Book #8: Author’s Note, Introduction, and Chapters 1 through 5-Melinda Copp Collaboration

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man”-—Samuel Johnson

“We speak about losing our minds, as if it is a bad thing.  I say, lose your mind.  Do it purposefully.  Find out who you really are beyond your thoughts and beliefs.  Lose your mind, find your soul“—–Vironika Tugaleva

“I am only responsible for what I say, not for what you understand”—John Wayne.

I am in the process of bringing Book #8 to the general public, with the help Of Melinda Copp, my editor and ghost writer. I loved the way that I presented the material, but most others did not. Even in my more loving human/spiritual experience, I still carry my father’s capacity to turn people away.  And, at times, I carry a little “John Wayne” energy.

We have all had “teachers” like that, haven’t we?

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The symbol for the number 8 is also the same symbol for infinity, if the number 8 is laid on its side.  This is a significant attempt by me, as I attempt to point out where “infinity” may actually be experienced.

We are infinite in our fundamental nature, being the very emanation of this universe in a human form, and with an ever evolving consciousness.  Yet, the unenlightened mind continues to interpret our sacred magnificence as if it is something profane in nature.  What is disturbing to me is that not enough of our population is curious about what our purpose might be on Mother Earth. Far too many accept that satisfying biological urges while working, maintaining a family, and entertaining ourselves is enough.

I remember the “show and tell” period from grades one and two.  I would stand up in front of the class at every opportunity, whether I had something to show, and talk about, or not.  I never wanted to miss an opportunity to share.  When I had nothing to show, it sure made for some awkward “tells” however.  Yet, that embarrassment sure beat the humiliation that I received just sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on, which was all too frequently my chair.

We are all in the same class now, though everyone has their own unique lesson plan.

This latest book is a small part of mine.

The perception that the sacred, which is our world, and all of its life, is somehow profane is what motivates cultural insanity and darkness.  That is why ecological disasters and global warming stay in the forefront of human experience.  This darkness also creates the conditions for the proliferation of war, murder, greed, rape, and a common knowledge experience where it is socially acceptable to diminish the value of each other, animals, and our beautiful planet.

This book, like all other pointers to where true knowledge might lay, has no value to those who continue to look away.

If I allowed myself to continuously live in the fullness of my healing potential, this writing would be purely poetic in nature.  Yet, I made the choice long ago to be in the world, just not totally of it and its awkward nature.  My writing remains rather corrective in nature, and attempts  to point in the direction where love might exist, and away from where it definitely does NOT exist.

As biological beings, our brains are hardwired to protect our self, and our tribe, from continued threats and excessive pain.   Yet, we have access to a healing consciousness, which modifies those algorithms, and brings us back into balance from our excessive suffering, and our pain avoidance subroutines.

The conspiracy of silence that keeps us imprisoned within the structures of collective ignorance continues to rule much of our world, yet, to the evolving ones amongst us, the conspiracy of healing and love rules our hearts, and opens us up to our Soul..

This is what I do.  This is who I am.  I see problems.  I then look at the maps.  I find a healthier, safer, more functional path to travel, or, if it is not already available, I create my own.  I see opportunities for change, healing, and growth.  While the world continues spinning in its wobbly orbit, I present solutions that may assist awakening humans reach their spiritual possibilities.

It is often most beneficial to understand what is NOT true, that our native intelligence may finally connect with what MIGHT be true.

Stories from my own dark past have become the veins of the spiritual gold that I have mined for insight and wisdom.  My life timeline may be split into two distinct halves, the first half being the first thirty one years of my life, and the second half being the post March 1987 years.  For all intents and purposes, I have lived two completely different lives, though both parts have been characterized by my relative obscurity and, basically, anonymity.

The first period was informed by the internal voices for loneliness, anxiety, and insecurity, and feeling rather unloved, while remaining habituated to many self defeating attitudes and their resultant questionable self care behaviors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second part continues to be guided by deep curiosity, and the profound experience of our infinite capacity for awakening and healing.

Someday, this world will be part of love’s conspiracy of SILENCE.

“That SILENCE comes when the whole structure of the self is understood”—–J. Krishnamurti

INTRODUCTION

“We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”—Anais Nin

We are about to embark on a great adventure, and journey into the the center of our being, and even of consciousness itself.  And, we will be using the tools of word formation, and story development, to aid in our fantastic voyage of self discovery, and, ultimately, healing.  Consciously developed stories can become the defining containers for our infinite spirit, and keep us safe while we uncouple from old pathways of misunderstaning and personal disease, until we redevelop our capacities to live by the power of our timeless, limitless, present moment self.

One of the more powerful stories about my early life has to do with the unconscious parental care that I received as a baby.  My parents wrapped me in a blanket and put me in the car in the garage at night so they could get some sleep. My father was chasing the American Dream and worked two jobs at the time. And I was just another “damned crying baby.” This experience, although I didn’t know it at the time, left me feeling abandoned and lonely from the beginning. I always felt like I was competing for love. I never felt like I had anything to contribute. A toxicity pervaded my childhood home, the way it pervaded the culture at the time and continues to do so. My father overreacted to any situation that brought a sense of fear or threat into the home environment. I felt a need to internally, though unconsciously, balance whatever energy was being over expressed at any particular moment, which certainly added to my passive-aggressive component of self-expression. Though I loved my parents, I certainly did not want to grow up and be like them. And for most of my life, I wasn’t able to get over my upbringing.

Much of my early life was clouded by the traumatic influences that I experienced.  Trauma’s most damaging impact upon a human being is its capacity to attenuate, or even block, normal emotional expression and interchange with others. Literally, unexpressed energy becomes stored within the body and mind, creating black holes of negative influence on bodily function and our perceptions. Our unhealed emotional issues and traumas become entombed within our bodily tissues. When our personalities have been formed by the layering of our egos upon our wounds, the wounds become inseparable from us and then affect us in ways that aren’t always visible on the surface. And I know that so many of my problems have come about because I was made to understand that my cries weren’t important.

This was why I always felt alone in the world. It can be seen that we, as humans, keep layering ourselves and our ideas upon what somebody else is saying, rather than meeting the being where they are, and responding accordingly. For a long time, my sense of self revolved around internalizing what my mother and father expected from me, what I could or could not give back to them to attempt to please them, and my defense mechanisms for managing the fallout when I failed.

My belief and understanding is we all suffer under traumatic influences, be they caused by familial, cultural, or even by Mother Nature Herself.. Some people experience trauma within the family, in the school system, in a work setting,  or from the external environment. Society is too big and complicated not to have experienced some kind of trauma from how people have related to us and how we’ve had to relate to society. Virtually all men and women have experienced oppression, repression, and the resultant diseases of the spirit at some point in their lives, and we have been both the victims, and the conscious and unconscious perpetrators, of this behavior. Society is the greatest inflictor of trauma on the individual. And for the most part, the medical, economic, religious, cultural, political, and spiritual traditions have failed in their understanding of humanity, and its basic, innermost needs of being valued and listened to. And that’s caused some unnecessary pain and suffering. We have all attempted to manage our symptoms in our own unique, yet all too often broken and dysfunctional ways.

I spent a lot of years chipping away at my life through self-destructive lifestyle choices. And when I look around at the world, I see a lot of other people doing the same thing. Suicidal behaviors exist on a spectrum. There are, of course, people who are acutely suicidal. But when I say suicide, I also mean not fully developing our potential, not connecting with our spirit of wholeness within, and chipping away at a life. I’m also talking about the person, who because they can’t quite measure up, they don’t talk, they overeat, they don’t exercise, they drink too much, they start using narcotics, and they create accidents for themselves with their reckless behavior. We don’t call that suicide while it’s happening. But then, when we look around us and see so many dying young, there’s really no other way to describe lifestyle choices that didn’t affirm their value as human beings.

I made a conscious decision to try to kill myself on January 28, 1986. I didn’t succeed, but I have spent considerable time since looking back on that day and the events that led me to that decision.

From 1971 through 1987, as a practicing alcoholic and drug addict and mentally ill human being, I lost most of my remaining freedom of choice. I understand now that, all those years I turned to substances, I was doing so as an escape from the wounds of trauma. (moved from 1st page)

There has been a marked increase in anxiety, depression, loneliness, substance abuse, and other forms of mental illness in our general population recently. We have a 60 percent obesity rate, 16 percent of people admit to drinking too much, and 40 percent say they’re lonely. Loneliness may not sound like a hazard, but it can lead to heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, anxiety, depression, a weakened immune system, cognitive decline, and even death. The body creates stress hormones from that loneliness, and stress hormones wear out our systems and lead to other health problems that cause premature death.

These personal experiences are part of the bigger picture cultural disease. Turbulent political times and toxic leadership are manifestations or symptoms of a national disease for the major blocks of people who feel that they have been neglected, ignored, or persecuted. Far too many people on either side of the divide have felt that way most of their lives, and continue to diagnose and treat themselves for their own stress, loneliness, and anxiety.   It is dangerous behavior to self-medicate, and much too easy to choose the immediately available remedies of drugs, alcohol, and/or awkward or self-destructive political and religious ideologies to treat symptoms of our national disease. I have personally witnessed both mental illness, religious fanaticism and rigid fundamentalism, drug addiction, and early death through many of my co-workers, friends, family members, and acquaintances, and, even through myself. And while I came to the realization that much of my problems resides within me, I share a consciousness with this world that is damaged.

How to Overcome Our Trauma

I didn’t always understand how past trauma was affecting my present. Earlier in life, I only felt like there was something wrong with me. As a child, I told my friends that “I want to get off of this fucking rock”.  Since then, I’ve gone a search for truth that involved connecting the dots from what is wrong with me to what is wrong with the people and society around me. A spiritual awakening process beginning in 1987 was the start of my own exit from the chaotic mindset that characterized my life up to that point.  I had to begin a search for my own personal truth. That means I had to start developing my own story. I had to start believing that my words had value. I had to start believing that even though other people weren’t listening to me, that I could start listening to myself and give what I’m hearing value no matter how painful or terrifying the messages that were bubbling up within me were.

I had to make peace with the demons in my life, see them not as demons and tricksters but as assistance. I had to reinterpret the darkness within my heart and soul and give that darkness an opportunity to speak to me, because that’s where my story begins. I wasn’t listening. I was pushing it down by denying its value. I was pushing it down by drinking and using. I was pushing it down by continuing to deny the value of the spoken word.

A large part of my healing process involved what I call my Miracle Experiment. A miracle experiment, most simply, is the intention and all subsequent effort to heal from traumatic wounding, and the consciousness, and world culture, that such wounding creates. It means dealing directly with all of the darkness of our past, seeing it in the light of insight, love, and compassion, and moving onto new paths of conscious evolution. It means eliminating the objectification of reality and instead perceiving the universe as an extension of our true nature. And ultimately, it’s about forgiving and letting go, and learning to love ourself, and others, more completely..

When I recently rewrote the section on my search for truth, a period of time following my 1986n suicide attempt, I was to reenter the consciousness, and the emotional experience, of those most troubling times.  I did not expect or anticipate this, and I reexperienced many of the dark emotions that characterized this most turbulent and disordered time in my life.  I finished the work, and felt sad, and disconnected.  I took my sports car for a long drive, which typically lifts my spirits, no matter what may be going on in my life.  This time, however, it did not work.  I drove for 65 minutes away from home, and I found no relief.  When I began to slow down, to turn around and come home, a dove flew over my car, and seemed to lead me for over twenty seconds to a place to park, and to turn around.  I then remembered what the deove symbolized in my mind, the reassurance that my guiding spirit HAD NOT ABANDONED ME, and was continuing to lead me to my own promised land.  Suddenly, a torrent of tears erupted from me, and a huge release of energy overwhelmed my being.  I then felt an amazing forgiveness, love, and compassion for the past version of myself, a form of self forgiveness that I had never experience before.  Can there be a greater gift to give oneself in this life?

The Miracle Experiment brings the understanding that every time that  I identify with a person, a process, or a place, I have created either a new path of consciousness, or I have reaffirmed some older, more familiar, potentially worn out path that I have already been traveling upon, such as, “I am a victim of traumatic abuse,” or, “I am a lonely, isolated person,”  or, “I am an electrician,” or, “I am an alcoholic,” or, “I am a son of Beryl and Corinne Paullin.” Whatever I associate myself with either continues my path in old directions, or creates the imperative to create new words, thoughts, and experiences around a new direction.

After I have identified my own internalized issues, and have become willing to heal from them, I could just as easily say, “I am no longer traveling old paths of consciousness.” Then through mindfulness and meditation, I can stop or at least dramatically reduce thinking time-based thoughts and rehashing and rehearsing painful old memories, to create a new life experience for myself. Because of the innate human capacity to heal and change, I can create my new timeless self in each moment. The miracle experiment has no guarantee of success from a cultural standpoint, as the institutionalized traumatizing behavior and control is highly resistant to change.  Yet, to the degree that the individual can uncouple from these toxic influences, and explore the roots of suffering, the miracle experiment can proceed. And it is the perfect solution for when life feels out of control.

Another important action for healing from trauma is examining it. In 2016, Sheila Hamilton, author of All the Things We Never Knew, came to our house and talked about her book with my book club group. It’s a powerful book about her husband’s suicide and how she’d never understood what was going on with him. And she lamented the fact that David couldn’t tell his story.

One of my dear friends, Marty, who was a member of the book club and has since deceased, encouraged me to tell my story. That was when I really started trying. And it wasn’t an easy or straightforward process. But there was a story bubbling up  that felt like 100 pounds of stuff in a 10-pound bag. It had to get out. My whole life I had believed that I had nothing to say.  One day I begged and beseeched my wife, Sharon, to please tell my story for me, as she had already written a great book, and had that capacity.  She compassionately, and authoritatively, reminded me that my story was my own to develop, and to tell, and it will die with me, unless I find the courage, and the willingness to share it.  I never believed that I had anything to offer.  That was the story I carried with me. But that turned out to be false.

I started revisiting my childhood experiences and piecing together the story of my life. And while I was writing and thinking and making sense of it, I was struck with a profound realization. I saw, for the first time, the wounding process that I shared with my father. I felt an incredible compassion, love, and acceptance for my father, who had also suffered immensely under the spiritually destructive parenting of his own diseased parents. This can be particularly difficult for men. Men typically inflict their own wounding on everybody else, in subtle, or not so subtle ways. Usually, this manifests in dominating, or being dominated, by others. Philosophies of oppression, and of the monetization of reality, arise out of this wounding. Women and children are usually victimized, and/or those with sensitive and/or non-confrontational natures. But if you’re tired of people taking advantage of you, and you’re tired of people trampling on your heart, and you’re tired of staying silent, then you have to examine your experiences and open yourself to these profound realizations.

For a long time I didn’t have a narrative. I didn’t have a story. I had nothing to say. I was the guy who sat back in groups and either smiled or spaced out because I didn’t think I had anything to say. And I feared that, even if I did, no one would listen anyway. We tend to minimize our own inner stories. We may not even believe that there’s anything there to tell. Or we may believe that whatever is there should be hidden because we are ashamed of it. But the truth is, our stories need to be told.

The Profound Power of Telling Your Story

When people commit suicide, sometimes even the people closest to them are surprised. They never knew the person had these thoughts and intentions inside them. That’s because, when a person is approaching that sort of darkness, they’ve already minimized their pain and suffering, and the willingness of others to be present for them in their time of greatest need.. They already believe that nobody wants to listen to them. They feel inadequate, and they don’t know that they have a story, let alone that it has value. We are lonely because we don’t think anybody cares enough to listen to what we have to say. And in most cases, we don’t know what we’d say even if someone were listening.

I have a dear friend who is eighty years old and still can’t tell her story. She had several suicide attempts in her life. She raised two daughters and two sons, but they never understood what she was thinking or what drove her to that decision. And now, as adults, her children are struggling with some similar issues. Their mother’s story could save their lives, but she doesn’t have the words or the strength or the hope to put her healing journey into words. What got you out of your suicidal ideation? What got you out of your meaningless life experience so that you found a will to live and wanted to give back to the world? Today, my friend is living a wonderful life, but she didn’t have that for a long time. And if she could bring that to a story, then she could give that story to her children and share her healing, guiding wisdom with them.

This is what is said in AA meetings: we share our experience, strength, and hope with those that still suffer and with a hope that they can be encouraged by what we went through and then grab on to our story and then emulate it is their own unique way to make it their own.. When we have a story, then we can help lift up that person who is one step below us, then we have something to share that literally elevates them too. Because they’re looking for meaning too and they don’t know where to find it. But if they can be encouraged by somebody who has found it, that’s hope.

Some people, they want to tell their stories but they don’t have the language for it. They haven’t developed language of insight that gives them the capacity to speak what they’re feeling and what their life experience was, where they were hurt, what they felt during the hurt. And, yeah, this is difficult. Yet, intelligence is the capacity to use words to form new concepts.  And a more profound intelligence is the developed capacity to use the myriad of life experiences to create personal insight.

Even naming our trauma can be difficult. The process of naming is the way that our consciousness weighs and measures new forms of life, ideas, and experiences, it’s how we understand and interpret our stories.  Naming tends to attach a dynamic process to a fixed point in time and space, always with a past frame of reference, and thus permanently lodges it in the dead past. But naming our traumas isn’t enough; we have to find a way to see under the vast matrix of impressions of our past history that only float on the surface on the mind, yet continue to capture and hold our attention through their hypnotic appeal..

The awareness and the healing of childhood trauma places us squarely on new paths of consciousness, which leads us into sacred realms. For most people, healing requires perseverance and patience, to bring the us the fullest measure of healing.  And, until the final release from ego’s grasp, we must remain vigilant through insight and mindfulness, catching ourselves whenever we stray back upon the old paths.

I took several photographs of my baby and early childhood self, and grieved with these images of self my loss of innocence and healthy self-esteem during the early years. It was heartbreaking work, and the floodgates of tears opened up, threatening to drown me. Yet, this grief, like the unexpressed anger, are the most important contributors to the letting go of the old, familiar lonely path of feeling ignored and unloved by the world. Without such freeing insight, we continue on the older, more familiar paths of painful existence, where replication of errors of perception continue, suffering predominates, and the profane reigns supreme.

Why Telling Your Story Is So Hard

Having a life narrative allows us to shape and control the way we see the world and the pieces of ourselves that we share. But I’ve met so many people who don’t have a life narrative. They don’t have a story that embodies the wisdom that they’ve gained and the problems they’ve overcome.

I call this a conspiracy of silence. It’s not an intentional silence, but it’s a silence based on the fact that we don’t have words to talk about our personal pain. And this conspiracy of silence is taken advantage of by the people around us, as well as our political, religious, and economic leaders. The culture takes for granted that if we have nothing to say, that we’re doing okay. If we don’t know how to say our truth, then our silence is interpreted by others as a tacit agreement or as we have nothing to offer, when, in fact, we do.

Humans have both a loving, and a lying nature. But our tendency to lie overrules our tendency to love.  We tend to hide behind our lies, and often, in doing so, deceive ourselves first and foremost. We keep our secrets close to the chest and fear the day when everyone finds out. The conspiracy of silence embodies all of the shameful ideas that we have thought and acted upon.  A compelling part of this conspiracy is that others also share in this activity of keeping dangerous secrets, secrets that are attacks against ourselves and others, and the truth. This mutually imprisons all of us.

On the other side of the spectrum of our grand conspiracy of silence lies those who have finally embraced their healing potential. The conspiracy also indicates a hesitancy to talk with others around our spiritual potential, and our innate ability to connect with and manifest a more aware, intelligent, state of being. We may remain silent because of our own perceived inadequacy at presenting a supporting and compelling argument for our own point of view, fearing the indifference and rejection from others. Some shut down all points of view in disagreement with their own; others feel their resistance to any truth not already understood and applied. Many just turn their heads, and their words, away from the resistant person. It takes strength to successfully confront negativity while maintaining compassion and equanimity, thus not being threatened or degraded by the contact. This is a critical part of the conspiracy of silence. We become invisible to each other, the less curious we are about others, the less curious we are about ourselves. We become invisible to ourselves when we sit on our voice and fail to listen as our inner voice cries out for justice, peace, healing, and change.

The conspiracy of silence is all about preserving the established order and enhancing the status quo, and it is built right into the framework of our collective consciousness. Our collective common knowledge attempts to keep us in alignment and resonance with each other, no matter how out of phase with the truth that this knowledge may be.  The resultant toxic silence has become the manifestation of religious, cultural, and political conflicts intended to keep most members of society from talking about underlying issues related to trauma, wounding, oppression, misogyny, child abuse, patriarchy, and a whole spectrum of issues. The conspiracy continues whenever evolving people become too fearful to speak their truth and share their insights, for fear of being further attacked and marginalized.

To not express ourselves honestly and openly results in our own early demise, spiritually as well as physically. Some aspects of life just seem to elude our ability to effectively communicate around them, and never get incorporated into our personal stories, and thus add to the collective conspiracy of silence.  Also, other people’s stories and garbage gets back-filled into the holes and empty spaces within our own stories,  becoming embedded within us, and adding to our internal confusion and chaos. We must choose to no longer adhere to old, worn out patterns of behavior inculcated into us by our culture, our religions, our so-called teachers and teachings, and our misunderstandings of our parents,  and of our creator. We each must penetrate the conspiracy of silence, and bring the light of a loving heart and healing words to the hidden darkness. Our outdated sense of self will have to end, and we will have to find a new path of consciousness for this present moment healing event to have any hope of transforming the heart, body, and soul.  We need to follow new paths of consciousness, while dispelling the illusions created by our society and our individual fantasy thinking. The conspiracy of silence has to be exposed and disrupted, again and again if necessary, to stop the silencing of our true identities.

If we don’t speak up for what our needs are, then how are we ever going to make any progress with ourselves, within our families, and with this culture? Regardless of how difficult it may be, we, as human beings, are responsible for bringing our personal truth, and our stories, no matter how incomplete they may be, to the collective experience, including our family, our friends, our co-workers, our neighbors, and our religious and political leaders.

My life’s lessons were not gained in a classroom or sitting at the feet of a guru. My experience, and resulting wisdom, comes from real life, through love relationships, friends, enemies, family, and my work career. In college, I extensively explored philosophy, theology, psychology, and electrical, electronic, and computer engineering.  During the course of my work career, I was a mail clerk, maintenance mechanic, electrician, computer engineer, and instrument and electronic technician. Life has trained me to be an electrician, a computer engineer, a psychologist, a philosopher, an archeologist, and a spiritual explorer.

I believe that we need to address difficult human emotions and problems with expressing them skillfully. I spent most of my career as a systems analyst, doing electronic and computer design engineering and electrician work, and in that profession I did a lot of troubleshooting and repairing of systems. I assisted in the building and subsequent technical support of the operation of multi-billion dollar chip fabrication plants in Oregon, and maintaining the pumping and delivery systems of the entire fresh water supply to the City of Portland, among many other less economically significant endeavors. I love functioning systems, and I am intensely curious as why some systems succeed, and some fail, even after successful periods of operation. My intention is always to bring repair, and balance, back to any system which is malfunctioning. And one of the first steps we always took when working on any system was to understand it. Before we can begin any process of repair, we have to understand the system. And so, that’s where the process of finding your story starts.

This book may not be for the healthy, wealthy, and wise among us.  It is designed, however, for those seeking to create their own unique bridge to our healing potential. If you want more out of life than what you’re currently experiencing, if the conspiracy of silence is holding you back, or if you are a concerned witness to another’s dysfunction, then I have written this book for you. My hope is that it accurately points in the direction towards where our healing might be found. This book will be a failure if I have not encouraged another human being to escape their own repressive cycles and their own feeling of oppression by their family or by their culture evolve, and to finally speak their truth.

A Better Life, Starting With Your Story

Not everybody had the perfect family, and even those who claim to have still had to grow up in a damaged culture and make accommodations to that damage. Putting food on the table and basic survival are hard enough, but we all have to do it within the existing toxicity. And so we judge each other. We naturally seek to understand our self and our relationship with the whole, yet we become self-conscious, judgmental, and/or uncomfortable with those assessments. The loss of our connection with nature and our imbalanced and inaccurate perceptions of self and each other contribute to our sense of isolation, loneliness, and vulnerability. But we can take responsibility and make changes in the way we think and view the world. If we do not make ourselves aware of the reasons behind the choices that we make in life, we remain unconscious human beings, with little true freedom.

We are as sick as our secrets is an aphorism used extensively in recovery groups. And the truth is that our world does not heal until we do. It is our responsibility to find our freedom and stop blaming others. Otherwise, we will remain trapped in our labyrinth of self deception and spiritual corruption until the end. Without the healing of our wounds,  loving acceptance of ourselves and each other remains impossible, we remain separated from our true nature, and our pasts continue to dominate us. When we don’t tell our stories, the conspiracy of silence still reigns supreme, and our religions, economic policies, politics, and, in general, our collective consciousness, continues to give more support to our fantasies, rather than to facts and reality.

Many of us don’t believe that we have the seed for greatness within us. Many of us believe that somebody else is our greatness. We look outside ourselves, thinking that our greater good will come to us from Jesus Christ savior or from that perfect woman or that perfect man or that perfect job. We think that somebody else will do the work for us. We’re always looking outside of ourselves. But this is an inside job too. Yes, the good can come from the outside; but if we’re not doing the work to bring it out from our inside, then it throws life out of balance and creates dependencies. Your story of healing brings more balance to your self, and to all of your relationships.

If you can see beyond the limited vision of the self, and get to the deeper reality hidden within the soul, the potential for an inspired and higher powered human experience lies buried there under the detritus of a traumatized history. By going on a search for truth, the entirety of our life experience can be lived and experienced with true integrity, the potential for healing and completeness, and the best alignment with reality. It’s the difference between continuing the struggle and newer, more diverse and healthier possibilities for life.

Since 1987, I have chosen to live life more fully, with enhanced personal awareness, good health, and honest expression of all feelings. I experience joy and happiness the majority of the time, and I have maintained almost continuous sobriety. No one knows what our final destination in life will be, but living your story becomes an experiment in consciousness. If we are not experiencing miracles of any nature in our day to day life, it only indicates that we are too firmly entrenched in the ruts created by our past. Insight is the greatest benefit of finding your story, insight into self and insight into the people around you. Now I have peace of mind on a continuous basis. It isn’t fleeting, but a constant presence in my life that never existed before.

Make peace with your story, develop your own timeline, develop your own personal story, and be the hero of your own journey. Do whatever it takes. Find and cherish your own story no matter how difficult it is initially because as you heal and grow, that story starts to take on significance until it becomes part of the grand story.  It should no longer be “his story”, or “her story”, but instead, the unitine “our story”.

Are you tired of your own suffering, or the needless suffering of others?

Are you tired of being the silent stick figure in the dreams of others who would control and manipulate you like a mindless puppet, and turn you into unholy versions of yourself?

Are you tired of your past wounds controlling your perceptions, and guiding you onto diseased and despairing paths of unconsciousness?

What is your story? Where is your storyi hidden?  We need to hear it. So let’s start looking.

 

Chapter 1: Troubleshooting And Repairing A Broken System

Growing up, I was not provided with many clues for how to successfully manage the labyrinth of life and of my mind. The maps provided for me were incomplete and mostly inaccurate. My life had been characterized by early and intermittent, and mostly unintentional, wounding by my parents, especially by my father and older sister. But outside of my family, there was a culture that supported us.

My early exposure to Christian religion was also traumatizing. My young self could see through its parade of self-debasing interpretations of God and Jesus, and I was confused and often repulsed by many so-called Christian stories. Yet I was not to find other helpful guides, other than consistent loving support from my mother and my mother’s parents, who always wanted the best for me, and my father, though he sometimes appeared to me as a confusing trickster. There is one shining example of the poor guidance available for me in the story of Defender Dan.

In 1968 at the age of thirteen years, I was given a Defender Dan toy machine gun for a Christmas present. It was not a new toy, as it had minor internal damage that a father with mechanical skills might be able to troubleshoot and repair. My father had no interest in assisting me, so if I wanted a functional toy, it was up to me to do something about it. I was confused as to what was expected from me. Why was I given a gift that had known problems? Didn’t I deserve something that was new and perfect? I certainly did not have a fully developed skill package in troubleshooting and repairing this fairly complex mechanical system, but I liked a good challenge, and I thought that this endeavor might be worthwhile. Though I had no diagram defining the internal parts and their relationship to each other, I began dismantling it, trying to understand how the parts were related to each other and how it worked so that I could repair it. When Dad saw the gun parts spread out all over the floor, he accused me of destroying the gift, and then proceeded to remove his belt and whip the hell out of me. That beating hurt in a lot of different ways, for sure. The punchline, er, the belt line, is that, like my father, our life, and our world, will punish us if we cannot fix our lives, even though we may have  been provided with inaccurate repair diagrams and maps for living. This story captures the essence of our confusion as human beings seeking wholeness while receiving conflicted and inadequate support from others.

We live and operate in the background of our oft times toxic patriarchal culture. Our culture is broken, which leads to broken people and families. Yet, collectively, America has created a culture of denial, where we don’t look at our fundamental problems together, and confront them directly. To the extent that the broken individual might indicate a brokenness of our culture, is the extent that the broken individual is marginalized and minimized by the entrenched power brokers of our civilization and their sycophants.

A conspiracy of silence is an agreement, either formal or tacit, between two or more parties not to discuss some matter nor to reveal any information concerning it, especially in order to avoid blame, embarrassment, or other discomfort. It also points to the promises that we keep even though we may have never have consciously made the promises, which become the strongest pillars supporting the platform of our culture. There are multitudes of societal requirements that are not written down, and we all unconsciously obey these edicts, edicts which we never would have obeyed, had we been given a conscious choice. They become either the shell that we must emerge from, or remain the ball and chain attached to our spiritual ankles.

We are all part of an economic, social, and religious system that not only cannot always and often won’t hear our cries for help, but also cause much of the suffering that inspires our agonized cries. Calls to 911 or to 988 may work for some, but for most others that need help will ignore or bypass those options. Our unwillingness to speak, or to reveal our deepest, truest self revolves around issues of compromised senses of safety and emotional security, which are exacerbated by trauma, shame, and denial, and by our often times oppressive, life devaluing surrounding culture.

I have personally experienced toxic masculinity, toxic religion, and toxic capitalism. These issues are challenging to recognize and successfully address, due to thousands of years of cultural normalization of unacceptable attitudes and behavior, and a conspiracy of silence maintained to preserve and protect the status quo. Personal family, and/or cultural toxicities tend to stay ignored, overlooked, or even denied by those with little time for insight, introspection, or interest in other people’s points of view on these troubling issues.

I have witnessed many failed, or failing systems, human and mechanical, for most of my life. In any system, we come to expect that certain inputs will deliver desired outputs, while maintaining some sort of balance within the whole process.  But we need good information, and a well ordered and maintained internal system, to get the desired results. If we can find the errors in reasoning and historical conditioning, which contributes mightily to each of our personal narratives, we can begin a search for the underlying truth behind all situations, while shedding the cloaks of illusion that continues to clothe so much of the human race.

Troubleshooting Broken Systems

Troubleshooting is a form of problem solving, often applied to repair failed products or processes on a machine, a system, or even a human life. It is a logical, systematic search for the source of a problem in order to solve it, and make the product, process, or person functional again.

It means gaining understanding and asking questions, like:

• What is the history and  intention behind the original system design?
• Has the system ever worked properly?
• Does the system presently work?
• What are the history of the problems?
• Are the problems a failure of the system and its original design, poor overall  maintenance, and/or ignorance or malfeasance by the human operator?
• Can this process be improved or stabilized without a total rebuild?
• What are the best options for repair?
• Who is going to help me?
• How much can I help myself?

Being a broken human being rarely gets a lot of positive feedback, or life affirming attention from others.  It certainly is not a lifestyle choice for those who finally choose to awaken, which I finally did at the age thirty-one. How did I attempt to bring healing to my broken interior? I acknowledged that, of myself and my old ways, I was heading nowhere, and that I was doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. I did not have childhood training nor spontaneously developed capacities for insight, positive change, and growth until late in life. I needed to develop the emotional and spiritual fortitude to look at the entirety of my life, and then incorporate the experience for my greater good, which also impacts the whole of life in a more positive manner.  By developing the power of insight, I brought a new level of healing and awareness into this new, present moment of experience. Some call this process mindfulness, though I just call it taking personal inventory and improving my conscious contact with my higher power, as I learned through practicing the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I have come to believe that there is a power greater than my past understandings that lives within me, capable of restoring me to sanity, no matter how often I might fall.

Part of maintaining sanity is to allow for a continuous evolution of understanding and experience of who we are, and what God or Higher Power is, apart from religious dogma, ignorance, politics, and superstition. If we only continue to believe in things that we don’t understand, like our religions and their man-made, or God inspired, theories, it becomes nothing short of superstitious reasoning, if we are not also already inspired internally by this Truth. We must attempt to understand the mental ecology, and the history, of human beings, as we are the ones who creates and embraces ideas. This insight is essential if we want to cultivate any hope at all of troubleshooting and repairing any damaged human system.
There was no minister, church, support group, therapist, Care Unit counselor, Indian guru, psychiatrist, mother, father,  sister, wife, friend, daughter, son, pet dog, or Jesus Christ figure that could dig into my unique version of the human soul, and remove the thorns that had been thrust into my side since my birth.  My internal wounding and the resultant unsustainable suffering became the impetus to begin my inward journey, to face the absolute darkest areas of life itself, and then mine the treasure from my unique relationship with the dark force or shadow.  To not face myself would mean to continue living the second-hand/passed down story of dysfunction that I inherited from our culture and from my ancestors, from which we cannot ever completely heal, without first becoming aware of our internalized, unconscious subservience to those controlling agendas.

How to Describe Your Problem Completely

The first step in good problem analysis is to describe the problem completely. Without a problem description, we will not know where to start investigating the cause of the problem. Is it a systemic failure, is it limited to just one component or individual, is it transient or constant in nature. This step includes asking ourselves basic questions.

1. What Are The Symptoms? Who or what is reporting the problem? What are the symptoms and feedback messages? How do we fail? For example: loop or repetition of unnecessary or unwanted behavior, or quitting before a process is successfully completed. Is it intentional or unintentional  performance degradation? Is it an incorrect attitude and belief? What is the affect on all relationships?

2. Where Is The Problem Happening? Determining where the problem originates is not always easy, but it is one of the most important steps in resolving a problem. Is the problem isolated and specific, or common to multiple arenas within life? Is the current environment and understanding capable of being supported by a personal healing intention, or are broader, more socially encompassing changes necessary? Are there currently cultural power brokers attempting to dictate the way life’s route should be traveled? Is the source of the history of the problem purely an individual one, or universal in its expression?

3. When and Under Which Conditions Does the Problem Happen? Developing a detailed time line of events leading up to a failure is another necessary step in problem analysis, especially for those cases that are one-time occurrences. We can most easily do this by working backwards: start at the time an error was reported (as exact as possible, perhaps using the timeline approach), and work backwards through available memory and history. Usually we only have to look as far as the latest event that we have experienced conflict or despair, however, this is not always easy to do and will only come with practice. The intersection of society with the individual always creates multiple layers of interaction and mutual expectations, with the potential for far more failures than successes. Does the problem only happen at a certain period of one’s life? How often does it happen? What sequence of events leads up to the time the problem is reported? Does the problem happen after an environment change such as after creating new friendships, getting another job, or moving to a new neighborhood? Responding to questions like this will help us create a detailed time line of events, and will provide us with a frame of reference in which to investigate.

4. Under Which Conditions Does The Problem Happen? Knowing what else is happening at the time of a problem is important for any complete problem description. If a problem occurs in a certain environment or under certain conditions, that can be a key indicator of the problem cause. Does the problem always occur when performing the same task, or with the same people? Does a certain sequence of events need to occur for the problem to surface? Do other aspects of our lives fail at the same time? Remember that just because multiple problems might have occurred around the same time, it does not necessarily mean that they are always related.

5. Is there a fundamental flaw in the system and does it appear ubiquitously? Some designs just never quite reach their true potential for system’s operation and stability, and they require a total paradigm shift to see the process differently and bring repairs to it. If we have tested all available solutions, and nothing works, we have either approached the problem incorrectly, or we have exposed a flaw in the designer’s understanding and/or a failure in the implementation of the designer’s intention. We may have reached the most recalcitrant of problems, which are those that are expressions of a normalized unconscious dysfunction.

Asking these questions of ourselves and examining our lives is difficult work. The desire to fix a treasured object that has been damaged, bring a cure to a child’s disease, or to end one’s suffering is the manifestation of love. Love must be the guiding light while facilitating repairs and regeneration of any broken person, place, or thing. Bringing a hammer to a situation that requires a jeweler’s screw driver is a typical overreaction, is self defeating and reveals a life needing greater sensitivity and insight into itself. It is our desire to repair and improve, not damage further and destroy, so a conscious process must be undertaken to initiate repairs to any malfunctioning system, human or mechanical.

Finding the Problem, and Freeing Yourself

This is big picture troubleshooting, for sure. And change can be hard. In any electrical circuit, resistance to the flow of current is ubiquitous.  To reduce resistance, we can either tune the system by adding capacitors and inductors,  shortening conductor length or increasing its size, or increasing the applied voltage, all of which effectively reduces resistance.  There are also the second law of thermodynamics issues, which are entropy, heat related circuit degradation, and eventual chaos.  For humanity, the resistance to the flow of healing energy is also ubiquitous. Yet, we also have options for tuning our own spiritual system, by increasing our capacity to embrace, understand, carry, and transmit higher consciousness, which utilizes its own unique healing algorithm. Like in a high resistance electrical circuit, those who vehemently resist change and do not embrace their healing potential will eventually have their life system ruled by the spiritual equivalent of the second Law of Thermodynamics, where degradation and chaos reigns supreme.

Stories where our unique personal value have been sacrificed to maintain some unloving sense of family and/or cultural order, or disorder, will be fertile grounds for exploration. Also, the over processed junk food narratives of the collective human experience can become coupled to our own unique and vulnerable sense of self, which fosters self-defeating patterns of thought and action. Regardless of the perfection, or the imperfection of our upbringing, problems inevitably arise throughout the entirety of life, within this world that we share. Yet,  if they can be seen within a more expansive context, where we can become more self-aware, consciously engage in troubleshooting and repairing our own issues, and become open to traveling new paths of consciousness, the negative effects can be minimized, and resilience and spiritual competency can be maximized. The intention is to help the broken or under performing person experience enhanced functionality and, thus, experience a greater good.

Healing is a powerful current that runs through us, whether we recognize its presence, or not. Those who recognize it have the potential for an amazing life. Finding the root causes for our individual and collective brokenness allows us to change our lives for the better. We can live a purpose filled life, inspired by the desire to be the best version of ourselves, while serving the highest interests of each other and the Earth with all of its life.

Chapter Two:  My Search For Truth and The Answer I Found

 

              In April of 1984, I checked myself into the Lovejoy Care Unit, a hospital converted to alcoholism care and recovery. I had been a drug addict and alcoholic, as well as a person consciously suffering from inner turmoil, since my sophomore year of high school in 1971. My most important initial consideration was keeping my job at the U.S. Postal Service, where I worked as a maintenance electrician and instrument technician in training, which I was about to lose if I did not stop substance abuse. I was to stay in the Unit for thirty days, while learning, at a puerile, kindergarten level, enough about my disease and myself that there might be hope for me.

After an interview with my parents, Claire, my counselor, informed me that one of the burdens that I was carrying was that my father was still trying to live his life through me. I wrote a lot of dark poetry during that time, which provided many clues for me in my desire to leave the knowns of my suffering and search for truth, peace, and a much more fulfilling life. And I succeeded in sobering up, but not for long.

In June of 1984, while still working at the US Postal Service, I was sent to  their national training center in Norman, Oklahoma, for a three-week class on repairing mail sorting equipment and a digital logic course, which was a prerequisite to advanced training. I needed to pass this test to have any hope for advanced placement, which would elevate me into a new, more challenging career as a computer technician, which was, potentially, far more interesting than my mundane, regular job as a maintenance electrician. There were two parts to the test, which I needed a 75 percent score to succeed. I aced the first part, scoring 70 out of 70 on the digital logic portion. The last 30 percent of the test was devoted to complex schematics of electronic control systems supporting optical character readers and other equipment. I had no prior experience with this equipment, and could not properly interpret the representative symbology. I failed, scoring zero out of that the last thirty, failing the test by a mere five points.

On the flight home, I relapsed back into drinking. I was so disappointed at this seemingly unfair turn of events, that I became re-dedicated to my own self-annihilation, even ignoring and hiding from the presence of my Care Unit counselor Claire, who serendipitously appeared on the same plane back to Portland. Thus, my sobriety lasted for less than three months, for I did not quite connect with the healing threads that I needed to escape my personal hell. Peace was not found until after I descended fully into a dark underworld, where I attempted suicide in January of 1986, and then began my search for truth.

Cast Out on My Search for Truth

              It remains no mystery to me as to why many people choose continued addiction, or suicide over recovery and healing. Invisible wounds are the hardest to heal and the easiest to stay in denial about their life-threatening potentials. I was starting to see the end of my own road, with my out-of-control car crashing through all of the safety guardrails and continuing the race towards the finish line of my dead-end life. I knew that my problems could not be solved, at least not on my level, and I knew of no other levels that were accessible, or available to me.

I moved back in with Randy, my lifelong friend, in December of 1985, after ending my latest relationship mistake, Alcindia in a rather dramatic fashion, On January 26th, 1986, after yet another night of fighting depression with the hops and yeast antidepressants, I woke up upon Randy’s living room couch at 8:45 a.m., with him emerging from his bedroom, screaming to my clouded mind: “Bruce, wake up and turn on the TV. The Challenger just exploded!”

After watching that horrific event over and over, I had the crushing realization that my life was also over. In part because of a childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, I saw mirrored in the Challenger disaster the total destruction of all of my hopes of realizing my life’s potential, and I made the decision right then and there to end it all, and fulfill a pledge that I had made to myself when I was just fifteen years old. I had known since then that I was a hopeless alcoholic and drug addict, and if I could not shake the disease by age thirty (and if the disease itself had not already killed me) I would take matters into my own hands. I never told another soul of my self-imposed fifteen year “pull date,” should I fail at sobering up. I just held on as best that I could for the intervening years, and I tried my best to adapt to my self-destructive life situation.

I only needed to refill a prescription for some antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication that I already had secured from Dr. Dan Beavers, a psychiatrist that I had been seeing since 1985. I was going to take them all at once, and call it a life. I went to the pharmacist, with the intention of seeing the deed completed immediately.  While standing in line, I ran into Alcindia’s sister’s friend, Mike. We weren’t friends, but I knew him from around, and I started to share the smallest part of my story with him.  He immediately shut me down, stating that he had no time for other people’s problems, which reaffirmed my understanding of the other people’s tendencies towards indifference to each other. The pharmacist would not fill the prescriptions, however, even though I had one refill left on each one, and he told me that I needed to see the doctor again. I was not to be deterred.

I  scheduled an emergency visit to my psychiatrist for that afternoon. He perceived that I might be in a crisis and elicited a promise from me that I would not kill myself with the medication. Dr. Dan had just had another patient kill himself using the same medication, and Dan was still grieving mightily, and could not tolerate another such event from a patient of his. So, he got the empty promise from me that I would not commit suicide. Then I immediately placed those pills under the front seat of my car, for easy access and immediate use, should the conditions of my life prove that it needed immediate termination. I never intended to take those pills as prescribed, instead telling myself that unless I found a reason to live, that I was leaving this planet, without a rocket ship. Thus, began my official search for truth.

I called my old high school friend, Sean, who was stationed in Spain for the US Air Force. I told him that I had a fatal brain tumor and that I was going to die soon. He offered to let me stay with him in Madrid for a while. The thought of a geographic change brought a little hope to me, so I secured my passport, and applied for my pension from the U.S. Postal Service. I was going to use the money for airfare and to support myself Spain. I also filed for unemployment benefits, to help with my immediate income needs. Then I filed for bankruptcy, as I had no intention of meeting my financial obligations, which were immense. I had student loans, credit card debts, credit union loan debts, personal debts to my father, and other debts that totaled close to forty-thousand dollars. I wanted the slate to be clear by the time I was gone, and bankruptcy seemed like the right process to engage in. So I was putting my affairs in order.

In early February, I ran into DiDi, a woman I’d known for a few years and had a brief but intense relationship with in the past. We partied a few times and then decided to go to the beach. We traveled to Seaside together, and I did not really know what to expect, other than there would probably be some more partying, and maybe some connecting on a more personal level. We drank at several local Seaside bars until late in the evening when I no longer had any desire to drink anymore. I told her that I was going back to the hotel room. She stated that she wanted to keep the party going, and continued drinking and carrying on with some of the local folks.  She returned to the hotel room at two in the morning, all excited about some new friends that she had made, and the great cocaine that they had shared together.  She wanted to bring the two guys back into the hotel room to continue the party.

“No thanks, this is where I take my leave!” I told her angrily. I grabbed my overnight bag and headed towards home, even though I was drunk. Somewhere along Highway 26 I crashed my car into a guard rail, nearly going over a cliff in the process. I quickly got the car back onto the road and kept going. When I finally reached North Plains, I fell asleep at the wheel again, stepped on the accelerator, and rammed into the back of another car at freeway speeds. We both pulled over, and I was able to bribe the owner of the car not to call the police, since I was drunk, by writing him a check for $471, which was every last penny that I had in my checking account. My car was totaled, but somehow I was able to make it home, miraculously escaping death or a DUI citation. But I still didn’t stop.

I was to receive the retirement money by the end of March, and I owed my father nearly $3,000, so I no longer had enough money for a final trip to Spain. Stuck at home, I lived out of my 1977 Datsun 310 when I was not crashing in abandoned buildings with other homeless people,  while connecting with all manners and types of damaged and dangerous people.

It is a funny thing, I was nearly dead, or so I thought, so I had little fear as I met new people and befriended them. Most were people who I never would have associated with in my more ordered past, but in this phase of my life, I was curious to know those who I would have avoided if I weren’t looking for trouble. My only intention was to find the truth of living and of being, if there was such a thing, and I intuited that the truth might be hidden somewhere in this darkness and unknown.

I engaged will all types of individuals, and I had conversations with them about what life meant to them, and what they felt about God, good, evil, darkness, light, and human relationships. I carried my suicide drugs under my car seat, so that when the pain got too real again, I could make my departure from my world of little or no meaning, no peace of mind, and extreme personal suffering. During this time, I lived in an underworld community of drug manufacturing and distribution, homelessness, and crime. I witnessed crimes. I befriended homeless victims of sexual predators and child abuse, members of motorcycle gangs and their hit men, felons, murderers, and undercover federal agents, some of whom were still investigating the criminal tentacles remaining from the infamous, Stephen Kessler. I ran with my new friends, and my only intention was to be the best person that I could be, while living out the final moments, days, or weeks of my life. I wanted to live the twelve steps without actually recovering from drug addiction and alcoholism, which I had totally given up on.

Methedrine, crank, speed, go-juice, or one of any number of other street names of the same stimulant became my primary drug of choice, as it made me feel social, connected, and conversational with all others. I would not sleep for up to one week at a time, while running with my peer group. The Punjab tavern on Foster Road became my main hub or center for contact with many of the social branches of the tree of death that I was now climbing. Many a night was spent with a revolving group of my new friends there, with a main core group of people who had mutual interests. Each person I met during this time in my life both pulled me further in and helped me to find the path to recovery, and to finally embracing the path to truth and love within my own heart.

Ralph was from Scappoose, Oregon, or so he said. He was the center point for much underworld activity, and I quickly became his friend, and driver, through many underworld adventures. Through him I met drug chemists, motorcycle gang members, hit men, armed robbers, practicing felons in possession of firearms, prostitutes, homeless victims of child abuse, heroin addicts, and Steve (not his real name), who was an undercover federal agent, and who would figure strongly in my sober future. I learned to really love Ralph, who was an incredibly damaged soul, and his excessive drug use would sometimes cause concern for me. I noticed that paranoia was creeping into his mind, and we would joke about it, but he became my first living example of the damage that excess meth use causes.

I also befriended Ralph’s girlfriend, Sarah. One day, she decided that we needed to visit Jake, who was being held in Clackamas County Jail until his transfer was completed to a federal penitentiary. I knew Jake on the outside, and he was always so kind and friendly towards me. I wanted so much to express my sorrow at his long-term imprisonment. She told me on the way that our friend was a hit man for a regional motorcycle gang that distributed drugs, and he was in jail because one hit went horribly wrong for him. Sarah and I snorted some of the latest designer meth creations from our favorite local chemist just before arriving at the jail. Then when we met Jake at the reception area for the jail, all that would come out of my mouth were awkward grunts and squawks. The stress created by the meeting, coupled with the drugs, probably caused my loss of the ability to speak, thus contributing to the “conspiracy of silence” that my own drug use and addiction enabled.

On another frightening night, I was sitting at the bar yet again, conversing with the owner, Jack, when Robert slid in and sat right next to me. I didn’t know Robert well, but I’d seen him around, and I knew he was recently released from prison. He said, “I have been out of the neighborhood for a long time, and I am hoping to find some old friends.”

“Well, maybe a new friend might show up, say, right next to you this evening?!”

“That would sure be nice.”

Robert and I had an awkward exchange then in which I made a joke about him being a murderer and then learned he’d been in custody for killing a man during an armed robbery. I bought Robert a drink to overcome the awkwardness and talked to him until one of his old friends showed up. They went to the restroom to conduct whatever business they had. When Robert returned, he was slurring his words even harder than he’d been a few minutes before and his eyes had lost their luster. He closed his eyes and slumped down, face onto the bar. Then, he fell off of the chair onto the floor, where he was trying to right himself.

Thinking he was sick, I asked the bartender if he could call the ambulance. He shook his head and said, “Bruce, he is right where he wants to be. If you could, please help him over to a booth in the corner where he can try to get his shit back together.”

Still not sure what was happening, I asked the bartender if Robert had just done heroin and why he would do that.

Jack said, “Bruce, some people are just waiting for a better day. Today is not the better day for Robert, and it may never arrive for him.”

As I got Robert to a booth and out of view to keep us out of trouble, I didn’t truly understand what was happening. But I understand now that the Conspiracy Of Silence had claimed yet another human being. The heroin completely shut the bartender down to his humanity, and left me wondering what my own fate might be if I were to find myself in Robert’s situation.

One night I was hanging out with Dorothy, who was a young woman with two young children. She was a heroin user, dominated by the needs to use, and she was also shadowed by a former lover, Jakob, who was incarcerated in jail at the time of our connection. While I was at her place, I noted her scraping used spoons so that she could get together enough heroin residue to give her a fix. Her supply was out, and she was waiting for her next delivery, so she was tense and anxious. She believed that her criminal boyfriend, Jakob, had extraordinary powers and could astrally project himself out of prison at night. As long as she had company (friends or heroin), Jakob could not materialize into her home to threaten and dominate her, as he did when he was not imprisoned. Our conversation was intense too.

She did not believe in the power of God, having long eschewed any connection with such concepts. She lived for the moment, and knew all too well that shit happened regardless of how “good” or “bad” a person was. She told me about her darkness and belief that even good people will turn against others in a heartbeat, should the need arise.

“Good people do not really exist,” she said, “just fucked-up people who occasionally make helpful choices for themselves or, inadvertently, for others, usually while they are really just trying to selfishly take care of themselves.”

I argued that I believed we all have both energies, and it may only be that if we stumble upon the right understanding. We can act more from a not-so-dark, not-so-selfish position, and occasionally help ourselves and each other to have better lives. Then she called me out.

“Well, Bruce, how much time and energy do you put into having a better understanding of yourself, and being more helpful to others?”

The answer was none. But I wanted to actually try to look at the forces of darkness within myself, to see where I might also be negatively impacting myself and others through a lifetime of not fearlessly confronting those energies. I had no idea what would be revealed, if anything, if I ever successfully overcome my own darkness. Dorothy used heroin to cope with her darkness. But when she said her supplier was on the way and offered it to share it with me, I declined because I’d never done heroin or intravenous drugs before, and I knew I probably didn’t want to start.

But even though I had limits, I continued an incredible downward spiral into addiction, becoming so disfigured that my friends commented on my slight, unhealthy experience. I had lost seventy pounds. I had started hearing voices, and I had become paranoid, as well. And I worked hard not to show anyone that this was happening. But when I insisted that a major undercover operation was in the works, no one believed me. I imagined people telling me that my car was bugged and tore my car apart, searching for the transmitter or the recorder. I had two different people stop by, and try to interrupt me from the search, which only added to my own paranoia. I did not locate the transmitter, but I spoke to the empty car as if someone were listening. I wanted to trouble whoever was listening, renaming myself “the Wild Card” and saying aloud all my dark thoughts. I let my world know, in no uncertain terms, that I was no longer aligned with anyone, as I was on my way to my own death.

When Ralph relocated to protect himself and my social group subsequently collapsed, I met Doctor Dave. He was a short, friendly man, with a severely pockmarked face, and he was recently was released from jail. He introduced me to intravenous drug use, ever so carefully shooting me up with speed for my first time and most subsequent times, as well. I could not shoot up by myself, as I feared needles too much. But the incredible rush I received from intravenous drug use hooked me for the final two months of my drug abusing life. My mental health was irreparably damaged, and my “search for truth” had apparently only uncovered a hastened path to death for me. I was at a party when a friend, Frank, had just secured a fresh batch of speed mixed with heroin (which I had never used before), and he invited me to join him. Sure, why not? I had nothing to lose but a life that was already dead.

I started to accompany this friend to an upstairs room, when I spotted an old friend, Steve, talking with a healthy looking thirty-year-old woman, a person that I might have been attracted to had I been healthy. I met Steve at the same time that I met Ralph. Steve was a very intelligent, well-dressed man, about eight years older than me. Shortly after becoming a peripheral person in our rotating community of characters, I started suspecting him of being and undercover cop. Even so, I had always counted on him to give me good insight into others, though he held the truths about himself close to his chest. He became a big brother to me, at times, and would not spare me criticism, He initially could not understand why I thought it necessary to be where I was, either, though he was the only person that I ever told that I was on a search for truth. And I did not understand, at the time, how he could get by with so little use of drugs. Then I heard the girl at the party say his name, and it was not Steve, confirming my suspicions that he wasn’t who he said he was.

When he saw that I heard his real name, and he then knew that I knew, Steve took me aside, and tried to explain. I instead stopped him and told him that I had suspected him all along of being undercover. I also told him that his secret was safe with me. I told him my journey was about to end, that I was going upstairs with Frank, and if I survived that experience, I was going to return to my car, grab the pills under my front seat, and finish business, once and for all. Yes, I was finished.

Steve grabbed my arm, excused himself from his girlfriend, and took me outside to his car. He said, “Bruce, I can no longer keep you protected and safe. Your search for truth has to end within this dangerous world. Now your real search for truth must begin, starting with your relationship with your father. I never want to see you again, but believe me, I am going to try to help you, any way I can. You deserve so much better of a life than you have given to yourself.” And then he drove me home.

At my father’s house, Steve let me out. He and his partner drove my car to my dad’s house later that evening, and I never saw him again. The pills had disappeared from under the driver’s seat, as well. There was no way that I was going to go back to the doctor for another prescription. I was still a mess, strung out from months of drug abuse, alcoholism, gambling, and I only weighed a mere 135 pounds. My face was all broken out, I had the most horrific shakes, and I heard voices. I had experienced convulsions several times, and I wasn’t thinking very clearly.

My parents were still snow birding in Arizona, so I called my old roommate Randy. He came over, and he, his girlfriend, and I proceeded to down an inordinate amount of my father’s booze and wine. My parents would not be home until the end of the month, so I was still able to keep my dysfunctional momentum going. After partying, Randy went home, and I was left alone with my horrible problems. That was when I blacked out.

I don’t remember picking up one of my father’s loaded guns or driving to another friend’s home in the Milwaukie area. This person was an associate of one of the drug chemists in the underworld culture that I had just emerged from. I have no idea why I went down there, but I awoke from my blackout when the gun discharged, shooting a hole in the front door of his apartment. He had two sleeping children in one room, and a sleeping wife in another room, and I was fortunate to have not brought harm to anyone. He then brought out a hypodermic needle out and injected me with speed (I still would not inject myself). I immediately snapped out of my drunkenness, and proceeded to talk with this guy for twenty-four hours. He gave me one more injection, and then clarity finally hit me.

Literally, a light went on in my mind, and I saw the utter insanity of the person I was with and the insanity of my life. I stood up, laughed at the guy, called him and myself nuts, and walked out of the front door, got into my car, and drove back to my parents’ home. I was changed, though at the time I didn’t know how much.

With five dollars left to my name, I needed to make a decision. Either I could buy more beer and cigarettes, or I could go visit my grandparents in north Portland. I kept the five dollars and drove to family. My grandparents were happy to see me, but were concerned for my appearance. I claimed to have the flu, and grandmother nursed me back to some semblance of health over the next five days, while I detoxified and had withdrawals from cessation of cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs all at the same time.

Return to Myself

I returned home to my parents’ home after a week at the grandparents’. It is another funny thing, two days later, out of the blue, Craig, a friend from childhood called me for the first time in three years. He was court ordered to attend AA meetings for a DUI, and he asked if I wanted to go with him. I figured since God was such a big part of AA, and since I was searching for truth, maybe it would be worth trying it. I proceeded to attend over 270 meetings in my first ninety days; I had nothing else to do, having lost my job, and, basically, my life, to my disease. Craig stopped going to meetings after his court ordered attendance ended. But I continued to attend them, feeling like I had finally found my spiritual home. I then literally spent thousands of hours over the next several years in AA meetings, communication, investigation, reading, writing, meditation, associating with all types and manners of people, and, eventually, healing my relationships.

I had to finally face troubling relationship issues with my father, my family, my society, and my unconscious.  Working the Twelve Steps of AA, initially in my recovery, and practicing meditation and mindfulness helped me to find the threads of meaning that would lead me out of my desire for self annihilation, while also finding a great measure of inner peace.

The 12 Steps of AA Revised To Reflect My Present Spiritual Understanding

1. Through our own extended suffering, we finally found the desire to want it to end. We admitted that when we become self-destructively habituated to any substance, situation, perception, or judgement and/or lack of forgiveness in our relationships with others, we lose our freedom of choice, bring unnecessary trauma into our lives, and into the lives of others, and, thus, fail to achieve any lasting sense of inner peace and joy. We finally realize that our lives have been lived unconsciously and have become unmanageable as a result of that neglect.
2. With our new found hope and openness for change came the desire to begin to awaken to higher possibilities for our lives. We realized that, in our essence, we have an interior, though neglected, power that will heal us and restore us to balance if we pursue it in earnest. We now realize that we have not been living up to our full potential as human beings.
3. We made a decision to turn our will, and our lives, over to the care of our higher interior power. We become open to the possibility of embracing a new Truth for our lives. We want to access the power to continuously evolve, and we want to cultivate our heart to be more loving to ourselves and others. We decide to let go of anything that impedes our progress towards happiness, healing, and wholeness. We realize that without the deepest of desires, and intentions, to change our behavior, we will not be transformed.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We have lived a life without a high sense of self-esteem, and we have made unfortunate choices because of the scarcity consciousness that has resulted from it. We realize that when we find the blocks to our evolution, and become willing to remove them, our new found insight will guide our paths with precision to the Truth of our existence. This is our entrance onto the path of mindfulness and higher consciousness.
5. We admit that we were not being truthful with ourselves and with others, and by talking with another who we may trust, yet not be beholden to, about our errors in judgement and in actions towards our self and others, we can better deal with the shame and self-judgement that so often arises from the deadly secrets that we once felt that we must keep. Just by honestly talking with someone else, our burdens can be lifted. Our secrets need no longer keep us imprisoned and mentally ill. When two or more people come together in the spirit of truth and honesty, mutual compassion and empathy also become part of the gathering.
6. We become entirely willing to let go of our attachments to unhealthy attitudes, behavior, and people. We wish to see clearly, without the limitations of our past, of our family history, and of our cultural conditioning, with all of their embedded trauma.
7. We open our hearts through humility and the willingness to change to embrace a new possibility for our life. Our new found sense of connection with our higher interior power inspires us to become more grateful for the gifts that we now have, and we are now spiritually preparing to finally give back to the world in a meaningful, positive way. We want to finally let go of all of the emotional charged memories which keep us trapped in a dead past. Rejoice, for the old demons are being transformed into the new angels!
8. While we were unconscious to our higher potential as human beings, we bring emotional, spiritual, and perhaps even physical harm to other innocent beings, and we want to try bring healing and peace to those who have suffered from the effects of our ignorance. We realize that through the mirror of all of our relationships, dysfunctional or otherwise, we are granted a view into how we truly see ourselves. We want to see through the eyes of Truth, and not through the pain and suffering that unfulfilled relationships may have brought to us.
9. We made direct amends wherever possible to all people we may have brought harm to, except when to do so would bring further injury to them or to others. Our guilt will not be assuaged at the expense of others. We make full application of our new found wisdom and our renewed desire to bring no harm to any sentient being. We want our world, and our own personal sense of self, to feel safe from further attacks from us, and our honest disclosure of our mistakes to those impacted by our errors in judgement will continue to support that intention.
10. We continued to take personal inventory, and, when wrong, promptly admit it. We have become honest with ourselves. We practice mindfulness and continue to develop our capacity for insight into ourselves. We now know ourselves, and we now know many of the potential impediments to experiencing and expressing the Truth of our being. We no longer solely abide in old modes of thought, and now we are more focused on the beauty of the present moment.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with the Truth of our being, praying only for knowledge of Truth, and the willingness to live within its infinite domain. We now understand that this whole process of recovery is a meditation on life, and that the evolving, healing life that we are now experiencing is our living prayer. Each time we drink from the deep interior waters revealed to us by meditation, more of our painful dreams are dissolved. We finally realize that the capacity to change, to evolve, to grow in our infinite spirit is the whole point of our human existence. We are now traveling upon new paths of consciousness.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we attempted to carry our message of recovery to our world, while continuing to practice these principles in all our affairs. We have finally become whole, and are now conscious, caring human beings. We have accepted full personal responsibility for our lives, including healing our past, and keeping our present balanced and harmonious, and we no longer blame others for who we are now. We are now experiencing prosperity on many levels, and have witnessed the healing of ourselves. We have saved the world—from ourselves. Our life is now our truest teacher. We realize that we have no power to bring salvation to others, yet, it is our responsibility to point to the way of healing for others who may still be suffering, and who may finally become interested in overcoming their own limitations.

 

Beyond the Twelve Steps

Outside of meetings, I was enlightened by a new teacher, a recovering alcoholic by the name of Jack Boland, who had released to the world many series of tapes on recovery and spirituality. On May 16, 1987, John Johnson, my coworker at the Fred Meyer warehouse, gave me on of his tapes on recovery, and for this I am eternally grateful. I listened to these tapes over and over, and something miraculous happened afterwards

My search for Truth, which had taken me through the darkest regions of hell, was about to give me wings, and enable me to fly to the sun and beyond.

Yet, the prison guard with one of the primary keys to release me from my own spiritual imprisonment was my own unhealed relationship with my father. Overcoming a lifetime of oppression and control by others is no easy task. It also must be done clean and sober, for the true depth and healing of the experience to permanently take hold. I began a new relationship with my father, starting with my new-found sobriety. After that era of my life, I certainly was ready to move away from ignorance, the effects of trauma, and suffering.

My arrows of perception became radically redirected inward in the spring and summer of 1987, after a series of three most profound spiritual experiences and my exuberant practicing of meditation, coupled with a newfound willingness to travel upon new paths of consciousness. I was given a vision to bring healing to myself, through allowing the Divine Feminine to love and nurture me unconditionally, while also learning how to pass that healing energy to others. I was shown how my perception can be transformed, so that I no longer just see myself, and the world, as two separate experiences or entities.

Chapter 3:  Finding Yourself in The Collective Consciousness

When I look at our culture, I see the rising waters of anguish and despair flooding through it. There are so many broken promises and  dreams, so many shattered expectations, so many lost possibilities that these wounds now define the day-to-day life of far too many citizens. As we witness our families, watch the news and read the newspaper, we can see the tragic answers are the creation and promotion of cultural and individual insanity, with its resultant suffering. Mass murders, early deaths, suicides, drug addiction, alcoholism, abuses of woman and children, racism, extinction of species, destruction of our ecology, and all of the damaged relationships that fail to find healing will continue to predominate within the collective mind of mankind until we make conscious contact with intelligence, love, and sanity. We have to begin protecting ourselves from all that, to become healthy people, retain our sanity and our humanity, instead of being consumed by despair, fatalism and anger. In the words of Michael Franti: ”Life is amazing, and then it sucks, and then it’s amazing again.” There is so much suffering in the world, and it brings a universally humbling, painful reality.  

Human suffering and evil are two spiritually destructive forces that humanity has dealt with each moment of its existence. Failure to address these issues directly and consciously only leads to more suffering, and enhances the collective perception of the presence and growth of evil in our world. Many causes of suffering are preventable, however, and they have their origins within our broken, unhealed minds. Suffering comes in many forms, and has many causal agents. Suffering eventually touches all of us through its many different manifestations. Suffering may arise: 

• as a direct result of trauma experienced at any point in life; 

• through living a meaningless life, with a resistance to change and evolution; 
• through an action of intentional hostility by others; 
• through incurable diseases of the body or mind; 
• spontaneously as a reaction to the vicissitudes of life; 
• from an inability to do what is right; 

• after witnessing horrific acts of violence; 
• from the inability to reconcile the belief in God with one’s own grief and loss; 
• from becoming addicted to substances that were designed to take our pain away; 
• from the perceived inability to speak one’s truth; 
• from not having one’s voice heard in the face of oppressive powers; 

• from contemplating the continuation of our daily pains into a distant, unknown future; 
• from continued bullying or threatening behavior from peers, employers, religions, politicians, or family members. 

 

 Pain, and suffering, without any hope for healing, brings anger, despair, depression, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. While being an unconscious man, I contributed to this disease of the spirit and to the overall relationship dysfunctions within the world. I have been subjected to the same family and cultural forces of oppression and repression, spawned by cultural and family mutual control dramas, which daily contribute to crazy making communication and behavior between all of us. Being a family man, I have taken note of the mutual-blame game and scapegoating that circulate continuously and serves as justification for each individual holding onto their own version of our cultural disease.  All of this just leads to more suffering by innocent family members, friends, acquaintances, community members, and ourselves. Who amongst us does not want life to lean more towards amazing, rather than just sucking? 

Things don’t often work out according to our best laid plans. And often, if we seek out many of society’s treasured goals, we find that goals didn’t live up to our expectations. The problem is not our plans, expectations, dreams, or aspirations. These are sacred and we must retain them. The point is that it’s not solely our fault. We have been let down in ways we never should have been. We have been neglected in ways that genuinely hurts and endures. Our possibilities shrank not because of something we did or didn’t do, but for a much, much bigger reason. Much of it was beyond our control, but once we can see what other options are available to us, we can find our reservoir of hope. 

Our world is filled with an infinite supply of life affirming meaning, and we can experience it if we can tune into it and our whole self.  Yet, news in recent years has been dominated by references to the actions of people living meaningless lives, as indicated by upswings in opioid use, alcoholism, gun violence, murder, mental illness, poor diets, insufficient exercise, and suicide. These factors are a small part of the real story. I have seen, and I believe at the deepest level of my own being, that disease in the mind of mankind is directly related to disease within the body of mankind. This is a difficult but essential truth to contemplate and to perceive: our society has created many of the conditions for our early demise through our lack of shared meaning and values. 

My male heritage and my experiences as both a son to an oftentimes toxic father, and working with many damaged men in the electrical trades and in general employment, provided the background for much of my understanding of this suffering. Patriarchy, as expressed through men as a collective consciousness, is mostly responsible for creating the present day conditions of our diseased world. Wikipedia states: “Collective consciousness, collective conscience, or collective conscious is the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society.” Men in power would rather have our neighbors, wives and children assaulted, raped, overdosed through drug use, or murdered through gun violence, than promote and enforce healing changes. Thus, we need more women in positions of power and influence, and men need to get in touch with their potential for toxic behavior and attitudes, and begin to make necessary course changes in their hearts and souls. Yet both men and women are directly influenced, and often controlled like puppets, by the collective consciousness that we all access, and share. 

Collective consciousness has a source in our ancestral and genetic predispositions, and all of the answers that our culture, our families, and all of our individual selves have dreamed up to some of the great questions of life. The answers have become part of our philosophy, our history, our religion, the substance of our hopes and dreams, and the foundation for all of our nightmares. This is the seed consciousness behind the development of our sense of self, where our own answers to the important questions of life give rise to fragmented interpretation of life, and of the universe. 

 

Individual Conscious 

We only need to look within ourselves, and to our pasts, to see how uncertain our memories are, and extrapolate that to our human history, which is also plagued by short-term, medium-term, and long-term memory loss. Even though our present history has only about 5,000 years of written records, some cultures have historical narratives that appear to have been passed down for at least 30,000 years. The aborigines of Australia claim a 60,000 year narrative, while Central and South American indigenous peoples and their shamans also claim lineages of tens of thousands of years. Western European civilization appears to be an outgrowth of the migration of African tribal members at least 13,000-30,000 years ago. The human race has a long history, but throughout human history, our brains have grown more complex with the development of language and our lives more socially connected. Much of that information is stored in our bodies and minds. But as individuals, we can only consciously access what we were around to remember.  

Once we develop consciousness as developing human beings, our internal sensations, emotions, and thoughts went online and became available to make us aware of who we are. Our internally observed neural activity told us what we like and don’t like, who we love and don’t love, how experiences make us feel, what we think, why we behave the sometimes odd ways that we do, and what we want. Because this inward directed, self-sensing part of our brain can itself be seen as an input, we can be aware of ourselves being aware of ourselves being aware our ourselves, times infinity. The experience of having conscious awareness happens on levels beyond the physical plane, without typical sensorial awareness. It can feel so extraordinary and exalted that it seems like it must be the result of something more than just brain chemistry, perhaps even a manifestation of something of an otherworldly, or even divine, nature. Our nervous systems are a vast universe of sensations, feelings, and thoughts. Conscious awareness has added a window to this interior dimension where the immeasurable and the unknowable may be accessed, caressed, or manhandled, by our sense of self.  

Helen Keller is a remarkable account of that very universal process.  Helen Keller gives an outstanding narrative of the beginning of her own sense of self, a new self which seemed to arise out of her more instinctual, or even chaotic biological response to life.  Once she recognized that the letters w, a, t, e, r represented the substance that she washed with and drank, her own unique sense of herself also arose. Literally, understanding the word and its symbolism opened the miraculous door to her self. And the ability to communicate this conscious gives us power.  

There are two or more sides to every story, and the epoch of mankind certainly could have been defined historically by its nearly infinite number of interactions between members of our worldwide community, past and present, and all of the resultant stories derived through those connections, be they ordered or chaotic in nature. History is created and maintained by the institutionalized powers, and transferred to all members of the community. Our history continues to be written to accommodate the prevailing victorious powers and understandings of the age in which it was first written. Many times, the greatest, most courageous and intelligent heroes of our race remain anonymous, though their stories were captured by others. They died before they could even create a story, thus the survivors, usually less qualified and relatively more uninformed, are the historians, and their story, not the story of the real heroes, are accepted as the narrative.   

Women within many ancient cultures were regarded as healers and carriers of medicine. They were loved, honored, respected, and protected by the community for those very reasons. It can be surmised that in our pre-history the balance of the masculine and the feminine through mutual understanding, acknowledgement, and equality existed and supported the good for all. Yet, mankind’s story, when told by the historical progression of women, would be much different than the story told by the history that men might present. History is rarely described and defined by the ones who were stuck at home caring for the wounded and the children, by the submissive ones, by the artists or sculptors, or by the losers in any conflict. Our history is no different, being described, and defined, by those in power, which are predominantly white male influences. Masculine energy has dominated our specie’s relationship with the universe, the world, the plants and animals, and with each other for most of recorded time, and well before the human race had any capacity to keep records. The Christian bible is replete with aphorisms and statements relegating women to the background of the church and in all relations with life. There is an imbalance within the field of the human spirit.   

This oppression of women, and repression of so-called “feminine characteristics” within the male reflects in the diseased and imbalanced relationships. These principles have also become established as conscious, and unconscious, norms for perception within the collective consciousness of America and mankind in general. And, an unfortunate and dangerous outcome to this division between the man and woman is that the man is unconsciously conditioned to see the feminine aspects of himself in an objectified manner, and tries to oppress, control, and dominate those aspects, emotions, and tendencies, rather than integrate them into a complete holism within himself. 

So how on Earth, or in Heaven, do we bring balance back to ourselves? 

 

Finding Yourself in the Collective 

I have attempted meditation upon my own source of pain and suffering, and what came to me was how most of what I know about myself and my reactions to the world was created by my fundamental relationship with my parents and my culture. Missing from this was any accommodations to my relationship to my world, the universe, or any concept of a higher power. My sense of self in my early years revolved around internalizing many of my parents’ attitudes. I was acutely aware of what my mother and father expected from me, what I could or could not give back to them to attempt to please them, and my defense mechanisms for managing the fallout when I failed to please them. Beginning early in my life, I also developed the desire to protect them and myself from the results of the conflict that arose in our house, either when I made yet another mistake or when my father overreacted to any situation that brought a sense of fear or threat into the home environment. I developed a need to balance whatever energy was being expressed at any particular moment, and I was very unskilled at those kind of efforts. 

With the death of my father in 2017, it ended the era of subservience to his needs, and the need to protect my mother from my perception of his aggression towards her. It also ended the era of incomplete grieving for my mother’s death in 2009. I had to immediately support my mentally deteriorating father when mother died, and I had never completely worked through the grieving process. With my father’s passing, I was an orphan, and all of the entanglements that kept me wound around their lives were now physically removed. With my father’s spirit no longer overshadowing my own life, I was allowed to develop more fully into a better version of myself. For me this was an extraordinary release because the formation of my sense of self was influenced by parental bonding issues in childhood. Yet, I had assembled my sense of self to the best of my ability, the process was one of self-organization, something that neuroscientists and psychologists are still studying and understanding. 

In our world, there are countless examples of self-organizing systems, and all creatures, and the minds of those creatures, are examples of that miracle in action. The evolution of all of Earth’s creatures appear to be primarily organized through the pattern created by the history of the species, and its interactions and successful adaptions with its earthly environment. The DNA appears to carry much of that history as a guide for the self-replicating pattern within all cells. Epigenetics is the study of how our behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way our genes work.  In recent years, genetics and epigenetics continue to be studied and mined for the great knowledge about our predispositions to certain characteristics and behaviors. Yet, for humans, epigenetic research has recently shown that some of these patterns may not necessarily be unchangeable, but may be open to suggestions from changing the external environmental or even making attitude and lifestyle adjustments. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change our DNA sequence, but they can change how our body reads a DNA sequence. Up to 5 percent of our genes may be amenable to epigenetic suggestions, or adaptations, and the future may show that many more genes may be turned off, or on, depending on the need of the organism.  And, in a most encouraging development, there are scientists now proposing that as individual human beings, we may be an integral part of the Bigger Self that is organizing, or reorganizing, our own consciousness, and have greater influence upon our own biological system. 

Our consciousness has a self-organizing principle, as it organizes itself into our unique personal sense of being, while also categorizing data, accruing knowledge, and forming perceptions. The uncertainty of self-organization in consciousness is a great mystery of life, though we now know that a healthy integration revolves around how well the impressionable being feels accepted by, and connected to the environment that the human body travels through. Thus, happier, self-loving ordered senses of self arise and are supported by myriads of successful interactions with its social and physical environment.  

First and foremost is the being’s acceptance and integration into the primary family group. If we do not get the requisite positive feedback from our parents early on, we face tremendous odds against forming a happy, well-adjusted self organizing principle, or ego.  And the enlightening 1995 Kaiser study of adverse childhood experiences shows the deleterious effects on our health as adults from damaging parental behaviors, either through omission or commission, or other traumatic environmental influences when we were children. Toxic masculinity, or, more precisely, an unskilled capacity to relate to people in a peaceful and mutually accepting manner, was to become a defining characteristic of my life. Coping mechanisms such as passive/aggressive behavior became my normal response to the daily challenges of life. I had internalized and normalized an incomplete composite creative advisor, or a trickster, of who I thought my father and mother were. This became a source of self-talk and feedback for me as a child, and then as an unconscious adult.  

The same process occurs for our social self, too. There is another identity within us, virtually independent of our inner parental feedback creations, which we create internal cultural advisors. As an individual within a culture, I applied the same unskilled balancing mechanism within consciousness, where I would weigh and measure societal needs of me, and others that I love, with whatever my personal needs may have been. I felt out of control over so much of my own life, while feeling divided, fragmented, and so unsure of which direction to point my life towards. In several recovery programs, this fragmentation is called the committee, and we all need to do some ferocious work to get that committee to permanently adjourn. There is no peace of mind, otherwise. 

We must not normalize and internalize what our failed society is, and make it part of the unchangeable forces within our consciousness. We must not bear the burden of our society’s bad behavior. While we are under control of this diseased culture, we have internalized our society’s failures, and have mistaken its failures for our own. But we dare not internalize its failings, or the oppressive qualities of this abusive culture will become part of who we are. So where can we find relief? 

 

Alleviate Your Suffering 

The Buddha had his own ideas about what constitutes mental health, and by his definition, anyone who isn’t well on the way to enlightenment is insane. Quite how literally he meant it when he said all humans are mad is hard to say. But when he looked at ordinary people like us going about their daily business, he saw a world out of balance — and a world that by necessity is out of balance, because it is composed of those same off-kilter individuals. He understood that we, collectively, misunderstand the world that we live in and misunderstand ourselves. Thus, we all end up living in a virtual reality of delusion, confusion, and distortion.  What’s more, we largely share the same delusions, which means that we don’t even realize that our minds are disturbed. As Krishnamurti suggests, it’s possible to think that we’re spiritually and mentally healthy because we share our mistaken values and understandings with those around us. Collectively, our ill minds create ill social circles, and we consider ourselves healthy because we see our values reflected in our spiritually sick fellow travelers.  

Creating the basic conditions that support emotional and spiritual growth might be beneficial to the entirety of our human race. People have basic needs regarding personal safety, security, and placement within the society. Here are some simple, and not so simple, human needs coupled with spiritual intention: 

• To belong, to feel safe while belonging, including the desire to help and protect others while helping oneself. 
• To speak up, and feel like we really were heard, and not have our spirit layered over with others’ errors in reasoning and judgement. 
• To be able to listen to another at the deepest level possible, and be present in the spirit of understanding, cooperation, and collaboration. 
• To feel whole, and to be able to recognize that wholeness, not only within ourselves, but within all others. 
• To love all others, as well as to be accepted, and loved, with as few conditions attached as possible. Unconditional love was never meant to be reserved just for a mother’s love for her child, so it is a great evolutionary objective to attempt to be a channel for it. 

• To evolve, for if we do not, we become subject to the forces of friction and chaos inherent within a closed mind and system, resulting in higher physical and mental disease and dysfunction. 

 

To heal, we must first understand what has us under control, before we can learn how to let go of what controls us. We can place ourselves on a new, healthier path of consciousness by considering the sources of our suffering and our role in the collective conscious. Asking questions of ourselves and answering them point to foundational facts that most of us encounter or employ in our efforts to meet the needs for economic security, establish our place in society, relieve stress and keep ourselves at least marginally happy, and pursue family fulfillment. 

 

Questions to Ponder: 

• Why does suffering exist? And why does it visit me so often? 
• Who and what am I? 
• Are happiness, joy, and freedom possible in my life? 
• What am I really looking for? 
• What really is prayer? 

• Does religion hinder or help a modern-day seeker of God? 
• What is a “well lived life” and how do I achieve it? 
• What is good mental health, or what does it mean to be normal? 
• Who are my people, and where are they located? 
• Why do I feel rejected so often? 

• Why don’t people get along better with each other, and why have I become so isolated? 
• Will I ever fit in?   
• Why don’t I feel peace of mind? 
• Why do some people become spiritually and emotionally disfigured by their desire for sex? 
• What is the role of objectifying people in ignorance, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism? 

• Why do some people exercise excessive emotional control over their partners? 
• Why do I not feel satisfaction when I achieve the goals that I have set up for myself? 
• Why do I not feel joy when others achieve greatness, or accomplish great things for themselves? 
• Why do I sometimes feel threatened by others’ successes? 
• Why do I internally try to hold others back from success and positive social acknowledgement? 

• Why do I always seem to “self-destruct” right at the moment when I am about to achieve great success? 
• Will I ever completely understand myself and others? 
• What is oppression, and what is my relationship to it? 
• What is repression, and why do I participate in it? 
• Why is expressing real human emotions such a double-edged sword?  

• Why are my feelings so hard to identify sometimes? 
• Why are some people always so angry, indifferent, detached, or depressed?  
• Why is anxiety the defining feeling of this age? And why is it so hard to heal from it? 
• Where is the love that I feel is missing from my life? 
• Why don’t I feel more love for myself or for others? 

• Why do I continue to experience poor self-esteem? 
• Why is our culture so focused on youth and physical appearance? 
• Why am I so self-conscious? 
• Why do I feel that I have to always be competitive, or “better than the others” just to fit in? 
• Why is capitalism, dependent on competition and greed, the predominant economic system in our world? 

• Why does shame and guilt control so much of my life’s experience? 
• Is it possible to speak or live a lie long enough that we no longer can accept or believe the truth? 
• Is a person’s silence because of an absence of opinion, or from a fear of speaking the truth? 
• Why can’t some people be more emotionally and spiritually present for others? 
• Why do people feel that they need to engage in mutual “control dramas”? 

• Why do people endlessly pursue entertainment and/or use drugs and alcohol to excess, and ignore their own personal transformation and healing? 
• Why do I have no desire to contribute to society in a more generous and meaningful way? 

 

Not all these questions will speak to you, but some of them will. Use them to stimulate interest and curiosity to pursue your own answers. We must keep in mind the profound impact that our parental upbringing, and our immersion in our culture over the duration of our lives, has upon any potential superficial answers that we might give. It is of utmost importance to understand the fundamental dynamics of our own unique sense of self, and how we may not answer these questions in such a way that honors a more fundamental, and unknown, spiritual essence that we all have. 

 

Chapter 4 : Approaching Trauma More Consciously

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

― C.G. Jung

Like most of us, I have had many traumatic events in my life. I can never forget the dark feelings of abandonment, the helplessness, and disgrace, or the mental or physical pain of my early years. Trauma results in damage to, or loss of, connection to ourselves, to our bodies, to our families, to others, and to the world around us. This disconnection is often hard to recognize because it doesn’t always happen all at once but rather over time.  We make early accommodations to our traumas, with the wounds, and our need to feel safer and more secure, creating spinoffs of our real self that were designed to manage our suffering, and to reduce further attacks upon our self.  These spinoffs become aspects of our defense mechanisms, and  actually dominate our awareness to the point of making us believe that this is all that we are, in spirit and in truth. Often, the damage wrought by the original wounding does not become evident for decades after the original trauma.

One of the several subroutines, or spinoffs of self, that my consciousness ran resulted from an accommodation to early trauma that I experienced. This part of me was of the nature of the “savior” archetype, which was a part of myself that believed that for anybody to ever love me, I would have to save them or do something heroic. This is where my need to overachieve arose from, and my excessive loyalty to other damaged human beings who would not have been in my spiritual orbit otherwise.  I experienced overpowering grief and incredible guilt and shame every time I witnessed failing health or death in friends and family members, including pets.  I also could not tolerate abuse in any form, especially when I witnessed male friends exhibiting controlling or misogynistic behavior towards their female partners.  Sadly, my needs ended more than one long-term friendship.

Like all others within our society, I have also been traumatized by our culture and religion in both profound and subtle ways. Trauma seems to be a natural outcome of our collisions with life shattering events, and less intense though destabilizing experiences that we were not able to adequately process and heal from at the time of their origin.  It is now known that trauma can arise through actual acts, or through the careless or unconscious omission of necessary love at strategic life junctures.  Yet, some even claim that there is no greater trauma than our passage through the birth canal, and that the rest of our lives are defined by our response to that expulsion from the safe womb of mother. No matter how it happens, trauma must be understood and dealt with, or we will be limited by our instinctual responses to its experience.

Our fight or flight mechanism is how we respond to trauma and threats within the environment.  It operates at a nearly instinctual level, but it can be malleable, depending also upon the situation, our individual value system, and cultural conditioning. We tend to think before we react, and our thinking draws from hints from our biological hardware, our historical patterns of behavior, our genetics, and our training. Society, in combination with humanity’s neural-linguistic capacity, has provided mental software subroutines that enable us to process and act upon information to not only keep us safe, but also to act in efficient and, mostly, culturally acceptable manners. The problem is that many of these subroutines act below the conscious level and are fundamentally defective, having become habits of thoughts, with many perceptions being created from a dead past.  Added to this are self-generated subroutines created through traumatic wounding, and it may be seen how the concept of free will may only be a concept until the self is made wholly conscious, healed and whole.

All of these subroutines become sacred cows that are not only erroneous representations of truth, but also keep us trapped within a limited radius around the whipping post of our own personal and collective ignorance. The human race remains a breeding ground for violence of all types, with its traumatic impacts upon all of us.  We are culturally inculcated into ignoring the distressing objects of our perceptions, by the scapegoating of others and denying our unconscious support in the very reality that we are witnessing, and, perhaps, violently reacting against. Pretending not to see, or not speaking of the evil that we see or hear results in no healing potential for anyone.

In our beginning strides on the spiritual path, we usually start with a motivating assumption, an assumption offered by others, yet probably also informed by our intuition and our long lost innocence: Though we are not experiencing it now, there must be a better, or even a perfect state of being available to us.  There must be a cause or reason that we are not experiencing this blissful state.  Is it because of an error in our thought, behavior, upbringing, acculturation, or even a fundamental flaw in our being? Or is it a result of trauma? I have looked at my traumatic wounding at the deepest level, experienced a total disillusionment with the total lie of a life that just accommodating and normalizing trauma may become, and then reawakened to infinite new possibilities for living.  As a general rule of healing, if we can see the problem completely, without self deception, then the very power of that insight generates new pathways for the healing traveler to walk upon.

It is time for all of humanity to also become experts in our own unique life experience, and understand the impacts of malicious and unskilled behavior upon all of us. It is time for humanity to just say no to being agents for the proliferation of traumatic wounding. We can start by understanding the causes of all this trauma.

 

Toxic Masculinity and Our Sacred Cows

Historically, since at least the Greco-Roman times, men have established the rules of mutual engagement.  Our world culture’s dominant male energy has a propensity for creating toxic and traumatic engagement that result in patriarchal systems of political, religious, and economic understanding that maintain the status quo through a multitude of forms of oppression. Yet the status quo remains quite imbalanced, and it continues to bring harm, even to the proponents of these systems and the perpetrators of toxic behavior.  To this day, men continue to struggle with trauma-inspired feelings of poor self-esteem, while keeping this disfiguring system of engagement with the world solidly in place.

Women can also be the perpetrators of trauma and suffering, but the statistics are obvious as to which sex is the major perpetrator of crimes against self and others through intentional and unintentional traumatic assaults.  Men outpace women by an almost 20 to 1 ratio, so it is not even close.  Men are the primary vehicles for the delivery of darkness, and are impacted by the poisoning within their own spiritual ecosystem that carrying such energy would predispose them to. Yet, both passive and aggressive males and females can both benefit from understanding the effects of trauma in their own lives, and we can all take enormous strides to bring healing to ourselves.

There are a number of choices that most men make in our efforts to cope with an often times distressing and threatening life experience. We may fear being seen negatively or receiving a negative evaluation by those people familiar to us.  We may fear being placed in an unfamiliar situation over which we have no control.  We have developed a trauma-inspired brain that seeks to avoid any experience that reminds us of a time when we were helpless and unable to escape threats or discomforts.  We spend extraordinary amounts of time perfecting the passive/aggressive role, where we don’t reveal ourselves directly to others, but instead make our presence known through secretive behavior and hiding activities.

Men typically inflict their own wounding on everybody else, in subtle, or not so subtle ways. Usually, this manifests in dominating, or being dominated, by others. Philosophies of oppression, and of the monetization of reality, arise out of this wounding. Women are usually victimized, or those with sensitive natures. We may participate in trauma-inspired anxiety reactions or accommodations to our wounding, such as:

1. Don’t answer or initiate phone calls. (After all, the phone is the heaviest object in the universe!)
2. Be silent, or shut down after brief sharing, whenever in group settings, such as family events or community gatherings. (Well, they didn’t want to hear what I had to say anyway!)
3. Hide from difficult feelings through overeating or excess drinking of alcohol. (Hey, these are two prized self-treatment options, what gives here?)
4. Hyperactivity and vigilance around keeping a safe position, in restaurants, religious events, or social encounters. (Keep that exit in sight, you never know when you might need to run for it!)
5. Being apologetic for almost anything negative that occurs around us, even if we are not at fault. (Well, it sometimes is a race to get to the victim’s role!)
6. Poor self-esteem, don’t care for self, instead focus on others. Ignore the self, often to the point of masochistic emotional abuse.
7. Ignoring our own feelings (especially anger) and any warning signals from our bodies, and not communicating honestly with others, through avoiding difficult feelings and perceptions, and maintaining people pleasing behavior.
8. Excess competitiveness with others while engaging with greed and the need to keep up with the Jones.
9. Proving self-worth in environments where self, and others’, worth is disrespected, and try to fit in where we don’t belong.
10. Stockpiling weapons.
11. Not speaking up for ourselves or for others that are oppressed for fear of being marginalized.
12. Over immersion in entertainment.
13. Not exercising, not respecting the body’s needs.
14. Use of recreational drugs to the point of habituation (including marijuana).
15. Smoking, vaping, or chewing tobacco.
16. Using sex as a way to manipulate others, to artificially build self-esteem, or as a disguise for loneliness.
17. Workaholism, perfectionism.
18. Addiction to risky behaviors and activities in general.

 

These attitudes and behaviors are guaranteed to bring poor emotional and physical health to the damaged ones, and only encourages the further repression and traumatizing of our self. Life certainly can be quite the complicated challenge, and our responses to it determine whether we can maintain reasonable health and a sense of joy and well-being, or collapse into a deteriorating life situation.

Several recent news articles and studies have indicated that there has been an epidemic of younger, white, middle class men who have been dying at earlier ages than would be statistically forecast, for at least the past thirty years. There are many references to environmental causes, gun violence, to the opioid/fentanyl epidemic, painkiller addiction, heroin addiction, alcohol abuse, or poor diets as leading causal agents.  There is also the so-called “white man’s despair,” an expression recently coined that encompasses a wide range of unhappy and unhealed American white male attitudes and behaviors. I have seen, and I believe at the deepest level of my own being, that this disease in the mind of mankind is directly related to many of the diseases within the body of mankind.

There is a disease of the human spirit that has targeted and used masculinity for thousands of years to victimize everybody, all in the name of religion, progress, security, and economic growth. Does anybody still think that the suicide victim, lone wolf arsonist, abusive alcoholic, mentally ill person shot by a policeman, drug overdose victim, morbidly obese person, corrupted national politician and/or reality TV star, or mass murderer, is a unique being, with no relationship to the rest of the very humanity that spawned him?

The history of humanity indicates that, collectively, it is acceptable to pass unfair judgements against our self and each other, approve of the distribution of weapons of war to countries and to individuals, promote inequitable distribution of resources and wealth with a now monetized Mother Earth’s resources, cultivate  excesses and greed as aspects of positive capitalism, incite division,  violence, murder, and war, continue injustice and inequity, defend racism and white supremacy, promote religious and philosophical persecution, and create and continue the conditions for addiction, and suicide. This self-destructive behavior continues, seemingly unabated. And there are large groups of humanity who would rather watch their world burn than collaborate with it to bring a measure of healing to all.

In the 1980s, during America’s campaign to reduce the proliferation of drug addiction, Nancy Reagan made the famous statement: “JUST SAY NO!” The understanding at the time was that addiction was a personal choice, and by reversing the “yes” that was being said to drug use to a “no,” the problem would just disappear.  In the absolute, that is quite true. Our real problem as a human race is that we have had our desire to just say no to perceived negative situations or behavior gets overrun by a lack of alternatives to choose from, peer pressure, family and religious training, and our own failure to develop or maintain the ability to set healthy boundaries for our self. Why doesn’t our civilization say no to the proliferation of traumatic events, and the wounding of the innocent? Because it doesn’t work.

We are all susceptible to the damages incurred by spiritual asphyxiation, should we neglect to listen to the stories being told by our most vulnerable family members. The sensitive and the oppressed of our culture define the leading edge of the journey of our own shared human experience and are indicators of our collective spiritual condition. As a culture, we need to remember that the traumatized of our culture, the mentally ill, the diseased and damaged population, which includes the addicts and the alcoholics, are society’s “canaries in the gold mine.” Their diminished lives are direct evidence of a cultural disease, and they become part of the narrative of cultural and spiritual dysfunction.

The possibility of bringing balance and a sense of wholeness into life must be embraced, and conscious movements towards healing will greatly reduce trauma’s burden upon us. When healing from the impacts of trauma is not pursued in earnest, many negative outcomes become possible: Some become addicted to the idea that their only function is to provide for their family, and, having achieved success or failure, they become disillusioned. Some may eventually lose their sense of meaning and direction in life with the loss of a career, marriage, or community. They may become lonely and depressed, and may develop profound mental illness and/or become addicted to drugs and alcohol if not treated.  Those who somehow hang in there, waiting for a better day may never see it.

One only needs to look around, and view the effects of toxic masculinity, and its ugly spawn, toxic religion, toxic politics, and toxic capitalism, to see that repression of our feminine nature, and the Divine, is built right into the very fabric of our cultural existence. The Golden Rule, which states, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” does not bring great hope or direction to huge segments of the human population, religious or otherwise, because they are ignorant of love’s need for the release of emotional controls over others, self-care, peace of mind, and adherence to collaborative and compassionate principle. As the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “We are made for goodness.  We are greatness in the making.” How can we achieve that goodness again?

Trauma and its wounding results in extreme contraction of our spirit.  By being willing to face ourselves, and our grief, traumas, and suffering, we can develop the capacity to move freely through our lives instead of remaining tethered to the pillories of our painful pasts.

 

Facing Your Trauma and Returning to Goodness

Each human child depends upon the quality of love, safety, and prosperity of the family household, and these are primary factors that greatly influence a growing child’s evolutionary path through consciousness. The parents are by intention also designers, builders, and co-creators of the early life and consciousness of the new child, even if the DNA determines a greater portion of the heritage. My father spent five years at a local university learning about psychology, child development, logic, philosophy, and religion, and yet his successful mastering of these subjects in school did not translate into insight as to how to best parent his children. My mother studied Dr. Spock and others, yet did not develop the insight necessary to know that placing a blanket wrapped crying baby in a car in the garage at night so Dad could sleep missed the bulls eye for perfect child care by the widest of margins. All creators strive for perfection, and most parents are no exceptions, yet that desire for excellence is difficult to identify in dysfunctional families, especially by children who were negatively impacted by chronic parental mismanagement. Victims of wounding carry the pain well into adulthood, and even unto death, in situations where the trauma is never made conscious or gets addressed in a loving, healing manner.

For those who may need help refreshing their memories, or understanding if healing from trauma should be a serious consideration, taking the following test may be of help.  The Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Questionnaire is ten questions to help people identify their childhood experiences of abuse and neglect. Here is the questionnaire.

 

Prior to your 18th birthday:

1. Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
2. Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Push, grab, slap, or throw something at you? or Ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
3. Did an adult or person at least 5 years older than you ever… Touch or fondle you or have you touch their body in a sexual way? or Attempt or actually have oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
4. Did you often or very often feel that … No one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special? or Your family didn’t look out for each other, feel close to each other, or support each other? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
5. Did you often or very often feel that … You didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, and had no one to protect you? or Your parents were too drunk or high to take care of you or take you to the doctor if you needed it? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
6. Were your parents ever separated or divorced? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
7. Was your mother or stepmother: Often or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her? or Sometimes, often, or very often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, or hit with something hard? or Ever repeatedly hit over at least a few minutes or threatened with a gun or knife? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
8. Did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic, or who used street drugs? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
9. Was a household member depressed or mentally ill, or did a household member attempt suicide?                        No___If Yes, enter 1 __
10. Did a household member go to prison? No___If Yes, enter 1 __

 

If you answered more than two questions in the affirmative, you are potentially predisposed to a cluster of poor health choices, continued traumatizing of self and others, suffering within the self, and creating a generally troubled life experience. The embodied stress of trauma causes cortisol to be injected into the bloodstream for, potentially, decades of time, causing stress and inflammation related illness and disease.

A Canadian study reported in the scientific journal Psychoneuroendocrinology found that individuals exposed to adverse childhood experiences tend to be biologically older than their counterparts. The authors considered whether accelerated biological aging could help explain the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and poor health outcomes later in life. Their findings suggest that harm, such as abuse or violence, in early life takes many forms and can lead to health consequences many years down the road. The researchers found that the link between adverse childhood experiences and biological age was stronger for more sever forms of adversity, such as physical and sexual abuse.

I scored high on the ACE test.  As a child, I had several health issues, and I was restless, discontented, and suffered from a feeling of not being heard or fully accepted as a child. My parents and my culture made their compelling arguments for trying to convince me that their paths and understandings were righteous, and I just needed to pick myself up by my bootstraps and be mature enough to understand and find where I fit in this challenging place.

The greatest trauma to the human soul is the early damage to our sense of self that causes poor self-esteem, and all of the compensating behavior that occurs downstream from the wounding.  Without even knowing it, we traumatize others with variations of our own original trauma.  If our trauma created a sense of self that is insecure and feeling unloved or unlovable, our relationships will be held back by just that much, and will not dynamically evolve into the fullest of their innate potential.  We remain pilloried to the past, and lost within the unconscious response patterns of a mind trapped in the labyrinth created by that activity.

Trauma and suffering are not synonymous, though suffering may arise from failure to directly address traumatic wounding, which only leads to more suffering and the unconscious predisposition towards creating new traumatic life events. Many causes of suffering are preventable, however, and they have their origins within broken, unhealed minds unwilling to embrace the possibility of personal change.  And, most of these assaults against our Spirit originate within the family, though environmental influences from a corrupted societal norms and religious malfeasance also play major roles in the origin and proliferation of traumatic wounding.

My first thirty-one years of life reflected the internalized horror of a life suppressed and traumatized by the conspiracy of silence, a silence created by my misguided need to preserve and protect a limited, damaged image of self, and of all others. My own true nature had been masked over, or silenced, through that process. A lifetime of oppression of myself and the unconscious repression of several aspects of my feeling, loving nature had brought to me a series of near fatal illnesses, physiological as well as spiritual. I saw how a dark force, common to all of humanity continued to live, move, and have its being enshrined within my own heart and soul. I saw how the medical, economic, religious, cultural, political, and spiritual traditions remain burdened by their own limitations of understanding and intelligence. I saw that my own suffering was shared by most of the other people that I knew. I saw that those who suffer have little energy to provide emotional support for others who still suffer, as well.

Tragically, many of us have experienced great difficulties, traumatic impacts, and suffering through our relationship with our family, our family’s religion, and our culture. Some of the traumas most resistant to healing happened in our early years, or even before we became verbal as young children.  And most victims go through life, never knowing the source of their chronic pain, be it physical or emotional or both.

Traumatic experiences, grief,  and suffering may arise through an action of intentional hostility, or it may arise spontaneously as a reaction to the vicissitudes of life. Suffering may arise from an inability to do what is right. Suffering may arise through incurable diseases of the body or of the mind. Suffering may arise through the trauma of witnessing horrific acts of violence. Suffering may arise from the inability to reconcile the belief in God with one’s own grief and loss. Suffering may arise from becoming addicted to substances that were designed to take our pain away. Suffering may arise from the perceived inability to speak one’s truth and to have one’s voice heard in the face of the oppressive powers of the day. Suffering may also arise from contemplating the continuation of our daily pains into a distant, unknown future.

We know all too well where we are now, and for those that do not like their present state of awareness, we do have options.

 

Dealing with Your Trauma

Meditation is a way to access the trauma stored in the body. My friend Paul Zilka, during a meditation experience in the early 1990s, literally saw a small semi-human form, vaguely resembling his young self, erupt from a historical wound in his back, crawl up to his shoulder, and fly away. Thirty years of back pain disappeared through that amazing exercise, facilitated by Jerry Jones, the famous meditation teacher.

In 1987, during a profound meditation, I was also shown two complete identity matrices attached to my own bodily energy field.  I did not recognize them as creations from damaged parts of myself.  I was ignorant of trauma and its potential impact at the time, and all I could do was to note that they were not there for my greater good. I intuitively knew them to be tricksters. They stayed with me for years afterwards, for I did not know what to do with the information. I did not know it at the time, but I performed a spiritual bypass where I was able to postpone dealing directly with them, until I had the requisite insight and knowledge as to deal with them effectively.

If it weren’t for the incredible spiritual strength, and wisdom, of my life partner, Sharon White, I would not have been able to have, what some people call, the following cathartic event. It was on a Thursday morning in February 2018, and I was preparing to go to the Pilates class that Sharon and I attended, and I wanted to get there early so that we could warm up on an exercise bicycle, with a little aerobic activity.

But while I was ready to go, Sharon was on the telephone, talking with a friend. I, trying to be innocent, said, “Can we go now?” And she got mad. Her anger released in me the trapped energy of a lifetime. While raging at her, I became aware of a pain so deep, and so all-encompassing, resulting in an anger from a source that I had never touched before, at least as a verbally conscious human being. Sharon and I went our separate ways for a few hours, while we both tried to understand what the heck had just transpired. Leading up to this experience, I had been intensely exploring the entirety of my life experience, having written seventy pages about my early childhood and trauma, my maturation process, addictive and self-destructive cycles, while providing glimpses into higher possibilities for living. All of this writing had placed me, without me realizing it, into the psychic world of all of my past pain and suffering.

After a meditation, I had a realization. My wounded essence, and the issues stored in my bodily tissues had actually cried out for the first time and I actually listened to it, without my ego repressing it as it had for sixty-one years. And I also saw, for the first time, the wounding process that I shared with my father. I felt an incredible compassion, love, and acceptance for my father, who had also suffered immensely under the spiritually destructive parenting of his own diseased parents.

Sharon paid the price for a couple of hours, while I acknowledged the wounded baby within me. But, I had an insight that still informs me daily. I saw how we, as humans, keep layering ourselves and our ideas upon what somebody else is saying, rather than meeting the being where they are, and responding according to the dictates of our heart center, which in most people, especially men, has been scabbed over by our own early spiritual wounding.

              My life has transformed from a trauma induced static state of distress and emotional stagnation to a dynamic, ever changing experience of life’s infinite possibilities for healing, new perceptions and enhanced spiritual experiences.  I say yes to the present state of evolving enlightenment, and no to the diseased mind stuck in the past.

Here are some other options for healing:

• Create a visual timeline.  Write onto a piece of paper, a long piece of paper, the years of your life.  Start with the birth year, and carry it forward to the present moment.
• Listen to music from the time when the wounding occurred. It will open up emotional vistas, using the wholeness of the self.
• Write extensively about the time in question.
• Work in conjunction with therapist trained in traumatic wounding.
• Perform ceremony that indicates finding the wounds and freeing them from our tissues.
• Listen to the stories from family members, friends of family, and, especially, friends of the parents who may have witnessed aspects of your upbringing.
• Have an incredibly supportive partner, or a therapist, to watch with you the emotions that arise during the turbulent periods of the introspection.
• Make a decision to make amends to the world for our own unconscious wounding of all others, which was our unintentional response to our own wounding.

 

Freedom from Trauma Now and in the Future

Trauma must be recognized for what it is, which is psychological wounding as a result of a single experience, the repetition of similar experiences many times, or a combination of different experiences which have attacked one’s safety and security over an extended period of time. It is an assault against our innocence, an oppressive act, or series of actions, against our essence, and the unskilled way we have dealt with it becomes the source of much of our repressive tendencies and sufferings.

To not express ourselves honestly and openly results in our own early demise, spiritually as well as physically. Many people within our society have lost all freedom of choice. I have much compassion for those who still struggle with the sometimes lifelong effects of trauma with its resultant suffering, and its deadly spawn of fear, indifference to others, disassociation from one’s own self, mental illness and alcoholism/drug addiction. Fortunately, we have other places to travel to find our healing, and there already are awakening people to observe and learn from, to gain hints on how to find our way back home to our own innate goodness.

We each must penetrate the conspiracy of silence, and bring the light of a loving heart and healing words to the hidden darkness. Can we bring our sense of self, with all of our historical wounding and suffering, and look at it honestly and openly with our self, and others?  If so, then we can then bring hope to all of the other canaries in our society who are now struggling for air.

Note:  Chapter 5 will be added to considerably as work progresses by Melinda

Chapter 5 : Insight And Mindfulness

“The unexamined life will be painfully lived”

—-Jack Boland

 

When I was a kid, I had a strange and profound dream. A priest, having received his directive from on high, then returned to his village along the lake in the high mountain region. He gathered all of the villagers together, and informed them that they were to take every golden figurine, every sacred symbol that they owned, and they were to throw them all into the lake, and never to think about them again. Then, he told each villager that they must each go into their own home, and face the evil one without any protection or care from any of their gods or their symbols of the sacred.

The priest then returned to his own home and tossed all of his own idols and treasures into the deep blue lake. He stripped himself bare of all clothing, and then began to summon the forces of the dark. He became surrounded by a fog, and as he lifted his hands, sparks started flying out of his fingertips at the unknown force of darkness that lay just beyond his visual field, still hidden beyond the boundaries of the fog. The priest refocused his energy into his arms, and hands, and the sparks grew into a steady energy field, extending from his body, his heart, and his spirit, towards his unknown adversary. He was determined to overcome this force, this dark energy, and he redoubled his efforts.

The priest’s heart began to race out of control, he began to sweat profusely, and a growing sense of fear and dread began to take hold of his entire being, as he finally understood that his energy could not last forever. Yes, for him to continue this battle, he must sacrifice all of his life force. Yet, he felt that he had no choice but to keep engaging the enemy, to finally see the face of the force that had terrorized his village since time began. He desperately strained and stretched to see the object of his fear and disdain, even as the ebbing energy field flowing from his fingertips continued to cut through the fog.

Suddenly, a face began materializing before his faltering gaze. As he collapsed to the floor, almost drained of all life, he could no longer fight an undeniable truth: the face of the evil one might be his own!

Projection is a name given by psychologists to this experience, where we finally realized that the conscious world that we feared, the conscious world in which we created idols and gods and psychological mechanisms to protect ourselves from the perceived or potential evil, was actually a world that we created through our own ignorance, both collectively and individually. This manifests in all of the horrors that we witness on the world stage daily, and in all of the family and cultural dysfunction under which we were raised. We are all wounded by this process, and rather than find a way to heal from it, we ignorantly arm ourselves against further assaults from others, even though we are part of the attack against our own self in the first place.

What if a real miracle was trying to happen in our lives, and too few people cared or were not even aware enough to attempt to look for it? This indifference or ignorance is the foundation for chaos in our world and within our own minds. Those who refuse to look at the toxic masculinity inspired darkness within our culture become its unconscious and, unwittingly, its most ardent supporters. Indifference and hatred continues to threaten to destroy everyone and everything. Tragically, in this age, collective outpourings of love and support for victims follow domestic terrorist acts, rather than healing and preparing the culture enough to actually prevent the heinous behavior in the first place. But through Insight and mindfulness, minds and hearts are transformed, making all of us much less likely to become the source of suffering for others, and we become the living examples of loving non-violence in action.  Insight plants the seed of the miracle into our minds, and mindfulness is the great gardener of that miracle, resulting in a more abundant, healthy crop of happier, peaceful, loving, and ordered thoughts.

 

Profound Insights of the Self

One of the greatest insights that I have made is a direct result of a science class that I attended in fourth grade. Mr Hill, our principal and co-teacher of the fourth grade class, was going to perform an experiment, and he wanted to teach the students about the power of observation. Each member of the class was to record everything they observed.

The teacher heated a portable electric stove. He then grabbed with some insulated tongs a thin sheet of metal and set it onto the burner. The metal immediately began to distort in size and disfigure. When he was done, the metal no longer looked like it did before.

I watched, yet I had no words to describe what it was that I had just witnessed. I had never seen anything like that before, and I was struck dumb by it. I saw two kids writing feverishly on either side of me, and in my need to fit in and not look stupid, I copied off their papers and used their words to help me create my own descriptions. Even as a kid, I depended on other people to give a description about events that I did not have the words for. As a result, I have seen how the mystery of life can sometimes get overrun by society’s need to establish and maintain a continuity of reality and a shared understanding of events between all of its members.

Someone else had the description of what I could not yet describe, so I used second-hand words to fill in the gap. Extrapolate this need to fit in and to belong to all collective gatherings of human life, including religion, politics, and society, and the potential foundation for illusion exists within all such bodies of experience. The description is never the actual event, yet those who did not have the experience, copy and worship the description, and overlook the event that may be still happening right under their noses. They have never developed the capacity and the willingness, to give their own unique description of an event, they are in fear of offering a different or contrary version of the event, or they have never witnessed the event itself.

In my junior year in high school, I was required to keep a daily journal, and record my insights into myself for a writing class. The problem was that I had no insight, at least as far as being able to put into words what the interior nature of my mind and life looked like. I did not spend a lot of time giving descriptions to events happening around me, and, instead, listened to others as they described their own experiences, which I either accepted and supported or rejected and judged against. But for me to give a description of the interior dimensions of my own being seemed an impossible task. I had to submit something, and in my desperation to get a decent grade I went to a bookstore, to find a book to help me to look at myself. Hugh Prather had written a book called Notes To Myself, and I stumbled upon it, and bought it. I was so empty of complete statements about myself and my life that I copied statements from Hugh’s book, and tried to personalize them so that it would not be obvious that I had copied his work. I got my passing grade, felt very relieved, and continued on my awkward, highly dysfunctional path through high school.

I was near the top of my class near graduation time, yet I was completely out of touch with the majority of my classmates, as well as with myself. I had hoped that to finally graduate from high school might change, if not end, much of my social anxiety and sense of disconnect. Of course this could not be further from the truth. When I entered my freshman year at the University of Portland in 1973, I was lost again, and I had no internal maps to guide me through the complexities of college life. The use of pot, alcohol, and relationships with emotionally diseased people continued in earnest, obscuring any clear vision of my goals, and I constructed many self-destructive road blocks that impeded all progress.

Looking back, this verbal and emotional disconnect would have been great stuff to write about in the high school class, but I was living a lie, without having the words to even describe it, and the telling of the truth to others, let alone to myself, might force me into changes that I could not embrace or consider as possibilities. The absence of personal honesty and insight, and to be verbal around it, and the inability to communicate my distress with others doomed me to a deteriorating life experience. This limited my choices so much that many days, and years, I felt trapped in a prison, with interior windows sometimes only opening to Hell. I did not even have an adequate description to communicate my hell to others, so this is the secret behind the motivation for many mysterious suicides.

A most diseased way that human beings acting out of their own wounded natures is by continuing the attacks against those that they have already hurt. It is just heartbreaking to be a witness to, or to be on the receiving end of, attacks against our souls and being by those who have already hurt us, and who cannot or will not acknowledge their own culpability. The victim is made wrong for having feelings, and for expressing their anger, fear, distress, or heartbreak. Because the perpetrator does not want to face his own bad attitudes and behavior, he lashes out, and makes wrong, those who attempt to speak up for their own life and rights. If we cannot accept responsibility for our own wayward thoughts and actions, healing and forgiveness, whatever that word may point to, remains an impossibility.

Those who remain silent about their own responsibility for and participation in their own projections of hatred, ignorance, pain, suffering, intolerance onto others, remain a fixture of our culture’s conspiracy of silence. It happens on the cultural level, and on the personal level. We are all victims of racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, and all other malicious, malevolent attitudes and behaviors, trickling down from our politicians, corporate boards, employers, family members, co-workers, acquaintances, fellow drivers on the road, or the person in the cashier’s line with us at the grocery store. The answer to these problems is mindfulness.

 

Cultivating Mindfulness

A man got into his car, and put Jimmy Cliff’s song “I Can See Clearly Now” onto his car audio player. He started the car and began driving down the road during a rainstorm. Not more than one block down the road, he slammed head-on into another car, critically injuring himself and the other driver. The policeman who showed up on the scene investigated the accident and noted that the driver had failed to turn his windshield wipers on. He visited him in the hospital to interview him, so that he could finish his report.  When the driver awoke from his coma, the officer asked him why he didn’t turn on his windshield wipers.

“Officer, I did everything right. I was playing the right music in the background, and I trusted that I was seeing all that I needed to see. I just did not think that I needed my windshield wipers.”

The officer immediately cited him for reckless endangerment and reckless driving. Because even though the man was unaware that he was doing something wrong didn’t make it any less wrong or destructive. Our unconscious behavior causes damage every moment of every day. Mindfulness means turning on those windshield wipers and leaving them on! As human beings, it is always raining somewhere inside of our minds or even in our heart.

The examined life demands that we take inventory on our self, and make every effort to understand the motivations behind all of our thoughts and actions in this world. The deeper we dig, the more that we learn that we are connected at a much deeper, more profound level with the rest of humanity than we previously understood. It is then that the healing we undertake as an individual can have a ripple effect upon the rest of humanity, because we all influence the collective, as well as individual, consciousness that we experience as human beings.

Mindfulness is meditation, with our eyes wide open. Insight and mindfulness work together to bring the parts of ourselves back into alignment with each other and reduce the profound impacts of brokenness and chaos in our lives.  It is a lifelong process, and personal awareness is as necessary as brushing our teeth and eating healthy foods for our overall well-being. With mindfulness cultivating the seeds planted by insight, a new world order can grow, and bring our world back into alignment with the higher orders of peace, health, and collective well-being.

Each one of us has a self-organizing principle, or we would not remain integrated and true to our sense of self, and we would dissolve into chaos, fragmentation, and insanity. For me, God is a historical name for the self-organizing principle of consciousness within each one of us, plain and simple.  The story of Genesis is a myth or parable about how the organizing principle of consciousness itself, God, unfolds in space and time, our responsibility for using the naming process to create an accurate representation for the outer world, and how it makes a more peaceful, happy experience for self and other. The world was the picture of disorganization and uncertainty; everything was formless and void. But God changed everything. His action began as His Spirit was moving. The Spirit of God was brooding, studying, examining, lingering. And only after this hovering did God take action and start bringing order. God illumined everything about the world, day after day bringing order out of chaos.   When he was satisfied, he could rest. Because God is the very organizing principle of our consciousness, then ultimately it is our personal responsibility to direct the internal construction project.

God’s actions in creation help us understand how we actually approach our lives, and the ways this awareness can help us today. For God still brings clarity to confusion. God replaces disorganization with organization. Uncertainty is replaced by certainty. Chaos is replaced by order. Those who are aimless are given new plans. Emptiness is replaced by meaning and purpose. And any sense of darkness is replaced by a new light, or understanding. This is a process that is now known as mindfulness, but it has been known to godly people for all of time.

God does not judge us, we judge ourselves, and, thus, we can become more godlike in nature and manner, once our blocks to loves awakening and awareness are acknowledged within.  There is no white bearded man in the sky, ruling from the golden throne, with angels circling his head.  But, there is wisdom within us, when it is cultivated, and our insight and true knowledge become angels to us, as they lift our spirits, and our understanding and connection with each other, the world, and all of the life upon it.

We are responsible for incorporating love, rationality, and understanding into our world views, and this successful action literally creates the lord within us that informs and guides all of our actions. We must bring order out of the chaos that we created through ignorance in our minds, and in the minds of those people who are part of our community. We must separate the light from the dark, and we can only rest when we have become one with the goodness at the center of our being, and at the center of everyone else’s being. We must become mindful, or, in the words of Alcoholics Anonymous, continue to take personal inventory, and when we miss the mark, promptly admit it and change course, rather than waste time defending our illusions.

While watching our minds both while in meditation and being mindful, we will watch many trains of thought just passing through.  While physically and emotionally engaged with the outside world, we will find many trains of thought passing by, as well.  The first thought response to any situation is usually a conditioned response, which means, to be mindful, we must take a pause before acting on each thought.  There is always another train of thought ready to take the place of the last thought, and this next train might be the better response. This is almost the equivalent of taking a deep breath before taking action. That next train has a much higher likelihood of being filled with more spiritually inspired passengers, especially when it arises from the pause moment.  We can have a happier, more peaceful and loving train of thought ride just by pausing before acting and not jumping on the first train that passes through.

A fixed truth about life is that if we can’t honestly look at where we are in life, we will never find the true motivation or foundation for change. The non-examined life always results in a damaged, dysfunctional life, and that characterizes both individuals, and the collective society that they participate in. Our misunderstanding of life, no matter how Christian we claim to be, creates infinite opportunities for chaos and disharmony with each other, and we feel betrayed by, and suffer endlessly from, all of the wounds incurred through fragmented belief systems.

We are typically healed though the power of awareness in the present moment of experience. I am to be forever walking into the unknowable present moment. Living into the truth of what that is now is the new story of my life. There is but one mind, but its truth cannot be experienced except by resting in the unknown of the present moment. No teacher will affect our salvation, we must work it out for ourselves. The God of our misunderstanding only needs our humility, patience, and sincerity to approach it successfully. The medium for healing is our own consciousness and the consciousness of our spiritually aware helpers, and this is always happening now.

 

Living a Mindful Life

 

Insight and mindfulness, meditation, walking away from self-destructive dependencies, maintaining dialogue with others, speaking my truth, fighting against oppression of others, and repression within my own heart and soul, following new paths of consciousness, working out my own salvation, while helping others on their own paths as well are ways to develop collective awareness and healing and bringing peace of mind to my own interior universe. I cannot love others, or my own life, completely, until I make peace within my own heart and soul.

The Word (peace, love, healing, wholeness, unity of life) must become flesh, and dwell within me, and within all of us.  To not have that experience is to invite all of the darkness, turbulence, and disease that the world has to offer into our individual and collective lives. Through insight and mindfulness, the difficult emotions that arise within the human experience are experienced in the most sacred, honored way of the Spirit within us.  We become more free, and honest, human beings.  And, a few of us get to experience the real miracle, where we see from that aspect of our real nature that can watch our thoughts arise, without being the self who remains unconsciously controlled by them.