Latest / Gabriel Ellis, PhD | The Curious Mind Podcast / Everyday Trance IV: The Magic of Emotions - Kundalini, Sartre, Buddhism

Transcript

Everyday Trance IV: The Magic of Emotions - Kundalini, Sartre, Buddhism · Gabriel Ellis, PhD | The Curious Mind Podcast

• 0:01
  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Curious Mind
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  podcast. My name is Gabriel Ellis and in
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  the previous episodes I shed some light on what I call the
• 0:11
  everyday trance, which means briefly that in everyday life we
• 0:17
  are always embedded in some sort of trance that limits and
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  narrows our state of mind. Today I will focus on the role
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  of emotions and how they magically transform our
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  perceived reality in connection with those everyday trances.
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  But let me start a little bit with the digression.
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  I happened to start watching the HBO series Breath of Fire about
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  the pseudo Kundalini movement by the pseudo gurus Katie Griggs
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  and Yogi Bhajan and the miniseries begins with a short
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  quote from Katie Griggs and here's an extended version of
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  it. I will leave the source of the
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  YouTube video below. Here goes the quote.
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  Reality is a trance, so that means that you can define the
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  trance. Self hypnosis.
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  Your reality is a trance of your own making or someone else's
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  making who doesn't have your greatest good in mind.
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  And she continues, any contemplative practice is going
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  to give you an ability to start to take that sovereignty of
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  thought choice back. And then when there are thoughts
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  that aren't yours, you can say, oh, that's not mine.
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  That's actually not my thought because I am happy, I am good.
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  So on the surface that sounds pretty close to what I have
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  described with the everyday trance.
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  But let's take a closer look at where the similarities and where
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  they differences are. Katie Griggs describes a variant
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  of trans in which there is an outside world, but the trans
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  decides whether you are happy or unhappy.
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  She implies that we cannot remove the trans from reality.
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  So far the similarities, but then it goes downhill both
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  philosophically and ethically. When she says that there is a
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  creator of this trans who has bad intention toward me, this
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  automatically creates an enemy image.
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  Who these nefarious forces are remains unclear here, but it is
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  certainly the others end quotes. This way of speaking
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  automatically brings with it a logic of fight, attack and
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  power, including power over myself.
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  She then goes on to say that with the help of contemplative
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  techniques, 1 can identify negative thoughts as not
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  actually mine and thus return to the actually happy self.
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  I think that I described a more correct understanding of
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  everyday trans in the last episode.
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  The trans is based on the structure of the mind itself,
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  with its transcendental and psychological categories, and
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  it's based on the evaluations and interpretations of my
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  experiences, which are aggregated in the unconscious
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  and then give the conscious self the everyday impulses.
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  And who do these past evaluations and interpretations
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  come from? Well, from a mixture of
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  internalized evaluations of others, yes, of parents,
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  society, friends, etcetera, but also of my own evaluations which
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  I have also internalized. So clearly Katie Griggs enemy
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  image is wrong. There is no villain who wants to
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  manipulate us rather than mind as it is constructed, produces
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  trances, even unhealthy trances on its own, even if they're
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  based on my own past experiences.
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  As I sometimes say in my therapies, your past solutions
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  will become the futures problems, which means when I
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  developed solutions, beliefs, convictions in the past that
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  helped me in a certain situation.
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  When they get automatized and not applicable to the present
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  time, then they will become an obstacle because they will
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  hinder me to get a clearview of the present problems and the
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  necessary solutions. This is the trance that I have
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  created myself and that I suffer from in the present.
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  Another false idea is that you can define your own trance with
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  self hypnosis. This is too simple because the
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  trance encompasses my entire experience, my entire worldview,
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  including our idea of the self, so the idea of who I am.
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  We cannot separate the trance from ourselves and then in quote
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  put ourselves into a new trance. Conscious self hypnosis only
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  works in relation to limited content.
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  For example, if I'm afraid of a certain event or I want to get
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  over the end of my relationship. Or sometimes athletes learn self
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  hypnosis in order to be more relaxed or focused when they do
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  whatever sports they do. Milton Ericsson, the founder of
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  modern hypnotherapy, for example.
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  He was ill with polio as a teenager and he taught himself
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  self hypnosis to deal with his pain and paralysis.
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  So self hypnosis only works in parts of our experiences, not in
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  relation to the entire everyday trance we are in.
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  There are two major problems if I believe that I can re
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  hypnotize my entire life. First, the unconscious will
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  eventually fight back against the ego's obsession with
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  control. And this is not only my
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  experience and my view. Philosophers such as Plato,
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  Hume, Russell, Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacombe and de Luz have
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  already pointed that out, and I think I will deal with this in
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  more detail in a future episode. Secondly, practitioners who fall
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  for such impossible claims and promises will inevitably ask,
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  OK, tell me, how do I do that? This great self hypnosis and
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  this puts them in a regressive child position which makes them
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  vulnerable and can get them to be exploited psychologically,
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  physically and financially. Which unfortunately happens all
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  the time with sects that make such impossible claims, such
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  promises for unatailable goals. Goals, including these as it
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  happens in the HBO series with a pseudo Kundalini group.
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  And by the way, I recommend to watch this serious Breath of
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  Fire. And also as a side note, this is
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  not in any way a commentary on Kundalini itself, which is a
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  long tradition in India, but of the people who bastardized this
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  Indian tradition in for their own purposes.
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  Anyway, this is a good introduction to the actual topic
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  today, namely how the components that I've described together
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  with the emotions work together to create the everyday trends
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  that we find ourselves in. To start with, just a few words
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  about my approach. Through my almost 15 years of
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  therapeutic experience and over 20 years of meditation, I have
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  developed a very good understanding of these
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  psychological processes through my psychological, philosophical,
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  and spiritual experiences. I think that I'm fortunate
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  enough to be able to describe the topic holistically, at least
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  for myself. But when I prepare podcasts, I
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  don't want to pretend that I'm the first to know the individual
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  mechanisms involved. And that is precisely why I'm
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  looking for historical predecessors who have dealt with
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  the puzzle pieces in detail and who you can look up if you're
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  interested in it. And an important side effect of
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  me dealing with those texts is that I can of course, learn a
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  lot from these old masters myself, even though I have had a
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  good intuition of the topic. And so during my research I came
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  across an important contribution, namely by the
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  French existential existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre,
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  who described the role of emotions in the construction of
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  reality in a work that was published in 1939 called Sketch
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  for a Theory of the Emotions. Then he describes how
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  unconscious emotions influence consciousness in such a way that
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  the body perceives a qualitatively changed world.
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  OK, the idea is as follows and I will go into it in detail and I
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  hope you can understand it then. So first the Organism is
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  confronted with an unpleasant situation and then in response,
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  the mind tries to magically, and this is the wording of Satra,
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  magically remove this danger either through an action, for
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  example fleeing or destroying, or through a magical suppression
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  of its own consciousness and magical.
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  He uses the word because the Organism kind of magically makes
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  the dangerous object go away through activities or through
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  shrinking of the consciousness. In the first case, which is
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  fight or flight, the willpower is focused on the impulse to
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  flee or destroy, and other content is blocked out.
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  So this means that we either have concrete actions of flight
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  or aggression, or at least the fantasy of such actions acting
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  out scenes in the mind, mental images, fantasies of flight or
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  fantasies of violence. What happens there is that
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  consciousness is narrowed, and in this narrowness past
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  experiences of flight or aggression are brought up, and
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  this opens the door for all kinds of regression, which is
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  for past experiences and evaluations and judgements that
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  are superimposed like a film over the concrete experience in
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  the present. As I described last time,
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  consciousness benefits from the fact that the psychological
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  present is not a point but a period of time, because there it
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  has at least a short time to reflect.
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  It has a choice on what to react to in this blurry the smeared
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  presence. And secondly, the present
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  consists of many layers, the psychological present.
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  This means that the reacting consciousness has access to a
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  large internal library of impressions of flight and
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  aggression at virtually any time.
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  It can therefore always react to old emotions with new emotions,
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  right? Because there is a period of
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  time. In this period there is, for
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  example, in the layer of emotions, there is a memory of
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  an emotion of aggression, for example.
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  And then in the same presence, because the present time is a
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  period of time, it can induce already a new emotion that
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  reacts to that. It can react to old emotions,
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  with memories, to memories with emotion, to memories with
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  physical behavior, to mirror memories with feelings, and so
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  on and so on. This is the consequence of the
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  mind having several transcendental psychological
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  categories which at the same time are layered in
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  consciousness. The availability of these
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  impressions is ensured by the narrowing of consciousness,
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  which fills all available layers with only very specific
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  information of flight and aggression, which makes it very
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  likely that they're reacting. Consciousness will then fall
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  back on trans thoughts, trans memories, trans emotions,
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  evaluations and feelings of flight and aggression.
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  So the entire mental system, all the different categories in the
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  different layers are filled and overloaded with very similar
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  content. And as a consequence of this,
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  consciousness gets stuck like a broken record.
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  The reacting consciousness has just not diverse material to
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  react on, so it has to choose again and again.
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  Fight thoughts, fight emotions, fight memories, fight fantasies
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  and so on. So this was the fight or flight
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  mode of the trans, and it is similar with depression.
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  And here is a quote from Satrin My Melancholy, which was at the
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  time The term for depression is a method of suppressing the
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  obligation to look for these new ways by transforming the present
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  structure of the world, replacing it with a totally
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  undifferentiated structure. What it comes to, in short, is
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  that I make the world into an effectively neutral reality,
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  emotionally neutral reality, a system which is effectively
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  incomplete equilibrium. Objects highly charged with
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  effect are decharged, brought down to effective zero, and
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  therefore apprehended as perfectly equivalent and
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  interchangeable. In other words, lacking both the
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  ability and the will to carry out the projects I formerly
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  entertained. I behave in such a manner that
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  the universe requires nothing more for me.
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  This one can do only by acting upon oneself, by lowering the
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  flame of life to a pinpoint. And the noetic, which means
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  mental correlate of this attitude, is what we call
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  bleakness. The universe is bleak, that is,
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  of undifferentiated structure. And this is what depression is.
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  Nothing seems to matter, nothing is important, nothing needs to
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  be acted on. Of course, it's not a pleasant
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  state of mind, but this is exactly what Satva describes.
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  It's a shrinking, a shriveling of consciousness as a response
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  to seemingly unsurmountable problems.
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  We find such an extremely emotionless consciousness not
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  only in depression, but also in strong dissociations that occur
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  in cases of abuse and trauma. Also.
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  There the victims feel no longer themselves or they experience
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  the situation as if outside their body.
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  For example. What is crucial for Sartre as as
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  an existential philosopher is the organisms programmed
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  tendency to react to danger with a narrowing of consciousness,
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  which means with the perception of the world.
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  That leads to a reduced ability to take responsibility for
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  oneself and thus a reduced ability to express 1's free
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  will. Responsibility and free will
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  were essential aspects of Sartre, who wanted to emphasize
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  with his philosophy that we as a basis basic kind of state of our
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  existence. We have the responsibility for
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  our life, for our actions. And he wanted to lay kind of
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  open these existential facts so that we as a reaction to that or
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  as a consequence of that, that we don't fall prey to the
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  trances that seem to suggest otherwise, that we cannot take
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  responsibility, that we don't have a free will.
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  So this connection between unconscious emotions and a lack
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  of responsibility for our actions, it also casts a
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  problematic light on the intuition and our so-called gut
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  feeling. Because if we take a close look
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  at what actually happens when our intuition speaks up, we see
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  that it must be based on needs that are inextricably interwoven
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  with fundamental beliefs. So they're not automatically
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  interwoven with truth, and they're not automatically good
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  for us. So the intuition alone does not
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  tell us whether we have a reaction that is healthy or wise
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  or unhealthy for us. What we're actually doing is in
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  a complex situation. We are shifting responsibility
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  for our actions to our inner authority, which is the gut
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  feeling and intuition, with the hope that this inner authority
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  already knows what is good for us.
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  Unfortunately, intuition, just like trans and feelings, comes
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  in a package that suggests authenticity, so we tend to
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  believe it. But the fact that we delegate
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  our responsibility to an authority, whether outside or
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  internal, is already an expression of a reduced
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  consciousness, shrunken consciousness.
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  And it is very difficult in everyday life to assess whether
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  the inner voice is truly wise as it pretends to be, or if the
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  voice represents a past that is no longer valid, or if it
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  represents internalized voices from society or from our parents
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  or the people that we think are cool, and so on.
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  In my therapeutic practice, this means that I definitely
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  encourage clients to invite, feel and perceive intuitions,
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  but not simply accept them as the voice of wisdom, but to
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  rather integrate them into a broader perspective to really
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  assess them, and only then to decide how to act.
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  OK, so first first summary beliefs.
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  Unconscious emotions and conscious feelings appear as
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  three interrelated aspects. Beliefs are the condensate, the
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  summary of previous experiences that represent the worldview of
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  my past, regardless of where they come from those beliefs.
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  Unconscious emotions are the representations of these beliefs
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  in this very moment in the present, and they cover my
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  current perception with the trans.
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  So the unconscious emotions are the trans blanket over the
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  perceived phenomena in the present.
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  And feelings are the representation of the
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  unconscious emotions in consciousness.
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  So these are the conscious feelings and they can further
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  strengthen the current trans, but they don't have to be there.
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  I often work with clients. Who don't have conscious
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  feelings, but are nonetheless driven by unconscious emotions
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  and the trance that it creates. And the fourth aspect is the
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  physical actions that make the trance a reality in the outside
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  world and thereby further cement it.
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  So when I act on my trance, people perceive it.
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  They react to me being in the trance, which I then perceive
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  and so this kind of connects with my belief that I should be
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  suspicious and so on and so on. So my actions kind of further
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  cement the reality of the trans and feed it back to me.
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  So what happens in very unpleasant situations?
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  The organisms first reaction is that it cannot cope with a
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  challenge. This belief activates previous
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  beliefs in which the way of dealing with overwhelming
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  situation is stored. The reacting consciousness
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  narrows down the perception depending on whether fight,
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  flight or depression, So what kind of style or predisposition
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  we have. This is triggered in the blurred
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  present. More and more layers of the mind
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  are filled with content that corresponds to the trans, as I
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  mentioned, thoughts, feelings, perception, memories, impulses
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  of will and impulses of action. And this means that finally the
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  reacting consciousness has only trans content available.
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  And this of course is the solidification of the trance.
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  So the consciousness gets lost in the trance and this naturally
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  raises the question of how do we get out of it?
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  I will cover this in the next episodes, but I can tell you
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  it's there are only moderate approaches to it.
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  I will not promise you kind of the five steps to get out of
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  your everyday trance. We cannot get rid of the trance.
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  We can modify it, we can reduce it, and only kind of in the
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  extreme cases of the salvation in Buddhism, for example, there
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  is at least the outlook to a complete eradication of the
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  trans, but this is not available or attainable to us normal
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  beings. But before that, I would like to
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  present to you the the Buddhist view of the trans and the role
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  of emotions. And I think that after the
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  detailed descriptions I just gave to you, you will understand
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  the Buddhist text better because they are notoriously succinct.
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  In a sermon of the Buddha, and I'll leave the link to it below,
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  there is a talk of two arrows that hit normal people when
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  something unpleasant happens to them.
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  The two arrows are two types of feelings.
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  The first feeling is the immediate physical reaction that
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  is unavoidable to the unpleasant event.
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  This is what we react to. OK, here comes the quote from
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  the sermon from the Suta. When ordinary people experience
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  unpleasant physical feelings, they react with sadness and
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  lamentation and become mentally confused.
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  By the way, I adapted the translation a little bit, but
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  this is the trance, the reaction of sadness and lamentation and
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  the confusion they experience. 2 sensations goes on the sermon,
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  one physical and one mental. It is like someone being hit by
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  an arrow only to be hit by a second arrow after that.
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  So here the text distinguishes between feelings that are
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  unavoidable and reactions to those feelings which then lead
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  to further feelings, but which one unconsciously inflicts on
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  oneself. So the first ones are
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  unavoidable and the second ones, those unconscious emotions, the
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  unconsciously triggered feelings, these are something
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  that we inflict on ourselves and the whole Buddhist teaching
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  basically. And also the sermon tries to
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  point out that there is a second possibility to have only the
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  first emotions, the first uncomfortable feelings as a
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  reaction to uncomfortable situations, but the second, the
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  reaction to it is unnecessary. So these reactions and the
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  subsequent feelings represent the trance the sermon continues.
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  When ordinary people are touched by unpleasant feelings, they
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  resist them. In addition, they long for
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  pleasant feelings because an ordinary person knows no other
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  way out of painful feelings other than pleasant feelings.
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  They don't understand how the feelings arise nor how to bring
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  about their end. When they feel a pleasant
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  feeling, they cling to it and identify with it.
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  If they feel a painful feeling, they cling to it and identify
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  with it. If they feel a neutral feeling,
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  they cling to it and identify with it.
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  So these terms, clinging, attachment and identification,
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  they as a consequence create what I mentioned before, the
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  filling of the layers of consciousness and of the mind
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  with transcontent and to the reacting consciousness.
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  Only then has transcontent available to react to.
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  And this is what the Sutra, the sermon, calls the ordinary
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  people. This is what they do that then
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  they lament, they suffer or and a pleasant experience the
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  rejoice. All of these are trans reactions
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  based on unavoidable first impressions in the mind.
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  So these concepts of attachment and identification, they already
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  provide clues to how Buddhism solved this problem, but more on
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  that in the next episode. Important is here that Buddhism
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  was aware of the role of emotions and unconscious
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  emotions and feelings in maintaining mental problems,
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  which I'll call here the everyday trance.
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  And they integrated this understanding, of course, into
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  the Buddhist solution. As I mentioned, I will leave the
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  sources for the quotes in the description below.
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  The final remark. As a therapist, I passionately
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  enjoy to be a therapist, especially with clients who are
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  interested in tackling their problems with deep
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  understanding. So if you enjoy one of these
• 27:14
  conversations, if you are interested in therapy, look up
• 27:18
  the link for the trial session in the description below.
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  Look out for the next videos. I hope you're interested and
• 27:28
  continue to be interested in the contents that I provide.
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  Thank you. All the best.
• 27:34
  Until next time.