Halloween? Thoughts About the "My Son is Gay” Blog Post

I’m amazed that this blog post got so many responses.  I made the mistake of contributing a comment and now I’ve received and deleted thousands of email comments.  Every so often I read one but I can’t possibly read them all.  I’ve never subscribed to a blog before.  So what is it about this particular topic that created such a sensational response?

Most of the responses are about whether the mom in question did the right thing or the wrong thing by supporting her five year old son in his wish to wear a Daphne costume to a Halloween party.  I won’t take that on right now.  There were several categories of response repeated over and over.  Some where supportive, some were critical and a few were insightful. However, it got me to thinking about Halloween in itself.  Why is Halloween such a big deal?

For one thing it is a chance for people to be something they could not be in every day life.  Whether they are angels, demons, glam queens, super heroes, the grizzly dead, aliens, or monsters it’s all about being something not encountered in everyday life.  The crack between worlds or dimensions that Halloween supposedly represents is also a crack between what is socially OK and what is beyond the boundaries of conscientious reality.  Why do people get so much enjoyment in going beyond these boundaries?  It is obviously great fun.  It’s even fun to be scared, if it’s not overdone to the point that we can’t return to the ordinary reality.  We can indulge certain behaviors and desires not allowed in their undisguised form.  But is this all there is to it? I suspect there is more.

For a little while we can exist in an alternative reality.  It is not a reality that the current orthodoxy of Scientific Materialism supports but it obviously has an attraction that is, well, more attractive. The blog post that got me started here is not really about this issue.  I believe it has drawn so much reaction because of the sensitive topic’s of gender identity, social positioning of the sexes and potential religious threats.  But there is the hidden issue of Halloween itself that also includes these topics.  What is it and what is it not?  Especially why does it get so much attention in this modern post religious society?  Of course very few people attach any religious significance to it either pro or con unless they are practicing pagans or extreme fundamentalists.

The door between worlds is supposed to be especially thin at Halloween.  There is something very intriguing about a door between worlds.  The concept of a door is itself powerful.  We go through doors to change where we are to something else.  A literal door opens to indoors from outdoors and vice verse, or into a public building, someone else’s house, a different room, etc., but always a different environment.  That is what doors do whether literal or figurative.  Is there a door opening from this well known (at least we believe we know it) reality to a place of mystery?  And, is the mystery about all the scary things we can imagine, and hope not to meet in our familiar reality, or is it about those who no longer exist in this reality? When they die where do they go?  Is it just poof! And that is the end.  Or does all that life force come from someplace we can’t experience with our senses, and then return when it’s physical container is destroyed? Death itself is intriguing because we can't touch the world of the dead from the side of life as we know it. It scares, repels, and fascinates.

Fear is an indication of energy invested in the object feared.  Sometimes it’s justified but it is also frequently an indication of something valuable that is seen as a threat to an identity that has become too small.  After all we don’t fear the unknown, we fear what we think we know about the unknown.  It is the fear of something we don’t want to identify with or incorporate into our world.  Sometimes this kind of fearsome topic appears in dreams as thresholds we are afraid to cross or monsters that can’t be stopped or outwitted. But always it indicates something that threatens reality as we believe it is.  That is the source of titillation, repulsion and fear.

MANIFESTATION?

Bit by Bit I’m learning about manifestation.  I’ve always been very good at it when it involves things and events that were not clouded by emotional issues and bad conditioning.  That is a significant awareness in itself.   It is an indication that I have some flaws in my operating system that automatically defeats certain intentions and desires. But it also indicates that when I’m clear of these obstacles desired things happen and life moves forward without obstruction. I’m in the process of sorting out the helps and hindrances along the path to connecting effectively with the world beyond this computer, a canvas, or my immediate friends.

My intuitive judgements have a similar history.  Certain intuitive perceptions come easily and are completely trustworthy because they don’t have much to do with personal issues either pro or con.  It is all about the clarity of the system. 

This is a new awareness that makes it much easier to hone in on the problem.  We are talking about magic here.  My definition of magic is the ability to move energy through focused intention to a specific goal.  Much of the magic we experience is unconscious.  In reality much of our life force goes into this unconscious magic.  In other words we live in a situation that has been unconsciously programmed to achieve certain results.  Often these results are very uncomfortable and self-defeating, not to mention entirely opposite of our conscious intention. 

Techniques of manifestation so often fail because they don’t take into account those semi-hidden personalities that have another point of view.  Do we all want to be rich, successful in our careers and happily mated? There are several levels of operatives here.  One is the conflicting opinion inside of one individual.  The other is the voice of the higher self that doesn’t believe that all of these results will necessarily advance the wellbeing of the soul or the planet.  There are higher agendas than the individual ego. To achieve certain kinds of success and yet become unbalanced in relationship with the Higher Self, the welfare of other beings and Mother Earth often has a severe backlash waiting in ambush at the end of the trail. Thus success in manifestation is not always positive in the long run.  

All of this talk about conscious vs. unconscious is in need of definition. I believe that what I’m really dealing with here is a less obvious type of multiple personality.  Who am I really?  This is the root of the issue.  Just who is doing the manifesting? There is the child person who is programmed to believe certain things about life and self, some that are no longer in anyone’s best interest, and then a shy person who doesn’t really want to know the details of her inner workings.  Also there are those shadowy beings that each have a secret agenda and can be very conniving.  To simplify this issue I’ll conclude the list with that person I want to be and have come to understand as the outer image of my soul.  This is a work in process.
This is the person I wish to put in charge of manifestation.  To do that some of the other selves need to grow up and allow this to happen.

Frequently the desire to be rich, at the top of one’s field, and loved by the ideal mate is an attempt to override the fear of the concealed mojo of low expectations, i.e., a curse. The reason for bringing in these different facets of self that live within one body (the visible one) is that they all manifest different results and these different results are frequently in contradiction and conflict with each other.

I use dreams among the indicators of what my various selves are up to.  It’s especially useful to take note of the things that seem really off-the-wall. Also, anything that embarrasses or disgusts me is likely to be rich territory. After I develop some familiarity with some of these themes I begin to notice that they have correspondences to so called waking life, if there really is such a thing.  I don’t recommend taking on the really difficult, scary dream events all by yourself unless you have practice in dream work.  It’s too easy to get paranoid and allow fear to put on a monster coat and go chasing after you.  If your alienation from your hidden selves (or someone else’s) has gone that far you probably need to work on it in the company of someone with solid experience such as a therapist or support group.

A few years ago I would never have put this kind of rumination out into public display.  I had a kind of emotional agoraphobia.  This is one of my deliberate manifestations.  I’ve learned that whenever I discover an inner truth it is important to give it a physical form.  Being in the world is my primary work.  Everything in life is connected to everything else.

 My mother almost abandoned me, not in her heart but in her fear of life.  First, her husband and her mother both thought she should have an abortion because they considered her frail, and because there was a war going on and my father was about to be drafted and she would be on her own.  She went ahead and had me, which was what she wanted but she was never able to totally acknowledge my existence.  It was a type of superstition on her part. The intimidated child in her was afraid she would lose me if she fully acknowledged my existence. When my baby sister was born three years later, she came in with a damaged heart and died within six months.  This brought my mother to a nervous breakdown.  She went into a dark place that covered much of my childhood.  Much later she confessed that she had cut off many of her feelings for me because she believed that God was punishing her for her inadequacies and would take away her children.

I’ve had a recurring dream/memory since those days.  There were Monkey Bars in the playground near our apartment during my first three years.  I struggled to reach the first bar and looked up to the older children on the tiers above with enormous longing and determination to actually climb to the top.  We moved away before I was able to accomplish this.  Several times I ran away from home and went back to the old neighborhood.  But each time I was caught and brought back before I was able to accomplish my goal.  Eventually we moved to a different state, and that was that. But this pattern has stayed with me. I continue to symbolically pursue the monkey bars and over and over some outward event prevents me from accomplishing the goal.  Only a few years ago I recognized this as a life pattern that unconsciously ruled from the shadows of my memory. I won’t go into the details but I now have a powerful tool.  Sometimes things come very easily when the obstructions are removed and manifestation becomes an organic development.

There are layers upon layers in these stories and it continues to guide me as I learn to identify the components.   I’ve had teachers along the way, also; Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Carlos Castaneda, Arny Mindell, and so on along with some of my personal friends. Learning astrology was also helpful.  For those of you interested in astrology I have a Gemini Sun in the 12th house, Moon conjunct Jupiter rising in Cancer (also in the 12th house, all of these squaring Neptune in the 4th house, and much of my strength comes from Mars conjunct Pluto late in the first house, Venus in Taurus and Uranus conjunct Saturn in the 11th house.  It is a cosmic snapshot brought down to the personal level.  Some folks can’t accept the idea that the position of the planets at a certain time can apply to anything personal.  That assumes that we are totally personal.  It may well be that everything in the universe partakes of an overall pattern if we knew how to read it.  Humans have narrowed the field in certain ways for millenniums.  They read numbers, stars, sheep’s innards and so on but were functioning on the assumption of holography long before it was a
concept.  Somehow external patterns stimulates awareness of an internal reflection.