The 'Mad' Parts of Sane People

We've had yet another warm, comfy week in Southern Ontario, and we spent the last week often celebrating Dar's birthday. This past Friday Dar and I and a good friend went to our favourite french restaurant, owned by a really good friend of ours, ate a great meal and spent some time drinking an excellent Chateau Pajot Sauterne with the chef and his wife. Truth be told, I GAVE him the bottle of wine this past January, for his 50th birthday. he saved it to share with us. God, I have good taste!!! ;-)

I mentioned last week that Dar and I and self-same friend had a "spa day in Toronto," and my hair's cut. Our friend clicked a picture of Dar and me.

Glad for all of you, and how often you write to say hi. Please, keep sending your friends Into the Centre. We love meeting new travellers on the path.

 Warmly, Wayne

Some weeks ago, I quoted a bit of text from a book called The Mystery of Human Relationship, by Nathan Schwartz-Salant. The book has proven to be extremely dense with Jungian archetypes, Freudian ego definitions and alchemical references. I've managed to get through half of it, and keep intriguing myself with interesting ideas. I even took the book along on my kidney surgery day, and read some of it, both before and after. (The "after" part was especially interesting, as I kept nodding off . . . )

The transformative (alchemical) process described in the book is best described, I think, by the recognition of how close we are to chaos -- to madness -- what Schwartz-Salant calls "the mad parts of same people." It's the feeling of something that is "of" me, but "not me,"-- a part of me that lurks around the edges of my consciousness. We do all that we can to avoid having to confront, let along reveal to others, this "mad part." Yet, wholeness and spirituality lies in confronting and owning the part.

Here's today's quote:

"Generally, one experiences considerable disturbance when a consciousness emerges that conflicts with one's established personality. The stronger this awareness, the stronger the conflict. On the one hand, the realization or embodiment of this consciousness requires that old structures, which once defended against the new awareness, dissolve. On the other hand, the affirmation of the new awareness requires that one be willing to be led further in ways that are not necessarily predictable." (pg. 100)

Schwartz-Salant argues that we must gain the courage to see all of ourselves, and we need to confront ourselves within a relationship to another. The result of such confrontation is transformative wholeness.

 In one passage making this point, he mentions a Kwakiutl Indian story of the two-headed snake god Sisiutl.

The snake's intended victim is saved by standing firm against the approach of the fearsome creature.. As the two heads of the snake approach the warrior, the heads must turn inward in order to eat him. At that moment, Sisiutl

"will see his own face. Who sees the other half of Self, sees Truth . . . when he sees his face, his own other face, when he has looked into his own eyes, he has found Truth." (pg. 107)

Further, the author writes,

"But one can learn to stand firm and fight one's terror while still holding on to one's humility at being overwhelmed -- not by another person, but by a phenomenon, by two talking heads and by the terror they engender." (pg. 107)

OK, so where is Uncle Wayne off to today, you may wonder? Told you the writing (his, not mine ;-) ) was dense. However, dense or not, the guy makes sense. It would not be too far off the mark to make all sorts of parallels to the stuff I wrote on on deconstruction that appeared in the last three issues of Into the Centre.

In a sense, the deconstruction project, the "next step" beyond the ego project, is not an escape into some airy-fairy netherworld of crystals and other-worldly experience. It's a descent measured in inches (OK, Dar, Centimetres - cheech!) and is a descent from the head into the body.

Emphatically the author equates the arising of a "higher" consciousness with a willingness to be in the body. It's almost as if, in our willingness to accept our "in-the-body-ness," we somehow, paradoxically, embrace our Soul.

You'll remember from lots of Into the Centre articles that I see the purpose of ego development (from age 0 to 16, we would hope!) is to create both walls (which, through deconstruction, can be converted into flexible boundaries) and an ego identity, (which, through deconstruction, is a letting go of.) Again, we say, most people don't move past the ego project, so the walls keep feelings trapped in our bodies, and threats and others out. My "stuck" ego identity tells me it is "me" who is building and maintaining the walls.

I was describing this process to a client the other day, and likened it to building a castle. Up go the rocks, the walls. I stand in the middle of my walled fortress, seemingly impervious to the slings and arrows lobbed from the outside. Eventually, I suppose, siege weapons will be trained against my walls -- and eventually someone stronger always comes along and knocks a hole in the walls.

Now, the wise person might think,
"Hmm. Maybe a moving target is harder to hit."

Most people, however, determine that the architect was at fault -- and that thicker walls are needed. They erect another edifice, more massive than the first. Think about people you know, or you, and how most confront, say, a death or a divorce. Haven't you heard someone say, "I'll never make myself that vulnerable again!" Because we were taught to erect defences and hide as part of  building our egos, we can almost be forgiven for doing exactly the same thing, as an adult, when we are hurt. We wanna run, we wanna hide.

Back to the wise person. They decide that living behind walls is stupid. Sound is muted, light is flickering, and you're in there - alone. Life, real life, they realize, is best lived outside of the walls. So the wise person steps out and starts walking, listening, seeing, relating. It would make little sense for that person, just in case, to drag along the castle. Or several bags of concrete. No, if you're walking, you'd better travel light.

It is scary out there, exposed to all sorts of new, unfamiliar situations and dangers. And thus it is with self-exploration. We move from the safety of the head, with all of its rules and regulations, judgements and resistance, down into the body, into a territory we normally only visit when emotions arise or when we want to have sex. Down, down, into the realm of darkness and emptiness, fullness and light. Into body, into Soul, Into the Centre ;-) and decidedly, into connection.

As a psychotherapist who uses as one of his methods of relating "Bodywork," imagine my joy in reading, " ... one has a particular experience of living in it, which is to say, one feels confined in the space of the body. This state requires a free flow of breathing that is felt as a wave moving up and down the body; then, one begins to feel that one inhabits the body." And inhabit it we do, with all of the attendant feelings, passions and dynamics." (pg. 72-73)

Once you get in there, in the depths of you, you notice, almost immediately, the chaos. Thoughts seem to emerge, not from the head, but from the heart. A couple of weeks ago, Dar and I were having a discussion, which I chose to escalate into something else. It never became a fight, due to lots of practice on both our parts, but was, for sure, heated. My part was to go inside and concoct a way to hurt myself over what I perceived Dar to be saying. Rather than check out her intention, I left myself to my head trip. I soon was feeling self-righteous and "right." For a bit, I tried to "prove" my rightness. Dar bit for about one second and tried on "I'll never get this right!" but that didn't fit, so she returned to being with me in my drama.

I then slid from my self-righteous head down into my body, and things got real dark, real fast. I spent a bit of time sitting with Dar while being by myself, feeling my pain, wanting to run, to hide, to die. Then, Dar and I made verbal contact again. Dar picked up my latest booklet (it's now on the web site, see announcement above!) on dealing with the voices in our heads, and started to ask me questions. I quickly found this both ironic and amusing, and was able, then, to begin to describe my inner process to her. It was in that conversation that I began to integrate, once again, some of the darkness and "craziness" of my inner landscape.

Think of it this way - if the ego project is to build walls and to scare us into staying firmly in our heads, from the perspective of our heads, we will have a quite restricted view of things. Sort of like seeing life out of the slots in the tower wall, if you will. Now, to the ego, the tower, the castle, is the world. All that exists is contained within the walls - all beliefs, all understandings, all self-knowledge is knowledge from within the ego structure itself.

It's like Aristotle's cave - the shadows on the wall are perceived as real and reality. The report from the guy who goes outside and sees the "real" world is dismissed as describing a fantasy. Thus it is with us, until we choose to leave the safety and predictability of the castle walls.

Of course, allowing yourself to fully feel your feelings and fully inhabit your body is a scary thing. Not because the contents or feelings are bad, or scary per se, but because they are different. Intense. Hot. Strange. Our tendency is to fly away, back to the safety of the walls. Better predictable and lousy, than unknown and scary.

Many people stop their self-exploration just at the point when they realize how ill-serving their rules and walls are. They get a taste of the freedom, but fear the outcome of confronting the "madness," the passion, the unboundedness of the parts of themselves they've resisted knowing. It is a normal reaction to flee the exploration for safer climes, and one that needs to be resisted.

Courage is required for this exploration, and courage comes from the willingness to go deeply inside, see what's happening and report it to an intimate. This revealing of the depths of you can be with a therapist, a Bodyworker and especially with an intimate partner or partners. It involves the willingness to be totally honest and open about the feelings that you confront. It's about revealing attractions and repulsions, and emphatically it's about being willing to risk endless experimentation and testing of the artificially imposed limits society would tell us are "for our own good."

It is only in this risking that we can know if the person we are with is, in fact, capable of standing with us. As Schwartz-Salant writes: "Only the person who accepts entrance into one's world of madness is worthy enough to see one's soul. Only then may he or she be trusted enough to prove that he or she will not be another violator." (pg. 109)

Seeing your own face, standing firm, refusing to run, being honest and communicating from the dark and scary place - leads to Truth. Leads to expansiveness. And the walls come tumbling down.