Blackout

the monkey is born into his house as he awakens from the blackout. He does not know how he arrived in this prison, so he assumes he has always been there, forgetting that he himself solidified the space into walls.

Trungpa positions blackout as the primordial moment of ego-origination: the arising of a bounded self-sense from a prior state of unconscious openness, making ignorance of one’s own constructive activity the founding condition of conditioned existence.

Trungpa, Chögyam, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973thesis

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the synchronistic event was bringing a sane message — it was warning him against having a mental blackout (for an electric lightbulb signifies ego consciousness, in contrast to the sun, which is the Godhead).

Von Franz interprets a synchronistic symbol — an exploding lightbulb — as a psyche-generated warning against the mental blackout that inaugurates psychosis, establishing the term as clinical shorthand for the collapse of ego-consciousness.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993thesis

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the event means a ‘blackout’ of that man’s ego-consciousness, the disruption of his ego, which is exactly what happens in the beginning of a psychotic episode.

Von Franz equates blackout with the disruption of ego that marks the onset of psychotic breakdown, framing it as a diagnosable threshold event legible through synchronistic imagery.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

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Tamas is a blackout; rajas is a city riot. But in sattva, the city is peaceful. Your heart is full, rich, loving, and wise, so the splendor within shines forth freely.

Easwaran maps blackout onto the Sankhya quality of tamas — the guna of inertia and darkness — positioning it as the total extinction of inner luminosity, in explicit contrast to the turbulence of rajas and the clarity of sattva.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting

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Every night was blackout drinking. The really bad times were when I would have to struggle outside to a liquor store or bar late at night, weaving and trying not to stagger.

This testimonial treats nightly blackout drinking as the terminal expression of solitary, compulsive alcoholism, linking amnesiac intoxication to the complete privatisation and degradation of the drinker’s life.

Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc, Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition The Official ‘Big, 2001thesis

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didn’t everyone have blackouts? I used to joke about how great blackouts were because you saved so much time in transit. One minute you’re here, the next minute you’re there!

This passage illustrates how humour and rationalisation function as defensive manoeuvres against recognising blackouts as pathological, demonstrating denial as a structural feature of alcoholic self-perception.

Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc, Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition The Official ‘Big, 2001supporting

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In my third year I drank homemade peach wine, and when it was gone, I had some whiskey. That night, I vomited, in a blackout.

The narrator marks his first blackout as an early and memorable threshold in the progression of alcoholism, locating it within a developmental sequence from social drinking to pathological compulsion.

Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc, Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition The Official ‘Big, 2001supporting

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I had gone out on New Year’s Eve. When I came to, I thought it was the next morning.

This account presents the temporal disorientation of waking from a blackout as a proximate precipitant of the narrator’s first contact with AA, framing discontinuous consciousness as a turning-point experience.

Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc, Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition The Official ‘Big, 2001supporting

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