Have you wondered why is it so difficult to deal with trauma?
Do you think forgetting an occurrence or denying an incident will help in overcoming a mistake or a personal loss?
Thanks to the recent studies and advancements in areas of neurology and psychology that has finally changed the outlook of medical practitioners towards diseases and their cure; there has been a genuine approach now to treating the cause rather than symptoms of the diseases. Also, while earlier research experiments were conducted to show how plants grow better in a friendly environment, and how cows yield more milk when they listen to pleasant music, now finally focus is on where and how pain emerges and the reasons for its triggers.
Much of this attention and new studies has been due to the search in the direction of consciousness and results yielded are due to the knowledge gained from wisdom in Yoga and Buddhist and its practice traditions that postulates on how ‘pain’ is a primordial feeling and an inevitable sentiment that all living beings have to undergo for evolution.
Prescriptions from the Indian knowledge practices to deal with ‘pain’
To begin with, Nature is dualistic – light and darkness; day and night; joy and pain; hence, much of all the animal nature that manifests as impulsive behaviours and responses emerge from one thin strand of darkness within us i.e the inability to process duhkham (pain). And, we feel it as pain because we are born lacking clairvoyance, as unprocessed and recessed memories from a distant (or immediate) past that exists in the form of mental conditionings, that repeatedly clouds our rationale.
That’s right! Memories are powerful as they are a storehouse that contains a repository of experiences, which are quite important for learning life lessons to evolve and refine our perception of ultimate reality and true self. But…, at the same time, how can we move towards a perfection, if our immediate reality is repeatedly influenced by unknown scarred memories?
This is precisely why it is required by us to flush out and refresh our memory scape continuously, to develop a clear vision that will prevent our intellect from regression and stagnation. After all, pain is a mental suffering due to a myopic vision and an irrational intellect.
A good example to understand the nature of memories is from the cult fiction movie X-men: First class. The movie shows how Prof Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) helps Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) to control the disturbing raw emotions by redefining it. At first, the movie establishes how a personal loss: extreme trauma and helplessness felt by young Erik opens up a dimension inside his psyche that gives him access to extraordinary powers. But since Erik has no control over his emotions, the powers he has access to was often getting wasted for the wrong cause, many times mounting as new problems. Empathising Erik’s psychological condition, Prof X managed to juxtaposing on a bad memory, a good memory. While Prof X succeeds in redefining the emotion felt without changing or altering a past occurrence, the memory of an event is also not brushed under the carpet, or wiped out completely. Also, in juxtaposing two memories, the resultant emotions that surfaced in association to an event involving his loved ones allowed Erik to momentarily process his emotions, giving the intellect the required time to transcend past the triggers of painful events stored in the form of memories. Thus, Prof X managed to reduce the intensity of the pain felt by Erik whenever the disturbing memory (re)surfaced.
Even though Erik learns to channelise and manipulate the extraordinary powers to become Magneto; the scars of the past wounds remain for Erik. As a result, Erik’s intellect does not evolve completely, retaining the negative energies to reside in him without giving it an appropriate closure. This is why we find that Magneto as a character was constantly filled with hatred and vengeance; even though his concerns were just. If they are not caught in the web of hatred like Erik, then they might end up being caught in fear, ending up to be a cynic.
This example actually demonstrates a concept in Indian aesthetics, where commentator Abhinav Gupta beautifully states that karuna rasa (sentiment of compassion) is a sentiment that emerges from śoka sthayi (psychological thought state of universal pain), and, can be used as a psychological tool to evolve a being if introspection is employed intelligently: associating śoka with a memory of sukha (happiness). Many of Indian musical compositions of padam-s are based on this principle. It will begin with how the protagonist is missing the presence of her Lord that is causing extreme pain in her; and in the process of what she is feeling, she wanders back to remember a time when she enjoyed the company of her Lord intimately. Bottom line – there are only two emotions to feel and we have a choice on how memories we want to keep and how we want to remember a being or a incident.
Aristotle too has elaborated this differently in his Poetics, explaining it as catharsis. His work on catharsis is why the Greek drama celebrates tragedy as the ultimate genre that as it has the capacity to cleanse any residual (and)or repressed traumatic emotions in an onlooker. In this way, painful memory can be effectively dulled using accompanying joyous memories attached to a sentiment. This concept of duhkham (pain) has also been explored beautifully by Disney in its animated movie: Inside-Out, which shows how we require all of our emotions, but have to learn to digest, assimilate, declutter and compartmentalise them regularly.
Having described how pain can be dealt by an individual, question is: can an entire community cleanse its negative energies and mental conditionings residing in the crevasses of the heart space causing pain?
If a society has developed a social aptitude that addresses the need for cleansing by flushing or burning irrelevant sentiments, without wiping away truth, then that society retains the potential for growth and progress. For eg., Germany as a nation confronted the happenings of WW2, accepting the brutality the Jews suffered due to the wrong ideology ie. Nazism. This allowed the generations who were born following the WW2 to be less defensive of their country’s history and more humane. It also allowed them to retain a significant national sentiment, patriotism in its citizens.
But…, with time, when the relevance and the brutality of the WW-s fought fades and new warfares develop, then, there could be a possibility for humanity to suffer once again. Therefore, for restoring a more permanent order in the world, it becomes necessary for nations to develop an identity that is rooted in cultural consciousness. Only cultural consciousness can develop a vision to groom individuals as a universal beings; helping one to overcome deep rooted subtler causes of pain including social injustice suffered by communities due to their religious differences and ethnic backgrounds.
A nation being a collective, where a “story” (whether on social media, print or television, or its own history) ultimately resides as a memory in the collective consciousness of the people of the nation. Hence, stories have to be carefully constructed and even more carefully interpreted.
Significance of stories
Stories are powerful memory tools and this is the why many of the ancient societies including Vedic have used story as a tool to infuse virtuosity in people. India, which has always been pluralistic, ancient communities had high existential outlook, and so they focussed only on balancing Nature’s dualism i.e bridging the gap between idealism and realism instead of enforcing any one ideology such as a religion. Vedic has been the only culture which has accepted a-theism as a mainstream of theological study.
That is why many new findings and discoveries of modern science can be compared to concepts of Vedic. In fact, a specialised concept in Indic mind science can be compared to cloud technology and their operations and functions. Once anything goes into the cloud, it is very difficult to remove or alter; just as it is in case of memory.
In Vedic knowledge systems, memories are associated to the element āpah: or water; and, the cumulative psychological states of individuals exists in the sky in the form of clouds. And, based on the clarity in the sky, the emotional and temperamental states change in us. The cycles between Earth and Sky in Vedic systems at a deeper level stores patterns of the sanskara-s, or mental conditionings that becomes the cause for birth and death. Since Indra, the God of lightening and thunder can wield his weapon: Vajra, that can break the formations of the dark clouds, he is worshipped for gaining will-power and strength to remove the past mental conditionings stored in our DNA-s causing our birth imperfections. Similarly, since Varuna, the God of sky, oceans and water is responsible for the mental conditionings that we create in the present that will decide our future birth defects, the Vedic society gave much importance and place for Varuna as a celestial God. The underlying note is that the element of water is the carrier of impurities, and so addressing this element in the body can bring harmony and inner peace in one way or other.
In connection to this, Patanjali in his mind science text: Yoga Sutra, mentions that our mental conditions are the cause of all pain; and only transformative experiences can cleanse, developing clairvoyance in an earnest seeker, thereby helping to transcend pain. Similarly in the context of pain, the life and search of Buddha to remove suffering becomes a motivation for the emergence of Buddhism.
Based on the deeper principles dealt in Yoga and Buddhism, the paths ‘Stillness of the Lake’ and ‘Restraint of a Mountain‘ has been specifically developed to target mental conditionings of past and present. The idea is since humans are accumulating emotions all the time, the goal of a seeker (in the path: Restrain of a Mountain) is to learn how to segregate and burn negativity certain irrelevant emotions before it clouds one’s vision and judgment. But not before, the seeker learns to calm feelings of anxiety, by observing the sentiments that trigger it (from the path: Stillness of a Lake).