Andy White Blog

Fleeing the Dark Brother.

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

like a bitch..

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

whils’ stealin’ de lan’.

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

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

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

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

You can suppress guilt for decades,

or at least the feeling of guilt…

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

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

self

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

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

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

Guilt is good…?

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

But we still gonna fix them , right?

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

… you pay money for dat?

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

being a frien’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

who he hates…

I was not abused….!

You were bound and gagged…

I don’t hate!

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

It wasn’t about me!

Unable to breathe….

He was doing the lord’s work!

Big knife, you shat yourself with the horror.

An angel saved me!

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

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

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

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

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

Ishy?

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

Selah!

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

Feet of Clay.

If there was a prize..

like an Oscar..?

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

Bob Marley, Jimi Cliff..

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

My vote would go to Nebuchadnezzer…

Neb.. I cant even pronounce that.

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

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

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

..and cavalry, loads of cavalry..

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

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

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

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

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

So we know where his allegiances lie..

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

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

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

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

Mesopotamia being faaaaaar away….

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

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

cos they agreed…. on certain things.

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

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

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

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

No, there’s more…

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

Its not pretty.

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

and what him trying to sell…..

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

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

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

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

Without Her you become divided…

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

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

And still doesn’t get it.

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

DONT SPEAK HER NAME>>>

er, ‘course your thing, er greatness…

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

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

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

that have to crumble….

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

Yay!

The Continuum Concept.

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

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

Babies are born with inherant expectations.

top of the list….

that the mother/baby continuum is sacred…

but it ain’t… no mo’

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

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

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

which mean that…

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

that not a good thing…

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

By her ‘avin no place of honour.

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

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

Being lost in the Desert….

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

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

Suddenly there’s a limit on plenty.

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

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

Capacity to hold together in times of stress -reduced.

Capacity for inner conflict resolution -reduced.

Capacity to use reason -reduced.

Compassion for self -reduced.

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

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

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

so that it can be different……

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

Which is tough..

and so we pretend its not a big deal.

back inna soup.

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

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

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

which can be useful.

excuse me…?

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

then definite roles and rules are life-savers.

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

Everyone knows where they are…

Me Tarzan on steroids

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

Wha..?

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

I’m not into allat kinky stuff man.

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

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

A Psychology of Jacob’s ladder.

So Jacob, having sorely ripped off his brother,

flees Esau’s wrath…

like a bitch..

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

like the Oscars.. with the red carpet?

Kind of….

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

Jacob has just betrayed both his kinsmen to the bone,

and no goin’ back…

and he’s done it for earthly power…

and got away with it.

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

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

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

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

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

and so the collusion is complete.

Everyone gets to live in bad faith.

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

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

of what is going on…

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

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

Its a bromance.

…where both parties can indulge themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can no longer talk to me.

an’ Yahweh acting very strangely…..

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

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

feelings are bad.

But values come from feelings.

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

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

An being special inste’ of loved.

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

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

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

No end to dat lis’.

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

you.

red team blue team

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

Tell de story, mon.

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

De story…

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

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

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

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

Him come to a bad end…

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

But dis time with a twist, mon.

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

De split mo’ subtle…

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

So Jacob get de land…

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

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

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

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

… days of natural law are over…

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

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

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

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

carrying god’s shadow:

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

but this is a new and different landscape of depersonalisation.

Him get worse…

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

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

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME>

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

NOT SLEEPING TOO WELL.

Something particular keeping you awake?

WHAT YOU SAYIN’ ?

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

IAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAMIAM

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

UTDYIKTDYTDYTFUKYFU

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

UFYTSUTEOL

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

LI@UGUP+UT.

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

ULDTKYT

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

UTWSREASFG

it grows in us.

Fielding narcissism.

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

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

What do you do?

here are some options;

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

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

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

4) back away.

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

And its good for practising compassion.

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

Go deeper.

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and, don’t sign anything.

three steps forward..

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

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

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

Why Babylon?

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

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

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

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

Belonging. Belonging born of Relatedness.

Home is where de heart is………

And you wonder, ‘how necessary was that?’

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

In fact we have regressed.

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

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

Bling!

and war

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

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

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

Cholesterol of the Soul.

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

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

Give me Napoleon any day.

On Trying New Things

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

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

Then I thought about it.

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

that’s the Egyptians..

what’s the Greek then?

amphora…

5 bucks an amphora…..

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

4 bucks an amphora….

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

3 bucks an amphora….

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

No-one wants my frikkin hair tonic..

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

How do you do that then?

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

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

We get re-invented in the process.

Stand back please, one at a time.

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

Form an orderly queue please…

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

Now, madam, thats no way to behave….

we want it, but its intrusive.

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

and life will never be the same.

No, I won’t trade for your donkey….

and so there is much loss

Or what you learned on the way….

closing doors

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

and goodbyes.

I need a new line of business.

Trying new things is tougher than it looks.

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

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

scardy cat scardy cat

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

I didn’t understand a word of that.

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

straight over my head, whoosh..

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

that doesn’t sound good…

Our Ground dries up and cracks..

oh dear..

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

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

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

not..

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

but we’re alright…?

yes,yes,

The Miller, his Son and the Donkey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hooray for the Miller!!

Him learn him own heart!

Through abuse, critisism and other people’s prejudice!

Yay!

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

He found who he was from a multitude of mirrors.

Some of them not very nice.

But it didn’t matter.

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

If only we can reflect.

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

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

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

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

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

Knowing alla answers shut you down, mon.

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

Blessing the Obstacle.

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

How is it possible?

Why as much as how.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How?

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

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

If you say so.

What, look what they did to me?

And what are you doing to you?

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

Could this be good for anything?

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

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

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

Ah, the magic word….

Wot?

Options…

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

if you like…

KHGFJHFJHFHF

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

Ok, big shot. Enlighten me…

As you wish…

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

Zero.

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

I just want to go home.

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

I’m in the grip of…

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

Now you are mocking me..

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

err..

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

that would be good.

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

But I want to be free…

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

Wha..?

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

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

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

really..?

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

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