Superterrestrial Serenity
What if serenity is a basic feature of psyche? Even one of the exigencies of life? Like a hidden mode that can be turned on given certain physiological parameters. While helplessness, anxiety and conflict are often figured as ground-zero of psyche (at least according to psycho-analysis) could we not also imagine another rather more mysterious ground—although no less ordinary—a state of super-terrestrial stillness emergent from certain kinds of attention in which psyche and soma achieve a kind of supreme equilibrium…? (note 1)
Granted that not everyone had a mother who loved them, we will suppose that, past a certain age, a warm blanket will do in a pinch. Here we are imagining a child, even an infant, having no pressing needs and lapsing into a serene state of mystical revery. Does this not often happen? Even more so: what if this dreamy serenity is necessary, ordinary and, past a certain limit of self, the prevailing mood?
We’ll admit we are astonished that a great deal of mystical literature, telling of experiences near or beyond this limit, speak not of an anxiety, or of a chaos, or terror, but rather a profound sense of peace; even a peace that passeth understanding—the so-called noetic. An expansive and earthly calm, produced, not by god, nor by Xanax, but by the parasympathetic nervous system. Is not this oceanic serenity nothing less than a transformation of anxiety? This same old helplessness turned inside out?
The psychoanalyst may be too quick to dismiss the common super-terrestrial peace produced by meditation (and other altered states) as a regression, as dissociative, or as boundless narcissism. The possibility of such genetic tranquility no doubt violates their insistence on ordinary unhappiness; that the human is condemned to lack, is divided, is caught in a terminal state of alienation (note 2). Such decisions made on behalf of the human remain puzzling to me and more than a little obtuse: why should we diagnose the patient before they enter the consulting room? If the psychoanalyst remains open to the paranormal—all those ghosts and demons appearing in the literature—why not also be open to the possibility of endogenous super-ordinary states of serenity? And not dissociative withdrawal either but wide-awake, where the sensory apparatus is turned up to eleven in a state of exigent equanimity.
By equanimity we mean a peculiar kind of psychical yes-saying; an acceptance of every feeling and sensation, every stray thought and shred of anxiety. Why should it be a surprise that the practice of such yes-saying, based on mere respiration in a sitting meditation (note 3), should result in an uncanny serenity? And not in spite of our mortality and helplessness, but rather because of it...?
Note 1: An exigent equanimity may come across as rather heretical to certain psychoanalytic readers of an orthodox persuasion, for whom the unconscious is a “seething cauldron;” but no matter, we aspire to heresy. The restlessness with which Freud moves from the death-drive to the nirvana principle creates an ambiguity and an ambivalence which is retained in later thought: it is typical in the west to equate nirvana with annihilation. And yet we must also admit that equanimity is the basic feature of psychoanalytic listening—Freud’s famous “evenly suspended attention;” and probably free-association is not so far off.
Note 2: The Buddhist perhaps will agree with the psychoanalytic philosopher on their conception of lack, division and alienation, but with this difference: in-as-much-as these are effects of the ego, they are, strictly speaking, unreal. In this sense, this super-ordinary peace is precisely the suspension of the ego and its maladies.
Note 3: granted that this particular path may not be for everyone for some people cannot sit still.
