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.

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.

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 Rod of Iron.

Extremism has found a whole new level of crazy in Pennsylvania this week. Sunday worshipers at the  ‘World Peace Sanctuary’ were surprised to bring considerable media attention to their humble gathering by holding a ‘commitment ceremony’ resplendent in capes, crowns and AR-15’s.

Ostensibly, the ceremony was between gun toting couples but if you look at the pictures and listen to the rhetoric its pretty clear that the commitment is between the pious and their hardware, believed to symbolize ‘the Rod of Iron’ from the book of Revelation and Psalms which, in both instances, is about smashing people up.

”Thou shall break them with a rod of iron; thou shall dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel”. Psalm 2

So these people are not just practising their second amendment rights..

and their crowns are not mere decoration..

What kings with Rods of Iron tend to do is subjugate everyone else. When the time is right. When there is a sign. And the AR-15 is not just the means to do it, (the clue is in the name ‘assault rifle’), but the right to do it. When you wield the Rod of Iron you are not only above the law. You are the law. To possess a religious icon or relic bestows legitimacy upon the bearer and shares in its power, for the mere fact of his possession demonstrates the favor of God’s will.

Throughout history there has always been a brisk trade in saint’s toe nail clippings and locks from the heads of martyrs, fragments of the true cross, thigh bones of the prophet….

Dukes and king’s would do battle to house the bones of some venerable saint because it meant that you got to participate in their lofty station. They are a hot line to God. The keeper of the relic possesses the blessing of God and expresses divine prerogatives that regard the rule of law as pots to be broken….

which is what the Rod of Iron does best.

because the faithful not only have the right to bear arms but the right to whale on yo’ ass.

By the way, the Scottish still want the Stone of Scone back, nicked by the English in 1296 and stashed under the throne in Westminster Abbey. Must be very important for 30 generations of kings to sit on…

By identifying with the Rod of Iron, the Pennsylvania parishioners have conferred upon the AR-15 the same kind of magical power as the spear of Longinus, fabled spear that pierced the side of Christ and confers God’s blessing on whoever holds it…an idea so compelling that it was fought over for centuries by a whole string of Kings and Emperors from Charlegmane to Hitler.

The profane killing machine is elevated to sacred sceptre, conferring the spiritual authority of God’s right hand on whoever is swinging it.

which is a tad unfortunate for everyone else because it means you can now be killed for your own good. Like zombies.

So there is a small  and niggly problem with being entirely good way more serious than being mocked by your mates, for if you are ever so pure you cannot help but live in a world that is ever so bad. And then the badness is at your door. Being becomes rooted in paranoia.

If only it could be kept to oneself, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the problem with being ever so Pure is that you are suddenly awash in the worlds’ wickedness, hemmed in on every side..

yea mine enemies compass me round..

and so pretty soon purity and paranoia team up. They go together.

In fact its anger at not being allowed your own destiny, stuffed down since you could crawl, suddenly given an outlet, blessed by the lord, with all that undifferentiated infant rage now given machine guns to cradle.

The Sanctuary of Peace are not random crackpots. They are the thin end of the wedge, the visible end of a more pervasive madness that may not parade but still have their assault weaponry imbued with divine powers.

Ever since Siegfried forged his sword from a fallen star the Self of Western Collective Consciousness has been contaminated by the archetype of the warrior king, consolidated by weaponry identical with the will of God.

Just holding a machine gun makes you drunk. Add to that participation in divine mythology, that you could be the keeper and wielder of Wrath… Its easy enough to get young men to take up arms just to prove their manhood…so being God’s right hand to boot and you have a cocktail its difficult to resist. People think that because you can have sex before marriage these days without being tarred and feathered, we are free of the figure of Yahweh but he’s just gone underground, God’s will sunk into steel and nickel-cadmium.

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 Secret to Dream Work.

I was visiting a girlfriend’s mother for the first time. She was a bad tempered old bat and the evening got even frostier over dinner. I was sat at the head of a long narrow table, the women either side of me facing one another. At the end of a tortuously slow meal full of awkward silences mother leaned forward and asked her daughter in a loud whisper, ‘does he want any more?’

She could just as easily have saved her voice by prodding me in the gut to see if it was full.

I’m right here.

Ask me.

Its laughable, but we often do the same with the figures of our inner worlds when we ask what they mean or try to interpret.

As soon as we ask someone else, ‘what does it mean?, we do two things. Firstly we give away our inner authority. Jung noticed the consistency with which persons would defer an insight into the significance of a dream but when asked what they thought Jung might make of the dream they would be full of ideas.

More importantly we alienate ourselves still further from Dream itself by treating it as though it were a specemin in a petri dish to be intellectually dissected, rather than an ‘inner’ Other with whom to have a living relationship.

Mostly we feel that whatever meaning there might be in dreams has to be extracted by an expert. From the Psyche’s point of veiw this is like bussing in assistance on your wedding night…

and this is not even the bold cry of ‘your interpretation is the best’, because  by becoming the ‘authority’ all you’ve done is snatch the scalpel yourself.

Put the scalpel down.

play nicely.

or..

maybe just nod politely from a safe distance.

Irrespective of its content the main aspect of Dream is relatedness, between one another, self and world, and the crazy gang in your neo-cortex all wanting air time and talking at once.

With the demise of Relatedness not only do we disconnect from one another and the world, but also from the Unconscious as a thing-in-itself.

Yes, its a bit disorienting. Something Unknown is doing I don’t know what.

And it is not inside me.

I am inside it.

I knew a woman who was regularly terrorized by a dream figure that would not leave her in peace. Night after night he would invade her sleep, jolting her awake in a cold and fearful sweat. Eventually she exclaimed in a rather peeved voice, ‘but why? He’s only some part of me..’

‘Perhaps that’s the attitude he’s trying to shock you out of….’

The idea that aspects of a dream are all mere parts of oneself is a pleasing fancy promulgated by folk who regard the Unconscious as as the dustbin of the mind rather than the source of Consciousness itself.

Dream figures may not be part of you at all.

they have there own purpose and push for expression…

nascent potentialities..

birthing awareness…

stuff you were born with, inherited from ancient time, springing whole from the Psyche like Athena, fully armed, from Zeus’ thigh.

The problem with this is that it can make you feel very small. And whatever Dream brings is going to be difficult to digest. By its very nature it presents contrary perspectives that insist on us adjusting our world view.

We resist the deflating encounter with the Emissary of the Deep, not so much by a shooting of the messenger but by failing to bring Her in from the cold.

‘Wanting to know the meaning’ can be a kind of defense against experience. We want Dream to be an object of consciousness rather than something else in the room we have to reckon with.

So there’s a meta-level at back of all the creative ideas you can bring to bear on dream work, its one of simply allowing yourself to be awed by the fact that there is an Other..

not self

that knows self intimately..

and tends self ceaselessly.

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 Tyranny of the Positive.

Part of the problem with the multi-billion dollar ‘think-positive’ franchise is that people are left with the sense that meaning can’t be found in anything else.

‘Positive thinking’ touts itself as awareness raising and life affirming but its  sentimentality can leave folk feeling guilty about feeling guilty and angry about being angry.

The New Age is mostly the Old Age with its prejudices re-arranged. We no longer call it sin, but still get to feel bad about feeling bad.

The implicit doctrine of ‘positivity’ is that if you can’t manage it you’ve failed, and even advocates inauthenticity to attain the goal. Fake it to make it!

Apparently there can be no soulful value to be found in regret, depression, anxiety or mourning over loss.

“How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.” T. Moore.

There is no time to linger and sift through the ashes, its all about moving on and letting go; fleeing, in fact, from life that would sully us with its dirt.

A lot of ‘positive thought’ is newspeak for lack of compassion. Folk are simply giving their refusal to value the leaf mould of life fancy clothes to wear.

Turn that frown upside down!

What’s disturbing is that the philosophy of ‘positive thought’ seems so maternal and affirming but actually much of it is extremely macho and intolerant.

Pain is a weakness, regret is a waste of time, anxiety a worthless affliction and much of the advice of New Age ‘therapists’ little more than a set of judgements about how others ought to live.

And its oh so popular because it gives the bright, cheery narcissistic streak in us all endless permission to lay into the weak or vulnerable inner child that can’t live up to such fine ideals.

“Usually, the main problem with life’s conundrums is that we don’t bring to them enough imagination” T Moore.

Inner conflict then becomes entrenched. We get to be shamed rather than enriched by the shadow, plagued rather than humanised by our imperfections.

”One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious.” Alan Watts.

Whilst it is true that we cannot worry away our problems this is not to say that worry itself is without value. It could be an expression of love or involvement or participation and riding roughshod over it as something ‘negative’ is to fail entirely to find its meaning or value.

There are things in life to be depressed about. Its just inhuman to say otherwise. Becoming depressed can be really important. It acquaints us with the saturnine quality of life, the reality of the ‘old, outmoded dispensation’, and needs to be entered into..

”when we are completly exhausted by the weight of our own identity”. J Foster

Depression is there for a reason. Its not just some blow of fate. Our task is to find its meaning, what threshold of life it presides over, to find its context and be able to say, ‘of course, you feel like that’. Then it will pass. I’ve seen depression lift at the mere consideration that it might have some value…

I came across this piece of spiritual fascism today,

”Any feeling of insufficiency, unworthiness or unloveability is created by thoughts. We don’t experience these feelings when we don’t have the thoughts that create them.” Noah Elkriel.

What nonsense. If people are treated like shit they will feel like shit. The thought ”I feel like shit”, comes after the fact. The mind does not create lousy parents, a nuclear threat, or economic depression.

These are realities that our feeling lives must be touched by if our humanity is to remain viable and if we are to care enough to do anything about it. Trying to block out reality by changing your syntax is like abolishing elephants by refusing to acknowledge them.

”What we resist, persists”. CG Jung

The whole ideology of ‘positive thought’ has some big hitters in support..

”Once the correct ideas characteristic of advancement are grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force that changes the world.” Mao tse Tung.

Thing is, his ‘great leap forward’, cost more lives than those murdered by Stalin and Hitler put together, and puts a little perspective on how positive thought can wind up crushing those its supposed to serve.

Our culture is run through with, ‘je ne regrette rien’. We aspire to live without regret, forgetting that this wish is really a narcissistic desire to remain ever the same, never to grow or to gain the perspective of greater wisdom. It is also to forget that Edith Piaf dedicated her song to the benevolent embrace of the French Foreign Legion and that she herself struggled with lifelong addiction.

Nietzsche too, with his ‘Remorseless Life’, was famed for his intolerance, his contempt for the feminine and the ease with which his philosophy was used by the Nazis.

The fact is that we need to fail, to mourn and to regret.

“It is in the nature of things to be drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives, and give us necessary complexity and depth.” T Moore

Our task is to tend life’s situations, not to ‘improve’ them. For if we fall foul of the fantasy that whatever doesn’t suit us can simply be pushed away or turned on its head then it will materialize into precisely those things we originally wished to avoid.

The Singing, Ringing Tree..

‘The Singing, Ringing Tree’, a modern rendering of a Grimm’s fairy tale, caught my eye because its 1970’s TV series was described as..

” the scariest kid’s TV show ever.” Mark Pickavance.

Paul Whitehouse allegedly wet his pants, though, to be fair, he was only five at the time.

In this scariest of stories the hero is a heroine who saves the day by means that are worthy of our attention. The scary story has much to say about how scary situations are redeemed.

It all begins with a naive Prince calling upon his Kingly neighbor to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The Princess treats him rudely and throws his gifts on the floor, saying that she will only consider him if he finds the fabled Singing, Ringing Tree, whose whereabouts have long been forgotten.

The Prince goes off, crestfallen, searching here and there. Eventually he gets to the very furthest reaches of the kingdom where he finds a stone bridge to a secret land guarded by an evil Dwarf who captures him. The Prince explains himself and the Dwarf perks up. He has just such a Tree and will give it to the Prince provided that it sing and ring as proof of the Princess’ love by sundown or be made his slave.

‘cool..’

the puffed up Prince replies unwisely, ‘or may I be turned into a Bear…’ which was a rather stupid thing to say to a wizardly Dwarf whose best thing is a magical challenge….

because of course the Princess just dismisses him, despite turning up with the Tree and patiently explaining that all she needs to do is love him for said Tree to ring and sing…

The Prince returns to the Dwarf and is turned into a Bear, a spell that can only be broken by the singing of the Tree which is discovered on the stone bridge by the king, sent out like a lickspittle by his tempestuous daughter who has changed her mind and wants it after all.

Phew.

So, our heroine is not very nice to begin with and why should she be? Her father is weak yet still treats her like chattel and the stupid Prince thinks he can buy her like a cheap whore. And where is her Mother? Maybe the ugly side of the Princess is what you get when the Queen is squeezed out of the story.

The loss of the Mother/Queen in Western culture has given rise to inestimable grief in our time, long forgotten like the traumas of infancy. It spills from the couches of psychotherapists, from guilty lips’ confessional whispers. It slides from the slumped shoulders of the masses, crumples us before the blinking, blinkering screen. The longing then embeds itself in stuff, wants ruts and gathers clutter, mourning that is more a vague feeling of devaluation or of somehow being unwanted.

The Mother/Queen is archetypal permission to be what you are without which stony eyed disapproval for daring to follow one’s own destiny can cut deeper than death itself because it is aliveness itself that is under attack.

‘We will do anything to make sure life is secure, even if it is static, rotten  and dead.’ M. Woodman.

To change this means to become conscious of the fear of being fully alive that precipitated it. Rather than face the lonely truth you suppress yourself, kill off imagination and stub toes where redemption may be found.

‘If we can’t relate to metaphors, we are denied access to the archetypal world whereupon it comes into our lives by warped and toxic routes.’ ibid

 

Buried grief appears outside us, banished from persons to stuff, as though the myriad things were like the weaving threads of a comfort blanket, magically fending off loss for as long as we surround ourselves with and add to it. The radiant must-haves and bucket lists serve a purpose beyond mere diversion or amusement.  They make us feel whole again. We can connect with what we’ve given away of our Deep selves momentarily,  which is why people will work themselves into an early grave to lie in the sun five days a year and slit one anothers’ throats for a pimped ride that still takes the same time to get to there.

The king returns to his castle having promised the Bear that he can have the first thing he sees when he gets home in exchange for the Tree. Of course it is the Princess, though she doesn’t care and goes off to plant the tree in the fountain at the center of the garden, ousting the poor goldfish whose home it was, demanding the tree sing but…

it..

just won’t.

Bear arrives to claim his prize, taking on the king’s entire guard, abducting the Princess and making good an almost magical escape.

When they arrive back in the Dwarf’s secret kingdom the Princess demands her feather bed, her golden cup and silver plate. But they are all left behind;  treasures rudely supplanted by mere berries to eat, lousy spring water to drink and horrible soft moss to sleep on.

because what you see is what you get ..

‘your focus determines your reality.’..Qui Gon Jinn

She then demands Bear give her his secret of making animals like him. He says that the problem is she appears arrogant, heartless and obstinate to them. She sarcastically wishes to appear as others see her but doesn’t realize the evil Dwarf is listening in..

and makes it so.

The now ugly and disheveled Princess flies into a rage but there’s no denying her reflection in a clear pool. She realizes that she can only gain the love of creatures by loving them in the first place. Bear has already learned this by his earlier failed efforts to compel the Princess’s affections. She and Bear have something in common. They begin to co-operate and build a shelter together, much to the Dwarf’s annoyance.

Sad at her lack of love the Princess wanders off to find them something to eat. She finds a dove with a broken wing and tends it, tearing a bandage from her dress. She helps free a giant fish that the dwarf has frozen in ice and a deer caught in a snow drift.

While she is gone the Dwarf wrecks her home and blames it on Bear,  manipulating her to go back to her father with false stories of him being on the verge of death.

When the Princess reaches the castle she realizes she’s been tricked, but more importantly out in the garden the Tree is ringing and singing at last..

the beautiful Tree!

Being willing to be depressed and anxious about the right things awakens love in her and the tree knows it

Now she has to get back to Bear whom she realizes is the Prince, but the Dwarf throws up a great barrier of thorns over which she leaps with the help of the Deer she rescued. Then he sends a flood but the Giant Fish comes to her assistance. Then he drops her in a deep ravine but the Birds, whose friend it was that had a broken wing, arrive to fly her out.

Eventually the desperate Dwarf encircles the tree in flames but the brave Princess calmly walks through them to embrace the Tree. Dwarf is no more and Bear is restored.

thank Frigg….

the Norse goddess who has quietly presided over this whole tale despite her exclusion from the guest list, making the salient point that the jewel in the lotus is Relatedness.

In the earliest shamanic Bear cults throughout all Northern cultures, in evidence as long ago as 80,000 BC.,  the bear is uniformly recognized as the  messenger of the Gods….

‘stemming from a time when humans and bears shared the same caves.’ Iou Ghinoiu.

and so they shared identity, too. The Bear is Grandfather, the Old Man, Old Martin, my kin, included within the circle of compassion such that the conflict of hunting them created the first art forms known, ceremoniously placed skulls and bones which served as ritual requests for forgiveness, found calcified in the limestone caves of Carpathia.

Imagine setting out to kill and eat your Grandfather who also happens to be the messenger of the Gods, oh and did I mention claws? Think Sumo wrestler with steak knives. You love him and revere him and want to eat him. If he doesn’t eat you first.

When opposites like this collide something new happens. Perhaps consciousness itself is born of such conflicts.

”a new content that governs the whole attitude, putting an end to the division and forcing the energy of the opposites into a common channel. ” D Sharp

The Princess is saved because she cares about the fact that she doesn’t care about anybody. She realizes that the Bear-man has good in him, that he’s as bewitched as she by the toxic legacy of the rejecting King and his shadow the evil Dwarf..

The King is weak but more dangerously he is split, between being identified with his daughter in unhealthy symbiosis, momentarily joining the quest as would a romantic suitor, whilst using her in as a bargaining chip in his promise to the Bear, acting out the loss of her in what is really nothing more than a cheap bet,

Being king is a mixed bag and not just because you have to fend off every one who is not, but because divine right is a euphemism for pact-with-the-devil…. causing you to kill what you love.

So actual enemies are the least of your worries. Identification with the gods is going to make you paranoid. You need magical protection and plenty of it. Making a deal with an enchanted Bear-man who can take out your entire guard seems.. expedient.

and easily worth a mere daughter.

In the Viking times that spawned such stories, suitably anxious kings,  had as their immediate magical protectors, Bear-men, Berserkers. The word ‘berserker’, comes from the old Norse, ‘ber-sekr’ meaning ‘bear shirt’, which is a literal description of how these howling warriors would go into battle, without mail or armor. The purpose of their battle rage was to ‘hamask’ to change into the Bear itself and tear into the enemy’s ranks like beasts.

And even though they tended to cut down friend and foe alike, which might put a crimp into your victory pint, they were as honored as they were shunned, and  generally had productive social roles other than being really handy in a punch up. They were boat builders and poets too.

”This fury, which was called berserkergang, occurred not only in the heat of battle, but also during laborious work. Men who were thus seized performed things which otherwise seemed impossible for human power. ” D. Howard.

which makes you wonder if the las Vegas shooter wasn’t a frustrated composer, a Beethoven that hung out at the Mall instead, someone whose daimon became a demon because he had nothing to create, like the man who stubs his cigarette out on his girlfriend’s arm to give her something to remember him by.

In our story the Bear-man and the Princess build a house together. It’s the beginning of their redemption because they do so despite brutish bear behavior and the princess’ foul appearance.

The house is a symbol of ‘both-and’, rather than ‘either-or’, inner space you can stretch out in with Wild and Ugly, where meaning can be found in metaphor,

‘The essential feature of transitional phenomenon is a quality in our attitude when we observe them.’  D. Winnicott.’

which is actually a very curious thing to say.

and not just because quantum physics agrees

but because attitude is a choice to make rather than a thing to have.

which means you are free..

if you like.

The Princess’ choice to love has nothing to do with her situation. She cares for whatever crosses her path and does so without thought of return. When push then comes to shove it is precisely these relations forged with her inner world that manage to defeat the regressive forces that prefer her to be dependent on outward powers.

The evil Dwarf surrounds the Tree with flame but she walks straight through it. She has developed a new relationship with suffering and has accepted that it is part of love. She no longer shies away from it and so it cannot really hurt her.

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.