What If Transcending Yourself Isn’t The Path To Bliss?

Hello My Love!

If you haven’t done so yet, you can read

Part One of this post here.

Part Two here.

Now onto our final section 🙂

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In Reality, Life Is Very Complex

We don’t want to believe that we are a part of a large, complex, chaotic system, a collective of humans that are all making independent choices that we have no control over.

We don’t want to believe we were, or that others were, born into circumstances - through no choice or fault of their own - where their upward mobility is limited.

Where their or our access to resources is intentionally by humans or naturally cut off.

Where resources aren’t evenly distributed.

Where people are traumatized and then act from that trauma in ways that cause those around them harm.

That society itself is set up by traumatized people and thus operates from a place of ignorance and fear that actively harms us.

We don’t want to believe that we can simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That we can have lineage trauma. That we can experience the lack of something and literally not have the power to get what we want.

We don’t want to see the chaos. The bigness. The actual structure of reality that’s incredibly complex.

We see the patterns of our thoughts and feelings, micro behaviors and we project our caregivers onto the Universe - and that is our world view.

We believe that being loved and accepted = survival.

We project that love and acceptance = survival out onto all of our relationships and the Universe/God at large.

We see it ALL as a grand system of rejection or acceptance and THAT being what determines if we experience pleasure or pain in life.

Thus we LEARN to deeply hate the parts of ourselves that seem to get us rejected, that are misunderstood because these parts feel like existential threats to us. We never learn to identify what’s UNDER our pain/pleasure sensations - our emotions, our thoughts, our physical experiences - but rather gauge how they make OTHERS respond to us - and make our determination of these parts of self/sensational responses to life based on how they make others treat us. Because we still feel that provision comes from the outside, and that outside has to approve of us. When they don’t we can’t change them so we want to change ourselves.

We can’t question/change the systems - just like we couldn’t question the all-knowing nature of our parents - and thus we turn our pain in, trying to give ourselves a feeling of agency within our suffering. If we can just fix ourselves, be whatever we need to be, we will finally have access to all we need.

We believe deeply that to have what we need comes through approval - because that’s been the narrative FOREVER.

We start to see our coping mechanisms, self sabotage, anxiety, depression, physical illness and so on as what’s ‘wrong’ with us. We start to see our inability to have success in the system as a flaw in our makeup. We start to see not getting our needs met/not being understood by others as a deep existential problem, looking more and more to being understood by OTHERS as a means to figuring out why we are in pain/how to get the pleasure we want, and having THEM provide that for us - they are the gatekeepers of our experience rather than us becoming our own gatekeepers through understanding our own needs and how to get them met. Again, all natural transitions from our childhood AND from humanity and history in general.

We look at all the parts of ourselves that got us rejected, that got misunderstood, that got us abandoned and shamed - and we want to get rid of these parts - believing that when we do, all will be well. When we are finally perfectly good, whole, lovable, living up to expectation, we will never experience pain again and always be in a state of pleasure.

We believe in order to reach a state of permanent bliss (which is really a state where we continually have our needs met/are expressing as ourselves) we need to be ultimately LOVED and ACCEPTED. In order for that to happen we have to be our best selves. Whatever that means to each of us based on our conditioning. Thus we go about trying to get rid of our inner children, our emotional outbursts, our self sabotaging behaviors, our anxiety, our depression, our negative thoughts - whatever the school of new thought we’re specifically aligned with has identified as the ‘problem part’ that needs fixing - and we work our little butts of trying to get rid of/transcend these parts.

Just like we did as children.

It Makes Sense That We Want To Dissociate

Thus, these teachings of ‘I will be happy/awake/alive’ when I no longer identify with self - makes a lot of sense.

We have all experienced societal issues based on our identities that make us not want to be who we are.

We’ve all experienced interpersonal relationships where our pleasure was withheld or our pain was amplified/misunderstood by someone who had authority over us, and rather than us learning how to understand ourselves and get our own needs met, we stayed ‘stuck’ in a dynamic of looking to be understood and then provided for from without.

We kept with the same mindset that whatever parts of us DON’T fit into the system we are trying to fit into - the system we were raised to believe we MUST be successful within in order to be approved of and therefore provided for - are BAD PARTS, they are the reason we are suffering, and the only remedy is getting rid of them.

Ultimately, I believe it makes perfect sense that we want to transcend ourselves.

Because to me it seems that the real reality is that our pain and pleasure, in a lot of ways, aren’t fully within our control.

That our learning to get our needs met in real reality requires a total re-wiring of our perception of reality itself - not as a rewarding/caring/punishing caregiver, but as a basic structure of cause and effect reactions.

We have to re-negotiate our relationship to ourselves, investigating into our own pain and pleasure to discover what we need and want, and then we have to figure out how to get those needs met practically without depending on others understanding us and meeting our needs for us - which is HARD when we were trained from day one that this was the ONLY way to get needs met.

We have to come to terms with the sometimes very harsh realities of life - that there are human made systems that perpetuate harm in ways we can’t control. That there are natural systems we still don’t fully understand that limit our capacity to create the outcomes we want sometimes. We have to come to terms with the chaos.

It’s a lot.

Learning to love the parts of ourselves that got us rejected as children is the hardest thing most of us will ever do - because again it’s wired into our nervous systems that these parts are an existential threat to us. That to accept them is to be guaranteed rejection from the outside - and this rejection was DEATH to us. Learning to interact with reality instead of just people is another really hard thing to wrap the mind around, because humans have so much impact ON our reality. It’s scary to believe we don’t have total control over everything, that accidents can happen that we didn’t mean to happen or that we didn’t have anything to do with other than happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Coming to terms with the complexity is scary.

Thus I understand why we want to default to the idea that if we just transcend ourselves we will have bliss forever. That the source of our pain is our emotions, our bad parts, our bad habits - because those are things we feel we can control. If the source of our pain is bigger and more complex than that, if getting what we want is bigger and more complex, most of us feel incapable.

It seems to me that we have learned to want to dissociate from ourselves because being a self has been incredibly traumatic. We’ve perceived punishment from the Universe for being a self, as well as creating human against human punishment for being a self. We’ve had the trauma of ‘not enough’ lead to SO much self blame and shame again because the SELF is the one thing we seem to have control over. If we were to believe that the Universe is actually simply incredibly complex, that things happen to us sometimes in ways that we have no control over, that life isn’t as ordered and predictable and within our power to influence as it actually appears to be - for most of us this would mean a LOT of existential dread. The idea that if we simply perfectly control ourselves we will have freedom is attractive because it quiets that awareness of the vastness of reality. If we can pin the pain all on ourselves, and then find a way to just get rid of/stop identifying with those parts of self that cause pain it feels like never ending bliss and joy are accessible. If we acknowledge that we will never have total control and will likely face hard things no matter how much we control ourselves, we are facing a much scarier reality.

All I ask here, is that we consider these teachings from THIS vantage point. 

Is it possible that the notion that we will have bliss when we transcend ourselves is coming more from a place of trauma than a place of spiritual enlightenment? 

What do you think?

Is there any way we might want to consider that it’s not actually about REJECTING any part of self, but rather leaning INTO these parts so we can DISCOVER where the pain is actually coming from, and what we can practically do to remedy that pain?

Where our needs aren’t being met?

Where we have trauma?

Where society needs to shift?

Where it’s not our fault?

Where we can discover something new about ourselves and reality?

Where we can become more interdependent in understanding what we want and need from others and learning how to ask rather than looking to be preemptively understood?

Can we allow ourselves to expand into the idea of there being chaos and a bigger system at play and rather than allowing that to overwhelm us, making it an adventure that we will always have something to learn about ourselves and reality that DOES give us more and more power to create what we want to create within the structures that exist/help us tear down and build up new structures?

What if all of THIS was the actual freedom? What if it’s not getting rid of self that’s the answer, but understanding the self, the reality and the interplay of the two MORE, as we pragmatically move towards a life with more systems that serve the expansion of all of us?

What if THAT was freedom?

<3