Petty Tyrants and Promises

I always felt my mother was a thorn in my side. I don’t think most people realize how much their parents limit what they’ll be able to imagine and how they will do this. As children we learn to be reflected, this is really how we develop a self image to begin with, our parents, through repetitive ongoing responses to our movements and expressions, unknowingly give us our personal framework and then basically blame us for it. What a bad deal that is. They tell us who we are, and then deem it lacking. Now if you have some great parents, which almost no one does, your framework will be wide open, and not inhibited like a pet hamster’s movements are inhibited to its caged parameters. You wouldn’t think that your imagination or conception of the world at large which foretells where you’ll go and what you’ll do are such restricted but they are, unless of course you destroy such boundaries. You might argue, isn’t there a shared reality, this is how it works, you can’t go outside the boundaries of how it works, because that’s how it works, right? Everyone knows to do this you first must do that but are we sure? Does it really work this way? Or is it only our own limited imagination that determines how wide or how narrow our lives are?

My own life feels pretty fucking small today. I woke up in a house, surrounded by the other beings who live here, my children, one of my children’s partners, and three dogs. I think or imagine which is the same thing, that it’s my only day off, I’ve committed to mowing the lawn since no one else wants to go out there and do it, and tomorrow, it’s back to the job to do whatever I do there all over again, fucking again. Maybe you think I’m complaining. People who question their reality are always seen as being ungrateful aren’t they? This story of gratefulness for what you do have is so pervasive it almost feels real, but maybe not so fast. Why do we think that wanting more or something else in life is spiritually incorrect? Could this just be another installed idea to keep most people right where they are doing whatever it is they do? Someone has to collect the garbage, if all people were free, who pray tell would do it? No, we can’t have that. There’s a reason for keeping it all in the dark or society would not work at all. The grocery store re-stackers must keep stacking, receiving all the boxes upon boxes that come in. They must be forever unpacked, displayed, and presented for consumers to consume, hand over the money if you want this. Go to work and earn, nothing is free, you must trade your time, energy, attention, and life’s force for whatever it is you want. There’s no free rides, products do not just appear out of thin air, is this just a mind pattern? A virtual belief system? Did we choose it, create it, or were we just born into it to perpetuate the illusion forevermore? Yeah, I’m wondering how far my wonder can go.

So I got out there and mowed just the backyard. My son mowed the front before his girlfriend arrived so I didn’t have to do both. In reality, I didn’t have to do any of it. I volunteered to do it, not because it had to get done but because I find it fun to contribute. I love my little clan and when I can give I do, not so others can owe me or see me as some benevolent benefactor but because that’s what just naturally comes up in me and I tend to go with whatever that is. I have to say since the puppies were relieving themselves out front for a while, the grass out front finally grew and it wasn’t this sparse expanse of green that always seemed to be on the verge of dying out. Of course, that means more fucking mowing, as it gains momentum it grows up not just taller and thicker but faster. You don’t notice it when there’s a few tall weeds spread out here and there because you haven’t mowed in two or three weeks but when the whole lawn has flowered from the fertilizer it’s quite a different sight. The backyard grows much faster. It always has since that’s how it works, we let the dogs out the backdoor whenever they walk up to it. My backyard turned into such a tall expanse of grass and weeds once that it scared even the man I hired to tame it.

The puppies by the way are completely potty trained. It took our first dog six months, actually we had to send it away to a dog training facility for a month at that age, since our dog training skills were zero. Love is not enough unless you want to wake up to your entire house in shit and shambles. Interesting not so little tidbit is I had a thought while I was out there. As it was, my energy was spotty, since turning vegan, I basically lost five pounds so far. Basically, I wake up and since we’re still a little broke right now, we didn’t really buy any vegan food because well it’s a speciality kind of thing which isn’t really economical so I just don’t eat anything. I did buy a jar of instant coffee since I’m just used to waking up with a cup of joe but here’s the tidbit. The lawnmower started smoking. Yeah, at first it was just one pretty big puff. I shut it off and restarted it since I had this one little patch of grass left and by the end of it, the smoke was just pluming out of the machine. My thought was this: Wouldn’t it be nice to just hire someone to come and knock this mowing shit out once a week or so? I guess I got my answer, yes it would because it will be cheaper than buying a new lawnmower. My instincts are telling me, that machine is fried, dream out there.

My daughter and I decided to go by Walmart this evening, just for a few items, I still had room in my budget for like forty bucks but like a lot of stuff, shit just went wonky from the start. First off, we drive to the store which is probably three or less miles away only to arrive in the parking lot and realize I didn’t have my wallet. I always keep it in the car but I had an occasion to keep it in my purse because I thought I’d need to give a copy of my ID yesterday. I didn’t have to give a copy but I don’t generally carry my purse except to work, and so the wallet was at home, guess I was driving without having my license with me, too bad. So we drive home, and my daughter runs in to get it and we drive back to Walmart. We walk around and get our stuff only to find out at the check out that even though I have my wallet now, I don’t have my debit card, just a lot of maxed out credit cards, five to be exact but none with forty dollars on them. My son had used the other card and forgot to put it back again so it was in his wallet, not mine. Somehow I managed to make thirty of it go, basically ringing up a few items at a time and then seeing if the amount would go through. I might have looked up the balances on my phone but I left that in the car. On the last time however, it took a partial payment probably from the remaining balance and left me owing like a dollar and thirty cents after we removed two of the most expensive items, a package of mock chicken nuggets and some vegan bagels. The attendant on duty then literally tried to dig in his pockets for some change of a dollar and thirty cents, but I was like, “No, we’re not doing that”, and I found something else to take off. Needless to say, my daughter was probably more horrified than I could ever be because actually as sad as it was, I didn’t seem to really give a shit. Whether or not other people can see me or remember what I go through, who the fuck cares? To be fair, I have been through experiences in my life that were far more humiliating than this one could ever be. In fact, that’s what my mother so aptly reminded me of and the sole reason I thought I’d finally had enough of her. When we got home, I ran in to get my debit card back from my son, and so having another forty bucks available we went back for our lost items plus some additional ones, like a tub of chocolate chip ice cream for my son because he never eats anything. You see this has actually been my downfall, my mind is always thinking of ways to bring a smile even if it’s with something as stupid as a frozen dessert, which really isn’t a dessert to him. I think I did get that pleased sort of smile, that says, I love how you think of my happiness, in fact, I very rarely forget it. I write this knowing full well I’ll never know whether he had a thought about it or not. My imagination is just a wild thing and makes up shit on the fly.

The art of reminding anyone of who they are is really bullshit if you ask me. It’s like you think you know something based on their past, but do you really or do you just think you do? Shared memories are an obtuse phenomena. It’s like yeah you need to know something like whether or not you even know them, or whether or not they like ice cream and what kind, that’s helpful. To say that they are what you think they are is however a gross deception. They are to your mind how you think they are but and this is a huge but, they aren’t truly that. Almost no one alive actually knows this part. The only reason I do is because I saw it one night first hand and it’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d easily forget although forget you must in order to keep playing the game of life, basically it’s regulated to the background so you can play with the foreground, it may be suspended temporarily, but it’s never really actually forgotten.

Anyway, back to my mother, I sort of had a secret, a bad episode when the kids were very little. The kids didn’t know about it because they were frankly too young to remember. I didn’t ever bring it up because I’m not normal and don’t bring shit up if there’s no value in doing so. My mother’s memory however held onto it as something she might hang over my head. She often threatened to tell my children about it if she was drunk or mad at me for some reason, as if it would discredit me, maybe they too could see me as she did, as a total fuck up and see her as something better. At any rate, my kids are basically grown now and almost twenty years have passed since then, and last night, she told them about it so I had to explain what happened, why it happened, my state of mind at the time, and how shit went from bad to worse very quickly. To be honest it felt like a very shameful event even if a lot of it was out of my control anyway, there were other characters involved who I felt basically totally misread the situation, over reacted and fucked me doubly. I dealt with it though, and got shit completely sorted out so that here we are none the worse for wear hopefully.

The issue isn’t what type of person or grandmother in this case, tells a story to her grandchildren about their mother, her own daughter that can in no way help them since all it was designed to do was paint me in a bad light. The issue is why have any type of relationship with such a character? What the fuck for? Is she a friend? Does she help me or entertain me? Is it fun to talk with her or visit her? The answer to all those questions is a pretty flat straight forward no. The only reason I know this person at all, the only reason she is a part of my life is because she retains the title of mother and that’s it. Morally, it feels like there’s an obligation here since she’s 83 years old and has entered the last decade of her life when in reality there isn’t. I think on some level I fell into the spiritual trap of loving kindness to my own detriment. This is a hard lesson in terms of energy and what you will or won’t be able to do if there are these types of heavy connections weighing you down in some way or other, for in order to maintain the relationship, I must stay in character to some extent, I must be the person she knows and I’m not anymore. Neither am I the person she thinks I’ve become, because she never knew me to begin with. She didn’t try to know me, not because she didn’t want to although maybe that’s part of it, but because she couldn’t. There are those people who will never see you for what you are, and they are all around you all the time. Most of them are benign, you don’t really care, it’s not important because they generally don’t bother you. My mother on the other hand was literally a life sucking force my entire life for any love and understanding my child self was hoping to one day receive from her, I know will never come and I don’t actually need this anymore anyway. What I know is that she cannot give what she has not got, she never had any love for herself, other than ego’s demand to feel superior, in every relation she had, the only role she was able to play was that of what Carlos Castaneda termed, “the petty tyrant.”

The “petty tyrant” is an interesting character but not a nice one. Their role as far as I’ve discerned it is to instigate discontent, lavishly condemn, degrade, blame, and dig in to another’s sensibilities in order to trigger defenses and insecurities in others, put bluntly, you might call them assholes but their role is actually a vital one for without these irritators there’d be nothing and no one to overcome or get away from. They don’t ever see themselves as assholes mainly because in their mind’s eye they are always right and anyone else is wrong. To be fair all characters possess something of the petty tyrant and it’s really only a matter of degrees. The only real power they yield is usually to withhold something like money or affection in return for some favor. If they give, you’ll owe them, they never do so freely, they don’t know what that is. Challenging them is always futile because they are never wrong and you won’t ever convince them that they are. Even if they act out atrociously, they always blame something for their behavior so they can justify what they did. The dreamt world is full of them. Basically what’s going on with this type is what’s going with all types, what you see in the world around you is your own character as it is at its core. In reality, they are sad, frightened, abandoned, angry entities and that’s how they see you never as a friend but as a foe they need to control. If they come to your aid, they only ever do so to feel superior to you, and will later throw it in your face as a type of proof that they are better than you. Mainly, what they do best is uphold the structures of society and culture as they will adamantly defend the system against any and all attacks. Anyone who isn’t in line with their dictates will therefore be deemed insane or misguided according to their beliefs. The last but not least of their characteristics is that they never change, they are not designed to, there’s no ability within them to see beyond the confines of the dream and so, without any actual conscious volition of their own, they live to reek havoc wherever they go with whom ever they come in contact with. Let’s just say this; the people who have some sort of inner reflection, and strive to live peaceful caring open lives are totally outnumbered by the petty tyrants of the world at a rate of at least 10 to 1, and it might be much higher.

In some strange way, they are actually the perfect irritant to cause a person to go in search of awakening or the one true reality. These types are basically intolerable to anyone with any sense at all, since they never actually make any. They might attack you for reasons you know nothing about at any moment, just there you are having a nice day, and then the encounter comes and you feel your whole day is ruined or off somehow. They have an uncanny knack for reaching inside your character to expose its flaws, vulnerabilities, and blind spots. In this sense, you can actually learn a lot about your own character by paying attention to what they trigger in you. If you leave yourself open with them, you are bound to regret it as they will later use all information they have about you against you at some time. Since you have no way to sway them, the past is used as a weapon. For them, everything is real, their beliefs are true, and anything that challenges them is seen as a threat to be extinguished or curtailed. They never grow and hanging out with them will stunt your own growth because their energy is toxic and overpowering to systems that are open. This probably sounds like a horrible way to speak in terms of my own mother but I see what I see and have no reason nor impulse to deny or alter what that is.

What this whole exchange did for me was allow me to see where I still had charged emotion relating to the past. My mother’s whole tirade was geared to expose a type of guilt that I was still carrying. Guilt is a sticky emotion that this world uses to lock a person in place, usually forever, think prison without the walls. It’s more like an emotional prison that tells you that since once you ran into some trouble, maybe your behavior hurt someone or you believe it did, and now because of that, you have to live the rest of your life in the shadows, there’s no legitimacy for you. This is really just a feeling you have, but it stays with you. There’s absolutely no legitimacy to be found here anyway, this entire dream state is only made up of fantasy met with emotion, but you can see how this emotion of guilt is not going to serve you, it’s not going to propel you to step out of the confines of your current life into anything else. So it’s going to hold you back, it’s function is to instill guilt that never really goes away and your culture is basically dependent on it to maintain cohesion since it’s vital that some types of people stay taking out the garbage so some other types can board a jet plane to Bali.

The actual Truth of our situation however is no one is anyone. Nothing anyone says or knows actually means anything since nothing can mean something in this dream of life. This is a lot to assimilate. It can actually take years to discern how false everything is because from childhood onwards our mind’s eye has been conditioned to accept the idea of authority in just about every concept you can imagine. As a child, your parent has authority over you, in school the teacher has authority over you, and later on the system has authority over you. Everything is designed to keep you in your place, wherever it is you landed. They say you should climb your way out, elevate yourself from your humble beginnings into some sort of greatness or mastery, but you can’t, you can just work yourself to death trying to. You can never make your false character into something real, because well, it isn’t real. Your character doesn’t actually exist outside of your own imagination so any effort you spend to elevate it, is really just spent energy that ensures you won’t have the energy to take the trip through life that you were meant to be on.

This is usually actually wonderful news when you first see it but then, you’re faced with the question of what you should do now that you know. Who will you be if you’re no one? How will you conduct yourself? What persona do you use when you’re talking to others? You have to be someone right? The reason the sages seem so loving is not because they actually love you, they only love what you are, the character itself is immaterial. To just stay as awareness means to drop the character completely. It’s to relinquish any and all concern you might have for what it does and where it goes. To see that the dream of your life is taking care of itself, is to release all that your mind tells you is happening, because in reality you know it’s not even when it feels like it is.

My mother sent me a birthday card since it’s my 61st tomorrow along with my daughter’s who will be 24. She included a check for $500 and wrote it was for both of us. I gave my portion to my daughter since I don’t need anything past coffee and nicotine vaping supplies. My daughter wanted a vegan cake but we had to settle for vegan cupcakes in either vanilla or chocolate, and being decadent we got both. For our birthday meal we bought two frozen vegan pad thai dinners. We would have gotten more but the boys aren’t on board with veganism and will just make their own food. Oh did I mention I got paid, yeah, mostly okay on the financial front again. Going to Walmart for a card for my daughter I got some actual coffee and some vegan creamer so sitting here with a cup of that, it all feels perfectly fine again.

I imagine my mother will probably call on my birthday, but my thoughts say right now, I’m not getting on the phone. My daughter has ample interactions with her for the both of us. She was always her favorite grandchild. It’s telling because I was my grandmother’s favorite grandchild and she lavished gifts on me as a child and no one else. If the pattern stays true to form, then I already know the rest. I think if you were actually paying attention you’d be surprised at how well patterns can replicate accurately and to what degree in the next generation. It is spooky for sure but all is well here on that front.

Fast forward, my birthday is over. The day ended three hours ago and went as well as it could. We didn’t have a big bash celebration but just enjoyed each other’s company. My mother did end up calling but I didn’t hear the phone ring since as a rule, I keep my ringer off. I only noticed after we got back in the car from a walk we took in the woods. My phone somehow records the voicemail into text so I saw that. She had called to wish my daughter a nice day earlier while I was still sleeping. I guess she also told her she’d buy my son a new motherboard so that was some unexpected good fortune. After we were back home, at my daughter’s prodding I actually did call my mother back. She wished me a nice day and all that but it was a pretty short conversation as I didn’t have anything more to say. I didn’t bring up the past episode that upset me so much and neither did she. I don’t even know if she remembers since when she’s really drunk she basically loses her memory of what happened while she was under such influence even if I sensed she knew she’d clearly crossed a line that she maybe didn’t want to cross. That’s not her fault, that’s just what life does to us. It sometimes takes us places we would never consciously choose to go. I was triggered at the time, but now not so much. There’s a little sadness involved that feels like an after taste but that’s all. It is sometimes harder to see how things really are then it is to just be in some type of reactionary mode.

As my usual, I wrote a letter to my daughter for her birthday. I’ll share it with you here. Maybe it’s for more than just her, I don’t really know. It might be for just me. I read it out loud to all my children right before we made a wish, and blew out the candles on our cupcakes together.

Dear XXXXXX,

Life is a strange trip. That’s all you really need to know when you get here, except strangely enough, no one tells you this. No, instead, as soon as you get here they tell you to do this, and this, and that, and if you’re good and follow all the directions as perfectly as you can, when you grow up, you’ll make money and live a good life, just like they are. Of course, as a kid you see that no one who is barking out all these suggestions is living a good life, in fact, their lives suck. You see them as always stressed, always worrying about how they look or what they’ve got and they aren’t happy. In fact, in between barking orders at you, all they are doing is being angry and pissed off about everything. So why would you follow their advice at all you might wonder? Well, you wouldn’t, as a kid you try to go your own way but you see pretty quickly that this just really upsets them, so you try to play along with the whole charade for as long as you can. You get tired of being snapped at when you don’t get it right and pretty soon, beyond this, you really just start to live in your own mind, where you can make up your own stories, the kind of which you like much better.

What no one tells you is that your own stories, your own hopes and dreams, the ones your own mind conjures up for you, are the right way, not for anyone else, but for you. Somewhere deep inside you know this, even if you see all the other people doing something else, just what they were told to do. It doesn’t work for them but they fear looking or being different more then they trust themselves to know what’s right for them. You see most human beings lose themselves in the world of things, and forget completely what they really are, deep down in the center of their own heart and imagination. Now even if they want things, which is okay too, they don’t think they can get them. They’ve completely lost their own ability to direct their own lives and wouldn’t do so anymore if they were given the freedom to do so. Nowadays people actually want to be told what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and even why to do it. Instead of trusting in their own ability to find their own answers to life dilemma’s they just accept somebody else’s and while some people might look right explaining their answers, they never can be. Never forget that if it’s not your own answer to your own questions, then it’s not your answer. No one else’s answer will ever satisfy you anyway, because you’re really just trying to believe they are right. When you know anything for yourself, you never even need to ask for outside opinions. You already know.

So if I had any advice for you at this stage in your life, it’s to trust your own knowing. No one else can know what you do. You’re totally unique in this way, which is exactly how you’re supposed to be. No one else alive right now can experience life the way you do, that’s how special you really are. The universe wanted to see this world through your eyes. If it wanted everyone to see exactly the same it wouldn’t have made so many of us. Our differences don’t need to be reconciled then but honored so always honor yourself and what you’re knowing. This is never a mistake, it’s exactly right for you. The unique expression of you is the spirit of life wanting to be exactly you as you are right now. There is an inherent perfection to this, being you, so never let anyone convince you otherwise. As a rule of thumb, those who say they know don’t know, and those who actually know don’t say they know. That might sound wrong but it’s right, this will become clearer as you go along.

If there was one quote that you might get to know and remember, one quote that might get you through when you don’t think you know what you need to know, but you really do, it’s this one.

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd."— Bertrand Russell

You get to make your own opinions in this life, so don’t be afraid to make them yours. You need not agree with anyone and they need not agree with you. As long as you agree with yourself, that’s all that matters.

I love you. I will always love you. You are the gift of life itself. Never forget it.

Your Mom

This one was long enough, but here’s your song. If you listen to it as if life is singing it to you, it can help calm your fears for there is a promise that is not broken no matter how broken you think you’ve become. Life will come for you, all you have to do is wait for it to show up.