Daily Reprieve

From Endigar 277;

~ My failure is inevitable.  Thus I will disappoint all those who are close to me, eventually.  I respond to this idea with a strong need to withdraw and hide.  I procrastinate.  I fall into incapacitating depression.  There is a possible new idea that Gomu (God of my understanding) may be replacing this one with; Success is inevitable when I grab hold of those things that are apart of my purpose, my path.  Failure is inevitable when I refuse to let go of those things that are not apart of my destiny.

~ If I fail, I deserve to die.  What remains of my honor demands it.  Is there no hope for escape?  The fear this idea engenders creates a last-minute panic on the tasks I have accumulated through procrastination.

~ You must hate yourself to love another.  The depth of effective love is measured in the level of self-hatred you can embody.  This causes me to resist the natural growth of relationships, or If I desire for the relationship to grow, I prepare myself for absolute martyrdom.  It has a corrosive effect on trust.  Freedom becomes escape from commitments in love.  In discussion with the Moon Shadow guide, we discovered that I don’t believe that empathy is weakness, but, my empathy and compassion makes me weak and vulnerable.  Another idea revealed in the Moonlight;  There may be only one answer to this dilemma and that is to become a predator.  The Moon Shadow guide also said that he believed I was mistaking co-dependency for compassion. 

These three ideas seem to be related to one another.  The last one speaks to the warped thinking that comes from a well indoctrinated co-dependency, and the top two where developed to support the demands of assuming god-like responsibilities for lives of others in my intimate environment.  There is no doubt in my mind that this gets to the root of my useless ideas.  There is no doubt in my mind that I am powerless to extinguish, modify, or minimize it.  And I am very certain that it makes my life a chaotic hell. 

And if I believe that the only way to love others is to hate me, imagine the effect that has on my relationship with God.  If loving God means that I am to become a martyr, imagine what service work will feel like.  No wonder I get depressed after speaking, or doing anything remotely selfless and spiritual.  I am supposed to hate myself.  And if I feel that I have failed and disappointed God and everyone close to me, no wonder I walk around with a feeling that I am not supposed to be here.  I should be dead.  I am not and therefore I am wrong.  So the following ideas about God probably find their root in the deep-seated co-dependency revealed above.

~ God is not interested in me, only in controlling me for his own purposes, to protect his distant control on the human species.   This idea is not useful to recovery or spiritual development.  The band-aid solution I created for it is that I am willing to be apart of God’s conspiracy because of my own philosophy of the benefits of manifested personal mythology.  I enlist in his cause to empower humans, not just control them.  I do not surrender if I become aware the elements of “loving” are the elements of ultimate suppression.  For the most part, my current understanding of the God conspiracy passes for what we human’s perceive as loving, that is personal empowerment.  But this is tentative and not useful to long-term sobriety.

~ God wants to control me for his purposes, wants me to be his sissy whore.  He uses my heart’s desires against me.  He has no desire for my ultimate success, only my advancement to control others.  When this idea rises, I feel that I am in such a predicament that I cannot trust my mind, my perception, my environment.  Nothing is real, because it is temporary.  This idea causes me to fear going crazy, and fuels a desire to lash out at God and his agents, his men in black, his mafia. 

~ If I get out of line, God has a kill switch to amplify my lusts and natural desires to consume me, or, if I am able to overcome that, God can use my disconnected strength to turn me into a predator. This line of thinking cause me to see the parable of the talents in a different light.  I see the demonization of masculine energy.  Atheism is used to push me into life as a predator.  Agnosticism could be a self-protective delusion. 

So, at Oak Mountain, I turned the care and direction of my co-dependent life over to Gomu.  (God of my understanding).  I have done my individual work and now I continue on with the steps, and that means I will need to establish a 4th / 5th step discussion with the guide He has designated for me.

From Endigar 277;

~ The concepts and thoughts that I value will be overshadowed by a stronger presence.  The products of my mind and heart will be dismissed as insignificant in a crowd, and assaulted in the presence of a strong presentation.  This idea moves me into withdrawal seasoned with a continuous, simmering, judgment or open and probably unwarranted aggression.  People are usually surprised by the latter.  Another idea that came out that seems related is that I would become nobody if not cloaked in some special ability. 

~ Uncontrolled and spiritually undeveloped people will attack or hurt me.  This leads me to create protective alliances by pretending weakness, vulnerability, or hurt.  I call this the belly up manipulation.  It is such an ingrained practice that I don’t realize when I am doing it. 

Is this a root idea, or is it a resulting fear of something else?  Is it related to the discussion of the idea in Endigar 281?  A couple of other ideas that seem to be close relatives to these are:

~ Personal assertions that are not wrapped in a mantle of pain, depression, and anguish will not be taken seriously.  Assertions expressed with happiness will be seen as frivolous and thus, discarded.   I realized I felt this at a Hoot Owl meeting this weekend when the topic was on laughter and not being a glum lot.  It appears that this might create the deliberate manufacture of misery, a habit of morbid self-reflection, and the need to condemn simplicity.

~ Honesty is a social control mechanism and has very little to do with the discovery of truth.  When I hear someone say, “I just want you to be honest with me,” I translate that to mean, “I just want you to give me enough personal information to ensnare you.”  When I got my first Big Book, I attempted to go through and mark out and replace every mention of the word HONESTY with the word TRUTH.  I gave up, because it was all over the place in my book. 

The true powerlessness here belongs to the actual root idea, and I am just not sure what that is.  I need to get with my guide and talk some more on this.

From post Endigar 277;

“~ My ideas concerning masculine and feminine energy are rather medieval, primitive.  That is what the Moon Shadow guide observed during our conversation and we began a discussion of Tao philosophy.”

I am not at all convinced that I am powerless over this idea, that it is useless, or that the problems I have in my own relationships are even related to this perspective.  But I am open to learning, and I am willing to consider his observations.  A friend loaned me her copy of the Tao of Pooh, which I have read, and her copy of the Te of Piglet, which I will start reading very soon.

I really like the Tao and I can see the truth of it in nature and the flow of the universe.  Yet there is another oriental writing that I find interesting, and that is “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu.  And this leads me to the idea that I have about masculine energy that might be related.  “The ability and willingness to kill can accelerate the power to steward others.”

There is another idea that I have heard females express or imply in relation to their post-rape perspective that I have a hard time accepting, and seems to be related to my understanding of male – female energy.   The female seems to focus on the personal feelings of being dismissed, discarded, devalued.  The observing male seems to focus on the line crossed that must be reasserted, lest a precedent of predatory behavior be unleashed like wolves on the sheep.  I do not have a hard time with the personal pain that those who are raped suffer.  That is, I do not have a problem with the apparent focus of their pain as I have observed.  What gets me is the tendency for the crime to go unpunished because punishing the rapist violates what appears to be the self-delusions of those raped in response to that pain.  To consider what has happened, report it to law enforcement or those willing to seek retribution in their behalf, makes them vulnerable to internal attacks on their self-esteem.

DISCLAIMER:  I am working on personal issues, and I have not personally experienced rape.  I am trying to remain transparent in the process so others may see both the struggle and solution working in my own life.  If you have experienced the trauma of rape, it is not my intention for my words here to be taken as a statement of what I believe should become policy, or even worse, a judgment of those who have suffered.

I would like to discuss this one more.  I think what the guide is picking up on is my resentments against the apparent disequilibrium caused in society by the abdication of males in the face of the assertion of masculine energy in women.  And my resentments of the demonization of males who embrace masculine energy.

Is it possible that the problems with male dominance comes from a confusion in mentorship, not knowing the appropriate way to express ourselves?  And left with frustrated testosterone, men lash out.  And then they have to be beaten back by others who command masculine energy, usually other frustrated males.

Anyway, I am reading others ideas in this arena as they are being presented.  I feel that the current approach of my social environment is quite haphazard, with damning results.

I am not sure that the difficult parts of this idea reflects a root issue.

I heard this read in meeting over the weekend, and it is some good stuff, off of page 386 of the Big Book;

…I looked up an A.A. meeting and went there – alone.

Here I found an ingredient that had been lacking in any other effort I had made to save myself.  Here was – power!  Here was power to live to the end of any given day, power to have the courage to face the next day, power to have friends, power to help people, power to be sane, power to stay sober.  That was seven years ago – and many A.A. meetings ago – and I haven’t had a drink during those seven years.  Moreover, I am deeply convinced that so long as I continue to strive, in my bumbling way, toward the principles I first encountered in the earlier chapters of this book, this remarkable power will continue to flow through me.  What is this power?  With my A.A. friends, all I can say is that it’s a Power greater than myself.  If pressed, all I can do is follow the psalmist who said it long before me:  ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’

The person who shared this at the meeting talked about the 11th step’s direction to pray for the power to carry out God’s will for us, and then turned to the part in the book where it says that God desires for us to be happy, joyous and free.  It was really helpful to hear this.