Us Against Them VS We ARE Them

I wrote this before the events that are unfolding in Israel began. It’s more light-hearted than this moment in time deserves. And I’m sitting with the grief. And what I wrote is still true, for me. Maybe for you, too.

The wild thing about what is going on in the world right now with the Right vs the Left, Blue vs Red, Conspiracy Theory vs Rationality, Woo vs Mainstream, etc etc etc, is that they, whoever they are to you and where you are oriented, think that we, whoever we are and where we are oriented, don’t know what’s REALLY going on. That we each have a view of a correct, real and undeniable reality, and the Other side is stupid, uninformed, malicious, dangerous, and misled. And there is no way that I’ve seen to convince one side that the other is wrong. Or right for that matter. This is what Naomi Klein talks about in her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Listening to a conversation with her talking about her book, and my recent conversation with Samantha Brooks, is what brought up all of these thoughts this morning.

I don’t have any big answers for solving any of this, and I’m not going to dive into the political arena, trying to convince anyone of anything. Don’t worry. I know by now that reality is real for each of us, and is different for each of us. There is a “there” out there, I’m pretty sure, and also all of our particular lenses color that “there” almost completely. Our beliefs, our past, our traumas, our family cultures growing up, the media bubbles that we immerse ourselves in, and what meaning we make of all of it are overlaid onto the “there” out there, so that we end up with two people having the same experiences and coming out with vastly different memories and interpretations of the same event. Want proof of this on a small scale? Next time you’re with your family, ask them about a particular memory from earlier in life where everyone was involved. If all of you come up with the same exact recollection of that experience, look a little deeper. Ask a couple more questions. I would be astonished if you didn’t find discrepencies in the story. And don’t get me started on memory itself – how it’s been proven that every time we remember something it changes slightly to conform to the story that we’ve told ourselves around it.
These questions and many others can bring us to the edge of what the fuck is reality and how do we navigate it. Just look at the Mandela Effect… I’ve had my own experiences with this: certain that I experienced reality one way, but when I go to the all knowing Google to confirm, finding that I am simply wrong. And a bunch of other people are with me. Some folks remember the past one way, and another group remembers it a different way. What can be the meaning of this? If we take our experiences seriously, which is a touchstone of my work – take it seriously and hold it lightly – we tend to start taking other people’s experiences seriously as well. Once we believe ourselves, it is easier to believe others, even if we just believe that THEY believe what they believe.

All of this serves to bring us closer to a new and weird ontology, especially if we’ve been immersed in and served by consensus reality for most of our lives. It’s easier when consensus reality wasn’t ever super solid to begin with, or didn’t ever serve us or work for us anyway (think experiencers people who have seen ET’s, UFOS, had prophetic dreams, mystical experiences, seen ghosts, people who’ve undergone reality-shattering trauma, shock or loss, huge groups of people who are not served by the systems in place – impoverished, BIPOC, queer, neurodivergent or otherwise unheld, uncentered folks) to see the world behind the world in all of its multilayered realities, from the mundane to the supernatural. I think this is where it’s easy to start to wonder if we’re in a simulation, wonder wtf is actually going on around here. Or we just double down on our version of reality and make sure we’re comforted by being right, by being in the know, safe in the certainty that our reality is the real one, and that everyone else is a fucking idiot.

Maybe, though, there is a secret third option. An option that lives in the land of paradox and both/and, and bring-it-in instead of kick-it-out.

Maybe reality is both objective and subjective. Maybe this place is like a simulation, a honeycomb matrix, and maybe that doesn’t make it any less real. Maybe, as Morpheus says when Neo asks “But wait, I thought the matrix wasn’t real,” the mind makes it real.

So this is the real world, and it also seems to shift based on where we place our attention and that quality of that attention, as the FWAO have said. And the way they delivered that didn’t feel at all that it was just true for me. That’s how it is for everyone. And if that’s the case then we are both living in an objective reality, and a subjective reality that shifts and responds to each of us individually.

All of that to say, we’re all living in our own realities that are no more and no less real than anyone else’s reality. So this fighting over who is right, who is wrong, is pretty useless. Ultimately, if what all of the spiritual teachers say is true, stay with me here, we’re all just one thing, right? And that means that this mirror world of the quote unquote “Other” that we’re witnessing is part of us, too. We are each other’s shadows. Each other’s mirrors. We are each holding an unseen, unloved, unwanted, unacknowledged piece of the other. We hold each other’s dark shadows and golden shadows. Anyone who has ever done shadow work and been horrified/astonished to see themselves in the person that drives them the most batshit crazy knows what I’m talking about.

That happened with me in my two most recent relationships, and I can feel that there is some remaining work to do there because I still feel some activation around it. In the first of these relationships, it was just a shit show of blame and shame and spiraling and finger pointing and trauma and despair. It was YOU are wounded and need to get your shit together, and I would NEVER treat me the way you’re treating me, and him saying, YOU’RE the one who needs to get her shit together, YOU’RE the one who treats me like shit, and if you would just accept me as I am, and me saying, no, you accept ME as I am.
The second relationship was a healing ground for lifetimes of that cycle, and lots of painful realizations. One of the most hilarious and most tender and most shocking was that in this second relationship I had labeled him as Avoidant Attached, and me as Anxiously Attached (so a lot more consciousness and kindness around these patterns – we were really trying) and then realizing one day with a sick rolling stomach that oh fuuuuuucckk, I actually have a DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT style, which means I was both Avoidant and Anxious, so that when he finally came close to me, I pushed HIM away, and what a mindfuck that was for him. (Since those days, I’ve come to understand a more nuanced idea of attachment styles thanks to the world of Dr. Scott Lyons and others – that we are all actually somewhere on the spectrum of securely attached and insecurely attached and that it can change based on the kind of relationship we’re in, or even if we’re resourced on a particular day or not. So massive compassion for us all on these edgy fronts, figuring out how to human together through this messy time on the planet.)

At that time, though, with that realization of a disorganized attachment style (which is, I assure you, the worst one – so much so that many books and lots of research just skip it altogether because it’s so confusing and difficult to deal with – lots of thanks here to Diane Poole Heller for including that in her book so lovingly and helping to bring it out of the shadowlands), I was the thing, in part, that I had labeled him. And when I realized that, something in me broke and I stopped pointing the finger and just lived in the confusion. Through acknowledging that, though, and seeing my shadow (80% of the work, in shadow work, after all), it was brought into the light and healed and integrated and I stopped projecting those qualities onto him and owned my shit. And he went through his own process with that. I saw all of the ways I was projecting both my own unloved and unclaimed (dark shadow and golden shadow) qualities onto him, and that changed everything. I also saw the ways that he labeled me that were his own projections. I worked through those as well, and those that weren’t true, that were placed on me and didn’t actually belong to me, but came from his own unhealed stuff, I gave back and let go of. I stopped internalizing the ways that other people saw me that just weren’t true.

This is all incredibly deep and tricky work and it is only with the help of wonderful teachers that I was able to navigate it all. But it does work. Shadow work is real and it can free up so much tied up energy from our psyches and then we can use that energy to improve our health, or go on crazy OBE journeys, or write books, or practice lucid dreaming or just finally rest. And it offers another gift – that of massive compassion. When we stop separating ourselves from the other, and see that we are mirrors, when we see that it is a big we instead of an either/or, this huge love rushes in and what the Buddhists call Bodhichitta is activated. The wisdom that arises from compassion, the wish to reduce suffering, and that wish in action.

So yeah, that’s what I’m talking about when I’m saying that “they” are the mirror of “us” and “we” are the mirror of “them”. Shadow work, baby, but on a vast collective, political, cultural, global scale.

It’s not us or them. It’s us and them. We. Fighting over which reality is real is gonna get real old, real fast, as we watch the world burn around us. If we don’t remember we belong to each other, that we ARE each other, we’re gonna be in a world of shit that we can’t even imagine. The medicine, the balm, the salve, the fix, is to be courageous enough to let reality expand to include more, not less. Let compassion arise as we realize that we are truly all in it together. Do our own personal shadow work. Become safe for ourselves, as my teacher Sarah Durham Wilson says, then for the room, then for the world.

THEN we can all rise up together and eat the rich.

Just kidding. “They” are “us”, too. Let’s love ourselves and each other back to wholeness instead.