Strata
Humans long for belonging, but we can only belong as deeply as our awareness allows. If you don’t have access to anything deeper than your own conscious ego, the deepest level of belonging you’re capable of will be ego-belonging. Your sense of inclusion will mostly consist of “they’re nice to me!” or at least “they say I’m one of them.”
If your awareness reaches down to the level of your personal unconscious, your sense of belonging could extend more towards “I share unconscious tendencies with these people,” which could range from “we all smile a lot” to “oh great, we all dislike the same types of people!”
Many of the loneliest periods in life come out of this dynamic. You belong to a group, and all is going well — but then your awareness deepens, you begin to sense a deeper layer of yourself. Now, you can’t help but feel your old relationships are shallow, built on sand. You feel lonely when you talk about this new deeper layer of yourself, and you’re met with awkwardness, resentment, even exclusion — rather than the recognition and belonging you’d hoped for.
There can be a happy ending, if you’re lucky. Your new loneliness drives you to find people who can recognize and connect with your new layer of experience — people who do share this deeper layer with you. People you wouldn’t have considered connecting with before, because they didn’t belong with your previous way of belonging — but now, that old kind of belonging seems less and less important.
Continuing down, layer by layer, maybe you’ll find yourself surrounded by, belonging to a group of people who share your own deepest values; who belong to the same gods as you; people whose lives are expressions of the same questions your own soul has been asking since before you were born.
But it all depends on you — how much are you willing to face? How deep can your awareness stretch its roots? How many times are you willing to face loneliness, to reach a deeper belonging?
Encounter
It is precisely the moment when we become completely conscious of the boundaries of the worldview we have comfortably inhabited for several centuries that is also, inevitably, the moment we abandon it: we see the door in the sky, and we walk through it.
- Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
Artifact
A few of my own artifacts this week:
I released Volume 0 of an upcoming “Imaginal Literacy” series. It’s a brief introduction to imaginal practice, presented with a guided exercise. In the exercise, we explore your inner impressions of three related terms: deeper self, higher self, and true self. You can pick it up here.
I’ve been writing articles and recording audio on my Patreon, mostly about an upcoming mystery project (“Imago”), and a series of “Lightning Drafts” about the infra/meta distinction, alchemical containers, and adverse reactions to contemplative practice. I’m going to keep spending more time on Patreon in the upcoming, and I’d love to have your support there.
Finally, changes will be coming to this newsletter after the next issue (Infra #10). When I started this newsletter, I set this format to help me keep a consistent structure, and I told myself I’d at least do 10 like this. Now, I have a better sense of what I want things to be like here, so you’ll be seeing more of the new vision soon.