Splitting the Ego Atom

Some time ago I experienced an ecstatic vision, rising out of sleep, in which I physically, emotionally, and spiritually experienced what we would call Paradox. (See Postcard from the Lip of the Void.) These sensations all occurred together, at once. A baby being born and the same baby as an old man dying. A village shuttering its windows in fear against arriving tanks, and the same villagers driving the invading tanks. A water drop forming in the vapors of clouds and at the same time dropping into and being absorbed by the ocean. All of it happened at once, outside of time, outside of space. And my body and mind rebelled. In fact, I could only experience fragments at a time, as my mind attempted to hold them together and couldn’t, as my body attempted to sense them together, and couldn’t.

I once read an article on children’s language development by Allan Schore, a neuropsychologist who studies the neuropsychology and attachment development of children. He described how mothers/caregivers, with all good intentions, narrow a baby’s experience by teaching language. Imagine a baby standing up in her crib following a nap on a spring afternoon, taking in a number of sense impressions: skin sensation of a spring breeze, sunlight warming her skin and falling on the room in a variety of light patterns, sounds of birds and insects outside the window, flutter of the curtain in the breeze, etc. The baby is having a multimodal, multisensory symphony of experience. These are not separate experiences that the baby notices in sequence (as I’ve had to write about them), but a woven tapestry experienced as a whole. Mother then enters the room, exclaims, “Oh look at the nice sunshine!” Baby’s multidimensional experience suddenly gets split into a focus on the sunshine. Now there is only “sun” and it’s multimodal beingness is reduced to the word “nice.”

The mother didn’t do wrong. She did what is needed. She is teaching language to her little one. She is teaching her to take a step beyond the Garden of Eden, to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. She is helping her little one to form an ego, an incredibly important tool for survival that will help her interact effectively in a three-dimensional world. The unavoidable cost is to lose the richness of the original experience through the creation of little bubbles or atoms called “sun” and “tree” and “house” which will eventually be drawn in a way that can be seen and understood immediately by others: a circle with lines emanating from it, a rectangle for a trunk with a circle on top for leaves, a square with a triangle inverted for the roof, the letters “h-o-u-s-e,” and so forth. We celebrate these accomplishments of children, without realizing, perhaps, the cost to the child’s creative spirit, or how we can minimize the cost.

Even so, I’ve come to the conclusion that our conscious, social minds need our splits and our bubbles of separateness (inside and outside), that they are a built-in way for us to get along in a world that isn’t often attuned to our holistic needs. For example, I was able to split off my physical needs from my emotional needs as a child. As a result, I was able to enjoy and find pleasure in the food my mother cooked for me, without having to cope with overwhelming feelings about ways she hurt me. I was able to split off painful memories that, had I held them in memory, would have threatened my ability to cope with the dangers surrounding me. And I was able to experience a spiritual split that allowed me to experience the Blessed Mother (I was raised Catholic) as my spiritual, comforting, protecting mother.

In adulthood, at least since age 30 or so when I rediscovered a spiritual path, I have been focused on reuniting those parts of myself that have been split off, with reconnecting all of the separated parts of myself. Right brain to left brain, inner/emotional brain to outer/thinking brain, heart to gut to head, etc. The most important split, and one that remains most difficult for me to heal, is the split that came as a result of childhood abuse: body split from everything else. This split has resulted in chronic physical pain, stiffness, neuropathy, and autoimmune disease. At 68 my body is so much healthier than in my 40s and 50s. I haven’t had any symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis in over a decade. But I feel the loss of my body, the loss of enjoyment of my body. And I know my body feels the loss of my spirit and energy.

Here’s the way I’ve been conceptualizing the reconnection of my split parts. Like everyone, I formed an ego, that requirement of living in a social and material environment. I perceive that ego as a network of small “cells” or “atoms” or “bubbles,” each having a rigid membrane holding it together, and there is a lot of power locked within each atom. Also like everyone who attempts to live an examined life, I have attempted to become aware of, and to reconnect, all of this power-being-held-within-rigid-atoms. All of this power is one thing – the power in atom A is the same power as that in atom B. When and if the rigid exterior membranes of these atoms melt, all of that power will unify, it will take up space, it will have perceptible Presence. There will be a Big Bang of Merry when my Ego Atoms finally collide and merge together into a unified field. I confess that I am not sure what integration will look like. I am working toward something I can’t imagine.  Will it be like my vision of Paradox? Like the baby holistically experiencing in the crib? Or will the Big Bang of Merry be something more like release from this 3-D world, more like death?

It’s because of that ecstatic vision of Paradox that my heart, and even my head, KNOW that there is no separation, in me or anywhere, that All is already integrated. Knowing gives me the courage and patience to continue. Knowing gives me the language to render it in words of separation. But my body is not yet convinced. My body still feels the pain of separation.

So. I breathe deeply and sigh out as I wait and watch and move for the tendrils of connection to form. I breathe deeply and sigh out as I stand and move and and dance and watch for freedom.

Free at Last!

The other day I watched a PBS American Experience episode called Soundtrack for a Revolution. I saw television footage in that segment that I remember seeing while I was in high school. I didn't really understand what I was seeing back then: police dogs attacking nonviolent protesters, freedom riders pulled off buses that were then torched, people being clubbed by police, dragged by their hair, set upon by fire hoses, turning up missing, killed. Seeing those clips again resurrected the horror of the violent sixties for me, when John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy were all assassinated, over one million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were killed in the war, and untold numbers were killed, injured, or maimed in the nonviolent movement for civil rights.

A portion of Dr. King's I Have a Dream
speech was also included in the episode, made all the more poignant by the contrast with the violence of the television clips: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" I wept, seeing that speech again all these years later, after countless viewings during Black History month. I watched it again today on YouTube, and wept again. You have to remember the violence to appreciate the full power of his words.

On Saturday I practiced telling the story of the Ten Best Ways (a/k/a the Ten Commandments) in a Godly Play/Faith and Play training. The background of the story is this: The Hebrews, enslaved in Egypt, have escaped on foot. They are following Moses and are being chased by the Pharaoh and his soldiers, who have horses, chariots and weapons. The Hebrews are afraid. They come to the Red Sea, an inland sea that is about twice the size of Lake Superior. They believe they are trapped, and they think they are going to be killed or enslaved again, with the punishment that comes following escape. Then God tells Moses to hold his staff out over the sea. And the water is parted so the people can cross.

The Ten Best Ways lesson begins at this point. The story is told in a "desert box" or sandtray, using small human figures and a tall mountain. I began: "The people came through the water to freedom! They were so happy they danced!" As I moved the figures over the edge of the blue tray into the desert, it felt very real to me. My own body's joy joined with the joy of the people as they leaped to their freedom. I could feel the rush of adrenalin, the bubbling up elation, the anticipation of being "free at last!"

Freedom is such a precious thing. I never knew freedom as a child or teenager, except inside of myself. I could create worlds with my imagination, read stories, watch movies, and I could feel free for awhile. But the reality of my physical life was not an experience of freedom. I didn't realize it then, of course. It was many years later when, as an adult in a therapy session, I could feel the relief of escape. And the burden of it.

Because it takes courage to be free. Rollo May, the American existential psychologist, once wrote, "The opposite of courage … is not cowardice, it is conformity." Conformity means that you go along with the crowd, you don't follow your inward leading. In order to resist going along with the crowd, it seems to me, one has to practice doing the things that help you be free. In my language, this is a "discipline" or a spiritual practice.

The people of the Civil Rights Movement practiced the spiritual discipline of nonviolence. They received the physical blows and attacks, the spitting and harassment. They fought back with music, words, and prayer, not with violence. Occasionally someone may have lost the discipline. Perhaps they bit the policeman who was dragging them by the collar, or yelled an insult at someone who had insulted them. But the Civil Rights Movement achieved freedom under the law for African-Americans because they had the courage to deeply practice the discipline of nonviolence.

When the Hebrews were marching across the desert to God-knows-(literally)-where, they began to complain. They were tired and hungry and scared. The first time Moses went up Mt. Sinai, he was gone for awhile. The people became even more anxious. They longed for the certainty of their enslavement, they longed for a God they could touch, a God they could see. They longed to conform to the life their captors had created for them! So they melted all their gold and made a golden Baal, a God of Egypt. Everyone there had presumably heard Moses tell them that if they committed to Yahweh, Yahweh would commit to them and lead them to the Promised Land. And probably not every last one of them felt at ease with dancing for the God Baal. But they did it anyway. So there was another level of conformity when those who were not led to dance conformed to the prevailing mood of the crowd. The people lost their courage, and their commitment to the discipline of monotheism. They made a graven image, and returned to the ways of their captors.

Personally, I like graven images. I have several in my home: Isis, Innana, Kuan Yin, Kali, Nut, Ix Chel, Brigid, Ganesha. My God doesn't require that I forsake these aspects of myself in order to worship with the Unity. My disciplines are different, but I must practice them in order to experience the freedom I seek. I must practice breathing, singing, drumming, and inward worship. I must practice physical movement, and healthy eating. My disciplines set me apart in some ways, since I avoid foods that are commonly eaten, and engage in some practices that are uncommon among Friends. Sometimes I feel an internal pressure to conform to what I perceive to be others' ideas about what is socially comfortable or Quakerly. I lose courage and I let go of my disciplines. When I do that, I am unfaithful to my freedom. I conform to my perception of what other people, not God, want for me. And then we all lose. Everyone loses my power, and my authentic, sovereign self, including me. Everyone loses what I could offer, if I were courageous enough to be free.

Quakers can also lose their freedom and leak their power through rituals of conformity. When we don't practice our discipline of mindful listening for the will of God in our Meetings for Business, we lose our freedom to discern creative ways forward. When we focus only on our own comfort without attending to the needs of the different, the poor, and the disadvantaged, we lose our freedom to live in harmony with the whole complement of humanity. When we allow ourselves to vent our frustrations about others in our meetings, rather than approaching the offending Friend personally, in kindness, we lose our freedom to be in unity. Every time we fail our discipline, every time we expect other Friends to conform to the prevailing Quakerly political attitude of the day, every time we recognize the "heavy" Friends of our meeting but slight the "light" ones, we are like the Hebrews, building our golden Baal of social and political correctness around which to dance.

It takes courage to be free. And when we have the courage, "… when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children … will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"