In Search of the Archimedean Point
““It’s not the traumatic things that happened to us in childhood,
it’s the traumatic way we remember them.”
So where were we? Ah yes, the beachhead Tom has established. As he began to ask the little guy “What are you feeling?” - as he was beginning to imagine him - he reported a sense that something had shifted slightly. I believe that any psychological shift is always subtle and significant. “Subtle is significant” is a brilliant understatement uttered by Shinzen Young, an American Vipassana meditation teacher
A week after our session, Tom was lying in bed with the angry thoughts returning, his mind racing, once again, his heart beating rapidly. Tom reported, “I have no idea where this came from, but I heard myself say, ‘these are just thoughts,’ and I felt myself immediately relaxing. I don't remember this ever happening.” Believe it or not, I think that the little guy “heard” him! If Jung is correct, and little Tom is not merely a figment of Tom’s imagination, but, through Tom’s ability to imagine little Tom, or personify him, the little one had become psychologically real in Tom’s mind. It’s as if, metaphorically, a frozen child was beginning to thaw out and breathe again. If this is true, we can imagine that little Tom can now hear Big Tom. In other words, an inner relationship has been established between the conscious ego Tom, and a formerly split off part, little Tom, who is no longer isolated and alone. We’ll return to Tom’s story later.
• • •
Unfortunately, we have reached a rough patch, and you may find a certain tendency toward sleepiness, but please do not lean too far forward in your chair! Earlier I promised that, if I could find a way to tell it slant, I would return to Jung’s quote about the monotheism of consciousness. Sad to say I have no beautiful Korean bowl to bong or metaphor to offer, and I suspect singing “Yes Jesus loves you” will not make Jung’s prophetic words more digestible. If I cannot tell it slant, the best I can do is unpack Jung’s following words for us.
“If tendencies towards dissociation were not inherent in the human psyche, fragmentary psychic systems would never have been split off; in other words, neither spirits nor gods would have ever come into existence. That is also the reason why our time has become so utterly godless and profane; we lack all knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else. Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it coupled with a fanatical denial of the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems.”
Perhaps it’s best if I begin with a story!
• • •
One day, perhaps three years after moving to New York, I walked my dog Willy in Riverside Park, and then returned to my small apartment and lay down to rest, with Willy lying next to me. As I closed my eyes, I had the strangest sensation, as if my eyes had turned inward. It felt as if the physical eyes were no longer focused forward, toward the closed eyelids, but actually turned toward the back of the head. Weird and impossible. How many thousands of times had I closed my eyes before this seemingly ordinary and non-eventful afternoon? Later I pondered what made that moment different, but nothing ever came to mind. Suddenly, it felt as if my physical eyes had turned around. I had never had that sensation before, and have never had it since, although (true confession) I certainly tried to repeat it for months after this event!
In a split second, I realized that I was looking at VB’s body lying on the couch, with Willy nearby. Whoa Nellie! Where was I? On the ceiling looking down. It was amazing! Exhilarating and frightening in the same moment. In that moment, which probably did not last in “real” time more than a matter of seconds, awareness explored the body, which was seemingly floating and almost pressed against the ceiling. Yes, it had a head, two arms and two legs. But this body felt only semi-solid, as if it were made of some transparent substance, incredibly light and flexible. “Wow!" At first I thought I was on an amazing adventure, until I realized that this astral body was slowly passing through the ceiling! Whoops. Was it on its way through the roof of the brownstone apartment? Exhilaration turned into panic. This was terrifying. I was sane enough to realize that the fear that part of '“me” might end up floating over the New York skyline was absolutely ridiculous, but, on the other hand, it did not seem that absurd considering that I was looking down at my own body! What would happen if the astral body actually slipped through the ceiling? Would it remain connected to the physical body? I knew that the eyes were key to what had happened, and it made sense that if I could open the physical eyes in the body lying on the couch, I could somehow get back. With every ounce of will and effort that I could summon, I strained to open those tightly closed eyes in the body below. Finally, somehow, they opened. I heard a “whooshing” sound, and suddenly there I was lying on the couch. It was as if nothing extraordinary had occurred. The clock was ticking, Willy was sleeping, and my little world was back to normal. But I was not quite the same person. Two things had happened during that experience. I knew without the slightest doubt that there is “something” (an other) that survives death. It was an incredibly freeing realization. Also, I knew that I would never ever forget this experience; nor have I ever.
Most of us have heard about astral travel, and it’s not that unusual for some people to have dreams where they dream they are flying outside the physical body. But my experience was some kind of “out of body” experience, while the conscious ego was still awake, and apparently quite rational. In psychological terms it was some type of dissociation.
“If tendencies towards dissociation were not inherent in the human psyche”
Jung suggests that these tendencies towards dissociation are a psychic fact, and inherent in our psyche. In other words, dissociation is not merely hypothetical, it is an empirically observable phenomenon. In psychology, dissociation is considered an aspect of psychopathology, including what was formerly called “multiple personality disorder” but now called “Dissociative identity disorder.”
Every psychotherapist is familiar with dissociation. We listen with heavy hearts as a client recounts being sexually abused as a young girl. She remembers watching the horrid experience from above, as if she were on the ceiling looking down. This is not psychobabble, LSD, pot, or a hallucination. Most of us have heard stories of someone reporting an amazing experience during surgery. Suddenly, they are watching the doctor and nurses working on their own body which is lying on the table, or we have heard stories about a person reporting a near death experience, where they were moving toward a bright light, then returning to this life. Clearly some of these experiences have nothing to do with pathology, but often they are associated with some kind of trauma. Perhaps dissociation is a strategic psychological defense mechanism necessary when consciousness feels threatened with some form of extinction.
Jung’s “tendencies towards dissociation” might be better conceptualized quite simply as a psychic faculty in human consciousness, and I suspect that the Buddha was quite familiar with this psychic faculty. He called it Mindfulness, or sati in Pali. In The Bare Bones of the Buddha’s Teaching, I suggest that mindfulness is the psyche’s extraordinary ability to view an experience from the vantage of a double pointed arrow. Consciousness is focused on the object while being simultaneously focused on the subject. This is the image that Rajneesh (or Osho as he later named himself) suggested, and I have never read a superior description from a Buddhist teacher. (Rajneesh being Hindu) It’s almost like having the capacity to be extroverted and introverted in the very same moment.
Jung famously said that psyche cannot find an archimedian point outside in order to see itself (or lift itself out of the unconscious). You remember that Archimedes said if he had a place to put down his lever he could lift the world. The poignancy of Jung’s statement is that no one can stand outside herself in order to see herself. But I wonder if this is not precisely what the Buddha, from his amazing experience, saw as a human possibility. Perhaps this is precisely what the faculty of sati is capable of doing. To put it in Buddhist terminology: That which can achieve an archimedian point is called sunyatta or anatta.
To continue with Jung’s words: “If tendencies towards dissociation were not inherent in the human psyche, fragmentary psychic systems would never have been split off.”
Dissociation is precisely what happens to the conscious ego when it encounters something that threatens its existence, but that is almost exclusively from a Western psychological perspective, and it has always had a cloud of suspicion or pathology hovering over it. We dissociate because we are freaked out. But there is something one-sided in this view. It leaves out a spiritual or non “scientific” component to a phenomenon that seems inherent in psyche’s tendency to separate or split. If mitosis, the cell’s splitting process, is fundamental to organic development, why assume that splitting ends with cells? In teaching mindfulness and tying to find words to describe what is nearly indescribable, I used to call mindfulness a “wedge” that comes between awareness and a thought. Ordinarily consciousness fuses with a thought. We make it real and give it authority, as Ruth Denison said so many times. This happens because awareness does not appear to be able to stand back from a thought’s gravitational pull, any thought: beautiful thoughts, religious thoughts, horrible thoughts, painful thoughts, silly or trivial thoughts. None of the content seems to matter; we fuse with all of our thoughts.
The establishment of mindfulness is the sine qua non of the Buddhist approach to observing thoughts without fusing with them, and one factor above all seems to be intrinsic to any thought or a stream of thought’s gravitational pull : not only is sati present moment awareness. The crucial factor is that mindfulness is not based in ego consciousness. Imagine a room filled with students waiting with anticipation to learn mindfulness-based stress reduction, who were asked to leave their egos at the door. There would be a stampede toward the exit.
I think Jung would have been fascinated and perhaps encouraged with the idea of sati’s potential to relativize the ego’s tyrannical grip on consciousness. Mindfulness begins with watching the breath as an object, but like an ancient alchemical process, the first step is separating the elements in the prima materia. In the increasingly subtle, step by step process of sati, awareness (much like the sun which always shines even when seemingly obscured by clouds) begins to separate from the ego. Awareness then begins to function (still shining!) without the need for an inner commentator. It sees, without the ego’s incessant commentary: “I am seeing.” I believe that the Buddha’s method, based on sati’s inherent “tendency,” or potential, to separate, is precisely what Jung saw as psyche’s tendency to separate, and he saw it not from a pathological perspective but as an intrinsic path to the Real. It’s the way we grow! The paradox in both alchemy and meditation is that only in initial separation can the parts be differentiated sufficiently, and then reunited, or transformed into wholeness.
• • •
Finally back to the session with Tom: Little Tom found no avenue to continue developing on a “normal” psychological path where time was on his side, so he “split off’ from the conscious ego, and became a “fragmentary psychic system” separated from the greater psychic system called Tom. He became an autonomous entity. He did this because a tendency to dissociate is inherent in our consciousness. Now I am not smart enough to know whether little Tom’s splitting off occurred because the conscious ego, Tom, could not bear some relentless level of psychic pain in the little guy, so he pushed the little one away, or if in a more mysterious way, little Tom retreated because he no longer could connect to the larger entity. Perhaps both things happened simultaneously. The point is that it happened, and it happens to so many of us and to our inner children. They became fragmentary psychic systems, and, as a result, we became less imaginative, less capable of seeing metaphor in everyday life, less creative, dryer, less child-like, less joyful and more like beings who live in the Kingdom of the Literal. In other words, we became what is commonly called “adult.”
“Neither spirits nor gods would have ever come into existence.” Oi vey. Another rough patch ahead. (To be continued).
