The Sunday Soma IV: On Dissociation, Adulthood & Fractured Awareness

The Road Back to Non-Duality

Somatic Check-In:

How I’m feeling in my body right now? Well, I can tell you what my brain feels. She’s craving dark chocolate like a son-of-a-gun. Not just any chocolate—no, in my deepest, darkest fantasy, I'd be clutching a rich, steaming, frothy ceremonial-grade cacao. Imagine wildflower honey, a dusting of flaky Himalayan salt, and maybe a touch of almond extract. (Last week, in a festive spirit, I went rogue and swapped hot water for Trader Joe’s peppermint tea. The result? A peppermint cacao so divinely holiday-esque it felt like Santa Claus himself moonlit as a chocolatier and whispered joy into my cup.)

But today? I'm stuffed—gloriously, rebelliously off the rails.

The mutiny began with a bagel (Gluten-free? Nope!) crowned with tofu-cream cheese and real lox that laughed in the face of every dietary ideal I ever had. It ended in a decadent plate of Nachos Pequeños that felt like a hymn to chaos. Add too much caffeine, not enough water, and a long-forgotten fast, and you have the cocktail of culinary anarchy fueling this moment.

My emotions this full moon (yes, it was the full moon Saturday night)? Unhinged. A barren Las Vegas salt flat: dry, cracked, and stretching omnidirectionally into horizons unknown. My brain felt overstimulated, in really challenging moments, like a series of rotten, misfiring folds—synapses sparking with the precision of a drunk archer.

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The Midnight Hog Hunt: Dragging Myself Kicking & Screaming into Adulthood

Adulthood, for me, is like a midnight hog hunt in a Mississippi bog. Mud pulls at my every step, threatening to suction me into its black abyss. The hog, by the way? That’s me—wild, muddy, stubborn.

For the first time, mere months after my prefrontal cortex has solidified (according to my developmental age bracket), I weirdly feel more and more like a “young” person - like someone who’s actually my age - than ever.

Frozen fragments of my younger selves balk at the effort of pursuing my various goals: “You’re telling me I have to work THIS hard for my dreams?!”

The path to actualizing my vision board has been anything but a springtime meadow frolic—it’s a slog. But here’s the paradox: regressive failures, letdowns, and pitfalls I’ve encountered on the way to what I think I want in life seem to continuously offer up their own grotesque liberation doorways and bitter-to-taste wisdom. Each regret or “pregret” (TM Emma Speer) is liberation dressed in hideous bog-appropriate wardrobe, sure —but it’s freedom nonetheless.

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Dissociation, Dance Floors & the Return to Center

Speaking of bogs, I’m writing this in a café in Manhattan called Mud. It’s the aftermath of a 10-hour workday, punctuated by a day-time dance party and capped off by this writing session and a hot cup o’ earl grey and those naughty, loaded nachos.

A mere 48 hours ago, I was stuck in the regressive vortex of my mother’s house—trapped in the familiar infantilization cycle. Her therapist once said that family triggers age regression. I can attest. As Ram Das says: “If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family.”

I was drowning in distractions - emails, poorly timed phone calls, mindless snacking, and late trains. The self-judgment felt near unbearable. But somehow, I made it here.

And now, tucked in the corner of this dimly lit café, it’s dawning on me that self-hatred is no more than a trauma response - a protective shield crafted by a nervous system desperate for safety. Dissociation, too, isn’t a weakness but a standard psycho-spiritual escape route, a survival strategy baked into human architecture that goes deeper than a defense mechanism. Stay with me, I’ll try to explain:

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What Is Dissociation? (Hint: You’re probably doing it right now unless you’re literally Buddha or Jesus etc etc, and if so, Hayyyy girl!)

Dissociation as I understand (and somatically experience) is the psychic act of stepping away from embodied reality - an organic divergence of consciousness from full-on experience when that experience becomes too overwhelming to bear. At its core, dissociation is the fragmentation of the self, driving parts of us into the subconscious.

These "fractured parts" often take the form of age-regressed selves: the rebellious teenager who lashes out to survive humiliation, the frozen child who retreats into silence to avoid harm, or the hyper logical adult who weaponizes intellect to make sense of a turbulent world. (these are purely examples…not that I have any of those parts. ;))

These parts, however fractured, aren’t villains. They are protectors—keepers of experiences too painful to integrate into the present.

Dissociation allows us to live, but it also robs us of living fully.

The Luciferian Enlightenment and Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Ignorance’

Nietzsche’s concept of “will to ignorance” suggests that we actively choose not to see reality for what it truly is. At first glance, this might sound foolish, even dangerous—but consider this: what if ignorance is a necessary survival mechanism, just like dissociation?

"Will to ignorance" is a lived experience. I theorize it’s a collective defense mechanism— trade-off between the pure, undifferentiated awareness of non-duality and the fragmented comfort of temporal knowledge.

It's what I call the Luciferian enlightenment—a trade-off between ultimate non-dual awareness and the comfort of limited knowledge.

The Collective Will to Ignore

On a societal level, this same dynamic plays out. We dissociate not just as individuals, but as a collective. In these times of great upheaval—war, climate crises, economic collapse—our collective consciousness fragments.

I just started “Quetzalcoatl Returns” by Daniel Pinchbeck and was struck by this quote he included from someone named Ed Ayers.

“It’s likely that a general pattern of behavior among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis as they fall.”

Why do we distract and numb ourselves in the face of existential crises?

Perhaps it’s because the weight of fully seeing is unbearable.

Dissociation is the most common a societal shield, manifesting as consumerism, endless scrolling, toxic positivity, and the numbing of deeper awareness.

Our collective “will to ignorance” mirrors the individual’s journey. As a society, we trade non-dual awareness for shiny Lucifarian light of materialist distractions or glimmering concepts of knowledge, turning away from the infinite to cling to what feels manageable—even if it is a pale shadow of the truth.

To see this process of dissociation is a deliberate act of will - an entrance into the trance of temporal knowledge where our fractures become both our blindness and our survival - is actually quite empowering for those of us struggling with full embodiment, self-acceptance, and presence in life.

But what’s the fuss about, really? Doesn’t the realization of non-duality - the emptiness of craving, rushing, and jealousy - render it all obsolete?

If you’re not a fool, you’ll make your way merrily through the terrain of ignorance, whether it’s a bog or a sunny meadow. Patience becomes not just a virtue but an obvious fact of life when you understand the infinite nature of time… and I wish I were wise enough to remember this for longer than just as I write ;).

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In that profound LSD trip, I realized democracy begins within. Each fragment of self inside me - no matter how long pushed into my subconscious, seemed to make a cameo that day and express their various voices as votes in my perception of reality, which then acted as a vote of freedom and empowerment in our larger pool of collective consciousness.

In my really, really bog-slog like integration process since then, my mindfulness practice has become the only non-dual compass of unified awareness I can rely on to guide me home.

Rather than trying to hunt down and eradicate the parts of myself I’d been traumatized into dissociatively shaming, I’m learning to meet my own willful ignorance with radical acceptance and even compassion.

I cry, I dance, I get horny, I grieve, I sometimes eat nachos when I shouldn’t; I mostly forget but I sometimes remember. And as I go through the endlessness of Samsara and samskaras, I'm finding myself to be brutally human, and I'm learning to hate that less.

I'm learning to recall when my brain does a silly dance of disassociation that self-hatred that it’s a trauma response, passed down through generations of conditioned toxic shame.

More soon.