Tag: Essene Gospel of Peace

Giving the Devil his Due.

In the wildly phantasmagoric, ‘Essene Gospel of Peace’, an alchemical coagulatio of Gnostic wisdom and late neolithic enema rituals [great if you are handy with a calabash], there comes a bucolic moment when the Master berates his followers for going on at such great length about their suffering and how much they are tormented by Satan..

‘Satan torments you thus because you have already fasted many days and you do not pay to him his tribute. You do not feed him. You torment him with hunger.’

Psychologically,

‘You are over-identified with being good. You therefor deny, split off and project your shadow and pay for this with a good solid neurosis. The way out of this mess is by repairing the relationship with this disavowed self.’

Nietzsche echoes this a few centuries later, with added flowery bits, when he made the observation in ‘Birth of Tragedy’, that the brothers Apollo and Dionysus have become estranged from one another in our culture. We have come to worship at the altar of only one of them with our sunny dispositions and political correctness and have driven the invaluable other underground, causing a great rent in the collective psyche..

‘Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture, can save the Apollonian dream from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind.” F. Nietzsche

Any over-identification with a single story/storey, mono-anything, is going to have the effect of enervating the psyche, preventing development and generating schizoid, [indiscriminate rambling] characteristics in the personality. You begin to become unhinged and increasingly reliant on denial and projection to stay behind the picket fence of your preferred ism. Hence much of the paranoia of our age. Monochrome is a little threatened by red, yellow and blue, which it secretly wants to become.

Uncomplicated belief systems, produce split realities. If you won’t be complicated you will develop a complex instead, one that requires carefully choreographed conflicts in order to stay afloat. The cut and dried belief system in which all the questions are answered and there is no internal dissent is… well, cut and dried. It is severed from its roots with all the moisture sucked out of it. The cutting and the drying divides the self against itself, desiccates life, creating schizoid separation from self and world. In lieu of our daemonic guardians standing watch over us, they are suddenly co-opted into the kind of self care necessary to split realities. Preserving ‘our way of life’ becomes a divine mandate.

‘The transpersonal is placed in the service of defense’. D. Kalsched.

Instead of the transcendent function being used to create transitional space between self and other, the opposite happens. The psyche fractures to accommodate its denied multiplicity whilst the transcendent function is bused in to enforce social distancing and prevent the psyche from conferring with itself. I.e. reflecting. It becomes a sacred duty to hive oneself off from what is going on.

“The schizoid experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself ‘together with’ others or ‘at home in’ the world.” R.D. Laing.

We pay dearly for any belief in our own exclusive rightness, in ‘first and only’. Despite convictions of privilege, rectitude and self-congratulation, the price is internal division and disconnection from others which is why spending any time with a true believer will always leave your head spinning.

At the schizoid end of narcissism the problem is not simply lack of empathy for others, but more an actual denial of others. Others become statistics and collateral damage. Bad numbers. I’m put in mind of a patient who left, never to return, with the words, ‘I just can’t see you as a human being’.

”To feel potential and share with a beloved other is what the schizoid cannot do because their nascent longings were traumatically disappointed as children.’ Kalsched

Its a bit like saying that the way we collectively address when-Mother-is-missing, is to split off anxiety and bolster sudden fragility with life giving convictions and certitudes, whilst having to dumb down life’s complexities and infinite variety. This then drives the devil in us crazy… and vengeful, wanting his pound of flesh for the ongoing delusion that you are captain of your ship, and that there are no raptors aboard. Or at least if there are raptors, then its quite safe. And if its not safe then its not my responsibility. I wasn’t there. I don’t know nuffing about any raptors. I never met them.

The scary thing about Trump is that he really is a man of the people. Its not just that a hundred million people think this clearly ungodly man is blessed by Jesus. Its that he really does epitomize many of the values we all hold, including the right not to have to grow into long pants or go through life with any critical reflection.

‘‘Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his
beginnings, and something else believes it has long since got beyond all
that.” C G Jung CW9.

What else should we expect of a collective which has lost its mother?

The collective loss of the divine feminine produces a cultural response no different to that of an individual toddler who is suddenly forced by neglect or bereavement to adopt a position of absolute certainty in life in order to compensate for chaotic feelings of loss. All Mono’s are likewise full of full of passionate intensity and always know what’s going on. The widespread belief that we somehow cannot help but evolve seems to be undercut by the fact that whatever ism we belong to, it shares with all the others the same blinkered prejudice of an exclusive and ‘right’ way of looking at things consistent with schizoid defense structures.

Mr Trump’s recent assertion that intravenous bleach, a known suicide method, might be the miracle cure for Coronavirus, seems to demonstrate the addling effect, the split realities and the psychic enervation which results from first and only, from failing to give the Devil his due.

Beyond Conflict.

One of the best ways of getting to sleep is to ask yourself a really profound question. The deeper the better. Dropping such a stone into the Well of Night is a torment to already reluctant Goblins who down tools in protest at all this pre-frontal cortex overtime which is a great help in nodding off. Turn your profundity over in your hand as if it were The Precious, next thing you know it’s morning and you need to pee.

Last night’s was the charm. ‘What is the most significant thing anyone ever said to me?’ A few pretenders threw their hats into the ring but I was suddenly way too tired to pay them any mind.

To have the desired effect you need fresh questions on a regular basis, otherwise the Goblins keep working and you’ll be up all night. Sometimes you can’t think of a good one, a nice juicy one to provoke the Goblin’s strike, but these musings work just as well and many a peaceful night’s sleep may be entered into on the magic carpet of wondering hard about what to wonder hard about.

Next morning though, it came to me. The most significant thing that any one ever said to me was after a session with my analyst, Chuck, who was also a gifted potter. He was seeing me to the door. In the hallway there was a magnificent example of his work. I asked him quite casually how he managed the inevitable desires to become rich and famous which must ride in on the back of such craftsmanship. His answer rang in me like a bell. ‘I tip my hat to them.’

The Zen quality of Chuck’s attitude towards the shadowy, grasping aspect of human nature seems to me the encapsulation of enlightened action. He really had found a mid way between the extremes, being neither enamored nor repelled by wealth and fame.

Non-attachment isn’t about separating yourself from the world, about getting rid of or overcoming anything. Unfortunately much popular psychology is steeped in the notion that people have to be fixed, made better, panel beaten back into normality. Ironically, inner conflict is bound to result from such partisan affiliation, from identifying with some narrow band of the psyche at the expense of all the others.

”You can have it any color you like so long as its black.” H. Ford.

When life’s other hues are relegated to the Underworld out of the need to present a particular face to Others, you visit a world of hurt upon yourself. The consistent view, the tried and true, the default position; none of these chime well with immediate life, the fresh possibility striving to outgrow yesterday’s mold.

”There is as much suffering derived from our resistance to circumstance as from the circumstances themselves.” M. Israel.

Though we are largely free from the tyrannical hold Church had over the hearts and minds of it’s Flock in times past, we still seem to be in the business of trying to divide Good from Evil and fighting the good fight. Today’s demons are Anxiety and Depression which we combat no less than Knights of Old, wielding Prosac and Chlorpromazine in place of sword and lance.

But change never occurs on the back of such a combative attitude. In fact it makes it worse, entrenching inner conflict for which some new medication will soon become necessary….

‘What you resist, persists.’ S. Freud.

If you want to grow, you have to lower your weapon. People tend to think of their demons as the problem, but its the desire to be rid of them which actually causes the greater part of suffering because their strategy is rooted in rejection of experience and internal division. This then lends said demons with sharper horns and pointier tails.

The fears we have about entertaining our own alienated self is poetically expressed by the issues surrounding the US southern border wall. There is a strong feeling that unless there is an impenetrable barrier then there will simply be chaos, civilization as we know it will end, overrun by murderers and rapists.

The reality on the ground is very different as is often the case when the axe you are busy grinding can be put aside for a moment.

In the apocryphal Essene Gospel of Peace the Master says to the afflicted,

‘ Satan torments you thus because you do not pay to him his tribute. You torment him with hunger and so in his agony he torments you.’

What this means is that resolving inner conflict entails having a position slightly outside it, one that refrains from overly taking sides so that identity is not entirely wrapped up in it, just as a child may develop a relationship with Daddy without it having to cost him his relationship with Mummy.

‘The greatest and most important problems of life can never be solved, but only outgrown.” C. G. Jung

‘Trying-to-resolve’ is actually a form of throwing yourself back in the fray. It’s the wish to fix so that the issue will go away. It’s wanting to grow whilst sedimenting self construct and most destructively, identifying with the conflict itself.

But you are curious, you want answers; yet if the quest for knowledge is tinged with wanting dominion over it, wanting to feel secure, wanting to be free of the tension, then the spirituality used to counter materialism becomes yet another form of obsessive nut-gathering and covert inner warfare.

‘To solve a problem is to kill it.’ E.F. Schumacher

An old Jewish fable attributed to Rabbi Haim of Romshishok tells the story of the difference between Heaven and Hell. They are actually the same place but in Hell the long spoons at the dining table mean that no-one can get the food to their mouths and so all are wailing and moaning. In Heaven the people are feeding Each Other.

The difference is Relatedness, which seems to be in such short supply these days that the British even have a Minister of Loneliness, Tracey Crouch, who has given teary eyed speeches vowing ‘to tackle the scourge of isolation’, using the same vanquishing language of conflict that creates isolation in the first place, rather than examining the ways in which we refuse to feed one another.

Generally this must involve a confession of some kind. Not the pill box variety, just the heart felt ‘bloody hell’ of realizing just how much you with-hold from yourself and others which then exacerbates conflict and its symptom, isolation.

Of course it takes a long time to get so poised that you can tip your hat to the devil with the confidence that such a gesture immunizes you from the worst of his effects. There are bound to be more clumsy efforts. But you have to start somewhere.

So next time you find something lurking in the lower corridors of the Psyche, refrain from running it through with your mighty weapon. Try tipping your hat and introduce yourself nicely. Ask after its name. Make it a cup of tea. Find out where it comes from and where it is headed. Swop baby pictures, take some selfies. You’ll part on better terms.