Twilight Within

Unlocking Our True Nature

By Madame X © 2004

House of the Dreaming dares us to discover ourselves and explore our true-nature, that inner part of us that is beyond personality, thought, spirit; that eternal, unchanging core of essence inside all of us, dreaming ancient dreams.

Over time we have learned the art of deceiving everyone around us, even those that mean the most to us.  We seem to be accepted and loved for those parts of us that we have chosen to share; yet we fear how they would feel if they really knew us, what would happen if we stripped away our dayside-personality.  Certainly our explorations need not involve anyone else, they are personal private investigations.

It may not be easy to acknowledge that we are very different than how we present ourselves; similarly, neither are we the person that our parents and society have insisted on.  Within every one of us there are dueling oppositions light vs. dark impulses, instinct vs. conscience, desire vs. duty, and what is reason vs. what is imagination.  We can deny those unacceptable sides of our nature but risk being at the mercy of their powerful primitive demands.  Our inner nature is not exclusively made up of savage predatory impulses, but of all those aspects that our dayside-personality cannot accept; it may be awkwardness, insecurity, submissiveness and tenderness.  For what to one may be strength to another is weakness.  Knowing this, we can see the need to understand and accept our true nature finding ways of dealing with the conflicting contradictions of our dual or even multiple selves.  House of the Dreaming appreciates this innate struggle, but before we continue on our quest, we must commit our character to the Veil of the Waking Dream; for as we delve further into our inner selves we will be faced with serious internal conflict where such bastions of the Veil, like loyalty, fortitude, resolve and compassion, must become our only guides.

A good deal of psychic energy is utilized to sustain our dayside-personality; the more divided we are within ourselves, the more energy is necessary to keep away the threat of loosing that façade.  Achieving Twilight Within is to mesh the conscious dayside personality with our denied innate instincts.  Once we achieve inner twilight we no longer need to misappropriate our precious energy.   Discovering, acknowledging and accepting our true-nature will not only enhance our self-awareness, increase our inner-balance, becoming more self-assured; but we will also become more respectful and less critical of others as we realize our own personal meaning.  Undivided, we will be better prepared to face the challenges of the world around us, while reaching for higher goals.  Achieving twilight within, as both a child of darkness and light can be the most empowering triumph of our lifetime.  

To do this we need some essential tools as ours is not an easy quest.  First, we must develop suspendability, putting aside our pre-conceptions of who we are, who we are supposed to be, and what is reasonable sanity; being aware of our first instinctual thought and initial inclination in any given situation.  We need to suspend subjective judgments of our actions as they serve only to deceive ourselves, leading us astray from our quest.  Second, we must leave behind aspects of our ego that can only serve as impediments, like pre-concepts of mastery and control; certainly, we do not know everything nor can we control everything.  In this creative alienation exercise, where we dare to look beyond our dayside identity, finding our twilight within, we realize that as different as we may be we are an intrinsic part of an intricate universal web, where regardless of which individual point we select to touch, it affects and reverberates throughout the whole.  To succeed in our quest we must surrender, accept and befriend our innate nature.  Third, and perhaps most important, we must continually remind ourselves that although every unthinkable aspect of our inner nature must be identified and reckoned with, we do not need to act upon each and every one of them. Allow the Veil of the Waking Dream to guide us.

Before we dare to pursue any kind of Dragon Work (utilizing our extrasensory gifts) we must come to terms with our true selves and the solidity of our character.  Knowledge is power, power corrupts, lest you have a firm understanding of whom you are and where you stand within yourself.

It is important to know what influences our dayside-identity.  The initial defining of whom we are that took place before we were even born.  Should we believe in spiritual reincarnation, then a myriad of factors come into play; like parental sexual fantasies during conception, death and rebirth trauma, innate nature, unfinished work, continued growth, quests … touching on a more material plane, our first influences were our hereditary lineage implications, genetic predispositions or mutations, and the unavoidable parental expectations.  As a child, our family’s behavior was the most potent factor in our becoming, as it established the boundaries of who we were expected to be.  It was their reactions to our natural behavior that taught us what facets of ourselves were acceptable, as it became necessary to hide our natural, instinctual selves behind a façade of protection from disapproval, punishment or humiliation. This early defense system supports the repression of our instinctual responses, recollections, and innate nature creating division between them and what is acceptable, expected and appropriate.

We all have used fantasy to compensate for all those expressions that were taken away from us.  It was our games of make-believe and role-play that allowed us to express those inner parts of our being that we were not allowed to explore elsewhere.  Many of us seldom had this opportunity aside from the fantasy games of early childhood, while some of us were actually able to continue our explorations into our teen years or early adulthood with role playing games of marvelous superheroes and villainous antiheroes.  Although we are something very different than what we played in those fantasy games, we understand that they were a creative exploration of different facets of ourselves.  Giving wings to our fantastic creative impulses whether as games, music, on paper or canvass is for many of us the only way to express those latent parts of our true-self; opening the gates to imagination expressing it under the only available/permissible outlets of music, artwork and fiction.  Without the world of fantasy to turn to, we can certainly be prone to turn the tide on the levels of acceptability, indulging in debauchery, excess, violence, self-destruction, apathy or ennui; there we may become irretrievably lost, unable to renounce our new found ways.  Some of us exist in the even dimmer half-world of self-deception, denial and people-pleasing often also resulting in an irretrievable loss.  The few of us that have emerged from the other side know how close to the void we have been, how close this false-self was to becoming the only reality we knew, and how truly fortunate we are to have found each other today.

Our dreams are one of the many roads toward discovering the denied aspects of our nature.  In the privacy of our dreams we often see clearer reflections of our true-selves, revealing aspects that we decidedly buried deep inside.  In our dreams, dark figures offer us small opportunities to claim those lost pieces of our inner being; often offering us useful tools to disarm current perspectives or situations, as long as we are willing to listen.  Certainly encounters with our inner-self are better left to the dream world than during times of stress or duress when we need control more than ever.  Yet it is during those very times when we are more prone lose reason being truly beside ourselves in thought, word and deed as if possessed by some daemon.  Circumstances generating high anxiety, disorientation and stress provide perfect introspective opportunities where we can opt to make lasting changes in the way we acknowledge and process our inner identity.

Spiritual journeys like meditation, ritual, journeying, fasting, chanting, isolation, sensory deprivation, corporeal stimulation and trantic work can evoke substantial revelations about who we are.   The key lies in the interpretation of these often symbolic visages of indefinite times and places that often challenge the pre-concepts of morality, reason, and reality.  A place of twilight, magic, and illusion, our true nature is a, which are unlikely to present themselves in a straight-forward manner. 

Past life regression work can also be extremely useful, as any result of such explorations casts a definite light on another facet of us, regardless if it reveals a certifiable past life.  Such procedures like hypnosis, self-hypnosis, the Christos Method, archetype contemplation, Ouija board consultation, and astral plane retrieval may help unlock those deep unconscious energies that lie beneath our observable threshold of perception, or in some cases to process thoughts from varied perspectives.

Whichever approach, or combination of approaches, we chose to take as a means to discover and accept our true selves towards inner twilight; if it is worth doing, it is worth doing well.  Patience, discipline and perseverance. Keeping good records and always checking our sources is vital, as is to temper our serious desire with humor and a good dose of joix de vivre.