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.

Kibbles for Schrodinger’s Cat.

Scientist Steven Weinberg says that the corrosion of religious belief by science is a good thing because of what an awful God it is that’s shared by Christians and Muslims alike…

…but while his character analysis may be spot on it does tend to make a neurosis of anything other than ego based psychologies and ignores discoveries in quantum physics that seem to demonstrate that there is something truly mysterious, mystical, about the relationship between Consciousness and Matter, between Time and Eternity.

‘The Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that.’ ― Erwin Schrödinger.

just as the person who is fifty experiences themselves as the same person as they were at forty no matter what has happened in the interim.

Quantum theory uses an intertesting term, the ‘quantum superposition’ in which an atom can pre-exist in a combination of multiple states corresponding to different possible outcomes. Curiously, this is also true of Consciousness.

”The unborn work in the psyche is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself,” CG Jung

Shrodinger’s cat experiment, in which a cat in a box would be killed if a random particle was detected by a gieger counter and could therefor be considered both alive and dead until you’d checked up on it, was meant as a mockery of the prevailing ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ which supports the idea of quantum superposition and can demonstrate the truth of it with experiments during which light behaves as a wave or as a particle depending on whether the experiment is being observed at the time…. Even if it is being merely monitored by detection equipment…

matter playing peek-a-boo…

Consciousness, too, exists in multiple, contradictory and sequential forms that seem to have very little to do with one another not unlike a recent scientific discovery which has determined that some species of dragonfly shares no DNA with its nymph. At some point in the metamorphosis the organic state of the nymph not only dies to itself, it is reduced to its most basic atomic constituents…..

from which will emerge a three gram jump jet.

For those who have a Newtonian point of veiw, life is like being a dot on a page. It cannot imagine a line any more than a line could imagine a page, or a page a book. Yet what seems particular to all life is this incomprehensible transition from one kind of life to another.

Something I console myself with when I’ve lost perspective in all the chaos, is that whether science or religion is right in their eternal wrangle about the origin of life, it is an indisputable fact that at some moment, from a ball of millenial flame now cooled sufficiently for rain to fall and support life…

Life did just that, and at 2.34pm one Tuesday..

Life blinked on.

Consciousness too, blinks on from multiple potential states beyond our comprehension and navigates a passage through the world chiefly by virtue of the attitude held towards that quantum superposition from which it emerged..

and whether or not it allows itself to be altered by involvement.

An example of quantum theory at work in fairy tales can be found in the comparable stories of, ”The Devil’s Golden Hairs,” and ‘Brother Lustig,’ both of which involve an encounter with the quantum wave function of Hell.

In the first story a boy is born with a lucky caul and a prophecy that he would marry the daughter of the king who just happened to be around. The king took Lucky Hans and threw him in a river to die but he was saved by a Miller who then raised him as his own.

Years later the king passed by the Mill. By chance he learns of the boy’s identity and sends him to the Queen with a letter saying, ‘kill the bearer of this note.’ But the boy gets lost and wanders into a thieves’ den where he falls asleep. The thieves read the letter, feel pity for him and secretly change it for one saying, ‘marry this lad to the princess’.

And so it was.

When the king finds out he has been tricked he’s enraged and sends his new son-in-law to fetch three golden hairs from the Devil’s head, thinking he could not possibly return.

On the way the prince encounters three gate keepers. The first asks, ‘why does the spring here not gush with wine as it once did?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘but I’ll try to find out.”

The next one asks, ‘why does the tree of golden apples no longer give fruit?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘but I’ll try to find out.’

The next is the ferryman to Hell. ‘Why must I be the eternal ferryman ?’

‘I don’t know’, he says, ‘but I’ll find out’.

When he gets to Hell the Devil is out, but his Grandmother is home. She’s friendly when she finds out that he’s there to save his marriage, when he’s transparent and straight with her. She turns our hero into an ant which she hides in the folds of her skirts having promised to help him get the hairs and the answers to his questions..

Prince as Ant has acheived what the Tao calls action through non-action. He acknowledges the primacy of the quantum superposition to take care of the situation.

The Devil arrives tired and grumpy. He falls asleep on Grandmother’s knee and when he’s snoring she tweaks out a hair. He wakes startled. ‘So sorry,’ she says. ‘I was dreaming of a spring that no longer gushes with wine.’

‘Nor will it,’ replies the Devil, ‘for as long as the toad sits upon the source.”

He drifts off and she tweaks a second hair. ‘So sorry,’ she says as he starts up, ”I was dreaming of a once beautiful tree of golden apples that now has even lost its leaves…’

”and it will die entirely if the mouse continues to gnaw at the root…’

A third hair and the Devil leaps furiously to his feet. ”Sorry, so sorry, I was dreaming of a ferryman who was imprisoned to his task…

‘so will he always be till he hands the oar to another,’ grumbled the Devil and wandered off to a spot less infested with grandmothers.

And so our hero returns victorious with the three hairs and the secrets of the various afflictions… and bags of gold from the grateful gatekeepers.

‘Can I have some? asks the wicked king.

Sure, says the prince, ‘go ask the ferryman for his oar.’

The kind of consciousness a person has, influences their material fate.

This is not a crude, ‘everything happens for a reason’, nor even that we might make meaning of tragedy. Its more that Fortune favours the brave. Fortune was a Goddess before the church got hold of her and made her an attribute of knights. In our story, the youth who experiences himself as fortunate catches Her attention. In her guise as Grandmother, the quantum superposition, or archetype, enables him to realise a useful outcome because he’s motivated by his heart and by the Principle of Relatedness, which is her thing too.

So all goes well.

Not so for ‘Brother Lustig’, who, like Schrodinger, had a hard time with the Copenhagen Interpretation, that potential states can exist simultaneously on the threshold of the phenomenal world and that what happens next is down to how they are perceived.

Er, so, reality as well as beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

You can see why someone lurking with philosophical intent might have a problem with that.

Brother Lustig can’t co-operate with Saint Peter, his travelling companion, his wave function, who goes to great lengths to make sure Brother Lustig does okay in life but is thwarted by our hero’s own ineptitude and bad grace. The Self, the combined multiple states of a quantum system, has healing and energising properties. St Peter brings a man back to life with just the right salve and mysterious ability, but Brother Lustig, the self involved ego, is more interested in the reward of a lamb dinner than the miracle he’s witnessed.

Brother Lustig eats the only part of the lamb that Peter wants, the heart, and then lies about what he has done despite ample opportunity and considerable pressure to come clean. To make things worse he then tries to resurrect the Princess of the land who’d just died, by the same means as Saint Peter the day before.

Of course he is just inflated. He hasn’t got the knack for it and fails. Saint Peter has to step in at the last moment and pull him out of trouble. He even gives him a magic knapsack which could contain anything he wished to make sure he should never be hungry before he departs but Brother Lustig is unimpressed.

”I am very glad you have taken yourself off, you strange fellow, I shall certainly not follow you.’ Grimm.

Eventually Brother Lustig dies and comes once more face to face with St Peter at the Pearly Gates who is reluctant to let him in.

‘At least let me return the knapsack,’ he says and passes it through the gate. No sooner has St Peter taken it than Brother Lustig, thinking himself clever, wishes himself into it. St Peter tutts quietly and places the bag in a corner.

‘Tis strange how some want their Eternity. The power was only to wish things into the bag. Now you will have to stay in there.’

”What happens to a man has something to do with him.” CG Jung.

We create our reality.

and do so by refraining from trying to be the author of it all the time.

”One must not wish to leap over everything and penetrate directly.” Lu Yen

Lucky Hans has a way of rolling with life by accepting his dependence on it. He lets himself be lost and need help. He willingly takes a backseat in Grandmother’s folds while she does the work. He has faith in the Universe because he knows it will offer him the face that he shows it.

”The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.’ CG Jung.

I was once on a train which was bound to my destination but via a different route to the inbound journey. The conductor points out that its the wrong ticket and that I could be liable to a fine and the cost of another ticket.

The situation was entirely absurd and of course I could have protested the unfairness of it all since I was clearly just making a return trip. The route was irrelevant.

But the guy had a job to do.

So I handed him the ticket and crawled into the folds of Grandmother’s skirts.

He looked at me, looked at the ticket, clipped it, and handed it back.

A quantum system, British Rail conductor, remained in his Quantum Super-position until interacted with or observed by the external world, BR passenger, at which time his wave function collapsed into a definite state,

”causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement.” from the Copenhagen Interpretation

The situation emerged as a result of how it is measured. I knew he would do the right thing, and he did.

”Consciousness is fundamental. I regard matter as derivative of consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Max Plank.

So we have to stop it already with all the what-is-the-meaning-of-life? What life might mean presupposes that we know what it is…

The followers said to the Master, ‘Tell us in what way our end will be. The Master replied, ‘Have you therefor discerned the beginning in order that you seek after the end? For in the Place where the beginning is, there will be the end. Happy is he who stands boldly at the beginning. He shall know the end, and shall not taste death. Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. logia 18.

My teacher George Brown used to say, ‘don’t get caught in the (client’s) story’. Its even easier to get caught in our own story and, like Brother Lustig, to get mesmerised by the drama.

Roberto Assagioli, founder of Psychosynthesis, likened the psyche to an orchestra where there was the various facets of personality represented by different instruments, the conductor, the organising ‘I’, and then the Self, the composer.

What he left out was the audience, the all important observers of the experiment, since music is meant to be enjoyed after all. They, by their appreciation, draw the utmost from the performers who in turn forge admiration from envy and abundance from gratitude.

Teachings from Thomas.

The Gospel of Thomas was buried in the desert at Nag Hammadi along with other sacred texts by gnostic monks fleeing persecution. They were hidden for safekeeping, in the hope that someone of their number would survive the wrath of powers already Orthodox and Deadly by the fifth century; not averse to giving any-one they didn’t like the chop.

None returned, though the books themselves…

”lay unmolested until such a time as the established Churches lost the power to be able to subdue them.” H. MacGregor Ross.

They were discovered ‘accidentally’ by someone who thought to himself, in all the vastness of the unforgiving desert, that this particularly parched and arid spot looked like a perfect place to do a bit of a recreational digging…

in 45* of desert heat.

Curiously the book itself is about persecution, the persecution of ourselves and how this leads to our treatment of one another. It also tells us quite explicitly how to resolve this….

and it doesn’t involve being good.

which is why the church wanted to get their hands on it.

These undisturbed ‘logia’, straight from the mouth of the Master, are undoctored by millenia of fiddling kings. And they record, in typical Gnostic style, just how entirely dismissive he was of the Establishment.

”Grapes are not harvested from thorn trees, nor are figs gathered from thistles.” logia 45

sometimes he’s a bit less polite..

”for they are like dogs in the manger for neither does he eat nor does he allow the oxen to eat.” logia 102

and sometimes, plain insurrectionist..

”I will overturn this house… logia 71.

But what really made the Church at the time want to kill him and the Church that then bore his name to twist the story into such a butchered parody, is what he has to say about sin and redemption, the mere thought of which would quickly have had him roasting over an Inquisitional fire had they been around at the time.

He doesn’t even want us to be sorry..

”Do not lie and do not do what you hate.” logia 6.

His philosophy (philo-Sophia) is not about imposed morality, or sanctioning behaviour, or codified law. Be square with yourself and with the Image, the Other, within.

At-one-ment, right now.

and so buying your way into a future heaven on the basis of good behaviour becomes laughably like prisoners applying for parole..

‘If those who guide your Being say to you, ‘behold, the Kingdom is in the heavens, then the birds of the sky will precede you.’ logia 3

no-where to go, nothing to do…

”The Kingdom is in your centre, and it is about you.’ logia 3

It turns out that redemption is not only available without having to weigh your sins in the balance or having to go to church on Sunday. It is actually more a matter of fulfilling your own destiny, of living out your undivided potential, whatever it is..

”If you bring out what is inside you, what is inside you will save you. If you do not bring out what is inside you, what is inside you will kill you.’ logia 70

Sin is then the failure to become oneself,

They said to him ‘let us pray today and let us fast!’ Jesus said, ‘what is the sin that I have committed or in what have I been overcome? When the bridegroom comes forth from the bridegrooms chamber, then let them fast and let them pray’. logia 104

According to the uncensored Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven is attained by resolving inner dividedness…

”If two make peace with each other in this single house they will say to the mountain ‘move’ and it shall move. logia 48

There is no gaining of favour, no propitiation, no sacrifice, no prayer, no offering, no special diet, since this in itself already creates a world of divisions between one thing and another and therefor misses the point. Rather we have to turn to the Image within, unmediated by any prejudice or external opinion and try to digest its import without being swallowed up in turn.

”Happy is the lion which the man will eat… and abominated is the man whom the lion will eat.” logia 7

This means that we must take everything as it comes and experience our circumstances as independant of salvation. To favour one set of circumstances over another is just to go back into division. So when someone from the crowd shouts out to him..

”fortunate is the womb that bore you and the breasts that suckled you…”

he replies..

”There will be days when you say fortunate is the womb that did not conceive.’ logia 79

Jesus is pointing to what alchemists centuries later would call Unus Mundus, One World, a coniunctio oppositorium, the collapse of Division in on itself from contradiction into paradox, atonement but with a hint of death since the experience of the Image within is always deflating, crucifying.

”A death blow is a life blow to some, who till they died did not alive become. Who , had they lived did most surely die, but when they died – vitality began.” Emily Dickinson.

The death blow is the bloodied nose of ego realising it isn’t king of its own castle but it is also the end of division, of alienation from Self and others.

Its as if we are three and bickering when suddenly a competent adult steps into the room and calmly takes charge. And that person is you.

Division on a collective scale is at its most evident in our war-mongering but there is an aspect of modern atrocity that deserves special mention. The body counts and broken buildings are all too evident and its that which catches our attention. Less obvious but at the core of Western alienation is that we just don’t care.

Descendants of the survivors of the the Armenian holocaust, a genocide of 1.5 million people just a century ago, all say that preventing this terrible catastrophe from slipping into historical obscurity is a full time job. No-one wants to know. There are only 22 nations that acknowledge it even happened. The US is not among them.

So why all the denial?

You would think that given that the Armenians were Christians savagely killed by Muslim extremists that Western allies were at war with at the time, would be all the excuse needed to impliment, forever, the overt foreign policy of unashamed war profiteering our civilisation covertly enjoys.

But the true horror of this genocide was in the silence that accompanied it.

No-one went to help them. We didn’t care enough to intervene. And that’s why no-one talks about it. Because its a massive blot on our collective conscience. To think that one and a half million lives came second to diplomatic manouvering that resulted in European powers actively voting against intervention on behalf of the Armenians, out of the concern that it would increase Russia’s influence in the region is just appalling. It’s inhuman.

‘…abominated is the man whom the lion will eat.” logia 7

Psychologically, when we split ourselves in order to identify with one polished corner of the p;syche we are bound to see our demons out in the world that then gives us riteous leave to regress, to do as we please, or to do nothing.

Consumers become the consumed..

And so we can suck our teeth and say isn’t it terrible what we failed to do a hundred years ago. Weren’t our forebears awful? Feeling all pimped for our piety forgetting that right now exactly the same thing is going on in Yemen. An entire people are being starved to death by Western backed blockades and arms deals.

It’s allowed.

Why?

Because folk are too divided to care..

‘On the day you were One you created the two, but then being two, what will you do?’ logia 11.

The divisions are endless, race, creed, dogma. But they’re inner divisions too, from our own shadows, from the inner image, from the mediation of the Divine Feminine.

‘for my mother has begotten me, but my true Mother gave me life.’ logia 101

and so whilst its true that we have to stomach for just how much inner division and lethargy actually exists, so too does it seem to be the inevitable consequence of a culture that is not simply plagued with the unbridgeable tif between Yahweh and Lucifer, nor even the ugly divorce scene between Him and..

DON’T MENTION HER NAME..

Sophia…,

LKJHGFUFYKDTKYTDFKYTDF

..but that the split within his own psyche between Old and New Testament is diagnostically scary because Gods, like people, tend to regress when they are under pressure. And Yahweh is not a pretty sight when he’s in his terrible twos.

What can we do?

Name what is going on.

‘happy is the man who knows when and where robbers will creep in, so that he will arise and gather strength and prepare for action before they come.’ logia 103

M. L. von Franz gives the example of telling herself that the book she was writing was a load of rubbish and should be abandoned. After some while she realised that she didn’t think that at all, but that something very persuasive, yet hidden inside her, really did.

When your robber arrives sit him down and ask him what he wants. Remember to be polite.

The White Snake.

Once upon a time there lived a king who seemed terribly wise. Nothing happened that he did not know about. It was as though he heard all the news of the land in the wind.

This king had a strange custom. Every evening a secret dish would be bought to him at dinner that no-one could see him eat. Even his trusted servant didn’t know what it was though one night he could not contain his curiosity. He took the covered remains of the dish to his room and had a peek. The dish was a white snake which the king had only nibbled at.

The now not-so-faithful servant took a nibble himself and suddenly he heard a great chattering outside his window. Two sparrows were in great discussion of all the things they had seen in the woods and fields. He could understand every word. The morsel of white snake had given him the power to understand the language of animals.

On that very same day the queen lost her ring. The poor servant was the first to come under suspicion and was compelled either to produce the thief or be executed. He went down into the courtyard in despair and while he wondered what on earth to do he overheard two ducks having some conversation..

‘Oh my stomach feels rough,’ said the one, ‘I guzzled up the queen’s ring by mistake after she dropped it into the moat from her window.’

Immediately the servant grabbed the duck and took it to Cook who served it to the queen and the ring was discovered. The servant was offered a great reward but settled for a horse and some provisions to go a-wandering.

One day he saw three fishes stuck in reeds at the bank of a river. Feeling their plight and hearing their distress he freed them. ‘We will remember and repay you,’ they said.

Further on he heard a tiny voice complaining at the horse’s heavy feet and looked down to see the Ant King lamenting his people being crushed. So the servant moved his horse to the side of the road. ‘We will remember and repay you,’ said the Ant King.

Further still he came across three raven chicks that had been rejected from the nest. Their hungry crying was so piteous that he killed his horse and fed it to them.

‘We will remember and repay you,’ they said.

Now he had to use his own legs and eventually arrived at the walls of a great city where he heard it announced that the Princess there would marry whoever could perform a task of great difficulty devised by her father, the king. The servant immediately volunteered though his heart sank when he saw that the task was, to fetch up a gold coin thrown into the sea. He sat on the shore lamenting when suddenly the three fishes he’d saved showed their heads.

‘We said we’d help you,’ they said and spat the coin onto the shingle.

But the princess wasn’t happy. She spread eight bushels of millet over a field and demanded he collect them all up by dawn. The servant despaired over the impossibility of it all and just waited for dawn and death, but when the dawn came the job was done.

‘We said we’d help you,’ said Ant King.

The Princess was impressed but not enough to stop wanting to kill him. She gave him one final and ridiculously impossible task, to fetch an apple from the Tree of Life at the End-of-the-World.

Our languishing servant sets off and wanders through three kingdoms looking for the Tree as best he could but to no avail. Eventually he collapses, exhausted, by a stream and settles down to sleep. He hears a rustling in the branches and a golden apple falls into his hands. Three ravens fluttered down..

‘We said we’d help you,’ they said.

He takes the apple to the princess and they both take a bite….

It’s said that curiosity killed the cat because curiosity initiates us across a threshold that means the end of an old way of life. The servant’s mouthful of White Snake is more than the betrayal of his lord. It is the betrayal of his own set role in life and the disruption necessary to growing up.

Moreover the White Snake has powers. The capacity to understand the language of animals is symbolic of the hero being able to ‘hear’ the impulses, the intuitions and the wisdom of his own deep Psyche. It is the moment when you realise you are not master/mistress of your own house.

My analytic grandmother, M L von Franz tells the story of a dream which constituted her first encounter with the objective Psyche, the Other, so impactful that she curled her knees under her chin and stayed in bed all day.

Such an encounter with the Unconscious is life changing. Outwardly it is often by virtue of dubious others who are bound to enviously attack the person who has found something seemingly unique to himself. The servant is accused of taking the queen’s ring, a motif rooted in Adam and Eve’s theft of the awakening apple.

In a sense the accusation that one must have found such good fortune by illicit means is justified, since advances in consciousness are to the cost of herd membership and its filial obligations, not to mention the gauntlet thrown at their feet. Individuation and folk going their own way depletes the collective storehouse and challenges collective hegemony.

not a popular choice.

”Every step towards greater consciousness creates a kind of Promethean guilt. Through self knowledge the Gods are robbed of their fire. The one who has ‘stolen’ the knowledge becomes alienated from others…” D Sharp.

Despite proving his innocence the servant still has to leave and, like Parsifal, goes wandering the world.

He is bound to feel be-wildered and disoriented as he sets out on his journey. Not only has he undergone a Copernican revolution of consciousness but his values have also changed. The Principle of Relatedness which has been awoken in him cannot endure the cries of the poor Fish trapped in the reeds. He has to do something. Increases in consciousness do more than constitute the capacity to ‘hear’, they also demand that we take action in line with what we know.

The vignettes about the Fish, the Ants and the Ravens all have this quality of relatedness to them, of carefully paying attention to the contents of the unconscious. The episode with the ravens adds something further. He sacrifices his horse to feed them. He gives up his own resources in a seemingly counter-intuitive way, he relinquishes an attitude that brings him down from his ”high horse”.

The scene of the Ant King and his thousands of subjects collecting up the millet seed is reminiscent of and has its roots in the story of Eros and Psyche who is tasked by Hera to separate out thousands of seeds by morning.

”there is still something which can rescue one. The unconscious is not only chaos but also order…’ ML von Franz.

Speaking of the role played by the ants as agents of the Self in the story of Psyche and Eros, von Franz says..

”The ants have mysterious unexplored qualities, they just collaborate.” ibid

but only in the wake of a brush with death.

Though he wanders and searches the three kingdoms the Apple cannot be found. The philosopher’s Stone only appears Deo concedente, by the will of the Gods, once we have well and truly exhausted the project of being author of our own meaning.

The gift of the Ravens is a kind of Manna, the experience of a redeeming intervention. Something Unknown is doing I don’t know what. Victor Frankl tells the story of a dying girl in Auschwitz who, in the moments before her death, gave thanks for the tree she could see out of the window.

The Prince and Princess eat the Apple. The gifts of the Unconscious have to be embodied. They have to be both experienced and then expressed in some way in the world.

‘When you have a big dream you have to tell it to the People. Black Elk.

A big dream of my own was that I was backpacking in a forest with friends. Bit by bit we lost our way. Then we began to lose each other. The group shrank. Then I started to lose my stuff. My boots were gone. I lost my pack somewhere, then my bearings. I was alone and naked and stumbling about in the dark.

Then there was sound ahead, beating drums, a glow in the forest, drums and dancing, wild frenzied dancing and in the middle a great pillar covered with vines and grapes the size of plums which all shook down. A great voice said, ‘Eat, so you may enter the kingdom of Heaven and live forever.’ Then I realised that the pillar was a finger and the voice came from the mouth of that to whom the finger belonged.

So getting lost is not just inevitable. It is required. The servant has to wander the three kingdoms. We do way too much to combat stress. We construe it negatively rather than seeing it as grist to the mill, part and parcel of the three kingdom’s rich tapestry. When did you ever grow when life was easy?

Once in a while I remind myself that dreams do not simply ‘mean’ something. They are help.

”We said we’d help you”, they said.

Like the Ants they work at night, ordering, gathering, suffusing us with meaning.

The belief that the Psyche is whatever we know of it is the deathknell of aliveness. Knowing you don’t have the answers…

and perhaps not even the right questions,

and that much of life is supposed to be a mystery, is precisely what evokes wonder and appreciation. You’ve gotten sufficiently out of your own way to make space for that which is looking for you, while you have been so busy looking for it.

The Sin Eater.

Whether its Vampires, Frankenstein’s Monster or the Walking Dead, Modernity has a fascination with those who manage to negotiate the razor’s edge of what should be a pretty clear divide between sending out for pizza and dialing 911.

The confusion is then complicated by the question of which realm we are headed towards once the issue of whether we are sufficiently dead to qualify has been adequately settled.

Trying to exert influence over this might seem like a waste of time given the amount of life’s unheeded prayers, but up until the Industrial Revolution it was not uncommon for those at Death’s door, either side of it was good, to employ a ‘Sin-eater’ in order to swing the odds.

The Sin-eater, a person otherwise shunned by the community and living at its fringes, was tasked with taking on the sins of the departed/ing in order to facilitate their passage to a better place. This they did by ritually eating special bread over the corpse/to-be, and washing down their wickednesses with milk or cider.

Tradition dictated that a fee of sixpence also be levied. Even Sin-eaters have to live..

..for now.

The sin-eater represents something for which we seem to have no contemporary equivalent, the collision of love and hate that wishes the departed/ing safe passage whilst admitting the need to bus in a little extra help.

Dining on damnation had to be the world’s worst freelance gig; but the important thing is that the practice spoke to an implicit consensus that a person’s soul is not as discreet an entity as we might like to think.

We live in a soup of psychic material that can make it difficult to determine who’s ‘stuff’ belongs to who before the veil is even lifted, assuming that whatever we are suffering from must be the product of our own experience.

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‘It is unsettling to imagine experiencing feelings and thinking
thoughts that are in an important sense, not one’s own.’ [Ogden
1992].

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It nevertheless remains that in early life, and for those who remain there too long, the contents of our inner world are readily..

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‘engendered in and processed by another. . . thereby relieving the self of the effects of containing them.’[ibid]

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A man came to see me complaining of depression. He seemed more henpecked than depressed. It turned out his wife had sent him to see me and left him on the same day. It was too coincidental. She had offloaded something on this man and then fled the scene to her new life.

I enquired about the ‘depression’. ‘Oh’, he said, ‘my wife told me it was depression and she is usually right about these things’. ‘What about the wife’s depression?’, I asked. He seemed surprised, ‘well, she used to be depressed when I first met her but she is much better now.’ I suggested to him that this might be because he was now carrying it for her.

He was not depressed but he was easily loaded down. We could meet to speak about that if he wished. He perked up. Next week he told me that when he got home there was a message from her on the answer phone, left at the time of our session, to say that she had suddenly felt overwhelmed with depression and desperately needed to talk to him! His house cleaning had immediately returned her chickens to roost.

Psychic material can be traded. Even Jesus dying for your sins is the first line in an arrangement that will involve crippling remorse and loads of being sorry..

‘Christian children all must be mild obedient good as he..’

People making amends for one another’s sins is as old as the hills. We fear its evil twin Contamination just as much, and with good cause, as any afternoon visit to the asylum will happily confirm.

madness is contagious.

and if you work in the place you will quickly be accosted by your own delusions of grandeur.

Karen Horney says that children deal with trauma in one of three ways, by either going Towards, Away or Against the object of their suffering. Those who chose to go ‘towards’ are often highly empathic in adult life. They are the backbone of the caring profession, teaching, public service.

But they are also prone to contagion by parental/collective ideals, undigested by anyone else in the family, that they carry or live out for Others as one of life’s crosses or as fate, but whose? The willingness to please can mean being a host to unbridled parental demons that have a way of sucking the life out of you.

Sometimes it can kill.

I spent three tours of duty subjugating already impoverished people and getting shot at before I realised I was high on something that had nothing to do with me. It had to do with a father who’s son was to be maryred for his country according to some hidden narrative. I was a bit player in an ancient drama. My death was so assured in his scripted mind, his debt to God so complete in its payment, that he even sold my stuff.

The adaptive child does not stop at being good. They are compelled to collude with unspoken parental expectations that the child live out a certain ideal, quite often something the parent has not managed to do for themselves and so needs to acheive by proxy.

What can develop is the riteous stance of having fulfilled a host of obligations fueled by the simmering fury of never having been truly seen or witnessed…

wiv croutons of centralised power and palling up to the gods..

Somehow whatever system seems to be in power it always winds up with autocrats playing god. Turkey has just voted to put all its powers in the hands of one man, having fought for centuries to escape the grip of autocracy. Within a generation of liberty, equality, fraternity, France had an emperor. How does it happen?

It happens because that’s the way we like it. Rulers who think they are God are our style. It means that we can do it too.

The danger is that if you give a narcissist an army he will be obligated to pick a quarrel with his neighbours, with anyone…and not just for the adrenalin, the sure sense of purpose so necessary to inner chaos, nor even the kudos or the booty, the noble regime change nor base rape and pillage, not even the laurels of victory themselves but for the sake of being the right hand of God.

The possibility that identities can overlap helps us to understand why we put people into power who are bound to abuse it, since what we suffer at their hands is outweighed by permission to take example from them, to identify with them and play God in our own small way.

Watching Kim jong Un’s parade last week I realised that what so scared me about the tyrant was that his face beemed with spontaneous joy at what his heart knew was entirely orchestrated, by him.

Thousands of people moved like chess pieces but made to seem as though they had just spilled onto the pavement from the 9.05 to Pyongyang, all carefully wearing slightly different suits and the occasional shirt sleeve to create the illusion of a spontaneous and prosperous people all exuberant for the great leader, thronging through town, though also all in rows and waving like they had been taught it by a drill instructor.

Kim had created a reality so perfect in its conception that he was taken in by it himself. Isn’t that what God does? The people, all in mystical colour coded union with one another, individual trials and tribulations washed away by identification with the Great Leader who binds them to the Gods whilst propitaiting and gaining protection from them on the People’s behalf.

And yes, of course, the people are oppressed, but you have to wonder, given that whether its Mao in Communist China, Hitler in Fascist Germany or Stalin in Socialist Russia, the similarities seem greater than their differences. Which suggests an X in Humanity’s meaning-of-life equation…

until you recall that playing God is encouraged by the glorious leader and that sins can be traded.

provided you have the coin.

Transforming Envy.

Years ago and far away there lived a young lad called Sanji whose home was above the local Bakery in his village. Every morning Sanji would sit on his balcony and savour the delicious aromas that wafted up, cinammon and chocolate, fresh bread and fancy pastries. A myriad wonderful smells swirled in the street and curled in through the windows.

The Baker, Sanji’s landlord, was a miserable curmudgeon who begrudged Sanji his youth and vitality, his enthusiasm for everything, his happiness at so little. For it was not just the smell of his wares that Sanji so brazenly delighted in but Life itself. Every occasion seemed like a wonder to the ignorant brat. Summer heat and Winter chill couldn’t dampen his annoying smile and so the Baker fumed at Sanji and hardened his heart.

Many years had passed since the Baker found any joy in life. He secretly envied the lad his carefree spontaneity, his faith in a life unencumbered by all the pressures that seemed to beset the Baker so much so that he could no longer enjoy the taste of his own bread let alone the smell of it on the breeze.

One morning, a Wednesday, and therefor spicy jam tart day, Sanji was taking in the morning on his balcony as usual when the Baker stormed up the steps and banged on his door.

”You can’t be enjoying all those smells for free you know,” he shouted. ”I want seven gold pieces in arrears for all the smells you’ve enjoyed at my expense”.

‘Dude, you can’t be serious.’

So the Baker took him to the Magistrate who listened to both sides and scratched his beard throughout. Eventually he said, ‘Sanji, go find seven gold pieces, we will reconvene in the morning”.

Sanji felt stumped by the unfairness of everything but towards the wee hours he realised it was more that he felt so deeply sad for the Baker who would not be a richer man for the seven gold pieces he’d spent the evening trying to rake together.

Next morning they both showed up before the Magistrate who gestured to Sanji for the bag of gold. He shook it before the Baker,”how do you like that then Baker?” he asked.

”Oh, I like it just fine”, said the Baker, reaching out for the chinking purse.

”Good,” said the Magistrate, ”because that is your payment.”

”What?”

”Fair’s fair, the sound of gold for the smell of cakes. Dismisssed.”

The key to understanding envy is that it is a defense against experience. The Baker splits his vibrant yet vulnerable and heavily defended inner life onto Sanji and then persecutes him for it, since as much as it relieves him of the burden of longing so does it rob him of sponteneity and the possibility of rediscovering himself. So Sanji seems like a thief, not just of smells but of love and life itself. Much paranoia on behalf of the Narcissistic character is at this level of giving away responsibility for personal destiny to seemingly powerful Others who the person then feels has robbed them…

The problem with growing out of Narcissism is that it leads you straight into the experience of the Other, who is bound to attract all your demons and shine a light on all your imperfections, failings and losses. Envious spoiling by intellectually abstracting something so as not to feel it like a punch in the guts seems inevitable, but it does allow one’s sanity to stray. The Tulipmania of Holland in the 18th century is a good example. ‘Special’ bulbs were worth small fortunes, until someone woke up one day and decided that they were not…

Folk went bankrupt and ended up having to eat their former prizes, humbled by the extent to which such a covetous enviable fancy could be so succesfully attributed to a cousin of the onion.

”People will do anything, no matter how absurd in order to avoid facing their own souls.” C. G Jung

Much of what constitutes our leisure time is easily identifiable as avoidance of life. We favour technology that allows us a degree of abstraction from the real world. Much of it prevents communication rather than aiding it; the alienating TV screen that halts all conversation, the incessant beeping of mobiles and pagers that prevent communion with self that only a quiet hour can bring.

By the same logic of the lush, who drinks to drown the shame of being a drunk, so too do we seek refuge in abstracted realities to find some respite from disocciated lives. This it cannot do because it is symbols and people that are meaningful and not the words we use to describe them. If this were not so the need for a holiday could be satisfied by reading the broshure and the need for company by describing the kind of person you are looking for.

”In the intellect, symbols and images have become dried up and dessicated, an abstract skeleton, all structure and no life.” E. Edinger

You can watch Western Narcissism alive and well in its natural habitat throughout the world of conceptual art, a genre which now embraces anyone still alive who has had the cheek to express themselves. Its not just that I don’t like the pretentious work, or that I just don’t get exploded sheds or kiddy mittens on spiked railings. It’s that what people say about their work has become more important than the work itself. There is no contemplation, no feeling, just buzz words, slogans, intellectual abstraction whose purpose it is to interrupt experience rather than induce it.

”you just sayin’ that because you was refuse’ yourself, mon.”

Quite right, I didn’t make it through to the shortlist of the prestigous Ashurst Prize, into which I had submitted my painstaking work of five years, a mosaic of recycled ceramic shards called, ‘Abundant Delicious’.

http://farm7.clik.com/AndyWhiteMosaics/gallery_709420.html

And of course I’m a bit miffed.

But what really bites is not just that I din’t get in, but the kind of art that did…

http://www.artprize.co.uk/shortlist-2017.html?utm_source=Emerging+Artist+Prize+2017&utm_campaign=6a23555170-Art_Prize_2017_shortlist_announced_2017_31_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_540d01bbbc-6a23555170-119062745

Now maybe its because I am a connoiseur of the ceramic shard, Mrs Shorttle’s eulogy to ‘mending what is broken’ not withstanding, but this is bullshit. And I’m not just turning my nose up at it because it required no effort, nor that it actually represents a collective fantasy of instant gratification and throwing any old crap together that is then worth thousands, but that the spiel that goes with it has the power to steer the onlooker away from their own common sense.

“If you break them and then mend them, and they’re decorative, is that a valid function or are they now defunct? That question is, I think, quite interesting in terms of society’s interpretation of the elderly.” K. Shorttle.

I was unaware the elderly could be interpreted but hey ho, if you can’t blind them with brilliance baffle them with bullshit. Just say anything…

and she does..

and its all very good sounding, yuge even…

but without this bizzare yet politically correct sounding monologue her entry is just a pile of random bits..

and very small bits they are too, mon.

We think we are so evolved and yet the acme of culture seems to have become a forum for wordy invocational spells that have the power to turn crap into art, a trick way more difficult than turning a frog into a prince. The problem is that when what you have to say about something is more important than the thing itself the psyche dissociates. Wishing, suddenly, really can make it so. In fact, the more banal and anti-art something is, the more one’s subtly bullying powers of persuasion and verbal sophistry must plaster it with Truth. Which means anything can be art so long as you can cripple the discriminatory faculties of your audience with a sufficiently ponderous incantation.

In fact it’s crap. Its alternative art and like alternative facts it only floats if it’s delivered with staccato sound bites and the kind of supreme self confidence that actual artists tend to lack. Which is why we hide in our studios. The tragedy is not simply that all of us are then taken for fools like the townsfolk in the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, but that if art is what can be said about it, then what about love and life? We are being invited, coersed, into experiencing the world from one step removed, from the perspective of another’s vantage point rather than our own.

and you think if you don’t get it you must be unsophisticated or common.

So while the art world touts itself as the vanguard and cutting edge of correctness, the way its sold means that the answer to the question, ‘what is art?’ can no longer be answered by reference to its content but on how it is presented. The garnish and the chef’s patter is now more important than what you ordered.

and don’t ask for the salt shaker.

What transforms the envy in our story is that Sanji finds meaning in his despair, that it is actually a form of compassion and therefor bearable. The wisdom and kindness of the Magistrate makes sure justice is done without excessively shaming the Baker, who he prybars into the here and now with his, ‘fair is fair.’

It’s said that art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Conceptual art does neither. To be either comforted or disturbed requires feelings. You have to be experiencing something. Conceptual art is opposed to us experiencing anything. Its intention is to prevent experience. Here is my work and this is what it means. Don’t feel, don’t contemplate. Above all don’t reflect on what you’re going to do with your broken mug once you get it home. Or remind yourself what you paid for it.

But in the spirit of pitching in and being a good sport my next submission, having researched the judges carefully, will be a burp. Not an actual ordinary burp you understand but many burps digitally recorded and amalgamated into a Platonic ideal of burps to represent the transcendence of temporal restrictions by eternal ideas, expressing a philological break with post-modern dialectic towards a fully globalist multi-culturalism.

The homogenised burp will then be fed through an electromagnetic spectrograph to emphasise social diversities interpreting inner cities which will then be rendered into a responsibly sourced food dye by undocumented immigrants using ancient skills of pasta making from the heart of Tuscany to create, ad definitum finum, the taste of the colour of the sound of archetypally broken wind.

”We are in a bad situation in the West, we live as decapitated heads. The intellect is indispensible in order to understand but you must feel yourselves to be related to the whole man.” CG Jung

To be fair the fault does not lie with Mrs Chorttle, but with a culture increasingly demanding disposable yet instant gratification that mirrors the provisional way in which we are encouraged to live.

The challenge of our time is to find the perspective of the Magistrate who can be both just and compassionate. He finds a way of engaging the Baker’s perspective, he uses his language and symbols, enters his world without being swallowed up by it. He adds to the Baker’s value system, mirroring the envious man without shaming, insulting or colluding with his dismal world veiw..

I once knew a psychiatric in-patient who’d been very poorly tended, mostly by an uncaring and gamey psychiatrist. One day she shows up for her 20 minutes a fortnight of his god almightiness. He indicates a golfball on his desk announcing, ‘this is an orange…’

‘you peel it, I’ll eat it,’ she replied.

The Song of the Harp.

There is a story of a man who hit his head and when he woke up he could play the piano. Did he awaken a latent gift? Or did he put out of action something suppressing? Either way the music was in him all along.

It’s important because mostly what we learn in life is not to. My own father’s silent message was, ‘achieve, but don’t ever go beyond me.’ This is an attitude that is endemic in the West, me first, only. Its patriarchal splashback that has a very particular impact on children.

This is symbolised in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk by the devouring Giant with a taste for his wife’s tastiest boy-pie but more importantly the things he has, the appropriated qualities of the natural child symbolised by the singing harp and the golden egg laying duck, that need to be redeemed/stolen.

The devouring giant is a corporate fascist possessed by the archetype of Saturn who, importantly, eats his own children…

and voters..

Of course he does it for their own good…

to teach them about life

a conundrum as unlikely and impossible as the Church, Darwin and Freud all singing from the same hymn sheet on the theme of human Wickedness and Strife, but nevertheless true.

”The assumption of innate sociality is at direct odds with the fairly universal civilised belief that a child’s impulses need to be curbed in order to make him social. There are those that believe reasoning is better than the hickory stick but the assumption that every child has an antisocial nature, in need of manipulation to become socially acceptable, is germane to both points of veiw”. J. Liedloff.

This basic assumption conjours the Devouring Giant from the collective imagination, it sets in place a style of fathering that is idealised for want of substance. In the name of teaching him about life he slowly consumes the child’s vitality instead, his spirit of adventure, his self-confidence and worth.

If our fundamental belief systems frame humanity as disobedient and full of anti-social willyness, then how are we to turn out? Children invariably live up to their parent’s expectations, particularly the darker, unspoken, semi-conscious ones. Our survival instincts compel us to soak up every scrap of information about ourselves even if it is to our detriment.

Up until I was forty I used to say about myself that I hadn’t an artistic bone in my body. I used to say it to the extent that I began to puzzle over it before finding that it was entiely untrue http://farm7.clik.com/AndyWhiteMosaics/ though it took a great upheaval, a huge crisis, to break through decades of restraint and having to hive off my talents to be loved and accepted.

I know of several instances where an anorexic child has been freed only once the parents had become conscious of their own covert campaign against the child growing up. The refusal to eat is actually a form of compliance to the deeper message ‘don’t grow.’

A satire that documents the consequences for us of such unlived creativity is portrayed by the robot character, ‘Bender’ from the cartoon hit series, ‘Futurama’.

Bender was rejected from the assembly line for his imperfections. He has no creativity micro-chip and therefore no imagination. This impacts his whole self construct which manifests under stressful circumstances as a partially autonomous identity, the somewhat creepy ‘Titanius Anglesmith Fancyman of Cornwood’.

The robotic Narcissist, plagued by the feeling of being defective from birth, adapts with impeccable instinct to a lifestyle devoid of his own destiny whilst just about managing not to be eaten by it.

Bender is a modern rendering of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz who didn’t have a heart. In the story of Jack and the Beanstalk this is more specifically amplified as the sentient harp, the Principle of Relatedness, the profound creative depths of the child that the envious Giant appropriates, that he requires the child to forgo for the sake of approval. The inner aridity this then creates is represented by the mean poverty endured by Jack and his mother at the beginning.

The liberating effect of the singing harp is further amplified in the fairytale, ‘The Song of the Harp’, where, likewise, a sentient harp is imprisoned by a devouring male figure, The Old Man, Saturn.

When the Harp is liberated..

”the sick children who had been thrust away in dark cellars, came running forth whole and well, healed by the song, sinking into every heart, waking all to fresh new life. ” Rachel Penn.

Not only is the inner child redeemed but also the adult sense of lack and incompleteness ..

‘The black-haired woman who sat on the farther side of the fountain; the sting had gone from her heart; peace unspeakable had swept it away and between her eyes and the flowers and the swaying crowd of people something bright was falling which slowly blotted out from the mind of each one there the memory of their many deeds of shame, and all their sin.” ibid.

The other treasure that Jack has to redeem in order to be free of the tyrant is a duck which lays golden eggs.

Dissonance in a family makes it difficult to digest experience, to contain contradiction, to reflect upon one’s situation because reality is too split to support it. You can’t learn. When kids go through divorces the first thing that suffers is their grades.

Though the demanding Giant is the scarier of the two with all his threatens of death by incissor..

‘fee fi fo fum I smell the blood of an englishman. Be he alive or be he dead I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.’ bad tempered Giant.

The Mother Giant is as crazy making and colludes with her husband by witholding the transformational duck whose alchemical powers of turning farmyard scraps into golden eggs allows a child to grow from shitty situations, to change his point of veiw, to reconstrue events in new light that changes the meaning of events themselves.

Mother Giant prevents this from happening by the dissonance in her relationship with her spouse. His taste for boy pie notwithstanding, his official scariness is underpined by a covert and tantrumming brat that his seemingly submissive wife steers like Matron.

All this hidden stuff means Jack can’t entertain life’s disappointments without them tearing him apart because he can’t turn them into lessons without the help of the alchemical duck who can turn even life’s swill into golden eggs. Without this capacity to embrace a whole variety of circumstances as being all grist for the mill, the kind of willingness to enter into experience that is more trust than courage, Jack will be at the mercy of the Giant. He has to take it or die trying.

So eventually the two treaures are bought to earth. But it is a curious and particular detail that makes sure Jack is then able to enjoy the fruits of his daring. What finishes the Giant off is not simply that he chops the beanstalk down..

‘Luckily, because of all the chores he’d done over the years, he’d become quite good at chopping and it didn’t take long for him to chop through enough of the beanstalk that it began to teeter’. leanne Guenter

You do your chores in co-operation with natural law, out of the instinct for social co-operation and helping one another and it is by the effect of these efforts that the giant is killed.

The Secret.

The authorities took my son away. Everyone knows a man cannot raise a child. So they took him, dragged him off kicking and screaming. We met fleetingly in the woods. He was in terrible shape, covered in self-inflicted cuts to protest his situation.

One night I was sobbing out loud with the horror of it all, begging Providence to change our situation, raging against what had happened, when a very still quiet voice spoke inside me saying…

”your anguish is a measure of your love is it not?”

Er, yes.

‘Would you wish your love to be less?”

Er, no.

”Then be grateful for how much love you have…’

and so I was.

within weeks he was returned.

The secret of Abundance is Gratitude. It is Gratitude that recognises the wealth which already exists. The rule of attraction manifests further abundance and soon..

a virtuous circle is created.

Wanting it badly enough doesn’t work. It doesn’t take determination. More a kind of melting into how blessed you are already and not even for one thing or another but for breathing, the rain, that night follows day.

Sometimes we may feel that because there is so much suffering in our lives we cannot be grateful and start the circle of abundance turning. So then we have to be grateful for that…

for surviving the dark place..

for the resiliance that bought you through..

for the strength that sustains you during your travail.

Wounds give perspective without which we do not grow.

”To live and love only where one can trust, where there is security and containment, where one cannot be hurt or let down, where what is pledged in words is forever binding, means really to be out of harm’s way and so out of real life.” James Hillman

Wounds are necessary. There are several different types to be grateful for. Firstly there are the wounds inflicted upon us by others…

‘that which does not kill us makes us stronger..’ anon

then there is gratitude for one’s own folly..

‘Non, je ne regrette rien..’ E. Piaf

then the challenge to be unconditionaly alive to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune..

”to survive is to find meaning in suffering”. F. Nietzsche.

and finally there is the gratitude for the discovery of your own moist depths in the process of it all.

”In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.” A. Camus.

Most of us think of prayer as being one form or another of asking for stuff. It doesn’t work because of the tautology involved in evoking a God about whom you have already decided you know better. Wanting life to be different is petulant, a rejection of one’s situation which is bound to increase suffering rather than alleviating it.

‘What we resist, persists.’ S. Freud.

In ancient times they seemed to understand better about the power of gratitude. Prayer and Gratitude were synonymous. There are still some examples especially in Psalms, but a good way of guaging how things have changed from a culture of abundance to one of relative inner poverty can be ascertained by looking at how the structure of our most evocative prayer, the lord’s prayer, has been changed over the years from its original Aramaic.

here is the whole thing.

Abwûn
“Oh Thou, from whom the breath of life comes,

d’bwaschmâja
who fills all realms of sound, light and vibration.

Nethkâdasch schmach
May Your light be experienced in my utmost holiest.

Têtê malkuthach.
Your Heavenly Domain approaches.

Nehwê tzevjânach aikâna d’bwaschmâja af b’arha.
Let Your will come true – in the universe (all that vibrates)
just as on earth (that is material and dense).

Hawvlân lachma d’sûnkanân jaomâna.
Give us wisdom (understanding, assistance) for our daily need,

Waschboklân chaubên wachtahên aikâna
daf chnân schwoken l’chaijabên.
detach the fetters of faults that bind us, (karma)
like we let go the guilt of others.

Wela tachlân l’nesjuna
Let us not be lost in superficial things (materialism, common temptations),

ela patzân min bischa.
but let us be freed from that what keeps us off from our true purpose.

Metol dilachie malkutha wahaila wateschbuchta l’ahlâm almîn.
From You comes the all-working will, the lively strength to act,
the song that beautifies all and renews itself from age to age.

Amên.
Sealed in trust, faith and truth.
(I confirm with my entire being)

You can see for yourself that its been altered quite dramatically. Not just a word here or there, the whole meaning is different. I will comment only on the feeling of gratitude which runs through the original from beginning to end like a dancing brook.

On Finding Oneself.

I got lost on the moor. It was already a bit misty when I set out, but then great banks of fog came in from the sea, cliffs of cloud, and soon visibility was down to a few metres. I thought it was ok. I’m ex-paras for god’s sake. I could leopard crawl through a snow drift with the best of them but of course within minutes I was completely turned around.

Don’t panic. Retrace your steps. Look for your own footprints. But it was hopeless. I stumbled about like an idiot getting more and more confused. Then I realised that all this ‘trying to find my way’ was my problem. I was looking at the ground with all its myriad features (or lack of them) when I needed to be looking at the lie of the land. My vehicle was parked at the top end of the moor and all I had to do was follow any gradient that seemed even slightly up hill. Within minutes my car emerged from the fog.

How like life. We get lost in the detail, in the busyness, in not seeing the wood for the trees. We try to figure out our dream rather than shaking hands with it. We try to decide what job we want to do rather than allowing ourselves to be called to something unscripted. We ask about the meaning of life as though it had to be something we could understand.

We think we are way more evolved than our ancestors and contemporary Indigenous people. Yet any aboriginal person would have laughed till they wet themselves to see me trawling about the moor, labouring under the deluded misapprehension that I was somehow using my superior survival and tracking skills when in fact finding my way was the kind of thing I could do in the dark after half a bottle of whisky if only I had the sense to look up.

Its not enough to feel that others are our equals. We must realise that we have something to learn from them. Some tourists in Australia asked an old ranger how the Aboriginal people find water in the desert.

‘They don’t have to look for it,’ he replied. ‘They know where it is.” Tom Keneally

In his lengthy field trips with the Xavante Indians in the Amazon, anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis describes the shift in his own consciousness when he realised the true purpose of their traditional log races.

Log races were major events. The whole village would get involved. Logs would be specially cut and teams would roar through the jungle at high speed amidst great cheering and excitement.

At first it seems like a competition. Then Maybury-Lewis notices that one of the logs is way bigger than the other, putting that team to considerable disadvantage but no-one seems to mind. Then he sees that team members from the winning log are peeling off to help those behind until they catch up. When the teams arrive together the village erupts.

”Everyone seemed to be speechifying or shouting or just yelling with glee. It was by common consent the most beautiful log race that had been celebrated for a long time. It was then that I understood. It was not a race at all, at least not in our sense. It was a ceremony, an aesthetic event.”

Individual runners are extoled by their team mates, not for running hard or fast, but for running beautifully. The ideal was to arrive together, symbolising a reconciliation of tension between Nature and Culture…

‘harmony through complementarity..’ ibid

Shortly afterwards M-Lewis has a dream that he is watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine chapel. To his horror the great artist begins to rub out the work. Lewis screams at him not to. Michelangelo looks up and….

‘in the voice one uses to reassure a small child he says, ‘but they are not supposed to last forever..’ ibid

Beauty is a fleeting thing, yet all art is done for beauty’s sake. It’s only a paradox if we lose from the mix that the purpose of beauty is not that it become collectable but that it is transformational. And not that you appreciate it but that you participate in it.

Maybury- Lewis went to learn about the Xavante and wound up learning mostly about Maybury-Lewis which is why he is such a vivid ethnographer, he discovered the Xavante in himself.

The creative daimon of Michelangelo accepts the ephemeral nature of the work because doing it is more important than having it. Only, the spirit of your own aboriginal nature has to be alive and well to know this.

Whilst the West is left wondering if beauty is truth or truth, beauty… arriving finally at the profundity that it is in the eye of the beholder, the aboriginal spirit within us all knows that beauty is something you live in. Its not just subjective. You sink or swim in it depending on how turned about you become by cultural insistence that values product over process.

”Beauty will come in the dawn, and beauty will come with the sunlight. Beauty will come to us from everywhere. Where the Heaven ends, where the sky ends. Beauty will surround us. We walk in beauty.” Billy Yellow. Navajo medicine man.

When the indigenous person is suppressed or even held in the imagination as less, we make less of ourselves. We undermine the deep aboriginal spirit in our own psyche which is the soil from which we are grown and the source of our creative life.

How we Heal.

People often say in despair of their lives that you cannot go back and change the past. My reply is always the same, what heals is not that we can change the past but that we call it by the right name. A story that exemplifies this is ‘Rumplestiltskin’, a tale of love’s triumph over tyranny.

It starts out with the Miller boasting to the King that his daughter can spin straw into gold. Now, why would he do that? What’s going on here?

”Unless he seeks it in himself, a man’s feminine counterpart is to be found in his mother, sister or daughter’. (Jung 1983).

In the absence of a Queen of Heaven, an inner image of Anima, he finds Her radiance in the eyes of his now divine daughter, whom he idealises out of all existence. He thinks its love but actually its unconscious worship to the point of parody and depersonalisation.

You could say that the backlash for Yahweh breaking his ex-wife Sophia up in three and casting her into the sea, waaay bakkina day…

the whore of babylon incident….?

the very same….

…….waaay back before the Beggining, is that he, Yahweh, does something similar to himself and to Patriarchal Consciousness in the process. It also broke in three.

And regressed.

The first piece of Yahweh is symbolised by the apparently benevolent, wide-eyed Miller, but this weak father clearly has his own interests to the forefront, a handy foot in the door at the Castle where there is somehow already a tacit ‘understanding’ with the wicked king rooted in his underlying attitude that even loved Others are somehow still a means to an end.

The Miller hands his daughter over to the wicked king, the second fragment. He demands she spin the straw into gold on pain of death. The degree of depersonalisation is increased along with a corresponding loss of his own capacity for internal dialogue or reflection. She is now openly chattle and he is officially a tyrant. Consciousness is diminished. As soon as she ceases to be a ‘thou’ he cannot say ‘I’. He goes for bling over relatedness.

But the third aspect, Rumplestiltskin, is a whole new level of nightmare. He agrees to spin the straw into gold first for jewels but ultimately wants her un-born child….

Rumplestilskin has gone over to the dark side. He’s a creature possessed. The power of life and death over the Queen are not enough. He wants to break her spirit too.

At first, the Queen agrees to Rumplestiltskin’s advances and is seduced by the promise of an easy life. Like the ancient story of Sophia unearthed at Nag hammadi, which tells the story of a Queen being victimised, made a slave/whore to men and how she redeemed herself…

…for this is what our brave queen does. She changes her mind and goads Rumplestiltskin’s pride, getting him to agree that if she can find out his name she keeps the baby.

Directly, she dispatches her Faithful Riders to every corner of the kingdom to find ol’ Rumple’s name.

As my boy would say, ‘she becomes good’.

The birth of the child has awoken a new value in the queen. The child is the new value. It also represents “a more complete picture of the Self” CG Jung and a vision of the “whole person in their pure individuality” ibid – unfractured, unscattered, unbroken.

Wherever you find love there will be cavalry, warriors that still work for the Missus. The Queen’s Faithful Riders are aspects of the Self still connected to the Principle of Relatedness. They go out to the four farthest wild and tangly corners of the kingdom in the service of the Child. And even though they are in despair they go out, like Grail Knights, in search of the malady in the land.

”Our excessive civilisation is the neurosis of our time,” C G Jung

The queen realises that she will do anything in order to protect the new life of her child. She redeems her situation by entering willingly into her own suffering on the understanding that the suffering is the new love that she feels.

”My arguement with psychoanalysis is the pre-conception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering. Arthur Miller.

So despite her slim chances and it being the end of all she knows, she says,

‘I will do it anyway.’

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Rumi

And actually its her awakened love for the child and faith that there is some ground of Being, not to be discovered as such but remembered, something long forgotten, something mysterious that the Faithful Riders give their all to find.

Its this discovery of doing what she must do gladly that redeems suffering and brings about the synchronistic event that saves the day. When she gets in line with her purpose, the Universe gets behind her.

”The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no-one could have dreamt would come their way.” Goethe.

She is saved because she makes peace with her suffering, not for the promise of some gain but because she is impelled by love.

And not because anyone taught her that.

But because it rose up unbidden in her own soul.

It seems like a fool’s errand but there’s a certain magic incured in life when self preservation ceases to be your priority and in the last moment, the secret is discovered by the strangest co-incidence.

Rumplestiltskin is found by one of the riders dancing about his fire singing his name out loud! ”, “tonight tonight, my plans I make, tomorrow tomorrow, the baby I take. The queen will never win the game, for Rumpelstiltskin is my name’…

Naming something means an end to being unconsciously identified with the other. So then it has no power over you. It’s like saying the Emperor is naked.

And so the queen manages to guess correctly. Rumplestiltskin stamps through the floor in fury and is never seen again.

“Names have a sort of influence, words are apotropaic. When you can name a thing the patient is half liberated. Hence we have the healthy effect of name-giving to help abolish a thing” CG Jung

We might ask along with Shakespeare’s Juliet…

”What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet..”

but that would be to forget the meaning of Romeo’s name and the significance it then places upon their tryst.

Something common to the Miller, the King and Rumplestiltskin is their sense of entitlement. A title is a special kind of name, or one that enobles a name out of allthe mire and constraint that suck others down into the mud, especially useful when there is very little life between serfs and barons.

In such a world, names become synonymous with qualities, with archetypal associations to honour and virtue, all of which then excuses you from abiding by the actual law so long as it is in the Name-of-Something.

Names are symbols. They mean more than they denote. A contemporary example is the emphasis Mr Trump made on things having his name on them and that this in itself guarenteed their success and intrinsic value.

So roses by another name really do smell different and what you call things is incredibly important. They can shape the quality of your life.

In a nearby village there is a shop keeper who spends most of his time on the pavement outside his establishment defying the elements in t-shirt, bermuda cutoffs and tennis sneakers. Through wintry gales and horizontal sleet he endures. Nothing can tempt him from his summer holiday. The harder it rains the more fierce becomes his heav’n-cast looks of defiance.

I understood it all when I overheard him refer to where we live as, ‘the arse end of nowhere’. The beautiful and remote coast of North Devon, a place that many would give their right arm to call home, is suddenly shmeered in colonic bile rooted in confrontational entitlement which meant not only that he could not enjoy our rural idyll appropriately dressed, but that he had to have his knee caps chafed raw every winter to air the feeling that life should be different.

The Snake Prince.

There was once a likeable Prince whose wicked step-father stole his crown and banished him to the Furthest-Corner-of-the-Kingdom without any of his stuff. Every year the Prince had to travel to the Evil Castle and pay the step-King tribute, confirming him as the rightful ruler of the land.

One year, in the midst of festivities honouring His Greatness, the Prince slipped like a shadow into the King’s private apartments without really knowing why and took a medium sized Glittery from the royal jewellery case. Without specifically noticing what he was about, he put it in his pocket, sidetracked as he was by the reasoning that it was the least owed to him. Without thinking too much more about it, he rejoined the party. From the shadows, the wicked King looked on and smiled.

On the way home to the Furthest-Corner-of-the-Kingdom, the Prince began to feel ill. He got bad-tempered and compained about everything. The road was too bumpy. The days were too hot. The nights, too cold. Nothing and nobody could get it right.

and, I’ve got a headache.

Things deteriorated further once he returned. His archery was off. Riding in the country gave no pleasure. He had a run of bad luck at cards. Pizza had become more appealing than healthy greens. Something was amiss.

oh, and a tail.

Eventually, once his tail simply couldn’t be hid, he called for all the Wisest Healers in those lands over which he still held sway..

er, down to the next village…

Aaall the Healers in the land I say, but no-one could help him, not even Granny Troth’s goose fat rubbing linament and the People began to mutter that maybe he hadn’t been overthrown enough.

Early one morning, an old lady who smelled of the Forest came and knocked at his door. On her shoulder sat a magpie with a beady yellow eye. As soon as the door was ajar it flew in and began a strange dance on the kitchen table.

‘George indicates the presence of some dark magic,’ said the Crone and straightway the Prince fetched the Glittery out of the table drawer where he had hidden it. She prodded it with her stick whilst he told her what happened.

‘Waaal’, she said, after an eon of princely tail-shuffling silence, ‘you can’t oppose him by becoming like him. That will certainly make you ill. But more importantly, this thing has juju on it. Magic. It has the meaning of you accepting that your crown is lost. It causes you to lose your strength of purpose, to forget who you are, to be satisfied with consumption. The Glittery must go back and you must address the loss of your crown in a more direct way.’

”But I was only trying to teach him a lesson,” squirmed the Prince.

‘More’s the problem,’ quoth the Crone, plumping herself down into the comfiest chair she could find. ‘If only you had been motivated by greed or vengeance. But no, you want to teach him something. Its an act of charity, a hair shirt hope, not for your crown or your destiny, but for his redemption. As if you had such power… whilst at one and the same time slowly becoming the wretch he takes you for. How faithful you have been….’

”But the value of the Glittery is so small compared to the Crown…”

Conscience doesn’t discriminate, Prince. Nor does it care what we sell ourselves out for. You tried to ease the tension of the King’s betrayal by betraying yourself. You joined his game, this person you hate, and found a way to be less than you are. So your true Self will ever snap at your heels and sabotage your efforts, creep up on you as symptom, ailment and adverse event.’

”Are you saying I’ll get my legs and my crown back if I return the Glittery?”

‘No, but your head might clear sufficiently to be your own man..’

The Prince nodded and cried a bit..

George swooped off with the Glittery in the direction of the Evil Castle. When he arrived there he paused on the ramparts and waited. A puff of glinting black. He waited and waited and waited.

When all was dark and silent, George flew down into the wicked King’s bedchamber where he slept and tossed and snored. He landed in dreadful silence upon the pillow. Another moment and George popped the Glittery into the King’s open mouth so that he choked horribly, wretching and clawing for air before dying in spectacular writhing agony on the expensive, imported, Byzantine floor.

George did a different kind of dance on the kitchen table when he returned. The old lady nodded to herself, kissed the Prince on the forehead and trundled off, back into the Forest.

This is not a moral tale.

Its about how we manage loss and growth.

The Prince tries to draw a veil over his suffering by justifying an act that places him above Natural Law wherein the legitimate grief of his dethronement lies. He retreates from himself into an identification with his aggressor. He concretises his wish to be excused from life’s knotty problems in the Glittery which will some how magically make his situation better. As if the loss of his crown could be compensated.

Individuation doesn’t want to be either inflated or let off the hook like this. If we do not tread the razors edge between them it will inflict us with poetic symptoms instead, like the Prince’s snake tail.

”Psychologically the serpent is the principle of gnosis, knowledge or emerging consciousness. The serpent represents the urge to self-realization in man & symbolizes the principle of individuation.” Edward Edinger

The Prince numbs himself to his loss with the mesmerising Glittery which has the symbolic value of affording him immunity from life. But its revenge is to turn him into a cold-blooded consumer.

This wish to be above the law is endemic in our culture. Its what gives us the driven quality so obvious to Indigenous People. It is the end towards which we place so much effort in social climbing and amassing of trinkets which testify just how far above the law we have risen.

We have plenty of schooling in this. It even has biblical approval. Cain got to be above the Laws of inheritance. David’s abduction of Bathsheba placed him above the Laws of marrriage. Nebuchadnezzer is driven insane by Yahweh and made to eat grass for seven years on account of his wanting to be above the Laws of governance, yet all these men are pretty much let off the hook because of their faithfullness to the lord.

The earthly dimension of this is that the closer you are to centralised power, with the suits and gizmos to prove it, the more immune you are from constraint. We’ve even begun to equate it with freedom itself. There are many levels of such immunity, all the way from being able to shrug off a ticket because you are a local and know the policeman’s family, through being able to afford legal representation, to bribing Congress..

er, I mean, making hefty charitable donations.

This power to shrug off constraints that would bind and bring down Others is what motivates much Western striving. The irony is that the developmental stage typified by much throwing of oneself about and being excused the rules that govern other family members is early childhood. We aspire to be regressed. We still want the Glittery that will make the feeling of being cheated go away. We still yearn for ‘the lap of luxury’ which is not as much about goodies as it is about not having to answer the phone and having everything taken care of.

But for as long as we pursue the Glittery or aspire to it, nothing can change in our lives. Soon we are thrown into crisis, the unconscious guilt, the toothsome failure to live, manifesting in the external world as divisiveness and bad luck.

I was walking in the woods on a lovely warm February morning. It was a wonderful sunny day. I met someone walking the other way and commented on our good fortune.

‘May as well make the most of it.” said he, managing, not only to fail entirely in gratitude, but to be defensive, petulant and slightly short changed about this marvellous day into the bargain. No day could be bright enough for him to feel that he had not still some how been cheated.

And he probably had…

..of some birthright,..

long ago.