Hello Love!
If you haven’t already done so, please read Part One of this post here.
Now onto this week!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Self Was A Source Of Trauma For A Reason
If we take the idea taught by the yogis that we must disidentify with all that is ‘ego’ or illusory or impermanent about us - knowing basically ALL that we identify with as humans falls into this category - in order to achieve true liberation - and we put it into CONTEXT - we look at how the caste system was set up at the time, how hard survival was, how much suffering and disease there was - it’s not a stretch to think that this may not actually be a spiritually grounded idea, but rather a last ditch attempt at trying to remedy a hopeless life situation.
For centuries people born in India had no upward mobility, life was hard, most people lived lives that were deeply painful - and the ONE escape was to run off into the forest, to fully shed your ‘identity’ within society, to go live on your own, connecting with only nature. Freeing oneself of the confines of society by releasing your ‘identity’ - who you were within that system that then caused you so much pain - WOULD have been INCREDIBLY freeing. Would have been the ONLY kind of freedom available to most people at the time. Being yourself in the society they were in, having to live by the rules and also having to suffer through what it took to maintain a life would have been inherently painful. Who you were wasn’t a concept in your own personal mind - it was dictated to you by your culture and that dictation had very REAL consequences. Letting go of the ‘self’ in those times would have been an incredibly profound rebellion from a system that caused a lot of pain.
Again, this is still the case in MOST places all around the world.
Our cultures simply aren’t set up for *most* people to be safe, to have enough, to thrive.
We may have Western culture that looks like a lot of people have access - but in reality what has to be SACRIFICED for this access is our true selves. Is our humanity. Is our need to rest, to be authentic, to have real relationships. Our current culture is built on fitting into a very, very narrow definition of ‘good enough’ and anything that doesn’t fit that is made to be unsafe in some way by our culture. In other less Westernized places there is still a lot of poverty, war, tribal divides, religious wars and so on - again - MOST places on the planet today are NOT safe for most ‘selves.’ We all have to hide, protect, conform, deny, try to fit in on some level in order to have the systems provide for us what we need to survive. It’s a LOT of trauma.
The complexity of all of this is overwhelming, which would then reinforce our desire to simplify it all.
If It’s All US We Have CONTROL
Moving forward to the New Thought arena, again I think it makes a lot of sense that humans would have come to a place of wanting to believe that ALL of our pain, ALL of our suffering, ALL of what ails us is a result of our own minds/perceptions/ways of thinking - that we are being blessed/punished by an all knowing, perfect, ordered Universe based on our good or bad behavior.
If we boil new-thought down to its roots, we find a teaching that says basically ‘reality/the universe/God is perfect, all knowing, all seeing, totally in control - and we are his children/a part of it. When we do the right things, think the right things, behave the right way, we are rewarded with pleasure.
When we think/behave/act in the wrong ways, we are in ‘delusion’ and in this we go AGAINST God/The universe/reality and thus cause OURSELVES pain.
We CHOOSE in any given moment whether we’re going to be good children or bad children, in alignment or out of alignment, and in that choice we experience either pain or pleasure.
We get what we want, we manifest our desires, or we simply FEEL amazing all the time because we SEE the perfection in everything. All pain is a delusion of the mind on some level. We have total control over our own destinies - all we have to do is ‘align’ at all times, and in this we will be rewarded with what we want/will be liberated from even ‘needing’ what we want, because we are floating in the awareness of the perfection of everything.’
To me, this sounds like an adult version of the experience we all had as children with our caregivers.
Remember, in our childhoods the ONLY thing we had control over was our own behavior. We were dependent upon our caregivers to provide for ALL of our needs, as well as rescuing us from pain. We needed them to help us understand the struggles we were going through, we needed them to help us problem solve and learn - and without their help, without their guidance, without their provision - we were HELPLESS to procure pleasure/escape pain. Their acceptance or rejection of us was PARAMOUNT to our survival at the time. It would have very much appeared to us at the time that the way we behaved made or broke our capacity to be safe, to get our needs met, to be ok. To be rescued from pain and given the pleasure we sought.
Because we had no understanding of ourselves, how reality worked, how to determine what it was that we wanted or needed/how to GET what we wanted or needed in real reality - we were fully dependent upon our caregivers reading us, understanding us, loving us and therefore providing for us.
When we were hungry, for a LONG time, all we knew was pain. We didn’t understand that we needed food. We didn’t understand what food was. We didn’t know how to get food - and even if we did, we still RELIED upon our caregivers to help us/provide that food for us. Meaning when we were hungry, all we could REALLY do was cry out or act in some way that would get our caregivers attention, prompting them to read the situation and meet our needs.
As we grew, we may have become more and more aware of hunger, food and how to get it - but our caregivers were still the gate-keepers. Most of us had to ask permission to eat. Again, for a long time we couldn’t go to the store ourselves and buy food - food was provided through the medium of another person. And so it was with ALL of our needs. We LEARNED to be codependent with our caregivers/providers because in our childhoods this was the only way. We needed them to provide for us since we weren’t capable of providing for ourselves. We weren’t capable of understanding our pain and pleasure signals, discerning what was happening within and around us to be causing the pain and pleasure, and what we needed to do in REAL reality (eat, sleep, move, create etc) to feel good. It was ALL a matter of being understood and loved by someone else, and then given what we, oftentimes, didn’t even know we wanted or needed.
We also had to believe that our caregivers were all seeing, all knowing and all powerful.
We needed to believe they had a GOOD reason for everything they did, didn’t do, everything they loved in us and everything they rejected.
Their approval was to us, the final word.
Their rejection was again, law.
We couldn’t question their authority, because in doing so we would have been making ourselves feel REALLY unsafe.
If our caregivers WEREN’T all knowing/powerful/right - that meant we were in unsafe hands. To be rejected or let down by our caregivers wasn’t an opportunity for us to accept ourselves anyway - because again their rejection could have - to our little nervous systems - meant the difference between survival and death. If they rejected parts of us and our expression, because we were SO dependent upon them, we also had to reject these parts. See them as existential threats. If they didn’t understand our needs, oftentimes this would turn into ever increasingly desperate attempts at getting THEM to understand - rather than stimulating us to understand OURSELVES. We weren’t then looking for how we could meet our needs without them - we would usually just be traumatized and this would drive us deeper and deeper into feelings of hopelessness, fear, anger, frustration and again, desperate attempts at getting THEM to understand. Feeling more and more fearful the less we were understood/accepted/nourished and nurtured. Even in adulthood for most of us, it still feels like our needs are being offered or withheld based on how society perceives us - around how well we are accepted or rejected.
Growing up, most of us never really grew out of this phase.
We stayed being relatively unaware of our own needs, and in a mindset that told us that provision comes from the outside - not through choice or laziness or incompetence - but because the WORLD is SET UP around this understanding. All of our systems are built on codependency and the idea that love and provision are external resources we must earn.
We learned that there is ALWAYS some form of gate-keeper between ourselves and what we want/getting away from what we don’t want.
That PEOPLE/books/teachings are the holders of all wisdom and knowledge and that we must seek information from these things.
We maintained a low level of self awareness, learning how to act out, call out, turn off parts of ourselves, shrink and so on in order to elicit certain responses from others - never really getting clear on what our needs actually are, how the other is meeting those needs/not meeting those needs, how we could meet those needs without the other and so on.
We never really learned to identify our own needs, because keeping up with behaving correctly in the system is a full.time.job. We aren't choosing to be ignorant of ourselves and reality - we HAVE to be to keep up. Checking out to check in is HARD.
Most of us still feel dependent upon the approval of the outside world, because we feel to lesser and greater degrees, that our pain and pleasure depends upon the people around us (bosses, coworkers, friends, significant others and so on) understanding us and meeting our subconscious or conscious but under expressed needs. We fall into relationship patterns over and over that mirror those of our childhoods because those patterns of self denial, suppression, acting out and so on are familiar to our nervous systems, and we seek out people who RESPOND to our subconscious behaviors the way our caregivers did.
We Still Feel Like We’re Being Tested
We still see the world as a place where we are being constantly tested, constantly vetted for our worthiness, and then in that worthiness or unworthiness we are either rewarded or punished - because we don’t really understand what we want and need, nor do we have a solid understanding of how to get those needs met outside of our interpersonal relationship patterns. Society is set up in this way. Our systems of consumption and production are not based on what’s pragmatically best for the human being - the thing that has value - but rather are organized around unfettered production and over consumption. We live in a world built on profit for profits sake - we sacrifice life for production - leading to the few having SO much more than they need, while the many will never be able to work hard enough to have enough. But rather than seeing this, we are trained to believe that it is our job to prove ourselves worthy TO THE SYSTEM in order to have what we need. We are sold the idea that it’s our ‘selves’ that are holding us back from having what we want - so that we don’t get wise to the actual structures that are simply INHERENTLY designed to profit the few at the expense of the many.
We are gaslit into accepting blame for our lack when in reality the system is rigged. And we fall for it because again, it’s tapping into our core childhood conditioning. It’s a smooth transition from the natural codependency of childhood to the unnatural codependency we have developed with the larger world/humanity.
We then project this same dynamic out onto ‘God’ or ‘The Universe.’ We see the Universe or God as a kind of caregiver - all seeing and knowing, caring about us, having perfectly good rules for OUR BEHAVIOR that we are then punished or rewarded for following. We don’t see reality as a cause and effect structure that doesn’t judge but rather offers up consequences of actions - we see a benevolent/maleficent consciousness that is intentionally giving or withholding what we want and need, based on our behavior.
We believe that we are being rewarded or punished for our ‘good’ or ‘bad’ deeds, our thoughts, our emotional states - using our pattern recognition skills against ourselves in many ways. Rather than seeing the larger picture of the society we live in, the culture we live in, how systems are set up, how larger patterns of biology, psychology and sociology are all playing together to create the outcomes of our world - we see correlations to how we were individually behaving/feeling/thinking when this or that good or bad thing happened, and we project a consciousness that is PLANNING all of this onto the Universe around us. Just as we did with our caregivers in early childhood.
We don’t see the bigger picture, our actual needs, our actual wants, how reality functions and how to navigate the complex systems we live in. We see our own behavior, what seemed to happen based on that, and a universe that’s rewarding or punishing.
We WANT to believe the Universe/God works in this way - that it cares for us personally, that it’s watching our inner world closely and that ALL of the results we get in life are due to that inner state/our behavior/thoughts/things we have CONTROL over. We want to believe that we can have access to anything we feel we want or need, and that the only thing separating us from our desires, our pleasure, is our own behavior on some level.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Let’s let this digest, and I’ll see you back here next week for the final part.
<3
