An article written by Karen Belling
This article is part of a series of essays that the Newsletter has published from this author on the topic of human consciousness and its application to our work. Access to previously published writings will enhance the ideas expressed here. The Rumi Revolution described Rumi’s belief that there are two separate paths to evolution, one physical and one psychological and emotional. An article entitled The Two Arrows refers to the tendency to lament “What’s the matter with me?” when something goes wrong. The Dual Directive refers to the two innate human drives towards 1. autonomy and mastery of the environment, 2. love, which refers to our psychological, emotional, and relational health. The premise, based on Rumi, is that the second drive is in process of catching up to the first.
Karen Belling, is mostly retired but still seeing a few clients and focused on writing. She is a former U of M adjunct faculty member. Any and all feedback is welcome and helpful. She is available for consultation upon request.
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“If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it” ~ From Singapore, a poem by Mary Oliver
We routinely witness the dual directive of consciousness occurring openly in the animal world. We see the mastery of tasks associated with survival, and close bonds of individuals to other members of the tribe. With few exceptions, individuals depend on the group for protection and finding food, but also for what appears to be pure pleasure. Animals form tight bonds with tribal mates, and grieve heavily when individuals pass away. They do exhibit aggression in regard to food and territory, but there is neither judgment nor resentment or malice nor remorse in the predator/prey arrangement. There are no complicated agendas; there is no “self”, no ego, and no fretting about purpose. There are no moral directives other than survival and love. Animals’ needs are readily apparent. When they are hungry, they look for food. When in pain or hurting in any way their misery is apparent. When they want affection, they openly seek it. The dual directive is not in conflict and there is no pretense to hide. Animal senses are much more developed than humans, not only sight, smell and sound, but also vibrations that allow them to detect danger and communicate across distance. There is increasing evidence that they communicate telepathically.
Animals, like babies, just live, form connections, and love, all in present time. The unconditional love they show for us feels real and evokes a feeling of presence. The mutual experience of love that we feel towards our pets is the drive we have to be so devoted to them, spend so much money on them, and experience such grief when they leave us. Animals, like babies, are connected to consciousness in ways that man seems to have lost. How do they do that? Or more specifically, what stands in the way of humans from having that same capacity?
Over many years of time, the brains of mammals evolved in ways that allowed man to be aware of his thoughts. In addition to consciousness of his surroundings, human minds developed to enable people to be conscious of their thoughts. People could then see that they could use their minds to solve problems and at some point in time man became aware of himself as an individual self, separate from other people and other life forms.
He saw himself with his senses, that there was “space in between” himself and other matter, both living and nonliving. (Ego tunnel, reference). There were many advantages to this new awareness. People began to develop as individuals, developed language and then culture. However, with the perception of self as separate, man’s mind became split and lost awareness of who he was before, of his true nature. The felt experience of connection to other life forms was lost. It was a tradeoff that paved the way for people to develop their minds and become who they are today.
Reflections on how this has happened are reported across disciplines by thinkers and writers who had no conscious connection to each other. It is generally accepted now that an evolutionary, process was what brought us here, but numerous sources describe it in other creative ways. Here are a few of those explanations.
The Biblical story of the Garden of Eden reflects the recognition of mans’ feeling of alienation and separateness. It is a mythological way of describing mans’ disconnection from nature, and thus from a part of himself. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and man’s nature became flawed based on this “original sin”. The message is unequivocal: we inherited sin, and because of our sinful nature, we are fraught with adversity.
We do not inherently have a right to happiness, love and peace of mind. In other words, we have to be “fixed”, redeemed by an outside force. We can help ourselves by “doing” good deeds and believing in God. It must be remembered that this is a story and not based on known history. It is an attempt to explain mans’ experience of alienation, but then also becomes a narrative that feeds the separation.
Psychoanalytic theory offers another explanation for mans’ sense of separateness. Human infants are not born with a “self”. In the womb, and for the first few months of life, babies live in a world cradled by feelings of connectedness and belonging. Consciousness of themselves as separate does not happen until later in the first year of life when their brains start to develop their sense of self. At that point they lose the feeling of connection to others; a traumatic experience.
The term devised for this process is “narcissistic wounding”. It implies that we are inevitably damaged, and set up for brokenness. Good parenting can help, and bad parenting makes it worse, but either way the wounding is bad and we need to be fixed. This process is at the heart of psychological thought.
Rumi’s poems describe our separateness as part of an ongoing process that is taking place over time; in that way his ideas are similar to Darwin’s. He asserts that evolution is a two-way path, physical and spiritual. Love is the source of all life; it preceded physical evolution and created it. In the process, man lost awareness of his true nature, one of connectedness and love. The difficulties man faces are due to his inability to see this, and be able to experience his/her connection to the earth and all of life. Rumi never uses terms such as sin or wounding. It is acknowledged that our path is fraught with pain and suffering, but events have purpose.
As we learn to face life, and to accept ourselves, our feelings and our humanness, we get closer to our true nature. His theory is the “why” things happen. Darwin’s version is the “how”. That means that “nothing is wrong”, only challenging, when adversity strikes. What psychology calls narcissistic wounding Rumi describes as a normal process; a challenge to the human race to help us regain our lost connection to consciousness.
SUMMARY
Hope For Our Hearts
The biblical story of The Fall is based on the felt experience of people that we are alone and lonely. It suggests that something in ancient history went wrong, and there is no way we, ourselves, can fix it. We are dependent on outside forces, God (or maybe a priest), good parents, or even luck, to redeem us.
The concept of narcissistic wounding is based on observations, and is recognized by scientifically minded psychologists as stemming from evolution. Unfortunately, defining that process as narcissistic wounding cements it as “something is wrong”. This is the same thinking as the second arrow; “What’s the matter with me”, and leads to the thought that if something is wrong (difficult or painful) someone or something is to blame. It is fair to recognize that our distress has roots in the process that babies go through in the first year of life, and potentially helpful as long as we recognize it as how and not why. Defining that process as “normal”, if only from an evolutionary perspective, as part of our collective humanness, instead of seeing ourselves as flawed individuals could help us heal.
Rumi’s theory of evolution offers hope for our hearts. There is nothing wrong with us. Though often painful, as we strive to meet the challenges of adversity, we awaken to greater and greater levels of consciousness and thus love. We need only to accept our feelings of isolation, face our feelings, and “let the light in”’.
“Pain is inevitable but suffering is not”. Buddha
“Originally you were clay. From being mineral, you became vegetable. From vegetable, you became animal, and from animal, man. During these periods man did not know where he was going, but he was being taken on a long journey nonetheless. And you have to go through a hundred different worlds yet. There are a thousand forms of mind”. Rumi, quoted in Robert Ornstein, THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
Rumi: “The wound is where the light gets in”.
