The Limelight and the Dark

One night, I pitched my camp on the edge of a meadow, next to the deep woods of the Willamette National Forest in Oregon. Technically, I was on the grounds of my friend’s homestead — but there was no fence, no wall, no difference between the area that was mowed by a couple of desultory grazing animals and the close web of dark trees that loomed up just beyond the verge.

I had no tent, I was sleeping out upon a large blanket. Some others were individually wrapped in sleeping bags. It was late summer, and the animals could feel it: the vice of winter in the distance beginning to press upon the remains of the year. As the moon rose over the field, a pack of coyotes started yipping and howling from somewhere in the darkness about a half-mile away.

Now, I’ve heard coyotes many times. Their call always makes the animal in me prickle with alertness, and the sound is far toward the other side of the spectrum from what we ordinarily consider reassuring, especially in the dark. Sometimes, when we are caught in the snare of half-sleep, we make unearthly moans and yowls, and frighten ourselves. These calls are the coyote’s natural voice. It is always a glimpse into the alien world we inhabit, hearing that sound, and remembering that not only do they not require comforting in the recoil from their own sound, but they lean into it, let the rush of strangeness take them. One call begets another.

In this instance, a strong anxiety gripped me as I lay there, listening. My mind fixated upon the continuity of the ground between the coyotes and my body — how they could just stalk over to where we were bundled upon the Earth, nothing keeping them from us, no separation. A version of agoraphobia swept through me: I felt too exposed, too exactly-where-I-was, too findable. These wild wolf-dogs — which in my mind became, for that moment, avatars of strangeness — could find me, would find me, would take me over.

And so, I did the only thing possible: I disappeared. Yes, my body was still in the field; but as an energetic presence I vanished. It’s different than not wanting to live, or withdrawing from life. It’s not dissociating. It is disappearing. Some of you will know how to do it, too.

There is a polarity to our energetic wiring that permeates our demeanors, our ambitions, and shapes our lives profoundly because it governs the quality of the charisma available to each of us. Make no mistake: your polarity setting is far more impactful than the matter of whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert. Moreover, this is not a continuum, it is a binary polarity with no seeming middle ground — just like how magnets either entirely attract or entirely repel each other.

The polarity is this: some of us are appearers and some of us are disappearers. But what exactly do I mean by that? Well, appearers are those of you for whom your dominant behavioral dynamics reinforce your identity, your person.

Phenomenally, you appearers are always broadcasting a signal about who you are. You are the people who like to announce your presence when you walk through the door. You like others to know you — you want to be known. (Let’s emphasize again that this is different than extroversion — although they often go hand-in-hand. It is, of course, quite possible and common to want to be known and also to not be comfortable in social situations, or to feel most comfortable in one-on-one company.) You may not know who you are (uncertainty about your life, your values, etc.), but you know very well that you are.

For those of you who are strongly charismatic appearers, the effect is striking. You have the ability to draw the attention of others, to make people care about you, and to allure others to resonate with (and invest in) your journey of being. You are understandable — you make sense to other people. For those of you who cultivate this dynamic, you can become a powerful charismatic proxy for other characters: an actor, a storyteller, a motivational speaker, a whip of populist fervor.

But even when you’re by yourself, you appearers can never wholly shake the anchor of self-consciousness. Your very presence, no matter how fleeting, makes a telegraphic impression that ripples through the whole kaleidoscopic puzzle of reality. You are incapable of leaving no trace.

What about disappearers? In your case, your dominant behavioral dynamics work to deflect your identity, to sublimate and pass along the influence of your character to other mechanisms; we build plausible alibis for our effect. Think, perhaps, of the true Wizard of Oz — the Man Behind the Curtain.

But disappearing is more essential than that: it is to slip, for a moment or for an eternity, off the ledger sheet of reality. You are unknowable, enigmatic, opaque. At the extreme, nothing reflects off you, you cause no ripples or waves. Effective thieves are disappearers, as are spies and those who stake-out and tail other people — anyone who is subversive and secret and gets away with it. Close observers (such as naturalists, writers) who want to see what the world is up to when the world isn’t aware of an observer are also habitual disappearers.

It might be hard to imagine a parallel and opposite form of charisma that exists for disappearers, but it’s there. Very skillful magicians are often understated. Now we move into the territory of Verbal Kint, the narrator and antagonist from the 1995 noir film “The Usual Suspects.” Kint is self-deprecating, sniveling even. He weaves a useful story from a constellation of random elements surrounding him in the police precinct office, and then vanishes. Even his signature limp disappears (in the film’s stunning final sequence). You might think that the persona of Kint is a low-rent mask for a villain who is full of narcissistic grandeur and malice, but no — Kaiser Soze (Kint’s true identity) is likewise an inscrutable cypher.

There is another possible reason for why I felt so unexpectedly anxious when laying on the open ground on that long-ago Oregon night. It is possible that what I heard wasn’t coyotes. Sometimes, our animal selves detect an anomaly — “a glitch in the matrix” — way before our logical minds parse out the mistake. Perhaps, like the “not-deer” that some in Appalachia have seen, or the “crawlers” that have been encountered deep in the lonely woods, there was something not naturally and fully realized about these “coyotes:” an unfaithful and monstrous reproduction, an occasional and overlooked outcome in the permutational magic of the cosmos. Maybe something that ought not to be indeed came to be.

I mention this for two reasons: first, because one of the formative experiences for Disappearers (the kind of event that can even catch impressionable Appearers by surprise and flip their dominant polarity) is the particular fear that is only felt in the presence of the unnatural, when a primal instinct tells you to flee. Encountering a moment where something seems deeply wrong or unbearably alien is a scenario many people can recognize from their own experience at some point in their lives. The command to Run! is a sign of an organized fight-or-flight response in the central nervous system (which is obviously different than freezing or dissociating). It evolves into a thrill at imagining one can always escape, one can always hide, one will never be found. One is safe.

The second reason I mention the probable origins of disappearing as a response to the paranormal is more significant. To see why, let us first consider further the implications of appearing — being who you are, being knowable.

Even God the Unmentionable and Unnameable has a mailing address (so to speak). Anyone can write out a prayer, fold it, and insert it into one of the cracks and crevices in the Western Wall abutting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where Jewish tradition holds that the divine presence has never left.

This idea that everything and everyone has an address, a locus, is very satisfying to our way of thinking. It implies that everything belongs, that everything has its place, and that everything is special. In the grand symphony of reality, every tone is heard. Furthermore — much like the familiar objects on the curio shelves lining the rabbit hole down which Alice is falling — every object can be visited in the seat of its identity and be known. Mysteries reveal themselves.

This is the promise and joy of appearing: it is possible to be truly known and loved. Nothing and no one will ever be lost.

The uncomfortable corollary of that proposition is that everything dark and twisted, spooky and evil also has an address, also is located in the great web of things that are. They can come out of the shadows and find you. And you can stumble into them. And everything — including the dark things — can develop that charisma, an attractive magnetism that lures the attention, time, and life energy of others, feeding upon it and growing larger. There’s a psychic address for Bobby McFerrin and there’s a psychic address for Hitler, and we all know them both. Anyone can find them.

Yet, what if there is more to the mystery? What constructive effect can disappearing have in the architecture of the Cosmos? The ability to disappear suggests that reality is not so simple as everything in its place and a place for every thing. Certain objects and people must rather have forwarding addresses — runaway identities that dissolve into further complexity and even chaos, instead of resolving to a point. This is described by the mathematics of fractal sets and boundaries.

Then, too, there might be redundancies of identity, converging and diverging according to rules we’ve only just begun to fathom. The Buddha has argued convincingly that nothing, no Self, is permanent. But, likely there is a “conservation of identity” principle, analogous to the conservation of energy: Self cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form. Disappearing doesn’t mean ceasing to exist.

Where disappearing initially might seem morbid or eerie, it reveals surprising grace upon deeper understanding. So much can be facilitated and nurtured when the imprint of the Artist is light upon the material. The creative inspiration available when we let Work speak for itself rather than using it as an avenue for personal applause is enormous. A wise person said that generosity has its greatest, most magical effect when the source of the generosity remains secret.

Then (as promised), there’s the second reason why disappearing might have its origins in responding to the paranormal. The nature of paranormal reality is to fall outside the tidy address system of the manifest Universe — to exhibit the very qualities of being (non-local entanglement aka “spooky action at a distance,” ghostly boundaries in time and space) that make disappearing itself possible. That is to say, disappearing is a paranormal behavior we’ve developed as an adaptation to a paranormal world.

The question remains: can appearers disappear, and vice versa? Earlier, I stated that you are rooted in one behavior set or the other as your “home ground,” and can’t easily exchange one for the other completely. That seems generally true.

However, it is quite possible to develop the ability to visit both behaviors within yourself comfortably and fluently — and that ability to do so is key to unlocking the full potential of your existence as an unlimited creative agent and master of life. The secret, again, lies in the nested dynamic of the Holonomic Principle: to be able to disappear into the role of appearing — to lose yourself in the character you need to play at that moment.

Conversely, the skill is also to be able to “empty the self of the idea of self” (kenosis, the Christians have called it) so that the divine will can come through…summoning a collected, powerful presence of Self suddenly (like a rogue wave) out of the invisible silence of being.