Nirvana and the hero

Whiskey’s supposed to drown a memory

I’ve gone from one to one too many

And the thing that really gets me

Is how your memory drowns the whiskey

(Jason Aldean)

I wasn’t going to write no more. I really wasn’t.

Like some people swear they’re gonna stop smoking, or drinking, or binge eating, but then again fall prey to the habit and the urge, I guess I will commit the deadly sin of caressing this keyboard once again and producing some draft out of the inspiration boiling in my bowels.

I have to say, I am not completely to blame for this. An old friend I recently caught up with provided me with a text about trauma, and we were chatting about it, and I got all revved up with inspiration, so here I am in front of my computer screen, trying to fill some white pages.

And not fill them too much.

I thought it might be a challenging goal to try and analyze two opposite sides of the sixties, the free love of the hippies and the raw and miserable conditions of the Vietnam warriors, and try to see how both these lifestyles can be called traumatic.

I know, I know, there ain’t much traumatic about fucking away all day and smoking pot and listening to the Doors or whatever experimental music is going on on your radio station. You cannot compare that to tripping through a swamp in some far away country risking your head being blown off every second, all for… what?

Still psychoanalysis has this notion of trauma, which is somewhat challenging.

I will start by saying that although I do not agree with the view and terminology held up by most contemporary psychoanalytic colleagues of mine, I do understand what they are trying to say I think, and I will clarify my own point of view in the pages to come.

So what is trauma to Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis?

To psychoanalysts we are foremost talking beings. Words are what keep us together and what makes reality manageable. We need words, we live on words, we eat words, we drink words, we breathe words, and for sure we are shitting out words all of the time.

Words make us human.

Personally, I have been trying to work on a different line of thought, the idea that it is repression which makes us human, the alteration of our awareness by the instance of the ego. In my opinion the differentiating characteristic of the human race, separating it from the plant and animal world, is not that we use language, but that we are not fully awake.

The problem is we are plagued by the devil.

Many times by now I have described how to me the ego, the shadow, is the devil that is constantly holding back the light of our souls, making it an almost impossible struggle to live and advance, to take a step forward without being pushed two steps back.

This ego come into our lives during what Lacan has called the mirror stage, and appearing cleverly as the image of our own bodies, it seduces the pure and innocent light of (our) awareness to attach itself to its instance. The thing we see hypnotizes us and narrows our consciousness until all we see is our ego, and all of our sensitivity is swallowed up by this demon.

This is very strange, as I have said before, because nothing in this world, inner or outer, sucks up our energy as strongly and as fascinatingly as this image of our bodies. We are not mesmerized all of our lives by some tree or river, our attention is not taken up for years and years right up to our death by some flower standing on the kitchen table.

But the vision of the image of our bodies has us so captivated that we believe we are the image, rather than the actual body. We trade in our divinity for some form of idolatry, the cult and adoration of the shadow, which, in return for our attention and consciousness, gives us death within our hearts, the suffocation and repression of our light, awareness and soul powers.

I believe it does happen that these powers do rise up within our being, the powers of our body, temple of our soul.

It may happen during sexual exploration, it may happen during times of heightened sensitivity caused by life threatening challenges such as occur during times of war and battle, and it may even happen spontaneously, seemingly without a specific cause in the process of psychosis, which I have called a return to innocence.

What is trauma then, to psychoanalysis, I believe, is exactly this: the rise of the original awareness in the being of the body, the strengthening of the senses in a trade-off with the devil, making him relatively less important and even disappear out of sight.

This fading of the self-image is what is called depersonalization, it is as though we are falling apart.

In truth, it is not our body which is falling apart of course, unless you are suffering from leprosy, but it is the image of our body, our ego, which is falling apart.

And we are in the habit of identifying with this image so hard, that we really feel and believe it is the real us that is disappearing.

It is like a movie that shows blank scenes in between the course of a story, or a song on the radio that is interfered by crackle and noise.

The image fades because the attention, the consciousness and awareness is called for elsewhere. There is no attention left to be invested in the ego, it is all needed by the real of the body. Needed, in the case of a struggle for physical survival, or simply invited in the case of sexuality. Or just desired in the case of spontaneous psychosis and schizophrenia.

So what do war, sexuality and schizophrenia have in common? A withdrawal of the libidinal investment in the ego, a calling back of the soul powers of attention and awareness from the hypnotizing self-image unto the actual living body senses.

This is when the ego fades, like the song or movie I mentioned, when there is no light left to shine upon it and make it appear.

The ego becomes a luxury we can no longer afford to keep alive.

However, the ego struggles for its life. It cannot stand the thought of us not paying attention to it, for it lives and thrives on our attention. And when we no longer invest our spirits in this image, the image inflates itself. Like a plant leaf growing larger in the shadow in order to catch more of the sunlight, it expands, it intensifies, and it will do so until our last breath if we are unfortunate.

So the ego fades, depersonalization, but it does not completely disappear so easily.

In order for it to disappear, we need lots of spiritual exercise.

So when it returns, it locks up the original light again to reign in its forms of darkness. And it is not, I believe, the heightening of our physical sensitivity which is traumatic, as we commonly understand this term, but the enclosing of this episode and state once again when the ego restores itself in our spirit.

So I believe that during the times when the ego is not there, there is no problem. The problem comes into play afterward, when the ego makes us feel bad about forgetting it. How can you… not think of me?

Sorry, I was thinking of myself first.

No, you must always think of me.

Hell…

So when we let go of the ego, it punishes us, with feelings of guilt. We owe it our attention, our spirit and awareness.

If the situation of fully focused attention and complete withdrawal of the emotional energies into the real body were to continue, without returning (it) to the master that is the ego-demon, there would be what Buddhists have called nirvana, enlightenment.

So Buddhists practice this repeated withdrawal of the spiritual energies from the ego, an intentional fading of the shadow, in order to transcend it fully, and start a life without it.

We come upon such states of consciousness only through pathology, or sexual ecstasy.

It is for this reason the western science of psychoanalysis calls sexuality traumatic, and warns against the depersonalizing effects of spiritual exercise aimed at enlivening the body.

Understand it if you can, but psychoanalysis, having started with Freud trying to trick the ego into letting awareness live and breathe, in the end advocates a firm functioning of the repressive instance of the ego. It is very hard to understand, and I do not believe it is right.

It just goes to show, I think, that we have not yet fully understood spiritual dynamics.

Now why do people suffer from trauma, if I believe trauma is nirvana?

This state of the self-image being absent.

Being empty of self.

Selfless.

It is because the state of selflessness is not permanent, I believe. Because the withdrawal of spiritual energy from the self-image is not completely perfected.

It is because the state of being empty is not fully realized, because the grounding in the original self is not fully realized.

So there is only one way out of trauma, and that is straight into it.

Instead of having a trauma, as we would describe it from the stance of the ego that occupies and possesses the spirit and its energies, we should move to being the trauma, rooting in the spiritual powers of our souls.

I have noticed that in spite of a ‘normal’ state of consciousness, thus the hypnotization by the ego, psychedelics and even meditative ways of expanding consciousness are somewhat given recognition in treating the problem of trauma.

Psychedelics can help seeing with the eyes of our original spirit, unblurred and unblinded by the ego’s disturbing interference. During psychedelic therapy, for instance with MDMA, our souls may function in a fully regressed state, in a simple state of pure innocence and sensitivity, and in this state, the experience of the original trauma becomes accessible once again, to be remembered and made peace with.

Inmates and war veterans alike benefit from David Lynch’s program of distributing and promoting Transcendental Meditation, another way to regress from the hypnotic state of the imaginary mind into the ocean of original and unbound awareness.

And do we not see in the tons of drug and alcohol ‘abuse’ displayed by the war veterans an attempt to free themselves from the fasces of the devil and find peace with their past, in some kind of self-medication that would hopefully help them remember, and set their imprisoned spirits free?

Forever free?

I believe the East and its spiritual knowledge hold much promise in the field of trauma.

They may teach us that the problem is not the heightening and withdrawal of spiritual power and energy back into the real of the body and the absence of upholding the ego, but the insistence and repeated reappearing of the ego and its disturbing mirror palace that makes up our minds.

We should learn to live without the ego, without the mind, just being powerful bodies that are not captivated by no demon and that live and breathe without compromise, without bowing and bending and without any mea culpa.

Yes, the devil demands our attention, and no, we do not owe our souls to him.

So the end of the ego, is where our soul and our body’s interests are no longer a sin, and where we stop having traumas and start being traumas.

Being walking states of awareness without the image to uphold.

Being free and careless as the animal and the flower, that do not care how they look.

And forgetting the mirror, would we not be forever beautiful even more?