"Can you tell me what, from your judgment and experience, you consider to be the source of suffering and unhappiness in the world?" ...
"Is it evil?" ...
"In reality, it is vice versa. When you distance yourself from the source of suffering, when you name it as opposite to what you want to be (I assume that you all want to be good, don't you?), you lose a chance to change it. Because it continues to live inside you, as part of you, making you make many of your choices, but you refuse to recognize it, so you remain in ignorant bliss and you continue to suffer.
"We call the source of unhappiness and disease `trauma.' And we believe that there are live representations
of trauma in all of us. In our tradition, we call them `spirits of trauma.' Whenever something hurts you and you don't accept it fully as a complete part of your history, you create a gap in your memory; a gap which, when the hurt is strong or repeated many times, becomes occupied by a spirit of trauma. You don't have to imagine some fashioned freaky monster sitting on your back and sucking out your blood." A ripple of soft laughter went through the audience as an expression of relief.
"You can think about this in terms of neurocognitive science, if you like the term 'neurotransmitters' better than 'creatures of the night.' You may call them additional subjects; you may define them as unintegrated representations; you may choose whatever language and metaphors you prefer. It doesn't matter. What matters is the process. The internal psychic process, often extended throughout generations by the inheritance of patterns of trauma formed, perhaps long, long ago, when one of your ancestors went through an unbearable hurt.
"Human genes are much more flexible than we think. They perceive as much as they act. When a hurt reaches
the level of genes, it makes them behave differently and distort the memory, preventing the memory from becoming complete. The gap in memory is created, and a spirit of trauma houses itself in this gap, hidden from our awareness. ...
They learn to hide them from themselves and their children. They play hide-and-seek with spirits of trauma, and guess what? Most often they lose, because even when they don't remember, their genes—those unfailing memory units—do, and the hurt stays there until you heal it. ...
"The same mechanism works with smaller things. We start to gather up more personal hurts in the basket of our memory soon after coming into this world.
Every creature tries to survive. It is true for the spirits of trauma as well. They need to 'eat.' They are always hungry. They create 'food' for themselves by generating more hurt. Why does the 'Paradox exist, that victims of abuse become the worst abusers themselves? It is not logical, but it is perfectly reasonable for the spirits of trauma to grow in abuse victims through their hurts and feed themselves by re-creating those hurts. You may know this from your own experiences.
{snip}
There are three main points I or why it is vitally important for everyone to win in their battle with the spirits of trauma. First, because when you conquer them, it brings profound healing, reverses unhappiness, and treats disease. Diseases are the means by which (in organism tries to fight the traumas on its own. So many Times, I've seen people get sick and look for help at very particular points in their life, moments when the spirit of trauma becomes activated in a person with incomplete psychic memory. That is why many healing changes follow when you are able to eradicate the root of trauma.
"Second, we believe in our tradition that whatever we do directly touches generations before and after us. When you free yourself from trauma, you heal your ancestors and protect generations after you. I saw many people who would act out their traumas, essentially looking for help, when their children reach the age when they themselves experienced the hurt. ...
"It is not a 'concept.' It is a way of living your life, feeling its boundaries and borders. It relates to what you ultimately understand as 'self.' All knowledge comes to that understanding. But with any knowledge, the truth is that you can't obtain it just by making the decision to do so. You have to exchange your personal experience for it. "All of you in this room have created the wealth of your experiences in your own unique ways. Yet it brought you here tonight so you will receive this knowledge. I believe that without those experiences that prepared you, you wouldn't have come tonight. Your car would have broken, your friend would have called, and so on. It is true for those who didn't plan to come but who happened to be here seemingly by accident. Believe me, it was not an accident, but your experiences which strive to become knowledge, that brought you here tonight." ...