
ABOUT ME BY ME (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
Warning: I am about to talk about me.
If it is unconscionable to you that a person you think is supposed to be spiritual still wields a charismatic sense of "I-ness" or ego that aims to dissect, divide, compare, judge, make emphatic points and loudly tell tales about hers-truly—and tall-seeming ones at that—then this page may be indigestible and unnecessary for you to read beyond this point.
About me:
Almost 30 years ago, my teacher warned me that for as many people who truly loved him, ten more would truly hate him.
Indeed, we were banished at the door of our coconut-wire island's world-renowned parties. Dressed-down in ashes and dust and unbefitting for the dressing-up, we were summarily dismissed as social pariahs and commonly reviled by those in the "know" as the uninvited ungodly and his minion.
Reviled by whom, commonly? Dismissed by whom, conclusively? Who is the devil chaser? Who is the accuser? Who is the character assassin? Who is the witch burner? Who is the cult buster?
Who points, hammers and screws harder their sharp-ass finger like a nail to a crucifix to gleefully shame their "shammer"? Who righteously rouses a rabble to bear down and eke blood from a stone to abuse their "abuser"? Who overrules the un-godly? Who salivates at the prospect of a mobbing? Who appropriates a one-path sanction to terrorise the inconvertible "heathen"? Who is self-congratulatory as the profiteer of victimhood? Who lands the villain role and who is villain-ous? Who created whom?
Who am I?
As you can see I am someone who asks a lot of questions when not being pursued by answers. This pursuit brought me to live as my former guru's resigned captive for years in a bamboo and stone hut precariously perched on the slippery slope of a ravine. Un-restrained by the mores that grant passage and position in socialised rings, the labour-pains of an uncommon love trained me to face future prospects as a greatful, conscious, convertible outcast.
To some of my pale-eyed detractors, I am not even worthy of being a noble savage. I am for them far worse than that: The dramatic woman. The angry woman. The unreasonable woman. The psychotic woman.
I have been watching and asking.
Over the years, I have come to define a "they" by their own determination to be so. Why? "They" have said they get stronger against me. In them I see collective tendencies recognisable because they are repeating and because I do remember the “crack-hit” of temporary power derived from deviance. Virulent deviation from their essential nature is clearly the power-monger's choice.
I am vilified by those harbouring hurt on the fringe. I am punished by those in self-imposed exile for leaving them out. I am accused of having magical powers to seduce and bind people into worship of me as the one and only overriding source of their awakening. Many assume, without due diligence, that I have garnered these powers for power’s sake in satanic or erotico-spiritual rituals. Indeed I have dug deep into my repositories through ritual. And what I am here to say is that any powers that I am imbued with by being true, are in circulation by offering my truth, not by corrupting another's.
I am powered through my offering—offering the unconditioned from me, through me, as me, back to source. Me is the key. My me and your me are key. Our god-given "egos" in service to true nature are no less than magnificent and conspiratorially down-played.
If people see my face and body powering through their bodies in high-def, multi-dimensional veracity, and they raise me up in exaltation, I am researching with them the unique signature, traditional function and peculiarity of this. By my punishers I am accused of taking advantage of people's ignorance and wrongly endorsing this oddly shared view that I am somehow the source of someone's awakening.
They admonish me in disgust and won’t fathom why I am not doing the "right" spiritual thing by saying, "No, it’s all you. It is not me. I am not special and we are all the same".
Why do the "right" thing when clearly there is something underfoot that is worth a full-blown investigation by volunteering participants who are not invested in being perceived as right or spiritual? Their choices are not governed by the understandable need to be perceived as happily and successfully established on the path to enlightenment with a certifiable guru, in order to feel safely validated by a seemingly spiritual community. They are choosing to experiment together and play out their natural parts of a bizarre, unexpected and yet so-very-familiar tale—a tale that has been spoken in tongues in small and strange gatherings for eons.
To my self-appointed superiors, my motion to growl—and yes, I growl, hiss, purr and rumble— has been predictably minimised as an emotional outburst. "It will pass," they say. "Impure Kundalini ascent," they concur, without allowing or experiencing the "uncontrolled" to overwhelm their controlling survival mechanisms. Sure it will pass, but what happens in the pass-ing, in the in-between? And what if—just what if—they don't actually know for sure beyond a doubt, that this existence is not just a controlled illusion, that it was overpoweringly real all along, and they "missed the forest for the trees"?
I have been told since I was a kid that I have a mouth like a washerwoman, the Grand Canyon and a chatterbox. You may have even heard this from me before. My mouth has been literally washed out with soap. That piece of me that has been told to pipe down and to just say "positive" things is the very thing that transmutes gripe into grace: my motored mouth and the braided voice that plays on my lips.
My motion to speak in the open was once stifled through ridicule (by a woman) as a "Broadway play". When I am not shamed into silence by being told I am so..."dramatic, darling…" detractors get nasty. I am called "honey" in an oil-spill tone. And when "they" really start to lay it on thick, I am called a poor, unheard, "abused little girl".
And their hatred becomes all the more clear the closer they move in to customarily strip me of my "protective layers" for my own "good". They offer me conditional approval in return for certain proof of "vulnerability".
And their coup de grâce: they take it upon themselves to propose in calculated commiseration that I repent and heal myself of the "trauma" of being me. And if I show particular signs of rehabilitation, they cannot help but remark how I am evolving. And if I change my tone as I fall and get up, I am demoted from the spiritual ranking they had originally transferred onto me.
Image by Mateo © 2014 Uma Inder