Inner Conflict(s)
If you are lying in your bed at night, and the sleep doesn’t come and you feel your body buzzing from head to toe, chances are your head does overwork on trying to find an opening in a dead-end street. Your nervous system is high strung due to the super – stress of having to find a solution on which you perceive your right of existence depends on: two or more Ego-References are battling for priority and none can be given one. For the Substitute Sense of Self-oriented system there is a red-alert and life threatening situation at hand, all the while you are trying to sleep because it is night and you are supposed to.
Here I refer back to the page on Indirect Motivation, of which Inner Conflict is an aspect. We find here the drawing of the guitar-playing boy. Imagine how in case of Inner Conflict there is more than one red balloon in the head of the person.
It is relatively easy to obey the commands of one Ego-Reference, but what if orders of two or more Ego-References have to be followed and their commands contradict one another, cannot both be done? This is a complication that leads to an Inner Conflict – and it’s an already-lost battle, because a choice has to be made to obey one and ignore the other ones. Because so much is at stake in the fulfillment of an Ego-Reference, tremendous fear comes up.
When you’re in this situation, you recognize it because you experience the following bodily sensation: a collision of nerve currents going in different directions, which results in a perceived buzz throughout the body’s nerves; there is not necessarily tension in the muscles. It feels as if the whole nervous network is under stress. It is best to visualize by imagining a place in the sea where it comes ashore from various directions. It leads to a point where those streams meet and collide. That is how your nervous system feels on a moment of Inner Conflict.
The whole nervous system is indeed under stress, because the impulses towards action are heading in various directions and in opposing ones. On a subconscious level the person is confronted with a big dilemma: he has to choose between fulfilling two or more incompatible Ego-References, which generates greatfear for Annihilation. There is no ‘good’ choice available, as the moment allows only for one Ego-Reference to be worked on. Consequently only one Ego-Reference is potentially going to be fulfilled, which means that the other ones need to be ignored at the cost of (perceived) Annihilation.
The practical result of this situation is that, due to the lack of sleep and the stress, it is impossible to bring any of the Ego-References to a good end, which again increases anxiety.
In short, we are talking about an inextricable knot of perceived threats to the Substitute Sense of Self, (read: to the right of existence) and the body experiences that particular situation accordingly. However, there are usually no conscious thoughts or images that would help reveal the nature of the issue, namely which particular Ego-References are involved and how are they conflicting? This is a situation that can lead to a ‘blank night’, a night of total insomnia plus the unpleasant buzzing feeling.
Describing bodily sensations involves subjective observations, but exactly such observations of such sensations enabled me to recognize the pattern of inner conflicting Ego-References in myself. I would be very interested in whether other people can confirm these sensations as familiar. I would be even more interested in finding out whether spotting those sensations effectively helps people diagnose their inner conflicts. Please, if you feel inclined to do so, let me know what your thoughts and experiences are as together we can map these out and serve others.
