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The book project is now my primary task, moving on to death. Often, I feel the work has served its purpose as far as I’m concerned and could dump it, but given that I’m obviously not the only older person dealing with the long-term effects of life’s traumas, it could be helpful to others and should be written and published. So, I’ll keep going. My next task is to write the second part in a language my target reader can understand. Writers should keep that person in mind, and in this case, I think of an older man who was a brother on the streets of Piccadilly Circus all those years ago and who may not have had the same good fortune I had in being able to live a ‘normal’ life and even gain something resembling an education. I feel guilt about being a ‘survivor’ as said today; there were boys by far more deserving than I was to be miraculously lifted out of Satan’s birthday party, and given a chance in later life.

French philosopher J. J. Rousseau wrote, “the life of one is the life of all.” If we have something helpful to others, it is our duty to share it with our fellow humans. All this is giving myself a kick up the arse, which is something I often need.

Aside from procrastinating, which this is as well, there’s little to talk about. My last bike ride ended, maybe it was a recall from escape to face doing what I ethically must do. There’s the yacht that needs attention and engagement with society, which, for me, is attending demonstrations in support of the children of Gaza and their parents, of course, but it’s the children we carry most in our hearts. How do you live when at the dawn of your existence, evil took your parents, your brothers and sisters, friends, even your limbs, it destroyed your belief that the world is a place of magic and happiness? Again—it’s the reality of negation.

Today I think about a boy I met in a Soho backstreet.

Aquinas and the Silence Beyond Knowing

by Paul Nyssen

Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest architect of medieval Christian thought, spent a lifetime weaving logic and faith into a single cloth. His Summa Theologica sought to reconcile divine revelation with reason — an immense work of order, clarity, and precision. Yet, one winter morning in 1273, after celebrating Mass, he laid down his pen. To his faithful secretary, Reginald of Piperno, he simply said:

“All that I have written seems to me like straw compared with what has now been revealed to me.”

He never wrote another word. The Summa was left unfinished.

To the historian, this moment is puzzling. To the mystic, it is luminous. Aquinas had devoted his life to constructing a rational bridge to the divine — and then, at the end, saw that the bridge itself was unnecessary. What he encountered, perhaps, was not the God of syllogisms, but the same Void that Musashi described: that place where “it is” and “it is not” coincide.

In Zen thought, enlightenment (satori) occurs not through knowledge but through the collapse of knowing. D. T. Suzuki wrote that “to know nothing is to enter into everything,” echoing Meister Eckhart’s own insight that “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Aquinas, the theologian of order, may have glimpsed that same paradox — a revelation so overwhelming that words, those tools of affirmation and distinction, were suddenly useless.

The Jesuit scholar who once remarked that “all theology is speculative” and that “we only have human words, which are entirely insufficient,” was speaking in the same tradition. Language, for all its beauty, is a fence built around infinity. The mystic’s silence is not the failure of theology, but its fulfilment.

And perhaps that silence speaks to the “street boy” as well. After all, his journey — through negation, loss, and the violent collision of good and evil — is also a pilgrimage toward the Void. He, too, lived through the collapse of one self and the uncertain birth of another. His redemption, if that word still holds meaning, lies not in returning to an earlier purity, but in accepting that both the darkness and the light are his teachers.

In this way, Aquinas’s silence and the street boy’s survival share the same origin: the recognition that truth is not merely understood — it is lived, and often suffered. When the intellect and the ego have exhausted their strength, what remains is something simpler and more essential: being itself, standing before the unfathomable, neither affirming nor denying, only seeing.

In that moment, theology meets Zen, and the greatest of Christian philosophers joins hands with the warrior of the Void. Both would say, in their own way, that the divine is not something to be spoken, but something to be become.

Affirmation, Negation, and the Human Question
by Paul Nyssen

The question of why evil exists, if there is a God and if good has triumphed, remains one of the most persistent in human thought. Catholic theology has long held that evil has no existence of its own, that it is merely the absence of good. Augustine and Aquinas both proposed this as a way to
protect the concept of a benevolent Creator. Yet anyone who has seen the face of suffering knows that evil feels like presence, not absence. The street boy, faced with human cruelty, would not recognise evil as a “lack” of good but as something alive and intentional.
If God is all-powerful, then evil must exist with God’s assent — which is to say, as a permitted part of creation. That permission, disturbing as it sounds, may point toward a deeper structure: that negation is not an accident in the order of things but an element of it. Without negation, there would be no growth, no choice, no consciousness. To exist is to be torn between what affirms and
what denies.
Zen philosophy recognises this tension as ceaseless negation. In Dogen’s (the monk who introduced Zen to Japan) words, “the way is attained through loss.” Nothing exists that does not also vanish, and the moment of arising is already the moment of disappearance. In human life, this takes the form of moral and psychological struggle. Negation often disguises itself as affirmation; the act that seems to affirm life can destroy it. Desire can become possession; care can become control. The deception gives negation its power.
Jung recognised the same dynamic in the “shadow self.” The shadow is not merely evil — it contains the vitality and creativity the conscious ego refuses to acknowledge. But when denied or split off, it turns monstrous. Dennis Nilsen’s (serial killer who confessed to the murder of fifteen boys) life illustrates what happens when the shadow takes control. What he could not integrate — his shame, his desire, his need for control — became a consuming negation that used the form of love to express annihilation. In Jung’s words, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
The street boy’s struggle is the inverse of Nilsen’s. He lives the same internal conflict but does not surrender to it. He endures it, survives it, and eventually reflects on it. His healing begins when he can see both forces — the affirming and the negating — as belonging to one life, his own. This is not moral resolution but spiritual maturity: the capacity to hold contradiction without acting it out.
In Zen, Musashi’s *Book of Five Rings* describes the “Void” as that which is beyond human knowing but can be known by observing what exists. D. T. Suzuki, interpreting both Dogen and Meister Eckhart, wrote that nothingness is “the coincidence of straightforward affirmation and
ceaseless negation.” Perhaps this is what theology once struggled to name when it spoke of the mystery of evil. The universe itself may be the result of this coincidence — a ceaseless collision between affirmation and negation, being and non-being.
To admit this is not to excuse cruelty, nor to romanticise pain, but to see humanity as part of a greater reality. Within us, affirmation and negation are never at rest. We oscillate, we contradict ourselves, we destroy, and we rebuild. The saints and the murderers are not of different species; they are extremes of the same design. Musashi, who killed his first opponent at thirteen and
survived battle by hiding in a ditch, lived long enough to see beyond combat into the quiet space of the Void. From that silence, he wrote of balance, discipline, and the clear seeing of what is.
Perhaps this, finally, is what my street boy saw: that the human being is a paradox made flesh. To live is to stand at the intersection of affirmation and negation, and to keep walking.

The Void and the Human Way

There’s a link between the earlier reflections and a passage from Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. What Musashi names as “the Void,” and says is beyond human knowledge but knowable through observing what exists, can be understood as the idea that everything — the universe itself — is an expression of the Void. D. T. Suzuki, comparing Dōgen and Meister Eckhart, wrote that nothingness is the coincidence of “straightforward affirmation and ceaseless negation.” This is, I think, another way of describing what Christianity calls the tension between God and Satan, good and evil — or more abstractly, that place where “it is” and “it is not” coincide.

If this is so, then there must be a consequence — a form seeking to resolve this opposition — and that is why we might surmise that the entire universe is an expression of a collision between opposite, yet equally true, realities. This includes human beings. Within us, affirmation and negation are in perpetual dialogue, even in conflict.

It is a mistake to believe that people are what they appear to be — settled, defined, unchanging. History abounds with examples of great sinners who became great saints, of those who participated in evil, later devoting themselves to good. Zen reminds us that every person follows a way, which may be impossible for others to understand.

Musashi himself killed his first opponent at the age of thirteen and went on to fight many others. Legend says he was never defeated; truth suggests otherwise. He likely won many battles, survived others he lost, and, as a warrior, endured more than he conquered. There’s a story that he survived the battle of Sekigahara by hiding in a ditch. A complex and all-too-human man who, at the end of his life, could write a book of strategy that is still studied today. We can be thankful he hid in that ditch.

 

The Street Boy and the Mirror of Negation

by Paul Nyssen

Abstract

The Street Boy and the Mirror of Negation explores the intersection of trauma, memory, and philosophical transformation through the narrative lens of a boy whose early exploitation forces a radical reshaping of identity. Drawing on Francis Eustache’s work on emotional memory, the theory of structural dissociation (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, Steele), and the Zen-influenced philosophy of Miyamoto Musashi, the essay examines how the human psyche adapts to overwhelming experience. The “street boy” becomes both survivor and witness to the paradox of negation — the impulse in human desire that seeks affirmation yet turns toward self-destruction. His journey suggests that trauma is not merely a wound but a crucible in which identity can be reforged. The essay concludes that true recovery lies beyond the fixation on victimhood: it is the reappropriation of experience as wisdom. By integrating scientific, moral, and existential perspectives, The Street Boy and the Mirror of Negation offers a meditation on suffering as a path to self-knowledge and renewal.

Prefatory Note

This essay explores the intersection of lived experience, trauma theory, and philosophical reflection. Drawing on models of dissociation (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, Steele), contemporary neuropsychology (Eustache), and the Zen-influenced thought of Miyamoto Musashi, it seeks to understand how the human psyche reshapes itself in response to trauma — and how recovery may involve not merely healing but transformation.

Trauma, Memory, and the Shifting Self

In Eustache’s view (“Mémoire et Émotions”), traumatic experience may be “bracketed out” of conscious recall, while the emotions attached to it remain vivid and enduring. Such emotions, he suggests, can “retain their original charge” even when the narrative memory fades. This distinction reflects how the amygdala and hippocampus — one mediating emotion, the other memory — become decoupled under extreme stress. Van der Hart and colleagues, in their structural dissociation theory, describe trauma as splitting the personality into an “apparently normal part” (ANP) and an “emotional part” (EP). The ANP handles daily life; the EP holds unintegrated emotion and traumatic reaction. But this model risks implying that the ANP is a fixed state of health, and the EP an aberration — when in lived experience, the two may continually interpenetrate, evolve, and exchange dominance.

The Street Boy: A Case of Adaptive Transformation

The street boy’s story challenges neat psychological boundaries. Before trauma, he lived as a “normal” adolescent. Entrapped in exploitation, he rapidly adapted — a survival evolution rather than a breakdown. He became functional within a brutal system, learning its codes and power dynamics. When later rescued and returned to safety, family members described him as “a different person, as if dropped from Mars.” Yet, during the period he lived with a supportive couple, he was described as happier, even whole — suggesting that his new identity was not purely a mask but a true synthesis, a provisional but authentic ANP integrating his former EP. The difficulties that later emerged may thus reflect not regression but re-fragmentation — the loss of the adaptive, street-forged self that had achieved temporary integration. When the pre-street self resurfaced, it brought with it inherited shame and repression. Trauma was not simply an interruption; it was a crucible of transformation.

Negation and the Human Mirror

What the street boy witnessed among his clients was the paradox of affirmation and negation. Desire expressed itself as a search for life, yet immediately turned upon itself as shame and destruction. He saw men who, in affirming desire, negated both themselves and him. Over time, he learned to reverse that dynamic — discovering power in the ability to evoke and control the desire that once victimised him. Negation became mutual. This mirrors the existential tension Zen calls the interplay of affirmation and negation — forces that, in their unity, drive transformation. As Musashi wrote in The Book of Five Rings, one must sometimes “descend into the world of confusion to find the true way.” The street boy’s descent, like Musashi’s paradox, was not moral decay but a movement through suffering toward insight.

Integration and the Journey Beyond Victimhood

If we accept, as Eustache proposes, that emotion and memory can become uncoupled, we might also accept that recovery involves their reunification — not by suppressing emotion but by giving it context and meaning. The street boy’s challenge in later life lay in reintegrating conflicting selves without rejecting either. In this light, the ANP is not a permanent refuge of normality but a work in progress — a construct shaped by experience, culture, and moral imagination. Musashi’s Zen-informed teaching reminds us that descent into darkness can, paradoxically, refine character. He wrote that “the way of strategy is the way of nature; it cannot be learned from others.” In this spirit, trauma may be understood not as the annihilation of self but as an encounter with its limits. It is not romanticising suffering to recognise that pain, faced directly, may deepen one’s capacity for understanding and compassion. Eustache warned that modern societies risk becoming “collectivities of proactive victims” — people who make woundedness the cornerstone of identity. True recovery, therefore, must involve reappropriating one’s history without being trapped within it. The street boy’s journey — from innocence to survival, from negation to awareness — suggests that healing is not the erasure of trauma but its transformation into wisdom.

References

Eustache, F. (2019). Mémoire et Émotions. Odile Jacob.

Van der Hart, O., Nijenhuis, E. R. S., & Steele, K. (2006). The Haunted Self: Structural

Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatisation. Norton.

Musashi, M. (1645/1993). The Book of Five Rings. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Shambhala.

 

Other than that, we had another demo in support of Palestine today, which went well and included many Jewish participants.