Experiencing Moments of Living
(Part IV - The Cambium, Chapter 20)
When it’s over, I don’t want to end up
simply having visited this world.
〰 Mary Oliver 〰
Spilling the Guts of Subjective Experience
None of us are free, if one of us is chained, none of us are free.
〰 Solomon Burke 〰
Subjective experience is a riddle. When physically present at an event, experiencers assume that witnessing the incident equals experience. This is far from the whole truth. Witnessing an event is only the first piece of the puzzle, or the first clue along the trail of this treasure hunt.
The second clue is a personal, entirely subjective, rational explanation ~ the assessment of the Intellect of what happened. To receive the first two pieces of the puzzle, ask yourself two introductory questions
1st › What happened?
2nd › What was this all about? or › What am I thinking according to my own rational evaluation?
The experiences we are talking about here are those we perceive as troublesome,
the ones that stop us in our tracks and cause inner turmoil.
The spontaneous answers to these two questions are a good starting point for an excursion through our own experience. To be clear, the experiences we are talking about here are those we perceive as troublesome, the ones that stop us in our tracks and cause inner turmoil. At this point along the journey, the conventional contemporary anthropocentric mind assumes to have reached its destination, to have figured out the whole truth of what can be known by the human Intellect.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Although this information reveals the apex of the proverbial iceberg, the zenith of this exploration can only be reached by travelling towards the nadir of the experience, which lies hidden in the depths of the inner world.
To access the deeper layers of our own experience we must pass the threshold of the raw and direct emotional contact with the event. Despite the fact that such explorations are most valuable, effective, and necessary in response to incidents, which trigger a negative subjective response, this is always uncomfortable by nature.
Contrary to popular beliefs, this is partly the point of this exercise! The point is to truly feel the full whack of your own subjective experience, to get to know your own feelings in their whole spectrum of intensity, and simultaneously to realise how things, situations, behaviour of others, etc. affect you, rather than skirt around the troubling event with an air of fake supreme confidence, pretending it didn’t touch you.
As long as we dance the ‘pretend-I’m-always-positive’ jive around parts of ourselves,
while excluding them from the dance of life,
we cannot enter the secret world of our own inner life.
As long as we dance the ‘pretend-I’m-always-positive’ jive around certain parts ourselves, while excluding them from the dance of life, we cannot enter the secret world of our own inner life. If you want to really know what’s going on in there, you must at some point(s) open the flood gates and dive through the wild waves of your inner ocean, which will give you access to the knowledge held in the deeper realms of your inner world.
~ A word of caution before entering your own Sphere of Inner-Ocean Reality ~
Be aware that facing painful emotional experiences can (and most likely will) trigger the trauma which caused certain parts of your inner populations to freeze and get trapped in the inner permafrost.
Releasing these immature inner beings from their frozen state is not possible without pain. Occasionally this pain can feel unbearable, for a short time. However, not feeling it is not an option either.
If we avoid direct exposure with full attention, awareness, and willingness to accept the pain as part of you, this frozen suffering nags and niggles away under the numbing layers of frost, eating us alive, barring us from living the life we are yearning to become, draining the life blood from the Inner Ally and all other vital Faculties, blocking the vital forces from flowing through the entire organism of Consciousness.
Not feeling our own most painful emotions shuts us off from becoming who we most desperately want and need to be. Because none of us can be free and fully alive as long as some of our inner populations are trapped, frozen, and paralysed by being scared to death.
None of us can be free and fully alive
as long as some of our inner populations are
trapped, frozen, and paralysed by being scared to death.
Pitfalls in the Wilderness of Emotional Experiencing
Becoming skillful at digesting our grief
makes us a source of reassurance and
stability for the wider community.
〰 Francis Weller 〰
One way out of our painful experience leads through and beyond the wilderness of our own suffering. It may not be the only way. But if the suffering has already made itself at home within your inner world, paying some friendly visits to this uninvited guest, with the offer to transform and integrate it, is a safe bet to make this cohabitation work for both parties.
Such encounters don’t need to be overwhelming. The way to avoid drowning in the agony and torment of old trauma is to witness it in small manageable steps (See ‘The Power of Small Steps’ in Chapter 18)
Born and raised in a culture of anthropocentric thinking, we have been taught to subscribe to the theory that more is always better or faster. In the realm of the Inner Healer (Instinct) these rules of logic don’t apply. Facing the full onslaught of the pain all at once can be counterproductive.
Pulling a scab off a wound too early can delay the healing process. There is a reason why we call ourselves ‘patients’ when afflicted with an illness. Patience supports healing in any form of suffering. To patiently offer as much loving attention to the inner populations who are in pain as you can tolerate and are willing to give, does wonders to relieve the suffering which has taken residence in parts of your inner world.
The inner resistance to feeling the old pain of trauma is not the only pitfall along the way. When embarking on this path of healing you can’t always expect sympathy and support from others, or even yourself. I have heard ‘moral’ and ‘spiritual’ counterarguments, suggesting that engaging deeply in such inner work may be overly ‘self-indulgent’.
In a world where so many fellow humans are struggling to survive massive manmade or natural catastrophes, are my and your ‘negative experiences’ worth contemplating? While there is so much bigger shit to sort out?? I have found myself agreeing with such reasoning, doubting the voice of my own Inner Healer.
Now I know that this is a fatal question. What if the lack of human ability of our ancestors to process their negative experiences has contributed to the escalation of catastrophes on all fronts? What if it lies at the root of everybody’s suffering, including yours and mine? What if I cannot fully function while struggling with that ‘little baggage of poop’ I’m carrying?
The bottom line which always draws me back to continue along this track is the understanding that trauma is not a competition! It is unique and personal. My unique trauma is my personal companion on my life’s journey.
Trauma is not a competition.
It is a unique and personal companion on life’s journey.
Subjective Experience as a Path to the Soul
Meet injury
with the power of goodness.
Study the hard while it’s easy.
Do big things while they’re small.
The hardest jobs in the world start out easy,
the great affairs of the world start small.
〰 Lao Tzu/ Ursula K. Le Guin 〰
I was brought up with parental instructions to never complain, count my blessings, and think of all ‘the poor children in Africa’ (apologies for the colonialist language) who’ve got a much harder time than me…
My parents were social activists and peace workers with high moral standards, committed to making their world a better place. While they undoubtedly helped lots of people, made significant beneficial differences in the lives of others, and were admired by many, they did not find inner peace. They departed from the earthly realm leaving much unresolved grief and guilt behind.
In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, psychotherapist and grief worker Francis Weller suggests that an apprenticeship with sorrow to heal personal grief is about healing individual loss and restoring the Soul of the World.
“It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul,” Weller writes. “To be able to freely move in and out of the soul’s inner chambers, we must first clear the way.”
I cannot say that the abysmal suffering of far too many people in Africa and on every other continent has made any significant difference to my experience and personal struggles with my relatively privileged cosmopolitan life. It didn’t change, prevent, or transform my subjective negative experiences, my self-sabotaging self-talk, or ongoing inexplicable sense of inadequacy. I doubt that me counting my blessings has helped anyone either.
What has helped me ~ and might benefit others too ~ is that I have figured out a way to process my negative experiences, translate them into personal wisdom, and hopefully make a constructive contribution to collective human Consciousness while finding my path through the dark.
Receiving the Noctarine by inspiration has been my greatest gift. The materials for Synchronosophy, developed by ongoing inner and outer guidance ~ by the grace and generosity of my creative daimon ~ are my toolkit for navigating the relatively small-but-shitty-enough experiences of life. I am sharing these to encourage anyone who feels called to do so, to trust their own journey with their own experience. It’s the only one we’ve got.
Nobody needs to wait until they have a story of greater hardships to tell. We can’t afford to. If we practice transforming the small rotten paraphernalia of everyday life ~ which is hard enough to do! ~ we can learn valuable lessons for the transformation of the big godawful stuff too. In my understanding, this is what Lao Tzu meant all those centuries ago when he recommended to “do the big things while they are small.”
Who knows what happens when a small tribe of hosts of human Consciousness, each making their individual little changes, transform their ridiculously tiny angst and comparatively nanoscopic woes, the size of specks of guano of a seabird in the ocean …
We may yet become a swarm of butterflies who trigger a sea change of epic proportions to transform that titanic collective ordure (= excrement; something vile or abhorrent) which threatens to wipe out our entire world in one apocalyptic tsunami.
Surfing the Tides of Experience
We can hold our experience while allowing ourselves
to be held by something greater than ourselves.
〰 Matt Licata 〰
Synchronosophy and the Noctarine fell into my receptive mind as a toolkit. They became my secret superpower to help me navigate the dark stretches of my inner land- and seascape, populated not just with grief and sorrows, but teeming with fear, shame, anger, despair…, the whole scary hordes of inner monsters whom we are supposed to avoid like hell, according to some.
This was the real immediate and primary reason why I immersed myself in this work. I couldn’t afford not to. My emotional turmoil was so overwhelming. Those unpredictable tidal waves would have swept me away, sucked me out to sea, no idea what might have happened to me, with all solid ground lost under frantically paddling feet. I might have drowned in those waves, confirming the wildest nightmares of the dreaded theories of my elders about my ‘mental/emotional health’.
When negative experience comes to your doorstep, and there is no way you can keep the torrents of dark and wild emotional waves at bay, what do you do?
I took a crash course in surfing those waves. Through my work with flashfloods of emotions I learned at the speed of a diving duck that this doesn’t need to be as dangerous and frightening as too many chronic influencers have claimed. Emotional waves come and go. They pull you out into the inner ocean and wash you back to the shore, provided you don’t resist the toing and froing.
The important thing is to remain both detached and connected to how you feel. You will identify with those emotions. That’s part of the point! They will make you feel as if you are the helpless little child who you were when your Consciousness was first hit by the trauma. Your awareness may not hold any memory of the event. Your emotions carry the memory.
The key to keeping yourself from drowning in the turbulence of the experience is to allow yourself to immerse yourself in the identification while also being the observer who remains on the edge of the experience. By fortuitous design of some divine creative force, the organism of human Consciousness is equipped with two ‘personal assistants’ on whom you can call for this purpose. They are part of our default setting, commonly known as the Self and the Ego.
These two characters were birthed about 120 years ago, during the infancy of the triplet of mind-studies ~ psychology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis. In Synchronosophy, they have revealed a new and unexpected side, which comes in very handy for our work of inner growth. They can be used as tools to travel through unknown inner terrain, locate valuable information, and ensure a safe return to the ‘outer world’ of consensus reality.
For the purpose of surfing emotional waves, the Self and Ego serve as a virtual diving duck with submarine options and innate navigation system. One of these two PAs takes the role of the attentive and compassionate witness, while the other allows themselves to be immersed in the traumatised-abandoned-child-experience.
Summoning Self-Care and Ego-Agency
Contrary to the range of definitions of ‘self’ and ‘ego’ in various schools of psychology, the Noctarine defines the Self as self-perception, and the Ego as ego-identification. These names indicate their native functions.
The Self and Ego are not ‘vital organs’ in the sense as the eight Faculties. They don’t act of their own accord and don’t produce or process any information of their own. They are versatile functions, inherited or inbred in human Consciousness, enabling us to access all vital Faculties, gather information from multiple sources and translate it into languages we can understand. Both of them respond autonomously and spontaneously to what’s happening within the organism, but they also have a ‘voluntary mode’, which allows us, the owners of our Consciousness, to direct them at will, according to our intentions.
The name Self carries the original meaning of ‘sameness’. The reflexive nature of its function makes it perfectly suited as a tool for self-observation and -reflection. Ego is the Latin word for the first personal pronoun I, which is essentially another word for referring to oneself. Ego is the part of me that identifies, thereby stimulating intimate attachments. Self fulfils the task of perceiving, observing, witnessing.
Self-perception gives you the means to see yourself as if on an inner screen. Ego-identification shows up whenever you are irresistibly drawn to something because it feels as if it should be or could become part of you. Identifying with something has become mixed up with identity in recent use of the word. This is an erroneous interpretation.
Ego-identification attracts us to ideas, features, people, or objects we find desirable or sense as lacking. More often than not these ‘identifyers’ are temporary. They are substitutes for something which we don’t yet know, which may be part of our entelechy (= realisation of potential) or it may not.
Ego-identification can only show us what is generally already on the radar of our understanding. It is not meant as a final destination. Neither does self-perception have to reflect who we truly are. Self and Ego can help us to keep track and move safely through the tricky and often murky inner territory.
The Ego supplies the power of agency to the human organism of Consciousness.
The Self provides the skill and access to resources to care for all indigenous populations
The Ego supplies a certain power of agency to the human organism of Consciousness, while the Self provides the skill and access to resources to care for the indigenous populations of all Faculties. In other words, you can call on the capacity of agency through ego-identification and the potential for selfcare through selfperception.
To get an idea what this means in practice, here is an example: when swept up by a wave of emotional turbulence, and I allow myself to feel the full impact of the discomfort, my self-perception-care (SPC) mode switches on immediately. (This happens automatically because I am used to this practice. Initially you may have to make a deliberate effort to remind yourself ‘switch on SPC!’ Like all habits, this can be practiced).
With the SPC mode switched on I call on my resources and expertise of parenting any immature creatures who inevitably turn up in the wake of such an incident. Now I can switch on my ego-identification-agency (EIA) mode. This may happen spontaneously or requires a little coaxing, if you are used to suppressing or avoiding painful emotions.
With your SPC mode in full flow you are ready to allow your EIA to express itself freely and safely. SPC takes over the role of witnessing and providing a loving caring environment. EIA plays the part of the hurt child, stirring in the inner permafrost, calling for attention and support.
With my SPC giving undivided attention to the experience, I can allow my EIA to follow the emotional discomfort, let the wave pull me out to sea, allow myself to feel the full impact and extent of the pain, dive through the suffering of re-membered trauma.
Why would I want to do that?
If you have ever lived with small children you can guess why. They demand and need your loving attention, and they won’t stop crying and nagging until they get it. Inner children stuck in the inner permafrost can only heal and be released from their plight in the same way.
This phase of being pulled out to sea by the emotional wave should only last a few minutes. In a constellation of bigger upheaval there can be several waves in succession, lasting perhaps half an hour in total.
Your SPC should be in charge of this situation at all times. You should be able to end this session if necessary (either because of an unexpected interruption, or when it becomes too overwhelming), letting your inner child know that you’ll return soon and give it all the attention it needs. If you make such a promise, it’s a good idea to keep it. You may need to build up trust between your immature inner population and your SPC-EIA-team.
In any case, keep in mind that you are not the child anymore, and you don’t need to resolve this all at once. As mentioned above, when releasing emotional pain related to past trauma it is best to do so in small manageable steps. Following such a release, the whole organism needs to find a new sense of balance, equanimity, coherence and stability. This rarely happens in a single session. Every little step is a significant move in the right direction.
Tracking a Companion Story
When diving into and through an emotional wave, I am not looking for an explanation. I am not asking my Inner Expert to offer some rational reason why I might feel like this. I am simply immersing myself fully in the experience, giving it my full attention, allowing it to rise into my awareness and be whatever it is, listening to the voice of my Inner Healer.
Self-perception helps me to connect with the emotional experience in a respectful and compassionate way while remaining detached enough not to regress into the traumatised infantile mode. Ego-identification allows me to fully experience the pain of the child, as if receiving the full impact ~ which I am, but without the risk of re-traumatising myself and getting stuck again in the inner permafrost.
I mentioned earlier that ‘experiences of life can be read as clues for a treasure hunt’. Gathering emotional information is another clue on this path. It is an important clue, telling you about the intensity of the experience and its impact on you.
The purpose of this work is not to hang on to such clues. We pick them up, read them as messages, and follow their signal towards inner treasure. For this reason you don’t need to hang around for too long in a turbulence of the inner ocean.
Once you have an idea of the emotional pain (as mentioned before, it doesn’t need to be complete), you can make a note of the clue and move on straight away. Now the big and critical question arises, HOW TO READ AN EMOTIONAL CLUE?
Various theories have wrestled with the question, what causes negative emotions? ~ in futile attempts to nail down a definitive answer.
Potential explanations are that negative emotions arise…
…. when something bad happens
…. when you have negative thoughts
…. when you imagine something terrible to happen
…. when suffering physical discomfort
…. in response to a ‘negative mindset’ (either your own or someone else’s
…. as a result of a negative belief or pessimistic attitude
…. when other people feel bad, because emotions are contagious…
etc.
Synchronosophy doesn’t ask such questions or speculate about their answers. Here we are not primarily interested in causative factors. Looking for causation, generally speaking, is rooted in the assumption that if we can detect the cause, then we can eliminate or ‘correct,’ or prevent the resulting event. That kind of logic belongs to the anthropocentric paradigm.
Synchronosophy looks for synchronous events rather than assumed causes. When negative emotions are stirred within the inner underworld, we ask one single question many times over…
…. what else is happening in my inner mindscape when I’m feeling like this?
In homeopathic anamnesis (= gathering data of a patient’s medical history) this is known as investigating ‘concomitant symptoms’. A concomitant is a companion symptom occurring in an area unrelated to the primary seat of the disease, at the same time. The relationship between companion symptoms is temporal (co-incidental) not causal.
You can apply this question to every Sphere of Reality within the landscape of human Consciousness, e.g.:
3rd › How do/did I feel when this happens/ed?
4th › What is going on in my Sphere of Fictional Reality (= realm of the Imagination) when I’m feeling like this in my Inner-Ocean Reality (= realm of the Instinct)?
Only you can answer such questions. Your spontaneous response to these questions become the next clues on your treasure hunt. They throw new information into the arena of your awareness. The 4th question nudges you to move on from the emotional attachment while watching a new dawn appear on the horizon of your mindscape, which opens a path towards profound transformation.
Does the second clue cause the third one? Or does the fourth clue cause the third? Or vice versa?
On an ordinary treasure hunt, clues are like beads on a chain. On their own, they don’t make much sense, but together they deliver the crucial message. Like fibres spun together into a single strand, they twist themselves around one another into the golden thread that leads the seeker through the labyrinthian maze of their own experience.
I myself am a labyrinth, where I easily get lost.
〰 Charles Perrault 〰
The second resource sheet for the practice of Kairotrophy contains exercises and suggestions to nurture the Inner Healer.
Missed the earlier chapters? Click the links
The Rootstock of Synchronosophy
Chapter 1 The Mycelium of Synchronosophy, Chapter 2 Sub-Soil of Synchronosophy, Chapter 3 Nutrients for Synchronosophy, Chapter 4 Adjustments to an Unnatural World, Chapter 5 Loss of Self and Identity, Chapter 6 The Destructive Trail of Trauma
The Heartwood of Synchronosophy
Chapter 7 Emotional Messengers, Chapter 8 Love Thyself, Chapter 9 The Birth of the Noctarine, Chapter 10 Subjective Experience, Chapter 11 The Inner Wilderness, Chapter 12 Polarity and Wholeness
The Sapwood of Synchronosophy
Chapter 13, Symphony of Senses, Chapter 14, The Rainbow of Consciousness, Chapter 15 Ancestral Will, Chapter 16 Acts of Knowing, Chapter 17 Powers of Knowing, Chapter 18 Structures of Knowing
The Cambium of Synchronosophy
Chapter 19, Growing a Human Life
“With my SPC giving undivided attention to the experience, I can allow my EIA to follow the emotional discomfort, let the wave pull me out to sea, allow myself to feel the full impact and extent of the pain, dive through the suffering of re-membered trauma.” I feel like you just mapped out, and gave words to, the exact process I went through while learning to live with MdDS. So while you’re speaking about trauma here, I’d say this technique can also be applied to physical pain and dis-ease in the body. It didn’t make my symptoms go away, but for the first time after years of struggle, experiencing both Self-ID and ego-ID simultaneously helped my nervous relax within the symptoms. And this experience then opened the door to developing a lasting, unconditional peace, within whatever circumstance I was in. So wonderful to have a deeper understanding now of what I was doing!
Well, first I am humbled to be quoted by you here Veronika. Thank you. The Self will need to pay darned close attention to that darned Ego now ;)
Another exceptional read with so much to consider and allow to sink in.
I very much enjoyed your description of subjective experience which seems very aligned with my feeling that subjective experience is like filtering external impressions through at the habitual shape of ones own emotional architecture, which itself has been shaped by the external impressions fed into it, a kind of feedback system between the self (attention) and the external world (Impression).
I also love your idea that at no point are any of these things ever fixed or atrophied and that it's so important to "remain both detached and connected to how you feel" or kinda pay attention to the attention. Just wonderful.
I also felt great affinity to you saying, “What if the lack of human ability of our ancestors to process their negative experiences has contributed to the escalation of catastrophes on all fronts?” I love this. In The Crow I've been using the symbolism of a fire in the past billowing smoke through the generations into the present, which is essentially the same idea, no? So nice to read other writers expressing similar intuitions and feelings.
And this - "I am simply immersing myself fully in the experience, giving it my full attention, allowing it to rise into my awareness and be whatever it is, listening to the voice of my Inner Healer." Beautifully said.
I think/feel that your approach is a very healthy way of dealing with pain and trauma and just generally life itself. Thank you Veronika, that was a pleasure to read.