Living With Trauma: The Healers, 22

I had a dream last night, or in the small hours of the morning, that I would like to share with you. I was working on a large abstract painting on a loose hanging canvas, featuring light emerging out of darkness. There were several other artists to whom I was psychically connected with working on the same sort of painting, inspired by my ideas. I went to visit one of these artists, a young man of about thirty or so with short dark hair, dark eyes, and high cheekbones. We were in his apartment and I told him frankly that no real art is an individual expression but something that we share and express and develop collectively, in community. This conversation went on for some time, but this theme is really sticking with me right now: this beautiful notion of all of us doing the same art, all of us providing different details and angles but we are all collaborating together in this work of beauty. I am also thinking of addiction. I have rather a simplistic-sounding idea of some of the roots of addiction and this comes out of this dream. This very idea that we are working together on the same expression of developing, evolving beauty also strongly suggests for me that we are all longing to return to an original state of wholeness and harmonious wellbeing. To quote Joni Mitchell's famous song: "We've got to get ourselves back into the garden." Throughout the world we carry in our deepest unconscious this collective memory of an original wholeness, a kind of golden age so far removed into the distant past that there is no history recorded of this. This is a notion that baffles the evolutionary biologists and the evolutionary psychologists because, as atheists, they want to explain everything as a result of their own God, Evolution. (By the way, as I have repeatedly mentioned on these pages, Gentle Reader, I believe in evolution, but I also believe that the process gets significant help from someone in whom some of you might not believe. But don't ask me. I wasn't there. Neither were you.) We carry with us so much baggage of the Collective Unconscious. We still are saddled with ancestral fears of enemies, plagues and disasters and threats that no longer exist, but those fears drive us still. They drive us to fight unnecessary wars, accrue unnecessary amounts of wealth, and to do everything we can to make ourselves powerful and invincible even though our foe no longer exists except in the hate that we project onto other parties. Remember the Cold War? There was a saying in those days: if Russia didn't have America to fear and loathe as an enemy and existential threat, they would have had to invent one, and vice-versa, so neurotically did America thrive on the alleged Soviet menace in order to bulwark and justify their own existence. And the beat goes on. We all do this. Trauma survivors, people with PTSD, do it in spades, perhaps. Or maybe by having the diagnosis we are just noticed more because this kind of projection of fear, threat and hate is a universal trait of our humanity. We are all collectively traumatized. But we all long to return to the garden, to that original primal wholeness that sings and teases from the remotest corner of our collective memory, driving us into some of the most absurd and hazardous pursuits and escapes. If we have undergone our lions' share of abuse and trauma we are going to be all the more vulnerable to this relentless hankering for escaping into beauty and wholeness. I think that this is also a major and very powerful driver for addiction, and this is what makes addiction a disease so difficult to cure. This is why only love (I don't mean the romantic nonsense!), real, unconditional love is going to heal us, and those of us who have been broken and scarred by trauma can become the most powerful vectors of this universal unconditional love. We all want to come home.