TRANSCRIPT
Am I enlightened? Ten years ago, eleven years ago, I created a website, and it was all about the journey to enlightenment. When I talk about enlightenment, I mean the full resolution of trauma within us. I think it was partially my naivete and partially for the sake of simplicity that I approached the subject that I am enlightened and that I really had resolved my traumas.
I remember being called out early on by people on the web, saying, “How can you be enlightened? Are you really enlightened? I don’t think you’re so enlightened.” I really had to take a closer look at myself, and I was glad for what they were saying because when I looked at myself, I realized my answer on a deeper level was much more nuanced.
The reason that I was saying that I was enlightened, I think in part, was fear. Because I felt like, I said, if I was talking about enlightenment and I said I’m not enlightened or not fully enlightened, then why would anybody listen to me? What I came to realize over time was that I don’t know anybody who’s fully enlightened. I know some people who are a lot closer than others, but I don’t know anyone who’s done the whole thing. I don’t know anyone who’s resolved all their childhood traumas and is living trauma-free and is totally connected with their true self and totally manifesting their gifts.
But again, I do know people who have done it a lot more than others. I think I knew it ten years ago; I had done it a lot more than others. I’d spent years and decades exploring my inner self and working out my traumas when a lot of people were going off, and my peers were going off getting married, having kids, building careers. I was grieving. I was exploring my childhood. I was breaking from my parents. I was confronting them. I was doing a lot of crying. I was having a lot of nightmares.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t capable of going off and having a career, and in some ways, I did. I wasn’t really capable of getting married because I knew it was a farce. Going off and getting married and having kids, even though, you know, I was as attracted to women as every other heterosexual guy I knew, I just didn’t feel right going and doing basically what my parents did. I felt like I had a lot of work to do inside, and so I really massively grew.
I started becoming much more conscious, and I knew it. I knew I was self-reflecting all the time. I could see how I was more conscious than basically almost everybody around me, and so I called that enlightened. It now sounds a little bit grandiose, but the point being, it’s ten years later since I put out the website and more than ten years since I was challenged by people on the web. So my answer is more nuanced, and here’s what it is.
I still have unresolved childhood trauma inside of me. I think my early abandonments and my early neglects and abuses from my parents from when I was one month old, and three months old, and six months old, and two years old, I think I’m pretty well aware of what happened to me. It’s hard to know everything because it’s not like the people who abused me ever came and told me much of what they did. I’ve had to figure it out a lot of it through my feelings, through memories, through photographs, through journaling, through studying my dreams, through actually asking my parents and talking with them, allowing them to feel safe enough to tell me stuff, which at times I’ve done. Now I don’t do that anymore.
Also, talking to other people who were around in my childhood, I was able to put together a picture of my story. That’s how I think I know better now that it’s not all resolved. I still have a lot of fears of abandonment and rejection. I think I still want to be loved externally by others in ways that I haven’t yet figured out how to love myself. This is going back to little Daniel inside of me that’s just a few months old, a little baby in some ways still. I see it because I’ve seen myself access those parts of myself in my life, and I see how unresolved I still am.
On the other hand, I have resolved a huge amount of stuff. I know that because I’m not the person I was. I’m not the teenage boy that I was. I’m not the young adult that I was. I’m not the kid that I was. There were a lot of things that I did that were replications of my traumas: fighting, bullying, being bullied, putting myself in positions to be bullied, being mean to kids, fighting with my sibling, being cruel. At times, I did a lot of things that were real, like replications of what had been done to me. Also, being really terrified of intimacy. Being terrified of intimacy with myself at first when I started journaling when I was seventeen, it was really scary. I was lucky if I could write a couple of paragraphs.
Now it’s just different. Now it’s like I can look in the mirror, really or metaphorically, and know myself much better, be aware of who I am, look at my flaws a lot better, have much more easy access to my inspiration, to my strong spirit, to the real me, and to really know that I know myself. These are all signs that I’ve done a lot of work to resolve my trauma and really have connected to the person who I am, and I’m developing that, yes. But there are still parts of me that are wounded, that are dissociated, that are still depressed, that are still grieving and are working through that process of going from dissociation, being split off, into the healthier state of being depressed, into the healthier state of grieving that, and then from there into the healthiest state of being what you could call enlightened. If I don’t really like that word, but I’m using that because I used to use it ten years ago. But really, of being self-actualized, of being resolved, of being connected with myself.
So my proportion of unhealthy, dissociated, traumatized versus healthy, self-actualized, enlightened is getting more and more and more. When I was a kid, it wasn’t so hot. It was more like this, and it’s been going like this, this, this, this. Now, what do I project for my future? More growth, more self-honesty, more grieving, more real connection with the true me, more connection with the little baby and the little child that I once was and that still lives inside me in some ways, more distanced from my family of origin emotionally, and ultimately, yes, more enlightenment. Maybe someday full enlightenment. I know I keep working toward it, but I don’t know.