No Spiritual Bypass Allowed

Hearts break left and right

None of us free from sorrow

Love shows us the way

It’s a given that people are crazy. I mean this literally. Take whatever level of interpretation you like. Of course there are degrees, but let’s just begin with the fundamental, all pervading (Buddhist) truth that unless we’re enlightened, awake, liberated, seeing clearly, we are by default living in a world of delusion based on disconnection from our true nature and the mis-identification of self; call this ignorance, not perceiving or relating to things as they actually are, and therefore severance from reality. Crazy.

Then you add on to this foundation the insanities perpetrated routinely by cultures and societies and governments and corporations and schools and families and religions (we’ll suppose that I’m allowing Buddhism, at its best, to be considered a philosophy, or perhaps even more accurately, a psychology and a metaphysics; not that in practice it is immune from the faults of organized religions), and we don’t really have much of a chance of getting much of anything right. To wit: the state we’re in.

Of course there are degrees, I said, and aside from the foundational situation of “normal” delusion, which is also a matter of degrees, I want to refer to the more extreme forms of madness that can be created by the bad treatment of some people by other people. Bad parenting, for example. Whether intentionally harmful or accidentally harmful, but in either case without remediation.

Let’s suppose a sensitive boy, maybe artistically inclined, either outrightly abused by the parents, or maybe “only” neglected by way of a variety of abandonments, leading, perhaps, to further abuses at the hands of other people. Let’s say the family is monied, and the boy is sent away to boarding schools, in England perhaps, and maybe raised otherwise by nannies. Maybe these experiences cause damage at an early age, and that damage is never remedied, then or later, and the little, and then not-so-little guy is left to his own, maybe fairly creative, psychological devices when it comes to building and protecting a minimally extant ego/self that can function, survive, in the world. Let’s say we end up with a rigid and toxic narcissistic personality disorder.

This need to be right

holding strong to ego’s view

ancient legacy

Everyone ought to now be abundantly familiar with this particular disorder, as the result of the four years of the Presidency of The United States of one Donald Trump, a toxic narcissist if ever there was one (in my humble opinion. disclaimer: this assessment is the expression of one person’s opinion, and should not be understood to provide any kind of expert diagnosis. whew!)

Extreme arrogance. Extreme disregard for the feelings or well being of others, lack of empathy. Extreme need for attention and admiration (add, in Trump’s case, for unquestioning obedience and loyalty). Extreme manipulation, selfishness and demandingness. All of this, we might say, rigidly formulated to protect an extremely fragile ego structure and to ameliorate extremely low self regard. You get the picture.

Recently I have been the target of such a person. A person with whom I have had some intermittant relationship over a few years. It isn’t pleasant, to say the least. Delusions, lies (or maybe just alternate facts?), hatefulness, hurtfulness, verbal/emotional attacks, vehement insensitivity and intent to do harm on various levels. And of course harm has been done. My emotional body especially has been injured, and enough time has passed now so that recovery has been possible.

What I was aware of, and what I was triggered by, at one extreme, is the true hatefulness directed at me and the wish to annihilate me, perhaps not physically, since that would probably entail undesirable consequences. My nervous system was activated by this because of the injuries of my personal history, but also, and not less significantly, by my genetic coding, my cellular “memories” (collective trauma) of the history of the Jewish people, routinely demonized, as I was, and “eliminated” by the powers of the day throughout time and place, reaching its most insane height in the last century, obviously, by the government engineering and implementation of The Final Solution of the Nazi Third Reich. I believe I have some sensitivity to those who may wish to eliminate me, in this case, emotionally and functionally.

I’m writing about this because it’s importantly some of what has happened in my life in the tropical paradise of Thailand, because it’s more interesting and more significant than what we had for lunch today, and to help me process through the pain of it. Pain, existential terror, a bruised emotional body, which I experience primarily in the solar plexus as a kind of challenge to my safety, as signals of danger, arousing a fight/flight/or freeze response. The person in question is now on my “dangerous persons” list, a toxic person who I now know cannot be trusted, and with whom my intention is to have no further involvement. And yes, there is also the reflexive survival part of me that has thought it would be very nice to kill (annihilate) said person, and I have created vengeful images and feelings of violent domination, brutal destruction and threats of my own, all in reactive self defense of course.

If one could taste joy

what rich flavor might it be?

Mystery on my tongue

I’ve been through this before. as it happens, so I’m somewhat familiar with the territory. I have the resources, using therapy-speak, both inner and outer (I do have Nancy after all) to work with it and through it. The experience of knowing there is someone who hates you, who wants, at least symbolically, to annihilate you, is very unsettling. I’m also keenly aware that I am not defined by my emotional experience, or by my thoughts and fantasies. In some concretely practical way isn’t this, at least partially and importantly, what the spiritual life is about? Enlarging our knowing and our experience of ourselves so that a certain equanimity is possible even in the face of this sort of thing? So that whatever presents itself in our experience has a larger self identity to contain it? I know it is for me.

And then there is just the heartbreak, the sadness, about this whole state of affairs, about the injuries we cause each other, about the pains we all live with, about the dangers we all face, especially from damaged and unhealed others, but also simply from the inherent realities of the human condition. My feelings have ranged between this heartbreak, this sadness, this grief, and the feeling of being endangered. Another loss for me on this round in Thailand. Another unexpected change to keep company with my list of unexpected changes here.

The good news is, as always, that I get to continue to expand my ability to embody the compassion (and self-compassion) that constitutes the most sane response to all of this madness and suffering, to love and to be in joy, while also remediating the injury I’ve sustained. And more good news, as always, I am ever grateful for all of it.

I have, we all have, the same capabilities for violence, hatred, insensitivity, abuse. It’s equally as much the denial of this truth as it is the overt exercise of it that creates so much harm. When none of the instinctive bio-physiological fight/flight/freeze responses are any longer satisfactory, when something more than reactivity is required, there an opportunity for compassion truly arises. May it be so.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be free from suffering, and from the causes of suffering.

Om shanti, shanti, shanti