More fruitful discoveries from my YouTube viewing and/or listening.
This one is about archetypes.
Normally, I view this kind of archetype based psychology with a skeptical eye. A lot of those types of approaches seem gimmicky and forced to me.
But I have watched all four of the episodes about Moore and Gilette’s theories about the archetypes of the Love, the King, the Magician, and the Warrior, and have determined that there is more than enough substantive insight for them to be worth discussion.
So like… vas-y!
I am talking about the Lover this time because of the comments about how the passive shadow form of the archetypes is The Dreamer.
The Dreamer is passive, detached, and lonely. They end up preferring their inner world – their dream life – to the real world because to them, the real world is harsh and cruel and unbelievably cold, and only their carefully cultivated inner life can meet their needs.
Not very well, mind you. But it’s all they feel they have.
They also shy away from the Lover’s rich and lively take on reality. Where the Lover embraces life and all its joys and sorrows in order to maximize their feeling of aliveness, The Dreamer maximizes detachment, withdrawal, and emotional guardedness.
Ironically, the coldness the Dreamer flees comes not from a cold and callous world but from their detachment from it. The warmth and life and connect they so desperately seek can only be had if they are willing to lower their guard and be real and alive and present in the moment instead of hiding far, far away.
Obviously, I am talking about myself here. I am totally the Dreamer.
I live in a tiny, cloistered world detached from everything except my beloved video games. The games (supplemented by my YouTube vids) keep my mind too occupied for doubt, anxiety, or depression to creep in. This has the effect of pushing them out of my mind and allowing me some precious time when I am practically sane, and safe from my inner demons for a while.
Hence the addiction.
It gets me through the day but it is killing me, emotionally and physically.
Video games can keep me busy, but they can’t make me feel loved. They can’t make me feel alive and present and real. They can’t melt the ice around my heart and let me live and breathe again.
I can love them all I want. But they will never love me back.
Still, I feel like this video gave me an important clue as to the direction I should go to help heal myself. I now recognize that my detachment is the problem and that the path out of my prison requires me to be alive and present in the moment.
That will not be easy to achieve. The prospect quite frankly terrifies me. It is a challenge to one of my primary defense mechanisms and that’s going to be a tough pill to swallow.
Might as well get started right away, then.
Hello world. I’m…uh, here now.
Please don’t hurt me.
More after the break.
I am blown away by the fact that this fucking exists.
It’s a service called Musiversal (ick) and through it you can get top notch professional studio musicians to record your freaking songs, man.
That’s so amazing that I am not sure I can handle it.
Just thinking about the possibilities makes me think I am going to faint.
These songs I occasionally write could become actual music. Real music played by real musicians in a real recording session. A session I would supervise.
Un. Freaking. Believable.
That’s all I wanted to say about that right now.
Scared to live
Let’s take a deeper dive into why I am afraid to live.
It boils down to intensity. The more alive you are, the more intense every experience is. It’s liking turning up the volume on life.
And I have always be afraid of loud noises.
So on those rare occasions where my juices are flowing and I am feeling better and more alive than usual, it has been this intensity intolerance that has been the primary force dragging me back into the darkness.
The light is too damned bright out there, in the sunshine, where I long to be.
But this is a childish reaction, because presumably if I just hang in there and refuse to bolt for my hidey hole, I would eventually acclimate to my new environment and the problem would go away.
And without having to sacrifice my healing and growth.
Maybe that’s what I am really afraid of : change. Change is scary. Change means waking up and being aware so you can create your new normal, and that takes effort, and is a risk.
It is far far easier to keep sleepwalking through life, dead to the world but numb to the pain with no effort or strain or energy to maintain.
Stop that, he told himself.
Easier but not better. Easier but a lot worse, in fact. Like I said yesterday, part of the price of healing and growth will be learning to choose the path of greater resistance. TO deliberately make life harder for myself.
And that’s not easy for a liquid type personality like mine. Water only flows downhill, after all, at least on its own. All my life, I have sought the easy way out, minimizing stress and strain while maximizing leisure and pleasure.
And I have gotten away with it because I had enormous natural gifts that made that which is very hard for others trivially easy for me and therefore I have skated through life on highly minimal effort.
Great way to get through school, but no way to get through life.
No matter how gifted you are, at some point in order to get what you want you will have to do things you don’t want to do no matter how hard, scary, or boring they seem, and that means you will need self-discipline.
Your parents were right about that, as it turns out.
So after a lifetime of mindless self-indulgence and the tragically sad life that leads to, it seem it is time for me to wake up and go to work.
Which is fine.
But I might just whimper a little as I go.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.