Recommended Listening: Embers by Elder
A sneaking suspicion of mine: our general theory of traumatic wounding and our corresponding model of healing (these two must arise as one whole theory, each one implies the other) has emphasized the impact on how trauma destroys time without equal weight to the way that trauma destroys space. It is as if our theories of traumatic wounding are still working with Newtonian laws of physics without a corresponding Einsteinian leap into the insight that space and time are two parts of one continuum. When I pay extremely close attention when I am experiencing a traumatic reaction, it is not just that I have stepped into the past and am living in a time memory but I have also found myself trapped again in a space memory full of relations, bodies, and inanimate objects in my environment. Why does the world feel the size of the 3 inches immediately surrounding my body in these experiences? Because I have not just fallen through a wormhole in time but also in space and my nervous system and mind have superimposed this other world onto the place I am in, right here and right now. I am trapped in both the temporal and spatial dimensions of my past experience. My mind and my body are then and not now. In essence, I have just found myself inadvertently thrust into a world that is not the one I was just inhabiting, defined by the origin experience of trauma’s features of the time-space continuum. The body and nervous system have the power to create wormholes to other worlds. Any theory of trauma must account for the distortions in the time-space continuum and the creation of a new world that is finally safe to inhabit and exist in. If not, we have only begun to understand one layer of the physics of trauma which is helpful but incomplete.
When your Inner Critic arises, question its basis of judging reality and you as a part of that reality. To do this, we must overcome our fear of being the arbiter of all metaphysical truth. Notice that the Inner Critic part of you assumes it knows something above and beyond reality itself to have the power to thereby judge accordingly based on some standard from which to compare reality to and you as a part of it. Critic parts, both Inner and Outer, act as if they are beyond reality itself because they deem to judge everything inside of it. Notice that in essence, they are the mind itself operating as a god with dominion over all of reality. But it is only the demiurge that has pulled the veil over your eyes of what which is the most fundamental ground of existence. If you want to silence your Inner and Outer Critics, discover what is beyond their conception of reality and recognize them for the loving deceivers they are. And know that anything that can be thought is not reality.
The fundamental nature of interbeing between all things is ecstasy. All things are communicating with us and with each other at all times and we with them. And this communication is essentially ecstatic because it constantly reminds us that we stand outside of ourselves at all times if we can listen and respond accordingly. The nature of this ecstatic interbeing communication is constant, unceasing communion and intimacy. Even more: intimacy is ecstatic communion of both being with and being beyond yourself at any one point in space and time.
Is your body a fist or is it an open hand reaching out for mine through time and space, across eons and uncrossable chasms? I’ll do my best to make myself an open hand because the grief of meeting you with a fist instead of that in me which is most longing to hold you and be held by you will be unendurable. And how often my fear of holding myself open to you has inevitably led me to that which is unendurable precisely because I fear that which feels unendurable. But there is no way to know what is unendurable until I open myself to discover what I can endure.
How can we claim dominion over anything, and especially any other being, when we don’t understand them at all? The more I understand a being, the more respect I seem to have for it and the less control and power I desire to have over that being. In truth, dominion over any being is an impossibility because no being is ever totally knowable and static. How can I pin down that which is constantly moving? How can I trap that which moves like sand across a dune in the twilight hours of the evening? And how much my desire for dominion over other beings is directly in proportion to my lack of understanding of myself. Maybe best I just focus my energies on seeking to always learn and attempt to understand. That will be the entirety of this life.
When I hear of animals grieving their dead children or comrades, I can’t help but wonder what power and gravity would shake this world if we were to grieve like them? Would my grief shake the ground the way the elephants’ feet rattle the dust and shimmy the leaves on the trees? Would I wail like the bear so loudly that it would stop the moon in its tracks? Would I wait at the train station like the dog, Hachiko, longing for my owner that has died and never will return to me once again? Would I return to the site of my friend’s falling like a crow to sit in stony silence, a mystery even unto myself of why I need to return to mourn? Perhaps. What I do know is that when I grieve, I become the animal which I am underneath all this thinking and activity. And in that moment, I am not so different from an elephant, crow, bear, or dog. I will always need this reminder. Most often, it is the inherent pride of my thinking mind that takes me away from the humility in my animal body. To weep all the tears in your soft body, you must become the animal that you are.
The human mind and nervous system seem to contain a function with allows us to dissolve the mind itself and its constant separation of subject from object, self from other. This function can be used either to keep the body alive at the expense of the possibility of self-dissolution (which occurs in derealization and depersonalization during traumatic experience) or it can be used to transcend the limits of the mind to find that which is above and below all at the same time, that which is beyond all distinctions (that which occurs in mystical experience). Perhaps the greatest tragedy and hope of the experience of trauma is the accessing of this function and the loss of self it engenders is the clarity that the mind and nervous system have this power at all. This leads to an awareness that the mystic and one in psychosis, the shaman and the wounded, are all utilizing the same capacity. Loss of self can, in its most radical moment, be the greatest discovery of self.
When the birds trumpet their call to the morning light, I know that there is more in this reality than I can ever see, smell, touch, taste, hear, or think. It is ever-receding from my mind and I am forever in pursuit of it. And this is good. But on a good morning when the birds sing, I sit with the mystery in my heart and we have tea. It tells me a few of its names and I quietly gasp at how many there are. They just keep coming. And I always desire to hear the next one dripping from its mouth. I’ll never stop asking the mystery for its names.
All too often, we chop up and dissect what we perceive and experience into discreet bits and imagine we can then make sense of the world we are in by reassembling the the bits back into some coherent whole. But the primary way we experience the world is through the way our mind/body/nervous system’s superbly genius way of capturing and modeling the way the entire world and our place in it function as a coherent, seamless whole. And this world-modeling capacity of the body/mind/nervous system quickly presents us with clear guidelines of how to exist in that world and to survive, maybe even thrive, within it. The true nature of trauma and what it is to “flashback” to something is not that we flash back to some prior time and feel what we felt there. The actual experience is that our mind/body/nervous system hold the map and entire model of that world where the trauma occurred and at the blink of an eye, thrusts us back into that world to ensure that we are prepared to survive within it. Within that model are a coherent set of body sensations, feelings, beliefs, behaviors, meanings, and a corresponding sense of self. The primary problem in healing from trauma is primarily in learning to guide and direct this genius ability of ours to model and create worlds.
How can I ever accept myself, my life, or my world when my nervous system lives in a world that is not my own? The world we all too often live in is not ours but the devoured mental emotional placenta of our time, place, and material conditions of our birth. The mind eats the world its born into then replicates it endlessly until we decide to stop it. If I’m born into hell, then the world my mind/body/nervous system models of reality now will be hell until understand what possesses it to do so. And if I’m born into heaven, then my world will be heaven accordingly. This is what has been called karma. Yes, it is an endlessly flowing stream of habits and patterns but also of our mind/body/nervous system’s ability to continually replicate the model of the world based on whether it was safe to survive in and grow at its origins. The world I’m born into first is the psychesoma of my father and mother and their fathers and mothers before them. They devoured the worlds of their mothers and fathers and fed them to us. We all begin being world-eaters and the only hope of freedom is to become a world-creator.
Instead of “what do I need to do?”, ask instead: “what do I need to feel?” Solutions are more often than not a substitute for one’s real feelings about a real situation. We could do with a good deal less of solving our problems and focusing instead on understanding what are problems even are. And this understanding primarily occurs through feeling and experiencing our problems to their limits. And who’s to say where searching for those limits will take us? Maybe to a total transmutation of the problem itself in the first place.
In a certain school of Buddhist practice, it states one must confront the terror and pain of reality itself being the threat to your safety and sanity to proceed to true liberation. Have you ever awoken in dread and panic? I offer that this is you hitting the cold iron of this stage of striving for liberation. What this Buddhist model offers is a recognition that there is no liberation without the direct encounter with the absolute terror that comes with feeling fully when the mind/body/nervous system’s capacity to model a world and reality that is hell itself. And all of our associated ways to run and distract from it. When reality itself is your trigger, there is only one option: find a totally different experience of the mind/body/nervous system to inhabit. In other words, you must recraft an entirely different world to exist in which dissolves the conditions of hell at their root. And this is only possible through the seeing through of the veil that the world you operate from as your default which creates one fundamentally hostile to your existence. And the way to the truth of this realization and the radical break to create a new world comes only from sitting with it in its entirety.
What I have found is the most compassionate, loving, and clear understanding of my Inner and Outer Critic parts is that they are artifacts of a dead world that do not know they are dead. They are ghosts haunting the mind/body/nervous system in hopes of preserving the world they lived and died in for the sake of protecting us. Because we also lived and died in their world right along with them. So when we hear them whisper in our ears or scream in our faces about the terror of the world they live in, take very good care you do not follow them back into it. Instead, ask if they would like to come to your world now. And what will follow is not their final obliteration but their final decommission.
In states of intensive feeling and vulnerability such as a non-ordinary state of consciousness from ingesting a psychedelic teacher, meditation, yoga, or grieving to name only a few, notice that there is no question whatsoever of whether there is meaning and purpose in the universe in those moments. Because in all of these states, meaning and truth are inherent to the environment itself. They are woven into the fabric of reality and experience itself. Because there is no you and environment that are separate to even question it. Loss of meaning comes primarily from the self that has come to believe so thoroughly in the separation of subject and object that both are lost as a result of its desire to understand, which is to say protect itself from being part woven into reality itself.
The mind/body/nervous system (in our understanding of trauma and how we model and build worlds to make sense of existence) has two primary functions: one is to serve as a conduit and circuit breaker for the exchange of energy and information in the metabolic exchange processes between particular organisms and their environments. This a metaphor of circuitry and organics to model the exchange of energy and resources discussed in interpersonal neurobiology and Marx’s ecosocialist model of the economy and environment. When trauma hits us too fast with too much and too soon, the circuit breaker throws and closes down to preserve the circuit from any further input of new information, energy, and experience. The second function is to serve as a modeling computational system for maximizing and making more efficient the ways to make energy and information flow within the circuitry for greater expansion, growth, and interdependence with the environment and other mind/body/nervous systems. The world we exist in is primarily a reflection of the capacity of the mind/body/nervous system model we have access to. It is based on its greatest capacity of energy and information exchange at any given point in space-time. And this is how trauma impacts the nervous system so intensely and shapes and bends it around pain. It traps us in functioning in a world built upon that pain and the limitations of the circuit and metabolic capacity at that point of rupture. The damaged mind/body/nervous system perceives and lives in a damaged world without further information and energy to update its modeling of the world. And who we believe we are is a reflection and expression of that model and world. One must throw the circuit breaker and restart the process of exchange. And this can only be done with the help of others. The breaker requires at least four hands to be thrown open again.
When we encounter any kind of object with our minds (and we most often encounter ourselves or each other first as objects), notice how they contain some horizon beyond which they are unknowable to our minds. This absence of the known, the endless rising of an unknowable reality, is where the emptiness inherent in all things is constantly presenting itself to you. And our minds are most conditioned to filling in that unknowable space, that emptiness, with the projections of the mind. In place of a sacred and beautiful experience of emptiness and form all at once, the observer that stands in the light of nothingness and blocks its liberating waves from our vision.
Anxiety and depression are artifacts of the first world and the primary world of our father and mothers and their fathers and mothers before them. When we have these feelings by and large, they are flashes of past worlds that we have existed in for generations upon generations. Anxiety and depression are always past. They are the greatest and most terrible inheritance from our ancestors.
Healing and the evolution of your inner world do not come as a smooth line, gentle and under your control, but as punctuated evolution full of thrashing fits and starts. They can be violent, destructive, and dissolve the ground beneath your feet. And how could it be otherwise? Our current state is maintained by enormous violence. And it must be shattered by a kind of violent, forceful impact of love to be freed up for change. But hold on, my dear – yes, it will be rocky but it will be exhilarating and I’ll meet you at every point along the way.
The first world is a desert world. And you can choose to become a denizen of the desert and glorify your ability to survive and exist in its brutality and scarcity or you can choose to get the fuck off the planet as fast as possible. Or there is the most radical, third option: we terraform the desert itself, make it full of life and choice and nurturance. Because desert worlds are created not just by evolution. In our inner landscape, the desert world is shaped by the extraction and oppression of human hands. And there is no glory in staying on a desert world when you can leave of your own free will. But there is glory in transforming the desert into a place where you can live and others may even be able to live, as well.
Seeing the worlds inside of your mind/body/nervous system and healing trauma are principally about traversing and understanding how all the underworlds and hell realms live inside of you, me, and all of us interdependently. And just as Dante did, led by Virgil full of love and desire for wisdom and to end his suffering by reclaiming what he lost, you must enter the gates and leave all hope behind you. And realize that hope for Paradise was always that which preserved your suffering and prevented you from entering the gates of the Inferno as your salvation. In that moment the gates are entered, Paradise and Inferno become the very same place to the mind/body/nervous system that has seen the illusion of the self that seeks Paradise in the first place. In that moment, your suffering becomes your greatest liberation.
