I had a profound experience with this video, and I feel like I woke up to something during/before/after viewing it, after months and months of doing nothing but thinking about the trauma I grew up in.
The thing Leo was saying about how families are always here, they're like different locations on a swinging pendulum on down the generations, based on the strength of the story they tell about why they're here -- that snapped a lot of things in place for me.
I was raised Muslim, but am half white, my mom from a Catholic family. These big Muslim and Catholic families that themselves came from big families that have been going down the generations like that, presumably. Certainly within memory of my recent ancestors. Very status conscious, very worried about being seen at the mosque/church every week, but low spirituality. Team Islam, that sort of thing.
I was decidedly not Muslim, and even though I was dragged through it so much, it never sparked in me even a little bit. As an adult, I was deemed the scapegoat and cut off contact. At first, I felt liberated, but soon it seemed like built in defense mechanisms swung into place and swung me into this enormous gender confusion. I spent about a year thinking maybe I was transgender, maybe that was my problem. I had enormous black depression based on this trauma for over a decade, so I was searching for anything. All I knew was being cast out of my family meant I was deemed unworthy to do the following: be considered respectable, be confident, be able to project my actions into reality (the kind of "fucking the world" that I heard Leo describe as what masculinity is, once). Instead, I experimented with gender fluidity for a while and found it really interesting, but very... inert, ambiguous, impotent, distasteful and uncomfortable.
Recently I got a new job that has allowed me to start fresh, and develop a normal masculine demeanor for the first time in my life, after starting to heal from some of the feelings of complete impotent unacceptability. Still, I remained interested in the whole masculine/feminine thing, I wanted to learn more about it, I couldn't stop thinking about what masculinity and femininity meant for me, while also digesting ideas of non-duality from here and other sources. It felt like there was some kind of puzzle piece I couldn't quite wrap my cognition around, and then...
A couple days ago I heard the song "Fantasy" by Mariah Carey.
Stay with me, here.
Leo talks in the Survival pt2 video about how form is important. The lyrics are simple, but at first they seemed to me like this strange juxtaposition of Catholic schoolgirl energy, like she's talking about being horny for Jesus or something. But in the context of thinking about Catholicism in terms of its ability to inspire its followers to continue it on, this makes PERFECT fucking sense. I listened to the song like 25 times, then later watched this video, and it's like alllll this non-duality stuff snapped into place all at once, along with a final certainty that I can let any further sway Islam has over me drop, and a sudden swinging back into place of my masculinity.
Going back to form being important: "Fantasy" starts with this really heavy serious intro, then almost winks at itself and plunges into a light, breezy Tupac-esque beat with modern synth sounds. It has an unmistakably exuberant bounce of the groove that corresponds to the complete inability I felt to fit in with either Catholic or Muslim paradigms. Just a sense of absurdity to my existence, a sense of sticking my tongue out at the 20 centuries or more of dominance that the Abrahamic religions held over my world.
I grew up in so much trauma because in many ways, my parents fucked up by getting knocked up with me. A person like me, this perfect blend of two competing belief systems' shame defense mechanisms. That was a large part of the personality that made up the conscious experience of being me. Like Leo talking about staring at actuality in his hand, and becoming the freefloating hand that is simply itself, just for a moment... That is like my trauma. I was a living personification of the failure of my creators to essentially sow their field with the right blend of reccesive and dominant genes. Whereas a slightly different mix of traits and genes could have resulted in a strong, fecund man that somehow integrated the sensibilities of both Muslim and Christian virilities, instead I was cast and then raised in a neglectful way that led to my feminine side overtaking my masculine one as a child, as I subconsciously sensed the lack of control or masculinity that my dad set as an example. My masculinity became muted as I reached puberty, and then later in adult life when I was discarded by my family, it swung shut and I had my gender confusion.
*****
"Images of Rapture/creep into me slowly/as you go into my head
And my heart beats faster/when you take me over/time and time and time again."
That was me feeling my spirit coming to attend to my human animal, or relate with it in a more noticeable way.
I've had this urge, for the last couple months, to just... apologize. To no one in particular. And not about any particular incident or action. I simply wanted to describe in as detailed a way as is possible without it being about a specific thing that happened. Just expressing every possible variation of the feeling of remorse, sorrow, regret, desire to change, desire to rectify, change and understanding. To just fully and utterly enunciate that feeling to the furthest fullest extent I can, in writing. In carefully, consciously chosen words. I want to do this with certain other feelings I endlessly feel inside of myself filtered through the physical mechanisms of my brain, which themselves are based on the experiences I have gone through.
Eventually I realized this idea is essentially trying to scrape up against a Platonic ideal of certain emotions, or certain... spirits. Hmm.
Spirits. The spirit of apology exists, independently of whether I ever received the apologies I wanted in my life, or if I was ever able to give the ones I deserved to give, let alone thinking about how I wouldn't have had much vocabulary with which to honestly, genuinely and constructively describe WHY I was apologetic, how I planned to change, what I learned, why it won't happen again, etc etc. I probably would not have been able to be mindful enough to tease those things apart before.
Kept me thinking, though. Sometimes I feel something illuminating itself through the physical structure of my brain, and the experiences it fixed upon, traumatic or not. It was like some consistent force was trying to project itself through this flawed brain structure. Whether or not it was ever able to attain its self image in physical reality, it was there, much like the spirit of sorrow example above. But what was this the spirit of? Was it the spirit that inspired me to dress in drag in public sometimes? Was it the spirit that told me to go to art school anyway knowing I was completely flying in the face of my dad's pressure for me to be a standard second generation immigrant doctor or whatever. Was it the spirit that would become more present with my human body at the end of a work day, and start to attend to my body's needs almost as a person playing the Sims gets its sim some dinner. So what is that spirit?
Duh. It's ME.
That snapped into place somewhere in the first 20 minutes of Survival pt. 2. Something *clicked*, the understanding that this is a story that literally justifies itself but can kick start you into a human being to awaken from if you're so able.
All of a sudden it made me realize, as you were talking about it, that if my personal story has justified itself into existence, then there must be significant work to be done in the later half of my lifetime to neutralize this inter generational trauma and make sure it ends with me, at least this little tendril of it. I feel uncommonly confident and able to undertake this task, and I have a clearer image of how to do it, over years, in many different steps, than I have EVER had about any life direction I have ever had, when I was still running off the old Abrahamic-trauma-software. This is just evident to me now, the path I must take. It seems to have arisen directly from my spirit blowing through my subconscious neural networks and illuminating the right energy, the right vibe, the right confidence. I have been feeling more present in the moment, day to day, in the last couple months. I've never been able to hold that kind of presence before, especially for so long. Now it seems I have crossed some sort of threshold of self-awareness. I feel vastly more self-aware than I did last night, last month, last year for sure.
The parts where Leo directly addressed those of us who were born, like helium atoms being fused out of hydrogen ones, out of the sheer starstuff of main-line Muslims, that was very helpful for my understanding. My dad had a mosque. I briefly turned it into an art gallery, once. I was quite proud of that, it felt like a significant internal cultural achievement for me. His dad had a mosque, quite a large one in fact. I prayed there a couple times as a kid.
All those centuries...
"I'm in Heaven/With my boyfriend, my laughing boyfriend/There's no beginning and there is no end/Feels like I'm dreaming but I'm not sleeping"
I feel conscious in a way I didn't last night, before watching this video, listening to "Fantasy" several more times, and writing out this post. This is a consciousness of more self definition, instead of simply being refracted through the prism of neural structures in my brain that were designed to only be able to bring a conscious experience of trauma or shame.
I guess I just kinda figure, if it's possible for a human individual to experience and live that pain for as long as I did, then what is possible with love and guided awareness? I now have the ability to work on my own little piece of the tapestry of the big bang and physical reality, such as it is. My own little corner of creation, here, in my city, in this body, in this brain, in the next three to five decades probably.
I will be the "sinner" that proves the lie of the saint. I feel strongly that I want to engage with this trauma electrical impulse that shuddered down from my ancestors, through my grandparents, my parents, and into me, fully acknowledge and accept the pain, transform it into something that no longer is associated with the hot nerve of rumination and trauma thinking, like a sore tooth you can't stop tonguing. And thus contain my mess and try my best to coexist with my fellow humans in a positive, adding value way, of abundance (and holy shit do I feel the abundance now), rather than my previous ways of unending self-pity, lack, shame, seeming inability to do anything about it.
Leo you're a good egg, man. Thank you.
