak moods regularly. I had to sit with the depths of my fuck ups.
I took a page out of Bukowski and just lived in it. Walked into it with open arms and felt miserable until I wasn't miserable.
And then we start again.
I developed a sense of bravado and pride after awhile.
Because I knew that this is what was facing all of my drunk relatives. My "tee-oh-sh-pie-aye". This is what's waiting for them. This misery. This hurt. These looping thought patterns. This terror, this anxiety, this loss, this fear. This is the permanent cross that every single one of them will have to one day carry.
And I was carrying it already.
So when I carried it, I carried it with pride.
I lost someone every year for five years.
My cousin drank himself to death before he was thirty. Combination of diabetes and alcoholism.
One of my best friends got into a fight at a party. Walked home drunk. Walked into a blizzard and never made it back.
His death was tough - I was still young back then. He was a loser like me. I thought we'd both live and figure out this life together but then he disappeared for good. When he died I drank harder than I ever did before, and didn't let up until it was all over.
It wasn't long after he died that I was able to drink a half gallon of vodka to myself.
The next year another cousin died - drank himself to death by age 40.
The year after that my uncle died - he picked alcohol over chemotherapy and died of skin cancer. He drank all the way til the end. They found him unresponsive in a bad part of town. They said whoever he was with robbed him of his morphine pills and cash.
The year after that...
We were coming up on the one year anniversary of my sobriety. Late May.
I put a big nail into the drywall and wrapped a cord around it. Tied it around my neck and let all of my body weight rest. The sound of my bedroom fan slowed. It was no longer a continuous drone. It morphed into a pulse. A heart beat and I knew that I was either going to do it finally, or I was going to bitch out.
I bitched out.
The house was quieter than usual all day the next day.
Felt eerie.
Finally I asked ma what the fuck was up.
She said that the EMS took pops to the hospital the night before.
My old man, man - he'd drink until he had withdrawals. Then he'd get shipped off to the ICU for awhile. Eventually he'd recover from it and then he'd be sober for three to six months. But there's always a holiday, there's always a birthday, there's always an excuse to start drinking again.
It was progressive - when the potassium deficiencies happened we found a new level - potassium prevents muscle aches and this guy was running low and he'd wake us up screaming because it hurt too much.
But then that'd come and go and then the ammonia levels got all fucked up and now he was getting drunk off a few shots of booze and his thinking got all fucked up, but eventually he recovered and life moved on.
And then he fell off the wagon for a few months and ran out of money.
He was tied to a trash bin for three days. Normally he'd taper with some Joose but that wasn't working this time. For three days he threw up all day.
Ma says towards the end he was pissing and shittin' himself too.
Pops spent a few weeks in a coma but that was it. He was gone.
He died June 9th. 2018.
We buried him June 15th, 2018.
One year to the day of my car wreck.
Two days after the funeral was Father's Day, and it was the one year anniversary of the last time I drank, and my pops couldn't be there because he couldn't stop drinking.
There's more to this story but we'll stop after a few remarks.
There's a book called Betwixt and Between. It's an anthology about rites of passage. It starts off with an piece about a suicide epidemic in a sleepy Colorado town. I think it's called "Suicide's Unaswerable Logic" or some such.
The second piece is about rites of passage and troubled youth. Something about how therapy mixed with bonfires helped these youngsters transition out of this destructive mindset.
It's a cool collection.
One of the authors talk about how rites of passage, initiatory rites - how the ego might know on an unconscious level that it has to die. That it has to self destruct.
And the thing about a "proper" culture is that there would be a process for this death. But it wouldn't be a concrete death, it'd be a symbolic death. A ritual death.
I think there's something similar behind our own impulses-towards-self-destruction.
I think we're looking for a purpose and a living myth. We're searching for a deeper meaning behind life, and that's something that modernity simply can not give us.
For me, that car wreck was my ritual death. There was a before and an after. Not only did my body get banged up pretty good, but we were left with a souvenir. We were left with a makeshift gravestone to my former self - that being my totaled vehicle sitting out in the yard for over a year.
I grew up around a lot of drunks.
I watched us destroy ourselves firsthand.
I watched our mistakes ripple across the generations.
I think we have a long way to go until a new ritual death can be made.
Until we can have a taste of the numinous, of the archetypal self, of the unconscious.
I hope my talks of visions and a mushroom trip will be outdated, will be cliched, will be worthless in ten years, in five years even.
Self-transformation is possible with our given sacraments - with red meat, with sugar, with tobacco, with meth, with pain pills, with alcohol, it's very much possible, but to experience it fully we need a container strong enough to hold us through the inevitable descent, the coming night sea journey. Depression, fall out, addiction, misery - these can be transformative if we have the foresight needed to ride it out.
But I don't know if it's enough.
And I hope in the future MDMA assisted therapy, LSD assisted therapy, Ayuhuasca assisted therapy, mushroom assisted therapy - I hope someday we'll come to a place where our society has matured enough to use these tools in a more effective manner.
I look back at my time as an alcoholic as one long initiatory process, with many deaths and rebirths.
I don't know how we can give that back to others.
But I hope we can.
For me to not end up like most of my relatives I needed Jungian psychology as a foundation. I needed to suffer. I needed to dream. I needed that mushroom trip. And I needed my own ritual death.
I also needed the voice of "higher power". But my higher power wasn't an outdated Judeo-Christian man in the sky. My higher power came from both the psyche and the outside world, it came through with glaring synchronicities that I could not ignore.
Submitted July 20, 2019 at 01:06PM by daturapiss https://ift.tt/2JTya5s
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