Ever feel anxious? How about lonely? Depressed? Have you been there before?
Maybe you’re there now.
It may bring a bit of relief to learn that anxiety, loneliness, and depression have been the dark shadow of human consciousness for thousands of years.
You’re not the first, and you’re not alone.
As human consciousness evolved, the emerging challenges and opportunities of a complex social environment generated the pressure to adapt by forming a recurrent loop of self-conscious awareness (ego) in the individual.
Now, in addition to perceiving one’s environment and reacting to it, this new egocentric vantage-point awakened a capacity for standing apart from others and everything else, seeing oneself through the eyes of others, and accessing one’s own inner (subjective) experience.
Game changer.
From the position of what psychology calls ego strength, referring to a well-centered, emotionally balanced, and neurotically stable personality, consciousness is free to flow along three distinct channels.
- A psychosocial (“self-other”) channel leading outward to the stage of interpersonal relationships and social life.
- A psychosomatic (“mind-body”) channel leading inward to the grounding mystery of consciousness itself.
- A psychospiritual (“soul-spirit”) channel leading upward into transcendent experiences of higher wholeness, belonging, and inclusion.
Storyline A
Immediately when you were born you were welcomed by a provident community of caretakers and other admirers who made sure that your needs for safety, nourishment, protection, and love were adequately met. Over time as these bonds of healthy attachment were strengthened, your trust, regard, and appreciation of others in your life developed a natural intelligence along with the skills for social connection and interpersonal intimacy.
Today, this psychosocial (self-other) channel of consciousness keeps you engaged in relationships and invested in those with whom you feel safe.
Connection and love are essential needs of every human being, and without them (or enough of them) you feel disconnected, isolated, unloved, and lonely. Thankfully, in your case these needs were adequately met, resulting in the cultivated abilities of social bonding, establishing trust, building rapport, negotiating differences, resolving conflict, reaching compromise, and contributing your gifts for mutual benefit.
As a provident early environment nurtured your psychosocial intelligence and equipped you with the skills for cultivating connection and love, something else was going on deeper inside you. A psychosomatic (mind-body) channel was reading and reacting to those positive conditions by calibrating your nervous system to an adaptive internal state.
Held and surrounded by what you needed, a default resting state of calm composure was set as the default link between your temperament and environment.
Psychosomatic science confirms just how deeply involved consciousness (mind, psyche) is with the vitality and functional health of the body (soma).
Feelings (body) and thoughts (mind), states (body) and stories (mind), moods (body) and myths (mind) form an inseparable braid of intelligence that can be cultivated for essential wellbeing.
With a clear psychosomatic channel established, consciousness is able to release and descend to a stillness within for grounding and peace. This inner surrender to the grounding mystery of being is the original meaning of faith – before some religions got tangled in the web of belief, turning faith into the acceptance of orthodox doctrines and belief in the existence of god.
Still in most traditions and practices of contemplative spirituality, the goal of meditation is to empty out into the grounding mystery of boundless presence and inner peace.
The (psychosomatic) upflow of consciousness from this inner wellspring and outward to the (psychosocial) field of relationships and the social stage, continues along a psychospiritual (soul-spirit) channel that empowers a leap beyond the merely personal to a higher wholeness of transpersonal fellowship and unity.
Transcendence is about “going beyond” the anchors, boundaries, and horizons of personal identity and its managed world. Breaking through its cocoon of personality and meaning, consciousness takes wing into higher dimensions of participation, belonging, and community. Now, elevated and standing outside but still containing your ego (the psychospiritual definition of ecstasy), consciousness joins the consilient harmony of individual voices in a communal Ode to Joy.
Storyline B
Immediately when you were born, you awoke to a Reality that wasn’t responsive to your needs. For whatever reason, your taller powers and family of origin were not able or just didn’t give much attention to your cries for safety, nourishment, protection and love. As this went on, the normal and necessary bonding of attachment, trust, and affection was not adequately facilitated, and consequently you were deprived of the opportunity to develop your natural intelligence and skills for social connection and interpersonal intimacy.
To compensate for an improvident Reality, your attachment became more neurotic and desperate, unable to let go for fear of being abandoned. Under such compulsive demands, however, no amount of attention and assurances were enough to convince you to relax your grip and just trust the process.
Internally, you were in a chronic state of anxiety. Not having the safety and support of healthy bonds to satisfy your psychosocial need for connection and love, your nervous system didn’t make the body a calm and restful place.
You can understand how some religious and ascetical traditions might regard the body as a prison of the soul, characterizing salvation in terms of mortifying (suppressing and killing) its desires and gaining final escape for the soul from the body’s coiling tension.
Many forms of suffering and illness are the symptom and effect of an impeded psychosomatic channel, where the mind (psyche) has dissociated from the body (soma) and regards it as hostile territory. A lack of grounding and inner peace drives neurotic attachment in your relationships, as you expect and demand that others make you feel secure – or at least less insecure.
Your irrational and unrealistic expectations, however, are only a setup for further disappointment, renewed ultimatums, and a growing resentment. Just as you can’t let go (release) inwardly, you find it impossible to let go (forgive) the inevitable failures of others to deliver on your demands.
Feeling chronically anxious and episodically lonely, what is happening on the psychospiritual channel of consciousness? Actually there is little to no supply left for the higher wholeness beyond yourself, for the unity of life and community of persons that promise the joy of belonging to something greater.
Instead of joy, you feel depressed – “pressed down” into a hole of melancholy, hopelessness, and despair. Instead of ecstasy, you feel stuck in the muck.
If you find yourself in Storyline B, the good news is that you have finally found yourself!
The journey ahead invites you to get grounded and stay centered, then reach out to make connections that will inspire and support a leap beyond yourself into the harmony and higher wholeness that have held you all along.
Tracts of Revolution 