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.

Goddess Eroded .

Anathema to believers, irrelevant to infidels, reading the banned books of the Apocrypha takes someone who believes and wishes they didn’t in order to go searching for clues into our collective spiritual malaise and for healing stories to tend the soul afflicted by Single System systems.

Most of the books are banned because they make some reference to Wisdom/Sophia, Yahweh’s old wife…

DON’T MENTION HER NAME…

who was dumped for the new bride, Israel…

He’s a bit touchy on the subject and the Apocrypha reads like the dream journal of a troubled deity with interrupted REM sleep…

What you are forbidden or discouraged from reading says a great deal. It is about way more than social control or extracting taxes. Its also about identity and the state of your relationship with the gods.

Ontological insecurity can be more threatening than death anxiety itself (how much do you exist in the first place?) which makes it all the easier to kill one another over who reads what. The unearthed sacred texts at nag Hammadi were buried there by someone who was afraid for his or her life and did not survive long enough to reclaim them….

Some of these books to-die-for are not so obvious as to their wickedness. Some were made canonical on pain of death but then, after several centuries of sober reflection, banned on pain of death….

At the apex of the period we euphemistically call the Renaissance, owning such a book, even asking about it or wanting a peek, could get you torched quicker than you can say ‘psychotic delusional paranoia’.

The majority of Christendom’s searing scream-fests, for they were intended as spectacle, held during these noble and enlightened times, were not of witches, but of ‘heretics’, anyone who had no mates and whose toe had strayed from the path: who had perhaps asked an imprudent question, wondered out loud about the doctrine of transubstantiation, or why angels might rebel…

So, what’s in these stories is dynamite of some kind..

But what?

Take the seemingly innocuous Book of Tobit, cast down by a mighty ecumenical quilling at the Council of Trent in 1546, from being the equal of Isiah to being the cause of your nasty end if you say otherwise…

Apparently..

..Tobit was a wealthy exile living in Ninevah circa 800 BC. One hot night after burying a body, Tobit slept outside. Sparrow droppings fell into his eyes and blinded him. He prayed to God to let him die. On that same day in Media, Sarah, one of Tobit’s kinsman, also prayed for death because she was constantly ridiculed for having been married seven times. Each time, after the ceremony, the demon Asmodeus had killed her husband before the marriage could be consummated.

God hears both prayers.

allegedly.

With Tobit expecting to die soon, he sends his only son, Tobiah, to Media on an errand. Tobiah is accompanied by the angel Raphael. En route, Tobiah is attacked by a large fish which Raphael shows him how to kill. He also instructs him to remove its gall bladder, liver, and heart, because they “can be used as medicines.” Upon arriving in Media, Tobiah marries Sarah at Raphael’s insistence. He uses the fish heart and liver to magically dispose of the demon and protect the marriage bed. When Tobiah returns home, he applies the gall and restores his father’s sight.

No big deal, right? Everyone is riteous and the good are rewarded. And anyway the book was made canonical by the Council of Carthage in 397AD…

So someone, somewhere, must have looked at it one day and saw something…

something threatening…

and here’s what it is..

They weren’t rewarded by the mighty arm of Yahweh at all. Yahweh doesn’t come into it. They rewarded themselves. Tobit’s peity was rooted in the Principle of Relatedness, in the Old Ways, in virtue being its own reward and not in the abstract faith required by Holy Emperors, which, by 1546 had become an establishment celebrating a millenium of its own divine status.

”There’s this sentence in the gospel about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. Jesus said that in the context of a pagan Caesar. Once Caesar is Christian, the things line up differently. There’s a kind of theologizing of secular power and a secularization of episcopal power.” W. Godwin.

Tobit was an exile from the northern kingdom of Israel which still adhered, in some degree of secrecy, to the Goddess, Wisdom/Sophia..

DON’T MENTION HER NA..

oh, do shut up.

The focus is on redemption through relatedness. His burial of the body in the beginning of the story is against the rules of Establishment which he breaks in order to honour the spirit of the dead.

”The moral teaching of Tobit shows endless parallels with the Wisdom tradition in it’s solicitude of social justice and service [to one another].” F. Bruce.

being blinded with birdshit seems like poor recompense or even punishment for his devotions which he does not recant but just wishes to die. ‘If you’re going to be like that, just kill me…’

not a lot of faith..

which the Council of Trent now required of prophets. Faith in redemption, in judgement, in god’s promises, in heaven, in forgiveness..

all of which will be dolled out tomorrow…

and not the ghastly grime of moment present, in which redeeming acts of random kindness might occur, eruptions of spontaneous charity,

wherein humanity is redeemed via the recognition of divine immanence in one another rather than by fearful deference to a remote and transcendent god.

Moreover, Tobias is pally with Raphael who is never named in the Old Testament on account of him being part of the angelic mob described by Enoch, equally persona non gratis, as having quit Heaven to consort with mortals, particularly the ladies, and treacherously taught them all kinds of cool stuff conducive to self reliance….

like how to defend yourself from man-eating fish and what parts of it can be used for apotropaic purposes…

to defeat demons..

BUT..

You can’t just have random people swanning about the countryside being given inside information on how to prevail against the Lord of Darkness and rescuing damsels without official documentation.

It won’t do. It makes those in power look redundant and foolish. Moreover it frustrates the wonderful loophole that allows for us to perceive ourselves as pious without having to actually look out for one another, the joy of being able to do what we like so long as we are sorry later.

It’s not acceptable that Asmodeaus is defeated, not by God, but by a naive young fool from a tribe with dodgy inclinations and love in his heart who values betweeness-in-the-moment over faith-in-tomorrow.

and then he has the gall…

oops,

to go and cure his father, who was clearly in the process of being punished by God for his indescretions and wasn’t even sorry for his sinful adherance to tradition.

bin it.

and pull the toenails out of anyone who protests.

What Feelings Are For.

What are feelings for? Psychotherapy is all too quick to point out the problems that occur when feelings are repressed, but doesn’t say much about the function of feeling itself. Ever since Descartes’, ‘I think therefore I am’, feeling has come a poor second to thinking as a basis for experience. To be emotional is to be misguided.

Yet our values and opinions are largely rooted in a feeling response to the world. Thinking is rarely primary and does not afford action with value. It is feeling that guides action. Without the full range of your own feeling response to life, behaviour has to be regulated by external authority

”Feeling always binds one to the reality and meaning of symbolic contents, and these in turn impose binding standards of ethical behaviour from which (the intellect) is only too ready to emancipate itself.” C. G Jung.

One of the defining aspects of the psychopath, who doesn’t know how to behave, is that he suffers from ‘flattened affect’. I.e. he does not feel. His riding roughshod over others and behaving as he wishes is synonymous with not feeling. Not knowing what he feels deprives him of the means to know what others might feel and so the only guide to behaviour is external constraint.

Madness is often a question of the absence of something ordinary as much as it is about the presence of something exotic.

Of course it could be said that some forms of dis-ease are full of feeling. There are even some studies that have been made which seem to link the onset of schizophrenia with excessive expression of feeling in the family. Closer inspection reveals that what the researchers are describing is not feeling but hysteria. The hysteric is not expressing feeling. He is manufacturing emotion in a dramatic attempt to compensate for the want of genuine feeling. He makes histrionic mountains out of mole hills in order to try and induce some sense of aliveness into an otherwise desolate life. Such counterfeit feeling is an exercise in unreality. Schizophrenic responses to these misrepresentations are only to be expected.

In the town where I grew up one of the boys was very disturbed. He was bright but couldn’t concentrate in class and continuously failed his grades. Eventually he took to drugs, anything he could lay his hands on, and dropped out of school. The last conversation I had with him consisted in his concern that the electrical appliances in his home had turned against him. Apparently the fridge had been particularly belligerent and thrown spears at him.

Both of this poor boy’s parents were hysterics. His mother was the more florid of the two and had once attacked him with a kitchen knife for failing to do his homework. Was she the emotional refrigerator who threatened him with sharp ‘spears’? Of course in public she contained herself a little better but there was always something exaggerated in her gestures. It wasn’t possible to ask her the time without her feigning shock, clutching her breast and sweeping her eyes to the heavens.

The boy’s father was the local vicar. He was peaceable and friendly but peaceable and friendly from fifty paces. When you met him in the street he would throw his arms open wide and run towards you as if you were a long lost brother whilst staring avidly at a point just past your left ear. One day I was sent around to their house on some errand. The vicar was in his study poring over a box of old sepia photographs. Would I like a look? He had been a big game hunter in his time and this was the record of his trophies. One photo impressed me deeply. It seemed to be his favourite and he spent some time telling me the story attached to it. A large bull elephant with great tusks dominated the picture. Hanging from one of these tusks were the entrails of his companion that the elephant had just gored to death.

His friend had died horribly. But he isn’t connected to this event in the least. There is no shred of horror, shock or loss. There is no sense of any feeling about what had happened at all. It has all been replaced by the drama of the intrepid journalist getting the ultimate action shot. How pleased he is with his photography. The focus is crystal clear. The composition is just perfect. It’s a shame the way the colour is faded though.

His sermons had a similar feel to them. They always left the congregation slightly bemused. His gusto made everyone a little depressed. It wasn’t that he was always reminding folk of their sin or painting lavish pictures of hell and damnation. On the contrary, his was a vision of love and light. It was that his message was forced. He was a priest pretending to be a priest, which left his flock playing at being a flock. This was confusing for them because they were already a flock. Perhaps his son was similarly befuddled.

Many forms of dis-ease seem to hinge upon the problem of inappropriate feeling, the lack of it or the faking of it, which can then leave a person unclear about both their identity and their values. Who they are and what they hold good are cradled in feeling which connects them to themselves, to one another, and to the world.

‘’Feeling is vital to the sense of reality and relatedness. When feeling is inhibited or repressed, people and things hold little meaning or value.’’ J. W. Perry.

You hear a lot of talk in counselling and therapy circles about ‘negative feelings’. I get a lot of people who want help with them as though it were possible or desirable to cut them out like some cancer. They forget how lucky they are to have these troublesome feelings where they belong rather than having them somatically expressed in the body where suppression would have them develop into truly problematic symptoms.

There’s really no such thing as a ‘negative’ feeling, just feelings that reflect an uncomfortable reality, that don’t fit with our preferred self-image or seem to lack meaning because they have lost their context. As such, these feelings are like an internal compass pointing to a reality we may prefer not to name or indicating a direction we prefer not to take but without which we cannot be whole.

In his account of Nazi concentration camps Bruno Bettleheim, a Freudian analyst who was in Dachau and Buchenwald, was repeatedly surprised that certain men failed to cope when all his psychoanalytic experience suggested that they would do better than others. He believed that those with strong superegos would survive and could not understand why they did not.

In the famous story by Antoine Exupery (2001), the fox says to the Little Prince,

‘’It is with the heart that one sees rightly’’.

He might have added, ’’and acts rightly too’’. Bettleheim (1991) observed that prisoners would commit suicide at the point that they no longer felt able to respond emotionally to their situation.

‘’One had to comply with debasing and amoral commands if one wished to survive,’ but it was necessary to stay aware of whether this were ‘’good, neutral or bad.’’ ‘’The freedom to feel… was what permitted the prisoner to remain a human being. B.Bettleheim.

What killed the prisoner,

’’was the giving up of all feeling, all inner reservations about one’s actions, the letting go of a point at which one would hold fast no matter what.’’(ibid)

Values, humanity and the will to live itself could only be maintained by retaining the freedom to respond emotionally to circumstance even if one was powerless to effect change.

Conversely, the SS were trained to forgo basic human values by expunging their own emotional responses to the extreme situation of the camps. One of the methods employed in SS recruitment was to have the soldiers rear Alsatian puppies during their indoctrination. Of course the men would become emotionally attached to their charges. At the end of the process they were commanded to throttle the dogs with their bare hands, demonstrating both literally and symbolically their capacity to choke off all feeling that then made their inhuman purposes possible.

People commit inhumane acts against one another because their own humanity has been choked off. When I was a boy at public boarding school, a colonial throwback that made Tom Brown’s schooldays look like a summer picnic, the new-boys always swore that when they became seniors they would never treat the juniors with the violent contempt that they themselves were having to endure. The culture of the school was steeped in institutionalised bullying. Twice daily roll calls were necessary to stem the flow of runaways, a roll called so frequently I can still rattle it off after 35 years.

Sexual abuse was an organised part of a new boy’s inauguration, as were regular beatings and various forms of psychological torture. In fact those same new boys were just as sadistic when they became seniors. It was necessary for them to become so in order for them to repress the memory of their own humiliation. Any real protest, except in the vaguest terms, would bring renewed punishment from above and accusations of being wet from one’s own dormitory. No-one wanted to see their own terror laid bare in another’s suffering.

Lights out provided enough cover of darkness for the privacy of muffled crying. There would be no concern but no condemnation either, for comment either way would validate the fact that someone was in pain. Occasionally the entire dorm would be whimpering, blankets and pillows stuffed into mouths to deaden the sounds. No-one said anything to anyone else and there would be no mention of it in the morning. The bell would ring and it was business as usual.

We could only refer to our experiences indirectly by saying that we would never treat the next generation of new boys in the way that we had. But the actual feelings involved were always dismissed and so the values that might have prevented a boy from repeating what he had himself suffered could not be informed by experience. My first day as a senior is dominated by the memory, not of one event or another, but of being drunk with power.

I sent a new-boy to the tuck shop to get me a coke. When he returned I could see from the level in the bottle that he had taken a sip. My response was to hold a knife to his throat and threaten to kill him.

Years later, aware that there was something un-nameably wrong with my life, I took myself off to the Sierra Madre (mother mountain) for space and reflection. One day I was walking along a narrow path in a shallow valley when I became aware of a great pressure wave, a force of Nature, like a racing storm front, approaching me from behind at speed. I began to run, then dived off the path and into the brush as it overtook me, throwing me down, dissolving me in a grief that only began to take coherant form as it found its expression. It started out as the regret and self recrimination for all kinds of terrible things that I myself had caused others to suffer. Then it became for want of my parents who I hardly knew, and finally I found myself crying for my childhood nurse, Suzzanah, terrible gut wrenching loss.

Finally, as it all subsided, I crawled over to a Yucca cactus and propped myself up. I got out my billy and brewed some tea. There was a little shade, a soft breeze and some friendly whisps of grass. I got to my feet thinking that this was a good spot and if I could triangulate my position I could find my way back here. What I saw was an endless valley dotted with a thousand Yuccas, all with their measure of shade, their bit of breeze, their whisps of friendly grass.

I didn’t need to find my way back to anything. What I needed was always right in front of me.

Later still, as a psychotherapist in private practice, I am often asked, ‘how do you get in touch with grief and pain?” The answer is always the same. It will find you. Once you have interrupted the strategies and lifestyles put in place to occlude it. And you don’t need to go to Mexico to know this to be true, though it does take the realisation that propping up relationships that don’t work, getting sick, and staying in dead end patterns may well preserve you from life’s difficulties and pain, though it does so at the cost of aliveness itself…

The metaphor of the endless Yuccas means that opportunity is always exactly where you are so long as you do not fight what life has to offer.

”Our suffering is as much from resisting the circumstances at hand as the circumstances themselves.” M. Israel.

Years later still, I lost the care of my son in a custody case. I had raised him from a baby and was utterly disraught. In the wee hours I cried and wailed, begging providence to return him. A small voice in me said, ‘your pain is because of your love, would you like for your love to be removed so you hurt less….?”

This article is based on an extract from my new book, ‘Abundant Delicious… on attaining your heart’s desire.’ .https://andywhiteblog.com/2016/06/11/abundant-delicious-hot-off-the-press/

The Fate of Unmet Grief.

When I was six us white folks left my Nanny, Suzannah, behind and went off on a big holiday adventure aboard the S.S. Uganda from Dar es Salaam to Portsmouth. It was only in the straits of the Suez that the narrow water whispered up we wouldn’t be turning back. She was gone. I would never see her again.

From the broiling desert sky enswarmed a sickening cloud of feathery black moths that choked and crushed and smothered.

I didn’t cry much. But then, neither do I remember much. A dog bit my arm. There was a magician at a party who found chicks behind everyone’s ears. In England, I whistled the happy jingle for Esso Blue all through the winter.

At school I met Anita who had broken her neck and wore a brace bolted to her chest with a leather chin strap that got wet with spit. Desperate to void my void I joined the taunting kids who’d circle and taunt, throwing her dufflecoat about saying it was infested with fleas, the pressing urgency to offload and purge psychic toxins had broken the Principle of Relatedness which always has a merciful foot in the other person’s world.

In time I came to realise that I was not alone in my aloneness. Most kids had never even had a Suzzanah, and in every eye there seemed to be an icy shard of one size and shape or another, splinters of unacknowledged loss, hidden yet endemic, running through life as the unmet need to be held or fed.

As a culture we collectively deny our unmet grief and displace our inner hungering. It has become an orgy of consumption and instant gratification so extreme that having more than you need has had to be turned into a virtuous right in order for us not to wonder about it too much.

But the problem doesn’t stop there.

Unmet grief can be the death-knell of creativity and play. It often takes the shape of the fear that some terrible disaster will happen if we go our own way. Memory has been safely projected into the future as catastrophic expectation which we believe in so strongly because its human nature for children to blame themselves for events so as to continue to be a party to them, to be as big as them. Unacknowledged grief is managed by making ourselves somehow magically responsible, a psychological slight of hand whose price is not apparent until the child tries something autonomous wherein he is liable to be..

‘swamped by unconscious lethargy and paralysis’. M. Woodman.

Breaking the mould requires grief and loss to have been somewhat consciously expressed in life so that we have at least some faith that it can be survived. Unmet trauma in early life makes the prospect of change and endings unbearable because there’s no containment for the fragments of Self that grief breaks us into.

But the problem doesn’t stop there, either.

Have you ever wondered what goes through the mind of your average foot soldier laying seige to the castle wall? You know, during the quiet bits where fear has diminished sufficiently for thought to occur at all…

I know because I’ve sat countless watches on active duty.

you’d be forgiven for thinking that it were all about booty and the prospect other people’s stuff, or the girl back home, but for the most part the man-at-arms is quietly having a religious experience, through his immersion in the horde, through belonging in the band of brothers, through identification with his noble purpose, through vengeance in the name of…

whatever might be at hand, some popular god is always good..

It doesn’t matter what’s caused the arguement between the higher ups. That is the preserve of his captain, whose silken banner now enfurls him, whose great might would just as readily..

crush him.

But what’s a little crushing?

..when serving gives sacred purpose whilst indulging every other vice in the name of a vituous other….

who, in turn, considers himself appointed by God….

Our hero gets to participate in the reflected glory of his king. He becomes his right hand, and dispenses law rather than being subjected to it.

”We’re the king’s men! We can do what we want!” Game of Thrones.

And so what actually fills his heart on darkest watch is the quiet delirium of power that goes with being above the law..

Levy Bruhl calls this ‘participation mystique’. It’s where separate identity is sunk into collective structures. Anthropologists use this term with reference to ‘primitive’ culture but we only have to put the news on to see it operating most violently in our own society.

It has a more benign form in sports playoffs where the fan is permitted the carnival renewal that comes with team colours and the collective unity in either cheer or groan.

Rites and ritual around the world often include this aspect of immersion in the Collective. The Hindu Holi festival involves everyone getting spayed with the same paint. Tribal markings and dress codes re-absorb the individual momentarily into the replenishing experience of collective identity. In the West there is the literal immersion in water as our baptismal rite, which for all cultures has to do with belonging..

being marked on the ledger..

having tribe.

The problem for Single System systems is that these rites barely feed us anymore. Centuries of having definite answers has eroded vibrant experience, rooted as it is in need, dependence and the unknowing of human vulnerability.

Ironically, this separation from Nature and the lonliness of our exclusive identification with the topmost levels of the psyche can readily, if temporarily, be ameliorated by one of its worst symptom, War.

Our gallant footsoldier, standing watch at the castle walls, ready at a moment to butcher, rape and plunder ordinary folk just like himself for a cause he struggles to put into words without using slogans… all this inhuman brutality is contained without rancour in the simple elevation of doing God’s work and being above the law.

The horror of giving up his individuality and personal responsibility is soothed and subsumed under the mantle of divine protection which both legitimises every action and ensures belonging….. the censuring wounds of alienation bathed and bound by the very beast set loose when greed is sanctioned by faith.

So, yes, there’s booty to be had…

meh.

and heart stirring rhetoric about freedom and ‘our way of life..’

double meh.

but mostly its about the buoyancy of Belonging, which, with the Principle of Relateness so eroded and mis-shapen these last millenia, has taken some curious forms of expression.

You could say that experience-of-tribe is..

”nothing but a relic of the original non-differentiation of subject and object, and hence of the primordial unconscious state, characteristic of the mental state of early infancy, and, finally, of the unconscious of the civilized adult” – Carl Gustav JUNG, CW6 §741

but Jung would be the first to agree that archytpes are bi-polar, and that this is a definition at the clumsy, regressed end of the scale.

”The puerilization of the conscious attitude should not be understood (simply) as a regression; it is often necessary in order to produce an unprejudiced, naïve, receptive consciousness.” ibid

The belonging of shared identity with an other person, animal, thing…

is also experienced as At-one-ment, redemptive immersion in the waters of life, non-separation.

”neither subject nor object but simply whole.,, A Watts.

Having a cause greater than one’s own small struggles is one of the basic conditions for experiencing meaning in life.

but what shape is it going to take? In Single System systems people’s natural spirituality is so dammed up by bureacracy of creed and dogma that the renewal of self through ritual is frustrated..

and so it comes out as an idea to die for instead,

And if that seems a tad exaggerated, bear in mind the five hundred years of iternecine wars and burnings at the stake in Europe, all over the question of whether the bread and wine of communion were the actual blood and body of Christ or not, way before we turned our envious projections upon the wily Moor…

People were prepared to die in their droves back then as well…

herded one way or another into the grinder, fuelled with riteous convictions of immortality, burning Envy given tools of…

punishment.

When Mama has been gone so long you can’t remember her face, the space where it should be gets taken up with black flapping moths that eat away at the strands connecting you to everything. So you have to go to a lot of effort to sew yourself back in.

Belonging becomes more important than living….

In a fine speech promoting the draft, the pundit below asserts that we should arm our sons and daughters and send them off to die because we need..

‘something so that we can all feel invested in the same game, because that’s the part that we’ve lost.’ Jon Stewart

er, yes ok… except that the part we’ve lost is the part that doesn’t need to go to war in order to feel alive.

Etiquette’s Magical Hat.

What people around the world consider good manners varies a lot. If you go and visit a Masai chief east of the Ngorongoro Crater, his good manners will be to slaughter a goat in your honour. Your good manners will be to eat its eyeballs. Failure to do so will spoil the party.

In Togo, remember to break the bones of the beast and eat the marrow. In Brasil, never cut the lettuce in a salad.. and burp after your meal. If you do the same in England, look embarrassed and beg everybody’s pardon.

Whatever the custom, its about how to be together, how to belong. But etiquette, like consciousness, has a shadow. It can take some curious turns and serve some dubious masters.

Louis XIV, the Sun King, matched the material extravagance of Versailles with the gestural minutiae of Court Etiquette, a system that seems quite absurd until you get to the bottom of the magical purpose it served….

bearing in mind that the problem with building castles is that they tend to attract armies..

and people who want to put your head on a spike.

Actually, the battles might have been welcome relief from the cloak and dagger of court intrigue. At least you knew who and where the enemy were. With the intense centralisation of power at Versailles there was no such certainty and so extra measures had to be taken.

Etiquette got political.

Louis, as a living embodiment of absolute monarchy had to contend with the intense contradiction of being entirely isolated in his Majesty whilst being surrounded by suffocating, wayward courtiers who wanted a piece and perhaps pieces of him.

Etiquette, as a conjurer’s parody of how to belong, became necessary to tyrannise effectively.

‘These extremely strict rules governed priority, determining not only who was allowed to approach the important people in the Court, but also where and when… thereby strengthening the royal authority.’ M Visser.

No-one in Versailles was allowed to use the doors. There were ushers for that. If no usher was available you had to wait even if you were the duc d’Orleons. Ten thousand people, all with their movements between rooms entirely restricted.

Restriction of movement was backed up by restriction of gesture…

”each time anyone was polite, he or she was simultaneously acknowledging rank and demonstrating who stood where. M. Visser

a shared pretense, a delusion in fact, of polite correctness that was in fact rooted in paranoia, fear and inequality.

”Their vanity was flattered by the customs which converted the right to give a glass of water, to put on a dress, and to remove a basin, into honorable prerogatives. Madame de Campan.

rather than the control necessitated by living in constant mortal apprehension.

The policing of emotions became internal, and finally invisible even to themselves: they were able to think that they acted, not in obedience to power and self-interest but for purely moral reasons.” M. Visser.

And to this end Louis could control people down to the most astonishing degree and do it in the name of polite manners.

Here is ‘How to walk’, from a court guide,

You begin to walk by stamping the left foot and leaning forward so that the right foot rises. In a smooth movement the right leg will extend and move in front of the left. Be sure that the distance between both feet is not bigger than the length of one’s foot However the hells of the right foot should be placed in front of the toes of the left. Once your right foot has touched the floor the other one will push back your upper body. You now proceed as mentionned above. Always be sure to spread your legs outwards and bend your knees which keeps you from buckling your legs and crossing your steps which would be an immense mistake. “Maitre à danser” written by Pierre Rameau.

How to wear your hat…

”When putting it on place the hat on the forehead above the eyebrows. Now push it backwards a bit with your hand touching the tip, but not too far. The hat should be slightly turned to the left which displays one’s face much better. The button of the hat should also be stuck to the left side.” ibid

The genius of Louis, whose earliest childhood memory was of half crazed mobs breaking into the royal appartments where he slept, was that he invented a system of exacting social control that people actually wanted to sign up to. It wasn’t experienced as domination. Learning when it was your turn to unfold a napkin, how far to unfold it and where to put it when you are done was experienced as crucial information people would give their right arm for, really believing that there sole desire lay in not wishing to offend.

Louis was under no such illusion. He knew perfectly well what he had orchestrated. When his brother, Phillipe, called for a chair with arms on it, which he wasn’t allowed even though he was a prince, Louis forbad him, explaining..

”It is in your interest, brother, that the majesty of the throne should not be weakened or altered; and if, from Duc d’Orleans, you one day become King of France, I know you well enough to believe that you would never be lax in this matter. Before God, you and I are exactly the same as other creatures that live and breathe; before men we are seemingly extraordinary beings, greater, more refined, more perfect. The day that people, abandoning this respect and veneration which is the support and mainstay of monarchies,–the day that they regard us as their equals,–all the prestige of our position will be destroyed.”

And so from the royal rising ceremony with its inaugural peck on the cheek from his childhood nurse, to the retiring ceremony at night, Louis followed a strict schedule governed by rules that read like a check list for OCD, as did all the members of the Court, all regulated like clockwork orange to assure the continued robust health of his Majesty.

The official version of Louis’ cause of death was senile gangrene. His leg rotted off. Apparently, not a sufficient cause for suspicion of foul play…

which rather suggests someone got tired of decades worth of complicated compulsory dancing..

and realised Louis’ worst fears.

Either way what Louis left us was the reminder that intelligent, educated people can be herded like sheep if only they can get to be part of a special club. Not unlike the fetishist’s prostrations that serve both to approach and maintain distance, whose compulsions are rooted in the shared unconscious terror of life threatening intrusion brought to reality for Louis’ line in 1789 when those whose legs had not rotted off, lost their heads instead.

Our own anxiety is that even though we know how badly this story ended we still aspire to be like them. Every lotto sign, Oscar red carpet, every scratchcard, every X factor, could be you, could bring the dream, the dream of unimaginable wealth and power. Lie awake at night fantasising of what to do with it all forgetting that its like wishing for a narcissistic personality disorder garnished with assassination paranoia.

” The devil comes to you not with red cape and horns but as everything you ever wanted.” T. Max.

Oligarchs are bound to have power over those who nurse a secret desire to be like them.

Still, never mind. You can always just feign shock when it all comes out in the wash and say you kept silent so as not to offend.

Paranoia and the Masked Maiden.

Paranoia evolves in families which have a particular skeleton in their closet, a singular unwritten rule about how-to-be, way more than stuff that can’t be discussed, or episodes and stories that are off limits. Its as simple as pretending you’re nicer than you are. The more correct, the more paranoia. Jostling truths produce split realities. The designated paranoic will be as barmy as this split is wide.

A man comes in for the admissions interview of a psychiatric ward. There’s an ashtray with three cigarette butts in it. He looks at it long and hard before settling back comfortably in his seat. With an ironic smile he says, ‘ok, I get the picture.’

Another man is somewhat handicapped by the penetrating power of his gaze. It is so intense it can turn people into glass. But the day is saved, he knows when to avert his eyes just in time.

What a relief…

”when in one’s early life, the mother exhibits strong polarities of presence, alternately nurturing and witholding, what is formed is a split reality.” R. Gunn.

This is typically lived out collectively in men as a ‘madonna/whore’ attitude, where women are either worshiped, untouchable and beyond stain or slappers to be degraded.

In my last post I looked at the kind of spiritual distortions and divine machismo present in the story of Siegfried and how his appropriation of the Divine Feminine weakens and ultimately kills him..

Taking a narcissistic stance in the world, all charged up with Dragon Blood and Duty, costs more than death and destruction because a split in the psyche will cause all kinds of mischief in the meanwhile.

The death and destruction is garnish.

The split in the Western Psyche is admirably conveyed in allegory by the loves of Siegfried; Brunhilde, who is all noble, true and unreachable on the one hand, and then Kriemhilde who has a taste for dark magic and vengeance on the other. Her name means Masked-Shield-Maiden, a helmeted beserker.

So things aren’t over when Siegfried is betrayed and murdered by his shadow, lord Hagan..

not by a long chalk.

Kriemhilde wants heads.

To this end she marries Attila the Hun who has the kind of clout needed for such a hit and invites her conspiratorial brothers King Gunter and Prince Gizelher along with Hagan to a baptismal ceremony where she chops them up into small pieces.

Everybody dies, oh, except Attila who just carries on doing what Attila does best.

Its the kind of party where paranoia might well be of service. Or at least a few more hired goons.

The baptismal/death feast is the prototype of an enactment our culture seems to unwittingly repeat on a disturbingly regular basis, people hacking each other up, or the world they depend upon, without quite being sure of the reasons why. After all, Kriemhilde was largely responsible for bringing about the death of Siegfried in the first place by using black magic to mess with his destiny.

With the loss of the Goddess our relationship with Yahweh underwent some intersting changes. One of the less obvious is the unspoken, collusive and paranoia inducing prospect of how exactly we are to be a bride to Yahweh.

Fortunately, certain…deals can be struck whereby God promises to be gentle with us provided sufficient blood is split to mark the occassion.

God’s Covenant to his people is like a kind of guarentee of unconditional love to make up for trying to kill mummy..

but in exchange for sacrifice.

your children will do.

When its own turn, we try to fob God off and look the other way with minimal, symbolic sacrifices, haggling him down to a container of foreskins and a war in every generation.

A foreskin is not just a symbol. Having it ripped off will also affect your sex life. Modern ad hoc medical justification for circumcision was preceded by a widespread desire..

”to control ‘masturbatory insanity’ – the range of mental disorders that people believed were caused by the ‘polluting’ practice of ‘self-abuse.’ K. Paige.

There was widespread belief that circumcision was necessary to prevent a boy discovering his penis, along with beatings, spiked boxes, cauterization….

”without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.” R. Darby.

But even this explanation of ‘selfless mortification’ is underpined by something more visceral..

Abrahmic law, old enough to be on the DNA waiting list, is quite clear on the matter. His love for you, His Covenant, depends on your sexual mutilation …. that or go find a mead hall to hack up and spill your blood in.

Preferably in some out of the way place where media coverage is more easily controlled.

When the feminine is split, the Royal Road to the Unconscious gets lane closure and diversions. Lots of cones and men in hi-vis jackets.

Symbols and their meanings come apart and paranoia steps in, for what else is paranoia than not knowing the significance of something or having a feeling that is still in search of a context?

My friend and colleague Chuck Schwartz, an analytical psychologist for many years, told me the story of how he was hiking in northern Portugal, a very remote region of the mountains. At dusk he arrived in a small village but there was no-one around. The whole place was closed up. Eventually he tried the church and found the priest who explained that though the people were good Catholics and came to church on Sunday, on Friday they closed themselves up with their ‘mumbo-jumbo’.

Chuck asked to be introduced and wanted to find out about the mumbo-jumbo. It turned out the people were celebrating Jewish Friday prayers. They had fled persecution from Russia as a community, settled there three generations back and converted. Behind closed doors the rituals continued, but, because they could not be refered to directly or talked about openly, because of the fearful secrecy, the meaning was drained from the experience..

leaving only mumbo-jumbo.

Chuck is a Canadian Jew. He recognised the form of the prayers and rituals and explained to them what they were doing, to a great outpouring of feeling and remembrance.

We too have forgotten, like Siegfried, and make our mumbo-jumbo in the forests of Vietnam, the deserts of Iraq, the jungles of Africa, where only the best and the bravest propitiate the unmentionable maw, ultimate sacrifice, not for his mate, or for the safety of loved ones, let alone spoil, but because having God answer the rest of our prayers depends on it.

Like the medical or moral reasons for circumsicion, we give ourselves the lattitude of an ad hoc lie, to explain what won’t stand up otherwise..

er..

And because our good-god won’t let us have war just to snatch one anothers’ stuff..

because that would be greedy and bad.

Or just for the sake of time honoured rape and pillage

cos that’s not being good is it….

We’ll have to do it for an idea instead. For some ‘ism or ‘ist.

Some banner to get behind.

When the feminine is split and half sunk in the unconsciousness..

‘it responds with violent emotions, irritability, lack of control
coupled with lack of selfcriticism and delusions. [Man] becomes
ruthless, arrogant and tyrannical’. (Jung 2014)

….overrun by Kriemhilde..

who,

for as long as she stands,

is She-who-must-be-Obeyed.

Hidden in the wings.

all pissed and pointy.

Cursed Gold and Dragon’s Blood.

The legend of Siegfried is fascinating as much for its context within the events of that time as the story it told. It’s not that old. Its origins are in the Volsung sagas of 600AD or there about and the story didn’t acheive popularity in its own right untill 1100 or so..

witch burning had already begun.

‘Whilst the ancient powers faded a wonderous tale arose that captured the hearts of the people; a blacksmith who slew a dragon and won a legendary treasure….” U. Edil

what was cursed and all…

yes, yes, we’ll get to that.

The story of Siegfried is symbolic allegory for the violent collision of Norse and Christian cultures much as the epic of Gilgamesh (https://andywhiteblog.com/2015/06/21/the-fate-of-gilgamesh/) was the last offering of the matriarchal Sumerians before being entirely overun by the Assyrians and their one god Marduk.

In both cases an epic tale sprang into being that tells of what happens when people fail to accomodate one another. They read like a curse upon the times, a judgement made, not by any one person, but by the collective imagination of an epoch.

One version of the story of Siegfried has him a king’s son raised secretly as a blacksmith after the throne is taken by Saxons. One night a star falls to earth. He runs over only to find someone else has also seen it and arrived at the same time, Brunhilde, queen of Iceland..

who just happened to be passing..

The story of Gilgamesh, another proud and warlike king of a New and Shining Age, contains a very similar scene. This king dreams he is walking about proudly amongst his people when a star falls on him. He couldn’t lift it off. All the people gather around and worship it.

”the star means the immortal soul of man…. the eternal kernel of the human psyche, the eternal man within us. And so he is now to follow his unique destiny instead of fullfiling a collective roll…’ M.L. von Franz

Gilgamesh gets the message and goes journeying for the elixir of immortality. Over in Europe, Siegfried doesn’t do quite as well…

A collision of cultures is a bit like the the meeting of different ecosystems..

”Naturally occurring ecosystem boundaries sometimes form a unique habitat to which species are specifically adapted.” C. Banks-Leite

conjuncted systems do more than co-mingle. They can produce new life.

The same is true between individuals..

‘The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.’ C. G. Jung.

Hopefully.

But sometimes it doesn’t quite work out like that.

especially if you have a foreign policy to rival Genhgis Khan.

Siegfried decides to forge the star into a sword.

Not a good move…

In ancient times swords were imbued with mystery and given names. They absorbed the power of the Gods and the souls of their victims. The nearly alchemical processes involved in their production were a kind of magic and many believed swords were sentient, that they had their own life. Forging the star into a sword is placing the numinosity of the Self and the autonomy of the Psyche in service of the Warrior archetype…

which is asking for trouble.

Siegfried’s wars are liable to become holy.

He calls out Fafnir, a scaly dragon and defeats Her much as Gilgamesh defeats the great Humbaba/ Cybele, Great Mother of the ancient world…

Fafnir had treasure, the cursed horde of the Niebelung, gold that will make you wish that you had never even heard of it, much less nicked the lot..

Fafnir’s treasure is what every great She-Beast stands guard over, the Principle of Relatedness. Its cursed because if you try and force relatedness or possess people you produce the opposite. Being-with has to happen by itself. You can’t make people get along, make them love you, or make them stop. And wanting it all for oneself is precisely what destroys a person.

Both the stories of Gilgamesh and Siegfried, poised as they are on the tectonic plates of history, express a solemn truth. You cannot kill off the She Dragon and snatch treasure guarded by the Living Dead without consequences.

even if you did bathe in Her blood.

”when the curse begins to bite, beware, for it will find your weakness and through it destroy you.” the Niebelung king.

Siegfried confuses his persona as warrior with the numinosity of the Self which he now experiences as his possession rather than as a transcendent principle.

”Some say that the fish contains the sea. I say the sea contains the fish.” C. G. Jung.

His bathing in the dragon’s blood has also made him invulnerable so there will not be a lot of getting through to him. This kind of inflation, the lion’s share of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, is not as simple as thinking you are better than everyone else. It has to do with being defended against influence and identifying oneself with archetypal structures of the Deep that then puff the personality up out of all proportion.

Siegfried is beginning to experience himself as the right hand of God. A split develops between him and his shadow, Lord Hagan, who condenses the Niebelung curse into an evil potion that makes Siegfried forget about Brunhilde. So Siegfried’s inflationary appropriation of The Treasure, his belief that he is its master and that the psyche is simply what he knows of it has a terrible impact on him. He feels fine, fantastic actually, but he’s lost something, some soul connection. He’s forgotten who he really is. To re-member is to become whole. To forget, more than loss of memory, means to fragment and fall apart.

Siegfried, King Gunter, and the young prince Gizelher, Gunter’s little brother, make a blood pact between them to try and paper over the cracks forming in their relationships with one another on their way to Iceland so that Gunter can propose to Brunhilde.

The threatened ego structure is resorting to magical thinking in order to hold itself together.

if you don’t step on the cracks the bears won’t get you..

but Hagan is excluded and grows more vengeful.

The four men present themselves to Brunhilde…

”you don’t know who she is, she’s not quite real, too good to be true.. and there is something wrong somewhere.” B. Pasternak

The men speak big, but they are in a sorry state. King Gunter, in the role of executive ego, has his shining, amnesiac persona Siegfried fight for Brunhilde’s hand in his place by use of magic, whilst Siegfried’s discrimination is entirely lost in his slavish devotion to ‘his Duty’ and even steals Brunhilde’s magical belt given her by the Old Gods. This constitutes further appropriation of the Unconscious for personal gain, a trend that will mature centuries later in the cult of Bling, rampant materialism and knee-jerk warfare.

”Man is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State.” ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 194

And so instead of the Hierosgamos, the sacred wedding between heroic personality and the Unconscious in the fullness of all her Maidenly Power we have a parody instead, represented by a farcical double wedding between people who don’t know what is going on.

Gunter, having faked who he is, marries confused Brunhilde. And Siegfried, having forgotten who he is, marries deceptive Krimhilde, Gunter’s dark sister, who has drugged and deceived her beloved with magic potion.

Things can only get worse, hey?

Siegfried is murdered by his shadow, Hagan and Brunhilde throws herself on the pyre.

And they all did not live happily ever after.

No, there was the mailed fist in the velvet glove of Entrenched Feudalism, the Black Death, and a thousand years of Crusade that got itself all confused about the nature of Treasure.

Fear and the Firebird.

In a recent FB post, someone asked what people felt was the worst, the most ‘negative’ emotion. The almost unanimous answer was ‘fear’. It seems that we have demonised visceral emotion and forgotten its value, all of which may be ‘correct’ but which can only serve to impede our journey given the capacity of unwanted fear to keep us indoors.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the role of fear in the individuation process. The context for this will be a Russian folktale, ‘the Firebird’.

It was Prince Ivan’s job to care for the Tsar’s greatest treasure, a tree with golden apples. One day a golden apple went missing from the tree. The next night another…. The night after that the Tsar told Ivan to stay awake in the garden and discover the thief.

He waited and waited and waited. Then he saw the most incredible thing. First it was just a bright glow on the horizon, but then, arching like a comet through the sky, all radiance and brilliant fire, came the thief. It was a Firebird, mystical, breathtaking and wreathed in flame. And for a moment Ivan was rooted to the spot with dread.

Ivan did his best. He ran after it with shielded eyes, but only in time to catch a single feather from the Firebird’s tail. He had failed. The Tsar was amazed at the beauty of the feather, just enough to appease his wrath at the thief’s escape, and sent Ivan to find the mysterious bird on pain of banishment.

First Ivan reached a dark forest where he encounters a toothless wolf. A pedlar had once given Ivan a wolf’s tooth. It was useful for polishing the golden apples to make them extra clean and super shiny. Ivan took pity on Wolf and gave him the tooth. Wolf was grateful and accompanied Ivan to the castle of Koshkei the Deathless where it was said that the Firebird was imprisoned.

Koshkei the Deathless has another prisoner, Princess Vasilisa, a princess of great beauty. Wolf gives Ivan this warning.

“Do not look at her! Koshkei the Deathless has turned her heart into wood, and hidden it so that she has no feelings. If you fall in love with her she will never be able to return your affection.” But without Wolf there to remind him, Ivan forgot the warning and fell deeply in love with Vasilisa.

Now Ivan has to rescue the Firebird and the princess. But before he can make a plan, Koshkei the Deathless appears. He says that Baba Yaga, a terrible witch, has stolen the Firebird. Koshkei the Deathless tells Ivan that if he gets the Firebird back from Baba Yaga, he’ll give him the opportunity to choose between the princess and the Firebird.

Ivan sets off, riding on Wolf’s back. When they find the witch’s house, they see that both Baba Yaga and the crow are fast asleep. Once again Wolf issues a warning to prince Ivan.

“Before you go, a word of warning. The Firebird will be fastened by a golden cord to Baba Yaga’s crow Vanka. Bring the Firebird, but leave the cord.”

Ivan forgets this warning and leaves with the golden cord still tied to Vanka the crow who wakes up and squawks and squawks. Ivan is captured.

Wolf sees all this and fetches princess Vasilisa who pretended to be a pedlar woman and tricks her way into the house. When Baba Yaga and the crow are once again asleep she frees Ivan and the Firebird and they all run away.

Back at Koshkei’s castle Ivan has to choose between the Firebird and the princess. Whilst caught in his dilemma Koshkei tries to turn Ivan’s heart into wood as well. Vasilisa sees this and bursts into tears.

“Stop!….. Stop your crying!” shouts Koshkei the Deathless.

And in that moment, Vasilisa realises where he has hidden her heart …… in her tears. Koshkei the Deathless shrivels up like the wicked witch of the west and the spell of the wooden hearts is broken.

When I was a teenager in the Rhodesian Commandos, an unwitting lick spittle for de Beers Mining Corp and Anglo-American’s right to loot and pillage Africa, we were blacking up in the ops tent of our bush camp while the choppers warmed up to their whiny scream and the CO barked a few more encouraging words before we were flown into battle for the third time that week. They called it ‘counter insurgency’, which is almost as cute as ‘collateral damage’. No, hideous-lottery-of-death would be better.

My sergeant comes over, ‘Are you afraid, Andy? he asks.

‘Yes, Sarge.’

‘Good, if you’d said not, you’d be a liar or a fool and I have no need of either’.

Fear and the unknown are first cousins. Since the Unconscious is by definition unknown, fear and self-knowledge are even more closely related. Which is why the dictum ‘know thyself’ is not the top of most people’s list.

In any case there’s a lot in life to be scared about. Crossing the street can be the end of you. The endemic belt and braces attitude which says that fear is a weakness or ‘catastrophising’, rides roughshod over raw human experience, fails to find meaning and lacks in compassion. It also robs you of the teaching to be found in your fears, even the ‘irrational’ ones. Stupid fears are ever a cloak for sensible ones.

I have found that psychotherapy clients faithfully present the same one issue time and again. Whatever the content of their personal experience they all suffer from hovering too long on the edge of something. What lies below is almost irrelevant. It’s the drop that’s important. Descent into the unknown self which both literally and figuratively involves an encounter with Death.

Ivan’s encounter with the Firebird is the gritty moment in all our lives when we realise there is something in us of which we had been completely unaware, something intensely alive, vibrant and…

Not-me.

It is something that seems not to be of this world and puts an end to an old way of life. You could call it spiritual awakening. For Ivan, the brilliant bird is bound to induce something in him similar to the experience of the angel appearing to the shepherds in the nativity story.

Fear not said he for mighty dread had seized their troubled minds..

The original rendering of, ‘seek and ye shall find..’ had a second part to it…

‘and when you find it you will be troubled’..Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

This is because encounter with the Self is what Michael Fordham calls a ‘deintegrate’, something that pulls the world-as-we-know-it apart, loosening internal co-herance, momentarily weakening personality and threatening stability. Ivan’s fearfullness is appropriate to the occasion. He’s encountering a trancendant principle which he can never know or ‘grasp’ and to which his fate is now inextricably and fearfully bound.

‘Where your fear is, there is your task.’ C. G. Jung

The encounter also tips Ivan into the living complexity of the Unconscious symbolised by the Dark Forest. Ivan’s skill is not so much that he’s big and brave but that he has a ‘propitious attitude’ and gives Wolf (back) his teeth. Giving Wolf his teeth is Ivan’s preparedness for his journey to be dangerous. He allows Wolf to be dangerous in anticipation that he himself.. might be dangerous. He aquaints himself with his own instinctive nature that knows how to use things like fear…

‘be warned! Do not look at her!’

but he does.

wasn’t scared enough.

So Wolf has to bail him out. Luckily Vasilisa knows the value of legging it.

We were once compromised deep in enemy territory, way up on the Zambezi escarpment.

Shouldn’t have been there mon..

A hurried, uncoded message came through on the radio… half the Zambian army were on to us. Five minutes away.

….with them guns..

We ran all day long from early dawn, down bright lit forest paths silent but for Hoopoe and Vervet; over golden grassed plains, zigzagging for dusty hours down, down to the clean wet river by night fall. Forty miles. Strange how fear in the right place can lend you wings.

Ivan is none too smart but he’s persistant and isn’t put off by his failure or fear of further failure.

‘It is impossible to live without failing unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all.” J.K. Rowling

In order to redeem the firebird (and himself) Ivan has to encounter the devouring, death dealing aspects of the archetypal parents symbolised by Baba Yaga and Koshkei the Deathless.

As Death mother Baba Yaga instills in you the sense that you’ll be destroyed if you go your own way…

‘swamped by lethargy and paralysis…. incubated by the crushed hope of an unlived life.’ M. Woodman.

As Death father, Koshkei represents the chronic felling of stuckness and restlessness that pervades so much of modern life.

The word ‘chronic’ is derived from Chronos/Saturn… the dark face of father Time whose afflictions are worst for their endurance, unfeeling wooden-ness that has gone on so long it has become the norm.

Like Saturn eating his children, what the chronic condition does is to devour what comes so naturally to children, the capacity for play, curiosity and innovation. This is because the psyche is being drained of its resources by the need to prop up prescribed ways of living that are opposed to you finding your own destiny.

Ivan is not saved by his great courage or cleverness.

He is saved by the despair of having to endure impossible love, by being helped when he doesn’t really deserve it…

by running away..

by horrified tears…

and by the reflection of his own humanity in the desperate face of another.

‘We become enlightened not by imagining beings of light, but by making the darkness conscious. This, however is disagreeable. C.G.Jung

Facing the unknown is an apprehensive process. So, if we are not kindly to our fears and regard them simply as there to be vanquished then we will never make friends of Wolf, be saved by Vasilisa, or discover where the treasure lies.

Going Mad to Stay Sane. Reprint.

Self destructiveness can be a spring board for a soulful life like no other if we can realize the meaning in the message, if we refrain from putting a lid on it with medication or inveterate ‘fixing’.

The book tells the story of King Midas from Greek mythology who wished that everything he touched be turned to gold. He only realizes what a curse he’s bought on himself when he embraces his daughter…..

It also tells the backstory, what kind of parents he had and what the family dynamics were that could foster such a terrible desire. How does he live? How does Midas resolve his issues? How does he now approach Dionysus who granted him his hideous wish.

The story uses allegory to reveal how we grow through adversity and foolishness. It looks at the deeper significance of self-destructiveness, as a symbol of something meaningful that can be transformative.

The book has a new preface by Dr Dale Mathers who is a Jungian analyst with his own new book on the shelf, ‘Alchemy and Psychotherapy’.

Enjoy the book and find new ways to make sense of old patterns.

Books are signed and cost £20 plus p+p.

‘Abundant Delicious’, new book out now.

This book is about the peculiarities and issues of crossing life’s thresholds. It’s about why and how we sabotage ourselves. Its about how we get stuck. It’s about how we live out destinies that are not our own. It’s about the process of self-discovery, the encounter with the Unconscious and the difficult journey that follows.

To do so, this book retells the ancient story of Sophocles’ Oedipus and shows, more than the spurious use to which it was put by Freud, that this intricate tale contains a whole string of symbolic events, developments and encounters from which we can gain perspective on contradiction, paradox and appreciate some of our ambivalence to what we want most in life.

Each chapter of the unfolding story contains dream like encounters, challenges and treasures that you will recognise from your own experience. Like a grail legend, or heroic quest, it uses myth as metaphor, to bring to the creative imagination what Sophocles finally addresses as…’the Secret and the Mystery’.

Enjoy.

‘A Tao of the Soul’, says Satish Kumar. Editor-in-chief of ‘Resurgence and Ecologist’. Author of ‘You are therefor I Am’ and ‘No Destination’.

Andy White is an internationally recognised writer, teacher, and artist with twenty five years of clinical experience as a psychotherapist in private practice. contact; info@andywhitemosaics.co.uk

Books are signed and cost £28 plus p+p.

Pandora, and the Tyranny of Hope..

I thought I knew the story of Pandora.

It is widely known as a theodicy, an explanation of why there is evil in the world.

Another Eve to blame.

which somewhat misses the subtle meaning of the story.

If the sins and vices are out of the box, like the cat from the bag, the game is up. The shadow of humanity is being made visible by the gods and becomes something we have to address. Each in their own way.

Pandora is raising consciousness. Her other name, Enesidora, means, ‘she who sends up gifts’, which is the propitious way to treat unconscious contents that inevitably make their first appearance in their worst moods. When the oracle says ‘know thyself’, it means the stuff in the box, which, without Pandora, would still be there.

The scam, is the angle we put on Hope being held back.

Oh, poor me, there is so much wickedness out there in the world beyond my gleaming picket fence, but at least there is Hope that someone might come along and do something about it.

As though it were a good thing.

Hope. Be passive. Wait.

What better way to control people than for them to have waiting be their holy duty?

and wait for tomorrow while you are fleeced today.

Which is what Hope becomes when its still trapped in the Box.

This Box is no ordinary thing. It was fashioned by Zeus as a retaliation against humanity for Prometheus’ stolen gift of fire, consciousness.

With consciousness comes…the shadow.

”You want to be conscious? Be conscious of this,..” says Zeus, and introduces humanity to its underbelly….

and its mortality.

but better out than in, hey? Pandora did for humanity the best she could, she let the shadow be visible, something with which to negotiate rather than being hidden away behind lock and key. Like Prometheus she helped us become aware of ourselves and returned the diseases that the old gods had become so that they could return home, to us.

She kept Hope back to be mean, to stamp her individuality on a situation for which she was only meant as a messenger, so that she too could decide her own fate and have a place in history.

Anything kept in the box comes to us as Fate. We idealise it, project it, become it’s tigerbait. And we forget that hope for tomorrow makes passive slaves of today, that hope can make the actual fear of a situation quietly bearable until fear and giving your power away become part of life.

Living in hope can be a way of living in fear or lack without actually doing anything about it. It implies you think you know what you need which is probably debateable.

‘Since when did people know what they wanted?” Morgan Freeman as God in Bruce Almighty.

It also gives the imagined redemption of the situation over to a further imagined other, a heavy burden for any would-be knight…

soon be-nighted.

Living in hope can turn the refusal to live or grasp your destiny into a shining virtue.. a psychological sleight of hand that allows a person to live with the contradiction between who they actually are and a preferred, more polished version, with the landfill of wishing it were different. Such a trick carries a price and keeps us caught at the developmental level of wishing-it-were-so..

and sewing all kinds of pigs ears into silk purses

and prose into candyfloss…

”love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear… e.e. cummings

Atop his crate of toffee apples, Cummings may speak of ‘hope that has no opposite in fear’, but what else is hope for than the wish to be delivered from something? Without having to be too conscious of what that something might be…

something with teeth, maybe.

Our hope to be saved from it allows it to roam about unchecked.

Zeus did not put Hope in the Box of Evils by mistake. The Shadow of Hope produced ‘Waiting for Godot’, a story of two men who spend their entire time waiting for someone who never comes. The play is excrusiating because you can see yourself in the roles so easily whilst wanting to wring both their necks for their pathetic helplessness at the same time.

Hope had sucked the life out of them.

Irvin Yalom calls it the neurosis of the ‘ultimate rescuer’, the wish to be defended and redeemed from responsibility and saved from the anxiety of being free by some powerful other.

Sometimes what it takes for transformation to take place is precisely for us to lose hope, hope of attaining prefection, of changing someone, of living without anxiety, of living forever.

The sign over the gloom arches of Diss, the gates of Hell in Dante’s ‘Inferno’, are inscribed, ‘Abandon Hope all ye who Enter Here’. Its a useful piece of advice.

Placing to much emphasis on hope is failure to accept your situation. If you are hoping overly for something then you are not in the moment or grounded in what’s actually happening.

You can be herded.

and forged into armies..

because Hope is aggressive, too. It arrogantly knows what it needs and from whence. Then, made a holy thing of it.

Hope is privately at war with what-life-is on account of what-it-should-be…

living, ‘if only’…and so not really living at all.

”Our suffering is as much on account of our resisting the circumstances at hand as the circumstances themselves.” M. Israel.

Something else should be happening.

I was once walking in Wales. I came across a small sign, pointing, ‘llwyber troed”.

It seemed like an interesting sounding place and so I took that direction despite it not being on the map.

..because it was not on the map..

In fact I faithfully followed the signs to Llwyber troed all afternoon, expectant at every bend, before I realised it was Welsh for footpath.

Living in hope is like that. You are looking for something you’re already on.