Lion & the Lamb

I finally watched the JDR video, the one with me in it. (See here. Or see Transcript of our dialogue here.) It was uncomfortable seeing myself. I look like a frightened rabbit in the first part; funny, because I wasn't aware of it at the time. I was only aware of trying to be as open as I could. I guess my body was experiencing fright, and being open meant I wasn't doing anything to disguise that fact. But compared to all the perception management I do with my videos and podcast, it was quite painfully exposing. It's the first time I have felt distaste seeing/hearing myself in a long time. Mild distaste, but distaste nonetheless.

There’s a moment in the video in which John is looking at me and his eyes tear up and I felt this fatherly love emanating from him. I hadn’t consciously experienced it at the time, but it was there in the video. Watching the whole thing back was a strange experience. I wondered afterwards, why they picked this particular one, and whether it was John who chose it. It doesn’t seem to be the most accessible talk he gave during that trip. I also thought how, if someone were skeptical of John, they would think I was such a putz, with my eyelids flittering away like a little bird. They’d think I was faking it, a New Age sucker.

So be it. If this “historical” event ~ a public transmission of my encounter with JDR ~ wasn't undermining for my person, I’d know something wasn't right.

Two days later, today.

I thought about John, the words he'd said to me. That was the thing I didn't mention above: I wrote about what my person thought about the whole thing, but not the effect hearing his words had on me. They are powerful words, and since this is John, I know they are true, because John can't lie. When I was hearing the words at the time, a big part of my reaction was to do with my person feeling special, happy that John recognized me and what was happening in my life. But hearing them again without that element of “me” (in fact, I felt anything but special seeing myself looking so timid and goofy), it drove home the meaning of the words: that I am in the midst of a huge shift in orientation, a shift that is going to happen no matter what I do.

I remembered then that John tears up right after I say to him, “I couldn’t have done it without you, John.” My Wife laughed at that bit, watching the video, and I didn't know why at the time. Now I’d guess it was because it’s true, what I said. It took some presence of mind to say those words, and afterwards, I wished I hadn’t said them. I’d had to close a little, and come out of that unfocused/surrendered space, in order to assert myself to the degree of saying something like that. As a result, it seemed a bit forced. But then, when I watched the video, it appeared as if somehow, if not the words then the truth behind them, seemed to move John. I felt this fatherly love coming out of him. And now I wondered if maybe it wasn’t fatherly, so much as male motherly? If when I said those words, John recognized that one of his chicks was about to hatch, that his attention and nurture had caused another being to come forth. So his love “shone” through for a moment, seeing that and knowing that.

That is the truth: I couldn’t have done it without him, not the way it turned out anyway. And so John was getting to see how the fruit of his being had seeded the fruit of another’s being.

Recently, my Wife told me that I am exuding gangly teenage energy. Apparently, it has to do with how my individuation process has finally begun again, having been hijacked/arrested in adolescence. Joseph Chilton Pearce writes about how, in adolescence, we are readying for a huge shift in consciousness which entails a whole new area of the brain being activated, and which probably has to do with the heart opening also. A natural enlightenment. But because this never happens, that sense of a big event being on the horizon is never satisfied. We are left incomplete, unformed, dormant.

What John told me was that I was about to experience “a massive, clean, clear growing up.”

Remembering all this on the rock, seeing all this, I opened and tears came. I was careful not to try and make it into anything. The closer I get to this, the bigger it seems, and the more I see just how ordinary it is.

John wasn't seeing my person heading for some great apotheosis. He was simply seeing another being coming forth into its fullness. It didn’t matter in the least bit “who” I was. All that mattered was that another flower was opening in the great cosmic garden of being.

It is massive; and yet it is nothing at all. Just in the natural way of things.

I thought about how everything we fear is in the past: the supreme terror is a memory of the distant past. So although we live in dread for the future, what we fear is actually in the past. What is in the future that gives rise to fear is a time when we get to let that terror-trauma all the way back into consciousness. So then, we live in fear of that fear.

I know that I need never fear anything outside of me again, because I have identified the great fear within me. And nothing external could ever amount to more than a trifle, compared to that vast, nameless (because it's pre-verbal) internal terror.