This letter was written to update my close friend, Francis, on how my life was proceeding. By the end, it had become a summary of where I was at that point in my training. Further proof of the power of recording my journey. At the time, I reflected that I would not send it and Karaj agreed, adding that it is a very good and valuable piece of writing. I never sent it.
Dear Francis,
Well, it’s been a while. I have been very busy over the last few months and life has been pretty full. At the moment I am in a rather grey area of my life. Grey for two reasons. Firstly, I am caught between committing myself to my work here and running away. This is where I have been many times before, except that this time I know (somewhere inside) that running away will solve nothing and staying where I am and showing some commitment will go a long way to breaking at least one of the undesirable patterns in my life. Undesirable insofar as it does not get me where I say I want to go. Rather, it leads me in a direction which heads towards the fulfilment of my script, which will leave me bitter, unfulfilled, immature and in great physical pain.
The second explanation for the greyness follows on from the first. The more I stay here, the more difficult things are becoming. The more I try to sort myself out, the more I am finding out about myself and the more I dislike what I see. The most recent challenge for me is that I hate women. The reasoning behind this is that, as an infant, I made a decision about my mother (and therefore all women) that because she threw my dad – whom I idolised – out of the house, she was to blame for ruining my life and I would, therefore, take revenge in whatever way I could. Unfortunately, I have never fully expressed this hatred, for whatever reason, which has caused it to seep out unconsciously, whilst at the same time I have had a (false?) smile on my face because I want to please people. I just want to be loved.
So you see, as I progress in my development, the shit stuff is coming out. It is the same as any cleansing process. If I want to cleanse myself, then all the dirt has to come to the surface. An added factor is my arrogance, which tries to convince me that I am okay; or even better: that I don’t really have any problems at all. That in itself is an issue which needs addressing and sometimes, all things considered, it all seems too much. Too much to handle, too difficult to achieve, and those are the times when I fantasise about running away.
Thinking about things as I write this letter, there is a lot of hatred in me, not just towards women, and if I am to survive and prosper as a human being, I must deal with it. In the letter I wrote to my dad in January, I described how, as he has aged, the veneer of his pleasing nature is no longer strong enough to hide his true feelings. The same is true of me and I will have to accept that if I am to progress further I must come to terms with the negativity I carry with me.
Too often I have put my needs, desires, thoughts and feelings to one side in order to please others, while all the time building up a store of resentment for that very reason. I have dismissed my hatred and irritation as wrong and tried to cover it up by agreeing with people, going along with them, sometimes going out of my way to make sure their needs are met so that (a) I will be loved and (b) no-one will see my negativity.
When it does come out it is uncontrolled and very often manifests itself in an emotional attack on whomever I have in front of me. I used to seek out evangelists as a form of semi-controlled release but eventually that argument lost it’s appeal. The negativity is still there, however, and at the moment there is no conscious outlet for it. Up until now there has not even been any conscious acknowledgement of it. The result of this is that it appears at an unconscious level and alienates people, thus allowing me to confirm my original conclusion in a self-fulfilling kind of way. What I am trying to say is that I am my own worst enemy and until I get off my high horse and see this in its entirety, I am going nowhere.
I was hoping for a more light-hearted phase in my life before contacting you, but this is where I am at the moment and it does not look like getting much better in the coming months. I just hope I have the strength to stick with it.
As for the water that has gone under the bridge in recent times, I told you during the phone call in October that nothing has or can assault the strength of our friendship; unless we allow it. The benefit I have taken from knowing you has been enormous and just because I am here doing what I can to to sort out areas of my life which need addressing sooner rather than later, does not mean that our friendship is suffering in any way.
Love
Jonathan