Instinct. The nature of us humans when we have struggled free and burned through all the trappings and the efforts to be what we are not, never have been, always will be instinct. Animals. In the very best sense of the word. Woven in consciousness within the consciousness of all nature. Deeply connected, Grounded. Stable. Intuitive. Attuned. Alive. Healed. Transformed.
We restore to instinct through trauma and loss. These awaken us to instinct. We can’t think our way through them. We can’t rationalize away grief and pain. We have to do something else to heal so we don’t get stuck. We bear down, like our bodies giving birth. We eschew distraction. We sharpen. We surrender. We say “I can’t” then experience something within us that can. It is so impressive that we create more space for it. That’s instinct. It takes over when we have nothing and are nothing.
It is powerful enough to make us believe in a higher power. That higher power is within us and it weaves us into all of nature. The emptiness trauma imposes fills with it. It speaks in our poems, our songs, our stories of what happened. These remake us in earth’s image: primal, direct, connected with everything. When we are healed, we forget. We return to the human world. The self that returns wonders, though. It wonders what the hell just happened? When we experience trauma again, when trauma or the healing process from trauma strikes again, we remember that event, that presence, that experience of feeling ourselves torn open then saved. We ask for it again.
Was it God? Was it Jesus? Was it magic? Am I magic? Am I Jesus? You can stop here. No. Nor are you touched by an angel, exceptional, holy, a messiah. You’re an animal. Trauma had to remind you. Trauma had to knock your constructed self off the planet so you could connect with your natural self. And your natural self is not like your unnatural self that walks alone possessed of ambition, ego, and the ennui that ambition and ego fill you with. Strip those away, and you are humble. You are gentle and sweet. You are also patched into a superior consciousness. This consciousness transcends time and space. It knows the storm is coming. It knows when the disaster will occur. It knows your loved one is in crisis. It knows to sit still on the earth and sink into it for healing. It knows patience and longevity. It knows eternal life as all of us move between seen and unseen worlds. All crossings of the threshold are beginnings. All crossings of the threshold are deaths. These are interchangeable. Everything always is. We say we are reborn.
When we begin to create, we begin our movement back into nature. At first we are clumsy as ghosts learning how to be ghosts. We try to make good art. We fear failure. We make it easy on ourselves and copy someone else. We say Art is refined emotion translated to perfection so never try. This is how we are taught. This is why we stop before we start. To connect to instinct, we have to forget all of that and just create. We feel that first word on the blank page or stroke of paint onto blank canvas, the first trespass upon our interior wilderness. We feel the criticism and our judgment. We feel the terror and call it “too busy to waste time on this.” We say, “I’m not creative.” Once we touch that wilderness, though, it stirs. To stop its stirring, we can drown it out. We can succeed at this. The world is designed to support this success.
Every word of scripture is about instinct, and every sacred text. Every religion is about turning away from one world and aspiring to enter another. Every religion presents a path for doing so:
The world is an illusion.
Your emotions reinforce the illusion.
The illusory world is represented by cities on fire, non-fruition, fiery pits, sensory disabilities, inhabitable lands, lands about to be flooded, and an ocean, to name a few.
The non-illusory world is represented by an ability to walk on water, to live for many generations, to know that nature knows absolutely every detail about you and about what you are here to do.
The non-illusory world is free of all suffering.
The non-illusory world is beautiful.
All you have to do to get from #3 to #4 is die.
Death is an illusion, too.
Crossing over from ego to instinct involves singing, dancing, looking inward, dreaming, being patient, using words in meaningful ways, avoiding harsh speech, walking the earth, and acting in service to others.
Crossing over from ego means working through your emotions, learning them rather than avoiding them, allowing them to guide you to their origin: beyond them and back into instinct, by never acting on them in ways that require dishonesty, selfishness, and violence. These burn down to their essential compassion, the only state of being you need.
Once we are inside our instinct, we are free of suffering because we are free of desire. We become generous and very precise in identifying how we can help. We find all the components for accomplishing such tasks close at hand or on their way toward us. We recognize these when they appear even before we know we will need them. We “read” the world because all nature is made of a language that also makes us. We learn it by learning ourselves. We are our own dictionaries. The first part of our lives gives us the legend for reading the world as map. Grasping ceases. We have all we need. We calm down. We are whole within a vast wholeness. Everything is in its place.
We access this sanity through our stories, by going back into them and discovering meaning. Through this process, our egos and intellects melt away to reveal our true natures. Every story and poem we create is another slant of life shining upon our interior dark. We don’t have to wait until it’s all covered to feel the healing benefit. That comes quickly and becomes a guide. Heal this, it says, presenting an idea for a poem. Heal this, it says, presenting a fun idea for an essay or a story of your experience. Heal this, it says. And we heal. Our thinking changes. Our speech changes. We discover we care more. We cry. We feel moved to help others more than ourselves. We start to have vivid dreams like we did in childhood. A lot of childhood things come back to us. We wonder if we are losing our minds. We are. In the best way.
We find we become better storytellers, poets, and painters the more we welcome the creative impulse to take over. We don’t have to learn something. Something within us already knows. We have to uncover it, and it reveals more with every go. It doesn’t take long before we trust the telling in whatever form we choose. We feel ourselves feeling better. We feel ego settling back down to its optimal proportion, barely there at all. Once it’s dealt with, we can be happy. We can marvel at flowers and clouds. We are free to be ourselves. Our real selves. This lets Nature be its real self, too. All the wonders we have hidden from ourselves by hiding from it open before us. We understand it all. We know what we are here for, what to do, how to speak, how to eat, what to wear, how to see, and how to listen. The first and every step of the journey is to feel, though. To feel it all. To not seek refuge from feeling. To venture all the way into it, we dive into the deepest, darkest pool, and discover we breathe better there.
The ancientness of stories is about this. Storytelling is our instinct for guiding us back into instinct. I see this in teaching Creative Writing. My students transform in surprising ways, each one in their own way. It’s not because of my teaching. Much as I raised my daughter, I show them a few key skills then get out of their way. The rest of it happens inside them. It deepens their perception first, then it deepens their sense of who they are. By the time they’re ready to graduate, they are much more who they are than when they began.
The sacred texts are about this. The Tao, Resurrection, “Jerusalem,” “Israel,” Enlightenment, Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven, Philosopher’s Stone, and all the ideas of the “elect,” “chosen,” “mystic,” and “wise” mean restored to instinct. Plain, simple—rough-hewn, non-fancy, down-to-earth, unrefined, not-even-capitalized instinct. Take away all the politics of religion, take away the power structures, take away the need to have someone interpret scripture. Take it all away, down to the books. Take away the notion of the books having been written with the intention of creating a religion. Take away the notion that the stories and verses that comprise sacred texts were written as sacred texts or even written at all. Remember that stories and verses travelled just fine without writing for tens of thousands of years. They are orature. Memory carried them long before they were written down. Each of them embodied all we needed to stay connected to earth and one another.
Writing poems and stories align us with Nature. Developing as poets and writers develops us into instinct. It’s inescapable. It’s a consciousness. It’s in everything. That’s how Nature communicates with us, even the stupid and fun stuff (especially the stupid and fun stuff). It’s how we never entirely detach. We always have stories and songs. We even “stream” them constantly. We feel lost when we don’t have a “show” to follow on Netflix. All stories are always this one Story. It is always this one Song. We were never for an instant left behind by ourselves. We were always close. We were always magic. Every time we felt completely lost, we were found. We just didn’t know by what. We know now. This is how it works out. This is how we return. This is how we heal the earth and world. This is how we begin, and it’s how we never entirely ended.