Life and Life-Energy

Roy Lisker

Chapter 7

Transformations of Being

The sense of "Self" – a intuitive recognition of “being a certain way” - is more feeling than idea, tied up as it is with an intellectual, or objective “identity concept”: attachments to one’s environment and community; claims to possession; memories; personal worth, etc. Such recognitions are normally deemed to be of a positive nature, as in expressions such as “self-respect”, “self-esteem”, self-discovery”, yet one also finds pejorative connotations, as in compound terms like “self-centered”, “selfish”, “self-serving”, “self-preoccupation”. Selfhood is a slippery concept at best, eluding our grasp when we most feel that we’ve come to understand it. All together it appears that the Buddha had the right idea: we don’t know what the self is, but we do know what hurts.

We will set up a distinction between Self and Identity, and between both of these and Being per-se. Identity will be taken to signify a kind of momentary self-recognition, as when we think, “So that’s what I’m really like”, or “I like to think of myself as”, “Now I realize what I really am.”

Self is a more ambiguous notion, constantly shifting, unstable, compounded of various, not always consistent components. Although it continually eludes our grasp, we cannot desist in our search for it. Being is an abstract concept, a philosophical category, the central issue of philosophy since the time of Plato: the pre-Socratic philosophers were largely concerned with physical substance, but, as far as we know, it was Socrates (and/or Plato), who saw that the dilemmas of selfhood constituted essentially moral issues, notions of justice, goodness, government and so on.

One ought also distinguish between the “external” or “objective” self, (one’s name, weight, height, function in society, nationality, state of health, etc.) and the “internal self” that is to say , “self awareness”.

As evidence of the existence of an Unconscious Mind, most of us recognize that our momentary self-awareness only covers a small fraction of our total potential. Everyone can relate a story to the effect that they had no idea that they possessed a certain talent – artistic or intellectual – until the day when they decided to try doing something with it. To a large extent, we are always discovering externally what we have always been internally.

Consciousness itself skits along the thin boundary between the animate and the inanimate, forging an identity which, to others and in part to ourselves, is void of internal content or intentionality. An intuition of personal identity, continually challenged and redefined, persists through all changes.

Yet what we call “Identity” is in fact a process, not a static thing, or entity, or substance.

The conflict between the unalterable realities of “external identity”, that is to say, objective observations of self, and the sense of “internal identity” is unceasing. This being so, the self-image abides in a continual state of flux. The anxiety attendant upon the recognition of the lack of self-knowledge when that knowledge is essential to planned action (Am I strong enough? Do I know? Can I cope?) may be itself inhibiting, even painful. Yet it can also be the prologue for a great adventure, akin to the excitement felt by a student or apprentice setting out to learn a subject or master a craft, knowing only that the journey will be filled with challenges and discoveries and that one’s “identity” will be forever changed by it. Yet effective action appears to be impossible without some meaningful answer to the “unanswerable question”: What am I? (This is the essence of the Zen Buddhist emphasis on spontaneity, the spontaneous execution of actions unfettered by doubts, questions, or worries about self.)

One’s life-energies themselves are bound up with this quest for identity. Would it not be simpler just to act, without the nagging question in the background, “Who is it doing the action”?

Acquired with difficulty, the sense of self remains vulnerable to the vagaries of a constantly shifting reality. Complacency is short-lived: in fact it is impossible for anyone to be complacent for very long. In proclaiming that the universe is driven by the forces of Love and Strife, Empedocles put the greater emphasis on the latter.

Shock

The immediate psychic reaction to any challenge to the Identity (taken here to mean the totality of the mind-body complex) is shock.

Shock may be brief or prolonged, exhilarating or

demoralizing, stimulating or acutely painful. A perceptible, if minute shock reaction underlies every sense perception. All things, from the faint buzzing of a fly's wings to the devastation of an earthquake, produce an initial reaction of shock. Shock figures in the adjustment mechanism as the first stage of the process of transformation of Being through confrontation with non-Being, that which is external to Self.

When the complex of conscious sensations, ideas, and life-energies bound up in unconscious attachments that go into the full scope of the self, is threatened by changing conditions in the outer world, the life-energies bound up with this conception are extinguished. It is in this sense that shock is the psychological equivalent to bodily death. Yet this stage is also the planting of a seed that will blossom into rebirth and renewed life. That it may be considered a sexually-related process is more than mere analogy: Like the creation of a somatic child, it progresses through a stage of insemination (Shock; encounter of Being with non-Being); embryonic development (Becoming, Pregnancy), and arrival at a new statement of self-awareness. The phenomenon of rebirth or renewal, either in the long-term, or in the immediate details of daily life, is central to all major religious systems.

In Detail: Any challenge, affront, assault, from the slightest irritation to a devastating trauma inflicted on the mind of the individual creates a region of non-sentience, or unconsciousness, in the living psyche. This healing of this wound is accompanied by the intense rediscovery of one’s existence, that is:

I am; I exist; I am alive.

Such perpetual activity is essential to our very joy in living: a

vibrant pulse of death and resurrection is our most potent

stimulant. Permanence and Change, Being and Becoming,

both sides of the equation are necessary for mental health. Happiness requires that the proper equilibrium be maintained between "deadly" boredom and "lethal" disaster. There is no condition that does not become irksome if maintained for too long. Security and Rootlessness alike have their advantages, but also their pitfalls.

Intense traumatic shock enlarges the domain of the lifeless Unconscious as repository of unassimilated experience, taking up what appears to be permanent residence within the mind. Hidden to its victim, evidences for its presence may be transmitted to the outer world through the

intricate structure of attitudes and behaviors associated with mental illness.

The “form”, what one might call the essential “shape” of the psyche is not so much a matter of its contents, thoughts, feelings and sensations, as it is about the design of the mechanisms, or processes through which we react to and assimilate new experience. Such words as “denial”, “withdrawal”, “dependency”, “obsession”, “rigidity” refer to the coloration that the fundamental internal adjustment passage from Shock to Pregnancy to Rebirth, will give to everything that enters the sphere of consciousness:

Psychic Being = (Mental Contents) + (Adjustment Mechanisms)

There is nothing mysterious about this: these are the biases and conditionings of the passions. They include not only our loves, hates, ambitions, appetites, beliefs, but, more fundamentally, the inherent psychological predispositions shaping our loves, hates, ambitions, appetites and beliefs.

A fearful and suspicious person, with tendancies to prejudice, will suddenly discover that he hates all the members of the new ethnic group that moves into the neighborhood. It’s basically a matter of a way of looking at the world. His fertile imagination will generate cogent reasons for fearing these people, and he will be prepared to take political action to keep more of them out.

Persons prone to denial will not accept that they’ve become alcoholics until they are rushed to the hospital in a coma; and even then they will refuse to face the simple truth. Or someone will consistently put the blame on others for their own failings. These psychological habits of dealing with facts, threats and challenges are far more important that the actual content of what a person thinks or believes at any particular moment.

Let us look at these basic mechanisms in detail:

Inertial Identity

Abandoning one’s cherished beliefs normally requires a considerable effort. Even clear evidence that someone’s views are misguided, wrong-headed, mistaken, immoral, or conditioned by immediate circumstances will be met with strong resistance.

These are not, of course, abstract ideas or matters of fact, but beliefs essential to one’s physical, personal, or intellectual security: insults to nationality, attacks on religion, insults to personal worth, accusations, suspicions that a spouse may not be faithful, threats to one’s source of income; and so on.

Even the most self-satisfied person, smug in his confidence in his own place in the world, lives in constant danger of being “awakened from his intellectual slumbers.” (In the case of Immanuel Kant, from whom the quotation comes, this appears to have been a good thing!)

The most unalterable attitudes are at the mercy of unexpected

events. And the fear is real enough: imagine an imperial dictator, someone like Stalin, who rules over many millions with an iron fist. One winter morning he steps outside the palace walls and slips on a chunk of ice no bigger than a quarter! Goodbye dictator, goodbye ruler over millions!

The classical Greek tragedies of Aeschylus (killed by a tortoise dropped on his head by an eagle!), Sophocles and Euripedes, all revolve about the central theme of resistance to change, (usually in the form of someone with his back against the wall, faced with an inescapable fate) and the shock of recognition when its reality can no longer be denied. Nor is the phenomenon necessarily negative. Rude awakenings can lead to the discovery of one’s unrealized potential.

We designate the complex tangle of habits and attitudes deriving from a stubborn clinging to a fixed notion of identity by the term Inertia. Inertia is the force within matter that resists change. Personalities in which inertial tendencies dominate are prone to fixed ideas, mental stagnation, obsessions, fatuous ego-centricity, morbid preoccupations, pathological self-doubt, and marked insecurity.

Escaping the bondage of Self

Despite the deeply rooted need to cling to one's views, whether fact or fiction, of one’s identity, there exists an

equally powerful force within the psyche which struggles to lift, or even to overthrow, the burden of a restricted self-definition.

Making major changes in one’s situation, throwing off patterns of rigid conformity are psychological necessities every bit as potent as opposing change. This creative upsurge expresses itself, in the intellectual domain, through the turmoil and ultimate gratification of problem-solving, in the physical domain by travel and adventure. Such activities, even when only partially successful, lead to the liberation of our life-energies from fixation on outworn causes, patterns of behavior, and unproductive beliefs. Revisiting the schema of the Rebirth Process:

Non-Being

Being|Becoming|Rebirth of Self|Being

Shock

As opposed to the conservatism of material energy (the “energy” of Helmholtz, van Clausius and Maxwell), life-energy, (the”energy” of William James and Henri Bergson) is self-generating. Just as the body restores itself after illness, even as the final stages of convalescence experience the return of a strong appetite for life, so too does the process of healing the devastation of psychic trauma terminate in re-affirmation of the living state.

Deeply rooted notions of one's own identity may be comforting, in the short run, but the long run they are imprisoning. When Hamlet states, "Denmark is a prison", the term “Denmark”

functions as a metaphor for what is most fundamental to the play,

, the incestuous mentality, the obsessive self-preoccupation, a

permanent "state" is in which there is "something rotten”. Escape

from the multiple double-binds of selfhood demands an eager

participation in the living challenge.

These twin faces of the living nature, stable identity

versus creative force, Being versus Becoming, are in existential

opposition, even as our hearts are forever torn by the twin, often contradictory demands, of Present Satisfaction and Future Gain.

This universal condition embodies the fundamental contradiction of sentient existence:

Being and Becoming, existing simultaneously in thought and feeling, are necessarily sequential in action.

That which brings gratification to one side of our nature inhibits the other, a kind of permanent tradeoff inevitable to psychological adjustment in real time. The oppression of prison is painful; as is the desperation of homelessness. Impotence against tyranny is a state of misery; yet a state of chaos and anarchy can be just as bad or worse: one thinks of the transition from Louis 16 to the Reign of Terror at the time of the French revolution.

To be typecast in a single role, like a movie star, though it may bring celebrity, is ultimately stultifying. However, to be without a socially defined function can render life intolerable. Opposites cannot abide simultaneously in the same person, therefore any quest for happiness based either on a

stable social situation which imposes roles and functions , or from a desire for freedom expressing itself in a constant craving for adventures and a nomadic way of life, must run its course and be dissatisfying in the long run. The greatest misery of all is found in found in a prolonged "identity crisis" which, by rendering effort meaningless, makes action impossible.

Analysis of the Rebirth Mechanism

The phases of psychic activity are summed up in the terms:

Being (Identity)

Non-Being (Shock)

Becoming (Pregnancy)

Rebirth

Anxiety (Present directed; sensual gratifications)

Anger (Future directed: ambition, vengeance)

Depression (Past directed, lamentation over what has been lost)

These mental and emotional states oversee the natural evolution that occurs during the passage through the stages of adjustment.

The first stage, that of Being, consists in recognition of one’s identity, and may be conflated with that of the final stage, Reborn Self, the new recognition of identity. This has both a conscious and an unconscious element. The conscious element consists of an acknowledgement, if not total acceptance, of a certain status quo. It states, more or less, “I am this and I know that this is what I am.”

The unconscious element operates a bit like the notion of a “field” in physics. Indeed, what we call the unconscious mind operates very much like the “field” concept: it remains “invisible”, both to the individual and to external observers, until a “test” incident or situation, (what in physics is called a “test particle”) is introduced into the some experienced situation, thus indirectly revealed the quantities and levels of life-energy bound up in it in a latent or fixated form.

To give an example: a person brought up in a certain religion, Christianity for example, might imagine himself free from believing in it. He might say “I’m not religious”, or even, “it’s all nonsense”, and never claims to be a Christian.

One day, over-hearing some insulting, derogatory or “blasphemous” remark against Christianity, he suddenly finds himself, in a totally spontaneous manner that catches him off guard, flaring up in rage. What has happened is that the life-energy bound up with his deeper religious beliefs was there all along, and only needed a spark to bring it to the surface.

The second stage is that of Shock, Fixation, Trance, a state of existential terror akin to hysteria. Shock accompanies the recognition that something, some vital entity, has “died” in one’s inner makeup. Even as the restatement of Identity in the first and final stages bears similarities with Birth, so do the characteristics of Shock bear similarities with the irreversible finality of Death. One might say that, in affronting the conscious/unconscious structure of the self, a trace of the lifeless cosmos, like a splinter, has become embedded in the mind.

Whether shock is brief or prolonged depends on a host of factors: the intensity of the initiating crisis, one’s level of expectations and state of preparedness, the degree of the implied threat, one’s inner capacity for resistence, resonance with similar experiences in the past, and so on.

The third stage is that of Becoming: latency, pregnancy, birth anxiety, counter-anxiety suggestibility, in a word, psychological chaos moving towards some ultimate resolution.

Hypnosis itself may be seen as a state of psycho-somatic pregnancy.

One’s mental universe becomes wholly absorbed by the

objects to which it has become attached. The 3^rd stage is a double bind, acting under the contradictory forces of a double fixation:

1. Fixation on Non-Being: the external threat, surprise, challenge, event, traumatic experience, catastrophe.

2. Fixation on Being: a self-critical state of internal introspection, a crisis of self-awareness.

What results is a kind of dynamic coupling, like the cycling of a steam engine or the functioning of a turbine, that guides the psyche through the turbulence of re-adjustment.

With respect to this phase the quandary "To be or not to

be”, may be taken in its literal sense: one's initial perceptions of personal identity are hotly debated and weighed against the advantages and dangers posed by one’s response to the new challenge.

The fourth or final stage of the rebirth cycle is Rebirth itself. Like a butterfly, the new living-identity cracks open the chrysalis of Becoming to re-emerge with resurrected affirmation, dramatically positing a new demarcation of the cosmos into Self and Other, a fresh recognition , however transitory, of one's place in the natural order.

Aristotle shrewdly observed that happiness is an activity, not

a quality. From the Nichomachean Ethics, Chapter 6:

“If we define the function of man as a kind of life, and this life

as an activity of the soul or a course of action in accordance with

reason, and if the function of a good man is such an activity of a

good and noble kind, and if everything is well done when it is done in accordance with its proper excellence, it follows that the good of man is activity of soul in accordance with virtue."

The same view is expressed in the Poetics in a mercifully

brief phrase:

"...life consists of action, and its end is a mode of activity, not

a quality..."

What Aristotle calls the "activity of the soul" we identify with

the Rebirth Mechanism, the stages of adjustment intrinsic to the

sentient mind, the impersonal driving force of consciousness, even

as gravity drives the cosmos and electro-magnetism the atom.

******************************************