The Egregore and the Pain Body
As a thinking being, at any given waking moment, you can connect to thought forms. Sometimes it feels like the actual thought form is hovering outside yourself. Can you recall having sensed this?
You have inherent perception, and your mind connects to thoughts used to articulate your experience. You can study various models and frameworks regarding how this works. These studies themselves are thought forms. Collective thought forms that an individual mind can cling to. While this is often a seamless occurrence, you can consider what thought forms you cling to.
From an external vantage point, it can feel like the thought form is an entity trying to project a message. One can even decipher if that message is naturally flowing or if it’s a form of manipulation. It can be neutral, as it simple exists. Whether you believe it exists is another question. Similar to whether you believe in the existence of collective unconscious, as proposed by Carl Jung.
The Egregore
An egregore is a collective thought form. Any collective thought form inherently has a limitation function. Meaning, that when you willingly include a thought form within your belief system, you consequentially set a limitation or boundary that will exclude conflicting thoughts. Limitation need not be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ It’s just the nature of our human existence.
When looking from the perspective of the egregore, it can act as a social control mechanism. This may sound ominous to some, but there are numerous social control mechanisms that make up our societies and direct our social interactions. The egregore allows you to have a philosophical point of view - which determines what you consider “in” and what you consider “out.”
The idea of an egregore may seem too esoteric for some, but it can be used for understanding how another energy force coincides with the emotional energy of an individual. These concepts are explored through other lenses including psychology, as with the notion of mass formation. One can attune the various lenses to look for some consistency across these layers.
The Pain Body
Eckhart Tolle uses the term pain body to describe the human tendency to carry "an accumulation of old emotional pain.” He suggests that you maintain a practice of awareness of your pain body, and to catch it before it arises to your mind. The object is to be mindful of occurrences that signify when your pain body dominates you. The awareness acts as a signifier that helps you determine when your emotional reaction is out of proportion to the triggering circumstance.
My interpretation is that unawareness of one’s pain body can lead to unwanted effects. Basically, the pain body will - if you don’t have awareness of it - influence your mind through emotional reactivity. For instance, you can think that you’re being rational, but your thinking is attached to an emotional trigger and the emotional residue lingering within your pain body gets activated.
Some individuals may believe that their thoughts precede their emotions, which can lead to putting less focus on how emotions can influence thoughts. I believe if there’s lack of awareness for an emotional feedback loop, then there’s higher likelihood for emotional reactivity to occur within the individual. This emotional reactivity engages the pain body, and it will feed the egregore connecting to the individual.
I believe that most individuals have a pain body, and each individual has varying degrees of awareness to it. Part of one’s awareness of it can come from noticing instances when feeling triggered. It’s like the trigger strikes a chord in the pain body. The pain body attaches to related thoughts. This thought activation simultaneously drowns out other co-existing insights that are positive and sustaining. It’s like the other awarenesses go dim, and the thoughts in resonance to the pain body prevail. These prevailing thoughts intertwine with the egregore.
The Intertwine
So, what elicits this intertwining? Is there a process to highlight? A lot of the intertwining happens reactively and unconsciously. There are practices to partake in that allow for more consciousness around the process. Intentional self-talk can help. It will slow down the process. Exploring intentful inquiry is beneficial when the pain body has yet to be activated. Therefore, providing a great preventative tool.
Since an individual often doesn’t read the cues that the pain body has taken over the driver’s seat until it’s already been engaged, it’s helpful to use mindfulness exercises. Allow your mind to have a chat with itself. For example, ask yourself: What helps with the growth of a thought form? Reminding yourself of the answer, which is: “Willingly thinking of something repeatedly.” This is at the heart of the growth of a thought form. The beginning of what can lead to excessively thinking about it.
When you consider the energetic burden that an individual might have with an unacknowledged pain body, you can understand the behavior of emotional reactivity. When the pain body attaches to thought forms, it’s a representation of the emotional residue that hasn’t dissipated or transmuted. Part of the emotional residue is still there.
It's this portion of energetic ‘debris’ that can be an attractor to the egregore. When the egregore has elements that trigger lower-level emotions, it can use the pain body to further anchor itself into someone’s energetic field. This becomes the new ‘emotional feedback loop’ that occurs for the individual. The pain body feeding the egregore, and the egregore giving some sense of relief to the individual (who is unaware of the pain body’s role). It’s not true relief as it’s happening unconsciously and negating integral aspects of being. It works against true integration.
The Resolution
From this framing, I do have thoughts about resolution. Primarily around connecting to modalities that support integration. Discovering modalities for integration will realign the individuals emotional feedback loop to no longer rely on the pain body and the egregore.
Another way to look at this is if there were heavy metals in your water supply. If you have a filtration system, it will separate the heavy metals. If not, your body will do it’s best to filter them, but some will remain. Over time the residue accumulates.
What is your emotional processing like? Do you have an emotional filtration system? What if your negatively charged emotional situations aren’t fully processed? Does this create lingering emotional residue in your energetic field? I believe is does. I believe one way to describe the pain body is like accumulating a collection of “emotional heavy metals.” The emotional residue stored in your energetic field can magnetize the egregore.
This is the intertwine that allows an individual to begin embodying the fear and doubt. If there’s any free-floating anxiety, it will coagulate when using the egregore as it’s focal point. The relief the individual feels will be similar to some kind of emotional release or detachment. It isn’t full release, and it’s not detachment. It’s only temporary release in order to bind, and re-attach, to the narrative or proposed ideology of the egregore. Therefore, you can seek the modalities that allow for release and detachment of these energies.