The spells we cast upon ourselves

Greetings and Salutations!

In the yoga tradition there’s an idea that if you’re not in an enlightened state then you’re caught under the spell of illusion, maya.

The goal of meditation is to break free from maya. In a good session, you can feel this way. You find your way into a place that’s above the clouds, a place where you feel aloof from the problems of the world, a place of connection and peace.

You touch a place where everything seems fine just the way it is.

After you’ve had such an experience it’s easy to get off your meditation cushion and think, okay well, now it’s back to the real world. But of course, the concept of maya turns that way of looking at things on it’s head. It says, no—the peaceful place was the real world.

I find the idea of maya to also be helpful when it comes to understanding emotions.

It’s a major shortcoming of our language that we don’t have more ways of differentiating between emotions other than saying that some are positive and others negative.

In the Self Salutation process, I distinguish between emotions in another way: some emotions are illusory, like maya. Others are genuine; they bring you into the deeper reality of what is going on within your heart.

The illusory nature of some emotions

When you look at it closely, you’ll see that a huge amount of emotions are simply mental traps. You can spin around in them endlessly without getting anywhere. They aren’t resolvable—at least not on their own.

Much of the anger we feel is like that. It’s an unquenchable fire. You can burn with it for days. You can try to forget about it but it will just seethe within you. You can act it out but even that doesn’t bring real satisfaction.

Much of what we call depression is the same. You can flail around in hopelessness and despondency for days on end without seeing a way out of it.

When you’re under the sway of these emotions, you feel disconnected from your true self, out of sorts. Because of this, I call these emotions Syndromes of the Lost Self.

Syndromes of the Lost Self

In An Introduction to the Self Salutation, I share six of these syndromes. I categorize them in terms of the relationship they arise in (either your relationship with yourself, the people around you, or life in general).

I’ve mentioned a few of the syndromes in past newsletters...

For example, when I analyzed the incident where Elon Musk told his advertisers to go f*ck themselves, I spoke about Power Outage Syndrome. That’s the syndrome you experience when it seems like you have an impossible choice between two unacceptable solutions to a conflict: submit to another person's will in a state of powerlessness or blow a fuse with them.

When I discussed Trump-induced anxiety, I spoke a bit about Storm Approaching Syndrome. That’s a state of pessimistic rumination over future events that are beyond your ability to completely control.

You’ll notice that I’ve given the syndromes names that describe the thought pattern that you spin around in when you are caught in these modes, rather than the emotions you feel.

I do that because we’re often in denial about what we feel.

How many times have you seen someone in the middle of an argument claim that they are definitely not angry? Hahaha. Yeah, right.

We all do that, of course. It’s part of the pattern of repression and denial of emotions that the Self Salutation is created to help us disengage from.

One reason I see the Syndromes of the Lost Self as illusory is that real as these feelings may seem in the moment, they dissipate immediately once you delve under the surface and uncover what’s really going on.

What’s really going on is the another kind of emotion, the one that brings you into reality and presence when you experience it, the genuine feeling in your heart that I call a Core Negative Emotion.

Core Negative Emotions

It takes probing to find the true source of the syndrome you’re struggling with—it takes a journey through the Labyrinth of Repressed Emotions—but underneath each syndrome is always a hidden culprit that needs to be surfaced and tended to.

Fortunately, these core negative emotions are resolvable. They aren’t pleasant, of course. But they bring you out of maya and reconnect you with yourself.

For example, when you’re stuck in Power Outage Syndrome, you boil in a frustration over the impossible choice of either torching a relationship or submitting to someone’s unfair treatment of you. But when you uncover the deeper truth of what’s going on, you will likely discover that this person is triggering a painful insecurity that’s buried inside your heart somewhere.

Once you surface and tend to that insecurity, you recognize the middle path between the extreme response. You find the way to assert your power without trampling on the other person.

Another way to look at what is happening is to say that when we banish one feeling to the underground—like shame, or fear, or hurt—it creates another, seemingly more tolerable feeling—one of the syndromes.

Not some cosmic witch or wizard

The Syndromes of the Lost Self each hide the work of the subconscious in a different way. They manifest when the subconscious warps reality to protect you from unwanted feelings.

To resolve the emotion, therefore, you need to move beyond the syndrome and address the real challenge.

If you want to live from your true self—if you want to maintain a state of mindfulness and extricate yourself from maya—you must be able to recognize when you are caught in one of these syndromes.

This is the process the Self Salutation is created to facilitate.

In the tradition I was immersed in, Maya is personalized as a goddess who casts a spell upon those of us in the material world, keeping us in a sleepwalking state, disconnected from our true selves.

Fortunately, the syndromes are not the curse of some cosmic witch; they’re spells we cast upon ourselves.

That might sound demoralizing at first. But it also means the solution is in your hands.

Peace,

Simon

P.S. Next Tuesday, January 9, 2024 at 5PM Eastern Time, I’ll host a live online meditation class. This class will be free of charge. You can sign up here. Spots are limited so please sign up now!