(no subject)
Aug. 28th, 2010 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingsword"Is there any place you know well enough to walk around blindfolded? Someplace that you know the landscape of intimately, the smells and hazards and denizens? That's how well I know self-hatred." -me
I have said before that I perceive my emotional landscape as a literal landscape, that it has geography and space and structure. That it has blind alleys, underwater caves, and the haunted, submerged ruins of the unconscious, full of treasure and danger. But I never told you what that was like because I figured that some other people perceived things in a similar way. A friend pointed out to me this week that he's never heard of that perspective. He just HAS emotions, he knows what they are and they make sense to him; he isn't concerned about where they come from. Never having that instinctive knowledge of myself made me tinker with everything until I had a framework I understood, and what stuff did I really understand? At the time I was good at dream logic, mechanical things, and architecture. So that was how I framed my inner universe. (Yes, the movie Inception does feel achingly familiar to me.)
Everything begins at awareness. It is the single point from which all parts of the self flow and it is the point that flows along all parts of the self. When we think that everything is relative, what we mean is that our attention and awareness are what everything is relative to.
So I'm paying attention to myself, and mapping pathways out in the streets of confusion and subway tubes of anger and space stations of curiosity. I'm laying out my internal life on post-it notes, and when I'm done you'll be able to rummage around in my headspace. Don't I just have the most cheerful projects?
I have said before that I perceive my emotional landscape as a literal landscape, that it has geography and space and structure. That it has blind alleys, underwater caves, and the haunted, submerged ruins of the unconscious, full of treasure and danger. But I never told you what that was like because I figured that some other people perceived things in a similar way. A friend pointed out to me this week that he's never heard of that perspective. He just HAS emotions, he knows what they are and they make sense to him; he isn't concerned about where they come from. Never having that instinctive knowledge of myself made me tinker with everything until I had a framework I understood, and what stuff did I really understand? At the time I was good at dream logic, mechanical things, and architecture. So that was how I framed my inner universe. (Yes, the movie Inception does feel achingly familiar to me.)
Everything begins at awareness. It is the single point from which all parts of the self flow and it is the point that flows along all parts of the self. When we think that everything is relative, what we mean is that our attention and awareness are what everything is relative to.
So I'm paying attention to myself, and mapping pathways out in the streets of confusion and subway tubes of anger and space stations of curiosity. I'm laying out my internal life on post-it notes, and when I'm done you'll be able to rummage around in my headspace. Don't I just have the most cheerful projects?