Identity Crisis – Twilight Zone
[thoughts from ~burning woman~ by Sha’Tara]
Imagine, if you will, a quiet farm house in north-east Dorset county. It is just past midnight and Mrs. Joshua Billings is sleeping in her upstairs bedroom. Her three year old son dozes fitfully in his cot under the single bedroom window. The house is dark but not cold as it is still early September. Outside nothing is moving except the age-old stars and the moon following their own elliptical orbits. Suddenly, from the south-east a light flashes, briefly illuminating the crop laden fields and tracing a long straight line which in the daytime is the driveway into the farm from the highway. Grabber, the old yellow dog sticks his white-fuzzed nose out of the doghouse, lifts an ear and whines, then turns and tries to go back to his dream… But on this night, that would not be possible.
… Oh no! Twilight Zone writing mode! Sorry, forget it. I’m not going to tell that story – too gruesome, too, too… just too… not this time of year. You want me to finish it? Do it yourself, it’s really not difficult at all and if you do it, it’ll be your own version. Come on, you can do it!
Let me try another approach.
Imagine if you will, a man waking up some perfectly everyday morning in late October to discover he has no idea who he is. Oh, sure, he recognizes his surroundings; his snoring wife with her back turned to him and her hair done à la Phyllis Diller1; the rumpled bed, the door to the bathroom and once he’s stumbled his way in there and flicked on the light, the face that looks back at him from the wall mirror is definitely his. His name is Roy Evans, of that he is certain. As he looks out the bathroom window he sees the beginning of a glow over the eastern hills and the stars above are still bright. Another cloudless, perfect Indian summer day. Nothing has changed. Everything is so, so, completely familiar and yet, try as he may, nothing. He really does not know who he is.
Has such a thing ever happened to you? Everyday, you say? There’s a smart ass in every crowd, isn’t there. No, seriously, have you ever had one of those moments when your mind froze all the details of your awareness and you stood there, or sat there, and for the very first time realized you really have no identity? That all that you believe about yourself; all that you know; all that you’ve experienced, belongs to someone you are completely familiar with but have no clue who that is?
I’ve had these experiences many times but never as persistently as lately. They’ve never lasted this long. Usually, by dint of head-shaking and focusing on something or other, I could “come back” and realize myself again. Now I seem to be stuck in this “I don’t know who me is” place. Or perhaps I point the finger at myself and shout: “I don’t know who you are!”
How did this come about? Well, let’s see. I think it was a truly twisted, weird dream with unfamiliar yet not unknown symbolism. What this dream did was squeeze my entire life into a short You Tube-style video. The incredibly condensed version of who or what I’d been in this life. Complete with the good, the bad, the ugly… as well as the stupid, the indifferent and irrelevant. Wham! There you have it and that’s all there is to it.
From that dream I developed a split mind, so to speak. I see myself as an entity at the center of “everything” if that’s the proper term for it. As I stand in that center, I survey all that is, all around me, and I’m also “there” in that other everything. Depending on how I “look” at that, it either moves closer to me or farther away. I haven’t figured out what causes “it” to become distant, or to move closer, nor do I know how to “use” this new awareness. I suppose it could have to do with judgment? Fear? (Though I’m completely unaware of harboring any fear whatsoever – but could be fooling myself, hiding this on myself.) Let’s go all out here: hate? Anger? Doubt? Pride? Or perhaps it’s a change to the opposite of these rather nasty traits, having worked at compassion, seeking greater empathy, more understanding.
I don’t know.
And how could I? I have no identity! I don’t know what it means to be “me” or whether that even exists outside this created reality. And I think that’s the rub. We exist in two realities, two realities that depend on each other yet seem bound and determined to wipe each other out. That which is Spirit (capitalized on purpose) provides the means for Creation (also capitalized on purpose) to exist, yet most religious teachings insist that “we” return to Spirit when we die, implying that Spirit thinks very little of our created effort and can’t wait to just wrap it all up and go back to watching Cosmic TV.
We of the created/material order of things and, so we believe, being more evolved than other animals, have a problem with Spirit. Somehow, fear of Spirit (fear of God?) got into the system and that which materializes and subsequently develops ISSA2 consciousness tends to denigrate Spirit and would rather relegate that, and all religious exercises, to superstition; leftovers from the time “man” learned to stand on two legs, make controlled sounds with his mouth and upon discovering he was inexplicably afraid of his environment, invented gods in his image so as not to lose it completely. Fat lot of help that’s been, but that’s for another Twilight Zone story.
I have always understood Spirit to be akin to Life. Before and Beyond all that is, all that can be known, there is that which breathes life into the created order. And this is where it gets tricky, because we are forced to choose between two realities when in fact it is impossible to make such a choice, certainly not in any rational fashion. Yes, we are material entities, but we also know, or suspect at the very least, that we are something else. And it is that “something else,” that which we approach as we age and consider our death (ultimate demise or greatest of all adventures?), which seems to repel any kind of individual identification.
So really this is an age thing for anyone who spends as much time as I, working, living, in the mind. I’m losing my “normal” identity and discovering that for a perhaps brief, perhaps eternal “moment” I will have to navigate my cosmos without a clue as to who I am.
Ever since “knee high to a grasshopper” I have been taught how to pack for this coming journey. And I have done so, not always wholeheartedly, but steadily, and now I just hope “they” have a really good baggage claim area, and that my bags are properly identified so I can grab them when I come out of the non-identity trance. Let the games begin!
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1 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Phyllis Diller (July 17, 1917 – August 20,
2012[2]) was an American actress and comedienne. She created a stage persona of a wild-haired and eccentrically dressed housewife who made self-deprecating jokes about her age and appearance, her terrible cooking, and a husband named "Fang", while pretending to smoke from a long cigarette holder.
2ISSA: acronym for intelligent, sentient and self-aware
I have had, infrequently, seizure like events that are very stressful and make me think that I'm about to die. They could be minor heart attacks, but my heart is good. They are most likely epileptic seizures. They do not leave me with any thoughts of living outside the box or other great stories like dreams do.
Ron
Love ya!
Jane
Bless you Regie, and a Merry Christmas, to you, whoever you are.
Cheers,
Dan