Written by Shai Tubali
In part 1 of this article Shai talks about the importance of the creation of true inner power. You can read the first part here.
A psycho-transformative process consists of two layers. The first layer is the creation of true inner power, which in my current understanding is the ultimate key to inner health: making one feel complete in power. This is an alchemical process, made possible by a set of mental and meditative techniques that gradually redirect the repressed will inwards.
Regaining our lost power
The other layer is the process of regaining our lost power. In the Expansion Method this is realized through five different aspects:
- we learn to retell our life story without the distorting lens of the victim-consciousness;
- we expose the true subconscious, seeing how it is will and frustration, and not past wounds, that shape our life;
- we tap into our forbidden power-wishes and extricate them from the subconscious,
- and we even reconnect with acts of aggression and profoundly transform them.
- Finally, we correct the profound weaknesses of our past, what we can generalize as ‘traumas’.
The work on traumas and on the psychological memory in light of the power-principle has proved to be extraordinarily effective. At the core of our psychological memory, there lies the experience of ourselves as victims. This victim-consciousness constantly affirms itself through further experiences of weakening. What I found out was that this victim-consciousness was merely our ‘false subconscious’: a protective shield so to speak that is only meant to hide away our true drives, that is, our wills and their frustrations.
In a trauma, the victim-consciousness reaches its heights, since we feel and experience that the world and life turn against us. We feel that all our power is taken over by someone or something that are momentarily more powerful than us. The reason we take it so much to the heart is that there’s no state that is more unbearable to the human being than a drastic decline of power. This memory of weakness becomes then fixed in us as a feeling of defeated power and is incorporated into our inherently-wounded relationship with the world.
Whether it is an externally evident loss of power or an internal dynamic, the experience of power loss will always ignite the psychic process of search for the lost power. One can imagine trauma as the shattering of the sense of self-power into many pieces, and the psychic process that follows from it as the desperate groping for the pieces in order to restore the sense of wholeness.
Since it is man’s relationship with power that gives shape to his personality, we must approach differently such memories. For starters, as we understand that the true identity of man is the willer and not the victim, the traumatic experience can no longer be permitted to enter into the center of identity. On the contrary, the trauma is the terrible shaking of our true identity as a continuum of will. From this follows that the main purpose of a therapeutic rehabilitation should not be healing the victim but rather retrieving the power that was dramatically lost in the event. Though what was lost was usually an external form of power, the therapy now aims to regather it in the new form of true inner power.
The traumatic pain is truly the sorrow over those humiliating moments of weakening. In our heart of hearts we are less hurting because of the things that were done to us and the event in itself and are much more tormented by the fact that we were immensely weakened, completely shaped and controlled by more powerful elements. The experience of oneself as a victim is therefore the great disappointment caused by the fact that our will was severely thwarted by a greater will.
However, in the White Light expansion process we overturn this condition completely: the person attains a state of true inner power in which he is capable of performing a regaining of his lost power. Now he is able to internally overcome the past event and the memory, to be bigger than life itself and this entire world of power, and in doing so, to ‘heal’ himself.
For this to be made possible, the person’s mind must be bigger and stronger than the memory; namely, it must be more powerful in order to overcome it. When the mind is more powerful, it manages to contain the memory, which was previously experienced as huge and overwhelming, in the same manner that a great circle includes a small dot in it. On the other hand, when we are only small dots that struggle to contain the larger circle of the memory, we can only be offered sets of compensations, such as forgiveness and acceptance. In Power Psychology trauma is a drastic weakening that can only be healed through a state of maximal power (a state which is applied to the traumatic experience of powerlessness). What helps the person to overcome it is growing his sense of self, which is also his sense of power, to a great, even unlimited extent. In this way, instead of nurturing the memory as a symbol of one’s loss of external power, it can be positively used for elevation and inner construction.
While during the trauma there was at least a certain degree of disassociation and unconscious activity, its healing is found in the very opposite, a state of maximal integration and consciousness. Full awareness and presence can redeem the previous state of lack of awareness and absence of presence. When the mind is integrated and expanded, it is capable of disposing of psychic ingredients which for the limited mind are indispensable. Therefore, it can remain bare and ‘unprotected’, without the need for devices such as compensation, diversion or any other survival reaction.
In such a process there is no need for ‘forgiveness’ or ‘acceptance’, no need for compensatory thoughts or even for a divine support from above. Man simply goes beyond the pair of opposites of weakness and power, steps down from this eternal seesaw, and from his new seat of inner power easily unravels the psychological memory. At this point the temporary weakness seems as a natural part of the continuum of life, as an inevitable part of the play of life in which we all must partake, and so the person is ready to participate again. Moreover, he is ready to want again.