The Diameter of the Bomb

Some thoughts of developmental trauma and prophecy, with help from the octopus

Dear Readers,

I am a writer who writes what she knows, a common bit of advice given in writer’s workshops. This maxim is not as restrictive as it sounds. Writing what you know doesn’t mean you have to have literally had that experience. It can also mean you have a felt experience of it, that it’s part of your emotional reality. Sometimes fiction writers create characters that have no relation to their personal lives and circumstances. Writing, at its best, is an act of empathy. If the writer can feel what their creation is feeling, and she has the skill to convey it, she can say she is writing what she knows—because she has experienced the same emotions as her character. In this time of reckoning with the distortions of racism, colonialism, and gender discrimination, there is a lot of talk about who has the right to tell someone’s story, with many believing that only people of a disenfranchised group have that right. Honestly, I don’t know what’s right. It seems wrong to me to limit someone’s creative imagination, but I do think it’s important for writers to look at why they are writing about an experience outside their own, and to also ask if their position in society has granted them privileges that are not accorded to people they are writing about, especially if those privileges give them access to money and prestige that are not available to their subjects because of their race, class, tribal identity, or gender. If you do this, an act of atonement will always reveal itself. Follow that impulse. It may not be culturally approved and your work may still be condemned or controversial, but if it’s emotionally true, you will have made an honest contribution and some people will get that.

Continuing on with theme of writing what you know, it’s been interesting to me how the series I began months ago, The Art of Spellcasting, has mirrored my own inner process and how it’s manifested in my outer world. My commitment here on Substack is to publish something weekly, and I’m behind, because I’ve wanted to write about scattering, the 8th principle of the oscillation of magic, but haven’t been able to. I’ve been beating myself up a bit, chiding myself for procrastinating. Just sit down and do it! I keep telling myself, but I’m glad I haven’t listened to my inner critic and forced myself to write on scattering, because the truth is, I’m still integrating it. If I write before that I run the risk of churning out something I don’t believe in, and we definitely don’t need more bullshit in the world.

Sometimes the process of writing is my integration. I fall into a trance as I write and move from the pastoral to the prophetic, from the village to the wild. If I’m lucky the words that come out are a coherent contribution to your lives. I say lucky, because it’s less work, but maybe that’s not actually the best case scenario. To be a prophet, often means to be misunderstood. Perhaps it’s the concept that’s beyond me, the one I have to work for, that is the greatest contribution if I’m able to translate it into an experience that moves you as much as it’s moved me.

Attic red-figure kylix from Vulci (Italy), 440-430 BC. Kodros Painter. Oracle of Delphi: King Aigeus in front of the Pythia. Antikensammlung Berlin, Altes Museum, F 2538.

Writing this now, I wonder if the prophetic is not meant to be understood. Perhaps the prophetic is not available to the logical mind because it’s meant to unravel it, to reawaken the dormant brain circuits that, when firing, give us access to a holistic consciousness where no part is known without reference to the whole. Right now is a perfect example of me learning something through the act of writing. In other words, I’m writing something I don’t know. Although it could be that I’m discovering something I do know and have just forgotten. Have you ever felt that? I’d be curious to hear in the comments.

The whole project of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles is to cultivate this holistic consciousness, to marry images with analysis. Culturally, the imagination is so handicapped now, we’ve forgotten how to read symbols and images, leaving ourselves open to being penetrated by them without comprehending their effects. Understand me, the power of images is not negated by our lack of comprehension. They work on us whether or not we give our consent. I am not a conspiracy theorist, if it’s starting to sound that way. In fact, I believe that our brothers and sisters who so adamantly believe in all the conspiracies thrown about these days, are suffering from an extreme right-brain deficit, often the result of shock trauma, that results in a vision of the world that is over-materialized. There is a seed of energetic truth in the conspiracies. Those with extreme right-brain damage are unable to understand metaphor and literalize these ideas, keeping themselves, and our societies, trapped in an endless war against perceived enemies that don’t exist in the physical. This becomes even more confusing, because we do know that many of our institutions are against the common good. It’s difficult these days to perceive what is real.

In addition, since the brain development of pretty much everyone alive right now has been affected by developmental trauma due to the traumatizing institutions we accept as normal, most of us are suffering from CPTSD, and as cultures we are witnessing the effects of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome play out on a large scale as war, climate change, mass shootings, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Until we integrate these mass generational and ancestral traumas the horrors will continue. Our collective brain is damaged and conspiracies that so handily offer us up an enemy to keep fighting signal the conquest of the imagination.

How can we win back our imaginations? Is that even what we should do, entering into yet another battle, joining the endless war? What are these times of turmoil and breakdown truly asking of us?

I’m not going to answer that right now. I could keep typing and see if some prophetic current pulls me into a vision I could present to you as truth if my words are convincing enough, but I know it would be a deception, a false prophecy, because right now any answers I come up with will be speculative. They are beyond my experience. Right now, I am sitting in the pain of those who are being bombed in Palestine, in the hostages’ fear, in the anguish of wondering if I’ll ever see my loved one again.

The Mū say the octopus is the evidence of the successful transmission of the last world’s experiment, electricity, into this world. Did you know the octopus has eight brains, eight of them governing each of the eight tentacles, with one central brain overseeing them all? What would it be like to perceive the world through eight limbs organized by one instead of one brain (ours) divided against itself?

And did you know the octopus has three hearts? Biologically, the reason is because copper-rich haemocyanin is dissolved in their blood, rather than iron-rich hemoglobin like us and most other invertebrates. Haemocyanin is less efficient than hemoglobin in transporting oxygen, so one brain pumps blood through the body, while the other two pump directly to the gills.

Oxygen is the energy source for every system in the human body. What would it be like to have thee hearts pumping it through you? Can you feel that? What would it be like to be able to think with eight hands, like the octopus’s eight tentacles?

Let’s look at some research from the Heartmath Institute, who, according to their website, is an organization “dedicated to showing how the heart, physically and metaphorically, is the key to tapping into an intelligence that can provide us with fulfillment.”

Most of us have been taught in school that the heart is constantly responding to “orders” sent by the brain in the form of neural signals. However, it is not as commonly known that the heart actually sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart! Moreover, these heart signals have a significant effect on brain function – influencing emotional processing as well as higher cognitive faculties such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving. In other words, not only does the heart respond to the brain, but the brain continuously responds to the heart.

The effect of heart activity on brain function has been researched extensively over about the past 40 years. Earlier research mainly examined the effects of heart activity occurring on a very short time scale – over several consecutive heartbeats at maximum. Scientists at the HeartMath Institute have extended this body of scientific research by looking at how larger-scale patterns of heart activity affect the brain’s functioning.

HeartMath Institute research has demonstrated that different patterns of heart activity (which accompany different emotional states) have distinct effects on cognitive and emotional function. During stress and negative emotions, when the heart rhythm pattern is erratic and disordered, the corresponding pattern of neural signals traveling from the heart to the brain inhibits higher cognitive functions. This limits our ability to think clearly, remember, learn, reason, and make effective decisions. (This helps explain why we may often act impulsively and unwisely when we’re under stress.) The heart’s input to the brain during stressful or negative emotions also has a profound effect on the brain’s emotional processes—actually serving to reinforce the emotional experience of stress.

In contrast, the more ordered and stable pattern of the heart’s input to the brain during positive emotional states has the opposite effect – it facilitates cognitive function and reinforces positive feelings and emotional stability. This means that learning to generate increased heart rhythm coherence, by sustaining positive emotions, not only benefits the entire body, but also profoundly affects how we perceive, think, feel, and perform.

What would it be like to have three hearts? What kind of empathy is available to the octopus?

I’m not saying we should wish for three hearts and nine brains. I’m saying, to myself first of all, then extending to you, and though you beyond you:

Pa wale pu’uwai. Open your heart wider.

Octopus detail, Kuniyoshi Utagawa, octopus, red fish, wikiimages

The Diameter of the Bomb

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

—Yehuda Amichai, Israeli poet

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light

Book News

Piko: A Return to the Dreaming is now available as an e-book, as well as in hardcover and paperback versions. You can purchase the book from all online retailers, as well as Bookshop.org, a non-profit that supports local independent bookstores. You can also request that your local bookstore or library order the book.

For those on Maui and Oahu, Barnes & Noble is stocking the book. Go down and grab one off the shelves so they keep ordering it! On the Big Island, Kona Stories has it in stock, with more outlets to come.

On Sunday, November 19th, I will be the guest speaker at The New Thought Center in Kealakekua. Service starts at 10am and the title of my talk will be “Combing the Old Woman’s Hair.” If you’ve read Piko, you’ll know what I’m referring to. I will also be offering a 4-part series beginning 11/25 at New Thought called “Journeying with the Old Stories.” I’d love to see you there.

I would also be so grateful for reviews or ratings on Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews help bump the algorithm, which will get the word out about the book. Here are links to do that if you’re so moved:

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