Bij de grenzen van perfectie

Bij de grenzen van perfectie

Bij de grenzen van perfectie
hokte Kafka, vaak heel stil
Zijn handen in zijn schoot
kin in jas, 't was er kil

Naast de grenzen van perfectie

ligt heel diep, een bronzig dal

voor sommigen de hemel

voor anderen de zondeval

In dat dal der imperfectie

sterkt eenieder zijn gemoed
vastberaden de berg weer te bestijgen
naar die grens met zijn helle gloed

Toen Kafka na jaren ploeteren
de grens vermoeid overbruggen mocht,
keek hij naar het prachtige dal
en voelde zich ietwat bekocht.

daar, dat dal,

was van dáár gezien

precies perfect, net wat hij zocht.

© Emmy van Swaaij

The slideshow of experiences

Throughout centuries mankind has tried to come up with a framework that helps in structuring the very vivid experiences people can encounter during their life. Experiences where they perceive memories, experiences - you name it- that seem to be located outside their usual time and space perceptions. A very popular idea to give it a place is the notion of reincarnation. Where a person goes through cycles of many different lifetimes from one life to the next and evolves in a certain way.

When I was younger I never really thought much about this topic, I mean there was no reason to for I could still place my experiences in the neat box my psyche had formed to make sense of the world. Until I experienced something that didn’t fit into that neat box any longer….

My dreams showed me that I was able to pick up interesting, sometimes frightening, at other times joyful, strange adventures that took place in different places and different timeframes. Sometimes during those experiences I was able to perceive things from a different gender-perspective, different age. Giving me tremendous insights through these dreams themselves. The themes depicted in the dream were always reflective of whatever issue or theme I was exploring during my own daily adventures, never separated from that.

Though vivid and very realistic those were all taking place in the world of dreams and it was easy to say: “oh it was just a dream!” after waking up in sweat having experienced for instance being chased by Nazi’s in a concentration camp.

Then at a certain day I experienced something so out of the box that I felt lucky I’d found a framework to place it in when I came “out of it”, in this way retaining the carefully constructed balanced state of my psyche I finally had mastered after some time of identity crisis.

I was about 18 years old, was about to go live on my own but was in that in-between period where I still lived at my parents house.

Seated on my bed I was reading a book when I suddenly found myself galloping through a landscape on the back of a black horse. This change of perspective was so abrupt and startled me tremendously. The book I was reading had nothing to do with horses or the scene itself.

All my life I have been very afraid of horses and now here I was galloping on one! The wind, caused by the speedy pace blew through my hair and I kept looking behind me. My body was operating naturally, as if I had been riding horses all my life. Fact is the only time I rode a horse was during a high school-trip, frightened as hell, at a riding school and I can tell you it didn’t go as smoothly as this.

I realized my body was much smaller than it is normally and also that my brain wasn’t working like it normally does. I felt, and this was a very strange experience, less intelligent or at least, I was using my brain in a different fashion than I normally do.

I looked at my clothing and noticed that I was not a woman, but a boy about 13 years old. I kept galloping and looking over my shoulder seeing the men, clearly following “us”. I realized that this boy I was peeking along with had stolen something and was desperately trying to escape these angry men. Then…boom bam, suddenly the horse fell down taking me to the ground as well.

Because I was looking backwards all the time I hadn’t noticed the huge branch of a tree and knocked my head and both me and the horse fell to the ground.

Amazed by the real-as-life sensations, I knew I was not dreaming in the same intense way as I now know myself to be Emmy. I had two perspectives, my own and the boys simultaneously.

The men caught up and one of them grabbed me by the collar and pushed my face for a slight moment in the mud where I found myself laying close to. All I was thinking was: wow! The feel of this mud! It’s so real!! After this thought: swoosh!

I was “back” in my room, book still placed on my lap, startled, heart beating with excitement. What was that??? A strange hiccup of my psyche? It was all so very vivid and real. Had I fallen asleep? In my experience I certainly hadn’t. But what was this?

I felt lucky that I was familiar with Jane Roberts work with her/Seth’s theories of multiple realities existing parallel to one another. I had a framework to place my experience in.

I felt that my consciousness had momentarily zoomed into a parallel existence of myself. A strange hiccup of sorts, maybe caused by the intensity of this boys experience, maybe to show me that there is more to our tuning of our consciousness than meets my usual eye. What was very clear to me was that in no way that boys “now” was any less real than my own. It didn’t feel as “past”, to the boy that was his “now”. It all felt very immediate. But could I say: I am that boy also? In my experience I felt very clearly: I am that boy but at the same time I’m not all of what that boy is. There is a place where we overlap, but I can’t state: I AM that boy, I “own” that boys lifetime. I felt that I had to come to a different conclusion though I didn’t know yet what that conclusion was. I wrote down in my notebook:

“I know the understanding is there somewhere, but it is like with the sea, even though knowing that the sea is there, and that it is big. I can only see a small part of it. And never see the whole thing, or all its parts. So my understanding will always be very partial. But I can at least enjoy the small part of the sea that I do see. "

Just as Jane Roberts didn’t like the usual perspectives of what reincarnation is claimed to be, I felt that there was more to this concept and that the concept was a meager interpretation of what might be the case. I felt that the point of power is in the now, not in the past nor in the future and had recognized my own interpretation of reality in Jane’s/Seth’s writings. I still love them dearly, they echo my own truths.

But if reincarnation (having several lifetimes, one to the next and “owning” them) doesn’t feel right, where can I then place my experiences into that are so out of the box? Over the years and through my own explorations I found the following analogy that seems to be a flexible enough framework to me so that I can give my experiences a place, without limiting my experiences folding and forcing them into the framework.

Remember these?

Loud clicks accompanied them while they travelled their way through the projector in many a household. The presentation disrupted at times when one of them got stuck or happened to be upside down.

Making fun of them during improv-skits was the last time I’d heard of them until some time ago during a different kind of improvisation I engaged in that some people call channeling.

I prefer to name and see this particular activity no differently than the process that is going on during improvisational theatre. A creative way to explore reality, not unlike the creative way children learn about their reality through the use of play. There are so many expectations and assumptions glued to the subject of channeling I simply and passionately don’t agree with.

I wrote about this in earlier articles (“Dipping into the rich palette of the personality structure” as published in one of the earlier issues of WISP for instance )and I probably will keep writing about this topic as my perspective on the matter, like all living things, changes and transforms but also is at times so contrary to what I see described in most literature on the subject that I have to speak up. I can’t go too much into it in this particular article for I need the space for another topic that I started describing above: The way our consciousness is able to tune into what seems to be experiences from different places and times than the one it is generally focused in.

During one of my improvisations in consciousness accompanied by my good friends Ellen Gilbert, Tom Chez and John Hawkins the following analogy came forth out of our material:

“All that is”, God, Devine energy, consciousness, however you wish to call it, expresses its energies into physical life to get to know oneself. Because consciousness is ever changing and thus never can gather the conclusion: I know myself, endless new experiences spring to life to give form and shape to its (his/hers?? Whatever you like best) being.

It molds into the form of physical life. And just like we take pictures of our holiday adventures to review our holidays later on, all these experiences are never lost but stored in the collective memory. While looking at pictures we can enrich our present moment with the experiences we encountered before. Coming to new understandings and conclusions about who we are at each moment because of these experiences we have encountered.

Well let’s say that there is this huge psychic library where all experience is stored and as consciousness explores itself, the living snapshots it takes are formed into psychological slides, while exploring a certain theme. These are spontaneously placed into certain psychological slots in this library, structuring them by certain themes.

Just like we can place the different slides in one of the diorama slots and name it: “Holiday to the Rocky Mountains 1999” there are psychological “slots”, physical life-time experiences combined in one slot that one can name for instance: “Belgium, Yosef 1909-1943” another might be called: “resisting change and overcoming this resistance”. Every possible experience is stored there, this includes all possible timeframe’s, genders, family units etc. etc.

All those slides stored in an ever expanding database. The same slides can be stored in different combinations. Just like the letter e in this whole article is present in many different words, but through the unique combinations it will have a totally different role to play.

They don’t have to be placed in one particular slot, this happens naturally, automatically, a kind of natural “structuring” that is constantly occurring.

I think our personality structure attracts out of this psychic library certain lifetime-experience slides by its interests, longings, curiosity and through this expands and develops itself. Every personality structure has access to all the different slides in the library.

No one can say: “ I own these slides”

I think you “borrow” them from the library but unlike library books where you are not allowed to write in or add things to, you are in this case, adding to the content of these slides while you are looking at them. (“projecting” them through your own personality structure).

It can even be the case, I think it is, that the same slides are being selected by different personality structures. The same “blueprints”. But because they are placed in a unique rack, just like the letter e is placed in different variations composing the words of this article as I described before, they get a different, unique meaning. In this way I think we are all connected, because we all share at least some of the same slides from this ever expanding collection.

I think that my conscious awareness is focused on one particular slide, the Emmy slide and at times there is this hiccup where my consciousness jumps to a different slide in the rack of my personality structure where the same theme is explored as I am doing in my present moment, but then for instance in a different timeframe, in different situations. It is important to keep in mind that the slides are not stale, those slides are always in movement, like little always ongoing movies. Those slides always exist simultaneously and influence each other but I don’t have to necessarily be consciously aware of them.

When I look at the other slides, if I happen to be aware of them, when their existence shines through my Emmy-slide, like the words on the other side of a handwritten letter can do, my Emmy focus will always be influencing what I see, it will be my (ha!) frame of reference. There is no other way to it. In a way that Emmy slide functions as the filter on a lens, adding my own unique style to the contents of this psychic library.

This analogy helps me tremendously to frame my experiences without forcing them to fit in a too tight framework as I perceive the usual notions on for instance reincarnation to be.

When I had that wild experience quite some years back, with the boy on the horse, I simply hit the psychological button to go to a different slide in my rack from this library, but was able to switch back to my usual perspective and even during the experience I never lost my “Emmy” perspective, it was always present also. I’ve noticed this with all my experiences of this nature and will explore this topic in another article! Perhaps see you there!