You’ve heard of Near Death Experiences: someone who drowned, stopped breathing on an operating table, or died in a fatal accident miraculously returns to life. The revived person recounts that while “dead” they were met by angelic beings or a white light that guided them through a review of every moment of their life. They describe this experience as filling them with new hope, purpose and love. Researchers who have studied the thousands of NDEs have found amazing similarities in the many accounts. Our aim here is not metaphysical: people with religious convictions tend to believe these experiences are proof of an afterlife; neuroscientists think they reveal the brain’s insistence on making meaning even as it is dying. What we want to focus on is the near universality of the Life Review in NDEs. Putting the question of an afterlife completely aside, the research indicates that at the moment of your death, your brain will quite likely go through this Life Review process. What would that be like for you when that happens? Here’s what some who went through NDEs said about their experience:
My life appeared before me in the form of what we might consider extremely well-defined holograms, but at tremendous speed. I was astonished that I could understand so much information at such a speed. My comprehension included much more than what I remember happening during each event of my life. I not only re-experienced my own emotions at each moment, but also what others around me had felt. I experienced their thoughts and feelings about me…
When you have a panoramic life review, you literally relive your life, in 360 degrees panorama. You see everything that’s ever happened. You even see how many leaves were on the tree when you were six-years-old playing in the dirt in the front yard. You literally relive it. Next you watch your life from a second person’s point of view… You will feel what it feels like to be that person and you will feel the direct results of your interaction between you and that person.
As a child she made fun of a scrawny, malnourished asthmatic kid who eventually died from a cerebral aneurysm. The kid once wrote a love letter to her which she rejected. In her life review, she experienced his pain of being rejected…
(For more, see: http://www.near-death.com/experiences/research24.html#a04)
Imagine what it would be like to re-experience every act of aggression you committed in your life, not just seeing all the details clearly, but fully and completely feeling the emotions of every person you have hurt. Remember, the beings of light are witness to your Life Review. They see it all. The curtain of secrecy has been removed, so everything is revealed and nothing can be denied. Do you cringe even at the thought of this? Or do you say, “Well, that’s not so bad. Sure, I might have hurt a few people, but only when I had no choice, only in self-defense…” Can you recognize this voice speaking to you as your self-image, desperate to preserve your sense that you are a “good” person?
The hard work of this chapter is to face your acts of aggression, to own them, to feel those moments totally and honestly. You don’t have to wait for your NDE. You can go through this experience now. Probably you are thinking, “Why on earth would I want to do that?” You want to keep your acts of aggression secret, even to yourself. The answer is that acts of aggression – more specifically, the bursts of aggression that seem to erupt from you with great forcefulness – constrict your life, and actually deny you true inner power. The purpose of this chapter is not to simply re-experience such moments, but to transform yourself through this practice in five specific ways (which we will explain in detail at the end of the chapter) that will bring more freedom, power and love into your life.
Most people find it hard to see raw aggression in themselves, but very easy to locate in others: “Yes, I know all about it – my husband suffers from this!” or “Do you mean things like what my father did to me when I was a child?” Everything we have learnt until now – the mask of concealment and the self-image, the victim-consciousness, the false subconscious and the habit of diversion – gathers to deny this part of your reality. There are of course the obvious extremes of aggression in which you might have not participated: sexual abuse, physical violence, or emotional terror. However, there are also subtler expressions of aggression: silent manipulations to get something, lies to hurt someone, deliberately turning a blind eye to the suffering of others, sending small but deliberate signals of loathing, hatred, scorn and spite capable of cutting someone right to the heart. To this we can add internal acts of aggression: death wishes, megalomaniac hallucinations in which everyone is under our dominion, sadistic fantasies, and any wish to get something without caring about others’ feelings.
No one is free from these bursts of aggression, so the journey you are going to take in this next practice will bring you into territory shared by all humanity. Yet you will experience it as a place totally unique to you, buried in the darkness of your psyche. We promise you, if you open that door following our instructions, you will never be afraid of this place again.
As a first step you need to find a quiet place alone where you won’t be disturbed for about an hour. Bring a pen and paper. Sit quietly with yourself, and invite the recollections of your bursts of aggression, subtle and blatant, to surface. Most likely you will find it easy to come up with at least two or three. If you think that you have drawn a blank, that there is nothing there, that you have always been the innocent victim surrounded by real aggressors, please consider that a door might still be locked to you. This barrier is a diversion of your false subconscious. Let go of your identification with yourself as a victim and invite in other memories and start again.
Write down your memories of ten different bursts of aggression. After the first few you may face this barrier, as if there are no more. As you persevere you’ll get a chain of memories appearing as if from nowhere. Some of these may be tough to acknowledge, perhaps incidents known only to you and your victims. Ignore the interpretation you gave these events in the past that justified your behavior in order for you to live with it. Ignore the diversions that shift the blame for the aggression to another person, or to the circumstances forced on you, or to your past traumas that “drove you” to this outburst. Forget the excuses, and focus on the event.
Keep going until you have collected ten memories of aggression and you have written them down. Just writing a key word, a person’s name or the location will do. Now, start at the top of the list and work your way down. Look at each event closely. Don’t turn your head away. They are part of your past, of yourself. Imagine this as part of your Life Review displayed on a hologram, or movie projector, and you can see each and every vivid detail. It will be like reliving the event in slow motion, but this time, unlike when it happened, it will be with your eyes fully open. You will be getting a complete picture of yourself. You won’t distort, won’t deny. It is also an important feature of the Life Review that the celestial beings who witness it with you do not judge. It is crucial in this exercise that you adopt this non-judging perspective too. See everything clearly, but set your moral mask aside. This is not about being a good or bad person. It is about facing your reality and feeling it fully.
When I (Tim) went through this exercise, I found it intensely painful, like ripping a scab off a wound, ten times. I noticed myself struggling with feelings of depression (literally striving to depress my awareness). I fell asleep in the middle of the exercise, sitting in a chair in the middle of the afternoon! I finally woke up and continued to the end. It was hard for me to fend of my false subconscious telling me I had my reasons, that it couldn’t be helped, and to keep my awareness on the scenes as they fully and vividly unfolded.
Look at such moments as they actually were: eruptions of your will, uncensored expressions of your primordial wish. These are the times when your power-wish could no longer tolerate the usual restraints of culture and morality. It wanted to get what it wanted, and just got tired of pretending to be nice. Ah, all those endless compromises we make with the reality of billions of other wills! What polite concealment! In your bursts of aggression everything you secretly yearned to do but didn’t dare finally escaped your control. For that brief moment you threw aside the mask and took what you wanted. For once the predator didn’t need to use a knife and fork to enjoy the prey.
Pay attention to your own internal state as you recollect each of your ten events. To allow a burst of aggression, you need to intensely harden your being so that you feel nothing. It’s similar to the freeze in trauma, only here you lock the centers of feeling to prevent the flow of emotions for other reasons: you need to bring yourself to a state of pure wanting, wanting that only wishes to impose itself on its surroundings and completely take over. You’re like a soldier in combat that must shut down all emotions if he wants to focus on conquering the target. A soldier cannot afford to break down and cry at every horrifying and bloody sight around him. So you need to perceive the other that shrinks in power beside you coldly and as if from a great distance in order to turn them into mere objects and use them.
Immediately after each burst of aggression, what happened? Your culture returned to you. You needed to somehow explain to yourself and the shocked others what took place. We tend to do this in three ways that actually make us weaker. First, it’s very common for people to say after such bursts: “Something came over me,” or “I don’t know what possessed me at that time.” Why does this happen? Your self-image maintains that you’re a good person. So to recognize such raw aggression as part of who you are is unbearable. You had to be overcome by some external force – just like in trauma. In other words, to let this happen you had to be weak. Second, in the moments after an act of aggression, we often condemn ourselves. Horrified by what we have just done, we may make a vow to abstain from any use of our power, as if that will keep the world safe from future abuse at our hands. This vow starves our will from any outward expression, and that makes us weak. Third, we sometimes justify what we have done with a self-defense argument, the aggression of the weak: “They pushed me to that,” we say, or “I had no choice but to defend myself!” In both condemnation and justification it’s always some external factor we blame for making us behave aggressively. In so doing we deny our agency and our responsibility for our acts.
The truth is, not only did you commit your acts of aggression, you were never more present. In the midst of such an outburst you are the most “you” that can ever be: raw and untamed will, a will that always cultivated the fantasy of immoral, unrestrained self-expression. Just like a river pressing on a dam for too long, when the water rises high enough, the dam will burst, violently and destructively.
I (Shai) once led a workshop in Germany on true inner power in which I asked the participants to bring up some memory in which they felt they possessed true inner power. I was taken by surprise when more responded by relating their bursts of aggression. They told me that in such events they felt they were finally their real selves, being in their full power. They didn’t find it disturbing at all that this happened at the expense of another, because, they argued, they were acting in self-defense. They emphasized only their feelings of self-expansion and cathartic release. But if you dare to take a penetrating look into the reality of this kind of eruption, you’ll see something else that is unsettling.
Bursts of aggression are the flip side of traumas. While in traumas your whole being is reduced into a state of minimal power-experience, so that sometimes the only power left is your mere survival, in bursts of aggression your power overflows to such an extent that it becomes forceful and coercive. You grow in power at the expense of others’ weakening, and often unashamedly usurp their power. It’s like being so intoxicated by the fulfillment of your will that you become indifferent to the damage you cause others. In some cases, you may even sadistically enjoy watching them suffer. Just like in trauma, during bursts of aggression you retreat to a state of minimal awareness of your surroundings. Only here this constriction of awareness has a different purpose: not seeing anything other than your object of desire or hatred. Your being becomes fully concentrated, not recognizing anymore real faces and real victims, just the “thing” that you want or the “obstacle” you need to remove.
That’s why most bursts of aggression have something to do with a clash between your will and the opposing will of another. In such instances you felt that the only way for you to get what you wanted was to force it with all your might. Of course, if you put a camera on at those moments to be your silent witness of the situation, you would likely feel terrible: from the outside you look like a crazy person, a grotesque and trance-like being who has lost all self-control in the effort to fully control another person. When the tables turn against you, and others burst aggressively at you, these situations usually become your traumas. Then you experience what it is like to be treated as an empty husk, a thing for the will-fulfillment of another. You become a faceless object, and this, as you well recall, is a devastating and humiliating experience. When you do that to another person in your burst of aggression, something constricts in you, hardens, and freezes. As long as this hardness stays in you, you will be blocked from the full flowing freedom life has to offer you.
So, now that you have fully and honestly faced the memories of your aggression in the first part of this practice, how can you transform them into energy you can use to develop inner power? Truthfully, you’ll only understand this fully after you manage to transform one memory. There are five steps to this part of the practice. Some of them are new applications of techniques you already learned in previous chapters. Each step has its own benefit along the way:
1. Accept ownership of your aggression. This will free you from the eternal victim. When you embrace your bursts of aggression as part of your true self, you challenge the self-image of the eternal victim – an image that keeps you in a state of minimal power. When you accept you’re not just a defenseless pure soul, but someone capable of aggression – of evil, if you like – then you can claim the energy of that evil as your own. So the first step you need to take is giving up your story that this was not “you” who did this horrible thing. Then give up the condemnation or justification that separates you from your outbursts. Instead, take responsibility and ownership: “This was not some form of demon possession. This was me expressing my primordial wishes in an unfiltered way. Yes, I am this predator.” If you’re capable of such forcefulness, this means you are already in possession of great power.
2. Locate your primordial wish behind each burst of aggression. Recognize your primordial wish as the cause of your aggression. This makes you conscious of your strong will that wishes to create reality in its own image. For each of your ten memories, turn them over, as you learned to do in Chapter Two with episodes of frustration. Expose the wish behind each outburst. Ask yourself: what was my unrestrained wish in that event? Then, as you learned to do at the end of Chapter Three, turn these wishes into a useful energy through the practice offered there.
3. Transform the energy of each memory into pure power. Bursts of aggression can be transformed from force into pure power and pure presence. This step is particularly significant for those who suffer from a sense of powerlessness. Working with such memories makes the clenched fist inside of you loosen its grip, releasing a new flow of energy into your body and mind. Just close your eyes again and relive one burst of aggression in great detail, reconnecting with the feelings, sensations and perceptions that you had at that time. Pay special attention to the intense and heated force that came through you. When you feel you have gathered enough of this force, drop the memory and remain only with this tremendous, vibrating energy. Feel it in the present moment. Then turn it inwards: let it fill your entire body and being, breathe into it and let it flow from head to toe, like molten lava or wind from a blast furnace making it a gushing flow of presence. As you feel it flow, acknowledge that this great power already exists within you. You are literally transforming the memory of your “evil” back into the raw energy of will. Now you can use this energy for whatever you like. Whenever you need inner strength, you can come back to this exercise to charge yourself up. For example, whenever you’re on your way to confront a challenge in your life that demands great inner strength.
4. Grow in love. Strange as it seems, your ugliest moments of cold-hearted aggression can help you to develop empathy and love. When you recall these memories, you can see how your heart was empty and shut at the time. Expanding your awareness of the pain that you caused others can reawaken the emotional system that had closed down. In this way, your bursts of aggression can lead you to conscious awareness of the other’s existence in a profound way. Your primordial wish cares about no one but itself. As long as your will is content and you are wearing the mask of goodness, you are never deeply aware of other people. The unique clash of wills that leads to a burst of aggression opens a gateway for you to become fully conscious of the reality of the other. When you truly see, you will no longer wish to appropriate and objectify someone else. You’ll feel that you want to give the other an equal opportunity to express their own power. This awakens something awesome into your life: the growth of goodness out of your badness; the growth of love out of violence. In this way, bursts of aggression can teach you compassion beyond ordinary morality.
To practice the growth of love, bring up one of your ten memories of aggression and relive it just like you did in step number 3, above. This time don’t focus on the force that erupted from within you. Instead, focus on your victims. Become more and more conscious of them: look at them closely, at their sorrowful face, feel their distress and weakness, allow the feelings that exist in you today to become present in that event. Observe the tyrant that you were in that moment through the victim’s perspective. What do you see when looking at yourself through their eyes? Expand your attention more and more. You can expect it to hurt as your emotions come to life and you feel what they felt. But if you pass through the hurt, it will lead you eventually to include both your being and the other’s in the full reality of the moment. Keep in mind, this is not about asking forgiveness or feeling remorseful. You are learning to experience love and compassion beyond morality. The point is shifting beyond the solitary, egoistical view of life, and welcoming into your world the reality of the other person and their will. To complete the practice after your meditation is finished, allow someone to fulfill their will at the expense of your will sometime soon. Do it out of the recognition of the existence of other wills beside your own.
5. Rid yourself of negative charges and imprints. Everyone easily accepts that their traumas can cause psychological and physical distress, but they don’t think this way about their aggressions. Like traumas, bursts of aggression also create deep-seated imprints and patterns of behavior that can accumulate as negative charges and imprints within your mind and body. So if you’re seeking therapy to remove negative charges and imprints, tell your therapist also about the aggressive parts of your past and suggest focusing on these events as well as the traumas.
Having completed the practice of this chapter, you will be much more conscious of what is happening to you next time you experience a clash of wills with another, and feel the inner bubbling of energy that signals an imminent burst of aggression. You can also use the technique from Chapter Ten for dealing with trauma to prevent your aggressive impulses from boiling over: First, rate the severity of the situation between 1 to 10, with 10 as the most justified aggression. For example, are you fending off someone who is trying to kill you? That would be a “10.” Is someone you love being rude to you? Honestly, how bad is it? This technique will give you distance and perspective. Second, when you feel the crazy dictator arising inside of you, resist the tendency to erase the reality of the person you are clashing with. Instead, look directly into their eyes and acknowledge they are here. As soon as you realize the full reality of the other, be thankful for this moment of your expanded presence. This can flip the potential for violence completely on its head. You might find yourself suddenly filled with love and empathy for the other person. Or you might simply start to laugh.
Will you find yourself saying…
“I know I’ve hurt some people in my life. I take responsibility for my outbursts of aggression. I don’t blame anyone else, and I’m certainly no victim. But I don’t condemn myself either. What I learned from my past outbursts is that I’ve got tremendous power. I want to channel that power consciously from now on, not let it explode out of control.”
“Wow, I’m having such an aggressive power fantasy right now, imagining what I would like to do to that hateful person. What would happen if I looked in their eyes and saw their full humanity? How would that change the scene?”
“You make me so angry, insulting me like that in front of my friends…and it’s, oh, well, on a scale of justified aggression from one to ten, I guess it’s about a…two.” (Laughs.)