Intrapsychically, I think resistance to change looks like violence.
Certainly, in most of us, externally, we get violent when people violate social rules, right? If someone says something rude, or cuts you off in traffic, or steals from you, or is actually violent with you in speech or action, these are what trigger anger, are they not? There is a way things are supposed to be, and when that “way” is violated, anger is the result.
Kun Zhi is the place of conflict. It is the dark place, where there is anger on the horizon, fires lit, dim shadows fighting in the distance over you don’t know what. It is your nasty self, the violence you may watch nightly on TV but refuse to feel in yourself. It is the part that makes you watch “comedies” about assassins. Ha, ha, ha.
I feel like a part of spiritual work is going through a meat grinder. It is taking all the stable forms that you thought were you, and destroying them completely, and this is every bit as painful as it sounds. It hurts like a sonofabitch.
You know, we look at pictures, or maybe have ourselves met, these yogis, say in India, who live by the Ganges and have the ashes of corpses on them. We view them as some completely other sort of human being. But they aren’t. They are just willing to go farther than most of us. They are blessed with a culture which encourages and supports this. Imagine being smeared with ashes from a crematorium here. You would be locked up quickly and gladly.
But it seems to me that if the main true deep spiritual task is learning to process all experience, then traumatic experience has to be a part of this, doesn’t it? Trauma, if it has not happened yet, remains possible all the days of our lives. If you are being systematic spiritually–Grundlich, in the inimitable German word–then you have to be prepared to process trauma too. If it does not already exist in you, you have to induce it.
I would strongly encourage everyone to read Alexandra David Neel’s book “Magic and Mystery in Tibet”. The scene where she comes across an acolyte practicing Chod in a charnel ground strewn with bones, and some fresh bodies, who is having something close to a nervous breakdown, but not quitting, is absolutely unforgettable. Not by me any way. She finds his “guru” in a cave not too far away, who is in deep meditation at perhaps 2am, and tells him about it. She says “aren’t you going to do something?” In effect, he says “he knew what he was signing up for. He will be OK, or he won’t. Either way, this is how it works.”
I myself am going through some strong energy. All the hippy dippy types I read say the world is going through weird energy. I don’t know how much credence I place in all this, but I definitely am. But it’s a logical extension of a long term process.
I had a very violent dream last night which ended, in the dream, with me puking in a toilet. So I wake up, and the first thing I have to do is realize that all the players in the dream are ME. Parts of me. And the violent one, the one no one would claim, that is me too. That would be the energy behind my Garuda.
Do you not think the Sopranos was popular not least because some part of most people wants the freedom and excitement of being a gangster? Living in a world where life and death moments and decisions are common? Where many moments have immediate and severe consequences?
I will lay in bed some nights, just feeling pain. It doesn’t go away. It’s like my tinnitus–I just distract myself better and worse. But that’s not good enough for me. That’s not a solution. I want a solution, and not that solution.
And the other night I had this dream. I was in a Marine training group. Part of our training was sitting in a freezing rain on a boat to New Orleans without jackets. We just had to put up with it.
I don’t know if Marines do this, but cold immersion is definitely something the SEAL’s do, and in reality all soldiers have to be able to put up with cold. In the dream, it felt easier when a bunch of other people were enduring it with me.
Part of spiritual training is like this, I think. It is learning to tolerate and put up with discomfort, with feelings you want to push away and dissociate from. It’s not truly harmful, and in the end it is beneficial. We were, in the dream, on the way to New Orleans for some time off. Good times were on the way.