Death Practice Dreams 012
A Story That Eats Itself
Had a fantastic chat with Bree Greenberg that is up for viewing here:
Death Practice Group #6, The Story That Eats Itself: An Introduction to Non-Conceptual, Sleep & Dream Practices, is coming up Weds Nov 16th 2022 4pm PST.
As i try and help guide people through the maze of their own interpretive confusions, we come across the extreme fear and protections against real intimacy & honesty. Conceptual Practices like visualizations, complex alchemy/neidan, introspective contemplation, etc, are great, and, they only get us so far back home.
What’s a rogue writer-practitioner to do? Well, write some more I guess. So here you go. Also stay tuned to my instagram as I might do some more AMAs and a Livedream before the 16th.
Humor & Trauma’s True Reflection
One of the hallmarks of entrenched ghostly "trauma" is the inability and difficulty to laugh - at the pain, at the conditions of the pain, at the rest of reality that isn’t the pain, etc.
Laughter itself is a very interesting neurophysiological phenomena. In animals (we were and still are) laughter is actually a kind of barking, it’s a defensive communication, a speech-action that takes real energy to enact. This proto-laughter isn’t quite yet the laughter we associate with the word.
In a group of animals, this barking-together is called mobbing. That is, it is a group defensive action, a bunch of animals bark-laughing AT something, at other beings. It becomes clear that it is a protective mechanism. It stops the other beings dead in their tracks. It is like a thunderclap or small explosion in the environment. It says, “together we are strong enough to make this too risky for you.”
From this great ape behavior, our great old ancient grandmothers banded together and developed the first rituals — symbolic speech-actions combined with full red ochre bodypaint, the first real theater of the oppressed, in order to stop the naturally occurring rape and violence domination that happened to them. The red color disguised which of the women was menstruating and summoned a real image of solidarity, firmly announcing that these women were “wrong time, wrong species” for sexual intercourse. The women mobbed or bark-laughed as part of this ritual theater.
Eventually, this bark-laughing as defensive performance became singing & laughing as spontaneously occurring trembling inside the group body and inside each individual body of the group. What started as defensive enactment gains a life of its own, it transforms into the form of laughter we recognize today.
But without that initial defensive reasoning, we can’t have the laughter we like. Because the laughter we like is based upon a kind of rage-defense speech-action that is socially contagious. That is, it is strengthened and gains momentum in groups.
Before laughter is a yes, it is a no, and more than that, it is a no that lives in-between joy and fear, between agency and perceived helplessness, between pleasure and pain. It is connected, again with women, to the flooding of biochemicals that happen during childbirth, and to all members of the species when undergoing an initiatory ritual that involves, singing, dancing, drumming and some form of difficult actions such as scarification, piercing, fasting, bloodletting, ritual fighting, etc.
Why is any of this important for our modern, secular experiences of pain, oppression & “trauma”?
The ability to bark-laugh at a perceived danger is the action by which we can regain fluidity inside of our nervous system. When this bark-laughing becomes the spontaneous trembling that takes on a life of its own, we can experience the entire system “thawing” and revealing its non-victim status, regardless of the externally oppressive conditions. This to me is a glimpse of nondual reality in which pain, fear and hunger are not deterministic of our identities and narratives.
Humor is the capacity to tell heretical stories about “the way things are”. Humor is how we break the rules that keep us enslaved in co-dependency, learned helplessness, narcissism and domination. Humor is the capacity to not just endure, but thrive inside of difficulty. And thrive TOGETHER. Humor brings us out of the isolation & individualism that the trauma body convinces us is protective.
Humor, the Rulebreaker, allows us to imagine a what-if? story directly inside the arena of our own perceptions, interpretations and value judgments. It allows us to directly perceive that “the way things are” is not the ONLY way things are.
As much as trauma, pain & fear seek validation for their experience, they also seek a validation in which their experience is either the ONLY truth, or the MOST IMPORTANT truth, mimicking the very same toxic hierarchal dominance models that appear to have caused the trauma in the first place. In this way, we can begin to clearly see that trauma is a replication of the trauma that caused or infected it, taking on a polarized identity position and changing perception to perceive a world of binary and polarized agents at constant odds, offering only win/lose scenarios or compromised transactions.
It becomes very “sticky” to interact with a hurting person who is radiating this way of perceiving. States of consciousness have their own kind of vibe or gravity that is somewhat contagious. Life, Nature, is interdependent, every “thing” is “bleeding through” its containers all the time in various ways. This is a double-edged sword, because human attention is wired for threat detection as a primary defensive capacity. The “traumatized” mind then, begins to perceive threat everywhere, and also seeks validation and a group body to help protect it, just as our ancient grandmothers did. But groups that all believe the same mis-perception are likely to behave as zealots, fanatics and dominators in their own way, replicating the dynamics that created them in a misguided yet in some way brutally honest attempt to free themselves from the protective walls of trauma that are suffocating and imprisoning them.
But how can one become free of these defenses when the defenses themselves appear to be the only things keeping you “safe”? This is the hell-of-mirrors that is a mal-adaptive defensive response.
Humor then, is a way that we can play directly with the mirrors in that hellish fun house as first steps to breaking free of them. We can use the mirror maze itself as a kind of playground for the whole system to gain increased intimacy, honesty and playfulness within the apparent confines of the castle that is a cage, this castle that is made of glass.
In this castle-cage-mirror-maze, one of the hardest challenges is for the person to begin to discern real honesty from danger/narcissism. The system is laden with double-binds that cause internal conflict & compromise. The person has learned to numb out or dissociate from the complex tangles of non-choices that appear as “irrefutable facts” inside their decision making system. They have not yet learned to play with new options for the sake of play, as every choice which is really a non-choice, appears to be a matter of life OR death, safety OR danger.
In reality, these either/or choices are not really real, but appear to be so in the nervous system of the person. All the more reason why there is an imperative towards Humor, which is one of the ways our system can go BEYOND THINKING, even if only for brief moments. This beyond thinking experience space is where real truth, real honesty is reflected.
However, the WORST thing, from the perspective of the trauma body, is for anyone to tell the truth. Telling the truth is an admission of real honesty. It is not a domination tactic by which the truth you are telling is the GOD of ALL POSSIBLE TRUTHS THAT MUST BE OBEYED. However, when a traumatized person begins to tell the truth, they will often use truth-telling as just another weapon in the arsenal of the domination strategy, because on some deep level they believe that domination is the only “real” way to survive, even as their own oppressed and traumatized survivance shows them otherwise.
The battle playing out within is between the desire for honesty and the desire for power, because the person has yet to feel the true power within honesty. They still believe a narrative that you can either only have power (and be dishonest) or be honest (and powerless).
The Rulebreaker of Humor knows this is an absurdity and seeks to undermine the social norms of domination, hierarchy and dishonesty at every turn. For even when Humor is engaged in obvious farcical fictions, the honest expression of the fiction is revealed as somehow MORE honest than the normative social constrictions and obfuscations.
The trick is to expose the internal double-binds and narrative hallucinations as honestly as possible, without shying away from the absurd, dreamlike nature of them. It is not merely “feeling feelings”, but expressing the poetic multiplicity of our personal complicity with the cage-as-castle. Exposing the recognition that the very things we use to “protect” ourselves also trap us in a psychedelic maze of projections and victim cosplay.
an all too short bibliography that has informed this writing
Beyond Thinking: A Guide to Zen Meditation by Dōgen
THE PRE-EMINENCE OF THE. ACTOR IN RENAISSANCE. CONTEXT. Subverting the social order. by Scott McGehee, as part of The Routledge Companion to Commedia dellArte
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I appreciated the long conversation you posted at the top of this post, especially about finding the truer moves. I have watched myself take them and miss them, with important findings. I think lately about superman when the villain is putting him in a bind: ‘choose superman, save the world, or save your girlfriend!’ And he answers with a wise crack and somehow saves them both. And while it never really seems plausible that he could get away with a total victory, I think about play and humour giving us a few extra seconds to think of a different outcome or a truer move. The second nervous system idea is freaky and there’s a lot of inner chatter going on about that, for me right now, mapping and charting the features of my better-known delusions might be an easier task than trying to smell Truth