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There is an old Jewish story about a poor man who complained to his Rabbi that his cottage was so cramped and small he could only take it as a sign of God’s judgement. The Rabbi pondered and then asked, ‘Do you own any animals?’

‘Yes’, said the man, a cow, a goat and some chickens.”

”Take them into the house with you.” The Rabbi’s advice seemed strange but he did as he was told.  So the next time they met the Rabbi asked how things were going. ”Terrible,” he replied, ‘The cow’s tail is in everything, the goat stinks and the chickens crap everywhere! What shall I do?”

The Rabbi strokes his beard, ‘Now, get rid of the cow.’ The man is entirely perplexed and goes home muttering at the Rabbi’s contradictory advice but the next time the Rabbi asks how things are he has perked up a bit,..

‘Well, some improvement, but the goat is eating everything it can and the chickens roost in every available spot. My wife and children are going mad. What shall I do?’

‘Kick the goat out,” replies the Rabbi.

The next time they meet the man seems more relieved but the chickens are dusty and loud….

‘Now put them back in their coop,’ suggests the Rabbi. The following day he rushes over to the Rabbi saying, ‘thank you, thank you, my house feels like a palace, my family are so happy and I’ve never slept so well.., oh joy!”

On the face of it this story is a moral admonishment to be happy with what you have because life can always get worse.

‘I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.’ Helen Keller.

It teaches the importance of gratitude but more to the point it demonstrates that gratitude’s transformation, it’s capacity to suffuse life with meaning and excitement, has little or nothing to do with circumstance.

In everyday life the bad tempered person will find any number of reasons out there in the world to be as grouchy today as he was yesterday. The bountiful personality will find the same number of reasons, from the same data, to have yet another great day.

How you feel about events depends on what shoes you happen to be wearing at the time. Whatever you are unconsciously identified with is going to run your ship and determine how you think and feel regardless of what is going on at the time. We feel gripped from without when we are enslaved from within.

‘The way out is by the door, why do people not use this method?’ Confucius.

People often say of therapy that you can’t change the past, as though it was something fixed in stone. But ‘remembering’ is not as obvious as it looks, largely because children easily abdicate their own point of view to keep in step with others and so remember things from other people’s perspective, like having a single window in a house that doesn’t even belong to you looking out over landscape that looks alien but isn’t…

Recalling life events from your own point of view can be a quest all of its own, let alone from what inner vantage point you might then face the world in the here and now.

The Japanese have a folk tale of a man who comes across three stone cutters. He asks the first what he is doing,..

”Just eating shit’, says the poor man, ‘having to chisel away at this fucking stone all day. It’s humiliating, I might as well be a prisoner doing hard labour.”

He asks the second man what he is doing…

”I’m earning enough to feed my family and clothe my kids. I’m learning skills and working together with this crew of masons.”

He asks the third man what he is doing..

‘I am building a cathedral…’

If you didn’t check in with the other workers you might be tempted to feel sorry for the cruel fate of the first stone cutter, to identify with his feeling of being so constrained and done to…. He doesn’t see that the shittyness of life is something he carries around inside him. He projects it onto whatever the world offers him, devaluing so as not to feel devalued,  identifying with a compensatory function for whom nothing is ever good enough. And so it isn’t. You could crown him king and it would still be shit.

”We do not see things they way they are. We see them the way we are.” Torah

All too often our freedoms are pinned on the outcome of events, what happens on the outside. It’s a version of passively waiting around for someone to rescue you dressed up as virtue. You want the suffering caused-by-the-outside to stop.

I was once involved with an unfeeling woman who ’caused’ me no end of suffering and unrequited love. Then I dreamed that I was trying to explain something so that she would finally-understand-me, when all of a sudden the perspective pulled back so that I was now looking on and could see that I was dressed as Robin from Batman…

I was boy wonder..

rescuing the damsel in distress.

My suffering was not because of anything she had said or done. It was because I was inflated and believed myself capable of saving her from herself, when in fact I was quite out of my depth and had woefully overestimated myself. The dream was chiding me, ‘get out of your super-hero garb and you’ll feel a lot better.’

So I did,

and I did.

”Our suffering is as much created by railing against the circumstances at hand as by those circumstances themselves.’ L. van der Post.

When you find yourself suffering in an apparently needless way it’s difficult to ask the question, ‘what in me feels this way?’ You’re too close to it for perspective. After a while the answer comes out that you’re identified with some corner of the psyche that is not getting it’s way and that the many other mansions of your inner world aren’t getting lived in.

Perhaps it’s easier to ask, in a quieter moment, ‘On what does happiness depend?’  Any concrete answer, much as you might want to nail it down, is identical with suffering. Why? Because it makes aliveness conditional, narrows options, refuses the unscripted and prejudges meaning. It’s the beginning of fending life off rather than adapting and growing.

What this means is that the pursuit of happiness, given the status of constitutional right for many and collectively synonymous with freedom, is at the root of much human misery. It’s not just that your happiness might be at the expense of someone else but that the wish for life to be other than it is actually prescribes joy. It narrows the band width for engagement with life and so has the opposite of its intentions..

This is not to say that you shouldn’t strive for anything. Wanting nice things is not the problem. It’s having to have them and feeling failed if you don’t that will put a crimp in your day.

Once there was a man who had seven sons though none of them pleased him entirely. His secret frustrated wish was for a daughter.  Eventually a girl was born and there was much celebration though she was so weak that she had to be baptised immediately for the fear she might not live until the priest could be fetched. The father sent one of the lads, he couldn’t recall which, to get water from the well. All the others followed and an argument broke out between them as to who would carry the jug such that it is accidentally broken.

The boys are too afraid to go home.

Their father becomes ever more impatient..

‘They have evidently gone off on some game and forgotten about it,’ he thought, becoming even more agitated. He paced and fretted and muttered. Eventually he lost his rag and let out a great curse,

”Wicked boys! May you all be turned into ravens!” No sooner had the words left his lips when there was a great fluttering up of black wings around him. The boys had returned in just that moment, hunger having driven them home.

This cautionary tale has a great deal hidden in it: not only what happens to neglected sons, but it also details the role that the feminine then plays in redeeming the brothers from the depersonalising and debilitating effects of the Patriarchy.

The Princess is raised without the knowledge of her brothers, a secret kept carefully by her parents. Eventually she overhears some loose conversation between courtiers and the truth comes out. She becomes determined to free her brothers come what may and sets off to find them even though she has no idea where to begin.

She walks to the end of the world.

But cannot find them.

She goes to the boiling sun,

But cannot find them.

She goes to the freezing moon.

But cannot find them.

Eventually she goes to the Stars who comfort her and give her a magical drumstick of chicken which is a key to the Glass Mountain within which the Raven brothers are held.

When she gets there she discovers that the drumstick is lost, so she cuts off one of her fingers and uses that to open the mountain. Inside she is greeted by a dwarf who says that the masters will be home shortly and invites her through to a lavish dining hall with a groaning table and fancy cutlery.

The Princess takes her royal signet ring off and pops it into one of the Ravens glasses before ducking out of sight, uncertain about how she will be received. When the ring is discovered and its meaning discerned, a great shout of joy goes up, ‘Our sister is here to save us!’  When she shows herself the boys are restored to their human form..

and there’s loads of hugging and leaping up and down.

The generally accepted moral of the story, that harsh words should be avoided, misses the psychological significance of this shortest Grimm’s tale. It details an aspect of patriarchal legacy not generally considered…

besides the daughter being raised on a lie..

the sons become a mob.

Part of the problem with belonging to an exclusive club is that its members are generally required to forgo the temperament that might enjoy anything beyond the club, anything that might be a part of a more personal destiny and so despite their privilege so too are they held back in the pell mell of life’s schoolyard, imprisoned in collective identity. Instead of thoughts or feelings he might call his own he has a manifesto. This is fervently trotted out as if it were the beliefs themselves that mattered but you soon find that they are mere soundbites of collective opinion..

Caaaaw!

This kind of authoritarian father winds up cursing all his sons. Not just the one, he forgets which, to whom the task and the responsibility was given. He fails to distinguish between them and thus fails to relate to any of his sons as a person in his own right, regardless of their guilt or innocent. He treats them as members of a flock before cursing them to remain so.

So these sons can never reach maturity. They are trapped in the Glass Mountain, a fancy prison with a dwarf  butler instead of a jailer and every finest thing instead of bread and water but detainees nevertheless. The father’s curse that lies insidiously behind the idealization of their royal blood means his son’s are barred from finding their own way in life and have to remain tied to family expectations even if these are that you fail or that you succeed but only by having to betray the fundamental impulse to your own self discovery.

By contrast, the Princess really knows what she’s about and makes the unpopular decision to take matters into her own hands.

She’s been witness to her father fretting over procedure and decorum, preferring priests to doctors: worried, not that she might die, but that she may do so improperly.. and so she has something concrete to kick against.

She sets off with determination and suffers all kinds of extremes before she is at last assisted by the Stars, the deep archetypal reservoirs of the Psyche which so often nurture and guide when a personal quest is courageously embraced.

The story suggests that the inner feminine plays a much greater part in his passage to manhood than he might be willing to let on. The more popular myth, that valiant George defeats the devouring mother with all kinds of super charged macho warrior items..

is perhaps a later story, since a knight must already have a lady on whose behalf he quests, whose colors he wears, who is curious about the face behind the visor,  who wants to know what he personally thinks and feels, what ground he stands on..

before the slightest prospect of being roasted alive should be even vaguely  entered into..

What does it mean to be truly human? One answer is that a person’s humanity might be measured by their capacity to empathically connect with another.

”You can judge a society by how they treat their weakest.” Ghandi.

There is no ‘I’ without a ‘thou’. For as long as the other is an ‘it’, then so are we.

‘Whatsoever you do unto the least of my brothers, you do unto me.’  Matt 25;40.

So governmental ruling that animals don’t have feelings has an effect much wider and greater than the already sorry state of animal welfare. Downgrading the sentience of any Other means we lose more than our connection to and care for them. We erode our own internal cohesion as well.  The capacity for reflection is diminished. Inner dialogue’s pathways become overgrown.

When we diminish the Other we become less able to enjoy and be emotionally nourished by them. We become less able to respond, to be responsible. We become less affected by loss. It too is degraded from the noble Grief of Bonds Broken to corrective medication for anxiety and depression.

Our disconnection from the plight of the Other might seem like respite from concern but in the fullness of time it brings poetic justice in it’s wake….,

‘…cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of activity and a lowering of self regard that finds utterance in self reproaches and self revilings..’ S. Freud.

This reduced capacity for both joy and sorrow is endemic in our culture, yet easily evades detection since such whittling away at the Principle of Relatedness in a world already enthralled to macho Gods that won’t talk to or acknowledge one another is as difficult to spot as a black cat in a dark room.

One of the reasons we can get so close to animals is that language is often garnish to tone and gesture, where the main body of communication resides, in which many creatures are already fluent, notwithstanding the human capacity to identify with species that can personify both our instinctuality and higher wisdom, sometimes bringing extraordinary benefits to the humans in the frame.

Clinical studies show that this ‘participation mystique’, which allows shared identity whilst honoring separation, alleviates depression and the autistic encapsulation suffered by isolated consciousness. Churchill described the depression he struggled with as his ‘black dog.’ Had he a black dog at his side he might not have had to have it within.

My old dog Noyle had a most unusual gift. He would go and sit quietly next to anyone who was emotionally upset. He was quite unobtrusive in his attention and would sit at an angle so as not to be impolite, though once in a while would catch your eye to let you know he was still there. And so all of a person’s feelings could be safely expressed. It was as though he just soaked them all up. So anger never lingered, hurt got directly attended, sadness was just allowed and moods dispelled.

Noyle’s magic went further. When my son was twelve he was taken away by authorities whose expert opinion it was that a man could not raise a child. He was eventually returned but in the meanwhile I was emotionally devastated by the loss of my son whom I’d raised single handed since he was a baby.

One night I was weeping in bed. Noyle was sat beside me holding his habitual vigil for anyone in pain. All of a sudden it seemed that a voice rose up in the darkness, not from Noyle himself exactly, but from the space between us, some well pool of Being that contained us both,..

‘you hurt because you love the young master so much..’

I nodded..

‘if the pain could be taken away by lessening the love would you accept that?’

I shook my head, no.

‘then embrace your loss. It is the secret face of love.’

Now, ten years later, the boy is a man and the old dog lies dead. I buried my face in his neck for a final time and as I struggled with hot tears I heard a familiar voice in our between…

‘you hurt because you loved the old dog so much…’

There is a variant on the Cinderella story, one of hundreds, called, ‘Donkey Skin’, which has some details in it missing from the popular version, details that might help us appreciate why it’s so difficult to get to the Ball with even the wiliest Fairy God Mother..

Suppressed details are always the juicy bit of the story, like the reporter’s question to Putin at the Helsinki summit, ‘Did you want Trump to win and did you help him?,’ to which the reply was, ‘Yes I did, yes, I did,’ being artfully airbrushed from the White House transcript of that hallowed meeting…

but I digress…

In the story of Donkey Skin, the heroine has to work as a swine herd and servant girl, taking on menial disguise in flight from a strange madness that has gripped her father, the king.

The Queen has just died of a mysterious illness and you might imagine that the king is smitten with grief. It certainly appears so. In his delusional state the despairing king imagines his daughter to be his next bride and so she is forced to flee, aided by the obligatory Fairy God Mother who knows to get out when craftiness fails, camoflaged in a donkey skin flayed by order of the king himself..

who now clearly has issues.

A Prince of a neighboring kingdom spies Donkeyskin one day and falls in love with her so deeply he collapses. In his delirium he shouts out that only a loaf of bread baked by the servant girl will save him. A ring lost in the dough gives away her true identity and everyone gets to win including her father, the king, whose madness is spontaneously lifted and his claim over her renounced when he first sees her as a bride…….

So not only does the Princess manage to escape the clutches of her mad father but he himself is redeemed by testifying to the fact of her separate destiny.

The king’s madness and it’s cure seem apropos in these days of deliberate nonsense and obfuscation. So how does the king’s madness unfold and what might we learn from the way it is resolved?

The king goes mad in stages. First there is the death of his Queen and you might suppose the madness of a broken heart but upon forensic inspection we see that though, ”the king’s happiness was shattered by the sudden illness of his dear wife,’… it was because, ‘she was so many years younger than himself that the idea she might die before him came as a great shock.”

It was not her death but the idea of it that drove him mad. Not her loss but that she had a destiny other than the bit part in his drama for which he had reserved her. His refusal to face her mortality is a denial of her humanity, in itself a form of ‘killing off’ the Other.

Rather than face the limits of his Narcissistic Omnipotence he collapses under the strain of denial, extending his treatment of others as stock to everyone else including his daughter who he now relates to as his date.

When the Princess runs to her FGM asking what the hell she can do, she advises her to ask the king for a dress made of the sky.

‘He won’t be able to do it and will have to let you go…’

But he somehow manages it so she suggests asking for a dress made of the Sun which she supposed would be trickier and it did indeed take death threats and staying up all night for several unhappy jewellers and gold smiths but by morning it was made.

The king’s madness increases as he doubles down. His incestuous desires join forces with out-of-this-world idealization of his daughter who he’s happy to experience as cosmic elemental force. But his depersonalization of her both as both sexual object and as goddess incarnate is then cemented by his response to her third and final attempt to appeal to whatever vestige of Relatedness remains in the old king by asking for the hide of his donkey which she’s sure he must refuse since he cherished the little donkey ‘above all his other possessions,’ thinking that he would never have the heart to kill his beloved pet and so she would be free…

But the skin is summarily delivered to her door and so she knows the king’s madness is complete, that the Other really doesn’t exist for him anymore. She can only escape, camoflaged by the skin, living out the arrogant king’s inferiority for him as Swineherd and Cinders.

Many a child is compelled to forgo their own destinies for the sake of an unstable parent who ‘knows best’ and overly steers their child in the name of ‘helping’. Such involvement has an incestuous quality because the unique destiny of the other, their person-hood, has been sacrificed in the process with the conviction that they shouldn’t trust their own thoughts and feelings.

Its a form of dumbing kids down that is not only mad but maddening. Poor Donkey Skin is made to feel that it is she who is the crazy one in the equation. Such enstupiding of others is easily done. If you treat people like donkeys they will soon bray, preferring to bend themselves out of shape than be incongruent with expectation.

So the danger is not just that the king is mad and can’t see what is in front of him but that the Princess feels it’s her fault and that she couldn’t think up something clever enough to keep her father’s hands off her and fool him into letting her go. So she begins to feel like a stupid donkey rather than realize she has been dumped on.

This process of enstupiding, so necessary to centralised power, is way more advanced than you might think. Of course there are the risible excesses of political correctness that compel shops to mark the Harry Potter broomstick on sale at Halloween with the disclaimer, ‘Does not actually fly,’ and sell salt with a serving suggestion….

But I only realized just how total we have become identified with our donkeyskins when I noticed today, for the first time ever and for your convenience, instructions on a toilet roll.

Apparently it’s a five stage process for which the kind manufacturers have provided a step by step approach to polishing your Nipsy, complete with diagrams, pointing arrows, when to wipe and when to pat, just in case you have become so addled with disinformation that you can’t recall, since last you crapped..

how to wipe your own arse.

Huzzah for the beacon of hope that is our proud civilization.

I suppose the thing is that if you are going to lie big, so big that not only did you not mean what you said,…

but that you actually meant the opposite of what you said,..and want us to take comfort in your being 180* out of whack

and then preface all this by saying that you hoped it would be perfectly obvious to everyone by now that you meant the absolute opposite of the tainted shite already pouring forth from your foul gob,…

then you need someone dumb enough to believe it and if they do not exist then they must be created. And where better to start than with the assumption that people are so out of touch with themselves that they need bathroom advice widely mastered by the average four year old.