Hence the dark and light now arouse each other.

In my mystics class, the speaker was talking about opening ourselves up to explore the room and each other with our senses, to allow ourselves to perceive things on a deeper, less obvious level. One of us, another student, asked if he meant 'sense' as in the 5 senses, or as in feeling emotions.

"Same thing." he replied.

He talked for a little bit about the possibility that emotions are a behavioral response to what is being sensed, that it is intimately part of the experience of logging information and drawing conclusions from what is being perceived.

That same student had given a small presentation on the life and spiritual development of C. S. Lewis, and one of the quotes she talked about from him had a lot to do with our separation from nature, and our passionate, constant longing to be folded into it, apart, whole again. I think being so heavily conscious is both the token thing that makes us unique in our own minds, and also forces us to feel different, alone. It seems that we have developed keen abilities to intellectualize things, to freeze images, aspects, objects and our emotional reactions to them, to be able to ponder things from a safe, objective distance. So we have become too afraid to be inside of an experience, looking out, to fearlessly step into mental illness, into connection, into love, into our fears, into something potentially painful. We do not nourish the brave parts of self, we quantify and qualify, moralize and demoralize, at a remove that severs us from ever being fully immersed in an experience. Maybe, just like we are taught at a certain point in childhood that we aren't allowed to touch each other, that it becomes an invasion of space, rather than a continuation of exploration, maybe we are taught then that we are separate from nature, that we are some distant, intellectual other, that, like Adam, we must spend our lives naming things rather than tasting them. How do we go past this forced perception? Education systems have developed out of a dogma that pits emotion and reason against each other, and we learn at a very young age that messy non rational emotions are expected to be considered lightly, if not all together ignored, rather than a natural part of ourselves that can be crafted, honed and wielded just as powerfully as our thoughts. We are all partially crippled creatures, and our cut off from the rest of existence is self imposed. We force it on our children. We are ashamed, filled with shame, conquered by it. Catholic, Christian or not, it consumes our existence. Especially the scientists.

We are ashamed of having feelings. Of feeling them.

A lot of the Mystics talk about emotion as how we access the spiritual, or how we tap into nature, each other. Every time that comes up, I wonder about anger, how we all learned growing up in western culture that anger and Satan are one and the same. I have always been hugely ashamed of mine, I ignore it, I walk away and allow safe, controlled bursts for no one to witness my shame and loss of control, I have almost completely eradicated my ability to perceive it. It is a thing unexpressed. When I am filled with it, it immobilizes me, and I am too afraid to be in that black space alone, or that I won't be around people I trust.

But actively ignoring it doesn't mean it goes away. It darkens my past so all I can see are the things I couldn't shout at people who were not kind, or gentle with me when they should have been. When I was tender, when I was fresh. It has left all of my memories twisted with black, with helplessness. I have not learned to wield it with maturity, I hide it like a phantom special needs child that will probably just humiliate me. I am ashamed of it, and as a part of myself, that shame spreads out and attaches itself to other things. If any emotion is a potential to experience the world more deeply, to access the divine, I imagine that cutting off any emotion becomes part of the problem, a kink in the connection, a cut wire, an artfully intellectualized self sabotage against feeling my own feelings and knowing myself.

"...winter in the course of the year, and midnight in the course of the day, are the time of concentration."

Maybe this is where we developed the concept of Ice Queens in our fairy tales, maybe this is why I always felt trapped in semi darkness, maybe this winter was much longer than I realized. Maybe this is why I am so intense, why its almost impossible to find lightness of being. That for how much I want to burn with feeling, I may be actively shunning warmth/light/fire/sun because I am too afraid of what the light would show, that it might be something embarrassing and crippled.

That there are so many different ways to burn.