Mixed Metaphors

Greetings all,

March has opened the floodgates and I'm swamped.  I'm grateful and yet tired.  Also there is still emotions to unpack.  It might be time for spring cleaning.  This week I am blending a bit of pop psychology, with retro video games, and some Doctor Who references. That's right I am summoning some of my former geek powers to enlighten you, so here goes.

I used to lose myself for hours in video game universes.  My favorite were adventure or role playing games.  I loved a good story combined with action.  I can thank the Final Fantasy series for a good bit of how I visualize magical and etheric effects with my work.  (Who says video games never did anything for me).  However one series of games had a profound impact on my understanding of mystical temporal mechanics.  That series was the Prince of Persia, and no I don't mean the substandard movie adaption that was put out a few years back.  The Sands of Time introduced me to a fascinating mechanic, the ability to rewind time and prevent tragedy like: falling from a ledge, getting a spear in the face, or falling into one of the many bottomless chasms that some insane architect put in the middle of a royal palace.  (I mean COME ON who puts gaps in the floor that you can only get past by swinging from banners and then running along the wall)!  You also have the ability to slow down the flow of time so that you can evade an enemy attack, and the ability to rocket through time and attack like a whirlwind.  Playing with time is fun.  I did it first in video games and now I do it all the time in my healing practice.

Acrobatics aside the games through story introduced the idea of retroactive causality.  For those not familiar with nonlinear time mechanics, that means that something in the future causes something to occur in the past so that the effect precedes the cause.  Pretty trippy stuff, but it allows you to do a lot.  I literally could go on for pages about these games but I need to speed ahead a bit (or time jump) to the last game in the series The Two Thrones.  In this one your gameplay is split between the prince and his alter ego the dark prince (somebody took Jungian psychology very seriously when designing this one). It was my least favorite but once again the game brings into sharp focus the consequences of our actions and the struggle within ourselves between our more altruistic and selfish aspects.  Mind bending twists of timey-whimey plots aside the prince could be any of us. (I really wish I had his build and could free run like him though #runalongthewallyoucleverboyandremember).

Okay I have laid the metaphors out.  So I am the prince and I too have those warring sides.  I have them in multiple facets as well.  It isn't just selfishness vs. altruism.  It is also optimism vs. pessimism.  The showdown of logical analysis vs.  feelings.  My head is a very divided place.  Emotions are especially tricky.  I am on the one hand an Aquarius I look at the ideas of feelings, I analyze, I project and I check for errors in the subroutines.  I evaluate what emotions are the proper response most times.  Then on the other hand I also have the moon in my chart ruled by Scorpio.  It is easily summed up as this, "Don't talk to me unless you are prepared to be real and drown with me in the abyss of sensation and meaning." So basically I get pulled between, "Feelings, but they're so….sticky," , and "None can feel the true depth and layers of what has passed between us it is unpronounceable in the language of men."

On and off I often despair that I will never connect with people or be "normal" enough to relate to the world at large.  It occurred to me recently that this may ultimately be the case.  I had a sad moment (not for the first time and most certainly not the last), but then I thought that maybe this was the point.  Maybe it was okay to not always connect with the norm.  Maybe I wasn't here to be the life of the party.  Maybe I didn't have to fit in, and maybe that was okay.  Maybe I won't ever really be accepted and that was all part of my genius plan for this lifetime.  There is a perspective you get from being on the outside that you just can't see when you fit in.  I never have fit in and most of my ideas come from my pondering alone, or on the rare occasion I connect with one of the other human outliers.

So how does this rambling assemblage of sci-fi and video game pop psychology apply to you?  Well are  you down on yourself for not being the "good" human who gets along with everyone and has well adjusted emotional responses to life?  (Psst it's okay I won't tell anyone).  What if instead of berating yourself for not being able to do things the way other people do, you did them your way?  What if the fact that you couldn't do what your siblings, colleagues, friends, or old school acquaintances do wasn't a burden, but just a piece of information.  Maybe it is a cosmic BRIDGE OUT sign for you.  What if wasn't a character flaw just stage directions?  Maybe you've been mixing your metaphors and you got your story wrongly labeled a tragedy instead of a comedy of errors.  Chew on that, maybe rewind time a bit and rewrite the narrative you've been playing over.  Perhaps you could change some of those fixed points in time with a little mental time machine.  Just remember you're bigger on the inside.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle