Drama Queen

Saniel Bonder is good at pushing my buttons, which is a blessing since my daily life often goes by without so many buttons pushed.

There are especially to things that serve as hooks for my rings, or triggers for my hangups.

One is his tendency to overgeneralize. He takes his own experiences and over-generalizes from them. In other words, he takes something that is completely valid and makes it into something invalid, he makes a truth into a lie. He takes a first person experience and translates it into second and third person, making it appear as a general rule. For instance, he had certain unpleasant experiences with his past spiritual teacher, and now he talks as if these are common for all traditions. Or he tries to make it appear as if the natural uniqueness of Waking Down is especially special and unique, more so than for any other tradition.

The other main button I push when I encounter him is the drama queen one. He has a tendency to make things into something far more dramatic and special than they need to be. One little example: he and others in Waking Down throw around the "D" word a lot. In Zen, they talk about the "divine" as ordinary mind, a shit stick, or ordinary shit, and those are terms that work much better for me!

Of course, all of this has to do with a certain immaturity in the awakening process as well as in communicating it. It would not be tolerated very easily in a more mature tradition, or if he had continued to work with a teacher after his own awakening.

Taking my own advice

So how does all of this show up in me? I wouldn't have these reactions unless (a) I did the same and (b) it is outside of my conscious (fixed) identity.

Well, I too use second and third person language - or sometimes first person words and second/third person tone. And this bothers me a great deal, but not enough yet to weed it out more thoroughly. He helps me see that I am doing it as well, and that there is some energy there to bring awareness into it and change it - if only recognized as what it is: advice for myself.

And the drama queen tendency is also here. In response to his and other's tendency to use the "d" and similar "spiritual" words, I sometimes move to the opposite ends of the scale. Either in toning it way down, emphasizing the ordinariness of it. Or by favoring terms such as "ordinary shit". Both, in their own ways, equally dramatic.

Last night, in our interim deeksha group, I also noticed that in sharing my own experiences it came out a little dramatic, far more than I wished. And this too is a clear indication of something that is in the shadow, excluded by my conscious identity, something I am not yet very familiar with in myself.

The "resolution" to all this is of course to become more familiar with these tendencies in myself, integrate it into my conscious identity, and from here become more fluid with it all. Less stuck in one or the other.