How I Came To **¿UNDERSTAND?** I Am Female, Part 2

In my last post on this subject, I was digging into the general idea of subconscious gender, and how I constructed that identity in my own peculiar roundabout way. I talked about my ideas of different types of knowledge other than rational and religious or faith based knowledge. The basic thread is that the body, my body, is the receiver transmitter, and the things I learn about my true self specific to this blog, my true gender identity, are discovered primarily through that receiver, my body. One simple example: I may have used this one already, but it will serve as a quick segue too.  Back at the turn of the century, I was walking down the street in my little town, about to cross, jaywalk in fact, and I suddenly held back, just momentarily to reflect. I felt this idea go through my body, that was just saying, “You can be as graceful as you like.” It is like simultaneous thing that happens, and you don’t really know where it comes from, because your mind is intuiting something and your body is talking to you like a bird that just flew up and landed on the fence post.  And  it isn’t until much later after dozens of reflections on one of these ‘moments’ that you realize there is something at work, a force that is more powerful than anything you can describe. It is as though you are seeing the future and the past at once and it is a huge wall of a dust storm with little pictures floating in and out of the cloud. And there you are going along just watching it like a movie.  See, we prefer rational constructs of knowledge, because we can measure, quantify, and even though the reward is so miniscule, it is verifiable that it happened, it is provable and after numerous attempts it is irrefutable. We know.  Rubbish ok, bawlderdash and crap.  The knowledge of rationality is powerless in the face of truth.  We all know this.  This is why we say, “I just know.”  (know)ledge – it’s there, trust yours. So many years later, after the ‘moment’ of grace on the street in my little town – and here, by the way is the segue… I began to actually understand in words and rational thinking what this thing was inside me that was wanting to come out for so long. It was this woman.  And this woman began to dance. I mean, dancing for 2 hours almost every day. And this woman began having revelations, and visions while dancing in the dark with candles –  sweating and crying and laughing. And this woman went off to a rave for three days and danced and laughed and sweated – and she saw it was all good. Considering the number of sources that combine to make the inner being, it makes sense to use a lens of individualism, rather than collectivism, when surveying gender identity throughout the society. That is, if I look at each person as an individual, without a particular connection to societal labels or doctrines, I have a better chance at knowing that true person. I also have a better chance of allowing my body to tell me what the truth is that I am perceiving. How can we come up with a pristine rational configuration of our selves or others on demand?  Well, the answer is – we can’t.  Yet society, ‘the man’, our peers – even the ghost in our own internal machine is constantly demanding that we have the identity ‘on their desk by Monday morning’. It’s ridiculous the pressure we put on ourselves and others, to identify. It’s a pressure that comes from foreign programming, a source that isn’t really true. When did this all begin?  Well, I could get into beginnings of rational theory, and scientific method, and make some kind of gesture as to how that affected our spiritual selves, but I am not going to. I don’t feel the pressure to ‘prove’ my truth.  The process of finding things out through my body / my self as a complex receiving instrument, has proven itself to me already. It is my own truth experiment that I have been hypothesizing and testing my entire life. Let me make it clear with an example: when I was walking home from school in grade seven and I realized that death was real and it was coming right at me, I froze in my tracks, my body filled with that truth, and I it has remained the same ever since.  I can remember the situation, the scene, as if I were an observer outside of my self, still completely visual and clear. I know that at that time, I had been to lots of different Christian churches, but I never was taken with the whole idea. I was already developing my own type of spirituality. Everyone in my family was committed to the church through the process of rituals etc, being accepted by Jesus and so on. Anyway, now whenever I am reminded of the truth of death, my body feels that same feeling. It is an absolute truth, well, as absolute as death can be until one begins to delve into things like transmigration of spirit – but let’s leave that for now. Just as a reminder, in my last post I referred to this as apophenic, and ex nihilo (out of nowhere) type of knowledge. Those descriptions may conjure quite different things for different people, depending on your familiarity or understanding of them. For me, apophenia is a randomness of discovery that includes a lot of different categories at once. So while someone can exercise their thinking in a way that is linear and have a sort of logical process, apophenia simple takes all the things ‘as themselves’ and derives the meaning from what is self-evident in the moment. Ex nihilo is an old Latin thing and for me it just means that it is something that didn’t exist before, that some of the things that I discover through this learning process I can only describe that way. Another example of this other type or way of knowledge. I was working in the mountains in British Columbia in reforestation. One day, I came across a large patch of ground covered with hundreds of plants that I didn’t recognize particularly, but for some reason, I stopped working and began to investigate this plant.  I found the roots were all gnarled together in a massive ball that looked a bit like a brain with dirt all intermingled in the rivulets (if you can picture that). You should know also, that I was working in the wilds like this for some time and there is an innate connection that happens, especially when you exert yourself. Just as a side note, the aboriginals around where I was at the time, used valerian as a topical antiseptic for wounds. (Thompson Okanagan Kootenay area tribes) Anyway - Then I recognized the smell of the roots and probably what had caused me to stop in the first place. The plant was valerian, and the root is used for a sedative among other things. After I recognized the smell, I felt almost a kinship with this plant, like it had made this communication with me. It may seem a bit weird if you happen to not be in tune with such things, but believe me there is a truth to this that goes back further than recorded history.  I just want to make a quick point to illustrate the kind of knowledge that brings one to understand that the body, our body, many different types of bodies, are like transmitter receivers for knowledge, and the knowledge that is being sent and received is nothing like the kind of rational knowledge that we all deal with daily. We are so caught up in that kind of epistemology, that the vastness of other types of knowledge become invisible.  My hope is that I can only inspire someone to begin to journey into that sacred place of your own self, and just let it begin to speak to you. The world around us now tends to indicate that you need to be like this or like that in order to take part in the sacredness of self and knowledge and connection to source etc. The methods of gaining access to sacredness are all tied up in expensive workshops and groups of people who have a myriad of political and financial agendas.  I say, go inside the store yourself, and take charge – no one knows that place as well as you.  You go in, it wakes and you wake with it.  It is the closest thing to magic that I know. So I ended up saving a ball of the valerian roots, harvested from one of these plants – there were hundreds of the plants all around me, and that one ball of roots lasted me for years. I still use valerian root that I purchase here in the co-op, and it has a special kind of awakening energy for me. It has a sedating quality, and that to me is a generic idea – being sedated.  To me the plant is like a dream giving plant. It is like something that connects you to things that you can’t find, can’t connect with but have a deeper urge to do so. This is how I came to think of valerian as a signature (Amorah Quan Yin in one of her books says that the so called ‘signature plants’, come from Sirius.)  I think that in the book about Findhorn, there were initially references to signature plants and that the plants had specific spirits or faeries that were in them, like dwellers or guardians. It is also a piece of my story that bears proof in things that I believe, but really cannot prove. I also believe that certain grains are similarly endowed with spirit or maybe you can call them signature plants as well. Isn’t it interesting that there are truths that we cannot prove, that do not adhere to the concept of faith, yet we know they are true – we have (know)ledge. This is the way that we want to find our true selves, our true gender or subconscious gender as I sometimes think of it. This is how we want to experience our sexuality, in a place beyond any truth that has been programmed or taught to us.  This is our sacred journey, right? Are we going to let anything or anyone take that away or diminish it?  Let’s not.

In my last post on this subject, I was digging into the general idea of subconscious gender, and how I constructed that identity in my own peculiar roundabout way. I talked about my ideas of different types of knowledge other than rational and religious or faith based knowledge. The basic thread is that the body, my body, is the receiver transmitter, and the things I learn about my true self specific to this blog, my true gender identity, are discovered primarily through that receiver, my body.

One simple example: I may have used this one already, but it will serve as a quick segue too.  Back at the turn of the century, I was walking down the street in my little town, about to cross, jaywalk in fact, and I suddenly held back, just momentarily to reflect. I felt this idea go through my body, that was just saying, “You can be as graceful as you like.” It is like simultaneous thing that happens, and you don’t really know where it comes from, because your mind is intuiting something and your body is talking to you like a bird that just flew up and landed on the fence post.  And  it isn’t until much later after dozens of reflections on one of these ‘moments’ that you realize there is something at work, a force that is more powerful than anything you can describe. It is as though you are seeing the future and the past at once and it is a huge wall of a dust storm with little pictures floating in and out of the cloud. And there you are going along just watching it like a movie.  See, we prefer rational constructs of knowledge, because we can measure, quantify, and even though the reward is so miniscule, it is verifiable that it happened, it is provable and after numerous attempts it is irrefutable. We know.  Rubbish ok, balderdash and crap.  The knowledge of rationality is powerless in the face of truth.  We all know this.  This is why we say, “I just know.”  (know)ledge – it’s there, trust yours.

So many years later, after the ‘moment’ of grace on the street in my little town – and here, by the way is the segue… I began to actually understand in words and rational thinking what this thing was inside me that was wanting to come out for so long. It was this woman.  And this woman began to dance. I mean, dancing for 2 hours almost every day. And this woman began having revelations, and visions while dancing in the dark with candles –  sweating and crying and laughing. And this woman went off to a rave for three days and danced and laughed and sweated – and she saw it was all good.

Considering the number of sources that combine to make the inner being, it makes sense to use a lens of individualism, rather than collectivism, when surveying gender identity throughout the society. That is, if I look at each person as an individual, without a particular connection to societal labels or doctrines, I have a better chance at knowing that true person. I also have a better chance of allowing my body to tell me what the truth is that I am perceiving.

How can we come up with a pristine rational configuration of our selves or others on demand?  Well, the answer is – we can’t.  Yet society, ‘the man’, our peers – even the ghost in our own internal machine is constantly demanding that we have the identity ‘on their desk by Monday morning’. It’s ridiculous the pressure we put on ourselves and others, to identify. It’s a pressure that comes from foreign programming, a source that isn’t really true. When did this all begin?  Well, I could get into beginnings of rational theory, and scientific method, and make some kind of gesture as to how that affected our spiritual selves, but I am not going to. I don’t feel the pressure to ‘prove’ my truth.  The process of finding things out through my body / my self as a complex receiving instrument, has proven itself to me already. It is my own truth experiment that I have been hypothesizing and testing my entire life.

Let me make it clear with an example: when I was walking home from school in grade seven and I realized that death was real and it was coming right at me, I froze in my tracks, my body filled with that truth, and I it has remained the same ever since.  I can remember the situation, the scene, as if I were an observer outside of my self, still completely visual and clear. I know that at that time, I had been to lots of different Christian churches, but I never was taken with the whole idea. I was already developing my own type of spirituality. Everyone in my family was committed to the church through the process of rituals etc, being accepted by Jesus and so on. Anyway, now whenever I am reminded of the truth of death, my body feels that same feeling. It is an absolute truth, well, as absolute as death can be until one begins to delve into things like transmigration of spirit – but let’s leave that for now.

Just as a reminder, in my last post I referred to this as apophenic, and ex nihilo (out of nowhere) type of knowledge. Those descriptions may conjure quite different things for different people, depending on your familiarity or understanding of them. For me, apophenia is a randomness of discovery that includes a lot of different categories at once. So while someone can exercise their thinking in a way that is linear and have a sort of logical process, apophenia simple takes all the things ‘as themselves’ and derives the meaning from what is self-evident in the moment. Ex nihilo is an old Latin thing and for me it just means that it is something that didn’t exist before, that some of the things that I discover through this learning process I can only describe that way.

Another example of this other type or way of knowledge.

I was working in the mountains in British Columbia in reforestation. One day, I came across a large patch of ground covered with hundreds of plants that I didn’t recognize particularly, but for some reason, I stopped working and began to investigate this plant.  I found the roots were all gnarled together in a massive ball that looked a bit like a brain with dirt all intermingled in the rivulets (if you can picture that). You should know also, that I was working in the wilds like this for some time and there is an innate connection that happens, especially when you exert yourself. Just as a side note, the aboriginals from around where I was at the time, used valerian as a topical antiseptic for wounds. (Thompson Okanagan Kootenay area tribes)

Then I recognized the smell of the roots and probably what had caused me to stop in the first place. The plant was valerian, and the root is used for a sedative among other things. After I recognized the smell, I felt almost a kinship with this plant, like it had made this communication with me. It may seem a bit weird if you happen to not be in tune with such things, but believe me there is a truth to this that goes back further than recorded history.  I just want to make a quick point to illustrate the kind of knowledge that brings one to understand that the body, our body, many different types of bodies, are like transmitter receivers for knowledge, and the knowledge that is being sent and received is nothing like the kind of rational knowledge that we all deal with daily. We are so caught up in that kind of epistemology, that the vastness of other types of knowledge become invisible.  My hope is that I can only inspire someone to begin to journey into that sacred place of your own self, and just let it begin to speak to you. The world around us now tends to indicate that you need to be like this or like that in order to take part in the sacredness of self and knowledge and connection to source etc. The methods of gaining access to sacredness are all tied up in expensive workshops and groups of people who have a myriad of political and financial agendas.  I say, go inside the store yourself, and take charge – no one knows that place as well as you.  You go in, it wakes and you wake with it.  It is the closest thing to magic that I know.

So I ended up saving a ball of the valerian roots, harvested from one of these plants – there were hundreds of the plants all around me, and that one ball of roots lasted me for years. I still use valerian root that I purchase here in the co-op, and it has a special kind of awakening energy for me. It has a sedating quality, and that to me is a generic idea – being sedated.  To me the plant is like a dream giving plant. It is like something that connects you to things that you can’t find, can’t connect with but have a deeper urge to do so. This is how I came to think of valerian as a signature (Amorah Quan Yin in one of her books says that the so called ‘signature plants’, come from Sirius.)  I think that in the book about Findhorn, there were initially references to signature plants and that the plants had specific spirits or faeries that were in them, like dwellers or guardians. It is also a piece of my story that bears proof in things that I believe, but really cannot prove. I also believe that certain grains are similarly endowed with spirit or maybe you can call them signature plants as well.

Isn’t it interesting that there are truths that we cannot prove, that do not adhere to the concept of faith, yet we know they are true – we have (know)ledge. This is the way that we want to find our true selves, our true gender or subconscious gender as I sometimes think of it. This is how we want to experience our sexuality, in a place beyond any truth that has been programmed or taught to us.  This is our sacred journey, right? Are we going to let anything or anyone take that away or diminish it?  Let’s not.