Franklin Taggart's Blog

For their wedding, a couple decided to ignore the environmental concerns of the day, and have their guests release helium balloons as the couple was leaving in their limousine for the delights of their honeymoon. Each balloon was tied to a small bag of rice that weighted it just enough to keep from following it's natural inclination to rise and float away. The rice was thrown toward the couple as they left the church, as tradition dictates, and then all of the guests released their balloons as the limo departed. They each then went their own way and left the church. One lone balloon was left behind. Naturally it strained against the weight of the rice bag, but to no avail. The weight was too heavy, and the helium was beginning to lose its buoyancy as the balloon began to sag. Just then a small bird flew into the church driveway, and it spied the small bag of rice. Being hungry, it began to peck at the rice bag, repeatedly working its beak into the small lace package until finally o

Trauma. The relationship ends, the baby dies, the firing happens, the illness takes over, the collectors call, the accidents happen, the abuse, crime, and calamity all take their toll. The nervous system goes into hyper-protective mode, senses heighten, adrenaline courses through the body, focus narrows, and for the time being, my defenses are up. Strangely enough, the pain doesn't arrive until later. When the dust has settled, and I'm left alone to process what has happened, then the pain comes. My mind is flooded with thinking - thinking about the loss, thinking about an unknown future, thinking about who's to blame, thinking about revenge, thinking about how I can manipulate the Universe, thinking about putting a gun to my own head. All this thinking keeps the pain alive, and feeds it. Behavior becomes impulsive. I yell at my kid, I curse at my wife, I become self righteous, I power up, I justify my actions because I'm in pain. My compulsions ultimately become futile

In conflict, I take on one of three roles: Victim, Rescuer, or Persecutor. In Victim mode, I fixate on the injustice, the wrongdoing, the trigger; pointing my finger at the persecutor, avoiding responsibility for the emotional state that my own fixation is creating. In Rescuer mode, I step in to  help, overstepping my boundaries, and taking on responsibility for feelings that aren't mine, trying to fix. In Persecutor mode, I shift into anger; blaming, raging, powering up; heaping shame and contempt upon the Victim. As the drama unfolds, I dance from role to role, and as I dance the conflict grows, the pain that I'm attempting to avoid grows, and the elephant in my room shits all over the floor. All of it, every role, all the pain, all the drama are products of my own perceptions. They don't exist in an objective reality. They are purely constructs of my own mind. As long as I'm in the drama, there is no relief. Like the old movie War Games, where the hacker and the comp

I believe that that core concern of our time is not political or religious at its root. I believe we are in the midst of a worldwide crisis of consciousness. If we look back over the relatively short history of humans on Earth, our recorded history is particularly minute. We've only been able to keep track of things for about 5000 years, but paleontologists are finding indications of the presence of humans that spans back into the hundreds of thousands of years, possibly even longer. Every generation learns more about our existence than the one that preceded it. Where 5000 years ago, myths and stories were used to relate histories and worldviews, now we have a much more complex understanding of where we've come from, where we've been, and where we're going. Even so, there are a large number of humans who are clinging to a worldview that doesn't take into account much that we've learned over the past 2000 years. In the course of my own lifetime I've experienc