by Roland Bal
Conversation about conditioning and trauma and how it plays out on different level i.e. personally, inter-generational and collectively.
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Barcelona, Spain
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Trauma Therapy Transformation Podcast, Where we explore health, Recovery and consciousness. Where did mankind make a wrong turn? Right. I mean, It's a big topic and it's starting with a kind of negative proposition that we did make a wrong turn and that's for us the question still if that really happened. I mean the way I think about it when I was preparing the topic is to. . . Let's start on a micro level that I can see on a personal level that going through experiences that are upsetting them might be incidences or periods that have an effect on my emotional well-being and the way I acted out in my relationships in the world. And I can take that a little bit further when I've kind of, Okay, I worked on several issues myself, Mother-father issues, Self-esteem, Repressed anger, Anxiety, All that. When you dig in a little bit deeper you see that a lot of these events that happen as personalities or incidences in my life that they're often related to first of all my parents or our parents in general. So we come more into the domain of intergenerational trauma. So what we identify with from our parents, What they carry with them from their parents, Etc. And not so much like going beyond like traumatic incidences or periods that happen just their mindset, The way they raise you, The way they kind of feed you the construct of society and their values. So it goes from the personal into the intergenerational and then from there on just to take it a little bit further or wider even we come into the cultural or the collective trauma or the unconscious where and again this is my own reasoning or my line of thought so bear with me. But I'm thinking more as to like major impacts that happen to us as a society, As a collective, Like wars, Floods, Big earthquakes, Famine, Feminine and how that affects us on a deeper level and also how that structures the brain. So hence my question as to did mankind make a wrong turn somewhere and how is our brain wired nowadays? Are we really fully present to the moment? Are we present to the now? And how is our brain functioning? How is our wiring functioning? Are we just using part of that? And that kind of becomes clear as we're like I've done quite a few meditation retreats myself and also I've lived in other continents and countries and you feel that just changing a country or a culture for a while you feel that you change perspective, You move into another part of you and you can see things from another perspective and the same happens with meditation that when you really sit for let's say longer than a week, More than five hours a day that at some point things start to shift, You start taking a bit more distance from your preoccupations, Your worries, Your thoughts and your emotions and you start to open up in something else like tensions go from the body and you feel more connections in the brain. Though the pain is that when you re-enter into society some of your older patterns come back again as well. It's like you're plugged into the construct of society and that then defines your reality and just on your own it becomes a bit difficult to kind of create a wholly different way of living or being connected to that state we come upon in meditation. So yeah this is from my perspective as to where did mankind make a wrong turn and what is it that on a day-to-day basis being human beings living in society, What is it that you potentially might be missing out on? Take your time, Let that sink in a bit. I imagine this inner awareness and inner peace being the source of making this turn as true, That indeed peace must be in me and you and others and the degree to which that's true things shift. And as you pointed out when I leave the meditated state or the sacred container I find occasionally in life I am impacted by so many of the cultural forces that it leads me to point to the early 1900s. Because if you look at history there is prior to about 1900 maybe you could look at it a lot of ways but about 1900 there is this incredible what some economists call great enrichment that happens and the great enrichment coincided with the industrial revolution where we went from agrarian to urban and we started if you were to break it all down cooperating. And this cooperation produced value beyond the understanding of previous history. If you imagine all of history and the value being created it is a pretty straight line for most of time and then at about 1500 it starts to come up slightly but at 1900 it takes a radical L shift and in the United States especially and Western Europe it is almost vertical. The amount of relative over the time of this last 100 years or so great growth in value riches manufactured and all even if you take the more subtle societal shifts lifespan infant mortality crime etc. All of these objective realities shift dramatically in a positive way and yet in the experiential value of life satisfaction inner peace it is not a parallel to suit the external. So I think the turn that was at the key of it being a wrong turn is at the time that this is happening and we have foundly as a culture in most places not all over the world but in the America Western Europe Latin America and maybe even some degree the Soviet Union the former USSR. We started cooperating and there was a fellow named Kropotkin a Russian fellow who was advocating a theory of cooperation that it is cooperation of the fittest it's the cooperative people it is the way nature works the colonies and the ways in which nature actually creates value are cooperative models. At the same time Darwin is writing his survival of the fittest and that phrase comes from his work which had not really that as its core title and it was romanticized as that's what's happening with the Industrial Revolution we have learned how to and even Adam Smith's theory of economics was distorted to be about everybody's self-interest is what produced this great enrichment so it began to be about the separation rather than the cooperation and it's the survival of the fittest and what is later comes out as Ayn Rand's don't worry about others be your absolute best self the others are pulling you down it is not where the value in our world comes from and this battle for the minds of the culture is what took place at that point and for reasons I judge our ego fear-based that I when I am an individual and now asked to compete the rugged individualist that it was represented by America the cowboy the way in which I get ahead and make it on my own and damn the rest of you I will lead us to the value and the greatness became romanticized in movies and in literature and the culture instead of choosing Kropotkin's no we need to stay in a cooperative model we'd be better being bees than being whatever it is that we envision as individuals and that was the term because as an ego it is indeed incredibly fearful once I separate myself from you from nature from the culture from others and now it's on me to make the world in my image it is all distorted and it comes from a sense of ego fear and desire so we get consumerist culture and we get marketing to get more we get the more is better we get all of those distortions of reality and that's what sent us on this incredible roller coaster ride where we get things but not wholesome inner values and inner satisfactions and that that was the distortion and I think that that's the place we sit and the ways in which you can now look at where cooperative models are seeking almost like a plant turning to the sun and every cultural way in which we're saying even the technology I personally really enjoy Facebook and what it does to our culture and the way in which there's this togetherness that's bubbly and funny but just like nature it's messy but it's moving us into this and technology is allowing for I don't know if you've noticed what's happening at Amazon now but Amazon is like a huge tree of you want anything Alibaba and Amazon will provide it for you will have no needs in the future you don't even need to promote your business they'll promote it for you you don't even need to create your product promote your product they will help you do it and these two huge vines are growing along in the world and creating a return to some natural way of being I think we've had in our conversation the idea that there is a the only ego less wisdom comes from something natural in the body and I've talked about my my way of saying if I hold my breath after I exhale and wait until my body's urge to stay alive gets me to take an inhale that inhale has an energy to it a truth to it that if I use it and run all the way out to the end of that inhale I become a natural being I am at my exalted karmic prana filled Kundalini best and if I operate from that place I am again like the original source energy may act into something and that shift is what's taking place and causing this combination of hopefulness and despair that we're feeling in the current state so that's my hallucination about where the current happened and how it relates to where we are at this time. Now you mentioned earlier that there's been a lot of change especially around the turn of the century but the kind of the L shape that you said of acceleration and our emotions there's something not matching that there's been such an acceleration but in terms of inner peace that hasn't been really growing in the same acceleration or the same speed. Because it was co-op competition not cooperation. Now I would actually take it a lot further back in time that and I'm going to question your hypothesis or your way of thinking a little bit that's why we get together of course that yes I agree with you or I can see there's been so many changes the last hundred years or again an acceleration of different changes economically communication connectedness that when something happens in Europe it affects the whole world and vice versa. But I would kind of I would assert that on a very deep level something fundamentally has been static and it has been static for a long time in the sense that yes a lot of our outer world has been changing but we still hold on to what you mentioned rather than being cooperative we're self-centered or self-based. Just me my own safety my own security and then the other and like following that line of thought and coming back to our original question where did mankind make a wrong turn where might that have happened and I want to see if we can go into it as a questioning process rather than asserting a position of knowledge because it's for me it feels the question itself I should put the topic as a question did mankind make a wrong turn somewhere I should put it as a question because it leaves us open to explore what happened. Now there are a few theories out there that kind of point us in some direction as to like in the Bible they talk about the big flood as something that happened on a worldwide scale now might it have been that through a worldwide calamity we moved away from a brain state or a being state that was more integrated that was more caring for each other for the for nature for the world at large and through that cataclysm we moved into a wiring a brain wiring that's more focused on survival and just looking at our brain structure how we function it seems like I read a few books that said the melatonin that we produce is far less than what it used to be and in mammals or human beings many years ago and it's that level of melatonin which is a hormone a brain transmitter a neurotransmitter that neurotransmitter helped us to connect bigger cover bigger areas in our brain structure especially covering the connection between the left and the right hemisphere and between that you have the corpus callosum which is really the connection between the left and the right hemisphere and gradually over time because we've been practicing that self-centered survival way of functioning that connection between our left and right brain has become less and we can kind of see that in the way that I'm generalizing it but we can see that in the way that we act that we're quite future-based especially in Western civilizations we're logically intellectually based in the way we operate predominantly and that what we put out in the world kind of feeds our inner structure like it feeds back into that survival mechanism and then more so when we collectively do that so yeah what are your thoughts on that that indeed the core experience you describe of how we have shifted because of this external pressure to be alone the sense of being alienated right so what do we want as a as a species connection and safety connection and safety connection and safety and robbed of that in a world that says no you're alone you're not connected to nature not connected to your soul one another and all those different ways it creates a physiological shift right suddenly parents are going off to work the factory rather than home nurturing on the farm right suddenly societies are crowded and all the institutions that used to exist in the home health care was in the home you were born and died in the home you had all of your energy needs were met by the home in the hearth all of the ways in which you were had a central place and a family and a community were broken down as people went to the urban setting and without the same kind of the urge was always there all of the support groups all the people were there trying to help women's liberation and all of the other getting the vote and all that all those energies existed but there was this now heavy cultural pressure to be alienated and feel alienation so where does that come from because just to kind of scale that down a bit we can also see that in our personal lives and often my clients tell me that I have good intentions but then there's part of me that sabotages the whole thing and on a personal level and following the life story you can kind of map it together as to there's part of them that still lives in the past due to their past traumatic experiences that need expression now taking it to the more society level that you just described that there's these intentions or there have been these structures of wanting to nurture wanting to provide for health care but there's the part of us and again I would say even collectively that there's a sabotager there not with mal-intention but nonetheless it's like the spirit of trauma runs deep and that kind of pops up its head sometimes it skips a generation but then it pops up again one generation later in our history in this 20th century history hundreds of millions of people were killed over ideology yeah and the idea of ideology is based in the level that you and I understand it and talk about it in terms of belief and belief I hallucinate comes from a kind of alienation if I'm not safe and loved I need something to go on so communism begins to be my that will solve our problems there are problems it's manifest it's obvious there are problems I am alienated you're alienated I'm feeling this you're feeling this we're all anxious we begin to have this lack of the melatonin happening in our brains because they're not soothed our parents didn't soothe us their parents didn't soothe them all this sort of way starts to happen and now the anxiety leads to well I now need to externalize identify externally with some thing that is to say so whether it begins to be a kind of religious fundamentalism a kind of political distorted reality yes we all just if we all only if we just get rid of the outsiders it'll be good again all these ways in which it began to distort itself into external and these are powerful forces if a Hitler comes to power a Stalin comes to power Trump now comes to power Trump comes to power we begin to have a distorted reality now that impacts everybody and all of this wonderful earthy human want to be the right intentions was overpowered by that so so I think that there needs to be just a fundamental recognition I in my work I think we've shared it before I ask of myself and those I work with that you at least consider no longer believing that your thoughts and feelings are true right okay would that be an inception point yes and if I can get myself to question every thought and feeling as it comes up and stay curious about what it really is asking of me but my feeling of abandonment arises which is the result of this living in an alienated culture I no longer give it the power to to control my actions right but I consider now slow slow that down a bit because this is interesting stuff as to what happens because these interactions are so quick there is a thought coming up we identify with the thought we give it importance in a certain rightfulness or righteousness and then we become caught up with the thought pattern and then the emotion emotions get infused in it so what is what provides the framework where you can kind of keep that on hold and start a questioning process do we always need to have a crisis or is there another possibility there my notion my particular imagination says there is the possibility of this breaking of that cycle right an interruption that's possible at the end of every exhale right and you notice in our conversation and if anyone's ever around me you'll see me frequently right which is my version of breaking whatever urge is coming from this thinking feeling loop that is about to send me over that edge out of intention into action because the intention never changes the only action that actually ever serves me is love and peace right and relaxation but hold on there I'm being the devil's advocate that that might not be the starting point where many people are that might be and I include myself sometimes or at times that we might be I might be very identified with something I might be so caught up in a certain belief it might be whatever so when you start to say when you talk about love and compassion for me it's like kicking me against the shins when you start coming from the other end I'm putting this in deliberately because some people might be listening they say young come on be real I'm in conflict you can't you can't start with love suddenly no right totally I totally get it I hear you that's why I say the only egoless wisdom comes from the body so what I need to do what I advise and I practice is right right is it something let me say yeah no no I think that my service so if I am in upset conflict fear worry anger shame overwhelmed I am already manifesting a symptom and a fact that I am NOT where I want to be and in my case where we actually are when we are safe and loved so my opportunity is to get back to that place I've been taken away from from home I am kidnapped by my thoughts and my feelings and I am swirling in the world upset crazy and everything and yet because I live in an alienated culture where I have to protect myself and I'm not aware of the connection I have with everything I have no choice I've got to defend this is how I feel this is what's going on how dare you tell me to go back to peace and love right you idiot and I need jerk if I can get myself if one can get themselves to take that exhale and drop down maybe more than once maybe ten times at the end of one of those exhales will be an ability to wait right and in that space everything I learned in my now 40 some years of yoga is that yoga really is only important if I can get myself to pause at the top and pause at the bottom of that it's that space between the breaths where everything happens so if I can get myself to do that drop down and then pause suddenly I wake up I remember and when I take the inhale fully I mean to the degree possible for a human to fill themselves and actually unfurl my spine extends and I feel completely from there I remember who I am really who I am not the anxious alienated creature and creation of my experience and from that place there is nothing but connection and love and right right a kind of joy am I for many people I might take more incremental steps though that when this first anger anxiety okay can I first take that breath to start with and remind myself that breath I put it in different terms I think for me the the biggest tool one can have is negation and for me negation is to be aware of something without feeding it more energy which again you can say it's also a certain way of breathing in or breathing out and being with that gap state as to okay and I usually say it to people can you feel the pressure of thought without going into the thoughts itself the directions of thought itself so when you take your attention and your energy will probably be concentrated in the head when there's conflict when there's thoughts going into all directions now without going with the thoughts themselves can you be aware of the pressure that those thoughts give or the heat that it gives off for the disconnection that it gives and can you use that as a starting point and that in itself is a negation because you're negating the movement of thought pulling you in a certain direction and that is the inception point rather than going with the flow of thought which is always bound by as you know already guilt blame self-approach regret jealousy embarrassment shame comparison when there's a break in that and there's a shift into where am I here right now even if that's disconnection that opens up a pathway to connection and if that's starting with the outer ridges which is I'm present with just the pressure of the head to the uncomfortability of that that is a starting point to take you on slowly on deeper and deeper and I just mentioned that that when you start with the inhale and exhale and then directly from love and compassion that for many people it would just be a shock to the system or too much of a step to take they're like what the hell young I can't do that what are you asking of me so I like to kind of break it down as to okay where you are where are you right now and that will be an infusion of thought emotions future past and kind of push that into the now and from there on go from the disconnection to the connection the physical tension of it and from there on slowly on you can take it into the different emotions and the different dissociations and then the different stories connected to it and then the different stories behind the stories connected to it as like in the light of our topic now one of my questions I have is to I can to some degree I can work on my personal issues so there's you might feel you and me or any other person that's been working a lot on themselves that does this ever end or is it does it become something that we can get stuck in ourselves that we're looking for the continuous improvement or self development or the continuous bettering of ourselves and like going deeper beyond the personal into the how did I say intergenerational into the collective or is there a point where you say okay let me can I look at the whole field at once so the whole field of consciousness with all its different layers of interactions and see it as a field or what David Bohm calls thought as a system can I look at that whole field in itself and hold that have the resilience to hold that and move beyond or move through that I don't know why am I taking in this direction but it kind of happens right now so I'm appealed to by almost everything you say and it really enjoy the exchange and I have long held a few ideas one is and then you bring it up with your question I believe that we need a 12-step program called thinkaholics anonymous because this indeed is the greatest addiction of all that I believe my thoughts are real is my number one addiction right and when I let go of that addiction which wants me to continue to make it better and better and in some way come up with an answer and finish this quest right gets in the way of my actually doing what you say and that is apprehended all at once from a place of acceptance and not even acceptance just recognition right that this this is the movie of a cognition I would say but yeah yeah cognition I'm just I'm having this experience or this experience is happening and I need not control it understand it or even name it and from that place my little breath practice is just a tool to take me back to awakeness and cognition when I get when I fall asleep and believe my thoughts right but there's a cleverness coming in very subtly very quickly as well and you mentioned earlier we might go from one system to the other we might get identified for looking with security and communism then that doesn't work we go to democracy then that doesn't work then we go into Buddhism and that doesn't work then we might slip into alcohol and that doesn't work as well then we might slip into finding the perfect relationship that also really doesn't work as an idealism and even when we meditate deeper and deeper we have this idea of enlightenment that we get focused on of some another objective that we can grow or become at some point in a future point of time so it becomes more subtle and more clever and we get caught along the way in different directions for me what I come back to is like the common denominator is always that sense of time which keeps creating itself or we can we get caught in that process of time of projecting somewhere in the future yeah so how can we live with time out of a sense of timelessness because you can't say okay I'm gonna do away with time because we live in a physical reality we've got projects we've got ambitions we've got interactions with other people we've got a body so how can we live with a sense of timelessness how can we live at time out of a sense of timelessness without making that into in the next object of enlightenment for me the the value of age has been the recognition of how little I really understand and know to the degree my answer to your question is it's a mystery right it is the the Native American the First Nations approach to great mystery right the prayer is always to this not knowing right right so you and me you and me right now opening these questions and like as I'm actually verbalizing those questions that sense of creativeness or mysteries we're inviting it within the room or as we're describing our processes of thought feeling and how we can get stuck on something or how we can divert from that sense of mystery again we're pointing out disconnection and that helps us to connect actually to essence right here right now so can we can we invite ourselves to be present to that as we're going into this process right now yes and I am stuck in duality entropy impermanence and I am a dualistic creature having this experience so I need tools to remember and wake up as the culture we described that has taken the wrong turn I judge creates an effect on me that brings me out of that state and into the anxious ego identified confusion of trying to make it answer itself get me out of the discomfort I need all those things you listed when you talked about alcohol and these are ways to handle the discomfort mask it or manage manage it and I'm saying the only way to manage it is to not believe in it and let the mystery wash over me over and over again and the tool of the breathing which that's all I learned from yoga is this space between them that's where mystery lies that's where peace is there's silence in there there's space in there there's all the experience of it happens there that's beyond my thinking about it so I need not continue to identify with the thought in almost any setting my experience of my beautiful bride is not about what I think about her it is when I go to what's she smell like how does that feel what is the texture of the touch between our bodies how does that actually experience that works and satisfies me at an essential level where none of my thoughts about her beauty or thoughts about what she needs to be your thoughts about any of it so you
4.4 (42)
Lavinia
December 18, 2021
More please ...
James
February 10, 2018
Great talk,..for me simply ,we as a species took the wrong turn when we lost our sense of community in the West,when capitalism replaced community,when the seeds of competition were nurtured ,instead of our environment,this blue planet,when lust for power as individuals,and globally fed our egos...,and we lost our way. Thankfully,to places like insight timer,and many other places around the world....I believe it is us that holds together ,with loving ,positive energy and insight...the very thing that is saving this human population,this planet. Progression in the last 100 years has had its good points...but it has come at a cost,I think the human condition will never change in my life time,and balance Is returning,but we need to do more. I believe humans by nature are loving creatures,it is this that gives me hope, But we need to speak out more,stand in front of the negative energy,and say no more. Loving kindness to you all
Tara
March 17, 2017
I enjoyed the conversation between them. I liked the idea of our thoughts not being real.
Terri
January 28, 2017
Important conversation. This is great. Thanks!
Rita
October 31, 2016
Another "wow" you two! Thank you for your thoughts...lol...and sharing them with us.
Colleen
October 12, 2016
Very interesting talk.
Alexis
October 12, 2016
Loved that conversation !
