*This is an early version of a chapter in my upcoming book, Saturn’s Maw: Essays and Aphorisms for the Living and the Dead
Suggested Listening: Worlds Theory Playlist
“World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies “World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other…What occurs is always a process, a doing – specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.” – Rollo May in The Courage to Create
“The world arises in this fathom-long body, with its senses and mind; such is the world, the arising, cessation, and path to cessation of the world.” – Shakyamuni Buddha in the Anguttara-nikaya
Show Me the Self and I Will Pacify It for You
I once heard that at some point, the path of personal healing becomes a spiritual and philosophical quest. I have always been fascinated by this idea in my own journey of trauma healing and spiritual practice for the last 30 years. My own journey as a Complex PSTD survivor, trauma therapist, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist, and Zen Buddhist practitioner have all been driven by these primary questions: what exactly is the nature of this quest? And where and how does one path become the other? After three decades of searching, it is clear that both the path of healing and the philosophical and spiritual quest are two necessary paths to confronting the most fundamental questions of who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going? And what is this experience we call reality? In my own journey, healing trauma and the philosophical and spiritual quest have taken me right into the heart of the void to find whether there is any such thing as freedom and liberation from suffering at all. In my own dark nights of the soul and sitting with others searching for healing and freedom, it is out these quiet caverns of despair in our bodies and minds that we often ask, is it even possible to feel healed and free? Is it foolish and naive to even hope for such a thing?
Just as Dante’s Inferno begins with Dante himself being lost in a dark wood, scared, alone, and with no escape from confronting the dark, we come to healing at the midpoint between innocence and freedom. We come after the disaster has already occurred and all too often, we do not even know what catastrophes have befallen us. We come anxious, we come isolated, we come dissociated, we come enraged, we come depressed, we come with all our fear and trembling. My own journey through the dark wood has been rife with anxiety, terror, transcendence, grief, and above all, answering the call from the heart of the abyss itself. This call demands we develop the courage to find out what it means to be human. For in the long journey from suffering to freedom, there is no lotus without mud and there is no freedom without going beyond the very edges of our imprisonment. It is in the most intimate and sacred moments with my own inner world or with others in my therapy office that we name the core of our experience of suffering. We are plagued by the feeling of being in a prison for reasons we do not understand. We have been imprisoned by jailers whose identity always recedes from our conscious awareness back behind the protective walls of the prison cell itself. So we must start from sitting inside this cell and inside the dark wood if we hope to be healed and be free. The only alternative is to live and die in delusion about the very nature of our imprisonment or that we are even imprisoned at all. For no one is more imprisoned than the prisoner who has convinced themselves they are free.
Gabor Maté has said that “Trauma is not what happened to you, it’s what happened inside of you as a result of what happened to you.” This provides a radical shift from a focus on events to a focus on impact as a necessary step in healing from trauma. But what exactly happens inside of you as a result of what has happened to you? Answering this question is our task and when followed to its core, it takes us to the very limits of inner and outer space. It is a question whose seeds originate for us all in the birth of the universe itself. To answer that question, we must go through the nervous system, the mind, and our sense of self to the worlds which have impacted us so greatly of which we are an inextricable part. There are many answers to Maté’s question proposed by the various therapies focused on healing trauma. You fragment into protective parts, your Inner Child is wounded and your life is dominated by an Inner Critical Parent, you experience emotional flashbacks to your original unprocessed traumas where you felt utterly alone, you have interrupted threat responses that must be completed, or your soul has been disconnected and split from your body are among just a few. Each theory posits its own model of what happens inside of us and a corresponding way to address what happened inside of you. Each answer implicitly contains some kind of theory about what it is to be human beings and what must happen to restore our systems back to some sense of wholeness in our humanity. A theory of how we are wounded inherently comes with some idea of how to treat and heal the wound. And while there are many shared views for all the different theories of what happens inside of us from trauma, this bridge from healing trauma to spiritual and philosophical liberation is what we are seeking to build.
Perhaps the best and most comprehensible answer in the therapy world thus far can be found in the scientific research and application of memory reconsolidation. Trauma teaches us to believe certain things about ourselves and the worlds we live in as part of our survival responses kicking in to keep us alive during traumatic experiences. And those learnings become so necessary to maintain for our ongoing survival that we will filter out information which might prove those lessons wrong or outdated. We fragment and become trapped in those learnings as if they were still the world we live in now. For our vulnerable minds and bodies without proper safety and support due to this fragmentation, we feel we cannot survive the unexperienced experience of the original encounter. Those beliefs fill in the gaps of the experience and feelings we could not tolerate. This is what fundamentally leads to the ongoing traumatic reactions causing our suffering. And we guard those learnings with our lives because they protect us from the greater suffering of intolerable emotion and sensations unable to be processed from those experiences. So trauma is fundamentally about learning. And it is about a core belief that must be maintained so we can function at all. Some startling but common examples of this include: it is better to punish myself and live in pain than to face the grief of having parents that hated me and feeling unwanted. Or if I stay depressed and never feel motivated to do anything while I isolate myself from others, I will never have to experience the pain of being rejected or abandoned by others. The number of learnings that can drive these intense forms of compassionate suffering vary as there are distinct nervous systems in the world. But our cognitive abilities and nervous systems are structured to find some quite universal solutions to stave off intolerable pain and terror. These ingenious solutions also happen to create the very source of our ongoing suffering. If trauma fundamentally teaches us to believe certain things about the self and the world out of survival, then it only makes sense that healing must also be based on a model of learning to address it.
Approaches that utilize this process of memory reconsolidation are essential to healing and reshaping our learning as a core part of “what happened to us” because these learnings drive a vast majority of our suffering and symptoms like anxiety and depression. They go beyond just counteracting our suffering through cognitive changes or giving us coping skills (though these are also essential, as well, for regulation and safety in our bodies and minds). They aim to address suffering at its root (i.e. the learning and strategies that drive it) and therefore are quite radical in their approach to healing. After years of both receiving and offering healing using many approaches that are based on memory reconsolidation processes, I have also come to see there is a massive set of assumptions or unacknowledged conceits within these approaches related to the very nature of our experiences of healing. These conceits are so vital to explore because they are the vast chasm that separates healing from freedom and liberation in most Western psychological approaches. We can find the lost stones and rails of the bridge by asking “what is the mind that is wounded and full of illness?” and “what is this self that experiences the trauma and what happened?”
These questions for the sake of healing now lead us into the realms of philosophy, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and evolutionary biology to name just a few areas of relevance. For many of us trained in psychology and various healing professions, we are often conditioned and trained into being so highly specialized that we can often struggle to cross the bridge from healing to liberation ourselves. We live in a world where specialization, technocratic training, and fragmentation into various scientific disciplines for centuries now can unwittingly lead to a myopic view of the very nature of healing we are engaged in. And it is often the case that the religious and atheistic worldviews can be at odds with our healing practices originating in the long history of scientific materialism for centuries now in Western European-based cultures. These historical contexts profoundly shape our avoidance of the questions of the mind and the self or they lead to very specific ways of answering those questions which can undercut the very radical nature of healing itself. Or we, unbeknownst to us, smuggle in the assumptions of those bigger contexts and worlds without realizing how they doom us to limitation.
What is most important for us here is to begin to take a hard look at what is this self that we are trying to heal. As a starting point and drawn from various studies of the self in philosophy and psychology, the self can be thought of as the center for 3 dynamic components that are in always in relationship to each other:
- Subjectivity – the felt sense of being alive
- Perspective – the point of view from the center of experience and being alive
- Agency – the center of action from being in living experience
What happens inside of us as the result of trauma most directly alters our sense of self through how it shapes the structures of subjectivity, perspective, and agency. All 3 of these components of self become organized around nervous system responses that prioritize survival over all else. In the work of healing our traumas, our experiences of anxiety, depression, or any type of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder are inextricably bound up with these aspects of self. We cannot extricate ourselves from the snare of depression or anxiety without confronting who is the self that is depressed or anxious? While our healing approaches based on the model of learning, like many experiential therapies for trauma, can touch upon dimensions of the existential and even spiritual of human experience, all too often the idea of mental health is limited to how to make us more flexible, adaptable, and regulated in our environments as our adult selves. This is necessary to healing and restoring us to our lost sense of wholeness and it is also insufficient for anyone interested in crossing the bridge to self-realization and liberation. Becoming more mentally healthy and adaptive to your environment rarely goes beyond inquiring into the self and mind once you have become more adaptive and healthy. And to limit our approach to healing to just becoming more adaptive adults means we only heal to the degree we can be better suited to the very environments that are wounding us. Healing trauma and the aspects of the self grants one passage through the gate of spiritual inquiry. We can now start to ask questions from a metathinking level about who and what we are. For if there is one shared yearning that myself and most other trauma survivors I have worked with over the years, it is the desire to “know who I truly am”. Knowing who one truly is must inherently lead to questions that take us beyond just healing and to the very nature of who is asking the question? These questions involve exploring the nature of the self and the mind and become inherently existential and spiritual kinds of inquiries. It is not just about becoming more mentally healthy – it is also about what does the human being require to live with intense feelings of meaning, purpose, and agency in your life and in the world again.
So if we inquire more deeply into the 3 aspects of self as deep structures of any experience of forms of suffering like depression or anxiety, we begin to speak and hear language that captures not a set of symptoms but a highly emotion-laden phenomenological experience for human beings with nervous systems. In other words, we do not experience these types of suffering as a set of symptoms but as an entire world shaped by these structures of self. In Complex PTSD, for example, there is a profound sense of being either dead while alive or terrified of living at all. Or your perspective of the physical environment and the world around are infinitesimally small and not shared by others. In my own experiences of physical alterations of space, it is as if the entire cosmos that exists is roughly the three or 4 inches on the ground in front of your feet. You live in a state of isolation in the midst of a vast ocean of connection. Your sense of agency in the world is dramatically altered and defined by the limits of the things you have learned from that trauma. Your only options are usually to fight, flight, freeze, or appease to survive (and even this is a generous description of the experience).
As is thoroughly understood and explored in Buddhist philosophy and practice, these experiences reveal in its most intense form how the mind precedes everything. We experience these radical alterations in space and agency because the mind shapes the self and world itself. In therapeutic terms, this mind that precedes everything would include both the body, mind, and our very sense of self. And even more radical than this, we also find that the body, mind, or the 3 components of self do not exist separate from each other. They are codependently arising (we will frequently return to dependent arising as a practice and a philosophical principle). And with enough exploration and training in something like meditative practice, we can directly experience that it is impossible to actually find any separate components of the self from our experience. The implication is that any sense of self we do or do not have is also codependently arising on myriad conditions of which we are frequently unaware of or actively ignoring. And it is where and how these three dependently-arising elements of subjectivity, perspective, and agency are being actively constructed and shaped moment-to-moment where we have the greatest power to reshape our experience of the world. Because how those elements are constructed moment-to-moment is an artifact, a set of learned patterns of feeling, thinking, and acting that are inherited from a specific world of experience. As the political philosopher Michel Foucault might say, the self is a historical artifact. And if it can come into existence, then it can recede from existence.
In the experience of C-PTSD, anxiety, or depression, it is principally these three elements of subjectivity, perspective and agency which is the locus, the ground zero, or how our experience of suffering is constantly arising. Since there is a significant overlap between anxiety and depression with the core experiences and protective strategies of complex trauma, let’s look at at C-PTSD as a test case. Inside the hell realm of C-PTSD, most emotional learning leads to a sense of being alive which is profoundly built on isolation, terror, and complete lack of meaning and purpose. There is a sense that there is no hope – things are forever going to be the way they are and you have no power to change them. The world and reality itself are defined by threat and danger. As odd as this is to consider, these are not actually the core problem but are symptoms of how we have learned to address or avoid the core problem. Frequently, this is both a reality of what was experienced in childhood as a small being with no power to change their environmental circumstances and what we may be experiencing as the brute facts of our existence as adults. It is coherent to believe this as a child. But we often totally accept that it is also coherent to believe this as adults. And as we grow and change, the protective coherence of abandoning all hope is primarily kept us safe from feeling alive or being vulnerable to only be decimated and destroyed all over again. The again is the key word – we have already experienced annihilation, abandonment, or chaos and it was intolerable. This time, the ultimate terror is that if you now choose to live and you were be to destroyed again, now you would be responsible for your own destruction. So who would dare to feel alive again in a dead, meaningless universe full of dangerous others?
In this world and universe of danger and terror, there is a necessary and extreme limitation on the perspective and point of view of being alive. At the center of your experience you feel small, vulnerable, fragile, easily shattered or destroyed by any experiences of rejection, being misunderstood, or hurt. This perspective creates a feeling that the world is extremely hostile and constantly encroaching upon your very being. Again, as a child with no protection or ability to change your circumstances or environment, this is a highly coherent and adaptive learning and the perspective one feels when in some kind of traumatic flashback reflects the reality of this from a child’s perspective. For our developing nervous systems under threat, it is highly adaptive to maintain at all costs a view that the world continues to appear hostile, alien, and incredibly small because it keeps threats to a minimum and under control. Uncertainty is minimized and there is less chance of increasing the amount of threat in your environment at any given time. Isolation is highly adaptive and coherent in a world that is only filled with threats and unsafe others. Many of our experiences of overwhelm from this core nervous system state are attempts to minimize and reduce the amount of information and stimulation coming in because our systems are already so overloaded with the constant terror of destruction that it takes little to push us outside of our capacity to tolerate reality. But as we will come to later, this is primarily a strategy not so much to keep the world and reality out but to keep unconscious pain and terror in.
Lastly, it becomes highly coherent and part of a larger schema of the extremely fragile and powerless self in a huge, hostile world to reduce any sense of agency dramatically to zero or close to zero. In my own experiences of C-PTSD, the only avenue of agency and action I have in the world during a flashback experience or being triggered into some traumatic regression to a past world is bracing and armoring my body against a fatal blow from the world and other people. For a child or infant, this bracing and tensing of the body is in fact the only real means of having agency and action in an unsafe environment where they have no power to change their circumstances. I may not be able to stop the world from destroying me or abandoning me but I can brace my body and feel anxiety. For a small, vulnerable being, bracing and tensing along with overthinking and catastrophizing (i.e. hypervigilance and anxiety) are extremely coherent in their world and gives some illusion of having agency and control over an uncontrollable situation. Into adulthood, this coherent schema from childhood serves to primarily protect us from what D.W. Winnicott called primitive agonies of our past. What continues to be somewhat adaptive long after the primitive agonies occurred is not that we can stop them in the present from happening again but that we can keep the past inside and outside the realm of our awareness and experience. This is why grieving, crying, wailing, and shaking are often the primary way to resolve terrifying abandonment fears and hypervigilance. It is finally seeing the reality of one’s early experience that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that one could do to stop it. But bracing your body and using your thinking mind to simulate an entire universe of possibilities allowed us to feel some semblance of safety and control. And here we develop the crucial link that thinking equals safety and control. A tragic but necessary learning where the thinking mind is now a means of control instead of exploration.
What is most crucial about recognizing these components of self related to subjectivity, perspective, and agency as coherent learnings and protective strategies is it allows us to check our conditioned tendency to try counteracting them. If we can instead use a state of open awareness, curiosity, and compassion, we can come to see that these aspects of self that make up our basic sense of reality and the self are coherent strategies that emerged from a specific experience in a specific world. This can only be done through this open, compassionate awareness because counteracting is fundamentally about control. And control is a very symptom of the self’s coherent strategies built to primarily avoid our own primitive agonies. Yet again, these core aspects of self are codependently arising based on certain conditions and circumstances and this is never seen or liberated until we can one day give up the illusion of control. Effective experiential therapies for trauma aim to increase our ability to understand and reconnect to the original world where these coherent strategies emerged from and why they developed at all. Through them, we can finally see that these coherent strategies were always the lesser suffering compared to the direct experience of the primitive agony which, in truth, was completely intolerable at the time. And as myself and many others have found on the healing path and to redeem and resurrect the self, there is no redemption in simply counteracting our tendencies toward suffering and terror. We must see through the self that has been organized as a defense , a protective barrier, against an even greater suffering. Then we can find our way across the bridge from healing to spiritual and philosophical liberation. It is only through this crossing we begin to see the self that has suffered so greatly and our suffering itself are not what we thought they were.
Our Ancient, Twisted Karmic Selves
The model of learning we explored thus far primarily functions on the individual or interpersonal level (these approaches became increasingly the focus with the advent of frameworks like attachment theory or object relations in the mid-20th century). Spiritual disciplines and philosophy take a radically different tact to answer Maté’s question. For many, their answer to what has happened inside of us involves some kind of alienation from our true nature. And this inevitably leads to an alienation and delusion with nature, reality and truth itself. We live in greed, hatred, and delusion in Buddhist terms. And the way to overcome our separation and alienation involves finding our way back home to the truth of our unstained, untraumatized nature. Meditation, yogic disciplines, prayer, selfless service, and traditional and some modern approaches to sacred plant medicines and psychedelic molecules prioritize this way of answering Maté’s question. We must engage in some type of alchemical transformation process to purify the mind, body, and spirit of the poison leading to our suffering. This poison is the poison of delusion, separation, and obsessive self-focus. This alchemical process occurs primarily through practices and not just thinking or helping us adapt to the world. Answering Maté’s question usually entails cutting through the limited ego and self-centered focus of the mind to undo whatever our conditions have been that led to the experience of having a separate self in the first place. These conditions extend far beyond the individual and interpersonal contexts as the source of suffering but aim for the existential, metaphysical, and cosmological roots of our suffering and separateness. These paths typically utilize a model of inheritance (e.g., karma, original sin, etc.) to answer this question of what has happened to us. We come into the world inheriting the conditions of separateness and seeds of suffering from the entire history of the world and universe itself. It is not just your family but all of humanity and reality itself which has passed down the seed of suffering to you.
Many of us experience the legacy of both our traumatic experiences and countless generations of ancient, twisted karma through the schemas of our self or ego (another older but useful word still). These schemas profoundly shape the self in ways that make it extremely challenging to experience safety and connection to ourselves and the world. In Buddhist traditions, our karmic inheritance gives us our sense of separation and all the greed, hatred, and delusion that come with it. Our fundamental experience of dukkha, or suffering and dissatisfaction with life, in Buddhism is originally meant as a wheel where the spoke does not quite fit. This leads to an all pervading sense of there is something wrong or unsatisfactory about ourselves and life as it is. Our ego and sense of a separate self is then driven to drive to resolve, numb, or escape this dissatisfaction. In terms of subjectivity, perception, and agency, our structures of self are built around this fundamental dukkha. But even more so, they are the fundamental source of dukkha. As Pete Walker says in his approach to healing from complex and developmental trauma, we are looking to make the ego more user-friendly. The fascinating implication of his phrase is it implies there is something or someone that is using the ego.
Our contention is that the best way to find an ego that is user-friendly lies in bridging the path of healing and the path of self-realization and liberation. Because if my ego becomes more user-friendly for me, what are the implications about my relationship to the larger world and reality I exist in? And is it possible that my ego becoming more user-friendly could radically alter my relationship to others, my communities, and the larger social-political-cultural world I exist in? While trauma and Buddhist conceptions of suffering are not one in the same, they are deeply related and intertwined. Suffering may not be trauma inherently but trauma is always inherently about suffering. What they both share is that when our bodies, minds, and selves are organized around escaping our resolving suffering and pain from high states of threat, we are in the presence of both a psychological and spiritual problem. For one key thing that trauma healing can offer to spiritual practices such as Buddhist meditation or yoga is the understanding that our dukkha and sense of separation are primarily bodily nervous system states that lead to certain organizations of the mind and self. And in my own experience, the greatest lesson of pursuing the path of healing while also being a practicing Zen Buddhist is that underneath my greed, hatred, and delusion is that I am afraid. Greed, hatred, and delusion become my primary strategies for dealing with the problem that my separate self, isolated and cut off from others and the universe, is a self that is constantly in the throes of terror of being abandoned or annihilated.
Many great psychological mystics have attempted to bridge the gap between psychological healing and spiritual liberation so this is not a new idea or pursuit. People like Rollo May or D.W. Winnicott have worked to bridge the gap through their emphasis on intersubjectivity. Theories of intersubjectivity in the field of psychology hold a radical implication not far from core tenets of Buddhist philosophy: there is no self without the other and that our sense of self is predominantly something that emerges after the fact in the intersubjective field. The intersubjective field is the storehouse of shared perceptions and understandings that arise from the culture we share but also from the shared ways our bodies and minds perceive and shape our perception. This embodied storehouse of consciousness and culture we call the intersubjective field is the grounds for how we interpret the world. And for better or for worse, our sense of self and interpretations of ourselves, others, and the world and universe as a whole emerge from this intersubjective field. And great spiritual teachers such as Thich Nhat Hahn have bridged the gap through his teachings of reconciliation with ourselves and our wounded Inner Children through the Buddhist view of interdependence or “interbeing”. For Hahn’s Buddhist teachings, psychological healing of our core traumas of attachment and development, especially with our parents and family systems, are essential for being able to live in the world with compassion, gentleness, and joy.
The common thread these synthesizers posit as fundamental, even unavoidable, to healing and overturning the root cause of our suffering is to radically alter our understanding, functioning, and relationship to the self. And this creation of a new relationship to the self and of the self to the world must unify both our individual experience with a kind of interpersonal and intrapersonal experience of ourselves as emerging from countless conditions of the worlds we emerge out of. And this new experience of the self is either: the self is an expression of and dependent on the environment it arises from or that there is no self in the way we experience it in our daily awareness. In these views from teachers like May or Hahn, this in fact are the same thing. The self is a ghost, an illusion, of the environment and a myriad of conditions of which we can never fully understand with our rational mind. The self is posited in the midst of all this as a way of both surviving but also engaging deeply with the conditions we arise from. It is not the center of the universe but it can become a vehicle for expressing these myriad conditions and be extremely user-friendly because it no longer needs to be organized based on survival and separateness. The unfortunate side effect of having a self is that it becomes all too easily assumed to be outside those conditions it arises from and having an illusory sense of power and control over those very conditions. This starts a chain of cause and effect which posits there is a stable, unchanging self in here and a stable environment and other selves out there. Enter the gates of our suffering.
While the relationship of the self to suffering is one that characterizes all human experience, trauma is primarily an experience of intensifying and hardening the self. What happens inside of us from trauma is we develop a self that becomes incredibly rigid, brittle, fragile, and preparing for constantly being assaulted and potentially annihilated by the world. At some point, all healing becomes a philosophical and spiritual quest to address this core question of who am I and what is the self that I think that I am? The cataclysmic impact of trauma strengthens and intensifies this need for a self that vies for control with all the conditions of the world. This self feels it is a separate entity that can and will be destroyed by those conditions. This does not mean that our body will not cease to function someday or that violence and devastation are not real in a conventional sense. This only means that when we look at the nature of our experience in space and time, this constant positing of an essential self in the midst of constant change seems to be where all of our suffering originates from. It is paradoxically the source of our suffering while at the same time being impossible to find if we look deeply into our experience. Can you find the self that is reading this sentence right now in this very moment? Can you find the self that is not your sight, your thinking, or your bodily sensations as you read this? As the great Zen master, Bodhidharma, once said to his student when asked about how to pacify an anxious mind, “show me the mind and I will pacify it for you.” And when his student found it impossible to present, he cheekily responded, “There. It is pacified.” What a thought that we can let go of the self and our rigid, fixed mind not with terror but with absolute glee!
Perhaps you notice a tightening in your chest when you feel the breath of this no self experience on your neck and it brings you chills. It is to be expected that our self, hardened and rigidified by our trauma and suffering, will tremble in fear and even fight back with thoughts and criticisms at this exploration. How can I exist in the world and protect myself and stave off pain and death if there isn’t a me here doing the protecting? While this at first glance appears to remove all agency and freedom from us (an especially terrifying prospect if we already struggle with depression, anxiety, and the various pervasive forms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) and this is terrifying for the separate self, especially that carries traumatic and karmic legacies in our bodies and minds. The radical seed of hope planted by this perspective is the solution and only way out of the feeling of isolation, powerlessness, and aloneness we deeply feel as a result of our wounding and karma is not fixing or escaping the self but going through it and beyond it as some isolated little entity floating out in the darkness of space. If we ever hope to feel healed or free, we must must first understand what it is we are trying to heal and liberate. And the further we follow this trailhead, the more we discover we have been fundamentally confused about what it is we are trying to heal and liberate.
We are introducing here an experiential theory of seeing through and beyond the self that can combine both the path of trauma healing with the path of spiritual liberation. It is a soteriological metatheory for use by healers and those in search of healing for liberation and expanding their sense of freedom. This theory is my own roadmap for how to journey back home to the center of the universe from which we have been exiled. For the path home can only be found by going through the experience of isolation and separation fully. The resulting philosophical and spiritual insights into our aloneness are the blossoming of that very seed of hope hidden in the darkness of the void. In my own journey, for this to be possible, we require a way of making sense of the intrapersonal, interpersonal, relational, social, cultural, existential, and spiritual dimensions of healing. And this must unify both the model of learning and the model of inheritance. And above all, it must be usable. For if the map to any sort of healing and journey up from hell to the light were not useful and usable, then it would be just another product of hell itself. It would likely be just another way the mind and self are fabricating a way to avoid or escape the self but not fundamentally challenge it as the source of our suffering. And there is no greater tragedy than a path of healing and liberation being simply just another source of suffering, alienation, and isolation.
A Product of Praxis
The soteriological metatheory we are developing here is a product of my own praxis. It has emerged from my years of therapeutic practice exploring the underworlds of Complex PTSD and existential and spiritual catastrophe in my own life and with countless clients and fellow travelers. It also emerges from my own practice of Soto Zen Buddhism and various yoga traditions for almost 3 decades, over a decade of psychedelic journeying and consciousness exploration, and years of study and organizing in political and communal spaces. It is essentially a map of my own journeys to the underworld and back up into the light on the path of healing and spiritual liberatory practices. Throughout the years, I have always felt a deep longing for some way to find where on the path to healing the gaps and breakdowns occur between various levels of our wounding and experience. I have always found these gaps are most acute during moments of spiritual and existential crisis and finding a way to bridge together social and political change with healing and interpersonal and personal healing with exploring the implications of spiritual practices and psychedelic medicines for exploring consciousness. For myself, those cracks in the path to wholeness and freedom are where I fell through the ground most often. Many a dark night of the soul was occasioned by those falls and many have been longer than short.
In all those experiences, I kept coming back to a longing for some way to find the missing lattices and connective tissue between the various layers of consciousness and experience which could help make sense of what I was witnessing, feeling, and fumbling my way around during the long midnight hours of suffering, confusion, and loneliness. And since my particular flavor of neurodivergent brain and nervous system give me an unrepentant desire for conceptual frameworks and philosophy, I kept yearning and fabricating my own metatheory to do the job for myself. But rather than something that could claim to be perfect, complete, and unassailable in its logic, I most deeply wanted a metatheory that was primarily soteriological. If this metatheory could not work for liberation from suffering, expanding our sense of freedom in the world, and returning us to a deep and meaningful connection to all things, I do not see much point to it as a metatheory worth its salt when you are trudging through the hell realms. You do not have the luxury of mere speculation when your head is on fire and you need the water. It must be gritty, raw, and real for it must be a reflection of the very thing it is seeking to address. For myself, I say give me a theory of healing and liberation that is caked in dirt and soaked in the blood of our pain and truth. Give me a road out of hell that is paved with compassion, wisdom, and no small dose of joy.
This is all a way to say that this approach and methodology emerges from both helping others heal and my own path to healing. The praxis which has led here results in a perspective on healing that encapsulates both the therapist experience and the experience of the wounded and despairing journeyer to the underworld. As it must. For myself, I have read many a trauma therapy manual and wondered in all the descriptions of nervous system states, survival responses, or exercises to heal your wounds, where is the experience of the being who suffers in it? Where is the description of what it feels like traversing the hell realm and how it relates to the practices of healing and liberation? What I crafted for myself and those I journey with is a theory that conceptualizes the intersubjective field of both Dante and Virgil in the Inferno. And how could it be otherwise? If it does not capture the entire intersubjective field of healer and the healing, it would be solely a clinical perspective of a complex, dynamic human experience which cannot be captured in just a clinical theory or methodology. Any theory of healing that cannot account for the actual embodied experience of the one that is healing would be incomplete. It would be a necessary but insufficient view and tool for the process of healing. It is one thing to know how to reset a broken bone. It is another thing entirely to help heal a break with your own subjective experience of the pain and fear guiding your hand. And the incomparable joy and relief that comes when the break finally heals enough to function again.
An example of the importance of praxis in any approach to healing trauma is perfectly exemplified in Richard Schwartz’s discovery of Internal Family Systems. Schwartz was working with traumatized clients struggling with disordered eating and self-harm patterns as ways to cope with that trauma. Frequently, he noticed his clients would talk about the “part” of themselves doing the harming or the disordered eating as ways to cope with and protect the client from an even greater suffering lurking in the darkness. And when he would try to circumvent or power struggle with them, the parts would fight back even harder and do more damage. So he did the only thing that can be done in that situation: he surrendered his control over “fixing” the part or the client. It was a major shift from the common ways of counteracting these behaviors to approaching them with compassion and as logical and strategic ways to protect the person. And lo and behold, what evolved was a theory of healing our fragmented selves that seems to mirror the very functioning of the mind and our consciousness through naming our emotions and behaviors as protective parts just doing a job they likely never asked or wanted to do. Theory evolved through being informed by practice and through the direct experiences of his clients themselves. Schwartz’s practice evolved into the IFS model so popular now through surrendering of his own clinical power and control to the intersubjective field itself. And by doing so, it taught him and all of us about what it is to heal in a new way for Western psychology and therapy.
Healing can and must be grounded in practice and not just study and research if it is to truly heal and liberate. I myself and so many of my fellow travelers and clients have experienced the disconnect and lack of attunement when someone is practicing the healing arts but is utilizing hollow techniques not informed by their own depth of theorizing and practice. We can be left feeling even more alone and hopeless when this happens, mired in further isolation and painful abandonment feelings. Often the thought comes that if this person who is supposed to know how to help me heal does not understand me, then what hope is there of any salvation and healing in this life? This is why a great therapist and healer such as Pete Walker emphasizes so strongly that therapists who have truly confronted the terror, pain, and despair of their own hellacious childhoods will be the most effective at helping others along the path. Because when we must journey to the ninth sphere of hell, we need someone to hold our hand, to be with us, and to know that we are understood, seen, and known fully while we confront hell’s truths. We must never and perhaps can never stand alone, feeling the terror quake in our bodies as we stare the abyss right in the face. And they can do this fully only when they have to some degree done it themselves. When they have not, their own defenses against hell in their own hearts will likely rear its head to protect them from the truth of our hell, as well. This is also not an argument for perfectly healed healers as a necessity. That would be another symptom of the all-or-nothing idea that trauma mires us in perfectionism and idealization. This is more than likely just another protection against having to experience the messy, painful, scary truth of our own lives and being in relationship with others in the intersubjective field. Yet again, it would be another ingenious defense limiting our ability to heal and confront hell fully. But this is to say that we do require a good enough companion and guide for the journey to the underworld. And good enough-ness stems from hard-earned wisdom from your own journeys to hell.
While we must emphasize the importance of practice as the basis and result of which theories are made, we must also not neglect the ways in which having a theory has been underemphasized and even avoided as a large part of the landscape of healing and trauma therapy. By and large, the overarching theory and philosophy we all inherit in the United States and larger Western capitalist world is scientific materialism. And scientific materialism has greatly informed most of the trauma therapy approaches on offer for us. This means that we often use these tools like we wield a scalpel. They are instruments in the hands of conscious beings with minds and theories inherited from the larger cultural context we are in. One great weakness of not having a clear and explicit theory or philosophy that informs and is informed by our practice of healing is we can be oblivious to all the ways we make assumptions and practice in a way that is significantly beholden to that theory. Theory not only emphasizes what you see or focus on in any given experience. It also deemphasizes other things and shapes what we do not see, as well. Mind and body precede everything. Or even more confusing, we carry a mish-mash of various techniques and practices which can undercut the very effectiveness of those practices due to our own incoherence of what actions we take in any given scenario. One prime example of this is the modern scientific materialist use of mindfulness and Buddhist practice. While the use of mindfulness in this theoretical orientation can bring great benefit to our ability to calm our minds and bodies and even heal trauma, it can severely limit the amount we can also incorporate the deeper philosophical practices that can lead us beyond mindfulness that only adapts us to an increasingly stressful and disconnected world. We can miss the liberatory and self-realization practices which challenge our very notions of self and other or radical questions of whether there really is any material world out there separate from our own consciousness and experience of it.
While many of the most effective treatments for trauma and its associated horsemen of suffering increasingly can address the psychological and somatic wounds of trauma, praxis can and must be the bridge to the social, cultural, existential, and spiritual layers of experience, as well. This is the missing link that praxis can provide for us in a truly holistic approach to healing. These layers of experience, while experienced in the mind and body, require an ability to think about systems and larger social and material forces that shape our experiences. And to question the very nature of our experience of mind and body because they are the very places where the sovereignty of the separate self is challenged. To question the sources of our suffering at the levels of social, cultural, political, or existential/spiritual experience is inherently to transcend the limitations of the separate self. This is all to say, that we must return to the roots of healing and psychology for our soteriological metatheory of use: philosophy and spiritual disciplines. Because while experiential approaches to healing enhance flexibility and freedom with the schemas and stories around suffering and trauma, philosophy and spiritual disciplines go deeper and ask, “who is the self that is telling these stories about my trauma and pain?” And philosophical frameworks such as systems-level thinking or Marxist dialectics radically can alter our experience of our daily consciousness as only something that aims at the foundation of our consciousness and thinking can do. And healing, if it is anything, is about reshaping our relationship to reality and expanding our consciousness. These approaches and many other spiritual and philosophical perspectives have been our greatest tools for exploring the nature of reality and to explore and expand our consciousness for far longer than psychology or trauma therapy have come into being. We would do well to consider what they still can offer us on the path of healing. For in the process of healing, we seek a more harmonious and free relationship to reality and ourselves. And the tools to do so most effectively can and must be developed in the process of the exploring and expanding of our consciousness as a practice and discipline informed by philosophy and spiritual disciplines.
To recapitulate: we are developing a unified theory and practice (i.e. praxis) of how to change consciousness to end suffering and find freedom and liberation for the sake of all beings and the world that can be usable for the healer and the healing. While it is indeed about philosophy and psychology, its primary orientation is toward self-realization and liberation. It is born from pain, terror, joy, wonder, and light. It is a child of direct experience in traveling into the void, journeying to the underworlds, and finding a way back and out. We have all heard talk about only a change in consciousness itself will save the world and us from ourselves. If this is so (and I do believe it is a huge part of the picture), we should get to work on figuring out how to change our consciousness in a long-term and meaningful way. And we should start working this out fast. In Buddhism, the Bodhisattva Vow always entails doing the impossible: beings are numberless, yet I vow to save them. That yet is 100,000 miles wide chasm. We must do the impossible. And fail and fall our way into that process. In Buddhist philosophy and other theories of the self which sees us as emerging from our environmental conditions and shaping them in turn, essentially what we are is a constant process. We are a feedback loop that is constantly swirling like a whirlpool which gives our lives and experience shape and momentum. This shape is consistent over time and completely codependently arisen based on our conditions. But it is a completely real appearance of form created by the very movement and conditions of the water itself. The tools I’ve honed through my practices and refined in the intersubjective field with others (clients, friends, partners, mentors) are developed specifically for the purpose of framing healing and liberation through conception of ourselves as this whirlpool. A theory which cannot model reality effectively is not an effective model. And like it is said in the Buddhist tradition, a wise person never does anything for just themselves. They always do it for others and their liberation, as well. For in the end, there is no substantial difference between the two.
The Net and Its Models
In the world of spiritual and religious mysticism, teachings from Buddhism, Hinduism, mystic Christianity, Sufism, and other nondual teachings along with experiences with psychedelic medicines encourage us to look for direct experience to find the truth of how unity and difference exist as one process (i.e. the intersubjective field within a larger context of unity). For this reason, praxis has been the foundation of most major schools of Buddhist and yogic philosophy and practice for millennia now. We are emphasizing that healing is the most powerful foundation to self-realization and liberation because our ability to navigate our direct experience toward liberation is profoundly shaped by our nervous system states. We know reality through our body and senses so our ability to regulate our nervous system and emotions becomes essential to how our mind experiences reality itself. And if spiritual and mystical traditions can offer our healing path something essential, it is a vast and rich library of concepts and poetry on the nature of direct experience of unity and difference. We will focus here on the Buddhist conception of codependent arising as the fundamental nature of reality itself. This is poetically depicted in the image of Indra’s Net from the Avatamsaka Sutra. This metaphor will be our starting point and end point in our soteriological metatheory. And like all good metaphors, it has the power to restrict or reshape your understanding of your life and how you operate within it. Indra’s Net can be the linkage between our practices of trauma healing and experiential therapy, psychedelic medicines and nonordinary states of consciousness, meditation, or other spiritual practices in our exploration of the nature of our suffering.
As discussed, trauma restricts the self and makes it rigid and brittle through relying on protective parts such as anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, and addictions of various kinds. The SPA of the experience is that you are isolated, alone, helpless, and waiting or even wanting to die. Think of Indra’s Net as the most radical opposite and even antidote to this experience. In the Net, meaning and purpose are inherent in your inner and external environments because there is never a question of being disconnected or separate from anything else. All too often, meaninglessness primarily stems from a feeling of being cut off from one’s environmental conditions or inner world of feeling and sensation. You live in the world of thinking and thinking alone can never bring meaning and purpose. Only feeling and living in the body can do that. In the Net, you have freedom and autonomy but never at the expense of connection and belonging. Your grip on the self is flexible, pliant, and able to seen as an expression of the myriad reflections of all the other jewels in the Net and the threads connecting them to each other. As opposed to the model of inheritance or model of learning which characterizes the experiences and structures of reality through the lens of a separate and/or traumatized self, we have moved into a model of reflection. As we heal and find liberation for ourselves in this model, an accurate and expansive reflection of reality and other jewels prompts our jewel to grow and shift its perspective and content in new and expansive ways. Our jewel is in constant communication with all other jewels in the Net and is in fact defined by these reflections. In the Net as opposed to the scary, limited world of the separate self, we can now safely be shaped by others and shape them in turn through reflection. The need for control and to play god through stopping the flow of time and space to protect ourselves and prevent us from ever being hurt or abandoned again has been extinguished.
In the highly influential school of 4th and 5th Century Indian Buddhist philosophy and practice called Yogācāra, the fundamental starting point for the practice of liberation is to ask, “how is it even possible that we can be in delusion of our mind’s true nature and have the illusion of a separate self in the first place?” The answer to this question then becomes the basis of how we can practically address this fundamental delusion at its root. In the throes of traumatic pain and terror, these are the types of questions we can never stop to think and ask. We must survive. Or so we feel. Our questions must go beyond just “what happened to me?” or “how do I heal this wound?” to question how is it even possible that traumatic pain and suffering can even create such an existential and spiritual wounding of separateness in the first place? In a reality where disconnection and aloneness are not even possible in the way we think, how and what are the conditions for a human being to even feel this type of aloneness as a core part of their experience at all?
Many experiential therapies for healing trauma focus such as AEDP, IFS, or Coherence Therapy, focus on this “undoing aloneness” as the core of healing trauma. But for schools of liberatory practice like Yogacara, separateness is a core part of our inheritance of human delusion itself, not just for those of us that have survived traumatic experiences. Yogācāra philosophers and practitioners developed the concepts of the ālayavijñāna, or the storehouse consciousness, and the kliṣṭamanas, or the mind defiled by afflictive emotions, as the core of the problem. Almost 1500 years before Freud and Jung talked about the individual and collective unconscious, Yogācāra saw that it is this storehouse consciousness (or the Buddhist unconscious, if you will) which holds not only the seeds of our suffering from traumatic experiences or emotional afflictions for anxiety and depression but also the seeds of having a separate sense of self at all. As we are pushing to find some metatheory that can even make sense of how is it even possible to feel this aloneness and disconnection when we are wounded in such a way, approaches and practices from schools like Yogācāra are in many ways more useful precursors and starting points than many schools of Western psychology and healing. They have already sought to bridge the gaps between these approaches to healing and liberation which are so needed in our fragmented state of healing practices in our times.
This is precisely why explorations of consciousness and healing practices with psychedelic and plant medicines are so useful. And precisely why they become powerful tools to bridge the gaps between personal and interpersonal healing and the need to reorient and reconstruct the self as an expression of a greater spiritual and existential reality of which the self is but a part. In experiences in nonordinary states of consciousness we have access to via psilocybin, MDMA, or LSD among others, it is often the case that one experiences a reality where it is absolutely undeniable that our experience of ourselves as tiny, alienated, and insignificant creatures in a meaninglessness universe is disconfirmed. Sometimes, this disconfirmation can even be quite terrifying and shocking when our whole life has been built on the illusion of separateness and we are so invested in its reality. Or in ketamine experiences, a profound amount of relief can come from the experience of no longer occupying a physical body or even having a “self” but of being just pure witnessing awareness. In many of these experiences, we come either gently or forcefully to recognize that the concept that we are an isolated and individual self cut off from the environment and larger reality we are a part of is woefully incorrect. We can see through the self to a larger reality of which we have been ignorant and even avoiding as we have fortified ourselves in our fear and suffering. A necessary and useful illusion for so many of us but an illusion all the same. And it is no wonder why in nonordinary states of consciousness, it is possible that we can experience a radically supercharged process of memory reconsolidation. It is no small wonder why memory reconsolidation has been proposed as a possible core mechanism of change in psychedelic healing. Nonordinary states of consciousness provide, sometimes for the very first time, the possibility of seeing and thinking about our experience differently.
In nonordinary states of consciousness with psychedelic medicines or with intensive mediation experiences, we are immersed in an entire experience of reality which disconfirms many beliefs and learnings from traumatic experience and our prior conceptions of life. Even more so, the self becomes more porous and amenable to change and reconsolidation to fit this updated experience of reality. The implication of nonordinary states of consciousness and their power for healing here is that the separate self is also a schema composed of specific learnings and afflictions influencing our subjectivity, perspective and agency in the world. Separateness results from a specific structure of beliefs and habits that has arisen out of a particular response to the world and environment of which we were and are a part of as human beings with nervous systems. The self is a set of constant ongoing processes where we constantly must repeat its function and purpose in our thinking, feeling, and acting to ensure we can still survive and function protectively in an environment interpreted through the lens of separateness. It is a grand unifying schema underlying many, if not all, of our other learnings and learned strategies for how to survive and function which lead to our primary sources of suffering. And the schemas of the self are codependently arisen in our specific worlds cultivated in a certain location in the spacetime continuum.
Over time, this schema of the self constructs and reinforces the very way our bodies and brains develop and function in the world. In many forms of therapy and increasingly in neuroscience research, the self and its narratives or emotional learnings are the core schema which generate many mental health challenges in the first place. What is being gleaned more and more from studies of psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca for treating mental health conditions is how the primary mechanism of change for healing could relate to the way psychedelics “reboot the brain” through a powering down of functioning of the brain called the Default Mode Network (DMN). The DMN is an ongoing process that is operating in the background of our conscious experience when we are working, doing tasks, and other activities. But it primarily operates when we are in a “resting state” without any specific task to be accomplished. It has been proposed that the DMN is related to what we call the “ego” or self in our daily experience. And the DMN’s role in our mental health has particular implications for treating things like depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other conditions where rumination and self-criticism are prevalent. Studies show that classical psychedelics consistently disrupt the DMN but it is unclear how much it is a direct cause of improvements when using psychedelics to treat these common psychological maladies. But what is clear is that this DMN disruption seems essential in why psychedelics can so radically alter and break through the concrete of experiences with depression, anxiety, or addictive patterns. It involves a shutting down of the normal ego functioning and self-definitions that perpetuate our suffering so that radically new information and experience can reshape the self to exist with radically different assumptions and information.
And why is this so necessary? For a small personal example, take this story from my own journeys with psilocybin and other psychedelic medicines to heal from a nightmarish history of Complex PTSD. The messages I’ve consistently received (like countless others also have in these experiences) from psychedelic medicines, are emblematic of this process which occurs not just in psychedelic experiences but also in some form in experiential trauma therapies or meditative practices. At a crucial point in my healing journey and with a moderate dose of psilocybin, I found myself standing outside of a large, sacred kind of chamber. I distinctly heard psilocybin tell me that to enter this chamber, my ego/self must sit outside the door. For the only way into this chamber was to not to destroy but to set down the self. This could perhaps be called an ego death but my experience told me that this was something different and more nuanced. All too often, the “ego death” of psychedelic states is more of a ego suspension or surrendering of the self to the experience so it can be reshaped and reformed based on that new experience. I told my egoic self that he must wait outside the door but I promise I will come back for him. Once inside the chamber, I found myself standing and talking with the spirit of psilocybin. It told me directly that in truth, there is no such thing as a separate spirit or consciousness of the mushroom that I must seek wisdom and answers from to heal. That, in truth, there is no self and other. But in reality, I must present myself to myself as this wise other being of psilocybin to hear and experience the truth of the deepest reality of myself. This truth is that my ego and day-to-day self-consciousness posits this is who I am and that there is something outside of me that I must utilize a psychedelic to encounter because I was too afraid to accept the truth of my nonseparation. In the end, it said we are playing games with ourselves to essentially find that there is no self and wise other out there that will save us or make us whole. And the only way to walk into the chamber to learn this sacred wisdom is to set down and surrender the self willingly and by choice alone. The reward for that act of surrender was an utterly profound and indescribable recognition that my feeling of being this isolated jewel in the Net was a total fabrication of the separate, traumatized self I had been operating from for decades. And that even the idea there were separate jewels is also a construct of the self, a conventional truth, that could be seen through as another illusion arising from within a reality beyond what my limited, egoic self could understand or experience.
What I am proposing here from years of study, practice, and personal exploration and growth experiences in nonordinary realms of consciousness via psychedelics and meditation practice is this: the construction of the separate self is a schema that provides a particularly powerful solution to the emotional problems arising from the traumatic experience of aloneness and isolation. And the core of all healing and liberatory approaches endeavor in some way to reorient or reconstruct this self as no longer needing to solve its original problem. As an example, in the experiential therapy of Emotion-Focused Therapy developed by Leslie Greenberg, the core of maladies such as depression or anxiety are defined by the conception of self as the root at the base of the tree of suffering of each. Depression involves a self that is defined as worthless. Anxiety is defined by a self that is fragile and constantly on the verge of being annihilated. And psychedelic research on the DMN also points at how this seed of our self-concept is where our suffering lies. Depression, for example, is built around the ego/self constantly conducting the symphony of the body and mind through endless repetition of the music, “You are worthless. You are unlovable. You are fragile. You are alone.” It is this DMN functioning in the background (i.e. a self that is defined by the music the DMN is conducting) which is the root of the stuck-ness and eternity-feeling in the experiences of being in the world of depression, anxiety, or PTSD. And interrupting the DMN (i.e. the self and its way of being defined and recreated moment-to-moment to survive a particular type of experience via messages about the self) with a psychedelic such as psilocybin can facilitate profound transformational change in healing and growth of both personality and spiritual experience.
But while profound spiritual breakthroughs can occur with the assistance of spiritual practices such as meditation or with psychedelic medicines such as psilocybin or DMT, there can still be a persisting experience of the self as alone, not safe, and on the brink of annihilation. How can this be so if we have experienced something that transcends the separate self as the source of our suffering? We must delve into the frequent gaps in healing that occur even mystical experiences and post-ego death states at the level of our relational and emotional wounds. While I may now see that there is something much greater beyond myself that is real and has meaning, I still cannot understand the persistent and ongoing feelings of dread, physical tension, anxiety, and the haunting certainty in my body and emotional states that I am not safe in the world. Something persists and the threat, the mysterious thing that terrifies us, seems to be woven into the very fabric of our nervous system. While experiential therapy for healing trauma can help us with the intrapersonal and hopefully interpersonal layers of healing and psychedelic medicines and spiritual practices, there is this chasm of the social, cultural, and existential layers of meaning which can be overlooked, as well. And it is in these layers and wounds that the separate self can find yet another stronghold to maintain its dominance of our experience and existence.
Bodies of Meaning
The great child psychologist and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott once said that “there is no such thing as a baby.” For Winnicott, the entire basis of our existence, before and after birth, are profoundly relational and interpersonal. The concept of a baby inherently implies a mother in a logical sense but also in a biological sense. Without our caregivers, we would not survive the profound vulnerability and dependence of our early infancy. There is no mother and no baby but a mother-baby matrix of relationship. This is our origin. And our earliest experiences of this matrix as they relate to our inner emotional and physiological states, ideally with a safe and loving caregiver, create what is called affective/emotional synchrony through the process of attunement. Our sense of self as a being that thinks, feels, and has a body emerges from and carries with it the earliest experiences and legacy of the quality of this matrix. My caregivers model and teach me what it is to be and to have a self. Their own learnings and inheritances from generations past of what it is to be and have a self are necessarily transmitted in these early experiences to our small and vulnerable nervous systems. We grow into ourselves from and by being dependent on a larger, more developed nervous system. The self that that is passed down to us carries the legacy of past schemas of our parents and their parents before them. In our praxis here, we build on Winnicott’s insights by saying the self we develop carries with it the learnings and particular solutions to particular emotional problems and sufferings of our ancestors. And along with that is the very learning and schema of being a separate self at all, regardless of our traumatic histories.
One place in modern trauma healing and neuroscience research where this sense of solutions to problems informs the self and our learnings about how to operate in reality is in the Polyvagal Theory of Stephen Porges. Deb Dana, a clinical social worker, has popularized this theory with her work and connecting up our autonomic nervous system’s functioning with the ways we think, feel, and construct narratives based on what autonomic state we are in. In their elegant phrasing, “story follows state” captures how our experience and thinking activity is emerging from our nervous system states in any given moment. And as our autonomic functioning is directly influenced by both the relative amount of safety or threat in our external and internal environments, how we think, feel, and tell stories about our experience are profoundly influenced by how safe we feel in any given moment in our environments. In a scientific materialist framework, most of the application of these theories, such as with Polyvagal Theory, stop at the insight into the nature of the mind and body being influenced by the environment in terms of the relative level of safety and survival at play. Polyvagal Theory is quite strictly applied to the healing arts at this moment. To go further than this, we would have to start questioning the nature of the self of mind and body in relation to the environment as a total system. And while scientific materialism is profound in its insights into things like neuroscience and nervous system functioning, the problem of consciousness as it exists and what is the self that even can do scientific explorations and questioning at all is as mysterious as ever in the scientific materialist worldview.
There are other areas outside of the neuroscience and therapeutic realms where this relationship of meaning, body, and mind has been powerfully explored in ways that closely align with schools of philosophy and practice like Yogācāra. One place of great interest for us in the work of philosophers Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. Johnson’s stated goal in his work has been to “put the body back in the mind”. And their collaborative works question many basic assumptions we all carry as good scientific people of the modern era about the relationships between meaning, language, and how our bodies and minds relate to and emerge from our environments. For example, In The Body in the Mind, Johnson explores how most of the primary schemas we unconsciously use in our day-to-day experience which give our world and experience meaning involve “an exceedingly complex interaction with your environment in which you experience as significant and employ structured processes that give rise to a coherent world (emphasis mine) of which you are able to make sense” (p. 31). And the environment of physical space but also of our culture, history and politics profoundly reflect and shape this embodied sense of having a world to exist in. Here is Johnson at length on this point:
…understanding is the way we ‘have a world,’ the way we experience the world as a comprehensible reality. Such understanding, therefore, involves our whole being – our bodily capacities and skills, our values, our moods and attitudes, our entire cultural tradition, the way in which we are bound up with the linguistic community, our aesthetic sensibilities, and so forth. In short, our understanding is our mode of ‘being in the world.’ It is the way we are meaningfully situated in situated in our world through our bodily interactions, our cultural institutions, our linguistic tradition, and our historical context. Our more abstract, reflexive acts of understanding…are simply an extension of our understanding in this more basic sense of ‘having a world’…understanding does not consist merely of after-the-fact reflections on prior experiences; it is, more fundamentally, the way (or means by which) we have those experiences in the first place. It is the way our world presents itself to us. (p. 31, 45)
We shall include in Johnson’s list the history and schemas of our family systems (which includes our traumatic experiences and associated emotional learnings), our neurobiology and survival responses, and our legacy of attachment and relational experiences. With these now in mind, we can begin to see that the way our worlds are constructed involves a mind-bogglingly vast and intricate web of experiences. What is also most important in Johnson’s work for our purposes is the clear way in which our world and sense of meaning as embodied humans does not come from our mind reflecting on things after the fact. Our sense of meaning is codependently arising as a moment-to-moment process that makes up the very world we experience. There is no self without this world and all the myriad things that make up our experience of that world.
The practice and philosophy of Yogācāra closely aligns with the work of Johnson. Both are describing from different directions the ways we are constantly mapping our bodies in relationship to spacetime and our environments to help us most efficiently function within them. They both postulate that there must be a kind of neutral but constantly flowing river holding all the potentials of our past actions and those we inherit from our society, culture, linguistic context, and familial history which are shaping our experience of the self and our world over time. More so, we can even come to see that our experience of the self is firmly constructed based on cognitive categories which create the illusion that a self persists over time or that there is a separate self and an other in the first place. In Yogācāra, the practice of meditation allows one to see and experience this process happening in real time either directly or only slightly indirectly. And over time with our practice, we can plant new seeds in this unconscious river that can lead to the separate self, its associated afflictions ,and our inherent self-centeredness to be softened or even liberated completely. What is most important for our purposes here is not just a recognition of how deeply Yogācāra philosophy sees the codependent arising of the separate self but that there is a way to practice which also allows us impact and influence on how it is constructed and experienced as a separate thing from the world. Even a schema as entrenched and seemingly-unchangeable as the separate self is able to be transformed through practices such as meditation. In essence, this is what liberation is in Buddhist practice. And practices such as meditation can help us transcend just recognizing or thinking about the way we have a separate self to actually having agency in how we experience it at all.
In the realms of existential philosophy and psychology, there is a profound acknowledgement of this relational foundation of how we experience the self and the world we exist in. In the existential psychology of Rollo May or Irvin Yalom, relationships are the most profound source of meaning in our lives and key to healing our wounded separateness and meaninglessness. We experience this meaning or meaninglessness directly in the body and mind through the existential given of isolation or connectedness. While some degree of isolation may be inherent to the human condition in the existential framework (we call this existential isolation), it is acknowledged that our unwillingness to reckon and accept this existential given is a primary cause of anxiety and neuroses. For May, he goes beyond just a recognition of this fundamental basis of meaning related to relationships as a primary existential given for human beings. He describes our experience of having a world at all as completely constituted of this complex web of relationships. Our self is but one component of an ever-flowing process between ourselves and our world. In fact, they are two parts of one dynamic process. The self we have is the world and the world is the self. And this “world” is not just our interpersonal relationships. Each world implies the web of relationships of the political system, economic system, culture, physical space, and every other aspect of the larger environment. And these are also constantly in a process of dynamic unfolding and codependent arising. It is no small wonder that a primary cause of the rise in anxiety and depression in the United States can be found in the larger systems and social forces (such as a competitive capitalist economy) that drive isolated individualism, disconnection from meaningful work and community, and disconnection from the natural world and green spaces among other factors such as the prevalence of childhood trauma. Our epidemic of loneliness is but a symptom of this larger codependent arising of a separate self that is isolated and without meaning as part of these larger systems and worlds.
It is no wonder why May would move more toward a radical perspective on the nature of our individual suffering which brings him not far from the viewpoint of Yogācāra. May in no small part was deeply influenced by his mentor, Marxist psychoanalyst and social psychologist, Erich Fromm. This is evident in his conceptualization of the self and world as one dialectical unity. One radical strength of the Marxist tradition is its emphasis on systems and the nature of process as primary when we try to understand any specific social development or political system. Marxist philosophy sees that things transform and change through how they relate and interact with their opposites. History and the world we exist in politically, culturally, and most importantly, economically, transform and grow from dynamic interactions of large materialist forces. This is yet another place where there are radical challenges to our common sense feelings and experience of the separate self as some atomized, isolated jewel floating in space. Friedrich Engels in his work, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, explores this dialectic in its most intimate experience for us when he describes how our first encounters with the political and economic system come through how we are socialized within our family systems. And this family and the schemas of self it operates with are profoundly influenced by history and political-economic systems. I learn how to be an individual under capitalism in my family system first-and-foremost. And if my family is working class or has struggled for generations with ongoing poverty and oppression of any kind, I will come to learn that history viscerally as an embodied experience within my family and primary caregiver relationships.
One major strength of Marxist political philosophy for almost 150 years now is its emphasis on how we come to feel alienated in the world as an individual experience but also as a result of a collective process. And of course, that collective process is largely tied to the political and economic structures we exist and are socialized in. In my own experiences of organizing and building communities to address systems-level change with others, I frequently would notice how much our awareness of the systemic causes of alienation were woefully inadequate for addressing and healing the profound alienation we felt from ourselves and each other. The binary choice between individuals versus the collective and communal was frequently a site of justifying mistreatment, abuse, and exploitation of individuals for the safe of collective action and change. It was as if any recognition of the ways that individuals’ entire worlds and histories of personal trauma and schemas of the self were shaping how we could even frame a conversation about the collective change we sought to make. We did not see the collective reality – we only could see our pain and terror. And very often, the individual experiences we carried into the room and the streets were fundamentally built upon the very same forces, emotions, and assumptions of the self that were part of the larger political and economic system of capitalism we were the children of.
In political philosophy, thinkers have long tried to untangle and clarify this relationship between the individual and the collective for the sake of understanding how social systems are reproduced over time and how they can be changed. More and more, social and political philosophers have turned to exploring the conditions by which the individual and the collective both emerge from a shared basis. In the work of social philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he coined the concept of transindividuality to name this deeper matrix of emotion, history, and meaning which the individual and collective arise from. The realm of the transindividual is the realm where the conditions of being an individual and self at all are being decided continuously all the time. It is this realm of perceptions, desires, and beliefs that are pre-individual where the real game of politics is to be played. And this realm is both social and psychological. What this points to is that even in some of the most dense and complex of political philosophies, the primary aim is to dissolve the separation between the individual and the collective through analyzing the shared matrix of relationship and interdependence that is the basis of our experience. In a phrase just as applicable to these political philosophies, both the individual and the collective are codependently arisen. The realm of transindividuality is completely shot through with our schemas related to how we feel, how we perceive, and how the world is shaped and constructed at levels below our conscious awareness. And it is emotion which most radically shapes our shared collective realities and worlds. We see that the separation between our individual structures of perception, feelings, and meaning (what feels most personal to us) and the larger systems and world we exist in is an illusion. They emerge from a shared context that is (you guessed it!) codependently arising in every given moment of space and time.Our shared schemas of self are handed down in the relational matrix from the larger political, economic, and cultural systems of which we are a part. That there is no baby and no mother is not just a relational truth but a political and economic one, as well (to put a Marxist spin on Winnicott’s phrase). And this political, economic, and cultural inheritance process is part of an unimaginably complex and dynamic process where self, other, parents, family, politics, economics, and the larger material world all interact constantly. All too often, however, we are working against the lack of communication and historical fragmentation (i.e. the gap or chasm) between these different perspectives on how the separate self is being radically shown to be interdependent and only one component of a much larger process. It is rare to see attachment researchers or trauma therapists comparing notes on the separate self to Marxist philosophers or Yogācāra practitioners. And it is not often that psychonauts and Zen Buddhists exploring nonordinary realms of consciousness or paths to liberation are talking to existentialists and social psychologists. Of course, there are many exceptions and fruitful places of dialogue to be found in the nooks and crannies of each specific framework and practice. Indeed, many of them are directly part of the worlds influencing this writing. However, our contention is there is a dire need for a framework to create stronger links between each level of human experience and our worlds where it can be most powerful and impactful for individual and collective liberation. It would address the under-discussed process by which the separate self functions as a schema to orient to the world and solve particular inherited emotional problems/traumas. We need a better bridge to cross the chasm where our individual and collective sufferings are most acute but appear separate. And it is precisely this concept of a world hinted at by Rollo May which holds so much promise for healing and liberation from suffering. And it is to these worlds we will now turn our full attention.
To be continued in Beyond Heaven and Hell: Escaping Realms and Creating Worlds (Pt. 2)
