Cliffhouse Publications

Time-Meaning-Healing

Hello everybody,

It's really amazing to have this kind of interaction with you, it is a different dialogue unlike anything else, and I appreciate your interest, support, and good wishes.

Today I feel that I need to elaborate a little more on my understanding of Time and its relation to healing. After all, we are talking about transforming the internal space, and I believe no true change in internal boundaries by "breaking the walls" will leave our experience of Time unaffected when it's complete and done right. In fact, true healing should alter the experience of Time immensely.

But first of all, I want to respond to the comments to my last post, both of which raised important and profound questions. One of the questions was "how can we let go when we don't know what it is?" and related to that was, "is the victim trying to go back in time in an attempt to understand traumatic memories?"

The difference is subtle but significant. As I mentioned in a previous post, the traumatized person often tries to go back in time to the place before the trauma occurred, but there can be no understanding there, only the opposite - enforcing denial. On the other hand, do we always need to "understand" trauma and to know what it is we are trying to let go of? I don't think so. Again, it is the difference between concept and meaning, as I mentioned before. Subtle but substantial. Sometimes, and for many victims, it is better to let go without knowing the details, the meaning will be there regardless.

Thank you for mentioning Altai being in the now. I know that native cultures have completely different experiences and relation to Time. In a way, their God of Time is quite different from ours. And in a way we will change as a culture by changing our old "Gods" and merging them with "Gods" of other cultures so completely new "Gods" will be created, including the God of New Time.

Now let me talk a little more about our actual experience with time.

Time is a condition of existence as we know it. A condition so fundamental that it is essentially impossible to distance ourselves from it and to judge it "objectively". Yet, we all know how different the experience of time is at different moments in our lives (when we are young, happy, tired, worried, scared, ecstatic), each emotion has its own time frame that is quite different from the others. 

Time is usually more powerful than any experience we feel in the moment. By saying that, I mean that time has the power to take the feeling of experience, fade it away after playing with it inside our memory, and ultimately dissolve it completely no matter how hard we try to hold onto the moment. 

Time always wins the game it plays with our attachments, with one exception. That is an instance when the hurt we endure in the moment is so profound that it affects and hurts not only our feelings, but our sense of time as well. "Traumatic time", a point in one's personal history marked by a tragic event, like a poisoned river, if not healed, is going to carry inside it generation after generation of repeated sufferings.   

Time has the power to bring back those memories we desperately try to forget. As if the history of trauma creates this hidden deal between Time and Memory that we have no access to. So far.

Let's explore the mechanics behind our experience of time and its relation to the memory of trauma.

The perception of time flow is generated by an internal monologue (which I would refer to as inner communication, since it is not only verbal but involves sequences of other modalities), our thinking process which basically creates explicit memory. As we tell ourselves our own story (without being aware of it mostly), time flows, turning present events into past ones inside particular memory boxes in the brain. Life makes sense.

What happens when we face severe trauma? The story line breaks off, the time flow is disrupted, and the hurt of trauma now has a ticket to show up in our present and torment us over and over again any moment it wants to. 

With regular daily experiences, the events become past experiences in our memory after we attach certain meaning to what's happened. 

"I had a great vacation." Done. Recorded. "My boss is a jerk." Done. The character was created and will now play out his part in your reality. "This relationship doesn't work." If you say so... 

Whether we like the meanings of the events or not is not that important, what is more important is that we have it. And as the meanings continue to snowball inside our minds, with them grows our sense of identity, our idea of who we are in this world, regardless of whether its true or false as we'll see later.

That's why our internal communication progresses as we continue making sense out of our reality. And Time continues to flow. 

That changes when the trauma occurs. 

The most frequent phrase I have heard as a therapist working with my trauma patients is "it doesn't make any sense". And I've seen the most pain associated with this particular saying. Most likely the pain is going to remain until we are able to find some meaning for it. 

And another common phrase I have heard often is "I don't know who I am anymore". Not only does the traumatic event not make sense in a person's storyline, but it shatters our sense of self because the main function of identity is to create meanings. But after trauma, we find ourselves unable to make sense of reality any more. I hope I can say more about specific mechanisms related to the dimension of identity in future posts.  

Naturally, as healing progresses, we as human beings, learn to attach some meaning to the pain that shattered us, sometimes turning upside down our complete system of beliefs and values, often reconstructing our entire semantic universe, just to ease the pain. And it works when it happens. New meaning restores the flow of time and lets the memory of pain finally become the past so we can move on. 

But this can take years. And in those years, a traumatized person would remain a prisoner of one particular moment, locked inside the cell of unresolved hurt that never stops, cut off from the past, with no sense of the future. There is no being in the present either. The painful memory occupies one's awareness any time it pleases and the person is "gone" from the present moment, as many of us who've tried to help loved ones overcome trauma can witness. Their bodies are still here but their minds and souls are captured in those dangerous territories of past hurt where nobody else can have access to no matter how hard they try. And that's another suffering for families and friends who would do anything to bring their loved ones back, but they don't know how, no sacrifice they can offer would be enough.  

"I will never be the same again." True. But what are you going to be?

I hope that through our work in Cliffhouse we will be able to see new ways of healing, more direct, effective and available to more people.

With all my best,

Olga  

Comments

Thank you so much for that, Olga!

Yes, this helps so much to put the last 40 years in perspective. Especially in my case making peace with the different aspects of working with my own deep trauma. Peace in the sense of not shunning the pain any more, but journeying with its sound vibrating though me, and not denying its huge impact on my current state and character.

I have pursued extremes in the quest of ‘attaching some meaning to the pain that shattered us, sometimes turning upside down our complete system of beliefs and values ...’, as you express the intensity of such gateways so succinctly. All that effort has not taken the pain away, but added much to my realisation of its chemistry in my own explorations and quests.

Now there remains a sense of inner-flying to find ways to express what I’m learning in this world beyond the place where pain was still feeding mad anger. Slowly, with TIME, the pain has been unmasked.

I am quite surprised that there is only one comment here after what I would call such a great description and analysis of the effect of trauma on one’s sense of time and flow of life.
My own question, dear Olga, would be:
To which extent does your healing experience about your friend Lara, as told by you at the end of ‘Master of Lucid Dreams’, still help you for healing other traumas in yourself?
I loved the words Michael says at the end of the Preface:
‘Fear nothing and remember that it is the father who punishes and it is the Mother who forgives.’
I am French but my family is from is from the French Caraibbean island of Martinique, so I belong to every possible race, even just in this lifetime - and I remember living in other places and times as well. On top of it, I have been living in the growing Universal City called ‘Auroville’, South India, since 1972, and have discovered there through wonderful direct inner experience the reality of What also in India they call ‘The Divine Mother’.
When I read your invitationin your post to recreate our ‘God of Time’, it made me immediately take back that second book of yours and re-read that most beautiful passage echoing and completing the description of What you saw under the tent in Afrasiab:
I undesrtand that the fire and the suns are extensions of my heart and that is a true trritory of the God of Time. It is her territory. The Great Mother lives here, inside the sun, and it is her love that reunites all separated memories. She has the power to forgive everything, for she gave life to everything.(...) For the first time I realize that God is not a mental concept but an alive, ,powerful, vibrating being and we all belong to Her.’
This is where for you what was before a mere concept became a meaning - the meaning perhaps - and healed you at the same time as it healed also Lara.
This living experience of the Great Mother is also mine since many years, and heals my life constantly.
Is this indeed what you alluded to in your post when mentioning a New God of Time to be found?…

Sorry for all the typing mistakes I unwittingly left in the above post!… Now it’s too late, but next time I’ll remember to make use of the ‘Preview’ button you obligingly provided along with the ‘Submit’ one!!!
No trauma of guilt or shame, though, let no one worry! :-D

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