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Notes to Transformation - Chapter 4 - Loss
of Self
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All existence is made from energies. Energy, by its nature, flows
and changes freely, coagulating and dispersing like a mountain mist.
Some of these processes are slow, and some are lightning fast. The
energies collected in rocks take longer to alter than those in muscles,
flowers hold their form longer than emotions. Indeed, emotions and
mental activities are among the most fleeting forms of energy: As
Buddha said, "a million thoughts pass in the beat of a butterfly’s
wing".
The baby registers every event as energy and sensations. He sees
auras and devas and sometimes other psychic phenomena. He has no
sense of himself, but is merged as one with his mother and everyone
around him. He feels her joy, her fear, her anger and her weakness
as his own. Thus the totality of his mother’s emotional makeup
becomes part of the baby’s identity, even in small things.
Emotions in adults have been civilised and controlled. Instead
of flowing freely and spontaneously, our anger, hate and jealousy
hide within us like compressed nodules waiting to explode. These
immobilised nodules I call ‘energetic closures’. We recognise
the nodules in others and call them a personality. The way she shakes
her head or flicks a finger, the tone of her voice when speaking
of him, the disarming laughter that deflects criticism -these personal
traits are what we see of the energetic nodes that have gone into
her creation.
Closures are free-flowing feelings which have been blocked and
immobilised. Most of us would recognise that we put tremendous effort
into holding them in, and are often deeply ashamed whenever they
break out. Being energies, they still radiate on everyone round
about and, as babies are sensitive, some of these closures will
be permanently imprinted onto his growing psyche. As a baby responds
to emotions and sensations long before his mind can discriminate
or use language, whatever is imprinted at this time creates the
ground on which the mind will have to function. Few other factors
will be more important.
This is typically how it happens. The baby is asleep and peaceful
but his mother becomes anxious from something she heard on the radio.
The baby feels this anxiety and wakes up fretting. Mother hears
and, anxious something may be wrong, goes to comfort him. This discharges
her anxiety and, as she calms down, so does the baby who goes back
to sleep. Mother believes she has comforted her baby, but in fact
the baby has collaborated in comforting his mother. The mother’s
energetic node is already inducting a matching pattern in her baby.
In another example, Wendy is shopping with her baby Sarah and sees
something that triggers anger in her. Sarah picks up this change
in energy and becomes fidgety and uncertain, and may throw her dummy
out of the pram. Wendy, needing to discharge her anger, picks up
the dummy and scolds the baby. Sarah is now being attacked directly,
and starts to cry. So Wendy picks her up and both are comforted.
The process of energetic induction begins as Sarah merges with both
Wendy’s pattern of anger and with the method of discharge that
brought her comfort. Week after week Wendy will repeat this pattern,
though the situations may change. One may occur in the shops, the
next when visiting grannie and another looking at the telly, but
there is a common energetic sequence behind each one. Sarah gradually
acquires a set response to this often-used pattern of her mother’s.
As she gets older this response may become a primal influence in
developing a ‘cool’ demeanour where she is incapable of
revealing her anger. This major component of later behaviour started
in small everyday interactions between Sarah’s connectedness
with her mother and Wendy’s own complex egoic energies.
This phenomenon has many disturbing implications. In taking on
the energies of her mother Sarah has, in a sense, inherited Wendy’s
closures. In the deeper layers of her personality Sarah is not living
only her own life, but also the life of her mother, and since she
‘inherited’ in the same way, Sarah is also taking on aspects
of Wendy’s mother before that, and older generations long forgotten.
This is called karma by some. Parents may continue to induct their
closures on their children well into adulthood, and even after they
die.
None of this behaviour is deliberate or conscious. Yet it inducts
energetic closures of the most profound kind, and there is absolutely
nothing the parents can do about it. The mother’s influence
is generally more important than the father’s. Even if the
man was absent he would still be present in the child’s growth
through those energetic patterns in the mother which chose that
man. For example, mother may have been a giver who married a taker.
This father hardly need be there for something of his energy to
effect the baby, because her need for a taker in the house will
cast this baby, willy nilly, into the same complementary role so
she can go on giving.
As the infant separates from his mother he is likely to attach
to some of her energies to prolong the final moment. Though the
mother may feel she has given so much of herself to her child in
love and effort, she is very unlikely to have been changed in any
fundamental way. But it is entirely different for the baby, for
his primal energetic patterns were open to being influenced at the
deepest level.
By the time he is a couple of years old he may contain more of
his mother than himself. Not that this self is unimportant. We are
given a certain mix of characteristics and essence qualities from
the beginning. Each of the children in a family will evolve differently
as their individual energetic patterns and the effect of their birth
permit. A strong-willed baby will react differently to the supermarket
situation than will a tender one. A baby with a curious nature will
not react in the same way to a jealous father as a baby who accepts
easily. Each child will respond to the energies impacting on him
differently, depending on his original nature.
In the baby, feelings and sensations flow easily in the open space
of the psyche. They come into being and are expressed or responded
to, and pass away as easily as they have come. The interaction of
free energy with the baby’s original mix of qualities is not
unlike the water-laden air which creates what seems to be a stationary
cloud as it passes over the mountain, whereas in fact the cloud
is being continuously formed and dissolved as the air rises and
falls. Over time the closures inducted from the baby’s carers
tend to congeal his flowing energy into nodes. The quick mobility
of his being becomes restricted into structures which thereafter
direct his responses. When accessed in session these closures feel
like alien presences inside that can be sensed as we would sense
an object. A major task of our work is to bring awareness to these
primal closures so they may be released. As the energies are freed
we begin to feel that experiences are occurring within a vast inner
emptiness. This achieves something akin to some Buddhist meditations
which lead to the experience of our nature as space.
"There is just open space. Our most fundamental state of mind,
before the creation of ego, is a basic openness, a spacious quality."
Chogyam Trungpa
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