Higher Super Powers (or, Letter to a Friend)

The journey - and what could be a more appropriate word - that brought me from where we last met to where I am now has been long, arduous, thrilling and deeply rewarding. When it started I did not know where I was going, except that I knew ‘my land was barren,’ physically, emotionally, psychologically. At the beginning, I still fantasized about quick fixes, and if I am grateful for anything that students of psychological alchemy have taught me, it is that the transformation of lead (undeveloped consciousness) into gold is a work with no shortcuts, requiring dedication and a mix of scientific procedure (hypothesis, verification, new hypothesis, synthesis) and genuine curiosity.

At the beginning I was ego-dominant, and determined that, while I was open to far more than ever before as a possible means of healing my psyche, I would not regress into infantile religious beliefs or projections. Primitive religious conversion was not on the table - nor should it have been. And yet, notice how I was rational in this thought, and yet still characterized by ego dominance. It was as if I had raised myself out of the evolutionary muck by stacking up the dry land of reason, only to discover I had built a tiny island, and couldn’t figure out how to reconnect to the mainland of psychological fullness and human connection.

Before I go further, I want to draw attention to the fact that writing about personal psychological development is difficult. Steve Martin said “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” This is even more true when language (the favorite tool of the ego) is our means of expressing the ineffable. Still, I’m going to try.

So there I was, constantly craving escape from the tyranny of ego thoughts, no longer able to turn to drugs or alcohol as escape, and unwilling to turn to any made-up fantasy of Zeus or Mother Gaiia for assistance. I was stuck. And yet, I wasn’t, because addiction and recovery are never static. They grow like a child in the womb - no matter much we may fear the next stage, it is coming.

Which brings me to a vital question: why? Why does addiction exist? And why does it get worse? And why does it call on the most beautiful of humanity’s children? And why, more than ever, is addiction pulling people into this process, rather than just into some permanent static state of use\abuse? We are addicted to anything in the Western world, any release from ego’s torment.(1) We cut ourselves, starve ourselves, stuff ourselves, overwork ourselves... addiction can be to anything, anyone. Iit is a process of the psyche - not the substance. Why?

A dog can live his entire life in perfect harmony with himself and his environment. But humanity, individually and collectively, is in the throes of the pain of wrestling with egoic perceptions of power and control and existence. We make war with the world around us and with ourselves. Our days and nights and newspapers are filled with constant schism - dividing ourselves into who we are and who we are not and making war on any violation of this territory. There is much similarity between the foreign policies of nation-states and the attitudes of the addicted personality.

And addiction pulls us deeper in, even when there is no physical (i.e. opiate) component. If alcohol or starvation were simply actions that alleviated a random mental problem in the individual, then a certain amount of this “cure” would be all that was needed, and most alcoholics and anorexics would live their lives content with their little secret. (Why it’s a secret is a whole other topic). But this isn’t the addict’s story, except for a short period of time. Addiction pulls us in deeper and deeper, to more desperate places, further into a darkness we thought we were escaping, and then becomes the soundtrack to our lives.

I think there could be no better instance of the absurdity of much that is labeled as rational thought than asserting that it is some sort of grand coincidence that all addicts are drawn deeper into addiction, and that this magnetic pull also, coincidentally, leads them into the process of recovery. If, as the Bible said of primitive people, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God,” then surely the modern fool believes there is no greater Self, no subconscious. It’s just me (i.e., my ego) and some weird random electrical occurrences in this brain that I just happen to have. Also I have no idea why I’m doing what I’m doing at this moment - or why it’s getting worse. Must be the weather.

Even our collective ideas about addiction - from the most educated to the most infantile Christ-lovers in our society - are egoic and schism-worshiping. Addiction is universally regarded as something “bad” that happened to someone or the result of some error they made. Like stepping into a really muddy puddle. Anyone with even a basic psychological understanding knows that no one accidentally steps into anything, and yet this is how addiction is viewed: as an unfortunate happenstance.

There is an exception to this though: those who have gone through the process of addiction and recovery fully, or worked for a significant time with those going through the process, tend to see it differently. Now, when I hear of a friend whose cocaine addiction is worsening, I feel compassion and empathy, and yet I also feel a sense of knowing that this process, if they survive, is part of the healing of their psyche. I know, almost intuitively, that the process, like a fever, if allowed to run its course, will break down their walls of ego dominance and lead them to relocate their identity in the larger Self. I even feel this way about collective addictions, like say, our collective addiction to oil or consumption. I know that something collective and unconscious in us is taking us to a place of greater wholeness and connection.

This idea is as logical and rational as any other, and yet the rational parts of us resist it. We resist the idea that addiction and recovery might be a path to psychological wholeness with as much fierceness as we resist our own mortality. Because for the ego, that’s exactly what it is: the greater Self, the fullness of our unconscious mind, pulls us on a path to self-(ego-) destruction, and we grow more and more powerless to resist.

Part of the reason we resist has to do with our estimation of the size of the unconscious mind. Before I went through this process, I would have estimated my subconscious to be about the same size as my ego. I knew that there was a part of my mind that regulated my breathing and created weird dreams, but it was a small dark place that only occasionally intruded into my awareness. How funny that in the process of addiction and recovery, one of the first actions of the subconscious is impress upon the ego, through steadily worsening addiction, how little control it actually has. This theme runs through modern paranoia as well - in the myths of modern anxiety, from Kafka to the Matrix to cheap spy thrillers - the main character, a symbol of the ego, is first of all terrified to discover that he has no idea of what the world is made, or who controls every aspect of his life.

I’m not sure if it was Freud or Jung or Campbell or whoever that described the ego as a cork, and the subconscious as the ocean, but that sounds about right to me. The ego is a very important cork, mind you. But it cannot comprehend - in fact it is created and defined by its inability to comprehend - the size and scale of the human unconscious.

Because of Jung, we know that this unconscious part of ourselves accumulates into collections of (I hate this word) energy. These energies function in balance and contrast to one another, are universal, and emerge in projection and myth. Part of my unconscious is nurturing, another part is decisive, and that’s why I respond or react to the simple image of a king or a mother. I do not need to have read the history of monarchy by the time I am four in order to understand what “king” means - somehow I just know. It resonates with this large archetype within me.

The ego can barely comprehend what this means. It reacts both to the primitive ideas that there is a “god king” somewhere up in the sky and to the idea that there might be a sky king swirling around somewhere inside me, with equal vehemence.

But I need that sky king. I need him like I need water. I need access to all the energies of the unconscious to fully be alive. And having locked him out of my existence with the emergence of my ego-identification, it wouldn’t matter if I realized I needed him or not - he’s going to come calling.

One of the things that helped me here significantly was an understanding of pre/trans fallacy, an idea articulated by Ken Wilber. There are a lot of places that explain it better (e.g., http://www.praetrans.com/en/ptf.html), but I’m going to give it the old college try anyway.

At the primitive level of consciousness, we project aspects of our unconscious into the sky and onto trees, and call them gods. At the complex and rational level, we see that it’s just a tree and stars. And we have no interest at all in discussing where the idea of the god in the tree came from. Or why every culture on the planet has one. At a burgeoning level of enlightenment, we discover where the god in the tree came from (within us), and frightened of a regression to the primitive mind, we can fall into two errors: we reject all knowledge of the source of said tree god, and dismiss all discussion of his relevance as archaic and infantile. Or secondly, we embrace the tree god and dance around fires honoring him at bad jam-band festivals, and actually do regress to primitive and archaic ideas of gods and tree-spirits. Usually this involves constantly talking about “The Universe.” On the one hand, we fear regression, on the other, we fear the loss of all our awareness of powerful subconscious forces (gods) and all the gifts they bring.

Part of the challenge here is because the pre-rational understanding of the tree god and the post-rational (2) understanding of the tree god archetype - well, they look and sound almost identical. And the pre-rational tree god-worshiper actually has a lot to say about the archetype, since he was the one who first discovered it. The ability to differentiate is vital to maintaining the healthy role of reason and its main cheerleader, the ego. Just because the ego needs to experience a thousand deaths doesn’t mean it’s supposed to stay dead. The Christ-myth’s ability to express this truth is incomparable. It dies and comes back different and better for it. It still has a role to play.

This puts the person who has moved through rationality into say, depth psychology, in a sticky situation, and yet an ultimately rewarding one: I can’t betray my rational understanding when someone describes God as an alien in a celestial mansion, but I also can’t betray my significant relationship with the part of me that is best described as Great Grandpa Zeus.

Rather than spell out how I deal with said problem at dinner parties when some moron starts talking about synchronicity or the Holy Spirit, let me move forward by saying - it doesn’t really matter. Whether I tear down the idols or just roll my eyes and let the primitives worship them, what matters most is that in my own post-rational way, I not forget that I have to honor them as well. In fact my attitude has to be as humble as any acolyte’s when I deal with these aspects of the unconscious, because they are going to be the forces that decide whether or not I step in the mud puddles over and over until I start listening to them. The gods will not be ignored.

Recently my father, who is still somewhat attached to his primitive understanding of the unconscious, asked me if that meant I believed in God. (Let me add that I don’t try to explain any of this to hardly anyone unless I deeply care about them, and even then, only very gently.) I answered, “Absolutely. And demons. And the Virgin Mary. And vampires. And werewolves and Santa Claus and Batman and tree sprites and any other image the human mind has conjured. I believe in them all.” Interestingly, though this did confuse him a bit, it also pleased him. As my father, his greatest concern was that I not live isolated from the gifts the archetypes bring - and even though I violated all of his primitive religious tenets, he still cared more that I not live without those gifts.

And I can’t. I’ve tried living in the purely reductionist manner that characterizes modern man. It is too deeply shut off from muck from which we evolved. I also refuse to descend again into said muck (3) and lose my reasoning mind. So, I take the attitude of the penitent, treading softly before the gods of the unconscious, and I learn from every primitive phrase I hear about them as if that phrase was a clue to a mystery, and I let the gods guide me as if they were more real than any primitive actually has perceived them to be.

A word about fundamentalists here - notice how they, too, operate from the same place as rabid rationalists. Whether in the dark ages or in a small Baptist church or in a mosque in the Sudan, they have relegated God to a place of ideology, and not at all to the role of active participant in their lives. And the rationalists, those who have relegated no-God to a place of ideology, also deny the forces of the unconscious any access to their lives (i.e., Nazis, Communists, Fascists), and behave almost identically to the fundamentalists we deal with today - cut off from the healing powers of the unconscious, worshiping projections and their own egos, they act out the cruelties that they long to perpetuate against their own egos, making war on all that is vulnerable. Neither of them is able to thank God for the rain. (4)

All of this describes an intellectual understanding that I developed in a completely non-intellectual environment, by the way - that environment being the total disaster (wasteland) of my life. If I was primitive, the ideas I’ve covered here would have been unnecessary, but primitive and enlightened are not the same - even though they can look like it. I would have just found Jesus. And many people who have not fully developed their rational thinking capacity do just that - they get a degree in biology, they develop an addiction to painkillers, they cheat on their wife and make a disaster of their relationships, and they say, “Fuck it. I need Jesus,” and they regress and open themselves to a larger Self that includes the unconscious by embracing primitivism. They continue to think rationally about evolution or how to fix their car, but when it comes to what their role or sense of purpose is in life, they simply set their rational mind aside and go help poor people on the weekends because Jesus said to. And honestly, to that, I say, “Bravo.” Do what you gotta do.

It is not my path, and I do not think it is as rewarding as maintaining loyalty to the ego and the rational mind through the crucible that is our re-encounter with the unconscious, but it is still a more whole and giving and loving individual who emerges, as contrasted with the religious ideologue or the completely self-absorbed and isolated atheist who conveniently can’t find any rational justification for doing anything for his fellow man (or his own children).

But, having maintained my rationality, my skepticism, my precious reason through the process of opening up and allowing my unconscious to teach me about the nature of life and my Self, and to connect me with others, etc. etc. etc., I can honestly say with no betrayal of logic at all: Bitches Need Jesus, and real bad.

There is no whole individual who exists in a permanently ego-identified state. And there are a world of forces that can come to our aid, can reconnect us to our humanity (let alone to other humans), can bind our psychic wounds, can change our expectations of life, can create actual emotional and physical miracles of changed perception and relationships. I can make up my own names for these forces like alien-abductees do, or I can use the names they have had for centuries, it doesn’t really matter.(5) Eventually they coalesce into one large tapestry of energies and feelings that require a word something like God, and since “The Universe” is monumentally obnoxious, I just stick with “the unconscious” or the Greater Self. Who cares. As long as I don’t regress, I’m faithful to myself, and as long as I let the unconscious have a significant role in my life, then I’m faithful to the gods.

What matters is that I acknowledge that to shift from the insanity of complete ego-identification to the wholeness of a healed psyche will involve something (and this used to be really obnoxious to me but now I really don’t care, probably because I’m not deeply afraid anymore that I’ll lose my rationality) that goes a bit like this:

1. I acknowledge that my ego is not the whole of my mind. I acknowledge that living out of my ego has kind of made a mess.
2. I acknowledge that there are parts of me that my ego cannot control, and that by opening up just a little bit to their existence, they can start to clean up this mess.
3. In fact, after testing it out a little bit, I’ve decided to let the larger Self that encompasses both my ego and my unconscious hold the reins of my life for a while. To listen to intuition, and maybe to not worship my own thoughts all the time.
4. Because I’ve stopped thinking of myself as just my ego, I realize that my ego also isn’t willing to take responsibility for all its actions. So I’ve decided to go digging through what I’ve done that may have hurt other people, because I’ve projected a lot of my unconscious onto a lot of people, and they didn’t deserve to be punished just because I was trying to get rid of parts of myself.
5. I decided to adjust the relationship between my ego and unconscious a bit by communicating to my unconscious and maybe another person the ways in which my ego didn’t exactly behave like the sterling little innocent he claims to be. Chances are high that I found that my unconscious mind loves me anyway, and this created an ineffable sense of relief.
6. As this process developed, I started to realize that my egoic “perfections” were actually inadequacies, and that if I allowed my unconscious to add into my personality the other sides of my perfections’ coins, I would have a lot of flaws in myself erased. I decided to start letting this happen.
7. Soon, I started getting so into the process of not ego-dominating every action and thought in my life, I started a dialogue with the unconscious where I asked for help from different aspects in making me more whole, and less rigid in my perceptions.
8. My unconscious mind responded by reducing my ego dominance further with suddenly emergent memories of all the people I had hurt in my projection and delusion. So I decided to try and make that right as best I could, not so much for them, but out of a desire for the wholeness that such reconciliation promised.
9. Sometimes this involved hard work and giving.
10. I stayed aggressive in my wariness of my own ego’s attempts to form an image of itself as perfect. I found that watching for cruelty to others or projections that I could easily have overlooked were the easiest ways for the ego to reassert dominance. I started saying “I’m sorry - I was wrong.” A lot.
11. I developed a relationship with my unconscious. The forms of this relationship came and went, whether drawing or dialogue or recording dreams or whatever - I just let the relationship grow, like a perfect love affair.
12. I became so grateful for what I had learned, I decided that when the occasion arose, I would not keep it a secret, but take the gift of fire I had stolen from the gods and share it with someone else.

Even a year ago, I still would have resisted just about any list that had 12 points to it - even groceries. But I think this is a lot like how I learned to relax around my parents. I used to be extremely resistant and harsh to them - constantly reacting to their ideas and perspectives. I discovered this came from a fear that I would become like them again. That I would regress. As I became more and more comfortable with my own boundaries, more sure of my self and that their love would not turn me into an idiot Bible-thumper, I was suddenly able to relax, and enjoy them more. I think resistance to potentially irrational thought (i.e., anything with a spiritual component) is the same. The part of us that so deeply longs to be whole again scares us - because in some way we know we might do anything for that wholeness. (And addicts can’t even claim that they wouldn’t do anything to feel whole - because we have.) We have to reassure ourselves that regression is not on the table in order to allow ourselves to even dip our toes in the unconscious.

Even if those of us who are rational create our own language to describe what we learn about the almost worshipful relationship to our greater Self that wholeness requires, we should also be smart enough to realize that within every religious system, there were those who perceived their belief system just like this - and still their words were turned into weapons to be used against non-believers. Which adds meaning to the caution not to cast pearls before swine.

I consider all of this the most precious thing I’ve ever learned, and I only share it with you because I know that regression into primitivism is non-optional for you, and yet wholeness is equally inevitable. The unconscious has dictates that we cannot fully understand, and that includes who it self-selects to encounter it fully. I have started to suspect that it is those who are the most vital to the healing of the human collective who are somehow magnetized by addiction and recovery. Like the Precious Lord Jesus (j/k) said: “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

One last thing: what does this process feel like? What does it feel like to release the ego’s control, even if just a bit, and experience a self that includes the unconscious? Well, first it is/was scary. And then, it feels like love. This is a universally-declared conclusion by the primitive and the post-rational who experience a shift from identity with the ego to identity with the larger Self. It feels like the love of God. And since all of our definitions of God include everything we will ever know or see or feel or comprehend, who is to say that’s not exactly what it is?

Consider also that our mortality (which we can only experience once, and then we’re no longer experiencing it) is not the same as our perception of it. Our perception of our own mortality is actually a projection of both our imminent ego death and our fear of the unconscious. We fear death because we project all of our unconscious existence and consciousness onto it. But as that barrier between ego and the larger Self is broken down, the projection is retrieved, and death suddenly loses its sting. Eternal (as in, unlimited by the barriers of the ego) life is suddenly available to us, because there is no aspect of our psyche that we may not call upon to assist us where ego is inadequate. And since all aspects of our psyche have our best interests as their own, this feels like a swarm of angels who do nothing but love and aid us.

There is no part of my psyche that I may not trust, even the parts that led me so close to oblivion. And since my psyche includes everything that I perceive, there is no aspect of creation that I may not trust, even with my rationality still in hand. And in this there is a profound rest and peace. It did not happen overnight, and it can still disappear from time to time - but every minute I have spent opening myself to the possibility that my unconscious mind might contain all I need has been rewarded.

And while it’s true that there are a lot of similarities between the pre-rational experience of being “one with God” and the transcendent state of being open to the larger self, it is in no way the same. The unwillingness to regress is rewarded just as fully as the openness to evolve. I know this because I’ve experienced both - as a child I had pre-rational ideas and experiences of “God.” Anyone who tells you that the two are the same is full of shit - the pre-rational experience of God or angels or ghosts or whatever is far inferior to the experience of a whole individual whose rationality is fully intact.

For one thing, the pre-rational individual - and I might add, most rational individuals still under the ego’s tyrrany - live at the mercy of their Shadow. They experience only one side of duality - or so they think - and are constantly fighting off some sort of enemy, whether that enemy be the devil or ignorant superstitions that they don’t understand.

Another major difference is that the pre-rational individual doesn’t know that his ego exists - he still encounters it as himself and his body. Having become aware of his own ego and Shadow, and then worked to reintegrate them into his larger self, the “whole” person experiences fullness that neither the primitive nor the rationalist can understand. The limitations for the whole person are semantic - all he has to convey this experience are words or other art forms, and these seem either primitive or irrational or inscrutable to those who can’t discern the difference. It’s really hard to talk about communicating with and reintegrating subconscious archetypal energies without someone saying, “So... you pray?”

I know I’m making bold statements when I say that I think addiction might be some sort of divine call from the collective unconscious. But what’s funny is that if we look at our collective addiction to oil, and the real possibility of having to go cold turkey in the next fifty years, who will be able to help us make this transition better than those who have experienced ego death and rebirth? Not to mention that there is nothing rational about our longing for altered states unless the ego is in some sort of tormented separation from a larger self.

We had so little time together I have no idea how much of this you’ve ever heard of or not, and I know that I was writing it for my Self (ha ha or a muse) anyway, and it was the perfect time for me to put on paper something that has been only in my head until now. Happy New Year,

Adam

FOOTNOTES (because footnoting letters is just plain awesome)
1 - And I’m not demonizing the ego - ego has much to give, just as a mother does. It’s just that a mother can’t keep a child - the greater self - locked in a closet to ensure his safety. But ego has run wild in our lives and we think the world is as dark as a closet.

2 - Post-egoic is a better phrase, but because the ego loves to use a flawed rationality to justify its dominance, I like post-rational. A person who stares death by addiction in the face but still thinks he’d rather die than go to a 12-step can’t really call his behavior rational.

3 - I use the term muck because it’s what Freud used to tell Jung what he feared he would descend into if he accepted Jung’s ideas. The fact that the part of the psyche that he termed muck might bear an emotional and energetic similarity to actual muck, or that he was revealing a projection of part of himself onto mud may have escaped him.

4 - This is how I translate that in my head: Neither of them are able to feel gratefulness from their ego towards the aspects of their unconscious which respond emotionally to the symbol of rain, or to feel a connection with the significant concepts of healing and emotion and forgiveness that man has always projected onto water from the sky.

5 - Improper nouns usually are inadequate - “decisiveness” just doesn’t have the same sense of size that “Zeus” does.