Our Garden

"What have you done
With the Garden that was entrusted to you?"

- Antonio Machado

Allen Ginsberg in No Direction Home

"Poetry is words that have a power that make your hair stand on end. That you recognise instantly as being some form of subjective truth that has an objective reality to it - because someone has realised it! ...Then you call it poetry later".

- Allen Ginsberg

America - Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Liam Clancy

A phenomenal photo of Liam Clancy singing in the 60s. I grabbed it while watching No Direction Home.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Keith Richards Reflecting on Motivating Mateship in a Band

He's talking about how he was at art school and how everyone had a Sword of Damocles hanging over their head about the inevitable years of National Service in the military afterwards. All of a sudden one day the Government relaxes the requirements, and he's left in a hilarious Stockholm-like limbo.

"Suddenly you felt like you had two free years, but it was a complete illusion, of course. You didn't know what to do with it. Even your parents didn't know what to do with those years, because they wee expecting you to disappear at eighteen. It all happened so fast. My life had been plodding along nicely until I found out there was no National Service. There was no way I was going to get out of this goddamn morass, the council estate, the very small horizons. Of course, if I'd done it, I'd probably be a general by now. There's no way to stop a primate. If I'm in, I'm in. When they got me in the Scouts, I was a patrol leader in three months. I clearly like to run guys about. Give me a platoon, I'll do a good job. Give me a company, I'll do eve better. give me a division, and I'll do wonders. I like to motivate guys, and that's what came in handy with the Stones. I'm really good at pulling a bunch of guys together. If I can pull a bunch of guys useless Rastas into a viable band [he's talking about the Wingless Angels] and also the Winos, a decidedly unruly band of men, I've got something there. It's not a matter of cracking the whip, it's a matter of just sticking around, doing it, so they know you're in there, leading form the front and not from behind.

And to me, it's not a matter of who's number on, it's what works".

Excerpt from Life, An Autobiography, by Keith Richards.

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

Praised Be Man - Jack Kerouac

I came across these great lines by Keroac today while watching No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese's biographical documentary of Bob Dylan. The references to the symbolic ocean as eternity, source, dynamic ground, just keep on coming of late...

"Praised be man, he is existing in milk
and living in lilies -
And his violin music takes place in milk
and creamy emptiness -
Praised be the unfolded inside petal
flesh of tend'rest thought -
(petrels on the follying
wave-valleys idly
sing themselves asleep) -
Praised be delusion, the ripple -
Praised be the Holy Ocean of Eternity -
Praised be I, writing, dead already and
dead again"

- Jack Kerouac, Excerpt from Mexico City Blues, 228th chorus

http://www.youtube.com/v/aCV6UOi20Ys?fs=1&hl=en_US

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

The Many...

Now I a fourfold vision see 

And a fourfold vision is given to me 

Tis fourfold in my supreme delight 

And three fold in soft Beulahs night 

And twofold Always. May God us keep 

From single vision & Newtons sleep

- William Blake

Dan Siegel's nine critical components of 'Mindsight'.

1. Bodily regulation.
2. Attuned communication.
3. Emotional balance.
4. Response flexibility.
5. Fear modulation.
6. Empathy.
7. Insight.
8. Moral awareness.
9. Intuition.

Now just gotta work out how to do it while still rocking out like Keith Richards! ;-D

Forgive me one Christmas indulgence...

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Where My Story Starts - Broken Shelf

This is a link to a song I wrote and recorded with Simon Clark and Adam Gaensler when I was a youngster. Ah, memories! ;-D

http://zaphodb62.tumblr.com/post/2422914147/a-little-tune-written-by-adam-luke-and-i

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Anamnesis, or The Psychoanalysis of God - by Ken Wilber in One Taste.

(It is worth noting that this entry was written before Ken began differentiating structures and states (a la the Wilber-Combs Lattice) and instead stacked psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual states on top of magic, mythic, mental, and vision-logic. I don't think this alters the significance of this piece very much at all, however, but it may be useful to imagine this sequence as moving "diagonally" up and to the right through both structures and states, without necessarily differentiating between the two.)

1

Push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . .

2

Yearning, yearning.
Hunger, thirst, hunger here.
Swallowing, to swallow.
Must have, must have, must have.
Move toward, run away.
Fear, fear, fear, here.
Anger, rage, explode, swallow, grasping hard, terror.

3

I see, hear, feel. I am not alone. There are others here, of my blood, and we are one, against the others.

Nature sleeps with us, and rises with us, and we are sometimes bright, sometimes frightened, by this power over us. Our strong desire is not strong enough, many times. Earth, air, fire, water, follow no course, sometimes they help, many times they hurt.

Life is short, following the way of all blood on earth. There are others here, some are bright, some are dark. Those of my blood are with me. Those who are not, are not. Death is with us, and we put death on those who are not.

Family is of blood, and is with us. I am four in this family. Eighteen suns have brought me here. Now the moon is putting death on me. The moon, the snake, the water, they are one.

All things touch all things. There is no separation here on earth. To touch a thing is to be that thing; to eat a thing is to be that thing. We do not touch that of the other, we do not eat that of the other. Life is on this side, of our blood. Death is on that side, of the other. We do not touch the other, we do not eat that of the other. Now the moon is putting death on me, because the snake, the moon, and the water are one. When the snake bit, the moon entered me, and now death is entering me.

I have learned these things, from those who know. My family goes on, our blood mixed with this earth.

4

Boy and girl together are killed, we roast them and eat them carefully, for they are of the Mother. Blood is of the Mother, and we offer blood to Her, which comes back as our food.

I am Tiamat, of the fifth house, planter of the seeds that were brought to us by ancestors in the days before time began. My blood is of the Mother, my bones are of the Mother, my heart beats with the time calling us to Mother. My body mixes with earth, which is the Mother.

Few understand Mother. She is Life, her blood makes life. We offer her blood, the boy and girl are killed together, which we eat for the Mother, or else the seeds will not bring forth. Each four moon season, we sacrifice for Mother, which comes back as our food. If we do not sacrifice, we all will perish. I, Tiamat, know this, from the ancestors who brought us the seeds, in the days before time began.

5

My father's father descended from the Creator, whose abode is not here, but Heaven, and His ways we cannot know. In our city, the priests have means to contact our Father, but my family does not understand them. My father's father understood the Father, for they were kin, but we have forgotten. It does not matter, our lives are in His hands. There are many gods and goddesses, and He is just the leader of them all, though we do not know how.

The priests tell us that there was a time that our ancestors walked with the Creator, but then something terrible happened. We pray twice daily to be returned to before the mistake. I pray very hard, but the last time I prayed hard, my sister died anyway. My uncle said I must pray harder, so something must be wrong with me.

I am being trained to be a potter, because I am very good with my hands, and I see things about making. My brother was a potter; my other brother plows. One of my sisters died; they will not tell me what happened to my other sister.

We are fortunate, for we have a strong house. This is because my father's father was descended from the Creator. Also, in the blood fight that took this city from the others, our family fought well, and so we have this house.

The day of sacrifice is the best day, because everything comes from the Creator and we must give some of it back. My family sacrifices beautiful birds, which we raise for this. There are dark rumors about what goes on in the Temple, but I don't believe them. We see the sacrifices here, with the birds. The blood of the bird returns to the earth. Blood is the life we are given, so we give it back. To eat a thing is to be that thing, so after the bird is blessed by the priest, we eat it, because now it is food of the gods, and the gods are in it. So in this way we become strong, and the elements leave us alone. And yet, the last time I prayed for my sister, she died anyway, so there must be something wrong with me.

6

This world makes sense, obviously. And I am constantly struggling with those who want to hide the light of rationality under some obscure basket of deceit. UFOs, astrology, alchemy, astral travel, Eastern mysticism…. What a mess.

Most of these people, however well intentioned, don't seem to realize that they are living in a relatively safe and protected world precisely because of rational science and its fruits of medicine, dentistry, physics, economic production and abundance, the extension of average life span from thirty years to seventy years. The critics condemn that which shelters them. I've been an electrical engineer for over three decades, because it works, it is verifiable, it betters human lives. There is a real world out there, with real truth in it, and real hard work required to dig it out. You can't just contemplate your navel and hope to find out anything worth anything.

The fortress of science, is how I think of it. It will stand forever, constantly updated. That is, as long as the antirational inmates don't take over the hospital.

Perhaps I shouldn't get angry, but I do. Ever since my son died last year in an automobile accident, things have been a little rough. But running to a pie-in-the-sky God does no good at all. We human beings, for good or ill, are the only gods in existence, the only force of rational intention and good will. And we will save ourselves if we can be saved at all. The Bible is right about one thing: the truth will set you free. And science is the only path of discovering truth. What else could there be?

I'm not worried, anyway. Oh, once in awhile, I can't sleep, you know. I lie awake and stare into the darkness, and wonder.

7

All things are related to all things. When I first had that realization, perhaps when I was a young girl, maybe fourteen or so, it completely changed my life! I would later learn names for this—holism and so on—but at the time, all I knew was that all things were related to, connected to, all things. Twenty years, two husbands, no kids, three jobs, and one National Book Award later, I still believe this firmly!

My book, To Re-weave the Web, is a detailed account of this holistic view, based not only on all the late-breaking scientific discoveries—and oh there are so many! from chaos theory to quantum physics to complexity theories and systems theory, my head just spins, it's so exciting!—but we also have the holism of the indigenous peoples of the world over, who knew all this stuff way before modern science stumbled onto it. The Great Goddess returns! Gaia is alive! All things are related to all things.

This is wondrous, isn't it? Now that science is catching up with this holistic interwoven view—why, I was writing about this years ago!—I am looked upon as something of a forerunner. So I have become a heroine, imagine that! I've been asked to be on this board and that, serve on this journal and that, go to this conference and that. Me! Imagine that!

Oh, I forgot. Not just the indigenous beliefs, but Eastern mysticism, too. All saying the same thing, about the web-of-life, all things and all things and all of that and so on. So I don't see why those Zen people keep annoying me and asking if I meditate. What difference does it make?, I keep asking them. If you believe that everything is connected to everything, what else is there? You do it your way, which is meditation, and I do it my way, which is called holistic thinking. They said, that was just an idea and could I show them this oneness right now? And that made no sense to me at all. They're just being obnoxious, I think, like they know it all. Imagine that!

8

The hike through the mountain with my fiancé was everything I wanted. Madly in love, slightly crazed, we both were babbling fools. More like children, but it didn't mater. For an hour John had dutifully carried the picnic basket on his back, kidding all the time that it was only fitting that he should carry the food of the CEO of Digital Data Corporation, and I said, No, it's only fitting for a love slave, and that would be you. And I wasn't even finished with this sentence when suddenly I disappeared, and there was only the vista in front of me, and John, and this body… but no me, or no I, or… well, I'm not sure. I was one with all of this scenery, one with the mountain, one with the sky, it was exhilarating, a little scary, but mostly completely peaceful, like coming home. I've never really told anyone about it, because on Monday I was back at the office, running Digital, and who would have believed me anyway?

It never happened again. I sometimes read about things like this, oneness and whatnot, cosmic consciousness, but none of the words sound right for what happened to me. I hear that some people can stay in this state constantly, but I don't see how, I really doubt it. You'd lose all sense of orientation, I think. Anyway, it came and went. The more I think about it, the more I think it might have been something like a small seizure. It didn't seem like that at the time, but now it does. After all, what else could it be, seriously?

9

It was just the other day, I can still remember it as if it's happening right now, vivid, electric, weird. I was sitting alone, at home, and it's late, around midnight maybe. I have the distinct feeling that somebody or something is in the house—you know that feeling? Well at first it really scared me, I was really scared. I finally got up the nerve to go through the house, checked it really well. I sit back down and it happens.

This really intense fireball, I don't know what else to call it, simply materialized right there in front of me, right there in the living room. I know this sounds crazy, but this has never happened to me before, I don't see things, you know? But it wasn't just an electrical thing. I know this sounds crazy, but it was alive. Well, I'll just say it: it was Love. It was a living fire of Love and Light. I know this as sure as I'm sitting here. It sort of moved from in front of me to on top of my head, then back in front of me, then on top of my head. When it sits on top of my head my whole spine begins to vibrate, and shooting currents run up it, right to the top. Pretty crazy, huh? And then as soon as I knew that this was Love, it just disappeared, just like that. It just went away, but it scared the daylights out of me. But then it didn't, I mean it didn't scare me. It made me feel completely safe, I've never really felt like that.

I've heard about, you know, that light at the end of the tunnel? Except I wasn't dead. But I know what I know, and I know that Love is somewhere out there. My entire body feels different somehow. My spine hurts, like somebody plugged it into the wall socket, I don't know exactly. But the truth is out there. I know that. Oh, and I know I've started praying, just to say thanks.

10

Nature retreats before its God, Light finds its own Abode. That's all I keep thinking as I enter into this extraordinary vastness. I am going in and up, in and up, in and up, and I have ceased to have any bodily feelings at all. In fact, I don't even know where my body is, or if I even have one. I know only shimmering sheaths of luminous bliss, each giving way to the next, each softer and yet stronger, brighter and yet fainter, more intense yet harder to see.

Above all, I am Full. I am full to infinity, in this ocean of light. I am full to infinity, in this ocean of bliss. I am full to infinity, in this ocean of love. I cannot conceive of wanting something, desiring something, grasping after anything. I can contain no more than is already here, full to infinity. I am beyond myself, beyond this world, beyond pain and suffering and self and same, and I know this is the home of God, and I know that I am in God's presence. I am one with Presence, it is obvious. I am one with God, it is certain. I am one with Spirit, it is given. I shall never want again, for Grace abounds, here in the luminous mist of infinity.

Around the edges of this love-bliss there are tender tears, the faint reminders that I have so wanted this, so longed for this, so desperately yearned for this—to be saturated to the ends of the universe, to be full and free and final. All the years, all the lifetimes, searching for only this, searching and suffering and screaming for only this. And so the tender tears stand at the edge of my infinity, reminding me.

Out of this Light and Love, all things issue forth, of this I am now certain, for this I have seen with the eye of my own true soul. Into this Light and Love, all things will return, of this I am now certain, for this I have seen with the eye of my own true soul. And I have returned with a message: Peace be unto you, my human brothers and sisters; and peace be unto you, my animal brothers and sisters; and peace be unto you, my inanimate brothers and sisters—for all is well, and all is well, and all manner of things shall be well. We are all of the same Light and Love, of this I am now certain, for this I have seen with the eye of my own true soul.

11

Exactly how long I was Light, I cannot say. How long Form existed, I cannot say. How long I have been neither, I cannot say.

On the other side of Light, the Abyss. On the other side of Love, the Abyss. How long, I cannot say.

I once was a rock, I remember that, and push pull crash, I remember that. I roamed the universe of myself in slumbering abandon, and truth be told, it was humorous, always.

I once was a plant, then an animal, and thirst and hunger, I remember that. I ran toward, and ran away from, the forms of my own lust. I wandered driven, starving, dying. But truth be told, it was humorous, always.

I once awoke as human beings, and entered into the school of my own becoming. I first worshiped myself in the form of my other, I worshiped my slumbering self. I moved toward my own skin, dear nature, and I approached me now with wonder, now with terror, and did unending trembling and ritual pleading to deal with the terror I induced by my own sleep. But truth be told, it was humorous, always.

I once awoke as human beings in search of me as heavenly other, in my own form as misty mythic mystery, still asleep, but barely. I sacrificed aspects of my still slumbering self in order to appease the terror that my own twilight still evoked. But to awaken all at once, you see, would have ended the game right there. And truth be told, it was humorous, always, even as I cut into myself.

I soon awoke as human beings who, in striving to be a light unto themselves, were dimly on the trail of the Light that I am, even in my otherness. In one great move I stopped looking for me out there. In one great move, I awoke to the consciousness of light. In one great move, I turned within, or began to, and I could sense that this game was getting old, because I was now on the trail of I. Truth be told, it was humorous, even as it was starting to end.

And then one day, sitting alone as my otherness, I saw myself as a ball of Light and Love, and knew the Great Awakening was upon me.

In the next move in the school of myself, I entered into Me, as that Love and Light itself, and I was with I to infinity. And this I recognized altogether, in a whisper of a breath that embraced all space, and a flash of Light that contained all time.

And then, the Abyss beyond all beyonds. Some would call it radical Freedom, infinite Release, ultimate Liberation, the great Redemption, boundless Being. I wouldn't know, for there is no I to know, in any form, sacred or profane, and so there is only this radical Formlessness, which remains its own remark. It is not bliss, it is not God, it is not love. It is not holistic, it is not Goddess, it is not interwoven anything. It is not infinite, it is not eternal, it is not any conception or object or state whatsoever. I-I am not light, am not love, am not spirit, am not bliss. I-I am not bound, am not free, am not ignorant, am not liberated.

But this much be said: where there is not this Emptiness, there is only suffering.

All this I remember, in the school of myself. All this I have seen, in the history of my own discovery. All this I sing of now, to the audience of myself. All this I promise to others, who are the forms of my own slumbering. All this others will also see, as they awaken from their otherness and return their slumbering selves to the Wakefulness that has always existed, undiminished and untorn, in the heart of what they are.

Exactly how long I was Light, I cannot say. How long Form existed, I cannot say. How long I have been neither, I cannot say.

On the other side of Light, the Abyss. On the other side of Love, the Abyss. How long, I cannot say.

But I know I will empty even this emptiness, and therefore create a Kosmos, and therefore incarnate as the world of Form, and enter with Wakefulness the children of my own Awareness.

12

Around the sea of Emptiness, a faint edge of bliss.
From the sea of Emptiness, a flicker of compassion.
Subtle illuminations fill the space of awareness,
As radiant forms coalesce in consciousness.
A world is taking shape,
A universe is being born.
I-I breathe out the subtlest patterns,
Which crystallize into the densest forms,
With physical colors, things, objects, processes,
That rush upon awareness in the darkness of its night,
To arise as glorious sun, radiant reminder of its source,
And slumbering earth, abode of the offspring of Spirit.

13

The phone rings and I run to pick it up. "Yes?"

"Hi, it's Marci."

"Hi sweetie. What's up?"

"I think we should go on a vacation, spur of the moment. Just do it."

"Um, well, I've got all this work, you know, it's sorta…"

"Come on, it won't kill you to take a few days off."

"Okay, okay. We've never been to South Beach, and we wanted to give it a try, so we might as well do it now, yes?"

"Yes!"

Two weeks later, here we are, in South Beach, Miami, of all places. And resting in the ocean, dipped into the sea, I find glimmers of One Taste everywhere.

Emptiness, clarity, and care, are the names of this present moment, exactly as it is arising, now and now and now. The bodies of Buddha, the hands of Christ, the faces of Krishna, the breasts of the Goddess, the aspects of this very moment. I know that all of that is somehow tied to a pledge that I have made, deep in the heart of my very soul, how or where or when exactly, does not really matter. It is just that, for those who remember the course of their own consciousness—from mineral to plant to animal, from magic to mythic to mental to supramental, from body to ego to soul to Emptiness to radical One Taste—there is an extra duty asked of them, and that is to communicate what they have seen, and what they have remembered, and what they have found—what each I has found in the school of I as it returns to itself, shining and free, empty and bright, called and caring, just so, and again, just so.

And truth be told, it was humorous, always.

14

Marci is swimming. I finish my Coke and my sandwich. It is noon. The sky is clear, the ocean is blue, the waves surge freely on the beach, wetting the soft white sand.

Sources:

http://integrallife.com/learn/deep-end/anamnesis-or-psychoanalysis-god

http://www.amazon.com/One-Taste-Reflections-Integral-Spirituality/dp/1570625476

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

Interesting passages from Donald Kalsched's The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Encountering resistance to encounter groups

Over the years, I've been involved in a range of groups where psychologically-informed people crack the living shits at those who try to engineer closeness at the expense of individuals showing up as they are first. From at least three of these people, I've heard the breathy protest: "It's just like a fucking encounter group". Not having been around in the dusty old days of 70's and 80's psychotherapy, I haven't had the foggiest idea of what an encounter group is, and why it seemed to provide such an allergic reaction to these folks. My disinterest was also fed by wanting the experience that they were seeking to deny.

Today, with my psychoanalyst, I again suffered the protest - but this time with more conversation around what she meant. Boy, oh boy I wish I'd understood this sooner.

While there's a range of encounter group configurations, the simplest form comes from Carl Rogers, and he calls it "basic encounter". I found this excellent short summary at the link cited below: 'Here people sit in a circle, usually on chairs, and interact almost entirely at a conscious verbal level. The role of the leader is simply to "facilitate what is going on", to participate as a "full human being", and to encourage people to be "more honest and more self-disclosing". The leader sets up three conditions - empathy, genuineness and non-possessive warmth".

Now, while this may sound all warm and fuzzy, in integral language, it's about as green as it gets. Oddly enough, in most of the integral groups I've been part of here in Sydney, some form of this encounter is what we've unknowingly gravitated towards (notwithstanding the aforementioned protests). Fundamental to this "sensitive self" is the interpersonal cultural norms of lateral bonding, permeability, the superseding of emotions and caring over rationality, and sensitive communitarian self-dissolution.

I'm supposed to be an integral superhero, right? So this shit is supposed to humor me, right? Wrong. Massively wrong. Despite remaining critical in many facets of interpersonal life, I was completely shocked about the extent to which I try to make this form of encounter happen in my every day life. This has been one enormous blindspot in my self awareness. I might as well have sensitive self tattooed on my forehead!

Further, beyond the mere abstract colour coding, a juicy personal perspective for me in dealing with my psychoanalyst's challenges was coming to realise the repetition compulsion I've had around forcing my intimate relations to pursue ever more fine gradations of "fair" and "open" communication to sate my endless howling into the wind - a grasping sense of never quite merging. Not just green behaviour. Sort of borderliney, absence of self stuff. Eek! The lessons of alterity and intersubjectivity are fucking hard won, and today, I felt one step closer to a genuine understanding of their value.

Taking that breath of fresh air, (sort of sheepishly) looking at my lover's eyes afresh and being hugely grateful for the wise elder who has passaged me through this difficult year of deep psychological growth, I'm warmed by the last two paragraphs I read on more developed encounter groups and the injunctions they hint at for widening my embrace:

"Because of its emphasis on directness and openness ("say what you mean and mean what you say") the encounter group quite often leads to experiences of getting in touch with the real self, which we saw before tend to be ecstatic. This is why Schutz's own groups were ofen called "joy groups". Unfortunately, some leaders have occasionally tried to go direct for joy, by emphasising peace and love all the time. This does not work, because the joy has to be real spontaneous joy if it is to be genuinely experienced at all. We are not in the peace and love game, we are in the reality game; and if we do justice to the reality and the real self, joy will come in due course, in its own way.

This also applies to spiritual experience in the group. It is not uncommon for people in encounter groups to have deep spiritual experiences, which show them that the boundaries of time, space and the self which they have taken for granted are questionable. But to aim deliberately at giving people such experiences is not wise. The basic value in an encounter group is truth, truth to one's own experience. Anything which interferes with this is less good in this context and is not real encounter".

Source of quotes:

http://www.ahpweb.org/rowan_bibliography/chapter8.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_group

http://wakingdownintegral.com/category/integral/

http://www.fudomouth.net/thinktank/now_integralvision.htm

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

Sacral Pump

I found this on a website about practices for lifting the sexual chi through the body and getting in touch with the sacral pump's relationship to the head.  In addition to the work of Mantak Chia and David Deida, I'd read about this in an excellent article in Reality Sandwich recently.  It's great stuff!

... and I couldn't help but leave in the final cheeky line!  ;-D

Testicular Breathing

The first thing an initiate has to learn is testicle breathing. This is done by inhaling, directing the breath down to the testicles so your balls rise up. As you exhale your balls fall back down.

This cools down passion and stimulates sexual chi in a yin mode. Exhaling gets out accumulated wastes.

After a while a cool/cold chi is felt inside the scrotum between the 2 balls. You next "sip" this coolness to the Hui Yin (perineum) thru an imaginary straw. Once the Hui Yin is cold you next sip it through the tip of the spine to the coccyx. This step is difficult and important. There's a lot of bone that has to be broken through.

Now there are pumps in the body. One very important one is the sacral pump. When moving chi from the perineum to the coccyx it helps to activate the sacral pump. It pumps sexual force up the spine and transforms the energy at the same time.

The sacral pump is activated by humping -- i.e., moving the sacrum down and then pulling it up.

There's also a cranial pump in the back of the head. A sexual master activates both to pull the chi to the brain.

After moving the cold chi to the coccyx it is next sipped to T-11, the 11th thoracic vertebra, behind or opposite the solar plexus.

There you let the sperm force accumulate till it's ready to move on its own. Flexing that part of the back will help it travel up.

By the way, this movement of sexual force (kundalini) up the spine to the head is called "raising up the salaat" in Islam. In esoteric Christianity it's known as "uplifting the Christ."

The sperm force is next drawn to the Jade Pillow (back of the head) between C-1 (1st cervical vertebra) and the base of the skull.

Pressing the chin to the chest activates the cranial pump and moves the chi to Pai Hui (crown of the head).

The chi in the head should then be circulated inside the brain 36 times clockwise and 36 times counter clockwise. This vitalizes the brain.

After some practice you can draw the sexual force from the testicles to the brain in one long draw.

After filling the brain, press the tongue to the palate and let the sexual force flow down the front to the lower Tan Tien and the sexual center.

These are preliminary practices to mastering Sexual Kung Fu.

Source: http://amirfatir.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/Testic.htm

Litany Against Fear

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain".

—Bene Gesserit "Litany Against Fear," from Frank Herbert's Dune

Reminders...

As you might have noticed from some of my posts either on this blog or on Facebook, I've been besotted with the insight of attachment theory recently. Apart from the obvious clinical upsides of solidly grounding my new career in this discipline, it has had strong breakthrough implications for my worldview, therapy and insight into the trials of the relationships i've had through my life. In particular, i've been able to see deeply into the ways that my secure approaches have been frustrated resulting in anxious and, at times, disorganised patterns. Simply having knowledge of the interactions of these constructs has given me a tremendous grounding anchor in times where the chaos of life and relationship has been too strong. I've also been able to notice the predominance of avoidant strategies in those I've shared relational settings with. This excerpt from George Hardwell in particular has spoken to me at great depth, allowing for legitimacy of the projections which have silently pervaded many of my interpersonal and intrapsychic relations. I post it here both in the hope that someone else may one day also find it useful, and also as a symbolic gift to myself marking the boundaries which I have improperly allowed to be breached in the past and should never breach again.

What does the avoidant personality look like, and why does this result in silent divorce?

There is a personality type that is associated with avoidance of risk. Such persons are basically in flight from life and use manipulation and control to consolidate this flight.

One rule of life is that the greater our fear of life the greater we need to control. Frightened and insecure, such people will control in order to remove the risk of living. They will control appearances to ensure approval. They will control their family members to reduce risk.

A less extreme Avoidant Personality brings death to the marriage relationship, and their partner's self-confidence and identity, over longer time with less obvious abuse. This person may be male or female. Female patterns are often more subtle; not in the open, harder to detect. Husband may not know what is going on. She can quite easily keep up appearances while avoiding intimacy, undermining the individuality of her partner and escaping true marriage into silent divorce - a pretend marriage.

Silent divorce is fine with the Avoidant Personality. In silent divorce they have the emotional stability they desire - without intimacy. They have the status and safety of being married. If her partner stays in this silent divorce it could become the death of him. He will be trained to avoid expressing emotions, confronting issues head on, talking about 'negatives,' raising any objections to their life style and her increasing control of their life. This could manifest in him with emotional problems such as depression and 'an anger problem'. It may manifest as physical disease - some sickness. It might increase any tendencies in him to find escape in drinking, drugs, gambling or sexual addictions.

In a marriage with an Avoidant Partner both of the partners begin to deaden within, the heart sickens, the spirit languishes, one lives with constant residual depression and a search for life outside of the marriage becomes as search for life, love at the emotional and spiritual level. One strongly hungers and thirsts for that which will lift one spirits, heal one's heart, rekindle one's passion and bring the experience of community and intimacy to one's soul.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

There's Light In Even The Darkest Places

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

An Interview with Sex Therapist Dr David Schnarch

In his book Passionate Marriage, sex therapist Dr David Schnarch asserts that the greatest sexual pleasure in life is possible in one's middle and later years, when a mature sense of self has been achieved and genuine intimacy is possible with another person. Dr Schnarch shows how the details of your sexual style -- from kissing to daring erotic behaviors -- are a window into you, your partner, and your relationship.

Q. What is this book about?

A. Passionate Marriage focuses on helping people reach their sexual potential and have the best sex and intimacy of their lives -- within a long-term relationship -- even after passion and desire have waned. It doesn't focus on dysfunction, but instead on growth and helping people really make contact with their partner during sex. Good sex isn't about just elevating your heart rate -- it's about elevating your heart.

Q. How does your approach work and how is it different from traditional approaches?

A. I help couples use the inevitable problems with sex and intimacy to grow -- so they can have sex with their hearts and minds, and not just with their genitals (there is no nudity or sexual contact in our therapy or workshops). All couples eventually hit emotional "gridlock": when partners are at each other's throats, arguing about everything and no one can give an inch or say they're sorry.

Gridlock is a natural stage in the evolution of both people and their relationships; it isn't caused by lack of communication and communication won't solve it. It can be the pathway to the hottest, most intimate sex you've ever had. Passionate Marriage talks to people's strengths rather than to their weaknesses (i.e.: "childhood wounds" and "fears of abandonment"). It focuses on people's resiliency rather than their pain. Marriage operates at much greater intensity and pressure than we expect--so great, in fact, couples mistakenly assume it's time for divorce when it's really time to get to work. Unlike other methods, this approach may be used even when only one partner is willing to participate. By empowering the best aspects of a relationship rather than the lowest common denominator, this method helps couples on the brink of divorce, when empathy and listening skills offer too little and too late.

About relationships
Q. Many experts stress the importance of communication in a relationship, including "asking for what you want" sexually. You take a different stand. Why?

A. Marital difficulties are often not about an inability to "communicate." We've confused "good communication" with consensus and feeling accepted and validated. Communication is no virtue if you can't stand the message. The path to good sex is not "telling your partner what you want." It involves dealing with what I call "normal marital sadism": your partner probably already knows what you want, and the fact you're not getting it means he or she doesn't want to give it to you.

Q. You disagree with the popular notion that relationship problems arise because "men are from Mars and women are from Venus." Why?

A. There's a lot more to marriage than communication and how men and women communicate differently. A much greater cause of problems is our similarities--our dependence and insistence on getting a positive self-reflection from someone else, and our inability to soothe our own anxieties. The problem is not how "distant" we are. It's that we're emotional Siamese twins, "fused at the hip" through our dependence on our partner's validation. Many "relationship problems" are really the unrecognized natural growth processes of emotionally committed relationships. Marriage is a people-growing machine.

Q. What do you mean when you say that intimate relationships are "people-growing machines?"

A. A good marriage is not smooth, and marriage is not reducible to a set of skills. People have difficulty with intimacy because they're supposed to. It's not something to be "solved" and avoided. Problems with sex and intimacy are important to go through because this process changes us. These are the drive wheels and grind stones of intimate relationships. The solution isn't going back to the passion of early relationships because that's sex between strangers; it's about going forward to new passion and intimacy as adults. If we use relationships properly they make us grow into adults, capable of intense intimacy, eroticism, and passion-having sex with our hearts and minds, and not just with our genitals.

Q. In Passionate Marriage you talk a lot about differentiation. What is this?

A. Differentiation is a natural process in committed relationships that involves developing more of a self while growing closer to your partner. Men often sacrifice their relationship to hold onto their sense of self. Women often sacrifice their sense of self to stabilize their relationship. Differentiation is about having it both ways: having a stronger sense of self and a stronger relationship.

Intimacy
Q. What is intimacy? How is your view of intimacy unique?

A. Intimacy is about letting yourself really be known, including parts that you or your partner don't like. But it's not just about letting "warts" be known. It often involves showing strengths you've been hiding, too. Most approaches focus on getting your partner's validation and acceptance when you disclose. But you can't count on this, and if you try, it inherently limits self-disclosure because you won't say things your partner won't validate. Resolving gridlock requires intimacy based on validating yourself.

Q. You propose that the very way we think about sex and sexual desire sets couples up to have difficulty. Please explain.

A. People have been taught that "sex is a natural function." However, the sex that comes "naturally" is reproductive sex; intimate sex is an acquired ability and developed taste. The notion that "sex is a natural function" leads couples to believe that sex and intimacy emerge full-blown unless some "blockage" is in the way. But usually, getting the sex and intimacy we want doesn't involve removing a block, it involves growing up. Usually we just think of sexual desire as physical cravings (like horniness and "blueballs"). Desire involves wanting your partner -- not just wanting sex -- and we often don't want to want our partner because it makes us vulnerable.

Q. Your book talks about spirituality at the same time that it is explicitly erotic. How do you put the two together?

A. Passionate Marriage is the sexual "road less traveled," an erotic "Care of the Soul" that integrates sexuality and spirituality in deeply positive ways. It is about real passion and wet sex. It's about how relationships are spiritual journeys. It's pragmatic, explicit, practical, and erotic, but it's not simplistic and doesn't focus on technique. It takes a down to earth, "in the trenches," unglamorized, honest view of relationships.

Q. What do you mean by "speaking to the best in people" and addressing strengths rather than weaknesses?

A. The most important thing in marriage is not trauma and childhood wounds-it's strength, resilience and goodness. This book doesn't speak to readers' fears, insecurities, or inadequacies. It speaks to what's good and solid within people, the part that recognizes difficult truths. Marriage isn't simply a replay of childhood controlled by your past; it's a "people-growing process," the birthplace of adult eroticism and the capacity to love.

Q. We've all been taught that compromise and negotiation is the heart of marriage. But you say that it's the road to boring sex. Why?

A. People think the key to marriage is compromise, but what they really want is a "no-compromise marriage." Marriage isn't about giving yourself up or compromising yourself, because this generally kills sexual interest and desire. And compromise creates what I call the "tyranny of the lowest common denominator." The key is holding onto yourself so you can have more of yourself and more with your partner. When you feel proud of yourself, it increases your sexual interest and your interest in your partner.

Q. You say people often have the best sex and intimacy when they reach their 40s, 50s & 60s. But people have been taught for years that adolescence is the sexual peak of life. How can this be?

A. We have confused sexual prime with genital prime. If you want intimacy during sex, there isn't a 16-year-old that can keep up with a healthy 60 year old. People are capable of much better sex and intimacy as they mature. Ask your audience, "How many of you are better in bed now than you were when you were younger?" Most people never reach their sexual potential, and those who do are generally well into the fourth, fifth & sixth decade of life. Cellulite and sexual potential are highly correlated.

Connection
Q. In Passionate Marriage you discuss at length what you call "tools for connection." What are these "tools" and why are they important to couples?

A. Amazing as it seems, many couples are not in emotional contact while they are having physical contact. They may both reach orgasm but they are emotionally isolated. I have developed a number of "tools for connection." New ways to establish deep emotional connection in and out of bed. I encourage couples to forget about technique, and "follow the connection" during sex to know what to do next. We also suggest hugging 'til relaxed, eyes open sex, and even eyes open orgasm.

Q. What is eyes-open sex and eyes-open orgasm? And why are these important?

A. In informal surveys I've conducted around the world, it seems that only about 15-30% of all couples have sex with their eyes open, and only about half that number can orgasm that way. This means that most people have to shut their eyes to "tune out" their partner in order to be able to orgasm. Many people like sex in the dark with eyes closed because it's a way of keeping intimacy during sex to a tolerable level, not because it's more romantic. The intimacy and passion many couples seek is hiding right under -- or actually right above -- their noses.

Source: http://www.sheknows.com/love-and-sex/articles/1423/an-interview-with-dr-david-schnarch-the-sex-therapist

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

Post-structuralism, what the fuck is that? - Hennessy Youngman

ART THOUGHTZ: Post-Structuralism from Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/17431354

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Marion Woodman - Addiction to Perfection

I'm gathering a minor fascination with the work of Marion Woodman lately. It had its genesis in some chats I'd had with Sass about the infatuation her PhD supervisor has with her work, and has developed as I've listened to her on You Tube and read some of her work with Robert Bly.

This book, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride, is apparently an opus on consciousness of addiction underlying impulse. Addictions, both harmful and benign, which I've inhabited over the years almost always wind-up uncovering themselves as neurotic compulsions formed and reinforced out of habit in a climate of the absence - mostly, the absence of transcendent meaning. Woodman seems to be a wise one here.

It's especially interesting to turn my attention to this point in respect of the pressures of illusory perfection in the psyche. A large part of my process includes a seemingly endless coming to the vissicitudes of (my) existence with a curious, welcoming acceptance. The 'perfection' I crave is not an absence of defilement, but an ability to mindfully surf the waves of what makes itself conscious in all domains (e.g. body, mind, soul, spirit, energy, ego, self, other, nature etc). This is a huge task given the complexity in view between folks like Robert Masters or John Welwood and their invitation to beware of 'Spiritual Bypassing', the integral developmental views which encourage me to remain open to complicated growth, psychoanalytic and transpersonal views which provoke encounters with a range of boggling prima materia, and the spiritual psychology mob like B. Alan Wallace who, while by no means offer facile perspectives, nevertheless tease my perversions to perfection with comments like this (from today's Tricycle Mag).

"The big innovation of Buddhism is not in recognizing the suffering of a normal life, but in pointing out that mental afflictions are not intrinsic to the human psyche. Recent scientific research has shown that these afflictive tendencies of mind can be measurably lessened through Buddhist practice. But Buddhism is making a much stronger claim: that the mind at its deepest level has the nature of luminosity, of innate bliss, and is altogether free of mental affliction. That’s a big hypothesis. We can’t test it now, but we can head in that direction".

Holding the psychic tensegrity is nout but 'interesting'!

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

TEDx - Dr. Keith Witt - 100 Reasons Not To Have The Secret Affair

"Educated love is going to become the standard of the twenty-first century".

I first watched Dr. Keith Witt on some videos from the Boulder Centre for Integral Living. I quite liked the way he spoke about intimate relationships from a perspective that included the metaphors of colloquial integral developmentalism. I think this video nails his perspective better than any of those.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

The Man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaLv7vxF8fE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeAQxT7Q0IY&feature=channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwZ5_TVG7n0&feature=channel

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

What's My Age Again?

http://www.youtube.com/v/K7l5ZeVVoCA?fs=1&hl=en_US

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Watching The Wheels

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp9dc9im3-M

People say I'm crazy doing what I'm doing
Well they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin
When I say that I'm o.k. well they look at me kind of strange
Surely you're not happy now you no longer play the game

People say I'm lazy dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I'm doing fine watching shadows on the wall
Don't you miss the big time boy you're no longer on the ball

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go

Ah, people asking questions lost in confusion
Well I tell them there's no problem, only solutions
Well they shake their heads and they look at me as if I've lost my mind
I tell them there's no hurry
I'm just sitting here doing time

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go


http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

A Satisfied Mind

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCU3HXNGaAw

How many times have you heard someone say,
"If I had his money, I would do things my way."
But little they know, that it's so hard to find
one rich man in ten, with a satisfied mind.

Once I was waitin' for fortune and fame
Everything that I dreamed for to get a start in life's game
Suddenly it happened, I lost every dime
But I'm richer by far with a satisfied mind

Money can't buy back all your youth when you're old,
a friend when you're lonely, or peace to your soul.
The wealthiest person, is a pauper at times
compared to the man with a satisfied mind.

When my life is over and my time has run out,
my friends and my loved ones, I will leave there's no doubt.
But one thing's for certain, when it comes my time,
I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind.
But one thing's for certain, when it comes my time,
I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind mind mind, mind mind,
satisfied mind.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QphglQu3oL0


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ira4K_uhte8


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ira4K_uhte8


http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Marion Woodman, "The Battered Grail" Journey into Wholeness Conference, St. Simon's Island 1987

In this lecture Marion talks about spirit and matter - the infiltration of light into darkness. She discusses the woundedness she encountered in contemporary women and men and looks into the wounded masculine principle and the wounded body.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Aldous Huxley on Integration

"Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do".

- Aldous Huxley

Passages that Forever Changed my View #2: Rites of Passage, The Dynamics of Progress and Love and Marriage in Jung, A Very Short Introduction by Anthony Stevens

Rites of Passage

 

The archetypal tasks of childhood and adolescence for the male are symbolised in the hero myths which are found in all parts of the world.  These tell about how the hero leaves home and is subjected to a number of tests or trials, culminating in the supreme ordeal – the fight with a dragon or a sea monster.  The hero's triumph is rewarded with the treasure hard to attain, that is, the throne of a kingdom and a beautiful princess as a bride.  So it is in actuality, to embark on the adventure of life, a boy has to free himself of his bonds to home, parents and siblings, survive the ordeals of initiation, which virtually all traditional societies imposed, and win a place for himself in the world – the kingdom.  To achieve all this, and to win a bride, he must overcome the power of the mother complex still operative in his unconscious – the fight with the dragon.  This amounts to a second parturition from the mother, a final severing of the psychic umbilical cord – victory over the dragon monster often involves the hero being swallowed into it's belly, from which he cuts himself out in a kind of auto-caesarean section.  As a result, he dies as his mother's son and is reborn as a man worthy of the princess and the kingdom. 

 

In girls, the transition to womanhood is more readily accomplished, since feminine gender consciousness does not demand a radical shift in identification away from the mother's world to father's world as it does in boys. 

 

Although our culture no longer provides rites of initiation, there persists in us, regardless of gender, an archetypal need to be initiated.  We can deduce this from the dreams of patients in analysis, which become rich with initiatory symbolism at critical periods of their lives – e.g. at puberty, betrothal, marriage, childbirth, a divorce or separation, at the death of a parent or spouse.  Attainment of a new stage of life seems to demand that symbols of initiation must be experienced.  If society fails to provide them, then the self compensates for this deficiency by producing them in dreams. 

 

The Dynamics of Progress

 

For all young people, growth is a hard journey out of the familiar past into an unknown future, and there are times when everyone feels daunted by the precarious uncertainty of the path.  Sometimes it's challenges may appear so overwhelming that individuals breakdown or give up, or regress to a previous stage of development, returning to the mother in her archetypal aspect of nurturer and container.  The period from adolescence to early adulthood is the time when people are most highly motivated to look after #1, pouring all their energies into job, marriage, home and children.  It is a time of rapid, if one-sided, development – when few people have much time to devote to their inner life.  For this reason, Jung maintained that a psychological commitment to the path of individuation was hardly appropriate to this stage.  On the contrary, this is time to pay one's dues to society, in order to purchase the right to individuate which then becomes the task of the second period of life.

 

Love and Marriage

 

In most people, the capacity to relate to the opposite sex matures during adolescence and early adulthood, to the point where marriage becomes both possible and desired should circumstances allow.  The experience of falling in love, as we have seen, when one meets a woman or man, rightly or wrongly, appears to be the living embodiment of one's anima or animus.  This profoundly moving experience is an example of is what is means to be taken over by the power of an autonomous complex.

 

Every archetype, once activated, seeks its own fulfilment in life.  This is especially true of the animus or anima, for their quest for completion is rendered more imperative by the nagging insistence of sexual desire.  Bonding with a partner is more than just a matter of unconscious projection.  If the bond is to last long enough for children to be reared, then it must be sustained by continuing sexual interest, the insistence of the law and the recognition by each partner of the other as a real person with qualities over and beyond those that have been projected.  Failure to forgive a spouse for not living up to his anima or her animus fantasies can lead to heartache, recrimination and divorce. 

 

Jung was very aware of this from his own experience of marriage.  In his essay 'Marriage as a Psychological Relationship', published in 1925, he argues that a marriage can only be a true relationship if it transcends blind mutual animus/anima projections and if both partners become conscious of each other's psychic reality.  Otherwise, it remains as 'medieval marriage', ruled by custom and illusion, a mere participation mystique ('one heart and one soul').  In present circumstances, marriage has to be a more conscious, less stereotyped institution, even if this entails feelings of disillusionment as the contrasexual fantasies are withdrawn, and results in an increased incidence of separation and divorce. 'There is no birth of consciousness without pain', Jung said.

 

If, however, the union survives, then it can become what has been called an 'individuation marriage', enabling both personalities to grow through a richer understanding of eachother, their marriage, and themselves. 'This is what happens very frequently about the midday of life', said Jung, 'and in this wise our miraculous human nature enforces a transition that leads from the first half of life to the second.  It is a metamorphosis from a state in which man is only a tool of instinctive nature to another in which he is no longer a tool, but himself: a transformation of nature into culture, of instinct into spirit'.

Little Death

"For indeed our consciousness does not create itself. It wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious."

- Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East.

Aletheia

"The nature of illusion, being unreal, cannot destroy truth but only conceal it.  Revelation of another's' difference and foursquare reality might be defended against, we may fear it being painful and disillusioning, but it can also be gloriously refreshing.  The reality behind the veils of projection may, when expectation, fears, defences fall away, be more exciting and enriching than the dim shadows of our fantasies and the thing veneer of the reflecting surface we cover with out fantastic and illusory imputations about the other.

 

Even delighting in the ordinary, messy, fallible, sometimes downright silliness of our daily love lives is more exciting than the boredom of our neurotic repetition compulsions and fantasy-bound manoeuvres".

- Judith Pickering

Jung's Reflections of Freud in Memories, Dreams, Reflections

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Jung - Memories, Dreams and Reflections

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Examination of the Unconscious in Analytical Psychology

"How can we enable the unconscious to realize itself? By granting it freedom of expression and then examining what it has expressed. Thus, self-realization required the psyche to turn round on itself and confront what it produces. In conducting this experiment Jung again experienced himself as split in two - between the conscious subject, who experienced, recorded, and struggled to survive, and the unconscious other, manifesting in the personalities and powers that forced themselves on him, demanding his attention and respect". 

- Anthony Stevens, in Jung - A Very Short Introduction.

Mother Love

"When she passes, it's an extraordinary loss. Nobody, ever in your life, and I mean 'ever', will love you as unconditionally and unreservedly as your Mum. Ever.... Except maybe a daughter!".

- Laurie Johansen

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors - Robert Sapolsky

Despite rumors to the contrary, there are many ways in which the human brain isn't all that fancy. Let's compare it to the nervous system of a fruit fly. Both are made up of cells, of course, with neurons playing particularly important roles. Now one might expect that a neuron from a human will differ dramatically from one from a fly. Maybe the human's will have especially ornate ways of communicating with other neurons, making use of unique "neurotransmitter" messengers. Maybe compared to the lowly fly neuron, human neurons are bigger, more complex, in some way can run faster and jump higher.

But no. Look at neurons from the two species under a microscope and they look the same. They have the same electrical properties, many of the same neurotransmitters, the same protein channels that allow ions to flow in and out, as well as a remarkably high number of genes in common. Neurons are the same basic building blocks in both species.
So where's the difference? It's numbers — humans have roughly one million neurons for each one in a fly. And out of a human's 100 billion neurons emerge some pretty remarkable things. With enough quantity, you generate quality.

Neuroscientists understand the structural bases of some of these qualities. Take language, that uniquely human behavior. Underlining it are structures unique to the human brain — regions like "Broca's area," which specializes in language production. Then there's the brain's "extrapyramidal system," which is involved in fine motor control. The complexity of the human version allows us to do something that, say, a polar bear, could never accomplish — sufficiently independent movement of digits to play a trill on the piano, for instance. Particularly striking is the human frontal cortex. While occurring in all mammals, the human version is proportionately bigger and denser in its wiring. And what is the frontal cortex good for? Emotional regulation, gratification postponement, executive decision-making, long-term planning. We study hard in high school to get admitted to a top college to get into grad school to get a good job to get into the nursing home of our choice. Gophers don't do that.

There's another domain of unique human skills, and neuroscientists are learning a bit about how the brain pulls it off.

Consider the following from J. Ruth Gendler's wonderful "The Book of Qualities," a collection of "character sketches" of different qualities, emotions and attributes:

Anxiety is secretive. He does not trust anyone, not even his friends, Worry, Terror, Doubt and Panic … He likes to visit me late at night when I am alone and exhausted. I have never slept with him, but he kissed me on the forehead once, and I had a headache for two years …

Or:

Compassion speaks with a slight accent. She was a vulnerable child, miserable in school, cold, shy … In ninth grade she was befriended by Courage. Courage lent Compassion bright sweaters, explained the slang, showed her how to play volleyball.

What is Gendler going on about? We know, and feel pleasure triggered by her unlikely juxtapositions. Despair has stopped listening to music. Anger sharpens kitchen knives at the local supermarket. Beauty wears a gold shawl and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. Longing studies archeology.

Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka's "Metamorphosis" isn't really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his butt kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name "Napoleon," in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.

And we even understand that June isn't literally busting out all over. It would seem that doing this would be hard enough to cause a brainstorm. So where did this facility with symbolism come from? It strikes me that the human brain has evolved a necessary shortcut for doing so, and with some major implications.

Consider an animal (including a human) that has started eating some rotten, fetid, disgusting food. As a result, neurons in an area of the brain called the insula will activate. Gustatory disgust. Smell the same awful food, and the insula activates as well. Think about what might count as a disgusting food (say, taking a bite out of a struggling cockroach). Same thing.

Now read in the newspaper about a saintly old widow who had her home foreclosed by a sleazy mortgage company, her medical insurance canceled on flimsy grounds, and got a lousy, exploitative offer at the pawn shop where she tried to hock her kidney dialysis machine. You sit there thinking, those bastards, those people are scum, they're worse than maggots, they make me want to puke … and your insula activates. Think about something shameful and rotten that you once did … same thing. Not only does the insula "do" sensory disgust; it does moral disgust as well. Because the two are so viscerally similar. When we evolved the capacity to be disgusted by moral failures, we didn't evolve a new brain region to handle it. Instead, the insula expanded its portfolio.

Or consider pain. Somebody pokes your big left toe with a pin. Spinal reflexes cause you to instantly jerk your foot back just as they would in, say, a frog. Evolutionarily ancient regions activate in the brain as well, telling you about things like the intensity of the pain, or whether it's a sharp localized pain or a diffuse burning one. But then there's a fancier, more recently evolved brain region in the frontal cortex called the anterior cingulate that's involved in the subjective, evaluative response to the pain. A piranha has just bitten you? That's a disaster. The shoes you bought are a size too small? Well, not as much of a disaster.

Now instead, watch your beloved being poked with the pin. And your anterior cingulate will activate, as if it were you in pain. There's a neurotransmitter called Substance P that is involved in the nuts and bolts circuitry of pain perception. Administer a drug that blocks the actions of Substance P to people who are clinically depressed, and they often feel better, feel less of the world's agonies. When humans evolved the ability to be wrenched with feeling the pain of others, where was it going to process it? It got crammed into the anterior cingulate. And thus it "does" both physical and psychic pain.

Another truly interesting domain in which the brain confuses the literal and metaphorical is cleanliness. In a remarkable study, Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. In the next study, volunteers were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward, subjects either did or did not have the opportunity to clean their hands. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a request for help (that the experimenters had set up) that came shortly afterward. Apparently, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate weren't the only ones to metaphorically absolve their sins by washing their hands.

This potential to manipulate behavior by exploiting the brain's literal-metaphorical confusions about hygiene and health is also shown in a study by Mark Landau and Daniel Sullivan of the University of Kansas and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona. Subjects either did or didn't read an article about the health risks of airborne bacteria. All then read a history article that used imagery of a nation as a living organism with statements like, "Following the Civil War, the United States underwent a growth spurt." Those who read about scary bacteria before thinking about the U.S. as an organism were then more likely to express negative views about immigration.

Another example of how the brain links the literal and the metaphorical comes from a study by Lawrence Williams of the University of Colorado and John Bargh of Yale. Volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. In reality, the experiment began when the experimenter, seemingly struggling with an armful of folders, asks the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee. As the key experimental manipulation, the coffee was either hot or iced. Subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes.

Another brilliant study by Bargh and colleagues concerned haptic sensations (I had to look the word up — haptic: related to the sense of touch). Volunteers were asked to evaluate the resumes of supposed job applicants where, as the critical variable, the resume was attached to a clipboard of one of two different weights. Subjects who evaluated the candidate while holding the heavier clipboard tended to judge candidates to be more serious, with the weight of the clipboard having no effect on how congenial the applicant was judged. After all, we say things like "weighty matter" or "gravity of a situation."

What are we to make of the brain processing literal and metaphorical versions of a concept in the same brain region? Or that our neural circuitry doesn't cleanly differentiate between the real and the symbolic? What are the consequences of the fact that evolution is a tinkerer and not an inventor, and has duct-taped metaphors and symbols to whichever pre-existing brain areas provided the closest fit?

Jonathan Haidt, of the University of Virginia, has shown how viscera and emotion often drive our decisionmaking, with conscious cognition mopping up afterward, trying to come up with rationalizations for that gut decision. The viscera that can influence moral decisionmaking and the brain's confusion about the literalness of symbols can have enormous consequences. Part of the emotional contagion of the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda arose from the fact that when militant Hutu propagandists called for the eradication of the Tutsi, they iconically referred to them as "cockroaches." Get someone to the point where his insula activates at the mention of an entire people, and he's primed to join the bloodletting.

But if the brain confusing reality and literalness with metaphor and symbol can have adverse consequences, the opposite can occur as well. At one juncture just before the birth of a free South Africa, Nelson Mandela entered secret negotiations with an Afrikaans general with death squad blood all over his hands, a man critical to the peace process because he led a large, well-armed Afrikaans resistance group. They met in Mandela's house, the general anticipating tense negotiations across a conference table. Instead, Mandela led him to the warm, homey living room, sat beside him on a comfy couch, and spoke to him in Afrikaans. And the resistance melted away.

This neural confusion about the literal versus the metaphorical gives symbols enormous power, including the power to make peace. The political scientist and game theorist Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan has emphasized this point in thinking about conflict resolution. For example, in a world of sheer rationality where the brain didn't confuse reality with symbols, bringing peace to Israel and Palestine would revolve around things like water rights, placement of borders, and the extent of militarization allowed to Palestinian police. Instead, argues Axelrod, "mutual symbolic concessions" of no material benefit will ultimately make all the difference. He quotes a Hamas leader who says that for the process of peace to go forward, Israel must apologize for the forced Palestinians exile in 1948. And he quotes a senior Israeli official saying that for progress to be made, Palestinians need to first acknowledge Israel's right to exist and to get their anti-Semitic garbage out of their textbooks.

Hope for true peace in the Middle East didn't come with the news of a trade agreement being signed. It was when President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan attended the funeral of the murdered Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. That same hope came to the Northern Irish, not when ex-Unionist demagogues and ex-I.R.A. gunmen served in a government together, but when those officials publicly commiserated about each other's family misfortunes, or exchanged anniversary gifts. And famously, for South Africans, it came not with successful negotiations about land reapportionment, but when black South Africa embraced rugby and Afrikaans rugby jocks sang the A.N.C. national anthem.

Nelson Mandela was wrong when he advised, "Don't talk to their minds; talk to their hearts." He meant talk to their insulas and cingulate cortices and all those other confused brain regions, because that confusion could help make for a better world.

(Robert Sapolsky's essay is the subject of this week's forum discussion among the humanists and scientists at On the Human, a project of the National Humanities Center.)

Robert Sapolsky is John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology and Neurosurgery at Stanford University, and is a research associate at the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya. He writes frequently on issues related to biology and behavior. His books include "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers," "A Primate's Memoir," and "Monkeyluv."

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/this-is-your-brain-on-metaphors/?pagemode=print

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