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.

To the Officers at Standing Rock.

There are few so callous as to join some branch of the armed services without a noble ideal fuelling their motivation. You want to serve your nation and be a part of its fabric. You want to make a contribution to the higher good, even to the point of self-sacrifice. You want to leave your mark and be an example to those coming after you. You want to be someone others look up to.

But sometimes noble intentions can be railroaded and you can find ourselves being used in operations you didn’t sign up for.

A generation ago, I used to be at the spear head of military ‘defense’. I could strip a sub-machine gun when I was fourteen. I went to a cadet style boarding school with grenade screens on the windows and rifle drill after classes. By the time I was eighteen I had trained with special forces and enlisted in an elite commando unit. I went to war and fought in many a bloody battle..

One day something happened to change all of this forever that I want to tell you about. We had been dropped behind enemy lines deep in the bush. There was a brief but intense battle which, with surprise on our side, we had won. The sweep line crossed a clearing and on the far side I saw the broken body of a man. I approached him cautiously. Multiple wounds. Large pool of blood. Twisted limbs.

Then he opened his eyes and looked at me. He was alive. He stared at me impassively and without fear. His eyes bored into me. I made a quick check for weapons to distract myself from his gaze but he was unarmed. He was however desperatly wounded. A total of eight bullet holes in his upper legs and lower belly. I stood and stared at him. He stared back. His eyes ripped into me. Not a word was spoken.

Strange thoughts forced their way into my head. This is a man in his own backyard. Someone’s son. Someone’s sweetheart. He has a family as I have a family. He has a name as I have a name. He looks to the skies and prays to his gods. As I do. He wants to go home and longs for peace. As I do.

What on earth am I doing?

Something in my chest started to splinter and then suddenly snapped. Some nasty, rotten, fetid piece of ugliness in me broke and in one moment my most urgent task in the world became to save this man. I called a medic, radioed for a chopper and began to patch his wounds. His eyes never left my face. The sergeant arrived to see what the hold up was. He raised his rifle to shoot the wounded man. No prisoners. I growled at him to back off. He was my superior officer bu the didn’t argue further and the whole sweep line waited while I continued with my work.

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

There are two kinds of fight. One is noble, the defense of the land and its people. . The second, the quest for power, is not noble because it is about placing wealth above life. Life in which you participate and are a part. It is beneath a warrior’s true dignity to be used to suppress the common people. It does not bring honour to a man’s name.

It was the first time I had looked into the face of the ‘enemy’. I was a little surprised to find that he was just a man like me. And then I realised that he was a man like me with one teensy difference. He was on his own ancestral lands and I was not. I was not fighting for a noble cause. I was being used to bring about the very opposite of the ideals and well intentioned motives I signed up with, to serve, to protect, to defend.

We can hardly use the word ‘extremist’ without the prefix ‘Islamic’. But our own culture is riddled with extremism. We have been gaily oppressing people for centuries. People that already have next to nothing.We believe that we can go to war to do God’s work and that all the violence and destruction is pleasing in His eyes, indeed that through our aggression against the heathens we are bought closer to Him. How comforting, how dangerous, how terrifying.

Perhaps this is the real meaning of Armageddon, not some future megawar that destroys the world but any oppression of the common people that has lost it’s horror and destroys men’s hearts. Wars fought on this basis are not really about oil, or gold, or land, but about ideology, final solutions, the eradication of difference.

Unfortunately this also means the eradication of curiosity, wonder, and aliveness in yourself. It denies the importance of finding your own path in life and devalues the significance of other people on theirs.

Ask yourself if you can hold your head up at the end of the day. Ask yourself if you can tell your kids what you do with pride. Ask yourself if you feel respected by your superiors. If you get a ‘no’ to all three of these questions then, please, go home.

Recover your dignity as warriors.

Reconnect with what it was you signed up for.

Remember the intention to be that someone whom others looked up to.

Why We Are Unfree.

The Home Office recently ruled that information extracted under torture could be considered legal provided it hasn’t been perpetrated by an Englishman. Its about as thought through as granting torture licences to anyone called Gary or not wearing a hat.

Convictions blind to the obvious. It is the fact of torture and not the nationality or shoe size of the torturer that is the problem. Such foolishness is bound to be the logic of a government long used to the doublethink that slavery itself is fine so long as it doesn’t actually occur on British soil.

The ‘abolition of slavery’, was the first step in bringing about something quite opposite, the preliminary phase in a sequence of ever more sophisticated spins on the problem of maximizing economic gain with a relatively clear conscience. And so the actual taking of people by force, charitably gives way to the second stage, taking their country instead.

Despite the deepening entrenchment of slavery that this involves we enabled ourselves to do it with two shining badges of merit.

1) we’ve graciously freed the slaves from their iron shackles.

2) we’ve generously gone to their old country and brought the folks there flush toilets, bicycles and God’s word.

The fact that we’ve simply traded in carting people away for ripping off their resources in situ is lost in the proud gesture of what we are so generously doing for the savages.

So part of ‘abolition’ was the tacit agreement that, at one and the same time, European nations could carve up the ancestral lands of the now ‘freemen’ like a bunch of drunks at a turkey dinner. How they must have laughed. Yet a Nation’s moral conscience has to be repressed in order to enjoy such a feast. It is bound to reappear as some kind of avenging harpie to castrate the overblown power, denying eros to those that would deal so blithely in thanatos.

Our Victorian grandparents fainted at the sight of a wellturned ankle at home whilst indulging the whim to rape,pillage and pig sticking abroad. The unconscious is always poetic in it’s afflictions. The phallic thrusting into the third world is bound to evoke it’s counterpoint in the psyche.

In today’s world we’ve moved on a bit from the initial symptoms of Organised Greed into the upland plains of that Vaguely Troubled Feeling which accompanies long term denial. The patient has become depressed.

The shape of the Western divided self has shifted from the punishing moratorium on sexuality to a broader embargo on enjoying life itself. We need the efforts of a multi billion pound service industry to help us ‘relax’. Putting your feet up has taken the place of getting your leg over in the collective imagination.

Poliakoff suggested that the emptiness of modern life can be traced back to Western collusion with the horrors of Nazi Germany, but of course the West had been treating peoples around the world as sub human scum for a long time prior to Auchwitz .

Less than a generation before Hitler, the British had overseen the concentration camp deaths of thousands of Afrikaans civilians. Not to mention the precedents for Ethnic Cleansing perpertrated quite unanimously amongst ‘developed’ nations against Aboriginal people around the globe.

These ghosts are bound to haunt the collective corridors of the modern psyche for as long as Stalin, Hitler and Mao are the only Bad Guys. It’s not personal. Its just that Democracy can’t work for as long as its underpined by Capitalism. You get a police state instead, despite everyone’s best intentions. Don’t you recall how punitive Monopoly used to get? Democracy wants to share. Capitalism does not.

And so, to the Aquisition of Power, nothing is sacred.

But you cannot demean the humanity of others without it rebounding upon yourself. We share in the fate of all people and for as long as there is even tacit subjugation of others then we ourselves begin to become unfree, even though we then gave them back their countries in a show of generous beneficence…

having set in place ‘aid packages,’ economic infrastructure to replace the political one.

This new infrastructure renders direct political control redundant. Corporations cream off the remaining wealth without the cumbersome expense of domestic affairs.

This makes our now free people, slaves in their own lands. Our immigration policy then throws an invisible wall around them no less vigorous in its intent than the pass laws in Apartheid South Africa. They have the freedom to speak in the same way that they have the freedom to starve. Say what you like just stay on your own side of the wire.

After a while the peasants get riled at all our selfless charity and missionary effort. When they start to die because of famines that are the direct result of Western economic policies and wars that are fuelled by foreign interests they get a tad narked.

Of course, because we have oppressed him for his own good we can’t understand this terrible lack of gratitude. Convinced by our own purity and innocence we respond by indulging in even further greed and violence on the grounds that we have now been forced to it.

I was having an FB conversation with a proud British ex-Pat about his father’s role in the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion, making much of their fearsome, deadly pangas and how barbaric they were to use these great knives. He vanished from cyber-space when I pointed out that it was only because they were too impoverished to afford Apache helicopters to defend their ancestral land from the white version of Ghengis Kahn.

Wars waged on the poor can never actually be won by the Khans. The indignation of the peasant at having his acre of millet trampled by a power that wastes more than the peasant produces puts a resolve into his breast that the powerful other does not possess despite his superiority of strength. Then we make our biggest blunder. We call him a terrorist.

When I waged war on peasants for their own good, utterly conviced in the virtue of a quest that was no more than the further subjugation of an already oppressed people, we soldiers told ourselves endlessly about the inferiority of those we faced, the lack of training, the poor weapons, their inability to use them, the fact that some only had wooden cut out AK47’s. Didn’t they know they were going to die?

Western subjugation of sovereign lands and its systematic destruction of tribal integrity has given rise to people who are now happy to choose death over slavery. When life is rendered dishonourable beneath the yoke of another you develop a disdain for that life. There’s none so brave as those with nothing left to lose. For there are worse things than death.

And that is the unconscious, poetically afflicted, subliminal slavery that we white folks splash back on ourselves in the process of subjugating others on principle, as a matter of fiscal policy. The Enslaver, the Narcissist, who needs to demean and subjugate the person hood of the other, to pick their pocket in some way in order to keep his own buoyancy afloat, does so at his own expense and in kind, becoming a form of slave himself: a slave to the system, prone to addictive habits and patterns, forever caught up in trying to fill the hollow pit that is created inside when we take more than we need, when he’s restricted in what can be thought about, hog-tied by idealised convention…

all chained up in the hold of slave ship, ‘Other People’s Opinions’..

bound for the mystical far shores of Future Redemption.

at some point..

If he is good.

In Defense of Snacks.

We’re all fascinated with how its going to turn out. Fair enough, but there’s something about the way in which the world settles down to watch that wants a little enquiry.

We look on as though it were a reality show rather than reality. Everyone is fascinated with what Donald did next, hero or villain, we look on as if it were Noddy and Big Ears.

We’re a culture of spectators, which is perfectly understandable given that we are so invested in the future and the fantasy of what it takes to secure our redemption that we are only allowed to be Now in a very reduced capacity. Spectating leads the field.

And for Spectating, one must have Snacks.

When I was very young, just four perhaps, we lived in a tin rondavel way out in the bush on the Serengeti plain in Tanzania. There were leopards about so we were surrounded with a high fence of thorn. One night a leopard got in and attacked one of our Ridgebacks, lion dogs and no pushover. The screaming and snarling were terrible. My father rushed to the door in his pyjamas, picking up a heavy bladed panga with one hand and a packet of biscuits with the other. Thus armed he rushed outside to join the fray.

Ever since, I wondered about those biscuits. And perhaps decades of psychological training were less about my private troubles or wanting to save the world and more about the need to get to the bottom of this mystery. Only just recently I realised that when you are Spectating you must have Snacks.

My father was a man who had much more invested in how he might appear to others than in the demands of circumstance. He was what R.D.Laing calls an ”alterated” character, someone busy pretending at being themselves, as though life were a card you could retract after you’d played it, or, you were only playing for matches anyway. He was always a step removed from himself and therefore one of life’s eternal bystanders, perpetualy looking on, even in the thick of raging tooth and claw…

for which one must have Snacks.

Which is fine, except that it does cost us our connection to reality, as rushing out into the night to take on unknown assailants armed with a packet of Garibaldis would seem to testify.

Consumption does not discriminate between fact and fantasy too well. Its not just that it ties you to a life style that enslaves you your whole working life. Reality itself gets messed with because Consumption doesn’t care if its real or not so long as it can be swallowed whole. The fact that the world’s most powerful job is being contested by the Uber rich and sold to the prols as Democracy,…. all this easily becomes another day of Bread and Circus, a form of reality TV.

Meanwhile, the climactic episode of the Archers makes it to the headlines of the newspapers as if it were happening in real life. Anyone from the planet Zarg could really be forgiven for believing that they were significant players in important current affairs.

We tend to think of Consumerism as though it were some random unfortunate outcome of an otherwise…if not perfect, then superior world. Its difficult to think of it as a strategy for creating the illusion of freedom. We even think of it as healthy, as retail therapy, or at worst, something that’s naughty but nice.

But its something that alienates people from themselves and the world. This is most obvious in the Narcissist because once in his presence you will be the event he’s one step removed from. Today’s amusement and the author of the need for Snacks.

Consumer culture is the collective expression of Narcissism, something that is part of our makeup simply by our affiliation to millenia of Single System systems that forbid us from being Now and that for Centuries killed off anyone who claimed to have their own revelation based on personal experience.

You can’t control people who have discovered their own inner authority or who have realised that Heaven and Hell are Now, depending on your inclination.

On one level, Consumerism is our response to the desperate collective sense of remaining unfed by thepromises of redemption based on being good. Something, anything to try and fill the gap where unconditional love might once have been, before the days when you had to spend your life in a queue awaiting divine judgement, over doing the Tacos, Mountain Dew and corporate playthings in the meantime out of frustration and boredom.

But its more than boredom, and worse than frustration. Being in the Queue is to be eternaly divided against oneself, even if it is as an admiring onlooker where we might be protected from the dirt of real life but pay for it with being forever on the outside looking in, exiled from personal experience and the core of our own selfhood.

an exercise in unreality for which there had better be Snacks.

totemic transitional objects that both bind and separate, that toy with what’s real.

Except that Reality will then toy with us back and rub our noses in the fact that we’ve relinquished our common sense into the bargain. We now need the NHS to put adverts in buses telling people to use a hanky when they have a cold. At journeys end a toothbrush with instructions, ‘do not put batteries in backwards.’ En route, a shop window adorned for Halloween, sporting broomsticks for sale with labels,’ does not actually fly”.

The conflict we have with Now, wherein stuff like Common Sense resides, impacts most obviously in Sex and Aggression. The reality blurring power of Porn is not just the corruption and substitution of real relationships. Nor is it limited to its idealisation/denigration of the feminine. The voyeur becomes dissociated from his own masculinity.

The guy on the screen is the alpha male. You can watch but you get nothing. You are now of a low rank and will not be permitted erection.

But never mind, hey? We still have War, Consumerism at its demonic peak, wherein all the usual rules are suspended and you get to write you’re own handbook. You can make ‘executive decisions’, and call civilian atrocity, ‘collateral damage’, dissociate from the carnage.

I new a man who’d returned from one of our many little wars, shellshocked and neurotic. He couldn’t understand why. He’d never ‘seen action’. But he had pressed the little red button on the consol that made rockets go whoosh over the horizon. And pictures on screens, but not the imagination of Now to connect the two. He couldn’t recover his wits until he accepted that he’d gotten drunk on God’s Will and killed people.

Yet somehow it’s a more mundane and trivial story than the one above which makes me wince most at the extent to which we proud white folk are divided against ourselves. I was speaking to an aquaintance, a ‘countryman’ who had mightily come up in the world, married well and was now Lord of the Manor.

You might see him striding purposefullyabout, and with a slight limp at the effort, from one important thing to another. I mentioned to him in the lane that I’d heard the first blackbird of the season, joking that it was ‘officially’ Autumn. He turned and said, ‘I wouldn’t know a blackbird if I heard it.’

Still, there will be Snacks.

The Politics of Masochism.

Masochism is not a trait of Western Culture that is immediately obvious. Yet if you try to tease it out, like the rag end of plastic I recently found in my veg patch, you might find yourself there all afternoon, digging, sweating, tugging. Mounds of earth everywhere.

Out of all the election fever, the rhetoric of politicians and the hype of the media, one anecdote in particular grabs my attention. Its the moment when Mr Trump asks an audience of Iowans, ‘How stupid are the people of Iowa?’

That in itself was remarkable. Its a novel strategy. Normally politicians try to woo their voter, make them feel good about themselves. Mr Trump does the opposite. He actively humiliates them. But the truly amazing thing was what happened next. His ratings improved in Iowa.

How is it possible?

What’s going on?

”Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were for their salvation?” Gilles Deleuze.

The answer is that there is a strong Masochistic trend in our collective consciousness, which, contrary to popular belief, has little to do with sex.

”Masochism is not a mere perversion, but a reflection of the soul in its tortured, most inarticulate moments.” L Cowan.

Mr Trump has unwittingly hit upon a Big Secret. His slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, hinges upon the same principle as telling the Iowans how dumb they are. It mobilises the passion of having been done to, the lynch pin of Masochism. It says, ”you have been denied, robbed, bought low, subjected to the will of powerful others”. His message hooks in to how the West unconsciously feels about itself, that life has short-changed us somehow, a collective ‘truth’ which we are sorely tempted to reinforce by voting into power those who can then be guarenteed to abuse us.

We do the same in the dysfunctional relationships of our more private lives, staying on for years, putting up with the other’s behaviour, feeling hard done by, never stopping to ask, ‘what am I doing?’

The extent of Sado-Masochistic relating in the West as a dominant form of interaction was largely suppressed by the early schools of psychology who preferred to represent it as a flamboyant perversion so that it need not be recognised as something endemic or, for that matter, rife amongst those respectable gentlemen themselves.

Kraft-Ebing, big boss of the Neuro-Sciences in Vienna who first relegated Masochism to the ‘Perversions’ was the same chap who stonewalled Freud’s original and beautifully expressed, ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’, which clearly stated that neuroses were the result of childhood abuse.

Kraft-Ebing was horrified at the suggestion that children are harmed by their parents. He ostracised Freud until he changed his mind and substituted the drive-conflict theory which made the patient responsible for their own difficulties. He did the same with Sado-Masochism. Its the patient’s fault and its all about sex.

Curiously and for the record, the feted and popular Kraft-Ebing also thought of recreational sex as a perversion that required ‘treatment’, not to mention masturbation for which he had some cures of Inquisitional proportions, including the application of white hot irons to children’s privates, metal mittens, bed restraints and spiked cages to safely house your unmentionables.

Western Powers-that-Be, dissatisfied with projecting inferiority onto other nations and subsequently enslaving then to make the point, have also visited denied shadow onto the very young who are powerless to then resist what are in fact the unconsciously enacted fantasies of the Establishment.

And yet this still doesn’t explain the prevalence of Masochism in our society or why its so prolific in our cultural mind set as to swing voters in middle America, nor does it account for the emerging split between Empaths and Narcissists or the prervalence of addictions, alcohol consumption, gorging of all kinds, the endgame of which is invariably humiliation.

”I drink to drown the shame of being a drunk”. anon

Culturally endemic, ‘low self-esteem’ is the energy daily drained from us by the critisisms and judgements that we masochistically level at ourselves. Its the feeling of being a slave to the dollar, the sense that your esteem is measured by the affirmation of people you don’t actually respect, the wish as well as the fear that you’ll be ‘discovered’, found out, shamed.

A story that might help put all this in context comes from the Plains Indians, the story of the Jumping Mouse.

The Jumping Mouse was an adventurous sort. Alone amongst his brothers and sisters, he was determined to explore beyond the shade of the tree where they lived. The others begged him not to go, fearful of the black spots in the sky that wheeled above them.

But Jumping Mouse was brave and one day he set off. He scampered all day until he reached a pond occupied by a large wise looking frog.

‘Have I reached the edge of the world?’ he asked, panting.

The frog laughed kindly, ‘if you jump high enough, you will see a far off mountain. The top of the mountain is as close as you can get to the edge of the world.

Jumping Mouse jumped for all his worth and glimpsed the top of the mountain. He was determined to reach it. At the edge of the plain he asked Buffalo to carry him across. Buffalo agrees but for the price of one of his eyes. The Jumping Mouse plucks it out and climbs up. At the foot of the mountain he asks Fox to help him get to the summit. Fox agrees but at the price of his other eye. Jumping Mouse plucks it out and climbs up.

Delirious with excitement and pain, Jumping Mouse makes it to the top. He stands there for a moment, then hears the awful whirring of great wings above him. Mighty talons crush his body as he is whisked away. He prepares himself for a last final scream of agony when his blindness gives way to rushing sight and from his throat comes the call of Great Eagle.

Following your own star is not only full of suffering but demands sacrifices that will seriously impact you. The Gods invariably want something.

”The hallmark of the transpersonal is that it acts upon us.” S.B. Perrera.

The feeling of being subjected to the will of the Self is often an intrinsic part of spiritual awakening, being presented with a path that wasn’t part of your plan.

Contemporary Jungian analyst Lyn Cowan points to this commonality between Inner Revelation and Masochism, they share the experience of being subject to the will of the Other. She asks whether its not likely that if this aspect of our spiritual life is denied by Structures not too keen on folk having their own experience, then its bound to come out somewhere else in your life.

”It is not a matter of indifference if you serve a mania or a God. To serve a mania is detestable but to serve a God is meaningful (because) it is an act of submission to a higher spiritual being. When the god is not acknowledged, mania develops and out of this mania comes sickness.” C. G. Jung

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was of the opinion that the Soviet people needed to have Stalin as their leader because they had not suffered enough. The senseless anguished purging of the people enabling them better to see themselves in one another’s eyes, to realise their common humanity and hold it sacred.

The Oligarchs oblige us. Everyone knows perfectly well that Oligarchs prefer to stay that way and can only do so at your expense. In Orwellian fashion Free Trade Economy becomes the means to make the rich richer, the poor both poorer and less free until some mega-plague comes along and concentrates lines of inheritance for a while.

So while everyone argues for one candidate or another I would like to step back and ask, ‘what is it in us that gives such tacit approval to a two horse race between the uber-rich whose primary purpose is to shore up their interests whilst we’re so busy being done to as a trade off for staying at home under the tree where the black spots wont get us?

The Soul’s Revenge.

James Hillman’s book, ‘A Terrible Love of War’, begins with the story of General Patton surveying the aftermath of his battle field, saying, ‘God, I love it so. I love it more than my life.’

We need to put down our prejudices says Hillman, accept the normalcy of war, try to make sense of our love of it and the (seeming) need to wage war for its own sake.

er, except that psychopathic, ‘lead me, follow me, or get out of my way’ Patton, doesn’t speak for me and, in any case, it was winning that Patton was so high on. What so exulted him was not War itself but Victory.

‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Smells like victory’ Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.

Hillman goes on to make the case that War is….

‘a primordial component of being that fathers the very structure of existence.’ J Hillman.

He quotes Emmanuel Kant,

‘The state of peace among men living side by side is not the natural state, the natural state is one of war.’

which we join, according to Hillman, as a result of our failure to imagine into it sufficiently, the blind march of folly that subdues our reason through..

a working of the levers of duty, following the hierachy of command..’

Yet this feels insufficient. It relegates the cause of war to a martial equivalent of the Doctrine of Privatio Boni, that evil is the absence of good. War is then the absence or failure of individuation, failing to think for oneself, the failure to imagine consequences, failure to resist possession by the collective archetypal force of War itself, a

‘timeless theme of human existence.’ ibid

But is it?

I have been to war. I know the thrill of surviving the day, the power of immersing oneself into a collective identity with a common pointy-ended purpose. I have lived the racial slurs upon the enemy and bolstered my terror with superior malice. Warfare will indeed focus your mind and leave you little uncertainty about who you are or what needs to happen next. Notions of pillage are additionally tempting as are the tacit agreement that the rule of law and all things sacred are temporarily suspended.

You are the law and do as you please. Veeery tempting.

And then there’s Revenge…

But we need to go further than inquiring into ‘the causes’ of war in order to comprehend it, otherwise we are simply in a debate not unlike arguing over which of a bunch of schoolboys lighting matches set ablaze to a pile of wood. Nor is it sufficient to talk about scarcity of resources. The fact that the Chinese were harvesting millet for a thousand years before the advent of war seems to rule out the theft of resources as a primary motive.

If a peasant population is suffering for lack of basic resources, the main cause of that scarcity is unequal distribution.” B. Ferguson.

It is something that begins with centralised power.

”…pursuit of practical self-interest by those who actually make the decision, leaders often favor war because war favors leaders.’ ibid

Is war normal then, or have we simply normalised it, threaded it into the fabric of our being so that it looks like the original cloth?

In the past, a variety of anthropological studies have been keen to emphasise the warlike nature of certain contemporary ‘primitive’ tribes such as the Yanomami and held these up as insights into our ancient past. More recently it has been shown that many of these warring tribes in all their painted ferocity were tightly linked to European presence and even caused by the incursion of missionaries, anthropologists, slavers, miners and the ‘tertiary needs’ associated with the flood of materials and tools into ‘primitive’ culture.

‘It looks as if, all around the world, what has been called primitive or indigenous warfare was generally transformed, frequently intensified, and sometimes precipitated by Western contact.’ ibid

The Talmud says, ‘We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are”. Our attribution of inherent warlikeness to the contemporary indiginous cultures of today or to our own forebears is a form of collective projection which maintains the notion that we are sophisticated,evolved and superior by comparison, whilst, at one and the same time, commiting heinous crimes against them now justified by our generous wish to subjugate others for their own good.

So, contemporary ethnographic ‘evidence’ for our inherant warlikeness is highly suspect let alone the assumption that it is an adequate guage for our own antiquity or for the mould of those deeper layers of the Unconscious. It is an assumption rooted in the Dickensian philosophy of ”Phylogeny recapitulating Ontology” (the evolution of the species has the same stages as the development of the individual), a romantic veiw of our own paradisial past alongside the notion of ‘savages’ being like children whom we have to help down from the trees.

Or, they are comparable to neurotics, if you like your Freud.

But to suggest as an alternative that war is archetypal is a bold and mighty leap.

For starters the fossil records simply don’t support it. Archeological evidence from around the world shows that warfare has only existed in the last 8,000 years. http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/0703/0703_feature.html

The raiding party/hunting pack experience, so ancient we share it with apes and whales, is probably more the kind of archetype in operation if archetypes are to be bought into the discussion, but we still need to be asking how the impulse for an opportunistic raid of the neighbours mango patch gets translated into trillion dollar budgets and cruise missiles..

Eight thousand years is not a long time, yet what has emerged in the Collective Psyche in that twinkling of an eye has the power to stamp out life on earth. So we urgently need to know what we’re dealing with.

If it is not enough to talk about archetypes, or population growth, or the rise of iron weapons how can we account for it?

We could be really radicle and say that war with one’s neighbour is a way of keeping one’s own population under control, a chaotic international situation to divert attention from domestic shenanigins. But even this implies intent. If war is to the collective what a psychotic episode is to the individual there is not much use in talking about intent or conspiracy theories since what is happening is entirely unconscious.

How would it be, instead of looking for the symptoms or preconditions for war, we look at war as a symptom itself, a symptom of something so vast and hideous we can’t see it for what it is….,

‘a wound so common… that hardly anyone knows there is a problem.” R. Johnson

War always seems to be the outcome of real life events, out there in the world. Ferdinand gets shot in Sarajevo and triggers the First World War. Hitler invades Poland and triggers the next…. It all looks so obvious, yet leaders are assasinated on a regular basis without it leading to armed conflict and countries have been invading one another for centuries without it necessarily leading to massive international aggression.

Incidently, Archeduke Ferdinand’s death was as random as you like. The assassins positioned themselves along the route that his open topped carriage was supposed to take, armed with pistols and grenades. But he never showed up. He had gotten lost. So they all retired to a local bar for a drink, like you do when your assassination goes tits up. All of a sudden, who should draw up at the door of the bar all lost and asking the way? Yep. Ferdie himself.

So they killed him.

Which, history tells us, lead to the deaths of 38 million people…

I don’t think so.

I believe that the lynch pin of War’s emergence as a significant, commandeering factor of modern life, is largely down to a favourite pet theory we have about ourselves, a pet theory supported by Darwin, Freud, Neumann, and much of twentieth century Anthropology, the implicit notion that we White Folks are at the pinnacle of something.

The development of social hierarchies and some being more equal than others requires justification as well as enforcement. That justification is Specialness, more often than not, God-given specialness.

The Special then have to coerse the Un-special into agreeing with a state of affairs clearly not within their interests. How do they do this? By creating a diversion.

Don’t focus on your current abject misery. Don’t live Now, where the sting of the lash is still raising a welt on your back and the gnawing growl of hunger claws at your guts. Think of tomorrow and all the joys of your future liberation in whatever afterlife you have planned or is decreed by your, er, creed.

This is not the real thing. So put up and shut up. Focus on your future salvation while we fleece you today. This is the principle means by which people are collectively kept in line. So religion has to be hijacked by the Special in order to justify unfairness and inequality. You’ll get yours later. Your reward will be in heaven…

The Special depend on their lordship over the Un-special by luring them out of Now because that is where freedom lies. We can’t have the Un-special playing outside the rules. It would be like trying to herd cats. Promises of future salvation do the trick. The Un-special then put their shoulders to the wheel in the vain and passive hope for a brighter tomorrow whilst the Special, having been caught up in the gyre of their own PR, are also glassy eyed with the promise of future glory… and ownership. The young Nazi in ‘Cabaret’ sings..

”The sun on the meadow is summery warm, the stag in the forest runs free, but gather together to greet the storm… Tomorrow belongs to me.” from ‘Cabaret’

Unfortunately, this arrangement is a tad flawed for both parties..

“If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling.” – Carl Jung

Moreover, living in the future soon becomes a form of mass neurosis rooted in insecurity, fuelled by the fear and trembling, enervated by the lack of presence intrinsic to Being-Here-Now….

”Awakening as a future event has no meaning because Awakening is the realisation of Presence.” E. Tolle.

Life is not something passively lived out by us ants-worrying-about-tomorrow. Life has its own agenda. It wants to be lived, Now and to the Full. Eternity after all…

”is in love with the clocks of time. W. Blake

It doesn’t like being hived off to some glittery hypothetical possiblity.

”Unlived life does not sit idly on the shelf, it will turn round and bite you..” M.L. von Franz.

And what a bite! For there is nothing more designed to sharpen your present attention than a mob armed with machetes storming up the street, bombs falling from the skies or the crack and thump of being shot at. People often describe intense living, even religious experiences during War which is what it is for, to bring people into the aliveness of Now through a window if it will not be let in the door.

The gods are immanent as well as transcendent. If we spurn ‘Now’, then it will behave like an aggreived personality and express itself through channels we might not be too happy about.

”The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” CG. Jung.

We do not wage war, War wages us. Like a jilted lover spewing spite and vengeance, disenfranchised Moment, the fresh intoxicating delight of Now which we’re all so keen to abandon, floods back into our lives like an avenging harpie, a possessive and blood stained Kali, visiting poetic justice on our diffidence to the crucible in which life really occurs.

‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ ibid

So the archetype involved is actually Eternity, Soul itself grown dark and vindictive…

”the Self as Fiend.” P Ferruci

In her rightful place she is the Aqua Sapientia, the water of life. Deposed in favour of her sister, Tomorrow, (who never comes), she becomes the quest for a glorious death and the corner of a foreign field that is forever (state your nation here).

The Chicken Prince.

In my local town there is a putt-putt course. At the entrance a bold sign exclaims, ‘This game is played at your own risk!”

What are they afraid is going to happen? Might some senior citizen misjudge the strength of his swing and fatally club someone? Perhaps he could fall into the churning blades of Windmill or impale himself upon the plastic spires of Castle? Perhaps he might be swallowed by Snake or rudely thrown to the thundering tracks at Bude Station.

One of the hallmarks of Narcissistic Culture is our capacity to live with split realities. The strange torsion of your mind required to make the putt-putt sign meaningful entails a keeping apart, a split, between child and adult worlds that is really crying out for a unifying symbol to help us with the apparent contradiction of adults playing a child’s game.

Our world is full of such split realities. Collectively we fight for peace and oppress in the name of liberation. George Orwell called it ‘doublethink’, the capacity to hold opposing realities, believe in them both and, most importantly, not have your world disturbed by the contradiction.

Such splits are typical of both the Borderline Personality Disorder and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder. They tend to be more obvious with the former which often makes the borderline person appear more ‘crazy’ than the dapper narcissist who rarely looses his cool, but in fact his veneer of calm is only permitted by the split in him remaining unconscious. The wounding that caused it is earlier, more damaging and requires stronger defences.. The borderline is actually a bit tougher and can spend at least some time agonising over their failings.

This is because the borderline has one foot across the developmental threshold responsible for symbol formation and the emergent transcendant function that can deal with splits like self/other, inner/outer, conscious/unconscious. The narcissist however, has fewer tools to bridge opposites. His wounding is prior to the developmental stage of a negotiated reality with the world, before the possible transformation of ‘between’.

The alchemists say that, ‘to those who have the symbol the passage is easy’. This is because the healing symbol turns contradiction into paradox and makes us better able to live with ourselves.

‘How can you live with desiring desirelessness?’ someone asked a buddhist sage. ‘It just doesn’t bother me,’ replied the master.

In the West we achieve this capacity to live ‘au dessus de la mellee’ with much greater difficulty. We devalue relatedness and the feast of alternative perspectives it brings. We also devalue ‘Mother’. Freud never uses the pronoun, not once in all his books on childhood. But it is upon mother that the capacity for symbol formation depends.

‘The main threat to the modern infant is that he is the child of a dissatisfied mother.” S de Bouvoir.

If the child is un-contained by mother’s justified yet grevious distraction, then the emerging facets of himself cannot cohere or reorganise themselves into more evolved forms. Time will pass to no avail. There will be no mediation between self and other, no dialogue between I and me and no baseline for behaviour. The world will be ‘ready-at hand’ to quote Hiedeggar, stock to be used and abused rather than having the world be’ present-to-hand’, which is characterised by care and that which is between.

What to do?

An old Sufi story will help us.

The Chicken Prince was so called because the Prince of the Realm would insist on being naked all the time and pecking the ground like a chicken. He could not be persuded to join in even one of the courtly occasions in the proper attire, nor heed a single nicety observed by the good people of that place. The king was in despair. All his wise men had failed him.

Then, one day, an old herder from the hills came to the gate. He knocked saying that in the woods he’d heard a voice telling him to come to the help of the people and so he was lead before the Prince who was in the courtyard pecking away. The old man threw off all his robes and began to peck at the ground alongside the Prince who was a bit surprised…

but a bit relieved.

They pecked and pecked.

Then the old man began to hum as he pecked. Everything seemed to be okay. The Prince was a bit taken aback but it also soothed and so he tried it and discovered to his amazement that he could peck and hum together. They spent the whole afternoon humming and pecking.

Next day, after much humming and pecking, the old man began to make music like water over stones while he pecked. He quietly gurgled and span his sounds as he pecked. The Prince was a bit startled but he was also comforted by the old man’s undinting pecks and so he was encouraged and tried it for himself . It was delicious. He began to sing and peck and got so excited that before he knew it, it was time for bed.

Next day the Chicken Prince found the old man under one of the tables in the feasting hall muttering words to himself as he pecked and he kept certain things that seemed precious to him close by. He pecked and coddled his treasures and made words. The Prince was amazed but with a whoop he scampered off and found a treasure of his own making words all the way.

All day they pecked and coddled their treasures and made words.

Next day the old man had words and pants. The Prince was deeply impressed. ‘Why are you wearing pants?’ asked the boy, making his words.

‘I can be a chicken and wear pants’, said the old man. It seemed to be true. So he tried it and his pants were wonderful. So were his cool shoes. He found that even knives and forks were no impediment to his being able to express his inner chicken whenever he wanted. When he was in the mood…

which was less these days…

and so the Prince grew up to be wise and just…

and the old herder went back to his hills and wondered about stuff.

So what had actually happened? The kindly herder had done what he did best, he gently herded the disparate fragments of the Prince’s psyche into the same space so that they could get to know one another. He gave the boy the chance of finding his transcendent function, his treasure, by bearing the tension between opposing realities.

”The transcendant function is not something one can do oneself, it comes from experiencing the conflict of opposites.’ C G Jung.

which then,

”facilitates transition from one attitude to another.” ibid

If there is a cultural pattern in early development, a collective trend in response to the schism between mother and infant inevitable in misogynistic society, one in which children are bound to feel they have to supress themselves to live and that being made to feel bad about oneself is for your own good, then we will become collectively split, people of the lie, ever in retreat from the horror that to follow one’s own destiny is a form of self annihilation. The threshold cannot be crossed.

”Madness is not simply a propensity to participate in alternate realities but a loss of power to move freely among them.” J Nelson.

You can come across any number of examples of this in every day life. I was out walking my dog in the lane. A much older man overtakes at high speed, ‘power walking’, all sweat and gasping. A mile further on he’s ground to a halt. As I pass by he staggers over, grasps my arm and begins a monologue about potholes in the road where he comes from and how the roads here are like silk. The glory of the warm lane actually beneath his feet is apparently being saved for later, for when he in that traffic jam on the potholes. Morning or evening he’s a stranger to now. And the common thread of his day is that he’s never here.

A bit further on and my neighbour storms out of his cottage, flapping the sleeves of his jumper in frustration at the gorgeous indian summer sky. ‘You just don’t know what to do!” he yelled. As if the sun lacked the etiquette of observing proper form for the season.

On the way to the shop I bump into a mate with a long face. He’s certain his future is blighted despite the fact that he has just qualified in a new vocation and has been given a work placement. It doesn’t add up. Though this feeling of dependence and being unfed is congruent with his life script. His wife joins in the wail of inevitable poverty and miserlyness. It didn’t seem to occur to them that life is people and that they were therefore talking about each other, taking pythonesque comfort from the shared agreement and mutual head nodding of just how awful they really are.

Further along an aquaintance asks what I’ve been up to. I tell him I’ve been walking the dog and in the woods. ‘Ah the woods’, he muses wistfully. ” I love the woods but I’ve never got a good enough reason to go there,” .. all imparted jovial and calm, yet how it must tear at him not to have sufficient cause to do what he loves. Upon what precedent must such a double bind be nested? What can be inferred about the quality of life itself from such a trap? Does he feel the same about sex, friendship, a vocation? And if so what kind of fractious, driven, inner hell can it be when the richness of life is not a sufficient reason to live it?

Soul Loss, Soul Retrieval.

When I was an ardent young fascist and subjugating already impoverished people on their own ancestral lands, a Commanding Officer from HQ came to give us macho fighting lads a pep talk in the bush.

In those days and in that part of the world most people smoked but you could only buy two brands of cigarettes. Madison was for your man’s man, ‘strong and full of flavour’, Kingston was for women and Madison smokers trying to give up.

The tobacco company noticed the trend and decided to capitalise on the gender variable so they launched fags-for-girls, Berkeley.

The C.O. arrives, men at attention, eyes front. He invites us to stand easy and to smoke if we wish, producing a pink packet of Berkeley, removing the wrapper with all the curiosity of a novel occasion, oblivious to the faux pas unfolding. He lights one, coughs a bit and then delivers his spiel for as long as it takes the cigarette to burn down to clenched fingers behind his back.

It wasn’t just the social gaff, not just that we Madison guys would rather gouge out our eyes with a rusty spoon than be seen smoking Berkeley. It was his clumsy attempt at manipulation, the pretence of the man trying to be one of the lads which he assumed everyone was too stupid to see. But more than this, way more, what he actually did, despite his intention, was to suck the life and vitality out of the very group he was ostensibly there to enrich.

As he spoke, words slithering, tone masticating, hands ever hidden, I could feel something essential being drained out of me. It seemed that for the duration of this brief and otherwise unmemorable speech, all the soul consuming influences of my young life suddenly condensed about his quietly malevolent person; my deceiptful father, the toxic pedagogues of my hateful schooling, the cold calculation of imperial culture that sends its youth to their deaths for profit. By the time his Berkeley had burned down to nothing, so too, had I.

Whilst the C.O. was not playing the traditional narcissistic gambit of dumping his inferiority on us, something he reserved for the contemptuous enemy, to be in his presence was still an ennervating experience given his need to fill himself up with other people’s energy.

It took me decades to make sense of the experience…

… his covert agenda was to feed from the buoyant mood that already existed amongst the men to quell his own unacknowledged fears and insecurities.

This garnering to oneself of another’s qualities or energies is the flipside of narcissistic ‘gaslighting’. Gaslighting is when a person disowns their own behaviour or motivation by calling any attempt to point to it ‘projection’. It’s not me it’s you. What the C.O. did was the opposite, he filled up the gnawing gaps in himself with our morale.

The fact that we can be intruded on and depleted both by the Unconscious and by one another is what gives rise to the universal use of protective amulets against the ‘evil eye’. We can only understand these apotropaic objects as superstition if we fail to take into consideration the psychic fact that this kind of inter-personal robbery is a real thing.

When C. G. Jung was in Kenya he asked the headman of the village he was visiting if the people there had dreams. ‘No,’ replied the elderly African, ‘the District Commissioner has our dreams for us these days.”

We are uncomfortable with the permeability of the Psyche because it suggests us humans are a great deal less discrete from one another than we’d prefer to imagine. Our feelings of superiority depend on the conviction that consciousness is master of its own house. And yet somehow the collective imagination is still repleat with the mythologems of blood sucking vampires, brain eating zombies and witches that eat children, archetypal containers for the reality of the fact that people can get inside you and gobble you up.

You might experience it as finding it difficult to think clearly in another’s presence, knowing what to do or how to respond, or simply that you feel drained and exhausted by some apparently innocuous exchange.

The chronic form of this is the ‘negative introject’, an undigested and internalised complex of unacknowledged attitudes from significant others that got inside you as a child and made its home there, like a parasite, but one which also serves as a nucleus of identity to which a person can become attached and with which they identify..

”as though it were something precious.” F. Perls.

…despite the fact that a nasty introject can spend a life time cutting ego consciousness to pieces and gobbling down its confidence/wellbeing/autonomy from within..

This devouring aspect, can lead to a very real sense of loss of soul, as though one’s very essence had been stolen.

”If you ask a group of people, “How many of you feel you’ve lost part of your soul?” it’s typical that everybody raises their hand.” M. Harner.

To the extent that Narcissism is endemic in our society, so too is there this sense of loss of soul, and the need to go find lost or denied aspects of oneself.

In early development the ‘special’ child can’t realise at first that their elevated status is a trade off, compensation for being robbed of a unique destiny that invariably leads away from family and so..

”never gets a chance to develop his own personality, because he is so busy holding down the foreign bodies he has swallowed whole.” ibid

‘Close’ relations can sometimes be no more than that the child’s own path has simply been hobbled by co-dependant parents whose sense of self includes the attributes and qualities of their children, and thereby smothers the child’s unfolding destiny.

But sometimes its not historical. You just meet someone who has this practiced ability to drain the life out of you, your new best friend with a knack for ferreting out and spoonfeeding your deepest needs whilst plundering your inner grain store.

What to do?

There’s any amount of advice out there. My suggestion is that what’s required is a primal response, something ‘primitive’.The intellect is useless in this territory. The lost part of Soul has to be grabbed back in active imagination, acknowledged through ritual, tended in symbolic ways such that the malaise which draws our attention to that missing core, to its value, also mobilises our quest for Wholeness.

For years after I had bought myself out of the military I had a repeating dream of truncated men, men with limbs missing, ripped torsos, agonizingly incomplete. Throughout these scenes the recurring image of a deep, dark, menacing pool. No amount of interpretation seemed to hit the mark.

I decided on a radicle course of action. I knew of such a pool in a dark wood, so I went there one winter’s evening with the intention of spending the night, to see what happened. It was freezing. I walked around the pond endlessly trying to keep warm. A spontaneous phantasy arose in my mind that my ‘treasure’ lay at the bottom and that it was guarded by a troll like the one from the story of Billy Goat Gruff. It felt important and I paid attention to it. He had a lot to say for himself and so had I. We argued back and forth most of the night. Eventually he said, ‘well, if you want it back you have to come and get it.’

Dawn. There were patchy sheets of ice on the pond. I stripped off and waded in.

On the way back home, having ran the four miles back to the train station to get warm, I realised I had slept fitfully at some point in the night, curled up in the roots of a great Oak to take shelter from the wind. While I slept I had dreamt.

”Paying the Unconscious tribute more or less guarentees its co-operation.” C. G. Jung

I was visiting a ‘half-way house’ for damaged and handicapped men. There was a great party going on. Their wits had returned and they had all grown dense and luxurious beards. Then they gathered around the pond and pulled out a wealth of fish. A grand old man appeared on a white horse and magically drained away the dark water. I went over to him, seeming to recognise him. I shouted in delight, ‘I am your grandson!’ He looked at me with infinitely compassionate and twinkling blue eyes, reached down his hand to me and said,’ Of course you are.’

Narcissism, Compulsion and the Soul.

There were once two psychiatrists. The one invites the other for dinner. The guest arrives, asks to use the bathroom and disappears for an hour. Eventually he emerges with a knowing look.

”You have a serious obsessive compulsion,’ he says to his collegue, ”there are 542 bars of soap in your bathroom. I know, I counted every last one.”

Of course psychological conditions are bound to overlap but Narcissism and OCD seem to have a special relationship.

Why?

I was watching a Ted Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of ‘ Eat, Pray, Love’. She made the point that people who became very successful had a tendency to go mad and top themselves because they confuse themselves with the ‘Genius Loci’ who served as their muse.

The solution, she said, is to remember that ‘genius’, is its own thing. Not-me.

Very Interesting, but what is your point?

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. ~Carl Jung.

Narcissism notoriously lives out only one corner of (an idealised) life. Both the dark Brother, the less than salubrious aspects of himself, and the unlived potential, The Self, have to be projected…

and then come banging at the castle gates again and again.

And because the contents projected are always the same…

the banging is also the same…

and so interpersonal scenarios are endlessly repeated..

as are ritualised patterns of behaviour behind closed doors.

We live in a time of relative spiritual malaise. We also live in a time of marked obsessiveness and compulsive behaviour.

Could there be a connection?

Its curious that the definition and symptoms listed by DSM5 for a diagnosis of OCD (which includes praying!) sound distinctly like the ritual contents of religious ceremony. These include,

”repetitive behaviours, according to rules that must be rigidly applied.”DSM5

like a church service….

Precisely. Sacramental acts are also, ‘aimed at preventing or reducing distress or preventing some dread event.’

What’s the connection with Narcissism?

Waaal, Narcissism is particularily prone to OCD not just because the dark brother is eternally projected, but because the ego is identified with the Self. This means that there is no real spiritual life.

I don’t get it.

Spiritual life necessitates a relationship with God..

yeees…

but if you are identified with God then there is no relationship. Instead of having a religion, the religion has you…

By the scruff…

And marches its children off to war….

or down to the supermarket for a dozen bottles of bleach and a pack of toothbrushes so you can purify the pelmets of your appartment at 4 in the morning…

or out in the rain to buy cigarretes while every bone in your body is screaming, ‘DON’T DO IT!!’.

or muttering shameful babble to appease the fates whilst not realising that the person next to you on the bus is lookin’ at you strangely…

or washing endlessly in lieu of a genuine cleansing.

”It is not a matter of indifference if one calls something a ‘mania’ or a ‘god’. To serve a mania is detestable and undignified. But to serve a god is full of meaning and promise.” CG Jung

Narcissism won’t share, has no story, nothing to be a part off…

because there is no relatedness or participation in that which transcends it.

And for the want of partness in the greater whole we have compulsive patterning instead.

Like a stuck gramaphone record doing the same thing over and over. Round and round. Instead of meaningful sacrament we have chaotic excrement.

Instead of being drawn we are driven.

The fantasy that we are the captains of our own ships beckons the raven’s claw.

”Whoever sets himself up as judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.” A Einstein.

For want of having a story to belong in we are caught eternally on the same page.

And more than that, for want of the Principle of Relatedness that gifts us with both belonging and the internal flexibility of a conversation between I and me, we are robbed not just of meaningful context but of our own humanity..

which is perhaps why the DSM5 definition of OCD uses the language of automation, describing the phenomenon as ‘the brain’s junk mail.” Though it significantly acknowledges that OCD is responsible for, ”communication errors among different parts of the brain.” Ie. there’s a problem with internal dialogue.

meaning…?

That without the capacity for self-reflection we are driven along like leaves in the wind.

The legacy of Western Civilisation is effectively the deification of consciousness. Having cast out the divine feminine, the principle that mediates between Logos and ego, the two are bound to get confused…

like when you don’t have a soap dish and so you leave the soap in the bath and it gets all mushy and your mum yells at you?

Exactly, ego gets ‘god-almighty’, which is all very well for a bit…

until the mush begins..

and soon starts behaving as though there were no limits and as if nothing mattered save itself.

The psyche responds with a big fat neurosis to bring about some sense of proportion in lieu of actual awareness. Instead of the cleansing renewal he was hoping for the bath room hero finds himself compulsively feeling about the teensy yet glorified space into which he’s soaped himself.

…pretty sure he’s in there somewhere.

On Being Enviously Attacked.

I dreamt I was fighting my brother. Back and forth we went. Evetually I pushed him back and said, ‘Dave, do you know why we’re fighting?’

He shook his head.

‘It’s because of all the cool stuff you have,” and I indicated the lavishly furnished place. Wood panelled walls, expensive carpets, fine art…

He looked puzzled. ‘I thought it was yours…’

We both thought the other got the goodies but actually they just weren’t there to begin with. We thought, oh, the other must have it, to keep alive the hope that the goody could actually be a real thing…

but it wasn’t…

which might come our way one day…

but it didn’t.

When mothering is diminished in value and in availability, siblings fight.

This is a rule.

We would rather kill each other rather than admit that what we were fighting over wasn’t available.

Which is all very well except that it means being eternally consumed with envy.

You have to keep refloating the hope that one day the goody may become yours, perhaps by some mighty effort. Or at least, let you fuel the easier angry fantasy that some rival predatory suckling is secretly hoarding it all for himself.

We think of our inner world’s as being quite discrete and yet the context for my dream echoes back through the myth and legends of Western Culture. Romulus and Remus, Esau and Jacob, Cain and Abel, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. All these stories have as their context the Divine Feminine being killed off by Her consort.

When a divine aspect of the whole is missing, every generation is bound to re-enect the consequences of it’s loss one way and another.

”What you cannot remember is condemned to be repeated….” Santayana

Kill the dark brother! For centuries the children of Single System systems have dealt with the divine split between Yahweh and Sophia/Wisdom by splitting themselves into good and bad just as we do when our personal parents become irreconcilable.

Its so deep in us that psychological theories are developed suggesting that such splitting is innate and that the resulting paranoia is just part of growing up.

”The ‘paranoid-schizoid position’ refers to a constellation of anxieties, defences and internal and external object relations that are characteristic of the earliest months of an infant’s life.” M Klien.

So we blame baby so as not to call culture into question..

But if there’s no divine faminine (typo left) to preside over the sanctification of birth and motherhood how can baby be anything but paranoid and split…?.

trying to make the best of it….

Where’s my promised land?

This is not what it said on the broshure..

The feeling that there is something awry, something that makes it all just a little bit too scary to go off and do my own thing means, maybe, I’ll just settle for being special instead…

…whilst being secretly consumed with envy for everything we now imagine to be in the sole possession of some greedy, predatory other; imbued with gnawing hunger and riteous indignation.

Good breast/bad breast are redacted from good Jeruselm/bad Babylon, a split in Humanity 5,000 years old, engendered by God’s need for a subordinate partner…

…and not simply because we are that way inkliened.

The Sacred Marriage.

Jung and Assagioli spent an afternoon at Bollingen arguing about the nature of the Self. It got quite heated because they were in some disagreement, Jung arguing for a totality of the Psyche, Assagioli arguing for Contentless-ness and No-thing-ness.

You could say these very different perspectives were like yin and yang but that doesn’t quite cut it. You could invoke the story of the four blind mullahs all trying to describe an elephant from its trunk, foot, ear and tail respectively. Of course, they say different things, though its all the same creature.

But that isn’t right either. What Jung and Assagioli were doing was wrestling with the cut and shut legacy of Single System systems to our collective spirituality which mangled together spirit and soul such that we tend to use the terms interchangeably despite their great difference.

If the early church was to have the unity required to fend off persecution, it needed to pitch salvation as something that could only be attained through Itself. To this end people could not be having their own experience or finding anything ‘within’. So a great many of the spontaneous metaphors which sprang up to express ‘spirit’, the divine spark which transcends mediation by cultural organs, like those contained in gnostic texts at the time, were denounced as heretical.

‘The Divine Spark is not subject to the Law’, said second century Gnostic Valentinus.

Emperor Constantine was outraged. He not only outlawed Valentinian ideas. He made it a mandatory and summary death sentance to own his writings. And yet Valentinus was very nearly made bishop of Rome within a mere hundred years of Christ’s death so his interpretation of those events must at least have been popular.

And so they were, except the idea that Wisdom /Sophia had slipped a divine seed into Humanity via her gardener, Yahweh, without him noticing, through which Eternity-as-Ground could be glimpsed, and more, this side of death and contrition…. all this was bound to undermine allegiances to The Corporation.

At its inception, the Church conflated these two very different aspects of spiritual life, so that people would stop inquiring once they had arrived at Fearing-the-Lord and dutifully pay their tithes on time. ‘Spirit’ was allocated only to God and ‘soul’ became something you could only save in the fullness of time via the appointed means of culturally defined convention..

or die.

In the main we plebs have heartily embraced the sensible option and not just because we don’t like branding irons or having our nails pulled out. The prospect of keeping your nose clean for a future place in Paradise is an easier ride than finding your own way through thorny undergrowth which has a ‘de-integrating’ effect on the personality, a kind of stripping away or stripping apart that may be tougher than whatever the Inquisition has in its bag of tricks.

German born buddhist master, Anagarika Govinder describes his first encounter with Nothing-ness..

”I felt like a meteor drawn onto the orbit of a bigger celestial body _ until it dawned upon me that once I allowed myself to ‘fall’ without reserve, the impact would be my inevitable end. Suddenly a terror siezed me, the terror that this body and this mind would not be mine anymore, the terror of losing my identity for good: the indescribable, inexpressible fear of emptiness…. to fall into the nameless Void!” Lama Govinder

Govinder recalls that he ‘struggled tenaciously’ against this experience by getting up and frantically drawing a self portrait,..

”in order to assure myself of my own reality..” ibid

So we cast a blind eye to the churches embargo on our experience of spirit because of its de-integrating effect and go along with the mish mash of treating spirit and soul as though they were the same thing.

Unfortunately this conflation has had the effect of arresting our collective spiritual development because it discourages the spontaneous joy in spirit which is already redeemed, already One, something here and now, something not subject to God as-we-know-him.

What this means is that the experience of spirit or pneuma as Valentinus called it has to be had outside the auspices of church. With the God above god, Sophia.

which annoyed the church to the point of banishing him forever-and-ever-and- ever.

Amen.

and killing his mates.

So the Hierosgamos, the Sacred Marriage, had to go underground. The symbolism that represents the relationship between Spirit and Psyche could not be explored without treading on ecclesiastical toes and so it was cast on the dung heap as mere..

” conjugal productions of their fancied aeons” Bishop Iranaeus.

Valentinus described three different types of human experience. The first, and most numerous, were ‘Hylic’, the kind of person that just lets themselves live, that feels the psyche is whatever they know of it, who live in their appetites and fears.

The second he called, Psychic, people who become aware of the Unconscious as an objective fact that has to be reckoned with, that can give meaning and purpose beyond the satisfaction of personal desires.

What nearly got him martyred was his assertion that there was yet another stage after this, the ‘Pneumatic’, variously called Emptiness, Sunyata, the Void, which, with the greatest irony, was then left to the East to elucidate after the church had finally wiped out everyone who could attest to what was in fact the essence of Christ’s message.

And so the Hierosgamos got downgraded to being wedded to the Architect, rather than the coniunctio of Spirit and Soul that it was meant to be, with the ego sitting a couple of rows back from the main show quietly trying to keep from being overwhelmed by events.