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.

Creative Aggravation

I spent this last week finishing off my project, ‘Abundant Delicious’. It’s been five years in the making during which time ‘ordinary life’ had been very tough and I felt I somehow ought to be more buoyant about it all….

says I to myself…

But the truth is, I felt really dark and brooding and a bit…

bad tempered.

I began to question it..

then analyze it..

and then go, ‘hang on this is normal..’

Our creations create us back, have us brush with death and chaos, bend us into new and interesting shapes….

In the process of individuation, too, new contents can announce themselves in this devouring form and darken consciousness; this is experienced as a depression, that is to say, as being pulled downward. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.

Acts of creation have their own lives. They inveigle your inner world, reroute your hard drive through the thermo link coupling and then via the auxiliary engines….

never would have thought of that, mon.

Somewhere between having a lama for a house guest and doing the 24 hours le Mans over half a decade, by snail.

When I first had the idea for this piece, when it had condensed itself in my imagination to the extent that the entirety of life’s aggravation could not put me off the scent, I sat myself down and wrote out a contract listing a number of annoying things I had to take into consideration and accept/agree to in the process..

stuff like repossession..

yes, ok….

And de policeman…

thankyou….

well, but the crucial thing was not the outer trouble I was in, it was that I and me had to hold fast enough together, create enough inner cohesion and bloody minded determination to get it done. Its like a military exercise..

as well as act of devotion…

…a route march through shade and tone and line.

people say , ‘oh, you must be so patient’, but mostly as a way of excluding themselves from Art’s possibility.. And so i go, ‘no, its just that I’m not in a hurry in the first place.’ I’m a plodder. A fizzing plodder. And finishing it all is bound to be a kind of damp, squibby, fizzly out….ish… depression.

Only when we bear our situation and accept our depression will it be possible for us to change internally. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.

I once walked the Offa’s Dyke walk one summer. It’s 300 kms of Welsh hills all along the border with England, built by King Offa back in 1062 to keep the barbarian English out.

En route I teamed up with a couple of other guys who caught up with me at the foothills of the Black Mountains. The younger was 6’4”, 25 years old of muscle and testosterone. The older was 50ish slightly built, walking staff.. He continuously held us up with tea breaks and various nonsense, advising us on how to skruch up our toes in the dirt and air our socks………..

Only after a while did i realise he really knew what he was on about. He wasn’t just interfering. I began to study the man. He really knew how to walk. He always seemed to be lighting his pipe or taking in the view across the valley without falling back. The younger guy was huffing and puffing, passing up the umpteenth offer of a brew up in favour of ‘getting on’. but he never seemed to get ahead and by the time we got to Kington he was unable to walk at all and we had to shovel him onto a bus home.

The older guy and I then walked another 100km. Taking in the veiw, finding nice dry trees to have a brew up beneath and enjoying the Abundant Deliciousness of everything.

The key to success is to love what you do so much that you’d be happy taking forever over it. Where every delay is just one more opportunity to perfect the craft, and every moment of not knowing what comes next, the chance to muse on the wonder of life.

 

Narcissistic Seduction.

Its amazing what you can get away with.

you mean, not getting caught out by others…?

No silly, not getting caught out by that very worst of critics…

Brian Sewell, Robert Graves….

idiot, your own self!

what self?

Exactly! Narcissists are renowned for being obsessed with themselves, but its a misnomer. They have no self. Only self-image, which is very different.

How?

Self is the totality of who you are, spirit, shadow, warts and all. Self image is something you can  manufacture in your garden shed with paper clips and bits of string, breath life into and turn into a solid something. Someone to be reckoned with….

sounds great, just like God….

yep, only that’s where the hell begins, for you and everyone else in the equation.

How can it be hell if you are god?

Well, because giving yourself permission to invent yourself as you please comes with loads of small print. Narcissism is actually a torment, and much more for the narcissist than those around them though it may not seem like that.

Boyakasha! You kiding? I am so cooool…

yeah, for as long as you work at it. The torment of the narcissist is that its not just the shadow, the human imperfection and vulnerability of life  that has to be projected onto others  but also the Self, the sense of inner wholeness that comes from accepting who we are, that too has to be continuously exported….

takes a lot of effort…

oh yeah, its a full time job and like addiction, eats your life away… When the Self is projected, others are expected to redeem you which they can’t and are therefor experienced as sadistically witholding, or the Self is identified with in a grandiose way wherein others are experienced as worthless.

You make it sound lonely…

Oh yeah it is, but there is a super devilish bit in the contract that will make it aaaallll better.

tellmetellmetellmetellmetellmetellme..

you don’t have to feel any of it…

thank god

and your conscience is eternally clear, like you had some software that just wipes the slate clean from one moment to the next..

like an internal….negate and delete button.

You got it.

Yay!

lets take my favourite biblikal hero David,

wot slew Goliath..

the very same..

and became the first heroic king of the twelve tribes?

precisely

he who was beyond stain and beloved by god ?

yes,yes

immortalised for ever as the pure scribe wot penned the psalms?

exactly, now if i may conti…

who ruled the land  for forty years?

oh for fuck sake…

and was chiselled in marble by Michealangelo as a vision of masculine virtue….erotic yet innocent, powerful in form but gentle in demeanour…

dear god, can I tell the story?

of the greatest, most noble…

Murdered Saul and his general in cold blood…

most beautiful and comely..

commited adultery with Bethsheba and killed her husband Uriah with malice of forethought….

more praise…

killed two of his sons…

further adulation..

protected rapists..

further further further…

confessed the sins himself…

heaping even greater mounds of……

was punished by the Almighty…

of great and powerful ki….

and yet when the faithful are presented with the facts, out of their own book cry…

Who are we to critisise????

despite the breach of three commandments..

it was a lapse of judgement.

Narcissists feel superior and important and so entitled to be above the law and to engage in behaviors that are frowned upon and considered socially unacceptable in others. They reject and vehemently resent all limitations and conditions placed upon them.  Sam Vaknin PhD

As above…

The suggestion that a metaphorical Matricide is necessary for the evolution of consciousness is, I think, fatalistic. Its a confusion between what has happened and the way things have to be. Its like saying, ‘Oh, It was the will of God. It was meant to be.” Or, more crudely, ‘Whatever happens is deserved and therefore right,” and simply serves to absolve ourselves of responsibility and bestow the events of history with ad hoc justification.

Ok, come on what’s eating you now?

Well, its just that wherever you turn, learned heads nod over the demise of ancient and peaceable people who had a balanced gender perspective on things, claiming it couldn’t have happened differently.

and so…

Well, if we claimed that Hitler was inevitable and what he did was part of the evolution of consciousness I’d have an angry mob at the door in no time.

Yeeees…and…

So how is that different from saying that highly evolved civilisations where the goddess was venerated alongside her male consorts had to be overrun and destroyed as part  of some ‘natural process’?

clearly bollocks, but still… your point?

It means that my natural revulsion toward neatly tied packages has to overrun my attachment to my favourite pet theorists…

Oh dear, that.. Disillusionment in your heroes?

yeah

Sorry, never mind, you need to think about what the word disillusionment actually means…

Thanks, so …..the problem with stating that..

without illusion..

the problem with stating that amazing systems like the Sumerian civilisation which valued the masculine and feminine equally ‘had to crumble’ is that we are just handing over power and authority to others whose usurpation is given credibility and divine sanction simply by virtue of their having pulled off some act of uber aggression…

that’s the way of the world…

and 9/11?

er….

thankyou, now shut up and listen… The child only has to struggle free in a violent way if the maternal principle concerned is smothering him. Painting the feminine as some cthonic figure to be overcome as though she were simply a dragon to begin with, is a version of reality promulgated by the patriarchy which refuses to share the stage he’s busy smashing his guitar up on, and using spin that would make Alistair Darling blush, to present the feminine as though she were the shadow she throws.

Its like giving someone a character reference simply on the basis of negative traits, forgetting that the Principle of Relatedness wants her child to fulfil his own destiny and sometimes has to shove him out of the door to do so.

The equation between the unconscious/feminine and the conscious/masculine in some kind of Mexican stand off is excessively simplistic, though it is indeed a recapitulation  of an age old prejudice employed by the church to suppress and demonise what it can’t control…

just goes to show how deeply such attitiudes infiltrate modern thought…

And of course it is indeed a necessary part of the hero’s journey to discriminate and be torn between opposites but there is a distinction to be drawn between separation and being split, and its only in the latter situation that daggers have to be drawn.

In the judeo-christian system the divine image is only transcendent. This has led to the perception that consciousness can only be the same. As such it must be antagonistic to the unconscious on the basis that the father as Law and the mother as Nature are irrevocably set against each other.

In other cosmologies we find that differentiation is symbolically represented as a pair of lovers rather than as aggressors. The image of Geb and Nut in Egyptian mythology are presented as  co-operating equals in eternal erotic embrace as are Shakti and Shiva in the Hindu pantheon.

These cosmological beginnings  are older than written record or human memory. They suggest that consciousness of individuality originated way further back in antiquity than our capacity to trace it, anxious as we are to claim it as a recent phenomenon as though consciousness could only belong to us….

in our age..

like kids in the playground going, ‘Its my game’!!!

Also suggested is that the differentiation of I from Thou, with a corresponding inner dialogue between I and Me, or, in fact, the capacity for reflection, need not depend on violent subjugation of anything.

so below…

 

Splitting and Regression.

In the way that its so easy not to talk about stuff that isn’t there..

any more..

we puzzle over our symptoms endlessly because their roots are as lost in antiquity as they are in our earliest childhood.

back inna day..

the goddess Wisdom/Hokmah/Sophia was deposed. Our own connection to Nature was blocked. A millenial dam of unexpressed need began to build up seeking expression, but in a distorted  way.

When the Goddess is broken in three pieces and thrown into the sea in Revelations, this represents a final stage in the splitting of the feminine principle that has been underway since Gilgamesh chops down the sacred grove of Humbaba/Cybele.

In the story of Abraham  it is represented by him having three wives, one of which is Sarah his half sister and two others who are concubines. One, Hagar, is ‘given’ to Abraham by Sarah and therefor clearly a slave. The three fragments of the divine feminine become three archetypes.

none of them very happy, mon.

We think of all this stuff as not having much relevence to us but the plain fact is that the modern male is run through with this splitting of the feminine into virgin/mother/whore. Women are then either untouchable and simply to be provided for in a slavish way, or they are slappers to be treated like shit, or  they are jealously depersonalised as the embodied imago of romantic love to be longed for from afar.

doesn’t work very well…

Or, worse, the pieces of the goddess are projected into matter (mater) and we get  fascinated with possessions and all kinds of totemic stuff  which we crave, and polish, and stroke….

forever hungering…

By Abraham’s time we can already see the deterioration of consciousness that this rejection of the Principle of Relatedness has caused. In the epic of Gilgamesh, on the cusp of the new patriarchal order, we see both Enkidu and Gilgamesh punished for their inflation. There is a tacit expectation of them to be more conscious.

and to grow themsel’

In the story of Jacob, the ‘good’ grandson of Abraham, we find that inflation is rewarded. Jacob renounces his conscience and takes the route of least resistance in a regressed kind of way. He breaks three commandments in one go without any come back. He is special and exempt from the rules in a way that is reminiscent of aetiological factors in kids with Aspergers.

givemewhatiwantwhatiwantwhatiwant..

And so the die is cast that began with Gilgamesh’s ill fated attack on the Great Mother, now consolidated by Jacob who gets away with his attack on the natural man, Esau, beloved of the Great Mother who insists on people coming before power.

Jacob’s subsequent wrestle with his conscience dislocates his hip, a wound reminiscent of the wounded thigh of the Grail King, a wound symbolic of the failure to join the quest for the grail which must begin by honouring the birthright of the dark brother.

We think of the evolution of consciousness as a linear thing.

it ain’t neccessarily so..

We know perfectly well that trauma can cause splitting and regression. This can happen collectively just as it can individually.

There’s a tacit assumption in the literature that the subjugation of the divine feminine was essential, a neccessary condition for the emergence of consciousness. Erich Neumann uses the example of the natural shift of a child’s focus from mother to father as a metaphor, but Mum does not have to be chopped up and thrown into the sea in the process. The child’s frame of reference simply increases to include both without having to renounce anything except his own specialness.

The pattern of violent transition that it does fit however, with its corresponding ‘abaisment’, a lowering of the threshold of consciousness, and traumatic separation that can induce splitting is that of adolescent initiation.

This suggests a number of things. Firstly, that the birth of consciousness happened way before popular estimates, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. Secondly that modern conscoiusness may well be way below what it was for perhaps the majority of the neolithic period. And thirdly, that the  transition to full human maturity requires a return to the Great Mother from the collective initiatory wilderness

… lest it swallow us up.

What we learn from stories is not necessarily the moral that was intended. What we learn from the disturbing story of Jacob is that specialness is a goal rather than something to be renounced and grown through.

De small print of the Covenant is dat God is not bound by it..

Well observed. In the meantime  that internal split is kept wide open with the double message that you must have absolute faith in whatever I do given the proviso that I may change my mind at any moment.

Dat’s not fair!!

And in return I will let you kill off your dark brother for generation after generation without remorse or guilt and live riteously in your own lands as kings of the world…….

Er… so that comes with a squeaky clean conscience and,..you know.. invading people for their own good… if our cause be just?

yes

And booty….

yes

and..dancing girls?

yes

Ok, its a deal.

Yes!

 

A Bit of Gossip.

The Apocrypha is a collection of  ancient books excluded from the official Bible. The term means, ‘things hidden away’, and they had to be for hundreds, even thousands of years. Possession of one of these books could get you killed.

Painfully killed.

And why?

because they were complicated?

No, because they made people think and ponder and ask embarrassing questions.

like why is God so cranky?

Yes, but way more than that. Some books were sooo forbidden that they didn’t even make it as far as the Apocrypha. The book of Enoch was one such super forbidden book.

How forbidden?

Well, it was thrown out by the Council of Laodicea in 364 AD…… and never seen again until the late 19th century when an explorer found a few copies in Ethiopia that had been squirreled away before the Council got their angry paws on it.

They suppressin’ consciousness…..

Big time. And when you read it, which you can these days without having your finger nails pulled out, it reads like a fairly standard Old Testament book. And it was written by Enoch himself mostly, who was only 7 generations from Adam which made him Noah’s great Grandad.

Aw, and still they didn’ wannit?

Nope, one of the few truly antediluvian texts, nearly 6 thousand years old, full of stuff about floods and wrath and angels. Just what you’d expect.

So, what was the problem?

Well, it didn’t quite match up to St Augustin’s veiws on… morality.

They had rude bits?

Very rude, and also.. er.. a different account of why the flood was necessary….

I know, because we’re bad..

Not quite. It was all a very embarrassing kerfuffle. The problem wasn’t human lust but Angels’ lust…

Angels got lust?

have a peek..

In the generation of my father Jared some of the angels of heaven transgressed the word of the Lord.  And behold they commit sin and transgress the law, and have united themselves with women and commit sin with them, and have married some of them, and have begot children by them….

There was more than  the one fallen angel…?

Yeees, about 200 of them actually, rebelled against you know who and decided to come down to earth and find human wives. Which is why women in that part of the world wear shawls over their hair to this day.

So, the Angels can’t spot them?

Quite so, anyway they didn’t stop there. They taught us all kindsa interesting stuff, like Secrets of Plants and Healing and beautification of the eyelids…

Wisdom/Hokmah stuff….

Shhhh….!

DONT SPEAK HER NAME…

Sorry, please forgive my foolish friend…. Like Prometheus, Azazel and his mates gave us lots of knowledge which pissed God off really badly. And there’s more…

more embarrassment?

You bet. Why do you think all those angels showed their fancy to the ladies?

‘Cos God was getting divorced and they were on …..Her side?

Ssshhh… and more…. The angel Uriel who was ‘good’, went and showed Enoch all the stars of Heaven and their names and what they meant.

They were constemlations  of power…….

Yes, he’s given the tour of heaven, knows where the powers are and how to access them. And it seems like even Uriel prefers the moon over the sun if you get my drift…

For the sun changes oft for a blessing or a curse,
And the course of the path of the moon is light to the righteous

Oooohh…

Yeah, and it turns out that the flood was sent to wipe out the children of the angels except…

What?

Noah was the child of an Angel himself…. when he was born

his father Lamech was afraid of him and fled, and came to his father Methuselah. 5. And he said unto him: ‘I have begotten a strange son, diverse from and unlike man, and resembling the sons of the God of heaven; and his nature is different and he is not like us, and his eyes are as the rays of the sun, and his countenance is glorious. 6. And it seems to me that he is not sprung from me….

Ooops! An God let him live..?

that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things that the Watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons.

That is a bit embarrassing…

There’s worse.. He mentions She Who Must Not be Named himself…

Wisdom went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men,
And found no dwelling-place:

 Whom she sought not she found,
And dwelt with them,

As rain in a desert
And dew on a thirsty land.

So, Wisdom lives  amongst us .. and Noah was the son of an Angel…but if he, then we…

Ssshhh….

 

 

 

 

On not Deserving Life’s Aggravation.

When its asked why a loving God allows bad things to happen to good people, it implies a couple of things we may need to consider before pressing ‘Send’.

1) God is loving. 2) Everything happens for a reason. 3) People know themselves. 4)  there is a subset of the population to which shit aught to be happening more than me. 5) Bad people are not already in hell.

But mostly what it implies is that suffering cannot possibly have anything of value for life, is a complete waste of time and should be banned. If possible.

Given a base line that we’re all going to die horribly along with everyone we know and love………  What is a bad thing?

There is a story about a wise man who lost his horse. The villagers commiserated, ‘Oh, what bad fortune!’

‘Maybe,’ said the wise man.

Then the horse returned with a dozen of his mates.

‘Oh, what good fortune,’ crowed the villagers.

‘Maybe,’ said the wise man.

Then his son rode off on one of the horses, fell and broke his leg.

‘Oh, what bad fortune!’ quoth the villagers.

‘Maybe,’ said the wise man.

Then the army came around and recruited all the villagers except the invalid son.

‘Oh, what good fortune,’ crowed the few that were left.

‘Maybe,’ said the wise man.

The question of why bad things happen to good people is amplified and refined in the story of Job whom God allowed to be tortured beyond belief by his mate Satan with whom he had a casual bet,

…like you do, when you’re bored on a rainy afternoon… bet you can’t stick an entire twizzler up your nose…. bet you can’t light your own fart.,, you know the drill. bored, bored, bored.

But its worse than allowing Satan to pull the wings of butterflies, because God could have consulted his Omniscience and  known in advance that Job was alright, but hey, it was a rainy day… and much more fun to just see what happened.

Job does what many a child might do in the face of cruel and unusual punishment, he begins to attack himself and spends considerable papyrus wishing he had never been born.  He refrains from speaking his mind, assuming God is just good and asks Him to produce proof. Which every toady MP knows he can wriggle free from at this point and lets God entirely off the hook.

Job’s Comforters seem to be a kind of watered down version of Yahweh himself, ‘you must have been bad’. Examine your conscience my son..

‘You must have been a really horrible person in a former life,’ is the modern version of this aggressive, blaming attitude: forgetting that such a version of reality presupposes vengeful gods to be eternally and conditionally appeased , or do you mean something else by ‘deserving’?

It couldn’t possibly be that shit happens in a sadisim-free Universe. Why? Because that is just toooo random. So we preserve ourselves from excesses of irrelevance and the crippling anxiety of being a speck by assuming Misfortune’s Just Deserts while we polish our golden heads.

The whole paradigm is about what you have done and must have done. Its not about who you are anymore. Your bad luck condemns you. Your good fortune exonerates you. Its cruel and utterly lacking in compassion, paling into utter insigificance what God may or may not be up to at the time.

Rulers are good, by definition.

Phew! Thats a relief.

They have power and are obviously ordained by God whereas we whelps in the gutter  have clearly offended and deserve to be ruled like slaves.

Phew! I’m glad we got that sorted out.

Its not even about what you have failed to do. ‘Natural justice’, thus occludes the failure to live up to one’s potential, the sins of ommision that count every refusal to embrace life or give of one’s best…

Phew! You what in your what now?

Its all about being a good law abiding citizen.

Yay!

So many sage heads nod and puzzle, why was the book of Job ever even included in the bible?

Good law abiding citizen.

Yay!

Why didn’t they just sling it out with all the other stuff that was a bit trixy?

Good law abiding citizen.

Yay!

The good, law abiding citizen suffers, and actually more than most for their riteousness, and why?

Because not deserving it is worse than whatever it is.

Ya….

 

 

Fleeing the Dark Brother.

Whilst slagging off Jacob for fleeing his dark brother I conveniently forgot how I did the same not so long ago.

like a bitch..

thank you yes, and came to England having supported oppression and disinheritance of my own dark brother, ripped off for centuries by kind men who wanted to help them come down from the trees…

whils’ stealin’ de lan’.

look, you put one foot there,… and, shall I speak more slowly..?

and you thought you were very cool and politically correct ‘cos you bought yourself out of  the Commandos for a lousy $125 and hung out with separatist lesbians on a council estate in Ladbroke Grove.

And landed a nice little head start from Grampa Lawes once he’d been appropriatly chaperoned  from his hill of beans.. fat of the land we’d all just departed.

And I was good with that. My conscience was clear, I could live with the split of a bohemiam lifestyle funded by the booty of Empire. No problem.

You can suppress guilt for decades,

or at least the feeling of guilt…

…whilst it all mushes out of the bottom of the box, a goopy ooze of blind determination not to succeed, never to enjoy the fruits of your labour, never to tell yourself, ‘well done’ , or, ‘you made it’.

Everyt’ing all in a state of emergency alla time, drowning out…the voice of…inmost

self

to the point where even my muse seemed to have a nagging fishwife app.

I wanted therapy to get rid of it for me. That’s how I got into this game in the first place. Everyone knows guilt is negative, right?

Wrong, and its just more hiving off of the dark brother to say otherwise. Feelings are just feelings. Trying to divvy them up just creates more internal splitting, more idealisation of the self, a still narrower modus vivendi.

Guilt is good…?

good…bad, your options are just so limited. Sometimes guilt is just to be faced, like anxiety and depression. Not much fun I know but sometimes authentic and therefor appropriate to their context.

But we still gonna fix them , right?

More St George…  what you can’t seem to get is that when we talk about increases in consciousness its not just about some wizard prang idea that might pop into your head that wasn’t there before. Sometimes increase is precisely about paying attention to stuff you really don’t want to hear and letting yourself squirm with it.

… you pay money for dat?

Ask yourself, what does it mean to increase consciousness? To know more stuff? To write and do math? To go to one altar rather than another?

being a frien’?

thats closer, all this debate forgets that consciousness is also about conscience , being intrinsically connected to what you know in your heart as the right way to be.

Increase in consciousness is not some rarified threshold you cross having cleverly established the relationship between fancy conceptual ideas. Its about connecting experiences to the truth of our Being when we’d really rather not. Its about the cold light of day. Its about the, ‘oh bloody hell, what have I been doing/beleiving/ perpetuating all this time?’ and passing up the good news feed from your busy PR machine.

Of course, we don’t have to get all get wound up like tin soldiers and sent off to die for gold and diamonds in order to question the automatic pilot. If you are less fortunate you’ll have to find ways to be with the dark brother in your own backyard; feelings that are spurned, memories that are dismissed, responses to life that seem inferior. The shadow.

If we have the courage to tell our stories then we’ll find our way back to the dark brother because stories connect us to others and to ourselves. When stories cease to be told and get acted out instead then we’re all in trouble.

”The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.” C Jung.

What I notice about the pivotal tale of Isaac, Esau and Jacob, one in which the Principle of Relatedness is shattered before Greed, Abdication and Passivity is that no-one gets to tell their story. There is no protest or discussion anywhere. The silence at the end of the telling is like a child who’s cried himself to exhaustion.

Isaac particularly has seen it all before. And like any abused child who has had  no witness to his misery he sits quietly, unable to refer to experience that has already been hived off to his own dark brother, Ishmael…

who he hates…

I was not abused….!

You were bound and gagged…

I don’t hate!

And dragged up the mountain, pissing yourself with fear..

It wasn’t about me!

Unable to breathe….

He was doing the lord’s work!

Big knife, you shat yourself with the horror.

An angel saved me!

No, the angel saved Abraham. You were neither saved nor spared.

The angel was moved by my plight, by my innocence!

Nop, just taking care of business once Abe had  crushed the Principle of Relatedness sufficient to butcher his own child and God was done with his test. Game over.

Ah, okay.  .er, well, all’s well that ends well, what?

But it hasn’t ended well has it? All this passive acceptance of God’s sadistic use of you to test a third party and having to subvert your own truth has left you full of untold hate which then had to be siphoned off onto your own dark brother..

Ishy?

….and afterwards.. sacrificed relatedness with Esau and Jacob in a compulsive repetition of childhood horror and betrayal beyond belief sufficient for them to become so split that power assumed more importance than people.

Selah!

And this is our increase in consciousness…    I don’t think so.

Feet of Clay.

If there was a prize..

like an Oscar..?

like an Oscar,.. for who most influenced the course of history, who would get your vote? Darwin, Einstein…

Bob Marley, Jimi Cliff..

Charlemagne, he’s a goodun, uh uh uh, beheading in the name of the lord, that’s culture, real culture. Yep, you don’t get visionary kingship like that anymore…uh..

My vote would go to Nebuchadnezzer…

Neb.. I cant even pronounce that.

Neb, Great King Neb, scourge of the Assyrians. He was more than your average angry man in a chariot.. he shaped the way you and I think, feel and value.

..well, being at the head of chariots without number has that effect…

..he was on a mission to shape experience itself. Its with him that being separate from Nature becomes a collective paradigm.

..and cavalry, loads of cavalry..

..with a bee in his bonnet about having been a vassal for three centuries to an oppressive mother that holds you back and sucks you dry, Neb rose up with twelve generations of frustrated individuation and subjugation unchained..

…and well, it wasn’t very nice for everyone else.

The main thing however is not.. What Neb Did.

My nomination is not for all the brave and manly tearing up of everything, but for what was going on in his inner world. Its for the way he was going about all his vanquishing and the absentminded power that he had in order to be able to leave vacuums of power wherever he went.

First off, he’s named after Nabu, son and usurper of the goddess Tiamat.

So we know where his allegiances lie..

He wasn’t just conquering lands, he was unifying a mind set.

…like you do when you are desperatly screwed up having torn down your own ontological security symbolised by Neb’s dream of cutting down the Tree of Wisdom….

and you need people to think like you in order to keep a lid on it all.

And if you are vassal king Zedekiah of Jerusalem and you decide to do your own thing one day….

Mesopotamia being faaaaaar away….

Neb will come and do very horrible things to you….   and its the way that he does the horrible thing… that’s so horrible.

Neb praised Marduk, a sky father god  who’d recently tipped his own missus in the sea and so he was alright with Yahweh..

cos they agreed…. on certain things.

What a bastard! And you would give him your vote for the Oscar…?

I didn’t say I liked him. Its the person who’s influenced us most…. I didn’t say it had to be in a good way.

Anyhoo, Neb’s story amplifys the story of Gilgamesh millenia before, the first solar king who chopped down the sacred grove of the Great Mother, only with Neb the consequences are now spelt out a little…

…you don’t just get away with losing the elixir of life, swallowed back up by the snake goddess because you didn’t value it enough..

No, there’s more…

What he then dreams, after chopping down the Tree of Life and cementing his pact with Marduk, speaks to the consequences of such actions for the evolution of consciousness itself.

Its not pretty.

And its not just about what he has done but what he has become.

and what him trying to sell…..

He dreams of a great statue with a gold head, chest and arms of silver, legs and thighs of bronze and feet of clay and iron. A great stone is thrown down on the feet. They crumble and everything collapses.

Daniel, is unequivocal, ”the statue is you, oh great king.’ He prudently dwells on the way this will pan out years from now …  But the statue is also him, Neb and the pivotal place his divided, narcissistic self,  will now have in the collective psyche.

Centuries later its on every corner store magazine rack.. the tarnished star, the false glamour, the cult of persona, bling and celebrity. The drama, the anxiety, the manufactured veneer of feeling.

The symbol of the now divided/constructed king with his secret weakness speaks of a regressed  state, one in which defensive splitting  has to be used to maintain a system that is both imbalanced and lacking internal cohesion.

Without Her you become divided…

It may please us to identify with the gold head and maybe just wear a really snappy suit over the rest, but constructs are temporary and what isn’t taken down will be torn down.

Neb duly succumbs to the inevitable madness that goes with such fragmentation. He cries to Marduk to save him but Marduk seems powerless to intervene and the foolish king is made to live seven seasons in the wilderness.

And still doesn’t get it.

Seven was the sacred number of She Who Mustn’t be Named.

DONT SPEAK HER NAME>>>

er, ‘course your thing, er greatness…

The thing is that Neb and his jolly cohorts have been moulding consciousness at the point of a sword for over a hundred generations, touting the flaming-rock-in-the-shins version of events as a viable way to live…

Consciousness, which had previously been under shared divine parenthood for the entire neolithic period, does what any kid does in a divorce situation, he barricades himself into ever more restricted corners of the psyche, defensively splitting himself to maintain going-on-being.  But its like drugs, you have to keep doing more of it in order to maintain it.

The child becomes grandiose but mechanical, golden bright but with feet of existential clay that the story tells us will crumble…

that have to crumble….

and in the meantime we have being the best at everything..

Yay!

 

The Continuum Concept.

Jean Liedloff wrote a great book called, ‘The Continuum Concept’. She describes in detail the process by which we lose our connection to Nature.

The Continuum, based on instinct and rooted in the body, has been interrupted.

Babies are born with inherant expectations.

top of the list….

that the mother/baby continuum is sacred…

but it ain’t… no mo’

”When the expected does not take place, corrective or compensatory tendencies make an effort to restore balance.”

Like Gilgamesh building de Mother’s bones into him walls….

which just makes things worse because those compensatory gestures have to run forever in order to maintain equilibrium..

which mean that…

”deprivation… will be maintained indiscriminantly as part of development. Instictive forces do not reason. They assume that it will serve the individual to be stabilised according to initial experience.”

that not a good thing…

Not if baby’s experience is that access to mother is restricted…

By her ‘avin no place of honour.

”…a mindless terror of silence. The motionlessness. He screams. Afire from head to foot with want, with desire, with intolerable impatience… He listens.. he opens and closes his fist. He rolls his head from side to side. Nothing helps, it is unbearable.”

Could we compare the experiences of the infant state, Israel?

Being lost in the Desert….

crying into the wilderness…   rending  garments and gnashing teath…with tears and lamentations and ‘wherefore art thou…..?’

For the first time people want borders on their land and start to fight over it, not because there’s not enough to go around but because a defuse panic of disenfranchisment is sweeping consciousness with the absence of Mum. The land is now a part-object, the down graded receptacle for the experience of the divine feminine, and land-to-have rather than Nature-who-provides.

Suddenly there’s a limit on plenty.

If  the Principle of Relatedness is repressed, all kinds of ontological insecurities will rush to the surface. And though, ostensibly, the person has become perhaps more competent and single minded, underneath they are clingy, vulnerable and controlling. The need for ownership it generates and the use of people as a means to an end can never be sated because the maw it is being used to fill is not of this world.

And the danger is not simply that I immediatly make war on my neighbour. That is the least of my worries. No, it’s that I’m liable to go to war with myself.

Capacity to hold together in times of stress -reduced.

Capacity for inner conflict resolution -reduced.

Capacity to use reason -reduced.

Compassion for self -reduced.

Of course we’re anxious. The inner facets of our psyches are actually less well hinged together than they might be. We need therapists like no other culture. Western Civilization is ontologically riven in its foundations. A fault line that gives rise to the eternal nameless anxiety of our age. Something isn’t quite right. A vague apprehension of having lost… something. An emptiness.

The perennial issues bought to the consulting room, though each is unique in its content, all have the grey tolling of self-estrangement, the anxiety of being un-held by the universe, the unnamed longing and creeping depression that was never supposed to be part of priviledge.

What we’re suffering from is a kind of divine homesickness, of redeeming the dark brother and revaluing the Mother, of really feeling in its proper context what we’re missing…

so that it can be different……

But we don’t because then we’d see who we are and have to act accordingly.

Which is tough..

and so we pretend its not a big deal.

back inna soup.

”The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” S. Kierkegaard.

Not knowing who you are is a lesser demon, one that can almost be house trained by comparison.

We can try to shore up not being who we are, but it takes increasing effort, lashings of co-dependence and covert agreement to a sado-masochistic arrangement thereafter….

which can be useful.

excuse me…?

If a person can’t be clear about who they are, if the temenos created by the Great Mother in which autonomy can safely be explored without loss is then cracked, and I can’t talk to me very well without turning into bits on the kitchen floor..

then definite roles and rules are life-savers.

Hurting and being hurt is predicated on someone-hurting and someone-else-being-hurt….. so the collusive blancmange of  the Mutual Admiration Society needn’t swallow you up.

Everyone knows where they are…

Me Tarzan on steroids

… you Jane on valium, and a little love is allowed into play..

Wha..?

Sure, when everyone is really clear about their roles, as limiting as they might be then anxiety is quelled because everyone knows what the rules are. And when anxiety is quelled a little love might be allowed. Its constricted somewhat but still a creative solution to the problem of how to be together without getting devoured.

I’m not into allat kinky stuff man.

S/M is rarely found at the flamboyant end of the scale. It has a mundane cousin far more common or garden. Circles of domestic spite, dumping and guilt tripping, that serve without fail to create difference and sharply defined identities. Doesn’t really matter what it is , so long as you’re being can be reconfirmed for the umpteenth time.. and if relatedness has to be sacrificed on the altar of ontological security…..

You wonder why the masochist stays, forgetting how much identity and emotion there is in being done to with a clean conscience.

 

 

 

A Psychology of Jacob’s ladder.

So Jacob, having sorely ripped off his brother,

flees Esau’s wrath…

like a bitch..

er, yes… and in the desert he stops for the night. He dreams that a great ladder appears linking Heaven and Earth, with angels and a whole host of beings wandering up and down.

like the Oscars.. with the red carpet?

Kind of….

This dream is usually given the twist of meaning a new and progressive relationship with the Divine. An evolutionary step forward in consciousness. It seems like a two way street is opening up, a fresh concordat rather than just Yahweh plus megaphone. But as with all dreams we carefully need to take up the context…..

Jacob has just betrayed both his kinsmen to the bone,

and no goin’ back…

and he’s done it for earthly power…

and got away with it.

His transformation from Jacob to Israel indicates a new state of consciousness. But in what direction?

Jacob’s new incarnation of himself is as Vanquisher of the Dark Brother.  He has, developmently speaking and in terms of his own individuation, taken the easy road and passed up an opportunity for real growth . He opts to entrench the role of solar hero by being ‘The One’ at any price.

His dream comes on the heels of him depersonalising his brother, disenfranchising him, and cruely mocking his father.

This humiliation of God’s representative, his father, is lost….

..in the drama of looking to the self-same authority for blessing…….

and so the collusion is complete.

Everyone gets to live in bad faith.

When a child is allowed to get away with such stuff they regress and so does Jacob. This ‘special’ back door to God’s private apartments is the very same manipulative ‘gift’ you see time and again bought to therapy, touted as the happy childhood.

The child has in fact been bundled from the trail of how there seems to be no boundaries or rules around, care in fact, and is given some symbolic trinket of superiority as a compensatory gesture that, furthermore, keeps people’s eye off the ball…

of what is going on…

The golden boy has been blessed by Yahweh for stamping all over Esau as a representative of natural law and the Principle of Relatedness irrespective of his humanity.

Now, might has right rather than the other way around. The idealised Yahweh, having split off his shadow into Moab and She who must’nt be named, has a new-best-friend in the equally idealised Jacob/Israel who’s split off his darkness onto Esau.

Its a bromance.

…where both parties can indulge themselves.

God can act out his co-dependence without anyone noticing and Israel can behave without having to reflect or consider, in reality to stay comfortably small , abdicating choice (given I’ll smite you if you exercise the priviledge), and limiting the ceiling of success to the dizzy hights of being well mannered.

This ‘increase’, is only one from the point of veiw of the persona, which has indeed been refined and polished in one tiny corner of the psyche until it shines…

… with the proviso that any kind of relationship is better than none at all which is scarcely the careful  discrimination you might expect from a claim that consciousness is evolving here.

Consciousness is actually traded off against being special. You can do whatever you want so long as you subjugate yourself to Me.

I was at a wedding. A kid of about 7 was running about flicking up the ladies skirts. I grabbed a hold of his arm and growled at him that I’d tell his father if he did it again. My heart sank a little while later when the kid went up to his dad asking for something and the old man said, ‘take what you want..’

Jacob, as representative of the human condition regresses to an earlier developmental stage because Yahweh’s absence of involvement and failure to set more relational boundaries means that the temenos, the sacred space within which transformation takes place is not sufficient to allay overwhelming anxiety.

I can no longer talk to me.

an’ Yahweh acting very strangely…..

So what are we being taught about how to be in a relationship, about family loyalty and …about feelings?

Esau is landed with all the chaotic feelings and Jacob flees his ‘aggression’.

feelings are bad.

But values come from feelings.

‘Feelings always bind one to the reality and meaning of symbolic contents and these in turn impose binding standards of ethical behavior from which (we) are only to ready to emancipate ourselves.’ C. Jung

So, the luxury of being rid of ‘negative’ emotions comes at the price of being able to tell right from wrong.

An being special inste’ of loved.

And the expectation, repeated time and again, of relationships that are soured by a particularly toxic kind of jealousy. Not the jealousy of, ‘oh, you’re going off with someone else’. Or even, that its somehow bound to happen.

Its that you need anyone else in your life but me……..

because I really can be all things to you. Parent, muse, lover, confidant, drinking partner…etc.

No end to dat lis’.

And it would all be perfect and wonderful if only it weren’t for…

you.