Like the Razor’s sharp edge is difficult to traverse,
The path to one’s Self is difficult.

Katha Upanishad, 1.3.14

My Path since initially awakening six years ago has taken many forms.  I’ve seen it in my head as various types of landscape.  When I began, the Path was wide without much of a dropoff to either side, if any.  It was easy to traverse, for the most part.  The difficulty came as the Path rose and fell, requiring much climbing and descending.

Over the years, the Path continued to rise and fall, but generally trended upwards, eventually obscuring the Path behind me.  It also began to narrow, and there was more of a slope to the sides, adding an element of danger.  It was easier to lose focus on my goal and fall down, requiring regaining lost progress.  I always got back up, though, and continued on my way.

For at least a year now, though, perhaps longer, the Path has become as thin as the edge of a razor, and just as painful.  The land falls sharply away into darkness on either side, and it is frighteningly easy to fall into the pits that lie there.  Frequently, when I wish to simply sit and be still, I find instead that my mind has inadvertently fallen into a dark hole of one sort or another.

The problem is that is where my mind is used to dwelling, to the extent that it’s paradoxically comforting.  It’s simply what I’ve become accustomed to after all these years.  The darkness is my home, and I am not used to walking in the light, which is where the Path is.  In effect, I live opposite to the way most people do.  Most people are comforted by light and the way it reveals things, and conversely fear the dark because they cannot see.  I spent so much time in the dark that I learned to see, but became so sensitized to the light that it hurts my eyes when exposed to full brightness.  Plus, the world of light is full of so much activity and motion that it overwhelms me.

No wonder, then, that I find myself unconsciously skittering back to the darkness, where I simultaneously feel safe, yet in constant inner conflict.  In neurological terms, there is a deeply carved neural pathway in my brain that is the result of a lifetime of negative thinking and emotional patterns.  In the absence of a conscious effort to think and feel in different ways, my mind will automatically succumb to those negative patterns and spew out a stream of possible conflicts to chew on.  It’s a form of mental sparring practice that keeps me ready for conflict at a moment’s notice.

This is what hypervigilance has done to me, one of the key symptoms of complex-PTSD.  I got so used to being surrounded by conflict as a child that I now constantly practice for it.  This is in direct conflict (haha) with my efforts to be a more peaceful person both inside and outside.  If I am constantly conflicted on an internal basis, yet attempting to maintain a peaceful exterior, eventually that inner conflict is going to spill out, probably as an unpleasant surprise.  It’s just not a sustainable way to live, showing one face while hiding another.

Yet I am at war with myself, or at least with part of myself.  In her book “The Spiritual Awakening Guide”, Mary Shutan writes about a layer of conditioning one must break through called the Destroyer.  In psychological terms, this is an aspect of the psyche that represents a protector of last resort, willing to do anything and everything to keep its person what it perceives as safe, including destroy everything it perceives as dangerous.  If one is in the midst of deep personal work as I’ve been, that means achieving really great things and then having a part of one’s psyche decide that’s actually a bad thing because it’s unfamiliar and therefore frightening.

I cannot begin to describe how frustrating this is.  To have my own mind working against me and destroying some of my best progress by regressing into old thinking and feeling patterns.  To be on the verge of great breakthroughs, only to be forced to take several steps backwards.  It makes it very difficult to engage in the work that is necessary to process the Destroyer’s energy in order to dispel it because it’s my instinct to hate this part of myself and rage at it, to treat it like an enemy.

Unfortunately, that only makes the problem worse.  What this part of my psyche needs is counterintuitive according to my life experience thus far.  It doesn’t need hate and anger, it needs kindness and understanding.  In terms of the therapeutic system of Internal Family Systems, I should try to talk to this part of myself and get to know it as well as possible, find out what it needs to stop destroying things.  It’s standing in my way and knocking me down on this razor thin Path for a reason, I need to find out what it is.

I believe the problem is Trust, or rather, a lack of it.  I’ve been betrayed by circumstance and other human beings enough times that part of me can’t handle it anymore, so whenever the Destroyer detects a situation in which it fears I may be vulnerable to betrayal, it does everything it can to disrupt that situation.  Unfortunately, the Destroyer is essentially delusional after a lifetime of trauma, so while it believes it’s keeping me what it perceives as safe, it’s also ruining pathways to growth and healing.

From one perspective, I should be encouraged by the presence of the Destroyer.  It means I’ve made my way through the other twelve layers of conditioning described in “The Spiritual Awakening Guide” and it’s the only thing standing between myself and what the book calls “the Void”, which sounds scary but is actually where our individual connection to the rest of the Universe lies.  This is not a place, but a state of mind essentially identical to that which Buddhism calls nirvana and Hinduism calls moksha, a state of mind in which one is freed from samsara: the wheel of life, death, and rebirth.  This is the state of mind that allows one to realize the true Self in its divinely undifferentiated state.

In a sense, the Destroyer is trying to make sure that my spirit is worthy of achieving this state of mind.  It’s just going about it in a very dysfunctional way because that’s what it’s learned over my life.  It is the expression of the subconscious lessons I was taught growing up and living my earlier life.  It’s also convinced it’s doing the right thing, which means it’s going to take a lot of time, energy, and patience to convince it otherwise so that I can progress on my Path.  Otherwise it’s just going to keep knocking me down and back.

It’s important that I remember that the Destroyer is not something external to me.  Rather, it is an integral part of me, an aspect of my psyche that has essentially become autonomous in its efforts to protect me and therefore it.  From one viewpoint, I should be grateful for its presence, or at least for its intentions.  It’s a powerful part of my psyche that, if reprogrammed and redirected, could be used for greatly positive purposes.

I recently engaged in an internal dialogue with the Destroyer that I wrote down.  It was very illuminating, revealing a lot of their motivations and true feelings.  I discovered that it’s partially driven by panic and fear, which explains its extreme and illogical reactions to perceived threats.  It’s also driven by a great deal of concern for me and behaves the way it does out of a lack of trust for my actions.  It’s essentially treating me like a child that doesn’t realize it’s doing something dangerous (and even addressed me as “child”).

About halfway through the dialogue, the internal table “flipped”, and instead of me querying the Destroyer, it was asking me questions.  We essentially became equals internally, one light and one dark, each revealing itself in the other.  I have spent the last six years “fusing” broken parts of myself together, and I wonder if I haven’t at last reached a final fusing between my two main halves: one rational and logical in nature, and the other emotional and intuitive in nature.

This is what one wants in the Jungian process of individuation: to integrate one’s disparate parts into wholeness.  Combining logic and emotion isn’t counterintuitive, it’s what leads to true wisdom, seemingly by paradox.  However, if I’ve learned nothing else over the last six years, it’s that the Universe runs on paradoxes, often invisibly because they’re so hard to understand when one thinks in two dimensions like most people do.

In the face of such a massive internal task, I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed, but that’s what my therapist is for.  I imagine that, much like battling the final boss of a video game, this will take a lot of skill, time, and energy and won’t be easy.  By the same token, I’ve been at this for a while and consider myself the equivalent of a high-level player.  Perhaps rather than seeing this as a battle, I should see it as an exercise in another common element to many video games: alchemy.

While it’s true that the early alchemists laid down the foundation for what later became chemistry, their work also took place in the metaphysical realm.  They weren’t trying to literally transform lead into gold, they were attempting to transform the “lead” of ordinary life into the “gold” of an enlightened life through a variety of philosophical, spiritual, and mystical activities.  Carl Jung took an interest in the art of alchemy as it related to the work of individuation, which is the work of becoming the person you were always meant to be in the absence of other people’s definitions: your true Self.

Just as chemistry seeks to combine elements to create new compounds, which requires balanced equations, so does spiritual alchemy seek to combine and balance disparate elements of the spirit and psyche to reveal and renew the Self.  Remaining in balance between the logical and the emotional without discarding either one is what will enable me to painlessly traverse the Razor’s Edge without falling off to either side, to achieve Knowledge of this Self.