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.

Because I’m Not.

A mother is walking down the street with her child. She’s in high gear and the child of three-ish is having to run to keep up. She looks at him with annoyance and says, ‘why are you running?”

The boy, out of breath, replies, ”because I’m not.”

The poor lad cannot face the denial of his reality in her question, the dismissal of his inner world to which the only honest answer is a forbidden truth-telling version of, ‘because you’re in a big bad mood and stomping off…

without looking to see if I’m left behind….

And so the only thing he can do is to deny his own reality. At least there will be common ground if only on the basis of shared contempt for the child’s point of view. This will cost the child his footing. On the pavement and in life.

This boy is not, ‘failing to internalize values’ (Kernberg)

He’s internalizing them only too well.

I … am not quite real, but I can run and walk at the same time. Look out everyone it’s the fantastic running/walking boy!

Where adequate treatment fails, double think and grandiose Self structures ensue. We can’t be whole for as long as we identify with an expectation to run and walk at the same time.

Otto Kernberg coined the phrase, ‘Grandiose Self Structure’, to describe Narcissism. But his insistence on it having a ‘pathological formation’, tends to strip it of meaning before we’ve even had a look around.

The problem with calling anything abnormal is that we tend to lose respect for it and forget to ask helpful questions.

and so he has to account for sadism by saying that,

”the infliction of suffering is the child’s attempt to defend against his own helplessness, through the exercise of omnipotent control over another.” O. Kernberg

No, that’s what kings do.

Not children. Y’all confuse’.

Important names for things can get in the way of experiencing them. Its like mastering the Kama Sutra without ever looking your partner in the eye,

The thing about early deprivation is that it urgently needs to split off and project desperation. The child concludes that it is un-held because it is lacking or deficient. Moreover, the baseline of how people treat each other, reality itself, is violated. The intrusive dark splinter of not quite being real has to be visited on another.

and even more pointily when collectively encoded in religious lore…

DO AS I SAY ON PAIN OF DEATH..

in one moment and…

DO AS YOU PLEASE SO LONG AS YOU PRAISE ME.

on the other.

His poor flock are suddenly awash in persecutory anxiety and paranoia. Their double/bind is unbearable and can only regain their composure by joining Yahweh in his unreality …

”I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” St Paul.

and so it begins.

Kohut is unequivocal, Narcissism,

”results from massive shortcomings in mothering.” Kohut.

and even Kernberg will give a bit and refers to incipient..

”intolerable reality in the interpersonal realm.” Kernberg

which I suppose is a sanitized way of talking about the unbearable misery of being a child who is related to in an ideal way or not at all, which is what you get when Mother has had her spiritual essence sucked out of her by animus-ity which refuses to sacralize her mothering .

And so the crucial detail is that the Grandiose Self Structure is largely uninhabited by any one permanent resident, though there are tenants who might be acquainted

but not necessarily

in the way you might like.

or that might like you

and so we pollute because we don’t, and lie and cheat because we never and start wars because we’re not.

People don’t dumb themselves down with the nonsense of being accepted on the basis of rejection unless they have been systematically devalued already, and not in adversity, but by a child’s soul not being sufficiently welcome…

”until he too, loses all sight of it.” Alice Miller.

So paranoid anxiety might well be an appropriate response to having insufficient toe holds in the world. But what do you do with a kid who’s too smart to read the instructions at the front of his exam paper? The spouse who turns the Aga oven off in Winter and back on in May? The dismissive colleague…who isn’t.

If you are just benign he’ll take advantage and if you are too confrontative there will be no safety. So, you do as you would with any kid whose acting out because they’re not getting enough of the good stuff, you pick your battles..

and try to love them at least as much as you hate them in the meantime.

Creative Anxiety and Finding Love.

This,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8QmV8wxEeE

is a short video of Andre Rieu playing Sir Anthony Hopkins’ compostion, ‘And the Waltz goes on,’ presented for the first time fifty years after it was initially written. The unfolding story and the lyrical beauty of the music put my more critical faculties on hold but afterwards I wondered…

How is it that an oscar winning knight of the realm takes fifty years to get a piece of music played that rivals Strauss himself…?

You can imagine poets and composers from the four corners throwing their hands up in despair, the collective clang of manuscripts and canvases being binned around the world, the bathroom scramble for something to slit your wrists with afterwards.

Its true that anyone who embarks on some kind of soulful project has first to deal with the Sphinx that presides over the fact that they are liable to die in obscurity. Their treasure may never see the light of day.

And yet, why would we express, or want to, if not from the desire to share and be acknowledged?

The Sioux believe that any big dream or inspiration must always be bought before the tribe for the sake of all concerned and before the person could derive any benefit from it.

”A person who has a vision cannot use the power of it until after they have performed the vision on earth for the people to see.” Black Elk

..and so our potential and sense of self tend to get wrapped up in our soul project, whatever it is, and having it unwitnessed can feel tantamount to being unseen oneself, like an unnoticed child that might then begin to assume she is invisible.

But the tension between wanting to be loved and the lonliness of expression for its own sake can be unbearable..

so just train yoursel’ to get in a box and close the lid from the inside…

Creativity, whether it is witnessed or not, depends upon considerable anxiety. And shitiness. No one who was entirely comfy ever undertook anything. There has to be some frustration, some grit in the oyster, some sense of being driven.

”Conflict, and the need to overcome it, is a fundamental element in creativeness.” Melanie Klein.

Unfortunately, one of the foundations of our culture’s ‘house of narcissism’ is minimal anxiety, detachment.

”There is a strong negative relationship between “callous unemotional” traits and anxiety (Frick, Lilienfeld, Ellis, Loney and Silverthorn, 1999).

and so for the want of anxiety the hero/ine cannot set fulfil all their adventures or embrace their destiny. The child quickly learns there is no positive re-inforcement for becoming oneself, experienced, not as an idea or a conclusion, but as the gut-stabbing realisation of something so awful that it has to be projected into the future in some frightening yet representational way.

”Catastrophic expectation is a memory.” D Winnicott.

The experience of being anxiously unheld in a tradition that has no divine metaphor for maternal embrace is defensively split off into an immediate future world (knowing what happens next) and even though it may then manifest as persecutory anxiety, better out than in….

but it got a way of making people strange….

One of the jokes Jewish people tell about themselves is that there was a woman whose son was swept away by a freak wave from the end of the pier. As he sank out of sight she cried, ‘oh, is there no-one that will save my son’? And so one brave man takes off his jacket and shoes and dives in. After what seems an age, when all hope is lost, he returns with the young boy in his arms. The mother rushes over, takes one look and says, ‘and his hat?’

The fantasy that life always short changes you can be bent to fit even the most unlikely place you’d expect to see ingratitude. It gives a sense of the insistent need to experience being witheld from as an external reality rather than as earliest internal experience.

The problem is that all this omnipotent ‘knowing what happens next’ kills aliveness and poisons relatedness.

Yet,

if you asked most folk if they’d like a magic wand that could make them fearless, unfettered by worries or concerns, unaffected by the opinions of others, they’d likely jump at the chance…

except that this is the check list for malignant narcissism…..

wot don’t write waltzs.

So the main issue is not really the narcissists out there, or how to deal with them or how you got bruised by one but how we participate in it….

and the eternally fresh underwear of being too cool to have a go or wrestle with some passion.

So paranoia is good for something. There is at least some anxiety about. Some adventure to be had.

Though it might take fifty years to be able to contain its expression or find the inner renegade brave enough to say it out loud.

And for all that, what stayed with me most was not the beauty of the waltz or the struggle for its expression, but the lovelight in his wife’s eyes and the way she leant her cheek on his shoulder.

The Vengeful Goddess

Sekhmet is one of the oldest known Egyptian deities. Her name is derived from the Egyptian word “Sekhem” which means “power” or “might”. She is depicted as a lion-headed woman, sometimes with the addition of a sun disc on her head.

Sekhmet was represented by the searing heat of the mid-day sun. She was fierce. She had teeth and claws. She was also the patron of Physicians, and Healers and her priests became known as skilled doctors. So the fearsome deity was also known as “lady of life”. Above all, she is the protector of Ma’at, balance.

Sekhmet was closely associated with Kingship. She was often described as the mother of Maahes, the lion god who was a patron of the Pharaoh and it is suggested that the Pharaoh himself was conceived by Sekhmet.

According to myth, her father Ra became angry because mankind was not following his laws and preserving Ma’at. He decided to punish mankind by sending Sekhmet, the ‘eye of Ra’, and she began her rampage. The fields ran with human blood. At the sight of the carnage, Ra repented. He ordered her to stop, but she was in a blood lust and would not listen. So Ra poured 7,000 jugs of beer and pomegranate juice (which stained the beer blood red) in her path. She gorged on the “blood” and became so drunk she slept for three days. When she awoke, her blood lust had dissipated, and humanity was saved.

So what was it that pissed Ra off so much?

A bit of imbalanced Ma’at?

Seems a bit extreme.

Except that the imbalance was the loss of Sekmhet herself who shortly afterwards lost her status and her teeth when morphed into the rather more matronly and benign Hathor.

Lion got traded in for cow.

And since the Gods’ vengeance is invariably poetic Ra sent the very force which Humanity had so unwisely ignored to make a point from which it was impossible not to draw certain conclusions.

Your sins of ommision shall also be counted.

To withold is more damning than the sword.

Sekmhet’s fury is at the hybris engendered by depriving the Gods of their just acknowledgement.

When children are treated as idols, ‘special’ kids, little angels, the deprivation is two fold. Firstly the gods are not getting their due, but then neither is the child. Both are robbed of Ma’at. This makes Sekmhet and the child alike detached and vengeful.

The narcissist/psychopathic personality has been called the forgotten wo/man of psychiatry. There is a good reason for this. Psychiatry is focused on symptoms and the narcissist doesn’t have any.

How is that possible?

Because the narcissist’s wounds are about the absence of something essential rather than the presence of something florid or exotic.

Its difficult to spot what isn’t there.

Interestingly Dorland (1974) describes the narcissist/ psychopath as someome who has an anti social personality so the dysfunction is in relatedness…

”never in faults of logical reasoning, verbal confusion or technical delusion but rather in the sharper reality… of feeling behaviour” H. Cleckley.

The Narcissist does not simply disregard the ethical considerations or the rights of others in pursuit of selfish ends that momentarily outweigh his or her value system. What’s under consideration is part of a much more pervasive pattern…

that disregards regardless.

Conscience never really got developed in the first place.

Sekmhet’s altar is empty.

There’s a strong tendency in the literature not to hold parents responsible for their narcissistic progeny….

”I do not believe obvious mistreatment or any simple egregious parental errors can justifiably be held as the cause,..” ibid

and so despite brilliant descriptions of narcissistic enactments in his equally brilliant book, ‘The Mask of Sanity’, Cleckley is left scrabbling about for an explanation.

It being so difficult to spot what doesn’t occur.

Freud probably made the first description of the part played by deprivation.

”The necessary condition….is absence of love and a lack of emotional appreciation …” S. Freud.

I recall a training video on Autism we were shown as students. The young boy was being very badly behaved and kicking the skirting board in the hallway. The narration was focused on his behaviour and the strain on family life….

Unnoticed was what didn’t happen…..

an easy thing to miss…

His Mum was stood there with her arms folded….uninvolved.

even the three tear old sibling was pulling at her skirts as if too say,

‘Come on mum, get involved, be involved.’

I gave my son a massive plane with lights and buzzers for his third birthday. He stepped back a bit when it started going.

”I don’t want it, daddy.”

and for a second I was poised to give him a telling off for his ingratitude.

Did he realise how much I spent on the damn plane?

But then I realised that my gift was over-kill, compensation, the glazed look in his eyes was a mirror of me. I was uninvolved. The whole thing was so big and flashy he couldn’t play with it. He couldn’t hold it. He couldn’t imaginate his own adventure, pre-empted in fantasy by all the various sounds and movements it was already making.

And so I was ashamed.

All I’d given him was a manifesto of my own flashy noisiness which he couldn’t play with.

And so my ‘gift’ was actually an act of theft.

You took his Ma’at.

”Once, only obvious irrationality was regarded as a personality disorder. In fact, many less obvious disorders are more serious and incapacitating than those with gross superficial manifestations that can be readily demonstrated.” Cleckley

In fact, perhaps the delusional or schizophrenic person is a little better adjusted, given that symptoms contain meaning which can come to consciousness. How much more scary than the person who thinks they are Napoleon is the man who knows himself perfectly well but doesn’t care about you or your life as a premise for interaction.

I prefer Napoleon….

..and the paradox that even though it is the quality of a parent’s interaction with baby that determines baby’s later feeling life and the quality of future relationships or lack of them, so is it true that the epidemic of Narcissism is a collective phenomena, a direct consequence of the loss of the divine feminine.

How shall mother be….. if motherhood can’t be sacred?

Hathor, her sister, and in fact more a new incarnation of Sekhmet, mourns her loss.

Crucially, Hathor is goddess of motherhood and childbirth. If she is grief stricken for the loss of the lion/sun aspect of womanhood what will that bring to the mother/infant relationship?

Bruno Bettleheim, an analyst who spent time in Auschwitz, draws the comparison between concentration camp life and the inner world of the psychopathic child…

”in terms of the shared sense of depersonalisation and deprivation.” B Bettleheim.

Whatever the content of mother’s inner world, baby has a piece. Levy Bruhl originally called it ‘participation mystique’, a pre-verbal shared reality.

”the involvment in his mother’s emotional state is something he cannot separate himself from… he absorbs her psychological state as he absorbs nutrition.” F Ruppert.

If her state is one of being disenfranchised of spiritual worth or divine advocacy, then inner poverty is bound to result.

As is the compensatory gesture of having the child be special, laden down as he is with mother’s unvalued depths…

this dynamic is collective and cumulative.

and so society becomes increasingly self-centred and emotionally shut down…

Buuuut .. ..

thou shalt be more than a little bit depressed.

Wouldn’t it be spiffing if there was some poetic justice, some dark streak of irony in Sekhmet’s vengeance?

After all, the Single System systems have bred a very particular kind of person…

one who experiences the world as un-nourishing..

who doesn’t get told ‘no’..

has a propensity to project the shadow,

who is deadened in feeling…

without which values become a moveable ration pack,

who believes they are special and entitled

and that deep down they are godlike..

or doing God’s work…

with ‘unintegrated aggression’.

and no remorse or conscience….

Sounds like the perfect soldier to me.

Wouldn’t it be fun and clever if Sekhmet, ‘Lady of Pestilence’, then took them all and gave them guns and bombs while she drank her 7,000 jugs of beer and pomegranite juice,

ate nachos…

and just watched from the bleachers while Humanity took up from where she’d left off?

Narcissism Redeemed.

In 1943 Goebbles commissioned a young writer called Gerhard Burger to write a script for a Nazi propaganda movie. Little did he realize that Burger was in fact the pseudonym of banned and wanted satirist Erich Kestner whose books Goebbles had personally burned only months before….

‘Burger’ wrote ‘Munchhausen’ for Goebbles.

It was a great success.

Did Kastner sell himself out?

I think not.

The story starts as you would expect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Hjj-w8nU8

Munchausen is a golden super warrior, an apotheosis of Man endowed with eternal life. He knows all of Europe’s royalty and has an elite band of faithful servants all gifted with special powers. There are all kinds of heroic shenanigins.

But Kastner threw in an ending so subtle it is almost lost in the sentimentality, a message so understated as to be subliminal.

Munchausen quietly renounces his special powers for the sake of growing old with the one he loves. A much more humble vision than Goebbles might have intended, in fact something that managed to slide entirely under his radar. The final message of the film was what Kastner wanted it to be.

The way forward is by virtue of ordinariness and love.

Which is how it is with extremism.

And, by extension, anyone else who has ‘the syndrome’.

The so-called Munchausen syndrome is at the more colourful end of the Narcissistic spectrum. From a medical point of veiw it is ‘factitious’ insofar as its seen as just a case of someone wanting attention. But perhaps anyone who wants to be ill really is. The desire to be ill or to have a reason not to go out into the world really is pretty messed up.

It is also rather typical of the ‘puer aeturnus’ archetype that underpins narcissism, a wish to identify with only one tiny, idealised corner of the personality and to present oneself as this superior front to the world from whom admiration and solicitude can then be squeezed in equal measure.

The fact is that many a child laden down with parental expectations and archetypal projections is going to feel as though there is something wrong with them.

“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.” -Alice Miller

If they follow their own destiny they fail in their parent’s eyes. If they let themselves remain co-opted they betray their own destiny.

Such a conflict is bound to end up in A+E.

Real or imagined….

”The gods have become diseases, producing curious specimins for the doctor’s consulting room.” CG Jung.

It’s easy to critisize the arrogant narcissist as a malingerer, as someone living a provisional life, refusing to put down roots in the real world, a Dorian Grey with

”too great a dependence on the Mother.” Mats Winther.

It would be better to ask how that dependence has been fostered. If a child is covertly handed the responsibility of providing their parent with meaning then there will indeed be much hovering and disengagment from life in respect of such a sacred task.

It’s precisely such a child’s prescribed role to wait in the wings of parental ambition and to appear, saviour like, at just the right moment.

There’s no real getting on with your own life.

And you’ll feel as sick as a dog.

The modern rendering of the story… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdtJG1p7FP8

shows the situation more clearly and gives us the resolution to the situation. The Baron’s identification with his superiority has created terrible inner conflict with the shadow, the less than noble side of his personality. This is personified (as it is today) by ‘The Turk’, a Muslim Pasha with a taste for sado-masochism and decapitation who beseiges the city.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.. T S Eliot

Munchausen’s inner world has become so devoid of ordinary ideosyncratic material that he is compelled to identify with extreme, opposing roles in order to know himself. Even Catherine the Great is not sufficiently his equal.

”He becomes collectivized from within. The greater the identification with the youthful god, the less individuality although he feels so special.” ML von Franz.

This polarisation is hard work. So is covering over his inner emptiness given that his specially endowed servants are all captured or dispersed. The town’s regular troops are not fighting back because it is Wednesday. Ie his defences have regressed to autistic levels of functioning and so we find Munchausen depleted and close to death.

Narcissism in ourselves masquerades as self worth yet we see it clearly enough in others to find it annoying. We forget the deprivation behind it, how it feels to be secretly running on empty all the time. We fail to ask what all this grandeur is compensating for or what kind of world the child was raised in.

The term ‘Symbiotic Omnipotence’,

https://andywhiteblog.com/2015/11/08/symbiotic-omnipotence/

is useful in developing some compassion for otherwise noxious people because it describes how cumulative trauma to the sacred feminine over generations has had a serious impact on the experience of childhood.

”The danger for the modern child is that his mother is invariably a dissatisfied woman.” S de Beauvoir.

Millenia of spiritual repression has taught women to be secret with their inner world. For as long as baby’s ‘primary process thinking’ is predominant..

when he’s little..

yes, thankyou..

he participates in that secret and is bound to be imbued with its archetypal power, dominated in fact by something he’s unconsciously identified with, he must be the one to save the day.

From fear she conceals her deepest longings her greatest value, her soul, in her child, her golden redeemer, the gifted god-child…

that cannot help ignore the human clay of need and dependence; made all the more difficult to spot because the child in the equation seems to gain from the situation with..

”enhanced effectiveness of each type of functioning in the total personality.’ M. Khan

..the super-charged buzz of redemptive power, the hopes, the dreams….

and so..

“there readily develops a covertly arrogant mysteriously concocted pseudo superiority and false knowledge.” K. Horney.

…..represented by the special and bizzare powers of Munchausen’s now scattered servants.

He is saved from Death only by the anger and determination of a small child who needs closure on his story.

This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

— Terre Tempest Williams

To recover, to tell the story, Munchausen must first find his servants. He needs the inner resources, the different perspectives, of I and me. The problem is that they are all so imbued with magical specialness that they have come to various bad ends, like famous gunslingers that every punk kid wants to take down. Bertholde, the world’s fastest runner, has to be rescued from the Moon King, the masculine aspect of his Mother who keeps his potential trapped.

Gaining the freedom of his valet Bertholde has divine consequences. They are all tipped headlong into Vulcan’s underground forge where Munchausen meets and courts Venus. His valuing of the clumsy, gauche part of himself, his risking himself for the sake of relatedness, evokes a response from the divine feminine who is now clearly looking out for him.

But it seems it is ‘too little too late’. They are all swallowed up by a sea monster and taken down into the depths.

”Clearly they have been overpowered by the unconscious and are helplessly abandoned, volunteering to die in order to begat a new and fruitful life in that region of the psyche which has hitherto lain fallow…” CG Jung.

Munchausen must renounce the project to redeem others and get on with the process of redeeming himself. The search for his servants, the functional and unique components of his own personality is a ‘night sea journey’, a braving of the depths of himself in order to find new zest for life.

As you might expect, the servants Gustavo of great hearing, Adolphus of accurate sight and Albrect of fantastic strength are also in the fish, though they have lost their special powers. With suffering they have become ordinary. There is genuine compassion and fellow feeling between them despite their ‘failure’ to uphold the shining maternal ideal handed down to them and this acceptance of themselves and of one another precipitates their escape.

Their mutuality, their single-heartedness, conjours Munchausen’s horse Bucephalus to appear, instinctive martial energy (Bucephalus belonged to Alexander the Great), a symbol of dynamic transformation that orchestrates their escape.

The personality fears that to renounce the shared specialness of Symbiotic Omnipotence is to lose all love and belonging. In fact it is to find it. They experience that love can survive ordinariness.

In fact, that’s what it depends on.

Symbiotic Omnipotence.

There were five brothers, all of whom had an extra-ordinary ability. One could swallow the sea, one had an iron neck, one had stretchy legs, one could not be burned and the last could hold his breath indefinitely.

So the one who could swallow the sea was on his way to market with some lovely fish when a young boy asks him the secret of his success. The first brother shows him how he swallows the sea, leaving the fish stranded.

Off runs the boy from one fascinating thing to another. The first brother tries to call him back but is still holding in the sea which is getting…

heavier…..

and heavier.

Swallow the Sea eventually has to pour the sea all back out.

The young boy is drowned…..

overwhelmed by archetypal contents that do not belong to him…

The first brother is condemned to the axeman…

but he begs leave to visit his poor mother and swops places with Iron Neck whose head won’t be chopped.

So they try to drown him but he swops places with Stretchy Legs who can reach the bottom.

Then they try to burn him but Can’t be Burnt just laughs and calls for more wood.

Then they try to smother Hold his Breath in cream…..

What a wonder! He must be favoured by the Gods and therefore innocent!

And so the five brothers and their Mother all lived together happily for many years.

But he wasn’t innocent.

And you can bet it wasn’t happy.

The ordinary boy who unselfconsciously followed his own interest along the sea bed was killed….

negligently killed.

And so it is that there is a terrible price to be paid for being special. The curious, spontaneous child who can be as amused by a starfish as a merri-go-round is dead.

And the five special brothers might get fed to the hilt and sleep like angels, but they will never be free to leave or find wives of their own….

a tight orbit..

”around ‘planet mother’, on which we can never land, so we live in Never-never land.’ Dale Mathers.

Symbiotic Omnipotence is like being joined at the hip with a power that is simultaneously trying to eat you.

So when someone’s niggly narcissism is getting on your nerves remember that what you’re witnessing is only one half of a double act under which the present protagonist is fighting a rear-guard action…….

”So, what did you want to do this afternoon?”

Fait accompli hangs in the air like a toxic cloud. The six year old doesn’t know about verb tenses or implication. He just knows that whatever he had in mind will now no longer be possible..

and wasn’t ever possible.

The decision has already been made.

Pictures will be taken. It will be special. Money will be spent and a careful tally kept. You will have everything..

and nothing.

”When I was just a little boy, I asked my Mother, what shall I be? Will I be handsome, will I be rich…?

Join me in my world. Let me sit on your lap and cuddle up while we imaginate together about all the adventures my fate holds in store so that I can gain perspective, contain the anxiety of separation and the lonliness of life’s road.

Whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, Que sera sera.

Don’t be ridiculous. Not yours to see, nor yours to shape. Are you not content with all your special gifts? You who know the wild soul of the Hills, who understands the voice of the wind in the pine trees….?

…and so we find the child in class who can’t concentrate because what is maths to the mystical interpreter of the wind?

…the child who feels destroyed because he doesn’t actually know the answer to everything and is therefor clearly a dunce..

…the child who can never find his stuff because its just so irrelevant next to the holy quest of embodying Mother’s highest value.

…the child in a rage because his friend has other friends…..

…the child consumed with apathy because he’s had to leave his destiny behind in a ditch…..

And if everything on the surface is so wonderful and has to be kept so, then getting to know your way around ordinary stuff like how to lose your temper can’t be done.

”Unless anger or rage can be voiced, it becomes difficult to manage extreme feelings. The child has no way of learning to control his aggressive emotions unless he is able to experience them himself.” Asha Phillips

Mother refrains from addressing the less than wonderful qualities in the child, which leaves them free floating and liable to enactment or symptomatic expression..

Freud went to see his mother Amalie every Sunday, always bringing flowers, delighting in her praise, making much of her devotion….

”but he had stomach ache every time.” Sophie Freud.

Symbiotic omnipotence is a twilight world where what you see is not what you get and things don’t mean what they say on the tin.

The easiest thing to do is let yourself be carried along in a way that…

”enables a person to both perceive and deny [reality]”. M. Kahn

useful, say, if you had some command codes and a red telephone. Or had to make a call as to which way the Belgrano was pointing, or had any qualms about lending money you didn’t actually have, but would have once the loan is repaid with interest.

In other words Symbiotic Omnipotence is perfectly adapted to create Empires,to crush people with impunity and send young men who believe entirely in their immortality and holy purpose….

to their deaths.

Rememberance Sunday 2015.

The Golden Child.

Stanford University professor David Rosenhan and some of his students decided to see what would happen if they feigned hearing voices to gain admission to hospital, but then behaved completely normally once they were inside.

http://www.bonkersinstitute.org/rosenhan.html

Their ordinary behaviour was interpreted as schizophrenic in all but one case. Note taking was described by staff as, ‘engaging in writing behaviour.’

”Given that the patient is in the hospital, he must be psychologically disturbed. And given that he is disturbed, continuous writing must be behavioral manifestation of that disturbance, perhaps a subset of the compulsive behaviors that are sometimes correlated with schizophrenia.” D. Rosenhan.

All the students were compelled to admit that they had mental illnesses and take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release.

Once the cat was out of the bag, one peeved hospital administration challenged Rosenhan to send them more pseudopatients which they would then detect and unmask, so to speak.

Rosenhan agreed.

Over the next weeks the hospital identified 20% of their admissions as Rosenhan ‘fakes’…..

but Rosenhan had sent no-one there…..

booyakasha….!

Our ‘guilty until proven innocent’, model of sanity, is rooted in Freud’s Drive Conflict theory, the jewel in the crown of Western Civilisation’s war of attrition against the Principle of Relatedness.

Drive Conflict theory eroded the significance of Mother, and common sense, to such a point that the quality of interaction with baby now became a factor that was secondary to the child’s inherent constitution.

cut to the chase, mon.

People no longer affect one another. You hurt yourself because you are weak and stupid. As for Mother…

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME…

We will no longer speak Her name. In fact we will refer only to her ‘object-relations’.

Mother doesn’t get front billing in early life… just a part of her, nor will she play much part,

or have any responsibility for how screwed up you are.

and that is the official theory, mon.

”..it was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person’s real experiences.” J Bowlby.

What this means for’ mad’ and ‘sane’ alike is that there is no legitimate suffering in life. Psychoanalysis’ central theory places itself outside the vales of sympathy and compassion required to heal grief, trauma and tragedy. To heal, the wound must first be given legitimacy, and second, meaning.

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

There is a line in Sophocles’, ‘Oedipus Rex’, sung by the chorus and therefore almost certainly the philosopher’s own personal perspective on life..

”Life becomes death longing, if all longing else be vain”. Sophocles.

It means that life is not worth living for its own sake. Freud said that the purpose of his method was to return people to ordinary misery. Ordinary misery is not enough. There has to be involvement in life beyond individual gain and measure for it to be meaningful. There has to be connectedness with one another and meaning afforded to legitimate suffering.

Not to have this is worse than death.

The Divine Feminine is the keeper of such truths.

Without sufficient representation of Her in our lives we need a host of back up theories about the inevitablity of our isolation and how it is somehow intrinsic to experience. In fact it is a collective mallaise caused by the devaluation of the Goddess.

..and produces what Masud Khan calls ‘symbiotic omnipotence,” a mood of inertia, helpless dependence, and emotional manipulation in people….

”whose outward lives looked okay but who were empty inside.” Dale Mathers.

Here’s how it works…

The depleted mother tries to compensate for the absence of a sacred vessel for motherhood by idolising the child.

actively discouraging..

”the perception of others as valuable or nourishing, through subtle collusion and indulgences”. M. Khan

and keeping it from the real world.

She hides her sacred heart in her child. The child gets to be ‘special’, but carry’s this great burden of archetypal expectation, almost as a redeemer….. expected to do miracles… but denigrated like a demon when it all goes wrong…

”such a maternal relationship leads to dissociations…” M. Kahn.

The child can’t integrate his own personality. He’s been inappropriatley seduced into propping up something that is not his task to shoulder. His specialness is in exchange for mother’s use of him as a repository for all the archetypal material she’s been schooled to disown from her own soul. In the process he gets turned into a kind of golden idol..

”that we can then worship and adore so we have the illusion that everything is wonderful but actually have no real contact at all..” D. Mathers.

it’s a horribly split reality that leads to all kinds of superior, narcissistic behaviour and feelings of pathological entitlement on the one hand and worthlessness on the other.

The scary thing is that Yahweh’s Covenant with his people ticks all the boxes for Symbiotic Omnipotence.

Exclusive attachment,

THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BUT ME..

active discouragement of other influences,

THOU SHALT NOT MAKE IDOLS

shared specialness,

THOU SHALT BE AS A BRIDE UNTO ME

poor communication,

BURN THEM ALL,

”failure to integrate aggression,” M. Kahn

BURN THEM ALL.

and prohibitive harmony…

BURN THEM ALL.

Kahn’s prognosis is poor…

”with maturity they became even more isolated, suffering a pervasive mood of diffuse anxiousness and apprehension.” Kahn

being special is a con.

”Always remember that you are absolutely unique, just like everyone else.” Margaret Mead.

The healing here is not particularly in any moral outrage that one might have in what being special pans out to be but in the longing and incompleteness at back of it all…

because that longing and incompleteness is another way of talking about love.

which is why longing has such great power in it.

The Abraham Complex.

Armed with assurances from Western officials my father took his family to live in a war zone. Despite the fact that there had been a guerrila war going on for seven years and you had to go everywhere in armed convoys it was quite safe…

…and thus emboldened with the spirit of cognitive dissonance that conquors people for their own good and will risk their own family to do it, my father sallied forth into a fray…

that had nothing to do with him…

apparently.

”We are most powerfully driven by that with which we are unconsciously identified. Transformation begins with doing deliberatly what you used to do without noticing” C Schwartz.

I spent years wondering why any one man would place his family in harms way, confusing myself by looking for something of which he might have been conscious…

for the sake of a petty administrative desk job.

When i say, ‘harm’s way’, it was more than the armed convoys. It was also the grenade screens on the windows, emergency drills and standing guard over your schoolmates at night armed with a bolt action lee-enfield .303s before you were old enough to shave.

The Rule of Intentionality says that what pans out must have had quite some drive behind it to get there…

…and the principle of Occam’s Razor says that the simplest answer is usually the right one even if it seems unlikely.

You might say that a man given the chance to play god over others might be seduced by the power of it all to the extent that the jeopardy of life was somehow worth it…

but it was even waaay more than that…

more than lack of care..

or the need to dominate and control.

No-one goies easily to war without a belly full of aggression and narcissistic entitlement, unconsciously looking for an outlet or a lifestyle that allowed, that wanted, the enactment of pent up violence.

and the sacrifice being made was not to king and country, it was at an altar presided over by something distinctly more zealous.

In my post on synchronicity..

(https://andywhiteblog.com/2015/10/25/synchronicity-…h-the-numinous/)

I described how traumas can be passed in minute detail from one generation to another with the story of how my father sent me to school under precisely the same circumstances as himself all the way down to being mocked for having clumpy boots.

That which has had to be traumatically hidden, repressed, crops up in future generations, preserving in sometimes great detail the content of the original experience.

Children really do carry the sins of the fathers , unresolved and unconscious material, passed down the generations like a hot potato.

Sometimes what we’re trying to work through has less to do with us than we think.

Sometimes the untold story that hampers our tread is a personal one. That’s bad enough. But then there are the untold story of the family and the community, which are more dangerous still.

The return of the repressed then comes armed with archetypal overtones. Fragments of story will be lived out, not from the ideosyncratic details of individual life but from the common storehouse of the collective psyche, from the figures of myth and legend themselves, complete with the psychological intensity that belongs with the timeless.

”We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left these phantasmal gods behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts. We are still as much possessed by [them] as if they were Olympians…” CG Jung

The denied Jewish ancestry in my family rubbed my father’s nose in the fact by turning him into an Old Testament prophet. A bit of poetic justice maybe but hell for everyone else. He was seized daily with wild domestic enthusiasms at home and proclaiming Policy to the great unwashed at work.

”The gods have become …disorders [letting] loose psychic epidemics on the world.” CG Jung

My father was most dangerous in his incarnation asAbraham.

because I was his Isaac…

An’ Isaac got a knife put to his throat…

So I was called out to die quite a few times, and die I nearly did.

Nor was the Abraham/Isaac component of our relationship confined to my being sent to fight in a special forces unit against overwhelming numbers. When the war refused to consume me he bought me an old wreck described by the only mechanic ever to take a look at it as ‘a death trap’. It was entirely unroad worthy, illegal and I was unliscenced.

”You’ll pick it up as you go along”

Nor was his sacrificial intent so subtly enacted.

As a child my bedroom contained the unusual luxury of bare electric cables snaking from the wall, the bite of which could hurl you right across it. Further cables adorned the walls outside, rubbing bare in the wind and electrifying the window frames when it rained along with any water that might pool on the window sill.

”His dissociative tendencies are actual psychic personalities possessing a differential reality.” CG Jung.

But there’s no sacrifial stone quite like Fireforce.

On the outside you seem like immortal angels of death, armed to the teeth in choppers that were part dragonfly, droning the countryside in packs at 150mph.

But actually your gonna die.

Knife bein’ sharpen’ mon.

One way or another.

I hurt my back in a para jump. My lieutenant was a decent bloke. ”We’ll take you off first wave choppers.” Within minutes of my substitution the choppers were called out. The one I would have been riding in got hit by a SAM 7 half an hour later.

Everyone died.

My unit was eventually disbanded because there were so few of us left in it. No-one would join because no-one lasted very long. We were jinxes. Strangely, once we were divvied up amongst the other troops our status changed. We became talismen, touchstones of survival who could tell you it was by their great skills and magic as warriors that they lived. The mystery of the bullet-avoiding techniques could be graciously passed on over a game of cards or a pint of beer.

We played a lot of cards..

and drank a lot of beer.

In fact we white boys were neither heroes nor villains. We were sacrificial offerings at Mammon’s altar, no less than the Inca’s sacrificing their children to the gods with the exception that the Incas were conscious of what they were doing. We deem them savage whilst unmindfully doing the same, and sending our own youth to Abraham’s’s knife in unwitting allegience to the dark face of God who casts a blind eye to our greed in exchange for our children.

The Big Lie.

In 1980 a young analyst, Jeffrey Masson, met with Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna to discuss the possibility of him having access to Freud’s unpublished letters. She agreed and he was soon made director of the Freud Archives in London. What he discovered there should have sent shock waves around the world…

but it didn’t….

because the same suppression of the truth operates as much today as it did back then.

Masson was fired for making public what he found.

Freud’s accepted theory was a cover up.

Freud’s original theory was the Seduction Theory (1896) formulated in a paper ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, in which he said that something terrible and violent lay in the past of his women patients.

When he presented his veiws, his collegues alienated him overnight.

‘I am as isolated as you could wish me to be,’ he complained to his friend Wilhelm Fliess.

The newly revealed letters from Anna Freud showed how Sigmund then bowed to social pressure and renounced the link he’d made between childhood abuse and adult disturbance. Within a decade he’d substituted it with something else..

something hideous..

a theory that,

”now claimed that the victim fashioned his or her own torture. In particular violent sexual crimes could be attributed to the victim’s imagination.” Jeffrey Masson

Despite an intervening period as an intern at the Paris morgue where he saw evidence at first hand of the brutal rape and murder of children,

‘of which’, he says in private letters, ‘science prefers to take no notice.’ S Freud

…….soon, Freud himself was turning a blind eye until by 1925 he was able to say,

‘‘I was at last obliged to recognise these scenes of seduction had never taken place. They were only fantasies..’(ibid)

This more popular veiw has percolated down the century that’s followed and through almost every therapeutic discipline so that,

”most psychiatrists and psycho-analysts have, in effect, been reluctant to trust the memories of their patients, women in particular, about the traumas they experienced in childhood.” J Masson.

Freud capitalised on children’s tendency to blame themselves for the ills that befall them and turned his theory entirely around.

Then he got his job back…

and got invited to dinner.

But it turns out that Freud’s legacy of blaming the victim, one that allowed therapists to remain on the side of the successful and powerful, that narcissistically fed the notion of how sophisticated we all are, had a personal motive that went beyond his need for expensive cuban cigars.

At the same time as he was feeling the full sanction of his peers, Freud was seeing a patient, Emma Epstein, whose name had been entirely expunged from all official records. The private letters show why. Freud, still struggling with his own homosexuality, in particular his feelings for his friend Wilhelm Fliess, suggested Fliess operate on Emma Epstein under the macarbre notion that removing the turbinate bone in her nose would stop her masturbating.

The operation was unprecedented, unsupervised and bungled so badly that Emma nearly died of blood loss on site and again, later, from secondary infection, most bizzarely induced by a length of gauze left in her nasal cavity the size of a sanitary towel.

Excuse me.

It would be easy to get lost in the multiple malpractice issues that could be raised here, particularly given Emma’s resulting disfigurement, but the point I’d like to emphasize is the stance Freud took afterwards.

He used the incipient substitute theory he was developing to blame Emma for the ‘reaction’ she’d had to Fliess’ butchery of her face. Freud claimed Emma’s bleeding was ‘hysterical’, the result of sexual longing.

you wish…

In order for Freud to protect Fliess,

‘an himself….

”it would be necessary to construct a theory of hysterical lying, a theory whereby the external traumas never happened, but are fantasies.” J Masson

Emma’s bleeding could then be referred to as ‘dysmenhorrea’.

”a psychological explanation being pressed into service to exculpate his own dubious behaviour.” ibid

Why is all this such a big deal? Because a hundred years after Freud’s twin efforts to both absolve himself of blame in a sleazy sham and get back in with his mates, his theories have infiltrated every state institution even vaguely concerned with children’s welfare.

I had the misfortune of coming across a child psychotherapist appointed by the court to determine residency of my son. This man told me to my face that my twelve year old son’s lack of anxiety, his confidence in being able to walk 400m to school and a catch a bus into the next town if he wanted was clearly abnormal and contributary grounds to have him removed from my care.

I did get my boy back and the gentleman concerned was ultimatly spanked for his nonsense. But had I been less determined or less literate I would have lost my child.

The scary thing is that the whole system is full of such persons who believe they are doing their best by refusing to listen to children. My own child’s claim that he had been violated by the very person they wanted him to live with was strenuously suppressed by social workers and court officials alike. When I finally went to central archives for hard copy of the police report concerned and produced it before a judge it was angrily dismissed as irrelevant to the case and I was reprimanded for trying to stir up trouble.

Ironically, Freud himself shed light on the negation of childhood suffering in a paper that he wrote 20 years after he turned his back on the reality of sexual and emotional abuse entitled ‘Negation’ (1925), in which he states,
“In our interpretation, we take the liberty of disregarding the negation ….. To negate something in a judgement is at bottom to say ‘this is something which I should prefer to repress’. A negative judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression, its ‘no’ is the hallmark of repression ….. Thus, originally, the mere existence of a presentation was a guarantee of the reality of what was represented.” S Freud.

Unfortunately…

the fact that Freud’s distorted and unforgiving theory of human nature became so pervasive says more about us than it does about him.

For all the squalor of his personal motivations its down to the rest of us that we put him on such a pedestal for so long. Why did we do that? Because we too, do not want to know. We’re happy with how evolved and sophisticated we are.

We like our dominant myth.

Synchro-spam

Synchronicity is orchestral. It orchestrates and has a way of re-shaping

identity,

experienced subjectively, perhaps, as a change of values or aspirations,

”The hallmark of the transpersonal is the experience of being acted upon.” Sylvia Brinton Perera.

Its also true, in a more lyrical way, that we can count on the brass section at the major crossroads of life while the woodwind section is a bit more gentle, everyday kind of thing.

Hopefully.

”Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have the eyes to see.” C G Jung.

You might say that synchronicity was the Universe’s way of….

you are failing miserably to understand

Er, what I was going to say was, how can we be more aware of..

The best way is to stop cursing yourself for nothing….

and so I thought, lets go looking for it.

Synchronicity will occur wherever I’m all riled up about something because the riteous prick in me will always stir stuff up from the bottom of the pond with some kind of reactive drama…

in need of compensation.

So what has me fired up?

You must contact your insurance/medical assistance business immediately if
you should be referred to a medical facility for treatment.

And its not what you’d think. To my shame its not world hunger or political corruption, its the spam on my blog, the bastard scamsters and hackers that slip under the radar and piggyback me through cyberspace for the sake of a mention. Piano lessons in Singapore, Maths tuition in Queensland.

keep up wrinting.

If you were to apply a little method and actually practice what you have been preaching about the philosopher’s stone being found on the dung heap, then you could stop angrily deleting it all, but rather treat it as a waking dream and see what meaning might be found.

Perhaps my angst is that I insist on seeing these gremlins as parasites. And why shouldn’t I have a few parasites? Perhaps they could even be useful… the extent of my annoyance suggests it has more to do with me than I would like to admit, so there’s some gem in there…

To become identified with the fixed reference point of the separate self limits our freedom, entraps our creative potency and hinders our compassion.” P Levy

The thought of approaching my spam as a lucid dream is exciting…. it’s like having a new role…

”and though the soul does not assume the lead by killing off the ego, the ego is demoted, one might say, and given a different assignment in the psyche, which is essentially to submit to the concerns of the soul.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Ok so, most of it is pretty standard, what you’d expect, paranoid delusional stuff about the end of the world, preparing for Armaggedon..

some appeal to my male insecurity…

you too can have a longer penis, build this Extender in the comfort of your own home…

Hmm, before or after building a fallout shelter?

Consider the size of your own.

I am, I am, its just that my attention is now on…

cheap wedding dresses.

lots of stuff about cheap wedding dresses, the appeal strangely riding on the premise that you don’t want your wedding to look cheap.

and keep those straps tucked in girls. A stray brastrap could ruin your big day.

What kind of heavy trip is that? You can see it now..

OMG, a brastrap, you’ve fucked up the rest of my life, you bitch.

But the one that really got me…

was an advert for anal bleaching.

What the fuck is this doing in my psyche? Still, not to worry, apparently its quite acceptable in discussion these days and no longer for just porn stars and bridesmaids….

For crying out loud, what is it with the bridesmaids? Since when might a bridesmaid consider having her anus bleached as part of her maidenly duties? And to what purpose? How might it sit in the collective psyche of the dearly beloved knowing such a thing?

I don’t want to play this anymore.

#If you quit, how are you here?

Ok, but it feels….. shitty.

And not just because of the pervy connotations of it, or even the objectification of women, but because this denial of body, this cut offness from sexuality and this weird alienation from self is given the twist of debonair sophistication.

Barbie is still our aspiration.

How long will it be before you can’t show your face in public because you haven’t had your monthly bleaching? Shaving and waxing are no longer enough. Now you have to peroxide your heiney as well.

The ability to combine analytical thinking with imaginative execution is extremely desirable.

Ok, so we’re mocking the superficiality of modern culture, but yet to get the symbolism of all this. The problem is deeper than depersonalisation.

Its about disgust, before it ever occured to you that you are a person…

who might be… depersonalised.

Babies learn most about themselves and the world before the self/other dichotomy opens up. They learn from their kinaesthetic experience, from mouth, smell, feel and how they are held, the visceral cues about whether the Universe is friendly or not.

Henri Wallon uses the term ‘confiscation’ (Wallon 1949) to describe the emptiness that seems to be, from a western point of view, an intrinsic part of the developmental process. Confiscation implies that something once present has been taken away and indeed it has.

Baby has yet to learn of Yahweh’s divine truculence with the Great Mother but soon does so from the non verbal cues intruded in the personal mother, the loss of her divine representation bound to translate itself as depression and ennui. Baby is then compelled to join mother in her impoverished psycho-spiritual framework and confiscation is the felt result.

‘The loss which lies at the heart of confiscation is no small matter. It amounts to a revolution of consciousness the crucial feature of which is the decision to mistrust the evidence of our senses.’ ie Nature. Berman (1989)

Baby renounces the body as a way of knowing herself. The shared loss of the numinous feminine container which anchors and enrichens everyday mothering means baby is effectively born into an untrustworthy world which she internalizes, sacrificing her own capacity to apprehend reality.

Symptoms develop.

The obsessive’s preoccupation with ‘dirt’ is primarily a concern about how easily love can be lost, the panic of contamination a prelude to rejection and isolation.

The issues are disgust, tedium and whether or not love can be extinguished by diarrhoea. Baby does his best to fall in line by shamefully accepting that his pooh is intrusive, horrible and damaging. Perhaps even baby himself is intrusive horrible and damaging. What he does is still bound up in who he is.

Unmet needs in baby don’t go away. They manifest in adult life as a craving for instant gratification, passive entertainment, getting loved-up, the feeling of being owed a living and the expectation of having someone to take care of all eventualities.

The symbols are the lottery, the red carpet, celebrity.

In the meantime we are so regressed we have to be told what to do at every turn. Life’s simplest operations are governed for us, all the way down to serving suggestions on packets of salt, advice on how to remove a bottle top (twist!) and those oh so necessary instructions on a joint of beef to remove plastic wrapping prior to putting it in the oven.

This makes fewer resources offered to be robbed.

Sometimes we make apotropaic gestures to ward of feared expectations. Invariably, however,

‘the catastrophic expectation has already happened.” D Winnicott.

We project Armaggedon into the future. Its safer there. The Preppers are too late.

We’re facing the wrong way.

arse about face.

Which is perhaps why Jung once said to Marie Louise von Franz,

”I cannot confess to have solved the riddle of the coniunctio mystery”CG Jung

All of which goes to show how even the greatest minds are limited precisely by the mental identification to which they are bound to fall prey. Jung veiwed it as personal failure not to have figured it all out, forgetting that the hierosgamos, the sacred marriage, is not there to be ‘solved’ anymore than the bridesmaids are there to have their bottoms bleached.

The mystery is not a riddle to be surmounted or sanitised by man.

perhaps if the Unconscious could be approached from some vantage point other than being smart arse enough to suss it out then she would simply reveal Her treasures.

excellent listener.

and the bridesmaids might have their honour restored.

Synchronicity. Encounter with Numinosity.

The philosopher Heidegger said,

”There’s what I want to think about, and then there’s what wants to be thought.”

Its a single line that could keep you busy for a lifetime.

For instance, what about what I want to write about and what wants to be written? And who am I if I am merely penning what has already crowded its way to the forefront of my neo-cortex?

What are the implications for self-realisation if my idea of what it might mean is undercut by that which wants to be realised? What if enlightenment was something that came knocking at your door? What if it barged in?

I was a nineteen year old special forces…

be polite now..

soldier.

We had been sent on a mission to mop up some ‘auxiliaries’, fighters who’d annoyingly swopped sides and traded in their AK47’s for G3 semi-automatics and a hot meal.

It wasn’t very well thought out. They had a habit of defecting back again or just doing their own thing and had become…an embarrassment.

Six of us were sent in, concealed in the back of an armoured vehicle. The plan was explained en route. Lure them out of the bush with bully beef and cigarrettes and, ahem, ‘resolve’ the diplomatic….problem.

I had a small niggle about this. When we arrived at the RV the niggle had become an itch and the itch a gnawing pit of dread in my gut.

…in cold blood?

I began to sweat and moan. The officer was calling the Auxiliaries out of hiding. Soft thump of cigarrette cartons landing on the dusty ground. I heard voices, the crackle of dry undergrowth, figures moving slowly through the rifle slits, men with carelessly shouldered weapons.

…in cold blood?

The officer motioned us with a hidden hand. Sweat dribbled into my eyes, grime everwhere. The bottom of the truck was covered in bark and dirt from a fuel run earlier.

A woodlouse suddenly barrelled its way across the floor towards me, his feathery antennae working furiously, as if in desperate communication. Despite his tiny size he seemed to fill my entire field of vision. My bootlace trailed on the ground. He clambered up it with great effort, struggling to get up, as if the smallest advantage was worth any sacrifice, his now whirring antennae a dance of petition.

…in cold blood?

The woodlouse began to absorb my entire attention. He became Woodlouse, his whole purpose to convey something terribly important and it was as if, for just a moment, the waving of his antennae breached the divide between us.

…in cold blood?

The order was given. The firing and the screaming began. Woodlouse clambered further up, waving, waving, hallooo, halllloooooo.

..not in cold blood.

When it was all over I was still sat in my seat, unused belts of ammo trailing from a cold gun. The silence was eternal. I kept my eyes on Woodlouse who had climbed back down a bit but twiddling victoriously.

Woodlouse. Burrowing creature of the underworld who creates rich humus out of dead wood.

The officer and I looked at each other for a veeeery long time, his brain cluncking between the options of handing me down a juicy 128 days in detention barracks or an even juicier yet unfortunate accident. Woodlouse sat firmly on my boot giving courage and filling me with the strangest sense of calm. Nobody said a word.

Of course, you could say that I just projected my conscience onto the woodlouse but that was not my experience. When I read Jung years later saying that the soul is mostly ouside the body I understood what had happened. I had been redeemed by something beyond my own consciousness.

”Something in the outer world crstallizes or confirms an inner process.” Jeanne Lloyd.

In a moment of urgency, inner and outer had ‘lined up’, or perhaps revealed their inner unity.

“Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. We must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that is not derivable from any known antecedents.” C G Jung.

During the time I was in analysis I got befriended by badgers. They came to me in dreams. Once I was in the woods and one came right up to me and musked my boot.

So, I dreamt that I was sick and two men with the heads of badgers tattoed their print on my chest and sucked out poison through it via a blue golf tee. It was a great relief.

I had a session the next day. On the pavement immediatly in front of my analyst’s gate, in two up two down suburbia, was a blue golf tee.

Something unknown is doing I don’t know what .

yet there is some poetry in the fresh game, the new beginning, that is teeing off.

Several years later I got the tattoo of the badger’s print done as it had been in my dream. Shortly after I was coming home late at night on my motorbike and as I turned into the drive understood that there was a badger waiting for me at the bottom of the garden.

Badger. Burrowing creature.

It was pitch black and 100m away but I clumsily made my way down to the boundry fence and there she was. I walked right up to the fence as she snuffled up and down. Her partner 60m away, bolted .

We are more than we can conceptualise.

”Morphic fields extend beyond us linking us to the objects of perception, affecting them through intention and attention.” R Sheldrake.

The content of synchronicities are always unique but there is something that seems common to them. They have to do with the re-enchantment of life, an aliveness that comes from going into the unknown, from crossing some kind of threshold of Being, or perhaps simply by allowing oneself to be.

We do have this idea that enlightenment comes from all kinds of strenuous effort and sometimes that is needed but so is it true that sometimes what is required is simply to get out of our own way and allow realisation to unfold by itself.

My dear mentor Chuck Schwartz once told me,

”Whatever the specific meaning of synchronous events there is also the more general sense that you are on the right track.”

Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality,

”In a night dream, the dreamscape is reflecting the internal psyche of the dreamer. The dream is not separate from the inner world. Nor is our waking experience separate from what we normally call reality”. P Levy

So, what about if you’re not at all sure if you’re awaake or…

not?

Most of the time we at least think we know and are comforted by that. Sometimes, you can have lucid dreams and go about introducing yourself to figures of the inner world. But what do you do if..

you’re not quite sure…?

I’m in a garden and can’t quite decide one way or another. No lizard men… an acid test, usually. I look at the hairs on my arms, the whorls in my fingerprints, the grain of the brickwork in the garden wall. Then I pick up a sprig of three red leaves and hold it up to the light marvelling at the intricacy of their veins and the incredible colours.

Then its real whether you can find the seams in the universe or not, matey.

What a relief, and coughed up a kilo of broken glass.

better out than in…

Next morning I’m off to work down Commercial road in the East End of London, cash in hand casual work in an Indian gift shop. In the middle of the street is a sprig of three red leaves, but plastic and very unreal looking..

..laughed all the way to work.

When we step out of creed and dogma, braving the prospect of making our own way through the dark forest all manner of things happen to act as markers on the way,

”choreographed by the great pervasive intelligence that lies at the heart of nature, manifest in each of us as intuitive knowledge.” D Chopra.

When I was twelve I was sent to a foreign boarding school. On the first day my rugby boots were thrown around the dorm, mocked for their cheap brand and inferior stitching.

It was bad enough, but the really important piece of it was that it reminded me of a forgotten story my father told me long before. Remembered, suddenly and entirely. How his father had been shot down over Turin in 1942 , the rear gunner of a downed Lancaster. The RAF gave my father a bursary to a foreign boarding school where he was mocked for his clumpy shoes…

and how he’d never send me to such a place.

‘An you fink,

‘Ang on a frikkin minit.

Who’s life is this anyway?

Let alone what it might mean.

Something comes out of the blue with your destiny in one hand and the burden of generations in the other. Einstein’s anonymous god, a sometimes dark and unwanted co-incidence that nevertheless brings sudden, mercurial insight.