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.

red team blue team

Our most ancient stories are full of brothers who lack respect or don’t get on. These stories are more than quaint tales. They are archetypal patterns that can run us from within, default positions that we are patterned for like an old pair of comfy shoes that can, nevertheless, dance you to death.

Tell de story, mon.

I see a lot of people grappling, not with this issue or that, but the fact that we keep doing the same thing over and again. It suggests to me that the repeating stories we find at our earliest beginnings might shed some light on the compulsive repetitions of our own time.

De story…

The theme we find over and again is the one of divided brothers. One of the most fascinating and relevant to our time is the story of Isaac, Esau and Jacob.

I want to ask what this story is doing in such a prominant place, at the birth of a nation-rooted-in-one-God, and what the psychological consequences might be for those who inherit it.

tell de frikkin’ story, for cryin’ out loud…

I’m getting there, shuttup. The story of Esau and Jacob moves the older story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu on a notch. If you recall, our earliest ever recorded tale is from Sumeria and describes the fate of a king who would not be bound by natural law, who caused the death of his dark brother, Enkidu and built the first city walls to separate himself from the natural world.

Him come to a bad end…

Esau and Jacob, sons of Isaac are likewise divided, light/dark, hairy/smooth, with Esau clearly personifying the natural man, the dark and primitive brother who gets it in the neck.

But dis time with a twist, mon.

A thousand years have passed since Enkidu had to die. And in his absence, the golden boy imago has had the stage more to himself and we find that he has deteriorated quite badly.

De split mo’ subtle…

The demise of the dark brother is now ontological. Esau has his birthright stolen by Jacob who pretends to be his brother by covering himself with the wild skins that Esau wore, then goes to his father Isaac who is almost blind and ask for the blessing that would confer the family inheritance on him…..

So Jacob get de land…

But there’s more. The main piece of this is that despite this awful desecration of natural law and the wicked deception involved, Yahweh sanctions Jacob’s claim rooted in the fact that he was the one to be blessed by Isaac their father.

How he went about it was not material to de case…

Jacob gets to be big boss of twelve tribes and Esau gets…. Edom, you know tucked in there by Moab, washpot thingy..

The significant thing in terms of collective existential security is that you can now no longer count on anything. A blessing is more important than a birthright under even the most deplorable circumstances. Doing now has precedence over Being, and trickery is fine so long as it is sanctioned by authority.

… days of natural law are over…

and Yahweh will hand over the whole of Israel into the hands of a callous cheat simply because he punctuated his betrayal of everything you might hold dear, with submission to the patriarch. The submission is more important than the deception and of greater weight than the Principle of Relatedness which is sacrificed in the process.

But what does this have anything to do with anything…?

Because its the forge in which the Western psyche was shaped. We’re already strapped with the double bind of original sin:

https://andywhiteblog.com/2015/06/25/narcissistic-collusion/

carrying god’s shadow:

https://andywhiteblog.com/2015/06/20/moab-is-my-washpot/

but this is a new and different landscape of depersonalisation.

Him get worse…

The way you behave is no longer of any account, for good or ill. Your personhood and character are no longer of interest. And if I have to stamp all over the ageing bones of my loyal servant to do it I will. Without noticing that I have just emancipated myself from my Conscience….. and caused the Chosen to Doubt…

God’s mental state is deteriorating. He’s not even trying to justify it by pointing and shouting, or roaring about sin. The ignominious betrayal of Isaac is just shrugged off. He seems less able to give feeling responses to situations, cannot reflect and seems less present as though he were preoccupied with something or some one

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME>

I wasn’t… no…. . sorry…. I was just saying, you look a bit… off colour,… bit peaky..

NOT SLEEPING TOO WELL.

Something particular keeping you awake?

WHAT YOU SAYIN’ ?

Nothing,.. its just that ….sometimes our conscience keeps us awake, perhaps something you might have… regretted.

IAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAM

….or perhaps inuited, in a sleepy kind of way, that you just gave us permission to destroy the planet provided we do it in your name.

UTDYIKTDYTDYTFUKYFU

and that because of your centre-stage-for-eternity-caper you’re lonely and going a bit mad,

UFYTSUTEOL

and that without Her we’re all going a bit mad…

LI@UGUP+UT.

and it matters, Oh jewel of my heart, because this is all a bit borderline now.

ULDTKYT

and as the split grows in you, Oh bounding deer of the Verdant Meadow…

UTWSREASFG

it grows in us.

Fielding narcissism.

Saying there’s no such thing as a narcissist is only true when you’re feeling generous. The rest of the time, they’re real enough and its denial to say otherwise. You can feel trapped, especially if its family or work, and it can be tough keeping alive that you’re not destined to be a victim of the situation.

That other really might be depersonalising you, loading you down with shadow material, unrealistic expectations and enviously tugging at you’re essence.

What do you do?

here are some options;

1) play masochistically into the game without let or hindrance.

2) play masochistically into the game whilst wondering what you are about.

3) spend seven years in anaysis and then back away.

4) back away.

Wondering what you are about is good for a couple of things. Its good for seeing if you are balanced. If you aren’t they topple you over. Its like a pillow fight on a greased pole but you have no pillow.

And its good for practising compassion.

Don’t get caught in the story. Don’t stop at being so damn clever about the game they’re playing.

Go deeper.

See past the nonsense to the vacant, unmothered child behind the glass, where I can no longer talk to me.

Then, deeper still, to the flower that’s still alive beneath the boot.

This has the effect of changing the dynamics. The practice of kindness is powerful stuff and it doesn’t cost you your point of veiw. You are modelling tolerance of difference and embodying the other’s potential to do likewise.

Change begins that no amount of making-the-other-see will ever achieve.

An aspect of Relatedness that we lost with the Goddess is that generosity of spirit which is willing to walk a mile in another’s shoes and is actually the kind of mirroring containment the other really needs and is asking for in the first place.

Oh, and, don’t sign anything.

three steps forward..

Hokmah/Sophia/Wisdom, the Wisdom still known to Solomon and for whom he sung his epic Songs, was finally, ignominiously, thrown down in Revelations and branded ‘the Whore of Babylon’. All this has had more than repercussions in our age. It has moulded them.

We think all this ancient stuff isn’t important forgetting that its ancient us.

We can be entirely agnostic in faith yet these ancient stories are deep in our hindbrain, cornerstones of Western culture, the templates for our perceptions and relationships.

Why Babylon?

Because that’s where Her church was exiled to when Nebuchadnezzar seiged Jerusalem back in 425BCE.

Our perception of ourselves changed forever. Mostly we think of this ‘transition’ (repression and persecution) from Matriarchal religions as being in terms of increases, the ‘price we paid’ for emergent consciousness and tout the advent of writing and building skills as proof.

Leaving aside for a moment the other 75,000 years of homo sapiens history in which nothing can possibly have happened, a less remarkable change in consciousness occured with king Gilgamesh chopping down the sacred grove of the Great Mother, something so pervasive and common place we no longer notice it unless its in the form of ecological disasters or environmental devastation.

It is change, not in terms of what consciousness has gained, but in what it has lost,

Belonging. Belonging born of Relatedness.

Home is where de heart is………

And you wonder, ‘how necessary was that?’

How is consciousness being increased if the whole template for our relationships is predicated upon inner division, symbolised by the repeating motif of the dark brother’s demise, acted out in perpetuity all the way from Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the war on Islam, which, of course, is just coming up to its thousandth birthday..?

In fact we have regressed.

If the divine feminine can’t be acknowledged and mothering have no sacred context, bonding is messed with and we get to be special rather than loved. It looks great but its not, like kids with the hugs scrubbed off.

Its not consciousness that has increased but persona, an ever more flambuoyant and self-confident image at the level of mere personality that requires the dark brother to be killed off in every generation…..

Bling!

and war

…culminating in the cult of personality and projection of Self onto…the special, the celebrated, in whose glow we can then bask and get just a little bit of the good stuff for ourselves, just by way of association.

Being is impoverished and not just in terms of our relationships in which the dark brother takes refuge, nor in our substitute preoccupations with mater(iality), but in our inner cohesion.

Without the Principle of Relatedness, we hang together less well. The different parts of the psyche have their capacity to talk to one another restricted.

Cholesterol of the Soul.

You become less internally agile, less able to pool resources, make decisions, think on your feet, stay in touch with your body. When its really bad the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

And its the absence of something really quite ordinary that creates such disturbance, rather than the presence of something exotic.

Give me Napoleon any day.

On Trying New Things

Carpocrates was an old Greek philosopher whose contribution was essentially that wisdom lay in trying new things.

How trivial, oh those wily Greeks. Was he selling tonics as well?

Then I thought about it.

Arrrr, try my new hair tonic. Only 5 bucks a coptic jar..

that’s the Egyptians..

what’s the Greek then?

amphora…

5 bucks an amphora…..

As soon as we try new things, they spontaneously..

4 bucks an amphora….

..create inner dialogue between the now ‘old self’ and the new experience.

3 bucks an amphora….

Its not just a new thing its a new self….

No-one wants my frikkin hair tonic..

Be more persuasive, get their attention. You know, work the audience…

How do you do that then?

I dunno. Be Charismanic.. The conversation between I and me is kickstarted into life by the new thing. The encounter grows us, challenging our preconceptions and seducing us into the unknown.

hard as a rock tonic for you-know-what 50 bucks an amflora…

We get re-invented in the process.

Stand back please, one at a time.

That’s why just trying new food can be nerve wracking. It takes us out of our comfort zone and may require a bit of prodding and anxious speculation before we actually take a bite.

Form an orderly queue please…

I recall the expression on the face of a babe the first time he was given anything but breast milk, a drop of warm carrot juice on the tip of a finger. It was such a horrible ecstasy.

Now, madam, thats no way to behave….

we want it, but its intrusive.

Sales now limited to one amplora per person, stand back sir….

and life will never be the same.

No, I won’t trade for your donkey….

and so there is much loss

Or what you learned on the way….

closing doors

go on, you should be asham… oh forget it.

and goodbyes.

I need a new line of business.

Trying new things is tougher than it looks.

Oh, you shouldn’t be afraid to try new things…!

Well, that’s what they say, but actually new things are scary as hell and for a good reason.

scardy cat scardy cat

The Greeks still had the divine feminine, which meant that mothering was sacred. This means that the mother/baby bond has spiritual containment which the child won’t then need to spend the rest of his life trying to replicate.

I didn’t understand a word of that.

It goes without saying that if the Principle of Relatedness is held in high esteem then different parts of the psyche will be tolerant of one another, like nobles of a land all being really good mates.

straight over my head, whoosh..

Where the Principle of Relatedness is devalued we stifle the inner conversation, weaken the nobles ties and render the land open to invasion.

that doesn’t sound good…

Our Ground dries up and cracks..

oh dear..

When Yahweh casts Hokmah/Wisdom/ the Whore of Babylon into the sea in bits in Revelations he’s doing more than getting a divorce.

this is not going to be a happy thing…..

He’s also blighted her with a nasty disorder..

not..

No, a disorder of the soul. I can no longer talk to me and 1500 years later we can still get wet knickers over ‘I think therefor I am’, a millenial confirmation that mind and being are still identical and cannot remember their conversation.

but we’re alright…?

yes,yes,

The Miller, his Son and the Donkey.

Once there was a miller who wanted to sell his donkey so he and his son got up early in the morning and set off to market.

Along the way they met an old man who laughed out loud at them, saying ‘why walk when you can ride? Oh dear’, said he wiping the tears from his eyes, ‘ what fools!’

And the miller was so embarrassed to be such an idiot he leapt on the donkey and pulled his son up after him.

Along the way they met a bunch of little old ladies who screamed and cursed them, shouting, ‘the poor donkey with both of you great louts on its back, for shame!’

And the miller was so embarrassed, he threw his son down with a crash so as not to be cruel, and rode on.

Along the way they met a little girl who said ,’Why are you so cruel Mr Miller? Can you not see that your poor son, who is only a lad, is suffering in the growing heat? For shame!’

And the Miller was so embarrassed he threw himself to the ground and put his son up instead.

Along the way they met a couple who tut tutted and told him, ‘why, you should be carrying the poor donkey yourselves’. So they did.

And then they met…. the world, which bitched and moaned and complained one way or the other. And the Miller, even though he was a bit on the slow side, began to realise something and started muttering to himself under his breath.

Along came a boy chewing a straw who was about to say something but for some strange reason thought better of it and walked on…..

The Miller was scratched his beard, staring into space and muttering.

And then without doing anything in particular, he continued on to the market. And everyone he met bad him a good morning and tipped their hats.

Hooray for the Miller!!

Him learn him own heart!

Through abuse, critisism and other people’s prejudice!

Yay!

He arrives at the market looking pretty much the same as when he started out , but actually he has grown. He has found some kind of inviolable centre, and how? By learning the great art of being able to talk to himself through which he could finally arrive, not just at the market, but at his own conclusions.

He found who he was from a multitude of mirrors.

Some of them not very nice.

But it didn’t matter.

Most everything is recoverable in this life and more, grist to the mill(er), if only I can talk to me.

If only we can reflect.

… and from those outer mirrors find a few of our own, way down inside, that can tell us who we are and what we want.

They say that talking to yourself is the begining of madness only because it seems strange to a person who can’t manage a good mutter.

Both Stalin and Hitler introduced muttering laws during their regimes and for the same reason. Its not that you may be saying bad things about the state but because I talking to me is beyond the reach of the state.

Muttering to yourself is a kind of freedom from the way things have to be. It gives inner elbow room, perspective, the ability to chew things over…and digest.

If you can come to your own conclusions, decide your own values, direct your own fate, then you have renounced, THE ONLY WAY TO SEE THINGS who never has to consider, because the truth is already known.

Knowing alla answers shut you down, mon.

Which is why we need to forgo answers and ‘the truth’, in favour of asking the really good questions in life so that I and me can have a good natter, What do I want? What shall I live by? What’s important?

Blessing the Obstacle.

‘Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life.’ A. Solzhenitsyn.

How is it possible?

Why as much as how.

Isn’t it just masochistic to embrace and almost wish for the kind of suffering portioned out by life?

Surely the whole point is to steer clear of the really bad stuff. Aren’t we hardwired into the instinct for self preservation that would prefer to duck a ten year stretch for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or saying something out of place?

Well, yes, and I’m sure Sol would have rather been tucked up in his own bed, but shit happens and when it does it requires our negotiation.

”For there, lying on the rotten straw, I came to realise that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe but the maturity of the human soul.’ (ibid)

What is Sol’s secret? How is it possible to be gobbled down by fate on some pretext that mocks all reason and still emerge in one piece, grown, in fact?

Where is the bitterness, the utterly justifiable cry of foul play?

The great beauty of Sol is that despite being harried by inhuman forces and made to suffer the worst privation, to the point where death might have been a sweet release, he never gives the sense that he feels victimised by Stalin, or that his own humanity is ever lost. In fact, his experience is the opposite, like manure to roses.

How?

I read ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ half a dozen times, searching for that ‘how’?. Then fate landed me, quite randomly, in my own bed of rotting straw.

My first thought was, ‘this isn’t fair’.

If you say so.

What, look what they did to me?

And what are you doing to you?

Nothing, just lying here with my nose close enough to the floor not to smell the shit that’s been daubed on the walls in lieu of a paintset. Ge’meouttahere.

Could this be good for anything?

What like, oh, I must have been bad and this is my Karma?

No, but go down that route if you like, I can see how much it appeals to you.

What other option is there? I’m in the grip of malevolent forces!

Ah, the magic word….

Wot?

Options…

I don’t have any frikkin options do I? I’m hogtied like a bitch.

if you like…

KHGFJHFJHFHF

look, you do have options, right now you are exercising the option to moan like a baby. Problem is you don’t realise you already made a choice, or, actually, that you made a choice without realising that’s what you did because you are sooo busy looking after the sacred cow of there being only one way to approach life, one possible set of values, one reason for being…… and then you start squealing when you get to experience just how much you have limited yourself.

Ok, big shot. Enlighten me…

As you wish…

How much faith do you have in the values you were raised with?

Zero.

And yet here you are saying life can only be meaningful if you live out the mores, the limited perspectives, the material values passed down to you….

I just want to go home.

There you go again. You are on automatic pilot with only one bearing, one engine, one chart. There is no perspective.

I’m in the grip of…

..not having any perspective. Oh dear, it really is bad.

Now you are mocking me..

Not really. You are in trouble but not the kind you think. The prison is inside, one you’d carry with you even if life spat you back on the street.

err..

And the reason is that you only have one way of looking at things. Two legs good, four legs bad. You have one idea of what it means to be free, one idea of what constitutes meaning, one notion of what it means to be successful, and all derived from The Man in whose sainted grip you currently reside. And what this means is that life will continually frustrate and annoy even when he lets you go…

that would be good.

not if you only have one way of experiencing it. An obstacle is whatever frustrates our one-dimensional veiw of life. At the very least it gives us the opportunity to reveiw our situation but this can only be done by reminding ourselves that life’s meaning is liable to be a lot bigger that we could ever imagine.

But I want to be free…

which could only be had by one thing occuring.. someone else’s key in the lock..See? How about being free right where you are, without having to armwrestle the Universe? How would it be to experience freedom from different points of veiw? For starters, free from or free to?

Wha..?

And then other interesting stuff like, what has my suffering given me, how has my ease kept me back, what do I want besides what I’m told I want? Your rotten straw will be good for all that.

Yeh, Sol spent 300 pages slagging of the Narcissistic depersonalisation of Stalin, but then , with supreme courage, asks ‘what did we want him for’?

The plot thickens,’ there is good and there is bad and that is good’, as the old Gnostics used to say. We grow through hardship, consolidate and recharge through times of plenty and have to have both to live and grow. There really are people out there who’ve had the perfect childhood and everything laid on you know…

really..?

Yeah, and they’re all as dull as ditchwater.

”Do not rejoice when you have found. Do not weep when you have lost. Your soul, which was formerly dry, ripens with suffering.” (ibid)

On Being Special.

My country was named after a great hero. I was raised in Rhodesia, last outpost of our marvellous empire, only country in the world to ever be named after a man, my hero Cecil Rhodes.

He would have called it Cecilland, but the double l would have made it sound Welsh, which was foreign, and gay which in those days was punishable by being thrown into a prickly ditch at the very least. Actually, they’d just kill you. Hunting accident.

Yes, Cecil was my hero. Such a proud legacy he left.

”You can relax in the sure knowledge that having been born British you have already won first first prize in the race of life.”

what a relief…

Yeah, how cool is that…?

One day I found myself pointing guns at people out of my legacy of specialness. In protection of our divinely sanctioned ripping off of other people’s stuff and I caught myself, teetering on the brink like a drunk on a clifftop.

I later found out that Rhodes ran a secret white supremacist club called ‘Eugenics’, headed up by himself and lord Alfred Milner, an horrendous, murdering bastard..

but special..

that my proud boarding house was named after at school. They were to the Afrikaaners what the Afrikaaners were to the African and killed thousands of them, women and children, in concentration camps during the Boer war about 1905.

Like Hitler..

I said 1905. Hitler got the idea, and permission, from them, I mean us.

When Milner arrived in Southern Matabeleland, where I grew up, his diplomacy was exemplified in a single gesture, he rounded up the entire royal family and hung them.

Because they were evil?

No, because they were in his way.

My upbringing was seeped in having greater rights than others. The African, as a representative of anyone who was not me, was inferior.

hardly out of the trees..

it never occured to me that almost every African I ever met spoke four languages…

The majority of us superior people were raised by Africans who were mostly unspoilt by our tyranny so we kids got what we needed from them. They gave us the good stuff regardless..

my nanny was called Suzannah and I loved her….

…whilst I was taught to hate her family…

of which I was a part.

Of course, it was common knowledge that kaffirs were stupid. All except the one who looked after you, who was your mother and of course she was ok. Your own nanny was different from all the stupid ones.

and/or, my mother is inferior and so am I.

Imagine being raised in two worlds that regard each other with complete incomprehension.

What do you see in the mirror?

Now imagine going through that period of time, 3,500 BC when the whole known world was like that and suddenly half the community, those that worshipped The Great Mother,, were cut off and outlawed/exiled.

I remember my Mother, sort of..

No-one speaks Her name…

and if your name is not spoken,…

you cease to exist.

No-one speaks her name.

And no-one talks about Grampa Lawes being jewish and found lying dead on a mountain of beans.

I’m 40 years old when it occurs to me one day that I’m jewish.

WTF?

Piece it together, grampa lawes is found dead in his posh house in the Hove all sprawled on his beans. paternal mother’s maiden name was..what?

went to the library..

jewish.

I called my dad

yeah, maybe, on your mother’s side..

Maybe? Are you fucking kidding me?!

What the hell do you mean, maybe.

How can anyone forget who they are? How can EVERYONE forget?

In three generations we forgot who we were. And if we can do that on the ground what does it take for She Who Mustn’t Be Named….

IUJG<JHNG<JH<MHJNMHJ

to slip from consciousness.

Not long.

For some years the church fathers rather naively put many of her books in the Apocrypha, tacked on at the back of the bible as if it were okay so long as nobody spoke Her..

KFKHGFKGHF

The estranged spouses lived at different ends of the house until the Apocrypha was ousted to her own separate appartment in down town Antiquities. The last hard back copy I saw had, ‘Last copy in the County’, stamped in the flyleaf.

Many other of her books, like those dead Sea scrolls found at Nag Hammadi are now under lock and key in the bowels of the Vatican.

In the dungeon, mon!

Yeah, but thankyou hey, really, for who would you incarcerate but the opposition, tacitly conveying the significance of the prisoner…?

and thankyou to Cecil for giving me something to kick against that I might one day find myself. But not before swallowing his narcissistic bullshit hook, line and sinker.

On living up to Expectations.

If a child is expected to fail it will. Kids always live up to their parents expectations, particularly the less than salubrious.

My brother was expected to fail. Of course nobody said as much, they didn’t need to, he was given euphemistic titles such as ‘the practical one’ in the family, which was code for thick as pig shit and he dutifully rose to the occasion. It took being pegged to the antarctic ice through his clothes, sleeping bag and tent for three days of 200mph winds to knock it out of him.

Expectations are powerful because our survival instincts are tuned to co-operation with our group and serve collective values. We are born assuming others know best and give them due credit for that. If it were otherwise we’d not get far past inventing the wheel.

We’re born respectful.

So when God says to Eve don’t eat of that tree what does she understand of God’s expectations? Had there been an explanation it might have been different, something she could make sense of and.. respect. But He gives her no explanation, no meaning in the injunction, without which she hears only a hidden expectation of betrayal.

His command, without reference to her need for meaning, carries an implicit sense that this communication is only about discipline, authority and power. It is not about love.

You musn’t eat the fruit.

Why?

Because I say so.

Who is it for?

Nobody.

Sorry, what is it for?

To see if you would obey.

Not because i might die?

No.

Or because it would give me a tummy ache.

No.

So, just to see if i could be trusted?

yes.

So you don’t trust me then?

Not entirely.

But you made me in your image?

Yeees.

So, either you can’t be trusted, or you’re just fucking with my head.

HTDKYDKH<GDCH<KGCF<JHV<NBVCHGDCTH>UYBFKYTRFKBJFYG

Moab was not Yahweh’s first washpot. The die of sadistic witholding is cast from the Beginning. The interaction with Adam and Eve in a modern setting would have someone calling for a social worker.

The father uses sadomasochistic and manipulative techniques to seduce Eve into behaving as he knows she will with the limited awareness she has prior to gaining the knowledge derived from the apple. To obey you have to know right from wrong, you have already to have eaten the fruit. He tempts her..

thought the devil did that…?

Well, he finishes the job but its God that puts the idea in her head and makes her curious. His style of communication is actually psychologically damaging. Don’t use the faculty I gave you but do use one I have not.

Eve is trapped, she’s been slipped something under the table and its really ugly, a hefty archetypal gollop of contradiction and bad faith with which she must trip and fall, the sudden condensing focus for God’s ready curses, a toxic parent who gives a child a chore that it cannot perform in order to shame and vent His spleen.

Why is it a trap?

Because she must fail.

The consciousness that God is asking her to exercise is in the apple.

Not in her.

She cannot understand what he means and he knows it.

I watched a man point to a shop sign down in the village and patiently spell the words out letter for letter to his son, teaching him. Problem, the kid was two.

What the hell is he doing? Where is he coming from? What is his purpose?

He feels so good and riteous. He’s fathering….. whilst actively avoiding intimacy and contact. He might have joined the child in his world rather than shoe horning the boy into a narcissistic fantasy of how great a father he is.

The child cannot, with the best will in the world, fulfil what’s being demanded with out abandoning his own reality principle. He looks vacant, trying to make meaning. Daddy expects….something. I don’t know what but he is always right. I cannot understand. I must be stupid….

….which is the unconscious purpose of the exercise.

You will never, never, be as smart as me.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

Narcissistic Collusion

What makes us collude with Narcissism? It’s like allowing yourself to be bullied by a two year old! Why would you do that? For love? Well you might say so, I certainly have, but I no longer buy it.

Love wants us to grow and narcissistic collusion keeps us all small.

I once new a woman who tolerated an extremely narcissistic husband for 30 years because he once made her a cup of tea…. and on the strength of that alone commited herself to his tyranny. Was she a woman who loved too much? Too much something, but it wasn’t love.

The actual service with which he provided her, as a recepticle for all her inferiority whom she could then safely sneer at from across the room, was enough glue to hold the marriage together… forever.

In order to keep her eye off the ball she needed a whole gamut of back-up reasons for being with him, pseudo explanations for his behaviour and saintly giving him ‘the benefit of the doubt’, only made serviceable by living in eternal doubt herself and underming the entire structure of her own natural intelligence.

She believed in him all that time, not because he gave her any hope but because her unacknowledged need compelled her to find… anything, a lousy single gesture, to justify what she had done and cover up her deeper motives. She searched his every word and bent his every deed into some fresh shape that might then justify her own stagnant, loveless existence.

To do this she could turn black into white and rain into sun.

We humans are good at that.

Look at how we respond to God’s bad behaviour. We constantly let him off the hook out of our own urgent need to…what?

We hear over and again about how we were given free will but actually it doesnt say that anywhere, not at all… We need to believe it that’s all. In order to fulfil our own urgent need to.. what?

Jah man! Everyone know God give us free will…

Bollocks, its a delusion or at least the reducto ad absurdam of ‘we have free will therefore God must have given it to us’. The story of the apple suggests we’re capable of all kinds of stuff He didn’t intend. We collude with the idea that we were given free will so as to explain any subsequent smiting having failed to exercise it appropriatly.

Dat’s sin, mon.

No, we’re explaining away petulant behaviour we wouldn’t accept in a toddler because something in us needs to.

We alla’ us got free will, mon.

Yeh, but only as a result of dissobeying god. How can God ask us to exercise that which Eve stole when his punishment of her wanting to be conscious is to be cursed for eternity? His entire beef with people is Eve’s sin and yet now we are being asked to exercise it in order not to… sin.

Yeah, an’ it gets missed a lot that God frew them out the garden because they disobeyed…

..when actually what he says is, ‘lest they become one of Us’.(Gen 3:22)

He had someone with him?

Unless he was talking to Himself…

Hum, at the very least, he doesn’t want us to be conscious.

That’s not very nice, but… he did give us free will.

No, he never. Look, I’m a bright chap and the internet can give you every quote that’s even vaguely related and I’m telling you I trawled the lot. We just want to believe in this great gift which we have to honour on pain of eternal damnaation because we want to.

What you actually find is that free will is stolen, stolen and punished. Why would we dare exercise that which, just by the having of it, gets you cursed forever?

Why? Because we don’t have to be responsible. Yahweh is easy, you don’t have to search your heart. You don’t have to try too hard. Paul sells his whole spiel to the Thessalonians on the basis that the lords yoke is light and that ALL you have to do is abstain…

an’ praise.. got an easy ride mon, don’ complain…

I don’t want a fucking easy ride. I want to grow and growing is hard. I want something other than your feather bed. Did you ever wonder why our culture is so hungry alla time, desperate for that instant gratification fix..?

er..

…because, there’s no frikkin challenge within the fold that’s really worth the candle, so we may as well stay at home and stuff our faces. We believe in the lie that free will is something we’ve been given so we don’t have to face the fact that God wants us small and compliant..

And why…

..because we want to be …small and compliant.

The Green-eyed God

If you’ve ever tried confronting narcissism you know your gonna lose. Those walls are high and the Great Mother’s bones are built into them. Confrontation immediatly becomes a verbal wrestling match with the Marquis of Queensbury firmly gagged and bound in a corner. Or, the ground under your feet suddenly disappears and you’re now discussing some completely unrelated issue without knowing how you got there except that you will lose this one as well.

And if what you’re wanting to air is the issue of jealousy, the Marquis will be bundled out in a rolled up carpet while the barometric decompression in your lungs anticipates a variation of the mesmeric deluge, ‘yeah, but no, but’.

It will then either be flatly denied with a hint of, ‘ what’s your problem?’ Or turned back on you, ‘this is obviously your stuff.’ Or, condescended and humiliated, ‘did you get that out of a lucky packet?’ Or the ante is simply upped with ,’you don’t love me.’ Your role is now reduced to useless reassurance of the one who, moments ago, was trying to scratch your eyes out.

So, what kind of progress do you think might be made trying to confront God over his jealousy?

Zero

So, we won’t even try, hey?

no point, mon.

Despite the explicit mention of ‘other Gods’.

Can’t go there, mon.

Despite the injunction, sorry, command not to covet..

..yeh, but no but…

…and whooping his bride down the centuries for all kinds of imagined shenanigins..

mus’ be you done sumfink.

Methinks Yahweh protesteth tooo much..

Him got someone on the side…..himself…?

Or wishes he did. His current bride is clearly not up to the mark which begs the question of who set the bar.

She-who-cannot-be-nam..

DONT SPEAK HELUFYTDCGVNBMN..

yep, God’s constant paranoia about our unfaithfulness is more than the tacit acknowledgement of an unnameable…….

HGJH<FVH<JNVBMNVB

…….co-respondent, it is a projection of his own desire for she-who-no-one talks-abo…

HGFHG.

Him lust for him old flame.

Yep, Yahweh’s ‘leavings’ in the washpot of Moab, are primarily hormonal.

Moab?

Your neighbourhood.

Is that why the West is preoccupied with sex an’ bling?

Worse, matey, where else could the fulcrum of god’s shadow be brought to bear but on our own souls? Judgement day is small potatoes next to the fact that we are already up to our ears in God mank.

So, we sloshing about in God’s shadow…

No, God’s shadow is sloshing about in us.

Like we was His host.

Tapeworm styley. Him angry.. but need us..to be angry at.. No end to that one, mon.

Yeh its loopy.

Loopy lou.

Interesting word, loopy.. We all know it means,’crazy’, but the crazy is not about what you are doing, but that you are doing it blindly and going round in circles. The problem is the looping and not really a function of the territory through which you might be passing at the time.

Yeahhh…and…

So , what’s loopy here begins with having to fail in our endevour, in bending to divine sadism, hoping it will all go unnoticed. God uses us for His washpot so that he comes up all sparkly and restored…

But now we full of …. ‘leavings’ and bits of beard…

Yes, we have attributed to us, and identify with, a piece of divine shadow…

we gon feel bad..

Well, icky, yes, but more to the point, we just can’t do it. It’s all too much. We start going mad in the catch 22 of eternal failure either to contain God’s projection or, trying bravely, but looking like pervy curbcrawlers in the process.

So where is the loop?

I’m coming to that. Carrying god’s shadow is a bit of a buzz. Its like being juiced up on some fantastic high octane fuel, the cheif symptom of which is that we fall into the delusion that we don’t need one another anymore and are separate from Nature.

Loop, make the loop…

So that’s a sin, against ourselves and one another..

loop, loop…

for which we should indeed, feel bad…

guilt can be good..okay..

And gives God a hook to hang his washpot on. We masochistically buy into his game, bewailing the smiting, lack of favour and accusations of infidelity in order to cover up for the fact that we are getting off on the heady cocktail of god’s mank water.

And being special.

And there’s the loop, you are special but failed. You can be sorry all you want. You’re still wrong and bad. For as long as we carry god’s imperfections his jealousy will be justified. But his love for us depends upon us being His Moab. No win.

That ain’t right, mon.

And what happens when a child is put in a no win situation?

Him start trashin’ de place.

Loopy Lou.