Even when hell freezes over, it is still here. We can numb ourselves to DREAD for a while, but sooner or later we will move through its precincts in processes of expansion and liberation.

In a traumatic environment (in which natural and authentic responses are repeatedly oppressed or punished), or through a traumatic event, the energetic impact can be uncontainable for the sentient form as a whole.

Pure perception of what is happening can pose a direct threat to structures of identity, character and freedom of feeling. As an emergency response, the windows of perception slam shut: the conscious mind stops processing, retreating to a witness position outside of the body; the sentient awareness shuts down at its root, as the emotional pain is so great. A way to express it is to say that the doors of the heart slam shut, leaving the body and mind to somehow negotiate connection and direction through a bypass of feelings and emotions.

Sometimes, (such as in childhood or in extreme events), the system is simply not mature enough or capable of processing the consequences and depth of traumatic experience. To a greater or lesser extent, forms of personality are being carved out in real time, mostly through the reflexive rejection of un-consumable mental and sentient data.

Yet the energetic impact doesn’t vanish because it is uncontained mentally or unprocessed through feelings and emotions. It is absorbed into the physical matter of the body, from where it exudes a mist. When the light of consciousness falls there, it begins to sing its tragic story. Sometimes that song is a scream of panic and rage, like one facing an immediate threat of death. Feelings and emotions come forward that are out of all context with the present situation. In psychological terms, there is a “loss of proportions”.

The traumatic state and frozen emotion is held in sensory freezes and visible through muscular postures. It is collected in the spine and pushed down to the tail-bone which is a storage hall of living experiential memory awaiting reunion (as well as a space of unlimited potentiality and unconditional power).

At the same time, all traumatic events are witnessed from the higher mind, outside of the body. They are witnessed and imprinted on a substrata of memory, yet without a natural linkage to feeling responses. This lack of integration even of conscious information with appropriate emotional responses is why a highly traumatized person can relate the most dreadful incidents with a totally incongruent feeling – such as laughter, or a wave of the hand as if the story is far from relevant.

In psychology, these deflected and buried energetic forms are believed to be sourced in the ‘unconscious’: an indecipherable black box of the psyche that somehow escapes time and space and threatens to make us wild with its raw, irrational power.

It was only Carl Jung who introduced and researched (on himself) the possibility that this so called “Un”conscious could actually be the same dimension of unity, spiritual liberation, collective mythology and ultimately, freedom within form. “There is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites;” he wrote, “hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.”

Part of our collective responsibility while we are here is to do what we can to defreeze the surface of hell. This can seem counter-intuitive: when hell is no longer frozen over, all hell breaks loose. Yet the trapped living energy in these subterranean halls of our collective being will not vanish.

The life in this energy will anyway create movement and effect the whole. It vibrates through the causal layers of feeling. It rattles and haunts through repeating dreams and through life-time patterns of karma. Yet the movement of transformation and healing of trauma is entirely possible. In the words of the pioneer of trauma therapy Peter Levine: “Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.”

In this process, the energy of dread can expand, refine and integrate, manifesting as compassion. The other possibility is that it is pushed so deeply into matter that matter loses its harmony, and begins to destroy the local unit for the sake of the preservation of the whole. This is the origin of many physical afflictions, and perhaps a reflection of the way in which our planet is presently being injured by our collective difficulty in coming to peace.

Angels in the Dread Fields

There is an interesting feature of the polarity of heaven and hell. While from the vantage point of heaven, we are able to contain hell (in a way that we can even feel the beauty in painful experiences), from the perspective of hell, heaven is almost impossible to find.

The promise of infinite love or eternal light, even the soul of purpose, seems to have been ripped from experience, as if it were a mere illusion. The naked vibrations and discords of pain that underpin the atmosphere of dread are far louder and more apparently ‘real’ than any silent or invisible whisper of hope.

One who is caught in this field is hardly aware of the energy of dread, as there is a deep resonance with it. It is ironic that many of the occupants of the hell-zones are not aware of their suffering as there is such a depth of familiarity with it as the furniture of home. Solidified as “the reality”, the dread field has become the earth and sky of what’s possible, and living has generated to automated degrees of selfishness, jealousy and competition.

For many, when that ‘resonance’, or man-made harmony within discord is disturbed, there can be an incredible resentment, jealousy or even a despising of “others” caught in the fantasy of love, peace, innocence, purity, truthfulness or freedom.

A rage can break loose that intends to defile the holy places, rip the sanctimonious ones from their imaginary thrones, and educate the innocent in the hardship of the real world. This “real” world needs to be impressed, if needed, by force, on the gullible ones who have lost their connection with the ‘reality’ of suffering.

A key minefield in this, is in the split between male and female, which plays through family systems and the structures of patriarchy. As these forms are often passed on from generation to generation, leaving the dread field can be still more confusing as it can feel like betrayal.

In one sense, many enactments of cruelty and horror (such as today’s infamous ISIS), are embodying this raging scream of suffering, (in vain, heroic guise), screaming through the global media networks that physical life is fragile: we bleed; we can be hurt; we suffer the agony of neglect; injustice; sexual oppression; lies and propaganda. It’s a collective projection of the trauma of us all and the deeper horror is that everywhere it takes form, it creates more trauma, more dread and more division.

Hell is an isolated ward in a hidden asylum of our being, covered by masks of social conformity. Yet there are angels in the dread fields. They will not be seen, felt or sensed unless we reach out, in our despair, for help.

Assistance will come by virtue of form, which is pure, living presence. Angels of the dread fields both witness and open the senses to the experience of hell, yet they are not made of its energies. This is the I AM HERE of presence that can have an alchemical effect in releasing living quality from traumatic contractions. They are like rods of light, timelessly waiting for us to make that one critical movement of releasing the separate self: the prayer to the unknown; the surrender to the source; the calling towards a higher power to set us free; the allowance of source to move towards source.

This call from the gut of pure being towards the imperceivable, wider universe requires an allowance of the one energy that dread most abhors: the energy of helplessness. The admission of helplessness is the opening needed for help to come. This movement of surrender, the unconditional supplication into the darkness, ruptures the walls of the separate self. When these walls are fractured, the light of awareness shines through like a signal towards home. The angels are suddenly seen.

We can call them angels, but we can also call them real people. They are those who have been to hell and back themselves, and whose lives have been transformed through the natural arising of care. They care for the “other” because they have been the other. The awareness which suffered in hell is now the awareness that can stay in hell with another, releasing its walls which are based on isolation. It never leaves hell, it simply expands to include far wider and purer dimensions.

This awareness spontaneously answers the call of the awareness locked in trauma. In this, there is a live link set up out of the precincts of despair into the ‘heaven’ that can contain hell. Form cares for form through the shared unity of awareness. Compassion is born.