I found myself fretting and feeling that gnawing fear-obligation in regards to [work], and I fought that off, as well as I could. It’s a consuming fear mingled with guilt and obligation and more. And I wonder, Why do I feel guilt and fear—and the fear of shame.
I’ve been thinking about what CC calls the Second Attention, as it relates to my experience in the Otherworlds, the dreamlike experiences and encounters I’ve had. In the Otherworlds, having a nominal conversation with K, when some fellow shows up and I start talking to him. Then, I pull out of that hypnogogic state and wonder what’s been happening—blame it on a dream intruding into the projection because I’m tired. But I also believe I’ve been talking to others in dreams, conversations, discussions, and more that I don’t consciously recall, and that my subconscious, no—my conscious, halthaya-struck mind discounts them as “just dreams” and “probably nonsense.” And I have a hard time even recalling I’ve had these dreams, but I think talking and writing—even “inventing” them might help—would help bring them closer.
I’m on an edge between the fictional and the real, and the damnable thing is that the edge itself is imagined, is the existential crux we all should dance upon, but we run from it. We always mouth platitudes about the unreal, the uncanny, the unknown, the unformed, and so on, but we can thrive in that border world.
Defamiliarzation—alienation.
That edge, that crux suggests the sliding I’ve been getting at, bridging us and “here and there,” and Bruno also points to this in the crossing of mind and shadow, memory and thought towards reality. Bruno cares less for Plato being right than in pragmatic results, and his metaphor of the Shadow is his own, but it’s not necessary:
—the Riddle of the Shadow is what Bruno saw, and he locates the answer to it in the action of the mind on ideas, experiences. He sees the seed that manifests into indefinite forms, but I’m not sure if he gets a Multiversal view.
Bruno points to shadows as ways of perceiving the “light” indirectly, or to acclimate to the light—but they are also signposts on the way to “what’s above.” We exist, he says, in shadow, can exist because we’re in shadow, but that shadow can guide us towards other things. The shadow of Elethis comes to my mind, but—
Rapture, immersiveness, experientiality, Softening, listening, silence—that trance and seidr way, sliding into moments and experiences—you cannot easily seize the Otherworlds and ôl-vala—different ways of thinking—you cannot grasp at reality, though you can perceive it, if you will allow yourself to do so. Bruno says we have to wrap up things, cloak them, I’d say, in ways that we can grasp, find, take, use, move them, or to let them move us. Metaphor, story, survival,—
The will and spirit conperceiving, imagining itself and the world, these can be one light we send out to produce shadows and there by meaning—but the Worlds emerge from the multitude of wills doing all this and a multitude of shadows from one “source” come into being.
The “objects” are the darkness that produce shadows via light. Shadows also exist in the moment and as the motions of light and object produce the shadow—
—but shadows are also concatenations of a multitude of lights, objects, sources intersecting with each other in causal chaos and the Wyrd.
I rited tonight. Freya wanted my attention. First, the Guardians noted my difference in anxiety, and I have felt how much attention and energy I expended in anxiety.
As one touch starved, I have felt that I hinder myself with my lack of tactile experience.
Freya wants to enter me, to touch me, to shape me as much as the Morrigan/Dana had—still does—and I let Her, let Freya do so while the Morrigan and Others watched.
I felt the shadows of Ideas,—I felt them as I med’d in preparation for Freya—to slide into shadows like into pools of water.
Image: Sky by Crowess