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.
