I Am Alone, or Not

We come into this world as infants who surely seem more merged with deeper aspects of Being, or whatever you’d like to call it, than those who have been here a while. It takes time for us to train our attention consistently to this particular physical environment. Somewhere during that process we achieve a benchmark level of, at least perceived, separation.

When I was 6 my we moved into a larger house in a new neighborhood closer to the university where my father worked. It was full of children. After a week or so, I don’t really remember, I went to my mother and said “I don’t think that there is anyone in the neighborhood my age”. She said, “Well, Christine Daley is about your age”. In that instant I realized that she’d known that there was no one my age and had kept that from me. In my little mind I thought that if I couldn’t trust her to be honest with me, I was really alone in the world. That declaration, in that silent moment, made it effectively so. Many decades later I remembered this event at some Landmark course where they were specifically looking for such a “break in belonging”. I went to share what I’d seen with my mother and before I was even done she said, “I remember that. I regretted it the moment that I said it but it was too late”. Even she saw the impact that it had on me and remembered it all those years later.

It seems to me that at least one component of the process of being trained to be in this physical world comes in some form of a declaration that “I am alone”. It may be “nobody loves me, I’m not good enough, I don’t fit in” but is something along those lines. The “I”, in that moment of declared separateness, realizes that it must take responsibility for its choices as a solitary individuated entity. If it is going to survive in this world – to get what it needs and wants – it’s got to take charge and make it happen since it cannot guarantee the same resolve from anyone else. Given that on some level that each of us does have to make our own way, it makes sense that we do have to come to that declared state at some point.

After the event with my mom I experienced a deep sadness and often thereafter a sense of something missing. “I don’t belong here” was what I sometimes said to myself. Initially I was just depressed but somewhere along the way I developed a sense of “resentment” at having to be here, as if I was forced to or came reluctantly. Don’t really know where that came from but it was deep. Over years of spiritual reading and pursuits I came to assume that on some level I chose to be here, yet occasionally still “blamed” some others for leaving me here; as if I had been deceived or not given all of the facts before choosing to come here and was then abandoned. More recently I’ve acquiesced to the fact that I am here though I can’t say that I’m yet pleased about it.

Often during my spiritual journey I’ve described my experience of being “strapped to the front of a freight train”, when the downward thrust of energy from some seemingly “higher” place displaces my normal experience and demands attention without cognitive explanation of what is to be attended to. Energetically it seems like something deeper is rushing forward into my consciousness and bringing with it all of the intervening energetic wavelengths. This experience is always distressing, occasionally frightening and I am mostly irritable when in that energetic onslaught. My sense is that this is the source towards which my “resentment” is focused. And yet it seems that my discontent may actually just be with the velocity of the flow. It feels like a more intense version of my sense of certainty, that space from which clear creative choice arises. So it is perhaps the case that some deeper level of choice – perhaps made and forgotten – is manifesting through this forceful energetic flow.

While writing recently I had the experience of a merging with that energy; now seen as those “others”. It/they seem tuned to my writing. In some fashion I tuned to it in such a way that it no longer felt aggressive. This writing seems to be acclimated to that flow and may be the manifestation of that flow’s intent. In one moment the thought that arrived on the page in the midst of that tuning was “I am not alone”. I am quite at peace in this space just now; the antagonistic relationship that I once had, and will assuredly have again, with the “others” is gone for the moment. There is a sense of completing a circle that began at 6 with “I am alone” and has ended this particular part of my path with “I am not alone”. In the revelation that one aspect of my experience here is complete, I begin some other. I re-belong to some deeper aspects of one particular thread of We, all of whom I represent here and seem to have something to say.

As I have many habitual patterns since landing in this world I’m not expecting to shed any of them quickly but as I have this new tuning, and have a “story” for it, I can now both cognitively and experientially call it up whenever I remember to do so. My experiential world has a new place within which my many other perspectives can be held. Given that it has contextually shifted them all, at this moment there is a sense of stability, which I don’t often get in the fluid way that I experience the world. Everything looks a bit different and I have no idea what’s next.

This space will, no doubt, make this I’s range of perspectives much more diverse but it is temporarily comforting to feel whole and stable.

Now to really go out on a limb, I had the notion that “I am alone” seems a likely experience that Being might have had before this universe was created. Who or what was there to relate to then? So our similar declaration here in the physical perhaps attunes us to Being’s initial experience and opens the window for the presence of that focus here. In this case, however, over the eons the We have created McIntosh’s “beautiful” playground for the solitary “I” to participate in and appreciate.