But it seems to me that Burroughs–Robinson–still has a lot of unprocessed experience. He has chosen not to live in the past consciously–and certainly time spent in chronic anger, bitterness, and regret is wasted– but the nature of trauma is that until it is lanced and processed, it comes back, in the form of what Trauma and Recovery author Judith Herman calls “intrusions”.
And what I think needs to be clear is that intrusions can be very, very subtle. They can consist in a latent impulse to feel a positive, happy emotion, and the sudden snatching of it by a sort of vigilant darkness. This can happen dozens of times a day.
If we are beings of light, which is what I believe, the nature of light is to celebrate, to move, to glow. What stops us? Intrusions. Only be processing all the places within us where we stop light from glowing can we allow all the expression of which it is capable on this level of existence.
Psychopathology, trauma, deep unconscious grief and hurt: these are not the province solely of modernity. Indeed, by any objective standard, our opportunities for well being are vastly greater in the modern age than they have ever been. Most of us have never been exposed to war, hunger, thirst, slavery, and all the cruelties that follow in their wake.
There were narcissistic mothers, and cruel fathers in the Buddha’s time. Perhaps they were much more common. Imagine the level of existence of people who could not read, and who could not imagine any need to be able to do so.
So I will say again that “spirituality” consists first in the opening up of one’s psychological being, of healing all wounds, and learning to live happily in the here and now. Only afterwards does whatever we call “God” enter in to it. I have not seen God, and may never in this life. But I have seen a long succession of days which I have traveled clumsily, and which I would like to learn to travel with more skill.