We have to understand that, because the ego is a state of intellectual ignorance and numerous illusions and delusions, one cannot be a neutral observer of one’s ego from within one’s ego. Because it’s a split consciousness, there is always something hidden, something repressed, something foreclosed. There is something omitted in the ability to completely makes sense of the manifestation of the Real—particularly what we call here Real One, the Real of trauma and its effects upon the ego’s consciousness. This also, by the way, is the failure point of modern science; because modern science is based on the premise that you can be a neutral observer of reality when, in fact, the observer will determine what is observed—even though the cause of what is observed may be subconscious narratives, desires, drives, etc. of the so-called scientific observer.
In order to observe the ego properly, we have to do it from a higher level, from the soul. But the soul itself is generally out of reach for the postmodern ego because of its structure, its axioms, and its unproven premises—having been brought up in a basically atheistic, materialistic, consumeristic, superficial, dumbed-down, collapsing culture that has shed what used to be the core that would hold the culture together—i.e., a shared sense of normativity. The powers that be have deliberately destroyed that, along with all of the other principles that sustained traditional culture and even early modern culture.
The ego mind has a very difficult time recognizing its true nature. It requires a somewhat altered state in order to be able to glimpse the fact that the ego itself is an object (a mental object, a very complex mental object) in your consciousness—it’s not your consciousness itself. So, although the point of this retreat is to get you free of a limiting frame, the first problem we actually have to face is not the frame itself. The problem we are dealing with is that we were nearly all very badly framed. If you’re badly framed, that could mean that the frame is weak and can collapse, or it’s not straight (with one side maybe high and the other low, causing a bipolarity of inflation and deflation), or it can have all kinds of particularities that make it unpleasant to view. (We’ll be going over those.) And if you’ve been badly framed, it’s somewhat equivalent to being crucified (there’s one correspondence to Good Friday right there). Nearly all of us suffer on the cross of a badly formed frame. A cross even is a frame but one that is lethal—as are many of the frames that people are stuck in yet will not leave because they are identified with them.
So the first thing we should really get clear about, I think, is “What is a frame? What are we actually talking about?” It’s a very complex and deep concept with a number of levels to it, as we’ll see; but at the first level, what we really mean is a self-image that has been framed, “This is my image.” And it comes with a number of self-concepts, if you will—baggage. But it creates a self-image that is then put on display for the other: “This is me.” But it’s not a real self, it’s more like a selfie. That’s all the ego is: it’s a set of self-images, some of which may be inflated and megalomanic and compensatory to its state of feeling like a loser, an imposter, and a depressed and anxious being who is stuck in a frame that’s too small—that may seem ugly or smelly or toxic, even poisonous. So the frame can keep people from wanting to even see what selfies are put inside of it. Or the selfies will reflect the original framing drive that got internalized as the ego’s image.
Once you have been framed, your consciousness is split between an inside and an outside, between the selfie and the images of the other selfies in their frames that are on display in the gallery of ego relationality (or the meat market, as you might prefer). The ego is the object of the other, and the frame puts a limit on the reach of consciousness—puts limits on your intelligence. As long as you’re inside the frame, all of the intelligence of consciousness that didn’t fit into that frame is inaccessible unless it irrupts into the frame either from more trauma or from grace. But it’s rare that the framed intellect has any contact with its larger Self. The frame, therefore, turns you into a local materialized bodily being from a nonlocal formless consciousness that is co-present as the entirety of the morphic field. So the frame keeps you separate from the whole—the whole of infinite consciousness out of which you were framed into the belief that you’re a limited individual.
But a well-made frame (and even a poorly-made one) has some advantages. It protects you from the threat of depersonalization. If the frame were to break suddenly, you would be disoriented, you wouldn’t know who you were. There could be a “de-realization” of what was happening, and suddenly even more delusional narratives would replace the one that you might be in within the frame. So the frame gives you a kind of security of having a fixed identity: “I know who I am. I can show you—here’s the frame, here’s my image.” It enables you to function within a certain limited set of parameters, but at the expense of freedom. And it replaces the inherent joy of being unframed with the need for a constant supply of jouissance, which we could call stimulation producing a momentary thrill of enjoyment followed by (or even concurrent with) suffering—often even preceded by suffering.
So a frame, to use the Sanskrit term from the Trika Wisdom school, for example, the Kashmir Shaivite nondual wisdom schools—almost all of them together—call the frame a mala. And to get out of the frame, you have to become a nirmala. You have to go beyond whatever frames of reference have seemed like reality. So the frame could also be considered a monad, a monadic structure, or an ego bubble. Bubbles can pop; they’re not stable, and they can be extremely fragile. It’s a delusion, yes; it’s a limited frame of reference, but one that will not remain valid for very long because it creates a fabricated identity. It’s not authentic, it’s not real, it’s not inherent. It’s an artificial intelligence, an artificial identity that is an “as if” personality. And it will meet challenges that it cannot cope with because that fixed identity doesn’t have in it a repertoire required to deal with events that can shatter the frame. So the frame itself leaves you with a limited consciousness, but the real price is that it creates immeasurable unconsciousness—loss of consciousness and of the latent potentialities of consciousness which cannot arise within a small frame.
Is everybody with me here? Does this makes sense to people? OK, because you really have to see clearly the situation that you are in if you want to get out of it—and if you want to get out of it in a way that is developmental, that cultivates the blossoming of your potentiality and not further repression or distortion.
Although we’re beginning the conversation and talking about the frame, we will soon discover as we explore the concept of the frame that you were put into a frame initially, long ago. In fact, for many, the first frame was installed while you were still within a fetal body within the uterus of the one who became your mother. Now, in the old days, the fetus did not become conscious of the world but remained in a kind of deep, serene, peaceful sleep. Or the fetus would go into a dreaming state in which, if there was karma left over from a previous life or from a bardo state between lives that had to be settled, that would be resolved in the dream field and could be left behind when you were born so that you were truly newborn.
But if you’ve already been framed, meaning that you’ve became prematurely awakened to the fact that your body is stuck helplessly inside the body cavity of your mother, and your mother is in a state of anxiety or in a state of her own trauma or even in a state of anger that she’s pregnant and even considering aborting you—or maybe she’s defending you against the father’s wanting to abort you, if such a being is even involved—or she’s planning to give you away at birth for adoption and perhaps does that. Or you’re in the womb with a twin (or perhaps even two others or more these days) and in either one or the other position of “I’m going first, I’m getting out of here, I’m going to be the one who is loved. You’re the runt, you stay behind,” or vice versa. Or there will be an attempted suicide in the womb with the umbilical cord around the throat (attempting to hang yourself), or an attempt in some way to prevent the birth (which can often require a C-section to enable the birth to actually happen, or to happen in a way that doesn’t kill one or both parties).
So the traumatic frame can be there before you actually have language. You have only the vibrational input of the mother and her environment, her umwelt, her situation. And once you are awakened to the fact that you’re in a situation that you cannot understand—in which perhaps the mother and the father are arguing, or one of them is leaving the other, or there is some other trauma (the mother falls), or there is some other accident or difficulty or karmic crash—then the frame will often be with the self-image of one who should never have been born, one who doesn’t even deserve to exist, one who actually feels shame for existing and guilt for causing the parents suffering, and possibly a sense of not being able to cope with the energies that have been installed by that saturation with the negative affects of a situation that is outside the sensory or symbolic capacity to be processed.
Now, if one is not in that situation and the mother is very happy that she’s pregnant, she’s in a state of love and adoration of the to-be-born child and has all kinds of joyous plans for the child, and there’s an extended family support system, etc., and no internal sibling rivalry with twins or triplets or (after the birth) with an older sibling who didn’t want you to be born because you’re taking away their love, etc. All of these conditions, including the likely possibility that the mother wants a boy or a girl and you come out not one of those that is wanted, leave your ego feeling not the apple of mama’s eye but more like the black-sheep scapegoat and one whose frame is very tight and unpleasant.
So, both before the birth and after it as a helpless newborn clutching to the breast of the mother—or as a newborn who wasn’t breastfed and who didn’t get the consistent warmth of her body, her voice, and her lullabies, and who didn’t have your diaper changed at proper times and all of the other care required (i.e., if you were neglected)—then the frame becomes a very noxious place to be and you will not be at peace in your own skin. In fact, being badly framed is responsible for most of the somatic skin conditions that people have. We’ve even spoken about the “skin ego” before in earlier retreats, I think years ago. If you didn’t have much love and (let’s call it) idealization from the mother and the father and the family system, then you’ll have a very thin skin. You may have rashes, or the skin may be inflamed, or you may even tend to cut yourself and to create other problems with the skin.
Of course, if you have extreme instability in being able to keep a consistent frame because you got such mixed messages of love one day and neglect, brutality, and abuse the next, etc., then the frame collapses and creates a need to secure your body with some extreme means, like getting it tattooed or getting piercings. The tattoo will show “This is who I am,” you see?
Now, the proper frame is based on what psychoanalysis calls the “ideal ego.” It has two concepts in psychoanalysis. At the first assemblage point, if you received enough love and attention and care and freedom from trauma, you would receive the mother’s love as a sense that you are ideal (and that sense has to last for a certain amount of time, at least until weaning). But what if you weren’t your mother’s ideal? What if, in fact, she demanded that she be your ideal? Then your ego would have to invert itself. In order to sustain some kind of a separate self-image, it would have to withdraw from a kind of relationality that would create too much risk.
So, for example, if you were brought up by psychotic (or what could be called borderline) parents, not only would the projections by the parents of your self-image be somewhat (if not completely) psychotic, but that frame would create an inability to cope with reality at all, and it would bring about a kind of oppositionalism. In order to survive, you would have to compensate for the abyss of lack with either a superiority complex or a completely rebellious and oppositional one. Or you would reach a point of instability in which you could never overcome the fear of abandonment or the fear of being smothered by the other. Either one would cause you then, later in life, to be unable to risk love because love is a threat. If you have that kind of a frame and you really open your heart, what if the love is taken away? It’s too risky to lose it again and face the unbearable lack.
Or the other fear could be that of being taken over by the other and having to serve them, be exploited by them. So there’s a natural hostile dependency that is created in most relationships that a badly-framed person has with others. They cannot risk love, so instead they focus on capturing objects of desire—but objects they will never commit to or be vulnerable with. They can never even allow themselves to be seen with all of the elements in the frame that they have kept subconscious, repressed, or dissociated.
So eventually your life becomes very bitter. You will try to compensate for that either with the enjoyment of anger and turning your life into a kind of fight-club mentality or sadomasochistic jouissance will replace love (bullying and trying to sustain one-upmanship using master signifiers like money and power) or you may take up body-building or focus on being an object of desire, which may require you to become anorexic or to adopt some other modality to convince yourself that you are still more attractive than the other with whom you might feel some mimetic rivalry. Once you have a frame that is not workable, you will tend to cover that over with a concentric frame of a larger type that is compensatory to hide the original frame from the other and from yourself. But that original frame is always liable to show up in your consciousness with its unbearable truths.
So your life tends to become very superficial. No matter how much jouissance you get—no matter how much narrative of “I’ve got it made, I’m on top of the world”—self-presentations with this larger frame will still leave you completely dying inside from a lack of libidinal satisfaction. And that’s the state that most people are in today. How many can relate to that?
Because the nature of the frame today is so unstable and so inauthentic, you have to continue to create new frames around the original frame. Those will be based on attempting to gain stature within the larger family system, the school system, and then the social system, to produce new selfies that are more adapted and sufficient to enable you to represent yourself at least functionally in the world and ignore the agony, the anxiety, the dread, the terror, and the lostness of the ego at the core of the frame. This is the problem that we face.
