Author: andywhite

Psychotherapist/writer/artist/ author of, 'Going Mad to Stay Sane', a psychology of self-destructiveness, about to come into its third edition. Soon to be printed for the first time, 'Abundant Delicious.. the Secret and the Mystery', described by activist Satish Kumar as, ' A Tao of the Soul'. This book documents the archetypal country through which the process of individuation occurs and looks at the trials and tribulations we might expect on the way. In the meantime..... Narcissisim is the issue of our age. This blog looks at how it operates, how it can damage and how we may still fruit despite it.

Collateral Damage.

I was once at the vanguard of Empire, one of its sacrificial sons. I could strip a sub-machine gun when I was fourteen. I went to a white only para-military boarding school with grenade screens on the windows and rifle drill after classes. By the time I was eighteen I had trained with special forces, enlisted in an elite commando unit and went to war with my dark brother, little realizing that our task was not to emerge one triumphant over the other but for both our life’s blood to be spread out on the battle-field.

Such insights can take a little prompting.

We had been dropped behind enemy lines, into a terrorist base camp. There was a brief but intense battle. Afterwards we swept across the camp looking for weapons, documents and survivors. The sweep line crossed a clearing and on the far side I saw the broken body of a man.

I approached him cautiously. Multiple wounds. Large pool of blood. Twisted limbs. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me. He was alive. He stared at me impassively and without fear. His eyes bored into me. I made a quick check for weapons to distract myself from his gaze but he was unarmed. He was however desperately wounded. I stood and stared at him. He stared back. His eyes ripped into me. Not a word was spoken.

Strange thoughts forced their way into my head. This is a man in his own backyard. Someone’s son. Someone’s sweetheart. What am I doing?  And in the name of what? Something in my chest started to splinter and then suddenly snapped. I wasn’t fighting for freedom and ‘our way of life’ at all, though it had been easy to sell that to me because I’d wanted nothing more than to fulfill family expectations and live up to that heroic ideal. In fact I was a hired goon of Multinational Annonymous enforcing corporate takeovers that were actually just robbery of vast tracks of land and the enslavement of everyone upon them.

And far from returning heroic, soaking the earth with as much blood as could be afforded seemed to be the order of the day, the gorier the better. The task was not to kill the enemy but to die for your country, sacrificial appeasement to unnamed Gods for the hubris of Greed, taking land just because you can. I looked down at the broken man before me. It was just a roll of the dice which one of us lay ridden with bullets and the other still standing. We were like Isaac and Ishmael, sons of Abraham, locked in enmity engendered by a Father who would be a King chosen by God, quietly sat in his club nursing a brandy with some chums.

I called a medic, radioed for a chopper and began to patch my dark brother’s wounds. His eyes never left my face. As I bound one wound after another I noticed a ring on his finger. I took it. He said nothing, offered no resistance, just continued staring at me. I patched another wound then gave him the ring back. Suddenly ashamed. When I had finished I picked him up and carried him to a clearing in the bush where a chopper was waiting. As I slid him onto the helicopter floor he pressed the ring back into my hand and said, ‘Datenda Nkosi’. ‘Thanks boss’. I never went into battle again.

That night I dreamed I was fighting my dark brother. Back and forward we went. Eventually I pushed him away. ‘’Don’t you understand why we are fighting?’’ I gasped. ‘’Look at all this stuff you’ve got!’’ The room was spacious and immaculate. Expensive carpets, period furniture and portraits by the masters. ‘’Mine?’’ he puzzled, ‘’I thought it was yours.’’

When there’s is not enough to go around we defend ourselves from the despair of it all by imagining that if we are not getting the marrow of life then somebody else must be. This allows us to remain dynamic whilst feeling robbed. It’s a bad enough bind between ordinary brothers, but when those brothers are Abraham’s Children, Isaac and Ishmael, patriarchs of Judeo-Christianity and Islam respectively, a sibling scuffle can assume global proportions.

The problem created for Isaac and Ishmael, is that Abraham’s having such a special and exclusive relationship with God, combines worldly power and Divine will, bringing mixed consequences to the people and, as we’ll see, definite problems for his sons.

”This was not simply a quantative extension of a ranking system, it was a truly qualitative change by which society had entered a new realm.” P V Kirch

Superficially, kings meant centralised power, more rigid hierarchies, increased divisions of labour and more highly organised economies. But the most important difference, the most impactful on their subjects, was a shift in the value of human life, the rules about who you can kill without calling it murder…and how the gods are to be appeased by such rank inflation.

so you’ll be pleased to know that Kings are only recent inventions.

”The way of life we now take for granted and on the foundations of which we have built civilizations, occupies but one percent of the time of the big-brain’s preoccupation.” R. Ardrey.

We tend to think of kings as something that belongs to history and by which we are no longer affected. In fact it’s the other way around. The institution is very recent and pervades the very viscera of modern life.

Far from being ousted by revolutions or the democratic aspirations of suitably frightened subjects, kings adapted as only the very youthful can. They went underground, as our serf like devotions to the rich and famous, as the farce of rule by deep state oligarchs, as the proliferation of corruption and being above the law whose daily tabloid shenanigins, violent exploits and eternal wars are just the kind of court intrigue you’d expect from period drama.

Not only is the CEO style king a political leader, he is also the high priest, an incarnation of State-Your-Prefered-Deity-Here. You might imagine this to be some amusing footnote of history, a witty anecdote from The Golden Bough and yet its widely accepted by considerable swathes of people in our time that might has right, that the powerful are ordained by and represent God. In everyday life this trickles down and manifests in the wider populace as the feeling that, by virtue of your allegiance, you too are special and/or entitled to be exempt and above the law.

‘I like to be offensive”, said a Charlottesville supremacist. After all, what is the point of being above the law if you don’t demonstrate it once in a while? In fact what other way is there to make the point?

The archives of Ethography are rich in examples of how animals of all kinds obey a natural law which distinguishes between neighbour and stranger. This is so that the aggression necessary for survival within a species does not spill over into communal violence. Snakes won’t use their fangs when they fight. The anxiety of the young male baboon to join a new troop is not just for acceptance but for protection. Herring gulls will erupt into a frenzy of squawking and tear up great lumps of grass when anger boils over, without ever resorting to their rapier sharp beaks.

People are the same..

”All known societies make a distinction between murder, the killing of member’s of one’s own group – and the killing of outsiders.” G. Gorer.

In other words the Principle of Relatedness is more fundamental in its distinction of friend from foe than in the inevitability of any violent outcome. Latent violence is there, but it’s subject to the natural law that distinguishes friend from foe. Contact with those who fall outside this protection can be made safer by rituals of politeness, exchange, intermarriage and stylised etiquette..

We shake hands, give gifts, let you have the seat furthest from the lavvy…

For folk who have been chosen by God and doing His Will, this natural law works against the majority because the king is removed from the community by a host of taboos which means that everybody, subjects and strangers alike, are now Other, unprotected by the rule which says that even an angry wolf will instinctively muzzle his bite if a pup merely shows him its belly.

No-one is safe. And the sons least of all.

In 19th C Buganda, not saying thankyou properly, with just the right amount of dust poured on your head, could get you killed. Oh, and also if you were vaguely related, or caused his Maj’ to touch the ground..or if you were unlucky enough to see him eating…. or caught his eye…

and so life is suddenly very precarious…

The advent of King-ship spills contained aggression into explosive violence. Not just between the king and anybody that looks at him funny but between the subjects themselves who are now also objects just a shade higher in worth than a non-believer and scrabbling to secure their positions.

If just deserts are your thing it doesn’t end well for the king. He is inflated and so must die. Tradition has it that he comes to a very bad end.  In Dahomey, if he’s lucky, he just gets murdered for the crown. If he’s not so lucky he has to be chopped up in bits, sometimes having to do the job himself, while he can, before being ritually consumed by the next incumbent.

Sometimes the king’s violent demise is ritualised at the end of fixed terms. Scandanavian kings ruled for twelve years after which they were put to death or a substitute found to die in their place, for just the right kind of sacrifice might appease the gods… sacrifices in their ones and twos all decked out in costumed finery, but then… maybe it would cover all the angles if they were also made in their uniformed millions.

King Aun of Sweden (C6th B.C.) decided he didn’t fancy ritual dismemberment and prayed to Odin for a way out. Odin replied that he could live for as long as he sacrificed a son every twelve years. This he did, sending nine sons to their deaths. The Swedes prevented him from killing the last and tenth, so Aum died and was buried at Upsala.

On the other side of the World from Upsala the kings of Cambodia and Jambi would ritually sacrifice sons in their place, neatly buying time and eliminating the competition in the same breath, for who better qualified to serve as a substitute than one endowed with the very same qualities of potential kinglyness that make him a deadly threat? And what better appeasement to the gods for all the heinous greed than the blood of your own offspring?

Rather than repair his relationship with Artemis whose deer he killed, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order to secure a different agenda than the goddess intended…

and went to war.

Violence is going to erupt in any society where the instinctive rules governing whether killing is murder have been eroded by the king’s inflation to the point where everyone is alien and excluded from the circle of compassion, a breach  of belonging that can only  be jammed closed with appropriate sacrifices.  When citizens are unprotected by natural law, when they can be disposed of with impunity, they soon begin to harbour the wish to become a god/king themselves., domestic tyrants, small time bullies, lunch money bandidos of sacrificial subgroups made less than citizen, whilst war drums beat for the cleansing blood of the Nation’s sons.

The Glass Coffin.

A poor tailor becomes lost in the forest. As night falls, he sees a light shining and follows it to a lone hut. An old man lives there and after the tailor begs for shelter, allows him to stay for the night. In the morning, the tailor awakes to a mighty commotion. Outside a terrible fight is going on between a great stag and an even larger bull. Eventually, with the greatest effort and despite his wounds, the stag wins. Quite unexpectedly, it then bounds up to our hero and carries him off in its antlers to arrive, finally, at a Wall of Stone.

The Stag pushes him against a door in the Wall of Stone, which grinds open. Inside the tailor is told to stand on a large round rock. He does so and it sinks down into a Great Hall, where a voice directs him to look into a glass chest. Inside is a beautiful maiden, deeply sleep. She wakes and asks him to open the chest.

So he did.

The maiden then tells him her story: She was the daughter of a rich Count. After the death of her parents she had been raised in the forest by her brother. One day, a traveler stayed over and used magic to get to her in the night, asking her to marry him. She was outraged at his intrusion and rejected his proposal. In revenge the magician then turned her brother into the stag and imprisoned her in a glass coffin, enchanting all the lands around them.

When the tailor and the maiden emerge from the enchanted hall they find that the stag had been transformed back into her brother. The bull/magician is dead and the curse entirely lifted.

Hooray.

The tailor is successful not out of heroic daring-do or manly slaughtering of dragons, but by three simple things, letting himself be lost, being able to ask for help and doing as he is told by the Stag.

Getting lost is not much fun. People generally pride themselves on knowing their own heading.  Questioning stuff that used to be set in stone seems at best like foolishness and at worst like madness. Yet many a story begins with the confusion of not knowing how to proceed, with the loss of a value system that no longer serves, a sense of self that no longer fits, tedium with the known yet un-nourishing. Sometimes getting lost can be in the tangible form of an addiction, or a relationship that is more rut than track. Perhaps some blow of fate that deprives us of what we know. Sometimes getting lost is the loss of youth, initiation into the second half of life.

“Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Dante.

Being lost has a humbling effect on the personality. It strips you of arrogant presumption, makes you ask for help, feels gratitude in the place of entitlement, feels comforted by the meanest favour. When you are lost you let yourself be little. You proceed with caution, excruciatingly aware of vulnerability, dependence on others and the limits of your own abilities.

The tailor does not confront the Bull himself. It is defeated on his behalf, as part of a larger plan, with events then unfolding around him in a blur. He stumbles to his salvation in a manner that is decidedly unheroic. In fact he’s entirely bewildered. All he wanted was a quiet night’s kip and suddenly Great Beasts are tearing the garden up. Then one of them whisks you off in antlers set to steak knife, and buries you in stone with a set of instructions. Its all a bit much.

Without realizing it the tailor has set up the preconditions for a redeeming of himself that he scarcely knows he needs. It seems that he is just being swept along but he has evoked these events by his attitude. The person convinced by their own sufficiency would never allow themselves to be lost or admit it even if they were. The tailor has just the right mix of humility in knowing that he’s basically an ordinary bloke and just the right amount of courage to go sufficiently off the beaten path and lose his way.

Quests involve getting lost. Its not just a distinct possibility or even a rum chance. Its a requirement, like papers you’d hand over at a border check point to certify that you had no idea which land you were exiting, where you are headed or the name of the place. Or what you’ve done with your passport.

The reason is that the inner world is way bigger than anyone ever imagines. You think you’re just going to have a look around in the basement and find that, first off, it has no walls and then, that far from being a place of relics, it is full of life. You’re bound to wander off. And may not be back for tea.

Begging to be looked after by the Old-Man-of-the-Forest, suggests a propitious attitude that’s well advised. Those that live in the forest are generally also part of its dangers. In fact, does it not turn out that this is the very cottage once visited by an evil traveler who did away with the previous occupants?

The evil traveler is that regressive streak in us all which clings to omnipotence and magically getting whatever you want or think you deserve. He reckons he has the right to invade the Countess’ privacy and can’t contain his own petty feelings of vengeance when she asserts her own destiny. He is consumed with envy at her autonomy and narcissistically attacks that which he cannot control or dominate.

Children take in a great deal that doesn’t belong to them. We internalize the parent who seduces and uses the child to meet their own needs as well as the parent who wants us to grow. Kids already have a tendency to take on board responsibility for parental ills and failings let alone the pressure to fulfill expectations that have nothing to do with them.

This is especially true when either parent is unfulfilled in their own ambition and needs the child to sing their song for them rather than finding their own voice, imprisoning the child with expectations that stifle autonomy and so despite being special cannot grow.

I recall being given a guitar out of the blue by my mother. It was expensive, a fine gift, only, I had never expressed any interest in learning to play whatsoever. I dutifully tried but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for it because my interests lay elsewhere. None of which stopped me having to shamefully confess that I had failed in my efforts. She traded the guitar in for an accordion which I also failed to play. I was clearly a disappointment and felt myself to be so for some time after. My more humble harmonica, which I did love and did want to play, became a source of embarrassment, a symbol of failure, soon to be left lying around and lost.

Parental co-dependence with their kids, what analyst Masud Kahn  calls ‘symbiotic omnipotence,’ sometimes looks like a really special bond, sometimes distant and uninvolved or strangely switching between the two. The child is not so much a person as they are ambiguous receptacles for expectation and as such, more like museum exhibits or specimens in glass jars rather than sentient beings with destinies of their own. Yet, still special enough to want to pickle, a garnish to parental ‘magic’.

Archetypally, the wandering traveler is the dark aspect of Odin who, a thousand years earlier, demonstrated his tendency for using children to his own ends by allowing his son Sigmund to die for a crime he committed unknowingly and then by punishing his daughter, Brunhilde and putting her into a similar deep sleep for defying him and wanting to help her brother. If this were a Greek myth rather than a Norse one, he would be Saturn, devourer of his children.

The stag represents that aspect of the child’s soul that needs to sharpen its antlers on adversity, waiting for an auspicious moment to confront the two horned dilemma of being so special on the one hand but like a specimen in a jar on the other. Cervus fugitivus, the fugitive stag, is soul as spirit animal or guide, evoked by the sudden shock at the strange vastness of the forest. He represents..

”the bush soul, a ‘doctor’ animal, like the Celtic Kerrunos who presides over death, rebirth and the urge to individuate”. M L von Franz.

It’s in the nature of the fugitive stag to burst from the bushes, to protect its own from the entropy of being caught on the bulls horns, to be forever in dilemma, a life style of procrastination and the provisional life. We resist it because it’s noisy,  disruptive and a bit scary. You may know from experience what happens if you try and ignore it, but perhaps also what can happen if you allow the white knuckle ride of being scooped up in its antlers.

My analyst Chuck Schwarz once said that 90% of therapeutic work is done by heeding the Stag, picking up the phone and making that first appointment, whether its because a person is lost in the forest, awoken by the commotion in the garden, or being carried pellmell to the Wall of Stone. After that phone call is made, he told me, the soul has gotten involved. When people arrive for their first session they already feel much better.

How you think about the Stag and his Sister will depend on your attitude to the unconscious. One way of looking at them is as though they were parts of you and so its all about you which eventually gets boring. Another way is that the Stag shares the forest of the Psyche with you and comes to aid when, like the tailor, we are made ready by getting lost, asking for help and doing as prompted by the inner voice.

The story takes  the alchemical perspective that we are both redeemer and redeemed, which got them into quiet some trouble with the church who thought such a belief was tantamount to playing God, yet we can see that nothing could be further from the truth. The tailor’s part is a humble one. He frees the sister/soul from her imprisonment in matter but only at the behest and careful instructions of the stag. He is crucial to her deliverance but only by agreeing to be party to events rather than central to them.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

Xanax Nation.

State sponsored sedation has flowered. Xanax, a freely available prescription drug, has, over thirty years, gradually climbed to the top spot drug-of-choice in America. In fact the rate of escalation is scary.  Treatment faculty admissions multiplied tenfold in the decade between 2003 and 2013. Emergency room visits for non-medical use rose fourfold during the same period.

Xanax operates very much like Aldous Huxley’s ‘Soma’ in Brave New World. Everything that’s bothering you leaves the room. It is not replaced by anything else that might challenge or demand or impel. Anxiety is a distant memory. You don’t need anything or anybody. All yearning is channeled into going-on-holiday which can begin to feel like religious Communion..

“The service had begun. The dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of the table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula, “I drink to my annihilation,” twelve times quaffed.” Huxley. ‘Brave New World’

Of course it would be quite unthinkable, and therefor impossible, that inspired leadership might sit about actually discussing the means to sedate great swathes of their own population, yet every politician who ever clung to power knows that the greatest threat to their security comes from popular disaffection and what better way of dealing with torch bearers other than to send them on holiday? You have neither the messiness of police brutality nor the expense of incarceration.

”The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous.” ibid

Pfizer have been kind enough to offer Xanax wannabees a special discount card that lets you have a month’s supply for just four dollars….on the understanding that once dependency has kicked in and you need to treble the dose, the burden of a thirtyfold mark up may well then fall back upon your withering shoulders. The card offer can be legally rescinded at any time. Just as soon as your life begins to revolve around it.

Shame about the potential seizures, convulsions and suicidal thoughts should you elect to discontinue your prescription..

Disaffected youth represent the greatest percentage of voters there have ever been, a force to be reckoned with as demonstrated recently by the death threats sent to survivors of the Parkland massacre for daring to have a problem with being shot at.

How much easier it would be if those kids just went to their trusted GPs and got a prescription, you know, to help with their anxiety? Make sure it’s more addictive than heroin and ten times the strength of Valium and within a matter of weeks the identified patient’s voice will be silenced, their preoccupation with Justice and Truth supplanted by the disorienting merry-go-round of alternately craving and not giving a shit.

Manufacturers of the drug appeal to their own authority to sell it to you, ‘Xanax original purpose was to combat the symptoms of anxiety and panic disorder’ so that’s okay, innit? They made it about the thing they are selling it for… and hey, you can tell its safe because it is not an opioid…..

It’s like saying a Grizzly is not dangerous because it’s not a Shark. The fact is that Xanax is addictive and dangerous, whether you OD on the way up, or top yourself from withdrawls on the way down, so why is it the fastest growing and most happening back room of big Pharma with 48 million prescriptions written in the USA and 16 million illegal users for 2013? How come teen dependence has trebled in recent years?(cited from Quora.)

Smack has such bad press these days. You can’t even sell it in cough syrup anymore. And so even if you’ve taken over the country that grows it and have your own soldiers guarding the poppy fields, you still have the hassle of indigenous hostiles taking pot shots at you and then there’s the aggravation of shipping it out. Anyway, everyone associates the word ‘epidemic ‘ with opioids these days, whilst Xanax is somehow still respectable as a designer drug created by scientists in white coats to rescue you from the inconvenience of Morphine..

So it must be okay. Right?

And because its okay you can get it on prescription most any place just by ticking boxes on a form and signing. Its cheap, for now, like the cut price opium the British flooded China with in the 1840’s during the eponymous Opium Wars,  a time in which the British became very angry that Emperor Lin Xe-zu didn’t want his people’s soul destroyed  and made him pay back the value of Opium he confiscated and publicly burned in his valiant efforts to save them. But it wasn’t the bars of silver that the British were really after any more than the press gang down the dockside alleys are after the content of your pockets.

Lin Ze-xu, calculated that in 1839 Chinese opium smokers consumed 100 million taels’ worth of the drug while the entire spending by the imperial government that year was a mere 40 million taels. He reportedly concluded, “If we continue to allow this trade to flourish, in a few dozen years we will find ourselves not only with no soldiers to resist the enemy, but also with no money to equip the army” quoted by Chesneaux et al., p. 55)

All of which might have been very handy to any wolves in the wings and so they kept the Opium pouring in despite Chinese officials entreating Sir Henry Pottinger, Her Majesty’s dealer, to cut the problem off at its source by recommending that the British government ban the cultivation of the poppy in India. Sir Henry gave the time honoured response of any mafia boss that, as long as there remained substantial numbers of opium-addicts and corrupt customs officers in China, prohibiting the cultivation of opium in India “would merely throw the market into other hands” (cited by Ssu-Yu Teng, p. 70

It never occurs to him that he might uphold the law.

We gotta be da criminals udderwise someone else gonna be da criminal. We gots no choices.

Others could see the immorality of chemical warfare against civilians for what it was..

”This war with China . . . really seems to me so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude, and it distresses me very deeply. Cannot any thing be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men’s minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring by the introduction of this demoralizing drug, which the government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority.” — Thomas Arnold to W. W. Hull, March 18, 1840.

So drugging nations is not a new thing as such, but drugging your own? That’s new. And if it’s so distasteful to witness the systematic crushing of a nation for gain half a world away, so distant at the time that naval dispatches referred to China as ‘that singular and hitherto almost unknown country’, what then, when such sin of greatest possible magnitude is unfolding on your own block? When there is quiet but systematic encouragement to absent oneself from issues that you can no longer feel and no longer matter. Or would that just be too horrific to contemplate?

Xanax, coming to a street corner near you.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

 

Addiction and Connection.

We all know what causes addiction, right?

Drugs and Alcohol.

Wrong.

Pushers and bad neighbourhoods…

Nope.

Genetic inheritance?

Wrong again.

Some fascinating research has come out that shows pretty conclusively that drug addiction, which killed nearly a hundred thousand people in the USA alone in 2016, a year on year increase of over ten percent, is caused by none of the above.

So what could it be?

In the mid 20th C most of the experimentation into addiction and the conclusions drawn, which provided the popular model we have as to its causes, was done on rats in cages. They were given the option of regular clean water or water laced with heroin or cocaine. Without fail the rats took to the drugged water and duly expired, all of which seemed to demonstrate how helpless Ratus Ratus becomes in the face of temptation..

and by association, you and me.

Psychologist Bruce Alexander was unconvinced. He reflected on the number of folks in hospital on high grade diamorphine, the kind of painkiller used in hip replacements, used for weeks or even months at a time, that did not result in addiction. He also looked at heroin use by Vietnam soldiers, an estimated 20% of those deployed, and found that there was a staggering 95% spontaneous recovery rate once they returned stateside.

So what was the difference between the rats and the soldiers/ hospital patients?

The cage.

Alexander sought to test this hypothesis and put dozens of rats into the equivalent of five star rat heaven with ample toys and food and most importantly the opposite sex, along with the traditional option of heroin water and ordinary water. He found that the rats mostly ignored the drugs. They were far too busy being with each other.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is connection. Something we are not very good at despite our sophistication. So how can we account for this loss of connection? It doesn’t seem enough to talk about class conflict or capitalist competitiveness a la Marx, the loss of shared values suggested by Durkheim or Weber’s’ ‘alienation’ – mindlessly having to obey the rules of a faceless bureaucracy.

The maddening process of having to adapt to a mad world put forward by R. D. Laing is more tempting. You cannot manage such a contradictory dance without becoming internally split and having basic security unseated, though this still begs the question of what it is about contemporary society that makes it mad in the first place.

Social isolation, alienation from the group, is fairly easy to spot. The black sheep of the family, the kid who sits alone at lunch, the hostile co-worker, the crazy driver who carves you up in traffic without thought for the consequences. Less obvious is alienation from oneself. Being alone need not necessarily constitute loneliness. Most folk positively need alone time to recharge themselves. Likewise, being in the midst of others may not reduce loneliness at all. It might even make it worse.

Deeper and more biting than social isolation is self-estrangement, the kind of internal disaffection where I no longer comes calling on Me, where the inner pathways between different aspects of ourselves have become overgrown and abandoned.

One of the principle ways this happens is when kids grow up feeling they have to fulfill certain conditions in order to get loved. They learn that they have to be a certain way to gain approval, carry parental burdens whose covert expectations bends them out of shape, bury aliveness that draws envious sanction. This has the effect of walling children off, not just from one another but from themselves. A healthy ego cannot develop because there is way too much invested in projecting an ever more entrenched and idealized self-image. This ideal gets reinforced with social approval, momma’s little helper, teacher’s pet, the leader of tomorrow.

The cost to the child is they don’t know who they are anymore, their own destiny has been hijacked, hitched to a star not their own. The need to belong subverts the need to become.

This dynamic is poignantly expressed by Danny Kay’s Tubby the Tuba, who so wants to be a part of the orchestra that he has lost faith in the sound of his own song. He’s tempted to capitulate and just oom-pah along as he is supposed to but then reminds himself in a song of what that would cost him..

”Alone am I, me and I together. If I went away from me, how unhappy I would be.. Me and I .. oh my…’

He’s helped by a wise frog who encourages him to find his own voice though he risks the fury and rejection of all the other instruments in the process.

The question is, how does this prospect of self-estrangement cast its pall over our entire culture, so much so that tens of thousands of people a year are killed by addictions created out of the need to dull its pain?

We might get the idea of an isolated incident where a child feels compelled to betray itself for the sake of belonging and take to drugs as a way out. As a young heroin addict once told me, ‘Its easier just to take on all the family pain and then numb it with drugs than it is to shuck the burden.”

But how does this happen by the million?

The answer seems to be that self-estrangement is weaved into the very fabric of what we otherwise uphold as our fine upstanding social norms.

Trigger alert!

We are collectively encouraged to consider ourselves better than others to the point that healthy patriotism can become zenophobic hatred of entire nations upon whom we then happily project all those inferior aspects of ourselves that don’t fit with the ideal we are supposed to be, the ideal that gets us loved.

Couple this with any religion that supports such splitting, making other perspectives on spiritual life not just alien and stupid but wicked and evil, and soon you have entire populations that have effectively denied and demonised aspects of their inner worlds en masse to the point where only opioids will bridge the divide and give a moment’s respite from the resulting schism, stretching like a canyon across the desert lands of our otherwise proud and uplifted hearts.

It gets worse. The divisiveness that clings to ever narrowing bands of shining selfhood must go to war with any aspect of personality not quite up to the mark, which means that ego structure is weakened to the point that connection to the higher self, to embodied soulfullness, is lost.

Spirituality that is no more than ‘vain and empty repetition’ cannot be entertained because the personality is so divided against itself, so weakened by inner conflict, that the Self, whose impact de-integrates even the healthy ego, is experienced as simply too overwhelming. This is why Jung says, ”the more the church develops the more Christ dies.’ The covert purpose of such establishment is to prevent people from having their own experience, evicting them from the Ground of Being.

Divided and bereft, longing becomes craving. The Waters of Life become Gin, the manna of heaven, a ten dollar wrap or a handful of pills, the capacity for reflection – a line on a mirror.

Is it then too simplistic to suggest that the solution to epidemic drug use has something to do with collectively becoming a little less damn holy? Becoming tolerant of weakness rather than trying to eradicate it? Allowing oneself to feel shitty without it having to mean you’re shit? Letting others have a different point of view without it negating your own? Being curious, valuing divergence, rubbing shoulders with not-me?

If you want to kick the habit, get connected. Rediscover that childhood fascination with the new and the strange. Share something of yourself with your neighbour, even if it’s just your smile. Meet the eye of the newspaper man, give your fellow earthlings a nod in the street, raise the bar of receptivity.

but above all clear back the brush that’s overgrown the paths between your inner houses, knock down some of the stoney old walls of inner divisiveness and self-judgement, or at least acknowledge their presence and name them. Ask what rules you’re living by and break a few.

You’ll live longer..

and better…

and so will those around you.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

First Signs of Madness

An arrogant youth spurns the love of a nymph, Echo, and is punished by the Gods to suffer the same fate. He duly catches sight of his reflection in a pool of water one day and falls in love with it. Of course this image fails to respond to his affection. Like Echo, he pines and dies of unrequited love.

Some of the small details of this story are easily overlooked. The youth, Narcissus, does not fall in love with himself but with his image, his persona, an idealised self-construct that has little to do with his true self. He’s therefor easily fooled, not simply because he is so preoccupied with appearance but because Echo represents a  human characteristic that is essential to psychic life, the capacity to listen to oneself, to hear what you are saying.

Echo is a chatterbox who has been punished by Hera, queen of the Gods, for trying to protect adulterous Zeus whilst he consorts with the other nymphs. When his jealous wife comes looking for him Echo waylays her with endless conversation. Eventually Hera uncovers the ploy and punishes Echo by silencing her voice, all except the capacity to repeat, to mirror, what others have just said.

So Narcissus’ falling in love with his reflection is a substitute for the capacity to reflect. The death of Echo represents the loss of being able to listen to himself. His capacity for an internal dialogue, essential to weighing up situations and arriving at informed decisions, is suddenly gone.

Its said that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sitting yourself down for a good chat is the beginning of mental hygiene, autonomy, consciousness itself. In 1941 both Hitler and Stalin introduced ‘muttering laws’ that forbade talking to yourself because they understood that anyone capable of self-reflection was of the greatest danger to Autocracy.

Without internal dialogue you are left with a single point of view belonging to a disneyfied persona that suddenly has no points of reference by which to chew things over. Its like trying to find yourself on a map with only one compass bearing. This means that the narcissistic character, despite his grandiosity, is easily lost and led by the nose.

Narcissus’ fate is predicted by the wise seer Tiresius who prophecies that he will die when he sees himself. Its an important detail because it helps to understand the resistance of the Narcissist to look at his own behaviour with any objectivity. Not only has he lost the capacity for reflection, the prospect of regaining it means death, the end of an inner tyranny upon which his personality rests, the shattering of a nucleus around which his sense of self is condensed.

The do or die attitude of the Narcissist can make him appear quite tough and dynamic, though it points to an inner truth, an inner threat, which accounts for his otherwise fragile reactivity and eternal doubling down. If it seems as though getting his own way is a matter of life or death that’s because it is. From the point of view of the false self with its single perspective, its one track mind, any deviation from reality-as-I-know-it is immediately an encounter with annihilation, any admission of fault, a catastrophe.

Pliny the Elder wrote that the Narcissus plant was named for its fragrance (ναρκάω narkao, “I grow numb”) not the youth. Its an instructive amplification because this refusal to deviate from his proscribed self-image or entertain any perspective other than his own has a numbing effect on the true self which is now experienced as life threatening rather than as a source of renewal.

When Echo reaches out to Narcissus he responds..

”Away, touch me not! May I die before you have power o’er me.” Ovid

Her invitation to intimacy, the prospect of vulnerability and dependence, is experienced as so destructive because it compels him from the brittle self construct upon which his life is so precariously balanced and to entertain feelings that would contradict and destroy it.

He has to misconstrue her intentions as the wish to have power over him in order to dismiss her and find a recipient, no matter how unlikely, for his own unconscious need to dominate. Such power play is not for its own sake, or to make anything great again, but so as not to face the mortal blow to pride that awareness of what is actually going on would bring. So reality has to be distorted, any number of deceptions propagated, fake news spread like manure.

He has to make out that Echo is a slut, despite the fact of her virginity specified in other versions of the story where she is enviously attacked by Pan for similar reasons, because she’s beautiful, talented and chaste.

Everything outside the preferred frame of reference, every scrap of selfhood that is not allied to the ideal, must be split off and projected onto others where they become eternal sources of threat and disruption giving rise to all kinds of paranoia and persecutory anxiety. This is why pointing to hurtful behaviour is often received with a hurt expression and any attempt to simply state your own point of view experienced as an attack.

Aspects of the narcissistic character that are not loyal to the idealised persona must be attributed to others where they are perceived as an attempt to undermine and broach the ever diminishing circle of self-awareness. Walls must be built and people expelled en masse, even if their youth, education and clean records suggest model citizenship necessary to a strong future economy.

In some versions of the story Narcissus commits suicide. Failing to listen to oneself, being unwilling to have that inner dialogue can have destructive, even fatal consequences.

Unfortunately the damage is rarely confined to oneself. Others must go down as well, a schoolyard at a time maybe but perhaps also in their incandescent millions.

Still, if you’re not listening… perhaps they’re not screaming.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

Fear of Life.

My grandfather died on a mountain of beans. Not planting a flag mind you. Not victorious in any way. Just dead, in bed. When they found him, the cans of beans were discovered underneath, piled high from one end of the bedstead to the other. Not, one might surmise, because he thought he might have felt a bit peckish in the night, but to ward off actual starvation, which was a bit odd considering that he had enough cash to buy both the shop he bought the beans from and the bakery next door.

My other grandfather was more fortunate. He died of falling fifteen thousand feet in the twisting, burnt out fuselage of a Lancaster bomber.

Though the circumstances of their deaths were entirely different their final moments did have something in common. Fear, though what they were afraid of was worlds apart. The young anti-aircraft gunner, trapped in his cage of glass and steel, choking and struggling to free himself as he plummeted Earthwards, knew he was about to die.

You’d think the much older man, having had a full life, lying quietly in his bed with his boots off, was blessed with a more benevolent fate. But the mountain of beans belied the hidden reality of someone loveless, disconnected from a world by which he felt abandoned and against which he’d pitifully shored himself up with a horde of staple snacks.

Our more conscious fears are of the plummeting variety. Fear of Life seems incomprehensible, even petty by comparison, yet tomorrow’s Unknown sometimes has a way of eclipsing even Death itself.

and rather depends on the fantasy of what you think tomorrow will bring.

We Westerners think of ourselves as ever so evolved but we are caught in a cultural double bind that puts a severe crimp in aliveness. We think of the pursuit of happiness as a constitutional right but entering into the feeling that happiness brings means a letting go of control few will entertain. To the extent that you are invested in image and have learned to play the power game, so must you stay in control…

”because loss of control evokes the fear of insanity.” A. Lowen.

This fear is not immediately obvious until you look at how much talk there is about ‘negative feelings’, whole service industries whose sole purpose is to help steer you away from ‘toxic emotions’.  Entire psychological theories and therapies exist to facilitate the process of dominating feeling life with rational egoic constructs to help us ’emote appropriately’.

But feelings are not produced by the ego. You can’t make yourself laugh or cry. Not without looking as though you are auditioning for a part on Broadway. To the extent that you are invested in the holy grail of appearance, so must feelings and spontaneity be suppressed and secretly regarded as the enemy, there to upset the status quo, ready to ambush your pretensions and overwhelm defenses. Feelings, particularly the more vulnerable ones of dependency and need, become equated with madness.

And so, with the greatest of irony, what we fear most, more than death, is our own authenticity which really does have the power to intrude upon preferred self-constructs and shred them like confetti.

So ordinary pleasures, a hearty cackle, the relief of a good cry, the beating heart of desire, the joy that demands we let go for a moment, has to be fended off as if they were the devil himself and substituted  with multi billion dollar entertainment industries that amuse and help us pass the time without making any demands or rattling the bars of our cages.

People pay for this privilege by living lives of quiet desperation

”and go to the grave with the song still in them.” H. Thoreau

though it is not greed per se that leads people to want more and more luxurious and unnecessary things, but the fear that underpins it. Making ego king casts the rest of our souls in the role of enemy at the gate. A siege mentality is the inevitable result, dominated by fear and lack and loss.

This fear permeates our culture as absence of concern for others, as pathological competitiveness, as a doubling down on whatever yesterday’s truth might have been.

 ‘The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but it is really fear.’ Ghandi

The extent to which our lives are dominated by the unconscious fears associated with staying in control and projecting an image of ourselves that is dissonant with the true self has been artfully demonstrated by an experiment at Yale University conducted by professor John Bargh.

He observed that minorities are often attributed with the characteristics of germs and bacteria that threaten, like unwanted feelings, to invade and destroy. He reasoned that making people feel safer about ‘germs’ could change racist attitudes and political convictions about immigration policy.

So he set up a questionnaire on political affiliation but reminded a control group about the recent H1N1 epidemic and casually asked if the participants had their shots. This control group responded unanimously by filling out their forms with a conservative bias.

Then he set similar questions to another control group, reminded them of the recent epidemic, but this time handed out hand sanitizer before they picked up their pens….

‘A simple squirt of Purell after we had raised the threat of the flu had changed their minds. It made them feel safe from the virus and (by association) from immigrants as well.” J. Bargh.

Fear governs who we vote for, even if we don’t like the guy.

In the Yale experiment ‘germs’ were symbolic of ‘infectious’ minorities. But the minorities themselves are symbolic, of  ‘inferior’ and invasive feelings, ‘intrusive’ thoughts that like-wise want to be on the inside.

And so, if the world is to become a more gentle place, power withheld from tyrants, then the inner tyrant busy controlling experience and walling off a full emotional life needs a little friendly chat.

Protection from cruel overlords begins at home, begins with recognising the fear of being really alive, the loss of control over self and others such liberation brings and the fear of madness that attends daring to be our true selves.

Most of us prefer to die peacefully in our beds at a ripe old age. But if its atop a mountain of beans are we really resting contentedly? I think not. We might make a virtue of being so prepared, of looking out for number one, of being First and Only, but if its at the expense of being so alienated from authentic feelings that we spend that life wanting to ‘get away from it all’, then the plummeting version  begins to look like the better choice.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

Bad Baby.

Children need attention. If they don’t get it they will create it. The badly behaved child has simply had to resort to extreme measures in order to elicit something from otherwise empty vessels.

Even dog trainers know this.

It’s the owner.

The ‘naughty child’ is then rewarded in his efforts with shaming, which, though it has a pitiful prognosis, still gives emotional impoverishment a nucleus around which to cobble some semblance of going-on-being.

The problem with this, the price to be paid, is that such a child must then continue to behave in a way that elicits shaming in order to confirm their identity and continue to shore up that poorly self construct.

The Rule of Intentionality says that things have a way of panning out as they are supposed to. If you married someone who runs you down, then they are fulfilling a sacred service and ought to be paid. If you wake up after a drinking binge full of remorse and self loathing then that’s the purpose of getting so drunk. Many a junkie is equally addicted to the identity of being failed and shameful, formed way before they ever laid hands on their poison and much more difficult to give up.

Fulfilling expectation is instinctual. The Psyche takes a bet that baby will be born into adequate environs. Neural pathways are wide open to any signal or stimulus that gives baby information about herself on the basic assumption of a good enough environment that she’s hardwired to expect.

So the child attributes parental failing to herself. The parent is full of distaste because baby is distasteful. So that’s what she has to be. And sometimes it’s so close that you can’t see it. In fact it..

”may go unnoticed for the simple reason that s/he cannot conceive of an alternative kind of relation of Self to Other.” Jean Liedloff.

The feeling of intrinsic shame cannot be readily endured and so the Psyche grabs hold of the next best thing to bonding which is to identify with mother instead. She accepts the booby prize of being special, more like sisters now, which both hammers a few rusty sheets to her ramshakle hovel and shields her from the shame that underpins it, now invisible but still an enduring structure in the Psyche. Whilst being special and praised for all kinds of other things that have little to do with you may get you through the day, the underlying need to confirm the shame is biding its time.

”Instinctive forces do not reason. They assume the immense weight of their experience of Nature’s ways that it will serve the individual to be stabilized according to his initial experience.” ibid

So even though the narcissistic character is full of vanity and bluster, full of the archetypal power of mummy, consumed with specialness, so is he compelled by yet a deeper force to end up in the gutter one way or another, to bungle life despite himself.

In my opinion this is why Mr Trump seemingly does everything to hasten his own demise. Alienating his own secret service, making enemies of people who have dirt on him. He’s mocked for doing stupid things. These stupid things have an agenda, the end game of which looks like self-destructiveness but they might actually serve to keep him out of hospital. In the meantime the mockery and vilification will do nicely.

Sometimes things don’t make sense until you include in the mix a need to be scorned and hated. The apparent goal of domination and control is actually the means to an end, to obtain that which serves internal security better than loyalty, philanthropy or crushing your enemies. Humiliation.

Who is a stinky baby!

And so while it seems that fate comes to him from the outside, from the woodwork, from people dishing enough dirt, enough stink; it has all been carefully if unconsciously orchestrated and for a while shame and specialness will share the stage in a masochistic self-immolation of First and Only.

While all this entertainment is going down the rest of us run the risk of forgetting that Mr. Trump is a symbol. He is an expression of the Collective Psyche, the natural product of a culture that denigrates Mothering and rejects the Divine Feminine. This cancer runs through all of us Chosen People. Are you not special? Do you not have a political system so superior that it is exported through the bomb bay doors of Magnanimous Benevolence killing other mothers and babies for their own good every day of the week?

or at least if there is profit in it?

Strangely the number of enemies killed by our generous instruction in Afghanistan these last couple of years is not as high as the number of our own soldiers committing suicide in the privacy of their barracks.

Not to mention a hundred people a day in America alone who die of opioid overdose and the fifty thousand others a year that find more creative ways of commiting suicide in the face of unbearable shame.

Why else does a person kill themselves if not because they can no longer hold up their head? Behind all the Western facade of technological and moral superiority lurks a syndrome whose ultimate purpose is dark implosion.

and its way bigger than Trump.

Shame is systemic in our culture. If we do not wish to be ruled by tyrants then getting rid of them is only the beginning.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

 

The Spirit of Vitriol.

Vitriol was one of the most important compounds to the Alchemists. It was distilled from an oily, green substance that formed naturally from the weathering of sulfur-bearing gravel.

After it was collected, it was heated and broken down into iron compounds and sulfuric acid. The acid was separated out by distillation. The first distillation produced a brown liquid that smelled of rotten eggs, but further distillation yielded the nearly odorless Vitriol.

The acid is severely corrosive to mother’s apron strings. Armour fares little better although it has no effect on gold. Vitriol has a tremendous thirst, it drinks life in. If a flask of Vitriol is allowed to stand open, it absorbs water vapor from the air and overflows its container. The sulfuric acid in Vitriol is the agent of transformation in many alchemical experiments, so the alchemist is bound to brim over and flood quite a bit themselves in the process.

Alchemy is useful because it’s language and symbols are a kind of waking dream that symbolise the process of individuation. The various chemical processes undertaken were metaphors, living symbols, of psychological transformation.

So its interesting to find that Vitriol was often considered the very agent of transformation itself. Vitriol was not just a corrosive substance that ate away at whatever it touched, it was also a corrosive spirit that ate away at otherwise sedimented attitudes and leaden attachments, passion that swept away intellectual ponce.

How is Vitriol the agent of transformation? Well, Vitriol is vitriolic. Vitriol tells it how it is, even if it spills over a bit and makes your lip quiver or think about stuff you’d rather not.

This is easier said than done. Synonyms for Vitriol run like a check list of dating deal-breakers… acrimonious · rancorous · bitter · caustic · mordant · acerbic · astringent · acid · acrid · trenchant · virulent · spiteful · crabbed · savage · venomous · poisonous · malicious

or is that simply the opinion of powers whose bonds and holds are being dissolved away? a badmouthing of truth you don’t want to hear..?

Moral judgments aside, what Vitriol does is to tell it how it is come hell or high water, authenticity that cuts through pretension and lays things bare, that accepts the prospect of rejection and loss, that is happy to be a bitch.

As I was researching and musing, I reflected upon a period in my early twenties in which I was vitriolic to the point of apoplexy, constantly going off on one, desperately trying to separate myself from the white extremist community I was raised in..

and while I was doing that I found an image of Vitriol which is, to the last detail, a dream image of that same period that pretty much sustained me through it. In my dream, Vitriol sang a song which began, ‘God is at my right and at my left hand side, so who shall I fear?” In the image, which I’ve seen nowhere else in thirty five years, you can see the alchemical rendering of God as the primordial pair, sun/moon on the right and left hand sides.

what the hell…?

What does it mean?

It means being able to burn with something. At the first distillation you will smell like rotten eggs. You know you stink. Lots of shit surfaces. But gradually you become clear and odorless..

or is it that you just get used to the smell?

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

 

Healing Phobic Anxiety.

The knee jerk response to Phobia is to try and overcome it. You want to wrestle it to the floor, all helped along with how irrational and stupid it seems to be, adding the weight of shame to the burden of anxiety.

Phobias are like waking dreams, things that don’t make apparent sense and yet are full of rich symbolism, brimming with meaning for anyone brave enough to refrain from instantly running it through with a pointy stick.

People have very particular phobias about all kinds of things, each of which has a specific set of associations, memories, and life events connected to it that provide context, significance and even the psychological necessity for what appears to be nonsense to the dismissive eye.

Phobos was the Greek God of Fear, and as with all ancient tales and myths we can find out a great deal about ourselves and our afflictions by taking his circumstances to heart. Phobos, twined with Deimos (terror) was the son of Ares, God of War and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Procreation. Phobos personified the fear bought about by war (Ares), and conflict of any kind. Aphrodite was his mother, the dark side of whom is not-being-there. Thirteen kids, countless lovers, a jealous husband whose thing is weaponry…  So fearful Phobos and terrified Deimos were also the boy-Gods of loss.

Phobias are connected to the prospect of conflict and the subsequent loss that is wedded to it. And not just about who gets the window seat, but about whether you get to ride at all.

”Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.” CG Jung.

Much of what we fear is on account of its capacity to change us, to upset identity, to alter the status quo. Its not just that it’s ugly or full of teeth but that the encounter is game changing and you may need to check your name tag for a while thereafter.

Add to this the early encounter with Aphrodite, quietly resentful of being a brood mare, secretly loading the child with unfulfilled ambition, unsatisfied longing, the need to be redeemed by heroic action, already at odds with the child’s own destiny before s/he can crawl….

Fear of conflict is rooted in our survival instincts, which is not about the superficial tussle of who said what to whom, but about whether you exist as a person in your own right or as a part-object in someone else’s world. If asserting your own path through the jungle entails damage to parental love, if you are not the child your parents wanted, the child that would fulfill their hopes and dreams, then the desire to be recognized and the wish to be approved of are going to be in terrible, unbearable, collision with one another.

Our instinct to live up to expectation, even the absurd and ridiculous ones, is hardwired into the psyche because it’s connected to the basic assumption that parental expectations are there to promote survival. I am what I see in mother’s face. So that I must become. People pursue even destructive myths about themselves as if they were the holy grail, in order to maintain the conditions in which they first learned to feel at home.

Author Jean Liedloff  describes how the Chicago Fire dept was snow bound one winter and put out an emergency radio broadcast warning people not to set fire to their homes. House fires dropped to zero. Then the snows melted, the fire trucks got back in service, vigilance was called off and house fires resumed.

When the instinct to individuate collides with the instinct to live up to expectation, it can all be too great to bear, like your home going up in smoke. So it condenses, a super saturated solution of tension suddenly crystalizing around a symbol which now contains all the conflict and angst, and which you can keep at arms length for some of the time.

Phobos’ uniform presence in the myths is that his face was painted onto the shields of great heroes, like Hercules and Agamemnon.

”Staring backwards with eyes that glowed with fire. His mouth was full of teeth in a white row, fearful and daunting”… Hesiod.

Phobia is a shield, protecting heroic vulnerability. Legitimate but unacknowledged suffering retreats behind it, occluding the puzzle of how to be with other people, inherited from both Love and War.

The Psyche’s phobic solution, to parcel these fears down into objects that can be outside is really useful, provided you can stay away from its homing instinct .  Aspects of self taken flight invariably return to roost.

It’s important that Phobos is one of twins. Jung was of the opinion that twins indicated a quickening of consciousness, a doubling of the energies. Many traditions depict twins increasing consciousness or generating life.

The Xingu people of Brazil have stories about the twin brothers Kuat and Iae, who compelled the vulture king Urubutsin to give light to the dark world. Kuat occupied the sun, Iae the moon. Their wakefulness keeps light in the world except for a brief time each month when they both sleep.

According to a myth told in central Australia, twin lizards created trees, plants, and animals to fill the land. Motherless Romulus and Remus created Rome.

This creative aspect of Phobos and Deimos is not all that obvious, but if an affliction is also the means to heal ourselves, if the clue to wholeness is buried somewhere in the symptom, wanting only our patience to emerge, we are then witness to the remarkable ability of the Psyche to both shield itself and leave a paper trail to follow.

This capacity to experience Self-hood beyond our skins is testimony to the fact that the psyche contains the body rather than the usual contrary view.

”Some think the fish contains the sea, I say the sea contains the fish.” CG Jung

This sea contains all kinds of experiences, both the scary variety replete with teeth and palpitations but also those which are sublime and uplifting.

Victor Frankl tells the following story;

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.’”

When you accept that phobias are meaningful, dreamlike scenarios the unraveling of which can actually help deepen self knowledge and compassion, then, in a wider sense and having faced the terror of being but a speck in a grinder, you also make yourself available to the prospect of being redeemed by Nature, the self that exists outside.

Shame and the Shadow of God.

The cognitive dissonance between the miserable and violent Old Testament, Yahweh and the New testament version who was Well Pleased and Benign, has caused some of the flock confusion over the centuries.

Marcion of Sinope 144AD, averred there must be two gods and was driven out of town on a rail for his trouble. They must have been pretty serious about his eviction. Two thousand years later his spiritual descendants, the Ebonites, still live in desert mountain fortresses.

and not just because Yahweh is mean and carries Millenial grudges but because he moonlights as Mammon.

Its not that shocking. He’s split to the point of madness. When the Principle of Relatedness, symbolised by Yahweh’s ex-missus Hokmah/Sophia/Wisdom..

she wot got cast into the brine and done in with mill stones?

the very same. When She disappears back into the ocean, Humanity is easier to lead by the nose because people stop talking to one another from their hearts and have stopped talking to themselves, which, far from being the first sign of madness, is a rather good sign of I and Me having a productive chinwag.

The splash back for Yahweh is that he loses the capacity to talk to himself into the bargain and entertains no awareness of contradictions that give even mere mortals occasional pause for thought.

which is why Eternity is in love with the clocks of Time.

Unfortunately the Beloved has become a little schizoid. One of his dating handicaps is typical of the Narcissistic suitor who denies the relevance of potential rivals whilst being eternally chewn up with envy and vengeance. He’s split in the way crevasses are, the kind that can swallow you up…

the way kids are when their parents say one thing but do another.

One of his best is the claim to be the One and Only whilst pouring vats of divine libido into smiting the children of lesser gods, thereby acknowledging not only their existence but their worthiness of adversarial attention..

and occasional emulation..

It’s behavior that is entirely consistent with the malignant end of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the hallmark of which is continuous aggressive investment in the denigration and humiliation of others in a way that then justifies, for their own good, intrusive correction. So the shop front might be all love and peace and we’ll lead with that but in back is the treadmill of shame.

Guilt for what you have done is small potatoes, shame for what you take yourself to be goes to the bone.

For all our supposed advances we are a culture of  Job’s comforters, the neighbours of biblical Job who got pulverised by Yahweh as part of a bet with the Devil. When Job is reduced to sitting on a dungheap all covered in boils, his mates come over. Instead of commiserating, which you’d expect of even your harshest mate after being whacked by God through no fault of your own, they urge him to search his conscience. You must have done something wrong…

which gradually becomes…

there’s something wrong with you.

You can’t feed a baby on a park bench without people tutting. If your picket fence didn’t get a lick of paint at Easter you’ll be tutted to Thanksgiving. You can’t even die of old age or natural causes anymore. You must have bought it on yourself.

Reggie died, he smoked you know.

He was ninety four

All that phlegm, choked him in the end.

He was ninety four

Clogged up his arteries.

He was ninety four.

Even the positive thinkers and white knights are run through with it. What on earth must you have done in a past life to warrant such misfortune on your head? So life is not allowed to be tragic. Your deserved shame bought it down on you and every blow of life is thus just recompense.

Every body gets what they deserve.

This compulsive shaming is Yahweh moonlighting as Mammon, his secret denied self. Like Nice Man George from the song by Madness who sells newspapers by day and steals underwear from washing lines by night, Mammon’s job is to get you to feel bad about yourself. Bad enough to warrant multi-billion dollar pharma giants to feed Him.

Ostensibly, Mammon is the God of Money and Avarice, but he has degrees of subtlety about him, where it’s more about attitude than what you actually have..

”such goods as one does not need but holds as treasure.’ M Luther.

and even more trixy with this..

”Mammon causes guilt and shame for the treasures that we do have.” C. Dollar

Who are you to shine?

and so the taint of persecutory anxiety.

which is also your fault.

But of course the ultimate form of shaming is random death. Nothing quite like a senseless killing, murders that are allowed to happen, cuts to services that mean an early grave, to make a statement of unworthiness. Life held in the balance, not because you are a threat, but to show that you are not a person anymore.

which is why the most effective way to meet Mammon wherever you may find him is with your own self worth and unshamed humanity.

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