January 2024 – BlissNinja

Wearing the Masks of my past and glaring at the mirror til they see me

There is really nothing more to say when we come back to that beginning of all beginnings that is nothing at all. Only when you begin to lose the Alpha or Omega do you want to start to talk and to write, and then there is no end to it, words, words, words. At best and most they are perhaps in memoriam, evocations, conjurations, incantations, emanations, shimmering, iridescent flares in the sky of darkness, a just still feasible tact, indiscretions, perhaps forgivable….

City lights at night, from the air, receding, like these words, atoms each containing its own world and every other world. Each a fuse to set you off…

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.
RD Laing ‘Bird of Paradise’

Back and forth Ive gone, trying to decide which framework to use to tell my story, to evoke my past selves, to conjure the spirits of my composted dead….the spells of words, words, words to wrangle language into incantation and summon sensation from the tangled threads. Best to start from the beginning, so there is proper context for the cycles and patterns. My intention is to psychologically and astrologically deep-dive through the mythic landscapes of my narrative, as well as using Dreams and other dimensional experiences…..and journals and poetry that span my life…….creating a Quantum Astropsychography.

This is really an extended Uranus opposition Ritual, a systematic series of inner journeys into the deeply buried memories that are tangled up in the fascia of my body and in deep underground psychic gulag that holds soul shards, waiting for my return and to be released from their Prizm Cells. 18 months approximately of transits that will shake up the structures of my life and ego once again, so that I can be patchworked back together in a more meaningful way, ready to start the next leg of my journey of embodiment here. I must let go of it all. Surrender the moments and mysteries and experiences that have sculpted me. And start anew, as a sovereign Self in the playground…..ready to create and to embrace all that Life asks of me in this new reality (with its ever-more-shaky foundation). Pluto into aquarius, is bringing the reflection of a way of life that will rapidly become unrecognizable. My sons descendant is 2′ aquarius and his 5 planet stellium in early aquarius opposing natal saturn has me open-eyed waiting for what magic and transformation he will undergo over the next decade. He just turned 18. I cant help but be nervous, knowing all too well the many plutonic crisis’ that define my own life journey. And wondering what sort of games the lord of the underworld has in store.

I have watched sons
Claim
Their names beneath
The sun,
I have seen the same
Done
To me,
I have been a child
I have been a whore
I have been a maniac
Knocking on gods door,
And in the neon
The glow
The bliss that sometimes
We know
I have melted like
Wax
And my heart has
Dripped right
Through
The cracks in your
Floor.

Charleen Johnston 2004

The politics of experience

“As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavor; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world” we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies, we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and to ensure the minimal requirements for biosocial survival- to register fatigue , signals for food, sex, defecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing. Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.”
RD Laing ‘the politics of experience’

Many years ago when I was about 21 I discovered RD Laing ‘The Divided Self’ , which was one of many valuable books I read that helped me be comfortable with my psychological state and the way I navigated the world. Recently I picked up his book ‘The Politics of Experience’ and within the first chapter he brilliantly articulates what became obvious to me way back as a teenager. But on the eve of starting the deep dive into my own life via autobiographical storytelling, and the eve of my sons 18^th birthday, I read some passages that really capture my reasons for making the decisions Ive made in my own childrearing and in all aspects of my life. Early on I saw the truth of the above quotation, and I vowed never to be the ‘normal man’. Ever since I can remember, my first memories are realizations that I was ‘mad’ and not like the creatures around me. As I got a little older, the fact of madness haunted me. Just beyond the curtain of everyday life, the Madwomans Whisper called to me, beckoning me to follow into realms little understood, and which excited me, yet also left me vulnerable to the alienation of the common crowd. And instead of cowering in the face of madness, I have done my best to live out my truth in defiance of the mediocrity of modern expression. Ive raised my son to be a sovereign individual willing and able to step away from the consensus, with confidence in acting in a manner far from the ‘maddening crowd’.

“What we call “Normal” is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive action on experience. ..It is radically estranged from the structure of Being.

The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms’.

There are forms of alienation that are relatively starnge to statiscially ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing stage of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘ normal’ majority as bad or mad.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man’.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates its children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things.

If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive.

If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.”
RD Laing ‘the politics of experience’

How we experience ourselves and the world around us, including other beings, shapes how we act and how we think and how we create structures to contain our lifeforce. Our experience has been intentionally manipulated. The fog of delusion that humanity lives within is imperceptible to the average person, except through the vague feeling-sense of what is missing. In performing a ‘retrospective’ of my life, up to this point, at 43 years old, I intend to do soul retrieval to all those sparks of Life and Self that are trapped in the psychic gulag of my hologenetic Body of Experience. The act of re-entering these spaces, to free these selves, and to articulate and tell the story of my own Mythological existence, is to do my part in reMembering Wholeness. It is my Gift to the larger Body that I exist within, to tell my story and to untangle the knots of energy that bind my power to old dreams and dramas and to deliver my own Self as the birth pains of Sovereignty make any other life impossible. Theres no way out but in. Into the Body, into the Cellves, into the tIssues and into the Fascia which is the crystalline template holding the seed.

Coming to Terms with Self

Ive been waiting for this day, and this time, to begin this process of birth……been holding out for the ritual moment. And here I am…..Exactly to the minute of the official birth time 18 years ago today, of my one and only child in this reality. My son turns 18 ……RIGHT NOW. I live my life in the borderland of the Imaginal Realm, and arrange important things in such a way that I honor the Kairos of Life. Ive been on a quickening descent over the past year, at least, preparing for the major milestone of Uranus opposition, in my case the Sun is exactly conjunct natal Uranus, so this huge transit will be powerful on many levels. Other major transits all lining up at this time to make the whole next 18 months a dance on the edge of sanity.

My son turns 18, officially an adult in this game now. Almost an entire nodal cycle since he came thru my watery womb into his own notion of Self. I became a Mother in that same moment, bearing the beauty and the burden of Other, in such an intense manner. So now, as he spiritually accepts the mantle of responsibility for his own life and sovereignty, I also Birth My Self……..into a new reality. I will always be Mother, but as of this moment, internally, the Spiritual Birth Canal opens…..and I ceremonially swim through with a vow of sovereignty and Intent to transform myself into the next stage of my evolution.

Something that has been pursuing me for years, has caught up, and holding me hostage. Something that I made a contract to complete in the space between lives, where patterns and matter play with possibility. Ive been hunted and can no longer evade this undertaking. Writing has always been my deepest love. And my deepest need…..to express…..to articulate in the magic of language, the powerful spaces my spirit dances in. At heart I am a storyteller. And I have lived a life on the edge of the chasm, never fully part of this world. At 43, as the Kundalini Serpent stirs once again, I feel my Mind and Personality turning to mush as the Cocoon forms itself around me, creating space for transfiguration. My greatest blessing has been the opportunity to face all of my life cycles consciously, always perched upon the precipice of paradox. From this moment forward, I make the deep commitment to start writing out my life stories thus far, this quantum astropsychography. So many things to say and to capture, part of the reason it has taken so long. Or perhaps its just divine timing, and this project will be what carries me thru the event of this sacred birth of Self into the world. Letting go of distractions, Surrendering to the task at hand.

The Madwomans Whisper has been taunting me for many years, pulling me toward spaces that threaten to consume me entirely, but I know that it is the voice of my Daimon, who cares not for my human frailties and failures, but drags me incessantly toward greater creativity and embodiment, regardless of the strain on my physical vessel. I have felt more and more that I am going to implode completely, if I do not start tearing the scabs from my wounds and weaving the words as a magic talisman to take me through the portal. My natal blueprint, its all there. The trickster who straddles the boundary of the mortal and immortal worlds. The Divine undertaking, to so fully strip myself bare in front of the world that there is nothing left under this skin that has not been exposed to the light. The Gulags, my psychic landscape that holds fractal selves hostage, deep within the knots of timeSpace that demand a prism break. I know now how to release them, how to deFragment, how to Come To Terms with Self. Ive carried these seeds for lifetimes. It is Time, Now, to plant them into the Soil of the Souls SalveAtIon.

Charleen Johnston

1-29-2024