Dismantling The Menagerie

Who are you really?

According to science, you are bits and pieces of everyone you’ve ever known, everything you’ve ever heard, every feeling expressed by those whose vicinity you ever happened to be in.
I think this is what disturbs me the most – this unwanted velcro-like effect.

You see, the personalities I grew up around, through no fault of their own; were so limited in their insight, so skewed in their perspectives, so debilitated in their fears, that when I think of all that I may have unwittingly been exposed to as a child, I weep.

For the most part, hope was absent, struggle was a frequent bed fellow, and change was something ‘other’ people brought. We were never the catalyst for change (even in our own lives) and when that change inevitably came we had no say in the effects.

We didn’t happen to life, life fucked us – and we took it.

This self, that I defend so intensely, is merely a kaleidoscope – a menagerie of their misguided life-fragments woven together within my budding consciousness. As a child I sat, heard, and subconsciously absorbed the very things I despise today.

Who are we if not the beliefs of our ancestors? Their experiences and perspectives ring loudly from our veins.

---

Our personality is anything but personal, it’s disturbingly communal – unconscious individuality happens to be a lie.

---

We are an unruly amalgamation of every single thing our five senses have picked up from birth till this day. Some things dominate and remain easily accessible to memory. Others, more potent, descend and settle into our deepest, dankest regions never again rising into our awareness; but nevertheless silently directing our reins.

Something hurt someone.

In some forgotten past.

And now that very same thing causes us hurt today.

As a toddler, we may have happened to overhear a conversation – a partner, a husband, a-something was not to be trusted. We have no idea of the nuances, or even the context, of which this whispered tale may have sprung – as our minds were way too young to even begin to comprehend the subtleties of the adult world – and so we gave it our own meaning. And today, we find that we simply can’t trust men; we close up, push them away. But it isn’t us that’s consciously doing so, it’s that long-ago (not so buried) memory reaching with ghostly tentacles from the past deciding our fate – today.

We are a cesspool of the broken dreams of others, their mishaps, their failures; but also their successes, and their triumphs. Unfortunately one greatly outweighs the other by far. You’ll find that people talk more about what’s going wrong than anything that ever went right. So today, you’ll find that only 10 percent of your 60 million daily thoughts are empowering and you wonder why.

Life is ever responding to what we are, to the energy signature we are unceasingly emanating. Life isn’t hard, we have simply been indoctrinated to believe it is hard – and so it shows up hard for us. Absolutely none of the beliefs we have about life are absolute; every single one of them is relative to us and the beliefs we hold.

Is your life experiences not to your liking? After all how could it be? You’re a caricature of everything you’ve ever listened to, everything you’ve ever seen on TV, a hodgepodge amalgamation, a subconscious menagerie. Children live what they learn, they say and it is true. But not only children – adults do too.

Who are you? Ask yourself that, and listen very carefully as the almost muted voices of your mother, father, childhood friend, favorite movie star, all rise up and say, ‘you are me’. Caught in the thralls of cognitive dissonance, we sage our houses, when we should be saging ourselves. It’s us that need to be de-possessed. It’s our living temple that lays smoldering in the ruins. Why burn Palo Santo in the corners of our houses, when endless dusty corridors in our psyches are filled with remnants from ages long past?

I imagine this is what generational curses are, the multiplying and handing down of the worst of ourselves. Our fears, our prejudices, our limitations, our close minded beliefs. A whispered word; here, a barely remembered feeling; there. Distant memories eternally incomprehensible, but still yet thundering through the ages like a veritable blood song.
All shaping and morphing into the generation that follows; insidious, determined, unstoppable.
Until now!

A little awareness really does go a long way. Because just as Thoth, faithfully fanned the flames of consciousness within man until it caught ablaze, So the beginning of becoming aware is what grows into a maelstrom ripping away the veil of unawareness and making the unconsciousness supremely conscious. We now clearly see the states of being that had absolutely nothing to do with us. The beliefs we were governed by that we did not agree to take on. The personalities that shaped our lives that we would have disdained, had we had a choice!

---

And in seeing clearly we can now act!
And act we do.

---

Discarding everything that does not serve, and for the first time in many millennia mankind can consciously choose who he wants to be. He can consciously select his beliefs, his thoughts, and deliberately create the state of being which he prefers. No longer a victim of his upbringing. No longer being made into their image, whosoever they may be. Man is now recreating himself into an image of his own making.
Finally he is free!

Old things have passed away
Behold all things have become new

The Bible