Revolution, Awakening, And Leaving Abusive Relationships All Happen In Unexpected Ways by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2022-01-27 at 01:42:21 )

Revolution, Awakening, And Leaving Abusive Relationships All Happen In Unexpected Ways by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!

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People do not generally leave abusive relationships in egoically satisfying, Hollywood-friendly ways.

I point this out because those of us who are watching the peoples abusive relationship with predatory power structures and hoping for revolutionary change often tend to envision the status quo ending in an epic way that will make for a good story and let us feel good about ourselves and how right we were. And that just is not how these things tend to go.

One of the most shameful things about being in an abusive relationship is how much longer you will let it go on for than an outside observer would expect. How much brutality you will put up with and the ways you will justify it to yourself.

The shame of this can be soul-crushing. A friend once said, "The worst part was not when he raped me, it was having to make him breakfast afterward." The shamefulness of the abuse and degradation you will put up with because of where you are at in your mind is why people do not discuss this aspect more, which is why the loved ones of people in those relationships often have such a hard time understanding it. People do not talk about it, so many do not understand how common it is.

Generally when someone leaves an abusive relationship it is not really because they were hit one too many times. It is not because it got worse than it used to be. Sometimes it will be because the abuser started to assault the victims child, but even that will often happen in ways that are a lot more complicated and shameful than the victim acknowledges when telling the story later on.

Generally when someone leaves an abusive relationship it happens for the same reason flowers bloom: because it was time. Something just shifts, and suddenly you are seeing things you were not seeing before. You start noticing patterns, noticing manipulations, noticing the malice in the abusers face that you had previously compartmentalized away from seeing.

And then when you leave the reality of it does not often make for a great Hollywood movie or Hallmark TV special. It does not fit well into egoically gratifying stories. A process just kind of plays itself out, some things happen in ways you probably did not anticipate, and then one day you are not waking up next to the same person anymore. You might try to tell heroic stories about it, or others might do that on your behalf, but really it just kind of happened when the happening was ripe.

Spiritual enlightenment often happens in the same way. Zen Buddhism is full of stories of sudden awakenings where a monk meditates for thirty years while remaining locked in delusion and then suddenly experiences satori after slipping and falling or hearing a teacher say something unexpected or whatever.

It happens when it is time. A good teacher might offer some spiritual practices to help "lay the groundwork" for awakening, but one person can take those practices and never awaken while another can awaken very quickly. It is not like building a house or learning a new language where you set to work and do certain things in a certain way and then eventually you have what you set out to obtain. Awakening does not work that way. It is not the product of personal will. It happens when it happens.

A pot of water can sit there on the stove for minutes without looking like much is happening. When people look at our current environment of murderous exploitative status quo systems and deeply propagandized populations they will often despair because it is very much the same: it does not look like much is happening.

But then the water begins to boil. But then the battered wife escapes to safety. But then the spiritual aspirant sees beyond the veil of illusion. But then the people rise up.

Humans are storytelling creatures; that is why it is possible to gain such a tremendous amount of power over us by controlling our stories. We are storytelling creatures whose primate brains were not evolved for the purpose of giving us any absolute understanding of ultimate reality, whose senses only take in a tiny fraction of our surroundings, whose minds do not process what is happening in the ways science tells us things are actually happening.

What do you get when you have a storytelling animal with a very limited capacity to perceive life as it really is? You get a lot of things happening in ways that the creature did not expect, because none of their mental stories told them to anticipate it happening in that way. And then probably telling a bunch of stories about what happened which do not truly reflect reality.

If and when humanity does wake up from its propaganda-induced coma and push for the changes needed for us to evade extinction and create a healthy world together, it will happen in ways we are not expecting.

It will happen in ways that are not pleasing to the ego. It will happen in ways that do not allow us to stand up and say "Aha! You see? I was right all along!" It will happen in ways that do not form a compelling narrative.

And how could it?

If humanity is to survive into the distant future we are going to have to transcend the egoic mental habits which led us into this mess. We are going to have to transcend our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative which made us so easy to manipulate and propagandize.

We are going to have to transcend our self-destructive patterning, which will necessarily have to come from an unpatterned, and therefore unexpected direction.

It will happen when it happens, in a way we could not possibly have predicted it would happen.

So do not despair if it looks like things are not headed toward change. The boiling water, the escaped abuse victim, and the deeply enlightened mind all looked the same at one point.

Do not despair, and do not fear the unknown. The unknown is the only direction humanitys salvation can possibly come from.

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