The Man in Your Imagination

If you listen to people talk about people, you’ll notice something wild: even when people hang out with the same people, know the same people, do the same things, they’re all having a really different experience of the same things. There’s enough overlap to be able to talk to each other, but the more details you notice, the more differences you notice.

People are in fact not having the same experiences, hanging out with the same people, etc. They are interacting with their environment, but mostly with how they perceive their environment. Their perceptions don’t have to have shit to do with what’s happening, either. It’s one of the reasons we say that how people treat you has more to do with them than you. They react in a world of their own, because they perceive a world of their own.

I said, in the last post on Anaisa, that the person in your head to whom you have to justify yourself is not actually there. I’m going to take that a step further: the person or people you feel like you have to justify yourself to don’t exist. They never did. What you have is the memory of how you felt, the perception of what was done, and the fear of repeating both.

Why? Because you are people, too. You also interact in a world of your own, in which your perceptions are not particularly coupled to reality.

The man (or woman) in your imagination is something you picked up with interactions in your environment, and if they’re persistent, chances are good that the interaction in which you picked them up is not a particularly positive experience, and might be a really traumatic experience.

You might, in essence, be haunted by something that exists in your memory and imagination, something which drains, scares, or threatens you, kept alive by the fear of it happening again.

At the risk of sounding like a sales pitch: this does not have to continue to be your experience. One of the most wonderful tools of elevation is the eviction of that sort of thing, and I say this as someone who very definitely had a few things lurking in my imagination and memory which made my day-to-day miserable.

Vodou is, above all else, the pursuit of freedom. You do not have to be a slave to the man in your imagination.