Went in search of an aspect of self today, which I rarely do as that seems to be so, well, selfish. Anyway came upon this shallow cave with a young boy in it, maybe 7 years old. He thought it was a deep forest, somehow, but it was just a shallow cave. He had drawn scenes on the cave walls that I couldn’t quite make out. When I approached him, he shut me out and took up this hollering litany: “I TOLD YOU! I TOLD YOU!” over and over. His eyes were glazed, glassy, and he wouldn’t make eye contact. He just sort of swayed or stomped around in circles yelling “I TOLD YOU!”. It was like a barrier of bitterness he put up that effectively blocked out anything I or anyone else might direct towards him.
I decided to try a different appearance to see if that made it easier. So I transformed into a female figure, which was less threatening. He wavered a bit, but then took back up his refrain of “I TOLD YOU!”. So I shrank/transformed into a little girl, maybe five years old. That wasn’t threatening to him, so he stopped his hollering. With a little girl voice I looked up at him and said, “Told me what?”. He then showed me the scenes on the walls of his cave. They were suicides he had contemplated; I didn’t know whether any of them had been carried out or not. I don’t think they had. But they were times when he wished he was dead, and/or times when he knew things would turn out crap.
So I pointed my finger at one of the scenes and sparkly silver glitter flew to the lines he had drawn and they sparkled with light. I did this to several of the scenes he’d drawn. He was amazed, and said “How’d you do that?” I didn’t directly answer him (not sure I could have!), but instead I pointed to the first scene and re-interpreted it for him, saying “This shows that your feelings are more important than life itself”, meaning that his contemplated suicide depicted here was actually a sort of back-handed way of valuing and treasuring his feelings. He was amazed - he had never seen it like that (this was a completely new thought for me as well). I then indicated another scene, and said, “This shows that love survives death, and that death can be the doorway to something wonderful.”
He then got defensive about all of this, and stared marching in place and shouting “I TOLD YOU! I TOLD YOU!” all over again. But something strange happened - he sort of split in two, and one of his selves was standing by the little girl/me and watching while this other, much less aware “self” stood there yelling like a mindless idiot. The lucid little boy self was somewhat amused by the antics of his other self. I said to him, “What shall we do with him?” He replied with a mischievous grin, “Let’s tickle him!” So we leaped at the shouting zombie-boy and began tickling him, laughing as we did so, while he struggled to keep from laughing and continue yammering his chorus of “I TOLD YOU!”. Then the normal boy and I ray-gunned him with pink and blue paint, and he immediately calmed down, became completely aware and lucid, turned and looked us in the eyes and said, “I told you you were loved.”
The two then merged back into one, and I’m not sure where they went off to but the retrieval seemed to be over.