Andy White Blog

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 The collective loss of such intelligent compassion is a disaster superseded only by the second thing, the Goddess as Psyche,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.

On Tilting at Dragons.

I had a supervisee who was berating himself for being lost with his client. He described it as the shame of being adrift on a village pond in a row boat.. I had to point out to him that it was not his navigational skills, but his under-estimation of the body of water concerned that was the problem.

He was at sea.

As are we all when negotiating the vastness of the Unconscious.

An old tale tells the story of a sea monster that had been terrorizing the people. So the king thought he’d buy the monster off with a mighty offering. He summoned the people and charged them to bring every scrap of food they had to the main pier of their great maritime capital where it was all piled up for the monster to collect. He appeared, ate it all in one bite and asked what more there was for him and all his deep sea mates.

The dragon hunting hero in us all doesn’t like such stories. I recall the leg kicking howl of frustration and rage from my 12 year old son who was playing a video game and had spent three days descending into the bowels of the Earth in search of some magic scroll. He had arrived, finally, at the bottom where there was a cupboard within which he was sure to find it. But it was not a cupboard at all. It was a whole new world that he still had to find his way across.

The world should not be so big but it is. And so is the Unconscious, the deeper levels of which are made up of the Great Mother Herself.

When She was cut out of our Pantheon, we did more than circumscribe Olympus. We also severed our connection to the Unconscious, the lived experience of our own depth.

Just gimme the frikkin scroll.

There is a tendency amongst psychologists, even the ones that are seemingly ok with the Collective Unconscious, to talk about the loss of the Goddess at the hands of Yahweh….

with him cult of bling

..as though it was a necessary price to pay for the growth of consciousness.

…as though dividing up the sacred feminine into virgins-to-be-saved and monsters-to-be-killed were a sensible thing to do.

….as though having a culture rooted in millenial warfare with the dark brother was…. sophisticated.

…as though the collective delusion that having a say in the ‘below-stairs’ staffing of government were equivalent to freedom….

The terrible dragon mother has to be defeated for ego consciousness to evolve!!

No, it doesn’t. Ego strength in a child develops when they are nourished enough. The regressive urge to stay fused with mother..

which might require surgical intervention of the pointy variety…

is only necessary if attachment has been precarious to begin with. The ties that bind are tendrils of unmet need. We do not struggle to leave the table unless we have not had our fill.

So this dragon is not just pissed of at the arrangment whereby it can be deposed by a pretender dressed up in a tin can, masquerading as ego consciousness, and being allowed to get away with whatever it likes by Yahweh so long as it remembers which side its bread is buttered on, but is also the suppression of the unmet child protesting its emptiness.

Hindu tradition says the Gods show us the face we turn to them. Whether Kali is devouring or giving birth depends on your relationship with her. If we collude with Yahweh and attack the sacred feminine, then Dragon is what you will get.

Its the kind of family constellation where the child’s love for mother is experienced as a personal attack on him by father. Father is paranoid and creates split realities in the children who then have to partition up their inner worlds and renounce all knowledge of what they have had to do in order to contain the contradiction of limits being placed on love in the name of…love.

And so, I can no longer talk to me.

A great symbol of liberation!

Marvellous PR, but please note the thin golden thread on which the ‘maiden in distress’ holds the dragon, as if on a leash… So now what does it all mean…? And how grateful will she be once the hero puts his penis/lance away?

And they all lived happily ever after?

I don’t think so.

The Anatomy of Longing.

”There are links between a society’s predominant form of primal relationship and its collective social behaviour.” Mario Jacoby. Longing for Paradise.

Wow, what an idea. The collective pattern of mother/infant relations shapes culture, sex, religion…

How we eat, pray, love.

Jacoby draws on anthropological research comparing New Guinian tribes, the Arapesh and the Mundugumor.

The Arapesh have a distinctly close bond between mother and child and though they are a poor people they are characterictically friendly and generous. Their cosmology is easy going and occassionally adopts outside influences.

The warlike Mundugumor have a less bonded infancy, earlier weening and believe crying children augur well, bringing luck in their battle with various malign super-natural forces. Though they are prosperous the Mundugamor are aggressive, macho and nostalgic by comparison to the cheery Arapesh.

Also, if the Mundugamor took a dislike you you might get eaten…

that too..

What is going on in your life is quite secondary to how comfortable you are in your own skin. Jacoby links ‘well-being’ directly to a cosmology where, ‘the archetypal feminine is not suppressed.’

The Mundugamor are patriarchs. There’s no divine feminine, but there is a lot of mutual suspicion and nostalgic, whimsical longing, the object of which is often manifest as someone else’s stuff.

So ,what for we in New Guinea now?

I’m interested in it because we’re not so different. We too live in a largely reactionary world full of paranoia, greed and, above all, nostalgia.

But nostalgic and longing for what?

And if it is true that..

”Culture is an attempt to resolve the fears generated by a specific (pattern of) mother/child relations in earliest life.” F Renggli.

….then is there a connection between the longing in our culure that manifests as a desire for stuff and a lurking but as yet unnamed fear that permeates our culture…

surfed only by Bling!

gleaming hero!

Archangel of Mammon.

but what is he surfing?

Before we ask that, let’s recall the old adage that the devil’s best trick is to get people to say he doesn’t exist.

I was dining alone on holiday at an open air restaurant on a Greek island. I was forty. The table next to me had a young family sat down for dinner. In the process of not staring I began to soak in something the eye rarely catches, the inflection of tone in a man’s voice, how he jostles between wheedling with his wife or trying to trip her up whilst ‘managing’ his kids who seemed both lost and confused at his continuous frustration of their aliveness. And underneath all of that was a particular cheddary scent of fear with overtones of raspberry and citrus and so eventually I turned to him and said, ”excuse me but when you were a child did you go to Plumtree school in Rhodesia and were you in Milner house?

Boys Boarding School.

endless Kalahari scrub.. ,

masters in khaki with guns.

Even the matrons had beards.

and it was all in his voice and gestures 3 decades on.

The poor man nearly fell of his chair.

Consistent with the culture of that time there was no further discussion once we’d established that he had left the year before I arrived and was therfore my senior.

Our culture was so rooted in unacknowledged loss of the Principle of Relatedness, that you could smell it. I could sense it in this man’s table manners, in his style of fathering, in the convolutions of his relationship with his wife and in his bullish condescension dealing with the waiter.

And at the heart of it was a kind of ugly gap where something softer and more yielding might have been and without which our childhoods had been moulded in such detail that after 30 years and half a world away, I could recognise the impact of it on a person I had never met.

The miracle of which we could not discuss.

We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that are responsible for the birth of the gods. CG Jung.

I went to a dating agency and they wanted to know straight off how long it had been since I was in my last relationship. They had a formula; It takes 20% of the duration of the previous relationship to get over it.

I was a couple of months shy.

Did you take their advice?

No.

And went on some dates anyway..

yeah

how did they go?

The point is that in the whole of our species’ life span, some 120 thousand years of species stabilisation, we’ve lost half our pantheon in only the last fortieth of that time….

or actually only a third if you go by the apocryphal book of Enoch.

The point is that the violent suppression of the divinine feminine over the last several millenia is not so long ago. Somewhere in the collective unconscious of our species, it’s a recent emotional wound……

FFunny how apocryphal used to mean BBanned-on-pain-of-death and now only means of-unknown-PProvenance…

…..so much so that from the perspective of the species we are still in shock from something that we can barely remember, like a kid who’s all aggressive in the street and can’t concentrate in class as a direct consequence of something he no longer thinks about but still acts out in a symptomatic way.

”We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions and so forth; in a word neurotic symptoms.” CG Jung

In my 25 years as a psychotherapist I have consistently noticed that even the smallest acknowledgment of the sacred feminine, even if it is simply at the level of longing or divine homesickness,

even if its just at the level of admitting the vastness of the unconscious let alone what it contains,

has a way of resolving affliction.

How? Because the affliction was the unacknowledged psyche in the first place.

Loss and Shame .

The bottomless, shameful pit

of the unmothered child,

trying to claw whatever he can to staunch his wound…..

seemed to me to be best expressed recently by the aside in some article I read that Donald Trump had claimed to own 9 billion when he only had 4.

Only 4 billion?!

For shame!

And suddenly despite every fibre of your body screaming out against it you start feeling sorry for the man.

Only 4 billion..what an embarrassing out, dude.

His ability to make people sorry for him and the dramatic style employed by the man are narcissistically generated strategies of defence against shame or the prospect of shame. Like the flares released by fighter jets to put incoming missiles off the scent.

Problem is those flares are only partially effective..

and so you have to take evasive manouveres

alla time..

Shame is very different from Guilt. Guilt is about what you have done, so it can be atoned in some way. There’s always some possibility of redemption.

But developmentally deeper and more ancient than the Guilt and Atonement story is The Story of Shame and for feeling bad about what you Are, let alone whatever it was you did.

The Gnostics preserved some ancient fragments of the pre-biblical Myth of Sophia. They are an allegory of the degradation of the Goddess.

”She fell into the hands of bad men who passed her between them. Some raped her. Others seduced her with gifts. She became a prostitute. Overcome with shame she no longer dared to leave her abusers.” The Exegesis of the Soul

When the sacred feminine at the back of mothering ceases to be collectively honoured, what will the way she holds her child communicate to that infant?
What a baby experiences of its mother is what baby takes itself to be. If the mirror is seen ‘through a glass darkly’ then what can baby make of its own reality?

The dishonour to the feminine becomes baby’s dishonour. His shame.

An’ yo 4 billion will NEVER be enough.

Balint calls it ‘the basic fault’. This gives rise to RD Laing’s ‘Divided Self’ or Lacan’s, ‘paranoid alienation’ all of which needs soothing with Winnicott’s ‘transitional objects’.
But not all cultures experience this. Liedloff (1986) describes the child rearing of the Yekuana Indians in Venezuela and notes,

‘they grow up not experiencing any gap or having any empty space in themselves. They do not spend their entire lives, (as we do) trying to prove they exist or making up for the missing sense of self.’
Crucially for the Yekuana, Wanadi, the sky God, has a good relationship with his consort, the Goddess of the Nadir who lives in the bowels of the earth. She is symbolised as a four headed snake crowned with horns. Four-foldness represents wholeness. As snake she is eternally self replenishing and her horns denote divine power.

This earth goddess animates Nature. The Yekuana experience all acts of Nature as participating in the body of the Goddess. Motherhood and being with children is a sacred communion with Nadir. And so they do not experience paranoid alienation.
We are tempted to describe certain phenomena, alienation, paranoid anxiety, anomie, bad breasts and the like as though they were of universal significance rather than the culturally specific expression of something now passed out of memory but still so faithfully acted out over time they seem intrinsic to human nature.

In my view they are outcome of deep and profound spiritual loss. Yahweh banishes Hokmah/Sophia from the divine stage just after the time of Solomon (3000BC) and this is the last time in Judeo-Christian literature that we hear of Her without the new bride’s curses being thrown at her heels.

Given Her place in our imagination for the eighty thousand years or more before that and we’re scarcely over blowing our noses.

Of course the stamping of ash and bone into the sacred places to eternally desecrate them was a bit unfortunate.

And the, you know, all the hacking down of stuff.

Yes, and the, you know..

killings

We are the children of cosmic divorce who now live with daddy. We don’t see mummy anymore. And nor do we have feelings about it.

But we do hit each other a lot..

and break each other ‘tings..
At the same time as Yahweh was tipping Sophia/Hokmah into the sea the Assyrian God Marduk slays the Goddess Tiamat and the Sumerian Enlil deposes the goddess Nammu. It happened so long ago we are only dimly aware of it, but like the early and forgotten traumas of our own individual childhoods we still collectively experience the consequences at a symptomatic, visceral level. We collectively mistrust the body and demonise the instincts formerly championed by Sophia/Hokmah.

Henri Wallon uses the term ‘confiscation’ (Wallon 1949) to describe the emptiness that seems to be, from a western point of view, an intrinsic part of the developmental process from true to false self that is a substantial region in the underbelly of western civilisation. Confiscation implies that something once present has been lost or taken away and indeed it has. Baby has yet to learn of Yahweh’s divine truculence but soon gets wind from the non verbal cues of shame and rejection intruded in mother. And like all babies he holds himself responsible for the split he experiences in mother and begins to identify with her humiliation.

Confiscation is the felt result. ‘The loss which lies at the heart of confiscation’, says Berman (1989), ‘is no small matter. It amounts to a revolution of consciousness the crucial feature of which is the decision to mistrust the evidence of our senses.’ ie Nature.
Baby renounces the body as a way of knowing herself, sacrificing her own capacity to apprehend reality for one now rooted in shame.

With the loss of the continuum to the divine feminine, not only is the Universe suddenly unsafe but we ourselves cease to experience ourselves as trustworthy and have to compensate for it to the point of parody.

Kimwaki and the Weaver Birds.

A story from Africa.

Kimwaki was a wealthy young man whose father had left him a great inheritance. Kimwaki was even richer than he had hoped. He could hardly believe the number of cattle and goats he now had.

No need for him to work anymore! And so he spent his days dreaming in the sunshine. And resting in the shade.

His cows became hollow eyed and his pastures overgrown. But he did not care. Why should he! He still had enough for himself.

No fear of hunger touch him.

And he did this until he was very lonely and then bored of the lonliness, and then tired of the boredom.

But he had forgotten what it was that might make some difference to his situation so long had he lain indolent. And didn’t realise how he was harming the land and the people that lived on the land.

And so he suffered and puzzled.

One day, while he was suffering and puzzling, he heard a chattering above his head. It was Spring and the weaver birds were making their elaborate nests. Each bought something to the colony, delighting in their contribution, and by nightfall the framework of the nests were complete.

The next day the happy birds bought moss and feather and bits of wool to finish off their new homes. Thunder clouds were approaching but the clever birds were safe.

And all the time he watched them the more Kimwaki began to understand..

He jumped up saying, ‘I am a strong young man. They only have their little beaks while I have big hands. They are the wise ones and I am not.’

Next morning he got up early and took his hoe to his neighbours field and worked alongside him the whole day.

And on the way home he found himself singing…..

If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

And if you have more than you need then some part of you knows that this can’t be done without exploitation and is going to poison your golden chalice in the moment you put your lips to it,

though it may take some time for symptoms to develop…

We cannot be oblivious to the needs of others without incurring something rather nasty upon ourselves. The depersonalisation of the other required to keep our equanimity in the face of their plight, requires a broad swath through the psyche taking in our compassion for ourselves to boot.

The division beween ‘I and Thou’ is mirrored in the inner world by a narrowing of paths through the woods between the homes of I and me.

and so our responses to the world start becoming stereotyped. The narrowing of the soul’s arterial pathways limits life’s options.

The reason for this that the ‘either/or’ philosophy so eloquently expressed by the diplomatic coup, ‘you’re with us or you’re against us’, is rooted in Anxiety.

The ancient schism between Yahweh and Sophia/Hokmah, way before ‘In the beginning’, a split that resounds through our prehistory and the base of our skulls, cannot be tolerated very well so we over compensate

like you do

with now being the special child of the good parent.

We are children of both possession and exile.

The dissonance of it is unbearable.

And so the split is internalised.

And with that you get single minded.

You shut down all unnecessary stuff.

like feeling about stuff,

and stuff.

You know where all your kit is and you have a plan. You regress to fight/flight alternatives and you cram down anything you can find.

”Do not save your bread for tomorrow” A. Solzhenitsyn

If there is not enough ontological security for people to afford themselves any greater range of response then very soon every situation will seem to mean something very restricted.

When I was a teenager I once got a letter from a mother quoting the bible at me because I was clearly responsible for her son getting drunk one night.

”And if ye lead one of these little ones astray it would be better if you were thrown in the sea with a millstone around your neck.”Mark 9;42

What does that mean exactly?

It means that the coroner will have trouble establishing whether you were crushed or drowned.

If you cross my path I will kill you in cruel and unusual ways.

it’s a bit steep isn’t it?

even if you had had poured whisky down his neck..

as he lay dere bound hand an’ foot.

screaming and protesting..

The funny thing was that I saved her husband’s life the next week in a riding accident and then I was a saint.

The either/or limitation placed on people by the One System system spawns the psychological features that thrive in polarised situations, sado/masochism, narcissism, bipolar ‘disorders’. It’s as though the loss of the Principle of Relatedness that sinks back into the sea along with Yahweh’s first Wife, Sophia/ Hokmah,

way back in the before time…

and with it our deep knowing of place and belonging,

so destabilizes the psyche that it goes into a kind of collective shock, reducing living to very immediate concerns.

only…

…that then becomes a life style rather than a temporary arrangement.

An’ you wind up like Kimwaki thinking yo’ll blessed an’ all….

but the creative spirit cannot fruit in the narrow confines of merely choosing whether to rest in the sun or in the shade.

And what’s needed is something radically other than what we know.

The beauty of the story is that even though Kimwaki had forgotten what to do, the weaver birds showed him.

They are that deep instinct for co-operation, that grateful generosity which experiences its neighbour’s welfare as the source of its own joy, the abundance of the Principle of Relatedness.

And so Kimwaki learns the power of telling himself off…

and about the richness of life that there is to be had in looking beyond our personal concerns.