Andy White Blog

Toxins and Riddles.

A young Prince and his trusty Servant set out to seek their fortune. At night they come to a hut in the woods. A young girl invites them in but warns them Grandma is a Witch so don’t, you know, touch anything.

Grandma is very polite and tends the Prince with all kinds of goodies which he wisely refuses and so they make it through the night. At dawn, as the Prince rides off, the Witch comes hurrying out and grabs a hold of the Servant who is still adjusting his saddle, forcing into his hand a foaming vial of something vile….

If you stick your tongue out in Tibet you’re being ever so polite by demonstrating that you are not the incarnation of a wicked ninth century king, Lang Darma, who had a black tongue. If you stick your tongue out in the West you’re being rude or suggestive.

The reason you take instant like or dislikes to other folk is because their gestures say everything about them. The eyes are windows of the soul because the look which goes with the gesture speaks volumes in spite of whatever else you might be saying at the time.

Language is to gesture what pink mayonnaise is to lobster thermidor. And if the mayo is slightly off all kinds of strange taste sensations will ensue.

”Give this to your master,” insists the Witch, thrusting the horrible brew at the Servant. He accidentally spills it on his horse which promptly dies a terrible death. Panic stricken he runs off to tell his master what has happened. When they return to retrieve the saddle a raven is pecking at the dead horse. The servant grabs the bird to make a broth for their dinner and gives it to the innkeeper to prepare at the next tavern they find.

When what’s being said and what’s being done are out of whack dissonance is created. Strangely, whether we are damaged by it or can have a good belly laugh at events seems to depend on where you are in the room at the time. When the dissonance is on stage and declaring itself, it’s hilarious. When its hidden in the wings, it’s poison.

Little did our heroes realize that this tavern was a secret den of a dozen cut-throats who then capture them and steal their dinner whilst dreaming up fancy deaths for the unfortunate pair. Luckily, the poisoned horse poisoned the bird, which now poisones the thieves and all twelve keel over before ever even getting around to pudding.

When dissonance is named it’s fun. When it’s hidden, it’s a killer. When someone is visible with their idiosyncrasies it’s disarming, when they act them out it’s dismembering.

Comedian Rodney Dangerfield made his career out of juxtaposing mafioso hard man with eternal anxious tie smoothing. Ronnie Corbet made his out of being a small man in a big chair. Sarah Bernhardt exploits the mismatch of being utterly vulnerable yet totally street wise. Homer Simpson is the confident fool.

Though the dissonance is unexpected it’s upfront and happening to someone else. There are several degrees of protection. When the dissonance is concealed or denied it becomes poison because you must forgo the integrity of your own vantage point and bend yourself out of shape to accommodate it. This destroys our connection to the natural world and our instinctual selves represented by the poisoned horse.

In the next town the motif of the Evil Witch has evolved somewhat into Wicked Queen, thanks to the Prince and his servant managing to stay alive, even if only by a happy fault. This Queen is still pretty toxic but she is at least willing to negotiate and offers her hand in marriage to anyone who has a riddle she cannot solve. If she can answer it you get to be boiled alive and eaten. At least there are rules.

The Prince asks, ‘What killed none yet killed twelve?”

She can’t get the answer, so she steals into his room at night hoping he will betray himself in his sleep. The Prince is waiting for her and tells her the secret whilst quietly hiding her cloak. She is too excited to notice the loss and next day claims to have discovered the answer. The Prince responds by telling everyone what happened, producing the cloak as proof, and so her game is up.

Deception loses its power as soon as it is shown the light of day.

A riddle is a puzzle that has to be solved not by cleverness or guile but by insight, not by additional information but by shifting your mind set. Riddle and poison come together in our world with the perplexing dissonance of why it is that we pollute the air we breath, the food we eat, the water we drink. Like a riddle, it doesn’t seem to make sense. It seems impossible to get your head around the murky dissonance of planetary destruction in the name of progress.

As with the Queen’s secret deceit, there is something still unstated in the mix which stops us collectively acting upon what we know.

The clue is in the kind of reality created by toxic dissonance, the double message of, ‘make yourself comfy while I brew up a nice cup of venom’. The mind set of a split reality does more than live happily with contradiction. The world itself is split. There is the world in which I am a gracious host and then another in which I want to kill you; and never the twain shall meet.

We escape feelings of dissonance…

“by splitting the contradictory feelings so that one person is only loved, another one only hated … the good mother and the wicked stepmother in fairy tales”. Melanie Klien

A two tier society pretending to be democracy is a terrible toxic riddle. When we split humanity into Us and Them, we also split the world into ‘our world’ and ‘their world’. If the toxins we create pollute the earth, it doesn’t matter, so long as it’s not my bit of it. As soon as it is a l’autre cote de la riviere, it ceases to exist.

This attitude mirrors the individual defenses of early childhood in which baby has had to lodge its unwanted toxins in another, from which it may then be split off so as never to have to deal with them. It becomes someone else’s problem despite sharing the same roof.

This defensive capacity to split reality so that discordant truths can continue to co-exist but without jarring entails toxins from my world being exported into yours.

The riddle, ‘what is it that destroys its nest in the name of self interest?’ has, as its answer, not Homo Imbecelicus, who is too dumb not to shit on his own doorstep but Homo Discordus who is under the delusion he’s crapping on someone else’s.

The petrochemical chief exec is not polluting his rivers. He is polluting yours. You might think your river and his river are the same thing. You could draw attention to the fact they are named the same and run through the same country… but split reality chews logic for breakfast. Its your river and your problem.

So we’ll put the pipe line through the Indian reservation because that’s not God’s Green Earth. It’s in the alternate reality of alternate facts. And therefor not my problem.

When the fragile narcissist gets super insecure it’s not enough to be designating shithole countries, whole nations to dissociate from, as if they exists in some faraway nebula. The weakest leadership requires more than scapegoating to cohere. One’s own members must be attacked and made Other.

Whilst its comforting to be able to export plastic recycling to Bangladesh for child slaves to pick through, it’s less effort to identify the Them within and just go dump it on their block, even if their block is in your town. Splitting is like that, you feel safe on a sinking ship just because your bit of it is still dry.

The fracking debacle at Flint has left that town without water. Stokes County in North Carolina reports cancer clusters in proximity to coal ash ponds. Residents of Vicente Rivera in California have recently been exposed to Pyrifos after a mandarin grove was sprayed with the insecticide. The skies over north Dakota are black with natural gas flares that no longer require regulation.

What do all these places have in common? They are home to Them. They are Hispanic, Black, Indigenous communities. Sixty eight percent of African Americans live within thirty miles of a power station. The pipeline at Standing Rock was pushed ahead not because of sovereign right but precisely because of the tacit understanding that the land is Indian and can therefor be polluted with impunity in what can only be described as environmental racism.

Of course there is some splash back. White kids drink Aspartame just as much as black kids and Fukushima salmon aren’t fussy about whose table they land on. But that doesn’t matter either because the next generation are also Them.

At one time our world was also theirs. One day son, all this will be yours. It doesn’t seem to work like that anymore. The alienation required to make dust bowls of other lands has made deserts within our own just as the disaffection necessary to starve children half a world away has consequences for the emotional nourishment of those you tuck in at night.

”You say you love your children above all else yet you are stealing their future. Our biosphere is being destroyed so that rich people can live in luxury. If the solutions are so impossible to find maybe we should change the system itself.” Greta Thunberg (16)

We are used to individual instances of parents ‘dumping’ emotional toxins on their kids. This is increasingly assuming collective expression and is being acted out on a grand scale. After all, what are we destroying if not their legacy?

What makes us turn on our own? Why would we trash our own garden and grain store? It is the fact of our children that makes us custodians of the land. If we behave to the contrary what does that imply about our commitment to future generations?

So there is some toxic contract in these collective family dynamics. The clue to unpicking the riddle is in what’s shared between the next generation and the minority or indigenous group; which is that they are close to Nature, a world of primal unity against which consumer culture has not only set Itself apart, having put aside childish things, but also secretly envies and yearns for, enough to want to spoil everyone else’s tomorrow.

The Secret Masochist.

An arrogant young man gets on a train and sits opposite a little old lady. He begins to regal the carriage with his opinions, takes up everyone’s personal space, endless showing off. He gets off at the next stop but as the doors close the old lady opens a window and shouts out, ‘you left something behind!”. By now he’s running next to the carriage with his arms out, perplexity written across his face. ‘what is it, what did I leave?”

” A very poor impression…” she retorts, just as he runs out of platform.

There is really no such thing as a sadist or a masochist. Search and you can’t find one. Sado-masochism is a polarized continuum, like manic-depression, a kind of sliding between extreme states in order to know who you are, necessitated by narcissistic fragility and emptiness.

Narcissists tend to hide their unconscious masochism behind a front of cruel superiority. Sometimes this masochism has covert expression. Like toadying to Russians, or the ‘look what they done to us’ behind MAGA. Sometimes its done inadvertently by creating the conditions for perpetual investigation; and sometimes it just pops right out like the compulsive laying claim to government shut down. ‘I will take the blame, give me the mantle.”

The Sado-masochistic enactment unfolding on Pennsylvania avenue seems to be getting to the short strokes. Aided by the prophylactic restraint of seventeen strapping investigations…

Donald is finally going to cum.

Former US federal prosecutor Paul Butler recently described Trump as being ‘double teamed’ by the Mueller probe and the SDNY investigations. This image, now indelibly lodged in imagination, brought not a single blush to the cheeks of assembled MSNBC pundits whose blithe acceptance of such a metaphor suggests something a lot stranger than Russian collusion or Fraud is going on in the White House…

the unfolding sado-masochistic component of Narcissism.

Trump has the trade mark ‘big ego’ of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The irony is it’s lack of a healthy ego that’s the problem. The ego is full of gaps. There are sections of it you can drive sheep through. Its like having a claim that’s only marked off by corner posts, one of which has been eaten by a bear.

One solution is to identify with the bear. Your personal space is immediately cubed. Nothing can take you down. Bear is untroubled by life’s contradictions. Berries and Elk are all the same. You can just shamble on regardless.

Unfortunately, you might then need the world’s greatest ever shafting to be restored to more appropriately human proportions, a process that initially unfolds as the sado-masochistic tryst of Me and Not-me, the hell of Other People, the horror of realizing you are not the only one in the room.

You’d hope such developmental needs get resolved with incremental frustration of the toddler concerned. If not, the need for containment will find a more problematic expression. Whilst it may be colorful there is a small problem with this arrangement. Someone always has to get shamed.

Even when you are being praised.

Trump couldn’t help himself on his recent visit to troops in Iraq. The only way he could find to honor their service was, ‘you are no longer the suckers of the world.’ You try to be happy about that but somehow can’t quite summon the strength.

Words matter because they create consciousness. Abracadabra. That which I speak, becomes. If you ask an eight year old on Christmas Eve if they still believe in Santa you are sadistically calling her world into doubt.

If you lack the basic internal cohesion required not to blow a Christmas media event for kids by casting aspersions on the existence of the main event, then the sadism is not just gratuitous, it states your values. Its like wearing a ‘blame it on the badger’ t-shirt to an animal rights meet.

Such behavior would not be tolerated round the household dinner table let alone by the leader of the free world and the reason is that kids and impressionable folk take their example from you, Donny.

In fact the bench mark of Democracy is not just that your job is the highest in the land but that every kid that ever there was secretly aspires to be you, to have power and authority..

and to use it for good..

but how the fuck can they when every example they are given entails someone being screwed over? I pummel the Other into the ground therefor I am. WTF?

What on earth must you be compensating for to want to put kids in cages? What ghosts must haunt you to justify it with the paranoid delusion that they ‘harbor’ disease? Not that some are sick and need your help but that they sneak in armed with it, all sheltered and weaponized.

When an innocent child, fleeing for his life from situations others cannot even acknowledge, let alone survive, is then so failed by the hero he hoped would save him that he dies from sadistic neglect, you send a message. It is not a message of deterrence. Numbers are up. But it is a message of How-to-Be, delivered into the living rooms of every family in the Nation and around the world.

And finally, mounted on top of the heinous betrayal of that poor boy’s faith, a faith he held for hundreds of miles of weary trudging towards the fabled arms of safety, is the cowardly insinuation from Nielsen’s report making this not only his own fault but on account of his malign ‘harbouring’, as though he was some kind of gook whose evil plan backfired.

as though their not giving a shit constituted counterintelligence.

When a person in high office stoops to such gaslighting the moral being created is way beyond giving permission to hold office without embodying it in any way shape or form. It’s not simply the absence of something, a lack of care, or the failure of empathy.

Nor should we limit ourselves to Adam Serwer’s excellent u-tube blog that cruelty is something Trump has elevated to political virtue.

This boy’s death sets the bar of what it means to be human at a new low. Suddenly, all our lives are cheaper; contaminated, not by diseased migrants but by the malignant use of an Office to which the Nation looks for guidance, finding at bottom only the secret puerile need to be sent to the naughty corner so that he can get through another day without medication.

Despair and the Wall of Cheese.

In a world increasingly characterized by communications technology it might seem counter intuitive to question the centrality of language to dialogue. They seem synonymous.

But language is not necessarily the main factor or even a central factor in meaningful conversation. Whilst we are listening to the words we are paying even more attention to gesture, expression, tone, disposition.

When a gap opens up between what people say and how they behave its uncomfortable because the words no longer feel real, which means you in turn are not quite real. What we think of as ‘respect’ largely has to do with this consistency between word and deed.

If not, then what’s lost is way more than integrity or trust. Everyone touched by it has to split themselves to accommodate the unreality.

When I was a kid I once saw my father place his hand on my mother’s shoulder during an apparently innocuous conversation. Her involuntary response was a shudder of disgust, a gesture more impactful than a beating. What I thought was real was not. What shall one do, other than silently embark on a career of unreality?.

Years later I was stood in the queue at the library wanting a copy of the Writers and Artists’ Yearbook. The Librarian was a very attractive woman I was doing my best not to notice, especially on account of a gaggle of old ladies nearby that seemed to evoke my punitive mother complex, preserved from growing a full set of horns by the single strand of virtue that I was at least a clean boy.

So I got to the desk and blurted, ‘ah yes, can I have a copy of the Writers and Arse tits yearbook?….

It’s even more embarrassing and unreal when the split between persona and shadow happens at a collective level. Yesterday, two hours before the American government was shut down by a White House tantrum, a Senate Committee was called to an emergency meeting..

To avert the crisis..?

To take remedial measures?

No, to pass into law ‘The Curd Act’, which will tell you, or actually, stop telling you what is and is not in cheese. I curd you not.

”I’ve seen some surreal things around Capitol Hill, but this is really something. Vital parts of our government are about to shut down and the Republicans have called an emergency meeting on cheese.. Has anyone considered how ridiculous this is?’, Sen Jim McGovern (D)

Merry Cheesemess.

In part of the discussion that then followed, chair Pete Sessions (R) reassured the anxious committee that he was not talking about a wall of cheese. This was an important matter.. He read it in a newspaper.

‘I have the awesome responsibility to pass this important legislation… I’m not talking about a wall of cheese. It’s important. This committee handles important things.’ Sen Pete Sessions.

And yes, its laughable.. if it were not so tragic. The problem is that it doesn’t stop at being mad. It is maddening. You can’t witness such shit without going a bit crazy yourself. It’s contagious.

The fallout from Narcissism’s failure to tie up words and deeds goes beyond private embarrassment or collective absurdity. Everyone in the mix gets depersonalized.

This is why keeping your word is synonymous with honour. The congruence of word and deed, doing what you say, is about more than reliability.. It gives the other a sense of their own substance.

Your congruence places ground beneath the feet of others.

When society places a premium on image and takes its PR efforts for reality, rewarding Narcissism, success at any price, is going to have ramifications for the mental health of the next generation.

Normally we think of child abuse as being about concrete stuff that happens in real time, traumatic happenings you can at least still point to. What of Life’s non events, the trauma of things that fail to occur? What of the silent schism that opens up in a child when she is not allowed to inform herself of what she already knows, that Mother is depressed but pretends otherwise and so she has to join her, so as not to know what she knows..

As Narcissism succeeds in its project to make real that which is not, it has the effect of denying the autonomous reality of everyone in the frame which is so witholding it can rob you of the will to live.

US mental health experts determine that one in five children suffer from a diagnosable mental, emotional or behavioural disorder. Only one in five of those will be helped. Suicide rates among teens are at a forty year high and for the first time greater than homicide stats. Rural areas worst affected have the highest populations of Indigenous people among whom teen suicides have exploded.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/generation-risk-america-s-youngest-facing-mental-health-crisis-n827836?icid=related&fbclid=IwAR0w1MahcEZGF6RN-mrF2470cnS-U54v5QOASr-885ZEPRyttIoDPETcDUo

You might cite economic hardship but the principle factor is shame, shame at being marginalized but also the shame of being repeatedly deceived, of word and deed not adding up and the liquifaction of the ground beneath your feet this then creates… We white folks broke every single treaty we ever made with the Indigenous world and in so doing broke trust with the natural world wherein childhood also lives. Such speaking with forked tongue does more than steal the land, it also steals the soul and contaminates legacy.

Maybe it seems like it’s not such a big deal when words no longer matter, when the rules arbitrarily apply, when sincerity is optional. The end justifies the means and anyway I’m doing all this for you, baby..

But what we do to Others we do to ourselves and to our Own.

If the world you want to create costs you your integrity how shall your children live there?

How we Heal.

Whether or not suffering may be redeemed largely depends on how you think it’s supposed to happen.

The traditional idea of a cure seems to have been bent out of shape. It carries connotations of illness and disease, plus the idea that it can be fixed, a notion only a step away from driving out demons. More liberal notions of healing still tend to conjure the idea that it is something that can be dispensed, the starched white coat or the ecclesiastical frock simply traded in for a mystical cape and just the right incantation.

I feel your pain…

All of which begs the question of how therapy might work and why it’s worth you spending a small fortune on someone you never met in lieu of bread and beer..

How would it be if we considered what ails you, not as sickness, or as a source of shame and failing, or the irredeemable horrors of the past, as a kind of cramp? The kind of cramp anyone is bound to get when you go adventuring. One that need not necessarily require either medication, holy cures or making better?

If we think of syndromes and disorders in terms of particular kinds of cramp then we might approach therapy with less toolkit and more wintergreen.

Physical cramp wants massage, time, hydration and electrolytic supplementation. Metaphorical cramps need the same, in a suitably symbolic way.

First your psychic cramp needs the massage of sympathetic warmth and genuine interest. The cramp wants being paid attention to and taken seriously. It hurts like hell. You have to give the cramp time and space whilst safely hydrating it with the waters of the Unconscious, dreams, fantasies, and imagination that seeks out the sacred in ordinary life.

‘The main problem with life’s conundrums is that we do not bring to them enough imagination.’ T. Moore.

Jung observes that when the cramp is particularly severe..

”often only the hands are capable of fantasy, they model or draw figures that are sometimes quite foreign to the conscious mind.”

The need for electrolytes is a delicious metaphor.

Electrolytes are chemicals that form electrically charged particles (ions) in body fluids. These ions carry the electrical energy necessary for many functions, including muscle contractions and transmission of nerve impulses.

So what they do is facilitate our capacity to respond. They allow information to flow. If information does not flow in the psyche it gets cramp. I wonder if paranoia, besides having historical roots in a childhood and something to be paranoid about, is not also exacerbated by a restricted flow of information, like an inner disjointed and stilted dinner conversation of folk who don’t get on and won’t share what they know.

If something unknown is doing I don’t know what, then you will have plenty to be paranoid about…

Electrolytes are like pathfinders, connecting up disparate parts of ourselves so they can begin to speak to each other, creating the kind of internal dialogue needed for reflection between I and me. I once asked a colleague who specialized in working with manic-depression how he went about it. He replied, ‘When they are depressed I remind them of their energy and enthusiasm. When they are delirious and excitable I remind them of how shitty life can be.’

In the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece, as the initiates were reaching the ecstatic climax of their initiation, a dark cloaked figure would walk among the participants whispering quietly, ‘you’re going to die…’

Electrolytes prevent cramp by virtue of both positive and negative ions being present. There has to be a charge, some psychic tension, some sense of the interplay between different and even opposing forces in order for different parts of the whole to share their stories. Being ‘positive’ is a recipe for disaster. Half the soul gets cut away in the name of what’s best for you.

There’s no better recipe for depression than homogenization, presenting the same groundhog face to the world day after day where blended conformity becomes bland sustenance and finally, blunt instrument.

Thomas Szasz reminds us that the mind is not a noun but a verb, more of an activity than an actor. Without lubrication this activity cramps and has to resort to ‘proto-language’, ie symptoms, in order to catch our attention. Proto-language is cramped communication, having to rely on early modes of interaction that seem like madness but are actually de-contextualized pre-verbal gesture.

Szasz makes the further point that much of what we call madness is rooted in being deceived. When children are lied to the real self is cramped by the contrary injunctions to stand by one’s own experience vs the instinct to swallow parental directives as gospel..

In his ‘Etiology of Hysteria’, Freud the younger, yet to renounce his unpopular views of 1896 in favor of the later drive conflict theory in 1905, says that the damaging seal set on abuse, particularly sexual abuse, is by virtue of its subsequent denial and having to invalidate one’s own experience.

The child has to twist herself out of shape in order to amend her own reality. Restricted access to the truth means the pathways it follows become shut down and overgrown. Opening that traffic back up means truth telling and entertaining the dawning distress of trauma over the masking discomfiture of psychic cramp.

When external constraint has to be internalized as self-restriction, cramp ensues. Our movements are suddenly no longer our own. Borders have to be either narcissisticaly walled off or indiscriminately thrown open, leading to either blockage or invasive borderline chaos in the psyche’s body politic.

What this means for therapy is that specialized cleverness and mantles of office are really quite secondary to paying attention, creating space and being respectfully patient.

”If attention is directed to the unconscious, it will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water.” CG Jung

Cures are contingent on curiosity, healing upon the restoration of untended inner pathways and vocation upon the agonized calling out to the Other that draws attention to the fact you’re running on empty.

The Spirit in Matter.

Animism, the belief that Nature is sentient and that material things contains spirits, is mostly considered a quaint footnote of Anthropology by Church and Science alike. Something our foolish ancestors and merely primitive people believe in. Little might any inter galactic tourist imagine the extent to which such beliefs pervade modern life and among the very people who consider themselves to have evolved beyond such apparent nonsense.

As a student I was invited not to return to lectures by a Great Professor whose scoffing at the Hunter-gather’s totemic world drew my attention to the Gucci suit he was wearing and the Mercedes key fob in clear view atop his mighty desk. I made the grievous error of asking if these were not also totems whose meaning, unlike our ancestors, we fail to recognize or have simply forgotten…

Despite pretensions to the contrary, modernity contains just the same degree of magical thinking as it ever did. Evolution builds on what went before. Previous adaptations are the basement of Being. You can’t discard them any more than you could tear out the foundations of a building or heroically leave your childhood behind.

One of the defining characteristics of our age, difficult as it is to see the wood for the trees, is a disdaining identification with the top most levels of the Psyche. We’ve made a cult of Veneer. Which means that the innate propensity for magical thinking, the conflation of spirit and matter, slips its leash and happens without you noticing, making a deity of Bling instead.

The hold that money has over our imaginations is perhaps the most generic and pervasive example of the way in which we create symbolic equations between spirit and matter. We do more than expect money to make us happy. We stake our worth and meaning on it, pursuing it as if it were a holy Grail containing the promise of redemption and do so with all the anxiety of one who has indeed just lodged their essence in something beyond influence.

The deBeers Diamond Company made a fortune out of our hidden but all to human animistic soul. Some bright spark in marketing came up with the idea that if diamonds could be symbolically equated with eternal love and made a fixture of a sacred marital vow then everyone would have to buy their stuff.

Prior to the 1930’s diamonds were a strictly luxury item whose inflated price could only be maintained by holding back reserves that might otherwise flood the market. Ad men N.W. Ayer and Son found a market for the stones de Beers couldn’t sell. Their aggressive campaign took advantage of the one thing designed to put a diamond into every household whilst maintaining its mystery and the myth of its rarity, they equated it with Eternity, wherein all anxiety of separation and death is laid to rest.

Stuff as Symbol is an important part of growing up. The transitional objects of bear and doll in early childhood are necessary to manage separation anxiety and signals the development of symbol formation, part of whose function is to manage change whilst preserving a sense of object constancy..

Thereafter the capacity of things to embody and represent other things helps us to cross life’s thresholds. When my son was making the transition into his teens he spent hours whittling precious lumps of wood with which he decorated the hearth. He spent hours carving and smoothing. These sacred bits of wood were deeply significant to him, like aboriginal soul stones, which gave him belonging, gravitas, space.

The equation between spirit and matter is not only common, it can assume some very specific and intricate meanings. My favorite example is the mythology surrounding pirate ear-rings, which, to those in the know, signified much more than ornament.

The tradition was that the gold ring in your ear would pay the price of your funeral. The fact that this so rarely occurred, pirates generally dying either at sea or upon the gallows, invites closer inspection.

What the gold hoop says is that I have mates who I can trust and will do right by me. Its a mark of Belonging, of collective identity, which also serves not just as payment in the event of death but as a defense against death itself, useful in the piratical business. The ring is a statement of confidence that you will not be lost at sea and that you’ll die sufficiently in one piece to be buried at all; that it will somehow be quiet and dignified with both the wood and the time for coffin making, that you will be neither sluiced from the quater-deck nor tossed over the side..

a sentiment somewhat betrayed by the brief eulogy traditionally afforded piratical demise..

‘One and the body, the body I say. Two, shall be cast, shall be cast away. Three.. and into the sea, the sea, into the sea goes he..’

Such projections into matter are not merely defensive. The psyche often discovers the incipient stirrings of nascent consciousness in the worldly garb of either fascination or disgust, which, with time, may be realized as having more to do with oneself than circumstance suggests.

This is the meaning behind alchemical gold. The old alchemists understood that the ancient Sanskrit maxim, ‘Tat twam Asi, (‘thou art that’) meant the outer physical events they were exploring were reflections of inner processes. The base elements they sought to transform were elements of their own psyche. They knew their work was symbolic and in pursuit of inner treasure.

‘Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi.’ (Our gold is not the ordinary kind.)

Often this confusion of inner and outer is most keenly felt in relationships. We confuse lovers with angels, spouses with parents, opponents with the devil, migrants with inner impoverishment. We attribute public figures with the power to redeem our lives. Irvin Yalom even gave that one a name.. ‘the fantasy of the ultimate rescuer’. Someone, somewhere has the power to save me from my situation.

Such projections are useful despite the mess they can get us into because they afford us a glimpse into the inner world otherwise hidden from view. Nature abhors a vacuum..

‘ It is as if the investigator’s own psychic background were mirrored in the darkness. What he sees in matter are qualities and potential meanings which are chiefly the data of his own unconscious.’ C. G. Jung.

Modern psychotherapy makes use of this phenomenon, taking the raw elements of experience and fantasy, the ‘massa confusa’ and giving them context so that transformation can take place. My analyst used to describe paranoia, of which I had plenty, as a feeling searching for its home.

So projection doesn’t deserve such poor press. It can be useful. Sometimes it’s the way ‘in’. Marie Louise von Franz went so far as to say that the projection of ‘healer’ onto another can often yield results even whilst the projection is in place. You know from your own experience how everything in life feels resolved when you are in love, that you suddenly have more vitality and drive. You ‘glow’ with life, even though the beloved is condensed into a flawed and all too human vessel which can only temporarily contain it..

We encounter ourselves in the world, in other people, in concrete situations and sometimes just in concrete. We do this as a prelude to the disruptive experience of ushering emergent aspects of Self across the threshold of our inner caucus where they can be more consciously at home. Far from being an aspect of a bygone era we would do well to re-discover the conflation of spirit and matter in our own experience so they may be sources of meaning rather than the drivers of a cruel fate.

The Sado-Masochistic Self.

Sado-Masochism has much in common with the elusive, lesser spotted Venus Fly Trap Warbler. They both have fancy names and are so well camouflaged that even the ardent enthusiast rarely gets a peek. Danish philosopher and leading contender for the Worst-luck-in-love Competition, Soren Kierkegaard, who also had a fancy name, tells the following cautionary tale ….

There was once a poor peasant who was so down on his luck he did not even have a pair of shoes to wear.

One day, he miraculously came into some money. He walked all the way into town and bought the finest pair of shoes he could find. There was even some money left over. So he bought a jug of wine and drank it on the way home.

Before he could return, the wine got the better of him. He fell into a ditch where he passed out. In the small hours of the morning a coach came by. The coachman sees the peasant’s legs dangling out of the ditch across the road and he calls out loudly lest they be run over. The peasant raises a bleary eye, looks carefully at his newly shod feet and shouts back, ‘they’re not my legs, drive on!’

Since S/M is about what happens between people it would be better to say that it is a perversion of the Principle of Relatedness, of which sexual relatedness is only a part. The flamboyant/erotic end of the spectrum may well catch our attention but many S/M enactments are of the common or garden varieties and don’t make for interesting TV.

Nor is it enough to then say that S/M is rooted in dominance and subordination. These are expressions of and adaptations to something more fundamental which is still worth naming.

The child of any epoch or culture instinctively maintains the conditions in which it has learned to be at home. If disconnection and split realities are the world we are born into then even these…

”will be maintained indiscriminately as part of development.” Jean Liedloff

This relational dysfunction is much bigger than the sexual issues they might later encompass.

Narcissistic sadism has, as its prime objective, the eradication of the other’s subjective reality. Its means to that end is depersonalization, humiliation, witholding and the refusal to value or accommodate. His doing-unto-others denies and projects a fragile core. I wound therefore I am…

not my wound.

Empathic masochism dovetails this with low self worth, poor boundaries and subliminal victim mentality that colludes with and allows the sadist’s ‘bad behavior’. Power and responsibility are abdicated so Identity can take root in being done to.

”They are not my legs, ride on!”

The problem for the poor peasant is that if his poverty constitutes a nucleus of identity, a core self-construct, then the resolution of it will precipitate existential crisis. He won’t know who he is anymore. Resolving ‘the problem’, is therefor out of the frying pan…

and into the fire.

”Once you have identified with some form of negativity you do not want to let it go and on a deeply unconscious level, do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard done-by person. Eckhart Tolle.

So we resist what we want most because it costs us what we know of ourselves to have it.

”For someone who’s natural habitat is the brink of disaster, a giant step into security is as intolerable as the realization of all he fears most.” Jean Liedloff.

Our peasant’s new shoes threaten his whole view of life. He cannot afford to identify with his own good fortune. Having his legs run over would reacquaint him with his familiar bad luck upon which identity has long been constructed.

Moreover, the miracle of his wild adventure into town has the quality of a hero’s quest, part of which is invariably death/rebirth. If this is not realized in the inner world it will be enacted in the outer.

”Creativity… expresses itself in the ambivalent experience of rebirth through death (or) in sado-masochistic fantasies.” Erich Neumann.

The process of self-realization involves some painful processes over and above the unearthing of childhood trauma because it involves an end to the notion that we are masters of our own houses. This tends to lead either to a positive inflation in which ego identifies with the Self and becomes cruel, inconsiderate and puffed up with power, or a negative inflation in which we feel lower than a worm and deserving of nothing.

Its easier to act this out in our relationships than it is to contain the violent forces that can swing us back and forth between such extremes.

The alchemical tradition, which offers us a metaphor for the process of individuation, is full of grisly symbolism. The ‘mortificatio’ and ‘putrefacto’ are stages of the journey in which the old sense of identity dies and rots as a result of the encounter with the Self. These ‘torments’ are described as…

”cutting up the limbs, dividing them into smaller and smaller pieces and mortifying the parts.” Rosarium.

This painful process is amplified in Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’, in which the difficult encounter between bride and bridegroom represent the clash of opposites often described between ego and Self.

”The coniunctio is both desired and dreaded. From a distance it is the source of all yearning, but knocking at our door it is an object of terror.” E. Edinger.

In Solomon’s Song the bridegroom is wounded..

”You ravish my heart with a single one of your glances…”

This acknowledgement between self and ego….

”has a wounding or violating effect.” Edinger.

In Christian iconography this is represented by Jesus on the cross.

‘thou didst wound my heart with one of thine eyes when, hanging upon the cross, I was wounded for love of thee that I might make thee my bride.” ibid

In the Bahavad Gita, Arjuna asks to see Krishna’s true form and quickly regrets it.

”when I see you touching the sky, blazing with many colours, with mouths open wide, with large fiery eyes, my heart trembles in fear and I find neither courage nor peace. Devouring all the worlds on every side, you lick your lips. I implore you, as a lover to the beloved, show me a gentler form.”

The wish for mother confounded by the need to separate from her and the feeling of being torn apart that this can constitute in early life, is a motif that can attend spiritual awakening in later years. They share the common experience of an encounter with Other.

A favorite delusion is that one’s own destiny is simply something to yearn for. But somehow circumstances entangle from the true path… from where you are supposed to be.. forgetting that the path we seek is the one we are on and for good reason. The creatures that used to hide in the closet and under the bed along with all those that come in through the cracks from Elsewhere along the way, have taken up lodging in your outer world and become life’s spiky situations instead.

Deprivation and Deadly Sin

When I was first in therapy I was telling my analyst about my father’s recent marriage to his third wife. He stopped me in mid sentence…

‘your father’s what?’

…marriage..

‘you said ‘funeral’,….’

a slip of the tongue, the tail end of murderous rage I was quite unaware of until it found its own way into our conversation.

‘I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.’ F. O’Connor.

The ‘talking cure’ is rooted in this intimate relationship between self-expression and consciousness. This is true even more so for the expression of feelings… which is why personal breakthroughs are invariably associated with the catharsis of some forbidden emotion.

For consciousness to amount to anything it has to be shared.

‘I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.’ Black Elk.

The best way to shut people up and prevent awareness is to make sharing a sin. Most obvious is sexual sharing. But the embargo on freedom of expression runs through Western Civilization way deeper than who you can or cannot fuck..Sin is generally perceived as being about morality and being good but in fact its about daring to be conscious. Even God’s casting of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the land of blissful ignorance, is not for disobeying but for having the courage to be awake..

‘Behold, man is become one of us, to know good and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand and….eat, and live forever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden.’ Genesis 3;22.

Given that this is true, could it be that the so called Deadly Sins have to do with consciousness rather than morality? And if so, consciousness of what?.When we look at these sins….Wrath; Greed; Gluttony; Sloth; Lust; Pride; Envy… they seem ‘bad’, and yet if you look at them with an unjaundiced eye, as symptoms of something, you can’t help but notice the similarity that these symptoms have with something all too familiar to the consulting room of psychotherapists everywhere..

the post traumatic effect of Maternal Deprivation..

and not of your personal mother but of the Great Mother, the Principle of Relatedness, the Divine Feminine….whose influence the church is a great deal more concerned about than any of your idiocyncratic shenanigins. Which is why Sloth only latterly booted out Sadness from its millenial place on the List, just in time for the Industrial revolution..

Being good members of the flock means suppressing not just the memory of the Great Mother but more importantly the feelings of loss that accompany Her banishment..It’s not enough to eradicate Her from memory…

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME…….

neither must we collectively name the emotional wounds we are left with generations later, much as an individual child might make her vulnerability and loss at mother’s absence into ‘bad’ emotions and demonized longing, acting out the wish to be filled up and held in-arms with a substitute paradise of drug addiction, materialism or narcissistic entitlement..To ensure that the feelings of abandonment and loss are not discussed and thereby bought more firmly into consciousness, they are made into taboos which entrench repression..

John Bowlby ( Attachment and Loss. 1950) observes that the first stage of maternal deprivation gives rise to protest…WRATH… .and the assumption that someone else must have mummy….ENVY….prolonged absence creates terrible inner hungering….GREED….which the child tries to remedy itself…GLUTTONY… .or symbolizes the connection back to mother with sexual longing…LUST…Eventually the child begins to despair but tries to cover it over with a compensatory superiority….PRIDE….and finally falls into detachment and affectionless psychopathy…SLOTH…..

‘The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.’ J. Jaynes.

The great irony of the Age of Communication is that we have stopped talking to one another. Collectively we are in the stage of maternal deprivation that Bowlby calls, ‘detachment’. We are detached from one another, from ourselves, from the world, from our dreams and inner life..

”When we are cut off from the fulfillment of our basic needs we seek out substitutes to temporarily ease the longing. Bereft of connection to nature, connection to community, intimacy, meaningful self-expression, ensouled dwellings and built environment, spiritual connection, and the feeling of belonging, lots of us over-consume, overeat, over-shop, and over-accumulate.” Charles Eisenstein.

Even our vaunted sciences are rooted in separation and division..Newton saw the Universe as a machine… not a living organism. Darwin developed the notion of constant competition, a vision of Nature red in tooth and claw. Freud declared that we are without soul, as much a bundle of conflicts and strife on the inside as the natural world was assumed to be on the outside..

What science ‘discovered’ was the underbelly of its own belief system projected into the world that then allowed us all to rest easy with our loss but at the price of being forever plagued by the spectre of ‘deadly sin’, a price that has left Western Civilization apathetic and depressed..

“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 effectsJ. Bowlby.

2,000 years worth of long term effects……

‘From the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.’ N. Chomsky..

Like orphans who assume they must have sinned terribly for mummy to have gone away without actually having to feel Her absence…..and so we are compelled to take in Mother Earth by way of enactment, by the plunder and rape of the Planet, by the ravaging consumption of the Self, rather than by conscious acts of devotion known to those from whom we have descended in more ways than one..

“Our Savior is our True Mother, in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.” Julian of Norwich

The danger for us all in the era of Trump is not confined to his actions. It is that once he’s gone we’ll all be too busy dancing in the streets to understand that he was not some aberration but the inevitable outcome of any culture rooted in collective deprivation. Never has it been so blatant that what the leader of the free world needs is a good Momming, without which everyone else’s life continues to hang in the balance.

Fear of Freedom.

People are weird.

We’re not just self destructive. We also party to the precipice.

We amass more than we need but care more about how it’s packaged than the slice of time it’s supposed to save, as though time itself were ripe for consumption.

And then….

having worked so hard to gather more nuts than you can eat, be persuaded to part with it all at the drop of a hat and marched into a hail of gunfire on the strength of some brocaded phantom you can be sure is elsewhere at the time..

So, though we might destroy ourselves in all kinds of colorful and flamboyant ways, the silent running by which folk give away what they say they most want is stranger still…..

which is why the very different revolutions of modern times all seem to have a strange something in common. Within a generation the level playing field so dearly fought for is given back into the hands of tyranny.

Within fifteen years after the storming of the Bastille and the biggest hate fest since Nebuchadnezzer, Napoleon was crowned Emperor.

Tsar Nicholas 11 of Russia was finally toppled in 1917, yet these brave revolutionaries also struggle to bear their liberty for any longer than the French, managing to replace him with Stalin who’s Great Purge of 1934-39 made the Russians all sentimental about the good ol’ days of brutal serfdom under Bloody Nicholas.

The Chinese revolution shortly after that has the same odd twist. In 1949 political equality for all was ensconced in law along with equal rights for women. Land reallocation produced massive shared wealth among the poor and yet, by 1964, just fifteen years later, the Great leap Forward had succeeded in starving 30 million of them to death.

‘After eating the grass roots and the tree bark, they ate the earth.’ Lin Chun.

In each of these historic upheavals you see the same thing. With the gates to real equality and prosperity for all thrown open, the victorious people then turn on one another, sending their own to the guillotine or the death camp. In China this was expressed in it’s most bizarre form by the civil war between the Red Guards in 1968. You’d think the two sides had different leaders and objectives but they were both loyal to Mao and went into battle with one another both bearing his image, waving his little red book and chanting the same party slogans.

What gives?

There must be factors involved other than those we might normally consider to be a priority. Psychology 101, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, says that people’s primary motivation is to first find shelter, food, security; and only thereafter does the hairless ape need belonging, intimacy or creative expression.

Subsequent explorations, particularly out of the Existential and Jungian schools of psychology show that meaning is sometimes more important than bread and that people will readily sacrifice comfort for cause.

Some state it even more boldly..

‘If you take care of the body at the expense of the soul you will lose them both.” Weatherall

Generally the kind of cause that makes people sacrifice their primary needs is all too clear. A call to arms, the beloved in peril. But sometimes the details of even a common cause are not that obvious and folk can wind up sabotaging their own best efforts, goals achieved somehow allowed to slip between proverbial fingers.

The work of Wilfred Bion might assist us. He suggests that within any group there is invariably a gap between the stated assumptions of the group and the way it actually operates.

”Groups have aims far different from the overt task… [These aims] have the characteristics of defensive reactions to psychotic anxiety. In fact I consider this the ultimate source of all group behavior.” W. Bion (p. 476).

In Bion’s view, what matters in group behavior is way more primitive than Freud’s conviction, that despite pretensions to self determination we still need powerful others to determine our fate and relieve us of the fear of being punished for daring to stand unaided. Bion says we have to go deeper, the ultimate sources of our distress are psychotic anxieties, and much of what happens in groups is as a result of defenses against them, so that they need not be consciously endured.

What could these primal anxieties be?

Dark terrors are invariably to do with what is most ancient in us, both in the early life of the individual and in the ancestral memory of the collective. The deepest of these, for both individual life and cultural roots is loss of Mother.We know full well what happens when individual children are deprived of their mothers. What of Nations? What millenial impact the shaming, the humiliation and demise of the sacred feminine, on the darker hallways of the collective psyche? What shadows will they throw?

There are layers of our collective psyche that are traumatised. Culturally we are the kids of divorced parents who aren’t allowed to see Mummy anymore, can only recall her indirectly from the time worn assumption that tomorrow must be as depleted as today, as a vague feeling of loss and emptiness. Where she used to be is Weber’s alienation, Durkheim’s ennui, Freud’s melancholia, Jung’s loss of soul. The Divine Mother who has suckled the Earth for longer than memory has been cast into the sea.

”Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts o’ her tenderness:
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.” Francis Thompson.

Fortunately this desperate state can be mediated by several big guns in the paranoid arsenal. Firstly the feeling of lack can be palmed off onto inferior others to be purged in a colourful variety of nights of the long knives. Secondly, you can have some Glorious Other seem to embody everything you lack and then identify with them in a ‘participation mystique’, a fusing of being, to the point that your own destiny with all its trials and even your own safety are of little consequence.

It’s not simply that power or wealth may become one’s own possibility, just a dice throw of chance or opportunity away, but that even if you are trodden into the mud you can still be one with the Miraculous Other despite your empty belly and freezing feet.

so long as you have someone else to blame…

Sartre gives the example of the coach driver waiting for his feasting master in the winter sleet, their differences swept aside once he emerges, taut from his soiree, not by meat and drink but by an anti-semitic joke which gives the miserable coach driver a momentary warm glow of being in one mind with his oppressor.

To live in greater abundance brings perspective with it, asks how you have been living, breaks co-dependence, contradicts basic assumptions of scarcity rooted in a half forgotten story of violent loss.

If..

“Groups approximate to very primitive phantasies about the contents of the mother’s body, the elements of their emotional situations so closely allied to phantasies of the earliest anxieties that the group is compelled, whenever the pressure of anxiety becomes too great, to take defensive action (Bion, 1955, p. 456).”

then what do you think is going to happen when habituated oppression is suddenly lifted, when associations to the Great Mother’s body are ones of evisceration and dismemberment?

The new utopia cannot be entered into. Opportunity has to be passed up, conflict created, even if it is absurd and ridiculous…

rather than face…that Mother is gone.

The Curse of Creativity.

I once had the dubious honor of being locked up in a third world jail for an irregularity in my passport. I was thrown into a stinking cell in absolute darkness. The stench could have stripped paint. Bodies shuffled in the acrid void. A match was lit and held up to my face, one of three brothers who then shared their single blanket and the newspaper sheets that served for a bed.

As dawn broke I noticed another man sitting apart from us. He was curled into an upright fetal ball, sleeping on his feet to avoid the cold floor, arms wrapped around himself protectively. It was a posture that had the stamp of long practice. I asked the brothers about him. One of them explained that he had been here fro many years. He tapped his temple meaningfully.

Each morning some benefactor would drop off some peanuts and an orange for this poor prisoner. He received no visitors. No-one spoke to him. Not even the brothers. He was utterly alone. Over the several days it took to secure my freedom I watched him closely. Initially I was afraid. Then I got curious.

He said nothing, barely moved except to sun himself in the open corridor for the few hours in the day we were allowed out of our cell. He’d perch himself in a corner, trouser legs rolled up, his legs dangling out of the bars that ran down one side of the walk-way. There he would slowly unpack his treasure, meticulously shelling his peanuts and building an artistic cone with the husks. He attended to this in great detail, balancing each shell with delicate precision. Should any shell tumble down he would painstakingly replace it with quiet urgency until the project was complete.

Then he would peel his orange. Each rind was used to decorate the cone. Every last scrap of white pith was removed with infinite delicacy and used to crown his totem. Then he would break open the orange with all the seriousness and ceremony of communion. Each segment was savored as if it were ambrosia. Deep contentment seemed to flood through him as he lingered over every last morsel.

When he was finished he leaned his entire body against the bars as if exhausted with gratitude before extracting a remarkably clean handkerchief from the inner recesses of otherwise filthy clothes and carefully wiped the corners of his mouth. His sacrament was complete for another day.

Folk tend to assume that creativity is about talent and end products. We confuse it with technical ability. It suits us to do this. You can tell yourself that you have not been blessed with such gifts, that unmanifest creativity is not your fault.

Much tougher is the consideration that creativity is a kind of attitude towards life which is precisely our responsibility to cultivate regardless of circumstance. This can be done under the most abject conditions. Creativity in not the same as making things. It is not even a precondition for it. So what stops us from living so unconditionally when there is such freedom to be had?

The reason is that the creative attitude is iconoclastic, it breaks the mold of self construct, prods life’s holy cows, stirs up all the mud from pond’s bottom. Certainty and the confidence that goes with it has to be renounced. Introducing yourself gets complicated.

One of the struts in my own identity was always that I hadn’t an artistic bone in my body. I said so loud and long, enough to begin to get suspicious…. One day, just as a way of getting out of the house, I thought I would make a mosaic in my garden. Not art you understand. But the mosaic had other ideas and became art whether I liked it or not.

Now I had a problem on my hands. People were coming to see it. Someone ratted on me to the local newspaper. Strangers pulled their cars over in the lane to ask how I was getting on. Some little girl in the Post office said ,”look mummy, its the mosaic man.”

It was all too much. I covered it over and went back to being a writer. I was pleased with my new commitment. Then I got depressed. Then I got sick. A spell in hospital under the watchful eye of specialist consultants produced only raised eyebrows. Then I had a dream, a howling banshee screaming at me like a jilted lover, raging abandonment and retribution. Next morning I uncovered the mosaic and resumed my work. Within a few days my illness had disappeared. I wasn’t sick any more… but I was in crisis.

The birth of anything is a brush with death. Creativity’s handmaidens are Chaos and Bewilderment. An end to the log jam comes at a price. Much as it is uncomfortable, the inner blockage can feel like the lesser of two evils compared to the disorientation that attends a deliberate step into an unknown self. And so you stay put, reaching for the comfortable props that in a short while will be cursed as boredom.

The problem is not lack of courage but that the source of the fear is not sufficiently named and is therefor difficult to face. Rilke said it best…

”Every angel is terrible and so I suppress myself and swallow the call note of depth dark sobbing.”

Which brings us to the knife cut of our final undoing, compelled to ask from whence as well as to what end. Something other than ego consciousness is at play and demanding to be taken seriously. Not only will your creation create you back, it will depose you too. To be inspired is literally to breath something in, something unknown, doing I don’t know what…. questioning your place in the grand scheme of things with the eternal reminder that you are not the master of your own house.

The Uninvited Guest.

On the one hand addiction is a matter of chemical dependence. On the other it’s a need to feel the oceanic bliss of Mother flood long standing aridity just one more time… On the third hand, because these things are always complicated, its good business.

The British East India Company managed to ship 2 million kilos of opium into China in 1833, making loads of cash and disabling their coastal cities, a ploy repeated in America with the proliferation of crack among African American neighborhoods in the nineties and latterly with the more recent Xanax and Opiate epidemics which effectively disrupt community spirit sufficiently to prevent them organizing and then quiet the people whilst bleeding them dry.. Been shut up and had your account cleaned out? It’s okay ….

“..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon…” Aldous Huxley. Brave New World.

Nothing has to be done. Everything is meant to be and perfect as it is. Until it is not. But then preoccupation with your next score serves just as well to narrow focus, the impinging niggles of real life once more cast off.

“Too awful,” she kept repeating, and all Bernard’s consolations were in vain. “Too awful! That blood!” She shuddered. “Oh, I wish I had my soma.”ibid.

So addiction works whether you are loaded or not.

How considerate…

and yet addiction is one of those things we are most likely to vilify, to construe as something simply to be got rid of, something that can only be thought about in negative terms. Its like the curse of the uninvited fairy you find in Sleeping Beauty, or the impossible task visited on Paris by Neris who he foolishly left off the guest list to his wedding. She revenged herself by tossing a golden apple into the midst of the proceedings with a note.. , ‘to the most beautiful’.. Of course every Goddess present but one was in a strop by the end of the day and expressed their pique all through the disasters and devastation of the Trojan wars.

But if Addiction is simply cast as a bad tempered witch and the rest of the story just given over to fixing the terrible situation by heroic action, it glosses over how things got that way and, unlikely as it seems, how the curse might also hold any meaning.

Despite its debilitation, addiction persists because the fact that the world may be made to stand still for a very long time means disturbing realities which cannot be managed without way more safety can still be held at arm’s length. Sometimes these are the traumas of childhood but they are also the dangers of our own unique destinies that invite adventuring but re-invent you on the way.

If your world feels a bit rocky then the last thing you need is the destabilization of fresh challenges.

In Sleeping Beauty the curse of the wicked fairy seems spiteful, but earlier versions than Grimm’s reveal details that put this curse into greater perspective and help an understanding of the mythology of compulsive behavior.

According to the older version by Perrault the dark fairy has been banged up in a tower for so long that people no longer recognize her, believing her to be dead. Her curse is way more than the paranoia of being unintentionally slighted. Its justified fury at the betrayal of the Principle of Relatedness that lies at the heart of natural law and the inclusive protection sacrosanct to it that gives everyone the sense of having a place at the table, a place which might then relieve anxiety sufficiently for the fresh adventures of individuation.

The Dark Fairy is not vanquished by the heroic blade. She has to be redeemed, met half way. This begins with the poetic justice of being made to take sufficient time out to integrate what has been going on in the kingdom behind all the velvet and brocade.

Its why teens past playing happy families sleep in till noon.

and are likely to find other means if denied it.

By sleeping on something you give it fair consideration, the fallow time it takes for new prospects or forgotten facts to be identified with sympathetically, without forcing or fancy swordsmanship.

In Perrault’s version the Princess is not woken by rehabilitation’s kiss. She wakes because it’s time. The hundred years are up.

”Her embarrassment was less than his, and that is not to be wondered at, since she had had time to think of what she would say to him.” ibid

Her long slumber had been beguiled with reflective dreams through which she reconnected with the Principle of Relatedness enough to be scarcely able to speak half of what she wanted to say on waking…

The curse is a compromise between the dark fairy’s honor and the Princess’ efforts to try and process how this grandmother could be forgotten, what it means to remember Her, the Ground from which the kingdom sprang.

Marie Louise von Franz said of a dream that made her first take the demands of the unconscious seriously, ‘I put my knees under my chin and stayed in bed all day.’

When this incubation is allowed by the defensive hedge of thorns raised by the ‘good’ fairy to prevent SB from being disturbed, the Princess wakes up by herself. In some versions she has already given birth to twins Dawn and Day, symbols of nascent consciousness. We speak of dawning awareness and seeing things in the light of day, indicating a new development that now superceeds the old pattern.

”The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.. which consists in some wider or higher interest and through this the insoluble problem lost it’s urgency, fading out when confronted by a new and stronger life tendency.” CG Jung.

In 2001 Portugal became the first country to decriminalise the possession and consumption of all illicit substances.

The opioid crisis soon stabilised, and the ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates. HIV infection plummeted from an all-time high in 2000 of 104.2 new cases per million to 4.2 cases per million in 2015.” The Guardian 5/12/2017

What helped the problem was to stop seeing it as a problem. The language around addiction changed as well as the law. This then created huge shifts in collective behavior. Not by enforcement but simply because the powers that be had taken the time to include the troubled with compassion, afford them a place at the table and slept sympathetically on the issue.