I’ve been working on this shark painting for over a decade now. I crack it’s code at snail’s pace, and every time I think I understand what it’s teaching me, I fall off the painting wagon and spiral into another level of confusion. A halt in the painting process ensues. But I always come back. The image below is a Photoshop version of a future version of the original oil painting. I have intentions of going back into it as a part of my Samhaim ritual for 2021. As usual, my piqued interest in revisiting the painting has coincided with a request by my employer to set up three goals for myself for this academic year. And, as usual, I am diving deeper than I can express in my annual Goal Meeting. Here’s an attempt within a blog entry.
"The ability to lie, to oneself and to others, is prominent in postconquest consciousness...People indoctrinated into the post conquest mindset are even more susceptible to deceit because they're conditioned to downplay sensory, emotional, behavioral, and intuitive input in order to focus on what someone is saying." —From The Tao of Equus by Linda Kohanov
I read this over and over again. Then, I looked up "post conquest consciousness" because I was not familiar with it as a phrase, but I am sooooo familiar with it and it's powerful effect on my stress levels and my lived experiences.
I found this wonderful article by Christian de Quincy called Consciousness and Conquest. Here are some words that really got my attention:
In its search for truth, reason operates via conquistadorial dialectic: One idea, or one person’s “truth,” is confronted and overcome by an opposite idea or someone else’s “truth.” The clash or struggle between them produces the new synthesis—perceived as a creative advance in knowledge.
By contrast, liminal or preconquest consciousness, in striving for what feels right for the collective, seeks to accommodate differences. When confronted by reason, it naturally wants to please the other, and so invariably yields. Reason strives to conquer, feeling strives to please, and the result: obliteration or suppression of liminal consciousness by reason.
Even more disturbing to me was the realization that none of this implies malicious intent on the part of reason. Simply encountering an epistemology of feeling, reason will automatically overshadow it—even if its intent is honorable.
As I looked back on my own career, I found plenty of confirming instances. In my work, I have had many occasions to engage people interested in consciousness from perspectives other than philosophy or science—mysticism, shamanism, aesthetics, for example. More often than not—even if I was trying to be considerate of their different ways of knowing—these people left the encounter feeling abused or squashed by having to match accounts of their experiences against the rigorous logic of rational analysis. When a search for truth pits dialectic reason against dialogic experience the feeling component of the other’s knowledge can rarely withstand the encounter. Feeling feels invalidated. Wisdom is blocked by “truth.”
I read that and every panic attack and traumatic experience I've ever had became understood in a new way. My whole way of being is rooted in the pre conquest consciousness and is therefore, subject to being prey both in my patterned behavior as well as in our societal conditioning (which ultimately wrote my operating manual and which I am tearing out pages and currently rewriting.)
The wisdom that I sense is available to me in every moment, is also the devoured. No wonder I have spent so much time feeling the jaws clamp down on me...and then being told that I'm the crazy one. My superpower is in being prey. My peaceful rose is inside the jaws of the shark. Being prey and not judging it or slipping into shadow victim patterns can be (if I surrender and let it) my source of wisdom. It is what this shark painting is leading me to uncover....
Leaning into the mouth of a shark and finding a sensual rose as my Soul’s sensation is akin to choosing the belonging to myself and the wisdom I contain as truth over the pre-scripted belief that I am rotten to the core or on the wrong track. I just have to be willing to sit with the Shadow Self and practice that over and over until my wholeness is accepted. By Me. It is the opposite of seeking external validation.
So my intention is to practice wholeness by sitting with what I am always trying to flee—the projections of others, my deep-rooted belief that I am unworthy, that I am eternally wrong, that I don’t belong. It’s following the wisdom that Toko-pa Turner sets forth in her book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home. She says,
“There’s a big difference between staying positive and being generative. The first disregards hard truths, the second is the fruit of having composted them.” —Toko-pa Turner
This Shark Painting is my artifact—the one I produce during my composting. It’s the hardest truth.