Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  Here is what she taught me:

  • Begin by closing your eyes. Imagine yourself in a beautiful garden. See the trees, the sunlight. Smell the fragrances and feel the breeze. Take a moment to center yourself and focus on your breath.

  • Picture an exquisitely beautiful woman—a goddess, whose name is Lalita Tripura Sundari, which means “playful beauty of the three worlds.” She is smiling and walking through this garden toward you. Her skin is the color of the sunrise. She has large, luminous eyes. She’s carrying a sugarcane bow in one hand, and in the other, five arrows made of flowers. The bow represents the mind, and the arrows represent the senses. In the middle of her forehead is a third eye, which is open, showing that her awareness is fully awakened to the truth of unity.

  • As you gaze at this being, realize that a rosy pink light is emanating from her heart and flowing into yours. It’s healing the emotional wounds that you may have carried for lifetimes. Allow yourself to absorb this light through your heart. Feel it flowing through your body.

  • Imagine that a beam of pale blue light flows from her third eye into yours. Let it move into the very center of the head and bathe your brain in illumined awareness.

  • Now you feel that from the belly of this goddess, from the area below the navel, flows a deep red light directly into your own belly chakra. Let it cleanse the whole lower body of wounds, of sexual abuse and shame, of disempowerment, of insecurity, of the feelings of rootlessness or disconnection.

  • Sit feeling the goddess’s energy as light filling your head, heart, and lower body for a moment.

  • Now imagine the goddess dissolving into a point of light and being drawn into your own heart. As you continue to invoke her, accept the gifts she brings—awareness, love, and strength, all of which are in the hands of the Divine feminine, of Shakti, the power who awakens us and teaches us love.

  Sally shared the mantra that goes with this visualization:

  Om Aim Hreem Shreem

  She followed it with an invocation to Lalita:

  Om Aim Hreem Shred Lalitambikayai Namaha.

  “Om is the primordial sound. Aim is the mantra of inspiration. Hreem is the seed mantra that is said to bring forth the power to manifest anything, and indicates the goddess’s unlimited power to create. Shreem carries with it auspiciousness, foundational goodness, and beauty. These are the qualities of the goddess you invoke as you invoke Lalita.”

  17

  TRANSCEND AND INCLUDE

  CONVERSATION WITH KEN WILBER

  Author, philosopher, and cosmic storyteller Ken Wilber has written numerous books, many of them on integral psychology. He’s also the creator of integral theory, a pioneering four-quadrant grid that views all human wisdom and experience through lenses of the intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social. He has been a mentor to me since the start of my spiritual exploration, and we’ve spoken about a lot of things over the years. I was especially touched by his book Grace and Grit, a memoir of his short but profoundly beautiful and life-changing marriage to Treya Killam Wilber (which Ken candidly shares a bit about later in our conversation).

  I wanted to begin this conversation with Ken’s perspective on the causes of trauma and addiction. How can we heal ourselves from substances, destructive behaviors, and emotional wounds?

  Ken shined a light on the matter. “There are various levels of being and awareness, and the way they unfold is in developmental stages. The evidence for this is overwhelming. I wrote a book called Integral Psychology, and in it I included charts of over one hundred different developmental models. You could see in all these models that there were six to eight major stages of development that continued to appear repeatedly.

  “Development is a real process. Some developmental models have been tested in over forty different cultures, including Amazon rain-forest tribes, Australian aborigines, and Harvard professors, and no exceptions were found in any of those. The stages are real. That’s what’s so astonishing. These are stages that we find throughout nature, so we look at the most common holarchical stage of unfolding in nature.

  “It’s quarks to atoms to molecules to cells to organisms. Each level transcends and includes its predecessors. “Transcend” means it goes beyond, it has a bigger truth, more expansive. Molecules transcend atoms, they go beyond them, but they also include them. They enwrap them. Atoms are the ingredients of molecules. Molecules don’t hate atoms—they include them. Transcend and include is the primary nature of evolution itself. To negate is to move beyond something and its limitations. That’s what evolution does, and that’s what all the developmental lines in a human being do—they transcend and include.” This really resonated with me. The only way we’ll truly evolve is by including and integrating what came before into something great—into a greater good. Not by wiping it out. I just did a day-long workshop with my friend JP Sears out at Alex Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM) facility, and during that workshop JP made the point that if you cut a tree, you’ll see all of its rings—from one to a hundred of them (if it’s lived that long). As he spoke, I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, what a perfect example of transcend and include.” It also reminded me of an old Curl Up and Die band poster I used to have hanging in my apartment. On the poster was a big tree—half alive, half dead—and the text read, “But the past ain’t through with us.” So true. That shit still kinda haunts me to this day, so I no longer hang the poster (definitely a cool-ass band, though).

  “That means at any of the stages of human development, because there are two components—transcend and include—something can go wrong with either one. When that happens, you develop a pathology. You develop a sickness. You develop something wrong. When something goes wrong with the transcend part, it means it doesn’t get to fully move beyond or let go—it remains fixed at the previous stage. You’re stuck in it in some way. What that means is it can become an addiction. The individual is going to be addicted to some component of that stage that it should have let go of, and that addiction is going to show up in all sorts of ways. The person is going to be addicted to anything that reminds them of the original fixation, the original addiction, and that’s going to be a very real problem.”

  “Could a lack of self-worth or self-loathing be an addiction?” I thought to myself. Sure it could! In fact, these have been two of the great lessons I wish I could say I’ve chosen to work with in my life, but it was much more that they crashed down full speed ahead in a “holy shit, I’ve really gotta do something about this” moment (or moments would be more accurate—there have certainly been plenty of them). There are still times I look in the mirror and have to glance away quickly as I shudder at what’s reflecting back at me, remembering exactly how I got here and struggling with my worth. I look at the belt notches in my shorts and will often judge my sense of physical health by them. Not entirely unrealistic, but still, physical health should be judged by much more than a fucking hole in a piece of leather (or pleather or canvas, for my vegan/veggie friends). And here I am writing this book and feeling as inadequate as ever. Two books written on healing and spirituality and I still relapsed. I still went through phases of eating terrible food. I still lost my marriage. I almost died. Ah, life. If there’s one thing above all else that’s become clear to me, it’s that a spiritual path will not save you. What it can do, however, if you’re lucky (and committed), is help you make it through those “oh shit” moments by the skin of your teeth (and this is on a good day, of course). In fairness, the path wouldn’t be worth undertaking if a better quality of life didn’t come along with it as well. So fine, positive spiritual experiences/results, here’s your moment to shine: greater sense of well-being, spontaneous bouts of joy and gratitude, a deeper reverence for the simpler things in life (sunsets, good coffee, health, family, friends)—all right, all right, enough already, we get the picture.

  “The person is going to find themselves, for reasons that they can’t understand at all, obsessing about these things. They want to c
hase after them.” Ken was talking about things like drugs and food. “They want to repeat experiences.

  “Here are some very simple versions: food, sex, power, love, achievement, harmony, wholeness, unity. Even writing. You could say I was addicted to writing at the time I met my wife, Treya. I had been writing since I was twenty-three, about a book a year for almost ten years. It was my persona, it was who I was. You can get addicted to food by overeating. The person is looking to stuff himself with food. There is now a very large portion of the American population that’s overweight, many of them clinically obese. This is serious. You can have an addiction to sex. This used to be made fun of, but then as we looked at it more and more, we found that men and women could get addicted to the release that sexual orgasm brought. You can become addicted to power and become a power-mad, crazed, insane person. You can become addicted to love. Wherever we have these developmental unfoldings, we can have these fixations and therefore addictions to some component that we should have been letting go of. We should have transcended and included.

  “We should have very healthily let go of it, included it in a general, loose way, and then moved on. But we get these extreme versions, and that causes nightmares. On the include side of things, if you fail to do that correctly, then you fail to integrate the previous stage. You fail to embrace it, include it. It’s like molecules refusing to include atoms in their makeup. It’s sick, it’s a pathology. All the way back to the Big Bang, the universe has transcended and included, on and on and on, and when that goes unhealthily, it can make addictions and allergies, and on and on, and those are truly problematic. They’re very common. They happen all the time. They’re part of what we need to be paying very close attention to.”

  Ken’s extraordinary take on development and addiction segued into another thing I love discussing with him—what Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung called the shadow self. I wanted to understand how humans repress and disown various aspects of themselves and the repercussions of this repression when it comes to all sorts of addictions, acting out, stress, and neuroses in the context of addiction and relapse.

  Ken dove right in. “The shadow is a general term for those aspects of the self that are truly part of the self, belong to self, but that the person has become out of touch with, has become unaware of. Often—because it’s not that we forget them, but that we don’t want to know we have them—we disown them. We push them out of awareness. It’s an actual active repression.” Ken experienced a profound repression from who he knew himself to be during the very difficult time his wife was fighting cancer. He said that she had as profound an impact on his life as anything that ever happened. It’s still hard for him to talk about her death even twenty years afterward, and we’ll learn a little more about what he calls a “sheer withdrawal of actions” later.

  An example that came to mind from my life was an experience I had on a Little League baseball team when I was roughly eight or nine years old. I’d suppressed this experience for many years until it came flooding back one day while I was sitting in meditation. The coach was handing out our new team jerseys to all the players. We excitedly put them on, and mine was a size too small (and I was a husky kid). The coach took notice and made a comment in front of the entire group of children and parents, saying, “Looking good, Crisco!” That was the first time I became conscious of my weight and physical appearance; up until then, who gave a fuck? As a kid, all I was interested in was having fun playing with Transformers and Super Mario Bros. and shit. From that point on, I struggled with my physical appearance and weight, and while I know that this was in no way the only factor that led me to addiction, I’m certain it was part of it. At some point, I disowned that material, repressing it into my unconscious for many years while it wreaked havoc on my well-being. That’s one of my shadows.

  Ken was just getting started. “Shadow stuff is essentially if you look at the basic stages of growth that humans can go through, from the initial fusion state where the infant is one with his physical environment and he can’t tell where the body stops and the chair starts, through the impulsive stage and then through a self-protective, safety, or power stage. Then it moves into a conformity stage, and then it moves into the emergence of reason and the capacity for hypothetical, deductive thinking, scientific thinking, third-person world-centric notions, and so on. From there into postmodern pluralism and multiculturalism and multiple perspectives, and from there to the integral stages, which are all inclusive. But at any one of those stages, you can take some aspect of that stage, and because you have a great deal of judgment about it or a great deal of negativity about it or because you’re afraid of it, or because it triggers anxiety or fear in you, you can repress it. You push it out of awareness. It’s the defense mechanism that the human mind has, which is that it can cut off an awareness of something and pretend that it’s not there and ‘I don’t own that. That’s not me.’ ” But unfortunately, repressing something—dissociating it and pushing it out of awareness—doesn’t make it go away. “At the time my wife was ill, I was writing all of these books. It was the first time in my life I was really adapting to this new profession and new persona, but I couldn’t continue doing it. Treya’s illness forced me to really drop that persona of the writer, of my work, of making things okay. And of course this is an extremely common problem that men have, as we tend to identify with our doing. And so this was just a sheer withdrawal of actions that, if you want to, you can think of as an addiction. I had to drop something I had done literally every day of my life for the last ten or fifteen years. And stopping that was one of the single most difficult things I have done. It just ate me up, and as much as I had a Zen practice and Christian contemplative prayer, all these tools to help me accommodate to these changes—well, the changes were really overwhelming, and it became a profound learning lesson for me to simply drop that and give my life to this woman. And because I loved her enormously, I found ways that I could do that, but it was still eating at me.

  “Once you push something into an unconscious state, it continues causing problems. The most common thing that happens with it is that is gets projected onto other people. If I’m having trouble with expressing anger and I repress that, then I can project that anger onto people in the environment. Instead of me being angry at my boss, I’ll think my boss is angry with me and I’ll start reacting to it. That will make the situation bad, because I’m reacting to something that’s not there. Or at the same time, if I have a positive quality and I don’t give myself credit for it and I repress that, disown that, and project that onto others, then I’ll tend to hero-worship them. I’ll tend to think, ‘Oh, they’re the greatest.’ Now, they may be great, but when you take their greatness and add your projected greatness, you get a double greatness. That turns them from being very admirable people into superheroes. Then you completely do whatever they say, whatever they want, completely worship them—hero worship and so on.”

  I could absolutely relate to what Ken was saying about projecting the good and the bad repressed shadow material within myself onto others. Spending time doing shadow work helped me recognize how I projected so much shit onto other people, whether old friends or complete strangers—again, both good and bad. Let’s use bad as an example. A simple one that comes to mind is that I’ve often mentally judged men’s haircuts, especially when they’re fancy. But why the fuck should I even care? I shouldn’t—except the thing is, I do, and it is beyond jealousy. It’s shadow material I repressed for a long time during my adult years about how I started balding in my early twenties. My hair began to thin as early as sixteen, but the full-on balding started in my early twenties. Luckily for me, I was heavily into punk/hardcore, where you could easily get away with a shaved head or a baseball cap. But as the years went by and I began going to fewer shows, I couldn’t hide behind that as much, and the projection onto others grew. To this day, I’m still super self-conscious about the no-hair thing. I mean, I look decent with a shaved head, but I sti
ll struggle with it, and yes, at times I still judge those damn sexy-looking-man haircuts because I can’t have one.

  As I’ve come to learn with shadow work, virtually anything we project onto others is a form of shadow. Sure, sometimes a person is a dick, there’s no way of getting around that, but more times than not, if we take a minute to trace back whatever thoughts we’re projecting onto others and do a little exploring within to see what they’re saying about us, we’d be quite surprised (until we work with shadow for a while and it becomes like riding a bike).

  Ken continued with his intriguing point of view, saying, “In the same way, if you happen to be very controlling and critical and you repress that and push that out of awareness and you project it onto somebody in the environment—it very likely might be your mate, for example—you then feel that that person is constantly criticizing you, is constantly trying to control you. Now, they might be controlling, but when you add their controlling tendencies to your controlling tendencies, then they get a double dose of controlling. You feel completely overwhelmed by their attempt to control you. That is very common. When we project a negative onto people in the environment, we often will project it onto somebody who already has some of that trait, because we’ll see it and then go, ‘Oh, that’s who has it. That’s the controlling son of a bitch. I know somebody is being controlling as hell, but that can’t be me. Ah, it’s them.’ Then we get a double dose of that shadow material. That’s where people react wildly to that kind of perception. That’s a real shadow tip-off.