Recommended Listening: We Didn’t Know We Were Ready by Olafur Arnaulds, Talos, Niamh Regan, Ye Vagabonds
Underneath and unifying most of our experiences of depression, anxiety, worthlessness, and being so easily shattered by the world is the experience of not existing as a self but only a partial, fragmented piece of one. This is what D.W. Winnicott called the caretaker self or false self. And as each self also implies a world, the caretaker/false self implies a world. Its world is where existence is seen and felt as a penance, where fragmentation is necessary for survival, because not deserving to exist as a whole being is too much for any being to handle. And in the end, we need this caretaker/false self’s illusion that we can prevent the withdrawal of love which is and feels like certain death. In this world, to take care of others is an obligation and prison sentence. It is the price of existence itself where one does not deserve to breathe without paying a toll for the oxygen in your lungs. But the false self’s sly victory is that it always provides some illusion that the world can be changed and the self along with it. This victory is one of preserving power where there is none. But the caretaker’s world is always a world of serpents and glass. It is a world where the thread holding you above the abyss is snapped by even a glance or a change in tone of voice. Its power is so brittle, so thin and gossamer. If you want to develop a self that is woven from jade and gold, one that is unbreakable, then overturn the world that created your caretaking as a sentence for existing. This is an indestructible self, a self that no longer concedes to a world where existence is a penance. As Rollo May said, to become a full-fledged human being, our true selves, sometimes we must sometimes stand up alone against the entire Universe itself.
Hatred and self-hatred, this Gemini of violence, are intertwined like seething lovers within the heart of all those who have survived the Children’s Crusade of which there is no name and no history. Endeavor to see emotions and affect, even base sensation itself, as not something that is mine but a bidirectional flow of the circuitry of one’s current and past worlds. It is the constant movement between my nervous system and the great flow beyond me of my environment and other mind/body/nervous systems. In this shared world, we see that overcoming these ideas of my emotions, my feelings, my experience, opens a door to a kind of self which no longer has to be confined and trapped within this claustrophobic room inside of my skull. The self becomes an open field. And in this field, the greatest freedom and the greatest intimacy is that I am responsible for everything, everywhere, and for everyone. And so are they – and they are responsible for me, everything, and everywhere all the same. You and me break down into this great flow of our worlds. And in this, where does one demarcate hatred for self and hatred for other and the world? We see that we participate in and constantly renew hatred as a core feature of the world as it exists in our experience. When I hate, I become responsible for all hatred that has ever existed or will exist. Overcoming hatred of self requires overcoming hatred of other. And to overturn them at the root, how do we inquire what hatred even is and where does it come from? And who is this I that hates? Hatred arises from the experience of a radical negation of responsibility in the flow between self and other. It arises from the horror of otherness compared to my I-ness. And it all too often arises from the feeling of being betrayed. Hatred turned inward aims to protect the separate self from further damage from the environment. Hatred turned outward attempts to preserve the self through annihilation and expulsion of the other from our world system. Either way, hate closes the circuit and the doorway to the open field. We do not learn to hate, we inherit it.
Many would rather judge, criticize, neglect, abuse, reject, abandon, murder, and annihilate rather than face the terrifying black sun at the heart of their being. The desire for violence trumps feeling pain for us until we choose for it not to. When asking, “what pain must be so great that one would debase their very humanity and lose their connection to all of life to avoid it?”, we begin to get close to some semblance of what the great sages call compassion. But what is required to go the whole way is to be fully in touch with my own black sun. This is the great fortress to preserve and protect my own humanity. Pierce your own heart deeply enough and you inevitably pierce the heart of the other. What else could compassion be but the sword that slays our separation through binding us together through its cut? I must be ready to sacrifice my own heart, and my own comfort, to find compassion. To say, “I’m ready to be cleaved open in hopes that I might find something greater within me that I cannot see with these eyes that have only seen the dawn from my own window.”
Concepts emerge from the center of our wounds. And our wounds create the conceptual worlds we exist in. If you feel trapped in your world, inquire what concepts and wounds it is built upon. Then if you would like to overturn your own conceptual world, dare to discover what wounds you carry and who and what gave them to you. Descartes once said that everything you believe should be questioned at least once to ensure it is your own thought and belief and not that which was simply taught to you. How brave must we be to inquire even further into the violence that occurred to give rise to any one thing you believe or think? As much bravery as it has taken to bear the wounds you’ve already been carrying your whole life.
Most often, when we are at our most saturnine is when we are most in love with all that is dark and despairing about the world. Just as anxiety maintains a secret love with its object, so depression maintains a deep desire for the void. A love of that abyss and pleasure in its caress is sometimes all that we have to save us from its clutches. If I cannot end or escape my darkness, then I will will love it to the fullest and find all that is sensual and satisfying in its embrace. And deepest of all, my love of the abyss means there is an I, a self, that now exists in this world. A return to light must go through how much pleasure and enjoyment and self I get from my sojourn into nightfall. While our rebellion against the world can be a noble rage and a cry for freedom, we must cautiously examine how much this fallen world thrives on and has coopted the darkness of its subjects to keep it thriving.
In the biological and relational circuitry that our shared worlds are constructed of, there is no greater pain than when your circuit has become one that only can communicate with itself. Loneliness is not primarily about the experience of being alone but of being trapped in a world where no communication with other worlds feels possible. What is more lonely than our total mad descent into a world where there is only our mind communicating with itself? And oh, I known this madness! Screaming and pleading in a tongue that seemingly traps me even further into my own world occupied by no one save my own hungry ghosts. Our mind/body/nervous system registers this as metaphysical abandonment and rejection. We have fallen past the singularity’s event horizon and are tumbling straight into endless night. This world our endless night can risk no such thing as is called hope for fear of its ultimate crushing and disappointment. If we do, we risk being proven right in one’s complete and total loss, being trapped in a world of no communication. But most importantly, my descent into the abyss now grants me a world of my own. Because there is no reason to descend into the abyss unless we can find a temporary refuge there, the darkness is finally a place to call home. But how to find our way back to not just being a lonely world but part of a solar system? Nebulae collapse under the loving weight of their own gravity to form a sun and planets. Perhaps there are other worlds out there also in need of a solar system. Maybe we can form something new without all this crushing gravity that molded us in the first place. Maybe there are other worlds emerging out of the abyss around us all the time. I’d like to build a solar system with them.
Each world is composed of certain metaphysical architecture which arises over the course of time and space between our mind/body/nervous system and the attachment and physical environments we develop in. This architecture constructs and shapes what can and cannot be experienced. It shapes what can and cannot be asked. It shapes what can and cannot be felt. It shapes what can and cannot be thought. It shapes what can and cannot be related to. It shapes who can and cannot be connected with. But perhaps most of all, it shapes how we ask and answer one fundamental question: do I belong in reality or do I not? The answer to this question will guide all future building of your world and the relative strength or fragility of what the structures can support and hold. Experiences of anxiety and depression are fundamentally ways to answer this question which result in profound vulnerability and brittleness in our metaphysical architecture. If you notice yourself in these states, become very curious in how you are answering the one fundamental question in this moment, right here and right now. Each mood is an answer to a question.
The razor’s edge of forgiveness cuts through the conscious and the unconscious alike. Inscribed deep into the unknown known realms of the mind and heart is a line that connects fear of forgiveness, the iron law of cause and effect, and with historical determination. When forgiveness can be experienced, its greatest triumph is that it reinscribes the unconscious mind and heart themselves through opening a doorway to redefining history. Forgiveness is a passage outside the realm of linear cause and effect and historical determination. Because the dialectical process of hurt and forgiveness operates on the basis of linear determination. The passage of forgiveness grants access to a realm where we can choose anew what we want the past to mean to us, to change its relation to the present and the future through a transcendent act from a realm where time is not linear but whole. But for forgiveness’s final victory in this sacred realm, both victor and vanquished must walk through the door together into a place where history has no dominion. And how many victors refuse the offer, refuse the gift, because it would mean granting that there ever once was a war that they have fought and won? So until that day, it is best to play in the land of nonlinearity by oneself, even if this play carries the hollow sting of loneliness. Because the moment the victor walks through the door, we realize there was never any waiting and hoping. Forgiveness was always present.
Forgiveness is an act that which grants readmission to the order of being. Prior to its granting, we are banished, exiled, to some purgatory of shame and guilt which is either conscious or unconscious in our acts and words. But as in Dante’s grand vision, this purgatory prepares us for the great dialectic of nonbeing transforming into being. When we forgive, we love. But we also destroy the linearity of time, space, and history which are assumptions in the dialectic of being and nonbeing. But I require the other, I require you, for the dialectic to be set in motion. And this only occurs change offering you the hurt and wound I carry. When I share my hurt with you, I am offering you a gift and a chance to overturn the entire order of being and time itself. And while forgiveness from the other may be required in many instances, there are so many more instances where only forgiveness of ourselves grants us reentry back into the order of being. Because how can someone unlock my prison door when it is already open and I am too terrified to walk out? Nasruddin, the great Sufi mystic, taught us that we already possess the key to our own home. But we spend all of our time looking outside in the street because that’s where the light is. But we will never find it if we do not and cannot realize we left it on the table inside our own house. For many of our great wounds, the first and last person to forgive is ourself. Because no one can ever truly expel me from the garden. And I will never feel the terrible relief of this until I can find my way back to the place before there was even a you and an I.
Your rage is a wounded sun, a bitter star that longs to shine and illuminate worlds. How does one unburden a star? You must discard all of the detritus that it has absorbed so it can finally burn its fuel freely and purely. For often a star masks itself as a wall, a darkness, an emptiness. If you want the sun to reveal itself, you must call it by its true name and not the names given to it. Then and only then will its light reveal all that has been hidden in its shadow.
Comparison without inspiration is the domain of the Inner Critic. There is no perceiving another or the self in this vein without the lens of superiority and inferiority. This is another way of saying I do not see you or myself except as an object. This is the domain where culture and history have coopted our mind/body/nervous system’s ability to feel anxiety as a great engine of economic growth and social stratification. But inspiration without comparison is the realm of the sacred and the holy. It is a realm where there are only jewels reflecting each other without end. It is a realm where relationship operates with mutuality and non-objectification. It is the realm of the healed and the whole. It is the realm where alienation is overcome and the boundaries between self and other become fuel to burn even more brightly in your own position on the Net. It is the realm of where one being becomes all beings and no being all at once.
When my body moves, what is the dynamo of its being? Is it fear or is it joy? Is it moving to fulfill an obligation or is it to give a gift to the world? Movement requires some process, some conduit, to translate energy into action. And we do ourselves a great service by examining the conduits where we initiate motivation, action, reaction, and reason. For reason is also a movement of the mind and can be animated by a multitude of forces and energies. Is your mind animated by fear or joy? Underneath each activity is the sensation and the emotion as one complete experience with corresponding meanings and images. And underneath and alongside the sensation, emotion, image, and meaning are the entire world that spawned them. There is in fact no separation between the two.
There is no entering or escaping the Underworld without a direct confrontation with Cerberus. In our minds, this great beast called Cerberus is at its most vicious yet compassionate with lost souls yearning for freedom and a taste of the heavens. It guards the gates of heaven and keeps locked the gates of hell. It silently patrols the yawning void between the two that cuts through the center of your heart and being. Do you want to escape the Underworld? Then first recognize the trembling in your heart anytime Cerberus rears its triple head in your direction. You shall know it when you encounter the Inner Critic, Outer Critic, or anxiety have come clawing at your mind. Can you stand firm when you feel its hot breath upon your face? Can you not waiver when its jaws lock around your throat and it whispers, “you are not worthy of heaven and I tell you this because I love you”? I say the only way to defeat the great Cerberus is to see that it is also a lost soul, to see that you and it are in fact not two but one. There is no throwing open the gates of hell without pulling heaven down to earth and into the heart of the Underworld itself. We do not rise to heaven. We tear down the mirage of heaven crafted by Cerberus itself to find glory in the midst of hell itself.
In the circuitry of worlds that bind together self and other into one process of wholeness, it is essential to recognize that a mind saddled with pain becomes a weapon in the war of the self against the self and all other selves. In the trenches of this war, great caution must be given to how the mind interprets signals from across no man’s land from the other trenches. The greatest misapprehension occurs in the initial communique of emotions and experience from the other. When these signals are seen as an act of war, an attack of one mind upon another, there is nothing to do but dig your trench deeper and farther away from the other. Mind precedes everything and a mind of war can only see war. Alienation grows as the wasteland expands between our trenches. Again and again, we must ask what is this particular theater in which I am fighting this war? Who started it and for what purpose? Or am I only taking orders from myself? Set down your weapons. For the only way to ever accurately read the signals from across enemy lines is to raise your flag of surrender first. When this great act of liberation is leapt into, I conduct myself with the first principle of all ethical action: I have protected you and your mind from the war raging inside of my own mind. If you want peace, be peace and act in peace first.
Existing in the world of absolutes and binary logic is all too often a relic, a fossil, of the world in which I learned to hate or be hated, to kill or be killed, or abandon before I am abandoned. This relic is from a world where the primary orientation of the world circuity between subject and object, self and environment, is one of threat and existential risk. And what first began as primarily a threat to the body within the circuit becomes focused and orientated toward anything that provokes the feeling of existential threat and risk: loss of self, feelings of shame and rejection, disintegration of the self, overwhelm and violation of the body, or any other number of symbolic and existential experiences. It it threatens the core of myself, the entirety of all beings in the struggle for life against death will be invoked. For the human mind/body/nervous system, the interpretative, world-modeling function of the mind has been made a servant of this environment of threat and anxiety. And it is a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of a mind in existential catastrophe. So the only option to escape this world is to storm the very gates of the fortress of the mind in fear and reclaim, liberate, and expropriate the world-modeling function of your mind and return it to its rightful owner.
Seek to cultivate a body/mind/nervous system of infinite receptivity. For a circuit capable of infinite receptivity becomes capable of infinite intimacy. The solution to this plague of loneliness is to see the ways which my loneliness comes from a constipation of own energy and information flow between my world and the worlds outside of myself (of which there is no actual distinction when a circuit operates with regulation). Limiting, blocking, walling up, and avoiding receptivity leads to an orientation of control of and extraction from the Other and their world. So in the basic orientation toward the world of which I am but a node in a vast circuit, I can and must choose between receptivity/intimacy or isolation/domination. When I choose the second, I proclaim to all of life and the universe that I would rather destroy my world than humble myself before it and within it. Just as Ahab sought to smite the Sun rather than humble himself before the whale and nature, we would rather tear down the universe than recognize we are its child of both blood and glory. When I choose the second, I proclaim to be a god. When I choose the first, I find that there is a vast great network of being awaiting me to finally rejoin its chorus. I choose my own ordinary humanity as my salvation.
At any moment in time, the perception of your body is a reflection of the interplay between your mind/body/nervous system and the larger flow of energy and information in relationship to the environment around you. The vast majority of those beings around you loathe and hate their bodies. But this hatred is hidden deep within their inner state, terrified of ever speaking its truth out loud. Your perception of your body is a World state. It is a symbolic representation that maps the levels of threat, safety, and emotional regulation and connection within these state of relations between your body and others. Hatred is a world state of which body hatred is but one particular form. Do I hate my body? Then consider the way that hatred is part of and serves a particular world, present but also past and future. Within the heart of every hatred is the fuel to burn the world down and create a new one within your own body/mind/nervous system. And the best way to create a new world state is to recognize that no world state is ever just your own. All world states are collective creations and they are always being recreated or destroyed from moment to moment. The real crux is that we do not even know what worlds we are a part of and the bloody threads of attachment that keep them alive.
The question which silently haunts many of our inner worlds, “do I deserve to exist or not?”, cannot be thought without its congenital twin: is the world hostile to my existence or not? For while the world is full of hostility, the experience of its hostility being directed like a blazing missile at my being in particular is a flowering of the deepest seed of karma: that there is a world out there and I am a separate me in here. Buried deep within the ground where this seed is planted flows a silent river. And in that river there is the current of the world. And in that current lives a silent knowing behind all thoughts of self and other always waits to blossom. And in that silent knowing and watching is and unstained mirror which can never be shattered or broken. And in that mirror dissolves all questions of deserving and undeserving.
The experience of providing service versus being in servitude is primarily one of living in heaven or living in hell. Each is a particular state of being with its respective moods and orientations in our world system. Service is that which dissolves the rigidity of the boundary between self and other. It is a liberating act which can dissolve all competition, striving, anxiety, and meaninglessness. Servitude always carries the stain of oppression, the experience where one has known what it is like to live in fear as a slave. Like all things stained with oppression, the only hope of freedom is to find that kernel of truth within the lie and to transform the conditions of bondage into the flowering of liberation. All servitude contains the seed of service and of a transcendence of self and other.
There is only one body. There is only one mind. There is only one bodymind. It is equally your bodymind and my bodymind. Or rather, it is more true to say we are equally it. And we are wholly and completely it and within it without even a single sheet of paper being able to fit through the gap that separates us. Ah, what a joy to find not even a single particle of dust can fly through! You are so intimate with me in this moment that I cannot find any outside of us. What a joy it is to have you within my life and to be within yours. For there is only one life of which we are forever in intimacy with.
