You Think You're Loving (But You Don't Love Me)
Dostoyevsky said in his “Notes from Underground” that “consciousness is a thoroughgoing illness”. As an 18 or 19-year-old girl, I agreed with him. Now that it’s been six or seven years, I disagree. I counter that socialization— NOT consciousness— is a thoroughgoing illness, and because it is pandemic, those of us more acutely aware of our consciousness may feel burdened and weakened by that. However, it does not equate to powerlessness or the loss of power; it in fact gives one an upper-hand. To deny it is what causes the sickness, that being depression, anxiety, etc.
Socialization is the layering of illusions of cultural identity upon a person’s consciousness. The socialization of the Western hegemony is sorcery. It is a toxic glamour of smoke and mirrors of an evil social order that clouds our Internal Knowing and Seeing so that we might feel lost, fearful, and confused in everything that we do. This ruins all channels of internal communication which therein ruins external communication. Essentially, because of this glamour, we are collectively in a perpetual Mercury Retrograde. It is necessary for us to allow the Light of the Heart-center to be cleared so that the mind and Third Eye can also be cleared. It’s not enough to clear the gut. All channels must operate with maximum efficiency and that is only done with regular maintenance.
So, yes, those who are Other’d in some capacity are often much more consciously aware of how society is fraught with falsehoods that truly disempower us. That awareness may be very lonely, especially in 1864, when Dostoyevsky’s novella was published.
For context, “the anonymous narrator of Notes from Underground is a bitter, misanthropic man living alone in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1860s. He is a veteran of the Russian civil service who has recently been able to retire because he has inherited some money.” So I do imagine that he was feeling in some capacity disenfranchised, considering that he was alone in imperialist Russia. Maybe those lower vibrational lot solely moving from their social programming were less aware of the true extent of their suffering. This epitomizes the old adage that ignorance is bliss. However, knowledge is power and this will always reign true. Full consciousness of any given situation is the most powerful space to exist within; it is the only space in which we can truly and effectively manifest anything.
As Audre Lorde wrote in Age Race Class and Sex,
“My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggle which I embrace as part of my living.”
Being fully in our power requires us being fully aware of ourSelves and the world around us. This is why we have been indoctrinated into ignorance that pervades every space we interact with outside of ourSelves, and this is also why we must make it our own personal mission to eradicate all instances of this indoctrination, cast out all the cobwebs of the oppressive paradigm from within us, purging ourSelves of the shadows that may take the form of the deeper Mysteries but are actually just toxic replicants.
Manifesting as consciousness in a human body— the ultimate vessel for this level of consciousness and sentience in this Earth realm, obviously — may seem a thoroughgoing illness. This may be so to an ingrate. Ignorance, the same ignorance that we are forced to embody, makes us ungrateful. Gratitude comes when we understand the magnitude of the gift we are being given: FREEDOM! By our own hands! Liberation! Served to others via our own! We owe nobody else that honor but ourselves for the faith in breaking free of our shackles is a Herculean feat to embody, but Where there is a will, there is a way for whatever that means. How dare we think ourselves belabored by our own independence? Well, we dare because we have been beaten into submission by our oppressors.
The unfortunate and often confusing reality is that to shun such a responsibility is to give ourselves to our captor, oppressor, slaver! And that sense of powerless is what makes us see our consciousness as burdensome. We may wonder, why do some people choose to give into that? We all do at some point in our lives—some more than others— but it happens every day. Unfortunately, what the Powers of Desolation paint as freedom is not but another painful illusion. We look to Gil Scott Heron’s “Comment 1” for a beautiful interpretation of this:
“America was a bastard the illegitimate daughter
Of the mother country whose legs
Were then spread around the world
And a rapist known as freedom: free doom
Democracy, liberty, and justice were
Revolutionary code names that preceded
The bubbling bubbling bubbling bubbling
Bubbling in the mother country's crotch
And behold a baby girl was born
Nurtured by slave holders and whitey racists
It grew and grew and grew screwing
Indiscriminately like mother, like daughter
Everything unplagued by her madame mother
The present mocks us, good Black people
With keen memories set fire to the bastards
Who ask us in a whisper to melt and integrate”
When the imperial powers fell during the era of World Wars, there was no freedom found. Haiti is still in debt to France for their liberation. No, in these systems, freedom is an act of violence as all resources are stripped of you and the future seems a barren wasteland of uncertainty. In this globalized, imperialized world, none of us are exempt from the effects of the doctrine of “the world’s prostitute”. Some of us take the blue pill because the truth is that we are unable to withstand the responsibility that the power of our own freedom brings. With this understanding none of us can hold the other in contempt for succumbing to the brutality of this reign of terror and objectification nor should we hold ourselves in contempt. Hatred begets more hatred, and love begets more love. We may only drive out the sickness, cast out the shadows by blasting it with a steady stream of Love— those sweet waters of Osun.
And love is what we are here to talk about today. Love is the message, divinely brought to us through angelic, divine channels. In Ryan Murphy’s Pose (2018), House of Evangelista father, Pray Tell plays Love is the Message on repeat ball after ball after his lover dies of AIDS. The song is a symbol of the year 1980, before the disease became a plague:
“I didn't tell them what it was like in 1980 when we danced all summer to that song.
There wasn't none of this AIDS mess going on.
We were truly free.
Free to love, free to fuck, free to be our gay-ass selves in this beautiful little shithole of a town.
They'll never know that feeling what it's like to love without worrying that you're gonna die, or worse yet, that you're gonna kill somebody.”
If we consider the social climate of the ‘80s as the systemic attempted genocide of marginalized groups such as the queer and trans communities and the Black community as a parallel and direct result of the sickness of Western hegemony, we know how this will go. If we consider the story of the Yoruba Orisa, Osun— the embodiment of Love— leaving Earth and all life leaving with her not just a parallel but a warning, we know how this will go.
PART I
There was a medieval punishment that involved tying the body of a dead person to the back of whoever was sentenced to death and allowing the death rot to slowly but surely kill the carrier. This is what living with the toxic ideologies of hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism is like for us. We have been poisoned by the toxicity of the paradigm that is dead & dying, and it is corroding us, sapping us of our life force— LOVE. Because of this, we have collectively been walking around with broken hearts, so traumatized in ways that many of us haven’t even been able to see and so many are still blind to.
More and more each day, folks all over the world are Awakening to the reality of the world as it is, not the way we’ve been taught to see it. The further from the Truth we are living in, the more jarring this experience can be. So many people started with the Venus transit, and that Ascension was truly trying. If this was your first Ascension, I empathize.
The Year of Heart-Healing started with last years Venus Retrograde and is playing out now. It ends with the end of this Mercury Retrograde, which has made us revisit and revise the Lessons that we were faced with throughout the Journey of this year.
It’s no accident that the retrograde took place in Scorpio (starting in Libra season, when Venus is emboldened). Venus Retrograde cannot solely be reduced to Heart Healing. Witch Saturn in its home of Capricorn, it has been about healing our internal structures and systems of valuation, our systems of intimacy. What do we value and why? What do we show to the world and why? What do we keep hidden and why? All too many of us would have been so afraid to respond because the answer would be, “I choose to keep the reality of who I am, what I want, what I need hidden for fear of being rejected”— and that would make us seem weak and insecure. The truth is that when that is our answer, as it too often is, that is exactly what we are. I can say this because we all are weak sometimes; it is unrealistic and impossible to always be strong. But this acting from fear further weakens us, disempowering us on a soul level. It causes us to feel more insecure, making us unable to trust ourselves. We become the unsafe spaces we claim to want to escape. We perpetuate scenes that we don’t resonate with, causing us to hate our lives and resort to practices of escapism (often in the form of addiction and over-indulgence). Another version of this answer is, “because that’s how I was raised.” This is a shirking of accountability and an acquiescence of personal power. This attachment to victimhood begets victimization and it becomes a vicious cycle. Venus Retrograde in Scorpio would not and has not allowed that to stand.
This year has been a Journey within in order to find those parts of our Hearts that were mired in disease and Heal them so that we may be able to effectively move through this world, Integrated in all of our Bodies — not simply physical, but emotional and spiritual as well. This is what we mean when we speak of holistic health. Only with a pure heart may we manifest in ways that are fulfilling to us. If you’ve been trying to manifest things that you believe would make you whole, and have been unable to do so, this is why.
When people come to me asking for a Love Spell, I tell them that the problem isn’t that the object of their affection doesn’t love them, but that they don’t love themselves. They don’t understand their own nature. They don’t understand the world around them. Nobody who honors, loves, and respects themselves would ever seek to exact their will upon another. It’s not love they’re seeking. It’s possession. It’s ownership. It’s impossible.
PART II
In society, romantic relationships supersede all other relationships. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it mainly stems from the hetero-patriarchy that seeks to control us through the means of our most primal selves — our sex. I call biological sex the least common denominator because it is the binary along which all systems of control in the hetero-patriarchy are rooted. Ancient societies did not acknowledge a binary and many had what is referred to as a “third sex or gender”, people who were gender queer. To force us into these categories that then define our entire identity— from how we dress to how we talk, who we are attracted to to what kinds of jobs we undertake, so on and so forth— is simply the absolute crudest, most primitive form of social control that exists. It is belittling, it is degrading, and it is literally inhumane. These practices, these ideologies are not rooted in nature, as anyone can see by simply looking at other mammals; they are man-made. They are a means of categorizing us in order to control us and, in this modern age, to commodify us as consumers and as products. They are barbaric.
As social animals, being cast out of society is its own form of Hell— as all primates, we run in packs and belong to communities. Because sex is so inherent to our natures, more than maybe anything else, the shame tied to the stigmas against our raw human sexuality can be so harrowing that it breaks our hearts. It forces us to stifle ourSelves, to hide ourSelves, to compartmentalize and repress ourSelves until our Spirit is dead and we are but zombies and succubi (Energy Vampires). When you’re as sensitive as many of us today are becoming, the imbalance of Selves that this causes completely decimates ones quality of life. That’s why so many of us are unable to bear the TRUE burden of the day: the yoke of our oppression!
What do we do with those broken Hearts? Well, if you’re like most— afraid of rejection and alienation — you may choose to imitate what you are taught, reproducing implied societal values in order to be received into the social order. When society is ordered so superficially as it is in a capitalist paradigm, we associate love with marriage. But marriage is rooted in slavery. The purpose of marriage has always been and remains to be the expansion and/or strengthening of one’s material value. One begets children in order to have human capital. In this system, females are biological machinery for the production of children. Children are biological machinery to produce goods and carry out services. In this way, males are the benefactors of this system. We see that we are reduced to material goods, mere products to be used for the acquisition of wealth. Nuclear families become important so that we may form our own little empires and heterosexuality becomes monumentally important, historically enforced by Law and Scripture as nations build and leave their own territories to build global empires.
To some, marriage is the only way to financial security and stability. That’s why we see so many marginalized identities affiliated with femininity looking for “ballers”. This is ingrained in our DNA from millennia of trauma and oppression. To some, marriage is the only way to relational security and stability. It represents our worthiness for Love. But we are all worthy of love always, no matter what.
They say only someone close to you can hurt you. The reason that most murders, rapes, and other abuses are carried out by people close to us is by design— the destruction of communal life and replacement with public and private life. Our families are oftentimes privy to the most intimate information about who we are as people, and this intimacy is a level of vulnerability some may never want to show anyone but their family for fear of social rejection. Why can they only show their family their most authentic selves? Because family has to stick by you, according to social programming. That is, unless you yourself are such a social deviant who weakens the families social standing therefore belittling their social capital, in which case you don’t deserve the social safety net promised you. This is true of so many queer-identifying folks.
So many of us are claiming to be looking for love but so unable to find it. That’s because instead of looking for Love— something that lives within each of us— we look for social markers of class and wealth amongst other things we think we do not have but need to have a comfortable existence within society. We look for what will give us not the Spiritual life we have been looking for, but the material life we think we need. Love is without conditions. Love is eternal. Love is infinite. Love is everywhere should we choose to open our eyes to it, to receive it because it lives within us. But we are not looking for love. We say we are looking for love, but what we are really looking for is a reminder of our social value. We say we are looking for love, but really what we are looking for is someone to control. We say we are looking for love, but really what we want is a cash cow. We say we are looking for love, but what we really want is validation. We say we are looking for love, but really we are looking for a dumpster to store all of our toxic waste and shame.
To be looking for love is never to be looking for the material, because love exists first internally. So those material, external markers of what love should be… that’s not love. Love is a feeling. Love is a vibration. Love is a frequency. It’s a space to exist in where there is harmony, peace, and bliss. As long as we are leading from fear-driven, broken hearts, our ego will reject that space while every ounce of our True Nature yearns for it, causing a soul crushing schism that pulls us to and fro, never allowing us rest or respite.
We will continue to run away from Love, from harmony, from peace, from bliss — the only things worth running towards! We will continue to oscillate between abusive situations, awash in a sea of chaos and turmoil. We will continue perpetuating hate and commodification, masquerading it as love and acting out our pain upon others, who will take that hurt and turn it against their next so-called Lover. We will continue to play out a sick, sad narrative of victimhood, powerlessness, and consternation when the reality is that it is our own boot on our neck. We will continue to project our myriad insecurities on those who let down their guards and barriers, driving them further away from us because we fear that we are unworthy of love. Because that is the insidious nature of indoctrination — the seeds have been sown and given the blasphemous climate to ruminate in, so that we are our own prison warden and guard. We are our own police. And if we are not, then some other citizen is.
We are hard
Margaret Atwood
i
We are hard on each other
and call it honesty,
choosing our jagged truths
with care and aiming them across
the neutral table.
The things we say are
true; it is our crooked
aim, our choices
turn them criminal.
ii
Of course your lies
are more amusing:
you make them new each time.
Your truths, painful and boring
repeat themselves over & over
perhaps because you own
so few of them
iii
A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon?
iv
Does the body lie
moving like this, are these
touches, hairs, wet
soft marble my tongue runs over
lies you are telling me?
Your body is not a word,
it does not lie or
speak truth either.
It is only
here or not here.
—
From Selected Poems (1965-1975) by Margaret Atwood, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987.
CONCLUSION
Ownership, especially of other living beings is not real. We don’t own land, we don’t own things, we don’t own people. We all come from the Earth, so if anyone owns anything, Gaia owns us. But that is not the Truth of Life. The Truth of Life is balance and symbiosis.
The key to peace is self-possession. As long as we are possessed by the spirits of others, the ideas of others, the wills of others, we are not living our Truth. As we create these false realities that are resonant with our ego’s idea of what ought to be versus our Truth, we create and unbearable tension with the world around us. We wouldn’t need to escape our Lives so much if we made them Lives worth Living. Take dominion over your Life and find the prosperity, the abundance, the wealth you’ve been searching for
Only we can liberate ourselves from the yoke of the oppressor. We must stop making our fear and insecurities the problem of the community and start healing ourSelves. This starts by allowing ourSelves to take the opportunities for healing that Life gives us.
If we are looking for love, we must do so by turning within. We can no longer cower in fear of ourSelves. We must face all of the imagined monsters head on, with the bravery embodied in vulnerability. If we can’t be real and vulnerable with ourSelves, who can we be?
It is solely up to us set our inherent value. Know that in the infinite framework that we are all able to step into at any given time, our value is incalculable. We are literally the cosmos. How can we put a price on that?
I will end with this final thought: We can choose to reproduce our true nature, as cosmic beings miraculously granted the gifts of life, consciousness, and will or we can choose to reproduce the given identity of those that hate us and seek our destruction. The choice is ours.