How does dissociation feel? Preparedness for Christian Enlightenment.

Start using any medicine for denial–scripture, entheogens, yoga– and they’ll tell you: awakening entails a purgative stage. This is the “psychological dumping” spoken of by proponents of centering prayer. Of the calm in monastic silence, Abbots have said “placidity teases out toxicity.” They’re right: the beginning of awakening is a real inner-garbage carnival. We would feel none of it, though, if it weren’t for love making us feel safe enough to let go of it. To remember “this whole thing is happening because of love” is otherworldly difficult, but succeeding at it pays dividends in serenity.

Here’s the bad news: for us who are called to everything, half of everything sucks. There is a stage where the psyche, in preparation for enlightenment, dissociates. If you want to know how ready for enlightenment you are, ask yourself “how does dissociation feel?” Of course, those in denial will say they don’t feel anything. And they’re telling the truth. Denial is a state where awareness is so completely turned off that we don’t feel anything.

Awakening flips that script, turns awareness to the empty spaces in our bodily awareness, so that we say, instead, “I feel nothing.” Feeling nothingness is, on a bodily sensation level, the beginning of coming out of denial. Ego will tell us we’re making progress: but this is merely the beginning of calamities.

Dissociation feels negative at first. We see ourselves, correctly, as way too identified with both varieties of evil thought–and we see our host of anxieties, produced by those attachments, as self-imposed.

Years of stress get chucked at the nervous system–and as this is too overwhelming, it’s stored in the body. Intense sensations are like traps we’re caught in: we worsen them by trying to wiggle out of them. It’s terrible on a sensation level–pains of all sorts surface, often connected to strong memories. As we become aware (and let go of) whatever memories we’ve attached to them, the various sensations diminish in intensity.

One who settles in to dissociation will witness a change in its character. Now no longer painful, it merely feels numb. The ego that wants to feel positive sensations complains inwardly, but numbness is definitely an improvement on negativity. Properly speaking, disidentifying with the “you” doing the feeling didn’t produce the change, but the changes arose together.

We realize that attention and intention, centered on sensation, accesses a spot that is both painful and blissful–a spot which eventually suspends the ego doing the labeling. As gurus have said “there isn’t much room for ego when all you’re doing is breathing in and out.” As we increasingly let go of the narratives behind our pain, ego itself relaxes. The dissociation which felt negative at first, which felt numb for a moment, has become not only tolerable, but preferable to the self induced anxieties of our egoic game-playing.

Eventually, “being in the body without a self” becomes something we’re entirely comfortable with. The disciplines of recollection, “breathing, listening, feeling and mantra” actually become anchors. Breathing, listening and feeling diminish the intensity of afflictive thought, and mantra provides “the feeling of sound” as an alternative to afflictive thought. Directing our attention and intention properly allows mind and emotion to do whatever they need to.

Triumph changes. When Jesus rose, he rose with his wounds still open. He offered Thomas the opportunity to probe his wounds–he allowed people to hurt him, in other words–so that they could awaken. Being able to feel our wounds at all, much less allow them to be worsened by others, mindlessly or deliberately–for one who was once entirely unaware, this is victory.

In the beginning, we didn’t know that indulging desire, forming an ego, coping–these all take a toll of self imposed anxiety. Now we know. Our lives aren’t necessarily “better or worse” for the knowing. But they are undeniably fuller.