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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Inspirational
- Subject: Philosophy/Religion/Spirituality
- Published: 05/25/2023
Welcome to Wonderland
Born 1969, M, from Herten, NRW, GermanyWelcome to Wonderland
- An Article by Charles E.J. Moulton
***
"You take the blue pill... the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
- Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in
"The Matrix" (1999)
***
Our lives are the stories we invent.
The stories we invent are our lives.
And when we tell a story, we remember our own lives.
The best lives also make the best stories and the best stories inspire the best lives. For all the world is a stage and the duality is our synopsis. The lady of the manor is the actual winner of every story. For in the end we find the beginning and the heart of any story. Within the heart, we find love.
This is our hypothesis.
To understand this concept we must remember what we are about.
And what we are not.
We must choose.
Between this truth and that lie lies our drama, for when two realities clash, a tragedy is born.
The conflict between the have's and the have-not's.
The heart and the brain.
The master and the apprentice.
The old and the new.
And down the road that is our goal, we understand that we have to look deeper if we are to learn anything at all.
On our way in rediscovering our soul's true dream, finding our inner Superman, we meet some weird Jungian archetypes. Heroes, villains, threshold guardians, tricksters and mentors. We begin as apprentices and end as mentors.
Edgar Allan Poe spoke of reality being a dream within a dream. As far as Plato goes, his dreamers were dwellers in a cave seeing only the shadows of the real world reflecting on the cave walls.
Alice tumbles into Wonderland and discovers a new reality, filled to the brim with strange creatures, Lewis Carroll her threshold guardian of the parallel worlds.
In the end, her soul takes her back to her own beginning.
In Michael Ende's book about "The Never-Ending Story", Bastian begins his journey as a lonely outsider, only his own imagination as a guiding light, but he understands in the end that his inner life is the key to his own eternity.
The dream characters mirroring Dorothy's real friends in "The Wizard of Oz", Sarah's quest to find her lost brother inside the "Labyrinth", Anakin Skywalker's journey from innocence to innocence through supreme darkness in George Lucas "Star Wars", all of these stories give us some very deep hints of what we are dealing with here. These characters are us and their stories are the lives we make up in the true sense of the word. We invent ourselves new every day.
We might not be meeting C-3PO, Fuchur the Dragon or The Tin Man on our journeys, but we deal with diversity all the time.
The girl who grew up in a foster home, who never knew love, experienced strange people there, the stern nun that hit her or the aggressive tutor that screamed at her as she ran down the hallway. They certainly appeared to her as terrifying as Darth Vader or as weird as The Goblin King, their angry whips as threatening as light sabres.
When she fell in love for the first time, as a teenager, it really was to her as if she were Dorothy wandering down the yellow brick road toward Oz.
The boy who grew up in an artistic home, marrying a down-to-earth girl, most certainly felt as if he was walking into the cantina of Mos Eisley, seeing all these strange characters (Uncle Frank the famous proverbial devil by the Cantina bar on Tattooine and Aunt Jacqueline very much like Han Solo's adversary Greedo).
Meeting the rough and tumble countryside relatives of his girl was walking into totally new territory, just like Luke walked into the new world of the Empire.
The relatives saw their son-in-law's fear, his shaking hands the first few years, the father-in-law thinking he had to explain to him where everything was after five years in the house, although he tried to hide his fear with playacting a fake joie de vivre. His terror at times rose to Han Solo's heights, before he was frozen to be taken to Jabba the Mafia boss. His brother-in-law Mike certainly was as big as Jabba. Our hero felt like Luke Skywalker receiving his medal in The Throne Room when he finally rose to enough strength to keep up with his new family.
Life is our own Oz, strange at times and unexpexted, weird and sometimes strangely satisfying. It does not mean Oz is easy or that we should choose pain to learn. We can learn from joy or love or hope or passion. Our aim is harmony. For any highly sensitive person that has experienced hardship, a strange dependancy on difficult times can arise, one that makes us think we have to go through this shit and don't think we are worth the harmony. So we beat ourselves up to satisfy that inner critic so close to a movie villain.
We all have our inner Darth Vader that demands we follow his commands ... or else. Anthony Hopkins told a reporter in an interview how, during a sexy love scene in his younger years, his inner critic mumbled how despicable he was thinking that he was sexy.
If we search deep enough, we will find the first culprit we never passed. He might be our stern school teacher that screamed at us to be quiet when we were seven. He might be the angry father that terrorized us when we didn't do what we said or the slimey fake friend that abused us ruthlessly. He is our threshold guardian, our villain.
But remember that Darth Vader wore a mask not only because of his wounds but also because he was afraid to show us his true face.
Adolf Hitler was no different than Darth. Adolf was terrified of the dentist. So, if you have found out who your inner Lord Vader is, ask yourself why he has such a stronghold over you. The question is why he wants you to follow his commands and why you are afraid that his threats are real. Did someone threaten you with punishment if you did not follow suit? The only power Darth had was that Luke believed Darth had the power. So who do you give your power to? And why?
For what you see, you see, is definitely not what you get. Never ever. Often, human beings mistake what they see for something else than it is because they assume the other person is just a version of them.
The frustration of realizing and not accepting that they are deeply wrong is the foundation of every war, every divorce and every conflict. So, ultimately, we are here to work on our tolerance.
How many times have you said this?
"The story of my life!"
Chances are that you mean the things that keep going on wrong in your life. But, because life is a two-way-street, you are involved in this. What you are experiencing is karma and you have probably been here before to try to solve this. Karma is not necessarily you having done bad stuff. It could be you being unwillingly sucked into situations you don't want to be in. A victim/victimizer-kind-of-syndrome. To find out why this is happening is the goal.
Regardless of who you meet, you are experiencing snipbits of other people's lives, sentences from long stories.
And you know from experience that judging a story by one quote from it is a bad idea. So why do we do that with people?
What you mistake for fear might be anger.
What you mistake for joy might be masked frustration.
Your brain will lie to you in its interpretation of things.
You gut will tell you the truth.
A person constantly subjected to mobbing and abuse will be automatically sceptical toward people, possibly even overly serious and unable to be carefree, caught in a hamster wheel only she can take herself out of.
A person that has always been on the other side - either literally never experiencing being the victim or fighting back in order to avoid it - will not be able to understand anyone so pushed down it has been impossible to defend herself. Most probably, the victimizer doesn't care. And ignorance is evil, as Zaius spoke in "Planet of the Apes".
These two people are two sides of one coin.
Humility and ruthlessness. Love and fear. Light and darkness. Tenderness and ignorance. Hot and cold. Hard and soft. The soft one has to regain power. The hard one has to find the soft core. If they're lucky, they will meet in the middle.
The truth is that the softest, most tender and fragile part of you is your eternity, just like in the stories we tell. The spirit that survives death. What you remember in the long run. Your inner woman is your soul's centre, regardless of what gender you are. She is the mother we all spring from and out of and all positive change comes from her, which is why women are praised so highly in art. In paintings. In music. In poetry. In stories. We know that our feminine side is our soul, the Mary Magdalene that inspired Jesus, but the male side of us, society, is the part of us that demand we be strong and take responsibility in the world.
The Indiana Jones that protects our inner Willie Scott.
The James Bond to protect our inner Stacey Sutton.
The Superman to protect our inner Lois Lane.
But the hero will fall if he does not remember that his inner heroine's fragility is his true core. If he loses his humility, he loses his focus. That light is his strongest light.
The little lit match that lights up the entire football stadium.
Honor your mothers and wives like Jack Dawson honored Rose, for it is from them that our life springs. A society that treats its women well can only prosper. That is the reason why Yin, the female force, is mentioned first in our puzzle Yin and Yang.
All stories spring from this one truth: the hard becoming soft. Fear becoming love. Society becoming spirit.
The truth lies deeper.
True invention is far more than just fantasy and reality is never ever what we think. It's what we feel. And that feeling defies any categorization.
We tend to part reality into categories, don't we? But 95 % of what we are is subconscious and 100 % of reality is energy: the electromagnetic emission of 6,84 billion global smartphones constitute only a tiny percentage of the total emission. Our iris can furthermore perceive only 0,035 % of observable light. That is partly why there is extensive research into remote viewing and telekinesis. Scientists are now agreeing that energy is everything and reality an illusion. PSI talented people might have abilities to sense vibrations few others sense. The bottom line is that the spiritual world might be the most real thing of all.
If you have memories of past lives, trust them.
They are real memories.
"Face reality," the father tells his son.
The son should answer: "Whose reality? Yours or mine?"
To quote author Blerian Limani, soul is everything. Without it, we are empty shells. In fact, we are now getting that even the shells are just energy. Tiny blots of extremely strong vibration.
Like the tiny plant that grows into a magnifiscent tree if we let it, it does so because of its energy. Sting sang about how fragile we are. But this fragility is our strongest side.
The hippies were right when they urged us to make love, not war. A kiss and a hug is much better than a slap and a scream.
So we, humanity, are like Alice just having entered Wonderland and realizing that nothing is what it seems, our fears merely the dew drops blowing in the scarlet wind.
There are two worlds: the material one represented by the brain. It's namesake is society. The second one is the spiritual world. It is always here and now and is represented by the heart. What we are finding out is that they are two sides of the same coin. Every story ever told is about you, the heroine of the heart, going into the unknown territory of the brain and coming back with wisdom.
So, in actual fact, we are Neo and it is our choice what pill we want to swallow. The pill of ignorance or the pill of knowledge. We are not facing robots beyond our society's illusion, but the spiritual truth. The sheer magnifiscent size of our souls.
We take this form we call human in order to learn something.
If we take everything for granted that we see around us, never looking beyond what our senses can perceive, that sentence will at first sound strange. But the closer we dive beyond what we call reality, the more self-evident does it become that there is way, way, way more to life than meets the eye.
The key lies inside what we feel, how and why we feel what we feel, what triggers what we feel and how long it lasts or how easily we can let go of that what we feel, what we react to emotionally and what emotions trigger what behavior in us. Everything we do is determined by our emotional disposition and what we have taken on or let go of. It decides if we are open or closed, trust or mistrust, love or fear. Just like Sam learned in "Ghost", love is what we bring with us.
What we fear and love is instrumental to our fate.
A person that has found peace within will be peace within and the vibrations will be noticable to everyone around. For in reality, there are no borders between us. We are like the cells of our body that make us up. Likewise, we are cells in the conscious, energetic "body" of the universe we have given names throughout our history. Our feelings are our radar that show our way through reality.
Our trauma is the key to our healing. But analyzing the trauma intellectually is like driving through the night without your headlights on. Your brain records the information. Your soul feels it.
If we know that the body totally reforms itself every seven years, not one cell or particle remaining the same one, adding the fact that atoms and particles only are vibrational matterless energies anyway, we might get the hint of what's really real. Past life memory is stored in your soul's "iCloud", to formulate an analogy.
If energy never dies, and we can prove scientifically that it doesn't, then our energy has stored every life you've ever had inside your system. Your larger soul - angels you are connected to, souls of people you've lived with before and have loved in previous lives - will emotionally convey to you where and what you were through what places, professions, genders and cultures you are drawn to in this life.
Like that American boy, you might be drawn to the Pacific Ocean and World War II airplanes because your plane was shot down sometime in the early 1940s. Like that Sri Lankan girl, you might remember life in a far off Indian village where you lived as a male courier.
Like me, you might remember details of lives as a man in 18th century France and as a woman in 19th century England. It's taken me my whole life to understand one of, if not the, key core karmic issue my soul set out to solve in this life.
Dealing with manipulation.
Which means dealing with people trying to push their agenda or opinion on me.
Which means people seeing me for who I am and not who they want me to be. Ultimately, it is what you bring with you, but the real challenge is admitting that.
This kind of thing, people pushing their agenda or version of me on me, has been going on all my life. I had no idea why this was happening and why it confused me so much. Not even starting to remember my previous lives helped me make the connection. Once I had the details settled, I started doing my detective work.
I was murdered twice because of it, mainly because I was pushed into corners I did not want to be in. It got so far that I sometimes totally lost track of who I was. I knew even as a child, way before my spiritual awakening, that there was a problem. My life revealed the constellation bit by bit, very much like a star sign completes the full picture of a Virgin or a Big Dipper. Life makes you fathom the stardust we are. When we look up at the sky on a clear night, we see the moon and the one evening star reminding us of our truth. When the clouds darken the night, we must remember the heavenly bodies are still there in the great beyond so close.
I think if I known as a juvenile what I know now, I would have gone crazy. I even was in London in 1997 close to the place where I was murdered and I had no idea why I was so confused. Only later did I understand what was happening.
My brain really has not known what to do with the information. Especially remembering the room I died in as a 19th century woman is a daunting prospect. It blows me away. But it is an extraordinary gift. It is my failsafe proof of eternity. My biggest proof, however, are the feelings I have that are linked to my memories. I see the room where I lived in the 1880s and I realize what I felt about it, looking at that picture night after night and crying and singing myself to sleep.
Past life recollection is also a two-sided coin.
Realizing you have a karmic issue that has been going on for many lives can drive you insane. It's amazing to know, though, that you are eternal. No matter how many people you share it with, though, it is still your job to solve it. That is your male side. The James Bond to protect the damsel in distress. Does your male side want to be James Bond or a Jack the Ripper?
No one can choose this for you.
It makes total sense for a soul to recall its past life if it needs to. Chances are that the soul has made the same mistakes over and over and needs to go back to learn to change and transform. But untieing the knots between the influences between this life and my previous ones has been immensely hard work.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of reflection.
Be your own inner Yoda. He spoke of answers coming to you when you are passive.
If we do not ask ourselves why we do what we do, why we react the way we react, why we make the mistakes we make, we are doomed to keep making the same mistakes over and over. So it is good to look at the pain. Dig into the feeling. The thumb print of eternity. And I have news for you. You are protected and so are your loved ones. So don't fear it.
We're back at the depth of life like the visitors gazing at the magic alien world in the film "Avatar". What many people are deliberately escaping is depth. Once you start asking one question, it opens up a huge world of answers. And the silence is filled with answers.
Today, it has become easier and more difficult to take the deep road due to how easily you get distracted. Like Nicholas van Orton in "The Game", modern life daunts us and money in the long run is not the answer.
What was absolutely natural for people in ancient times has now become remote. That is much due to social conditioning. We are no longer born into and with nature, like we should be, born in nature, living in nature, dying in nature, but into a very well-oiled but sometimes "hiccuping" machine called society that pretends it knows everything and is everything. All we have to do to challenge this idea, however, is to inspect society itself. Or should I say "societies"?
For there is no such thing as one society.
We even differ in our opinions about what society is at all, what it can be or what functions it should have. We never question the society we live in and thereby forget some important factors. What are taken for absolute truths are oral contracts established through time and now taken for granted. In a neighboring country, other contracts apply. Democracy is definitely not democracy. Or was it democracy when Cecil Rhodes divided up Africa into countries by his desk in Oxford, literally enclosing age old enemies into states, ensuring centuries of war? To what end? For democracy? Is that Christian democracy? Conquistadors beheading indigenous peoples to promote the spread of Christianity? Would Jesus have done the same? No? Why? Ask uncomfortable questions.
We take certain things for granted until we start digging, playing devil's advocate - or should I say angel's advocate? - which is when we question everything we take for granted. This question has absolutely nothing to do with conspiracy theories or supposed political aims to manipulate the world. It's a simple fact that things are always different than they seem. People do take the easy way out, living as they always have, wanting to remain rich, closing their eyes to poverty.
Chances are that the rich simply want to remain rich and not control you, which does not mean that this is all they are about.
"My Dad thought the same way. Why should I be different?"
Because the only way to change the world is to question it and then change yourself. Not make yourself dependent on other people's behavior to change.
So don't take everything that society serves you unreflected. Know this: you are an eternal being living in a body. Your soul will never die because you were never born. You have always existed.
Reality is what you make it.
Stay focused.
This healthy scepticism is not limited to mere democracy or religion or anything for that matter.
It is easy and misleading to believe any of that works the same way everywhere.
We do not have to walk very far away from our front door to realize that the perspectives are so universally different from person to person that it probably will or already does flabbergast you. Even from family member to family member, the differences can be so humongous that the only way to describe it is people living in totally different worlds. Different universes, even. But that is why we are here. To connect worlds. Or universes. To reconcile the irreconcilable. To achieve harmony where no harmony was thought possible.
But that is no easy task.
It is like running uphill against the wind.
It takes perseverance and ruthless honesty.
Take, for instance, one of my pet subjects.
The French Revolution.
An old king named Louis XV is guilty of massive overspending, literally driving his country France into total bancruptcy. To save the crown, Louis XV is not blamed, but a political liason is suggested, marrying the young crown prince to a princess from the century-long hated rival of Austria. When Grandpa Louis XV dies, the teenagers, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, are way too unprepared for the business of running the country.
They're kids. 9th graders. Zits and puberty, confusion and hormones.
The new young king is ridiculed for his almost autistic shyness, even by his own jealous brother Stanislaus, who laughs at his brother Louis when he falls down while dancing at a reception.
The young king's fear of women is not a big help either. When the intrigue-loving court literally insist on being spectators to royal copulation, the king's already very prominent impotency reaches to new heights. Imagine being afraid of women and impotent and having people watch you not being able to perform in bed. Experiencing that in private is bad enough.
As a result, the King withdraws into seclusion and the new Queen is blamed for the lack of children. The usually rather frilly teenager Queen is never alone, now contradicting strict protocols of corsets and constant compulsive publicity, demanding occasional peace and solitude. Outside of the palace, the population misinterprets the situation, thinking the Austrian Queen is a lesbian who hates children. This enormous pressure of feeling lonely and hated by everyone, I call it the "Princess Diana-Syndrome", almost ensures the firstborn child, a miracle anyway, to be a sickly disabled daughter, which causes the population to hate the Queen even more.
No one tells the population that the royal couple are helping the farmers, becoming good foreign politicians and even helping the poor. They are blamed for very old problems. Sentences she never uttered, quotes from a popular book by Rousseau the Queen is reading, "let them eat cake", are put in her mouth. Some people are by now so adamant to find anyone to blame for France's catastrophic situation that they invent a scandal, literally creating the fake news of a purchased necklace the Queen categorically refused to buy because she considered it immoral.
The bad situation of lies being mistaken for truths now gets worse. After a state tribunal with a new delegation ends in catastrophe, one of the royal children dies and they withdraw to mourn, locking the doors. This is taken as a provocation against the tribunal and the shit, as they say, hits the fan. On July 14th, the Bastille is stormed. The insecure king is advised to negotiate and speak with the invaders, but he withdraws his troops. This is taken as another provocation. The bloodiest revolution in history is led by a leadership that drink champagne, dine and dance in the same palaces where the royal couple used to dine. A decade later, after 90,000 executed people, the whole debacle turns into a useless endeavor when a young officer named Napoleon crowns himself emperor. What do the history books say? Farmers with pitchforks overthrew a Queen that told the people to eat cake. There are historians that claim the French Revolution set new standards for cruelty in the world. Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves if the Second World War would have possible without it. If you believe in the eternal spirit and reincarnation as I do, you might agree that many souls are still healing their experiences there, if we believe souls incarnate in chronological fashion.
Fake news became real news.
That whole deal is a huge version of something we do all the time. Misunderstand each other.
Every country has not only its own laws and rules and infrastructure, but also its unwritten laws and rules and infrastructure. These subconscious rules are the foundation. The programming. The things everyone takes for granted. The things that if you challenge them you will suffer social disgrace. The core. The collective consciousness. Any member of any society of your choice has peer pressure to uphold the attitudes of what the society preaches. Bloodletting and witchcraft hunting were aged respected practices, but were the barbaric hunts for communists in the U.S. so much better? What is humanity doing today that is barbaric? Are we really evolved?
We need not go so far.
What are your rules and regulations? Have you taken over other people's beliefs because you were expected to? What is your Never-Ending Story? Where is your place in Fantasia? What's your evolution? Where would your soul rather be? With the creative, peaceful, centuries old Ba'ku in Star Trek: Insurrection or with the destructive aliens of the nearby moon in "Alien"?
"Between soul and sacrifice beats the heart of civilization."
That is a quote from the Sci-Fi series Orville.
Is that correct?
You be the judge.
Differences are necessary.
Without them, we will never know where we stand.
But we have to stand our own ground, adding your piece to the puzzle. Your piece is instrumental to the big picture.
Sweden, for instance, proposes a sociological colloquial familiarity and rigorous equality, so much so that the exact monthly wages of the ruling politicians are published regularly to the penny in the evening press.
When you meet a Swede, the first question you get is "What's your name?" and "Where are you from?". "What's your profession?" or "What is your job?" are sometimes considered rude questions.
Germany, on the other hand, takes these questions for granted. The first thing you ask a person is what they do for a living.
Put an extrovert crazy Korean in an introvert Japanese subway and you may have a problem. Or maybe you don't.
Put a German with a bulldozer attitude in a equalized
Swedish tourist location and you will most certainly get more than one laugh. Maybe you will get a cascade of guffaws. Or tolerance. That will maybe be up to you.
"Oh, my God!These Germans!"
"Oh, my God! These Swedes!"
"Oh, my God! These men!"
"Oh, my God! These women!"
"Oh, my God! These rich people!"
"Oh, my God! Those asocial people!"
Just fill in the country or religion or group or gender of choice. You noticing something? Any conflict issue has a very high society factor. A factor of social conditioning.
Life is constantly requiring for you to be tolerant.
Say a macho walks into a bus and finds two frilly girls talking loudly about make-up. They chitter and giggle about girly stuff. He rolls with his eyes and wishes they would shut up. His attitude is a reaction to a feeling, nothing more. Actually, it's a response to an energy that is coming from the two girls. Happiness. Being happy about sharing their thoughts about make-up and hairstyles. He judges them according to their appearance and what they are talking about and what he thinks that means to them. He disagrees. But what it means to him is not what it means to them. He mistakes his feeling for theirs.
"Oh, no," he groans in his head, "this isn't supposed to be. Everyone should be like me. Tough and hard. Make-up is stupid. If they are happy about that stuff, they can't be taken seriously."
It is founded on a presumption he was taught.
Frilly girls are silly.
Sharon Stone has an IQ of 150, but is not taken seriously everywhere because she happens to be a pretty blonde.
All the macho would have to do is to inspect that feeling for validity. Not avoid it, but concentrate on it.
Okay, so the girls in the bus are happy about make-up. But is that stupid? Why? And he is perceiving one moment of two lives. One sentence in two stories. They might be university students studying for their Master's Degree in Science, working part time selling doing translations from English to French.
One of them might be the daughter of a single Mom who's been fighting to stay afloat for the past decade. The other was mobbed and molested in school and has found help in the friendship with her bestie. They have sworn to forget about life and talk about frilly girl stuff at least once a week, just to gather some energy. But they are misunderstood because they happen to be pretty women. Lucky for them they did not rule France in 1789.
See how serious this is?
See how important it is to look deeper into something before judging someone according to what you think is true? And no matter what "everyone says is true" or you think is "obvious". Forrest Gump may not have had Sharon Stone's okay, but his heart was true and that should be enough for everyone.
Another example: two dozen opera singers, all with college degrees in classical singing, work in an opera chorus. They all live opera, love opera and see it as the highest form of culture. In comes a singer who has sung all kinds of music. Everything from musical theater to rock and roll, opera and art songs. He is a theater kid who grew up on stage. Consequently, his education is formally informal and he makes no difference between music styles. How do you think that new singer will be perceived in that surrounding? When he speaks of rock concerts he does on the side, the reaction might be a sceptical one, the boss maybe making sure he does not get too many roles, remarking that his stage performance the other night was "too musical theater". The question is if the critique is founded on opinion or truth.
We all misunderstand each other and our intentions. It's like we're in the crossfire between our inner being and the sociological construction we're supposed to be. OCD, autism and schizophrenia are in my view confused conflicts between heart and mind, sociological inner wars where the sufferers cannot handle past contradictions, unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, overestimating the effects of their thoughts. It's as if the mentioned macho was blasted into a huge inner war over the two frilly girls. Like diabetes, neurosis is a war wound of modern society. Did it start during the French Revolution?
We are used to one thing and go bananas when confronted with something that contradicts that.
We are impatient and want a solution fast, because we still live in the illusion that we have to panic or else.
But the universe is patient.
I would even include a high "But"-factor. We want to hold on to our intolerance. It is a way out. It is a quick solution. We need someone to blame. If we have that, we don't have to think for ourselves or take responsibility for our actions.
"Ah, she is to blame," we think. "Problem solved."
Just eliminate that other group and, hey, we think we've solved our problem.
The crucades, the religious wars, the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, you name the conflict, they are just big versions of intolerance issues that begin with everyone of us individually. In our daily lives. Not even outside our homes. Begin when you wake up. Don't wait for other people to be tolerant.
After "These ... (fill in the blanks)" most of the time we either get "They're all the same!" or "They're all idiots!"
Now, considering that
What we take for granted is totally weird for someone else. The polite Swede, the impolite German, the introvert Japanese, the extrovert Korean, the overly enthusiastic American, the charmingly intoxicated Frenchman, the screaming Italian, the comfortable Austrian, the delightful Irishman. Put all of them in a room together and you will have quite a party, worthy of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" or "My Big Fat Greek Wedding".
But all this diversity can also conjure up conflict. Generally, it is up to us if we can bridge our own insecurity.
But we are actually souls living inside bodies simply looking out of a pair of eyes. We recall our past lives and life changes. Your story is suddenly way longer. You are no longer just this person you are now. Before that, you were someone else. A poor woman that desperately tried to maintain her dignity in spite of hideous circumstances. Or an aristocrat caught between Schylla and Charybdis. A rock and a hard place.
You are an eternal soul. God knows where that ends. Were you once a dinosaur?
Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice in Wonderland is called "Through the Looking Glass". If we realize the world is our mirror and we can walk through it, we have already won the battle. Freddie Krueger was told in one of the sequels to his atrocities that "evil shall see itself and it shall die". Or shall I say transform? Atrocities are masks of rage hiding bottomless fear of change.
So find your inner Darth and smile at him. I think the guy just needs a hug.
There is another way to deal with eternity: counting your stories. Choosing what stories suit you. Realizing the stories you like signify who you want to be. And that is what really counts.
Counting your blessings. Writing them down every day. Stopping regularly when you have the time just to enjoy nature, look at a bird, smell a flower, feel the wind on your face, enjoy the warmth of the sun. Putting away your smartphone for a bit. Giving yourself a break. If you say you don't have time for that, you are misunderstanding the whole concept. These things don't take time. They are a matter of perspective.
You could be living in a dream.
You could be trying to see the lights.
You could be kissing the sky.
You could be making love to your wife.
You could be looking at a movie with your daughter, laughing.
You could be climbing a mountain, singing a song or just be smelling the roses.
You could just be enjoying life instead of wondering what it all means.
"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make" were the last recorded words of The Beatles.
It is said that a soul realizes before physical death, before transcending to the next world, that all of it didn't matter, that it was way less dramatic than she thought. That all that mattered was love or the search for love. Lightheartedness mingled with deep love is the core of eternity.
Back in 2022, I strolled around the garden of the Petit Trianon, where I walked with the Queen of France Marie Antoinette in another body 235 years earlier. I cried, because I remembered it so clearly. And it was a revelation.
"Love one another." - Yeshua
Create your own story, just like your story creates you.
That is my story.
What's yours?
Maybe you could be saying:
Welcome to Wonderland!
Welcome to Wonderland(Charles E.J. Moulton)
Welcome to Wonderland
- An Article by Charles E.J. Moulton
***
"You take the blue pill... the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
- Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in
"The Matrix" (1999)
***
Our lives are the stories we invent.
The stories we invent are our lives.
And when we tell a story, we remember our own lives.
The best lives also make the best stories and the best stories inspire the best lives. For all the world is a stage and the duality is our synopsis. The lady of the manor is the actual winner of every story. For in the end we find the beginning and the heart of any story. Within the heart, we find love.
This is our hypothesis.
To understand this concept we must remember what we are about.
And what we are not.
We must choose.
Between this truth and that lie lies our drama, for when two realities clash, a tragedy is born.
The conflict between the have's and the have-not's.
The heart and the brain.
The master and the apprentice.
The old and the new.
And down the road that is our goal, we understand that we have to look deeper if we are to learn anything at all.
On our way in rediscovering our soul's true dream, finding our inner Superman, we meet some weird Jungian archetypes. Heroes, villains, threshold guardians, tricksters and mentors. We begin as apprentices and end as mentors.
Edgar Allan Poe spoke of reality being a dream within a dream. As far as Plato goes, his dreamers were dwellers in a cave seeing only the shadows of the real world reflecting on the cave walls.
Alice tumbles into Wonderland and discovers a new reality, filled to the brim with strange creatures, Lewis Carroll her threshold guardian of the parallel worlds.
In the end, her soul takes her back to her own beginning.
In Michael Ende's book about "The Never-Ending Story", Bastian begins his journey as a lonely outsider, only his own imagination as a guiding light, but he understands in the end that his inner life is the key to his own eternity.
The dream characters mirroring Dorothy's real friends in "The Wizard of Oz", Sarah's quest to find her lost brother inside the "Labyrinth", Anakin Skywalker's journey from innocence to innocence through supreme darkness in George Lucas "Star Wars", all of these stories give us some very deep hints of what we are dealing with here. These characters are us and their stories are the lives we make up in the true sense of the word. We invent ourselves new every day.
We might not be meeting C-3PO, Fuchur the Dragon or The Tin Man on our journeys, but we deal with diversity all the time.
The girl who grew up in a foster home, who never knew love, experienced strange people there, the stern nun that hit her or the aggressive tutor that screamed at her as she ran down the hallway. They certainly appeared to her as terrifying as Darth Vader or as weird as The Goblin King, their angry whips as threatening as light sabres.
When she fell in love for the first time, as a teenager, it really was to her as if she were Dorothy wandering down the yellow brick road toward Oz.
The boy who grew up in an artistic home, marrying a down-to-earth girl, most certainly felt as if he was walking into the cantina of Mos Eisley, seeing all these strange characters (Uncle Frank the famous proverbial devil by the Cantina bar on Tattooine and Aunt Jacqueline very much like Han Solo's adversary Greedo).
Meeting the rough and tumble countryside relatives of his girl was walking into totally new territory, just like Luke walked into the new world of the Empire.
The relatives saw their son-in-law's fear, his shaking hands the first few years, the father-in-law thinking he had to explain to him where everything was after five years in the house, although he tried to hide his fear with playacting a fake joie de vivre. His terror at times rose to Han Solo's heights, before he was frozen to be taken to Jabba the Mafia boss. His brother-in-law Mike certainly was as big as Jabba. Our hero felt like Luke Skywalker receiving his medal in The Throne Room when he finally rose to enough strength to keep up with his new family.
Life is our own Oz, strange at times and unexpexted, weird and sometimes strangely satisfying. It does not mean Oz is easy or that we should choose pain to learn. We can learn from joy or love or hope or passion. Our aim is harmony. For any highly sensitive person that has experienced hardship, a strange dependancy on difficult times can arise, one that makes us think we have to go through this shit and don't think we are worth the harmony. So we beat ourselves up to satisfy that inner critic so close to a movie villain.
We all have our inner Darth Vader that demands we follow his commands ... or else. Anthony Hopkins told a reporter in an interview how, during a sexy love scene in his younger years, his inner critic mumbled how despicable he was thinking that he was sexy.
If we search deep enough, we will find the first culprit we never passed. He might be our stern school teacher that screamed at us to be quiet when we were seven. He might be the angry father that terrorized us when we didn't do what we said or the slimey fake friend that abused us ruthlessly. He is our threshold guardian, our villain.
But remember that Darth Vader wore a mask not only because of his wounds but also because he was afraid to show us his true face.
Adolf Hitler was no different than Darth. Adolf was terrified of the dentist. So, if you have found out who your inner Lord Vader is, ask yourself why he has such a stronghold over you. The question is why he wants you to follow his commands and why you are afraid that his threats are real. Did someone threaten you with punishment if you did not follow suit? The only power Darth had was that Luke believed Darth had the power. So who do you give your power to? And why?
For what you see, you see, is definitely not what you get. Never ever. Often, human beings mistake what they see for something else than it is because they assume the other person is just a version of them.
The frustration of realizing and not accepting that they are deeply wrong is the foundation of every war, every divorce and every conflict. So, ultimately, we are here to work on our tolerance.
How many times have you said this?
"The story of my life!"
Chances are that you mean the things that keep going on wrong in your life. But, because life is a two-way-street, you are involved in this. What you are experiencing is karma and you have probably been here before to try to solve this. Karma is not necessarily you having done bad stuff. It could be you being unwillingly sucked into situations you don't want to be in. A victim/victimizer-kind-of-syndrome. To find out why this is happening is the goal.
Regardless of who you meet, you are experiencing snipbits of other people's lives, sentences from long stories.
And you know from experience that judging a story by one quote from it is a bad idea. So why do we do that with people?
What you mistake for fear might be anger.
What you mistake for joy might be masked frustration.
Your brain will lie to you in its interpretation of things.
You gut will tell you the truth.
A person constantly subjected to mobbing and abuse will be automatically sceptical toward people, possibly even overly serious and unable to be carefree, caught in a hamster wheel only she can take herself out of.
A person that has always been on the other side - either literally never experiencing being the victim or fighting back in order to avoid it - will not be able to understand anyone so pushed down it has been impossible to defend herself. Most probably, the victimizer doesn't care. And ignorance is evil, as Zaius spoke in "Planet of the Apes".
These two people are two sides of one coin.
Humility and ruthlessness. Love and fear. Light and darkness. Tenderness and ignorance. Hot and cold. Hard and soft. The soft one has to regain power. The hard one has to find the soft core. If they're lucky, they will meet in the middle.
The truth is that the softest, most tender and fragile part of you is your eternity, just like in the stories we tell. The spirit that survives death. What you remember in the long run. Your inner woman is your soul's centre, regardless of what gender you are. She is the mother we all spring from and out of and all positive change comes from her, which is why women are praised so highly in art. In paintings. In music. In poetry. In stories. We know that our feminine side is our soul, the Mary Magdalene that inspired Jesus, but the male side of us, society, is the part of us that demand we be strong and take responsibility in the world.
The Indiana Jones that protects our inner Willie Scott.
The James Bond to protect our inner Stacey Sutton.
The Superman to protect our inner Lois Lane.
But the hero will fall if he does not remember that his inner heroine's fragility is his true core. If he loses his humility, he loses his focus. That light is his strongest light.
The little lit match that lights up the entire football stadium.
Honor your mothers and wives like Jack Dawson honored Rose, for it is from them that our life springs. A society that treats its women well can only prosper. That is the reason why Yin, the female force, is mentioned first in our puzzle Yin and Yang.
All stories spring from this one truth: the hard becoming soft. Fear becoming love. Society becoming spirit.
The truth lies deeper.
True invention is far more than just fantasy and reality is never ever what we think. It's what we feel. And that feeling defies any categorization.
We tend to part reality into categories, don't we? But 95 % of what we are is subconscious and 100 % of reality is energy: the electromagnetic emission of 6,84 billion global smartphones constitute only a tiny percentage of the total emission. Our iris can furthermore perceive only 0,035 % of observable light. That is partly why there is extensive research into remote viewing and telekinesis. Scientists are now agreeing that energy is everything and reality an illusion. PSI talented people might have abilities to sense vibrations few others sense. The bottom line is that the spiritual world might be the most real thing of all.
If you have memories of past lives, trust them.
They are real memories.
"Face reality," the father tells his son.
The son should answer: "Whose reality? Yours or mine?"
To quote author Blerian Limani, soul is everything. Without it, we are empty shells. In fact, we are now getting that even the shells are just energy. Tiny blots of extremely strong vibration.
Like the tiny plant that grows into a magnifiscent tree if we let it, it does so because of its energy. Sting sang about how fragile we are. But this fragility is our strongest side.
The hippies were right when they urged us to make love, not war. A kiss and a hug is much better than a slap and a scream.
So we, humanity, are like Alice just having entered Wonderland and realizing that nothing is what it seems, our fears merely the dew drops blowing in the scarlet wind.
There are two worlds: the material one represented by the brain. It's namesake is society. The second one is the spiritual world. It is always here and now and is represented by the heart. What we are finding out is that they are two sides of the same coin. Every story ever told is about you, the heroine of the heart, going into the unknown territory of the brain and coming back with wisdom.
So, in actual fact, we are Neo and it is our choice what pill we want to swallow. The pill of ignorance or the pill of knowledge. We are not facing robots beyond our society's illusion, but the spiritual truth. The sheer magnifiscent size of our souls.
We take this form we call human in order to learn something.
If we take everything for granted that we see around us, never looking beyond what our senses can perceive, that sentence will at first sound strange. But the closer we dive beyond what we call reality, the more self-evident does it become that there is way, way, way more to life than meets the eye.
The key lies inside what we feel, how and why we feel what we feel, what triggers what we feel and how long it lasts or how easily we can let go of that what we feel, what we react to emotionally and what emotions trigger what behavior in us. Everything we do is determined by our emotional disposition and what we have taken on or let go of. It decides if we are open or closed, trust or mistrust, love or fear. Just like Sam learned in "Ghost", love is what we bring with us.
What we fear and love is instrumental to our fate.
A person that has found peace within will be peace within and the vibrations will be noticable to everyone around. For in reality, there are no borders between us. We are like the cells of our body that make us up. Likewise, we are cells in the conscious, energetic "body" of the universe we have given names throughout our history. Our feelings are our radar that show our way through reality.
Our trauma is the key to our healing. But analyzing the trauma intellectually is like driving through the night without your headlights on. Your brain records the information. Your soul feels it.
If we know that the body totally reforms itself every seven years, not one cell or particle remaining the same one, adding the fact that atoms and particles only are vibrational matterless energies anyway, we might get the hint of what's really real. Past life memory is stored in your soul's "iCloud", to formulate an analogy.
If energy never dies, and we can prove scientifically that it doesn't, then our energy has stored every life you've ever had inside your system. Your larger soul - angels you are connected to, souls of people you've lived with before and have loved in previous lives - will emotionally convey to you where and what you were through what places, professions, genders and cultures you are drawn to in this life.
Like that American boy, you might be drawn to the Pacific Ocean and World War II airplanes because your plane was shot down sometime in the early 1940s. Like that Sri Lankan girl, you might remember life in a far off Indian village where you lived as a male courier.
Like me, you might remember details of lives as a man in 18th century France and as a woman in 19th century England. It's taken me my whole life to understand one of, if not the, key core karmic issue my soul set out to solve in this life.
Dealing with manipulation.
Which means dealing with people trying to push their agenda or opinion on me.
Which means people seeing me for who I am and not who they want me to be. Ultimately, it is what you bring with you, but the real challenge is admitting that.
This kind of thing, people pushing their agenda or version of me on me, has been going on all my life. I had no idea why this was happening and why it confused me so much. Not even starting to remember my previous lives helped me make the connection. Once I had the details settled, I started doing my detective work.
I was murdered twice because of it, mainly because I was pushed into corners I did not want to be in. It got so far that I sometimes totally lost track of who I was. I knew even as a child, way before my spiritual awakening, that there was a problem. My life revealed the constellation bit by bit, very much like a star sign completes the full picture of a Virgin or a Big Dipper. Life makes you fathom the stardust we are. When we look up at the sky on a clear night, we see the moon and the one evening star reminding us of our truth. When the clouds darken the night, we must remember the heavenly bodies are still there in the great beyond so close.
I think if I known as a juvenile what I know now, I would have gone crazy. I even was in London in 1997 close to the place where I was murdered and I had no idea why I was so confused. Only later did I understand what was happening.
My brain really has not known what to do with the information. Especially remembering the room I died in as a 19th century woman is a daunting prospect. It blows me away. But it is an extraordinary gift. It is my failsafe proof of eternity. My biggest proof, however, are the feelings I have that are linked to my memories. I see the room where I lived in the 1880s and I realize what I felt about it, looking at that picture night after night and crying and singing myself to sleep.
Past life recollection is also a two-sided coin.
Realizing you have a karmic issue that has been going on for many lives can drive you insane. It's amazing to know, though, that you are eternal. No matter how many people you share it with, though, it is still your job to solve it. That is your male side. The James Bond to protect the damsel in distress. Does your male side want to be James Bond or a Jack the Ripper?
No one can choose this for you.
It makes total sense for a soul to recall its past life if it needs to. Chances are that the soul has made the same mistakes over and over and needs to go back to learn to change and transform. But untieing the knots between the influences between this life and my previous ones has been immensely hard work.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of reflection.
Be your own inner Yoda. He spoke of answers coming to you when you are passive.
If we do not ask ourselves why we do what we do, why we react the way we react, why we make the mistakes we make, we are doomed to keep making the same mistakes over and over. So it is good to look at the pain. Dig into the feeling. The thumb print of eternity. And I have news for you. You are protected and so are your loved ones. So don't fear it.
We're back at the depth of life like the visitors gazing at the magic alien world in the film "Avatar". What many people are deliberately escaping is depth. Once you start asking one question, it opens up a huge world of answers. And the silence is filled with answers.
Today, it has become easier and more difficult to take the deep road due to how easily you get distracted. Like Nicholas van Orton in "The Game", modern life daunts us and money in the long run is not the answer.
What was absolutely natural for people in ancient times has now become remote. That is much due to social conditioning. We are no longer born into and with nature, like we should be, born in nature, living in nature, dying in nature, but into a very well-oiled but sometimes "hiccuping" machine called society that pretends it knows everything and is everything. All we have to do to challenge this idea, however, is to inspect society itself. Or should I say "societies"?
For there is no such thing as one society.
We even differ in our opinions about what society is at all, what it can be or what functions it should have. We never question the society we live in and thereby forget some important factors. What are taken for absolute truths are oral contracts established through time and now taken for granted. In a neighboring country, other contracts apply. Democracy is definitely not democracy. Or was it democracy when Cecil Rhodes divided up Africa into countries by his desk in Oxford, literally enclosing age old enemies into states, ensuring centuries of war? To what end? For democracy? Is that Christian democracy? Conquistadors beheading indigenous peoples to promote the spread of Christianity? Would Jesus have done the same? No? Why? Ask uncomfortable questions.
We take certain things for granted until we start digging, playing devil's advocate - or should I say angel's advocate? - which is when we question everything we take for granted. This question has absolutely nothing to do with conspiracy theories or supposed political aims to manipulate the world. It's a simple fact that things are always different than they seem. People do take the easy way out, living as they always have, wanting to remain rich, closing their eyes to poverty.
Chances are that the rich simply want to remain rich and not control you, which does not mean that this is all they are about.
"My Dad thought the same way. Why should I be different?"
Because the only way to change the world is to question it and then change yourself. Not make yourself dependent on other people's behavior to change.
So don't take everything that society serves you unreflected. Know this: you are an eternal being living in a body. Your soul will never die because you were never born. You have always existed.
Reality is what you make it.
Stay focused.
This healthy scepticism is not limited to mere democracy or religion or anything for that matter.
It is easy and misleading to believe any of that works the same way everywhere.
We do not have to walk very far away from our front door to realize that the perspectives are so universally different from person to person that it probably will or already does flabbergast you. Even from family member to family member, the differences can be so humongous that the only way to describe it is people living in totally different worlds. Different universes, even. But that is why we are here. To connect worlds. Or universes. To reconcile the irreconcilable. To achieve harmony where no harmony was thought possible.
But that is no easy task.
It is like running uphill against the wind.
It takes perseverance and ruthless honesty.
Take, for instance, one of my pet subjects.
The French Revolution.
An old king named Louis XV is guilty of massive overspending, literally driving his country France into total bancruptcy. To save the crown, Louis XV is not blamed, but a political liason is suggested, marrying the young crown prince to a princess from the century-long hated rival of Austria. When Grandpa Louis XV dies, the teenagers, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, are way too unprepared for the business of running the country.
They're kids. 9th graders. Zits and puberty, confusion and hormones.
The new young king is ridiculed for his almost autistic shyness, even by his own jealous brother Stanislaus, who laughs at his brother Louis when he falls down while dancing at a reception.
The young king's fear of women is not a big help either. When the intrigue-loving court literally insist on being spectators to royal copulation, the king's already very prominent impotency reaches to new heights. Imagine being afraid of women and impotent and having people watch you not being able to perform in bed. Experiencing that in private is bad enough.
As a result, the King withdraws into seclusion and the new Queen is blamed for the lack of children. The usually rather frilly teenager Queen is never alone, now contradicting strict protocols of corsets and constant compulsive publicity, demanding occasional peace and solitude. Outside of the palace, the population misinterprets the situation, thinking the Austrian Queen is a lesbian who hates children. This enormous pressure of feeling lonely and hated by everyone, I call it the "Princess Diana-Syndrome", almost ensures the firstborn child, a miracle anyway, to be a sickly disabled daughter, which causes the population to hate the Queen even more.
No one tells the population that the royal couple are helping the farmers, becoming good foreign politicians and even helping the poor. They are blamed for very old problems. Sentences she never uttered, quotes from a popular book by Rousseau the Queen is reading, "let them eat cake", are put in her mouth. Some people are by now so adamant to find anyone to blame for France's catastrophic situation that they invent a scandal, literally creating the fake news of a purchased necklace the Queen categorically refused to buy because she considered it immoral.
The bad situation of lies being mistaken for truths now gets worse. After a state tribunal with a new delegation ends in catastrophe, one of the royal children dies and they withdraw to mourn, locking the doors. This is taken as a provocation against the tribunal and the shit, as they say, hits the fan. On July 14th, the Bastille is stormed. The insecure king is advised to negotiate and speak with the invaders, but he withdraws his troops. This is taken as another provocation. The bloodiest revolution in history is led by a leadership that drink champagne, dine and dance in the same palaces where the royal couple used to dine. A decade later, after 90,000 executed people, the whole debacle turns into a useless endeavor when a young officer named Napoleon crowns himself emperor. What do the history books say? Farmers with pitchforks overthrew a Queen that told the people to eat cake. There are historians that claim the French Revolution set new standards for cruelty in the world. Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves if the Second World War would have possible without it. If you believe in the eternal spirit and reincarnation as I do, you might agree that many souls are still healing their experiences there, if we believe souls incarnate in chronological fashion.
Fake news became real news.
That whole deal is a huge version of something we do all the time. Misunderstand each other.
Every country has not only its own laws and rules and infrastructure, but also its unwritten laws and rules and infrastructure. These subconscious rules are the foundation. The programming. The things everyone takes for granted. The things that if you challenge them you will suffer social disgrace. The core. The collective consciousness. Any member of any society of your choice has peer pressure to uphold the attitudes of what the society preaches. Bloodletting and witchcraft hunting were aged respected practices, but were the barbaric hunts for communists in the U.S. so much better? What is humanity doing today that is barbaric? Are we really evolved?
We need not go so far.
What are your rules and regulations? Have you taken over other people's beliefs because you were expected to? What is your Never-Ending Story? Where is your place in Fantasia? What's your evolution? Where would your soul rather be? With the creative, peaceful, centuries old Ba'ku in Star Trek: Insurrection or with the destructive aliens of the nearby moon in "Alien"?
"Between soul and sacrifice beats the heart of civilization."
That is a quote from the Sci-Fi series Orville.
Is that correct?
You be the judge.
Differences are necessary.
Without them, we will never know where we stand.
But we have to stand our own ground, adding your piece to the puzzle. Your piece is instrumental to the big picture.
Sweden, for instance, proposes a sociological colloquial familiarity and rigorous equality, so much so that the exact monthly wages of the ruling politicians are published regularly to the penny in the evening press.
When you meet a Swede, the first question you get is "What's your name?" and "Where are you from?". "What's your profession?" or "What is your job?" are sometimes considered rude questions.
Germany, on the other hand, takes these questions for granted. The first thing you ask a person is what they do for a living.
Put an extrovert crazy Korean in an introvert Japanese subway and you may have a problem. Or maybe you don't.
Put a German with a bulldozer attitude in a equalized
Swedish tourist location and you will most certainly get more than one laugh. Maybe you will get a cascade of guffaws. Or tolerance. That will maybe be up to you.
"Oh, my God!These Germans!"
"Oh, my God! These Swedes!"
"Oh, my God! These men!"
"Oh, my God! These women!"
"Oh, my God! These rich people!"
"Oh, my God! Those asocial people!"
Just fill in the country or religion or group or gender of choice. You noticing something? Any conflict issue has a very high society factor. A factor of social conditioning.
Life is constantly requiring for you to be tolerant.
Say a macho walks into a bus and finds two frilly girls talking loudly about make-up. They chitter and giggle about girly stuff. He rolls with his eyes and wishes they would shut up. His attitude is a reaction to a feeling, nothing more. Actually, it's a response to an energy that is coming from the two girls. Happiness. Being happy about sharing their thoughts about make-up and hairstyles. He judges them according to their appearance and what they are talking about and what he thinks that means to them. He disagrees. But what it means to him is not what it means to them. He mistakes his feeling for theirs.
"Oh, no," he groans in his head, "this isn't supposed to be. Everyone should be like me. Tough and hard. Make-up is stupid. If they are happy about that stuff, they can't be taken seriously."
It is founded on a presumption he was taught.
Frilly girls are silly.
Sharon Stone has an IQ of 150, but is not taken seriously everywhere because she happens to be a pretty blonde.
All the macho would have to do is to inspect that feeling for validity. Not avoid it, but concentrate on it.
Okay, so the girls in the bus are happy about make-up. But is that stupid? Why? And he is perceiving one moment of two lives. One sentence in two stories. They might be university students studying for their Master's Degree in Science, working part time selling doing translations from English to French.
One of them might be the daughter of a single Mom who's been fighting to stay afloat for the past decade. The other was mobbed and molested in school and has found help in the friendship with her bestie. They have sworn to forget about life and talk about frilly girl stuff at least once a week, just to gather some energy. But they are misunderstood because they happen to be pretty women. Lucky for them they did not rule France in 1789.
See how serious this is?
See how important it is to look deeper into something before judging someone according to what you think is true? And no matter what "everyone says is true" or you think is "obvious". Forrest Gump may not have had Sharon Stone's okay, but his heart was true and that should be enough for everyone.
Another example: two dozen opera singers, all with college degrees in classical singing, work in an opera chorus. They all live opera, love opera and see it as the highest form of culture. In comes a singer who has sung all kinds of music. Everything from musical theater to rock and roll, opera and art songs. He is a theater kid who grew up on stage. Consequently, his education is formally informal and he makes no difference between music styles. How do you think that new singer will be perceived in that surrounding? When he speaks of rock concerts he does on the side, the reaction might be a sceptical one, the boss maybe making sure he does not get too many roles, remarking that his stage performance the other night was "too musical theater". The question is if the critique is founded on opinion or truth.
We all misunderstand each other and our intentions. It's like we're in the crossfire between our inner being and the sociological construction we're supposed to be. OCD, autism and schizophrenia are in my view confused conflicts between heart and mind, sociological inner wars where the sufferers cannot handle past contradictions, unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, overestimating the effects of their thoughts. It's as if the mentioned macho was blasted into a huge inner war over the two frilly girls. Like diabetes, neurosis is a war wound of modern society. Did it start during the French Revolution?
We are used to one thing and go bananas when confronted with something that contradicts that.
We are impatient and want a solution fast, because we still live in the illusion that we have to panic or else.
But the universe is patient.
I would even include a high "But"-factor. We want to hold on to our intolerance. It is a way out. It is a quick solution. We need someone to blame. If we have that, we don't have to think for ourselves or take responsibility for our actions.
"Ah, she is to blame," we think. "Problem solved."
Just eliminate that other group and, hey, we think we've solved our problem.
The crucades, the religious wars, the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, you name the conflict, they are just big versions of intolerance issues that begin with everyone of us individually. In our daily lives. Not even outside our homes. Begin when you wake up. Don't wait for other people to be tolerant.
After "These ... (fill in the blanks)" most of the time we either get "They're all the same!" or "They're all idiots!"
Now, considering that
What we take for granted is totally weird for someone else. The polite Swede, the impolite German, the introvert Japanese, the extrovert Korean, the overly enthusiastic American, the charmingly intoxicated Frenchman, the screaming Italian, the comfortable Austrian, the delightful Irishman. Put all of them in a room together and you will have quite a party, worthy of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" or "My Big Fat Greek Wedding".
But all this diversity can also conjure up conflict. Generally, it is up to us if we can bridge our own insecurity.
But we are actually souls living inside bodies simply looking out of a pair of eyes. We recall our past lives and life changes. Your story is suddenly way longer. You are no longer just this person you are now. Before that, you were someone else. A poor woman that desperately tried to maintain her dignity in spite of hideous circumstances. Or an aristocrat caught between Schylla and Charybdis. A rock and a hard place.
You are an eternal soul. God knows where that ends. Were you once a dinosaur?
Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice in Wonderland is called "Through the Looking Glass". If we realize the world is our mirror and we can walk through it, we have already won the battle. Freddie Krueger was told in one of the sequels to his atrocities that "evil shall see itself and it shall die". Or shall I say transform? Atrocities are masks of rage hiding bottomless fear of change.
So find your inner Darth and smile at him. I think the guy just needs a hug.
There is another way to deal with eternity: counting your stories. Choosing what stories suit you. Realizing the stories you like signify who you want to be. And that is what really counts.
Counting your blessings. Writing them down every day. Stopping regularly when you have the time just to enjoy nature, look at a bird, smell a flower, feel the wind on your face, enjoy the warmth of the sun. Putting away your smartphone for a bit. Giving yourself a break. If you say you don't have time for that, you are misunderstanding the whole concept. These things don't take time. They are a matter of perspective.
You could be living in a dream.
You could be trying to see the lights.
You could be kissing the sky.
You could be making love to your wife.
You could be looking at a movie with your daughter, laughing.
You could be climbing a mountain, singing a song or just be smelling the roses.
You could just be enjoying life instead of wondering what it all means.
"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make" were the last recorded words of The Beatles.
It is said that a soul realizes before physical death, before transcending to the next world, that all of it didn't matter, that it was way less dramatic than she thought. That all that mattered was love or the search for love. Lightheartedness mingled with deep love is the core of eternity.
Back in 2022, I strolled around the garden of the Petit Trianon, where I walked with the Queen of France Marie Antoinette in another body 235 years earlier. I cried, because I remembered it so clearly. And it was a revelation.
"Love one another." - Yeshua
Create your own story, just like your story creates you.
That is my story.
What's yours?
Maybe you could be saying:
Welcome to Wonderland!
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