Quick And The Dead

If you walk along almost any thoroughfare you will meet a lot of nearly dead people walking. Strangely, most of us are not disturbed by this. Is this because we are one of the nearly dead ourselves?

If you doubt this then consider for a moment the tens of thousands of people who manage to live their life because they are using anti depressants. Do a little research and look up how many millions of gallons of alcohol people consume each year, and how many billions of cigarettes are smoked. Both are know to be downers, influencing the nervous system, making the users a little more dead to sensation and finer feelings, a little nearer death.

But there is more to being quick or dead than what we drink or use to manage carrying on existing. Apart from dealing with depression, if you look at the faces you pass on the street you will see etched in misery or emotional pain. You will see whole faces and bodies carved by years of rigidness and anger. Perhaps more than anything else you will see most people stricken by blindness that is if you are yourself not stricken. And if you are not one of the blind you will understand that many people with an adult body are still infants or children inside.

So what is the difference between being quick and dead?

Well, to be quick has it meaning from the biblical term ‘the quick and the dead’. The word quick means to be alive, and was originally linked with the awareness of a baby’s first movements in the womb. That was named ‘the quickening’. To be dead is to lack that ability to move or express any response to the process of life and the environment. Something or someone who is ‘dead’ does not have the ability to grow, to develop, to move on from a given situation. So the baby who does not quicken does not go on to grow, to respond, to develop a relationship with anyone or anything. It does not unfold its innate qualities or potential.

At the beginning I used the term ‘nearly dead’ and this is because many people in today’s world are only partially expressing the qualities of life. For instance if we planted a seed and it pushed up its first leaves, grew a little but never flowered, we would think there was something wrong with it. Human beings are the most magnificent animals on this earth, and yet look around and see how many shine with this glory, or are really expressive of their potential. Of course there are many causes for this, but at the moment I only want to define what it means to be ‘quick’ and ‘dead’ in the context of what has been said.

Briefly, to be ‘quick’ means to be fully human, and expressive of all the possibilities of humanness. This means to be whole, and to be whole means to be in touch with and capable of expressing all the facets of oneself.

If a person is paralysed through illness or injury we and they can accept that they are not whole. They may struggle to regain that wholeness, and medical science is racing along in its research to help people do that. However, if a person has no real memory of their infancy or childhood; if they have no real experiential awareness of the animal impulses and instincts that drive them; if they cannot vitally know their integration and dependence on their environment and the universe, it is not considered worthy of mention or of frantic medical research.

Just one small example for instance. If your environment of solar energy, plants and plankton stopped functioning, then shortly you would not be able to breathe and you would die. Food would also end, and as your existence is actually a result of flowing air, water and food through your system, you would cease to be as a physical being.

That is an example of he blindness most people suffer. They cannot actually see themselves as a part of this flow, and as integrated totally in their environment and the cosmos.

Another example of the blindness leads to a totally false sense of who we are who you are. Everything you are is an expression of, or has its roots in the past. Every word you use, every thought, although it may be personal, could not exist without the immense past of culture, language development and brain structure. If this is difficult for you to see, then you are suffering some level of blindness. But it is psychological blindness rather than physical. Although obviously it also influences your physical sight, otherwise every plant you looked at, every tree you passed, every person you met, would be seen as an outcrop of aeons of past events, and with visible connections with the totality of their environment after all, what are roots and leaves? Such blindness arises from a level of deadness caused by some facets of yourself being injured, prevented from developing, or suppressed because of pain or anxiety. Your body would be recognised as millions of years old, the recent emergence of the life form that began at the very beginning of life on earth, and has reproduced itself through countless development, in an unbroken chain from that ancient beginning, over three and a half billion years ago. That is how old your body is. There was never a gap in those early life forms reproducing themselves and your body today. How could there be?

And that brings us to what was said about the forgotten childhood and the unknown inner animal. We easily understand now that archaeology and palaeontology uncover information through delving through the different strata of the earth, and that beneath today’s streets and cities lie hidden strata showing enormous differences of life forms and environment.

However, our own growth from a primitive cellular life, seen in the sperm and ovum, through an apparently aquatic body form, to our present physical shape and orientation, show us that as a total being we are everything in our inner strata from single celled creature to complex and self aware human. If we think of this as one might an archaeological dig, then just under the surface of our urbane self lies our own childhood, infancy, and life in the womb. If you cannot access them, then you have lost awareness of the factors, forces and experiences out of which your present self is formed. As such you are partly out of control of your life.

The layer beneath the baby self is the animal, and below that is the reptiles. These are actually part of your physical structure, and are reflected in the parts of the brain. (See Brain Levels.) Again, if you are not aware of how they affect and influence your conscious behaviour, you are in some degree deadened.

The foundations of choosing a partner and developing a relationship lie in the animal brain. But the foundations of that are in the reptile brain. Unconscious damage or suppression of these lead to distortions in the way we love and relate emotionally and sexually. Having worked as a therapist and also explored my own infant and animal self, I know that traumas or engraved behavioural responses at those levels can lead to the inability to truly merge and love another human being. It can lead to the longing to get close, but a pain that closes the gates as closeness develops. When those levels of self are badly injured or disrupted, instead of love and ability to cherish, there arises murderous rage.

If we lack easy expression of our child self we will lack full playfulness and bonding in sex and love. It is from the child level that we learned love or pain in a relationship. It is from there we really bond or fail to bond with a partner.

Becoming whole and alive means awareness of our inner baby and child, and a loving relationship with our animal self neither of them easily found in a culture that is so oriented toward money and possessions, and that has as its very basis, the obtaining of what somebody else has money, property, and territory.

Coming alive may mean going down into the cellar in which your child has been locked in the dark. It means undoing the trap and the desire to kill that we have visited on the animal within us. So many people now have sympathy with external animals, but unfortunately they are still killing or torturing their own animal.

Watch your dreams and witness it for yourself. They show you the world beneath you the hidden strata of your existence.