On Friday, four friends and I head to the South Carolina beach for a long weekend.
Ostensibly, we’re celebrating the 50th birthday of the youngest of our crew.
Here’s a snap from an earlier 60th celebration. (You get the idea.)
One of us reads the New Yorker regularly and so could describe this cartoon:
There’s a fellow sitting in his doctor’s office.
The doctor says, “Well, I can fix your back so it won’t hurt anymore. But, I can’t guarantee that you’ll have anything left to talk about.”
Ah, point well taken.
Luckily, we have a tradition that for years has helped shaped our discussions.
Once comfortably fed and settled in, one by one each is asked to describe her hopes and dreams for the coming year. And each must field all the questions. Not a corner is left to hide. Your turn can last a long time. Kleenex can be involved.
I used to love this exercise. To be heard, to be understood. To be loved.
But, I find it’s getting harder and harder to participate.
I have no idea of what to say. And even worse, the next day I can only hold my head and moan, “My god, why did I say that!”
As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it.
You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else.
All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.
Eckhart Tolle
For a life-long, self-identified “seeker” – doing seeking – working on transforming and evolving… this is devastating news. And I’m really beginning to realize that it’s true.
Still, I keep on trying.
I’m like some guy crawling cross the dessert on his belly. I keep trying the next spiritual transformation.
I know I can’t make that final shift in consciousness for which my heart so deeply longs. But dang, I keep on trying.
Futility. Stupidity. Ego.
What is this, if not Hope?
Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future,
and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the NOW
and therefore your unhappiness.
Forget about your life situation for awhile and pay attention to your life.
Your life situation exists in time. Your life is NOW.
Your life situation is Mind-Stuff. Your life is REAL.
Eckhart Tolle
More and more, I realize I am compelled by a primitive, irresistible force within me.
Maybe, that is actually Grace. But, I struggle too much to use that word voluntarily.
And so I get so grouchy, thinking about us sitting round the table or before the fire.
I get all irritated and frustrated, and cannot think it through with any clarity.
Hopes and dreams! Oh, pah!
Fruitless, pointless, mocking. I do not want to do this! And I’m going to tell them!…
All inner resistance is experienced as negativity in one form or another.
All negativity is resistance…
Negativity ranges from irritation or impatience to fierce anger, from a depressed mood or sullen resentment to suicidal despair…
Ah, gotcha once again. And Tolle proceeds to say:
Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let it go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change.
It would threaten your identity…
You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life.
This is a common phenomenon.
It is also insane.
Yes. I know it’s true.
Have you noticed? It’s very interesting.
I can feel how getting all stirred up, even down right suffering, has this hidden edge of pleasure.
Anger allows me feel my power.
Drama helps me get my point across.
Suffering brings me sympathy.
But, if I don’t call a spade a spade at least within my own head – where can I start being truly honest.
And I do value honesty. And truth.
So, so much for Hope.
Let’s move on to Dreams.
Years ago, this weekend’s Birthday Girl told me that I had the densest pain body of anyone she knew.
Speaking of such people Eckhardt Tolle says:
…your desire to awaken, to finally get out of this misery is much greater than a normal person's desire to awaken. …[for] when your dream turns into a nightmare, then you really want to awaken from that…
My desire to awaken is certainly more than normal.
But, I’d not say life is anywhere near nightmare status these days. There is just that primitive force at work deep inside me. And, I’d like to think that that is Grace.
But the fact remains that I am definitely in resistance to this whole “Hopes and Dreams” format. I do not want to look.
So, three dear friends get to spend six hours in the car with me come Friday. I hope I’ll be on better behavior.
And I’m going down there “unrehearsed.”
Luckily, we have promised not to discuss anything real juicy on the drive down.
We’re pledged to wait until we’re all together.
And I figured we will need a good two days simply to be debriefed on Marv, the man of Linda’s dreams – or not. We will have to see.
And maybe, I’ll print this out and read it as a manifesto. (It will not stop their probing, nor get me off the hook. But, it may divert attention.)
Meanwhile, I plan to take my camera and tripod. That should keep me focused on something like the Now.
That’s my plan… not my hope… not my dream.
It’s a plan.
Showing posts with label pain body. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pain body. Show all posts
Friday, October 17, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Mario’s Question from Another Angle
When the Dalai Lama came to Emory last October he met with researchers and held a conference on depression. Scientists here at Emory have been working with people whose depression has been unresponsive to all other conventional treatments: antidepressant medication, psychotherapy, and electroconvulsive therapy.
What they’ve shown is that intractable depression is immediately relieved when an electrode is used for deep brain stimulation of a very specific region of the brain.
The patients’ responses, so very striking, have made it into the research literature:
All patients spontaneously reported acute effects including “sudden calmness or lightness,” “disappearance of the void,” a sense of heightened awareness, increased interest, “connectedness,” and sudden brightening of the room, sharpening of visual details and intensification of colors in response to electrical stimulation.
These changes occured so quickly, literally at the flicking of a switch, that scientists believe that the response by-passed both chemical (neurotransmitters, stress and the hormonal HPA axis) and cognitive (such as the voice internalized critical parent) patterns.
This was an electrically mediated event that suddenly made the brain function in a different manner.
A different neural circuit had been turned on and that changed everything.
All this brings to mind Eckart Tolle’s description of the morning he awoke:
I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that…
I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window… I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains…I knew that there was infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself… I recognized the room, and yet I knew I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence.
Let this be then, introduction to yet another way of answering Mario’s second question which I have paraphrased as:
Why does negativity keep arising in us?
It seems to me that spiritual seekers are somewhat analogous to depressed patients.
What the scientists found was that after the deep brain stimulation lifted the crushing darkness, patients still had to work their way back to lasting health via the usual and slower modalities of medication and talk therapy.
As dramatic a shift the deep brain stimulation provided, lasting change required the depression be “worked through” on the chemical and cognitive levels also.
There in lies the parallel.
That flicking of the electrical switch is like the “freebie” of awakening.
For even after awakening there is more work to be done:
Realizing who you are is a piece of cake compared to living it.
It is a freebie.
You don’t have to do anything for it. You don’t have to change…
All you have to do is stop trying… for just one second.
Realization is a freebie, even if you are holding on to regret, blame, and judgment.
But you’re going to have a hard time living that realization because the nature of truth itself is something without a past, without fixed points of view, and therefore, without blame…
When you awaken, those remaining personality traits, ego traits, and hidden places within you come to the surface one by one in the clear light of awakeness.
As each arises it offers you an opportunity to see through it.
But you cannot see through anything that you do not allow to arise.
Each time you allow this arising, you feel a deepening in the sense of spaciousness, presence, and openness.
You have the sense of a causeless love, a causeless happiness.
Adyashanti
Or, as Maharishi (and others) would remind us:
The world is as we are.
And how are we?
Even the Awakened are like little ponds of muddy water. The mud makes it impossible for the water to reflect the true brilliance of the sun. Our job is to quietly filter out all the muck and debris.
Maharishi called the muck “Stress” – abnormalities in the nervous system caused by either an overwhelming positive or negative experience. Regular meditation would un-stress the stress creating a normally function nervous system.
Then, you would see your true self and infinite nature, but ego would remain.
More meditation and normal functioning of a stress-free the body would lead to further refinement, a fuller awareness of God and one’s ultimate Unity with creation.
Tolle seems to suggest that the muck can be understood as the pain-body.
He explains that until Presence is fully maintained, we will from time to time slip back into “unconsciousness” and experience the pain-body once again as the ego thrashes about trying to maintain the illusion of its individuality.
Presence as it fully ripens will transmute the energy trapped within the pain-body into Consciousness.
And Adyashanti, in yet another terminology, speaks of what the Buddhists have traditionally called “conditionings” – all those negative (and positive) ego traits that persist like “grooves in a record” even after an awakening.
So Mario, Negativity continues to arise from within us – not because we harbor some inherent evil – but because the body has not yet finished the internal alchemy that purifies every single cell within our body after awakening.
Awakening can be thought of as that electrical switch, the deep brain stimulation that establishes a newly functional neuro-circuitry.
In an instant, the depression lifts.
“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” (as the Bible says* and Handel composed in Messiah) - We see the Light.
And then, we are left with the rest of the process.
We have to rebalance chemicals and hormones, and even subtler energies, flushing out all the acupuncture meridians.
Or, at least, that is how I picture it.
*1Corinthians 15: 51-54
What they’ve shown is that intractable depression is immediately relieved when an electrode is used for deep brain stimulation of a very specific region of the brain.
The patients’ responses, so very striking, have made it into the research literature:
All patients spontaneously reported acute effects including “sudden calmness or lightness,” “disappearance of the void,” a sense of heightened awareness, increased interest, “connectedness,” and sudden brightening of the room, sharpening of visual details and intensification of colors in response to electrical stimulation.
These changes occured so quickly, literally at the flicking of a switch, that scientists believe that the response by-passed both chemical (neurotransmitters, stress and the hormonal HPA axis) and cognitive (such as the voice internalized critical parent) patterns.
This was an electrically mediated event that suddenly made the brain function in a different manner.
A different neural circuit had been turned on and that changed everything.
All this brings to mind Eckart Tolle’s description of the morning he awoke:
I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that…
I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window… I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains…I knew that there was infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself… I recognized the room, and yet I knew I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence.
Let this be then, introduction to yet another way of answering Mario’s second question which I have paraphrased as:
Why does negativity keep arising in us?
It seems to me that spiritual seekers are somewhat analogous to depressed patients.
What the scientists found was that after the deep brain stimulation lifted the crushing darkness, patients still had to work their way back to lasting health via the usual and slower modalities of medication and talk therapy.
As dramatic a shift the deep brain stimulation provided, lasting change required the depression be “worked through” on the chemical and cognitive levels also.
There in lies the parallel.
That flicking of the electrical switch is like the “freebie” of awakening.
For even after awakening there is more work to be done:
Realizing who you are is a piece of cake compared to living it.
It is a freebie.
You don’t have to do anything for it. You don’t have to change…
All you have to do is stop trying… for just one second.
Realization is a freebie, even if you are holding on to regret, blame, and judgment.
But you’re going to have a hard time living that realization because the nature of truth itself is something without a past, without fixed points of view, and therefore, without blame…
When you awaken, those remaining personality traits, ego traits, and hidden places within you come to the surface one by one in the clear light of awakeness.
As each arises it offers you an opportunity to see through it.
But you cannot see through anything that you do not allow to arise.
Each time you allow this arising, you feel a deepening in the sense of spaciousness, presence, and openness.
You have the sense of a causeless love, a causeless happiness.
Adyashanti
Or, as Maharishi (and others) would remind us:
The world is as we are.
And how are we?
Even the Awakened are like little ponds of muddy water. The mud makes it impossible for the water to reflect the true brilliance of the sun. Our job is to quietly filter out all the muck and debris.
Maharishi called the muck “Stress” – abnormalities in the nervous system caused by either an overwhelming positive or negative experience. Regular meditation would un-stress the stress creating a normally function nervous system.
Then, you would see your true self and infinite nature, but ego would remain.
More meditation and normal functioning of a stress-free the body would lead to further refinement, a fuller awareness of God and one’s ultimate Unity with creation.
Tolle seems to suggest that the muck can be understood as the pain-body.
He explains that until Presence is fully maintained, we will from time to time slip back into “unconsciousness” and experience the pain-body once again as the ego thrashes about trying to maintain the illusion of its individuality.
Presence as it fully ripens will transmute the energy trapped within the pain-body into Consciousness.
And Adyashanti, in yet another terminology, speaks of what the Buddhists have traditionally called “conditionings” – all those negative (and positive) ego traits that persist like “grooves in a record” even after an awakening.
So Mario, Negativity continues to arise from within us – not because we harbor some inherent evil – but because the body has not yet finished the internal alchemy that purifies every single cell within our body after awakening.
Awakening can be thought of as that electrical switch, the deep brain stimulation that establishes a newly functional neuro-circuitry.
In an instant, the depression lifts.
“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” (as the Bible says* and Handel composed in Messiah) - We see the Light.
And then, we are left with the rest of the process.
We have to rebalance chemicals and hormones, and even subtler energies, flushing out all the acupuncture meridians.
Or, at least, that is how I picture it.
*1Corinthians 15: 51-54
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Pain-Body (Part Four): Remembering Winter
…every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain.
It merges with past pain and lodges in your mind and body.
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field, and if you look upon it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth…
The pain-body usually has a collective as well as a personal aspect…
The collective one is the pain accumulated in the collective human psyche over thousands of years through disease, torture, war, murder, cruelty, madness…
Eckhart Tolle
My question is, “How is this possible?”
How is it possible to inherit what’s essentially a memory?
That should be impossible.
I should not actually “remember” what happened to my grandmother.
Yet, Tolle says we bear the scars and thus is some sense the memory.
Years ago my brother told me of a study in which mice were put on a zinc deficient diet. Their descendents had depressed immune systems for the next five generations – even when zinc was restored to normal levels.
To Andy, these results not only showed the importance of proper nutrition
but also had implications for all of us today.
Since there has probably never been a time when five generations have all received adequate nutrition, we must all still bear the marks of our ancestors’ deprivation.
Five generations.
That takes us back to great-great grandfathers.
In my case, these are the Bralley and Kearfotts who fought the Civil War.
In my case, when Andy mentioned the nutrition research, I was plagued by "flashback" of wars I hadn’t been alive to see.
So, I liked the idea of trans-generational memory even if it was just nutritional.
But then, it hit me.
“That is Lamarkism. And, That Can’t Be!”
Darwin shot that all to pieces.
“Acquired traits” like memories or nutritional status cannot be inherited,
and pain-bodies should not be possible.
Yes, I know. There is Nurture as well as Nature.
Psychological damage does get passed from one generation to the next.
But, Tolle seems to be describing something physical, something sounding almost genetic.
He is talking Nature.
So let’s lay aside for the moment the psychological impact our parents’ traumas.
Let’s also set aside the possibility that information may be “immaterial” - encoded “in our souls.”
Are there still factors creating an inheritable pain-body?
“Every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain”
I think this is what Tolle’s saying. There is something physical that gets created and inherited.
Which brings me back to, “How can this be?”
Maharishi, called it stress:
an emotional overload that changes our physiology and bodies.
Marahishi said that stress creates a knot. (A knot of what he did not say.)
Now we know that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder affects the hippocampus (seat of memory) and HPA axis (hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal axis - brain signals breaking out into the entire body).
PTSD also gives you flashbacks as memory replays in waking nightmares.
…But, how…
How could the traumatic memory be passed on to future generations?
How could I know what it was like to be a soldier in a war I never fought?
I could I develop PTSD from a war I was never in? (which is one way of describing my struggles for over twenty years after I awakened in 1975.)
I have mulled these questions over for several decades now.
It was only last month that I came across a journal article on plants entitled:
Remembering winter: toward a molecular understanding of vernalization.
Oh!
If plants “remember winter” then surely brains are not required.
But, of course! This is exactly the point in the PTSD refrain, “the body remembers.”
The article on plants went something along these lines:
Exposure to the cold of winter is an important cue for flowering in spring.
Flowering is due to cold-mediated modifications of proteins in the chromatin…
This process is known as vernalization…
which is just the technical way of saying plants recall the cold by modifying the proteins that entwine their DNA.
Memories don’t always require a brain.
And molecular information is not solely stored in the genes (which is the Darwinian position and the geneticist’s and my prejudice).
Information can be stored “epigenetically.”
Remember that word.
Epigenetics makes it possible to inherit acquired traits
(like the depressed immune systems of mice on low zinc diets.)
Epigenetics makes it possible to remember winter
(like a rose covered by the snow.)
Epigenetics can be trans-generational.
Epigenetics puts an end to protests of “Lamarkism!”
Epigenetics explains how “memory” can be inherited.
For Example:
Swedish men born in 1905 who experienced famine just before puberty, had grandsons who went through puberty earlier and had lengthened life spans.
Grandsons of the well fed had shortened life spans and increased diabetes.
For Example:
The World War II food embargo imposed by Germany on Holland caused 30,000 deaths.
The descendents of survivors suffered a range of health problems inlcuding: diabetes, obesity, coronary heart disease, cancer, as well as smaller-than-normal grandchildren.
Our bodies can remember that grandmother nearly starved.
It merges with past pain and lodges in your mind and body.
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field, and if you look upon it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth…
The pain-body usually has a collective as well as a personal aspect…
The collective one is the pain accumulated in the collective human psyche over thousands of years through disease, torture, war, murder, cruelty, madness…
Eckhart Tolle
My question is, “How is this possible?”
How is it possible to inherit what’s essentially a memory?
That should be impossible.
I should not actually “remember” what happened to my grandmother.
Yet, Tolle says we bear the scars and thus is some sense the memory.
Years ago my brother told me of a study in which mice were put on a zinc deficient diet. Their descendents had depressed immune systems for the next five generations – even when zinc was restored to normal levels.
To Andy, these results not only showed the importance of proper nutrition
but also had implications for all of us today.
Since there has probably never been a time when five generations have all received adequate nutrition, we must all still bear the marks of our ancestors’ deprivation.
Five generations.
That takes us back to great-great grandfathers.
In my case, these are the Bralley and Kearfotts who fought the Civil War.
In my case, when Andy mentioned the nutrition research, I was plagued by "flashback" of wars I hadn’t been alive to see.
So, I liked the idea of trans-generational memory even if it was just nutritional.
But then, it hit me.
“That is Lamarkism. And, That Can’t Be!”
Darwin shot that all to pieces.
“Acquired traits” like memories or nutritional status cannot be inherited,
and pain-bodies should not be possible.
Yes, I know. There is Nurture as well as Nature.
Psychological damage does get passed from one generation to the next.
But, Tolle seems to be describing something physical, something sounding almost genetic.
He is talking Nature.
So let’s lay aside for the moment the psychological impact our parents’ traumas.
Let’s also set aside the possibility that information may be “immaterial” - encoded “in our souls.”
Are there still factors creating an inheritable pain-body?
“Every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain”
I think this is what Tolle’s saying. There is something physical that gets created and inherited.
Which brings me back to, “How can this be?”
Maharishi, called it stress:
an emotional overload that changes our physiology and bodies.
Marahishi said that stress creates a knot. (A knot of what he did not say.)
Now we know that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder affects the hippocampus (seat of memory) and HPA axis (hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal axis - brain signals breaking out into the entire body).
PTSD also gives you flashbacks as memory replays in waking nightmares.
…But, how…
How could the traumatic memory be passed on to future generations?
How could I know what it was like to be a soldier in a war I never fought?
I could I develop PTSD from a war I was never in? (which is one way of describing my struggles for over twenty years after I awakened in 1975.)
I have mulled these questions over for several decades now.
It was only last month that I came across a journal article on plants entitled:
Remembering winter: toward a molecular understanding of vernalization.
Oh!
If plants “remember winter” then surely brains are not required.
But, of course! This is exactly the point in the PTSD refrain, “the body remembers.”
The article on plants went something along these lines:
Exposure to the cold of winter is an important cue for flowering in spring.
Flowering is due to cold-mediated modifications of proteins in the chromatin…
This process is known as vernalization…
which is just the technical way of saying plants recall the cold by modifying the proteins that entwine their DNA.
Memories don’t always require a brain.
And molecular information is not solely stored in the genes (which is the Darwinian position and the geneticist’s and my prejudice).
Information can be stored “epigenetically.”
Remember that word.
Epigenetics makes it possible to inherit acquired traits
(like the depressed immune systems of mice on low zinc diets.)
Epigenetics makes it possible to remember winter
(like a rose covered by the snow.)
Epigenetics can be trans-generational.
Epigenetics puts an end to protests of “Lamarkism!”
Epigenetics explains how “memory” can be inherited.
For Example:
Swedish men born in 1905 who experienced famine just before puberty, had grandsons who went through puberty earlier and had lengthened life spans.
Grandsons of the well fed had shortened life spans and increased diabetes.
For Example:
The World War II food embargo imposed by Germany on Holland caused 30,000 deaths.
The descendents of survivors suffered a range of health problems inlcuding: diabetes, obesity, coronary heart disease, cancer, as well as smaller-than-normal grandchildren.
Our bodies can remember that grandmother nearly starved.
Not That I have Proved a Thing
From a biological perspective none of this proves anything.
It’s no where close to really nailing down Tolle’s statements about the pain-body.
But, it puts us in the ball park.
One - Memory need not be confined simply to the brain. The body can remember.
Two - The impact of events (call it memory for short) can be inherited.
I find all of this exciting, even radical.
Radical? You say.
Yes!
And germane to those interested in understanding the mechanics of spiritual cultivation and enlightenment.
Realizing who you are is a piece of cake compared to living it.
It is a freebie.
You don’t have to do a thing for it, you don’t have to change, and you don’t have to alter anything…
Just relax and do nothing, go nowhere, and be nobody just for a split second – and grace shows you who you are …
When you want to live this awakening, you realize it will cost you.
The cost is your fixated point of view…
The cost is your resentment, blame, and judgment.
Adyashanti
The cost is the dissolution of your pain-body.
And that is something that you have to work at.
This is how we let go of all fixated views and ego.
So best we understand what the pain-body is, how it is created,
and what dissolving feels like.
Let me say this in another way:
For the past one hundred years biologists have held the view that as a caterpillar changes into a butterfly or moth, it essentially dissolves into a soup.
In its new incarnation the butterfly not only has an entirely different body, but also a whole new lifestyle, diet, and ecological niche.
Recently however, scientists have shown that a moth can remember what it learned as a caterpillar.
To be specific: Shock a caterpillar when it smells a certain chemical and later the moth will avoid that odor.
The moth can recall its conditioning- what it learned essentially in its “previous life” as “worm.”
Perhaps this learning/memory is stored in small pieces of neurocircuitry that remain intact in the soup. There are hints of this, but even so, it is a radical concept that old memory circuits survive the dissolution and are then re-integrated in the new nervous system.
This is so radical an idea that I am tempted to wonder that perhaps even caterpillars have a “soul” - something that records life lessons, not unlike the brain-dead subjects mentioned in Allan Hamilton’s book, The Scalpel and the Soul.
So, do butterflies have pain-bodies?
Do butterflies have flashbacks?
My god, the humiliation of remembering that once you were a worm!
Spiritual evolution can be ruthless in its search for truth.
Are butterflies not even spared?
I can empathize, as I recall the time in the fourth grade when I was forbidden to take recess with the other children.
My penmanship was so terrible that my teacher insisted I stay at my desk carefully writing out over and over again:
The worm one of the lowest forms of animals crawls on its belly.
“May I go to recess now?”
“No!”
Obviously, it was a lesson on “w,” “l” and “m”
I, however, took it as an opportunity to create one more bit of personal pain-body.
Which may, or may not, inspire a reinterpretation of this classic lesson:
The great Taoist master Chuang Tzu once dreamt that he was a butterfly fluttering here and there.
In the dream he had no awareness of his individuality as a person.
He was only a butterfly.
Suddenly, he awoke and found himself laying there, a person once again.
But then he thought to himself, "Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?"
(Any explanations will be welcomed.)
It’s no where close to really nailing down Tolle’s statements about the pain-body.
But, it puts us in the ball park.
One - Memory need not be confined simply to the brain. The body can remember.
Two - The impact of events (call it memory for short) can be inherited.
I find all of this exciting, even radical.
Radical? You say.
Yes!
And germane to those interested in understanding the mechanics of spiritual cultivation and enlightenment.
Realizing who you are is a piece of cake compared to living it.
It is a freebie.
You don’t have to do a thing for it, you don’t have to change, and you don’t have to alter anything…
Just relax and do nothing, go nowhere, and be nobody just for a split second – and grace shows you who you are …
When you want to live this awakening, you realize it will cost you.
The cost is your fixated point of view…
The cost is your resentment, blame, and judgment.
Adyashanti
The cost is the dissolution of your pain-body.
And that is something that you have to work at.
This is how we let go of all fixated views and ego.
So best we understand what the pain-body is, how it is created,
and what dissolving feels like.
Let me say this in another way:
For the past one hundred years biologists have held the view that as a caterpillar changes into a butterfly or moth, it essentially dissolves into a soup.
In its new incarnation the butterfly not only has an entirely different body, but also a whole new lifestyle, diet, and ecological niche.
Recently however, scientists have shown that a moth can remember what it learned as a caterpillar.
To be specific: Shock a caterpillar when it smells a certain chemical and later the moth will avoid that odor.
The moth can recall its conditioning- what it learned essentially in its “previous life” as “worm.”
Perhaps this learning/memory is stored in small pieces of neurocircuitry that remain intact in the soup. There are hints of this, but even so, it is a radical concept that old memory circuits survive the dissolution and are then re-integrated in the new nervous system.
This is so radical an idea that I am tempted to wonder that perhaps even caterpillars have a “soul” - something that records life lessons, not unlike the brain-dead subjects mentioned in Allan Hamilton’s book, The Scalpel and the Soul.
So, do butterflies have pain-bodies?
Do butterflies have flashbacks?
My god, the humiliation of remembering that once you were a worm!
Spiritual evolution can be ruthless in its search for truth.
Are butterflies not even spared?
I can empathize, as I recall the time in the fourth grade when I was forbidden to take recess with the other children.
My penmanship was so terrible that my teacher insisted I stay at my desk carefully writing out over and over again:
The worm one of the lowest forms of animals crawls on its belly.
“May I go to recess now?”
“No!”
Obviously, it was a lesson on “w,” “l” and “m”
I, however, took it as an opportunity to create one more bit of personal pain-body.
Which may, or may not, inspire a reinterpretation of this classic lesson:
The great Taoist master Chuang Tzu once dreamt that he was a butterfly fluttering here and there.
In the dream he had no awareness of his individuality as a person.
He was only a butterfly.
Suddenly, he awoke and found himself laying there, a person once again.
But then he thought to himself, "Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?"
(Any explanations will be welcomed.)
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Take One Step
My teacher, Wong Loh Sin See, had us all stand-up, take a bow and close our eyes.
After a moment he said, “Now, take one step backwards.”
Silently, we did.
After a bit he said, “Now, take one step backwards.”
And again, we did.
As I stood there eyes closed, simply waiting, wondering what in the world he was doing, I began to notice I didn’t feel so well.
It was hard to hold my head up. I felt weak.
I felt unsettled.
Unhappy.
“Now, take one step backwards.”
One more step and from the muffled crying I began to hear around me, I suspected that I wasn’t the only person having difficulty.
This was no simple break in concentration or centeredness as I had first suspected,
this was tapping Misery.
Finally, the Teacher said, “Take one step forward.”
Oh! What relief in that simple step.
Things began to quiet down. My strength began to return.
“Take one step forward.”
How very strange this was! I felt light. Happiness was welling up.
The Teacher had us take one final step, and just as joy began to surface he had us bow and take our seats.
We were all fairly stunned. We looked about surreptitiously checking other faces.
Everyone had had pretty much the same experience.
Discomfort had swept over us and then reversed into happiness.
The Teacher explained that as we go forward in life we grow in consciousness. Happiness spontaneously increases.
If we were to go back to our former lives, our former selves, we would be amazed by the misery we’d find.
Through spiritual cultivation our norms change.
Even if we don’t appreciate the progress that we’ve made, if given a chance to actually travel back in time, we would feel the difference.
The Teacher had just provided us that opportunity.
I tell this story by way of an apology.
I have had it in mind to write about Eckhart Tolle’s concept of the pain-body.
I have had it in mind to use events (STORIES!?) from my own life.
But, I find the mere intention has awakened pain in an almost cellular manner.
The exercise in taking a single step should serve as something of a warning.
The pain-body is a creation from the past that we carry to this day.
And if we travel back in time to probe the pain-body at its roots, I do believe our pain is doubled.
Yet ultimately, the pain-body is about the struggle to embody an awakened consciousness.
So, I feel compelled to try my hand at explaining what I’ve seen.
After a moment he said, “Now, take one step backwards.”
Silently, we did.
After a bit he said, “Now, take one step backwards.”
And again, we did.
As I stood there eyes closed, simply waiting, wondering what in the world he was doing, I began to notice I didn’t feel so well.
It was hard to hold my head up. I felt weak.
I felt unsettled.
Unhappy.
“Now, take one step backwards.”
One more step and from the muffled crying I began to hear around me, I suspected that I wasn’t the only person having difficulty.
This was no simple break in concentration or centeredness as I had first suspected,
this was tapping Misery.
Finally, the Teacher said, “Take one step forward.”
Oh! What relief in that simple step.
Things began to quiet down. My strength began to return.
“Take one step forward.”
How very strange this was! I felt light. Happiness was welling up.
The Teacher had us take one final step, and just as joy began to surface he had us bow and take our seats.
We were all fairly stunned. We looked about surreptitiously checking other faces.
Everyone had had pretty much the same experience.
Discomfort had swept over us and then reversed into happiness.
The Teacher explained that as we go forward in life we grow in consciousness. Happiness spontaneously increases.
If we were to go back to our former lives, our former selves, we would be amazed by the misery we’d find.
Through spiritual cultivation our norms change.
Even if we don’t appreciate the progress that we’ve made, if given a chance to actually travel back in time, we would feel the difference.
The Teacher had just provided us that opportunity.
I tell this story by way of an apology.
I have had it in mind to write about Eckhart Tolle’s concept of the pain-body.
I have had it in mind to use events (STORIES!?) from my own life.
But, I find the mere intention has awakened pain in an almost cellular manner.
The exercise in taking a single step should serve as something of a warning.
The pain-body is a creation from the past that we carry to this day.
And if we travel back in time to probe the pain-body at its roots, I do believe our pain is doubled.
Yet ultimately, the pain-body is about the struggle to embody an awakened consciousness.
So, I feel compelled to try my hand at explaining what I’ve seen.
Pain-Body (Part 3): Knowing All Along
I composed "Taking It Like a Man" over twenty years ago, long before I ever heard about pain-bodies.
Still, it is a good example of both the personal and familial pain body:
the pain body I acquired growing up and the pain that I unconsciously inherited.
In this poem I speak as child, adult, and my own ancestor.
When this poem came out of me,
(for that is a fairer description than to say I ever wrote it)
I did not know that during the Civil War both sides of my family sent many sons to war. Nor, did I know the details of their deaths.
In 1860 seven Bralley brothers enlisted in the 45th Virginia Infantry.
Mitchell Carter and Stephen Craig were taken prisoner.
James M. received a gunshot to the spine, laid paralyzed as a prisoner of war, then died.
Sergeant George Bralley was killed leading a charge at the Third Battle of Winchester.
When I first heard the words of this poem rumbling in my mind,
I had not seen the illustration in Harpers Magazine,
nor read the description of the Third Battle of Winchester.
So I did not see the resemblance between the events of 1864 and my own visions,
“flashbacks” I would call them, for over twenty years.
Back in 1980, I only knew that I seemed to be suffering PTSD from a war
I never fought.
But, I did know some history.
As my grandfather’s grandfather, John Pierceall Kearfott was something of a family legend. (Maybe you’ve seen the family farm online.)
J.P. rode in Jeb Stewart’s Calvary.
I took a handful of his Civil War bullets to “Show and Tell” in fifth grade and was quite a hit.
Mom had inherited his diary.
Reading that book I felt as if I sat with him in his encampments.
I could feel the bushes nearby, the heat, and the horses stomp the ground.
The diary also described the waiting
as day after day brother his brother Jimmy lay wounded on a cot.
Just after reading that Jimmy seemed a bit better, I was stunned, then haunted by J. P.’s one line entry,
“Jimmy died last night.”
J.P. Kearfott and his farmstead are still in my family’s thoughts.
At Uncle Eddie’s memorial, a couple cousins told of hopes of purchasing the place.
But, it was Kim, who raised the question that no one could address,
“Where are the women?”
Even Mom was mute.
Two generations of women (the great-great and the great) have no voice in our collective memory.
Except, perhaps, in this poem I wrote so many lifetimes later.
It seems my heart still carries their grief.
How very familiar it seemed to sit and wait.
How very familiar to know “my boys were dead.”
It seems I have inherited their pain.
Still, it is a good example of both the personal and familial pain body:
the pain body I acquired growing up and the pain that I unconsciously inherited.
In this poem I speak as child, adult, and my own ancestor.
When this poem came out of me,
(for that is a fairer description than to say I ever wrote it)
I did not know that during the Civil War both sides of my family sent many sons to war. Nor, did I know the details of their deaths.
In 1860 seven Bralley brothers enlisted in the 45th Virginia Infantry.
Mitchell Carter and Stephen Craig were taken prisoner.
James M. received a gunshot to the spine, laid paralyzed as a prisoner of war, then died.
Sergeant George Bralley was killed leading a charge at the Third Battle of Winchester.
When I first heard the words of this poem rumbling in my mind,
I had not seen the illustration in Harpers Magazine,
nor read the description of the Third Battle of Winchester.
So I did not see the resemblance between the events of 1864 and my own visions,
“flashbacks” I would call them, for over twenty years.
Back in 1980, I only knew that I seemed to be suffering PTSD from a war
I never fought.
But, I did know some history.
As my grandfather’s grandfather, John Pierceall Kearfott was something of a family legend. (Maybe you’ve seen the family farm online.)
J.P. rode in Jeb Stewart’s Calvary.
I took a handful of his Civil War bullets to “Show and Tell” in fifth grade and was quite a hit.
Mom had inherited his diary.
Reading that book I felt as if I sat with him in his encampments.
I could feel the bushes nearby, the heat, and the horses stomp the ground.
The diary also described the waiting
as day after day brother his brother Jimmy lay wounded on a cot.
Just after reading that Jimmy seemed a bit better, I was stunned, then haunted by J. P.’s one line entry,
“Jimmy died last night.”
J.P. Kearfott and his farmstead are still in my family’s thoughts.
At Uncle Eddie’s memorial, a couple cousins told of hopes of purchasing the place.
But, it was Kim, who raised the question that no one could address,
“Where are the women?”
Even Mom was mute.
Two generations of women (the great-great and the great) have no voice in our collective memory.
Except, perhaps, in this poem I wrote so many lifetimes later.
It seems my heart still carries their grief.
How very familiar it seemed to sit and wait.
How very familiar to know “my boys were dead.”
It seems I have inherited their pain.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
The Pain Body (Part One)
Mama used to say …I was especially sensitive to onions like my great-aunt, Tita. …when she [Tita] was still in great-grandmother’s belly her sobs were so loud that even Nacha, the cook, who was half deaf, could hear them easily. Once her wailing got so violent that it brought on an early labor… Tita made her entrance into this world…was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor…
Like Water for Chocolate, byLaura Esquirel.
I have been thinking about the pain body.
It is a term coined by Eckhart Tolle:
…every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain. It merges with past pain and lodges in your mind and body. This accumulated pain is a negative energy field, and if you look upon it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth.
So, there is a personal pain body that we acquire as we struggle to grow up.
There is also a pain body we inherit, simply by being human.
Here, Tolle describes social pain bodies. I think it only reasonable that there is also a pain body associated with our family history.
I look as this as so physically ingrained (albeit very subtly) that it is actually reasonable to consider it our inheritance through Nature rather than from Nurture. Although we are also shaped by inherited behavioral patterns. I am concerned more with physical and energetic inheritance.
The pain body usually has a collective as well as a personal aspect… The collective one is the pain accumulated in the collective human psyche over thousands of years through disease, torture, war, murder, cruelty, madness… Everyone’s personal pain body also partakes of this collective pain-body. There are different strands in the collective pain body. For example certain races or countries in which extreme forms of strife and violence occur have a heavier collective pain-body than others…every woman has her share in what could be described as the collective female pain-body… This consists of the accumulated pain suffered by women partly through…slavery, exploitation, rape, childbirth, child loss, and so on, over thousands of years.
The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.
College age and still at home, one evening I was watching a movie on TV.
During a commercial break, I rummaged the refrigerator.
A bit amazed at what I came up with, I held my bowl out to Mom
as I passed her in the hallway.
“Look at this! Chocolate ice cream and a dill pickle. How weird! But, I want it!”
“Oh! I craved that when I was pregnant with you,” was Mom’s instant reply.
Tita, Tita, Tita.
I have another story, many stories really, regarding the pain body,
as I am just back from a weekend in Kentucky.
The memorial service for my mother’s brother, Uncle Eddie,
reunited eight of the eleven Kearfott cousins, the children of Mom and her two brothers.
I hadn’t seen a number of these people in over forty years.
And I was stunned by the parallels our lives had run.
My generation may not have interacted all that much,
but we share some of the same ghosts and grief.
The pain-body doesn’t want you to observe it directly and see it for what it is.
The moment you observe it, the identification is broken.
A higher dimension of consciousness has come in.
I call it presence.
You are now the witness, or the watcher of the pain-body.
It can no longer use you by pretending to be you, and it can no longer replenish itself through you.
You have found your own innermost strength.
You have accessed the power of Now.
Eckhart Tolle
Well, I don’t feel all that in the Now these days.
I am too aware of the pain my family carries.
As we cousins, the women really, talked around the table, with my mom, and through the weekend, it became obvious that each in her own way was trying to understand and heal.
And so in the next few days and pages, that is what I hope to do.
Heal and share and perhaps bring some Presence or at least the light of day
to my family’s shared pain,
for the next generation is upon us
and they are struggling too.
(Pain Body Part II: Grandfather)
Pain Body (Part Two): Grandfather
At the table Saturday night, five of the women cousins sat.
It wasn’t longer before someone mentioned the tradition of eating oysters for Christmas dinner and the ensuing problems the raised for a young child.
I asked them if they knew why they were eating oysters.
Turns out, neither of my uncles had ever mentioned the story Mom recounted to us every year.
“My father was born on Christmas day and so he got to choose his favorite food for Christmas dinner. And he loved oysters.”
And about then, Mom would start tearing up, because Grandfather had loved her and she had loved him, and one week after she returned from her honeymoon in 1946,
William Kearfott put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Mom had felt it coming. She had had a dream the night before and called her father early the next morning. His reassure proved untrue.
In a few hours he was dead.
Uncle Eddie, age 14, was pounding on the bathroom door when his father killed himself.
So this last Christmas, when I walked into Mom’s kitchen to find her dressed in her all in her Merry Christmas clothes with tears in her eyes, I was ready for a trauma.
But, I didn’t expect her to say that she’d just found out that Eddie was dead.
I didn’t expect her to say that she hadn’t called him last night because she wanted to call tomorrow on the twenty – forth.
And I didn’t expect her to say that this old man with Alzheimer’s, who hadn’t done a thing without my Aunt’s help in years, had gotten out of bed all by himself in the middle of the night to die of a heart attack
in the bathroom.
The bathroom.
I have to wonder if the room hadn’t haunted him throughout his life.
His daughter Kitty was en-route home for Christmas, had delayed a day to visit with friends a few hours away.
She says that night a single clap of thunder exploded through her lodgings.
The event shook everyone.
An hour later, the phone rang. Eddie was gone.
I have to wonder about the noise of that gun shot.
I asked Kitty if she’d seen the lightening bolt Mom wears around her neck.
She wears it to commemorate my father’s passing.
As we completed the sprinkling of his ashes into the Atlantic one lone cloud on the distant horizon had flashed with a bolt that made us all jump.
“Poppy!” Mom had cried referring to her comment in the hospital as we’d waited for them to prop his body.
“Poppy said that when he died he was going to be ‘an electrical thought impulse.’”
At the time this strange prediction had simply made me laugh.
Now, it makes me wonder. How many circles do we trace out.
Yet another Christmas and once again, Mom was in tears:
She had meant to call.
All the men in her life died so quickly, just like that, no warning.
“And Grandma wouldn’t let me cry at Dad’s funeral!”
At the age of 82, Mom is still angry at her mother.
By the time I was 10, I knew that Mom’s body gave her constant pain.
She would wrap her legs in ace bandages as she constantly had flares ups of phlebitis, the blood clotting in her inflamed veins.
Other explanations included, “The doctor told me I developed food allergies rather than having a nervous breakdown in the early 1950’s.”
And not long after that, I became aware that both my uncles waged a battle against alcohol,
as did Mom and Grandma to a lesser extent,
as have my cousins.
But, I was surprised and then intrigued to learn this past weekend that,
“Six family members have suffered psychotic episodes.”
Since I was pretty sure I was being included in this list, I chuckled and replied,
“You know, I think we might reframe that statistic into terms of spiritual awakening.”
After all, one man’s Psychotic is another’s Shaman.
Thus, not all psychotic episodes are pathology.
The term “spiritual emergency” has been coined since I had many of my experiences.
I myself have always learned fascinating stuff every time I’ve slipped off the end of that old Bell Curve of Normality.
Not that the fall wasn’t painful, difficult, and something I might choose to avoid if given half a chance.
But it has always been an eye opener.
And in all honesty, I have often wondered if the hunger, the intense longing for the grips of spiritual connection, even at the cost of worldly function, isn’t simply a deeper layer in a soul also at risk more superficially to addiction to alcohol and heroine.
And if the next generation is following our lead (which apparently they are),
perhaps they’d like to know a bit about the family tradition:
We are a Sensitive bunch.
We hunger deeply.
We have not always been allowed to claim our sensitivity
and thus not allowed to claim all the power of the Self, not allowed to satisfy our deepest hungers.
That denial has created our family pain body and we will replay the cycle until the body is dissolved.
It wasn’t longer before someone mentioned the tradition of eating oysters for Christmas dinner and the ensuing problems the raised for a young child.
I asked them if they knew why they were eating oysters.
Turns out, neither of my uncles had ever mentioned the story Mom recounted to us every year.
“My father was born on Christmas day and so he got to choose his favorite food for Christmas dinner. And he loved oysters.”
And about then, Mom would start tearing up, because Grandfather had loved her and she had loved him, and one week after she returned from her honeymoon in 1946,
William Kearfott put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Mom had felt it coming. She had had a dream the night before and called her father early the next morning. His reassure proved untrue.
In a few hours he was dead.
Uncle Eddie, age 14, was pounding on the bathroom door when his father killed himself.
So this last Christmas, when I walked into Mom’s kitchen to find her dressed in her all in her Merry Christmas clothes with tears in her eyes, I was ready for a trauma.
But, I didn’t expect her to say that she’d just found out that Eddie was dead.
I didn’t expect her to say that she hadn’t called him last night because she wanted to call tomorrow on the twenty – forth.
And I didn’t expect her to say that this old man with Alzheimer’s, who hadn’t done a thing without my Aunt’s help in years, had gotten out of bed all by himself in the middle of the night to die of a heart attack
in the bathroom.
The bathroom.
I have to wonder if the room hadn’t haunted him throughout his life.
His daughter Kitty was en-route home for Christmas, had delayed a day to visit with friends a few hours away.
She says that night a single clap of thunder exploded through her lodgings.
The event shook everyone.
An hour later, the phone rang. Eddie was gone.
I have to wonder about the noise of that gun shot.
I asked Kitty if she’d seen the lightening bolt Mom wears around her neck.
She wears it to commemorate my father’s passing.
As we completed the sprinkling of his ashes into the Atlantic one lone cloud on the distant horizon had flashed with a bolt that made us all jump.
“Poppy!” Mom had cried referring to her comment in the hospital as we’d waited for them to prop his body.
“Poppy said that when he died he was going to be ‘an electrical thought impulse.’”
At the time this strange prediction had simply made me laugh.
Now, it makes me wonder. How many circles do we trace out.
Yet another Christmas and once again, Mom was in tears:
She had meant to call.
All the men in her life died so quickly, just like that, no warning.
“And Grandma wouldn’t let me cry at Dad’s funeral!”
At the age of 82, Mom is still angry at her mother.
By the time I was 10, I knew that Mom’s body gave her constant pain.
She would wrap her legs in ace bandages as she constantly had flares ups of phlebitis, the blood clotting in her inflamed veins.
Other explanations included, “The doctor told me I developed food allergies rather than having a nervous breakdown in the early 1950’s.”
And not long after that, I became aware that both my uncles waged a battle against alcohol,
as did Mom and Grandma to a lesser extent,
as have my cousins.
But, I was surprised and then intrigued to learn this past weekend that,
“Six family members have suffered psychotic episodes.”
Since I was pretty sure I was being included in this list, I chuckled and replied,
“You know, I think we might reframe that statistic into terms of spiritual awakening.”
After all, one man’s Psychotic is another’s Shaman.
Thus, not all psychotic episodes are pathology.
The term “spiritual emergency” has been coined since I had many of my experiences.
I myself have always learned fascinating stuff every time I’ve slipped off the end of that old Bell Curve of Normality.
Not that the fall wasn’t painful, difficult, and something I might choose to avoid if given half a chance.
But it has always been an eye opener.
And in all honesty, I have often wondered if the hunger, the intense longing for the grips of spiritual connection, even at the cost of worldly function, isn’t simply a deeper layer in a soul also at risk more superficially to addiction to alcohol and heroine.
And if the next generation is following our lead (which apparently they are),
perhaps they’d like to know a bit about the family tradition:
We are a Sensitive bunch.
We hunger deeply.
We have not always been allowed to claim our sensitivity
and thus not allowed to claim all the power of the Self, not allowed to satisfy our deepest hungers.
That denial has created our family pain body and we will replay the cycle until the body is dissolved.
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