There Is No Place To Get To - 1/3/20

A long time ago a magnificent and terrible event happened on this planet – a species became sentient. That species is, of course, human beings. This event was magnificent because for the first time on this planet an animal was aware that it was aware. A sense of “I-ness” presented itself to the world. Unprecedented to say the least.

But it was also tragic because there was no one there to usher this new sentient being into adulthood. As a consequence of this, this fragile “I-ness” became terrifying to the newly aware species. The world, which prior to sentience was just the world, all-of-a-sudden became very big, very scary and very other. The emotions, normal energetic movements within the body-mind, now became overwhelming forces that seemed to inundate the “I-ness” and they seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. The “I-ness” experienced things happening to it that seemed out of its control.

These emotional movements became too much for the new consciousness to handle so the “I-ness” tried to protect itself in whatever way it could – it split from the body. It set up “firewalls” to protect itself from the emotions=huge energies which continually flowed up the circuits of the lower brain regions into the neocortex. This cordoning off the mind from the body resulted in what some spiritual people call the mind / body split or spirit / matter split. But all it really is, is the result of young person’s mind trying to cope with overwhelming forces. Unfortunately, this was our first real trauma as a species and the underlying conflict became the fear of annihilation / the fear of death and has dominated the psychological development of our species ever since. In essence we all suffer from a form of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

By splitting off from the body, the mind now felt isolated and alone. A new structure arose to handle this isolation – the ego. The ego, an artificial construct whose job it is to keep the “I-ness” safe in whatever way it could. But because the person to whom this ego-formation is occurring is only two or three years old, the available possibilities for safety are limited so the defense mechanism, though ingenious, reflect the limitations of a small child. And wherever and whenever we cut off another overwhelming emotional state became another place that a part of us became stuck in “time”.

Everything that was not mind was now considered a threat including our own bodies. Thus connection to the “love” which seems to underlie the trauma was lost to. In its place came fear and hatred. Warfare became the status quo. The ego in order to protect had to re-create the universe inside the “head”. However, since the ego cannot know the whole universe, its structure is partial and incomplete even though it thinks it is whole and perfect. But whenever anyone threatens the ego’s universal construct it gets mad and attacks back. I will explore these concepts more in future blogs.

But this splitting off is necessary, believe it or not in order to develop a stable sense of “I”. Consciousness has to go through this phase. “Who am I really?” becomes the question. What are my potentials? What are my essential qualities? These are questions which should be explored by the developing human, but since very few have showed anyone in our species how to actually do this while we were still young, we have simply “inherited” the dysfunctional patterns of our families which were inherited from their families for time immemorial. Our species has never been adults emotionally, we’ve always reflected the emotional level of young children. And we’re scared out of our wits whenever strong emotions present themselves. We simply don’t know how to handle them.

And to explain our dysfunction our religions have created concepts like Original Sin and that we must transcend this body which we feel separate from and which is going to die someday. But this it the great mistake. We are meant to be bodies that are self-aware, not just minds floating off in space. And, believe it or not, our “enlightened” state is merely the reconnection of the mind with the body as a holistic human being. Our natural state is simply beneath our trauma, it’s not something that is conferred upon us or we attain to. It’s simply who we really our. In essence, there is no place to get to. Our authentic selves are just hidden behind psychological firewalls. We just have to heal the trauma of 10,000 generations. Sounds simple doesn’t it. It’s not. It requires that we make each of the defense mechanisms obsolete by making our ego feel safe enough to relinquish control of that mechanism. This takes time and a lot of self-love. 

Finally, if we don’t have a stable sense of “I” when the body and the mind reintegrate, then we will lose our sense of “I” in the enormous field in which we are trying to be reincorporated. It would be as if we became animals again. Actually though, the reintegration won’t occur until we have a strong sense of “I”, which, as you can guess, doesn’t happen to a lot of humans, though nowadays it seems to be happening a lot more frequently than before. We are reaching a threshold and hopefully when enough people have shifted to the holistic state, the whole species will switch over just like a light switch being thrown.