Coming back from trauma can be an absurd experience. Spending 13 years, as that, the non-me I instinctively strive to deny - and bring yourself back, from that! You can't help but relate to the world in a very self-other sort of way.
My mind occupies a pole beginning from the "inner witness"of simple awareness to an awareness of an "object" consciously experienced.
I am not the object, but the watcher. Trauma makes you see that. The fact that the mind can 'dissociate' from the body, can be felt as something 'anterior' the 'posterior' of self-experience, not only elucidates the the ontological primacy of awareness, but also confirms the necessity of the object in "creating" our effected self.
Our self is an object that we can 'create' by attending to our experiences in a non-judgemental and "mindful" way. But for me at least, or the historical feelings I've had with my nerves in my stomach and obsessions in my mind, I have also come to experience the ontological necessity of the "other" in 'mooring' me to something 'out there' . What is 'out there'? Think about a moment when you're actually and truly afraid. A sharp, quick explosion of feeling will emerge from the entrails of some ruminated percept; the fear is 'meaningful', and because it is meaningful, cognitively, for me, it'll engender a process in the brain that makes the body anxious towards movement.
That's the whole purpose of the HPA axis. To get the body moving in physical action - and away from the immediate threat to one's organism. But in our hyper-cerebral day and age, and not living in tune with the needs of our physical organism, the stress response system will get 'caught up' in a self- destructive positive feedback loop, with the negative thought, leading to FEAR (in Panksepps sense) which leads to perception of anxiety in the body - the limbs, neck, shoulder, chest, but especially the stomach; which leads to deeper attentional focus upon the thing that is feared, and so on until some negative feedback can be found to save the mind of the individual from the terror.
My point is, the worst the body can do to us - and the FEAR and fear it creates in our body and mind - forces the human individual into a dualistic posture. Usually, human beings don't find themselves completely alone in their existential suffering. They have a group of familiars around them, whether family, doctors, or friends. These people give suggestions to them. Early life, and the culture we all inhabit, contains 'talismans' of power, objects which promise existential salvation and experiential relief from the pains of human life. People pass these talismanic ideas between one another by talking about them; and in communicating them, we are mutually effected, both speaker and listener by the plausibility of their power.
But suggestion and the power of suggestion can only say so much. Evangelicals, Fundamentalist Muslims and many others have their "objects" by which they swear by; and again and again, they derive power. I would say 'science' is an object of power, but it's power is largely secular - not spiritual - and so strays from questions of love and fear.
When you're crippled and overwhelmed by fear, recoiling from the thoughts, images and perceptions of body as they smolder you with their power, one's mind reaches out as impulsively as the wailing arms of the crying infant, searching for it's mother. The mother-infant relationship makes the Self-other relationship a fundamental core of who we are: the environment is 'in us' from the get go. How can the inside yet be perceived as outside?
The pressures of life, paradoxically, teach us about the nature of life. If on is happy, go lucky, and pushing away all negativity, the world becomes linear, "stable" - or somewhat so - and comfortable. The illusion of this experience works powerfully in inhibiting people from discovering deeper truths that lies outside the periphery of their experience: they must widen it if they seek deeper truths. Which means, they must, in the mystical language of chaos theory, allow a little instability into their system in order to 'expand' their perceptual horizons.
But expansion requires integration, so again, to return to the issue of the 'other' and its most sly representative: thought. Thought is something we do so impulsively that people rarely consider it's ontological significance. But it's significance is simple. For any philosopher who feels 'good' about the way he sees the world, he has implicitly accepted the position - validity, and ontological status of - the perception he is positing by 'turning to it' in the act of thinking about it.
In their most desperate moments of fears, they 'recall' what they 'know' and calm themselves from within with the support of the thought. The thought 'moors' them and provides some solidity to their conscious experience. They feel "captains of their ship" and powerful in their ability to contain the tides.
Anyone who has tasted these horrendous experiences and who has turned inward, in love, to God, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call it, is acknowledging the deepest mystery that confronts the human condition: our embeddedness in a world where the essence works through us yet causes us to feel small and insignificant by the fact of our body and seperateness.
Life and healing comes from the inflow of that power - what can only be called a loving-kindness - into the heart and mind of the person. The viscera, before tightened and scored by anxious thoughts and feeling, is lightened by a feeling of tremendous gracefulness - peace - that paradoxically comes from a 'switching of perspective' from an act of thought. The thought sees the world and says to itself, suggestively, "relax", just 'accept', do not fight what is being felt, but just be with it. And why can we believe that we can 'just be with it'? Because we feel that love, that compassion, that lies at the core and center of human existence; built into us by the phylogeny of human evolution, and ingrained by the loving eyes of a mother.
The other is the fundamental "basis" of our capacity to feel love, to feel compassion, for ourselves, and for others. And in taking on such powerful experiences, the world becomes unified, compressed and folded inwards. Perception becomes more and more attuned, more and more secured by the eagerness of it's spiritness. With every thought upon feeling, a process already in motion becomes deepened, and the force which operates, as if, 'from without' becomes realized by virtue of it's organized 'containment' of the fear that it feels, by help, and with the support of the internalized "other".
No comments:
Post a Comment