By: Michael Eigen
Wait in the unknown and further transformation will occur.
I have learned that from experience. How can I say it if destructiveness may be rooted in an unknown source within? The word wait and the reality of waiting makes a difference.
This is something that psychoanalysis and aspects of meditation offer. Sitting with the destructive urge within rather than acting on it. Sitting as a different form of action. The dynamics of sitting in face of destructive pulls.
It is not only a matter of paying attention because attention comes and goes. It is more a matter of sitting through, waiting out. One may doze off and come back, become cloudy and vague punctuated by periods of attention. One attempts to stay with it but staying with it is intermittent. Freud noted that dreaming destructive things while asleep is safer than acting them out while awake. I wonder how much destruction while awake has a dreamlike quality, a kind of waking dream. Many qualities can feed destruction, including calculation, impulse, entitlement, injustice, pleasure and/or pain, determination, cunning, chance, opportunity, vindictiveness, hallucinatory holiness.
Psychoanalysis says, sit with them all. If you can, be with them, taste and smell experience. The more you sit with experience the more happens. Threads emerge and change, new feelings, thoughts, vantage points touch you. As time goes on, tolerance for experience builds, at least a little. One even develops a taste for tasting oneself and others and not settling for “this” view and no others.
It is not simply a matter of understanding. Socrates taught us that often what we take for knowledge is opinion. By sitting with inner waters we gradually make room for seeing how understanding can constrict us. Consciousness, our avenue of access and light of our lives, has its difficulties. What is it in us that seems to feel more or other than any of our capacities and informs them?
Waiting on the unknown and perhaps … the Impossible allows something else to happen. So much political psychology has been based on a control model, which involves inevitable swings between control and destructive outbreaks. What would a partnership model look like? Can we become better partners with our capacities and they with us? William Blake speaks of heaven as war in which each voice of personality has its maximum say yet all benefit. Rumi writes of welcoming all visitors within as valued guests. Here are hints of richness of waiting on unknown transformational processes beyond control with which we partner.
From: Under the Totem: In Search of a Path. Michael Eigen is an American psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is the author of 27 books and numerous articles. Among his interests are the relationship between mysticism and psychoanalysis. He draws on the work of a number of analysts and spiritual traditions in this work, commenting that he is "not a scholar, systematic reader, or follower of any school." While he writes from a psychological viewpoint, he readily quotes Dogen, Suzuki, Bodhidharma and Alan Watts.