Dear mystic man

Dear mystic man,

The first question I have is one for me: where do I start? My feelings about you have become so confused and conflicted in the time that you've been gone, since we had our falling out and since you blamed me for her passing, even though if anyone's hands were bloody we both know they were yours. I wish I could just focus on the good, and remember you as the man who was my one and only mentor, the teacher I never knew I wanted and the father-figure I always needed, a man who was willing simply to grant me that time and attention that I needed in order to flourish and bloom. Unfortunately, the way things unfolded has left me with little freedom and no simple choices for the framing, as both shadow and light meet within your being, at the eternal line carved between good and evil in the hearts of mankind.

The pressure from the other to view you as an individual with a blackened soul is enormous in the aftermath of your actions, and yet I find myself utterly unable to submit to this one-sidedness, as my memory of you shines with insight, kindness and empathy. The name of the competition for which I originally wrote this piece, Hometown Heroes, brings to my mind an anime called My Hero Academia, wherein the protégé of the arch-villain has the unique perspective of seeing primarily that side of this malevolent man which is concerned with nurturing those like him, healing them from their trauma, understanding them, being patient, and supporting the realization of their potential. Of course, my situation in relation to you was even more complicated than this, because you were not simply a villain as if this were merely a story, but rather you are a complete and therefore a complex human being whose character had many facets. This letter is a chance for me to remember and celebrate your virtues, and to acknowledge and condemn your faults.

Hometown Hero, eh? You weren't from my hometown, and in fact I'd never come across anyone like you before, anyone who could so clearly see me for what I was and who had the learning and the skills to help me to see what you could see. And boy, was there a lot to learn when I first met you; every single hour together was spent in a strange and paradoxical mixture of challenging tranquility, a state pervaded with a feeling that our work was of the utmost importance which was yet counterbalanced by a sense that we had all the time in the world, that things were unfolding exactly as they ought. You were, in a way, a hero to me though, because you showed me - proved to me - that it was indeed possible to persist in the philosopher's path for one's entire life, and you were able to showcase the precious gems which you'd mined during this time as evidence of the inherent value of our shared endeavour, which is so often undervalued and ridiculed in our modern capitalistic society with its emphasis on concrete and tangible goods.

Although we never physically met, in the meeting of our minds I found in you the kind of kindred spirit I had never known I desperately needed, a need that would demonstrate itself in the speed with which our relationship become that of the teacher and the student, one more instance or manifestation of that eternal dynamism which exists between a mystical master and his proverbial protégé. There was this incredibly enigmatic aura which always enshrouded you, an arcane shimmer which was subtle enough that most people didn't notice it, or, if they did, regarded it with suspicion. You told all these impossible stories, and I found myself wondering how someone so articulate and sharp could believe such ridiculous nonsense. How could such a brilliant and educated man take seriously such blatant impossibilities? It was an enigma, and I could not help but wonder.

Wonder was in fact a characteristic of many of my learning experiences during that time, as I was suddenly brought into contact with an articulate and skilful psychological awareness the very beginnings of which were all that I could manage. You were able to bring conscious light to territory which I had been struggling to model for many, many months, and in so doing you gave me the capacity to assume once more autonomy in my own life. Situations which had proven to ensnare and confound me were suddenly made palatable and intelligible, as I was gifted by you the many pieces of language for which I had been unconsciously craving for so long now. In the first few weeks, it was very much as if I had suddenly woken up to realize that I, like those sailors of old, had become bewitched by the song of a siren and was now dangerously close to seeing my vessel dashed upon the razor-sharp rocks.

"Our life is a dream, we are asleep. Once in a while, we wake up enough to know that we are dreaming." - Wittgenstein.

This quote describes my experience in those early days quite aptly, and one of the principal themes of the work which we pursued was how to facilitate the action of the world at large in helping us to wake up, and, more importantly, how it might be possible for such an individual to thereafter persist in remaining awake despite the dangers of drowsiness and automaticity which are so common in our routine and all-too-modern lives. This work we did within two parallel domains: a psycho-analytic domain, namely that of shadow work, and a phenomenological and speculative domain, which was of course our work on Stalking Synchronicity.

Before I met you, my interest in psycho-analysis was acute and I considered myself quite skilled in the art of relating to and understanding the other, however my encounter with you showed me in no uncertain terms just how much of my path was yet untraveled, and just how far I still had to go before I could be confident that what I was doing was helping the other, rather than hindering his or her own natural process. Through my exposure to you, I learnt not only to more clearly articulate my intuitions about the psychological proclivities of others, but I also began to see how these insights might be embodied in order to make my own self the object of a psychological process of maturation and development which was, in truth, only in its infancy. In other words, you provided me an example of how a man could strive to live out his ideas, and develop both his ideas and himself in parallel, with his lived experience serving as the ultimate experimental test of his conceptions. In so doing, what you gave me was a proof of living philosophy, and a demonstration of the importance of psychological insight into both self and other for such a vocation in life.

This living proof provided by your very existence of the legitimacy and value of the role of a true philosopher was, however important, not the most significant factor for my own psychological insight and maturation. Rather, your simple belief in me and your open-minded support of my dreams played the most essential role in the unfolding of my entelechy. Your belief in me, unwavering and steadfast, acted as a bulwark against the influences within my life which were persistently trying to convince me that my dreams were unrealistic and that I was not worthy, that I should instead focus on a practical path towards becoming a functional adult member of society - a tangibly productive tax-paying-citizen, so to speak. In other words, there were at the time voices ringing in my ears, repeating well-worn notions about settling for more mundane and workaday occupations because they are more financially secure and, in a word, feasible. The implication being, of course, that my dreams were not. Your simple conviction that my dreams were a realistic possibility for someone like me and your corresponding confidence in my capacity to contribute to the project which was your own life's work enabled me to believe in myself at a time in my life when those closest to me were doubting me constantly.

During that time, when the very woman who had the audacity to call herself my lover was the chief culprit behind the erosion of my self-esteem, you stood fast and helped me to stand strong in the face of such adversity, showing me how the repeating trauma from which I could see no escape was in fact the surface manifestation of a deeper pattern, a psychological habit of my own design which was keeping me trapped in this traumatic cycle. In other words, your intervention helped me to see how the world and life at large were both trying to teach me a lesson about myself and about my own responsibility in creating the situation I was now suffering, and your support made it possible for me to finally realize the painful truth: that she and I were hurting each other, and that until one of us was willing to stand up and to start growing up, nothing would change except that we would sink deeper into despair and continue to co-create our own personal slice of hell together. By assisting me in my formulation of these events not as something that was simply happening to me, which I had to endure, but rather as something which I was responsible for, both in its origins and in its continuation, you helped me to set myself free from the dream-like fantasy in which I had somehow become ensnared.

I cannot ever stress enough how much your freely and generously offered guidance, training and wisdom meant to me, especially in light of the revelation I had as the situation culminated and crystallized into its final state: that you had somehow managed to teach me a lesson that you yourself had still not learnt, and in so doing that you had helped me to heal myself from a wound from which you yourself were still suffering. You were my Chiron, and in my ongoing quest to manifest Jason I swear that I will never forget the suffering state which you perpetually inhabited, that state which allowed you the insight necessary to help me to heal my own trauma: the lonely and terrible burden of the wounded healer.

Indeed, your emphatic emphasis upon the healing problem was first and foremost among the foci of our earliest dialogues, in addition to the exploration of the enigmatic phenomenology of synchronicity, and this helped me to form a conception of you as someone who was fundamentally responsible, though uncompromisingly curious about the nature of psychological compulsions, both your own and other people's. You seemed absolutely committed to the exertion of conscious control over such base aspects of the personality, and to harm mitigation more generally. Our stances on these issues had a deep resonance and affinity I'd never encountered before, and we were both fascinated by healing itself.

This deep resonance which before I described as a feeling of kindred spirits was one of the many things formalized by me in language during the final part of our arc together, and the formalism that I ended up opting for was the notion of a class of magical touch wielded by us both: that of the stormweaver. This is a metaphorical expression of a certain kind of technique or method for effecting psychological recovery and transformation, and it was an idea we both identified with quite strongly.

In short form, the idea is that of the individual who resolves problems by amplifying them, by magnifying the storm and therefore the chaos, in order to increase both the amount of energy available at the moment of resolution as well as the degree of conceptual clarity possible from the perspective of the ensnared individual: by making the problem bigger, the part we are playing and the associated consequences become correspondingly larger and therefore more obvious to consciousness. Once the storm has become sufficiently constellated, knowable through an intuitive sense of how much electricity is in the air, so to speak, our healer begins to weave his way to the centre, to the eye of the storm, that place of stillness which gives refuge from the chaos. From this position of relative calm and tranquility, the stormweaver now begins to weave the strands of the storm itself, to channel the chaos in order to call forth a transformation of the entire energetic structure, bringing about the new dawn.

Perhaps to many of my readers I will have just departed from the relatively lucid recollection of events and feelings in relation to my ex-mentor, and pursued a fantastical tangent with no palatable connection with the overall story, however the pertinence of this digression may become relevant by considering the central theme of this metaphor: revolutionary ideas, and expanded horizons - that is, transformations of perspective. These subtle concepts tie into my work on the magical capacity of language, however in this context it will suffice to mention merely the way in which these new linguistic models (ways of thinking and speaking about the world and our experiences of it), which prior to my connection with mystic were beyond the boundaries of my hyper-rationalistic worldview, opened up new dimensions of experience and new ways of relating to my own existence that proved to be particularly fruitful in the months and years to come.

This creative production of true novelty - novelty which was beyond the imagined and thereby artificially imposed boundaries of my experiential reality - served to generate a certain kind of psychic energy around the work we were doing, a recursive resonance which began to influence everyone who was connected with us and our ongoing conversations. This was the resonance that would build and build until eventually it would result in my producing the evocative metaphor of the matrix of light to encapsulate some of the more paradoxical aspects of the evidentiary stream associated with stalking synchronicity. Unfortunately, as we approached this amazing and incredible new territory, our shared curiosity began to manifest a dubious undercurrent, a shadow. Even more unfortunately, this undercurrent was much stronger than normal because of that ambient energy, charge, the collected residue of so many synchronistic interactions.

And here, mystic, is where we start to get into those aspects of you that have impacted me negatively, those parts of your personality which you hid from me and those that you used to manipulate me. I find it hard to believe, for example, that you didn't know of the risks to the kind of work we were doing, and I find myself consumed by anger when I ponder the fact that you could have warned me, and we could have been more careful. Of course, maybe that's just my own special way to project onto you my own negligence, by assuming you knew. But then, I am confident that you did: you had 30+ years of experience on me, experience which I know has taught you the consequences of some of the ways in which you unfold your existential strategy among the myriad and multifarious spheres of life.

I didn't realize that we were engaged in a certain kind of reckless abandon, that our continuous excursions into the unknown could end up seriously destabilizing certain participants in the dialogue who might not be able to adapt to the new territory and whose response to this would be to bring the whole group to a halt. In itself, this would be like a short-circuit, a problem that prevents itself from getting worse by breaking the connection, except that part of our meta-analytic technique as a team was of course to bring conscious light to the compulsive nature of the projections of closure coming from our colleagues in conversation. I was naïve as to the potential such an approach has to bring to the surface suppressed traumas and open up wounds which the individual is not equipped to manage, and I was ignorant as to the corresponding responsibility the both of us bore.

This reckless abandon necessarily accompanies (as underbelly and dark side) the tenacious sense of curiosity each of us was equipped with, the cost of which is made plain through the consequences of that choice of attitude in relating to the world. Namely, people get hurt. There were warning signs, many of them, but I was too caught up in my own curiosity to notice, and you seemed not to care that they were there. I never could have expected the effect it would end up having on you, that you would wind up manifesting not the merit of the stormweaver, but its shadow: you ended up becoming possessed by the storm, and rather than wielding its power transformatively, you were bent to its will and you embodied and acted out the trauma you were trying to heal. It was intimidating and utterly chaotic.

I could see it, I knew what was happening, but there was simply no way for me to reach you, no avenue that you would leave open for me to access your heart or speak to your soul. As the storm built to an unbearable tempo, I tried to avoid the chaotic, climactic crescendo which I knew was coming, tried to escape the explosion of the extremely volatile psychic energy which I intuitively knew, at this point, was inevitable. I didn't know what to do, and so for several weeks I did nothing, and in so doing I know that I let you down, mystic. You needed me, and I let you down. I know.

When the waves finally broke and the tsunami was in actual fact bearing right down upon us, you sought to force my hand, angry at my lack of action and feeling betrayed by me because I refused to comply with your commands. I see now this was just your way of trying to compulsively manage a chaotic situation, but the thing is, I never agreed to take commands from you, and although you were my mentor, you were never quite my master. Somehow, in some way, I always knew that our relationship had a time limit, an expiration date, and when that date finally came, I was more or less ready. You, on the other hand, raged within the machine that I had built, my community, and took out your pain and fury on people who had done nothing to you, saving the most potent portions of malice for those for whom you felt a special sense of disgust. You no doubt felt that I had turned my back on you, but from my perspective you turned your back on me and our work together and sought to take out your pain on me and those in my community because you held me responsible for the way you were feeling, for not standing up for you and supporting you the way you had supported me. Your distrust of me was palpable, and you moved away from our relationship as partners, as colleagues in the great work, and moved instead to occupy a shadow position where you sought to exert control over how I acted and the choices I made. In short, you tried to strip me of my autonomy, and when I wouldn't let you, you simply lost it.

I wish there was another way to put it, but if there is, I cannot find the words. Towards the end there, I began to see that there was a certain sliver of truth to the nasty things said about you by all those people around me who you could see too clearly for their own comfort; that all those people saying again and again that there was something 'dangerous' about you were, in a way, right. In the age that has passed since these events, I have come to see all too clearly exactly what they saw, and I cannot help but regret the absolute naïveté as well as the veneration I displayed towards you, both attitudes proper only to children towards an adult who genuinely facilitates the optimal unfolding of their nascent potential. This you of course did, but I was not a child, and I should have been more responsible.

Although you did in fact occupy such a prestigious position in my life, now I cannot help but perceive all the myriad ways in which this attitude towards you constituted a profound blindness as to the fullness of your character. Specifically, my recognition of and appreciation for your value in relation to my personal quest caused me to neglect my inherent duties towards those within my space, and as I eventually began to experience the heavy-handedness which was so cleverly and carefully hidden from me before this, I started to see that our shared paths were due to diverge any day now. That our time was up was, I will admit, a bittersweet realization.

At the end of the day, I am left feeling utterly conflicted about the impact you had on my life. I know that without our relationship, I would not be half the philosopher I am today, and my work would be extremely myopic in comparison, not to mention rational to the point of virtual sterility. And yet, because of my connection with you I am indirectly implicated in something tragic, not to mention directly responsible for the degree to which your method exposed people within my community to harm. I was manipulated by you and deceived by you, not just by way of omission but even in certain cases explicitly; you never did learn how to keep your meddling fingers to yourself, always trying to influence the way others perceive both problematic situations and your part in creating them.

Above all else though, I am so very angry at you, for the way in which you tried to blame me for everything that happened, for everything that I didn't even know about, and especially for the way the situation ended up. How dare you tell me and others that the blood on your hands was first and foremost blood on mine, you wretched old man, when you lied to me and hid your connection with her, inappropriate as it was, from every one of our colleagues and most of all from me. How do you conjure up the absolute audacity which is required for you to project onto me the lapses in judgement and morality which were required for the way you wound up being tied up in everything that unfolded, including that tragic grand finale. How could you do that to me, mystic man, and how could you do it to her? How could you ask her to lie for you, how could you and why would you draw someone so young and innocent into your web of intrigue and deceit and fantasy and wonder. How dare you try to pin all of that, all of your actions, on me? How dare you.

You wanted an excuse, on some level I know that, to justify your need to leave our relationship. Perhaps you couldn't bear to look me in the eyes, so to speak, once I had began to unravel the web of lies which you had constructed to conceal from me the truth. Perhaps you were ashamed; I know I would be. You needed to rationalize what was happening and what had happened in a way that was serviceable; you had to relate to it in a way you could bear to live with, and I think that forced upon you this strategy.

But... I cannot bring myself to forgive you for it, for betraying our authentic connection in such an egregious way and for defacing my community and defaming my character in the aftermath of the chaos that you created. And so it is that I find myself in this unique position, feeling a bittersweet gratitude that my apprenticeship under your tutelage ended just as I had finished squeezing from you the last crucial drop of knowledge which I needed to learn. Our work together reached a natural end, but it would be nice to have parted on good terms; yet I don't know whether I should be grateful that I had no choice in this. On the one hand, I was left to blossom on my own, out of reach of your harmful influence; on the other, I was left to work it all out on my own again, unable to access your assistance.

In moments of great need, almost all I can remember of you is how incredibly helpful you were in so very many situations and conundrums, such that I cannot even begin to count the number of instances where I relied upon your wisdom to guide me in my pathfinding through an unknown land. You gave me confidence that I had never felt because you believed in me in a way that no-one ever had before, and never again do I get to feel your presence on the other end of the line, believing in me, listening to me, validating my problems and my approach and offering a helpful hand, a touch of insight and a clue as to how I might go about trying to unlock the problem on my own. Never again will you help me through a problem which is practically insoluble to me, and never again will I get to hear you laugh heartily at the challenges life serves you up.

This is what I miss, when I am stuck and feeling all alone in the world: I miss having someone who really understood me, who was always there to offer me an ear that listens like a heart that cares, a mind that contributes like the issues are shared. All I get to have now, of you, are echoes and fragments that I have saved, pieces of a past I no longer get to experience.

All I have left are fragments, the most precious of which are things you said about me to others, which you perhaps never intended for me to see. I have a little collection of treasures which demonstrate the esteem in which you held me, once upon a time, and the passion we both felt for the work we did in our 'partnership', which was your own word describing our relationship. Partners. As much as that means to me, though, you were much more to me than a partner in crime, work and play: you were the father I needed, but never had, even though my father did his very best in raising me.

You were someone on whom I could rely, in whom I could seek comfort and from whom I could solicit wisdom which would be framed in a way that I might find serviceable. With you, I felt seen and heard, and I am confident that never again will I meet someone with whom I feel such an incredible sense of kinship. You were, after all, one of a kind.

But I can try.

And I have no choice, because you are no longer with me, and once again I am forced to work it out all on my own. I'm not, of course, without colleagues, but I am once more without a philosophical partner, someone with whom my own personality and work can merge through our mutual evocation of the dialectical synergy possible between two such kindred spirits. I am without someone alongside whom I can evolve, and with whom my evolution has a certain resonance that raises us both above the our individual ceilings, and makes possible a broadening of horizons which is only ever possible through authentic developmental dialogue.

I am without a proper philosophical partner.

And this, I must admit, I sorely miss.

x

Dear mystic man,

Have I said everything that I needed to say? Have I run out of words? Is there space for a final comment, is there time for me to try for a sense of closure? Let us see.

I don't know if I will ever speak to you again, but somehow I doubt it. I know that you will probably never read this; I'm not even sure if you are still alive today, because you stoked such hatred within the hearts of those close to you that none of them will communicate with me even if all I'm trying to do is check up on you. My suspicion is that you likely won't be able to recover from a mistake of this scale, and that this event marked the beginning of the end for you. However, I am hopeful that, against all the odds, you find a way to heal yourself and that you find some peace with what you've done. I hope that you manage to learn what you managed to teach me, and I hope that you find someone who can take care of you in your old age. I hope we meet again, one day, but I am trying to be realistic - plus, I don't even know where I would begin, or what I would say if I ever did meet you again. One thing I do know for sure is this:

You changed my life, and it has never been the same since.

Yours truly,

Insinq.