Thursday 1 June 2006

Pic of the day: Now, and long ago... (Yes, this unique picture is of me the writer, not of cat-eared imaginary people. Rejoice momentarily.)

Yellow moment vs Yellow life

I tried to write an entry about my inner life from the age of 15 onward, but it became very long and weird. (This should not have surprised me.) So I'll try to limit myself some more!

***

I have written about this occasionally, but never in quite this context. The moment my life changed. I think I was 15, around there at least. It was already a time of great change in my life. Due to my slow development, I was still in puberty. At the same time, the summer I was 15 was when I moved away from my birth family, from the home where I was literally born and had lived all my life, to go to high school in another part of the country. It was also the year when I joined "Smith's Friends" (The Christian Church of Brunstad, Norway) in my heart, although it would still take a couple years before I could attend their meetings regularly. And it was (ironically, some will say) a small booklet by Elias Aslaksen, a Christian mystic in that church, which caused the change in me.

I was sitting in my grandfather's rocking chair in our living room, reading this small booklet, The way to react. In it, Aslaksen stated rather simply that we choose how we act toward others. It does not matter what they have done to us, or rather it does not diminish our freedom to act in whatever way we deem appropriate. It may be that we decide to act based on the information given us by their action, but in any case, it is I who act, not the other person. No one else can lift my hand.

As children, I think we all have said "He made me do it!". It is really how it looks. It is as if there was a law of nature forcing our body to attack those who taunt us, for instance. But there actually is no such law. I did not realize this until I was 15. Some clearly die from old age without having realized it. And not just in the matter of aggression. Excuses is like a favorite sports for humans. "Because she wore short skirts." "Because it wasn't locked." "The idiot in the car in front of me suddenly stopped." And my favorite: "A snake told me to eat it."

I was like that, and I did not even know better. And suddenly, while I sat in the rocking chair, there was light. As if a switch was thrown. My life changed.

***

And since then I have lived by that insight. No, wait, I didn't. Well, sometimes I did. I think my oldest brother can attest to that. He used to push my buttons and watch me make a fool of myself. But suddenly, the buttons did not work anymore. He did not have time to find new ones either, since we went our separate ways. He did however proceed to become a full-time psychologists, may he live long and prosper anyway.

But in everyday life, sometimes things come on so fast that you don't have time to remember who you really are, and then you act on habit and emotions. This happened to me as well. Sometimes I was just carried away. But every time, I returned. What had changed was my center of gravity, the anchor of my soul. As too many events unfolded to write all in this entry, I lived and learned and changed. Gradually I began to live more and more of my life in this state of mind. Now, it is my home. I can still fall down from it, but it is not something I only experience during peak moments, when I have the wind at my back. Perhaps there can still happen something so crushing that this identity ceases to exist while I am still alive, but I doubt it. I can be thrown out of balance still, but I come back to it naturally.

This is largely because it is not, nor ever was, faith. I did not believe what I read, I understood it. It is like the "red pill / blue pill" from The Matrix. Once you have seen beyond the illusion, reality never becomes the same again.

But in the real world, this first insight was a peak experience. These days, I rarely if ever have peak experiences. You may say more charitably that I live in a peak experience. But that is not quite true either. There are still things I want to change in my life. Or at least part of me wants to change. But my center of gravity is here. Perhaps this is my fate, or perhaps I still have some way to go. I feel like I do, but we shall have to see. But I have never had a "turquoise" moment where I saw life the way, say, Dalai Lama sees it. It remains theory to me. Or St Francis of Assisi, to take an example from my own culture. It may be just a difference of degree, but if so, a very large degree. And I am not even sure whether to feel guilty about it.