Wakeful Quantum Shadow Dreaming

(subtitled: The Blaming Machine)
© 2009 Howard McQueen

Last night my fever broke.

For over two weeks I have been carrying around an ever-escalating story that a friend has been “doing me wrong”. I’ve built an entire waking dream around this story. I’ve amassed dozens of diary pages to document the story. I’ve been up and down the story, engaged, disengaged, disappointed, discouraged, angry, at peace, and seen this cycle stop and start back up again with another friend that also lent their validation to my story / (aka my hallucination).

I have diligently amassed evidence to backup my story, more than enough for a character assassination. But I backed off from that – better to stew in my judgment and contempt for this person, this friend of mind that repeatedly did me wrong.

My friend and I had a session last night. He apologized for his behavior, and I heard this, but I remembered I have amassed two weeks of substantiated evidence backing me up, so I wanted his ear and a couple of hours to walk him through my obsession. He was insulted and insisted that I “let go of all that old history”. He also insisted that I see him, his life situation and his “modus operandi”, and stop playing in my victim role.

As I accepted the possibility (and freedom) of releasing all this history, this mountain of evidence, I realized that I had created a huge standing wave of energy that had been progressively discoloring my relationship with my friend. On an energetic level, I was shrinking myself into the poor-me victim and projecting shadow energies on to him (and he inflated into his sadist persona). Don’t get me wrong, he provided me with ample queues to jump-start my projections, but I now see that each of these queues was a cross-road, an opportunity to rise above judgment, stay in the moment, realize that my triggers were being activated and that my own deeper shadow callings were arising from my own past.

This is when my story shifted, a veil was lifted, and I opened my heart and saw my friend (again, for the first time in two weeks) in the Oneness of compassion, from a re-opened heart. There was tenderness, there was compassion, and the distortion and heaviness of shadow energies and the fiction of [bad him/poor me] dissolved.

I am left writing about this, with a sense of wonder and also amazement that it took over two weeks for this fever to build, shift, transform and ultimately collapse through surrender. I sense from direct experience that part of this wonder is uncovered within this me, seeing and feeling my own vulnerabilities to sense the world anew, allowing myself to be with more of what is in this world, rather than rejecting it.

There is no doubt that my friend is extremely self-centered and obsessed with his work, but it is equally true that he is a force of nature, an emerging spirit, pursued by his own demons and navigating through a tumultuous period in the history of humanity. He is unique, has his own modus operandi and there were aspects of this I became [not right with - mostly the influence of sadism]. Once this judgment was made, it was easy to become overexposed to his behaviors and then the machinery of judgment went into high gear, into the “you’ve done me wrong” and I really got down to the business of making me right and making him wrong and focusing on Separation.

I have new evidence now to share as a lesson learned. The internal polarizing energies I summoned and activated discolored and recast my relationship with my friend in the last two weeks. I became diminished and dis-empowered, and he became hardened, callus and dismissively powerful, all as a result of these energy dynamics. These energies revised and rewrote the story of our relationship, and this story was a fiction, of two people sabotaging and discarding their love in favor of the pain of separation.

Deep subconscious emotions call upon quantum energies to arise and play themselves out. Tolle refers to this as the “pain body”. When I look back now over this past two weeks, I am now aware and conscious of our pain bodies becoming activated, and that these pain bodies engaged in a relationship and danced their own pain body dream. While this was happening, my love and compassion for my friend receded into the background as the judgment and pain patterns arose and cast our love and camaraderie into a darker shadow.

The trance, the waking dream, the fever, the illusion -- has broken.

I feel compelled to share this story, as a reminder that from moment to moment we are constantly judging and choosing and shape-shifting our energies and our reality. What I have learned is to become increasing vigilant and notice when I start to weave a reality-dream that is built around reactive emotional energy, I AM discharging another shadow energy dream.

A great, follow-up article, The Chemistry of Blame, lays this out.

Always pleased to have any feedback. I am hopeful my words and writing this story does justice to what I experienced and desire to share. If you would like more information regarding this interpretation of energy dynamics can be found in the new book Emotional Freedom, By Judith Orloff (highly recommended).

Howard