Recommended Listening: Rescue by Richard Spaven
Artwork by Lia Halloran
No amount of pain and harm can ever truly heal a wound. The heart and soul are not a nose that you must rebreak and reset to heal properly. Our failure of imagination must not reduce that which is complex and ethereal into some mechanical process of brute force. Be wary of your tendencies toward masochism and simplicity, the adaptions to the conditions of torture and starvation. The only thing that heals is care and meeting the need not yet met. You cannot torture yourself into salvation and redemption.
When the Buddha sat approaching his enlightenment, the final obstacle Mara threw at him was self-doubt. I’ve sat long and well with this teaching. That which prevents liberation in the final moment will be fear in the guise of that which doubts and denies the self from a place of inner authority. But self-doubt is no cool, rational experience. It is filled with terror, panic, shame, and tears. It is the sword of samsara and the legacy of a life lived by others instead of by one’s self. See self-doubt for what it is – the veil of Mara pulled over eyes that are already awake.
So how does one overcome doubt? The most effective way to undercut liberation and enlightenment is to ensure that the attack appears to come from within. For the contradiction of self-doubt is that I am both unsure of my abilities and actions but completely sure that they are worthy of being doubted. Self-doubt is the mask of shame because it is not the actions or decisions I question but the very being that makes them. If the Buddha is not beyond self-doubt, then neither are any of us. And if the Buddha is able to overcome self-doubt, then so too is every single one of us. To overcome self-doubt, question the doubter itself.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of shame is its somnabulatory effect on the body and mind. Shame leads to a life of sleep based on fear. How can the body dance when it sleeps its frozen and living death of shame? But underneath the sleep likes a deeper awareness and awakeness – an awakeness of ourselves as a brethren in a great procession of being where dancing and churning and singing are the only requirements. Everything conspires for us to wake and hear the call of the grasses, trees, stars, and drums of this procession. When we answer the call to wake up, there is no anger and resentment for our eons of frozenness. There is just simple joy of finally taking our places with our brethren of beings.
A great Zen archer once demonstrated his mastery by preparing meticulously his arrow, nocking it into the string, and firing the arrow with pure presence only to have it sail clean over the target into the ocean beyond. “Bullseye”, he cries! This is true mastery – following every act through to its end, completely and without fear. No more and no less. How much suffering is caused by not following through our act, especially right as the arrow is about to hit the target? How do you even know it hits without being present in its final moment? Or how much suffering is caused by following an act through beyond its end?
The most ingenious and insidious protective mechanism of the mind and body is internalizing the narrative and confusion of those who oppress you. Dubois talked about this as Double Consciousness and Marx talked about it as the ideas of the ruling classes tending to become the ideas of the subordinate classes, as well. Paulo Freire speaks of it in the way education can just deposit ideas of the oppressor into the vulnerable minds of the oppressed children in their vulnerable malleability. Alice Miller and John Bradshaw talk about it in the way a traumatizing family shapes its offspring into little replicas of the parents and punishes them with silence or sword if they rebel against their boxes. All different ways to say the same thing – you are a slave to an authority which lives inside of you. You are haunted by a demon that calls itself reality. It is the demiurge itself.
Anxiety, at its heart, is a confrontation with our feeling of lacking power and solidity. The self that lacks power in this world feels fragile, easily shattered, ready to fall apart at the slightest provocation or prodding from the outside world. But anxiety’s most clever illusion is to distract us from the surge of pain and power. It rushes to the surface demanding our attention with the catastrophe that lies outside us at any moment we so choose to imagine as possible. We give away our power from fear of confronting the pain and rage that lies within from all the times it was stolen and denied to us. All too often, this is the choice that blends two distinct points in time: abandon yourself because you have no power or be abandoned because you have it. There is a wormhole connecting the two. Two distinct points in space bridged through a the transcendence of linear time. All healing involves separating collapsed points of temporality into their rightful places.
When I give away my power and agency, whatever I may have at any given point, it is in essence an abdication of my ability to mediate and shape reality to someone or something else. What is anxiety but this very abdication? It is a giving away of the apparatus of consciousness which serves as a filtration system of perception and phenomena. Anxiety serves as a broken filtration system which now mediates reality for me based on systems and other nervous systems which served as the auxiliary filter at some earlier point in our life. How trustworthy was your mom’s filter? Or your father’s? Or your ancestors? Or the very nature of the capitalist system of ideology and consumption you were bred in? Who does your filtration system serve – you or the blind gods?
The line between a safe and warm cocoon and dead carcass is very thin. Perhaps even a fraction of a millimeter. Be careful which side you lay your weary body down upon. One will crack open with your new form of winged fury and joy. The other you will be buried in.
Psychedelics primarily enhance and heighten whatever nervous system states you exist in at the commencement of the nonordinary state of consciousness. Stanislav Grof described LSD as a nonspecific amplifier of unconscious material. An even more radical leap is that the unconscious is the body and nervous system themselves held as unconscious material. We need something, anything, that can show us what our nervous system states we currently are in while also showing us what it is possible to access to (i.e., all of them). The psychedelic is always a crown upon the general state of your system at any given moment.
The most important thing is not what happened to you but what you didn’t receive and desperately needed as a result of what happened to you. This is why grieving repairs the wounds of trauma. Ask yourself – who grieved for you when you lay broken upon the floor? When you were hiding, trembling, in your closet? When darkness fell over your sky? When the lights went out for what felt like an eternity? Who will ever know these moments of defeat and abandon you and I carry in the softest flesh? Perhaps none should know for they are unspeakable. Unnamable. Grieving is finally giving and receiving that which you never received – the dignity and importance of your humanity. You are both the hand the gives and the hand that receives. You are the giver and the given. There is no grieving without witnessing. You are the witness to me and yourself. And I am yours.
A very wise spirit once told me when I inquired silently about its nature: I am that which shines forth. And it told me that we are no different. We are that which shines forth beyond and below the wreckage. There is no end to the light.
In the end, no one but us can decide when we are healed. Only you can know how to take off your armor and only you know when it is finally all removed. But here is the trick: you may have more invested in being sick than in being healed and sane. I’ve known madness, intimately so. What is madness if not pretending to be sick when one is entirely healthy? It is a rejection of the whole world if it means you will have to face how not sick you are. In the end, it is a fearful pulling away from how much this world can damage us. Becoming intimate with reality means becoming intimate with how much we can be damaged. We are so fragile and easily wounded, my dear. I hope we can stop pretending this is not so. Maybe then we could really feel each other and ourselves for once and let go of this game of illusions.
Who and what are we to speak of freedom? What constitutes freedom for any consciousness is shaped by the material conditions which condition that consciousness and which that consciousness shapes in turn. Over a century ago, intellectuals like Walter Lippman described the necessity of those in power in politics, business, and media to shape the environment of the masses of people to give them the illusion of freedom and choice within a highly circumscribed set of options. Over time, this was increasingly harnessed by the forces of public opinion, marketing, and capitalist consumer society to such a degree, that even outright revolution can be commodified and sold back to us. For us, freedom must now transcend even the idea of choice. Freedom is now a throwing the brakes on the train as it speeds off the cliff because you must. Freedom is awareness that there even is a train that is speeding toward the cliff. Freedom is seeing the conditions upon which your choices are based. Freedom is finally saying stop. Freedom is not a choice. It is an act.
Your inner critical voice (also known as your Inner Critical Parent or superego), which is the most powerful and responsible agent in the vast majority of your distress, is powerful in proportion to the degree to which it is hidden and obscured from your view. Adam Phillips calls it a stupid and dumb repetitive voice that is simply in pain and does not know what to do. It is true and it is a largely noncreative voice. But it still reinforces the hostility and internal war all the same. It’s an occupation by an oppressive internal enemy and the only way to sign the peace treaty is to see that this powerful destructive voice is not actually stupid or worthy of your hatred but is in all actuality a scared, defenseless, and helpless little child. But it is a scared helpless child with a weapons of mass destruction: shame, self-hatred, and fears of abandonment and inadequacy. How do you soothe a child with the power to destroy your entire world? With all the courage you can muster. And you hold it very, very close but not too close.
Only you get to decide when to shut the door of the past and open the door to healing, liberation, and the present. And there is no greater pain than waiting and expecting someone else to close it for you, especially when they are the ones who opened it in the first place and absconded mindlessly away with the keys as they were needed to close and lock it. What to do when they have forgotten they even left the door open or refuse to remember? You close the door yourself then weep uncontrollably for as long as it takes.
Seeking a true refuge outside of yourself is most necessary when you have no true refuge inside. While it is not an end in itself, it is necessary. The only way out of the internal war is to build, brick to brick, the internal refuge. But the bricks always come from other refuges which exist all around you in any moment.
The opposite of intoxication is intimacy.
A wise person once said that there was a last scream one uttered before we feel silent into numbness and despair. This scream may have occurred long before you have any memory of it. But it exists – it lies dormant in the depths of your being. Another wise person said once that the cry and scream are the baby’s ultimate weapons. So what happens when one’s ultimate weapons buried in the depths of your nervous system is lost? You lose the feeling that you deserve to exist, that your pain grants you access into the great order of being. Healing begins when you find that last scream and let it loose upon the world. It says,” I am here. I exist. I will be heard. I will be remembered.” When one has been outcasted from the very order of being itself, sometimes you have to kick the door in with a mighty wail to reclaim your space. Because who will wail for you and scream your scream if you do not? So get screaming. There is not much time.
Shame is the last weapon of the defenseless. It is the only arrow in the quiver when you are helpless against that which is your enemy in any given moment. Shame never fails me, it is always close at hand, and it always costs me my life when I use it to stay alive. Oh, if we are but brave enough to give up our very life for the possibility of living. This would be an act of true freedom.
