Confront the Dragon of Your Past

So this is the world that you’re in. You’re somewhere, because you have to be somewhere. Now you may not know where that is, which means that the somewhere that you are is chaotic. In which case, you need to go over your past in great detail and figure out where you are. You’re lost, and the problem with being lost is you don’t know where to go. The problem with not knowing where to go is that there are a million places that you could go, and a million places is too many places for you to go without dying. Being lost is not good and you need to know where you are. Layout the narrative of the past. Identify and break your life down into stages and identify the emotionally significant moments in each epoch. Write them out. What happened negatively? What happened positively? What did you derive from it? What could you have done differently? What did you learn from it? Narrow in on determining precisely where it is that you are right now. People are often loath to do that because they’d rather be spread out in a half-blind manner in the fog, hoping that the place they are at is better than it really is, deluding themselves by remaining there. Figure it out. I’m right here, right now, with these specific problems. If you identify a set of specific problems, and you can really narrow them down, maybe you can start fixing them in micro ways, bit by bit. But there’s no way you can do that without knowing where you are. It’s impossible. You can tell if you don’t know where you are. If you are haunted by reveries of the past, if they continue to reappear in your dreams again and again, you haven’t extracted the world out of your past experiences. Your potential is still trapped in the past. To confront the potential is to confront the dragon of the past. Of course that’s terrifying. Maybe you were abused as a child or maybe you were abused by a family member. You’ve had a direct encounter with malevolent evil but you have an implicit hypothesis of malevolent evil that is plaguing you. It’s still there, it’s trapped in the memories and the representational fabric. As an adult, you’re now burdened with the necessity of articulating that fully before you have any chance of freeing yourself from it. Lots of times people have to go into the past and re-encounter the forces that knocked them over. Sometimes its not repression, but rather that terrible things happen to people at such a young age that there isn’t a bloody chance in hell that they can figure out why that happened, what to do with it, or what they need. You carry that weight with you. You are encumbered. Your body encounters the world in stages. Unravel and disassemble the danger with emotion and then cognition. Maybe you can do it with the future in mind.

In the face of danger, you assume the role of the prey animal. You have to decompose at your untimely demise. What is the predator? Why are they making my life miserable? What is wrong with me that allows them to make my life miserable? You’re stuck having to decompose the errors in your life. Maybe you can’t. Maybe formulating an explicit philosophy of good and evil to deal with something malevolent in your environment just happens to be beyond you.