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.

The Story of Innana

Around about the same time, mid third century, as the church councils of Nicaea and Laodicia had finished deciding what you could and could not read, where you could pray and to whom,

And so prescribing the size and shape of experience..

we also find the first accounts of intervention in cases of madness.

which you might expect given the whole square peg, round hole..

on pain of pain..

dilemma.

And converting the gold of individuation back into the lead of corporate man.

for god.

So, we are fucked; is that what you sayin’?

Not at all, the prototype of Gilgamesh……..

https://andywhiteblog.com/2015/06/16/the-archetypal-narcissist/

…….is not the only possibility for us. The ancient Sumerians were kind enough to leave us a companion volume to the story of Gilgamesh, the story of Innana.

Wot?

Yeh, carved on clay tablets 5000 years ago..

why didn’t you say that before? Forty posts it’s been, forty frikkin posts of doom and gloom..

I was getting there, it takes time to tell a story…

So, let me get this right, the Sumerians, poised on the cusp of a brave new world of intolerance, persecution and eradication of the divine feminine in the shape of beardy, fast moving Assyrians, coughed up two volumes you say…

and some poetry…

One, the tragic story of Gilgamesh who thought he could mess with the Gods and this Innana, please tell me it ends differently…

Very different, because the story of Innana is the counterpoint of Gilgamesh, the proud king who wanted to eradicate the Goddess.

The story of Innana is about the death of one’s old self and being redeemed by something other than one’s own efforts.

It is about surrender and renewal rather than the heroic club of one and self estrangement we find in the dark brother stories.

tellthestorytellthestorytellthestory..

Ok. So, Innana, who is herself a goddess, decides to visit her dark sister, Ereshkigal, in the bowels of the Underworld. Ereshkigal, who is very mean, gets veeeery pissed at the thought that Innana would just show up like that without..

making an appointment,

and sends her guards to meet Innana at the topmost gateway to the Underworld where they take from her a garment at every one of the seven subsequent gates until Innana is naked before Ereshkigal who kills her with a single blow and hangs her up on a meathook..

you said it would be better than Gilgamesh….!

it will, just wait..

a counterpoint you said…

but I’m not done. Ninshubar, Innana’s servant, doesn’t hear back from her mistress and sends out word to ask the other gods for help. Enki responds, taking the dirt from beneath his fingernails and breathing life into it. The little dirt creatures visit Ereshkigal who is in terrible pain…

‘Oh my belly,’ she moans.

‘Oh your belly ‘, they moan.

‘Oh, my head’, she cries.

‘Oh your head’, they cry..

and eventually the compassionate little dirt creatures manage to beg Ereshkigal for Innana’s body back and restore her….

Booyakasha!

What saves Innana is not the heroism of her own inflated efforts. She submits to Ereshkigal willingly and allows herself to be stripped of what she knows.

How often is life like this? When we cross a threshold and have to go forwards feeling naked and exposed. When we have to submit to what is happening around us, when some way of knowing ourselves dies within us…

When we are hung up like green meat and cannot help ourselves yet somehow it pans out..

because the Universe is just a bit bigger than we gave it credit…

and all the trouble we go through is preparation for the self we are to become.

Ereshkigal compells us to face ourselves, to accept the grief and rage, to let ourselves be gutted, devoured, consumed….

…and precisely so that we may, in some unforseeable way, be not only redeemed but reborn.

 

 

Rennaisance Shadow

I came across a line in Wikipedia that so surprised me I wrote it down,

”The sociological causes of the witch-hunts have long been debated in scholarship.” wiki

The sociological causes…

hmmmm,

lets see…

Narcissistically inflated, gargantuan megabody, driven to dribbling insanity by its own self-importance seeps all its underlying aggression and unresolved sadism onto anyone who..

strangely..

had the courage to live on their own terms…

job done.

The idea that the evolution of consciousness through time is a macrocosm of individual human development suggests that we are at the cutting edge of the human race..

oh dear… so it does…

where you might want to be a bit cloudy about sociological factors..

given that killing people for their own good

isn’t very nice

but still

waaay more evolved in consciousness than even those of a few hundred years ago.

supposedly….

Actually this ‘more evolved’ that we’re supposed to be than even our recent ancestors feels like the same kind of prejudice we have against ‘primitive people’.

not a microwave between them…

Freud even suggested that the primitive mind ‘corresponded’ to neurotic states . (Totem and Taboo)

I wonder if  Western Civilisation hasn’t all been a bit of a detour, a hiccup in the plan,

instead of all the noble questing through history up to the glorious present that kids are still sold in school.

The chronic inflation of Monotheism and its kings is just not the same as ego development. In fact it prevents it because the belief in our own rightness…

…..requires splitting off and projecting the dark brother.

And so we’re eternally divided.

buuut… with permission to behave like toddlers..

with a three scoop cone…

and a box of matches….

The number of people burned at the stake by the Church for heresy is hotly (sorry) contested, with wide ranging estimates. Whatever the figure is, its genocidal.

but what can you do wiv anyone wot got their own ways but burn them?

Yeah, so they get purified…

Understan’?

Leaving the fold is the sin qua non of the individuation process. If you just swallow what you’re spooned, the limit of your potential is set at being a law abiding citizen. Part and parcel of this is to be on the side of ‘good’, wherein the dark brother is projected and growth grinds to a halt.

The hieght of persecution against heretics is given by Wiki as 1560 – 1630, curiously tucked into the same time period as the Rennaissance. Would it be too much to suggest, given all the puzzling over ‘sociological factors’, that in order for the golden era to flourish the shadow had to be projected onto, well, millions of others, who were summarily tortured and put to gruesome deaths?

Individuation was forced underground as alchemy, hermeticism and gnostisism, all of which could get you into rather a lot of trouble.

Bellini for the few and the Inquisition for the many.

For those not moulding salt cellars out of silver or painting the Cistine Chapel, life was short nasty and brutish, not to mention full of fear at the possibility that some untoward remark might be overheard in the street.

Or someone just don’ like you maybe..

Simply refusing the Pope’s authority over your spiritual life could get you burned at the stake and having the priest as ‘intercessor’ effectively put a barrier between common people and religious experience. Anyone claiming to have had their own insight into spiritual life would be liable to a late night visit from horrible men with clanking bags.

Ah, the Golden Age…

of chivalrous kings!

an’, an’, an’,… Richard the Lionheart!

Most noble of them all!

Wot nobley executed 3000 hogtied prisoners, men women and children in cold blood at Acre in 1200 AD!

Yay!

yeah, but only cos the Sarascens didn’t give him what he wanted.

The True Cross

that’s it!

Which they didn’t have..

and a ton of gold

yeah, gold, loads of gold

which they didn’t have…

well that wasn’t his fault was it..?

And so the insignificant and paltry details of what actually happened and how people actually behave is lost in a blaze of archetypal glory and proudly beating hearts where one party takes the ermined route of least resistance, generally strewn with corpses, whilst the other party line the same streets waving flags.

Narcissistic collusion.

Mind your step now.

 

The lonesome pine.

What does it mean for consciousness to evolve?

To know more stuff?

And how do you know if you are evolved?

Does it come with a chart?

Or an evolvomometer?

there’s no such thing..

no, but if there was that’s what it would be called.

Let’s say it did exist. What would it measure?

I knew a woman who  had married her more spiritual side in the form of a genteel analyst rather than develop that side of herself and so despite the art, philosophy and culture in evidence on the surface of their lives she was possessed by that with which she was unconsciously identified, matter.

Regardless of her exquisite house in pristine wilderness, with lakes and endless garden, she was unhappy. And she couldn’t resolve her dissatisfaction because it seemed to stem from outside her.

‘Look at that veiw’, she indicated up the majestic valley with its mighty forests and breath taking craggs. ‘Perfect, except for the eyesore’.

I searched about for the offending item.

‘There!’, she gestured impatiently at a distant tree. ‘That Scots Pine…’ and clucked further disapproval.

Waaay up onna faar hillside…

Despite the sophistication, or, actually because of it, there was a deep split in the woman that wouldn’t permit her to drink in the Spirit of Nature even when her priviledged circumstances handed it to her on a plate.

The next time I visited the tree had vanished.. but you may be sure the eyesore had not and was busy materialising elsewhere.

This kind of behaviour is typical of uninitiated puer energy and is the unhappy lot of anyone who feels that they are special. You can’t take in what you need.

To do so entails feeling the need..

which isnaa very special…

but whether you like it or not..

You become enlightened, not by imagining beings of light, but by going down into the dark. CG Jung

And so, paradoxically, being evolved means knowing you’re not, discovering your own darkness and diversity..

and being a bit chaotic in the process…

that, or the chilling madness of sneaking out with a chainsaw before dawn one day….

How much more truly evolved might it have been to notice the antipathy to that scots pine, wondered about its significance, meditated on it as a symbol or dressed its roots with wild flowers in curiosity and un-knowing?

The pine, by the way that it grated on her nerves, gave this woman a niggling shard of her story and the implicit challenge to discern its meaning in her life as that piece of Nature which spoiled itself.

Hacking down the tree was just one more stitch in a whole crochette work of compulsive repetitions and going around in circles in lieu of being able to participate in something greater than her own wants or babyish demanding.

She robbed herself of learning about herself from that tree, why it bothered her so much, what it represented, what the inevitability of ‘imperfection’ might signify and if it were to have a voice what it might communicate.

And whatever the content of those musings might amount to, they all rest on a premise..

that I can talk to me..

that i can reflect on stuff..

from different points of veiw

and not get bogged down in any one corner of the psyche..

till eventually you have to ask yourself…

who is this that moves so enthusiastically about the psyche….

finding value in diversity?

 

The Piranha and the Puddle.

A mate of mine bought a piranha.

Up and down it swam.

Then, another.

Each at its own end now.

Then a third.

They took to the corners of the tank and so they were ok with the fourth….

But then….

No!

yes the fifth..

and they all ate each other.

In the goldfish bowl of the Near East circa 600 BC, Nebuchadnezzar was like that fifth piranha..

all teeth and…more teeth,

snapping for space.

We humans need a lot more space than we think, precisely so we can think and be receptive to our creative daimons.

So its not just about jobs and food production.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
And Wilderness is Paradise enow. Omar Khayam

Up until ‘ol Neb’ wars between incipient nations were largely about honour. Your missus has gone of with some bloke to Troy and so you’re gonna get your brother’s help and then get some mates together and whip his ass.

Which is actually quite noble..

on one level.

With Neb’ and thereafter war gets a lot stranger, its about territory, incorporating people, wrestling their beliefs off them and exporting religious ideals. Neb’ didn’t just take over their land. He took people’s stories.

An’ broke their altars…

Like Gilgamesh before him Neb’ was a vanquisher, not just of nations but of gods. His name is accosiated with Nabu, son and co-conspiritor in the demise of his mother the goddess Tiamat.

So, not a people person…

He swallowed them up, them and their stories.

He realised that kingly subjugation by force of arms was not enough. The paralysing blow is to suck out a people’s mythology.

Which is why Empires deploy missionaries before soldiers.

Meantime the king goes mad with all those stories he’s gobbled down and like Phaeton stealing Apollo’s sun chariot, threatens everyone with his inflation.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Machiavelli.

Till he’s laid low by a divine thunderbolt and has to spend seven years in the desert living on grass to reflect upon his smallness.

In order to realise that the smaller he is the more space he actually has….

till this insignificant tract..

is Eden itself.

Space for a story.

A feature of my own story is’ the dark pool’. Sometimes it’s just a puddle….

but sometimes its a bog..

and sometimes its a sea of electrified shite.

Not all these dark pools are to be crossed or messed with. Some are a great deal deeper than I am tall.

And it doth oftimes behoove me to gettafugout.

Mysteries are not there to be uncovered..

Nor are stories to be dissected with some poncy what-it-means interpretation.

Much better is, ‘wow, this has something to do with me!’ and musing on it with respectful fascination knowing all the while that you can only get one corner of it in your mouth at any one time.

The trick is that you belong to the story and not the other way around.

 

 

The epidemic.

I was conscripted into the Rhodesian bush war at eighteen. I was part of a special forces helicopter and airborne assault squad. When I joined I believed I was protecting my family and neighbours from communism. Then I began to realise it was just more western imperialist expansion, and finally that I was just a wind up doll in somebody else’s violent fantasy.

Most of my guys were killed. The unit was disbanded because there just weren’t enough of us left alive. The rest were mostly destroyed by their own darkened consciences, because they could not square what they knew of themselves with what they had done/endured. Accidents, addictions, suicides.

Swallowed up from within…

I wound up in hospital myself,

opiated fractures and torrential rain..

An accident.

You could call it karma. I prefer to think of it as Conscience, but in the way you might think about an actual person who was mad at you.

The philosophers of ancient times called themselves philosophers because that’s what best described them. They were lovers of Wisdom/Sophia, philo-Sophia. It was a relationship with the unseen.

Conscience is the same.

Freud had the idea that Conscience was simply the internalisation of cultural mores. The Super-ego. A derivative structure.

Its understandable. Conscience is part of the Principle of Relatedness or if you like, the instinct for social co-operation which many branches of science prefer to ignore. It conflicts somewhat with the tooth and claw/ survival of the fittest/linear progression of consciousness to our-fantastic-selves model.

So we can’t consider the a priori nature of structures like Conscience without having to re-think a lot of other stuff.

The fact remains that Conscience is way more than a guilty reflex.  It is a semi-autonomous archetypal complex that we’d do better to treat as we would anyone else who actually came and knocked on the door. My men did not destroy themselves out of guilt or remorse. It was precisely the opposite. It was because they refused to heed Conscience. And so she drove them to drink, broke their bodies and blew their heads off.

‘Unlived life does not sit idly on the shelf. It will turn round and bite you.’ ML von Franz

In Western Civilisation, Conscience as knowledge-within-oneself was originally embodied by Sophia/Hokmah. When Solomon consulted his Wisdom it was not just some ethical part of himself. He would confer/pray for divine inspiration. The church fathers dumbed down the story just by writing her name with a small w to big up their man Solomon, a ruse entirely foiled by Psalms 3;

…14 For her profit is better than the profit of silver And her gain better than fine gold. 15 She is more precious than jewels; And nothing you desire compares with her. 16 Long life is in her right hand; In her left hand are riches and honor.…”

The notion that consciousness simply evolves means not only that we are readily seduced into beleiving that we can do no wrong, it means that we can’t find our psychological bums with our own hands and so our fate has to come to us from ‘outside’.

”To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several million human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.” CG Jung
These psychic epidemics are a form of possession from within. Whatever we repress in the Unconscious grows horns and a tail. So we have the eternal battle with Islam which is this millenial representation of our conflict with the Dark Brother…
But it worse than that…
The deposed Goddess hasn’t gone quietly. Though its true that from the earliest  beginnings the church fathers have done their level best to write her out of the literature entirely she has a way of cropping up precisely because you can’t heave a divine being out of your pantheon without consequences.
Right from the word go she’s there in the story as lilith, Adam’s first wife who leaves him because he won’t acknowledge their equal status. A little parallel process perhaps…
then she appears as the serpent in the way that things that cannot come in by the door will come in by the window….
In some ancient sects incantation bowls were unearthed that had been buried beneath the foundations of people’s houses asking her please to leave them alone…
I adjure you by the Strong One of Abraham, to turn away from this Rashnoi b. M. and from Geyonai b. M. her husband. [Here is] your divorce and writ and letter of separation, sent through holy angels. Amen, Amen, Selah, (Wiki Lilith).
We may chuckle at such ‘superstition’, but actually its a really healthy piece of psychological hygiene. The ritual containment of archetypal forces grown angry is conditional upon acknowledging them in the first place. But this impinges on our fine assumptions about our marvellous sophistication. So we make a little snort..
and take a little snort
and go back to our cocktails on the lawn.
or whatever ratrace we’re in that holds that up as the prize…

”We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about”. Joseph Campbell

This rapture begins with the humble acknowledgment that we are not masters of our own houses, that Conscience has her own life, and that any fine ideal we might manage to live out, any conviction we might have about our being at the pinnacle of anything when its all on the back of third world subjugation, sweat shops and the effective enslavement of millions is not just deluded, its part of the epidemic.

 

 

Buraq

On the face of the earth there is no one more beautiful than You
Wherever I go I wear your image in my heart
Whenever I fall in a despondent mood I remember your image

I met a woman at a party. Out of the blue she began to tell me about a baby dragon she had met in the woods..

oh dear, here we go..

She fed it and looked after it…

tonto…..

And then, when it was big enough she released it into back into the woods but villagers came up with sticks and clubs and beat it to death…

She burst into tears, asking between sobs…

‘What does a dragon mean?’

‘Do you see’, I replied gently, ‘how in a stroke you just beat it to death?’

She never thought to ask the dragon.

didna wear de image in her heart….

One of the main difficulties we have in finding a story to sustain us is that pretty much straight off we want to know what it ‘means’ and in the process rob ourselves of the soulful connection that first brought it to our attention.

We want to understand it rather than having a relationship with it out of which understanding might flow when it is good and ready.

We forget that stories and symbols which have the power to grab our attention also have their own life. So our wanting to know is like the discourtesy of rushing up to a person in the street and asking intrusively what they mean.

Our interaction with the Unconscious in the West is, as a rule, dismissive, arrogant and intrusive..

Like a swaggering king..

who wants to ‘understand’ stuff so that he can have power over it..

and kills it in the process of his dissection….

And my spirit rises a thousand fold
Your advent is the blossom time of the Universe
O Mother you have showered your choicest blessings upon me

With the loss of the Great Mother comes loss of the Principle of Relatedness. We lose sight of what is really important in life and wind up like king Gilgamesh, the first king of the first city, slayer of the Goddess Cybele, whose final act is the piteous praising of his city walls, his defended persona, rather than finding his true Self.

an’ so what about that? Him King!

Gilgamesh is an important figure because Western Civilisation has largely been built on the archetype of kingship and the ‘Madness of Ceasars’, the inflation that goes with it. Our belief in the myth of the ‘evolution of consciousness’ has to do, in part, with veiwing kingship as psychological progress and something to aspire to. This justifies the patriarchal spoiling which has occured as ‘necessary’, a bit like dropping atom bombs to ‘shorten the war’.

I believe, to the contrary, that the advent of kingship marks a period of regression in our culture, the beginning of a split reality in which the loss of the Principle of Relatedness means not only a diminishment of compassion for others but a loss of connection to self. Lets be cheeky and look at another of Gilgamesh’s dreams which seems to bear this out. I am indebted to  M.L. von Franz for her insights into this dream and paraphrase her liberally in what follows.

”I am walking up and down proudly in front of my people. Stars are in the sky. One of the stars of the sky God Annu falls upon me. I try to lift it but it was too heavy. All of the Uruk assemble and kiss it’s feet.”

So, here we have ‘the ideal man’, the primal hero, dragon slayer…

‘the great individual who takes on the challenge of changing forces and powers’. (Baring and Cashford)

supposedly…

and yet he has a dream that quite clearly critisizes him for this ‘evolutionary’ step with which so much of academia would like to attribute him.

As king he has fullfilled some collective role, but not his uniqueness at all. He is crushed by the burden of following his own star which the people regard with greater favour than august kingship. Rather than have a relationship with that which comes from the heavens, he attributes himself with divinity and considers his role to be by divine appointment.

So him crushed..

If you don’t follow your star and opt for corporate life instead, your fate will come to you from outside…

and at high speed.

for want of re-membering..

Also remember me on the Day of Judgement
I don’t know if I will go to heaven or hell
But wherever I go, please always abide in me.

For the rest of us, the ‘not-kings’, waal we like this king arrangement preety much. We’ll sit on the sidelines..

wiv chips and Mountain Dew…..

while we watch in fascination while ol’ gilga try to wriggle free….

”This fascination leads to an infantile giving up of oneself and being flat on one’s belly worshiping ….the projection…  ML von Franz.

so that peoples don’ have to make any effort themselves…

To find your story, to follow your star, ‘means isolation, not knowing where to go, having to find a completely new way for yourself instead of the trodden path everyone else is running along.” ML von Franz.

And so it suits us to hand over our power to others so that they will also carry the projection of the Self and all the aggravation that goes with it despite the loss of relatedness entailed and our meagre substitution of ‘understanding’ stuff for immersion in the Waters of Life.

Poetry from the Koran.

On having a story.

When the bond between heaven and Earth is broken, when even prayer is not enough… only a story can mend it.” Rabbi Baal Shem Tov

One of the horrible legacies of Narcissism in families is that parents find it so difficult to take pleasure in their children. Narcissism doesn’t value otherness and is therefore dead set against the child ever really being their own person.

Their job is to hold the mirror.

Not go galavanting about…

hither and yon…

o’er hill and dale..

So kids grow up feeling uncertain about the validity of their inner worlds. The froth and bubble..

an’ hiiiigh drama…

drags the child into a split reality where..

on the one han’…

they have the feeling that they have no depth to themselves either…

no story to be part of…

an’ on the other….

the yearning to be at home in the world…

And so there is an up side to being born into a damaged world/family. Like ‘sink or swim,’ you are compelled to find what you are made of..

whilst draggin’ yo feet like a bitch.

Be quiet. The reason for this is that the emotional deprivation anyone is bound to feel within seconds of Narcissism’s presence leaves a person with doubts about their personhood and some rather sketchy patches on the map. You might well want to stay at home.

beyond here there be dragons…

Buut then you might just get press-ganged by the Gods anyway and blown off your course right into one of those sketchy bits…

The child who has had an adequate upbringing is rarely a seeker or a discoverer. S/he doesn’t need to be. S/he is already satisfied. They will grow solid, dependable and trustworthy but none too interesting… whereas the unfed child will be driven to find some other meaningful context for ephemeral life.

To be part of a story that will contain and give meaning….

”so that our life experiences… will have resonances within our inmost being and reality, so that we feel the rapture of being alive.” (J.Campbell Power of Myth)

The child of Narcissism is born into a closed world. Its a fundamentalist world actually and the reason is because there is no reflection upon anything.

We already know…

We are sufficient to ourselves.

You are of no relevance.

In fact we scorn you.

But dry and empty.

One day, Insh Allah, the dry and empty gives rise to an itch that just has to be scratched. Despite ‘the world is just what I know of it’, the hungry child spits out the toxic nipple and leaves home one way or another in order to find a story that will really feed them.

Some say the fish contain the ocean, I say the ocean contains the fish. C.J.Jung.

It’s hard. Like the Ugly Duckling, the un-mothered child, already stuffed with onerous beliefs about themselves, is now additionally scapegoated and rejected for wanting to find their own way in the world..

but, it jus’ more of the same..

and so the search for what is truly soulful compells one foot in front of the other without knowing where to look or what to do. Intuitively we sniff out and make good on the promise we were born with that our needs will be met and go looking for the soil that will bring us to fruition.

For this we need a story.

Not something to ‘believe’ in..

Something that reflects our individual life as well as having its own..

something rooted in itself.

The story that grabs our attention, the movie that was so amazing, all has to do with deep containing structures in the psyche that are the templates of individual experience and as such, appropriate containers for them.

What’s required is not a chronological story of the past with yourself at the centre but a timeless story in which the temporal can find meaning and reassurance.

The story, or dream, that presents itself is like a ‘transitional object’, as a bear or doll might have been to the child we once were. It is both’ me’ and ‘not-me’. Sometimes you can feel so deeply identified with it that it seems as if it is ‘your’ story.

And that’s a wonderful thing.

Because in that moment the Universe holds a mirror up and says,

‘I see you.’

Kings, Chiefs and Shamans.

We had already been turned back at a police roadblock but finally managed to sneak into Pondoland in South Africa, hidden under the back seat of the only bus on the road. Pondoland, a tiny chiefdom tucked into the montains of Transkei, was off limits to white folk back in the 80’s. You had to keep your head down as you crossed the invisible cracks of Apartheid.

My friend and I knew it was an unwritten custom that we should announce our presence immediatly we arrived at our remote destination and ask permission to be there from the paramount chief. So we found his house, which was made of actual clay bricks and knocked on the door.

It turned out the chief wasn’t at home but his wives were very welcoming, saying we should stay until he arrived. We were shown immediatly to a room and bought refreshment.

Three days later he arrived, very pleased we were following the protocol of the land by waiting for him and asking for his blessing.

There was to be a meeting of all the chiefs the next day and we were invited, introduced, showing how our sleeping bags worked and what we had in our packs. It was all very enlivening.

The paramount chief then gave us horses to travel wherever we wished and his nephew as a guide for a week of trekking through the mountains of Pondo where we were expected and welcomed in every village.

And what I noticed about the people that I met was that they all had a serene, quiet confidence. And why should they not? They may have been poor as church mice but each person was cared for by the chief whom you could go and see when you needed to and discuss stuff.

How brilliant is that! We idealise our political system as an adjunct to the ‘evolution of consciousness’ myth, in so far as both stories have, as their central character, how wonderful we are. And yet we have a fraction of the voice that a Pondo has, despite his ‘lack’ of constitutional rights or codified freedoms.

I hear it argued a lot that the loss of such containing social structures and the ungrounded hurley burley of western life is ‘the price we pay’ for the individuation process.

There are apparently meagre examples of individuation in indigenous culture.

Its the same prejudice that says individuation only really began in our time.

I met a medicine man, clanking  with shells and beads. He threw a gourd of knuckle bones and told me of two women who would have to share me…. so quaint, until I had the perspective of twenty years hindsight to witness my two muses arm wrestling one another on a regular basis to see if I would be in my studio or at my desk that day.

The figure who embodies the individuation process in primitive culture is the shaman.. And anyone can be called to this role by the spirits. So, even though you may be an ordinary peasant that door may open and your individuation may begin at any time.

Lama Govinder tells the story of a taxi driver he caught a ride with who’d had a vision one day that he should go and shamanise at Lhasa, so he went and told the monks what had happened and he was duly instated, without a clue as to what was required of him. The spirits would know. And so everyone was quite calm about what would in fact be an extremely chaotic series of events. And then back to his cab driving till next time…

hey ho..

African culture is the same. The ancestors can call on you at any time. You may have to wander off on your own for a while. Aboriginals, too, have their ‘walkabout’, and the encounter with dreamtime.

As a society we don’t have that. And yet we feel that we are so much more spiritually sophisticated. Enough to want to take their stupid ancestors angrily away from them.

When Jung asked a headman in Kenya if he dreamed, the headman replied,  ‘we used to, now the district commissioner dreams for us.”

We gonna take your everyfing…

Its a shame C.J. didn’t take that into more consideration when he bewailed their lack of concentration at the palaver.

and then you gonna talk nice….

Kings are very different from chiefs and medicine men…

The archetype of the king is way more distant and power based than the archetype of the healer and, in my view, a less convincing candidate for a model of evolving consciousness. You can’t become the king. And the projection of the inner ‘nobleman’ sticks to him like glue because of his remoteness. so the most you’ll ever be is not-king…

But…

he will have your dreams for you. Walk down that red carpet of bling on your behalf. Die for your sin.

And the camera’s can click..

and the limo can run like silk,

and your piety can be everso great,

but for as long as the dark brother is reviled…

you will never be called..

and the ancestors will not be fed.

 

The Intrusion of Absence.

When i was about thirteen my father called me to one side and announced that it had been remiss of him not to tell me the story of my grandfather and would i like to hear it..

Ohyesohyesohyes…

So we went into his study which was more special and he sat me on his special footstool…

squealing delight..

yearning for the legend to unfold of the brave lancaster gunner who was killed over Turin in ’42

and so told me the special story.

‘When I was seven I was swinging on the garden gate and my father came along and swung me off…’ And he made a swooping gesture.

You can go now.

Its what I call a medusa moment. Its when there is a rider on an event, an ‘aubertext’, and what’s really being communicated is more like transmission, the passing on of some family wreckage rather than an enriching story. The moment turns to stone..

Falling like a stone…..

.and the place where  the nurture of ancestral tales..

So much smoke and, but…two engines still going, Ginger come in…GINGER! Oh God we’re going down, oh fuck, oh God..

.feeds the soul…..

If he had fallen like a stone, from say 1500m, physics says it would take a full 8 1/2 seconds to hit the ground, but then you’re built to float and are doing 200mph and Ginger’s still slumped over the throttle with those two engines still coughing…

.is lost…..

Even more intrusive by its absence was my father’s relationship with his mother. We had a rare, the only…ever.. family gathering one year.  My father announces for everyone to gather round for a video of the event to be taken for Nanny who couldn’t be there.

Hang on a minute….

Didn’t she die..like, twenty years ago?

But no, look, she has arisen in New Zealand.. where she went after her second husband gassed himself in the kitchen oven…

..so many fumes…can’t greath, choking now…sooo cold.

And what that stoney look does is worse than any beating. When moments are petrified by a parent’s need to pass on their own deadness it really does numb the child to its own life and teaches/compells the child to disown its potential.

About a year later we were playing chess one evening. I was on holiday from boarding school. We played quite a lot, or at least he regularly trounced me. Then, one delicious evening I won. For the first time. In history.

He studied the board in silence for a loooong time then scraped his chair back and left without a word. We never played again. And what i learned was not that i was a clever lad but that to shine is to be abandoned and so i went forward faithfully sabotaging myself at every opportunity and turning myself to stone.

Getting stoned….

thinking that was rebellion…

but in fact, unconsciously fulfilling one more silent expectation.

But all is not lost!

In fact, you now have a ticket to ride.

Because when the medusa moment has you up against the wall and whatever you do or say next will be wrong then you might as well fulfil your own destiny and find what you need out in the world

or deep inside

to reflect your truth..

to have I and me stay in the same vessel.

In the story of the golden fleece, Jason uses the reflection of his shield to defeat Medusa. So long as he is able to reflect he will be safe from being petrified.

So long as I can talk to me.

So that you know that being sent away is wrong..

And the swinging on the gate story is compensatory bullshit..

And the chess was all about beating me rather than playing..

..then the intuition and imagination of the stone child can come alive.

And where is your mother in all this..?

Veiled. Predominantly through the crack of the door to her room where she lay in valiumed haze behind tresses of shrouded  netting.

Thou shalt not be creative…

She was a brilliant artist, but didn’t have permission to be brilliant so she got migranes and valium instead.

Unlived life does not sit idly on the shelf. It will turn around and bite you. M.L.Von Franz.

Its amazing how mutual deadness can act as such glue in a marriage. The offspring involved are faced with a stark choice. Do the same thing as them or go on a veeeery long journey to find the fruit in the experience.

It’s in there somewhere, rippening in your adversity.

I had a friend who grew apples. One tree bore the most incredible fruit. They were sooo fantastic. Only it was bent double having grown in the shade of a massive firtree. To improve it’s lot she had the firtree cut down… but the apples never tasted the same after that. They just tasted like regular apples.

And so, for all those who’ve grown in  the shade of something seemingly deadening, don’t wish to be rid of it so easily. Would you be fruiting without it?

”Most of the people who are the greatest healers living on the face of this earth are unmothered children.”   Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

having had a rough start is kind of necessary to the individuation process. An old Gnostic saying captures this well,

‘ There is good and there is bad and that is good.’

When times are tough you grow. When they are easy, you rest.

 

 

 

Evolution of Consciousness?

We are not evolved…

not as much as we tink we are..

and we’ve been in decline for a rather long time..

So long, in fact, that we can give it the kind of spin that would make a politician blush and call what we are experiencing, ‘the evolution of consciousness’.

In reality, the erosion of consciousness, the process of becoming ever more internally divided that began with Gilgamesh being split off from his dark brother Enkidu way back in 3000BC, through the stories of Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, onwards and upwards to the sacred kingship of David, so idealised and golden that even God’s punishment of him failed to inform public opinion, is now ripped firmly in half by the 4th Century with all kinds of consequences for mental health.

you just summarised 3500 years in 7 lines mate. That is not cool. You lack intellectual rigour.

I’m not going for rigour, so shut up. I want nutshells and overveiw so we don’t get lost in how fantastic we all are.

Again.

In Revelation, written in the first century AD, we see some handover going on between Sophia/Wisdom, the Whore of Babylon, as prior embodiment of God’s shadow, and Satan whose name will become synonymous with evil.

The problem with scapegoating is that its not a one time thing. Psychic effluent must be continuously hived off and so getting rid of the shadow container immediatly necessitates the drumming up of another…

ethnic group.

When the Great Mother is banished the kids fall out, never more so than with the Christ and the Devil, who are now extreme manifestations of a split reality.

One in which modern psyche’s become bedevilled…

An aside, a story of possibility taught to me by ‘primitives’. I was in the wilds of Africa, the Transkian hills, very remote, places no white man had been. Seriously, one time people gathered around me and my mate Alasdair touching our hair and marvelling to one a another.

‘Told you they was real.’

‘Bloody hell, you really wos telling the truth.’

‘Do you think they know how babies are made?’

I digress, We were catching a ride with a couple of locals in an ancient vehicle. Sliding down muddy lanes, everything awash with pelting rain. On a hillside stood a young woman in a single shift singing to the sky, drenched, hands raised, dancing… I asked about her and was told she was crazy. I was young and inexperienced and asked if she should not be in a hospital. The guys looked at me with incredulity, ‘but, what would we do without her?’

She had value in the village.

No split reality.

So who was evolved?

In 325AD and 364AD the Council of Nicea and the Council of Laodicea respectively formed the official bible on the back of stirling efforts made by folk like Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons,

who was a right bastard,

and very keen for the split to become canon. Two legs good…

four legs bad.

The new book was good. The rest could get you killed. Even Enoch, who ‘walked with god’, was now kindling for those who refused to hand over their souls for safe keeping.

The devil leaps into focus in the public imagination despite all efforts to keep him in his pit and the world, both inner and outer, becomes sharply divided between good and evil.

that’s not a good thing for consciousness, mon.

It gets worse… From Constantine onwards, God’s representative and wordly power come firmly in the same vessel.

Kings are made at the Pope’s behest.

Or at least without sending armies…

The final blow to the feminine comes with the ejection of the books of Thomas and Phillip who regarded Mary Magdalene as  equal to the other disciples and Mary, the mother of Jesus, to have been divine herself.

Western culture is now firmly run by the archetype of the divine king…

but that’s very exciting, mon!

Well of course it is, but to what does it appeal? Oh, how wonderful that our great leader (place name here) is not only appointed by God but has backstairs access to Him in a way you and I do not.

but dats fantastic, mon!

No its not, everyone loses. It looks great for the king but he is now so inflated you can’t talk to him and everyone else is excluded from their own authority and knowing.

So him rule them better..

Sure, but what does it mean for the evolution of consciousness? Its the route of least resistance. The self is either projected, wherein we experience ourselves as lost to our own destinies, or identified with wherein we become psychopathic tyrants.

Neumann, whose book ‘The Origins and History of Consciousness’, seems as riven with controversy as content, says that this heroic individual, this divine king, becomes, ‘the forerunner of mankind in general’ as though he, the spiritual king were someone to realise as one’s own potential, an awakened archetype, at the least to emulate.

The Dark Ages disagree.

You going to read them whole book sometime then? Just quoting from at like that, like you de hexpert…

Fair cop, Its on my list.. Poor Neumann. To feel so accutely the disparity between the idea that consciousness simply unfurls and the fact of Nazi Germany…

How can this be the pinnacle of culture?

No more than the rest of our narcissistic society positively rewarding psychopathic adaptions.

If consciousness simply evolves how come the psychopath is so successful in our world?

An’ you can’t go callin’ for new ethics Erich, its too new world order all over again. Things never change much with rallying cries but with mourning and loss and grief and missing…

Which is kinda what the Dark Ages seem to be.

Centuries of monochrome and drench and rotting straw.

Consciousness seems to have suffered terribly under the model of the divinely appointed king. Not only would people’s daily round be largely at the level of subsistent survival, the common person hands over secular and spiritual power to some one prepared to subjugate them for their own good.

All of which culminates in the figure of Charlemagne..

know a lot about Charlemagne then…?

leave me alone.. enough to make a point..

your own point..

Waal that’s all I have. Charlemagne was made Emperor by the Pope, a gesture that inflates poor Charlie to such an extent that he began butchering for God. How do you corral 4,500 men and decapitate them one by one? Or would you do it in batches?