Last weekend, I was on a trip away with friends. Sitting in the backseat, innocently enjoying the view, I became aware of a feeling of nausea deep in my stomach. It dawned on me then that this was a recurring theme. That every time I sat in the backseat, the same feeling of nausea would arise. Instead of dismissing it as car sickness right away, I started to investigate the experience.
Long forgotten memories appeared as if I was in the moment that it happened. But I wasn’t. It all happened like a movie played on the screen of consciousness, albeit one that flooded my body with energetic phenomena. Many years ago, while I was around 6 years old, we were driving towards France to go on holiday. We left in the middle of the night with my dad’s intention to drive the entire way himself. But he started dozing off, so he stopped the car to switch places with my mother.
The first thing I remember after we stopped is the feeling of extreme gravitational force, as our car swept over the guardrail and flipped over multiple times before finally coming to a standstill. We all managed to get out of the car, but when I got out I saw my father standing there with a cut in his throat. He seemed all right, but the image hit me like a sledgehammer.
Now, many years later, I realize I wanted to puke in the moment it happened. To rid myself of the extreme feeling of dread and nausea by literally emptying my body. But I couldn’t back then. So the image, together with the energetic load and the bodily intentions, became deeply supressed in my personal consciousness, waiting to be remembered on a trigger that would kick up the energetic force once again.
That trigger came last weekend, and I’m glad it did. For if it came earlier, I might not be capable of letting it flow through me as I did now.
In the last decade, my view on trauma and anything psychological changed radically. Where I first tried the transcendent (we all know that one right?) approach, I now see my personal vulnerabilities as the gateway to sacredness. How? Let me try to explain.
Sacred trauma
There are many perspectives on trauma. But mine is seeing trauma as an invitation towards emptying myself in this life. Instead of placing trauma in linear time, I prefer to look at it a-causally. Synchronistically if you will. It is no coincidence that the big themes in a persons life can be deducted from the analysis of one’s astrological natal chart at their birth. And it is no coincidence that these themes are often similar to the themes already playing their role in the family. Our own wounds are the gateway to the divine, because it are these that keep us contracted in our state of personhood.
“If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably give up on life and humanity.” - Richard Rohr
Trauma naturally compresses the potential of consciousness. Better put, it keeps you personal and small. For the imaginal memories, together with the physical symptoms, are often so intense that you dare not go near them. The protective human mechanism is so clever that it even erases memories to protect oneself from the pain hidden in it. But with it, a split is formed. A split that keeps you from ever feeling completely whole again, often not even knowing that the true source of this uncanny feeling is the underlying trauma. You could even say the entire perspective of seeing yourself as a separate human being in a mechanical world is a split too, but not a personal one. It’s a collective one.
If you look closely, you see the splitting dynamic everywhere. Not only in psychology, but in quantum physics and politics too. In the story of Genesis, the description of how God created the world, the splitting mechanism is clearly visible:
[1] In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (split)
[2] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
[3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
[4] And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. (split)
[5] And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
This splitting mechanism is thus deeply ingrained in the fabrics of both physical and imaginal reality. And we, as microcosms of the cosmos, contain the exact same mechanisms in ourselves. There can be no light without darkness, no day without night. And yet we rather neglect the darkness and the material hidden in there, to stay safely in the light. The consequence of this pain-avoiding mechanism is an ever-continuing stepping away from wholeness. Because as Genesis shown, wholeness is the emptiness containing both the heaven and the earth, the dark and the light.
Jung realized this and created his entire psychological model out of the notion of coincidentia oppositorum: The unifying of the opposites. He saw that wholeness, which he calls “the Self”, can only be achieved through a process of facing one’s own shadow. Through unifying the consciousness with the unconsciousness, the light and the dark. Through integrating all those hurt parts that you’ve unconsciously abandoned in yourself back into the whole being that your essentially are. But where other therapy forms primarily focus on creating a healthy self-image, Jung realized that this process could actually bring about a transcendence of one’s own limited perspective. It is a long and painful journey towards Soul, which is inherently whole and deeply connected to the Cosmos as a particle of it.
If we do not, both personally and as a species, confront our own supressed pain, the splitting mechanism wil just continue to worsen (like I describe in my latest Apocalyptical essay) . It is this splitting mechanism that gives rise to polarization and projection alike. Out of avoidance of the buried pain our mother inflicted on us, we project this pain on every woman triggering that pain in us. We thus become unconscious slaves of the pain-avoiding mechanism, as if our behaviour is led by demonic forces out of our reach. Projection becomes automatic, and we truly believe these projections to be real. Let me try to visualize the projection mechanism in a simple way:
At first, the trauma is supressed and one is simply unaware of the power it hold over his/her behaviour. This leads to unconscious projection. What is supressed in the inner unconsciousness, manifests in the outer world as the enemy or source of pain:
At a certain point, one becomes aware of the source of the pain and realizes that they have been projecting their pain on the outside world as a pain-avoiding mechanism. This is not a fun stage, for a battle inside yourself ensues. Like an alchemical process, the body-mind starts to integrate the pain by letting the opposing forces play itself out in consciousness. But consciousness itself is unaffected, still, non-judgmental.
This alchemical process is as if brutal forces of nature oppose each other, finally leading towards the creation of a diamond. This diamond is a symbol for the circle around the Yin-Yang symbol, in which both the dark and the light are contained. It is the symbol of Jung’s Self, or my preferred notion of Soul. It is both deeply personal and impersonal. Both utterly vulnerably and immensely strong.
Consciousness is the primordial source, and all is split from it. To become whole, we need to return to this primordial source and confront all the splits that made us believe we are not whole. Ironically, this also means that we have to confront everything that made us belief we are separate from the world and its source. Because these too are projections that make our reality appear so real.
To me, trauma is an invitation towards realizing the wholeness of our Soul in this life. It is a calling to return to consciousness as the One source that gives form to our reality. A calling towards becoming that source itself. And it is trauma, these deeply personal stories of pain that make our separation and personhood appear so real, that could well be the gateways towards emptying ourselves of everything we are not. For how could something so painful not be real?
More on that in part 2 of this exploration, where we will be looking at archetypal splitting, imaginary trauma, and more fancy stuff.
Do you feel like exploring your own personal gateways to the divine?
Reach out to me via withpimstudio@gmail.com or react to this post!