I have confessed this to a practitioner of this work, but it feels to me like the Holotropic Breathwork I did, while useful in some respects, as a system works to retraumatize people. In trauma work, you don’t want to, as powerlifters and throwers say, “go big or go home”. Low and slow and steady needs to be the motto.
The whole thing is potentially very useful, but only once it loses the drug culture machismo. Hunter S. Thompson’s motto may as well have been “go big or go home”, but what concrete good did it do him? He was on various drugs and large quantities of booze and cigarettes his whole life, and he killed himself long before he reached the terminal stage of anything.
I woke up in the middle of last night and was really feeling that the whole of human history is defined by unresolved trauma. Religious sacrifice is related to trauma. Religious war–a related phenomenon–is as well. Everywhere you go in history, every where you look, you see–at least I see–unresolved trauma. The best parents, with the best of intentions, can traumatize their children.
I was in a comic book store the other day, selling the remainder of my collection (less Nick Fury #1, Warlock #1, and Avengers King-Size Annual #7, which has always resonated with me on a deep level, since I have long identified with Warlock, who “dies” and is reunited with his people in that issue) and it hit me that what I was seeing on all the walls was not all that different in intent and use than what one would have seen on display in a Roman or Greek, or Chinese or Japanese temple.
Comics always gave me this feeling I could not quite define. It was a sort of escape, certainly, but also a certain empowerment through visualization. I could imagine some psychological part of me was more like, say, Captain Marvel, than me. I could access, in other words, feelings imaginatively that were utterly denied me in the real world. I could access power. The essence of surviving and transcending trauma and learned helplessness is resurrecting a sense of power.
And what did suppliants at altars do in the ancient worlds? They asked for favors. They asked for blessings. And sometimes, they would feel powerfully that they got them.
Then I got to wondering about an experience I got getting invited last week to watch football at someone’s house. I don’t get invited to those sorts of things often, because I don’t really belong. I understand football better, I think, than most, simply because I am intelligent, and have watched enough of it. I don’t know the players and coaches that well, although it does seem obvious Nick Sabin belongs in the pantheon–see what I did there–with Bear Bryant.
And I was watching them yell at the television, as if they had the power to get that runner that extra yard, as if they had the power to make that receiver hold on to the ball, or the ball to make it through the uprights. And it occurred to me that this was a sacred setting in some places, one where the ritual space enabled and even encouraged the expression of emotions, of excitement, elation, despair and defeat, that were not allowed at other places and times, at least for men in groups.
It met, in other words, an emotional need, a very real one, one which is otherwise poorly met in our modern world. It is RATIONAL for grown men to yell at the TV and paint their faces, just like the Picts did of old, and for the same reasons.
And I feel this deep, deep solitude sometimes. This is not my world. I don’t have a world that I have found yet. I like watching football, and I like cheering for my team, but it cannot be sacred for me in that way.
And I felt that in this vast void of human experience, there needs to be a spark thrown farther into the darkness than any other, to illuminate and explore it. There needs to be someone on this planet, here, watching, who can simultaneously look at it from the outside and the inside, and figure out how we move forward from here.
The question is this: how can humankind as a whole learn to process and harness trauma in ways which increase emotional well-being, cultural wealth, social connection, and ultimately enable us to move farther and farther away from our animal natures, into the realm of a different type of experience, a different type of emotion and sensation, and towards the light which hides within all existence? Towards God, in other words?
This, at root, is the question of my existence. My intent is to build concrete ideas, expressed through specific people in groups, and to evolve them through experimentation so as to solve these problems, heal these wounds, and enable a human future, where such a thing at present appears doubtful.
This of course is ridiculously ambitious. But my logic is sound. The work needs to be done, and I can do some of it, at least. You cannot but begin where you are with what you have, and do it as soon as it makes sense to begin. The councils of prudence do not demand all projects begin immediately, but rather in the seasons when they makes sense. That time is soon. I am preparing.