borderland - a return perspective

i haven't posted any thoughts about borderland here in a while, perhaps because it's more or less slipped out of my thinking while other things were being revealed. the whole period of bliss caused by revelation of there really being no self was working through my system, and as i mentioned in yesterday's post - i had to come to extrapolate what it means for the whole world. and as i did, as i saw this void inside of me reach outward and embrace the whole world, i have been pained, i have cringed and cried, i have felt that the last bit of anything that mattered to me was being taken away.

but really, i was curious why exactly that was? why was there such a sense of shock over the world not being real, over the people not being what they seem to be?

talking to a dear friend yesterday helped put some things in perspective.

borderline personality disorder which marked pretty much the first 20 years of my life, as i have mentioned here is a strange condition whereby the person with it doesn't have the ability to put together a solid sense of self. the shifting sands there are marked, and dramatic. and the instability causes the person to suffer from chronic terror based on the feeling of void within, on the feeling that they don't actually exist.

having no real sense of self on which to rely, and never having any context or paradigm by which i could explain to others why i felt so differently than they seemed to, my life was a mass of confusion, each day existing without the benefit of the previous day's knowledge and solidity to help guide the new days. it's hard to even explain all this in words, but without a sense of self that is at least semi-solid, there is nothing from which to hang context and linear growth in time. i lived in the moment because i couldn't do anything else, had no other choices. when people were away from me, it was as if they didn't exist. when no one was looking at me, it was as if i didn't exist. my behaviors were erratic, incredibly selfish, and yet throughout it all i had no language by which to explain to anyone what was going on. i just floated, adrift.

the world was all i really had that made any sense to me. i didn't feel solid, or find any solidity to myself, but the world seemed very solid, and i had no reason to think it wasn't. everyone seemed so different than me, capable of holding together a pattern of behavior and personality in a way i was never capable of. the natural world was a refuge, in all it's solidity and constancy. music, and especially dance, were also a refuge. i was able to use my body very well, because despite what seemed full of flux within, the strength and grace of the limbs were dependable. all things that were seemingly physical around me, all the people of the world, the objects, my own body.... this was where i put my faith in solidity, to shore up against the ongoing terror of the void and flux within.

i have said for a long time, during all my 'self help' years in my late twenties, when i studied astrology and enneagram and such, that i am a very earthy person. i have felt very kin with earth and the solidity there has never been in question. while i've been markedly intuitive (probably the only reason i survived the first decades of my life) i haven't had my reality marked by strange happenings whereby the world grew thin or surreal or anything. i have accepted, in the zen terms, that mountains are mountains, and rivers are rivers.

but lately, as the sense of there being no me here, has been explored more deeply as i mentioned in yesterday's blog entry, the extrapolation of the understanding has left me with no choice but to accept the obvious. the world, and the people in it, are not even remotely as solid as i would have once thought they were. not even close. if there is no me, there is no anyone else, either. and if i accept that i don't know anything for sure, as i have been forced to do dozens of times these last two years, then i have to say that i clearly can't really know anything about the world either.

i remember several times during the last two years, there was this strong yearning to learn what the teachers all meant when they talked about emptiness. the word, the feeling there, held a charge for me intuitively, and several times i tried to squint into the distance and figure out what exactly that term meant. i didn't get it, until i did. and this space now, where the world grows very surreal and thin, where the whole thing seems oddly busy yet very empty.... well, i get it now. and it's entirely not what i thought it would be.

so how this ties together is that right before my experience on christmas, i had been considering the lingering fears i had that if i really let go, surrendered into this truth as it had been exposing itself in this life, that the whole borderline thing could reappear - and i would be some sort of no-self godzilla monster stomping through the landscape just ruining people and destroying lives the way i used to when i was younger. i thought that giving into the reality of no self could mean that the containment level wouldn't operate anymore, and my behaviors would go back to what they had been when i was young - all the terror response causing cruelty, emotional vampirism and inconsistency by the truckload.

i looked deeply there, and by doing so, there became this lovely perspective in my whole life. and i admit, right now, with this new understanding, there is that feeling again, that feeling of things linking up into one whole thing, making sense because in the realm of truth, everything is unified, and infinite.

i see that my belief in the world was the only solidity i had in a life full of flux and chaos. during extended periods of terror, ongoing months and years of extreme fears and psychotic, neurotic chaos, the world's reality was where i put all my faith.

and now, at this point, i have to reconsider that, and am being urged to investigate the questions backwards into a place where the question itself is not answered, but disappears.

i don't get to hold onto the world, and be an empty self amid a world of solids. that's incomplete knowing, a half truth, and leaves me as that which i have called 'half born'. i am not just empty capacity for all things, even though that still remains true. the emptiness has to move outward and embrace the whole world, to be drawn further and further out into infinity - drawn forward by the heart's intuition that all of this is actually One Thing. it doesn't get to be one thing if it remains unaffected by this truth - it will forever be one thing minus me, or rather i will remain here, looking at that out there.

that, right there, touches in too on these shifts in seeing that happen to me all day every day, and the possibility that, as always, they've been happening as a way by which to keep me out of a trance, and allow me to soften all the mental understanding of the world, and to soften into the kind of unknowing that is required for me to allow truth to move more clearly in my life.

so, even though the world, seemingly solid, and the people, seemingly directed by their own inner self, turns out to be a bunch of nonsense, there does not have to be terror. pain, while processing it, sure, but there doesn't have to be suffering around the whole thing. it just is what it is. mystery. more of the i don't know, magnified and expanded outwards in all directions. my letting go doesn't have to mean the kind of terror that i experienced when i was young, or the kind of madness of behavior that evidenced. there is just this, in this moment. and if the world isn't what i thought it was, well, that's just lovely considering i think my mind is a bunch of malarkey anyway.

there was some dark feelings over all of this, right up until yesterday when there was a pop in clarity, and the context of the whole thing made sense. at that point, i can see how easily the mind replaces a full, meaningful world with an empty, meaningless world.... it's all the same, it's somewhere to stand, a reference point, a belief. and therefore, in essence, it's not really true. and the pain abates, and a sense of wonder and curiosity creeps back in.

okay, the world is empty, seems busy and is also not really full of anything at all. wierd!! but wow!! a whole new wonderland of life to explore and be in and of - as the moment arises. nowhere to stand, which can be terrifying to the mind..... but it's a real liberation for the essence here, a kind of a love almost impossible to describe.