more thoughts on borderland

i am currently quite fascinated by borderline personality disorder (among many other mental illnesses) and how it all relates to this reality of no-self and truth as i have come to know in the living of it. perhaps in the future my understanding can go past the specifics of how my own life has unfolded, and i can make more powerful connections in other areas, but for now, i have to stick with what i learned in experience.

so borderline personality means that the person suffering has a personality which is on the borderline, it is not well formed, they have a sense of self which is never fully functional. from where i sit now, the most gloriously odd thing about having had that experience is that it proves to me that this life has a more thorough continuity than i ever could have imagined. as a child, i was unable to glue together a sense of self, an individual identity that could shore me up in the way the world around me demanded. i can see now quite clearly that this thing which is so obviously true - that there is no separate self, that a "me" is a fiction - is something i always knew.

that's probably the most powerful sense for me, right now, in looking at all of this. for something to be true, it has to have always been true, and will always be true. something doesn't just become true in a moment of discovery. discovery and insight recognize that which has always been true, but was just unseen or unrecognized.

to know now, with absolute clarity, that there is no self, no little person here running the show, finally allows me to integrate the whole of the life experience before now. and the borderline personality "disorder" was not the burden i thought it was all these years. quite the contrary - it was a profound blessing. there was always a sense in my guts that there was something deeply wrong in this picture, in the way i was being asked to live. everyone around me had these seemingly solid, well buttressed selves, identities, and the fact that from the earliest of my days i was incapable of doing the same reads now like - well obviously! it wasn't true! i had the great and powerful grace of no matter how hard i tried i just was not capable of perfecting the false self during the first 22 years of my life.

in a bit of digression, but not quite, it seems fascinating to me that what i once considered healing, all the years when i was "getting better" as far as my behavior in the outside world, are the years when i became much, much better at creating an identity that was functional in the world. i was very thorough in piecing together a healthy, intelligent, capable "wisdom girl" identity - a self that was created directly out of the parameters set by everything that was wrong with me during the borderline years. and we'll not even get into the depths of the spiritualized ego created during those years - that's a whole other conversation.

anyway, knowing now as i do that the psychologically and mentally created "self" is an absolute fiction, i am suddenly very loving toward that little girl angela. she was so inept at playing a game that seems to me now to be the saddest, cruelest joke we play upon ourselves - and creates all the division and separation which leads to a world gone mad with destruction. and the compassion in me overflows for all beings who are unable to dig into the lie, who are unable to excel at the illusory self - a feat i believe only a very small percentage of people are actually able to pull off.

most people have a taste, or even just a small thread connecting them back with the truth, with the fact that their identities are a falsehood, with their lack of a separate self. this seems evidenced by the sheer numbers of mentally ill people in the world, and people who are unstable, maladjusted and generally freaked out and messed up. the truth, being true, has that on its side. it cannot be denied for long by an illusion. every single moment of stillness and silence, it is just there, waiting, obvious.... inescapable. is it any wonder our world gets more and more focused on business, distraction and the constant need to be engaged with anything but aloneness and quiet?

i am trying to see the ways in which i can talk about this, the ways in which i can think about this, and i am honestly happy to report that my mind is on fire in a way it has not been in years and years. i feel full of life and vigor here, and am looking forward to more dialogue about this, and more ways to find the connections.

the challenge, of course, is that even if people have had a taste of the truth, there is a poweful pull into illusion, shored up by the world and society, and family structures and entertainment and so on. maya - the hindu name for the goddess of illusion - has her claws sunk in deeply, and it is very easy to drown out the still small voice of truth, the intuitive knowing, in favor of all the busy, loud, chaotic insanity of the mind. the structures of the world are set up in such a way to support the illusion, and no one drops out of the matrix without getting thoroughly picked apart by society and friends and loved ones. they draw you back in with whatever means they can - because every one that refuses the lie, refuses to reinforce the structure means their walls are getting thinner. it sounds horrible to say but your family doesn't want you to leave the matrix because of purely selfish reasons. they need you to help fortify their own lie. (not that they don't love you, but from inside the matrix love is always all bound up with falseness, sticky lies and the need to perpetuate the illusion)

thankfully for me, my family is very, very glad i left the matrix. only by leaving the matrix can i come back in and visit and have a loving and enjoyable relationship with them. living in the borderland was what was very hard on my parents in particular, because the constant back and forth was impossible for them to bear.

i really want to learn how to speak and think clearly about this subject. this awakening is not obscure, it is not special, it is not obsfucated, and it is not an achievement. it is simply the recognition of that which has always been here, and always been true. and yet, not seeing it, being totally identified with the structure of self, it can seem "out there" or some difficult mountain to climb or something special or worse - some made up ridiculousness because "obviously there's a self here, obviously there's a me, sheesh, angela, shut up.... i'm right here! duh!!" and with that, the refusal to investigate, the lack of curiosity, the inability to be humble enough to question.... that is the deception in action. those very refusals are what stops that which is So Obvious from embracing us, and drawing us back home. and maya does a good job, because we've all felt so cut off from the world, and it makes us deeply, enormously sad, causes us pain like no other thing in the whole world. and yet, our every single action, our every thought, is more division, and keeps the pain train rolling. maya is so good at having us snowed in illusion we're actually not only the prisoners, but also the jailers. we ourselves build and maintain the prisons that keep us isolated and hurting.

i am really moved by this subject, as it has always mysteriously animated my life, and pulled me toward what becomes more clear every day. there is such a deep Knowing in my veins that it finally evidences a thread through my whole life. the "self" or separate me is a fiction, a lie that wounds deeply and causes so much suffering. seeing this for ourselves is the most important thing ever, always was. it is even moreso now, looking around at the world gone mad with division. it is just the only game in town. it's the only thing going on. i hope to learn how to write and speak about it with even more clarity in the future. and i'm going to shore up my knowledge of borderline personality "disorder" because it is a sense i have that everyone in the world is on the spectrum of borderline, and it would serve us to our advantage to begin to understand how that operates.

waking up to my own lack of self is the greatest gift life has ever given - a truth that has always been here, just waiting to be seen.