When people react differently to a situation, it’s because they’ve perceived it differently – in other words, the mind’s filters processed the events of reality in ways that produced different results. These filters comprise our biases, beliefs, assumptions and learned behaviours. In short, our conditioning.
Perceiving reality more clearly involves slowing down and becoming alert to what’s going on inside of us. To develop the subtle ability t identify signs and symptoms of fear, pain and anxiety in their rawest forms – at the physical level of bodily feelings and sensations. If we witness these phenomena exactly as they are, right now, without judgement or evaluation, the power they have over our perceptions, reactions and behaviours becomes apparent. This act of recognition is the first step towards dismantling our conditioning.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
SCARED TO DEATH
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
John Lennon
“What have I just done? I don’t want to die. God, please save me.”
These were the thoughts that ran through Kevin Hines’ mind after he jumped off the Golden Gate bridge. He’d just committed suicide, or so he thought, for it was logical to think so. Over 98 percent of the desperate people who leap to their deaths off San Francisco’s famous landmark – which averages about two per month – perish immediately upon hitting the water. The impact equates to a truck hitting a cement wall. And if that doesn’t get them, drowning or hypothermia soon does.
But Kevin was an outlier. Despite punching it at first, believing it to be a shark, a friendly sea-lion swam to his aid and nudged him to the surface, keeping him afloat just long enough for the Coast Guard to rescue him. He was given another chance, and took it by turning his life around.
He now works as a mental-health advocate traveling the world, sharing his story with others in the hope of preventing some of them from taking their own lives.
In the four seconds it took to hit the frigid pacific waters of San Francisco Bay, Kevin experienced a 180-degree flip in how he perceived his life, its meaning and its worth. How could this happen, so quickly? And how many others have had a similar change in perception but weren’t so lucky?
T.J. CONNOLLY
Perception is an intriguing phenomenon. Despite its absolute power over our understanding of – and interactions with – the world, it’s entirely subjective. It varies widely among humans – from situation to situation, generation to generation, and culture to culture – never mind species. The spectrum and depth of sensory perception varies widely across the animal kingdom as each species adopted and adapted tailored senses to survive in specific environments.
Humans, too, evolved sensory capacities specific to our survival. We know them as sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. But many may not realise that the sensory information they collect is filtered through something else – what could be called a sixth sense – before being perceived and processed by our conscious minds. This supplementary sense has many given names: intuition, gut feeling, ego, personality or simply imagination. Whatever we call it, at a fundamental level, it’s a layer of abstraction consisting of complex networks of information accumulated through a combination of past experiences, cultural influences and inherited genetics. Together this forms what psychologists refer to as ‘conditioning’ – a framework of predispositions and beliefs through which our sensory world is filtered.
Interest in the phenomenon of perception goes back at least three thousand years when Greek philosophers attempted to understand how humans made sense of the world. While progress in this field developed slowly over subsequent millennia, in the past two centuries, as psychology emerged as a discipline separate from philosophy, increasing interest in this realm of cognition led to some intriguing insights. The most fundamental being that our reactions to an event or situation are driven by a whole suite of internal and external factors that influence how we perceive, what we believe, and how we behave.
All these aspects of our conditioning combine in complex ways to create our reality. Not a reality based on objective facts, but subjective factors filtered through the lens of engrained beliefs and behaviours. And Kevin’s experience shows us that meaning – the value we attribute to our lives and the world – is also dependent on this flaky yet immensely powerful lens of perception. Just like each of our personal realities, the meaning we attribute to just about everything is also subjective (it’s not exactly the same for everyone) and extremely plastic (malleable or changeable over time).
In Kevin Hyne’s case, his perception of life took on new meaning after he jumped off those golden arches. Meaning that didn’t exist just moments earlier when his mind’s filters were consistently producing a fearful and depressing perception of life, so dark it was literally scaring him to death.
After jumping, these filters somehow disappeared, and his perception of life subsequently changed. Life took on a new, more positive, meaning. All in the blink of an eye.
More than 700,000 people commit suicide every year (almost double the number of homicides). And this doesn’t include all the failed attempts, nor the many more millions, if not billions, of people around the world suffering with depression, anxiety and mental disorders that inhibit their lives and those around them in so many ways. It’s just the tip of the iceberg of a great well of despair in which a vast bulk of humanity are leading lives of ‘quiet desperation’. The stark reality is that mental afflictions are the biggest health problem humanity has ever faced. If every forty seconds, someone, somewhere on earth, kills themselves in order to ‘make the pain go away’ on a permanent basis, surely figuring out the root cause of this problem is of paramount importance. Why are we so anxious, depressed, and fearful?
Why is our species cursed with such global dis-ease? The unique case of Kevin Hynes points to the roots of the problem: humanity’s perception of reality is being haunted by negative conditioning stemming from our genes and cultures and, as we move through life, the pains, traumas and suffering we’ve never fully processed. They manifest as paranoid thoughts, ruminations, worries, anxieties, inner criticisms. These are the demons rampant in our psyches.
T.J. CONNOLLY
Kevin’s experience reveals one additional and critical piece of information: that a perceptual transformation can be achieved, not in months or years, but in a matter of moments. While such a revelatory experience may prove temporary at first, it offers us a glimpse of a more positive way of perceiving the world. A more positive way of living.
Practical Exercise: The Death-Jump
Close your eyes, take three slow, deep breaths, then:
- Visualize yourself distraught, standing on the edge of the Golden Gate bridge; hear the bustling and hustling of cars and people behind you, feel the wind in your face as you look down at the icy water below. Take it all in, then jump.
- Feel the cold air rushing past as you plunge to your death. Our perception of time slows down at such moments – use this time to take stock of your present situation and imagine how you feel as you fall.
- Does the immediate fear of death drown out everything else?
What about all those other pains and fears you routinely harbour? Is this the escape, the peace, the feeling you were seeking?
PAIN Point
Our perception of reality does not equate to reality. It is polluted by beliefs and biases that stem from our genes, cultures, and as we move through life, pains and horrors from the past that we haven’t fully processed. Our great task in life is to identify and remove these negative filters – to free ourselves up from their demonic control.
GET TO KNOW YOUR DEMONS
I think this man is suffering from memories.
Sigmund Freud
On 22 May 2017, Salman Abedi walked into the foyer of the Manchester
Arena. CCTV images show the skinny 22-year-old hunching forward to cope with the weight of a large rucksack on his back. Not surprising given it was packed full of metal nuts and bolts. Sheathed beneath this medley of mail-chain was a homemade bomb Abedi assembled just the day before.
At 22:31 pm, as the concert inside was coming to a close, Abedi squeezed his finger down on an improvised detonation button. The resulting explosion sent steel shrapnel cascading through concertgoers, the majority of whom were teenagers and children, as they drifted towards the exit, and the world was left horrified by a callous act of terror. In the weeks following the attack, Ariana Grande, the pop singer on stage that night, posted pictures online of a normal brain scan alongside one with PTSD damage. Below them she shared images recently taken of Grande’s own brain that looked strikingly similar to the one with PTSD.
The pop-star was obviously suffering both physiologically and psychologically, and was not the only one. While the attack ended the lives of 22 people – ranging in ages from 8 to 52 – the injury count reached much higher.
Indeed, the official figure of 200 was soon revised to over 800 on account of those suffering with severe trauma in its wake.
T.J. CONNOLLY
Grande’s images are a harrowing and tangible snapshot of a mental affliction humanity has demonized for most of history. Many ancient civilizations – from China and Egypt to Babylon and Greece – believed that those who exhibited symptoms of trauma and mental disorders were possessed by bad spirits; that the only way to treat them was exorcism and ritualized ceremonies often involving direct physical attacks on the body in order to force out the demons within. With religious dogma the only source of logic, and the systematic reasoning of science a distant dream,
who could blame them?
Thankfully we are now in an era in which science is enabling us to see deep under the skin of psychopathologies. In the book The Body Keeps the Score, author and psycho-neurologist Bessel van Der Kolk digs deep into decades of treating trauma victims to reveal how its symptoms manifest in our minds and bodies. The case studies described, often in harrowing detail, repeatedly show that physical illnesses, tics, behaviours, and a wide spectrum of somatic symptoms are commonly a communication from the subconscious. An acting-out of suppressed painful memories and emotions and/or an expression of trauma.
The bulk of his observations are now backed up by brain-imaging techniques, reinforcing the idea that the body is not just closely connected to the psyche but an extension of it. He stresses for example that ‘somatic symptoms for which no clear physical basis can be found are ubiquitous in traumatized children and adults’ and ‘can include chronic back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraine, digestive problems, spastic colon/irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue and some forms of asthma.’ The list goes
- Traumatized children, for example, are fifty times more likely to develop asthma in later life.
A multitude of attachment studies and other social sciences corroborate this psychosomatic view of the human organism. They show that the mind and body are wholly interdependent – causes in one lead to effects in the other and vice versa, sometimes in strange and unpredictable ways.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
If van der Kolk and his contemporaries are correct about these corporeal communications from our subconscious, it begs the question, what is the subconscious trying to tell us? And why in this way?
Given the human tendency to be able to see other people’s problems better than our own – the proverbial splinter in our neighbour’s eye – it’s easier to answer these questions if we imagine the subconscious as a separate person. Someone who’s trying to get our attention. In the case of past trauma, what could this person be trying to tell us?
The unpalatable yet straight-forward answer is it’s trying to tell us that something is gravely wrong; that there are powerful emotions and painful memories which haven’t been fully processed; that we might want to look at them; maybe get some help; talk to someone, maybe see a therapist. At a minimum, it’s imploring us to acknowledge – not ignore or suppress – the damaging imprints left behind by a painful event from our past In other words, our subconscious is asking us to face the truth of what happened, the impact it’s had on our minds and bodies. To stop running away, from the past, from our bodies – because it’s clearly not working.
But why in this way? Surely there’s an easier and less painful way to get our attention? Unfortunately not. While the subconscious is supremely powerful in so many ways, its modes of communication are extremely limited. It has just two primary mechanisms for sending warning signals to our conscious awareness: fear and pain. These typically take the form of anxious feelings and/or physical ailments. Unsurprisingly, both are very effective at getting our attention.
The problem however is that the subconscious doesn’t have a tongue.
Nor can it use braille, morse code, or any other more expressive languages.
After getting our attention, it can’t tell us specifically what’s wrong. It can only hope our conscious minds will heed the warning, take the time and make the effort to figure it out.
T.J. CONNOLLY
Practical Exercise: Physicality of Fear
- List out some of the recurring sores, pains, illnesses and ailments you suffer from on a regular basis e.g. headaches, migraines, eczema, asthma, weight problems, sore neck, lower back pain, etc
- Feel the pain in your body, and ask yourself: is it possible that this may be directly or indirectly related to stress?
- Now imagine stress, not as a root cause of, but as a symptom, or even a synonym, for fear – what do you think you might be afraid of? Maybe it’s a painful memory, thought, feeling, person or situation?
PAIN Point
The first step to letting go of trauma and negative conditioning is becoming aware of our inner experience, by paying attention to its physical manifestations in the body.
KNOW THY POISON, KNOW THY CHALICE
I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.
Edgar Allan Poe
In 1999, a group of U.S. researchers collated and analysed all published literature relating to injuries and deaths suspected to be caused by government-protected medicine. They outlined their results in a paper ominously titled ‘Death by Medicine.’ It’s an unsettling read; take, for example, the following findings (on average per annum):
- 8.9 million people were found to have been unnecessarily hospitalized
- 20 million patients were unnecessarily prescribed antibiotics for viral infections
- 7.5 million people underwent unnecessary medical and surgical procedures
- 2.2 million people experienced in-hospital, adverse reactions to prescribed drugs
T.J. CONNOLLY
Their most stunning discovery however was the total number of annual deaths caused by conventional medicine: 783,936. A figure which positioned the American medical system as the country’s leading cause of death – not heart disease, in second place with 652,091, nor cancer in third with 559,312.
Of course, the background context to all these stats is that many people are making shed-loads of money from the blunders. And a subset of these people are actively invested in ensuring they endure. But they’re being helped by a very willing consumer base. In other words, we – the average Jo and Joe – are aiding and abetting their prolific profit-making. Consider the opiate epidemic that plagued the U.S. and other countries in recent decades. It started off with doctors unnecessarily (there’s that word again) prescribing painkillers such as morphine, oxycodone and methadone for common maladies such as back pain and headaches. Drugs which are very effective in numbing the experience of physical pain but also happen to be very good at dampening down psychological and emotional pain. Despite initial claims from some of the companies producing these drugs, they’re also extremely addictive (so much so that overdose deaths from prescribed opioids roughly quadrupled in a twenty-year period, in near lockstep with increased prescription by doctors).
Why are they so addictive? Why is anything addictive? Of course, opioids activate the chemical reward system in the brain, but to fully understand humanity’s general proclivity towards addictions, we must look deeper at the overall drivers of human behaviour, the most fundamental of which is physical safety. Maslow placed self-preservation at the foundation of his Hierarchy of Needs because our instinct to survive overrides all others, and ensures we act swiftly, often without conscious deliberation, whenever we detect threats by: resisting (fighting), running (fleeing) or playing dead (freezing). Which mechanism we deploy depends on our perception of the threat: if we figure we can tackle it head on, we resist;
if we can avoid it, we run; while the most primitive option is freezing in the hope the threat loses interest and moves on. Today’s threat landscape however is different to our predecessors: most of our predators are either extinct, in safari parks, or locked in cages. Hence the world is physically safer. Now the primary source of threats arises from the inner world of the psyche. The mental realm where we organize and process relationships and communications, both critical to animals who depend on social structures for survival. Our brain and body chemistries thus evolved to support these functions by ensuring we experience mental or emotional pain whenever our social status is threatened. The bigger the concern the bigger the pain; the more we are driven to do something about it; thus, ensuring we maintain a healthy position within our tribe.
This is great, but evolution is kind of lazy. It repurposed the same body wiring that trips in the face of physical threats to trigger for psychological threats. This means that criticism from your boss, a stolen parking spot, or being ignored by your spouse can trigger the same psycho-physiological reactions as our ancestors experienced in the presence of a hissing snake. And it’s the same with less tangible but more ubiquitous events such as Facebook unlikes, twitter trolls and Instagram downgrades, all of which can happen dozens of times a day without you having to sidle from your seat.
This explains why so many of us have become willing victims for Big
Pharma, easy pickings for opiate epidemics, and extremely vulnerable to all other forms of addictions, from over-eating and busyness to alcohol and gambling. Our susceptibility to getting hooked on anything that numbs physical, psychological or emotional pain is monstrous because of what’s lurking deep within our subconscious: demons we perceive as threats because of the severe pain we know, and often feel, they inflict. So we initiate our symptom management defence mechanisms: worrying (original meaning being to “strangle” which is particularly apt given what we’re trying to do to our demons) is a common approach to resisting and fighting back. When we realise this just makes things worse however, we turn to sedatives to put them to sleep (a form of numbing or freezing), or any other addictive behaviours that distract us (all forms of running away). Whichever mechanism we employ becomes our poison of choice for dealing with demonic pain.
The problem with these approaches of course is that our demons are not external ghouls that can be exorcised or poisoned. They are disowned parts of our psyches, and our bodies the chalices into which we pour the poison.
Practical Exercise: Strategies of Avoidance
- List the top three things you do to “pass the time” e.g. watching TV, scrolling social media, grazing food, gambling, drinking, over-exercising etc
- How conscious are you when you are involved in these pastimes? Does your mind switch off after a while as if numbed? Is this comforting?
- When do you feel the biggest urge to engage in one of these “pastimes”? Is it when there’s an uncomfortable feeling you want to be numb or be distracted from?
PAIN Point
The desire to avoid pain is the source of all suffering.
UNDERSTAND PROJECTION IS EGO PROTECTION
Who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
Mark Twain
Satan, Lucifer, The Dark Lord, Beelzebub, Ba’al, the Devil. Despite his many monikers and cross-cultural notoriety in recent centuries, the Evil One was never a prominent figure in the Abrahamic belief systems of which he was born. That is, until a Jewish sect called The Hasids brought him to the fore in the 1st century BC. After becoming increasingly disgruntled with Roman rule over their Palestinian homeland, the Hasidic elders decided to withdraw the community from society. They needed a space of their own where they could pray, and more importantly the leaders could preach, without fear of persecution.
Judgement Day, the end of times, became a hot topic for the elders’ sermons around this time. They warned that God would soon descend to earth to destroy the wicked, in particular their Roman overseers and any traitorous Jews who helped them. The underlying message being: God was with them, the Hasids, and against their enemies whom Satan had clearly coaxed onto the dark side. This had the powerful effect of binding the marginalized group together to face a common enemy, one so sinful that the Hasids’ efforts were nothing short of a service to God.
T.J. CONNOLLY
By adopting this approach, they were one of the earliest groups in history to employ the projection of fear – through the personification of Satan – as a strategy for subversion. A clever move by the elders who clearly understood that the success of their campaign – and indeed any campaign, be it religious, political or otherwise – relies on the formulation of a few core messages to communicate to the masses. At a minimum, these should touch a common nerve and evoke deep levels of fear. They also work best when the fear is focused on an ‘other’ – a ‘them’ that will help define ‘us.’
Targets of this treatment have traditionally been other tribes with different values coming in to take our women, food, livelihood, way of life etc. Over time, however, this tactic became too hypocritical for institutions such as the Roman empire which was full of other tribes (the army’s whole conscription method was to fill its ranks with brainwashed barbarians from conquered countries). Immigrants and foreigners also looked too similar for many of the more morally inclined religions that were sweeping through Europe and the Middle East in the early centuries AD. Impugning other people, even if they were heathen, just didn’t align with the dogma they proclaimed to follow. No, if religions such as Christianity and Islam were to cement their status as reputable systems of morality and righteousness, something more ephemeral yet everlasting was needed to encapsulate the fear their success required.
Enter Satan, for his second act.
As the ultimate personification of evil, Satan turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving. And we’ve only touched on religion and politics so far. His biggest and most selfless act has gone even deeper in terms of ultimate pay-offs for humankind. It also explains his glorious descent into our collective unconscious.
For Satan’s existence means that humanity need not accept its animalistic heritage – important if we’re to believe we were created in the image of God – nor responsibility for any of our baser tendencies that society and religions condemn. Such evils are not a human ‘deficiency’, as Pope
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
Paul VI explained to a general audience in 1972, but a separate ‘living being, who [is both] perverted and a perverter. A terrible reality. Mysterious and terrifying. He is enemy number one, tempter par excellence. We know that this obscure and frightening being really exists and that he is still acting with a betraying astuteness; he is the occult enemy who seeds error and misfortune throughout history.’
What better way to discard all our deficiencies than to package them up and project them onto someone else? In this light, Satan is our Saviour.
Alas, he’s not real. The whole concept, as Jung once put it, is a metaphor for ‘the grotesque and sinister side of the unconscious…we have never really come to grips with.’ The shameful things we go to great lengths to avoid because the conditioning of our childhood and the psychological handcuffs of society’s accepted norms simply won’t sanction them.
So the amazingly imaginative forces of our minds operate according to what they believe is in our best interests. To ensure we remain within the protection of our collective tribes, it chooses ignorance as the best policy – disconnecting and dissociating from the unwanted aspects of our psyches, often aided by the mental phenomenon of projection.
This is how and where Satan steps over the threshold of time and personal space. Arising from the underworld – just as the allegorical monster comes out of the closet – he lunges straight into our minds.
But of course, it’s not just Satan who suffers the brunt of this psychological defence mechanism. What the ego repudiates is always split off in another – any other – meaning people around us are demonized too. On a daily basis we project onto others – from family members, colleagues, bosses and teachers to politicians and outright strangers – the characteristics, desires, dislikes, fears and any other traits and feelings we don’t want to acknowledge in ourselves.
Through this trick of the mind, we’ve become masters of self-deception. Organising our whole lives around avoiding the painful reality that all those faults, flaws and foibles we perceive in others, all those things that irk and irritate us so, are nothing but reflections of ourselves. Impressions from the demons in our psyches.
Practical Exercise: Projection Detection
- Pick some behaviours you notice in other people that really annoy you e.g. rudeness, lateness, temper, interrupting other people etc
- Imagine witnessing someone around you behaving like this now. What feelings does this stir up inside you (e.g. anger or frustration)?
- Now close your eyes and imagine yourself stepping into this person’s body and behaving like this; or even better, remember a time when you have behaved like this before. What does that feel like? Are you capable of similar behaviours?
PAIN Point
Watch out for all the things that disturb you in others.
They are projections of traits you suppress deep within. This is why you are disturbed.
SEEK THE SECRETS OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Carl Jung
When Satan appears as a seven-headed serpent in the final book of the New Testament, Saint Michael steps up to fight him and his legions of demons. At the conclusion of this celestial struggle, the fallen angel is cast into a vast ‘lake of fire’ to be ‘tormented day and night forever and ever.’ Historians believe this biblical beast is another metaphor for the unpopular Romans who, in the 1st century AD, had started persecuting the latest threat to their rule in the Middle East – the early Christian church.
The lake of fire is also believed to be a powerful image-metaphor, derived in part from one of nature’s most terrifying phenomenon: volcanoes. To this day, indigenous tribes retain an existential fear for the devils and demons that lurk inside volcanoes. The primordial nature of their eruptions undoubtedly influenced ideas of what hell looked like: rivers of flowing lava; firebombs tracing through the air; pyroclastic avalanches of super-hot gas and rock radiating in every direction, igniting all in its wake.
And in the case of super eruptions, monstrous mounds of ash pumped up into the stratosphere, darkening the skies for days, months, even years.
And while it’s easy to imagine lakes of lava flooding their banks to form an ocean of hell, it’s the beast’s arrival by sea before the biblical battle that holds even deeper meaning. Sea-dragons and water-serpents pepper the myths of the past, their symbols playing important roles in the religious and social lives of ancient cultures.
The oceans in which these beasts reside simultaneously came to represent the vast, mysterious, and cavernous depths of our unconscious minds which were just as dark, enigmatic, and fearful to our ancestors as the oceans of old. The message clearly being ‘there be dragons’ in both domains.
Oceans and seas thus came to embody the great fear we humans have for all that we suppress and repress, while the serpents and dragons lurking within embodied our more shameful and animalistic inclinations.
Entering these symbolic waters thus signifies a psychological transformation, one which requires that we come face to face with its monsters.
With the prize for those brave enough to enter this perilous domain – and quite possibly the stomach of a dragon – being wholeness and self-awareness. The wisdom of that which lies beyond and within through an assimilation of the defeated monster’s knowledge and power.
We see this symbolism inducted into the Christian practice of baptism. An immersion in water which imbibes the life force of God into the newborn while simultaneously signifying the death of original sin (the inner serpent or dragon) and a psychological rebirth into faith. The Hindu practice of Kundalini has comparable connotations: practitioners envision a divine life force at the base of the spine, symbolized as a coiled serpent whose sacred energy empowered creation. To release its cosmic energy, the serpent must be agitated, awoken and assimilated through focused meditation.
With so many metaphors and meanings, it’s not surprising that so many myths and fables from the past speak of serpent-like monsters, often with several heads. In the inner journeys of our lives, they symbolize the complex and mysterious forces of darkness within each of us. The inner demons we fear above all else. Their presence, while terrifying, also serves as a rousing call to arms, a summons to hunt down and assimilate their wisdom in the subconscious: the treasure trove of self-awareness that’s shackled to the shadow urges of our bodies, suppressed emotions and repressed memories.
Practical Exercise: Body as Ocean
- Close your eyes, take three slow, deep breaths, then:
- As you breath in a fourth deep breath, imagine the air flowing in through the top of your head and slowly filling out the whole of your body until your chest, abdomen, legs, arms, feed and hands are full of air.
- Now imagine all this air transmuting into water. Your whole body is now an ocean of water. Rest in this body of water for as long as you feel comfortable.
- This bottomless ocean, and all it contains (both good and bad), is your subconscious. Your true Self is the integrated composite of everything. All the events of life are nothing but waves on its surface.
PAIN Point
Memories, desires and emotions that are too painful, shameful or distressing to consciously face are placed in the deep storage of our subconscious. Until we bring them up into conscious awareness, they will exert a demonic influence over our lives.
WATCH OUT FOR SIGNS OF THE DEMONIC
Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
Joseph Campbell
The Toyota Production System (TPS) is famous for being one of the most efficient manufacturing systems in the world. Hundreds, if not thousands, of organisations around the world have adopted its principles and practices – reverentially referred to as the ‘Toyota Way’ – including the likes of Amazon, Caterpillar and General Motors.
The system has two simple philosophies at its core: ‘Jidoka’ which prioritizes the elimination of waste in pursuit of efficiency, and ‘Just-in Time’ which ensures each process within a continuous flow produces only what’s needed for the next process. Rigorously applying these philosophies to its operations has enabled Toyota to produce vast numbers of high-quality vehicles in a very consistent manner.
It also supports the continual and systematic examination of the entire production line, enabling Toyota’s engineers to implement a series of small incremental improvements over the course of each year (they are known to make over one million amendments to the TPS on an annual basis). As a result, the Japanese company regularly reaps huge rewards in terms of speed and quality.
One can imagine many things as a production line: a life, a career, the expansion of the universe. The flow of time too is analogous if we think of it as reality rolling by, with each individual’s experience occurring wherever they’re stationed on the line. Each moment, events flow along this line, through the framework of our senses and perceptions, producing feelings, emotions, thoughts, and physical reactions. And just like Toyota’s factories, none of this happens in a vacuum. In the background, the body is teeming with energies and forces that react and interact to form a complex yet functional system of inter-dependent process flows.
A complementary analogy might help here: imagine a spider’s web as it catches a fly – the impact instantly sends ripples across the web which serves as a communication system, telling the spider its dinner has arrived.
In a similar fashion, a sensory nerve in one part of the human body, a toe for example, might register a change in its immediate environment such as an increase in heat, itchiness, coolness, pressure or texture. The resulting sensations ripple through the web of nerves that connect back up through the spine and into the brain. Unlike a spider’s web however, the ripples don’t stop there; the nervous system simultaneously communicates with other bodily systems – such as the emotion-driving endocrine system – each with its own complex web of interconnections.
It’s difficult for a worker stationed on the Toyota assembly line to understand the system’s whole operations, but the great thing is they don’t need to. They have supervisors who watch the whole product line and supporting processes from afar, and it’s their job to develop a deep understanding of the system so they can fix issues as they occur. It’s the same with our mind-body systems. When we’re too immersed in the process of daily life, sitting on the production line, we don’t have time and space to take stock of and learn about the whole. Thus, we can’t fix larger problems when they occur. A way to address this is to regularly transition to the role of a supervisor who watches and learns about the various components of the system. In this way, through continual and ever-deepening observation, we develop the skills to navigate problems as they arise.
T.J. CONNOLLY
At a very basic level, this requires monitoring the mind-body system at increasingly fine and subtle levels. Noticing, for example, physical sensations at first, then seeing if and how they are tied to feelings, including what triggers them before they begin to take hold. At a physical level, these triggers might manifest in many ways: a tightness or tingling in the chest, a knot in the stomach, or stiffness in the shoulders. At an emotional level, we might feel fearful, angry, anxious, stressed or irritable. All are signs that demons and dragons lurk beneath at subconscious levels of our awareness.
The presence of emotional or physical discomfort tells us that certain buttons are being pushed; painful threads of a negative complex are being pulled; something external has scratched the surface of something internal.
At such moments, our conditioned minds automatically want to pull away from the associated pain. We might hear voices in our heads telling us to check our phones, watch TV, grab a beer, down a hot dog, swallow a pill. In the quest for awareness, it’s important to know we can resist these urges to run, hide, and avoid. We can resist the mind’s reflex to retreat from reality.
Toyota didn’t always make cars. It started out as a manufacturer of wooden looms and sewing machines. In 1903, when the company’s founder Sakichi Toyoda designed one of the world›s first automated looms, he included a clever function that immediately stopped the machine whenever the needle broke. The idea being to prevent waste material and defective products.
Thirty-four years later, when Toyota entered the automobile industry, assembly line managers sought a similar system that would allow workers to swiftly signal if and when they needed to stop production. The plant designers addressed this requirement by installing cords that illuminated lanterns above each worker’s station (these became known as andon cords after the traditional paper lanterns decorating many Japanese homes).
Whenever a problem occurred, a worker simply pulled the cord to light up their lantern, and a supervisor would come to their assistance.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
While the idea behind the andon cord is simple, many organizations have found it difficult to implement. This is not so much a fault of the process but rather human nature – people don’t like raising issues or asking for help. Neither do they want to be known as the person who stopped the production line. For the andon cord to be successful, a cultural shift is required. One based on the realization that pulling the cord, even multiple times, isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing because it means something new can be learned.
This is why Toyota’s managers overtly celebrate the illumination of each andon. It means an element of the process has failed, and something new must be grasped and mastered in order to resolve it. The result is greater knowledge and, over time, fewer production problems.
The same is true for us in relation to our perceptions and experience of reality. Our sensory nerves are like andon cords – whenever they sense something painful or uncomfortable, they light up lanterns in our mind-body systems and our initial reaction is to retract. Sometimes we consciously notice these signals and reactions, more often than not we’re only vaguely aware of them and their effects on our mood and irritability.
Like a production line supervisor, we can however train ourselves to look for them: by taking time to check in with ourselves; by paying close attention to sensations, feelings, and reactions stirring in our minds and bodies.
Being more aware of these nuanced experiences is the first step towards harnessing our demons, for it tells us where they are.
Practical Exercise: Body Sensations
Close your eyes, take three slow, deep breaths, then:
- Become aware of the touch of your clothes on your shoulders; feel your back touching the chair or bed you are resting on; your arms and hands resting in your lap; the sensations in your thighs and calves, the soles of your feet as they touch your shoes.
- Slowly repeat this rotation of focusing on sensations around your body. The important thing is that you get the ‘feel’, the sensation, of each part; stay with it for a few seconds, then move on to the next body part.
- After a few rotations, stop and see how you feel. Getting out of your head – of thoughts and inner talk – and into your body – of sensations and feelings – can be a transformative experience.
PAIN Point
We generate lasting positive emotions by embracing the negative ones.
SLOW DOWN TO SEE EVERYTHING
Men are not free when they’re doing just what they like. Men are only free when they’re doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.
DH Lawrence
Shortly after the battle of Gettysburg, a dejected Abraham Lincoln sat down and penned a long letter to General George Meade, the commander of the Army of the Potomac. After expressing profound disappointment in Meade’s failure to pursue and destroy Robert E. Lee’s confederate army, he concluded with the following lines:
I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape – He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would in connection with our later successes have ended the war…Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.
A strong communication from the commander in chief. So strong, in fact, Lincoln never sent it. He folded and placed the letter in an envelope on which he wrote ‘To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed.’ This was actually a common practice for the judicious president – he knew that one’s initial reactions were often counterproductive.
Lincoln was angry and frustrated, and he had every right to be.
Each of the four generals he’d appointed, one after the other, to lead the T.J. CONNOLLY principal union army in the Eastern theatre of the American civil war had disappointed. Their cardinal sin: wasting excellent opportunities to end the war early by chasing down Lee’s army following hard-won battles. Despite superior numbers, time and again they’d failed to take their chances, and the bloodshed was allowed to continue.
Of the four, however, Meade was probably the least deserving of rebuke. After graduating from West Point in 1835, while fighting in the Virginia peninsula campaign, he had been seriously wounded when a musket ball hit him just above the hip, missing his spine by mere millimetres. Despite an additional bullet then striking his arm, Meade stayed on his horse commanding his troops until loss of blood forced him from the field. In short, he was not a coward. And despite Lincoln’s disappointment, after some time to think, he would have realised that Meade, at the battle of Gettysburg, had at least fought well defensively in a battle not sought.
One of the best known of all neuroscience studies is the ‘free will experiment’ conducted by Benjamin Libet and colleagues in 1983. Using EEG to monitor brain activity, Libet and his team of doctors discovered that the region responsible for physical movement – moving a finger, for example – was often activated about a quarter of a second before the conscious mind became aware of the intention to move. In other words, the subconscious was ‘independently’ making the decision to take a physical action.
This simple observation suggests many of our reactions and behaviours are more autonomic than we’d like to think. It also suggests, however, that within this ‘magic quarter second’ between impulse and action, lies an opportunity. If we are deft enough to catch it, this brief moment offers the chance of exercising free will.
Lincoln clearly intuited the power of this capacity and used it to great effect, always taking time to slow down and retreat to his own counsel before making decisions. Or, as in the case of the unsent letter to Meade, reacting in a self-created sandbox where there’s little or no consequences. Even after winning the bitterly fought presidential election in 1860, for example, when people from all sides of the political spectrum were pressing hard for public statements and commentary, he exhibited a cautious and considered approach. Explaining to a large crowd at a gathering in Pittsburgh that he was ‘rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.’
Of course, this trait was not Lincoln’s alone. Many of the greatest thinkers and leaders in history, from Plato and Marcus Aurelius to Ulysses Grant and Barack Obama, nurtured the ability to temper their emotions and mental operations so as to see things more clearly. They understood that the practice of pausing, making use of the magic quarter second, is critical to reclaiming the power of choice. And this capability is borne from the most important choice of all – the personal decision to pay attention to what’s going on in the present moment. To be aware of what is happening at all times.
For his book The Perennial Philosophy, author and philosopher Aldous Huxley analysed beliefs common to many cultures and faiths.
One of his biggest insights was that the majority of spiritual traditions view the mind and universe, and everything within them, as an aspect of the ‘divine’. Within this framework, human effort is generally categorised across three parallel planes: lower, middle and higher. While routine actions of the physical body reside at the lower plane, our minds and spirits are generally believed to be able to rise up to higher levels of being, and thus obtain a clearer vision of the world. This ascension is achieved by embodying higher qualities such as humility, respect, compassion and love.
Despite this common framework of beliefs, so many of us spend most of our time wound up with worry and self-defensiveness, preventing us from practicing such virtues. The primary objective of spirituality,
Huxley determined, is to free up our focus and energy from these lesser efforts. Only then can we move beyond the middle plane of thinking and feeling to the highest plane that consists of pure intuition.
The lesser efforts Huxley spoke of equate to the demonic habits, beliefs, and conditioning that subliminally control our daily lives. By using up vast reserves of our energy, they prevent us from moving into higher planes of awareness. The first step towards breaking free from this trap is to witness how much of our energy is being used up in this manner. And the easiest way to do this is to slow down – to stop doing so that we can start seeing.
This is why the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal’s proclaimed that ‘all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ As an experience, sitting in solitude lies somewhere on the spectrum between pretty uncomfortable and def-con panic stations for many of us. On the few occasions when we find ourselves with nothing external to consume our attention, we’re soon reminded why we retain such intense levels of fear for it. For this is often when our demons – not drowned out by distractions – crawl up out of the corners of our subconscious into the realm of awareness.
Perhaps this is why humanity is moving towards a faster, rushed and increasingly busy existence. It’s also the reason why we need to slow down.
Practical Exercise: Reactive Emotions
- Recall a time when someone was critical of you and it made you feel angry. Now break the experience down into the following process
- Your first experience is the sound of the person’s voice.
- This is accompanied by an unpleasant feeling.
- The sound, tone and words are interpreted as insulting or offensive.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
- Anger arises as an emulation reaction.
- The anger is expressed or repressed (you deliver a stinging retort, or you swallow the anger and say nothing).
- If you slow down your mind during this process, you’ll notice the possibility of an opening between steps (d) and (e) – the reactive emotion of anger and the expressing of that anger.
- Developing the ability to differentiate between a demon-driven feeling (anger) and its expression is a critical step towards escaping its control over us. It allows us to step into the transition from step (c) to (d), consciously interpret the reactive emotion and step out of the reactive process before it gathers momentum. In the process we develop an increase in self-awareness.
PAIN Point
Demons go into hiding when we judge and react to them. When we start watching and listening however, they’ll reveal their true nature.
MASTER THE ART OF ATTENTION
Your obstructions are your demons, and your demons are shadow dwellers.
They live and thrive in the half-light of ignorance, so the way to slay a demon is by illuminating it with the full force and power of your focused attention; by looking at it, hard.
Jed McKenna
As editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, Jean-Dominique Bauby had it all.
He had reached the pinnacle of fashion journalism where his penchant for fine food, fast cars, and beautiful women was easily fulfilled. And at 43 years old, he was only getting started. With his talent, work-rate and charisma, nothing felt out of reach. That is, until the fateful evening of 8 December 1995.
After picking up son Theophile from his estranged wife’s house on the outskirts of Paris, the two began driving back into the city. It wasn’t long however before Bauby began feeling uneasy. Little did he know it, but a cerebrovascular contusion was about to short-circuit his brain-stem and change his life forever. His last thought before slipping into a coma was whether he should cancel that evening’s theatre tickets.
When he woke up three weeks later at an old army hospital in Bercksur-Mer, on the windswept coast of Northern France, Bauby was unable to speak. A crippling stroke had left him with locked-in syndrome – a rare neurological condition in which the mind is completely lucid yet not a single muscle can be moved. Except, in Bauby’s case, his left eyelid.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
Several months later, while still at Berck-sur-Mer, a visitor informed Bauby that the Paris rumour-mill – of which he had previously been a central character – was referring to him as ‘a total vegetable.’ The news irritated him to the extent that, despite his debilitated state, he resolved there and then to prove his ‘IQ was still higher than a turnip’s,’ by writing a book about his experience.
For the next two months Bauby laboured intensively, waking up early in the morning to memorize prose before spelling it out with the help of assistants. Using a method known as the Silent Alphabet – which involved blinking the only remaining body part that worked, his left eyelid, to signal the letters of words, one after the other – it took close to 200,000 blinks to complete the composition. Dying of respiratory failure shortly after its publication, Bauby regrettably didn’t live long enough to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly become a modern literary masterpiece and later, an award-winning movie.
In the book, Bauby describes how he woke up the morning of his stroke feeling ‘heedless, perhaps a little grumpy”. He recounts the indescribable chaos and collective nerves on edge of a Parisian transport strike; having to deal with a message from the former minister of health, a ‘quasi-divine personality’ who was furious about a montage in his magazine that ridiculed her (the damage-control call with her lasted 45 minutes, after which he felt ‘exactly like a trampled doormat’); and a feeling of apprehension for not having spoken properly with his son since moving out of the family home. Just two hours before the stroke, he recalls fighting the temptation to retire to his bed for the weekend amidst a ‘sense of utter exhaustion.’
Locked-in syndrome is a disease process where a fully functional brain is confined within a non-functional body. Often described as the closest thing to being buried alive, the devastating condition pushes the paralysed person back inside themselves, to consciousness and memory, the only part of life still under their control. While quite rare, it’s often caused by a stroke, the risk of which significantly increases with chronic stress. Something Bauby seemed to have a lot of.
Like many of us, he worked long hours to get tasks and projects over the line, simultaneously disregarding the tension, strain and rigidity building up in the body. Dismissing signs that something is wrong and repeatedly pushing forward, so many of us rely on stimulants to support our daily functioning, then sleeping pills to fall asleep at night. Yet the stress increases, as does the range of short-term remedies until – one after the other – they become increasingly ineffective. Eventually something gives and there’s a break down: our health deteriorates, a marriage collapses, a job is lost, or some other ‘accident’ occurs which doesn’t align with our idea of how things should be.
Whatever the crisis, the root cause usually comes down to us not being present in our lives. We’re not paying attention. Stuck in a loop, we end up repeating harmful behaviours and habits, unable to see their causes and consequences nor the changes required to fix them.
That is, until we wake up to what’s happening by developing an inward attention to our thoughts, feelings, behaviours and their drivers. A change which relies upon an initial intention to simply notice the conditioning that’s coercing every aspect of our lives. The exact opposite of what our genetic and cultural programming tells us to do: to mindlessly chase after ephemeral external things such as fame, fortune and approval.
Before his stroke, Bauby had been dreaming of someday writing a modern-day version of The Count of Monte Cristo. A book, interestingly, which contains a character with an affliction that appears very similar to locked-in syndrome: a ‘corpse with living eyes…three-quarters of the way into the grave’ who communicates with eye movements and expressions. The irony that he eventually wrote this book – but in the first person – was not lost on Bauby, who joked that his current state was a punishment from the gods of literature and neurology.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
While his dry humour remained intact, the new condition did have a powerful and life-affirming impact on Bauby’s overall perspective on life.
It afforded him mental space in which to explore new aspects of a life he’d always taken for granted. This led to the development of a newfound empathy and appreciation for introspection, as well as for certain relationships. In other words, the locked-in state had succeeded where his former life had failed in bringing his attention and awareness inwards. And as the external distractions continued to fall away, the physical debilitation progressed into a profound psychological transformation.
Pre-stroke, Bauby had been experiencing what could be called ‘locked out’ syndrome. His attention was primarily on external, transient desires that induce a lifetime of habitual reactions. Distractions which pushed him away from the present moment, and locked him out from the inner experience of his own body with its wealth of untapped wisdom. And while a newfound awareness was forced upon Bauby in a destructive manner, this doesn’t have to be the case for the rest of us. It’s possible, in other words, to proactively become the driver of our own transformation.
The first step is straight-forward (but not at all simple). We reduce our velocity; in other words, we stop working or thinking about working, about what we did yesterday, or what we are going to do this evening, tomorrow, next week, next year. Give ourselves some mental space and time to cultivate attention to what’s going on, right here, right now.
When we do this – maybe through a regular meditation practice or even just sitting alone in silence with a cup of tea – it’s common to notice an incessant inner dialogue playing out in the background of our minds.
While everybody has this, not everyone sees it – just doing so is significant progress. It also returns our awareness, even for a brief moment, to what is already here but has been outside of our attention: an innate and natural state where the mind’s chatter dissipates. For inspiration we can turn to the wise words of the late Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han who summed up the importance of this practice, and an overall attentive approach to life, as ‘the study of what’s going on’, before adding – in his beautifully understated manner – ‘what’s going on is very important.’
The great Socrates too warned against a life absent of attention when he told us to ‘beware the barrenness of a busy life.’ While Jesus called us to prioritize this sacred practice when he proclaimed that ‘the kingdom of god is here.’ But it’s a rare Christian who takes this seriously. Jesus’s words describe a heaven that’s right here, right now, inside every one of us. In other words, the proverbial ‘eye of the needle’ and ‘narrow gate’ of entry to all that we seek is quite simply the present moment; where, according to the great sages of the past, all our pains, joys, hopes and fears reside; our angels and demons hide; and beyond them, in the same place but deeper, peace, truth, wisdom and awareness.
Practical Exercise: Attention to Distraction
Close your eyes, take four slow, deep breaths, then:
- Focus your attention either on your breathing or on a specific part of your body e.g. the top of your head.
- After a while, your attention will inevitably move to something else – a thought, a sound, a feeling. This isn’t a problem, but once you are aware of this shift, stay with the new object for a while, notice its existence as just another object to focus on, then slowly return to the original object of focus.
- Notice that all these subtle mental activities initiate in a fraction of a second. It’s impossible to distinguish one from the other unless we practice active attention by cultivating an intentional effort to get intimate with what’s happening every moment.
PAIN Point
The present is where we wield the superpower of attention – this is where everything occurs, where all healing takes place.