How to operate with a blown mind

by Adam Lammiman on 2007-06-04 11:17:38

“The Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I” cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be anyway to get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in the Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Like, the Philosophers Stone, true Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.”

Robert Anton Wilson – Cosmic trigger Volume 1

There are points in everyone’s live when the rug of certainty is pulled from beneath them, when we are faced with the vast unpredictable nature of the cosmos in all it’s terrifying glory. Buddhist author Perma Chodron calls this our realization of ‘groundlessness’. Times when our illusions of a fixed and stable world are shattered and the true unfixed nature of the universe is revealed to us. When we are flung headlong into these moments I believe we are often faced with a choice, we can flee into denial and fear, clinging terrified to our raft of belief as we are torn apart in the tempest or we can let go, plunge into the depths and embrace the uncertainty as an opportunity for growth and understanding.What I want to recount here is my own recent journey into the chapel perilous. I’m going to be brutally honest about all my feelings, not for want of sympathy or praise, or because I think that what happened to me is particularly traumatic or special, but because I think that if you go on a journey into the abyss you have something of an obligation for those who might follow you to share what you bring back.

It’s almost a year ago now since I returned from my travels in Malaysia, I arrived home changed mentally and physically. I’d spent three months training solidly in martial arts, being steeped not only in the physical culture but in the mental as well, being taught by a Sufi and Bomo (Malay Shaman). It was intense experience which coupled with a month in India on the way home had left me physically and mentally exhausted.
I did return full of confidence and I would have said at the time vigor, but looking back I realize it was arrogance, I was eager to show off my new skills and pick up my life again, thinking that things would be the same as before.
It was about a month or so after returning the panic began to rise. The term panic attack is, in my view, such a term of understatement, the words do not really convey the full import of the experience. Imagine the most scared you’ve ever been, pure bottomless life fearing terror, like standing on the edge of a cliff convinced you’re going to fall but not quite sure when the ground will give way.

This purposeless terror sits waiting to rise to the surface at the sightless provocation, all the fears and dreads that lurk in the dark recesses of your mind suddenly become the most seemingly real and immediate threats that could happen at any moment. They often start from reasonable rational fears that though unlikely are at least possible but as these more plausible worries are dismissed they move into the most bizarre and outlandish fantasy that, though obviously absolutely impossible, nonetheless feel as though they will happen any second. It ‘s as though the rational surface layer of the mind needs some kind of map, some kind of label for this deep, pure nameless terror so it trawls through the dregs of your unconscious for something to hang it onto. Sometimes it was as though I could feel my mind flip through an index of fears until it found one that clicked, not that one, not that one, ah ha! And away we’d go again.

The Wheel of Life in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition divides existence into 6 realms or states of being, the world of Gods, the world of Demi Gods, the world of Humans, the world of Animals, the world of Pretas and the world of Hell. Each world could be viewed as a separate realm where we each suffer endless rebirths until we learn how to stop the wheel and step off into Nirvana.

However it can also be viewed as a metaphor for our own present experience as we are constantly ‘reborn’ into the realms from moment to moment. We shift from the bliss of the God Realm, to the uncontrolled passion of the animal realm, to the unquenchable desire of the Hungry Ghosts, or the unending torment of the Hell realm in a constant state of flux. We may find ourselves spending more time in one realm than the others, depending on the patterns of our previous experience that inform our current state, but we probably spend at least some time in each one of them at some point in our lives.
If we view the wheel in this way then stopping it is not a literal step into another world, far from it, it is rather a shifting of perspective to the realization that we create the realms through our thoughts and actions and that if we but change our perspective slightly what was once an obstacle, a point of suffering, instead becomes a means of liberation.

At the height of the panic attacks I was firmly in the hell realm, tormented by invisible forces seemingly out of my control, faced with a never ending catalog of fear (that was the worst part of the experience, the thought that it would never stop, that I would be like this for the rest of my life). But as the metaphor of the wheel above illustrates, at the core of this experience there also lies an opportunity and if it can be but grasped we can perhaps develop a new understanding about the world we inhabit.

The best way I can describe it is like being in a hall of mirrors. At first you blunder through blindly, terrified by the distorted and terrifying images looming up in your vision. You flee from these seemingly alien and uncontrollable presences that dominate your life, but there’s nowhere to go every time you turn a corner you find more distortion and greater fear. Until you gather your courage, stop and realize that all of the things you’ve been running from are wearing your face, they are simply your own image reflected back at you.

The peak of my visit into hell came one Sunday, I’d began to see a therapist working in the body orientated school of psychotherapy (quite influenced by William Reich though not strictly speaking Neo-Reichian) and through her help I had began to gradually get a handle on what was happening and become more comfortable with the experience. I’d stopped having the panic attacks but was still fluctuating through bouts of depression and despondency, coupled with occasional break-downs.

I woke up that Sunday feeling very depressed, like someone had draped a heavy weighted curtain around me that was impossible to shake off, as I went about my morning the feeling of depression got worse and began to alternate with bursts of irrational anger where I would be gripped by the sudden desire to smash things up. At this point I decided that instead of trying to take my mind off these feelings I would face them and see what happened.

During my sessions with the therapist I’d gradually come to realize that one of my main issues was one of control, I’d come to see my emotions as dangerous, irrational and separate from me. I’d developed many mechanisms to hold them in check, thinking that they needed to be kept on a leash, which in turn created a pressure cooker effect allowing them to build to bursting point.

I should point out here that none of these insights had been conscious to me previously, the main thing that the therapy had helped to do was to begin to gently bring to the surface all the unconscious assumptions on which I’d built my life, all the things that I’d taken for granted as the way the world ‘IS’ as opposed to realizing it was just a lense through which I was viewing experience.

It’s difficult to put into words what a profound shift this was, I realized that years of navel gazing, martial arts, yoga, esoteric practice and study were mainly defense mechanisms built on fear and a desire to control myself and my surroundings. I came to understand that my underlying assumption was that the world was inherently threatening. If we use RAW and Tim Leary’s metaphor my biosurvial circuit was permanently set on ‘run’!

So in my flat with no one else around and nowhere else to go I decided to let this fear rise and see what happened. I felt the urge to wail and sob, I threw things across my flat, I got out a kick bag and tore at it swinging wildly until I had no energy left to lift my arms, I began to let out the anger and fear I’d buried so deep for so long. At the end I knelt in meditation and let the waves of terror and rage rise through me, no longer trying to control it and no longer trying to act it out. I tried to drop the dialog, the conscious need to label and explain the feelings and just let them manifest.

After some time the rage and terror became less and less until suddenly I felt something almost like a switch flipping in my body and I experienced what can only described as an ‘opening’ in my chest. It was as if someone had ripped open a door long rusted shut and I felt warmth and deep feelings of love and happiness radiating out from my ribcage like a small sun had ignited there. I had never felt like this before, in fact I had never really felt before, in that moment I truly understood what opening the heart really meant. Suddenly everything was different but nothing had changed.
Whilem Reich identifies three levels of our character; Surface, Middle Layer and Core. The Surface level is our social level, the face we show the world, the level of social mores and graces, a careful structure designed to hold the layer below in check. Beneath this the middle level of our frustrated desires, spurned love and unresolved anger, it’s the part that comes to the surface when we let our mask slip, when we are angry or upset. However below the Middle Layer is the Core. This, according to Reich, is our original unsullied nature of unconditional love and acceptance we had as babies before will built up layers of frustration and anger to protect and cover it.

Many of us peak below the Surface layers of our personality and mistake the Middle Layer of anger and frustration as our core nature. Core beliefs that if present social constraints were to slip then humanity would descend into an orgy of looting and destruction could be seen as projections of these fears outside ourselves and often these fears are justified when this layer is manifested in a lone gunman or group acts of genocide.

However below this layer is an openness and love that we have buried under tonnes of emotional dirt, like sleeping beauty we have allowed our hearts to fall asleep and hidden them behind a forest of thorns.

“Only after weeks had passed did I begin to think that I had rather absent-absentmindedly, passed through what mystics call the dark night of the soul or crossing the abyss. Whatever one calls it, I reached the depths of despair and deliberately decided to love the world instead of pitying myself, and afterwards, I was no longer afraid of anything”.

Robert Anton Wilson – Cosmic trigger Volume 1

At the end of that tumultuous Sunday the feelings of openness and warmth stayed with me for a few hours but my defenses quite quickly reasserted themselves and I lost that connection with my heart. However that glimpse however fleeting gave me a comparison, I felt a connection with the world that I had previously been unaware had existed. I had spent my life in a flat and two dimensional world and suddenly I had a glimpse of a depth and substance.
I still fear and I still get anxious but I’m not afraid to live them now as I can see them as not something to fear in themselves but rather connections to this deeper well of feeling and depth of living. There is no Yin without Yang, no up without down, if we deny our darker emotions, if we place them somewhere outside of ourselves, then we also cut ourselves off from the positive as well. The trick is to neither be ruled by your emotions nor to run from them, rather to give them the space to express themselves and the courage to accept them.

“Feel shame only where shame is due. Fear only what is fearful. See evil only what is evil. Lest you mistake the true way and fall into darkness.
See what is. See what is not. Follow the true way. Rise.”

The Dhammapada, the sayings of the Buddha.

Resources

Reichian Growth Work – an out of print book on Reich’s teachings, though not exactly the same it shares much of the same underlying ideas that the characterize the therapy I underwent.
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/selfheal/reichintro.htm

Chiron – the London based Body Psychotherapy centre I went to, the website is truly awful but don’t let that put you off they really know their stuff. http://www.chiron.org

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