1. A Way of Inspiration

Looking back, knowing what I know now, I see how dissociation is an outcome of living in a traumatized society. Often pressures start in our families with our parents and siblings with demands that we follow rules and roles, without questioning them; and, to accomplish this, we disown parts of ourselves and aspects of reality. For so many vulnerable years we need our caregivers. Our survival is at stake. We must learn to fit in, even if it means we become blind to what is in front of us—that is called a negative hallucination, when you cannot see what is in your face. A positive hallucination is seeing things that are not there. We learn that too, and I suspect we all have some positive hallucinations that we share multi-generationally, which we might recognize, if we reflect, as a culturally sanctioned and socially enforced betrayal of ourselves. We are, after all, one of Nature’s strangest experiments. Our human capacity for metacognition, the ability to step back from instinctual wiring, and to be dampened to the non-duality of our deepest shared reality. Unlike our animal companions, we can exist largely cut off from the foundation of Being. This has provided us with gifts but has also left us prone to estrangement and insanity.

As I’ve tried to portray, my parents lived according to their clichés, and though not brilliant, not even half-baked, they were effective at sculpting my limitations and my boundaries. Perhaps your parents had sufficient education, social significance, and enough awards on an office wall that they proclaimed what is real or right or bad or healthy in more logical words and persuasive arguments. Backed up by their “heritage,” some families openly and grandly carry the receipts (usually these are financial receipts) that delineate success from failure. Who is worthy and who is not. Clearly their children must carry on in the same way on the same path or become an overt disappointment (or a threat).

Or, on the other hand, maybe the opposite was your experience, expectations were spoken in languageless fog, but still conveyed distrust if not sanctioned brutality; or maybe, another possibility, you were left to your own devices, as I was, and to the weightlessness of a leaderless family, randomly yanked here and there by anyone or anything with sufficient gravitational pull.

When Reality is unknowable

Let me start with the notion that reality is unknowable. Which means that what a person believes is, at best, a guess and, at worst, propaganda.

You likely have read that contemporary scientific models of the universe are strange and incomplete and suggest that we may never fully comprehend this universe, Inside-out and Upside-down. What we intuit as the state of things is not always what it is in fact. As a small indication of that, consider that various information arrives to our senses at different speeds; so, if a dog barks, we receive the visual of the dog barking first, the light waves arriving almost immediately, tactile sensations and auditory signals arriving late to the game yet our nervous system “bonds” these parts together to create one moment in space/time. It’s not fully understood how this occurs, but our brain bonds the different speeds, waves, data, and properties into a seamless moment, presenting it to us like a movie.

David Hoffman elaborates on such examples to a logical conclusion when he uses the metaphor of a headset suggesting that evolution has evolved a virtual-reality apparatus that translates some of the data in the universe (from an array of data greater than we can receive) in a way that “makes sense” and allows us to get around, to live a life and take care of our basic needs. But it doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about what is outside this virtual world. It has even been suggested that the experiences of time and space are properties of the apparatus, rather than fundamental properties of reality.

If our brain invents what we experience as time and what we see as space, then what we know is the “reconciliation” of multiple data streams creating the virtual movie that downloads through the body into the right hemisphere. Some of the information that underlies and feeds this experience comes from deep mammalian emotional circuits that have developed over the millennium. Individually, these energy fields become anchored to (associated with) specific people, places and things. So, for instance, if you are bit by a dog then anything you identify as a dog can be associated with danger, triggering anxiety, and so we learn to move away from “dogs.” Or, if we can’t move to safety, the sympathetic action systems engage, unconsciously and automatically: fight, flight, freeze, submit.

In development of a specific human animal, we move toward more complexity as we grow, our essential sentience evolves into a more evolved “proto-self.” The proto self is a concept I am taking from Antonio Damasio. It is not an identity, certainly not a personality, but a felt-sense that answers 2 survival questions…1. Is the world safe or a threat? 2. Am I sufficient/OK/lovable? Original answers come from our lived experience before we have any capacity to step away from this being-in-the-world. Before the left hemisphere came online, there was nothing else; embodied, emotionally in this world as experienced through the apparatus, we were in it.

In the right hemisphere lived experience, if we know the world is loving and we are lovable, then we live in a natural state of loving-playfulness. In this state, as we continue to develop and elaborate our innate capabilities, we evolve more ability to step away, more intentionally to be, to experience a way other than “lost in it.” We begin to live in Inspiration which requires such dual awareness…spontaneous immersion and some capacity to step out of the immediacy, giving rise to a wider, deeper, higher, understanding and the potential for a creative response.  Growing Inspired through the lifespan, we can develop the artistry of Loving-Work, grow into Powerful Work, and visionary Powerful Play.

The Headset of Trauma

Whenever, however, it starts for any one of us in this society, in our homes and neighborhoods we learn a virtual (dissociated) reality. We are born with the machinery to play different games and to embody multiple avatars. As we run the same pastimes day after day, setting off a neural firing pattern over and over, we wear tracks in our nervous system. Of course, everything changes in our time and space, and different circumstances, different ages, different challenges and offenses and successes require different patterns, unique avatars…until we all contain multiples, parts and parts of parts, players that remain in the game long beyond their usefulness, stored somewhere in our psyche and primed to show up again (as triggered states and voices in our head).

Far beyond our family, we are immersed in extraordinarily elaborate games in our schools, our peer groups, our churches, in the media messages on constant loops, and careers etc. The programs continue spinning out narratives. We download complicated and conflicting points of view and form new actors (internal and external) to punish us, if we resist the scripts, and to provide incentives to press on and on.

Our Mammalian Heart Cries Out

For many of us, the places we pass through in our development are environments in which our mammalian hearts cry out to belong—yet our bodies may not feel safe. Many of us are aware in our guts that we live in the dangerous prowling ground of predators. Though radically different in obvious ways, our current life can be as perilous to us as the prairies our ancestors shared with lions. Today, a modern version of hiding in the bush, we learn to survive the terrain by living dissociated.

We Play at Love, Work for Love, Work for Power and/or to Play at Power. These are survival energies that animate roles, forming a few finished and varnished characters that seem to be effective in the Fallen World, allowing us some “solution,” as long as we live outside ourselves, in a protective defense. Dissociated and safe. We can settle for a character’s life in someone else’s story, and never claim our innate powers to see, to know, to hear, to question, to refuse and to imagine, to disagree etc. Dissociated and safe. Fractured from life, but secure in the bubble of a busy and mindful intellect or in mindless escapes.

 Yet, we do not have to stay caged by trauma and the traumatizing social pressures, by our protections and delusions. As I plan to suggest, there is more beyond the normal (but truly Abnormal). We miss our Truth and Beauty. There is an Inspired World, but it is not out there. It’s not separate from us. It can’t be adequately known when we pretend to be an unfeeling driver watching the world through a windshield. Life is not a material place that we can passively study or actively control or just cruise aimlessly through. Inspired life is beyond the conditioned headset. Beyond what most of us know.

I believe our way to a fuller Inspired ground is through an experiential process: an expressive-creative work with a deliberate intention to pierce the dissociation by encountering and questioning the Barriers until we can re-claim our true purpose.

A Way

Psychodrama enables the protagonist to build a bridge beyond the roles he plays in his daily existence, to surpass and transcend the reality of life as he lives it, to get into a deeper relationship with existence, to come as close as possible to the highest form of encounter of which he is capable.    Jacob Moreno & ZT Moreno

 

In a Heart-drama, like psychodrama, we seek to descend to the deepest places, “to get into a deeper relationship with existence,” as Moreno (the inventor of psychodrama) puts it.

I use the term Heart-drama here because I want to discuss a self-directed process designed to be used in personal reflection and reinforced in daily ritual. Unlike psychodrama which requires space and many members to participate, as well as a trained director, our stage and the directing force in a Heart-drama is the creative imagination. Since everything takes place upon this mental stage, you won’t need to purchase an elevated platform and have rows of seats for audience members.

At core, the Heart-drama stage is any place where we can invite what needs to be in the spotlight, what risks encounter.

To explore the dramas of your life in this way, you will need to give yourself permission to go where you need to go, which is often to the origins of Pain and Self-deception. But I do not want you to think that Heart-dramas are only dire tests of courage. The stage is equally a setting for comedic improv, a place to experiment playfully and mutinously, or to honor the past.

Our drama begins when we recognize there’s something that’s warmed up. It wants our attention. We have an act-hunger, as psycho-dramatists name it. This just means we are ready and willing to interrupt our daily scripts and rehearsals, to bring our imagination to Heart of the arena, to give precious time and attention to what has been heretofore ignored.

Once we have concluded a bit of Work, on closing, we may want to carry our insights to an intimate setting, in coffee with a safe friend in a heart-rich dialogue for instance. If you do later wish to confide in someone, determine who will share your vision and avoid those who will not understand. Carefully discern who is worthy. As we get more accustomed to this Work, we may find it much easier to retake to the stage in a therapist’s office, a recovery group with members we trust, or to a quiet moment with just one person who is curious and compassionate enough to be in communion with us. Since this platform is ultimately within us, what therapists would call the locus for insight, it will appear any intentional time we open the curtain to what has been playing out in the deeper recesses.

I hope to offer you an opportunity to know as little or as much about my own creative vision and the therapeutic understanding that underpins this.  You are free to use my painting images as some use the Tarot or journal Morning Pages as described in The Artist’s Way, without concern for any underlying metaphoric system or theories. Feel free to go straight away to reflection and to creative expression. Or devise your own approach. To be honest, I typically skip around in a book until I can determine if it speaks to me. Later, I will make an effort, or not, to understand what the author hoped to convey.