The Mess in the Middle
By: Patricia Anne
Tags: Spirituality, Ascension, Manifestation, Spiritual Growth, Healing From Trauma

(image credit, Purple Milk Cap. Patricia Anne, 2020)

Tension is a creative force and life moves forward only in tension. This always feels uncomfortable. As a writing teacher I used this trope continually. I would say oh my students you are so uncomfortable. This is excellent. Now you grow. You walk out on that limb. You be brave. Let’s see what you can do there. I say don’t hold on. Just walk out there. Now move! And they did.

It was never lost on me that I encouraged the very things in my students that I could not do myself. How strange this is I thought. I am such an imposter but look at them grow. They are so shiny. They said ouch ouch ouch. We are brave. We are flying. This lasted some months and then it was over. When it was over some of my students said more please my teacher and I said yes you. You will come and work with me and we will continue this dialogue. Those were the best years of my professional life.

I want to talk about tension as the creative process, polarity, and the mess in the middle. We won’t ever be comfortable with this. That’s part of the point. At this juncture we must release our relationship with the binary. This is not the good or the bad. It just is. Sit with that. Feel the cognitive dissonance. The burning sensation in the front of your brain is your release. Out beyond ideas of rightness and wrongness there is a field. I will meet you there. Rumi’s field. This is where the magic happens and it is a magic multiplicity that arrives in all forms, high and low, large and small.

As above, so below. Let’s revisit this. The Hermeneutic Principle is that we exist in a world of duality yet this is illusion only. Duality exists only as a matter of the mind. To wit: we create it. When information comes to us as insight or inspiration, it is channeled through the mind and bifurcated. We split it as a matter of consciousness. This is the way we, as human consciousness beings, make ‘sense’ of that material that comes to us from the Divine. Of course this is absolutely corrupting and corrosive. The degree to which this corrosion happens or does not happen dictates the clarity of the thought and the purity of the vision.

When a human being is closed, or as the common parlance posits — sleeping or ‘not woke’ — inspiration from the Divine is not received. This is the blocking of the higher self, the blocking of spiritual guidance. Humans are ‘closed’ for many reasons. Chief among these is the matter of ego dominance. Ego dominance is a condition in which external information is privileged and favored over inner wisdom or guidance from the higher mind. This external information is received as programmes of thinking, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. This information is received and reified by the receiver. It is accepted as ‘self.’ Now these programmes can be positive — productive and generative in relation to the external world and its expectations — or these programs can be negative — deleterious and damaging — and of course all the markers in between these two poles.

All human beings run the continuum between being open and being closed. You can be a little open or a lot closed. It is a matter of personal and spiritual growth. You can be closed your whole life. Many people are. They can have fine, rich, and noble lives. This is not a binary. We are in Rumi’s field. Closed people are not bad. They are just closed. This is a description not a judgement. A critical distinction. Our penchant for binary thinking is so entrenched that I can make a descriptive statement like this and it will be received as a judgement. We must be vigilant against this.

Now the mess in the middle is the tension between open and closed. Closed is on the left and open is on the right. When you are very closed, you are in a state of stasis. It can be extremely comfortable there. It’s attraction is so magnetic. When you begin to nudge towards the right off this magnetic field, dissociation and discomfort set it. This feels alarming. We run back towards the pole of closed-mindedness. Why wouldn’t we? I wrote about this in Heal. I wrote retreat retreat retreat this feels terrible. Not these words but this was my communication. I said we are all busy with important and stressful lives. New ideas are bothersome things. We absolutely will reject them unless we are hogtied feet to the fire.

I was hogtied feet to the fire. Reader I was progressively ill for a decade. Over that decade I lost every marker of my external reality. I became not me. Not me anymore. Nobody. I sat frozen in that morass for five years. Five years of mostly still and silent hell sitting on my couch or lying in my bed. I had some reprieve from time to time and my family was not taken from me but other than that I was entirely stripped of my external lendings — off off you lendings. This is from King Lear on the Heath. Here we are at the lowest common denominator of ourselves, stripped of all our programmes, naked in a raging storm, alone, blinded, the unaccommodated man. Thou art the thing itself. See better, Lear.

Now I can only wonder why these lines, this play, would impact me so profoundly as a young woman barely out of her teens. I rarely taught Shakespeare as an English teacher and my reading of Lear was limited to an undergraduate class so why? Why these lines permanently engraved, so extraordinarily alive in full scenic regalia in my mind? I think because . . . now. That’s what I think.

This is a fine example of the mess in the middle too. It’s a big long extended metaphor, isn’t it? Wait for it, it says. This show is to be continued and we absolutely love this show. Or we should. But a life lived in a state of permanent unknowing anticipation of meaningfulness is challenging indeed. We want to know. We want surety. I get that too. What I think is that the creative tension allows for that too. It allows for both unknowing and knowing. It allows us to plan and dream and scheme and it also says be here, right here, be present now. Don’t think. Let go. Dream. Plan your future. Be certain. Don’t you even. Both of these things. Non-binary. We can hold both of these in our minds at the same time, parallel tracks.