January 14, 2021: ghosts

Before I fell asleep last night, I was visited by a ghost: I heard my mother weeping bitterly. I texted her this morning to make sure she was still alive. She's alive. But, nonetheless, it was her ghost.

I get the sense that this is one of those moments that is important from a psychoanalytic standpoint. When I felt her weeping, she wasn't weeping as my mother. Rather, she was weeping because she was in grief. She was weeping in the fullness of herself, in a greater totality of her being—not as a mother.

It's an achievement of personal development to be able to understand our parents as individuals with their own lives, seeing them not framed within their archetypal role as parents. That being said, I feel behind the curve because I have had such a problematic relationship with my parents because of our religious and ideological differences.

...

The feeling itself was intense. It has colored my thoughts even now after I return to this document over twelve hours later. Every time I think of my mother, I think of her in a state of suffering. She's suffering with the totality of her being.

I don't think she would have ever showed me such a face. She would never admit to despairing of life; she instantly pulls up a mask of humble, god-fearing, piety.. I assume that she felt the need to set an example—to point to the right way. 

But children need to watch adults overcome, for they do as their parents do, not as their say; for they are as their parents are, not as their parents wish they were.

...

On the metaphysics/ontology of ghosts: 

They are real. And you have encountered them. I do not know if they take physical form beyond the firing of neurons in the brain. But they exist and influence our world. Their relation to the world of physical matter is beyond me; they are not readily summoned by materialistic means. But the arts [e/i]nvoke them. 

They live alongside our ideas and the gods. Oftentimes, we're unable to distinguish between our ideas and them; most people don't even notice the difference between themselves and gods and ghosts.

A ghost says, the gods and daimons speak; you only need to inquire within.