Sat Yoga Archives, Gnosis, Spiritual Texts

The ego’s unconscious intentional structure has the logical form of a double bind. That means it can’t win for losing. This biocomputer program with a built-in bug (or strange loop) is responsible for the feeling that spiritual liberation is impossible. The subliminal double-binding instruction for most people remains throughout life the governing agenda of the censoring agency that lies between the conscious identity and the repressed infantile self-system, manipulating the interpretation of reality and enforcing its agenda through the activation of a superego voice and the deployment of a barrage of sophisticated defense mechanisms that keep the consciousness split, confused, and working against its own interests.

The double bind can be most easily understood in its original form as a way of coping with the impossible tension of separation versus symbiosis with the mother. The child loses no matter which alternative is chosen. If it fully separates from mother, the result is anxiety, the terror of facing a vast, alien world in a state of isolation and helplessness. If it chooses to cling to the mother, it loses its independence, it betrays its own desire for autonomy, its spirit is thereby broken, and it constantly fears complete loss of selfhood and freedom. Thus, the condition of self-hatred festers. Not being able to decide fully for either unbearable alternative, it remains caught in the double bind.

There are as many variations of this bind structure as there are egos. Let us examine a few of the more common ones. We can classify them into withdrawal binds, aggression binds, superiority/inferiority binds, and authenticity/bullshit binds.

Here is the history of a well-known aggression bind: A woman who, as a girl was angry at pathologically inept parents who did not listen to her. Either she had to throw tantrums to get attention, in which case she was punished, or she became passive and fell into despair. Years later, she romantically connects only with men who cannot be there for her, and she is constantly faced with the choice of either being enraged or throwing in the towel and feeling abused. Love is defined as giving up one’s autonomy and one’s hope, and her only connection with her partner is with his traumatized and furious ‘inner child’, with whom she colludes in a mutual re-traumatization ritual. Her relationships are doomed to be the serial futile pairings of hungry ghosts on a rampage—unless she finds a way to escape the double bind.

Then there is the man who as a child found he got better care when he acted helpless and withdrawn. So now, whenever he takes the initiative and acts powerfully in the world he feels abandonment anxiety. If he withdraws, he feels protected, though he is actually undermining his position in the world. If he comes out strong, he soon collapses in anxiety, and finds a way to justify giving up and going back into his cave. His withdrawal double bind keeps him from confidently building a life.

Then there are the many varieties of sexual aggression binds. In the most common, a woman does everything possible to be found irresistible by a man, but then hates him for treating her as an object. The man usually reciprocates by losing interest in her the minute he defines her as having been conquered. In these cases, others who are potential sexual partners have value only to the extent they have not been captured—or to the extent they can be used as part of the larger game of social climbing. Often, the partner is desired precisely for what makes him undesirable—to ensure that one remains in control and unafraid of rejection, and to have a scapegoat on whom to project one’s own shadow. Being caught in such a relationship bind can use up all one’s mental energies, so that one never has to face the deeper issue of being clueless regarding one’s real Self. One’s thoughts are a whirlwind circling around a false self-representation.

The double bind structure precipitates the creation of a superego—an internal judge of the self-representation that has been captured in the bind. Once that is in place, the superego voice then becomes the instrument of a second layer of psychic binds. The voice makes the demand to ‘be good’. The self-representation either rebels against this demand and is stung by guilt, or gives in and once more feels enslaved and weak. It becomes filled with the affect of self-loathing. To counter the power of the superego voice with its impossible hyper-ethical demands, the subliminal censor creates yet another voice, a demonic voice that demands that the self-representation violate the ethical laws of internal and social obligation (‘don’t call your mother,’ ‘have another drink,’ ‘tell the boss to stuff it’). The ego then enjoys the delicious feeling of power that comes with sticking it to the superego.

But the price is bad karma and fear of losing the support of the superego and collapsing. So some sort of punishment is induced. It can be interpersonal isolation, self-sabotage, or psychosomatic pain. Migraines are a common example. With this maneuver, the double bind is changed into a double enjoyment. The physical symptom justifies the antisocial behavior, like missing work or some other (perhaps sexual) obligation. So the demonic voice scores a point. The hyper-ethical superego also scores, as it enjoys punishing the poor self-representation by inflicting pain upon it, while the demonic superego rescues it with medicines that make it high, drugs that otherwise would be illicit and would not be allowed by the ethical superego—thus the self-representation finally also scores a point. In other words, everyone wins—but only because all sides lose. This is the wheel of karma on which the ego is bound.

Probably the saddest case is the double bind of the idealistic person. A person whose self-image is that of someone who is very spiritual and loving has a problem: To protect that image she cannot afford to do real inner work, since the work would uncover unbearable feelings of lack and negativity that would demolish the false image of the ‘beautiful soul’—and reveal the deeper abject self images against which she is defending. Such people want only a diluted, airbrushed, pop version of the spiritual quest, not the anxiety-provoking blood-and-guts-dark-night-of-the-soul version that is required for authentic liberation.

On the other hand, there are people who manipulatively adopt the spiritual journey as a way to evade responsibility for important life tasks. They avoid work and family obligations by claiming their time must go to the higher task of meditation. Yet they avoid real commitment to the spiritual path by claiming they have to take care of a partner or ailing mother or hold an exhausting job. And all the time, they are really attending properly neither to their horizontal dharma of work and family, nor to their vertical dharma of spiritual liberation. Instead, they usually spend their free time sleeping, daydreaming, watching movies, eating, or indulging the ego in other ways. They believe they can fool others, including their spiritual guide, with such games, but they are caught in a bind in which they are the only ones being fooled.

The jackpot question, of course, is how to escape the double bind. This has been the core focus of the research into transformational psychotechnology that yogic scientists have been pursuing for centuries. Buddha was such a researcher, as were Patanjali, Shankara, Hillel, Jesus, Pythagoras, Plotinus, Hermes Trismegisthus, Bodhidharma, and Lao Tze, to name some of the more famous sages in the ancient world. Some of their research has by necessity remained secret (because it cannot be put into ordinary language, but must be transmitted directly, energetically, by teacher to disciple).

But most of it is an open secret. It can be said simply, but the words cannot be understood, at least not by one whose internal censor is still operating. Some techniques are obvious. For example, the main approach to undoing a double bind is to create a countervailing double bind. One can see this at work in Zen in the use of a koan, such as: “What is the essence of zen? If you speak, you’ll be hit thirty times. If you stay silent, you will be hit thirty times!”

In many schools of psychotherapy, the intention is likewise to create a therapeutic double bind. For example, having accepted a therapist as an expert in achieving transformation, one’s resistance to insight and growth becomes clear even to oneself as being pathological and unsupportable. So if one accepts the therapist, one will inevitably open one’s heart and mind to one’s real being; if one resists the therapist, one is implicitly admitting the need for more therapy. Therefore, the only effective strategy to avoid self-transformation is to de-legitimize the therapist in one’s mind. Often it only takes a little distortion by projection, a little provocation, and a little collusion with friends or family to accomplish that maneuver, and voila, one’s ego is liberated from the bind of therapy.

Religious double binds are more sturdy than therapeutic ones, but less, well, therapeutic. In other words, if you accept x religion, it means you accept that you are both one of the chosen and a sinner. One side of the bind thus gets clamped on. Now, as a sinner, you long for redemption, for mystic union with God. Here comes the other side of the bind: if you claim to have achieved such union, you are a heretic, and therefore a worse sinner. Thus, you must continue to long for the supreme union, but you must never achieve it.

A more fundamental double bind is inherent to the spiritual quest. The ego-mind longs for liberation from its sense of lack, but it is weighed down by the fear of an inauthentic ‘Self-realization’, in which one fools oneself into believing that one has attained God-consciousness when it has only been a grand illusion. This is a profound question, because we all know of exactly such cases of gurus who thought they were a lot further along than they really were. And indeed it is true that any appropriation by the ego of a sense of enlightenment is false and misleading. However, it is also true that that ‘I is not the ego’. Any use of language that proclaims ‘I am the Light’ will automatically be perceived by others to be a claim that the ego is declaring itself divine. But we must not throw out the baby (God) with the dirty bathwater of egoic inflation. It is a valid inner realization that ‘I the Light (or the Void or the Self) am not the ego’. In that realization, there are no longer two entities, on the one side Light/God/Self/Void (take your pick) and on the other, mind/ego/body. Rather, the latter dissolves into the former. When transactions resume in the world of apparent duality, the ego is allowed to humbly take up its duties again, but decathected of libidinal energy, to use Freudian terms, while the luminous Self/Void remains as silent laughing loving presence.

This is the key to escaping the double bind: Eliminate egoic identification, and there is nothing that can be bound. Consciousness can begin by realizing its nature is simply difference from its contents. No matter what consciousness is aware of—a face in the mirror, words in the mind, memories, fantasies, bodily activities, affects—consciousness remains beyond any of its contents. Consciousness is nothing in itself, absolutely nothing, only pure awareness. And the primary content of consciousness is a sequence of ego-identifications that flow within the awareness as exemplars of a limitless range of potentialities rather than constituting an entity of some kind.

There is no entity called I, only a variety of partial self-representations and affects that appear and disappear on a spectrum from the darkest and most negative to the most rapturous, luminous, and boundless. Once both ‘the self’ and ‘the other’ have been liberated from objectification, negative emotions based on either a power struggle, a rejection scenario, or an envy relation all dissolve, and in the ensuing flow of love and care our creative intelligence will spontaneously surge in a transformational stream of pure consciousness. In that mode, all problems can be easily solved. Once the vital energy of Life, known in the West as Eros and in India as Kundalini, is freed from egoic desire—from the short-circuit caused by the inherent double bind that is egoic identification—consciousness regains its natural bioluminosity. We get our halo back.

Once the blocks and binds have been removed, consciousness returns to its eternal source. Consciousness is emptiness, the emptiness that reveals itself as luminous form. The entire universe is the divine hide-and-seek game of Self-concealment and Self-revelation. No separate egos ever existed. So that is how to get out of a double bind: there was never anyone to get caught in the first place, and therefore no one needs to be liberated. (If ‘you’ don’t yet realize this, have no fear. At some moment, the Nothing will come, like a thief in the night: Emptiness will dissolve the illusion of your separate existence. ‘Your’ destiny is Rapture.)

Namaste,
Shunyamurti

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