I: Introduction

At the start of almost every day, before I get out of bed (unless I don’t have time to), I practice a meditation of at least fifteen minutes (sometimes as long as half an hour). I lie on my back and start with several slow, deep, diaphragmatic breaths. As I do this, I pay attention to how all the parts of my body feel while relaxing them, starting with my feet, then my lower and upper legs, my pelvic area, my stomach, back, and chest, my hands and arms, up to my shoulders, neck, face, and head.

I’ll feel a tingling, vibrating feeling all over, relaxing me. Then I’ll imagine the waves of the ocean all around me and passing through me, for I imagine myself to be a part of that oceanic water. As the waves move up and down through me, as it were, my body moves slightly to and fro with those undulations. I try to keep my body fully relaxed the whole time, not letting my legs, for example, tense up as I feel myself swaying with the ‘waves.’

If I do this meditation/auto-hypnosis correctly, not letting myself be distracted by other thoughts (e.g., not ruminating on past pain, or keeping intrusive thoughts out of my mind) and keeping myself focused on those ‘waves,’ over time I start to feel the benefits. This is a mindfulness meditation, keeping me focused on the eternal NOW, what I like to call The Unity of Time (more on that below). A soothing vibration is felt all over my body, calming me.

The benefits of this meditation are felt gradually, cumulatively over time, as long as I continue to do it regularly, without any long breaks of not doing it for weeks, which would cause me to go back to my original angry, tense, impatient C-PTSD self. The benefits are far from having made me into some kind of Buddhist saint, of course, but they have calmed my raging spirit to a notable extent.

I’d like to explain now my theory, behind which I believe I gain benefits from this meditation, a theory that I call The Three Unities. I got the words from a 16th century interpreter of Aristotle, but I don’t use them to describe how a well-written drama should be presented. For me, they describe the reality of the world behind its surface differences. They are The Unity of Space, The Unity of Time, and The Unity of Action. I’ll start by describing the first of these.

II: The Unity of Space

Everything inside and outside of us, everywhere in the universe, is one, down in its particle and wave properties. The Hindus call this unity Brahman, that aspect of which is Atman inside each of us, and we must realize that unity and identity of Atman and Brahman inside and outside ourselves. The meditation of waves of water flowing through us and around us symbolizes that unity of Atman and Brahman, the infinite ocean that is everything and everyone.

Each of us–as infants–has no sense of a self that is separate from others until we see ourselves in the mirror for the first time. Prior to that, we’re awkward, fragmented beings that have little sense of where ourselves ends and “not-I” begins. The problem, as Lacan and the Buddhists observed, is that the whole idea of an ego, a self, is a lie. No thing has a permanent, fixed reality. There’s just the universe, of which each of us is a small drop of water in its infinite ocean, its waves flowing into crests of brief existence and troughs of brief non-existence, or crests and troughs of any pair of opposites.

Just as we’re alienated from each other, so are we alienated from ourselves, from our reflection in the mirror, be that the literal, specular image, or the metaphorical mirror reflections of our parents’ faces looking back at us, or any face looking back at us. The specular image gives the illusion of a united, clearly defined totality, creating an idealized self-image we wish we could live up to, but ultimately never will. The reflected image shows ourselves, but being apart from us in space, looks like someone else.

Just as the reflected image in the mirror is an illusion, so is the metaphorical mirror image of other people facing us an illusion. The whole notion of division between the self and others should be understood dialectically; there’s a bit of the self in other people, and vice versa, as I discussed the idea here. The more we realize that we are all interconnected, the more empathy we’ll feel for each other, the less isolated we’ll feel from each other, and the more inner peace we’ll feel.

The object relations theorists have an excellent way of helping us understand how there’s a little of us in other people, and a little of others in ourselves, that the line separating ourselves and others is blurred. We carry internal objects of each other in our minds all the time. To see how this is so, we must understand to what extent we project onto others, and introject energy from other people.

When I speak of projection, I don’t limit it to imagining others possessing our own, projected personality traits; I refer to projective identification, a coinage of Melanie Klein‘s that describes actually making other people internalize one’s projections so they will manifest these internalizations in their behaviour, attitudes, etc.

Wilfred R. Bion extended Klein’s concept to refer to a back-and-forth exchange of projective identification, starting with the mother/infant relationship as a pre-verbal form of communication. A baby doesn’t yet know how to process agitating external stimuli, because he hasn’t developed the needed thinking apparatus; so he projects those irritating excitations, those ‘thoughts without a thinker,’ onto his mother, who as his container introjects and internalizes them, the contained. She processes these feelings for him, then sends a detoxified version of them back to him, which he can now endure. In time, he’ll learn how to do this detoxifying and processing himself, without need of help from her. (Read here for more thorough explanations of Bion’s and other psychoanalytic ideas.)

When dealing with psychotic patients, Bion found himself having to play the role of mother in their treatment, detoxifying their upsetting external stimuli, since his patients’ mental illness had made them regress to the role of infant. Anyway, in a larger sense, we all play the roles of mother and infant with each other to some extent, trading energies and detoxifying for each other when we can’t do it alone. In this sense, there’s a bit of ourselves in each other, being traded back and forth.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the personality should be understood in a relational sense, not as an isolated entity. To get back to the core of who and what we are, we should de-emphasize the Freudian idea that libidinal satisfaction is about drives (i.e., pleasure-seeking), but rather that libido, as WRD Fairbairn observed, is object-directed (by objects, I mean other people with whom the subject–oneself–has relationships of friendship and love).

We tend to get broken off from other people as a result of insufficient parental empathy, that is, childhood emotional neglect. The frustrated child engages in splitting as a defence mechanism, regarding people as either all-bad or all-good, instead of an integration of both good and bad. This splitting is what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (PS), while the integration of good and bad she called the depressive position (D). These positions arise in infancy, but we all oscillate back and forth between them throughout life, an oscillation that Bion notated as PS<->D.

All of life is an oscillation back and forth between dialectically-related opposites, an undulation back and forth between crests and troughs: PS<->D, self and other, good and bad, projection and introjection, etc. Such is the nature of dialectical monism, or unity in duality, yin and yang, the ouroboros‘ biting head and bitten tail, the extreme ends of a circular continuum (the serpent’s coiled body).

When we’re cut off from ideal relationships with real people, connections that Fairbairn called the Central Ego (approximate to Freud’s ego) connected with the Ideal Object, we develop two split-off, subsidiary egos: the Libidinal Ego (similar to Freud’s id) connected to the Exciting Object, and the Anti-libidinal Ego (somewhat comparable with Freud’s superego) connected to the Rejecting Object. The former of these two subsidiary egos tends toward pleasure-seeking, the manic defence (the Exciting Object being such people as pornographic models/actresses, prostitutes, teen idols, rock/pop/movie/sports stars, etc.) against feelings of sadness and guilt; the latter subsidiary ego rejects and hates people, judging them (and the self), imagining one doesn’t need them, and imagining they all reject the self (i.e., a projection of the self’s contempt for others).

As we can see from Fairbairn’s endo-psychic structure (meant to replace Freud’s), it is in our nature to relate to others. If we can’t do so in the ideal way, that is, with real people (Central Ego and Ideal Object), we’ll create fantasy relationships of either a pleasurable kind (Libidinal Ego and Exciting Object) or fantasy relations of a hostile kind (Anti-libidinal Ego and Rejecting Object). Either way, in our alienation from other people, we’ll relate to something of some kind, because we’re always connected in some way; it’s just a question of whether or not these connections are healthy.

Lack of parental empathy, even (or especially) to the point of abuse, can lead to an even more serious personality problem: pathological narcissism. Healthy levels of narcissism are restrained with a reasonable level of humility–again, those undulating crests and troughs. Heinz Kohut‘s notion of the bipolar self is another example of how the personality should be conceived of as relational, for the two poles consist of narcissistic parent/child relationships: the grandiose self and the idealized parental imago, two exaggerations of the worth of one’s self and of others, originally, one’s parents. Traumatic damage to one pole can be compensated for by the other, but damage to both poles leads to self-hate, leading in turn to the danger of psychological fragmentation, a danger dysfunctionally averted by pathological narcissism.

Instead of the healthy swaying up and down between pride and humility, as seen in normal, mature levels of narcissism, in the pathological form, we see a splitting of extreme self-love (as publicly displayed in a narcissistic False Self) and extreme self-hate (the repressed or disavowed, projected True Self). Instead of shades of lighter and darker grey, we have only black and white.

Even desire itself, that first cause of selfishness, links us with other people. As Lacan explained, “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” That is, we desire recognition from others, and we desire to be or have what others desire. However well we behave, or however badly, we’re still connected with the world. And we always desire more and more, making the fulfillment of that desire hopeless.

We link with others, as Bion observed, through Knowledge (especially), Love, and Hate–his K, L, and H-links. When knowledge of the truth gets too agitating, those traumatizing things-in-themselves he associated with O, we refuse linking with them, the attacks on linking resulting in -K, a rejection of knowledge. To connect with the All, the Unity of Space, we must try to allow all linking to happen.

Now, whatever is within ourselves is also without; so the black-and-white splitting that occurs inside ourselves as a defence mechanism also occurs outside, in other people, split-off and projected onto them. To return to the more peaceful, greyish state of integration of good and bad, this must be perceived in both the inner and outer worlds–hence the need to grasp the reality of the Unity of Space. We’re all one, flowing up and down in waves.

III: The Unity of Time

There are really two parts to this unity: the eternal NOW, as mentioned above, and the cyclical nature of time, as symbolized by the ouroboros, a symbol of eternity.

Time–that is, past, present, and future–is just a man-made construct that we use for practical reasons; but this construct is a lie, an illusion, just like the ego, the self. There is only ever NOW: the past no longer exists, and the future doesn’t yet exist; sill, we treat them as if they exist, in our ever-worrying, ever-ruminating minds.

The Unity of Time also expresses itself in cycles, as pointed out above: after every ending is a new beginning, the ouroboros’ head biting its tail, and its coiled middle body representing a new time-cycle. This cyclical reality is seen not only in the obvious examples of the seasons, and of night and day, but also in such things as Nietzsche‘s doctrine of the eternal recurrence, and in the Hindu concept of the yuga. Those up-and-down undulations of the infinite ocean of Brahman symbolize the cyclical Unity of Time. Focusing on those metaphorical waves while meditating can keep one focused on the present moment, mindful of the eternal NOW.

IV: The Unity of Action

All phenomena that appear around us and in us, however random and chaotic they seem on the surface, can be interpreted in terms of dialectics, which resolve contradictory opposites into unities. These resolutions of contradictions can be of the Hegelian, idealist sort, or of the Marxist, materialist sort. Contradictions arise and resolve, the resolutions becoming new contradictions to be resolved, throughout history, in endless cycles.

The working-out of dialectical contradictions is a complex one, but for convenience’s sake I’ll break it down to the well-known, three-part schema that is Fichte‘s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (words that Hegel neither used nor liked). More accurate words for Hegel’s dialectic would be the abstract (a hypothetical idea to be tested out), the negative (an opinion that opposes the abstract), and the concrete (a resolution of the two opposing ideas, resulting in a new, refined and improved hypothesis, which becomes a new abstract to be negated and concretized all over again).

I prefer the words thesis, negation, and sublation to refer to this three-part simplification of the dialectic, this last word–in its original German–having such paradoxical meanings as “to lift up [to a higher level],” “to abolish,” “to preserve,” “to transcend,” and “to cancel [each other out].” I use the ouroboros as a symbol of a circular continuum to show the relationships of these three parts to each other. The thesis and negation occur where the serpent’s head bites its tail, and the sublation is anywhere and everywhere along the serpent’s coiled body, everywhere doing combinations of some sort of the thesis and negation, in an attempt to resolve them. Thus, the ouroboros symbolizes how all the infinite complexities of action in the universe can be seen to be unified.

I’ve already written up a number of blog posts that give examples of how this ouroboros symbolism can be applied to politics (from a Marxist perspective), to psychoanalysis, to film, literary, and myth analyses, and even to show how one can recover from narcissistic and emotional abuse.

In the larger philosophical scheme of things, we should remember Heraclitus‘ famous words, “Everything flows.” This idea must be interpreted correctly, like yin and yang, not so obtusely misunderstood as meaning, “Everything bad is good at the same time,” or some nonsense like that. Good flows into bad, and vice versa, like the crests and troughs of the ocean.

I bring this point up in reaction to a comment that a woman made on a FB page (“Narcknowledge”); she for some mysterious reason hated my presence on that page, and she began trolling me for every blog post I shared there. In reaction to my Everything Flows post, which has the yin/yang symbol among its pictures, she commented, “I hate that whole yin/yang thing…What good comes out of leukaemia?”…etc.

Leukaemia, the coronavirus, TROLLS, the oppression of the Palestinians and Yemenis, income inequality caused by neoliberal capitalism, and US imperialist wars–among countless other possible examples–are all unqualified evils. Good, however, can flow as a response to these evils, in the form of opposition to them: getting medical help, showing solidarity with the victims, socialist revolution…and not feeding the trolls. That’s how to think of ‘that whole yin/yang thing.’

V: Conclusion

Anyway, to conclude: meditation on these three unities–contemplating them all simultaneously by visualizing oneself as part of the flowing water of the universal ocean, staying in the present moment, and feeling the crests and troughs as symbolic of the cyclical ups and and downs of life–can give us peace by helping us intuitively grasp the deeper mystical truth of the world.