We are having one of those pleasant spring days where the wind is blowing through in periodic heavy gusts, the sky is overcast and the clouds scurrying along. The trees are hissing the breeze as it trots through (yeah, I am trying to be vaguely literaryish). I love days like this. They always feel pregnant with possibility.
Looking out my window, at the tree outside my window, it occurs to me how hard it has been, all my life, to feel–to ALLOW myself to feel–relaxed happiness. The alarm bell is always ringing, and even if I forget it in powerful moments here and there, the screech of the damned thing always finds its way through. The moment ends, and another moment–one not all that different, really, than the moment of disaster that one finds in many sci-fi video games like Half Life–begins, and continues.
Pleasure requires relaxation. This means people who cannot relax, cannot really find authentic pleasure. And thinking about this, I realize that the alternative, the worse alternative, is to find STRONG experience, since at least that constitutes a break from the status quo.
I think this is the root of sadism. It represents an escape from trauma, for a time.
The deeply traumatized have really two continual demands made of them by their nervous system: fear, fight, and feel shame, by the amygdala, and feel nothing, by what I will call the lizard brain. Feel dead. Look at your life through a window or perhaps even an open door, but never go out.
And as I think about it, perhaps what the lizard brain SEES when it looks out the window, as I referenced yesterday, is the amygdala. Why feel, when what you get to feel is painful?
So it is emotionally logical, if one accepts the SYSTEM as a whole–if one accepts that the fight, flight, shame and dissociative responses will never disappear, to create moments where they can at least be held back for a moment, where the person can at least rest, while waking, for a few brief moments.
And if you can make OTHER people feel fear and shame, then that accomplishes that. If you can make other people feel intense pain, then it pulls you out of your own dissociation, and reconnects you, briefly, with the world.
Here is a simplistic sounding but I think utterly true statement: the future of the world depends on all of us learning how to relax deeply. There is no more important priority, and nothing more intrinsically and necessarily spiritual than deep, deep relaxation.
And I will reiterate, as I do from time to time–if I were counting, it might be a rererereiteration–that Kum Nye postulates three levels of relaxation, and this makes perfect sense to me. I’ve experienced the first two a lot, and gotten faint whiffs of the third here and there.
Getting a good massage is the first level. Sociopaths can easily reach the first level. Bill Gates no doubt has some means of reaching the first level daily, if he even has an affective pulse and reacts to anything with emotions.
The second is what therapists using, say, neurofeedback, want to allow, but limit, which is that level where all the shit is stored in the dark. All the painful emotions that you dealt with by allowing them to disappear become visible. They pop up like balloons held underwater. This level can last a long time. This work is inherently spiritual work. Getting through this level is the main point of Kum Nye.
The third level is, properly, meditation. It is finding, within a relaxed state, energies and thought forms that are positive, and slowly allowing them to build and grow, through focused attention. This is not Kum Nye, properly speaking. Kum Nye is intended just to get you ready for something bigger and higher. But it is already much more than most Americans will ever see or be exposed to in their lifetimes of worry, consumption, doubt, fear, and eventual death.
In most of those lives they will become alienated from their children–in no small measure due to buying into the American Dream propaganda of nicer houses and bigger better cars–and wind up old and not very wise.
Growing old without growing wise is really a sort of abomination against nature. Part of the problem is that we are taught to value science, and you don’t learn science as a human growing old. You grow to learn how life works. So our priorities start out a big skewed. But in my experience, particularly for people who live comfortable, unchallenging lives, you can get old without knowing much, without having much useful to say about life to anyone.
Oh, I need to roll. Few thoughts for a Wednesday morning. Wotan’s Tag.