the trapdoor at the bottom of being
One cannot blame life for being what it is and sidestep being a fact of life oneself. One may be tempted to get out of life by ending one’s own, but that leads nowhere. An apple (rotten? poisoned? juicy?) bites into us and keeps on biting. We may not be able to stop life’s bite, but refusal to make believe what is happening is not happening opens new spaces. We change by our immense effort to confront what cannot be solved.
I sometimes describe this as a kind of psychic wormhole. We keep batting our heads against walls and something in our psyche opens, takes us somewhere that did not exist a moment before. We go in one place, come out another. A new portion of being is exposed or created. We feel differently because we are in another portion of existence.
There are stories that talk about a hole in the ground or going through a mirror or magical furniture, a wardrobe, a carpet, some point of entry to somewhere else, another existential plane. We play down this experience by calling it fantasy. Or overplay it by solidifying it into institutional religion. Or turn it into a sideshow or con by pointing to fakirs who exploit it.
What I am trying to point to is something intensely personal. As if the psyche is perforated by its own intensity and one finds oneself in another part of vast, unknown terrain without discernible forms or objects, just hints, ineffable sensings, something not liquid or solid or gaseous, yet mysteriously existing, an elusive landscape or background painted with tones of light and dark.
One finds oneself far away from the immovable wall one failed to penetrate. One day soon, one might bump into that or another wall and head-banging will resume. But, for the moment, one is somewhere else, another place. One failed to penetrate the wall but somehow penetrated oneself. Something in the core of one’s being gave way. And, like stories where one is whisked away by an unknown force, one is whisked to another state of being.
It may take years, much of a lifetime, to catch up with the discovery of such a little known or used capacity. But each time one tastes it, one feels the possibility of peace beyond understanding, bliss, happiness. One feels the thing itself. A discovery that stays fresh with use: one can never get enough of it. It adds a moving glow to existence, good or bad. One tries to channel, dose, and map it and, in some significant, if tiny ways, succeeds. But it is gracious enough, kind enough, to remain unmappable.
-Michael Eigen, Flames From the Unconscious: Trauma, Madness and Faith
