Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 5
October 25, 2020
The Art of Wellbeing (Nederlands)
Bart ten Berge
28 t/m 29 November
Twee dagen intensief mediteren rond het thema “Wel-zijn”.
Online: via ZOOM
De cursus wordt in het Nederlands gegeven.
Data: 28 en 29 November
Tijd: van 10.00 tot 18.00 uur
Prijs: € 220,- graag van te voren overmaken op rekeningnummer: NL 08 TRIO 0338 8445 62 t.n.v. ISSP Haren
Opgave: balthazar58@hotmail.com
October 22, 2020
An Affirming Flame
Yes, we are all one, interdependent, manifold expression of unity.
But what happens when the collective moves with denial, cruelty, violence, and rage, sweeping away individual freedom and demanding another kind of unity? What is going on when the collective demands conformity toward a unified agenda, and tyrants and despots whip up what appears as the passion of the collective? What do we do in a groundswell of lynching, hate or war? Don’t these collective evils show us just why we should avoid passion, lest it become collective? Shouldn’t we then seek a separate self to save our souls? Shouldn’t we then shun evil with the strength of morality and codes of ethics? Contrary to chapter 19 of this book, shouldn’t we let ourselves judge, even if it means standing alone? Wouldn’t we be justified in the deepest sociopathy?
From the micro to the macro, from individual to collective, this is the confusion that leads us to critical disempowerment. The manipulation of the collective field of disowned emotion, such as rage, hate, and jealousy, is not passion but collective release. It is not deep care and responsibility for suffering behind such movements, but a collective groundswell of emotional disenfranchisement.
Each time we refuse to acknowledge a resonance in our consciousness, out of fear of shame or blame, or just horrible discomfort, we avert our consciousness from it. The resonance does not disappear, it seethes beneath the threshold of consciousness. When we do that collectively, there are whole collective pools of rage, hatred, jealousy, and despair. These seek release in the safest possible way, without the risk of personal rejection from the herd. If we can find conditions where these emotions are framed as ‘good’ and righteous, then releasing them can feel empowering. The collective field offers such a possibility.
When two or more are joined in a thought or an emotion, the emotional resonance becomes compelling. When a critical amount of people in a whole nation join up to a field of denial, righteous rage, or hatred, many others will be energetically recruited. They will experience the same rage or hatred directly as if it were their own. The collective becomes intensely personal and the old personal grievances are suddenly endorsed by the power of the collective. Collective emotional consensus can be compelling to the individual psyche, moving it beyond rationality, decency, and the natural ethics of the heart. The individual can become a channel through which disowned collective horrors are released.
The deepest taboos within these collectively disowned emotions, the darkest of the shadows, involve the active principle: the perpetrator. While we are all victims of cruelty, who would touch the perpetrating energic experience of being the abuser? Who can touch the sphere of suffering in which we find the inner sadist or the unthinkable wrong? Wouldn’t we rather murder ourselves through suicide, than admit to the inner murderer?
Our vulnerability to the sways and throes of collectively disowned emotion, and the manipulation of these energies by tyrants, is a direct result of our inner inability to take emotional responsibility. Where we do not own the resonance within our consciousness, that emotional energy becomes available for outer manipulation. The responsibility vacuums in the psyche are the entry points for psychopaths to engineer, control and possess us.
It is precisely because we cannot own the individual energy of sadism that the collective sadism possesses us. It is because of our disposal of the core pain of evil, that the outer evil enchants us. When we refuse to acknowledge our power, the active principle of perpetration, then we become servants to collective perpetration. We get emotionally driven by the psychospiritual disorder of the whole. This is a disorder in which we are limited to a psychology of war: it is ‘kill or be killed’; ‘us or them’; ‘with us or against us’; hero, or traitor.
Nothing on this planet, including the full force of collective man, has the power to separate us from our true nature, and the unity that is inherent to the source of all we are. As Krishnamurti said: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
To realize that the separate self is not ultimately real but is an expression of pain, is to move from the suffering of social conformity into the deeper, integral quality of the authority of true nature.
All over the mammalian brain, there are mirror neurons. These are the neurons of experiential resonance, sometimes called empathy neurons. When these neurons were first discovered, they were understood in physical terms. When the monkeys in a laboratory saw the scientist eating, the neurons fired as if the monkeys themselves were eating. The transpersonal resonance is there, and we respond to it. We experience what we witness, as if we were the one doing it. But this is not just physical, it is also emotional and spiritual.
We have the free possibility of blending in, first-hand with any experience in our environment. In any given moment, we could attune to an endless range of vibrations – from affliction in a tied-up dog, through to the sense of infinity in the sky above us. There is a natural freedom here, but we get caught where we have issues, where there is unfinished business, where there is conflict, or in those fields of resonance where we lose our compassion.
Where we lose our compassion, we also lose our freedom to attune. For example, if we believe everything is allowed except the death of children, then with the death of children we lose our compassion. The universe in that moment becomes evil, together with nature, god, and any ruling authority. We get caught in the field of resonance in such a way that we can no longer meet it. Our awareness forbids this pain because it is not allowed. But now we lost our attunement, so we resonate with this pain everywhere, in the death of a baby ant, a young tree, a news headline or a spoken word that even hints at it. When we see a propaganda poster showing a baby on a bayonet, we are ready to bomb whole cities of the enemy, including man, woman, and child. Through our core pain, on the strength of the collective, we became perpetrators of the very pain we refuse to feel.
Passion as the affirming flame
Passion is the alchemical quality through which the vitality of core pain expresses as an offering to the wellbeing of the whole. Passion gives us the power to stay as the resource of true nature, even amid emotional turbulence. Passion can offer a ferocious love and make us perpetrators of care. It dissipates fear and takes the vitality from any emotion and offers it in service to the collective wellbeing. The collective wellbeing is responsive, empowering us back, from the outside-in. The swell of collective emotion is undercut by a deeper current, arising from that inner dimension where the individual and the collective are one. The power of emotional consensus is dispelled through a deeper power – the pure quality of power – arising with the unnegotiable strength and wisdom of passion.
From this core dimension it is known that as a human being, I am every human being, and I am the one human being. In this, the greater depth, wisdom, power, and responsibility emerges. We become an affirming flame, as in the famous poem of W.H. Auden written at the outbreak of World War 2:
“Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”
The resource of true nature offers source magic, that always outlasts the voodoo of tyrannical leaders. In the place of freedom of expression, passion offers freedom itself. In the place of the righteous rage, it offers the fire of truth. Beneath the urge to control, it offers the fearless power of all creation. Beyond the helpless energy of destruction, it brings existential energy that is indestructible. Beneath the compulsive urge to release emotion, it offers the unconditional release of unfettered, boundless awareness.
Nondual qualities are naturally expansive and are resonantly closer to true unity. Where emotional crisis can make the abyss a formless dimension of evil, true nature opens an unfettered dimension of emptiness which is a field of infinite creative possibility. Here, there are the core sufferings, including the suffering of evil. But also, here is boundless mercy, peace, freedom, love, and unity.
Both the individual story and the collective history lose authority as true passion emerges. This passion is sourced behind the suffering of time. Even death has no power over passion. It is sourced beyond the lostness of space. Even pure absence is passion’s playground. The passion lives on, even after the body has lost separate form. Stirring in every expression of life, whatever its form, this passion offers the realization of unity, at the center-point of wisdom, and this allows the navigation of the collective malaise through compassion that will liberate the whole.
Nondual Therapy: a World of Difference
Sometimes, we need an apparently abstract terminology to label something which is hidden in plain sight. The term Nondual Therapy refers to the obvious. Often, what is obvious is so taken for granted that it is overlooked, unvalued, and abused. The term ‘nondual’ literally means ‘not two’. It refers directly to the experienced, observed, and evidenced reality that we cannot be ultimately separated from the whole.
I, the writer, cannot be separated from you, the reader. Without the reader, the writer cannot exist. Without the writer, the reader cannot exist. In the creation of this text, the writer and reader are one. They cannot be separated. To write I must read, and to read I must write. The whole field of activity (both writing and reading) depends on a receiver, a consciousness in which both writing and reading take place. Without this receiver, the activity cannot occur. Without activity, the receiver cannot receive. There is no existential separation between parts of the whole. All forms depend on one another in order to ‘be’. The fundamental realization of inherent unity shows up in the visible world as the realization of the interdependent nature of all forms of life.
Wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man’s action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought.”
Quantum physicist Prof. David Bohm
The notion of oneness or inherent wholeness applies to an underlying reality, or an invisible dimension, and also to the manifest, perceivable world. The perceivable world includes events, objects, self, physical sensations, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and even the consciousness of being conscious, or the awareness of being aware. Universal oneness manifests as an inseparable field of information. We are one source expressing through the differentiation of the manifold.
In Buddhist traditions, this is called the Wisdom of Interdependence. In humanist African philosophy, it shows up in the wisdom of community (togetherness in unity) which is expressed through the Zulu phrase “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”, which literally means that a person is a person through other people. For short, this is often called Ubuntu: “I am, because you are”.
Interdependence is also enshrined in monotheistic cultures. The very notion of ‘do unto others’ is an ethic based on its wisdom. Meister Eckhart captures this sense of interdependence when he says: “Whatever happens to another, whether it be a joy or a sorrow, happens to me.” The female Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen also observed in the interdependence of all creation, writing: “Everything that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.”
We could tour the world citing the timeless theme of the wisdom of interdependence. Even in the most evidence-based science, ecologists observe the interrelated nature of all forms of life. Physicists uncover that the fundamental act of observation cannot ultimately separate the observer from that which is observed. We affect reality just by looking at it. Our fundamental sense of reality is in an interdependent relationship with the perceiver. We are observer-participants in all that is.
The wisdom of interdependency in the overt world has been expressed by the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh as an awareness of ‘interbeing’. It is not just that we interdepend, we inter ‘are’. We cannot independently exist. Separation cannot ultimately exist but is an illusion based on an inability to inquire deeply into the truth. Even the notion of existence is inseparable from non-existence. When we plunge our consciousness into one, we will always come up with the other.
There is universal, timeless, scientific, and experiential consensus that nothing can ultimately be separated from anything else. There is fundamental inseparability, self-evident nonduality, yet we act as if ultimate separation were not only possible but factual. We demand the right to separate from the whole at the same time that we bewail the loneliness, grief, the pain of rejection, and the suffering of isolation. We seem to be deeply confused in our fundamental form. This is partly because of the confusion between separation and differentiation.
A World of Difference
Out of one source, there is a glorious expression or manifestation of life as a perpetually changing differentiation. Each expression of life is unique, and each moment is unique. We are different in this moment from the moment before and the moment that comes next. Yet this moment entirely depends on the moment before and on the moment that comes next. Differentiation, or uniqueness, is actually a direct expression of unity. The embryo births the baby, the baby births the child, the child births the adult. Differentiation in a flow of unity is fundamental to the unfolding of life. The attempt at separation, or division (as opposed to differentiation) is a kind of violence that thwarts naturalness and the harmonious flow of causality.
When we look deeply into the nature of difference, we find that our differences don’t separate us, they are the proof of our wholeness. To be unique is not to move out of unity. To allow our uniqueness is to allow our unity. Difference is not at the root of our suffering. To celebrate differentiation is to celebrate creation.
The healing process ofDifferentiation
Unique expressions of unity
When this differentiation is fully allowed, then we become free of the illusion of separation and it becomes possible to truly contemplate phenomena without agenda. This agenda, or the attempt to dictate experience, is where the illusion of the separate self builds up. Separation feeds binary mind – it presents reality as polarized, either-or options. Differentiation leads to spiritual discernment, deepening insight, and self-realization. Discernment is a quality of consciousness, whereas separation is a belief based on fear.
Where differentiation is a healing process, the experience of separation is traumatic. There is an energetic shock in the forcing of reality that is necessary in order to feel ‘separate’. Separation is not ultimately possible, but it leaves a traumatic residue of violence which seeds an even deeper need for healing, reintegration, and the remembrance of unity. This deeper need is what propels the evolution of Nondual Therapy.
October 20, 2020
Spiritual Psychology Module 1
December 4 @ 9:00 am – December 8 @ 3:00 pm
€550
The times shown are in Israel’s time zone.
Spiritual psychology differs from conventional psychology in that it recognizes not only the healing power of spiritual aspects of experience but also the spiritual nature of profane experience.
In these workshops, we use exercises, and meditations to prepare the nerve system by safe degrees to unfold into the possibilities of direct experience.
This training builds up the nerve system and foundation of insight over a seven-year period, with meetings of 5 days taking part with the same group over 6-month intervals. Each module is certified in its own right, and until the 4th module, the group remains open to newcomers. The training works with meditations, partner work, and energy points to maximize the personal potential for fulfillment through the lifting and release of depressed or disconnected areas of our energy flow. The workshops support both depth psychology in working with people, and personal liberation into unconditional aspects of experience/
You can find out more about this powerful system of inner growth, healing, and energetic liberation here.
In module 1 we will introduce the energetic bodies and the chakra system and pass on exercises to realize the underlying unity beneath common ruptures in the psyche. This teaching of the spiritual psychology education is grounded in nondual wisdom and embodies the therapeutic techniques and methods offered in her pioneering book Nondual Therapy: The Psychology of Awakening.
A six-month payment plan is available here.
October 11, 2020
Spiritual Psychology Module 3, Israel
24th – 28th December, 2020, 9 am – 5 pm
Zichron Yakov, Israel
We hope to give this module in person, but if there is lockdown, we will default to online.
This group is still open to newcomers! To take part, contact us at info@iamhere.life
Cost: 2350 NIS. Each day includes a vegetarian lunch.
Module 3 invites an expanded awareness through the mental aura. Through bringing spaciousness, balance and rest from mental stress, a deepening embodiment is possible.
In this module, we will:
Learn about the layers of the mental auraExplore the flow of intuition and understandingBring ease to disturbing beliefs that have limited the possibilities of experience.Contact with non-physical dimensions of information and nondual qualityRelax into a deeper embodiment through the pelvic area
October 6, 2020
Introduction to Nondual Therapy
The true nature of healing
“Be passionately dispassionate – that is all.”
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Who am I? What am I? Where am I? What am I here for? What is the point? What is the purpose of life? Why do I exist? All of us, without exception – whether through strife or through life, through pain or gain, through longing or wronging, through wisdom or schism – all of us will come to these pulsing questions asked with insistence by our existence: Who is this? What is this? Where is this? Who am I? What am I? Where am I?
These are the questions of poets, scientists, engineers, philosophers, innovators, artists, priests, mystics, and sages. They are timeless because they are sourced outside of time. They are boundless because they are asked into an infinite space of the unknown. They are fiery questions, lighting up beacons of curiosity, as each answer ignites another question. They are formless, because the questioner is life itself, before any differentiation, into shape, size, or frequency.
Therapy without conditions
Life is asking the question of anything we could imagine ourselves to be. Yet our imagination is limited by fearful anticipations based on depressed conclusions. These existential questions, even without answers, reveal the forgotten vistas of endless potential. They endow meaning, purpose and evolutionary momentum. They transmit wonder, awe and curiosity. They put light on old battle lines, revealing the false claim within every limitation – that this line drawn in the sand long ago marks the end of the world. Suffused with the sense of impossibility, these limits claim to be impassable, that there is an end to being, and that there our true nature is restricted. In short, that we are stuck. Questions can dispel this illusion of limitation, by asking with a naughtiness: is this really true? What is on the other side of this so-called battle line?
As consciousness awakens with open eyes to the living body of earth, it might look for partitions of cities, states, and nations. It might look for the divisions in color, creed, and species. It might seek the tyrannical rift between man and woman. Yet it will not see black and white, but a myriad colors. It will see bodies of water and gradations of mountains, moving clouds and the awesome suspension of the planet in stillness, just as she turns on her axis while journeying through her orbit of intergalactic belonging. It will see unlimited beauty through variety within wholeness and it will see that it is good.
We look for limitations to define us, but where we put our faith in these limits, hoping that restriction will somehow keep us safe, we are always horribly, thankfully betrayed. This is because the consciousness that we are cannot be controlled, contained, conspired, or condemned. We are the conscious life before, beyond and after all limitations have passed. Limitations fail us and we find ourselves falling into the formless emptiness of boundless unborn potential. When our world of restriction ends, we find that we are free. In Nondual Therapy, this self-realization of the limitless within form happens safely, by degrees, sentient fiber by sentient fiber.
We look for limitations to define us, but where we put our faith in these limits, hoping that restriction will somehow keep us safe, we are always horribly, thankfully betrayed.
So, it is with our nominal identity, and the ideas we have about our shape, size, weight, status, and destiny. None of these can truly define us. Consciousness has the power to blow such suppositions apart, as if they never were. Consciousness will shed illusions and shatter the notions that have stressed the spirit, depressed the heart, and numbed the living body. Consciousness is the alpha and omega of all healing processes.
How is it that what seems like destruction, devastation and disintegration can lead to expansion, release and a lightness of being? How is it that our greatest suffering – the dread of the end of our world – when unmasked, can seem like nothing more than a bad joke told in a grainy way?
And-and
It can be thus because of a shivering possibility: that we are far more magnificent, powerful, and brimming with potential than we ever dared imagine. We are our own creators and the architects of our own destruction within a multisensual narrative in which we are the one inspiration. The whole universe is centering in us and swirling in a sensuous storm around the core of our individual doorway of consciousness: the doorway we call “I”.
Throughout the ages, the focus of sages has been on the evolution from the judgmental, discriminating mind, to the dimension of wisdom. The judgmental mind is caught in polarity. It splits experience into good and bad, wanted, and unwanted, light and darkness, winners, and losers. In this splitting of reality into twos, it creates localized energetic battlefields of comparison, competition, and conflict. Out of this warzone of consensual conflict, it appoints a commander in chief – a dictator of reality to which all thoughts must conform. This commander is often the loudest voice of the collective mind. Already wounded and condemned by eons of perpetual warfare, he is paranoid and feels constantly victimized. He speaks the language of fear and threat. His fuel is the rage at injustice. His mandate is to bring peace, and to do this, he wages perpetual war.
Nondual wisdom moves beyond this nonsensical belief in the division into two, ultimately separated, mutually exclusive sides of a conflict that are engaged in an existential war. It releases our consciousness out of the causeless struggle found in the either-or, into the self-evident truth of “both”. It is not me or you, it is both of us. You cannot have a choice without at least two options. Even after you decide on one option, both still are here. It is not either-or, it is both. It is not you or me, it is us, together. This is factual wisdom hidden in plain sight.
In the “and-and” – we find the interdependent nature of all things. There is no light except as a measure of darkness; no mother without a father; no parents without a child; no left without right; no up without down; no rising without falling; no winning without losing; no good without bad; no pleasure without pain; no death without birth; no me without you; no self without other.
They say it takes two to tango. In our physical dimension, this is true. Without duality, there would be no flow of love, no bliss of touch, no peace of togetherness, no movement, and no life. The split into two creates the bliss of experience through friction. If we were not separate, we could not rejoice in one another. If we were not one, we also would not rejoice in one another. All experience is a sensuous celebration of separation within unity.
War zones
The illusion is not in the dance of duality, but in the belief that this tango is an existential fight to the death – to the annihilation of one side OR the other. This either-or belief states that the universe is not big enough for the two of us, and that only one of us can come out a winner. It’s true. We are really, collectively believing in this absurdity – investing all our vitality in the destruction of each other, which is our own self-destruction.
Yet self-destruction is an impossibility because the belief in duality is the belief in impossibility. It is illusory. If I am self-destructing, which one of me is destroying which one of me? Which one lives, which one dies? You got it: everyone dies. It’s inseparable. The wellbeing of each part is inseparable from the whole.
Formed out of the toxic waste of fear, the illusions of either-or thinking are ungrounded and unearthed. They are in conflict with direct observation. My right-hand does not compete with my left hand. My right foot is not out to kill my left foot. If you are bad it doesn’t make me good. My future is not at war with my past. If the world is evil, it doesn’t mean that I’m an angel. Although I could be an angel dressed as a demon in an evil world.
Fear of pain is intoxicating, and it compels our consciousness into beliefs based on death, negation, and existential erasure, as if we could uncreate what has already happened
Nondual Passion: a quality of Consciousness in Nondual Therapy
Fear of pain is intoxicating, and it compels our consciousness into beliefs based on death, negation, and existential erasure, as if we could uncreate what has already happened. As if we could undo time or erase a pain that is already felt. We believe we can “get rid” of parts of who we are, not just from the present and future, but also from memory. And because we cannot do this, we pretend that we can by smothering it with the insentient energy of ignorance and denial.
When we are determined to get rid of a part of ourselves, we need to deeply believe in that part as being definitive of who and what we are. We religiously pay deference to the offensive part. In a way, we enslave ourselves to the suffering we fear. We make it the big issue. We make it matter as that one part which has the power to disturb our universal peace, disrupt our god-given vitality, and distract our cosmic consciousness. The very strength of our self-rejection brings an energetic charge to that which we are trying to reject. We pile the pain of rejection on the pain of rejection on the pain of rejection. There is no wonder that what we resist, persists, with bells on it. The force of our aversion brings force to the whole field of aversion, until all we feel is aversion, until it gets so horrible that we don’t want to feel anything anymore at all.
This is where nonduality becomes Nondual Therapy, through the tremendous power of truthfulness in accepting all experience, even the vibratory cruelty of the energy of negation, within the field of shared conscious inquiry.
We cannot get rid of what has passed, but we can change our attitude to it, expand our range of perspectives on it and deepen our insight into it. Healing does not happen through the elimination of parts of the psyche, it happens through the transformative power of inclusivity. Therapy is not a violence, but a shared process of softening, opening, and safe revelation. It is a process of relaxation into awareness. In every healing process, we move from disease to a fluctuating unease, to a sense of unconditional ease where we even begin to forget what we were fighting for.
To be well
This is the paradigm shift of Nondual Therapy – from a dimension of conflict to one of inclusion and overview. From core contraction of time and space where freedom appears to be loss, to the self-realization that regardless of contraction, freedom can never be lost.
The truth will set us free, and this wisdom has clinical applications that can turn a conventional therapy room into an opportunity for uncensored Satsang, and unparalleled depth healing within an atmosphere of compassion.
In Nondual Therapy, this liberating truth is not a “thing” or a fact from the world of “things”. It is the sense of truth, of atmosphere, vibration, or intuition, that moves through the skin, blood, gut, and bones of us.
Truth is one of the deeper senses of consciousness that will guide us into the core of our own being, through the halls of shame and the old gates of loneliness horrified by the prison walls of isolation. It will lead us out of the whole territory of stress and danger and into the dimension of true nature, the Garden of Eden which is the dimension of our unfettered, living consciousness.
This dance of duality is not doomed to be an eternal, existential slavery, but is an evolutionary passage of passion in which we unfold, by degrees of sustainability, into purer expressions of source. We are hardwired for this direction; programmed for passion; and coded for bliss. Every moment of our existence through varied densities of form is reaching toward this fulfilment.
Imagine or remember a new-born baby. When the baby cries, it is out of need, a need to return to wellbeing. This quality of wellbeing includes qualities of peace, connection, relaxation, fulfilment, and care. Even the baby’s pain reaches toward wellbeing – or “being well”.
Adverse experiences are literally vibratory encounters between our naturalness and the confused and unresolved energies in the environment. There is a shock of dissonance or disharmony. When there is a loss of balance or energetic bewilderment, we seek balance and clarity. Our whole being tends toward the harmony of wellbeing through all expressions of form – physical, emotional, and mental. This process of refinement into higher harmony is evolutionary. It is part of our deeper intention and manifest purpose in being here in freedom.
When we are shocked in our naturalness, or wounded in our living responsiveness, there is a reflex to pull back. Expanding energy contracts. These contractions aim to protect against further assault. They seek to numb the pain of the next blow. They shield us from the outer world and seek to disable that which has been unsafe. We instinctively seek coping strategies through trying to find the cause of the horrible discomfort of contraction. Condoned by the environment, we often end up blaming that exact experience in which we were shocked.
For example, when we were mocked because we were innocent – we blame the innocence of true nature for the mockery. When we are shamed in our purity, we blame the purity for the shaming. When we got into trouble because we were free – we blame the freedom for the trouble. In all, we are conditioned to blame our true nature for our suffering. The vibration of consciousness gets energetically associated with the vibration of pain, and as a result, we disconnect still more from our naturalness, which causes still more suffering.
Part of the effect of contraction is that we lose freedom of movement. The flow of quality energy gets frozen. Vitality gets reduced, and we lose grace and naturalness. In the density of contraction (contracted purity, for example), this frozen energy is denied time, space, and movement, yet it now reverberates with layers of suffering. The pain is not functional, so we numb it, by withdrawing consciousness. At first it is an occasional pain when we are triggered. In time, and without attention, the state of contraction gets fixed. It appears as part of normality, as something that has always been there, that will never go away. At this stage, the very notion of a nondual quality, like purity for example, can seem conceptual. Purity cannot “be” in the real world. Purity is a fantasy of fools; it’s an impure world.
Yet our consciousness is pure. It is made of purity. When we become conscious of the energy of our shame, we begin to experience it in purity. We begin to reverse the process of contraction. Rather than feeling ashamed in our purity, we begin to feel the purity of our shame. As we realize the purity within that field of resonance, and the pure space within the physiology of the emotion, the shame has the freedom to move again. It de-contracts, de-freezes, and reunites with the undifferentiated purity within conscious awareness. Decontraction releases vitality, as the voltage that has been short-wired now becomes available to the whole. A healing momentum builds up.
Nondual Qualities:
Natural & spontaneous.
Evolutionary.
Eternal and infinite.
Sensory.
One with conscious awareness.
Conduits of harmony and wellbeing.
It is no big news that love restores wellbeing, or that peace brings ease and relaxation. It is not rocket science that the energy of freedom brings solace when we feel trapped, or that the energy of joy uplifts a grieving heart. If beauty did not have a tremendous healing impact, then we would not flock in our free time to museums and places with awesome views. If the sense of connection was optional, we would not be dying from loneliness while the world turns its face.
The qualities of our true nature are not optional by-products of increased functionality or the latest medication. They are foundational to all wellbeing. They are the most abundant healing resource in the universe, and they are free, unlimited, and directly accessible to every living being. They are accessible as the qualities of consciousness, and wherever we are conscious, there they will be, whispering to us to be well. It is out of these ageless insights into the fundamentally transformative, evolutionary, and healing nature of consciousness that Nondual Therapy is emerging.
A nondual calling
Nondual Therapy acknowledges and harnesses this natural tendency toward well-being, whether it is physical, emotional, or mental. This is felt as a yearning toward the qualities of true nature. It is as if those qualities at the source ourselves are reaching toward those qualities in the whole. There is no private fulfillment. When we touch the quality inside ourselves, our whole drive is to share it with others. When we lose the connection inside ourselves, we call for it, like a teardrop resonating with the ocean.
When we realize the transient, sensory nature of separation, division, and discrimination, we begin to expand as conscious awareness. This is the very field in which all sensory vibration occurs, including the sense of division. There is a plain-sight, self-evident inclusivity of all phenomena in the here and now and there is boundless peace. These phenomena – physical sensations, feelings, emotions, and thoughts – are of a vibratory nature, arising and evaporating within our feeling awareness.
Healing depends on three principles: time, space, and movement. When these three are liberated through the realization that we are the eternal, spacious awareness in which the movement occurs, the whole field begins to vibrate with greater harmony and wellbeing.
In this, Nondual Therapy is deeply holistic, treating mind, emotional state, and body within one field of awareness. All impressions arise as experience, which is inseparable from this pure awareness. In its original meaning, the word “therapy” means to make whole. Nondual Therapy recruits and resources a wholeness beyond all the old coding of pain. It ventures a wholeness which is not a creation, but a recovery of the pure wellbeing of who we are, and who we will always be, irrespective of any play of experience.
Our true nature mediates the three worlds of universal consciousness, self-consciousness, and the collective unconscious. In this, Nondual Therapy is a resource, directed at the source of all we are in the infinite here and the eternal now. It resources through direct experience, to the core of experience, and from here to the spontaneous true nature of conscious awareness. It works with life, as life, in life.
Nondual qualities or the qualities of our true nature are often misconceived, reduced to a state of competition with negative emotions, and replaced by structures of ethical obligation. Nondual qualities are not primarily behaviors but are spontaneously arising vibrations, with an evolutionary purpose. They are unconditional, unlimited by time and space, meaning they are timeless and boundless. They are abundant, in infinite supply. They do not run out, and they never get lost. They cannot be injured or taken away.
Each nondual quality is accessed through our sensory ability. We feel them. We have a sense of truth, for example, or we able to sense love, peace, or freedom. The sensing of the quality invites it. In this, each nondual quality is an entry to the whole of true nature. As our sensory ability arises out of sensory awareness, the vibrations of nondual qualities are inseparable from awareness. Another way to say this is that they are the refined, vibratory nature of awareness.
The transformational effect of nondual qualities is that they pull form toward greater balance and harmony, orienting the mind, body, and heart toward increasing degrees of wellbeing. This brings release, reward, rejuvenation, and resource, often accompanied by a liberation of consciousness. Nondual qualities are both awakened by the touch of consciousness and deliver a liberation of consciousness.
When nondual qualities contract, through the process of shocks in manifestation through greater densities of vibration, there is a lack of time and space. There is a splitting of consciousness between the dominant perspective, and the contracted one. Contraction is a protective reflex, a resistance, and in this, time and space are withdrawn. However, some consciousness remains within the contracted form, and this claims its own perspective.
Because contractions are a split in consciousness born of conflict with an area of experience, they are reflected in either-or thinking or binary mind. This polarization reduces feeling sensitivity toward all the shades of grey, which can present sometimes as numbness and at other times as uncontrolled emotion. This numbness is also because contractions lack sensory context in the here and now: they are trapped energetic vibrations from the past. In this, their resonance can feel familiar, like a part of reality, or an old unliked family member. Consciousness effects contractions, awakening the condensed energy and bringing the permission of time and space that allows expansion. In this, the contracted energy is invited to return to the source – rather like ice melting into water.
https://www.amazon.com/Nondual-Passion-Quality-Consciousness-Therapy/dp/1912517094
In this book on passion, we focus on just one of the myriad qualities of consciousness. As you will discover, each quality is a doorway to the unbounded unity of true nature. Each is a perspective, or a way of perceiving. Each quality offers a portal to true nature, in which we access a timeless and limitless wealth of resources that empower our sacred passage of individual and collective evolution. This empowerment of the sacred rite of passage is called passion.
September 19, 2020
The Trauma that Blinds Us
Trauma can be like a repeating record, a time-loop, circulating through another kind of time. The same octave notes keep repeating, said one writer, until they get heard. Yet many trauma therapies come short in matching the compulsive sense of truth that can be the perfume of most traumatic experiences.
Many therapeutic models have a hard time avoiding either becoming an accomplice to repression (through trying to negate traumatic symptoms), or of dancing in tune with the client’s compulsion to repeat the story through different forms.
For example, one client has a story of feeling neglected and abused during her parents’ divorce. When that story gets tiring, the same formula continues to be experienced through different guises. The formula is: I am a victim and people are out to abuse me. So, when her job security becomes uncertain, it comes forward again: I am a victim and people are out to abuse me. When a potential partner seems to reject her, again: I am a victim and people are out to abuse me. Even within the therapeutic relationship: I am a victim and you are out to abuse me.
Even when therapy is able to awaken vivid memory, there can be a lingering sense of incompletion: some question still left unanswered; as if a voice in the night is still lost and unfound. I am a victim and people are out to abuse me. Trauma can often form a kind of base melody to reality, a pre-decided, fall-back position, an inevitability that underlies no single event, but all of them. It can sometimes seem that our client is addicted, or compelled to remain in the traumatic state.
What is right with you?
The master of Zen Buddhism Thich Nhat Hanh often comments on our psychological attitude towards ourselves. When you go to a psychologist, he says, you are asked: “What is wrong with you?” It would be better, healthier and more effective, he says, for a therapist to ask: “What is right with you?” From this spacious dimension of true nature in the here and now, it is possible to work from empowerment with any problem that might appear. It’s a paradigm shift in the psychological approach.
The reason why trauma can often seem so hard to heal is that there is has been a critical error in our approach: an error which Nondual Therapy directly addresses. This error is found in our rather massive blindspot to True Nature or the living qualities of unconditioned consciousness. Each time we let a physical event distract us from the wider, living, existential flow of the here and now, we repeat the original disconnect.
What gets traumatized?
Nondual Therapy asks the fundamental question: What is it that was traumatized? What was there before the trauma happened? What was whole, and suddenly appears to be broken? What seems to have been lost?
Traditional therapy often relates to horrific events, but not to that which was lost as a result of the events. The agenda is to ‘release’ (get rid of) the trauma. Yet this is in perpetual conflict with the sense of truth that pervades the traumatic memory. At worst, therapy might even try to medicate the symptoms of trauma out of existence. Again, while there might be temporary relief, this does not have the power to undo what has become the architecture of the personality. It can numb the feeling connection to deeper living resources, rather than encourage it.
In prioritizing the event of trauma and its effects, we have been looking toward the nightmare, rather than toward the awakening; toward the intruder, rather than toward the home that was violated. When we are in peace, and we get a shock of conflict, the peace is that which has been traumatized. When we are in wellbeing, and we get a shock of sudden pain, it is the wellbeing that has been traumatized. The roots of trauma, therefore, are found not in the trauma, but in the experiential space where the shock happened.
Surely, it is not the trauma itself that was traumatized. At least, not in the first instance. Therefore, the origin of trauma (the root of that which has led to isolation, denial, separation, and shame) is not to be found in the materialistic, physical arena of events. The root of trauma is to be found in that which became traumatized — for example, in the sense of freedom, innocence, belonging, wellbeing, home. Trauma literally means “Wound”. It is not the wound that was wounded, but the body in its natural health.
The experiential blindspot
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) defines trauma as a direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury; threat to one’s physical integrity, witnessing an event that involves the above experience, learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death, or injury experienced by a family member or close associate. Memories associated with trauma are typically explicit, coherent, and difficult to forget.
In this threadbare definition, there is a massive, unexplored blindspot in the words ‘personal experience’. What is experience? Is it that which happened or that which was felt? Can it be limited to unpleasant events that scream the loudest? Or mustn’t it also include areas of uneventful, subtle experience, such as the seamless sense of wellbeing, belonging, peace and harmony? When nothing stressful is happening, is there not also experience? Is it not this natural state that has been traumatized, and that now has become identified as a no-go zone, a source of potential danger?
After trauma, the greatest threat is not the repetition of the trauma, but the reemergence of unguarded naturalness, for this is subconsciously identified as the cause of the disaster. This is how traumatic shock disconnects us from our greatest healing resource — True Nature. This is also why we are compelled to repeat the traumatic formula. For all its suffering, the repetition of the traumatic formula feels less threatening the original shock to naturalness.
Shock: a rude awakening
Imagine you are a small child, sitting on the floor, watching children’s TV. You have a plate with a sandwich made by your mum next to you, and your favorite cartoon is showing. Suddenly, there’s a loud crash and commotion in the kitchen. You hear your mother screaming with anger and fear. A man which is your father stumbles into the room, says “hello” in a drunken voice, and falls on top of you. Shocked and in pain, you try to extricate your legs from beneath him, and as you do, he rolls over with his cheek in your sandwich. He fixes you with his wild, drunken eyes, and smiles, cynically. “Hello, child of mine,” he says. Your mother comes from behind and picks you up, hurriedly taking you upstairs to wait in your room. Memory goes blank.
What has been traumatized? What dimension of experience has been shocked so badly that from now on, it seems forever unsafe? Peace, harmony, relaxation, home, and wellbeing has now become a danger zone.
The answer is not found in the structure of personality. Because when you are a child there, sitting in a pool of seamless wellbeing and naturalness, you’re not identified as a person. You’re in a kind of experiential unity with the environment. You are in undefended one-ness and harmony, and this is where the shock of the bad thing happened. In experiential terms, this very harmony now becomes identified as the cause of the trauma.
When someone is suffering trauma, it is some aspect of naturalness or True Nature that has been shocked. It has been shocked so badly that the positive resource — the naturalness, peace or sense of wellbeing — is now subconsciously identified as a source of the threat. It’s not safe to relax; it’s dangerous to experience wellbeing; or naive to eat a sandwich in front of the TV (without having one open for an aggressor). Part of our natural, living resource has become the trigger — a trigger so sinister that we will often seek relief through the repetition of trauma — to make it happen in a form we can contain — rather than risk being shocked again in an unguarded, natural state of being.
Misconception of Threat
Seeking to protect the whole system, the mind steps in with strategies. In a state of fear, thought defaults to binary structures. These polarized thought-forms are saying that it’s either-or: either wellbeing or violence. As the violence previously had the power to trump the wellbeing, violence wins. The mind opts for the violent, unsafe baseline of ‘reality’. An undefended wellbeing is no longer an option.
The worrisome factor is that many therapists, without realizing it, will reaffirm the traumatic state by continuing to give suffering and dysfunction a status which has the power to disconnect us from living resources. Seeking to ‘get rid’ of the traumatic symptoms, they feed into the either-or structure of thought. Often, wellbeing will be viewed merely as a pleasant byproduct, which may or may not emerge when a personality is temporarily restored to a degree of functionality.
We are all drastically conditioned by the software of suffering. We are disappointed in love, so we keep a sense of disappointment and discard love. We are rejected in our friendliness, so we keep the sense of rejection and throw out the friendliness. We are angry at God, so we throw out God, and preserve the sense of rage. We grieve our beloved, so we keep the grief and deny the beloved. In the first instance, therapists need to find and prioritize the source of wellbeing within themselves and to rest in it as much as possible, throughout the consultation.
Then a therapeutic approach can emerge that can facilitate the relaxation that the client needs to rise above the either-or slavery of the binary mind. Someone in psychological distress needs to begin, even for a moment, to experience the possibility that wellbeing has not been lost, that it’s still here, existing quietly in the background to all experience. With some encouragement and practice, they can notice that it’s possible to be in wellbeing and suffer at the same time: indeed, that while suffering rises and wanes, the sense of wellbeing is continuous. It’s not either-or — as dictated by traumatic shock — but and-and.
Return to True Nature
Nondual Therapy will introduce this experience through techniques such as weaving through the timeline. For example, noticing the wellbeing that was there prior to the traumatic incident, and noticing wellbeing that has been there (although now, not consciously acknowledged) since the traumatic incident. It will help deconstruct the traumatic formula by encouraging the felt sense of its key weapons: ‘for example, the felt sense of shock; the felt sense of denial; or the felt sense of repression. These are just feeling sensations arising in the field of wellbeing. They do not have the authority to manipulate and reorganize reality. The more this is experienced in moments by the client, the more the client is able to soften to the world of experience, realizing that the dictates of psychological slavery and harmless patterns of feeling. Consolidation grows as each moment of insight and understanding releases a sense of reward that further encourages the nerve system to reprogram its identification of danger.
Trauma healing does take time, but the game-changer is the identification of how the core separation from naturalness is located within the naturalness itself. After that, the process of transformation, which involves the spontaneous reorganization of thought patterns and stress responses, happens with a life of its own, rewarded by a sense of wellbeing with every fresh breath of air.
September 7, 2020
Nondual Therapy and Trauma
Extract from Nondual Therapy: The Psychology of Awakening, by Georgi Y. Johnson
“It is the character that is doing it. There is a definite, inherited complexity. We are born into a pattern… We are a structure that is pre-established through the genes. There is a biological order of our mental functioning. If a man could look into himself, he would discover it. And when a man discovers it, in our days, he thinks he’s crazy, and really crazy.”
Carl Jung
There is a limit to how much we can control, medicate, section, or incarcerate parts of who we are, to avoid the confrontation with shared inner wounds. Condemnation of the perceived enemy simply leads to the general feeling of condemnation. This is because condemnation, for all its force and fury, cannot undo what has already happened. At the core, condemnation is impotent.
According to The Sentencing Project, In the last forty years, incarceration in the US has increased with rates upwards of 500%, despite crime rates decreasing nationally. The prisons are overflowing with untreated crimes. Consider for a moment that it is precisely the energy of guilt – a deep somatic identification with being ‘bad’, a perennial feeling of being condemned, a background sense of unworthiness – that causes us to do bad stuff. What comes first? The guilt or the crime? Primed as we are to believe that doing something makes us ‘guilty’, we are hardly able to consider attending to the inherited energy of guilt that we carry collectively and experience as personal. It is not the doing that makes us guilty, it is the guilt that has infected our being, often long before we ‘do’ anything at all.
“The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.”
CARL Jung
This sense of being tortured through living punishment or guilt is a horrific pressure on the chest and on the very basis of the body. It clamps the buttocks and tightens the throat, limiting both freedom of movement and expression. It shuts down the experience of pleasure, success, and reward, and contracts us from others as well as from our own source. Left with this irredeemable sense of evil untouchability, the energy of guilt acts out that ‘badness’ on the environment. It expresses itself outwardly, seeking to destroy the projected accusers. Why? Because any connection with the world is better than no connection at all.
So, we lock them up, these criminals, in ghettos of the guilty, splitting them further from the whole, ensuring that this guilt gets passed to their offspring. It’s an epidemic of dosing affliction with affliction, accusing the accused, treating trauma with more trauma. The world gets split into one great illusory verdict of good V evil. Fear to fall on the wrong side of the line between insider and outsider prevails. At the same time, for each us, no matter how much we pretend, the person in and of itself is never good enough. We are always guilty and act as if we can never be proven innocent.
Beyond prisons, we have the splitting of ourselves into the sane and insane; the serious and the ridiculous; the smart and the stupid; the winners and the losers; the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’; the elites and the masses; the survivors and the suckers; the insiders and outsiders; rising stars and those who are ‘going down’; saints and sinners; wives and whores; successes and failures.
We scramble reflexively to become one side of the coin while pushing away the other, flattening the dimension of life into perpetual self-appraisal and perpetual failure. The so-called good stuff totally depends on the bad stuff to be good. Without the good guys, the bad guys cannot exist.
“The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.”
PLATO
Whether outside of ourselves in the way we perceive others, or within our own psyches as it struggles through layers of inner conflict, we will see a balancing happening through these scales of duality. We grasp towards the light, the darkness emerges. We grasp our sense of self and find ourselves disappearing.
We need the insane people to make us feel sane. They define our assumed normality. We depend on the poor people to bring value to our riches. Our pleasure depends on our pain. The heaven in one corner of the planet depends on a hell somewhere else in the vicinity.
Every contraction has the potential to become a full trauma, just as every trauma will leave a legacy of contractions. This is true in an individual lifetime, but also in the plethora of personal stress patterns inherited in our genes. While a contraction is a psychologically acute situation, trauma is chronic. Many contractions can be symptoms of a core trauma and can continue to spiral around the trauma until it core imbalance is addressed. While contractions can play out with even a thin thread connecting them to the nondual quality that has become frozen (for example, with issues around rejection), in cases of trauma that thread has been broken and can be restored only through a progressive reintegration of the experiential universe of trauma with the experiential universe of the whole. In trauma, all sense of belonging here is lost, and because the loss of this connection to the feeling of belonging is simply unworkable in ‘normal’ life, the dimension of experience is simply severed from the whole. In this, the traumatic state forms a separate inner universe beneath the floor of normative consensual reality. It is like a rabbit hole. One moment a person is feeling fine, and then he sees a sick dog on the street which triggers his trauma, and then suddenly he is there: inside the trauma tunnel.
Part of what gives trauma its power over the human psyche and what allows it to pass through the genes from one generation to another is that in the splitting off from consensual, normative reality, there is an opening to a far greater reality. In the rift between our usual structure of personality and the traumatic state, there is pure emptiness, alive with the sense of truth. This sense of truth becomes associated with the traumatic state as a foundational reality. This gains a sense of momentous importance. This deeper truth is preserved in energetic memory to help future generations survive. However, what is mostly inherited is a legacy of incongruous fear responses resulting in confusion of how to integrate these with a fundamentally safe environment. This confusion separates people still further, as they have no good reason to be traumatized – nothing happened! This is partly why the acknowledgment of the epigenetics of inherited trauma and PTSD is a game-breaker in healing. It is also why Nondual Therapy – allowing whatever comes forwards as a perfect feeling response in the here and now to the needs of the form, can move more deeply than conventional therapy based on rationality and behavioral conformity.
At the same time, because of the rift of pure, underlying emptiness revealed through the splitting of part of the psyche, our traumas represent opportunities for spiritual awakening. The underlying truth in the split between one part of the persona and the other can be recognized as itself a resource – not just an ‘empty’ space. In addition, traumatic states, with their ability to affect perception and the nature of experience with a degree of certainty, can make a mockery of our belief in the permanence of our perceived reality. They can bring humility to the whole phenomena of personality and open up the possibility of perceiving more essential, existential layers beyond all forms of identity.
“Because its effects are so intense and pervasive, trauma can be a catalyst for profound surrender and awakening. I see it as a wake-up call for the human race.”
Lynn Marie Lumiere
The human psyche is in a dance of duality that will become increasingly contracted in multiple forms of paradox and senselessness until we open and restore the flow of the nondual qualities out of which every duality emerges. Only then is there space for healing. Only then, do we get freedom in the dance of duality, and only then is the dance liberated to move into the harmony and rhythm of the universal whole.
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August 8, 2020
The Tragic Magic of Addiction – Nondual Therapy
Extract from the new book: Nondual Passion
What is the official definition of addiction?
“Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences. Prevention efforts and treatment approaches for addiction are generally as successful as those for other chronic diseases.”
This standard definition states that addiction is caused by interactions between our brain circuits (read: conditioning); genetics (read: inherited trauma, stress responses and resilience); environment (read: education, culture, society, collective pathology); and individual life experiences (read: trauma). When you put it together, you find that the causes of addiction include just about everything – they are personal, collective, infective, contagious, inherited, historic and mental. All of these are mixed up together in a perfect storm – the storm that makes you an addict. But it is also the storm that makes you human.
Addiction is stated as a chronic medical disease, with holistic causes combining just about everything – biology, nature, and nurture. Something in the power, methodology and logic of addiction is so prevalent as to be part of our makeup, but it only becomes “addiction” when it is judged as bad or destructive to the wellbeing of the whole. Yet part of the badness and destructive effect of addiction is the result of the accusation of badness. Perhaps initially we sought out relief through certain rituals because we were in pain. When that habit is judged, the habit is made bad, but also our pain is made bad. The whole lot becomes “bad”. We are becoming badness. The door of compassion closes.
After judging addiction as bad, we add to the addict the energy of badness, shame, and guilt, which has a potency that can demonize the core pain – giving it a resonance of evil. The accusation of being a perpetrator of harm accentuates the contraction and its unbearable resonance. As it is bad, destructive, and evil, we seek to control addiction and the addict. Yet when this control involves humiliation, domination, forced submission, repression, and oppression, when it has the resonance of prohibition, it further demonizes the pain. It repeats the original movement of contraction or trauma. It isolates and disconnects the person from their own center and vitality. In the words of addiction expert Scott Kiloby:
“Emphasizing “I should” and “I shouldn’t” thoughts around an addictive substance or activity actually helps keep the addiction around, as it creates a sense of self that seems to have control. If control were truly the answer to addiction, humans wouldn’t still be addicted, because everyone is already trying to control addictions. It isn’t working.”
Who decides between the “should” and “shouldn’ts” in our lives and according to what value system? Often the conditions we put on each other reflect the conditions we put on ourselves. These conditions are mostly born of fear and pain. They are based on avoiding that outcome or that pain. We seek to deal with pain rather than to heal it. To heal it, we need to find it, wherever it is hidden, and behind whatever it is hidden. Even when our deeper pain is hidden behind a bottle, inside an addict who appears as the stranger that we just can’t forgive, our deeper need is to acknowledge that we are responsive to this pain. When we deny the pain, loss, or trauma within addictive patterns, and begin to dictate behaviors on others, we assume a standard without really standing for it, and then we begin a whole, circulating pandemic of shame and blame.
The habit of needing habits
How can we make this natural, rhythmic, ritualistic support system of repeating patterns of behavior work for us and not against us? How can we take the prison bars and find a scaffold for freedom in form – a ladder to the heavens?
An addictive tendency that brings wellbeing for the whole is clearly more needed than one that brings illness and death. How, then do we harness the power of addiction for the greater good?
“The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.”
Gabor Maté
Not by denying it, but by riding its power. The pressure, compulsion, vitality, and transformative power within the movement of passion resembles the addictive mechanism, only here there is an orientation toward the wellbeing of others through which the biochemistry of reward is spontaneously arising. We can take the passion but leave the battle for the bottle behind.
What is an addict? Here, we see the definition is not just covering substance abuse (food, alcohol, drugs), but also behaviors. What is behind both substance and behavior is the factor of compulsion. Our actions are compelled by a force which is greater than the authority that says we should not. To be compelled is to be forced, so addiction is when we are forced into a certain pattern. Yet the addict is often treated as the one having the compulsion – they are compulsive – rather than the one that is compelled. There is a split into two – a war going on between good and bad – which delivers a kind of stress and distress that seeks relief, one way or another.
Within this compulsion is the intense energetic charge of pain. Empowering addiction is that sense of unbearable agony in the psyche which is at once deeply true and utterly disavowed. We find that torment in the areas where we lose our compassion, where we break- down, where the resonance is an ongoing torture and is therefore unforgivable. In the words of Gabor Maté:
“Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”
The addictive substance or behavior is the one thing that delivers a momentary sense of wholeness, or freedom from conflict. The divisive nature of the ongoing war is also found in the splitting into competing external authorities: the authority that says you must not drink that whiskey, and the authority that says that you must. Either way, the whiskey is the issue, so it always wins. The substance becomes the common ground between the “should” and the “shouldn’t”. At least with the whiskey, we move beyond conflict. In whiskey, we are one.
The standard definition of addiction continues with the stipulation that these compulsions are those that have “harmful consequences”. Notice the judgment. Judgment heaps the energy of badness on whatever it is that you are compelled to do. It puts badness on your compulsion. This badness includes the vibrations of shame, guilt, and abuse. Your addiction has consequences, so now you are not a victim, but a perpetrator, so we can add cruelty to the list. There is a visceral threat of evil in it, and that evil is pushed toward the addict with his generational, environmental, cognitive, personal, brain mess of perpetual badness. This badness is constantly refilled by the scorn of others, so the addict now also suffers extra helpings of loneliness, isolation, condemnation, and despair. The self-destruction drive-thru goes turbo.
At this stage, let us breathe and take in a timely reminder: we are all prone to addiction. We are all addicts. We are addicted to being stupefied by our smartphones and to shutting down socially with social media. We sit stunned in our addiction to the news and to movie channels of terror, suspense, and ridicule. We are addicted to fast food, slow thought, and chemical killers of pain. We are compelled into easier ways to shop, lazier ways to survive, and cheaper ways to ignore the itching questions of our own life force. We toast the destruction of the planet with petrol and fly everywhere while bellowing smoke across the oceans. We are compelled to attend to sexist abuse, tyrants, war, atrocity and injustice and we revel in it, as long as it is far out there, away from our private, separate inner world.
We are addicted because the horror somehow makes us feel alive. We are addicted because in some forsaken precinct of the soul, we feel slightly less alone. And when we are done fumigating the soul through projection on “the world”, we re-engage with lame small talk and grandiose blame.
We are addicted to being “someone” and to losing no one. We drown ourselves in casual desire and snort the toxins of gender hate to spice things up. We lie and we buy ourselves into prisons of choice. We are all addicted and despite the harmful consequences, we have sorely neglected and denied out inborn passion for life.
If that last paragraph of holy rant makes you angry, let it. This is your own intimate passion on the rise.
If, for a moment, we could take the sense of badness out of our collective state of addiction, and instead be curious about this tendency to seek wellbeing in all the wrong places, then we begin to find a middle way to wholeness. What we know for sure, between our sorry state as addicts and our unfulfilled state as good citizens, is that both are seeking wellbeing. Yet wellbeing is not a stagnant state of “good-ism”. It is a tremendously powerful magnetic force. It is an impulse that runs through everyone and everything – from the source of me, directly to the source of you. It is where the point of me finds the point of you. Wellbeing seeks itself through the manifold. It is unstoppable. It is right here: where we are one.
July 18, 2020
A Sorry State of Affairs
There’s no point crying over spilled milk, yet the purpose and passion of these pages is to show you that there is. Our aim is to transmit something of the tremendous benefit available to all of us, when we manage to release some of the limitations we have around passion. Our refusal to cry over spilled milk is one of these. Our crying has no purpose, we are taught. It’s redundant because it can’t un-spill the milk. It’s senseless. Yet our crying has its own point, it is its own expression of loss, inseparable from all losses. The demand that we repress our pain is installed and updated by social norms. These unwritten codes of limitation and lack refute, pollute, and mute the naturalness of passion.
It all begins with debasing, vernacular catchphrases that coerce us as children into becoming small, inconsequential, and limited. It is a disowned semantic packaging passed from generation to generation, disguised as protective and yet crippling to the mind, heart, and health. Like all conditioning, it talks through nonsensical idioms, consensual “realities”, shadowy threats that we trusted – out of a longing to belong. We signed up to this system long before we could read the small print disclaimer disowning our brilliance. We got committed long before we knew that it would all end in tears.
“He thinks the sun shines out of his ass.” This is a British expression which is at best humorous and at worst outright cruel. It’s often used against someone who is passionate and alive with a mission. When he comes with a novel and brilliant idea, the admonishment can be: “Don’t make waves,” or “Don’t rock the boat!” When he moves with esteem and without social fear, we will say he is “full of himself” and that he “think he owns the place.” Pride comes before a fall as such people are condemned as “cocksure” or “big-headed” and “full of airs and graces.” They are: “too big for their boots,” and they think that: “the whole world revolves around them.” Some might say that they constantly “blow their own trumpets.”
Even if they are inspired, idealistic, altruistic, and well-meaning, it will not help, as it’s well known that: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
No wonder, when we, the accuser and the accused, feel a niggling itch of life, an impulse to create or find meaning, that we sabotage ourselves and feel ashamed of the secret wish to fulfill some deeper promise. It can only be selfish and narcissistic to want to be seen in the uniqueness of all we are. It’s grandiose and attention-seeking. Just the scent of it is asking for a good whipping, if not from the inner critic, then from the society of norms we all learned to hate and hate to love.
To use another tired idiom, the human psyche is indeed in: “A sorry state of affairs.”
Yes, it is sorry – a word derived from the Old English sārig, meaning ‘pained, distressed’, derived from West Germanic origin, from the base of the noun ‘sore’. It is a kind of addiction to a state of suffering. We feel sore that we exist, sore that we make things hard on one another; sore that we’re alive. This soreness is the apology we give for taking space and time as if being here in time and space was an offense. We are sore in our movement, sore in our eminence, sore in our freedom, sore in our truth, and sore in our passion.
Within this sorry state of affairs, we look for permission from each other to be free, and we feel both dreadful and dreaded when we’re not. Resentment grows, and our “sorry” becomes increasingly cynical. This sardonic disconnect, the suffering of which is also denied space, time, and permission, curdles into depression. Even the soreness gets sour. I’m so sorry that I’m sorry.
The depression, which was at first a feeling, in time becomes the lack of feeling, until at a certain stage there seems to be nothing there at all except a vaguely irritated boredom and perhaps some TV induced fantasy. From head to tail, from face to the place where the sun don’t shine, we get numbed down, dumbed down, and messed around.
How would it be to really make waves, or to rock the boat without fear of capitulation, launching head-first into the river of life? How would it be to find ourselves free of the tyranny of the soreness of being, and to feel suddenly suffused with wondrous airs and graces? To notice that the sun shines brightly, unashamedly out of the ass; to know that you own this place; to be sure of your cock and to feel the bigness of your head, while standing in tight boots with the surefire knowledge that the whole universe is revolving around you, as you blow your own trumpet and pave a road to heaven or hell – or wherever is needed – with the pure gold of good intention?
How would it be to return to the playground of pure possibility, Passionately alive and free?
To unlock and release the potential of the passion that can rise and move through all that we are, we need to reclaim the blueprint of the prison. Between states of boredom, resistance and depression, and the distractions of afflictive patterns, we need to find the cracking points. We need to let our pain be the fire of passion – moving from the helplessness, lack, and missing, to fury, vengeance, and the most outrageously embodied love for life.
For better or worse, through brimstone and fire, we need to get Passionate about liberating the tidal power of passion. The truth of our pain feeds the fire of our passionate becoming.
There is no point crying over spilled milk, except for when there is.
“If you’re always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”
Maya Angelou
I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty
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