Where do the Conscious and Unconscious Meet?

It all begins with zero.

I had a moment way back when my son was little and still sweet that epitomizes the gap between the basement and the ground floor level of awareness. We had just moved back to California when I reached this place I call Metaphysical Sublimity. I call the moment sublime because sublimity is a state of awe that occurs in the face of the extreme, whether that be The Terrible or The Gorgeous. I’m referencing the literary definition of the word as opposed to the scientific, not that there really is a Scientific Sublimity but I need something to help me tag the moments that we call sublime. I’m thinking of works by authors like Ondaatje or Sebald when I refer to Literary Sublimity. You may not have affinity with their writing so substitute as necessary. It’s the work that transfigures the platitudes of the normal for the viscereal sensorialism that are hard to put into words. The word ideal falls short but I’m getting closer. What they do to the human experience is to alter subjectivity so that our consciousness and unconsciousness merge in alignment with something bigger. Conceiving a baby was like this for me and once he hit puberty being a mother became something closer to dealing with a stranger in my home. That sounds terrible and that’s the point.

How does this transference of reality happen?

From a phenomenological perspective:

First, I must be aware of what I think and/or feel and make note when it’s an above normal happiness or joy and then I accentuate the realm to utter bliss. What happens next is awful every single time. I the ride to the peak then I hold on, something like being on a ski lift in the Alps that’s got a little too much grease on the line. It’s rapidly taking me down. I’m up in the buzzing space that shamans go to, above the body, the eighth chakra. I can see the vistas from here and then I feel the car jolt as the lift jerks and swings and heads down the snow tipped mountains. The clouds pass like froth on a foamy capped cappuccino. I feel the weight of the icy droplets in the air. I shiver and the energy takes a nose dive down my spine and rings my second chakra like a bell. I’ve only been on a roller coaster and it was sheer hell but this ride is heaven because it’s my body and mind combining the awful and the great. The cocktail is Transcendence. I’m in a state of pure vision, no judgements or expectations. They’re all wiped. I’m gone. It’s just clarity, this me is aware of the body around me, under me, over me except there is no me.

I was first introduced to this state of being, what I call Metaphysical Sublimity with its extremes in a tenacious axis the year that I was also introduced to the concept of Limit Experience. The mid-twentieth century French philosopher Michel Foucault’s writing was the medium through which I found a way to recontextualize the terrible discoveries I was making. Episodic amnesia took up residence in my brain in my early twenties, about the time Foucault designed and participated in the Limit Experience that ultimately led to his death.

Both terms have affected me profoundly as I have traveled both existentially and physically through events, places and the making of a connection with another human. Intensity abounds. Strangers are strange at first and then they become something else than “Other” if we stick around and they stick around, too. 

Around 2:00 AM I reached the Metaphysical Sublimity through some inner work. My soul awakens me in the wee hours quite a lot. I’ve connected the hours with the Chinese Organ clock; Qi was in my liver at two o’clock. I tracked whether the emotional states of these nocturnal journeys are colored by the emotional energies that a particular organ processes. Often it’s the case but often the link is more mysterious. When we aren’t keeping our energy regulated and our engines humming on all cylinders during the day, the mind and body go to work when we hit deeper vibratory levels of energy. Beta is where we do the drama. It’s our waking state.

Then, according to UCLA researcher Dr. Izhak Fried. He likens each brain neuron to a orchestral instrument’s musician explaining that in this metaphor the conductor, the consciousness of the sleeper, has taken a break. This is where my brain’s conductor decides to come back early and when he enters the door of the auditorium, the unfiled cellular structures of memory from the day are rebelling and don’t want to be codified as a part of the composition that’s on that night’s performance list. Instead, they need the conductor, my consciousness to become the listener of dissonance and to individually place each note in the sheet music giving the overall concerto a different emotional tone. The timbre is then routed to a point in time that biologically corresponds to the wisdom of the body’s own cataloguing system. If during the day I railroaded my sensitivities into alignment with social expectation, they want recompense. They want the conductor to sit down with the composer and figure out a more authentic way to communicate the identity of the emerging self.

For instance, here’s an easy association that most can relate to: the heart is the center for love but it can also get stuck if we interpret incidents in the world in a way that signals to the heart that we aren’t ready to face the truth of the situation and need more time figuring out the nature of the union. The heart then stores the event with all its implications and details. It becomes a storage facility for the quality of energy that we don’t have to the will, the courage, the faith, or the strength to manufacture as something else, something closer to what would make the heart hum along. It’s like oil being free flowing in the engine of your car or getting all thick and dirty and making your car chug along instead of humming up those rises from the valleys to the mountains. 

So, it’s noon and I’ve driven down to the Marina where the air is about ten degrees color than the rest of LA, and I’ve slid into my best writing booth at my favorite coffee cafe and I’m sipping my stand-by on my non-caffeine days, lemon-chamomile tea. As opposed to my once a month foray into the deep, cacao-ish taste of cold brew this herbal tea requires me to sit still and focus on my tongue and throat as I take in the icy subtly. A year ago I could not tolerate drinking something seemingly so useless as flower petals; I wanted a drink that would make my brain change gears like green tea does. 

Now as we’re inside the hottest months of summer and my body is more supple with the heat doing yoga every day for the last four months, my body and not my mind dictates how I conduct myself at the counter of the cafe. I notice the big jars of tea the way I now notice the quiet men in a room instead of just seeing the demonstrative conspicuous guys that usually prevailed in getting my attention. 

So when I was up at two this morning the kind of inner work I was doing was an energy refinement, I guess you could call it. And now, less than 12 hours later the difference in my attunement to the world around me is similar to the way it feels when you lower your body into a warm tub of water compared to the reaction you get when dunking yourself in an icy fjord. Both are nice. One’s easier to spell and get to but according to science it’s these extremes that light up our mitochondria and give it vibrance. 

The liver processes anger according to legend and this morning’s result explored suppressed rage, the ultimate taboo for my body to feel. Handling extreme emotions during the witching hours catches me off guard, my mind is off the cultural grid. This allows me room to embody aggravating life circumstances in a more graceful way once dawn arrives and the rhythm of daily interactions takes hold in the body again. The result is more room for the authentic aspects of my personality which gives me what I crave most, creative freedom. 

Each time I lean into the architecture of change I find new ways of using the tools provided by the frequent emotional jostling and psychological discombobulations that we humans engage in with friends, family, business practices, and institutional infrastructures. The magic of the conversation between the individual psyche and the layers of interaction we encounter in an average day, especially if you find yourself in a metropolis like me, is that each day contains experiences that land on two layers of the mind: the conscious and the unconscious. The more familiar terrain gets processed by the top plane of the psyche, consciousness and the trickier experiences that aren’t readily assimilable are packed up for storage in the unconscious.

Having developed a very clever and resourceful filing procedure, the mind allots values to incoming psychic stressors. An alarm response from the body’s physiology, say, with heightened articulations of power and clarify the separation between its shadow, force. The mind then has a chance, a brief pause, to tag the charged experiences with levels of reaction: 

L1 the detritus of life, the nonsensical and the annoyingly banal encounters making only a faint imprint on the time continuum.

L2 patterns of relational disrepair that will probably need attention eventually if we intend on continuing to interface with this person, place or thing, 

and, finally,

L3 the whopper, the horrific natural or unnatural forces that are devastating to the psyche’s sense of  identity and safety; this is the level that opens up the crack in the Universe and as Leonard Cohen sang, making available unfulfilled qualities to be reframed  within the elasticity of sublimity. 

IMPETUS TO THE FREEDOM JOURNEY

As you know from your own experience with the subconscious L1 and L2 aren’t that big a deal. They are irritations, gnats on the surface of the realm of transformation. They don’t inspire change. 

L3 is a different animal altogether and is the place Carl Jung often points to in his alchemical work. He thinks it’s worth a look-see and on mornings like the one I’ve just passed through I think he’s right, empirically the grace filled ease of my day proves his point: 

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life 

and you will call it Fate.”  C. G. J.

Reaching Metaphysical Sublimity requires going into hell with your waders on and feeling around in the muck of episodic amnesia until you pull up the root of the disturbance,  shine some light on it, and as it dries out reshape it into the aha moment which often requires allowing the body and mind to collide within the horrible truth that’s been soaked in the reality of denial.

After having gone through this alchemical process of transmuting stuckness into elasticity myself many times and then metabolizing the fecund material through creative projects including academic (masters, ph.d) curriculum/research, South American shamanic journeys and ephemeral writing techniques, I’ve learned to dig down to lip of the zero point and employ ancient and contemporary tools to open up the binaries of the psyche. This is where possibilities for clarity surface. 

Specifically, we hone in on the unmentionable episodes and explore the walls keeping the journeyer from a more vibrant life. I’ve used these tools with a playwright, a founder of an entrepreneurial start up, writers and more. Centering on libidinal freedom we track libidinal manifestations: desire, will, interest, passion, are explored at their root.

I’ve seen great results through helping people work with blocks in their professional projects and personal lives. If this work calls to you, let’s work together. I started doing sessions over the phone with people while I lived in Berlin and they were exciting! I think of them as Freedom Journeys.

To get an idea of what these discovery sessions yield peruse these testimonials from clients.

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