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Writer's pictureDr. Kathleen Hartford

Blog 3: Excerpts from Ramblings of a Mad Woman Unconscious Beginnings, The Fall of Man


Unconscious Beginnings, The Fall of Man


Angel closed her eyes hard and grimaced. The pain was excruciating. It felt as though she’d implode under the pressure. External sounds of groaning and crying frightened her. And what were those other unrecognizable sounds?

Another crushing squeeze made Angel feel as though she would explode, her heart raced, her fear intensified. Never had she experienced such pressure. No room . . . I need more room, she kept thinking. Suddenly a different type of pressure overwhelmed Angel, something hard against her head before it gave way, then her neck and shoulders. Through the muffled sounds and strains of pain, she heard:

“Congratulations, it’s a girl!”

Angel gasped as the feel of the air consumed her tiny lungs like a burning fire. She gagged as someone suctioned her nose and mouth. What is happening? A sound came from inside of her, one that she wasn’t even aware she could make: a scream. Then something foreign touched her . . . a grasp, rubbery and cold. The bright lights startled her, her skin, which had only known a warm, watery, peaceful home, was being stroked hard. Where am I? Another scream. I don’t like this, no! Cold metal. Another muffled voice:

“Seven pounds, six ounces. Apgar score: nine. A beautiful, healthy baby girl!”

Finally, a warm touch, soft lips on skin, a gentle caress, something, someone familiar, ahhh…feeling sleepy . . . so sleepy . . .

Have you ever thought of your birth or your child’s birth in this way? Have you ever felt into the experience and wondered what it must have been like, everything the mind and senses might have been trying to process?


The State of Amnesia

It is proven that infants can hear sounds and recognize voices from the womb. They are conscious of their surroundings but not yet conscious of themselves as “separate” beings.

They are still functioning in oneness, part of the “All That Is.” This awareness of an ‘individual self’ unfolds slowly, completing around the age of three. During these years of individuation and ego identity, toddlers lose something very precious: they lose the essence of who they really are, pure spirit, love, forever changeless, timeless, peaceful, and one with the “All That Is”. You are exactly as the Word created you, spoke you into being. With individuation, most of us lose our connections to our original source, our knowingness, our remembrance of trust.


This occurs because our world is an enmeshment of dependence on others. In our childhood years, this is a matter of survival; we need adults to hold us, feed us, clothe us, clean us, and hopefully love us. However, this dependency on our outside world supports a pattern of external referral for validation and need fulfillment. We are trained to look outside of ourselves to have our needs met and to know we are accepted.

Imagine waking up as an adult one day with no recollection of who you are, no memory of your past, not knowing where you came from or how you got where you are. This is where we all begin, in that unconscious state of amnesia. For many it never ends. Is it any wonder that we are afraid?


It is my hope that this blog series serves as an antidote to the amnesiac state, the state that causes separation from each other and a lack of conscious connection to the vibrational resonance, the WORD, that created us.


Remember

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. . . . And without Him was not anything made that was made.”


The Word is the vibration of creative energy that made us, maintains us, and keeps our bodies striving for life and optimal health. Our disconnection from it keeps our hearts longing for love and our confusion about it keeps our minds searching for understanding.


Life is filled with gifts, trials, tribulations, and irony. Perhaps life’s biggest irony is that we believe our perceptions of it to be real. We believe that you and I are separate, and this false belief creates fear. To manage and survive our perceived separateness, we create, with our mind and senses, a mental construct of reality. This perception of reality is agreed upon by the people around us, it becomes our group’s mentality and provides for us a comfortable container in which to feel accepted and live our lives.

Unfortunately, since it is our group we own it, and by definition of ownership it does not belong to others, only us and therefore. by default, becomes an opposite to their group. This opposition creates the “us versus them” mentality that divides religions, countries, professional sports teams, and many families. This division leaves the human race in a constant place of potential disagreement, battle, and war. What we believe to be real, what we are willing to fight for, die for, kill for, is, in fact, transient and illusory. What truly is real, we cannot see and have forgotten.


This is the lack of awareness that leaves us unconscious to our deeper knowing. What do I mean by “unconscious”? Webster’s dictionary defines it as “not knowing or perceiving, not aware; not possessing mind or consciousness; not marked by conscious thought, sensation or feeling.”


Do you have an awareness of something greater than yourself? Is your self-identity bigger than your name, your profession, your family, or your religion? In the most naked way possible, have you ever posed the question, If I am not my image as created by my name, ethnic background, profession, or religion, then who am I?


In our “separation illusion,” we begin to judge, define, and resist all the uniqueness around us. Remember our initial premise: What if life, and our perceptions of it, are not what we believe them to be; what if we are unconscious and suffering with global amnesia?


“All of the mind’s arbitrary conceptions of matter, phenomena, and of all conditioning factors and all conceptions and ideas relating thereto are like a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow.”

—The Buddah


In the hilarious 1970s sitcom Soap, there is a scene in which one of the main characters wakes up with amnesia, next to a railway line dressed in hobo’s clothing, asking: “Who am I? Where am I?” Many of you may know a similar scene in Shakespeare’s The Taming of The Shrew.


The hobo next to him answers: “Toledo. A hobo.”

I know it sounds silly, but isn’t this what we do when we are unsure? We look around and ask ourselves, who should I be here? We look at others clothing, others way of talking, acting, and eating, and we buy into the idea that to fit in, this is how we should be, especially if we wish to be accepted.


We look outside of ourselves for information about ourselves. The opinion of others has a strong influence in deciding who we are and how we should behave. We alter ‘who we are’ based on others’ expectations or judgments, even when this way of being isn’t comfortable for us.


The science of marketing relies on its ability to manipulate you into believing that you need what they have. The fashion industry changes hems, heels, and blouses so you quickly know if someone is in or out of fashion. After working with patients for over 35 years what I know to be true is a person’s degree of internal fear, anxiety, and depression is equal to their degree of amnesia and their need to be accepted and belong.

How did we get here? How did we become a collective group of unconscious egos living our lives, disconnected from one and other, playing out this cheesy soap opera called The Drama of Life? More importantly, how can we survive?


Chances are we learned to survive just as the character on the sitcom did. We looked at others around us and became outward referred in order to define who we are. The Soap gentleman—who was very wealthy, by the way—woke up next to a hobo, looked like a hobo, and was told that he was a hobo living in Toledo. So, it was a reasonable assumption on his part to believe he was a hobo. However, “reasonable” does not mean “real,” it means determined through thought or deductive reasoning. All of which come from your mind’s judgments.

When we begin life not knowing anything and a woman says, “I am your mother,” she takes on the powerful role of mother. We are then taught to say, “Daddy,” and you know “This is my father.” We now have mother and father as the two most powerful people in the world because they are our world, in fact we do not yet know that we are separate from them. We hear their conversations, their arguments, their television shows, their news shows. We take this all in completely unfiltered and we believe it must be true. We feel mother’s love, anger, anxiety, every minute we are with her. She is our life and her emotional vibrations become familiar to us, even comforting because she sustains us, feeds us, without her we do not have the whole of us.


We go to school and we are told, ”You are good at this” or “You shouldn’t do that” or “Say this, but don’t say that” or “Make sure you wear this, but not that” or “You should never be that” and “We talk like this.” We pick role models and often the role models are actors, models, sports figures who themselves are playing a role, who have agents telling them how to brand themselves to fit an image that sells. We learn about clicks, bullies and the difficulties of fitting in and being accepted especially in this social media driven world. Make no mistake, at that age rejection can feel like death.


As we grow up, we integrate all of that external information. Much like a computer downloads programming we download our cultural identity. Then we grow up and begin doing adult things, like looking for our life partner. Our life partner now tells us the type of partner we should be, most probably needing us to ‘be’ a certain way so that they can feel good or safe in our presence and within the relationship.


Unconsciously, we begin to live into the images that others have for us to survive, to be accepted, to feel and look good. We create a way to win in the world, then we buy into that winning image as if it were who we really are. Good or bad it becomes our way of being. It is the way of being that our mind goes to when confronted with familiar stimulations. In other words, we only play the game that on some level allows us to win. And just like any good sports team we adapt to win! Therefore gangs, or any group who accept us are so inviting, we are all longing for a place to belong. Unfortunately, with our amnesia we often miss that we already do.


“What is the ego? But a dream of what you really are.”

Gifts from A Course In Miracles





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