World Trade Center
We were talking about 9/11, and how it affected so many different people.
I know one young lady, who lived in Manhattan, and who was scheduled to be at the World Trade Center that day, slept in, and decided to do some work out on Long Island. When the train came out of the tunnel on the Long Island side, pandemonium broke out as the train passengers saw the effects of the first airplane impact on the WTC.
This young lady was stranded on Long Island over night. She had not brought her medicines with her, and she had to live out the long day and night of her greatest fear: to be stranded away from home without her medicine.
She knew some people at the WTC: the head of the University of Michigan Alumni club in Manhattan was killed; she had another friend who was talking via cellphone to his buddy, a gung-ho financial type who was on the roof of the WTC...
Let that sink in...
He told his friend good-bye... and jumped. He was one of the many who jumped that day, into the mortal gap between the great height and the blazing inferno.
Her mother was on the phone most of the night with her; she had found a motel to stay at and a kindly taxi driver did not charge her for the ride - she had not taken enough money with her - and he said that he'd never forget the sight of her in the rear seat of his cab crying for her friends and for her neighbors.
She developed a fear of flying after that. Never afraid before, she now was. Until this day, she does not look forward to flight gladly. Many people do not, and there are many sad stories of folks being "spooked" by being in the same airplane cabin as some people of Mideast descent, as happened in Detroit on 9/11 itself this year: panic in the skies.
Post Traumatic Stress affects different people in different ways. One need not even be directly involved in the trauma, for it is enough to feel it intensely: memory then creates the story which never goes away and which will change lives and create cowards or raving mad men of all of us.
The effect of the remembered story may lessen over time, but it has permanently become part of our narratives: it is an integral part of Me-Being-In-The-World.
Many things work this way, from terrorist attacks to runs on the banks to fiascoes on Wall Street. There are numerous traumas in our lives, and how we handle them is so important. In times of stress, it may become the most important thing in the world for us: to handle the after effects of trauma.
Panic attacks may follow in the years after.
Our own personal stories are focused on ourselves; we do not process all the sense data that pours in on us: our brains and bodies selectively choose the information deemed necessary, and try to ignore the rest.
It's like driving down the highway: we do not actually remember all the cars going by, only the ones that endanger us by speeding by; rarely do we recall anything going on in the lanes going the other way: they are mostly large objects of color going by.
We keep things within our capability of handling them: there are limitless things going on, infinite detail to life, yet our stories are focused rather minutely into our own lives and families and needs: that's about all the human mind can handle, and it does a good job of it.
Panic attacks destroy the focus. Panic opens us up to all the details, to all the incoming... as Radar O'Reilley of M*A*S*H would say:"Incoming!" All the possible incoming information begins to come in and overwhelms us, and we cannot handle it: it overwhelms the triage unit of our minds.
Panic attacks destroy the focus on ourselves and makes us almost infinite...
It renders useless all the limits and borders we have set up, it disarms all the defense mechanisms, it takes the scripts we have for our lives and tears them up.
Panic destroy the Personality we have defined for ourselves. The Personality no longer lives within well-known boundaries: it escapes all boundaries and becomes infinite in that sense. We can no longer cope with Life: it comes down upon us like a deluge upon ancient sinners or pyroclastic flows upon the inhabitants of Pompeii. It is a recreation of the Trauma - or traumas - which were the original existential attacks upon us and our personalities.
Panic removes all structure, and we are left to act as wild and feral animals backed into a corner.
When the Serpent tempted our first parents in the Garden of Eden, he told them that by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, they would become like God, the Holy. Of course, since this tree was forbidden them, being set as a border not to cross - or, the same thing - being set
off-limits, God was giving them structure and boundaries within which to construct the story - or History - of their lives.
The Holy gave us a place to stand and a homeland in which to define ourselves. We define ourselves as mankind, and we use the Holy as a Reality by which and against which to define ourselves. Without God, we would have no way to define ourselves as mankind.
You might be tempted to say that our conception of the Holy is the inborn Category of Intelligence we use to define ourselves; that is, we define ourselves as Being-Here and Being-Now in distinction to Being-Everywhere and Being-At-All-Times. We certainly define our mortality in distinction to the undying nature of the Holy as the Ground of all that exists.
In summary, God creates Intelligence and makes it subject to certain limits. These limits are described metaphorically as the boundaries of the Garden, or certain rules to follow.
When the limits are trespassed, that is Trauma. After trauma comes Post Traumatic Stress and Panic, memories of a better life, a golden age before we were harried from blessedness, a time when our stories were full of promise and not treachery: a life when our boundaries were respected.
When we watch the various B films about the
Frankenstein story, we hear the saying "There are things Man was not intended to know!" That is incorrect. It should be stated, "There are ways in which Man
cannot know!" (And when people speak of living a thousand years as science banishes the causes of death, they are ignoring that, as it now stands, such a life would be a Panic Attack in Time...)
Without the proper preparations; Man cannot perceive God... and here let it be known that seeing God is the same thing as the end limit of "knowing" as God knows... unless Man is prepared for his selfhood to be swept away for a certain period of time. ("Knowing as God knows" cannot be summarized within human intelligence, hence it is only when the process of "knowing as God knows" comes to an end that a human may retain a limited, focused, and - hence - intelligently crafted image of God.)
Adam and Eve once spoke to God face to face; we know we can know things as God does; yet the intention of the Eden story is to impress upon us the importance of how we create our daily lives as homely stories with structure and limits, and the vast distance from that to the limitless infinity of coming into contact with God; for the most part of our lives, we cannot live except as creatures of limited knowledge... in effect, outside Eden. To see and know and live as gods would destroy us utterly. However, we know we can escape the necessity of being bound to the story, to our histories... the very fact of Forgiveness is the proof that our histories do not bind us forever! Escaping from the self-imposed strictures we have learned since birth, however, is not easy: leaving behind the things of childhood is not a simply accomplished task.
Thus, the first Trauma was of our Finiteness: the first trauma when mankind "ate the fruit" and was confronted with the reality of becoming like God: being aware of infinity, being overwhelmed by the limitlessness of the created universe.
Adam and Eve were overwhelmed, they became mortal, and were driven forth to live East of Eden and live by the sweat of their brows, and to remember that trauma of glimpsing what appeared to be "the horror" of living without a focused story, to be eternal wanderers without a song, to attempt to be infinite with minds limited to selected narratives.
The Holy is all narratives, not just one.
We create the Stories of our lives. Granted we may have help, but the authors are us, free will and all. An existential threat - a threat to our very existence as living, intelligent beings - breaks down our stories. The young lady mentioned at the start knew someone at the WTC who escaped down the stairs and heard bodies falling around him when he had reached the plaza area... and he left New York and moved as far away as possible and started life as a farmer, entirely changing his story.
An existential threat makes us unfocused and aware of limitless information: we become "like God". The threat tries to destroy the boundaries of the Self. Yet it is a threat, still. We have not spent 40 years meditating on mysteries to prepare ourselves for the sight of Infinity! A mystic may seek the breakdown of the self, but most others do not. The Panic Attacks that are the memory of the existential Threat, the Trauma, are simulations of the threat, and seek to change the story in numerous ways.
However, instead of pining away East of Eden, we should seek understanding and wisdom to deal with panic and trauma. Soon October 2 will be here, the anniversary of the massacre of the Amish schoolgirls in West Nickel Mines. The Amish sought to forgive.
Reading follow up accounts, it is clear that it is not an easy thing to forgive the killer, yet this is what the Amish ways directed them to do.
Have the ways of the Amish been more effective is destroying the memory of the existential threat to them than we have been dealing with 9/11? I do not know, but as times stay stressful or become more so, we need to look at remedies for the wasted years caused by the existential threats to our well-being.
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