Continuum Concept: Spirituality

The Spiritual Implications of Continuum Deprivation

© BrightPathway.com Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, Gautama the Buddha proclaimed the first of his “Four Noble Truths”: “Life is suffering”. Nearly 250 years ago, Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his book “The Social Contract” declared: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”. Both of these statements are as true today, if not more so, as they were when they were first uttered. A mere glance at the daily news reports provides an onslaught of evidence about how unhappy and downright miserable are our nation and our world. Even those lucky ones not constantly exposed to the ravages of war, terrorism, poverty, famine, and natural disasters still are beset with a vague or not so vague sense of anxiety, alienation, and meaninglessness. To many, we are living in a world gone mad. How and where do we find meaning and a sense of happiness in the midst of this chaos? Christians insist that we need to seek salvation. Buddhists propose that we should strive for enlightenment. But just what is it that we need to be saved from, or enlightened to?

The human need for religion as we know it today, and all current and past organized religions, arose out of the need to heal the sense of separation created by the the demise of Continuum child-rearing practices in the dim and distant past. Jean Liedloff, in The Continuum Concept states succinctly that the premise common to every mythology is the notion that the happiness and serenity that was ours once in the distant past can again be ours at some time in a distant, unspecified future. The Buddhist perspective on this issue begins in the Buddha’s pronouncement of his “Four Noble Truths”: “Life is suffering”; “Suffering is caused by attachment and craving, based in separation”; “Suffering can be transcended”; and, “The means of transcending suffering is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path”.

An old Zen koan demands: “Show me your original face before your parents were born!” An understanding of the Continuum Concept provides the solution to this mystifying and paradoxical query. When are our parents “born”? They are born at the moment an infant perceives that the rightness of Continuum treatment is missing. When the parent separates from the infant long enough for the infant to sense that a separation has occurred, that separation creates a shocking emotional and physiological reaction of deprivation. The rightness that was the infant’s natural and normal experience has been dramatically disrupted. When that infant subsequently perceives that the parent’s return is what is restoring that sense of rightness, the infant surmises on an instinctual level that there is something apart from and outside herself that is taking care of her, relieving her distress and restoring the missing rightness. Then the infant senses that, without that something from the outside, things are definitely not right. The “something” in question is the episodic love in the form of physical contact, attention, feeding and care obtained from parents who are not faithfully adhering to Continuum principles.

When the sense of the “oneness” maintained by the in-arms condition is removed in an untimely and traumatic manner, parents (not in the sense of biological mother and father, but in the sense of caretakers) are born in the mind of the child, and they are prematurely viewed as entities separate from the child herself. An association is made by the infant to those parents as the source of the infant’s natural, inherent feeling of rightness, as opposed to being simply the maintainers of it. It is at this point that a materialistic perspective is adopted, the idea that there is some external circumstance, condition, object or treatment that will bring happiness and fulfillment, ease pain and distress, or both. All subsequent behavioral development then is aimed at doing to get rather than arising from just being. But that materialistic premise is a fallacy, an illusion, because rightness is the infant’s natural state without any input from the outside other than the maintenance of that feeling of connection via appropriate Continuum treatment.

If the origin of suffering is in attachment and craving, and the origin of attachment and craving is in separation, then herein lies the origin of separation. Why are humans the only species that experiences a sense of separation? Primates and other mammals do not. If we could identify the origin of separation, could we not then devise a means to heal that separation and liberate ourselves from suffering? The feeling of separation most humans experience is the product of Continuum deprivation, and Continuum treatment is a biological imperative. Without Continuum treatment, a feeling of separation and need for reattachment is created, which is an abnormal and unnatural pattern of development. It creates a sense of duality, with alternating episodes of “rightness” and “non-rightness” based upon external circumstances. This conditionality creates the first psychosocial dilemma, “Trust versus Mistrust”, in the progression of human development as described by Erik Erikson.

A functional, integrated, reality-based “trusting” ego develops arises when the child is ready to separate naturally and on her own initiative from the parent after the first six to nine months of appropriate Continuum treatment. A dysfunctional, fragmented, separation-based “mistrusting” ego arises when one’s parents are prematurely “born” as separate objects and viewed as the source of the feelings of rightness. But the rightness that seems to come from the outside is only partially satisfying because the episodes are temporary. Good times alternate with bad times. As cognitive capacity develops, both functional, and dysfunctional aspects of the ego develop concurrently. Thoughts and concepts of circumstances, events, people and objects come to have almost as much control over one’s internal feeling state as do the events and objects themselves, and sometimes more so. The need to obtain the right circumstances in order to overcome the aching sense of separation and to experience rightness-what the Buddha would have called desire-leads to attachment to thoughts and mental images about those circumstances. Attachment becomes a gating mechanism: “I’ll feel good if I have this, I’ll feel bad if I don’t”. Thoughts, faulty belief systems and deviant behavior patterns cloud and obscure the natural state of rightness. That is why spiritual traditions encourage the practice of meditation as a mechanism for quieting the thoughts, so that the original state of rightness that is and was always there can be accessed and experienced again. The Buddhist concept of “Non-attachment” is nonattachment to or detachment from not a thing or condition, but an idea: the materialistic fallacy. With this kind of detachment one can then experience “re-attachment”, that is, rediscovering and re-accessing one’s innate and inalienable sense of rightness.

This illusion of separation arising from the deviation from Continuum principles is the root of attachment. The failure of parents to recognize the requirement of Continuum treatment for a child becomes the source of all mental attachments and consequent inappropriate behaviors. Unresolved, these attachments ultimately result in neuroses, most psychoses, and all addictive behavior, whether it’s to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, sex, gambling, work, TV, another person, or any other material object, behavior, condition or thought pattern. If Man “everywhere...is in chains” it is because we forge those chains link by link as the dysfunctional ego develops into a prison by creating beliefs and behavioral strategies to cope with the fathomless pain of separation. If a child’s natural strategies to obtain what it is programmed to need are fulfilled, these attachments express themselves in relatively benign ways. However, if the child is met with rejection or punishment, then those initial chains are built upon with increasingly pathological reactive behavior patterns. The current answers that society provides to these seemingly insurmountable problems include religion, psychotherapy, medication and incarceration.

Depriving an infant of her Continuum birthright is also the origin of conditionality. The theological concept of “original sin” is actually the vulnerability of human infants to succumbing to the results of Continuum deprivation and the resulting adoption of the materialistic fallacy. It is not an act of commission on the part of the infant but an act of omission on the part of the parents. Every infant denied Continuum treatment is an Adam or Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden. “Eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil” and the subsequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden is the Judeo-Christian mythological version of the deviation of the human species from Continuum principles. Continuum deviance was the beginning of a sense of separation, and the subsequent experience of duality, a discriminating mind, and judgment (biblically, the “knowledge of good and evil”) - all of these being the foundations of the dysfunctional ego and its unhelpful strategies. The angel with the flaming sword set by God to guard the gate to the Garden of Eden and prohibiting re-entry is the mythological depiction of this dysfunctionally discriminating mind.

It is possible that Homo Sapiens as a species needed to traverse a period of psychic disconnection in order to stimulate the neurological and cognitive development that was necessary to motivate the progress we have made to the rational level of thought that has created our modern, highly technological age. The cognitive level of a people adapts to and is commensurate with the demands of the environment and the complexity of its survival tasks. Were it not for the separation of subjective ideas from objective reality, and the ascendancy of left cortical hemisphere processing, it perhaps would have been too comfortable just to remain at a “stone age” level of society, as happened with the Yequana. But it is not unreasonable to suppose that the stimulation required to initiate and propel the forward development of cognitive faculties did not necessarily require also the sacrifice of healthy emotional development, nor have such drastic and detrimental long-term consequences. This sacrifice is the origin of the search for a means to return to our original state of spiritual connection, giving rise to religions that depict visions and offer promises of “salvation” or “enlightenment”. This scenario is probably also the basis of Jung’s axiom describing the developmental progression of human consciousness on individual and global levels: “We move from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection to conscious perfection.”

The Continuum Concept is an “inconvenient truth” to most people, but truth is not a matter of opinion or expediency. When Jesus said “Suffer the little children to come to me”, He was alluding to Continuum principles. It was an admonishment to adults to maintain the conditions that allow children to preserve as they grew up their sense of the presence of the inner Christ. Modern day objections to the Continuum Concept are based on the premise that this truth is inconvenient to the way our culture and society operates today, and how humanity has “evolved” into a modern, busy, hi-tech society. However, this society is itself distorted precisely because the truth being objected to was ignored or suppressed in the first place. One might as well object to the Law of Gravity because it offends you that you’ll get hurt if you fall down a flight of stairs. If a parent deprived a child of air or water or food, that parent would rightfully be accused of child abuse. Due to the millions of years of biological programming, denying a child his Continuum right is equally as abusive. Just as deprivation of the former conditions manifests in physical symptoms - dehydration, malnutrition, death - deprivation of the latter manifests as long-term cognitive, emotional and spiritual crippling. Every child denied Continuum treatment has an attachment disorder, which would be more accurately termed a detachment disorder.

Healing the effects of Continuum deprivation is the gateway to spiritual transformation. Understanding the devastating effects that the deprivation of uninterrupted physical contact and unconditional love had upon us can give us the courage to use that knowledge and acceptance to drop off all of the neurotic beliefs and behavior patterns that obscure our birthright of happiness. Only when we finally give to ourselves what we feel we deserved from our parents, but didn’t get, will we allow ourselves to reconnect with and experience our true nature and unshakeable inner sense of rightness which has been here within us from the beginning. This is the foundational rationale for and the ultimate goal of all psychotherapy, religion and spiritual practice. Only then will we be able clearly to see “our original face before our parents were born”. If conscious, unconditional love can be defined as the the commitment to do whatever is necessary to support another in the fulfillment of his highest good and purpose with no expectation of anything in return, then Continuum treatment is the original expression and archetypical model of that love for the developing infant.

In the past 30 years, we have seen a plethora of books appearing which apply the principles of the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Tao to a specific subject area, among them The Tao of Physics, The Tao of Psychology, The Tao of Pooh, and The Tao of Gung Fu. If the “Tao” of anything describes how something is and should be done according to Universal Law and the natural order of things, then the Continuum Concept can certainly be deemed “The Tao of Parenting”. The natural behavior of the Yequana and similar extant primitive tribes provides strong evidence that until about several thousand years ago, perhaps later, the Continuum had been uninterrupted. When, how and why it was abandoned is the subject of research, conjecture and debate by historians, archaeologists and cultural anthropologists. But in this critical period in the history of human development, we cannot wait for those results to come in before we begin taking action. It is essential to the survival of our species and our planet that Continuum principles be disseminated and Continuum practices be restored as extensively and rapidly as possible. Within every woman is a child-rearing manual that’s more perfect than one that any pediatrician or child psychologist could write. Pediatricians and child psychologists may have knowledge, but mothers have innate wisdom, and the true expert on child rearing is the infant herself, always clearly and immediately signaling to the parent as to when she is receiving appropriate care and when she is not.

Our current global crises are clearly the spoils of the triumph of unrestrained intellectual tyranny over nature, instinct and intuition. The Continuum Concept is sounding a clear and timely alarm, admonishing us to return to our human roots; to acknowledge our true nature, responsibility and obligation to every newborn human infant; and to embrace the proposition that childlike wonderment need not become the inevitable casualty of growing up.

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