Suggested Listening: Together by Nine Inch Nails
My whole life, I have searched for a home. Not just a physical location to feel connected to but the inner felt sense of being at home in my body, the world, and the universe itself. Maybe you know of this search yourself. Underneath all the appearances and protective parts of myself (my armor, if you will) there was always an undeniable sense that I was an orphan in this world. An Orphan of the Real. I always knew that my “home” was never my place in the Universe. Inevitably, when we are orphaned and without a home, we must search for some form of healing because our necessary assumption is that this feeling is always the result of something inside of me being fundamentally broken.
So the search for home and belonging begins from a feeling of disjointedness we take to be a statement about our inner being. This is what the Buddha called suffering or dukha. It is the feeling that the spoke does not quite fit into the wheel. In my darkest hours, I experienced this as the terrifying truth that there was a crack through the center of the Universe that could never be mended, never be healed. It was not just me that was ruptured and broken beyond repair – it was the Universe itself. Myself being broken and the Universe itself being irreparably cracked were two sides of the same thing but with no awareness of this relationship until 25 years later. So I began to search for a home and for healing. I began to search for something that might one day redeem myself and the Universe even though it felt like an impossible task. If I “fixed” myself, I would seal this crack at the heart of Reality. I would finally feel at home.
If there is one key defining feature of the search for healing, it is this yearning for a home never before experienced but felt as an intimation, a somatic intuition, of it existing out there. Descriptions of this intimation can be found in epic poetry, literature, philosophy, spiritual and religious yearnings for god and the divine, and in the constant search for safety in relationships and in the self for every trauma survivor. How many times have you encountered this search for the home-not-known-but-felt in films, books, artworks, or in the deepest cavern of your own heart when you are surrounded by quiet and stillness? It is heard, felt, smelled, tasted in the fleeting moments between light and dark, birth and death, in our day-to-day existence. T.S. Eliot knew this search for home well and the yearning behind it:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.
There is a fundamental relationship between the words healing, wholeness, and home. In Greek, the word sozo is frequently cited as the origin of our word healing and means to make whole. And we feel most at home when we feel whole. But when we heal, there is a fundamental difference between something being fixed or redeemed in us versus something being dissolved which was never a material reality in the first place. The paradox of healing is that despite how much emotional and spiritual pain are easy to understand as a bodily metaphor, something much more strange and mystical occurs. It is not a bone being broken or a cut scabbing over, it is a dissolving of the origins of the emotional and spiritual pain at their very root. For example, in Coherence Therapy, the solution to shame and feeling broken is not to self-compassion ourselves in acceptance and love but to recognize that the story of us being broke and irredeemable was never true in the first place. Shame is and was a highly coherent and genius strategy to gave us a sense of control and preserve our attachments to those people and experiences that were too dangerous to see with a child’s open eyes.
When I heal, I remember that I am whole from the very beginning. And only then will I finally find myself walking the unknown, remembered gate into my home which has always been right here, right now, waiting for me to enter. In Zen Buddhism, we may call this a “gateless gate”. It is available everywhere in all moments and spaces. But to find our way home through the unknown, remembered gate, we are most well-served by having maps and guides given to us by fellow seekers and pathfinders that know that path. And this seeking of home goes well beyond our individual experiences of trauma, anxiety, or depression. It unifies us with a wider transpersonal realm which most therapy does not address let alone offer guidance for. I know of few other traditions that provide such clear and rich guidebooks of that realm than the philosophical and spiritual tradition of Hermeticism.
Entering the Hermetic Circle
While its origins and age are debated, Hermeticism is a mystical and esoteric spiritual philosophy that has influenced alchemy, philosophy, and spiritual psychology for centuries. At its core, it seeks to capture the ultimate nature of reality as a process (not a thing) which occurs in 3 stages. The paradox of the Hermetic view is that each stage is complete in itself but all 3 must be seen as a whole to fully understand the nature of each one. Each is complete in itself but also can only be understood and fully realized as a totality of all 3. An easy to grasp understanding of this Hermetic paradox at the heart of reality is the life cycle of the butterfly. While each stage of the cycle (caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly) is complete unto itself and you would not understand the prior or next stage if you witnessed it, the sublime nature of the process is how all 3 relate as distinct moments in an entire cycle of transformation and life. How does the butterfly carry memories of the caterpillar stage despite it being entirely dissolved during the chrysalis stage? This is Hermetic mystery at its finest.
On a cosmic scale in the Hermetic view, in the beginning was the One. The One was eternal and stable yet filled with what has been called holy aloneness. We touch this holy aloneness when we feel most isolated, abandoned, and rejected from the world around us. There is only you, floating eternally in the nothingness with the terror of complete and utter solitariness in your belly. So out of a profound need for activity and relation to something Other, the One exploded into the multiplicity of everything we experience as the cosmos and reality. The One becomes Many. Each are part of the One but do not know themselves as such. They are cosmic children without a home – holy orphans.
The One loses itself in this stage of transformation but there is a seed of wisdom and insight that can help each fragment find its way back to the whole. It is only through the ability to think, speculate, and use language by humans and conscious beings that we can eventually return back to the one and complete this circular dance where both the one exists at the same time as the different multiple expressions of it. This completes the circular process of “the many as one and the one as many.” It is inherently a paradox but the true nature of all things is this very paradox for Hermeticism. Everything contains its opposite and there is no single thing without something that it relates to and all expressions of the One mirror and reflect this fundamental principal. As above, so below.
So what does this cosmic-scale philosophy have to do with healing and finding out for yourself whether life is worth living? What does the One have to do with healing my trauma or not feeling anxious the moment my eyes open to the hell of my life? In my work with clients, almost every conceivable impact of trauma relates to the loss of some feeling of innocence and purity. We have been broken, destroyed, decimated, defiled, exploited. We have been powerless, helpless to stop violence and violation, and left alone with that experience and its aftermath. Dissociation and primal agonies and anxieties have robbed us of any hope that life is something meaningful and enjoyable. The world has a crack in it and we do not know how it will ever be repaired. It is cursed and we along with it. And yet we all protect at the heart of our Voids the deepest pearl of hope: what if there is something hopeful and worth living for? Better to never allow yourself the luxury of hope rather than hope and have it be decimated once and for all. From this, the feeling is there is no coming back. So keep the hope locked in the Void and never allow it to be seen, even by yourself.
An often-quoted line from Marianne Williamson states that we do not primarily fear the darkness outside and within us. Our greatest fear is our own light and power. When you are knee deep in the Void, this sentiment often rings not just false but deeply suspicious and even threatening to our nervous systems. How could it not when hope is experienced as a poison to the cursed? A voice deep within bellows, “How dare you, little cursed being, from ever thinking you have power and light? Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But at the heart of every black hole is unimaginable power so raw and inconceivable that not even light escapes it. The Void protects in its own way the jewel of a power that can alter time and space themselves. Every cosmic orphan in some way contains a singularity. Our nervous systems operate on survival, not on the principles of astrophysics and quantum mechanics so we can forgive ourselves for struggling to understand why we fear hope and light the most.. We need not blame them too much for this fundamental misunderstanding of the physics of singularities. Our nervous systems are adapted to a life of survival on our planet. And they require the use of a mind equipped with a good bit of magic and alchemy to learn the ways of the universe beyond the prisons and of our early lives and gravity of the Earth. As Cooper says in Interstellar, “We weren’t meant to save the earth – we were meant to leave it.” I think we can do both and maybe save ourselves in the process.
The Cosmic Child
When I was a small child, I dreamed of being an astronomer. I looked up at the heavens above me, dreamed of the nebulas and stars within me, and saw that there was something beyond comprehension in both inner space and outer space. And it was warm and alive. And this same feeling of grandeur and beauty at existence sustains us all beyond all pain and suffering. Jungian depth psychology and references to alchemy in the modern therapy and psychedelic worlds aim right for the heart of this same feeling. Whether it is the cosmos outside of us or the cosmos within in, something deep inside us sees its own face in a moment of unending recognition. Just as in the famous still face experiment of early attachment with children and their caregiver, when the cosmos responds to our signals and cries with warmth and recognition, we must delight and squeal in the fact of being mirrored. But what happens to this cosmic mirroring when your earliest conduits to the universe (i.e. your caregivers or your environment as a whole) did not mirror but showed you a lifeless or terrifying face? Is it not only natural for a child to project this same still, terrifying face upon the Universe itself?
In many approaches to healing from trauma, especially the complex and developmental variety, there is a primary emphasis placed on what we call inner child work. This involves focusing on early experiences from any period of life where the traumas occurred that have remained unintegrated and highly charged with nervous system activation and unprocessed emotion. In inner child work, we work to fully digest/process these experiences in the body as well as the mind to integrate into a more cohesive and stronger ego and self that functions in the here and the now without being plagued by reexperiencing of these unintegrated states. We call these emotional flashbacks, amygdala hijackings, regressions, or unintegrated neural pathways just to name a few. In the end, they all speak to something that was unexperienced in the core experience. It was too much, too fast, too soon.
In most inner child work (like the groundbreaking work of John Bradshaw in his Homecoming series and book), our primary emphasis is on creating a more secure connection to the adult self for the inner child part that has been exiled and left to be alone with all of its pain and suffering. In my work, we aim to conduct a rescue operation and bring that child home to the now where it can finally experience the safety, love, and acceptance it has always deserved. But what the Hermetic and other alchemical and esoteric traditions bring to this work is the understanding that the inner child represents more than just the suffering child of our particular experience. Our inner child also represents the larger principles of soul, innocence, freedom, and full participation in the cosmos that was hidden away in the Void to prevent annihilation. In my work with clients and in my own journey through the hell realms to rescue my own abandoned little one(s), I call this lost cosmic and ecstatic developmental potential the cosmic child. The Hermetic tradition at its finest saw that the place of human consciousness was to recognize its fundamental nature as part of Absolute Spirit. And hidden behind the veil of suffering there is this cosmic child waiting to willingly and consciously take up the mantle of being a co-creator with spirit and soul of the cosmos. We do this through full participation in the conditions of life and embracing of one’s fate willingly.
“Death is not real, even in the Relative sense —
it is but Birth to a new life — and You shall go
on, and on, and on, to higher and still higher
planes of life, for aeons upon aeons of time.
The Universe is your home, and you shall
explore its farthest recesses before the end of
Time.”
― Three Initiates, The Kybalion: The Seven
This is the pearl at the heart of the Void: not just the inner child of our particular life experience and lost innocence but the capacity to participate as a conscious subject in creation itself. Hidden away in the cosmic child is our birthright. This and only this is sufficient to understand why we would rather live in the bliss of nihilism and endless suffering than risk it being lost or stolen. This is also why in so many accounts of psychedelic experiences, a primary motif is being invited into an experience of being both witness of the unspeakable divinity of creation and being a part of that which creates it. We become both the One and the Many at the same time. And that may also be why so many psychedelic experiences and medicines offer an opening of the windows of neuroplasticity. They allow for rapidly accelerated healing of lost inner child parts and integration of traumatized neural pathways into not just a healed nervous system but a reorientation to your place in the cosmos. There is no inner child healing without the recovery of the cosmic child that is its true hidden potential.
This is where we come to see why we fear our light so much that we would rather reside in eternal darkness: because who can tolerate the responsibility of being cocreator of their life and the shared being and lives of all life around them through their actions and inactions? The embracing of this light and possibility of creation confronts us directly with the terror of our freedom. And even the experience of alienation and anxiety that comes from its embrace. Freedom invites anxiety because it confronts us with radical responsibility and openness. And there is no one wielding that power but you and you alone. There is no joy or pleasure in freedom because it is only a means to an end. For the Cosmic Child, freedom is a tool from which to craft the liberation of all beings, including yourself.
Erich Fromm in his classic work, The Escape from Freedom, describes two types of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. Most of us spend our waking hours and long-forgotten dreams searching for some kind of negative freedom. We want to be free of pain and fear, freed from the shackles of life and death as we know them, freed from the afflictions of life and choice. But very rarely do we see that this emphasis, even obsession, with the pursuit of negative freedom/freedom from is a very clever mask over our greatest terror and possibility: the freedom to create and experience our desire, feelings, and bodies as organic unities within a larger unity of consciousness and oneness. In building our connection not just to Inner Children but also the Cosmic Child, we find that freedom is not as heavy as we may have thought. It is playful, it is joyous, and it can risk with absolute abandon that our greatest efforts and creations can and will inevitably fall apart. Is the child crushed when they watch their sand castles fall apart only to be built again? Or do they squeal and cry out in absolute joy and sorrow all at once? And this is why all true creation and freedom fundamentally result in the expression of a marker of naked reality: the paradox.
The Weight of Innocence
At the heart of all mystical and esoteric philosophy and spiritual practices lies the paradox. A paradox is not a logical contradiction but (as Jung and alchemy would call it) the coincidentia oppositorum or union of opposites. A paradox is not a problem to solve but a reality to experience. In returning to the third phase of Hermetic spiritual transcendence that is shared by most esoteric spiritual paths, once the principles of innocence and joy are recovered in becoming the Cosmic Child once again for the first time, we are also simultaneously joined with the experience of profound power, freedom, and an unending responsibility for all beings and all things that have ever existed or ever will exist. This is where in Mahayana Buddhism the bodhisattva vow becomes the basis of all ethical conduct and life. But the wholehearted commitment to the impossibility of the bodhisattva vow already implies a paradox. You commit to both the relative truth that you will constantly fail to uphold it and the absolute truth that all beings are already saved yet they require your wholehearted diligent effort in the process nonetheless. Paradox.
Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed conceptualized that the ultimate goal of all revolutionary fights against oppression is to once again claim the right to be a part of history, to be historical subjects, and no longer be lost to time and silenced by your oppressors. Historical subjects, cocreation of humanity with Absolute Spirit, rescuing lost inner children, fully integrating as an adult self with the power and freedom to choose a life based on one’s values and soul, taking the bodhisattva vow to participate in all of existence as one who is committed to liberating all beings from suffering through the impossible psychedelic vision of the Mahayana – these are all pathways of consciousness that have recaptured some sense enormous power and responsibility for their life and the lives of all others. And of their capacity to both heal and to hurt other beings. Make no mistake: reality and cocreation also involve death, destruction, and disintegration. But what is participating fully in creation or history without the possibility to fail, make mistakes, and risk death itself? On the other hand, a mushroom once told me, “you are part of the Earth. And the Earth doesn’t make mistakes.” Paradox.
What all of this leads to is that coming home for the first time, healing, finding wholeness, completing the Hermetic circle, the bodhisattva vow, are all living from and within states of paradox. When the universe is your home, it means that you are no longer just a child of some specific family or historical and material conditions but a child and parent of yourself on a cosmic scale. A Hermetic text once asked how can you ever know god or spirit if you view yourself as fundamentally different and incapable of knowing your true nature as that same spirit? And what better home could one possibly find but to find that one is in your very core full of both basic goodness and also the same fabric of time and space itself? In the end, it is only the Cosmic Child that walks through the gateless gate to healing and wholeness. But this is just a way of saying that there is no gate to walk through and no separate “you” to walk through it. Ram Dass once asked Mark Epstein if he saw his clients as “already free”. I think of this often and wonder how much my feeling of unfreedom in any given moment is easier to tolerate than the freedom I do have in that moment. And what if we are all searching is not something found but only something remembered?
