TRAUMA IS THE GREAT BETRAYER, THE THING THAT HOLDS US BACK FROM OUR POTENTIAL, FROM OUR TRUE SELVES. WE GET CAUGHT UP IN REPETITION WOUNDING (UNCONSCIOUSLY REPEATING OUR TRAUMA OVER AND OVER AGAIN), UNTIL WE FINALLY CATCH UP WITH WHY WE ATTRACT CERTAIN PEOPLE OR SITUATIONS INTO OUR LIVES AND MANAGE TO END THE CYCLE.

Sometimes we end the cycle through therapy (making the unconscious conscious). In shamanism we do this through wound work (healing the inner parts of ourselves that still suffer), soul retrieval (calling home the parts of ourselves that we lost along the way) and compassionate depossession (removing foreign energies in our energy systems that don’t belong to us). This is how we heal.

But where does trauma come from and why is it here at all? Trauma, in the case of human harm (as opposed to trauma caused by accidents, natural disasters or caused by and within the animal kingdom), is caused when bad things are done to people.

In energetic terms, simply put, trauma is when low-grade consciousness, or ‘under- evolved’ consciousness, plays out its desires, whims, deficiencies and prejudices in the world, sometimes without concern for the impact on others.

While we all have our ‘issues’ and can unintentionally hurt others by our actions, we can recognise harm done when it’s pointed out to us and seek redemption through healthy remorse and repair. And in most cases, this also helps to heal the injured party.

But what is happening when someone seeks to wilfully harm others? What possible reason could someone have to intentionally inflict harm on another, or to one’s self? We can talk about wounding, revenge, mental illness and acts of desperation and impulse, but beyond these (and psychopathy), there is a force for intentional harm that exists on this planet that is not ours but affects us directly in immeasurable ways.

This blog will begin a series of blogs that will seek to unearth the enormous infrastructural energetic history of the causes of trauma in our world and hopefully begin to empower those who are interested in learning more about their own trauma and that of their clients or loved ones, and the causes of “evil” and intentional harm on our planet.

Humans as Divine Beings

Humans are a hybrid species of animal and spirit, more specifically, of animal and god-like spirit. To break the word ‘human’ into two parts, ‘hu- and -man’, the prefix, “hu” was considered by Sufis to mean “divine essence and identity”. In Hebrew, ‘hu’ means “the Essence of Essence, Secret Name of God, Ground of Existence.” In Ancient Egypt, ‘Hu’ (Hw) meant “the personification of a religious term, the creative utterance’”. From ancient times, the word ‘Hu’ meant ‘God’ or the essence of god, and ‘man’, from the Germanic and Old English ‘Mann’, meant ‘person’ or ‘human’. Combined, the word originally translates, literally, as ‘god-person’.

Consider, next, the etymology of the words ‘human’ and ‘humane’, both taken from the same Latin root ‘humanus’, meaning ‘a member of the species Homo sapiens’. The word ‘human’ speaks to the biology of the person, while ‘humane’ speaks to that person’s morality or compassion for others. The Middle English word ‘humain’, taken from the Latin, and that later became ‘humane’, meant “marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for  humans  or animals’.

Therefore, in our biological, etymological and religious histories, we can identify humans as innately embodying the natural qualities of ethical beings, by right. I would argue that it is not in our nature to be anything other than humane towards each other, because to be humane is to be human.

Conversely, to be ‘in-humane’ is to be ‘not human’, or at least to be sufficiently devoid of traits that belong in our humanity, so as to be removed from what we consider normal human behaviour.

I would argue that to be ‘evil’ is so far outside our scope of what it means to be human, that ‘evil’ is a foreign influence altogether and does not belong to us as a species by nature. And yet, some humans do heinous things. Why?

There is an old indigenous story of the grandfather explaining to his grandson about the war within being between two wolves. One wolf would tear the world apart and cast everyone asunder, while the other would build the world up and bring people together. The boy asked his grandfather which wolf would win, and the grandfather replied: “The one that you feed”.

There is a common belief that all people are capable of great harm and to some extent this is true. Under extraordinary circumstances, ordinary people can commit the most awful acts against each other, particularly where there is institutional bias or group behaviour at work.

But it is also true that however we ethically commit ourselves to be, which wolf we feed, that is how we tend to show up in the world. And, I would argue, that humans are ethical and decent in their nature; we are not displaced from our humanity when we are acting from our true natures. So, if humans are not ‘evil’ in their natures, where does ‘evil’ come from?

A Multi-faceted Universe —Many Realms, Many Beings

As intentionally conscious beings, we are not alone on this planet. Apart from the other 10 million species of animals on this planet with whom we cohabit the earth, there are other dimensions and realities and beings that we might not recognise as belonging to our ordinary reality, but that reside here, alongside us, nonetheless.

Western philosophy and science barely touch on these topics, at least to take them seriously, so I won’t try to unpack those arguments. Instead, I’ll address this issue from a shamanic perspective.

In shamanism, there is an ultimate goal to master in life, and that is to ‘survive death’. Strange though this sounds, it simply means to consciously ‘transcend’ the confines of physical, ‘ordinary reality’ and see death as a transition, not as an end. Death has no power over us if we do not fear it, if we know it to be a doorway, and not a ‘dead-end’. So, the ‘transcending’ is to do with us retaining our personal power over death and not surrendering our power through fear. It also means to be able to access other worlds and realms where death has no place, and to access the wisdom and teachings of the beings who reside there in those ‘non-ordinary realities’.

This ultimate goal, whether achieved or not, reveals two truths. It firstly teaches that fear strips us of our power. This is true of nearly all involuntary power transfers on earth. And secondly, it teaches that other realms exist and that other beings live there.

It is also true to say that there are countless numbers of these realms and types of beings, some of whom are highly evolved and can act as guides for us, and some of whom are simply humans who once lived on earth, and, after their bodies died went on to live in the “afterlife”, which constitutes one or more of these realms.

Spectrum of Consciousness: Beings Who Are Highly-Evolved to Under-Evolved

It is also true to say that within these countless realms outside of ‘ordinary reality’ (also known as ‘third-dimensional reality’), the beings that exist there can be measured more or less against a spectrum of consciousness that stretches from highly evolved, through to extremely ‘under-evolved’.

We are all on this spectrum of consciousness, and it would serve us to know where on this spectrum it is that we individually currently reside. We looked at the Three Milestones in the Trajectory of Consciousness in previous blogs and we can gauge where we are by reading which level of awareness seems to resonate with us most at this time. These Three Milestones can act as a compass, too, to help us to see where next we might go in our soul’s journey.

The more evolved on the spectrum that a being might be, the closer to their divine state that they are. The more ‘under-evolved’ that a being might be, the farther from their divine state that they are. This is true both of beings that are in physical form and of those thatare not.

More evolved beings tend to display and carry ‘higher-frequency’ energies of inclusion, compassion and kindness towards others. Less evolved beings tend to display and carry ‘lower-frequency’ energies of exclusion, selfishness and indifference towards others. Extremely under-evolved beings carry ‘extremely low-frequency’ energies and tend to seek actual harm towards others.

Of these ‘extremely under-evolved’ beings, there are many that originated elsewhere entirely, are not human in the sense that we know ‘human’ to be, and it is to these beings that the next blogs in this series will turn our attention.