"Ego is the one and only obstacle to enlightenment. Ego is pride. Ego is arrogant self-importance. Ego is the deeply mechanical and profoundly compulsive need to always see the personal self as being separate from others, separate from the world, separate from the whole universe. Ego is a love-denying obsession…
5 posts in
self-contraction
This piece is the next in a series looking at various forms of evolving notions of spiritual awakening. Earlier pieces explored the origins of the teaching of the self as curved-in-on-itself in St. Augustine, as well as how practices of somatic regulation could be used to bring coherence to this…
In a previous piece I explored the topic of how to bring somatic regulation practices, that is trauma healing practices, to the art of spiritual realization, specifically the mysterious activity known as the self-contraction. For more on the historical roots of the recognition of the self as the activity of…
"There is a moment in the story when the wound—of both the [Fisher] king and his environment—could be healed, not by medicine or technology but by insight. When the young knight Perceval arrives, he has the opportunity (which he misses) to pose the right question to the king.…
One of the deepest threads I’ve been exploring on this site is the relationship between trauma and mystical or high strange encounters. The overarching piece in that thread is this one examining trauma in relationship to ontological flooding (what I call ontological immersion). That piece offers the theoretical framework…