SURVIVAL THROUGH DEEP EXPERIENCE

The clue for this concept came from Tim Barrus.  As a sorely abused child, forced into emotionally and physically excruciating experience, he learned early how to figure out people and their moods for the sake of self-protection.  It was not unlike combat warfare.  Surveillance.  Some of it was from confrontational Gestalt therapy, though he never quite found out the answers he needed for himself.

In his San Francisco period as an S/M whore, one got access by going through a middle-person and paying a big fee upfront, as though using a shrink.  More than a few of the clients were PTSD soldiers coming from Vietnam.  They were both haunted by their experiences and yearning to revisit it, as in addiction.  Adrenaline junkies, probably from the time of enlistment, they craved “deep experience” in order to arrive back at that excruciating moment of surrender and intimate merging with others.  Many of these people, like the severely abused child that Tim was, go into disassociation, a foreign land, possibly a different identity.

Also, shrink-like, there was a period of conversation in which Tim sussed out an emotional map of the client: his memories, his defenses, his personal iconography.  Then he used enactment to evoke all that.  Props were part of it.  Equipment.  Maybe an assistant.  Sense deprivation.  Pain. Trapping.  Exposing.  Terrifying.  If it were an effective enough session, catharsis might happen.  That was not good for business -- it was better to end when the addiction was still high, throw them out to recover however they could, and expect them back for another fix.  Like religious experiences.  This is nothing like the little stories told with whips, chains and corsets on a saturday night.  This is more like terrorist torture, but voluntary.  Closer to abuse between sexual intimates or parents to children or, indeed, vice versa.

Mike Eiden is a shrink working in Manhattan who is known for the poetry of his insights and the intensity of the issues he handles.  He is approaching some of the same situations from a different angle, using a vocabulary of felt experiences that help his clients describe and resolve what is in their bodies and minds -- because emotions dwell in both places.  His clients may be deeply traumatized, but they are mostly urban, educated, and prosperous.

There is a third approach now expanding and sharpening, which is the study of what happens detectably in the brain-and-blood systems of a person hooked on extreme experience.  

In part they are driven by drug culture which is often aimed at achieving a “mind-blowing” experience, which appears to be one of our high values today in at least part of our society -- the younger part mostly.  Movies that feature impossible physical feats, books like “The Brave”  (about an Indian hired to be the "hero" of a snuff film) or depicting superheroes in the throes of near-destruction are a part of this, possibly because our lock-step society, combined with consumerism, thinks life is something you can buy, when instead they could join the Peace Corps.  Those who do choose peaceful service to others never quite recover.

I do not think these systems contradict each other, but at present they barely know of the existence of each other.  Nor have they really picked up on the religious aspect that deals in extremes and techniques of survival like meditation or ordeals.   Many of these can be explained by brain dissociation.  Some writers, like William Vollman, have plunged into survival issues, both urban and deep wilderness, and it is certainly true that print and other art forms are capable of evoking extreme experiences.  The next relevant discipline is anthropology and perhaps it’s the best source of integration.  This is where I return for an ordering principle in the Victor Turner/Von Gennep simple schema of liminality: entering, the nature of the liminal context (which Eliade calls the Sacred), and returning.  

Drawing on the neurology theory that suggests the brain patterns itself physically according to how it conceives of the world after the bodily conception ends in birth, and which proposes that after that first set of thought-sorting categories, all subsequent understanding is based on that early foundation, in the same way that the fetus builds each structure on the just-previous one, I will tentatively define “deep experience” as that which affects those earliest mental structures.  In short, something that questions the assumption of what the universe is.  A disillusionment is how it feels, when the old ideas don’t work and there is no new one yet.  

The “illusion” is religious conviction.  Faith at the deepest level is that first basic innermost set of convictions:  the world is a good and healing place, or the world is shit, or the world is not really there at all.  Temperament, culture and experience interact to create the specifics about how one should react to this belief.  Become enraged and fight it, conform for the sake of survival, seek help even if it never comes, despair and withdraw.  Dogma only makes exploratory explanations.

If one’s culture supports and agrees with one’s stance, all is comfortable.  If one’s culture contests and despises it, then life will be difficult, possibly short.  Those with the energy can find that this makes them strong.  But if they are transformed by change in the deepest structure of their being, something built at birth is reborn near death.  There are words for this:  epiphany, theophany, conversion, and so on.  Sometimes people find a grip on their identity and, well, something like redemption.  For instance, Tim and his ability and determination to reach deep into damaged at-risk boys.  Or Eigen’s willingness to always psychoanalyze himself right along with his clients, no matter how terrifying that might be.  Change at the deepest level is devastating even if it is for the good.  “The dark night of the Soul” is one attempt to describe how ghastly it is.  

When I first started trying to understand these matters, I did a lot of reading in liturgy.  It was useful and sometimes entertaining, but not at a very deep level.  The larger problem was that each denomination wanted to claim a “right” way to do things, a narrow view that only suited one set of people though they wanted to claim they owned all things transcendent and dismissed the rest as mere “phenomenology.”  Or if it wasn’t cheerful and clean, just demonizing like rock protest music: acid, heavy metal, whatever.  Now I need a new term.  I’m trying on “deep experience.”