Friends & a Movie can Change Things
Visitors from back home got me thinking about what remains
“The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
How often do we find the unity we seek then chuck in a hand grenade before we can enjoy it?
I have had many romances where I immediately recognised my own consciousness in the other and theirs in mine yet was soon overpowered by the mind’s fearful insistence on separation.
Honeymoon is soon on the downward escalator into the power struggle and then oblivion.
Traumatic injury growing up denudes the native of self-love who can then only find it in the mirror of the other. I could have happily murdered those I adored who then appeared to withdraw that much-needed ‘love’.
In fact, I had all the ingredients of a budding serial killer but my career hopes in that department were throttled by a surfeit of kindness and innate gentleness on my part.
I just couldn’t cut the mustard.
Joking apart, yesterday came armed with a series of revelations.
I had been contacted by an old mate of mine from England, a master astrologer not long married to another astrologer. They had come over for his birthday and a visit to a spa.
Would we like to meet up? That’s a challenging question for any hermit, which I have become, partly through natural inclination and partly through the strictures of the past few years.
As much as I like my friend, I had to push myself, but am so glad I said yes. Yashoda and I took to the city in our small Fiat and Bulka Z Maslem, a little restaurant we like with a delightful garden.
The problem was that it was snowing and so we remained indoors, chatting happily away and grilling them on what it is now like living in England.
There was a fair bit of astrological shop talk which left Yashoda a little in the dark and so we wandered into the city square and ordered some takeaway Pierogi for Giorgia (who is young enough to be our daughter) for the flight home.
I astound myself that as a warm and affectionate moon in Leo, I have become so anti-social, as each time I meet friends I thoroughly enjoy myself and wonder why the hell I don’t do this more often?!
As Rumi put it so well, ‘I am in astounding lucid confusion.’ It’s become a habit and a bad one.
What also filtered through my consciousness, permeating with a warming glow, is that I am brilliant at taking care of others, all that Scorpio making me at times terrifyingly incisive, but am still rather haphazard and somewhat nonchalant about myself.
I already knew that I am poor at self-care but didn’t fully let it in.
Seen from a certain lofty perspective, some of that is rather healthy. I worked hard to establish my identity as consciousness rather than body so I honestly don’t mind whether I am in one or not.
Joy is understanding — I mean fully — that you can never die, that in the deepest sense you were never born and all is well and, as Dame Julian of Norwich said, all manner of things are well.
Perhaps that will sound crazy from a more human perspective, but I don’t pay too much attention to people’s opinions as I know most are not yet rooted in this other, more radical perspective.
Yet I was reminded of the simple Taurean joys of Earth and family, laughter and friends, the simple truth of my deep humanness that rubs, sometimes uncomfortably, alongside my divinity.
I am working on making room for both — at depth.
So when my friends left for their flight, we were full of good cheer and bonhomie, inviting them to stay with us for a longer return visit. Great.
The truth is I have suffered from what the Victorians called Obscure Melancholia all my life. It is not quite a depression — although some may call it a chronic low-grade depression, but more of a deep world weariness springing directly from the soul. Not that there’s much spring in it of course.
As Thomas Mann wrote — I am paraphrasing — in the life of a society the mythological represents an early and primitive stage of life; in the life of the individual, a late and mature one.
My life has been filled with symbols, synchronicities and happenstances that marked it as unusual from the get-go. As I was once told, you are known spiritually and you are being watched.
I had three different clairvoyants tell me I was with the Buddha in his inner circle from the age of 12. Who knows? But I have always felt called to the deepest spiritual life.
I was also called karmically into various episodes of outrageous and addictive behaviours. Are we not here to taste the whole goddamn mess?!
Last night, we sat and watched a film, Stromboli, which turned out to be about an encounter group on a volcanic island. The setting told the story with plenty of explosions — tears, rage, laughter and a deeply touching ending.
I have worked long enough as a therapist to know even the smallest idiosyncratic behaviour has roots and, finally, legs. There is a reason for everything.
The heroine was drinking and acting out because, it turned out, she had been raped as a teenager. It got me reflecting on the depths of my own struggle which began in earnest aged ten when effectively I lost both my parents. My father, a deeply abandoned child, had left us when I was an infant; my mother had remarried a man she didn’t love, then had an affair using me as an accomplice.
Finally, she knuckled down to the marriage, chaining herself to a deep unhappiness and, at my stepfather’s instruction, turned her back on me.
I would never see my father again and had been sold down the river by someone I had stood by and protected.
I believe as children we make critical decisions about life. My own was that without love what is the point and that if those who are supposed to love us cannot or will not, it is all somewhat hopeless. Hence the melancholia.
Shortly after this seismic catastrophe, I won a place at a fee-paying school and, it turned out, was disastrous at history in my first term. In my juvenile mind, I imagined I could win back my mother’s love by turning this around.
I worked so hard for the exam at the end of the year, I moved from last in term work to first in the exam, leap-frogging my peers. That’s how motivated I was by love, but alas, my plan failed.
I was powerless over others but of course didn’t know it.
No wonder I drank from 12 years old like the rape victim in the movie. It was the only way I could kill the pain.
Finally, I found the true spirit after many painful years of trial and error and yet, in my deeply human self, remains something of the orphan I became.
Let me say this, in any pre-birth planning, never choose moon opposite Saturn in your natal chart for your life will be replete with emotional deprivation and plenty of hard yards. Throw in Mars in Cancer and you spend your life as an emotional oxen tugging a cart uphill.
Last night, I wrote in my journal, forgave myself some more, and reconciled with making the effort to stay alive a little longer. For I am the consciousness I so readily love in others and, like you, I deserve it.
And so do those beautiful kids who happen to have chosen me as father and grandfather. It is a fact I still can’t get my head round, buddha or not.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
