It seems I have finally grasped the difference between self-digging and self-knowledge. Imagine that scholars have found an ancient labyrinth palace under the ground. The self-digging scholar turns up on a bulldozer and smashes the hill to bits, and whatever survives he declares to be the ancient palace. The self-knowing scholar spends more brushes, more trowels and, above all, more time, but does the palace the least possible harm, so as to show it to the world in all its beauty. A particularly progressive scholar, a third one, will even restore what time and disaster have destroyed, as closely to the original as he can.
It is the same with our psyche. The other day a woman complained that she does far too much self-digging and, on top of that, depends on what other people think. In my metaphor that is like surrounding the scholar on the bulldozer with a crowd of onlookers who cannot see a thing properly from that distance, but who yell excitedly from the stands about where he absolutely must whack the bucket next. And then her complaint drew a shower of comments, many of them along the lines of "you're born that way". So we are born inside a bulldozer, and we are not ourselves unless we blast everything buried down there to kingdom come? A barbaric approach, but what can you do? None of us was handed an instruction manual for using ourselves at birth. What is more, the very fact that no such manual is issued has led to the opposite extreme: many people have decided that there is no earthly need for one, I know myself anyway... oops, and from there the answers vary from the most self-adoring to the most self-flagellating, sliding from one into the other by the least logical routes imaginable. And that looks like a point-blank refusal to dig the palace out at all, having told yourself that it is magnificent as it is, or hideous as it is, depending on what you have dreamt up about yourself. That approach always struck me as the least logical of all, which is why I have always been in favour of excavation — or at least of looking for evidence and information in reliable documents about what this buried palace actually is, and about why on this part of the hill you can jump about and beat drums, while on another part one wrong move risks dropping you into a dark pit whose roof has worn thin with time and weather.
And so, little by little, digging out the palace turns into the most absorbing game there is, revealing ever new layers, levels and floors of this marvellous wonder built by unknown hands. And the most interesting part is that this excavation will never end.
I am not the only one, by the way. People have been looking for such a manual since time immemorial: hence the signs of the zodiac, and Chinese horoscopes, and Zoroastrian ones, and Human Design, and the Vedas, and the whole of modern psychology. There is just one catch: all that abundance has to be studied, and we have neither the time, nor the wish, nor the culture of studying it. Honestly, how many of us read the instructions before the appliance starts behaving strangely? A minority, I suspect, and I am certainly not one of them.
Now, if only they gave us a user manual at birth. It would be many times more convenient. I can just picture it: they bring me to my mother in the maternity ward, and there is an envelope pegged to the swaddling: "Alisa. Sex female, orientation heterosexual. Feed on iron-rich food; after the age of 12 avoid lactose.
Send to yoga to even out the strong-arm tendencies.
Manifesting Generator 1/3 in Human Design.
An introvert, a Choleric, a schizoid by the S-Theory."
And she would have read it and understood at once that I had to be brought up this way and not that way; that there was no point demanding this from me, because you would catch hell for it; while that, on the contrary, had to be encouraged before I throttled it in myself for good.
Here I have to admit that a manual as compact as that could not have existed even a year ago. And some ten years back, the first do-it-yourself manual to myself proudly declared: "I'm a Scorpio, so I sting myself!" A good deal of water has flowed under the bridge since then, and a good many countries, acquaintances and jobs have been changed. And at some point "I sting myself" stopped being a sufficient excuse for all the foolishness of my wild youth. I will not go into all the details of how I got there; I will only say that with a counsellor it would have been quicker and less painful, but in the end I found the manuals to myself that suited me. How did I know they suited me? Simple: they explained to me exactly how all those bees in my bonnet work — the ones I had not known whether to poison with chemicals or swat with a slipper. And once you know exactly how something works, you can use it.And so, little by little, digging out the palace turns into the most absorbing game there is, revealing ever new layers, levels and floors of this marvellous wonder built by unknown hands. And the most interesting part is that this excavation will never end. Knossos, the very labyrinth with the Minotaur in it, is nothing next to the wonder of our body and our psyche. And the greatest sin of all is to leave the whole thing buried underground and go on jumping about on the hill, shouting that jumping about on the hill is all we need. AP 02/2020
