Step 7: Withdrawal

One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.

--Mary Renault

• Ok, we made it. Step 7, Withdrawal, the end of the line, the final release, the well-deserved rest, Shabbos, to sleep, perchance not to dream….

• So, what is the Withdrawal stage all about? What is its function?

• The Need Satisfaction Cycle is an energetic one. We develop energy as Need grows, we train that energy towards growthful Contact, and then we Withdraw and we integrate or digest what we got in Contact.

• We contemplate our new experiences, learnings, and discoveries, and begin to incorporate and own this new material into who we are. Like an amoeba engulfing and digesting food, we’ve engulfed the new material and now re-form our personal boundary, so that we become alone with ourselves again, after our period of openness in Contact.

• This function of Withdrawal is very important, because without it, we would never make new learnings a part of us, would never be able to let go of Contact, remember our autonomous selves, feel peace, and get the rest we need to go on to new adventures.

• The replenishment of Withdrawal also returns us to a state of receptivity, so that new Sensations can arise in a vivid and enlivening way. If we remained in the noisy neighborhood of Action and Contact, without the quiet peace of Withdrawal, we would not be able to discern the subtle stirrings of new desires.

Some Withdrawal Stucknesses:

Solitude vs. Connection:

• In Withdrawal, we re-orient to the universe within us, while becoming relatively-detached from our environment. This can present two challenges, depending on our personalities.

• Introverts may slide easily into Withdrawal, relieved to be out of the hustle and bustle of Contact, happy to be back in the cave of their own selves. Introverts often need, and take, a long time to process new information and experiences. Extroverts, not so much.

• Extroverts get their primary energy from connection. That’s why they seem to thrive at parties, meetings, and other busy events.

• While their love of connection tends to make Extroverts skilled at interpersonal contact, it also reflects, often, a fear of being alone. For extroverts, dependency and confluence are big issues. They can be great, if exhausting, company to others, but are often lousy company to themselves. They can be very accustomed to getting goodies like validation, praise, entertainment, and love from others, but feel afraid, insignificant, or lost when alone.

• This polarity is very evident when couples have a deep discussion or conflict. The more-extroverted partner could stay in the Contact indefinitely, processing verbally and demanding that the more-introverted partner keep up with them. This can begin to resemble a hostage situation, where the extrovert bullies, pursues, and noodges the introvert, long past the point where the introvert can even think, much less interact.

• On the other hand, the introvert may be so relieved to be able to retreat into the safety of the cave, that any further discussion of unfinished business is unlikely to occur in the future. This can harden into passive-resistance to further Contact, and become a vicious cycle that couples’ therapist Harville Hendrix calls “the turtle and the hailstorm”. The extroverted hailstorm pelts the introverted turtle with requests for more contact, and the turtle pulls deeper into her shell, which makes the hailstorm pelt harder, and on and on. Ain’t love grand?

• So, extroverts and introverts can practice self-explorations and different skills to navigate the Withdrawal stage such that they develop more range of response-ability.

Action vs. Rest:

• The Withdrawal Stage is the perfect time to work on our conflicts around the balance of work and rest.

• For most of us who have been raised with the stern Calvinist work ethic bequeathed to us by the Puritans, there is a deep distrust of the natural rhythms of our bodies, or of Nature in general.

• We are taught, in our culture, from an early age, the dangers of laziness, the sin of sloth, and the failures that are awaiting those of us who indulge in indolence and non-doing.

• And there are certainly many examples of people using well-structured arguments against Calvinist indoctrination in order to justify lengthy bouts of aimless Internet wandering, crossword puzzle overdosing, and repeat viewings of “Apocalypse Now Redux”.

• However, whether we scurry on the guilty, anxious hamster-wheel of overactivity, or sink into the quicksand of rebellious passivity, what we need to find is discernment and trust in the organic rhythms of action and rest.

• No regimentation or schedule will tell us with any real authority how much to do and how much to not-do. We are constantly forced to rely on our own lights to figure out this difficult calculus.

So, learning to find the organic flow of Withdrawal into Sensation is the key to balancing Action and Rest.

Withdrawal's Deeper Meanings:

“The process of deepest inquiry-a process that Heidegger refers to as "unconcealment,"'-leads us to recognize that we are finite, that we must die, that we are free, and that we cannot escape our freedom. We also learn that the individual is inexorably alone.”

---Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

• The deep dive issues that Withdrawal raises all have to do with the universal existential challenges of mortality and aloneness. Regardless of our personal histories or life events, these universal challenges present themselves in one form or another.

• The Withdrawal stage, because it represents separation and letting go of Contact with the world, evokes these themes. This makes this stage both very difficult, but also very fruitful. As Yalom and the other existential therapists and philosophers observed, exploration of these challenges makes our lives richer, more poignant, and more meaningful. So, let’s take them one at a time and see how much Mensch-milk we can squeeze out of them.

Mortality:

• From an early age, we become acquainted with the idea of death. When a child might develop this awareness, and how they learn to define the concept, varies for each child, but there is more than enough evidence now to indicate death is a concern that arises early in life, and can underlie many of our emotional concerns.

• Let’s consider the Ego’s reaction to death. As we discussed in the Awareness chapter, the development of Ego involves learning to Name, to assign identities to elements of our world.

• This includes creating a Me, separate from the other people in the world. This Me, this Identity, becomes filled with meaning and importance, as we attach to it all the characteristics, skills, strengths, weaknesses, and relationships with which we identify ourselves.

• The Ego-Identity is very special to us, is our deepest attachment. Even if we are not happy with certain aspects of ourselves, we are, to say the least, rather partial to ourselves as a whole. Because the Ego develops in service of our biological survival machinery, it also seeks to preserve us, which makes our attachment to the Ego-Identity very intense. So, the threat that the knowledge of our mortality poses for our Ego-Identity is great indeed.

• All creatures and organisms are built with self-preservative functions.

• As humans, our self-preservation is built into biology and psychology as our fight/flight/freeze process, biologically-centered in the limbic system of our brain, and including our increased heartbeat & blood pressure, quickening respiration, and restless, blood-engorged arms and legs (we need that yummy blood to help us run, fight, or freeze).

• On the experiential level, this is primary anxiety, perhaps what Buddha called, in ancient Pali, Dukkha. Some of the existential philosophers and psychologists believed that his “death anxiety” was the core of all of our other anxieties, and was merely tagged to or associated with objects, like snakes, interpersonal conflict, or the embarrassment of public speaking. In other words, no matter what the anxiety is attributed to, on the most basic level, danger feels like danger, and the limbic system rings the same alarm bells to being attacked by a knife-wielding mugger or an ego-threatening insult.

• Thus, we fear death and danger at our core, and in the Withdrawal stage, this Death Anxiety can express itself as the fear of dying, disappearing, missing out, being forgotten, becoming insignificant, or losing our selves.

• We develop all sorts of defenses to manage this anxiety. These can range from magical thoughts of immortality, to more-subtle, sophisticated defenses.

• Try as we might, we cannot eliminate our mortality, nor can we hold off awareness of it indefinitely. Sooner or later, the psychological veil that protects us from death-anxiety is momentarily-thinned, suddenly-pierced, or dramatically-torn-away, leading us to the great existential confrontations with our mortality. How we meet this confrontation determines whether we live in anxiety and defense, or whether we live more-expansively and deeply.

• In the Withdrawal stage, there are several possibilities for not just dealing with death-anxiety when it arises, but for actually courting it and making ourselves more at home with it. And this playing in the great void of non-existence can lead to a far-deeper Identity than the conventional Ego-Identity.

• The Ego-Identity, useful though it may be, is very limited and, ultimately, fictional. It is limited by the narrowness with which we see ourselves.

• We tend to identify with our Persona, those characteristics, remember, that we are proud of or happy about, and we tend to dis-identify or avoid our Shadow side. If we have done some work on ourselves, perhaps we have incorporated more of our Shadow, leading to an Identity that is fuller, less biased. That more-mature Identity has more emotional and behavioral range, more ability to respond flexibly to different situations.

• But, even if we have done the work of uncovering the Shadow and incorporating it into a more-mature Identity, there is still a fictional element to our Identity that mortality unmasks.

• That is, we are not really separate entities, separate “I”s. We are each composed of approximately 30 trillion cells. These cells are each integrated harmonies of even smaller elements, like atoms and molecules. Our atoms and molecules are themselves composed of even smaller guys, like bosons, quarks, leptons, neutrinos, zinos, and winos (yes, winos! Go figure!) To make matters even more fuzzy, all of these supposed particles are just our names and descriptions for various forms of energy and for how energies interact.

• That means, our separate Ego-Identities are convenient labels for a multitude of smaller things, none of which are separate things per se, but really plays of energy, dancing the dance of the great Whatever.

• None of these energies, subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, or organ systems has the slightest notion or concern for the Ego-Identity that we call home, nor do they have any more than a passing attachment to said Identity.

• The cells that make up our bodies die off and are born by the billions every day. And, sooner or later, the trillions of energy-dudes that make up our selves will go their own way and the integrated Me that we are so very attached to will cease to exist.

• Now, there is so much about all of that which is guaranteed to give any Mensch the willies. And, if you were taking it all in, I imagine you were feeling a bit queasy at the thought of all those separate boarders in our great big boarding house of a Self, all wiggling around and all only temporarily committed to staying where we’d like them to.

• So, just to give ourselves even a little bit of an illusion of control or order, let’s remember that the work of becoming a more-whole Mensch is to expand our awareness of ourselves and our lives, to develop more range of response-ability, and to learn to live in a more-fulfilling fashion. (At least, until our legion of energy dudes decide to fly the coop for other accommodations.)

Withdrawal Practice: Transpersonal Witnessing

The next step in interrogating and understanding our aloneness is to first see what we mean by “I”, and to start to let go of the Egoic “I”. So, we start with a contemplation.

"I have a body, but I am not my body.

I can see and feel my body, and what can be seen and felt is not the true Seer.

My body may be tired or excited, sick or healthy, heavy or light, but that had nothing to do with my inward I.

I have a body, but I am not my body.

I have desires, but I am not my desires.

I can know my desire, and what can be known is not the true Knower.

Desires come and go, floating through my awareness, but they do not affect my inward I.

I have desires, but I am not my desires.

I have emotions, but I am not my emotions.

I can feel and sense emotions, and what can be felt and sensed is not the true Feeler.

Emotions pass through me, but they do not affect my inward I.

I have emotions, but I am not my emotions.

I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts.

I can know and intuit my thoughts, but what can be known is not he true Knower.

Thoughts come to me and thoughts leave me, but they do not affect my inward I.

I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts.

-- Roberto Assagioli

This is a meditation designed to help us strip away our identification with the personal, Egoic Self. When we detach and see that we are not these elements of us, we are beginning to identify more with the Transpersonal or Witnessing Self.

Nondualism:

“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.”

--Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

‘I’ stands for indivisible, infinite, intimate and innocent. It is the substance of all experience.

--Rupert Spira

Contemplate this in awareness:

“There is simply experience. There is not something or someone experiencing experience! You do not feel feeling, think thoughts, or sense sensations any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling.

‘I feel fine’ means that a fine feeling is present. It does not mean that there is one thing called an ‘I’ and another separate thing called a feeling, so that when you bring them together this ‘I’ feels the fine feelings.

There are no feelings but present feelings, and whatever feeling is present is ‘I.’

No one ever found an ‘I’ apart from some present experience, or some experience apart from an ‘I’—which is only to say that the two are the same thing.”

Now when you understand that there is no gap between “you” and your experiences, doesn’t it start to become obvious that there is no gap between “you” and the world which is experienced?

If you are your experiences, you are the world so experienced.

You do not have a sensation of a bird, you are the sensation of a bird.

You do not have an experience of a table, you are the experience of the table.

You do not hear the sound of thunder, you are the sound of thunder.

The inner sensation called “you” and the outer sensation called “the world” are one and the same sensation.

The inner subject and the outer object are two names for one feeling, and this is not something you should feel, it is the only thing you can feel.”

--Alan Watts

• Nondualism can be found in the mystical branches of all of the major religions, whether that be Kabbalistic Judaism, Contemplative Christianity, Islamic Sufism, or the meditative traditions of Hinduism’s Advaita Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism.

• In modern day, we find it in the work of Ramana Maharshi, Richard Rohr, Jay Michaelson, Ken Wilber, and Rupert Spira, to name just a few.

• Nondualism could be thought of as the crown-chakra of Consciousness work, because it takes us just a bit farther past the Transpersonal Witness, towards a re-embrace of the whole of existence.

• The term “Nondualism” itself points to this. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the Sanskrit word, “Advaita” means, literally, “not-two”. This refers, essentially, to the seamless totality that is Reality.

• In Kabbalistic Judaism, they use the term Ein Sof, The Endless One.

• In mystical Christianity, it may be called God, but not the bearded-guy-in-the-sky God, rather what Paul Tillich called the undifferentiated “ground of being.”

• That is, regardless of how we chop up Reality into things, categories, groups, sets, and all the other mind-constructed definitions, actual Reality is not made up of things that are ultimately separate from one another.

• As Ken Wilber points out in “No Boundary”, every boundary we draw is an artificial construct, conventional and useful, but not true to the seamless nature of Reality.

• When we practice Transpersonal Witnessing, we are still working with a mind-created, artificial boundary. That is, when say, “Here I am, watching those sensations, images, thoughts, feelings, and events over there”, we are making a space between our witnessing self and the witnessed events.

• In fact, when we Transpersonally-Witness, the act of Witnessing is seamlessly-connected to that which we are witnessing. That is, there is no seeing, hearing, touching, feeling, sensing, or thinking that is separate from that which we see, hear, touch, feel, sense, or think.

• Many meditators struggle to keep their thoughts, feelings, images, and bodies at bay, dualistically-believing that Mindfulness Heaven lies in only the peace of the Witness. But, try as we might to just be the Witness, all that experience that we witness is not going away, and a new stress is created by trying to hold this boundary.

• The practice of Nondualism dissolves this boundary. We don’t go back to believing we are the separate roles and experiences of Ego, but instead, we start to know it all as the beautiful world of Reality from which we are inseparable. We re-embrace all that we have detached from, without falling into the Ego’s possessive attachment to our separate personal Identity, rejoining the great flow of life.

• So, how do we transcend this separation we’ve drawn in Transpersonal Witnessing, and how does that help us get past the isolation of even the Transpersonal Witness?

• For starters, we need to remember that all the stuff out there that we have named and boundaried, well, it’s all mind-stuff. Nothing that we perceive, contact, interact with, or name comes to us except through our Consciousness.

• We have many theories about a world that exists outside our Consciousness, but we will never, ever experience anything outside of that which is presented by our Consciousness. Every thought, every image, every sensation, every feeling, every perception, every event occurs within the space of our Consciousness. Like I said, it’s all mind-stuff, Consciousness-material.

• “Wait”, I hear you say, “of course there’s a world outside my Consciousness. Ask yourself, “Is there anything that I have experienced outside of my Consciousness?” The answer is “No”.

• So, all that stuff that we are learning to step back from into the Transpersonal Witness, all those thoughts, images, feelings, sensations, perceptions of the world, all of it is Consciousness shaped into some form.

• Consciousness is the basic playdoh of Reality, out of which is made all of the supposed-things that we perceive, including all that we think of conventionally as inside us and outside us.

• Not only is all that we will ever experience made only of Consciousness. All of these supposed-objects of Consciousness come and go constantly, arising from and dissolving back into Consciousness. The objects of Consciousness are like a play put on by Consciousness, as if Consciousness splits itself into different characters, dresses up to play their roles, and performs the play like it’s really happening “out there”. Then, just as remarkably, the split-up Consciousness stuff drops the charade, ends the play, and returns to the Source, undifferentiated Consciousness. And the tickets to the Consciousness play are free, cause Consciousness comps itself. Much cheaper than Broadway.

• What we want to do is to move from being Something (Ego-Identity), to No-Thing (Transpersonal Witness) to Everything (Seamless Totality).

• In the religious traditions, this is about separating from our narrow, limited, Egoic, identification with the worldly self, and recognizing our identification, our immersion in, our inseparability from the God-Head, Allah, Brahman, Buddha-Nature, Ein Sof.

• We could also call it the Uber-Mensch, although that gets a little dangerously-close to Nietzsche’s Nazi-corrupted Übermensch, so let’s just stick with The Big Menschowski. In this mystical consciousness work, the aim is to realize, experientially, our absolute oneness with the All right now.

This kind of contemplation requires, or induces, a stillness, as we relax our Ego’s rational slicing up of the moment into separate parts, and a kind of effortless quiet comes over us.

• The great teacher Ashtavakra describes it as such: “For the sage, even blinking is too much trouble.”

• This is very consonant with the teachings of the great Mensch, Jeffrey Lebowski, who famously said, “The Dude abides”.

• However you say it, the experience is the same, a quiet intimate acceptance of ourselves as the Moment, not a separate self in the Moment. Abide in it.

• Notice that, in these contemplations, we are not experiencing some sort of mystical sensations or anything out of the ordinary. As Rupert Spira points out, in Nondual practices, we are still experiencing the same sensory data, but we are beginning to change our interpretation of it. We are seeing and de-energizing the ideas that we use to cut up Reality into parts, and beginning to feel the intimacy of Oneness.

• As you begin to get used to his way of seeing our experience, you may begin to notice a sense of flow arising, and a growing feeling of “family” with all the elements of conscious experiencing. That water cup on the desk is no longer just a plastic object out there that you fill every so often and drink from. Now, as you let go of the separating ideas, your connection to it is more immediate. Your connection is no longer “mediated” by thoughts and definitions. Instead, it’s like Pirsig says about riding the motorcycle, you are in the action, not separated from it by the frame your mind draws around it.

• After playing with this in silent contemplation, begin to take this new way of experiencing wherever you go.

• Notice, wherever you are, that as you see, hear, touch, all of these connections connect us to the Whole.

• Our eyes touch what we see, our ears touch what we hear, our skin, well, touches what we touch. All of what happens, all of what we notice is our touching the Whole.

• And the more we let go of the separating ideas, the more we feel a part of the Whole Flow, waves and currents in the great ocean. We are no longer separate and alone, because we are not separate, not two, non-dual, rather we are one with the Flow.

• Every moment of our lives now can be felt at this dance, waking, doing, resting, sleeping, dreaming, and waking, this every changing waving ocean, this arising and falling of this wave and that, this ceaseless ongoing play of drama and comedy and travelogue and how-to guide and nameless, wordless flow of creation.

• And this is how we slide from Withdrawal back into Sensation, and Awareness, and Mobilization and Action and Contact and Satiation and, yes, back to Withdrawal. Again and again, always uniquely, rinse and repeat forever and ever. Eternal Mensches, eternally Mensching.