Let us talk about the state of mind that is a trance. This is nothing new, it has always been here, but particularly now with all that is happening in the world, it is very important to wake up from our trance.
What is a trance? This is a state of mind in which we are not conscious and aware, and we are running like hamsters on our wheel, over and over again, caught in an unconscious pattern.
Random House Webster’s defines it as: a half conscious state, seemingly between sleeping and waking, in which ability to function voluntarily may be suspended; a dazed or bewildered condition; a state of complete mental absorption or deep musing; an unconscious, cataleptic or hypnotic condition.
How on earth did we wind up in this trance?
First, most us live in a trance to varying degrees, and the trance is so insidious, we don’t know we are in it. The whole of society functions in a trance, so we see it reflected and echoed back to us everywhere and we fit right in. It is normal; this is how we and our society function. This ties back to my previous blog that was about living life instead of retreating in fear. Another reason we don’t fully live life is the condition we are now talking about.
We wind up in a trance for various reasons. One is that we are born into this world and we get conditioned. Another is traumas and psychological wounds that create unconsciousness. The basis of this trance is the mind.
Let us first look at what happens when we come into embodiment, when we take on a material, human body. This is a narrowing, a limitation, as the spirit that is vast and unlimited is poured into a finite vessel. I have written much about this in my book. Together with this comes the principle of ignorance - we forget. This is the basic principle and challenge of the human condition; we don’t know. It is like a seed that grows into a tree of ignorance with many limbs, and branching off into all kinds of thinking, emotions, and behaviours, the fruit of this ignorance.
The body or matter represents the unconscious; it lulls us to sleep. We are mesmerized by the snake. We forget what we are and we get caught in unconscious habitual patterns, in a trance. But at the same time, living in a body on Earth is an opportunity to wake up! Here is a seemingly nonsensical paradox but it contains truth, like the Zen koans, which can open our minds and facilitate awakening.
We are born as little defenseless and vulnerable babies and we are open, connected to the whole and not yet separated from it and our spirit. You may have seen the wisdom that lies in the eyes of a baby, feeling that here is a wise soul looking out from the face of this tiny, wrinkly human born new in the world to begins its journey. This is wondrous, isn’t it?
Then the conditioning begins. There is a good reason for this as we must learn about our world and how to not hurt ourselves and others, but I am going to focus on what the dynamic of conditioning does to us.
Our parents are the authority in our lives and tell us what to do and what not to do. We learn all kinds of rules, how to stay safe and how to behave in a social context. No, it is not okay to stomp on a frog or your playmate. You can’t behave like that; you need to be nice. Don’t ask that question; it is impolite and you are putting that person on the spot. This conditioning takes place everywhere in our lives. Through family members, elders, then our teachers and mentors, our bosses, people with authority through their position, titles, and popularity, and the government. So we get conditioned in our families, in our schools and universities, at work, in clubs, in our churches, on our spiritual paths, and in society as a whole.
Beside this, we are born into the world as it is. This is our normal and we tend to accept it for what it is; we don’t know any better. In the West, we wear black to a funeral. In India, they wear white. Why? Many of us are raised with the idea that you go to school and university and then you get married and have children. This is just what we do. There is nothing wrong with this if this is what you want, but that is not always the case and we fight with what we think we should do or others tell us to do.
Conditioning also happens through the systems we have developed in our societies. Systems are there for a reason, but they are devoid of humanity and heart. They are robotic and unconscious. It is only we, human beings, who can inject heart into the systems by how we use them, but we often don’t do that. So we become conditioned by the rules of society and we accept this. For example, in the current Covid19 circumstance, we have to line up to get in the grocery stores and store employees are policing this. You need to stay two meters away from other people and only so many people can be in the store at the same time. Even in communities where there are no cases or just a few, the same rules are enforced. Why? This is a conditioning as rules are imposed on us. We are conditioned in this way when we interact with government institutions; there are certain rules and we must abide by them, even if it harms us and it doesn’t make sense. New rhetoric has been introduced: essential and non-essential. This is another conditioning and now the idea has been planted that who we are and what we do is essential or non-essential.
Because of this conditioning, we wind up with many beliefs, assumptions, and behaviours that we don’t question or investigate; we don’t think critically about them. This conditioning is like a veil covering our society, but this veil, of course, exists within us.
Traumas and painful experiences create wounds in us that make us go unconscious. We develop defense mechanisms, specific behaviours, to keep us safe in fearful circumstances, but we keep engaging in these patterns even when the original situation is in the past. This is a form of unconsciousness. We are caught in unconscious patterns of believing, thinking, feeling, and acting. This shows in reactivity. For example, someone says something critical to us and then we react with anger and a counterattack and it is difficult to stop. It is like the doctor tapping our knee with a hammer and the leg twitches. These are unconscious, trance behaviours. I call them a trance because we are not present when we engage in them.
I remember a person behind the desk in a hospital, who reminded me of my mother in a specific way, having to repeat herself three times to me because I couldn’t hear what she said as I went into a trance. Or that time that a friend when saying goodbye to me in the lobby of her building where another person was present went into a trance, and said goodbye using words that indicated that I was having a problem, and I was going to be okay and to take care. The words didn’t fit my situation. This felt like stepping into an alternate reality. I could feel the energetic pull of this trance. Trances are obvious with people who do repetitive work or have to say the same thing over and over again. I was once at the US border and the agent went into his routine asking questions. I and my then husband had a different answer to one question, but the agent ignored it; he stayed in his trance.
We create stories about ourselves and our lives based on our experiences, such as our traumas and wounds. This creates a trance. We personalize what has happened and we make it about us. For example, if I am abandoned by a parent, I will likely create a story that I am not lovable or good enough. I am not important. These are conclusions I draw about what has happened and they are always wrong. I have made a big leap in logic and made the behaviour of the parent about me. I have made it personal to me and now it is my fault. Critical thinking is necessary here to carefully look at this story because it is full of holes and simply a lie. But many of us don’t tend to look critically at the stories we tell ourselves, we are used to them, and they are like a permanent irritant in the background, or we are not even aware of them.
The ego itself is a form of trance. Ego is self-awareness but when it becomes identified too much with our bodies and personalities, it can become a problem. It lives in its own world, created through its pain and thinking, and it lives in the head. Most of us live in the head and that is a trance; this is a virtual world of often unhelpful thinking and believing, and it takes us out of a grounded way of living in our physical reality.
The story The Emperor is Wearing New Clothes is relevant here. A vain emperor likes to wear new clothes and he hires two weavers to make him a new set. The weavers don’t make him clothes but tell the emperor the clothes are invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, incompetent, or stupid. When the emperor shows off his clothing to his subjects, they don’t dare say anything because they don’t want to be seen as incompetent. But finally, a child cries out: “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”
This story reflects what goes on with us and society. Covid19, and particularly the response to it, is a good example of this; the emperor isn’t wearing too many clothes. It is reflected in the field of psychology. The public has been educated in a certain way about the counselling field in psychology that doesn’t reflect reality. Psychology likes to pretend it is like the natural sciences, and that is true for some areas in this field, but not for the field of counselling. The fees psychologists charge are based on guidelines by their professional organizations and are kept high to fit with the created image of the psychologist as having a scientific education. This doesn’t mean there are no good psychologists, counsellors, and therapists who offer good value.
We don’t want to be seen as stupid, which translates in our time to being racist, bigoted, a conspiracy theorist, a climate denier, any kind of phobe, and simply a nasty person without empathy. This is the social control that wants to force us to admire the emperor’s clothes while in reality he is butt naked. This dynamic exists in much of society, which we believe operates in certain ways, but alas the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.
The child sees the truth. It takes not the ego but our child-like nature that is open and curious to see what is really going on. It can see reality because it is devoid of beliefs and propaganda; it doesn’t operate in a trance.
Our trance exists in a big way in who or what we think we are. This is the biggest story of all. A story we have created and believe in. Many believe that we are our body and personality with all its thinking and emotions. That is the biggest trance of all from which flow forth all the other trances. We are back to the tree of ignorance that produces much fruit.
I have written a lot about self-similarity in my book and I come back to it here. It means that parts of an object are the same as the whole; the object looks the same on any scale, so it is a pattern repeating itself on different scales. Our ignorance, the trance, is self-similar. It exists all through our lives from the big, who and what we are, to the small. I will give another example of the small. A mother teaches her daughter to make meatloaf. She tells her daughter to cut the edges off the meat loaf before putting it in the pan. Why? the daughter asks. That’s just the way it must be done, her mother replies. Later, the daughter finds her grandmother’s cookbook and reads in her notes that the meatloaf must be cut because her pan is too small for the recipe. Think of the procedures and protocols we must adhere to at work, even though they don’t always reflect common sense. The rhetoric about Covid19 in the media and other places is another example: stay home or don’t go too far from home. Really? Why? Let’s look critically at all the facts and then come to a conclusion. Another example is the atom. We have been taught the atom is the smallest indivisible building block of the physical world, which is now outdated knowledge. There are drawings of the atom and its electrons. But what most of us probably don’t realize is that nobody has ever seen an atom. It is a theory and representation of reality. It isn’t reality. In our minds, this theory becomes fact and we don’t think about it critically, we don’t question it.
Trauma, overbearing authority, bullies, and being dominated in our private lives and in society adds another dimension to our conditioning. Abuse creates wounds and it can make us afraid, pleasing others to avoid conflict. Trauma can render us helpless, unable to defend ourselves. So abuse in our relationships can further condition us to go along, be reasonable, don’t ask questions, and not stand up for ourselves. It conditions us to obey and not make waves.
Trauma and abuse break our boundaries. Now we are unable to defend ourselves and this creates many problems in our lives. There has been a trend for decades to be liberal and open and to allow things to happen; almost anything goes. The world has literally opened as we now live in a global world. Many espouse doing away with physical boundaries of our countries, our borders. Everything must be open, but this is a recipe for chaos, and that is what we see playing out in the world today. I invite you to consider this. We have a door on our houses. What do you think will happen if we take the door out or leave it open or unlocked?
I have learned that the law of the universe, the processes of our lives, are the same in different modalities of expression. The physical laws of the universe also apply in our mental and emotional worlds. They just look different. As a therapist, I see many people who have difficulties with boundaries; boundaries are challenging for most of us. I see the difficulties and chaos that result in people’s lives when they don’t put boundaries. The same goes for us on a global scale. This is also self-similar. Difficulties ensue when there are no boundaries for an individual, a family, a community, a state, or a country. It is the same thing. The psychological difficulties resulting from no boundaries will also happen when a country has no boundaries. There will be trouble, as we are seeing in the world today.
The principle of ignorance is present with us because we don’t live in the heart or we have little connection with it. The heart brings discernment. This is where the little child lives who sees reality. Without discernment or understanding, we look outside of ourselves to determine what is okay and what isn’t, what is true and what isn’t. But now we become dependent on others and what they think and say, and that is not the path to truth. It is another trance.
The antidote to all this conditioning is enquiry, investigation, and conscious living. We need to ask questions. We need to question everything! Nothing is sacred, not the spiritual or divine or anything else. Any hesitation or block to enquire is an expression of a certain belief we hold onto and a trance. By questioning I don’t mean the resistance or desire to control and know of the ego. I mean engaging a true question, an enquiry, exploration, or deep looking into something to discover truth.
We need to question how our society works. We need to question what the government and people with and without authority say. We need to question what our doctor, psychologist, or guru says. If we walk a spiritual path and we do a practice, we will hopefully come to a place where we enquire into everything. We look deeply into who and what we are, all our beliefs and assumptions, and even God or awareness. Then we can become conscious and move beyond any spiritual or other path, any set of beliefs and customs that narrow and limit the open potential, of reality.
Let us look at the world with the eyes of a child, of not knowing (this does not mean ignorance in the way I used it above. Here it is used as the not knowing that is our essence), and discover truth through our enquiry. We need to think for ourselves and not abdicate this power and our responsibility to others, no matter how many degrees they have, or how popular they are, or how high the position is they hold, both on or off the spiritual path.
But how are uncritical thinking, the trance, and boundaries related? They are the offspring of ignorance, of not remembering, of not being aware and present in the body in the moment. Uncritical thinking is part of the trance; we don’t investigate what we believe, what others say, and what goes on. Difficulties with boundaries, if not caused by trauma, arise from conditioning and not investigating our beliefs, what others, the media, the government, and people in authority say, we’re simply not interested, while caving to social pressure to run with the herd so as not to end up as an outcast. Fear is what drives this uncritical acceptance. Fear is what drives all our unconscious behaviours, based on ignorance.
Particularly now, it is very important to pay attention as there is a lot of propaganda issued by the media and others. There is, in fact, an attack on reality and it is being inverted. Hold on to your heart to stay right side up! It is crucial to investigate what we are being told and come to our own conclusions, to let our heart speak about what is going on and to have the courage (the heart) to give expression to this.
It is vital for us to wake up. To wake up spiritually so that we know who and what we are and we can live in the real world that will change as a result of our shift to the heart. But we also need to wake up to what is going on in the world. These two ways of waking up are not necessarily the same, but both are needed.