Hello everyone,
Apologies for my quietness. I've been very busy.
I recently came across this video however, that I think is worth sharing, of Eckhart Tolle discussing what he calls 'The Pain Body'. This seems to belong to Jung's definition of the Shadow, which further, seems to be a common component in the experiences of those deemed to be "schizophrenic".
I've spoken with a number of schizophrenics who are able to trace the voices and characters in their experience back to an earlier life experience such as past trauma (the personal Shadow) however in some cases, this doesn't seem to apply. I've wondered in those cases if the individual is encountering a "collective Shadow".
Quote:
Any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen for what it is in the moment it arises, does not completely dissolve. It leaves behind a remnant of pain. Children, in particular, find strong negative emotions too overwhelming to cope with and tend to try not to feel them. In the absence of a fully conscious adult who guides them with love and compassionate understanding, into facing the emotion directly, choosing not to feel it is indeed the only option for the child at that time.
Unfortunately, that early defense mechanism usually remains in place when the child becomes an adult. The emotion still lives in him or her, unrecognized, and manifests indirectly as anxiety, anger, outbursts of violence, a mood, or even as a physical illness. In some cases, it interferes with or sabotages every intimate relationship.
... Nobody can go through childhood without suffering emotional pain
The remnants of pain left behind join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body. It consists not just of childhood pain but also painful emotions that were added to it later in adolescence and during your adult life, much of it created by the voice of the ego. It is the emotional pain that is your unavoidable companion when your false sense of self is the basis of your life.
This energy field of old but still very much alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the pain body. The pain body however, is not just individual in nature. It also partakes of the pain suffered by countless humans throughout the history of humanity, which is a history of continuous tribal warfare, of enslavement, pillage, rape, torture and other forms of violence. This pain still lives in the collective psyche in humanity and is being added to on a daily basis...
Source:
__________________
~ Kindness is cheap. It's unkindness that always demands the highest price.
... A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through the pain-body, while others experience it only in certain situations, such as in intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss, abandonment, and physical or emotional hurt. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past. When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark can activate it.
Some pain-bodies are obnoxious but relatively harmless – a child who won’t stop whining, for example. Others are vicious and destructive monsters. Some are physically violent; many more are emotionally violent. Some will attack people around you, while others may attack you, their host. Your thoughts and feelings about your life then become deeply negative and self-destructive. Illnesses and accidents are often created in this way. Some pain-bodies drive their hosts to suicide.
When you thought you knew a person and are suddenly confronted with this alien, nasty creature for the first time, you are in for quite a shock. However, it’s more important to observe it in yourself. Watch out for any sign of unhappiness; it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a sombre mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, or a need to have some drama in your relationship. Catch it the moment it awakens.
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting qute close to the truth. It's the emotional pain body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active....
....The pain body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existance, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, "become you," and live through you. It needs to get its "food" through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness.
So the pain body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that refects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.
Once the pain body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will [see] that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others.
If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would disolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
The pain body, which is the dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the the pain that lives in you. But if you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again. The pain body may seem to you like a dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot pervail against the power of your presence.
... On a personal level, pain from childhood that leaves residues, Energetic residues… different things painful things have happened to you in your childhood and of course far beyond that in time. But let's just talk from the level of your present existence in this form.
The pain that is carried over from your childhood and beyond and leaves residues …doesn’t go away completely, it leaves residues of pain, Energy fields, everything is Energy. And then those Energy Fields get together, because they feel, they vibrate at the same frequency. So emotional pain gathers into one mass of pain, contracted Energy, that isn’t flowing freely. An Energy of (ET makes a sound, "Ahhhh, ahhhhh") that I call the “Painbody” that humans carry inside. An Energy Field of Pain.
The pain-body doesn't want you to observe it directly. The moment you observe the pain-body, feel its energy field within you and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness comes in. It is called Presence. You are now the witness or the watcher of the pain-body.
Here are three ways to observe and dissolve the pain-body:
- Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself in whatever form—it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship and so on. Catch the pain-body the moment it awakens from its dormant stage.
- Observe the resistance within yourself. Observe the attachment to your pain. Be very alert. Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it. The resistance will cease if you make it conscious.
- Focus attention on the negative feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it—don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you.
... The past two world wars are an expression of the pain-body in complete domination.
Release from the pain-body comes from observing the mind; observing how it takes a feeling, becomes identified completely with it, and thinks and acts out that feeling.
This witnessing is separation from the pain-body, disidentifying from it. When this happens, the light of awareness begins to dissolve the pain. One sees this shadow entity for what it is, an accumulation of past hurts, an expression of renegade life-force particles.
Witnessing is recognizing the self to be other than egoic mental and emotional turbulence. It is a return to recognition of the awareness that propagates thinking, which is a small part of consciousness.
Witnessing is placing the conscious in the moment and observing it express itself through mentation.
Recognizing oneself as the author of mind and not the outcome of mind removes the automation that goes along with a belief in determinism, which in turn arises because of the belief that mind arises out of matter.
This is the movement referred to as spirituality, and it is a movement toward wholeness.
Spirituality itself can be confusing because of the elaborate expressions on what it is; but, in its essence, it is an attempt to return to wholeness.
Wholeness, it will be discovered, can't be fragmented.
Wholeness is a return to identification with the origin of creation; a return to contemplation of the field of consciousness itself; a return to what is referred to as God, Beingness, or Spirit.
Our journey in life is a journey toward freedom, identifying with what it real, which arises from pure subjectivity, the implicate order. Our entrapment in the explicate order is by virtue of unconsciousness about the pain-body.
Hi SE,
Yes, I see similarities with ET's Pain Body and Jung's Shadow. An interesting book you might enjoy reading is Jung & Reich : The Body as Shadow by John Conger
Here is a link to a pretty extensive review. http://www.scientificexploration.org...4_blasband.pdf
You can buy the book in paperback form at amazon pretty reasonably.
Good to see you posting again, Shoe
yeah i wonder, because i see my shadow everywhere, where once it was said, you seem to have no shadow, which was also a bit disconcerted heh, but yeah, everywhere are reflections of me, people who were said to be me long ago, appearing again from the blue, people born the same time as me, so many coincidences and such, as i am scattered across the existence apparently? and none of them find any of this particularly remarkable, i just find it annoying, the language of the universe, in the roots and the birds and all the animals, the clouds, what does it lead to, ultimately i seem to be alone, i feel like schizophrenia is my attaqchment to the world, though i am gone, i am not the true me, maybe
but these are not graceful or thought out words
Sep 18, 2010, 01:57 PM
This is an old thread. You probably should not post your reply to it, as the original poster is unlikely to see it.
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