Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 16

Science Shows Memory of Trauma Passing 14 Generations

Scientists Have Observed Epigenetic Memories Being Passed Down for 14 Generations



Recent scientific findings on the power of inherited trauma to influence and literally form the intimate structures of our personalities is emerging as a game-breaker in both therapy and nonduality. The experience of freedom from structures of personality – the liberation into pure awareness – can be an initiation of a process, yet the subtle and somatic identifications with the energy patterns of the separate self can persist in what many have called the Dark Night of the Soul. Realizing that many of these forms of contraction and patterns of stress, survival, grief and terror were inherited together with our bodies from our parents through our DNA can unhook the final anchors of the illusion of the separate self. With this, unconscious layers of isolation, shame, fear and guilt can be released more easily. Bringing the loving light of awareness towards our inherited personalities is part of our purpose here. There really is nothing ‘personal’.

“We don’t know exactly why this happens, but it might be a form of biological forward-planning.” 

Until now, science has affirmed that trauma (and resilience when a traumatic cycle is completed) can be passed through several generations. Now, by studying fundamental forms of mammalian life – a dynasty of C. elegans nematodes (roundworms) – the effects of the environment on gene expression has been shown to continue for as long as 14 generations. What emerges is the evolution of the human personality through experience – stretching back to antiquity.

“To study how long the environment can leave a mark on genetic expression, a team led by scientists from the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in Spain took genetically engineered nematode worms that carry a transgene for a fluorescent protein. When activated, this gene made the worms glow under ultraviolet light. Then, they switched things up for the nematodes by changing the temperature of their containers. When the team kept nematodes at 20° Celsius (68° F), they measured low activity of the transgene – which meant the worms hardly glowed at all. But by moving the worms to a warmer climate of 25° C (77° F), they suddenly lit up like little wormy Christmas trees, which meant the fluorescence gene had become much more active. Their tropical vacation didn’t last long, however. The worms were moved back to cooler temperatures to see what would happen to the activity of the fluorescence gene. Surprisingly, they continued to glow brightly, suggesting they were retaining an ‘environmental memory’ of the warmer climate – and that the transgene was still highly active,” reports  SIGNE DEAN at Science Alert.

Furthermore, that memory was passed onto their offspring for seven brightly-glowing generations, none of whom had experienced the warmer temperatures. The baby worms inherited this epigenetic change through both eggs and sperm.

The team pushed the results even further – when they kept five generations of nematodes at 25° C (77° F) and then banished their offspring to colder temperatures, the worms continued to have higher transgene activity for an unprecedented 14 generations.

That’s the longest scientists have ever observed the passing-down of an environmentally induced genetic change. Usually, environmental changes to genetic expression only last a few generations.

“Worms are very short-lived, so perhaps they are transmitting memories of past conditions to help their descendants predict what their environment might be like in the future,” said co-researcher Tanya Vavouri from the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Spain.

Inherited Trauma

“Inherited effects in humans are difficult to measure due to the long generation times and difficulty with accurate record keeping,” states one recent review of epigenetic inheritance. But research suggests that events in our lives can indeed affect the development of our children and perhaps even grandchildren – all without changing the DNA. For example, studies have shown that both the children and grandchildren of women who survived the Dutch famine of 1944-45 were found to have increased glucose intolerance in adulthood.

Other researchers have found that the descendants of Holocaust survivors have lower levels of the hormone cortisol, which helps your body bounce back after trauma.

Studies have shown that not only trauma, but also resilience (the inborn competence in knowing how to manage certain stressful situations that comes when a trauma is brought to peace) is inherited.

We await the scientific study that will establish the critical effect of consciousness and awareness through therapy and introspection that allows the lifting of the epigenetic markers on traumatic memory, turning the limitation of inherited trauma into inherited resourcefulness.  Such validation would form a bridge of validation between the science of epigenetics and the restorative power of somatic experiencing and other life-saving methods to heal trauma. In addition, it would affirm the ancient wisdom of the importance of inheritance and ancestry in the in self-liberation from and within inherited patterns of reactivity. 

The Paper in Science.

I AM HERE posts on healing Inherited Trauma

 

Passover: a Nondual Story of Spiritual Liberation

The partner of slavery is liberation. Freedom has no opposite. In freedom, liberation and slavery are one.

The people were slaves. Their time, their space and their movement was possessed, under the control of an outer authority. Moses said: “Let my people go”. He spoke from the gut of existential freedom, demanding the freedom in time and space which is the birthright of all peoples. Pharaoh resisted, and suffered the ten plagues. The great collective fears: of insanity, disease, poverty and death, rained down on Egypt. The Jewish people walked away: into the desert night; into the gut of the unknown.

It happens to all inspiration: universal genius revealed through the living story gets crystallized, ritualized and assumes the dynamics of the forms that channelled it. Yet the best stories – like sacred vessels – hold the elixir of timeless wisdom for all who are able to drink from its source. Following are four of the deeper, mystical messages of the Passover story, as repeated through millennia.

 

[image error]

Yoheved’s trust in freedom: surrendering baby Moses to the river, to save his life.

The Wisdom of Impermanence

“This too shall pass(over)”. When we are enslaved in a dynamic of abuse, a lion’s share of the possessive power of the perpetrator is milked from the belief that this dynamic is permanent. You ARE inferior. You ARE the slave. He (she) IS your owner. Drummed through a repeated message of absolute authority enforced by cruelty, the victim at a certain stage shows what psychologists have called “learned helplessness”. The fight is gone, and the power dynamic is embraced as eternal. Victimhood becomes definitive.

The loss of control suffered by Pharaoh in the Passover story was witnessed by all Egypt. Chaos reigned – not Pharaoh – for all his riches. The learned helplessness of the collective flipped into the living helplessness of the slave master.

When impermanence becomes visible to consciousness, the belief structures through which the mind dominates the heart and dictates reality break down.

Freedom dawns, yet the sun was always there.

[image error]

Freedom opens us to the inner intuitive compass of destiny.

Opening to the Unknown

Beneath the surface of regular Egyptian life, the status quo was broken. Something deeper was on the move. Yet all the patterns of behavior – from working rituals, to dietary habits, through to prevalent idolatry were known patterns. This is how ritual builds reality – through reaffirming the known, the recognizable forms and the familiar rhythms in which we feel safe.

Yet freedom is never caught or confined to mental, emotional, spiritual or physical ritual. Freedom can be reflected by the mirror of the human being, but it can’t be directly perceived. This is because freedom is essential to the life we are. Yet at the same time, this means that the liberation from slavery can be fearful. It involves stepping into the desert – into the unknown precincts of new experience – and out of the safety of Cairo ghetto.

Throughout history, true survival has depended on our ability to evolve. Evolution demands that we open to the unknown and have the courage to move through it. Indeed, without the opening to the unknown, we wouldn’t be able to know anything at all. It is the surrender of the known patterns of slavery to the unknown, that the Jewish people were able to walk out of the captivity of generations.

Trusting the Miracle

The passover story is full of miracles, and equally full of the failure of the Jewish people to surrender to the living source behind these miracles. Moses himself had a hard time at the beginning. Speaking to the divine as it revealed in the perpetually burning bush, he asked for the name of the speaker. The voice replied “I am that I am…” What was he to do with such a reply?

[image error]

The despair of Moses at the collective addiction to idolatry and the cruelty of jealousy he witnessed at the foot of Mount Sinai.

However he took it, he didn’t take it personally and was eager to transmit to the people of Israel that it is not the man Moses who is leading them to freedom, but the divine. What is the divine? I am that I am. Creative freedom, existential consciousness, the source of all the forms in the universe and the source of every form. The insistence not to indulge into deification of Moses through idolatry was later reaffirmed. Despite the manna from heaven, and the guidance of the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of dust by day, the people still indulged in idolatry, and its partner jealousy, while waiting for him to descend from Mount Sinai. If it has been left to Moses, he would have stopped the whole Passover story there and then. But another kind of divine appointment was in play beyond his disappointment in his brothers and sisters: the appointment of destiny.

Still, in that moment when the group came to the Red Sea, many were ready to die at the hands of Pharaoh than walk into through the parted waters as instructed. According to stories, it was Moses sister Miriam who took the lead, dancing and singing through the passage between the walls of water. Can we trust the miracle of life to pass through the fearful passage of birth and death? Can we trust this existential freedom more than impermanence?

Freedom is Always Here

As long as we believe that freedom is somewhere else and caught either in the future or the past, we will not find the freedom that is always here. Freedom is not caught in time and space. Freedom is here and now. All we have to do is to drop our addiction to fear and receive its impersonal and passionate charge.

[image error]

Freedom is inseparable from who, what and where we are.

Freedom can’t be possessed by any human being, no matter how violent, cruel or frightening they might appear to be. Yet is at the source of every human being and every life form. Who am I? I am freedom.  

Freedom can never be punished, violated or incarcerated. It can’t be controlled. Freedom is inseparable from the source of all we are. It exists together with our slavery and together with our liberation from any temporary form. It is the light that gives sense to those contractions of slavery and those transformations that occur through liberation.

As human beings, we are in a process of evolution which involves perpetual impermanence. Yet our very ability to experience gain and loss; birth and death; slavery and liberation depends on our being more than that. It depends on the very freedom that is inherent to creation itself, and which is fundamental to the consciousness that can sing as it dances through the parting waves of the Red Sea towards the promised land, and to the voice that out of the passionate fire of creation can name itself only as: I am that I am.

Finding You ~ Georgi Y. Johnson

“Fear”, you said, “is in you.”


Fear like grief, like longing,


Like a lust.


Fear like a butterfly’s hour,


a fountain of light-


the edge of unknowing.


Fear – the space before


Surrender.


 


Opening now, can I open?


finding comfort


In depth?


 


High up, on upper floors


Gathering torn scraps


Of composition – the music


That vibrates somehow


In our creation.


 


A good soul comes here,


Telling of essence –


How it can only attract.


 


Where will we be attracted,


my beauty?


In apprehending roots


Of moments constantly lost?


In the wail of tear-drops for the ocean?


In the blind wisdom


Of Creative Unfolding?


Or in a single cell


On the upper lip


That consumes space to sense


The miracle of touch?


 


When the heart splits into


Ribbons of silver.


Flying into darkness


And disolving in wonderful nothing;


When the mother bear embraces


Herself;


When the lover bonds


With everyone;


When rain falls


(between, no, within the drops);


When the clock stops


And listens


To silence easily pulling


Time to the blissful vacuum


of eternity;


When eyes meet


In pure perception,


When the scent that follows you


Diffuses.


When we align like beams of light,


When you are gone,


Lost in structure.


 


Adoring then I find you here


In the space between naval and neck,


In my fingers,


quietly courting the waves


That divide future and past.


Unaccusing


miracle to exist.

Morphic Fields and the Implicate Order: Rupert Sheldrake & David Bohm

David Bohm was an eminent quantum physicist. As a young man he worked closely with Albert Einstein at Princeton University. With Yakir Aharonov he discovered the Aharonov-Bohm effect. He was later Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, London University, and was the author of several books, including Causality and Chance in Modern Physics 1 and Wholeness and the Implicate Order. 2  He died in 1992.  This dialogue was first published in ReVision Journal, and the editorial notes are by Renée Weber, the journal’s editor. 3 

Bohm: Suppose we look at the development of the embryo, at those problems where you feel the present mechanistic approach doesn’t work. What would the theory of morphogenetic fields do that others don’t?

In each moment there’s a selection of which potential is going to be realized, depending to some extent on the past history, and to some extent on creativity.

Sheldrake: The developing organism would be within the morphogenetic field, and the field would guide and control the form of the organism’s development. The field has properties not just in space but in time. Waddington demonstrated this with his concept of the chreode [see Fig. 5], represented by models of valleys with balls rolling down them towards an endpoint. This model looks mechanistic when you first see it. But when you think about it for just a minute you see that this endpoint, which the ball is rolling down the valley towards, is in the future, and it is, as it were, attracting the ball to it. Part of the strength of this model depends on the fact that if you displace the marble up the sides of the valley, it will roll down again and reach the same endpoint; this represents the ability of living organisms to reach the same goal, even if you disrupt them – cut off a bit of embryo and it can grow back again; you’ll still reach the same endpoint.

Bohm: In physics the Lagrangian law is rather similar; the Lagrangian falls into a certain minimum level, as in the case of the chreode.  It’s not an exact analogy, but you could say that in some sense the classical atomic orbit arises by following some sort of chreode. That’s one way classical physics could be looked at. And you could perhaps even introduce some notion of physical stability on the basis of a chreode. But from the point of view of the implicate order, I think you would have to say that this formative field is a whole set of potentialities, and that in each moment there’s a selection of which potential is going to be realized, depending to some extent on the past history, and to some extent on creativity.

Sheldrake: But this set of potentialities is a limited set, because things do tend towards a particular endpoint. I mean cat embryos grow into cats, not dogs. So there may be variation about the exact course they can follow, but there is an overall goal or endpoint.

Bohm: But there would be all sorts of contingencies that determine the actual cat.

Sheldrake: Exactly. Contingencies of all kinds, environmental influences, possibly genuinely chance fluctuations. But nevertheless the endpoint of the chreode would define the general area in which it’s going to end up. Anyway, the point about Waddington’s concept of the chreode, which is taken quite seriously by lots of biologists, is that it already contains this idea of endpoint, in the future, in time; and the structure, the very walls of the chreode, are not in any normal sense of the word material, physical things. Unfortunately Waddington didn’t define what they were. In my opinion, they represent this process of formative causation through the morphogenetic field. Waddington in fact uses the term ‘morphogenetic field’. Now the problem with Waddington’s concept is that, when he was attacked by mechanists, who maintained that this was a mystical or ill-defined idea, he backed down and said, well, this is just a way of talking about normal chemical and physical interactions. René Thom, who took up the concepts of chreodes and morphogenetic fields and developed them in topological models (where he called the endpoints ‘morphogenetic attractors’), tried to push Waddington into saying more exactly what the chreode was. Waddington, whenever pushed by anyone, even René Thom, backed down. So he left it in a very ambiguous state.

Now Brian Goodwin and people like him see chreodes and morphogenetic fields as aspects of eternal Platonic forms; he has a rather Platonic metaphysics. He sees these formative fields as eternally given archetypes, which are changeless and in some sense necessary. It is almost neo- Pythagorean; harmony, balance, form and order can be generated from some fundamental mathematical principle, in some sort of necessary way, that acts as a causal factor in nature in an unexplained but changeless manner.

The difference between that and what I’m saying is that I think these morphogenetic fields are built up causally from what’s happened before. So you have this introjection, as it were, of explicit forms, to use your language, and then projection again.

Each moment will therefore contain a projection of the re-injection of the previous moments, which is a kind of memory; so that would result in a general replication of past forms

Bohm: Yes. What you are talking about – the relation of past forms to present ones – is really related to the whole question of time – ‘How is time to be understood?’ Now, in terms of the totality beyond time, the totality in which all is implicate, what unfolds or comes into being in any present moment is simply a projection of the whole. That is, some aspect of the whole is unfolded into that moment and that moment is just that aspect. Likewise, the next moment is simply another aspect of the whole. And the interesting point is that each moment resembles its predecessors but also differs from them. I explain this using the technical terms ‘injection’ and ‘projection’. Each moment is a projection of the whole, as we said. But that moment is then injected or introjected back into the whole. The next moment would then involve, in part, a re-projection of that injection, and so on in-definitely.

[Editor’s note: As a simplistic analogy, take the ocean and its waves: each wave arises or is ‘projected’ from the whole of the ocean; that wave then dips back into the ocean, or is ‘injected’ back into the whole, and then the next wave arises. Each wave is affected by past waves simply because they all rise and fall, or are projected and injected, by the whole ocean. So there is a type of ‘causality’ involved, but it is not that wave A linearly causes wave B, but that wave A influences wave B by virtue of being absorbed back into the totality of the ocean, which then gives rise to wave B. In Bohm’s terms, wave B is in part a ‘re-projection’ of the ‘injection’ of wave A, and so on. Each wave would therefore be similar to previous waves, but also different in certain aspects – exact size, shape, etc. Bohm is suggesting that there is a type of ‘causality’, but one that is mediated via the totally of the implicate ocean, and not merely via the separated, isolated, explicate waves. This means, finally, that such ‘causation’ would be non-local, because what happens at any part of the ocean would affect all other parts.]

Each moment will therefore contain a projection of the re-injection of the previous moments, which is a kind of memory; so that would result in a general replication of past forms, which seems similar to what you’re talking about.

[Editor’s note: This is according to Bohm’s re-formulations of present day quantum mechanics. In the following discussion, Bohm will point out that present day quantum mechanics, as it is usually interpreted, completely fails to account for the replication of past forms, or the notion of temporal process, a failure that in part led Bohm to propose ‘injection’ and ‘projection’ via the implicate order.]

Sheldrake: So this re-injection into the whole from the past would mean there is a causal relationship between what happens in one moment and what subsequently happens?

Bohm: Yes, that is the causal relation. When abstracted from the implicate order, there seems to be at least a tendency, not necessarily an exact causal relationship, for a certain content in the past to be followed by a related content in the future.

Sheldrake: Yes. So if something happens in one place at one time what happens there is then re-injected into the whole.

Bohm: But it has been somewhat changed; it is not re-injected exactly, because it was previously projected.

Sheldrake: Yes, it is somewhat changed, but it is fed back into the whole. That can have an influence which, since it is mediated by the whole, can be felt somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be local.

Bohm: Right, it could be anywhere.

Sheldrake: Well that does sound very similar to the concept of morphic resonance, where things that happen in the past, even if they’re separated from each other in space and time, can influence similar things in the present, over, through, or across – however one cares to put it -space and time. There’s this non-local connection. This seems to me to be very important because it would mean that these fields have causal (but nonlocal) connections with things that have happened before. They wouldn’t be somehow inexplicable manifestations of an eternal, timeless set of archetypes. Morphogenetic fields, which give repetitions of habitual forms and patterns, would be derived from previous fields (what you call ‘cosmic memory’). The more often a particular form or field happened, the more likely it would be to happen again, which is what I am trying to express with this idea of morphic resonance and automatic averaging of previous forms. It’s this aspect of the theory that makes it empirically testable, because this aspect leads to predictions, such as: if rats learn something in one place, say a new trick, then rats everywhere else should be able to learn the same trick faster. That makes it different from Goodwin’s theory of eternal archetypes, which wouldn’t lead to that prediction, because they would always be the same. And this is where what I’m saying grows out of the tradition of thought that has been around in biology for 60 years, the idea of morphogenetic fields. These fields have always been very ill-defined, and have been interpreted either as Waddington did, to be just a way of speaking about conventional mechanistic forces, or by a Goodwin-type metaphysical approach.

A field which is very much more subtle and which has very little energy in the usual sense of the word, but has a quality of form which can be taken up by the energy of the radio receiver.

Bohm: Yes. Now if we were to use the analogy of the radio wave receiver which you discussed in your book: If you take a receiver, it has the ability to amplify very small radio wave signals. As you say, we can regard the radio wave as a morphogenetic field. And the energy in the receiver (which comes from the wall socket) is being given shape or form by the information in the radio wave itself, so you get a musical sound coming out of the speaker. Now in that case you could say the radio wave possesses a very tiny energy compared to the energy in the radio coming from the wall socket. Thus, roughly speaking, there are two levels of energy; one is a kind of energy which is unformed but which is subject to being formed by very tiny impulses. The other is a field which is very much more subtle and which has very little energy in the usual sense of the word, but has a quality of form which can be taken up by the energy of the radio receiver. The point is that one might look at the implicate order that way; the subtler levels of the implicate order are affecting the energy in the less subtle levels. The implicate energies are very fine; they would not ordinarily even be counted as energies, and these implicate energies are giving rise to the production of electrons and protons and the various particles of physics. And these particles have been replicating so long that they are pretty well determined, or fixed in ‘cosmic memory’.

Sheldrake: Yes, I think one could look at it that way. But whether these morphogenetic fields have a subtle energy or not – I don’t really know what to think about that. When I wrote my book, I tried to draw a very sharp distinction between formative causation and the ordinary kind of causation (energetic causation), the kind that people are familiar with (e.g. pushing things, electricity). For two reasons: first, I wanted to make it clear that this formative causation is a different kind of thing from what we usually think of as causation. (It may not be so different when one takes into account causation through fields, as in physics.) But the second reason was that it is an important part of my theory that these morphic fields can propagate across space and time, that past events could influence other events everywhere else. Now if these fields are conceived of as energetic, in any normal sense of the word, most people assume that they could only propagate locally according to some sort of inverse square law, because most known energies light, gravity, magnetism, etc. – fade out over distance.

Bohm: But that doesn’t necessarily follow, you see. One of the early interpretations of the quantum theory I developed was in terms of a particle moving in a field.

Sheldrake: The quantum potential.

Bohm: Yes. Now the quantum potential had many of the properties you ascribe to morphogenetic fields and chreodes; that is, it guided the particle in some way, and there are often deep valleys and plateaus, and particles may start to accumulate in plateaus and produce interference fringes. Now the interesting thing is that the quantum potential energy had the same effect regardless of its intensity, so that even faraway it may produce a tremendous effect; this effect does not follow an inverse square law. Only the form of the potential has an effect, and not its amplitude or its magnitude. So we compared this to a ship being guided by radar; the radar is carrying form or information from all around. It doesn’t, within its limits, depend on how strong the radio wave is. So we could say that in that sense the quantum potential is acting as a formative field on the movement of the electrons. The formative field could not be put in three-dimensional [or local] space, it would have to be in a three-n dimensional space, so that there would be non-local connections, or subtle connections of distant particles (which we see in the Einstein-PodolskyRosen experiment). So there would be a wholeness about the system such that the formative field could not be attributed to that particle alone; it can be attributed only to the whole, and something happening to faraway particles can affect the formative field of other particles. There could thus be a [non-local] transformation of the formative field of a certain group to another group. So I think that if you attempt to understand what quantum mechanics means by such a model you get quite a strong analogy to a formative field.

Sheldrake: Yes, it may even be a homology; it may be a different way of talking about the same thing.

Bohm: The major difference is that quantum mechanics doesn’t treat time, and therefore it hasn’t any way to account for the cumulative effect of past forms. To do so would require an extension of the way physics treats time, you see.

Sheldrake: But don’t you get time in physics when you have a collapse of the wave function?

Bohm: Yes, but that’s outside the framework of quantum physics today. That collapse is not treated by any law at all, which means that the past is, as it were, wiped out altogether.

[Editor’s note: This is the point where, as earlier mentioned, Bohm discusses some of the inadequacies of present-day quantum mechanics – in particular, its incapacity to explain process, or the influence of the past on the present. He then suggests his re-formulations – injection, projection, the implicate order, etc. – that might remedy these inadequacies. And these re-formulations, apparently, are rather similar to Sheldrake’s theories.]

You see, the present quantum mechanics does not have any concept of movement or process or continuity in time; it really deals with one moment only, one observation, and the probability that one observation will be followed by another one. But there is obviously process in the physical world. Now I want to say that that process can be understood from the implicate order as this activity of re-projection and re-injection. So, the theory of the implicate order, carried this far, goes quite beyond present quantum mechanics. It actually deals with process, which quantum mechanics does not, except by reference to an observing apparatus which in turn has to be referred to something else.

Sheldrake: Would you say that process at that level is a re-projection?

Bohm: Yes.

Sheldrake: And a re-injection at the same time?

Bohm: Re-injection is exactly what the Schrödinger equation is describing. And re-projection is the next step, which quantum mechanics doesn’t handle (except by the arbitrary assumption that the wave function ‘collapses’ in a way that has no place in the physical laws, such as Schrödinger’s equation).

Now, there’s one other thing that modern quantum mechanics doesn’t handle. Oddly enough, physics at present has no contact with the notion of actuality. You see, classical physics has at least some notion of actuality in saying that actuality consists of a whole collection of particles that are moving and interacting in a certain way. Now, in quantum physics, there is no concept of actuality whatsoever, because quantum physics maintains that its equations don’t describe anything actual, they merely describe the probability of what an observer could see if he had an instrument of a certain kind, and this instrument is there-fore supposed to be necessary for the actuality of the phenomenon. But the instrument, in turn, is supposed to be made of similar particles, obeying the same laws, which would, in turn, require another instrument to give them actuality. That would go on an infinite regress. Wigner has proposed to end the regress by saying it is the consciousness of the actual observer that gives actuality to everything.

Sheldrake: But that doesn’t seem very satisfactory to me.

Bohm: Nor to me, but apparently Wigner feels happy with this, as do some others. The point is, unless you extend quantum mechanics, there is no room in it for actuality, no room for any of the things you are talking about. So quantum mechanics as it stands now, I want to say, is a very truncated, limited, abstracted set of formulae which gives certain limited results having to do with only one moment of an experiment. But out of this truncated view, physicists are trying to explain everything, you see; the whole thing simply has no meaning at all. Think about it: modern physics can’t even talk about the actual world!

Sheldrake: But how do you think we can get to a concept of actuality?

Bohm: Well, I think through the implicate order. We have a projection of the whole to constitute a moment; a moment is a movement.  And we can say that that projection is the actualization. In other words, the thing that physics doesn’t discuss is how various successive moments are related, and that’s what I say the implicate order is attempting to do. If we extended quantum mechanics through the implicate order, we would bring in just that question of how past moments have an effect on the present (i.e., via injection and reprojection). At present, physics says the next moment is entirely independent, but with some probability of being such and such. There’s no room in it for the sort of thing you’re talking about, of having a certain accumulated effect of the past; but the implicate order extension of quantum mechanics would have that possibility. And further, suppose somehow I were to combine the implicate order extension of quantum mechanics [which would account for the accumulated effects of the past] with this quantum potential [which would account for these effects being non-local in nature], then I think I would get things very like what you are talking about.

Sheldrake: Yes, that would be very exciting! Of all the ways I’ve come across I think that’s the most promising way of being able to mesh together these sort of ideas. I haven’t come across any other way which seems to show such possible connections.

Bohm: If we can bring in time, and say that each moment has a certain field of potentials (represented by the Schrödinger equation) and also an actuality, which is more restricted (represented by the particle itself); and then say that the next moment has its potential and its actuality, and we must have some connection between the actually of the previous moments and the potentials of the next – that would be introjection, not of the wave function of the past, but of the actuality of the past into that field from which the present is going to be projected. That would do exactly the sort of thing you’re talking about. Because then you could build up a series of actualities introjected which would narrow down the field potential more and more, and these would form the basis of subsequent projections. That would account for the influence of the past on the present.

The set of particles, the whole structure of all the particles forming a system, is the actuality of that formative field.

Sheldrake: Yes, yes. Now how do you think this ties in with the alleged matter waves in de Broglie’s equation?

Bohm: That’s exactly where we started. These matter waves are the formative cause, and that was what de Broglie originally suggested.  However, he wanted to regard the matter wave as just simply a real three-dimensional wave in time, and that doesn’t work well. The formative field is a far better interpretation. The quantum potential is the formative field which we derive from the generalized de Broglie waves. And we say that the particle is the actuality, affected by the formative field. The set of particles, the whole structure of all the particles forming a system, is the actuality of that formative field.

But that model by itself still ignores time, so the next step is to bring in time, to say that there’s a succession of moments of time in which there is a recurrent actuality. And we would say that what recurs is affected by the formative field. But then that formative field is affected by what has previously happened, actually. Now that would help to remove most of the problems in physics, if we can manage it. And it would tie up closely with the sort of thing that you’re talking about.

See, at present we say that the wave function as potential spreads out very fast and then it suddenly collapses into some definite actual state for reasons totally outside the theory. So we say it requires a piece of measuring apparatus to do so. Then another collapse, and the only continuity of this system would be achieved by an infinite set of measuring apparatuses that would keep it in observation all the time, and these observation apparatuses in turn would have to be observed to allow them to exist actually, and so on. And the whole thing vanishes in a fog of confusion. Because people take the present mathematics as sacred, they say these equations in their general form are never to be altered, and then they say here we are with all these strange problems.  But you see almost no one wants to introduce anything fundamentally different into this general framework.

Sheldrake: So the de Broglie interpretation is the way you’re thinking of developing. You’d have this recurrent actualization of something which is continually associated with the formative field.

Bohm: And the present formative field is affected by past actualizations. In the present quantum mechanics there is no way to have the formative field affected by anything at all, including the past, because there’s only one moment that you can talk about. You can’t find anything that would affect the formative field, and that’s the problem.

Sheldrake: Yes, I see. Now this is a closely related topic: What I’m talking about with morphogenetic fields has to do with physical forms and habitual patterns of behaviour. The connection of these ideas to the thought process itself is not obvious, although they’re certainly related. If you start framing the whole topic in physical terms, as I do with morphogenetic fields, then you have to speak in terms of morphic resonance, the influence of past forms on present ones through the morphogenetic field by a kind of resonance. If, however, you start using psychological language, and you start talking in terms of thought, then you’ve got a handier way of thinking of the influence of the past, because with mental fields you have memory. And one can extend this memory if one thinks of the whole universe as essentially thought-like, as many philosophical systems have done. You could say that if the whole universe is thought-like, then you automatically have a sort-of cosmic memory developing. There are systems of thought that take exactly this view. One of them is a Mahayana Buddhist system – the idea of the Alayavijnana, store consciousness, is rather similar to the idea of cosmic memory. And the Theosophists I think took over some of that in the idea of the Akashic record. The entire universe is, in one school of Hindu thought, Vishnu’s dream. Vishnu dreams the universe into being – it has the same kind of reality as a dream, and because Vishnu is a long-lasting god, who goes on dreaming for a long time, it retains a certain consistency. There’s memory within that dream; what he dreamed about in the past tended to repeat itself, having its own laws and dynamics. All of those systems of thought have memory built into them. So you could phrase the whole thing in psychological language. But that doesn’t really help to make much contact with modern physics and our modern scientific way of looking at the world. So, in, a sense notions like the implicate order seem to be a better way of approaching the problem, because implicate order is neutral in connotation. It is something that can underlie both physical reality and thought. So it transcends the usual materialist-idealist dichotomy, which says either all of reality is thought-like or all of reality is, matterlike. The implicate order idea has the big advantage of transcending that distinction.

Bohm: In fact its very essence is that transcendence.

Sheldrake: If we take a broader view of creativity, we have the idea of the overall evolutionary process; now that’s clearly a creative process. How do you think that kind of evolutionary creativity is related to this model?

Bohm: You could speculate that a great deal of life is the constant replication of forms which are given with small variations, and that’s similar to our experience of thought: a constant replication of pattern within variation. But then we wonder, ‘How does it ever come about that we get variations – that we get beyond that pattern?’

Sheldrake: Yes, creative ‘jumps’.

Bohm: ‘Jumps’ – yes; you see we call it ‘jumps’ when it’s projected into the fixed categories of thought. If you were to say that there’s a proto-intelligence or implicit intelligence in matter as it evolves, that it’s actually not moving causally in a sequence but is constantly created and replicated, then there is room for such a creative act to occur, and to project and introject a creative content.

Sheldrake: The thing that’s involved in this creativity seems to be something which links things together, a wholeness which embraces parts and sets up relationships between them. They’re linked together within a new whole, which didn’t exist before. In this creative realization, two previously separate things have been linked together within a whole.

Bohm: Yes. They’re now seen as mere aspects of the whole rather than independent existences. You have realized a new whole, and from that realization you may create an external reality as well.

Sheldrake: So the creative process, which gives rise to new thought, through which new wholes are realized, is similar in that sense to the creative reality which gives rise to new wholes in the evolutionary process. The creative process could be seen as a successive development of more complex and higher-level wholes, through previously separate things being connected together.

Nature realizes this greater whole at a deeper level, which is analogous to imagination, and then it unfolds it into the external environment. In a way a flash of creative insight occurs in the biological system.

Bohm: And being realized now as not only independent parts, but aspects of a greater whole that has new qualities.

Sheldrake: Right, and that realization of a greater whole is what actually creates the greater whole

Bohm: Yes, and it could even propose it, as in imagination, or a flash of insight, you realize the whole in the mind and you further realize it outside by work. So you might suppose, say, that somehow nature realizes that it’s being presented with various things that now have to be brought together. Nature realizes this greater whole at a deeper level, which is analogous to imagination, and then it unfolds it into the external environment. In a way a flash of creative insight occurs in the biological system.

Sheldrake: Exactly. Now do you think that these relations between things which make them part of the greater whole could, way back in time, have given rise to the fundamental forces of physics? For example, could the gravitational forces that link together all matter have arisen through an original creative insight that all matter was one?

Bohm: One could say that in bringing together various things which previously had been disparate, suddenly there was a realization of their oneness and this created a new whole that is the universe, as we know it anyway. We can say that nature has an intent, you see, which is much deeper than what appears on the surface.

Sheldrake: Now, as to whether natural laws are eternally given or whether they are gradually built up – how do you see that?

Bohm: I think, in view of the implicate order, that the notion of formative fields gradually becoming necessary is what is called for. Even modern physics is pointing to that idea by saying there was a time (i.e., prior to the Big Bang) before any of these units (molecules, quarks, atoms), on which we are basing the necessity, even existed. So, if you said there were certain fixed and everlasting laws of the molecules and atoms, then what would you say if you traced it back to the time before the atoms and molecules existed? Physics can say nothing about that, right? It can say only that there was a formation of these particles at a certain stage. So there would have to be an actual development in which the necessity in a certain field grew more and more fixed. You can even see that happening as you cool down a substance that liquefies; at first you get little clumps of liquid which are transient, and then they get bigger and more determinate. Now physicists explain all this by saying that the laws of the molecules are eternal; molecules are merely consequences of those laws, or derived from those laws. But if you follow that back and ask, Where were molecules? Well, they were originally protons and electrons, which were originally quarks, which were originally sub-quarks. And it goes right back to a stage where none of the units we know even existed, so the whole scheme sort of fades out. It’s then open to you to say that, in general, fields of necessity, are not eternal; they are constantly forming and developing.

Sheldrake: I think that the current conventional and scientific picture hasn’t really faced up to this at all. You see, science started with a sort, of neoPlatonic, neo-Pythagorean notion – the idea of timeless laws – which has been taken for granted in science for a very long time. I think that when the evolutionary theory in biology came in, it triggered the beginning of change. We then had an evolutionary view of reality regarding animals and plants, but it was still considered that there was a timeless background of the physical world, the molecular and atomic world. Now we’ve gone to the cosmology of the Big Bang, which is widely accepted. So now we’ve got the idea of the entire universe as being a radically evolutionary universe. And this, I think, provokes a crisis, and should provoke a crisis. The idea of timeless laws that have always been there, somehow pervading space and time, ceases to have much meaning when you have an actual historical Big Bang, because you then have this problem: where were the laws before the Big Bang?

The black hole doesn’t involve time and space as we know it; they all vanish. It’s not just matter that vanishes, but any regular order that we know of vanishes, and therefore you could say anything goes, or nothing goes.

Bohm: There is also the belief, commonly accepted, that at the core of black holes the laws as we know them would also vanish. As you say, scientists haven’t faced up to it because they are still thinking in the old way, in terms of timeless laws. But some physicists realize that. One cosmologist was giving a talk and he said, ‘Well, you know, I used to think everything was a law of nature, and it’s all fixed, but as far as a black hole is concerned, anything can happen. You see, if it suddenly flashed a Coca Cola sign, this would still be a possibility.’ [Laughter]. So, the notion of timeless laws doesn’t seem to hold, because time itself is part of the necessity that developed. The black hole doesn’t involve time and space as we know it; they all vanish. It’s not just matter that vanishes, but any regular order that we know of vanishes, and therefore you could say anything goes, or nothing goes.

Sheldrake: The interesting thing about the Big Bang theory is that the minute you have to address the question of the origins of the laws of nature, you’re forced to recognize the philosophical assumptions underlying any sort of science. People who think of themselves as hard-nosed mechanists or pragmatists regard metaphysics as a waste of time, a useless speculative activity, whereas supposedly they are practical scientists getting on with the job. But you can force them to realize that their view of the laws of nature as being timeless, which is implicit in everything they say or think or do, is in fact a metaphysical view. And it’s one possible metaphysical view, it’s not the only possible one.  I talk with biological friends, and they say, Oh, what you’re doing is metaphysics. So I say, Wait a minute, let’s look at what you’re doing.  And then you confront them with the question of where were the laws of nature before the Big Bang. And most of them say, Well, they must have always been there. And you say, Where? There’s no matter in any sense that we know of before the Big Bang. Where were these laws of nature, sort of free floating? And they say, Well, they must have been there somehow. And then you say, Don’t you think this is a rather metaphysical concept, in any literal sense of metaphysics, because it’s quite beyond existing physics? They have to admit it sooner or later.  As soon as you get into that sort of area, the certainty that so many scientists think their view of the world is founded on simply disappears.  It becomes clear that current science presupposes uncritically one possible kind of metaphysics. When one faces this, one can at least begin to think about it rather than accepting one way of thinking about it as self-evident, taken for granted. And if one begins to think about it, one might be able to deepen one’s understanding of it.

Bohm (1957).
Bohm (1980).
Sheldrake and Bohm (1982).

Consolation Consultation ~ Frank Cavano

“Cancer, stage IV”-

neck

axilla

chest

abdomen

groin

 

Quiet as a graveyard winter,

they forget to breathe;

waxen figures, lined foreheads

 

As for me, I try to force

acceptance between

shallow inspirations.

 

The consultant speaks, his eyes

more alive than their faces.

He suggests to me a

new oral drug.

Wife, son, self

ask questions.

 

I’ll take the drug.

(To swallow all this

alone would be hell) but

 

family support is excellent-

visits

calls

suggestions

gifts

love

 

Six months later

I’m whole again.

Was it the pill alone that

worked? Was it the caring?

What, oh what, is healing?

And is it abandonment we

fear more than death?

PTSD effects may linger in body chemistry of next generation – PBS

Research on survivors of the Holocaust shows how catastrophic events can alter our body chemistry, and how these changes can transmit to the next generation. The result? Our children may suffer the effects of a traumatic event they never witnessed. NewsHour’s Stephen Fee has the story.

There is a unique opportunity to attend a 2-hour e-class with Mark Wolynn, to hear more about inherited trauma and the techniques that can set us free. Click here to find out more.

If you are in London, you can take part in a live, one day intensive with Bart and Georgi on Inherited trauma on April 8th, 2017. Find out more here.   

For online mentoring with Georgi to release the suffering of PTSD through Nondual Therapy, Find out more here.

The Living Horror of the Lynch: Epigenetics of Trauma

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Abel Meeropol (1939)

[image error]

May 1911 – the lynching of Laura Nelson.

As in horror we watch the digital broadcast of beheadings conducted by ISIS, perhaps refusing to enter this raw confrontation with the blood of death, defeat and barbarity, we often hear that this is a throwback from the Middle Ages. Perhaps the easiness in believing that belies a deeper trauma, hidden in the dark night of our collective unconscious. To many African Americans, the word “lynch” is far from historic. To millions of free humans living under oppressive regimes across the world, it even remains a perpetual threat. Sexual transgression, the accusation of intention to commit a terrorist act (by carrying a pocket knife), racial difference, jealousy and poverty, all feed the atmosphere of the lynch. This is a dimension of material and spiritual poverty through which the most bloody and crowd-endorsed expressions of hatred and cruelty take form. The collective murder expressed through lynchings takes the form of racial discrimination, and America’s over 5000 lynch victims have included civil rights activists, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians and others as well as the vast majority of African Americans murdered for a perceived offence to white privilege.

It’s not a private fear – the fear to be lynched. It has within it the contractions of ultimate rejection, disenfranchisement, power abuse and social condemnation. Often, our worst nightmare is not to be the victim but to be identified with the perpetration. In the words of Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, anyone who witnesses or takes part in a lynch is going to carry the open wound of the trauma:

“All thoughtful men…must feel the gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country, and especially over the peculiarly hideous forms so often taken by mob violence when colored men are the victims – on which occasions the mob seems to lay more weight, not on the crime but on the color of the criminal…There are certain hideous sights which when once seen can never be wholly erased from the mental retina. The mere fact of having seen them implies degradation…Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must forever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.”

Scientists have now been able to trace the epigenetic tags – stressors affecting the DNA and signalling fight, freeze and flight responses to the body – within African American populations living today, tracing the population movements into North America, and out of the Southern states of the USA (as a result of lynching, intimidation and segregation laws). This is the science of epigenetics – the more refined layer above the DNA, that masterminds gene activation and gene suppression. Today coined “Post-traumatic Slave Syndrome”, the psycho-cultural inquiry into the damage done to all sides is finally emerging, endorsed by the evidence of genetic science. (See: Tales of African-American History Found in DNA, New York Times, May 27th, 2016)

[image error]

A 21C campaign of terror: blood-postcards displaying lynch victims and spreading the fear and threat of white supremacy.

The science of epigenetics is revealing how the external environment affects us at the molecular level by altering gene expression and function that can, in turn, be inherited. It refers to chemical modifications or “tags” that mark specific genes around the intricate DNA complex.

From a psychological and healing perspective, the evolution of science and more sophisticated tools of inquiry into the nano-dimensions are literally showing us how our personality (that which makes us fearful, bad, good, guilty, a winner or a loser) is resonantly encoded in the form of stress responses around our DNA, and was received by us from our parents together with the cells of our bodies. This coding is formed by trauma and contracted states, or areas of stress and suffering. Healing is possible, when we are able to find peace with what was inherited, and create the inner safety for the genes to return to expression more directly attuned to the real-time environment. 

The aim of the lynch – beyond the stolen rush of the immediate blood-fest of cruelty, lawlessness and the temporary proof that ‘might is right’ – is to spread terror through the grasping of God-like authority over dignity, life and death. An effect of this is learned helplessness, cooperation with systems of disenfranchisement and structures of subordination based on the basic, physical instinct to survive.

Moving with the power of raw emotion outside the structures of law, the vigilanti literally aims to extinguish the forms he or she fears, as embodied in the lynch victim. In the Southern States, this propagation of terror went viral in the form of postcards of lynch victims. According to TIME Magazine: “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz, but lynching scenes became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned the cards from the mails.” To any African American, even such an image of racial crucifixion could be enough to awaken the terror embedded in the raw extinct to survive within the DNA.

[image error]

April Shipp’s quilt remembers US lynching victims

When Mark Wolynn wrote the book It Didn’t Start With You, he didn’t feel he yet had the authority of direct experience to write about the tremendous collective and individual trauma of slavery and the ongoing abuse of power within the racial divide within the USA. Then he met April, who’s healing journey unveiled one of the most brutal and unspoken chapters of America’s history. 

The following is a special extract of April’s story, which is one of the second edition additions to Mark’s book: It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who You Are and How to End the Cycle.

 

April, an African American quilt maker, was in her early forties when she saw a photo taken in 1911 of a black woman and her son hanging by their necks from a bridge. Several white men, women, and children lined the causeway above them. In that moment, April’s life changed. She became overwhelmed with the thought and image of lynching. “I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “That could have been me and my son.” From the day she saw that photograph, April’s anxiety increased. “It was as though every tree I saw had a body hanging from it.”

I asked her if she knew of anyone in her family who had been lynched.

It was difficult to say. In the late 1800s, her grandfather, the child of a black man and white woman, was left, along with his sister, on the side of the road. Her family took in the grandfather, but not his sister. It’s unknown what happened to the grandfather’s sister or his father.

As we know from history, black men were often punished for having sexual relationships with white women. Yet, white slave owners routinely fathered children with the women they held captive. A study published in May 2016 found genetic evidence of this history buried in the DNA of African Americans alive today. The DNA bore traces of European descent, which could be time-stamped during the era of slavery, thus enabling researchers to validate what has long been common knowledge.1

Although April couldn’t pinpoint with certainty that her grandfather’s father or sister, or anyone else in her family, had been hanged, she suspected someone had. At the very least, she carried the residues of a collective trauma, and shared it with other African Americans who felt similar fear.

April felt compelled to research every documented case of African American men, women, and children who had been lynched in America from 1865 to 1965. She uncovered the names of more than 5,000 people and sewed each one with gold silk thread onto a black quilt. With each name she added, April had a sense that another soul could finally rest. After three years, the length of time it took to finish the quilt, which now weighed twelve pounds, April finally felt free. 

In Nondual Therapy, we emphasize that often the complete release of trauma involves awakening to the most unspoken feelings within the shared atmosphere of the event. In our determination to support – and identify with – the victim within ourselves, this often leaves the perpetrator unprocessed. The horrific, socially affirmed phenomena of lynching has impact on us all, as the trauma of rejection and condemnation takes on hellish proportions with an outcome of death. No-one, whether victim or perpetrator is genetically left untouched by being in this field, and we are all also in it. We needn’t warn that history repeats, as history is repeating as this is written, even within our collective dread of that repetition. It is an individual and collective responsibility to find and open an inner power that is deeper and unconditioned by the dynamics of victim and perpetrator. Out of this power, a deeper evolution that arises out of the freedom beneath all human differentiation can be liberated.

There is a unique opportunity to attend a 2-hour e-class with Mark Wolynn, to hear more about inherited trauma and the techniques that can set us free. Click here to find out more.

If you are in London, you can take part in a live, one day intensive with Bart and Georgi on Inherited trauma on April 8th, 2017. Find out more here.   

 

We Are Bigger on the Inside. Space, Time and Nondual Freedom

We might be programmed to believe that inside ourselves there’s a limited space, and outside of ourselves there is infinity, but is this really true? Can any ‘thing’ touched by our consciousness ever be ‘outside’ of consciousness? By allowing ourselves all the time and all the freedom to move through space, it can become clear that the border where the inner world ends and outer world begins is all ways an illusion. Here, we take a short look at the psychospirituality of inner and outer worlds, and the birthright freedom to be able to dance through different points of view. Yes. Like the Tardis from Dr. Who, we really are bigger on the inside than on the outside.

The belief in a separate self utterly depends on a partition between inner and outer worlds. This partition is reflected in the construction of both language and thought processes. The “I” and the “Me” is everything from the partition inwards. The “other”, the “you” or “the world” begins where the partition of the private self ends.

At the same time, all forms of receptivity (sensory perception, learning, nurture), depend on entrance through this partition between inner and outer space. Equally, all activity or expression depends on moving over the borders of the private self. We ‘take in’ the outer world and we express into it.

Idris: Are all people like this?

The Doctor: Like what?

Idris: So much bigger on the inside.

Beyond this constant flow of traffic through the interconnectivity of all forms, the borders of the private self, as defined by where inside ends and outside begins, are highly volatile. This is because we are programmed to grasp towards what’s attractive and that which we seek to make ‘ours’ from the outer world, claiming it as part of the ‘inner’; while simultaneously pushing away that which we don’t want to identify with or feel, making it ‘outer’.

When we allow that every form has its shadow, then we can also understand that this can mean the formation of an outer world inside ourselves. Self-disgust (rather than the direct experience of shame), self-accusation (rather than the experience of guilt); and self-rejection are examples of the internalization of the inner-outer split.  This inner, estranged ‘self’, causes a tremendous amount of suffering as in addition to the inner suffering of division and conflict, the whole war is separated from the resources of the standard “outer” world. There is isolation within isolation, inner abandonment or betrayal within the apparently objective context of outer abandonment or betrayal. The psyche is imploding on itself. The battlefield is the body; the weapons are the emotions of the psyche; and the opposing governments at war strategize from polarized bomb-shelters of the mind.

The culmination of this is in suicidal thoughts and tendencies. “I want to kill myself.” Who is killing who? It is the last call of despair to externalize the self, to make it ‘other’, to get free of the accumulation of all the unwanted parts of the psyche. In suicide, unity is sought through which psychic polarization between perpetrator and victim, action and reception, or inner and outer, seek resolution through physical destruction.

When we journey all the way inside, letting everything that is experienced and everything that is thought be seen as other to that which can see, then it can be increasingly possible to rest as the awareness that is aware of every conflict or psychic split. This awareness can easily contain psychic opposites, as without awareness, they have no possibility of being. Even before the localized here dissolves in this field of shared awareness, however, any point of view or inner location from which to observe the conflict between parts of the psyche is advantageous. When we are aware of two opposing parts of ourselves, a third aspect at a more authentic layer is already emerging. The art of nondual therapy is to affirm that third position – a position behind and beyond the conflict. For a while, this third person can be embodied by the therapist themselves as they present in the inner world of the client. The third position behind the competing poles of duality relativizes and deflates the contractual hold of the energetic conflict and allows an overview which is both liberating and empowering. The shared experience of client and therapist can be like a unified old soul watching two beloved children fighting and competing within the limited field of an inner world. Like every parent, the reflex will be to breath peace and harmony into the energetic war. The fuel of the fight – the psychology of annihilation – never was the ground through which we exist.

Within the wider ‘Here’ of awareness – the terrain in which every conflict occurs – inner war subsides to the wisdom of the interdependency of all things; competition evolves as collaboration and the well-being of the whole system naturally becomes the compass of form.

The ultimate inside – that which is at source of consciousness and perception – is integral and at source to every moment of experience. The very nature of the split between inner and outer and the sense of confinement within the ‘inner’ world can be released when a realization emerges that everything is inside, and that ‘here’ is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

The Nondual Power of Connection: Mysteries of Loneliness & Intimacy

 

“Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.”

 Martha Beck

Spinning on its orbit, suspended as a particle within the infinite ball of the universe, is our lonely planet. Here, humanity is moving in an energetic stratosphere over the surface of the earth, sometimes connected, often hardly physically present. Here, this one consciousness, curious within its space and evolutionary time, looks inwards and outwards to find that which from the core of itself seems to be missing.

Spinning the wheel of my car around the roundabout, here it is again, this morning, these clouds of suffering. Let me taste them. Yes. We are moving through mental turbulence caused by some dense, disgruntled clouds of loneliness. Bad weather ahead.

The collective state of humanity includes a state of loneliness; an ache of separation from the whole; a longing for reunion or at least communion with something beyond itself. This is not the absolute state of humanity. But it is a filter of perception (staining consciousness and awareness) which could be called the state we’re in right now.

Loneliness is at the heart of every spiritual seeker, every lover, every artist and of humanity when it stands as one form. It is between man and woman, mother and child, a scientist and his research, the seeing eye and its own reflection.

The shame around loneliness is intense, burning in wordless form at the upper half of the chest.  Imagine the intimacy when one day a co-worker you have known at the office for 30 years turns to you and says:

“I have to admit it. I am sometimes lonely.”

“Guess what. Me too.”

What happens to the shame when the dark isolation of loneliness is balanced with the risk of intimacy? What happens with the isolation and the belief in eternal separation? What happens when we agree to be lonely together?

The suffering of loneliness is in the blue ice of the glaciers, in the rivers, streams and waterfalls. This suffering is at once moving and silently still through every ocean of the planet. It is in the steam that rises from the Korean kettle in our kitchen. It is in the clouds, in the rain and in the puddles where children jump. The suffering of loneliness is in a single tear-drop, that in its salty truth reverberates an awesome hurting in the wisdom that it never was really separate from the sea.

And I drive on, as I know we will spiral again through the territory ‘inside’ this unstable form of Georgi to the sanctuary of the heart and beyond.

This questioning, needy, searching vibration of loneliness in the collective consciousness will turn, is turning, to the dimension of awareness. It will turn through love to melt in love. Here, at the end of every feeling, and through and beyond all form, there is an infinity of love which is always, already given, a love that cannot be damaged, cannot be taken away and that is never compromised by the forms that arise out of its own fine substance.

This separate self will always be suffused with the suffering of loneliness. The suffering of loneliness is born from a fear of intimacy – its partner in the waltz of duality. This fear arises when there is a resistance to allow what is anyway already here in the human field: cruelty, horror, abandonment, isolation, terror, sexuality. Can we be intimate with that?

Like children who cover their eyes in the hope that they will disappear through not seeing, we block our perception to that which is anyway here, in our collective being. The pain of birth, the moment-by-moment torture of transience and death, the agony of inevitable loss. And then we send in the conscious troopers to “heal it” with love, without letting “it” be here in the first place.

Yet anyway, it is here, this suffering. It is only a small part of what is here. But it too, is here. Suffering itself is love and love is suffering by another name.

Thus, we become internally lonely, directed by a seemingly bottomless pit of need into the unknown to get the “things” that will fill the existential gap. Our refusal to allow intimacy with all the cracks in creation, our rejection of the imperceivable, throws up more loneliness, which in its solitary pride whips up more shame and disgust at intimacy. In this way, we spiral into a greater confusion of suffering. And we lose our ground on this sacred earth, separated in our consciousness, even from our own illusions.

The partner of loneliness is intimacy.

Connection has no opposite.

In connection, intimacy and loneliness are one.

Both loneliness and intimacy are driven by the hunger for deeper connection. Connection defines them. Connection is inherent, yet connectivity can get disrupted by grasping and aversion. At source, the allowance of the interconnectedness of life requires the release of layers of ego and identification with the personality. In the depths of connection, the individual person disappears.

Disturbances around the free flow of intimacy and loneliness indicate the need for transformation of parts of these areas, or the release of them. For example, much loneliness comes forward due to the death of a partner. The grieving one wants the partner back, endures loneliness and rejects intimacy with life. This could become a contraction around loneliness, but for some time, it can be experienced as a natural process of grief. The client is the authority on this. Do they choose to be lonely right now? Are they deliberately blocking intimacy? Also, this is allowed, when the deeper layers of connection to the forms are repatterning.

When we allow the nondual quality of connection, it can radically change our world view. Rather than being an assortment of separate things, or psyches, or humans, or life forms, we experience a vast, interconnected web, in which nothing is left out. Separation is happening and is connected to the whole dimension of human experience around separation. Loneliness is connected to a collective human state, as well as to an intimate journey through the layers of the psyche. Intimacy is a feature arising through connection, yet in itself, intimacy will not clear the channels of connection. What is intimate with what? Can we be intimate and bypass the depth of ourselves which is encircled by a ditch of loneliness? How authentic and open is intimacy, when its agenda is based on an aversion to being lonely? How can we share all we are, if we are not intimate also with its darkest precincts of form?

We can be physically, emotionally and verbally intimate, and still be aware of a stark feeling of loneliness that feels more true than the mask through which we relate. This will continue until we begin to relax in the sentient knowing that the ‘other’ is myself and I am the ‘other’. Only then, are intimacy and loneliness able to dance through pure connection. It’s a natural rhythm of relating through many dimensions of form, holding nothing back.

In connection, there is less dependency on intimacy, although intimacy depends on connection, as does touch, bliss, and ecstasy. In connection, there is no loneliness, although loneliness depends entirely on connection to experience aloneness. To put it simply, when we relax in the inherent connection between forms, there is no perception of “other”: connection is here regardless of division. At the same time, connection does not preclude degrees of separation. Just consciousness of separation connects it to the deeper whole. Sometimes, the best way to realize the power of connection is to allow separation in time and space.

Unity manifests through matrices of connection. Even rejected connections are connected as definitive threads of the whole. How would we define sanity if we lacked the concept of insanity to show what it is not? Sanity would lose its meaning. How would we be ‘OK’ without the prevalent possibility of not being ‘OK’? Every form is irrevocably connected to its shadow. Everything that exists, is composed of everything else around it. There is an inherent inseparability in form, and as such, an irrevocable living connection between all forms.

In the twin-trap of loneliness and intimacy, the therapist can take the nondual position of connection. Loneliness can be an easier sentient zone to allow than intimacy, where wounds can include sexual abuse or rape, childhood trauma, or a deep loyalty to toxic family patterns that forbid intimacy and naturalness, promoting pretence as a strategy for survival. At the same time, clients who have developed an addiction to intimacy – sexual or otherwise – are often in flight mode from that dread zone called loneliness.

The raw energy at the bridge of separation into individual sentient form is both lonely and intimate, and ultimately connected.

Where loneliness and intimacy dissolve, connection is happening.

“THE GOOD RED ROAD” ~ Native American Code of Ethics

The phrase – “The Good Red Road” is a term used by many different Native American tribal communities to represent one who is walking the road of balance, living right and following the rules of the Creator.

The Good Red Roads – Code of Ethics

[image error]1. Search for yourself, by yourself. Do not allow others to make your path for you. It is your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.

2. Treat the guests in your home with much consideration. Serve them the best food, give them the best bed and treat them with respect and honor.

3. Do not take what is not yours. Whether from a person, a community, the wilderness or from a culture. It was not earned nor given. It is not yours. You cannot enjoy what it not yours.

4. Respect all things that are placed upon this Earth.

5. Rise with the sun to pray. Pray alone. Pray often. The Great Spirit will listen, if only you speak.

6. Honor other people’s thoughts, wishes and words. Never interrupt another or mock or mimic them. Allow each person the right to a freedom of opinion. Respect that opinion.

7. Never speak of others in a bad way. The negative energy that you put out into the universe will multiply when it returns to you.

8. All persons make mistakes. No matter how small or how large the mistake is, it can still be forgiven.

9. Bad thoughts cause illness of the spirit, the mind and the body. Keep bad thoughts at bay. Practice optimism.

10. Nature is not FOR us; it is a PART of us. Treat all natural beings as a member of your family.

11. Children are the seeds of our future. Plant love in their hearts and water them with wisdom and life’s lessons. When they are grown, allow them find their own place.

12. Keep yourself balanced. Your Mental self, Spiritual Self, Emotional Self and Physical self all need to be strong, pure and healthy. Work out the body, to strengthen the mind. Grow rich in spirit to cure emotional ails.

13. Make conscious decisions as to who you will be and how you will react. Be responsible for your own actions.

14. Treat the elders as special gems – their wisdom will shine.

15. Be true to yourself first.

“Peace…comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the enviers dwells Waken-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us”

Black Elk, Oglala Sioux