A MATTER OF SURVIVAL

Excerpt from "Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds" by Thomas Hübl

If we fail to address the world’s collective trauma with clarity and compassion, we imperil the survival of our children and our children’s children—and countless other species.

A year after atomic bombs were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein pleaded with the public to recognize a key principle at the foundation of this truth: 

“Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. We scientists who released this immense power have an overwhelming responsibility in this life-and-death struggle to harness the atom for the benefit of mankind and not for humanity’s destruction. . . . [A] new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”

On the one end is Cartesian dualism or the mind-body split, and on the other, the “ghost in the machine.” The mind has either been revered as separate and therefore transcendent of matter or seen to arise entirely from it—consciousness as an accidental by-product of the brain. But what if mind and body, head and heart, spirit and matter, consciousness and form, and wave and particle are indivisible? What if we are integrated wholes—interrelated, interpenetrating, transformational, and cocreative? This is the foundation of embodiment and embodied practice, which sees burgeoning support across multiple disciplines: from linguistics, consciousness studies, philosophy, psychotherapy, psychoneuroimmunology and medicine, modern physics, spirituality, and more. 

SYSTEMIC IMPACTS OF COLLECTIVE TRAUMA 

Like truth, shadow always outs. Suppressed energy doesn’t go away, and even dark or disowned energy cannot be destroyed. It needs to move, to become, to transmute; it must find an expression. In this way, unconscious material rises again and again to the surface, seeking to be met, detoxed, and clarified. Until trauma has been acknowledged, felt, and released, it will be experienced from without in the form of repetition compulsion and projection and from within as tension and contraction, reduction of life flow, illness or disease. 

INNOVATION AND SOCIETY 

The modern era has seen startling advancements—breakthrough discoveries in science, medicine, and business, largely made possible by disruptive innovation across the technology sector. Improvements to standards of living in the form of sanitation, housing, labor reform, and health care have extended the human life span and ensured continued invention, innovation, and progress—from electricity, automobiles, airplanes, computers, satellites, spacecraft, and beyond, including AI, machine learning, robotics, autonomous cars, brain mapping, DNA mapping, and quantum computing. With every new discovery, we leap forward in our quest to understand. 

And yet the legacy of Newtonian materialism and Cartesian dualism continues to inform our interpretations of self, other, and world. Scientific thinking is still dominated by the perspective that we live in a cold, atomistic, wholly accidental universe that can be analyzed, predicted, conquered, used, and exploited. This notion reigns supreme—in politics, capitalism, academia, medicine, psychology, and even religion. It is the worldview of individuation and individualism, reliant on the myth of separation. 

Having split ourselves between mind and matter, we objectify the body, the “other,” and the Earth. The mind is differentiated from the emotions and elevated above them, and both are held as distinct from the body. Little authority is given to intuition, instinct, emotion, compassion, communion, or creativity. Split and compartmentalized, we speak about instead of from life. We stand distant and remote from ourselves and one another, affixed to interpretation but cut away from feeling. We cling to our disembodiment through intellectualization, compartmentalization, and distraction, all of which help obscure our wounds. 

But as long as we are split, divided, and separate, we remain unable to access our full subtle capacities. Unable to feel ourselves as belonging to one another or to the world. Unable to sense the numinous intelligence of our universe or to recognize ourselves as ultimately traveling along its evolutionary course. The illusion of separation allows us to fear and hate and exploit one another. To harm the body and damage the psyche. To reject nature and abuse the environment. To mistreat animals and children and ourselves. To repudiate the spirit and deny the soul. 

We may become addicted to cooking shows, yet know very little about where our foods come from, what precisely has been added to them, or how far they’ve traveled to make it to our plates. We consume plants without knowing how they were grown, whether the soil was cared for, whether they were produced from genetically modified organisms, or what chemical pesticides may have been used to grow them. Biting into a store-bought apple, we rarely question whether its purchase inadvertently supported the widespread colony collapse of honey bees or if exposure to the same insecticides contributes to health risks for farmworkers and their families. 

We may know the intimate details of celebrities’ lives while being far less attentive to the deeper truths of our own. We accept it as normal that movie stars, athletes, and hedge-fund executives are paid multiple millions of dollars, while most teachers, social workers, paramedics, journalists, childcare workers, and artists struggle to earn a livable wage. We accept corruption as a fact of government and business, standing by as plutocrats, kleptocrats, oligarchs, and white-collar  criminals rise to top positions of power in both. We recognize that professional sports, the cosmetics industry, social media marketers, and tabloid print and television rake in billions of dollars each year while throughout much of the world, schools go underfunded and essential education suffers. So we send our children to broken schools or accept it as a fact of life that other peoples’ children must attend them. Schools where regimentation, control, and standardized test scores are valued over student fulfillment, so that curiosity and joy and life are zapped out of learning. 

The longer we continue to disown our darkness, the greater the chance we will self-fulfill the prophecies we most fear. But as we reclaim the contents of our unconscious, we become better humans, more empowered to make a better world. Rather than encouraging harm and disconnection, the technologies we create from that vantage will further the benevolence of life itself.

Hübl, Thomas; Avritt, Julie Jordan. Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds (pp. 181-185 Kindle Edition).