Recommended Listening: Firebird by Common Saints
The most complex aspect to forgiveness: while some adult healed part of us may be more than capable of forgiveness, we often collapse into one undivided entity without internal relation this part and the inner wounded child who may never need to forgive or forget their oppressors and abusers. The true violence of saying someone needs to forgive those that hurt them to heal is that it collapses this multiplicity of being of mind and self into one single entity without our consent. A second wounding occurs when we experience this collapse as a demand from someone outside of us. Forgiveness is possible (and likely necessary for some part of us) but we often assume we know when that forgiveness is necessary and helpful for all parts of us or someone else. And this all depends on the temporal process of healing which cannot be rushed or circumvented. And when it is time, the inner healer extends forgiveness outward and extends understanding and acceptance toward that part of us that holds a heart full of pain and betrayal. My great suspicion is that until we can respect a being’s multiplicity, ours and others, we will always live in a world of the definitions of an Other rather than our own. Could we actually tolerate to live in a world comprised of our own definitions without forcing them on each other? It would require a courage that can only emerge from that within us which is beyond all definitions and opinions.
I’ve heard it said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past. It also means giving up all hope of a different self and others. It’s giving up all hope of a different world and different reality. It means continually giving up more and more hope until there is no one left to do the forgiving or the hoping.
Sometimes I am amazed at the absolutely subtle magic and mysterious power that is at work at all times in my experience. I sit and watch bamboo sway in the wind while I devour leaves and fruits of trees and plants which are destroyed in the process of sustaining this birth and death that is happening constantly in every single instance. The bamboo dances and I devour a garden – subtle magic and mysterious power. Creation and destruction are unfolding, arising and falling away, in every single moment.
Perhaps the greatest betrayal and loss for those encountering the traumatic forces of annihilation and abandonment in their most vulnerable years is the deep, bodily knowing that some mysterious birthright has been stolen from you. You have lost some inheritance from your ancestors that is only known in those moments when the wind blowing through the trees or birds’ call registers not as glory but as absolute panic. Something has gone horribly awry. The world and its appearances present themselves to you not as your home but as that which aims to destroy you in any given moment. The universe has become hostile to your existence at some point along the way. You have lost that ability to experience oneself as constantly being penetrated by the world and penetrating all things continuously not as a form of violence but as a form of becoming. Your world is not your home but your damnation. You had stolen from you this glory of reality itself being one of ecstatic interdependence. And woe to those deceivers, betrayers, and thieves who steal from another that which can never be stolen. For in the act of stealing, they have abandoned their own chance to call this world home.
When I have been at my most depressed, in the heart of the black sun without any orbiting bodies or light to find my way, my certainty of the meaninglessness of life and reality and the corresponding total absence of all real relationships (primarily caused by my own unconscious desire to isolate from all things) is also when I am at the apex of my arrogance. One part of the answer to our depression is deep humility and a willingness to see that the hyperrationality of depression and its underlying worthlessness and meaninglessness may in fact be based on totally erroneous assumptions. Or at the very least, assumptions which are not rational but profoundly based in feeling. When depression’s logic is airtight and there seems to be no way out of it, try burrowing like a mole under its foundations and see what you find. Tyrants always fall when their foundations are eroded by the most humble forces.
There is no self without a world and every world implies a self. The primary question is what self/world are we occupying at any given time and how on earth did we come to be this exact self/world experiencing itself continuously? And if we can glimpse this for even a moment, who is the me that is glimpsing it? In the end, we all have to find some discipline, some practice, that allows us to break the illusion that the world and ourselves are somehow two distinct entities.
When we let go, who is it that let’s go and what is it that is being let go of? The self lets go of the self and therefore gives itself to itself and the world. And the Self emerges in this action of nonaction because there is no amount of force which can lead to the great let go. It is only a full piercing insight into why you hang on so tightly in the first place that allows it to unveil itself.
Imagine your consciousness expanding out to see the entire spiral-armed flowing of the Milky Way galaxy. See that in your mind’s eye, this perspective on the grandiosity of the universe we are in is the true unclouded mirror of our ego’s tendency to claim itself as the peak of evolution and righteousness in our thoughts, deeds, and reactions. The imagination is primarily an organ of identification and for creatively organizing our sensations, emotions, behaviors, and mind into a unity which thereby functions in a specific world in a corresponding way. Does it change my way of walking down the straight to see myself as that which is constantly aware of the spiral-armed galaxy we are floating in? It certainly leads to a different flowering in my heart than the dream that I am just the small point of thinking right behind my eyes. In truth, the whole problem revolves around how we define where the boundaries between myself and the world begin and end.
The Inner Critic and its offspring, Anxiety, strike most sharply with their swords of catastrophe and boredom right before the gates of pure presence open right in front of you and within you. Because when you are fully present, all things are present with you, in you, and through you. And in that moment, there is just oneness and you are both a small part of all things and are all things at once. Or maybe all things are you is more accurate. How often I have turned back from the gates right as my nose touched them! I have trembled and let my heavy breathing and cold palms convince me that this was not a gate but some impenetrable wall behind which monsters lay in wait for me on the other side of if I do not turn back immediately. The wall is there for my own protection, my fear says to me. So I turn back, convinced that my fear is truth and that the key to this gate was not residing in my heart the entire time. The monsters that made me turn and run were only my own monsters and how sharp their scythes and swords are when they have cut me down. And I shall know their illusory sting when I feel most bored with my situation.
If there is one thing that Complex PTSD teaches us, it is that enduring and surviving our lives has been and will be necessary until the act of simply living our lives has been freed from the shackles of all that which has taught us that we are slaves and unworthy of such a fate as free human beings. Do you want to be free and liberated? Then discover who is this you that was taught that life is only that which is to be endured. Who is this I that continues to believe that my life is base and unworthy of joy and compassion? And who taught this me these things and for what purpose? And who taught them and for what purpose? What I do know is that when I step into the pure thin air of living my life versus just enduring it, my pulse quickens and I start to see that surviving my life has felt safer than living in it. And I learned this for a very particular purpose. Is it possible that me living life and not just enduring it threatens those afraid to live their own?
All too often, our typologies of traumatic experience are too broad and nonspecific to capture the actual experience of living within the wounding of the entire human experience of a mind/body/world system. While the categories of abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, etc. are important, we can deepen these into the actual experience of the nervous system being impacted with categories that capture the true impact of the wound: being crushed, being punctured, being shattered, being cut down, being torn apart, being annihilated, being devoured, being lost. These are the actual categories of experience from the point of view of the experiencer that emerge from the mind/body/world system. And it is this perspective that must be understood for any real experience of healing to occur. Because healing a puncture wound is always different than recovering from being crushed or being cut down. We cannot heal until we call the wound by its right name.
Anxiety is their world; joy is our world. Let us not confuse the two.
One of the most devasting aspects of feeling chronically misunderstood by those around you is that being misunderstood takes on the implications of proving that you are unworthy of existing and being understood in your totality. You are just a tiny scrap of unimportant detritus orbiting the event horizon of the singularity that is the center of your being and negates any possibility of connecting to those around you. The feeling of being misunderstood becomes proof positive of your total isolation and being unloved among all those other loved beings of the universe. But the glory is in understanding that being misunderstood requires the participation of others to do the misunderstanding. It is a sure sign that you have in fact never been and never can be truly isolated. And how can you be misunderstood when that which you are precedes all understanding or misunderstanding? In the depths of your pain of being misunderstood, look for the foundation of interdependence which makes it possible to feel misunderstood at all.
Understanding and misunderstanding of ourselves and each other are particular features of a mind/body/nervous system state and the larger circuit we are cocreating in any given moment. They are specific experiences that arise as part of either the functioning or breakdown of flowing current and information flow in the interpersonal/environmental neurobiological circuity of energy exchange. In essence, it is an indicator of whether we are sharing a world or existing in two separate ones. The ways we use our words and symbols is both an indicator and a means of intervention into the creation or destruction of this shared world and its flow of energy and information. When misunderstanding is currently happening, it is a way of saying that there must be some shift in how the circuit is functioning to ensure that someone is not lost, adrift in their own isolated world without any means of rejoining reality with others and a shared world. Isolation is the aberration – the connection of the circuit as a total dynamic process is the reality.
Each person is responsible for the hatred in their own heart. The extent to which I have not taken responsibility for the hatred in mine is the degree to which I will make you responsible for it. Where does hatred in our heart originate from? Most usually from the experience of being hated. And the most logical way to have control and protection over being hated is to hate oneself first. This hatred then turns outward the moment the original wound of being hated is touched. But in truth, there is never any true control or protection from being hated by anything or anyone. At some point, the sword of unholy sacred justice must cut the knot. And this sword is the sword of compassion.
In the culture of capitalism and its associated identity categories of race, gender, ability, sexuality, etc., there is an inherent and logical pressure to focus on the use of appearance and surface to establish the primary coordinates of value and judgement of reality. Marx once said that capitalism’s logic eventually dissolves all things solid into air. But what we are seeing more and more is that capitalism’s logic dissolves the insides of things leaving only the appearance. This fosters a more efficient way of consuming them. They become incredibly more compliant and complicit. In other words, capitalism is a vicious spider feasting upon the bodies of its subjects. And when this is internalized, this is what we do to ourselves and each other. We feed. Notice that the vast majority of our Inner and Outer Critic functions are primarily focused on appearances as the sole source of value. External validation and justification through appearances becomes gospel. And there is no greater place where this violence is concentrated than in the appearance and judgements upon of our bodies and the bodies around us. When I see myself in the mirror and feel loathing, rejection, shame, I am experiencing the deepest throws of being stuck on the web and hoping to be the most enticing morsel of food for the giant invisible arachnid hunting me every moment of every day. The only chance of escape is to rebuild a core within the appearance that is strong enough to escape the web. That core can only ever be one of compassion, love, and fury.
The primary fear and terror of being misunderstood is fundamentally about being trapped in the perceptions, delusions, hatred, and opinions of the other. In other words, it is being a prisoner in a world that is not of your making. This experience of capture therefore makes it impossible to shed the self and other because the very conditions of karma and attachment have been now the way that the self is defined by the other. How do I escape the other when the other’s world is my own? And how we then define others is based in this self and world of the other. The circle is complete and almost perfect in its logic and functioning. Almost. The fatal flaw is that we/it assumes that self and world are permanent. But what is more true is that our mind and bodies are more akin to a snake continuously molting and shedding its skin when growth becomes inevitable. And when it is ready, what does it shed? It sheds the skin of limiting beliefs, delusion, anger, and hatred and greed of the other. It sheds the mind of the other with all its anger, judgments, and opinions. We must become serpentine because there is in reality no other possibility of existing in impermanence.
There is no liberation without an inner and outer fortress. There is no inner and outer fortress without equanimity. There is no equanimity without a backward step out of delusion and into surrender if you want to be open and available to others. And there is no liberation without openness and availability to others. The paradox of liberation is that one must first build a fortress to invite in the honored guests.
When the Buddha sat under the bodhi tree during the sixth week of his enlightenment and the storm raged around him, the serpent king, Mucalinda, wrapped its body around him for warmth and used his cobra hood to shield him from the rain. Everyone needs the protection of a serpent king on the long road to freedom and liberation leading us into the womb of the Buddhas. There is no becoming a bodhisattva without the help of countless serpents to shield us from the elements every step of the way. And there is no being a bodhisattva without shielding countless others from the elements, as well. How does one see Mucalinda all around you and how do you become Mucalinda for others? And most importantly: how does one become a serpent king for yourself?
As children, we are forced through love or violence to swallow the worlds of our parental figures. And while your chains may be gold or they may be rusted out iron, they are chains nonetheless. And the degree of freedom you have which to discover yourself is correlative to the length of the chains that have bound you to their world. And how on earth can you ever fight back against this world you’re chained to except to avoid reality and cut off contact completely with the world and with the self? Building a new world of your own to call home requires an entirely different way of relating to reality which is not based on bondage. I call this relation of and to the new world (which is the opposite of obligation) ecstatic luminosity.
There are two trees that we are born and grow upon: one is a tree of life and one is a tree of death. The tree of death contains all those traits which have led us to exist based in fear of ourselves and others. The tree of life contains all those traits which emerge from self-compassion and being loving awareness for yourself and all beings. Both trees are in truth just one tree reflected back to you through the current state of your own mirror of awareness. One is but the reflection of the other. The tree of death is being reflected to you through the cool, clear surface of water of which you cannot fully grasp but fixates your attention endlessly. The tree of life is that which is reflected in the water. There is no tree of death without the tree of life of which it is but a reflection. So if you find yourself strung upon the branches of the tree of death, remember to fear not and know that you are never apart from the tree of life. You are only living in its reflection.
