Unfinished Business
Some excerpts form Unfinished Business
At the heart of the modern opera is unfinished family business. This may seem like an intellectual notion, or something reserved for the stage: the stuff of playwrights. If so, that's only because the theory has gone untested in our era. However, there is a real issue here of people needing to confront the possibility that their parents betrayed them or failed them in major ways. To heal this takes work, and moreover, it takes courage.
Anyone who understands the authoritarian conditioning of both family and politics can see the connection between the two. Ultimately, the government and its supposed leaders are in loco parentis. That means in place of a parent, such as a teacher responsible for children. And often, those authority figures abuse their power, following on from the traumas created by parents.
Many currently acting in the role of parents are themselves no more mature than petulant children, as evidenced in Tuesday night's "debate" between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is the drama of an abusive household, magnified to the scale of society. It's complete with perpetrators, enablers, victims, and rescuers in various roles as contestants, moderator, commentators, and spectators throwing money and disgust at the whole thing.
Right behind that is the Covid disaster. And right behind that still exists every problem that the United States and the world had one year ago today, suddenly multiplied many times over. Mars retrograde — the rare person seeking to individuate — is trying with all its might to find itself in the midst of chaos and oppression. It describes struggling to find the confidence to push back against it, and to not take out the anger and abuse on oneself.
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Yet the far more worthy goal is to dismantle one's individual conditioning to take abuse. That means learning how not to be infantilized (such as by an "expert" or "authority"), nor to give up one's power. Part of the internal conditioning is the fear of rejection by the family, which means by society.
Lurking in the back of the Covid mess is what seems to be the fear of death. What we experience and witness as the fear of death is more often the fear of life: of being alive. Death is inevitable; really living is not. Rather than attempting to confront the fear of death, it's much easier to smother oneself. It's much more difficult to strive to live fully and courageously.
Part of the problem is that being subjected to this kind of condition means being compelled to accept lies, or otherwise face expulsion (which in the primal sense means death). If you wonder why people are so easy to lie to, and why they accept this so readily, consider that it comes along with a death threat, whether subliminal or overt.
Yet for those determined to live while you are here, there is no choice in the matter. You live because that is the thing to do. Right now, one of the most important aspects of living is to confront unfinished business. Much of that unfinished business means figuring out just how you've been lied to, so that you can embrace your personal truth. One must necessarily lead to the other. It is not possible to know what is true, or what truth means, without recognizing what is untrue.
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In the end, this all comes down to bodily integrity. Whether consciousness is being infiltrated and our ideas about our physical existence are being overwritten, or whether our chromosomes are being damaged, or whether someone is suffering from the trauma of physical or sexual abuse, we are talking about the integrity of the body. Whether we are given poisonous drugs or conned into living next to a chemical waste dump, we are talking about the integrity of the body.
As we "ascend" into nonphysical form via the increasing immersion in digital existence, anything related to the body tends to become more confusing and more frightening. It is increasingly easy to shock people into fear associated with their body.
Children of Love Canal playing next to the toxic dump site in the late 1970s before being evacuated. Remember that we are all subjected to a wide diversity of chemical insults throughout our lives, and must do what we can to be aware of and minimize additional exposures.
When we think of the landscape and the oceans decimated by industry, we need to think of our bodies and how we relate to them. Biology is the most beautiful thing ever devised by nature. Whether you spend an hour in a forest or years studying how cells work, there is little that is more beautiful — and that is our truth and our existence on this plane of consciousness.
We are not merely our biology, but we are very close to it, and it is part of the miracle of existence. To the extent that our bodies have been turned into Love Canal, we must stop that process now. I know of nothing that more closely resembles the contents of Love Canal than the chemical and biological brew that is known to come out of the tip of a hypodermic needle.
Part of our unfinished business is learning how to take care of ourselves. That means learning how to nourish our bodies, how to rest, and how to prevent unnecessary damage. If we cannot take care of the landscape we directly inhabit, we will never be able to take care of our planet, nor will we have the motive to. There is an advantage here: most of us reading (and many other people) actually do have the means to take care of ourselves. Doing so is mostly about the willingness.
We are nature in the first instance. Our connection to our bodies is our connection to the Earth. It starts and ends with us: with your physical form. It is not the be-all and end-all; reality is much more than we see here.
However: here is where we are, in bodies and in a world that needs nothing but healing. That means doing your part. That means acting as if to hold the world together for as long as we are here.
Author: Eric Françis
Source: Planet Waves