The Eleven Day Tale: Day 4

The Fourth Epiphany: Always As Other

The phrase “forget what you know” is often heard when the subject is re-education, reconstruction, or enlightenment. This is a stupid, stupid phrase.

What we all know is not only what we have actively learned since our conception, but also what we have absorbed – everything that enters our senses lodges in our grey matter, somewhere. We know an exponential amount more than we ever utilize, and it is in this, the fourth phase of reconstruction, that the key becomes recall and remembrance, of everything ever known.

With my mind opening not only to so much that is new (as with my Endless Depth I now sense layers upon layers more than I ever did before) but also to so much that was always here, stored away, I have enhanced my mutability – and thus arrives the fourth epiphany.

I am countless; as Walt Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.” There are thousands of me; and with this realization, I now know how to enter life, live life, encounter life, and enjoy life.

Family members and friends die. Orgasms sometimes rock me close to a stopped heart. Bills raise my blood pressure. Police lights cause me to worry, even if they are speeding by while I reside quietly indoors. Epiphanies shake me right down to my foundations. The fourth epiphany: you must let things that happen to you – the thousands of things that happen to you in any passing moment – happen to the member of You, the facet of you, that can handle them.

This could be simply put as ‘multiple personality development.’ I contain a cool head that can brush my teeth and send me to sleep the night I learn of my grandmother’s death. I possess a mind that can clime my spine alongside the serpent Kundalini and enjoy the lights of heaven upon orgasmic release. I have the mind and muscle to make money to cover perpetually arriving debts. I have a wink and smile and composure for police lights, whether outside or right behind me. I am a writer, and a reader, of epiphanies, a teacher and a student of enlightenment.

This ability must be developed, as with catching a ball, or chewing, or successfully navigating a bus route, or maintaining the positions of T’ai Chi. As children, we are not taught the extent of this ability; ‘teen angst’ is the manifestation of a young personality with few developed facets; a person who does not yet have the skill to face each increase in stress with the side of themselves that can navigate the treachery. Teenagers battle their frustration at being unable to deal with an increasingly intense world. As teens become adults, more skills – more facets – develop, but anger in adults, too, is common; this battery of oneself is caused by a lack of the knowledge of how to turn the diamond of one’s personality to the correct facet that can deal with the pressure.

In Astrology, one of the oldest of personality maps, we are not simply our sign; we are defined by the placement of dozens of aspects of the self on a chart that usually looks like a wheel with twelve sides (a shape, it should be noted, that appears as a cross-sectioned gem when viewed two-dimensionally). More recently, widely accepted schools of psychology developed by Sigmund Freud and then Carl Jung were based on a multi-faceted personality: Freud’s standard trinity of the subconscious is well known – the Id, Ego, and Superego. Jung, building off of Freud’s idea for his Personal Subconscious, took the idea of personality facets further, developing the theory of the Collective Unconscious, which contains a more extensive list of five vital archetypes (The Persona, The Anima, The Animus, The Shadow, The Self) that form a foundation for countless others (The Trickster, The Hero, The Wise Old Man, etc.).

These are two quick examples of the fourth epiphany, that we must be able to access our multiple personalities at will, and that we must be aware we are doing it. This is self-honesty, and it is a challenge. Schizophrenia, ADD, OCD, Manic Depression, MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder), and most sociopathic behaviors are examples of the gravity of the fourth epiphany; each is an illustration of a personality type that can not come to terms with either 1) the extensive reality of how many ‘Me’s’ there are bumbling about in one’s noggin; or, 2) if the person does understand that they are not a simple, single-minded entity, they understandably, and often with frustration at their ignorance, display an inability to focus the right facet in the right place at the right time.

We hear things a lot. Like “you have to love yourself before you can love others.” And “you have to be honest with yourself first before you can enjoy trust.” Unlike, ‘forget all you know,’ these are deadly true. As I come to terms with the population that lives up in this bowl of brain-pan soup I use to check on the condition of the sun and the moon and the stars and the Earth each day, I grasp the jarring fact of what this realization entails – I must also deal with the scores of inhabitants of each and every other one of the people I meet, know, see, and encounter.

This realization, and acceptance, has dissolved so much of the stress I once felt (up until just a few days ago). The Me who got livid with a woman on the train for having too large a baby carriage in the aisle now instantly gives up the reins to the Me who is curious about the substance of the carriage’s tires, or the Me who is concerned about the look on the young mother’s bruised face, or the Me who is simply too occupied with the novel We are reading to worry about something so mundane. I am building an army of me (tip of hat to Bjork), ready to deal with anything that occurs, quickly, intelligently, with curiosity, wonder, humor, and always more interest in burgeoning questions than often unsatisfying answers. I am not alone.

You are not alone.

permalink