Blog

On Muttering.

Freedom is not something that can be given. It can only be quietly stolen – and even then, its from ourselves that we have to take it.

If some part of you colludes with authority out of the wish to be told what to do, to be looked after or to have life sufficiently regimented not have to ponder it, then you’ll turn a blind eye to the price that you pay for the priviledge.

The route of least resistance means renouncing your own authority and grabbing at the invitation to be led by the nose. Our glorious leaders will comply all too swiftly and then take their own route of least resistance into hubris and corruption.

So, everyone gets to be a baby.

Instant gratification for all.

what a clever trick.

We tell ourselves that we’re not babies….

yeah wiv, wiv, Voting an’ Freedom an all….

Except that it is precisely your vote that has actively helped bring about the covert intention of the One System system, which is that 93% of the world’s wealth lies in the bank accounts of eight families.

Or is the erosion of the middle classes and the consequent vast increases in inequality just an anomalie of the system? Could it not be simply fulfilling its purpose? Stuffing itself to engorgement whilst selling you the idea that you are free?

and evolved.

The ‘rule of intentionality’, says things go the way that they are pointed and so if there seems to be a contradiction in our system its on account of a collective split in the fabric of Western Civilisation’s reality.

When a child loses its mother, or is faced by a mother who is on automatic pilot, the child splits itself in order to cope with the trauma.
” The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. Far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.” Judith Herman.

Our culturally endemic narcissism helps us do this….

”Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” George Orwell.

and yet

”There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Maya Angelou.

Its not just the trauma of  loss but what then fails to occur, the pinched emptiness and emotional malnourishment that’s part and parcel of things that don’t happen and stories that aren’t told.

Part of the child stays in touch with what is going on, but has to hive off and suppress the story of the traumatised self to do so.

The problem with this slight of hand is that the divided self then has to live in a divided world in order to be congruent with it. It has to pour extra energy into interpreting that world and even more into ‘how-life-has-to-be’.

Collectively, this is exactly what has happened. We really have been separated from the Great Mother. We collectively respond in the same way as any child deprived of its Mother. We go numb, can’t really remember stuff, and construct a split reality to live our split selves in.

”Trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called “doublethink,” and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call “dissociation.”‘ Judith Herman

Our split, doublethink, world deals with some pretty tough contradictions, but still manages to preserve the notion that we’re ‘free’…. whilst compulsively living the same groundhog day for decades at a time, following slavish routines determined by others in pursuit of goals that come in the mail…

We think of ourselves as democratic whilst being perfectly aware that we are actually ruled by oligarchic mega-corporations.

”What do you think of Western Democracy?”

someone once asked Ghandi.

”I think it would be a very good idea,”

he replied.

We applaud our ‘standard of living’, whilst being appalled at how much crap we trick ourselves into amassing. We guage our worth by the size of the pile, build it up, tend the pile, polish and preen it, then take detox weekends to get away from it all.

We’re spiritually evolved yet still collectively judge our worth by what we drive and which neighbourhood we live in.

We think of ourselves as god’s meek children whilst inflatedly sucking the world dry.

We pride ourselves on our pile whilst acknowledging that money can’t buy  love. We loath consumerism but run ourselves into the ground in pursuit of it.

I and me not talking to each other is the lynch pin of this split reality. For as long as the path between their houses remains overgrown you can happily live with even the most crucifying of contradictions.

And be eternally controlled on account of it.

Why?

Because the divided are easily ruled.

Whether its sending humanitarian aid to wartorn countries in the same container as automatic weapons, or espousing compassion for others whilst allowing yourself to be treated like dirt, the trick of keeping I and me apart so as not to question stuff works like a charm.

In 1940 Stalin bought out a ‘Muttering law”, which said that you could get 25 years in the Gulag for talking to yourself. His mate Adolf (on the opposite side) thought this was such a good idea he implimented the same law a year later.

Thou shalt not speak to thyself.

Why?

Because Consciousness can’t be policed and when the inner split is mended people are more difficult to boss about.

”The best instruction you could ever give a poet: don’t ignore the honest muttering in your head.” Alice Oswald

Muttering is the spontaneous expression of forbidden truth. Its the secret story of the suppressed self. Mostly we think of stuff and then give it expression. Muttering is the other way around, you hear yourself after the fact. Its a kind of coaching, or in fact, mothering of oneself. The word ‘mutter’ comes from the German for ‘mother’. When we mutter we are mothering ouselves. I and me are sharing the comfort of  inner truths.

So listen to mutter, pay attention to what you say under your breath and through clenched teeth, hear the words of that song you keep humming. Do it out loud and deliberate. Whatever it is, is asking for more expression and validation by insisting itself on consciousness in this way.

Muttering is a form of what used to be called parapraxes, like slips of the tongue, because its rare that the content of the muttering comes fully to light. So the task is to listen to yourself muttering and really hear it, be its advocate. Then it will settle down.

They say that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. Its not. Its the first sign of truth squeezing past the inner censors. That’s why Stalin and Hitler banned it. They saw that it liberated people from their oppression by overcoming the inner division that had previously rendered them so maleable.

 

 

 

 

For life to have meaning.

Apparently, at the ecstatic height of the Eleusinian Mysteries rites of ancient Greece, a darkly robed and fearfully masked figure would walk quietly about whispering into the ears of the participants, ‘Death is coming.’

Such a ritual gesture is apotropaic, a turning away of the harm and evil influence of inflation, somewhat inevitable if the purpose of the evening is to become one with The Mystery.

The dark cloaked figure’s grounding reminder of death allows the experience of the rite to be integrated and lived out in the community as creative gratitude.

We do something rather different. We deflate with guilt. Major guilt.

Other than that the One System system encourages inflation at every turn.

What gets skipped over in all the stories of Yahweh’s Great Smiting, are all those he lets off the hook, namely anyone that would praise him. His commandments are trashed left, right and centre by his kings throughout history. The message is clear,

”You can do as you please so long as its in my name.”

Which is what Western Civilisation has subsequently done without restraint..

Bonzer,…sounds ideal!

Mistaking the heady raptures of an identification with a wrathful and plunderous god for the kind of wisdom that comes from a really rather different life is more easily done than should be allowed.

Nevertheless;

Wisdom is never violent: where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. ~Carl Jung,

And though it may suit us to mistake the one for the other there is a catch.

No, a consequence.

Thou shalt not do loads of stuff but chiefly thou shalt not become they full self for to do so is to have a relationship with Psyche which breaks the one rule we see Yahweh applying over and again whilst all the others are allowed to go flying.

No-one but Me.

Which gives rise to a wee problem.. Psyche and Sophia/Nature are the same thing..

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME.

No we weren’t, it’s just that for a person to truly become themselves they have to meet with Psyche and that has to happen outside the churchyard you grew up in.

There is a predominant body of opinion that says the Great Mother had to be defeated in order for ego consciousness to emerge at this, our shining pinnacle of evolutionery, er, progress.. The One System system is necessary, they say, to the emergence of Consciousness.

Bollocks.

What has actually emerged is not ego consciousness at all but a cult of persona, one-dimensional man, which is a very different animal. In fact ego consciousness is something of an endangered species. Mostly when people talk about their ego they mean some corner of themselves holding the rest to ransom.

In this scenario, most of ego is actually being tyrannised by the persona, a much more limited, single aspect of the personality which can gain the upper hand, or  feels it has to take over for want of sufficient internal co-hesion.

So, martial law then, really.

We have no reason to believe that people of tens of thousands of years ago had less of a sense of themselves than do we moderns, in fact it seems as though some considerable collective regression might even have taken place.

The kind Darwin could never allow except by acknowledging that Ant and Dec are the best candidates for an inter species delegation should one ever arrive.

In fact its more than likely that some of the people of yesteryear had already got what being human is all about. Its just prejudice to think that the living must be more evolved than the dead.

we’ve not so much evolved as wandered off

We are the ones with the narrow veiw,  the blinkers that go with Single System perspective. A multiplicity of divinities, as in many ancient times, would have meant a corresponding inner multiplicity, more elbow room inside, space to walk around.

Even the earliest of our ancestors pictograms, that of Geb and Nut,  brother and sister protagonists of the Egyptian creation myth , depicted what would have already been in consciousness for millenia, a lived sense of self and other, of I and thou.

I can talk to Me much better with such inner spaciousness. Sense of self increases with the identity that comes from the particular, unique mix of observances that you might make and various altars to which you might leave offerings.

In the West our predominant model for interacting with the divine has conversly been pared away to the somewhat less evolved wish/demand to be given stuff.

Even mercy, faith or grace.

What does it mean to have been raised in a culture whose principle prayer, once the introductory pleasantries are out of the way goes straight for, ‘give us this day our daily bread.’ Its not far off a demand for pocket money. Compare it to the feeling in this ancient prayer of the high priest of Ra,

”let me lie with the heat of sun in my beard,

Eating figs and smelling the hay

Let me enter the temple of fire

Bake me into bread, smelt me into gold.”

The Sweet Wound.

 The greatest obstacle to healing depression is to see it as the enemy. We talk about fighting, combating, struggling with depression. Even ‘having depression’ suggests it intrusively came to you from somewhere else.
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In the early days of my training I went to see an analyst and was reeling off my woes and complaints about life.
”At least I’m not depressed,”I said.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘you haven’t got there yet.’
I was shocked.
Depression could be a goal.
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The fact is there are lots of things in life to be depressed about. And if we then try and combat it rather than enquiring into its purpose, it entrenches itself.
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”What we resist, persists.” CG Jung
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Depression is a sign that I has stopped talking with Me. The path between their houses has overgrown. The feeling of social isolation that comes with depression is mirrored on the inside as self estrangement.
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Much depression has to do with the issue of authenticity, with whether we are being who we are. If a gap begins to grow between who we really are and who we wish we were then depression will fill that gap.
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If we pretend to be what we are not for others in the fruitless and misguided quest to be loved by them, then depression will call our attention to the dissonance between what is actually going on and the new improved version of ourselves we’re trying to sell.
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Whether its with yourself, your path, or life’s mourning and pain, the insistence on things being other than they are gives rise to depression.
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”Our suffering is as much created by our struggling against the circumstances at hand as the circumstances themselves.” M Israel.
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If we are living someone else’s life, or someone else’s vision of who we ‘ought’ to be, then depression will ensue. And if we are not living up to our potential on account of its cost to us, it will be all the worse.
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”There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.”  RD Laing
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The US spends an incredible $350 billion a year on medication and therapy for depression. This amount is currently increasing at a rate of 20%.
http://www.healthline.com/health/depression/statistics-infographic.
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The figures are scary and again its tempting to whip out you sword forgetting that depression has a purpose and failing to notice that it is pointing at something we subscribe to that doesn’t actually feed us or represent us.
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Something has to give.
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and not this or that but the paradigm itself.
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We have a collectively narcissistic vision of ourselves as highly evolved when in fact we are really the creature that has only one of its senses working and thinks itself so grand in the absence of all the others.
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This is the characteristic response, the strategy, of the un-mothered child, and indeed we’ve had no Queen of Heaven for quite a few millenia now. When Mother is lost the child does not grow, or in only one of its aspects.
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The rest of it shuts down, regresses and trashes the play pen.
”We fail to grasp the proverbial reality that as we selfishly destroy nature “our outer world”, consequently we destroy “our inner world”, and ourselves as a species. The psychological consequence of this disconnection from nature amputates our soul connection with Mother Earth.”
http://www.michaelgeorge.com/app/uploads/2015/03/Civilizations-Disconnect-from-Nature-and-Psyche.pdf
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And its a question of more than mere deprivation.
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The paradigm itself creates depression.

The monotheistic notion that life always has to be cheerful (could) be instructed by melancholy. We could learn from its qualities and follow its lead, becoming more patient in its presence, lowering our excited expectations, taking a watchful attitude as this soul deals with its fate..” T Moore

The loss of the Principle of Relatedness in our culture means both a loss of the internal cohesion of I and Me and of the bond between ourselves and the external world. This is generally experienced as disconnection, lack of trust and not belonging that then reinforces internal divisions and the feeling of alienation.
The thing is that the creative life also has its gloomy vales.

”Creative people who can’t help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.” RD Laing

So sometimes it can feel like a choice between the aggravation of refusing to be what we are or the further aggravation of  grasping life’s nettle. It doesn’t seem fair and its not.

”a warring peace, a sweet wound, a mild evil.” R Owen.

If the feelings of being depressed can be honoured as a form of longing then so can the feelings of riding your push bike down Middenmarsh hill with a mouthful of blackberries and chocolate.

based on an extract from my new book, ‘Abundant Delicious’, https://andywhiteblog.com/2016/06/11/abundant-delicio…ot-off-the-press/

 

 

Chaos, Reason and Creativity .

One of the cudgels with which the sentimental fascism of political correctness encourages us to beat ourselves is the notion, ‘everything happens for a reason.’

In other words, you are to blame for your own ills, an unforgiving, colloquial psychoanalysis that implies, along with Freud, that you must have bought this on yourself.

Then why is it so popular?

This mauling of the concept of karma by the wise ones casting their pearls before you is done so that their compassion need never be tested. The effulgent fantasy of how much they care whilst refusing to walk a step in another’s shoes can all be neatly kept in place.

But despite its harshness, so too are we easily comforted by everything happening for a reason. It keeps life’s chaos to a minimum. Stuff is not random, you just haven’t figured out what it was you did to deserve it. And once you have, you can be guilty again and therefor a causal agent in an otherwise crazy world.

….potent in your misfortune.

Everything happening for a reason will re-confirm your bad conscience for you. It will help to make meaning of suffering without actually having to stretch more than your pinky into it or learn anything at all, except what you already know.

It also justifies your advantage over others. You got to be that lucky because the Gods favored you in your great virtue and therefor condone you. Its not gluttony or greed, its reward for piety.

Either way, ‘everything happening for a reason’ pans out pretty well for those that have paid their subscription. And it all sounds so spiritual and evolved. But its not about karma in its truest sense at all.

It is no longer about, ‘what I must do to fulfill myself’, on the understanding that the Universe will bring lessons to help me in my endeavor.

What we choose to understand by Karma has become distorted into a fear-and-blame based response to life. We scrabble about for some misdemeanor to hitch our situation to so we need not experience our smallness or cosmic insignificance.

Everything ‘happening for a reason’ is a collective regression to pre Galilean times when we thought of ourselves as the centre of the Universe. Nothing could occur without reference to our narcissistic selves. It seems we haven’t moved on very much and the ‘evolved’ souls of this world will still tut and cluck when you are hit by a bus or contract ebola, earnestly encouraging you to search your soul, or perhaps what you must have done in a previous life to have deserved such a fate.

What is most interesting about this belief system is the impact it has on creative life. It kills it. What I’ve noticed is that when you accept that shit does and will happen without reference to reason, then creativity unfolds by itself.

The reason is simple. Creativity requires chaos.

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” F Nietzsche.

There is no chaos in everything happening for a reason. Its all faaar too squared away. When you can get out of your own way sufficiently for stuff to happen without reason, for things not to make sense, then inspiration comes.

‘Confusion is the welcome mat at the door of creativity.’ M Gelb.

I am a writer. I’m also an artist. There’s a common denominator. I’m at my best when I haven’t the faintest idea what is going on. I got taught this principle by a brother and sister aged four and six respectively who were marooned one summer in the same rambling mansion where I was grounds keeper.

‘Tell us a story.’

What would you like to hear?’

‘No, a new one.’

‘About a horse with a very long tail…

‘an a glass crown….

‘an a witch with a zapper ray…’

It was hard at first. I had unlearned my imagination and forgotten what it fed upon. They trained me up. The main thing is… to begin.

People hadn’t yet been educated out of their intuitive intelligence in ancient times. The Greek philosopher Carpocrates advocated doing something new every day to keep the chaos alive..

‘It is important to do what you don’t know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious’. C Castaneda.

Without the delight of being continuously up against the unknown even that which we think of as ordinary and mundane becomes fraught and tedious. I came across an article today titled, ‘How to eat an Apple’. I was tempted to post a request for some instruction about how to find my hands given that I’d need them whatever the technique being advocated.

So, thank god stuff needn’t happen for a reason. Praise be the glorious, messy, left field of life. And lets be thankful for everything that can sneak up on us unbidden and undeserved.

As far as things happening for a reason are concerned…..

I prefer Joel ben Izzy’s approach,

“I still believe that things in this world do, indeed, happen for a reason. But sometimes that reason only comes after they happen. It is not a reason we find, but one we carve, sculpted from our own pain and loss, bound together with love and compassion”.

Mayors ban Dying.

I wonder what a visiting alien could deduce from our insatiable materialism about the mother/infant bond in Western culture.

Mater-ialism.

And its not just about obscene levels of consumption or rampant trashing of our own playpens, but our attitude to our bodies, to growing old and dying.

Different cultures experience death in different ways. Ours is so riddled with anxiety and horror that we spend much of our lives engaged in projects whose prime objective is not to think about it.

What?

See….

What is suppressed in a culture slides into the Unconscious. It doesn’t go away. And when what is suppressed is Half of Heaven then we will all be busting at the seams with Whatever it is thats slipped out of sight.

Because,

‘The lost Goddess represents the psyche of each one of us.’ Freke and Gandy

Having Wisdom/Sophia entirely written out of our religion has not been some mere historical event.

“Young children, who for whatever reason are deprived of the continuous care and attention of a mother or a substitute-mother, are not only temporarily disturbed by such deprivation, but may in some cases suffer long-term effects.”
Bowlby
What happens when this dynamic is played out on a cosmic stage? When the Great Mother is cast into the sea by Yahweh so long ago now its human pre-history?

When the divine feminine is collectively repressed two main things happen. Firstly, we lose access to a crucial point of reference that enables us to make informed decisions. The story of Solomon’s Wisdom was, in its original form, about his relationship with Wisdom/Sophia before the church fathers dumbed it down.

She makes decisions on the basis of relatedness, the genius of which is the story of deciding to cut the disputed baby in half knowing the true mother would reveal herself through her love. The collective loss of such intelligent compassion  is a disaster superseded only by the second thing, the Goddess as Psyche,

’falls into identification with the body.’ (Freke and Gandy)

In other words, Sophia/Wisdom becomes locked up in matter from where she exerts a fascination over us. And instead of She who is more valuable than silver and pearls you have Silver and Pearls.

so its not as benign as you might hope.

When Wisdom/Sophia is sunk in the unconsciousness She,

‘ responds with violent emotions, irritability, lack of control coupled with lack of self-criticism and delusions. [Man] becomes ruthless, arrogant and tyrannical’. CG Jung 
Loss of the Goddess has done more than reduce the ‘developed’ world to spiritual subsistence. It must be asked whether our rampant greed is more than it seems. And its about far more than mere loss or deprivation.

”Maternal failures produce reactions which interrupt going-on-being and (constitute) a threat of annihilation, the infant does not really come into existence, the true self does not become a living reality.”D Winnicott.

The vengeance of the uninvited guest, the devalued and disenfranchised Mother/Queen, is bound to manifest as Goddess in her dark aspect. Hell hath no fury and our scorning of the Psyche has resulted in more than mere loss. Her banishment has not meant she’s gone quietly.
With the poetry of divine justice She has made us sleep on the bed we have made for ourselves. As Psyche she creates all kinds of afflictions from within. As (mater)ial world she exerts all kinds of bewitching fascinations from without. One way or another she will be of influence in our lives.

But its perhaps in our attitudes to death that we live Wisdom/Sophia’s loss the hardest.

And where we get craziest.

Its not just the unbridgeable gap of uncontained grief for the loved one but the sense, the reminder, that the Great Mother is also gone.

”A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. That is home. That is happiness.” Herman Hesse

Without that particular happiness we are bound to experience ourselves as homeless and fraught with the anxiety of a divine homesickness.

We humans have long memories. A recent paper in the Australian Anthropology Journal shows that at over twenty one sites around the coast of Australia there are tribal stories describing the rising sea levels and the specific effect that this had on the coastline after the last ice age retreated 7,000 years ago.

The loss of Wisdom/Sophia from our pantheon was only a piddly 3,000 years ago and on the timeclock of our species an event that happened less than twelve months back to a forty year old person.

What is effectively the extreme loss of containment/context for grief and mourning means we find it difficult enough to face life, let alone death. Instead of going through the various phases associated with death we just get stuck at denial. This not very noticeable on account of all the other denial we live in until it borders on absurdity.

I was reading about places in the world where you are not allowed to die on MSN.

In Biritiba, Brazil the local mayor banned dying for want of burial plots. A new cemetery was established and the ban lifted. But can it last?

In Longyearbyen, Norway, death was recently banned because the corpses weren’t decomposing in the permafrost. If you get sick you have to go and live where the worms can get at you.

And in Sarpoureux , France, the mayor forbad residents from dying by an official edict. “Offenders shall be severely punished,” he ruled. Unfortunately he soon broke his own law with much judicial time then spent by concerned locals contemplating not only how to bring him to justice but how he might be persuded to take the witness stand at the same time.

 

 

 

Woundology.

Caroline Myss makes an interesting observation about a narcissistic trend in our culture, the increasingly common occurence of people introducing themselves and interacting with others on the basis of their wounds.

It seems all so PC and, oh, he’s so in touch with his feelings and vulnerability…

but actually you are being picked clean like a Wilderbeest on the grassland vlei.

”People use their wounds as a kind of shadow power.” C Myss.

There’s a sense that life in general and you in particular owe the sufferer something on account of it, some special  kind of dispensation for which there’s a very good reason why the normal rules should not apply.

On one level its pure narcissistic manipulation,

”in order for the wounded person to elicit sympathy or compassion, to gain a measure of power and/or authority, and/or to claim allowance for their disagreeable actions.”D Ward

people are doing vulnerability rather than being vulnerable…

WTF?

But there’s more ladies and gentlemen…  more than just about getting inside your defenses or getting you to feel sorry for him without him actually having to connect with his tragic story.

The semi -conscious manipulation is chump change compared to the service his sad story performs in keeping his potential at bay.

Never better or worse, never truly mourned or courageously faced, the eternally suppurating wound  has the power to stop the dizzy world from turning.

For as long as the story takes to tell…

but there is a cost..

…one that might soon truly justify the feeling of an eternal wound.

”The most important wound the ego has to face is that of the unlived life.” Hollis.

And not just the regret of what could have been, or the guilt of what you refuse to do now. Its those myriad and very real sins of ommision, from a moment’s lack of charity to the wholesale turning away from Life’s entire work. All the things you will never do, be or become.

Without the divine feminine to personify the Principle of Relatedness, the human psyche gets bent and not just out of shape. Its like one of those physics lab molecules made of pingpong balls and springs. Take out a chunk of it and the rest of it turns into something different. Chemically different.

Most obvious is the difficulty we have in relating to each other. Then there is the erosion of feeling that might mend sympathy. Less obvious is the problem I now has in talking to me.

The open wound is like that of the grail king who refuses the Quest. It is a metaphor for the unlived life, for the marginalised potential that would turn his life upside down if it were allowed into play.

Without much prompting the narcissistic king will tell you his troubles ‘ad nauseam’, and mostly it will be about why he is doomed to fail and who is to blame, forgetting that his maudlin ‘poor me’  protects him from the open ground in which his potential lies buried.

Creativity disrupts, chaos at our door. Potential demands, responsibility cast at our feet. Life’s canvas creates us back and for the person entirely engaged in self maintainence and shoring himself up, the creative adventure must be passed up.

The creative moment is characterised..

”by the motif of severe persecution.” Walter Otto.

Creativity is the antithesis of self preservation.

”To begat something which is alive you must dive down into the primval depths in which the forces of life dwell. And when you arise to the surface there will be a gleam of madness in your eyes, for in those depths death lives cheek by jowl with life.” ibid

It really is tempting to stay indoors. For the one who prizes an even keel and calm seas, the creative adventure is a threat to ontological security since..

”there, along with rapture and birth, rise up also horror and ruin.” ibid

The narcissist is so annoying in his ‘poor me’ that we forget his soliloquy has the quality of a rearguard action in the face of multiple invading dragons. He’s defending himself from being torn apart by his own inner world.

His great ball of yester year’s suffering is a damn sight easier to shoulder than today’s possibility.

And no, you don’t have to feel sorry for him.

The Function of Feeling.

My dog reminded me of something today.

We live in a very quiet rural place, but sometimes heavily laden tractors thunder by in the lanes where we walk.

There’s not a lot of space and though he’s sensible I always grab him by the scruff for safety’s sake as they roar past. On this occasion I let him go a fraction too soon and he shot off on his belly away from the scary monster.

For a moment it just seemed like fear but then I saw the gleam in his eye and the expression of excitement.

”look, I’m getting away, master!”

There was joy in the skulking.

”See me leap and bound, master!”

He was in some timeless Jedi moment…

”Check out my moves and skills, master…’

the thrill of evading the terrible jaws of the tractor beast…

…and when it was vanquished he was so pleased with himself he pranced about with accomplishment.

Apparently no-one had told him not to be afraid, or that it was ‘negative’, or that he couldn’t possibly be thrilled as well.

But then he hadn’t had two millenia of good vs evil to contend with and so he could do what most of us within the Single System system cannot.

he could feel all kinds of stuff at the same time.

If God refuses to contain opposites then what are we to do with ours?

And if we must cast out the Great Mother on pain of being burned at the stake for eighty generations, what happens to individual mothering? 

What happens when Her place is usurped  by an obscure patron saint with the unlikely and instantly forgettable name of Gerard Majella…

…. born in Muro Italy 1726.

Now you know.

Gerard, patron saint of mums.

Not the Great Horned One, or She of the Triple Moon.. who trampled down the flaming Titans..

Gerard.

In the absence of any sacred space to experience the divine feminine, let alone her compexity, any  individual mother is liable to struggle to integrate these complexities within herself, and so it can seem…

”as if the child had actually grown up with an archetype rather than a real mother. This legacy of a one-dimensional, split mother image may thus come to be handed down from generation to generation.” Carl Gustav Jung

What we do with this impoverished legacy is what any child does in the face of a disenfranchised or divided parents. We split ourselves up internally and keep the wound open with guilt. We do this in order to remain more than bit players in what is already an overwhelming cosmic drama.

To paraphrase Ronald Fairbairn,

”If I am guilty, I am responsible. If I am responsible, I can influence events. I am not so weak and helpless after all.”

And so the child magically divides up its inner world into parts judged ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in order to hold the outer world together. It becomes contradictory so as to not to live in contradiction. It becomes divided to be in harmony with division.

One of the things the current flood of psychologists in the world are needed for is that life is not allowed to be complicated. We can’t be scared and excited. That’s messy…

…and politically incorrect. It has to be one or the other. And so our feeling lives grind to a halt . Because we’re only allowed half of life and pride ourselves in being ‘positive’.

The loss of the Principle of Relatedness makes this process all the easier and so we hardly notice the slow demise of conversation between I and me, the growing rifts between estranged siblings, nor the stealth with which life’s issues become so new and improved.

Our Good is no longer bedecked in Forest Splendour but in the Opiated Tinsle of an easy life where everything is obvious and nothing has to be puzzled over or wrestled to the floor.

And we like it like that. Even if it makes us ill….

The split allows us to feel….. sophisticated an’, an’, an’, worldly.

Having hived off the scrag ends of experience we make for a prettier patient..

…but medicine is not enough if the body doesn’t want it.

“People seem today to misunderstand how to be cured. They just take the medicine. (But) sometimes we try to keep our hurts and pains. Sometimes it does not want to leave us. Medicine is our friend and can help, so help the medicine. Tell the medicine you have talked to your body and ask the medicine to help you.The medicine and the body need to be friends.” Joseph Eagle Elk

The body mostly doesn’t want the medicine. So we just live out the one tiny  corner of life we’re allowed, patting ourselves on the back for our ‘positive attitude’ which has, in fact, done no more than reduce psychic life to a millpond where the slightest stir of wind has us reaching for the rescue remedy…

..or (name your poison here).

We have been so schooled in treating ourselves with suspicion that we no longer trust our bodies or our feelings. Diana Whitmore calls it, ‘the tyranny of the positive.’Our evolutionary pinnacle is thus one of contempt, not just for the dark brother whom we have already projected out into the world, but contempt for the world of feelings which, despite out ‘alternative’ vision we are still dividing up into good and evil.

There is no such thing as a negative feeling, only those that make us uncomfortable. You can ‘let it go’, but actually anything that doesn’t go by itself is being pushed away and all that’s happened is you failed to learn from experience. A place of honour, on the other hand, gives it somewhere to come to rest where its not going to hurt anyone and buy you the time to find out what its doing in your psyche.

Calling a set of feelings ‘negative’ is tantamount to waging war on oneself. Its a declaration of mistrust directed at our own hearts.

I knew a woman who was proud that she never used the word ‘hate’, and forbade its use in the family. Her children grew up full of hate, for themselves, because they had to turn it all in instead of affording it proper context. Nor could they embrace their individual destinies  because the primary purpose of feelings is to guide our values and show us what is important in life.

If we label large chunks of our feeling world as ‘negative’ we forgo our own bearings and are liable to lose our way  despite the luxury of forshortening the ballpark that such suppression permits.

 

Medusa and the Stone Child.

One of the most striking stories from ancient times is that of Medusa. Her name comes from the Egyptian, ‘Maat’, meaning ‘Truth’, and is the source of words like ‘medicine’ and ‘mathematics’. She is one of the most archaic mythical figures,

”perhaps, an echo of the demon Humbaba, decapitated by Gilgamesh.”Camille Dumoulie.

Like the story of Humbaba (https://andywhiteblog.com/2015/06/21/the-fate-of-gilgamesh/), Medusa is not really a monster at all, or if she is, she did not deserve her reputation. Medusa was a priestess of Athena who was raped in the temple by Poseidon.

Athena then turned her long locks into protective snakes and gave her a look which had the power to turn men, and their unwanted advances, into stone.

She is given the power to protect and destroy.

Her terrifying, petrifying glance, is some attempt to rectify the balance of unavenged desecration.

Poseidon’s rape of the sacred feminine is an allegory of what had actually just occured in the nascent moments of Western Civilisation. The Goddess was violated in her own temple and demonised. Perseus, in later stories, kills her. But her powers are not diminished even by death. She continues to petrify and is finally mounted on the shield of Athena herself where she serves the Goddess as her most deadly weapon.

How are we to understand the symbolism of all this? Is there some sense in which Medusa’s frightful glance is relevant to modernity?

The desecration of the sacred feminine was the precursor to a scurge of Single Systems that had a very limited and therefor inherantly intolerant perspective on life, meaning and purpose. This gives the adherants of Single System systems,  a great sense of certainty, cast-iron beliefs and unassailable self-constructs.

These serve to create a tremendous sense of self-justification but there is a price to pay.

The overly determined self-construct turns us to stone.

Of course we need some kind of self construct, we couldn’t do without it, but sometimes our adaptability is sacrificed in favour of unreflected pride, the  vulnerable tips of life’s budding supplanted by the concrete of  absorbed conviction.

Ernesto Spinelli, called it ‘sedimentation‘, a term borrowed from geology which gives the idea that something fluid and alive has been packed down so hard it becomes like rock.

”Life becomes fixed and calcified, laid down in a rigid and inflexible way that obscures experience.” M Cooper.

In other words we lose the capacity for reflection. We switch to automatic pilot. I can no longer talk to me. Nothing can be learned. Growth stops. And for all the fun of being right as an a priori fact of existence…

”The sure path can only lead to death.”CG Jung

The reason for this is that sedimentation, for all its conviction, becomes an unyielding bedrock, immovable, unadaptable, beyond discussion or influence. This stunts the possibility that new things and fresh encounters might inform, re-animate or enrich life.

”What is hard is a companion of death, what is soft and weak is a companion of life.” Tao Te Ching.

In order to lead a creative life we have to be receptive to the Unknown. We have to be willing to be led by circumstances, sometimes even against our better judgement. There must be some chink in our armour that lets in the Other so that the imagination can flower.

Without some vulnerability to the Other there is no interaction with the world or with our own depths. Nothing comes in or goes out. Conversation grinds to a halt.

”The petrifying stare is synonymous with the inability to accomodate or change.” Camille Dumoulie.

Sedimentation happens when our beliefs and attitudes are packed down to stone, when nothing can be questioned, when everything is pre-judged, where there is no longer any seeking for the truth. Of course, there is anxiety in admitting you don’t know, can’t be sure, or have no absolute conviction, and yet to have one’s inner world carved in stone is quite terrifying by comparison.

”As soon as by one’s own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one’s own right is laid.” Adolf Hitler

Compare that to the following statement from the most prolific writer in psychology of our time..

There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite 
convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have 
been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know." — C.G. Jung

By contrast the rigid character structure of the Single System system already knows. His one perspective is certain but because his sole point of veiw cannot help him to find where he is on the map, any more than can a single compass bearing, his anxiety grows. He clings all the more to what he knows beyond doubt.

Unfortunately..

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” Descartes.

No Single System system can achieve this. Reinventing yourself, breaking the hard mould, means to doubt what you strove for, to be genuinely confused at your own internal contradictions, to admit you don’t know.

Without this softening, the rigid character is doubly endangered.

Firstly, his own potential must be sabotaged. Learning about something is experienced as a narcissistic admission of defeat. I have seen many addictions and ‘getting stoned’ rooted in the resulting disruption and frustration of  potential. Unlived life doesn’t go away. It can haunt our dreams like an aggrieved wraith,

Secondly,

horribly,

and despite the efforts of the various rattling skeletons above, we get to feel that we’ve arrived and know what’s what.

Instead of being petrified or awed by our own depths, its strange Otherness will be attributed to the world beyond Single System’s borders, that which terrifies, some other mono, and make war on it, condense it into terrorists.

Bodies stone cold.

The alternative is by way of the Inuit story of ‘The Stone Child’ marvellously told and interpreted by Clarrissa Pinkola Estes….

http://www.amazon.com/Warming-Stone-Child-Abandonment-Unmothered/dp/1591793033/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209687816&sr=8-1

The stone child is mothereless and clings to a cold stone that gradually sucks out his life.

But the stone child recognises its unmotheredness and allows its anguish and grief expression . This cracks open the stone that sucks out warmth and life.

Its not that we suffered any one particular thing that wounds us eternally but that we have not felt it to the full.

 

 

Icarus, shadow child.

Most of us know the story of Icarus, the boy who flew too high to the sun on wings made of vulture feathers and wax..

him fell an’ drown.

There is a back story that puts the tragedy into some perspective. Its a salutary tale about the fate of children raised by narcissists.

always, with the back story.

The back story is where meaning lies…

Daedalus, Icarus’ father, was a master craftsman, a vain man who ended up being imprisoned in a tower by Minos, king of Crete.

a poetic fate..

Icarus was imprisoned with him. He was a dark and moody boy who liked his own company and showed little interest in his father’s crafts. His adopted brother Talos, back home and waiting for them to return was very different, outgoing, bright and ever at Daedalus’ side in his workshop.

These two boys and the polarized differences between them represent a common underlying dynamic in the children of narcissistic parents.

What happens is that the children embody the parental split between the idealized self and the shadow, relieving the parent of the burden..

and the responsibility..

of having to deal with their own internal divisiveness.

Narcissists idealize themselves. In order to do this, they must hive off their shadow onto others. When this happens in the family..

as it does..

you will often find one of the children inexplicably slow and clumsy, a bit stand-offish and perhaps socially awkward.

If there is another child you will also often find that this one is apparently brilliant and can do no wrong. They are smart, popular, sporty and attractive.

What is going on?

Narcissists don’t do relatedness particularly and have this black and white attitude of ”you’re with me or against me”…

identify with me and how great I am or get out…

Other people, especially impressionable children, wind up either having to carry the parent’s shadow, or they are persuaded to identify with the parent’s more expansive, solar qualities.

They get to be the ‘golden child’ in the equation and are often treated very differently from the one delegated to carry the family baggage.

The dark scapegoat builds a defensive wall around themselves, sealing their status as aloof and uncouth,

”to ward off the pains of the toxic shadow material” Sylvia Brinton Perera.

Interestingly, Perera also describes the clumsy,  guilt laden child as one who’s experience..

”leads to generalized panic and flight.”

And, of course, this is Icarus’ fate.

When Daedalus comes up with his plan to escape the tower, he forgets how well he’s schooled Icarus in being slow and dumb. He can’t take in the hasty, impatient instructions not to fly too high or too low, the irritated sub-text that says he’s too stupid to take in even simple things and so he faithfully lets the warnings go unheeded and his panicky flight soon ends in tragedy.

Once Daedalus returns home, Talos fares as badly.  You might think the blue-eyed favourite would get a better deal but he too soon winds up dead at Daedalus’ hands.

Apparently, the exuberant Daedalus is swinging the boy around and around at the top of a tower..

not another tower!

But he’s so carried away with his idealized and co-dependant relationship that he forgets about practical things like gravity  and games you shouldn’t play at the tops of towers…

His grasp on the boy slips…

he falls..

you know the rest.

The golden child of the narcissistic parent is strangely prone to accidents. He’s been raised in a rarified atmosphere where the normal checks and balances aren’t in place, indeed, they don’t apply..

And because he’s had to identify with his parent’s inflation he’s had to disregard his own destiny and sense of self-preservation.

The tragic fates of these two boys is well portrayed in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by the characters of Borrowmere and Farrowmere, sons of the narcissistic Steward and pretender to the throne of  Minas Tireth, Denzil. They both die, the golden child, Borrowmere, by over-reaching himself, imagining he can use the ring of power, the dark and clumsy Farrowmere, sent to his doom by Denzil who refuses to heed the impossibility of retaking the lost town of Osgiliath.

Sometimes the roles of Icarus and Talos are lived out in the same child, alternately idealized and dumped on, or praised to the world but vilified behind closed doors. I once knew a mother whose ‘amazing’ son was bound to win X factor one day because of his incredible, extra-ordinary musical ability but wouldn’t pay the pittance his school required for violin lessons because he was, ”too stupid to learn’.

Such a child internalizes this contradictory split, entertaining grandiose fantasies and un-realistic expectations of himself alongside self depracatory feelings of failure and incompetence.

Nor does Daedalus escape unscathed despite the various uses to which he has put his children. His shadow projection onto Icarus means he can’t grow, cannot integrate his own darkness and can’t stand back enough from Talos to enjoy the child’s own unique journey. He becomes increasingly childlike himself and ends his days eternally carving the figure of a winged boy….

Wiki equates the figure of Daedalus with the term ‘disambiguation’.

yes, I had to look it up too..

Its a poetic link. It means not to be ambiguous -to be single minded, and of course he can be once he’s foisted off his divided self onto his kids. But even then, and without reference to the fate of his offspring, it ain’t always a good thing..

no matter what Wiki says..

Why? because the compulsively single minded has no internal dialogue..

no conversation between I and me..

no reflecting and musing, no looking at stuff from different points of view, no variation in feeling, no living with the manure of paradox. His mono-voice, his one track mind, his singlularity ends..

in madness.

Narcissism and The Taboo on Tenderness.

Our culture suffers from what analyst Ian Suttie calls, ‘the taboo on tenderness.’ Not only are we discouraged from having a feeling relationship with our own ‘stuff’, we also tend to respond dismissively and defensively to others by thought, word or deed. Unspoken values inhibit the communication of intimacy and fellow-feeling.

Much of the over-emphasis on feeling and sympathy in the new age seems compensatory, as if it were being layered on, and can wind up looking like a parody of the natural, unselfconscious instinct to reach out to others.

the taboo remains in place.

It is also given virtuous clothes to wear. We call it ‘being strong’.We pride ourselves on our stoicism, the puritan spirit of reserve that  permeates our notions of what it means to be ‘civilised’. We become cynical and call it being ‘street wise’.

Such expressions of the taboo are cumulative from one generation to the next. The unmothered child cannot give what it has not been given.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.      Phillip Larkin.

In other words the taboo entrenches itself with time. Eckart Tolle agrees, social dysfunction, ‘is actually intensifying and accelerating.’

Most of the time we don’t notice this. We don’t want to. We prefer the prejudicial fabrication of how evolved and free we are. It’s a myth we need to believe in order to compensate for the inner poverty that is the underlying reality of our situation.

We think about freedom as ‘freedom from’, and congratulate ourselves on the long list that this generates, forgetting that freedom is actually about what you are free for.

Freedom is not something that can be given to you. Its what you do with whatever your portion of life constitutes.

But we don’t like that. It deprives us of the prejudicial surety that we are already ‘free’. It thrusts up at us the responsibility to be congruent with that inner knowing voice , to be what we really are, to recognise the taboo on tenderness for what it is,

life denying, soul crushing, unfreedom.

Prejudice is not just about irrational hate. It’s about the need to bolster and strengthen internal structures that have become fragile and fragmentary with the slow demise of the Principle of Relatedness that once held I and me together when we had a place in our pantheon for the divine feminine.

Prejudice is about the need to align oneself with ‘self-evident’ and therefor unquestionable truth, so that we needn’t face uncertainty, or experience the need for tenderness that might shepherd us through the unknown.

Unfortunately, deciding ahead of time how life is in order not to experience the vulnerability and groping in the dark entailed in the genuine process of self-discovery, robs us of the very freedom our certainty pretends to be.

There is a story of an Englishman who was in Tokyo on business. He asks a policeman for directions. The policeman replies in broken English that he doesn’t understand. The man replies,’ if you listen carefully you’ll hear that I’m speaking Japanese.’ The policeman says, ‘ah yes, so you are’, and promptly tells him how to get to his destination.

The taboo on tenderness, sympathetic availability, generates not only prejudice but a catastrophic failure to experience reality.

This has an unexpected impact on emotional and psychological development. Its not just a question of being out of touch with reality. Suttie makes the crucial and perceptive observation that the taboo prevents regression associated with the all important transitions we make from one stage of life to another.

These threshold moments are full of anxiety and necessarily involve a tentative three steps forward, two steps back ambivalence shot through with the need to regress and be looked after.

If there is a taboo on tenderness then the developmental need to seesaw back and forth between the instinct for self-preservation and the urge to individuate will be frustrated. The threshold will not be crossed because the environment simply isn’t sufficiently containing which then ‘acts as a positive obstacle to development and integration’.

As a culture we rarely allow the tender generosity of regressing in the face of life’s challenges that, paradoxically, permit us to cross safely from one shore of our being to another. This keeps us stuck.

We then need to compensate for this with the belief that we are special, sophisticated and frankly better than other people. The taboo on tenderness breeds narcissism.

Far from the fantasy of prejudice that evolution is simply a self rolling wheel with yours truly proudly at the helm, what we have is emotional starvation and inner poverty.

Eckart Tolle states it in even more radical terms,

”If humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being the diagnosis would have to be ‘chronic paranoid delusion with a pathological propensity to violence and cruelty’ ” Eckhart Tolle

Much of this is down to the frustration of not being able to cross life’s thresholds, made possible by tender response to the real need for containment and leaning on one another inherent in the grief of death, the anxiety of birth, the trepidation of the unknown. All of these require a gentle hand and a sympathetic heart if we are to go through the life experiences that accost our self-constructs and shake the struts of our inner world.

Without the divine feminine who presides over the instinct to reach out to one another, we grow in anxious fits and starts, stymied in our efforts to cross the rougher seas of the soul.