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The Unconscious Spaces Where Madness Resides
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In his book The Mystery of Human Relationships, Nathan Swartz-Salant--a psychotherapist--discusses the split between mind and body so many people today exhibit. His work is helping his patients bring to consciousness the issues they've blocked and forced into their unconscious mind. But many people have disconnected from their bodily needs from overadherance to such factors as ethical beliefs, cultural taboos, or repressed needs. And these factors can lead to a separation of the unconscious, between those issues affecting mind versus those affecting the bodily needs. The "psyche" itself has both these domains within it.
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There is, he maintains, a psychic unconscious and a somatic unconscious, and where there is a split between mind and body, study of the thoughts of the mind will not discern the neurotic or psychotic issues of the somatic unconscious. The psychic unconscious is experienced in dreams, day dreams, memories and daily life as images, patterns, causality, meanings, and histories. The somatic unconscious is experienced as pains, discomforts, tensions, constrictions, energy, arousal, and other feelings of embodiment.
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Schwartz-Salent discusses in his book ways of discerning psychotic spaces, held within the somatic unconscious that are not evident in the mind of his patients, as a “feeling of deadness” in the energy field between himself and his patients; or as an inability to maintain his attention on what his patients are saying or doing. He then knows that there is a psychotic issue that cannot be reached through “talking therapy”. In order to engage the issue, the imagination and intuition of his patient must be stimulated so that the patient can become aware of his own madness.
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For those of us pursuing self-knowledge through spiritual work, dreamwork or through introspection or meditation, this is a relevant issue as well. For by working with our minds, we need to be aware of this issue and pursue issues that are embodied as well as in memory. These issues, however, are “felt” as opposed to “thought or emoted”. Schwartz-Salant insists that this ability to feel is because of the presence of the “subtle body” or “astral body” which enables us to “feel” our bodies. Our attention to our own subtle bodies enable us to reconnect psychic to somatic unconscious. One might encounter such “dead zones” in ones psychic senses or in one's ability to feel one's own body or emotions; or an inability to maintain attention or focus in one’s own body-mind as one explores their body; ; or as feelings of intense anxiety, chaotic energy or confusion; or one might experience these psychotic spaces in others company as one senses/feels these psychotic energies in their bodies.
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Spaces of Madness
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Nathan Swartz-Salant argues that two of the forces which influence our unconscious processes are spirit and soul. He suggests that the psychic unconscious is more concerned with spirit, while the somatic unconscious is more concerned with soul. Soul seeks to descend into matter for experiences and learning in the body, while spirit seeks to return to its Source. The soul experiences these irreconcilable needs as an unwellness and seeks healing by descending into physical life and seeking sensation, experience, and meaning. In the process, the personality becomes lost in matter" so that the spirit's need to leave one's body is unconscious. When there is a mind-body split it is the spirit which dominates, so the soul suffers and the body reacts by manifesting these somatic spaces of madness. In time, those spaces manifest physical illnesses as a physical symptom of one's soul sickness.
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The person who is seeking him or herself must eventually turn inward to attend to these psychic and somatic issues. If she is attending to the needs of her spirit, she will idealize issues or seek beliefs that might enable her to resolve these spaces of madness in favor of ethics or idealistic values. This is sickening to her soul. This can only worsen the issue of embodied psychotic material. Here, she is "falling into the sky."
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If she instead turns her attention to her somatic issues and works on feeling her own body to ascertain her soul’s will, she will encounter at some point her inner madness through the sensations of inner confusion, lethargy, a feeling of “deadness” in life, pain, energy movements, tensions etc. Comprehension begins once one begins to put their attention on these “feelings.” Eventually, that attention to these somatic feelings will link mind with body and the mind will begin to pick up images or dreams that help to bring the somatic material into consciousness. In this case, she will discover that the only way she can resolve any of these spaces of madness is to drop all her idealistic beliefs or ideals that are creating her disembodiment. Here, she must allow herself to "fall to earth."
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However, even when these madnesses can be brought to consciousness, Swartz-Salant maintains that they cannot always be integrated. Nor will embracing them invariably lead to an integrated self. They may remain as open wounds that create delusion in life. But if the ego can accept them as a space of irreconcilable conflict and unavoidable, the wound can be contained. In a sense, the wound expands consciousness because it reveals one's immovable limitation in dealing with Reality. Seeing this, the individual can let go of her struggle to control reality and just let herself Be. Also, acceptance of one's madnesses helps one to accept one's imperfection and basic nature. It tempers us to accept how limited our own consciousness and power really is in the world, and how little control our ego or mental abilities really give us over life itself. And this is a great step forward in finding a place of sanity to stand in the world.
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Potential sources of these places of “madness” lie in the presence of double-binds and unseparated dualities. A double-bind is a place where every choice is unsatisfactory or dangerous., where no needs get met no matter what is chosen. The person then is unable to make choice into a duality, where one choice is preferable to the other. Many people accept what they are taught or told by authority figures in their lives, parents, church leaders, etc. When people create belief systems that discriminate between what is good and bad, right and wrong, productive and non-productive, what works in life and what doesn't work, they feel some sense of control in their lives. They have some confidence that when they act, and they act in accord with what they understand is correct versus incorrect, they can expect aan outcome in accord with their action. When they can not associate a logical outcome to their concepts of correct versus incorrect, they lose the sense that anything they do produces an logical outcome. Then, there is a feeling of powerlessness and incomprehension in dealing with the reality they perceive. These places of powerlessness and incomprehension are places of madness.
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Swartz-Salant points out that we all have our places of madness within.
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Not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.
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There is, in short, no way for us to escape our own madness, for it limits our ability to manage Reality and to be free in this world, to understand ourselves, to make sense of life, to find meaning in life, to make relationships, or to establish intimacy with others.
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The psychotic and chaotic parts must always be found out, contained, and allowed to stabilize if possible. The double -binds resolved, the unseparated dualities helped to separate in order to function.
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The major source of these spaces of madness within us might be the double binds created by the conflicts between our natural bodily needs, our instinctual needs, and the ethics or ideals we adopt from parents, society and religion. For here, in order to be well in our manifested selves, we must meet the needs our body gives us. But our ethical beliefs and taboos deny us the ability to satisfy those needs without sacrificing our immortal soul and/or spirit.
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For example, suppose that because of our religious training, we can neither accept our “instinctive nature” nor reject our instinctive nature without entering madness. Our needs lead us into lust, violence, rage, hate, rape or cruelty as well as platonic love, peace, generosity, and affection. Meeting our instinctive needs require we accept all our emotions. But if we are taught that expressing our feelings as they are is unacceptable, we repress them and deny them any kind of expression. Our ideals or beliefs forbid it. There is no solution in reconciling these conflicting demands of our realities, and so we enter a space of ambiguity and no-solution. The result is the creation of somatic spaces of madness, pain, suffering, loss, and despair.
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What is right and what is wrong? becomes "there is no identifyable right or wrong choice." There is only what other people say is right or wrong, but no matter what others insist is right, the outcomes of choices are sometime good and sometimes bad. What we ourselves believe to be right often turns out to be wrong. What we ourselves believe to be wrong turns out to be right for others. The mind is infinitely creative in rationalizing our points of view. No one sees reality the same. So there is no criterion of rightness or wrongness that anyone can depend upon. If this is the case, then life cannot be controlled through choice. The only solution becomes to surrender one's choice and accept whatever happens.
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What is true and what is false? What others say is true often turn out to be false. What we think is true often turns out to be false. There are very few instances in which something is totally true; most issues are partially true and partially false. Or something is true only from one point of view, but not from other points of view. When this is recognized, the duality of true and false breaks down in practice. And what is left is a space of ambiguity, a place that knows that a person cannot place his or her belief in dualities of true and false. The mind can justify anything with reason or belief or filtered memories. So again, one enters this space of madness where one cannot choose or discern what is true and what is false. The only thing one can do is to discard the duality of truth and falsehood. And again lLife cannot be controlled through choice.
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What is good and what is evil? What one person perceives as good turns out to be seen by someone else as evil. It depends on how one looks at things. People kill because of these issues, babies die, women are violated, all for the pursuit of the Good by violent persons convinced they are Right. This too is a space of madness. How can one live with this? By denying the instinctual nature of man. By replacing the recognition of instinct with devotion to some ethical principle that justifies killing, rape or infanticide. By repressing the instincts. By not entering the body fully so that one can’t perceive one’s own instinctual nature, by lying to ones self, by not allow one’s conscious mind to find or be conscious of one’s own mad places. But one knows that one cannot resolve this issue by external ethical criterion because good cannot be separated from evil outcomes, and outcomes cannot be anticipated. If mankind "truly" has free will, how can he choose between what is not distinguishable? Where then is free will?
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Consider, if you will, how language itself is dependent upon the above concepts. If we cannot think about concepts such as right and wrong, true and false, good and evil, then how can we address through conversation or argumentation any issue that depends upon these dualities? So we find that discussion loses its magnetism for us, and we become silent in the face of societal debates in politics, religion, or ethics. We discover we are no longer able to take a position on so many issues. In fact, it becomes more attractive just to rest in unknowing, allowing life to take its own course, and accepting whatever comes, as did perhaps the Taoist Sages of old China.
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One might attempt to live by the personal rule “Do no harm to anyone.! But no one controls outcomes, only intention. Sometimes when one intends good, people are hurt; other times, they are helped or not harmed. The only way to protect others in ones relationships is to Do Nothing with or to others. Only care for and about them. This again pushes one into a stance in life that is receptive rather than assertive, egoless rather than egotistical, passive rather than willful and active.
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(Now, if I have talked you into these arguments, then you are now as deluded as I already was when this whole article conceived itself!)
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Unable to resolve ones places of inner madness, an individual begins to allow life to come to her and begins to accept life as it is without attempting to control it or judge it. Her inner madnesses may be projected upon this world, seeing society and people's lives as mad, but madness is a part of human nature...not Nature...and one soon catches that there is much that is absurd about Man and the way he perceives life.
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Living with our Spaces of Madness
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Once aware of one’s own spaces of madness within, the ego/conscious mind can do two things to help itself: (1.) respect and have an affection for one’s own madness. One cannot live in this world without experiencing madness. Allow it its place. This is humankind’s Dionysian nature. Madness is a part of man’s life experience. (2.) Care for the dilemma of one’s own soul, for it is the soul who seeks its instinctual nature through the body in order to feel alive, to experience life, to retrieve lessons--but it cannot experience life without also experiencing madness or confusion. The spirit seeks its Source and to lose the sense of self, to leave the body here and go outward. And so the human being is caught between two irreconcilable forces: the spirit which wishes to expand outward and lose the sense of solidity, to surrender life to experience the wellness of Oneness in Spirit; and the soul, which wishes to incarnate in form in order to experience the sense of self and life in the physical.
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It is said that the ability to accept the ambiguity of life, these spaces of madness, is a mind that knows his own Divine nature, for the mind of the divine is a mind that can hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, can tolerate the double binds encountered in life, and tolerate the absence of dualities that enable one to make clear choices. Life is then filled with paradox. And the solutions to these paradoxes are difficult to identify. Most must be surmounted through intuition rather than through logic or analysis. And this seems to ask a lot from most people.
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One alternative in the above cases of double binds and broken dualities is to operate from intuition or "feeling" instead of logic or analysis. In these cases, a person might make choices for one thing over another because they feel the right choice. Or feel the choice that feels right to them. The choice process is irrational and indescribable. Choice is not scientific or rational. But choice is possible.
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Psychologically, these places of madness are referred to as neurotic or psychotic issues. They are parts of us that remain convinced that we cannot gain what we need, that we are confronted with impossible obstacles, that life is hostile, that the world is dangerous, that we can’t have what we wish. Containment of the despair or madness these beliefs create is possible only when an individual is able to find a meaning in their suffering; that they feel that there is purpose in the suffering; that, perhaps, the soul requires these experiences. As C.G. Jung said:
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“neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”
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Some choose the route of embracing the receptive way of living (archetypally the "feminine") to return the seeker to living from her instincts and the lesser consciousness of the Great Round:
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In the shamanic tradition of healing, what psychologists would call neurosis was perceived as alienation of the individual from his instinctive nature, from his or her mythic roots. Therefore, the shaman would frequently chant the creation stories and the foundation myths of the tribe to reconnect the lost soul to its roots, to restructure the patient’s perceptions towards the tribe’s worldview of meaning.(James Hollis, Tracking the Gods, p. 64)
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The Buddha, Gautama, also argued that this way of life was well. “All life is suffering, and the cause of suffering is the desire of the ego to control life…most of all to control one’s mortality. The secret to living well, according to the Buddha and all the great mythic systems, is to live in accord with the will of the gods, in harmony with the Tao.” Wellness is encountered when one can let go of the struggle to win or control life, to identify with the Great Coming and Going, to replace acquisition with the capacity to relinquish. This is the secret wisdom of the Great Mother in the timelessness of the Great Round.” (James Hollis, Tracking the Gods, p. 65).
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This choice, the cycle of sacrifice, terrifies the ego but supports and heals the soul.
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Modern society rejects this thesis. It is the patriarchal need to push our boundaries out; to advance; to evolve; to rebel against the unconsciousness of instinct; to accumulate wealth, power or status; to win over Nature; to achieve immortality in some way; to do or be something significant; to take what might belong to others. This is the archetype of the Quest…sometimes called the Hero’s Journey. The call to take this journey represents the need to overthrow some older value…personal or tribal. On this journey, the hero is wounded, and his wounds quicken his consciousness. He returns changed and changes his tribe by being different. He has a new sense of what is possible for his tribe. It is his difference that transforms his tribe. It is through his relationships that the changes are made.
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But even the hero must rest at some point. For as he seeks, he suffers. Although he receives the aid of the Universe on his journeys, he must leave those magical helpers behind upon his return. He must then rule his kingdom. The hero is the archetype of the ego as well as his need to be different, to be an individuality, to feel centered in his own “sense of self.” For the hero is seeking himself and the way to live life in a good way.
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Finding Meaning, Self and Connection to One's Gods
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Although each archetypal approach…masculinity and femininity, egoic and egolessness…has its advantages, each also possesses negative qualities. Great Mother brings peace and soulful life, but she also regresses us, takes us down into living less conscious lives. People who take this route are descending into that Abyss psychologists call the Realm of the Mothers, caught in lethargies, stasis, caught in the Borderland of the Underworld, caught in their tribal or family identities, and have little initiative to change. Here, the individual has little individuality or individual sense of self, but sees herself as a member of her tribe. Fear or tribal belief systems often holds the tribe in stasis, unwilling to take a risk or depart on transformative journeys that might define a new individuality or a new tribal consciousness. Although tribe members experience a sense of connection to their gods and a sense of meaning in life, myth and religion govern the life of the tribe and the individual.
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The Quest or masculine archetypal journey-- the Way of constant Seeking, self improvement, seeking advantages over others, and the accumulation of wealth or power--in the end brings suffering, for…as the Buddha noted…nothing is permanent. One cannot remain on a Quest for one's whole life, for in the end, there is nothing to be found except a new perceptive of one's self and life. Nothing one struggles to obtain can be retained or held onto...even one's new sense of self. Time takes it all away in the end. Death is the only ending. And one’s good works and achievements in the end are like rain in the desert. But it won't last forever, there is a sense of meaning from the adventures and discoveries on the Quest.
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Yet part of what makes Mankind unique is the fact that we have been granted free will, and free will enables us to make choices. Those choices may leave us disappointed in our lives or feeling successful. But we are plainly allowed to be willing beings, to try to achieve something, to be something new. Will is required to resist the lethargy of life under Great Mother’s rule. Will is required to combat our fear of taking risks, of striking out to discover something new. Will is required, even as we know we must eventually fall.
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As our environments change, we must adapt to new circumstances or we will not survive. And as we in the West are more and more isolated, more separated from our tribes and family members, more insecure, and less emotionally supported by community in our lives, we are in need individually as well as community-wide of adapting quickly to change in our external circumstances. And so we must “work our Wills” in order to stay strong, to resist the devolution and death wishes each of us carry in our unconscious minds, to survive individually and to grow into our potentials.
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And so we must balance these masculine and feminine archetypal impulses. In a sense, we are attempting what Zen Buddhists call “Not Doing”. Not Doing is a state of no-stress and resting in our instinctual nature. This is the state of wellness and soul’s rest. But the practice is to Do while Not Doing; to lose ones self in what one is doing so there is no past, no future, and no thought. Then what needs to get done gets done. This is a paradoxical state of mind in which two states of consciousness are maintained simultaneously.
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The only way to live in this way is to live in the moment. As Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says, “The path is the moment by moment evolution of our experience, the moment-by-moment evolution of the world of phenomena, the moment-by moment evolution of our thoughts and emotions. The Path ahead isn’t laid out…its made up moment by moment as we engage here with our thoughts and emotions.
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The moment is all the Path we have. We must be patient, and this means allowing things to unfold at their own speed rather than jumping in with our habitual responses to either pain or pleasure. We must be willing to experience whatever comes, pain or pleasure, sanity or madness, clarity or confusion and to value and appreciate life as it is."
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