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

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Passages that Forever Changed my View #1: Sean Esbjörn-Hargens on IMP in “Integral Ecological Research: Using IMP to Examine Animals and Sustainability”

From Esbjörn-Hargens, S. & Zimmerman, M. E. (2008). "Integral Ecological Research: Using IMP to Examine Animals and Sustainability" in AQAL: Journal of Integral Theory and Practice Vol 3, No. 1.

"Below are examples of techniques for first-, second-, and third-person research and some of the validity considerations of each method. Note that autopoiesis and social autopoiesis are the most recent methodological families to be articulated out of the eight—as a result they are more difficult to understand in a methodological sense since there are not many specific methods associated with these zones. The following lists are not exhaustive but they do provide an illustrative overview of the practices, injunctions, and validity issues that can contribute to Integral research.

Zone #1: Phenomenological-Inquiry Techniques (1-p x 1-p x 1p)

Self-inquiry, phenomenological investigation, sensory and or somatic awareness practices, visualization, prayer, reflection, introspection, journaling, artwork, poetry, movement, autobiographical writing, Gendlin's focusing, perspective taking, meditation, yoga, t'ai chi, vision-quests, dreaming journaling, shadow work, and mindfulness practices.

Validity: Positionality, honesty, authentic expression, thick descriptions, sincerity, integrity, vulnerability, epoche, identify assumptions, acknowledge bias, and transformative.

Zone #2: Structural-Assessment Techniques (1-p x 3-p x 1p)

Various kinds of development tests (i.e., psychometric measures), personality type tests, interview friends, family, and colleagues about oneself, journaling and noticing patterns, subject- object interviews, sentence completion tests, obtaining evaluations from mentors and spiritual teachers, psychograph analysis, feedback from others, watching video tapes of oneself, listening to audio tapes of oneself, noticing speech and behavioral patterns.

Validity: Established psychological tests, use of established developmental models, critical subjectivity, long-term inquiry, thick descriptions with analysis, triangulation, self-observations, feedback from others.

Zone #3: Hermeneutical-Interpretative Techniques (1-p x 1-p x 1p*pl)

Interviews, role playing, dialogue and debate, small group work (e.g., dyad and triad), group rituals and activities, discussion groups, story telling, attending performances such as plays, interpretive analysis, textual analysis, collective reflection and visioning exercises, collective introspection, various participatory methodologies, focus groups, trust-building exercises, group facilitation, nonviolent communication, interspecies encounter, making love, mediation and conflict resolution, improvisational acting, dancing, jazz, and martial arts.

Validity: Gives voice to others, serves community, reciprocity, honors others, trust, member checks, emancipatory, mutual understanding, resonance, meaningful, and symbolic.

Zone #4: Ethnomethodology Techniques (1-p x 3-p x 1p*pl)

Participant-observer techniques, participatory evaluation, forms of cultural analysis, appreciative inquiry, cultural anthropological techniques, forms of structural analysis, feedback about one's role on a team, family or couples therapy, actively observant parenting, polling, coaching and mentoring, analysis of semiotic codes, and use of mock scenarios.

Validity: cross-cultural, observation of group dynamics, symbolic coherence, well documented observations, prolonged engagement, member checks, and acceptance by group.

Zone #5: Autopoiesis Techniques (3-p x 1-p x 3p)

Imaginatively and scientifically projecting oneself into a biological organism's perspective, diagramming cognitive inputs and outputs, modeling vision and perceptual systems, and identifying pattern recognition capacities of organisms, mapping structural couplings between organisms and their environment.

Validity: pragmatic, advances the field, adequate account of the scientific observer, matches the biological phenomena, predictive, explanatory, empirical, and logical.

Zone #6: Empirical-Observation Techniques (3-p x 3-p x 3p)

Surveys, documentation, exams, fieldwork, observation, third-person descriptions and reporting, using charts, graphs, statistics to present information, exercise and diet, open-ended interviews, participant observer techniques in activities and sessions, review documentation, writing and dissemination of case studies, gap analysis, diagnostic testing, appraisals, skill building, technical/social capacity development, anonymous reviews of writing, and opinion polls.

Validity: repeatable, controlled conditions, empirical, logical, measurable, persistent observation, use of multiple senses, high response and return rate, clear questions/form, and representative samples.

Zone #7: Social Autopoiesis Techniques (3-p x 1-p x 3p*pl)

Analysis of senders and receivers of data, accounting of the perspective of the observer and the multiple senders and receivers, and holonic mapping. Diagramming the modes, channels, and networks of communication. Identifying the binary language structures that allow systems to register and respond to different phenomena.

Validity: provides an adequate description of the functional fit of the phenomenology of systems, includes multiple perspectives of a systems members, includes a detailed understanding of the observer of the system(s) and explains why different systems cannot "see" certain realities.

Zone #8: Systems Analysis Techniques (3-p x 3-p x 3p*pl)

Statistical analysis, mapping, scientific studies, library research of previous studies, monitoring, and evaluation.

Validity: Functional fit, repeatable, controlled conditions, empirical, logical, reputable sources, multiple sources, and direct experience with system".

The Flame

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

An Excerpt from HuffPo Article 10 Spiritually-Transmitted Diseases by Mariana Caplan

"The following 10 categorizations (sic) are not intended to be definitive but are offered as a tool for becoming aware of some of the most common spiritually transmitted diseases.

1. Fast-Food Spirituality: Mix spirituality with a culture that celebrates speed, multitasking and instant gratification and the result is likely to be fast-food spirituality. Fast-food spirituality is a product of the common and understandable fantasy that relief from the suffering of our human condition can be quick and easy. One thing is clear, however: spiritual transformation cannot be had in a quick fix.

2. Faux Spirituality: Faux spirituality is the tendency to talk, dress and act as we imagine a spiritual person would. It is a kind of imitation spirituality that mimics spiritual realization in the way that leopard-skin fabric imitates the genuine skin of a leopard.

3. Confused Motivations: Although our desire to grow is genuine and pure, it often gets mixed with lesser motivations, including the wish to be loved, the desire to belong, the need to fill our internal emptiness, the belief that the spiritual path will remove our suffering and spiritual ambition, the wish to be special, to be better than, to be "the one."

4. Identifying with Spiritual Experiences: In this disease, the ego identifies with our spiritual experience and takes it as its own, and we begin to believe that we are embodying insights that have arisen within us at certain times. In most cases, it does not last indefinitely, although it tends to endure for longer periods of time in those who believe themselves to be enlightened and/or who function as spiritual teachers.

5. The Spiritualized Ego: This disease occurs when the very structure of the egoic personality becomes deeply embedded with spiritual concepts and ideas. The result is an egoic structure that is "bullet-proof." When the ego becomes spiritualized, we are invulnerable to help, new input, or constructive feedback. We become impenetrable human beings and are stunted in our spiritual growth, all in the name of spirituality.

6. Mass Production of Spiritual Teachers: There are a number of current trendy spiritual traditions that produce people who believe themselves to be at a level of spiritual enlightenment, or mastery, that is far beyond their actual level. This disease functions like a spiritual conveyor belt: put on this glow, get that insight, and -- bam! -- you're enlightened and ready to enlighten others in similar fashion. The problem is not that such teachers instruct but that they represent themselves as having achieved spiritual mastery.

7. Spiritual Pride: Spiritual pride arises when the practitioner, through years of labored effort, has actually attained a certain level of wisdom and uses that attainment to justify shutting down to further experience. A feeling of "spiritual superiority" is another symptom of this spiritually transmitted disease. It manifests as a subtle feeling that "I am better, more wise and above others because I am spiritual."

8. Group Mind: Also described as groupthink, cultic mentality or ashram disease, group mind is an insidious virus that contains many elements of traditional co-dependence. A spiritual group makes subtle and unconscious agreements regarding the correct ways to think, talk, dress, and act. Individuals and groups infected with "group mind" reject individuals, attitudes, and circumstances that do not conform to the often unwritten rules of the group.

9. The Chosen-People Complex: The chosen people complex is not limited to Jews. It is the belief that "Our group is more spiritually evolved, powerful, enlightened and, simply put, better than any other group." There is an important distinction between the recognition that one has found the right path, teacher or community for themselves, and having found The One.

10. The Deadly Virus: "I Have Arrived": This disease is so potent that it has the capacity to be terminal and deadly to our spiritual evolution. This is the belief that "I have arrived" at the final goal of the spiritual path. Our spiritual progress ends at the point where this belief becomes crystallized in our psyche, for the moment we begin to believe that we have reached the end of the path, further growth ceases".

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mariana-caplan-phd/spiritual-living-10-spiri_b_609248.html?ref=fb&src=sp

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

Busted, Broken, Forgotten - Art of Fighting

if you're looking for a good thing
if you're looking for a clean heart
looking over this way
is not a very good start
been hanging on an old line
been living in a fixed time
been sticking to the same moves
and now i'm busted broken forgotten
old and worn and used
it's ok i know it now
and there's nothing like the truth
in anything that i can still do
in anything that i can still be
if there's a part of me that's still true
it's trying to promise what i cannot prove
so in the daylight you will see me
as not a definite or real thing
just as a shadow left to shifting
now that i'm busted broken forgotten
lost beyond all use
it's ok i know it now
and there's nothing like the truth
false signs and faulty lines well they may be excused
but how will time forgive me all the damage that they'll do?
so baby i'm leaving yeah i'm packing up and moving away
you'll never see me the broken boy is leavin' today
and you'll never find me from the the pieces scattered all along the way
cause they're bound to fade
now that i'm busted broken forgotten
lost beyond all use
it's ok i know it now
and there's nothing like the truth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9PpNThH4Ig

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

More favourite lines from RAM's Spiritual Bypassing

In many ways, spiritual bypassing is just another strategy to avoid fear, using the anesthetizing capacity of emotional disconnection as its primary tool.

The first step in working with spiritual bypassing is to see it for what it is—employing spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing in any significant depth with our pain and developmental needs—and then to name it, so that we might begin relating to it rather than from it.

The most obvious potential traps-in-waiting include the belief that we should rise above our difficulties and simply embrace Oneness, even as the tendency to divide everything into positive and negative, higher and lower, spiritual and nonspiritual, runs wild in us.

Other behaviors include taking global or impersonal stands on clearly personal concerns, as when we might talk about the "fact" that everything is perfect, all unfolding exactly as it must, while we are talking to another in a demeaning way. Or in response to someone's ...suffering we may say, "It's all an illusion, including your suffering" or "It's just your ego," delivering one-liners with minimal feeling,

In spiritual bypassing's realm, conceptual spirituality more often than not masquerades as real spirituality. Conceptual or emotionally disconnected spirituality can be very comforting and safe, very easy to trot out, and very easy to use to rationalize our removal, esp...ecially emotionally, from the more difficult aspects of life.

Spiritual bypassing keeps us stuck at a "higher" level that is really only higher in a conceptual sense. It's as if we are taking up residence on Floor 5 without having passed through Floors 2, 3, or 4.

Those of us caught up in spiritual bypassing tend to slap the labels of "positive" and "negative" onto emotions as if such qualities were absolute givens. But the more we investigate the reality of our lives, the clearer it becomes that ascribing qualities like "negative" and "positive" to emotions is inevitably a context-bound undertaking.

Anger itself can be a positive force: Getting angry that you have just lost your job may give you the energy and sheer drive to pursue more fitting work, which is obviously a positive thing. Likewise, getting angry about the abuse you are suffering in a relationship wil...l help fuel you to form healthy boundaries, providing much of the motivation and strength needed to either improve the relationship or leave it.

- Robert Augustus Masters

The Seventh Wave

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Voodoo Pilgrims

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

From concept to gestalt...

"Could deep meditation be the process, perhaps the only process, in which human beings can sometimes turn the global background into the gestalt, the dominating feature of consciousness itself? This assumption would fit in nicely with an intuition held by many, among others Antoine Lutz, namely that the fundamental subject/object structure of experience can be transcended in states of this kind".

-  Thomas Metzinger

Robert Augustus Masters saving the day again, this time with an insightful exploration of anger.

I'm furious.  Have been for a long time.  Thank fuck for RAM ;-D

From his free eBook, Emotional Literacy.

Anger

It's easy to trash anger.

After all, when it "possesses" us, are we not more prone to violence, ill will, and lovelessness? And, even if we can successfully counteract such "possession," we have, it seems, only curbed the beast — it still paces behind its bars, fanged and all too eager to do damage, while we play vigilant zookeeper. Or, less commonly, we may romanticize anger, rationalizing our "natural" urges to uninhibitedly express it, in the name of emotional de-suppression and honesty.

In both cases, however, anger is treated as though it were no more than an indwelling entity or mass, a thing either to be muzzled or set loose. Enthusiasts of "cooling down" and their "getting it out of our system" counterparts snipe at each other, citing — and making moral real estate out of — the dangers of either letting anger out or keeping it in. But there is much, much more to working with anger, as we shall see.

There is nothing inherently wrong with anger. Anger is not necessarily a problem, a hindrance, a sign of negativity or spiritual slippage, an avoidance of something "deeper," nor a demonstration of unlove. It is our use of our anger that is the real issue.

Do we blame our anger for clouding or befuddling our reason — playing victim to our passions being one of our oldest alibis — or do we assume responsibility for what we do with it? Do we turn our anger into a weapon, hiding our hurt behind its righteously "pumped-up" front, fueling and legitimizing our defensiveness with it, or do we instead keep it as transparent and permeable as possible, remaining non-blaming and vulnerable even as we allow it as full or penetrating a passion as fits the situation? Do we use our anger to get even, to score points, to overpower or outdebate, or do we use it to deepen or resuscitate our intimacy with our partner, to compassionately flame through pretense, emotional deadwood, and life-negating investments?

It's easy, in the name of angerphobia, to reject, crush, incarcerate, bad- mouth, or otherwise violate our anger, allowing it so few life-enhancing outlets that it — like an animal kept too long in a cage — usually behaves badly when finally released, thereby confirming our suspicions that it is indeed in need of much the same treatment as a savage beast that has somehow found its way into our house.

It is also easy, though less common, to glorify anger, with equally harmful results. Exhorting the inhibited to "get into their anger" may just lead to a forced anger, an anger of performance, an anger that leads not to healing insight, but rather to an overreliance on simplistic (and possibly aggression-reinforcing) cathartic procedures.

It is, however, not so easy to cultivate intimacy with our anger. Getting close to its heat, its flames, its redly engorged intensity, without losing touch with our basic sanity, asks much of us.

But if we do not ask — and ultimately demand — this of ourselves, we will surely miss knowing not only the heat of anger's fire, but also its light. As much as anger can injuriously burn, it can also illuminate — it all depends on what kind of relationship with anger we choose to cultivate.

Anger is an aroused, often heated state which combines (1) a compellingly felt sense of being wronged (hence the moral quality of most anger), and (2) a counteracting, potentially energizing feeling of power.

Can we identify anger — which is not a single emotion, but instead a family of related emotions, ranging from annoyance to rage — through the observed presence of particular behaviors? Not necessarily. We can display none of the behaviors supposedly characteristic of anger, and still be angry. Instead of pounding the table or cursing the idiot who has dared to cut us off in traffic, we may instead in our anger try even harder to please our partner, or smilingly withhold a piece of information that we know would help our partner. So can we — or others — recognize our anger through observing our behavior? Not necessarily!

Similarly, can we identify anger through the observed presence of particular feelings? Two emotions — like envy and resentment — may feel very similar, having much the same physiological characteristics, yet they do differ. We discriminate between emotions by attuning, however unknowingly, to the context of the situation.

Because bodily sensations are usually so obviously involved in emotion, we may confuse them with emotion itself. There is, however, more to emotion than just the feeling of it. Anger is an attitude, not just a feeling. We evaluate emotion, but not feeling — we may speak of our anger as "justified" or "unjustified," but would we speak of our feeling like vomiting as "justified" or "unjustified"?

Also, we can cease being angry, and yet still feel the very same feelings that a moment ago we identified as anger.

For example, I am raging at you for scratching my newly bought car, and suddenly I find out from a deeply trustworthy friend that you are in fact completely innocent of doing so, and I am now no longer angry at you. My evaluation of the situation has radically and almost instantaneously changed, yet the very feelings which I was experiencing just a moment ago — pounding heart, facial flushing, shoulders knotting, hands ready to strike — are still clearly present, having diminished only slightly.

So can I now call these feelings angry feelings? No, because their evaluative framework — or emotional basis — has changed.

Anger, contrary to popular opinion, is not necessarily the same as aggression. Aggression involves some form of attack, whereas anger may or may not. Aggression is devoid of compassion and vulnerability, but anger, however fiery its delivery might be or might have to be, can be part of an act of caring and vulnerability. Nevertheless, anger in general remains all but synonymous with aggression.

Aggression is not so much an outcome of anger, as an avoidance of it and its underlying feelings of woundedness and vulnerability. Recognizing this is essential for relational depth and maturity.

Viewing anger as aggression — or as the cause of aggression — gives us an excuse to classify it is a "lower" or "primitive" emotion. Or something far from spiritual. But anger is far from "primitive," though what we do with it may be far from civilized!

Rejected anger easily mutates into aggression, whether active or passive, other-directed or inner-directed. Thus does a means of communication become a means of weaponry.

Anger assigned to do injury, however subtly, is not really anger, but hostility. Anger that masks its own hurt and vulnerability is not really anger, but hardheartedness or hatred in the making, seeking not power with, but power over.

However, there is a potential healing here: to reverse the equation, to convert aggression, hostility, hatred, and every other diseased offspring of mishandled anger back into anger.

This conversion, however, does not mean eviscerating or drugging the energy of such negative states, but rather liberating it from its life- negating viewpoints, so that its intensity and passion can coexist with a caring, significantly awakened attention. In this sense, the world needs not less anger, but more. Especially anger coming from the heart.

Violence — the brass knuckles of abused wounds — ignores, tramples or dynamites personal boundaries, but anger, in many cases, protects or guards such boundaries, at best resolutely exposing and illuminating (or perhaps even flaming through) barriers to intimacy or integrity, without abusing those who are maintaining such barriers. Anger that burns cleanly leaves no smoldering pockets of resentment or ill-will.

Violence is not a result of anger, but is an abuse or violation of anger. Working with Anger: Four Approaches

The four approaches to working with anger introduced below provide a framework not only capable of making sense out of the diverse, complex, and enormous amount of material concerning anger, but also sufficiently inclusive to cover both personal and transpersonal considerations of anger.

(1) Anger-In:

Anger-In refers to strategies favoring the restraining and redirection of the energies characteristic of raw anger. Not surprisingly, advocates of this approach emphasize the importance of not directly expressing anger. Self-control, subduing and recontextualizing our anger — these are the cornerstones of anger-in. Anger-in "experts" tend to equate the expressing of anger with "venting," a lack of self-control, violence, and aggression. Anger-in practices teach us not only to identify those perceptions and interpretations that catalyze anger, but also relaxation and cooling-off techniques. Reinterpreting supposed provocations is essential to anger-in; such reappraisal reduces the probability of anger being openly expressed by removing or at least shrinking the perception of being under attack.

Though anger-in may make too much of a virtue out of controlling, managing, and non-angrily "expressing" anger, it does make a strong case for learning to step back from anger so that its more extreme or irrational impulses can be reconsidered or given more contextual space. Nevertheless, anger-in has a difficult question before it: How successful can a way of working with anger be that does not include openly expressing the actual feelings of anger? Would we, by analogy, consider a grief therapy to be successful that did not include the actual expression of grief?

(2) Anger-Out:

Anger-Out refers to approaches that emphasize the importance of directly and fully expressing the energies and intentions of anger. At the very core of anger-out theory and work is the notion of catharsis, which remains a controversial topic in therapeutic practice, despite evidence that incorporating catharsis in anger-management work makes it more effective.

Advocates of anger-out say that suppressed anger is not healthy — better to bring it to the surface (or "dig it up") and release/express it, they claim. As appealing and apparently medically sound as such "down-to-earth" logic may be, it can tend to overemphasize a merely physical approach to anger, as if anger was just something to discharge or eliminate from the body. The emotional-release work that characterizes anger-out practices can range from enthused licence to blindly cut loose (or irresponsibly "act out" anger) to profoundly healing, integration-promoting release and illumination.

(3) Mindfully Held Anger:

Mindfully Held Anger refers to approaches in which anger is consciously contained, not emotionally expressed, and meditatively attended to, with a key intention being neither to suppress anger nor act it out. In its emphasis on neither repressing nor acting out emotion, this approach appears to offer a solution to the anger-in/anger-out dichotomy. In being wakefully present with our anger, thereby closely witnessing the actual process of it (in its feeling, cognitive, perceptual, and social dimensions), we also bear witness, at least to some degree, to the very "I" who is busy being angry. That is, our perspective shifts from how angry we feel to who it is who feels it. We then take good care of our anger, cradling it much like we would an upset child.

At its best, the mindful holding of anger is not so much a containment of anger as a deliberately intimate embracing and investigation of it, a willingness to stay with our anger without outwardly expressing it.

Through such loving alertness, anger can be transformed into the energy of understanding and compassion. However, this practice carries its own dangers — as suggested by the more negative connotations of the term "holding" — especially when it is engaged in prematurely or in order to flee or suppress anger, as when we are not so much sitting with our anger as on it.

(4) Heart-Anger:

Heart-Anger refers to approaches in which openly expressed anger and compassion consciously and beneficially coexist. Put together the virtues of anger-in, anger-out, and mindfully held anger — healthy rationality and restraint, emotional openness and authenticity, meditative openness and compassion — and minimize the difficulties associated with each, and heart-anger emerges.

Heart-anger is anchored both in full-blooded aliveness and in clear caring for the other. As fierce as it sometimes can be (or has to be), heart-anger is but the emissary of wrathful compassion. Here, the expression of anger is not necessarily rethought or kept to oneself, nor always given free rein, but rather is deliberately infused with wakeful, investigative attention, without any requisite dilution or non-expression of its passion. It is "clean" anger, incisive, non-blaming, mindful, contextually sensitive, heated yet illuminating — rooted in both the personal and the transpersonal.

As such, it could be called soul-centered anger (by soul, I mean that depth of individuality in which egoity is clearly and functionally peripheral to Being). Such anger has a broad enough sense of human suffering to embrace a radically inclusive morality; it possesses sufficient faith in Life to persist in its fierce caring; and it has the guts to carry all this out.

If all that was necessary was that it shine, heart-anger surely would, but it knows that it often must also burn. And, because of this, it knows that it must also weep.

Getting Closer to Anger

Anger is moral fire. Whether it is destructive or constructive is in our hands. And our hearts. In the fiery care of clean anger, passion and compassion coexist, as do heat and light. We need to respect our anger, to cease viewing it as a problem, spiritual hindrance, or something beneath us, so that it might serve our well-being.

Neither to repress nor to indulge in our anger is far from easy, asking, among other things, that we meet it with genuine caring. Anger that is denied compassion easily becomes anger that is delivered, however indirectly, without compassion.

But how to bring compassion to anger? First of all, we need to approach it without aversion, which means becoming more intimate with whatever aversion we might have toward anger. The degree of caring with which we approach our anger is the degree of caring with which we can infuse the anger we give to others.

Anger that does not violate — this is the fiery face of compassion, the wrathful shout of the awakening heart.

The exploration of anger ought not to be the occupation of just a few. Not to explore anger, not to be intimate with it, is a dangerous choice, leaving us cut off from the very forcefulness and energetic underlining that may already be enlisted in the service of aggression, hatred, and mean-spiritedness. Not to know our anger is to keep ourselves in the dark, and in danger of being violent instead of simply angry.

At its best, anger — heart-including, open-bellied, open-throated, and so, so passionately alive — cannot help but support love and integrity, for it is then deeply connected to need, to vulnerability, to bareness of soul. It is then but relational fire, helping to both clear and light our way into an ever deeper intimacy, an intimacy that ultimately includes all that we are.

The fiery intensity at the heart of anger asks not for smothering, spiritual rehabilitation, nor mere discharge, but rather for a mindful embrace that does not necessarily require any dilution of passion, any lowering of the heat, nor any muting of the essential voice in the flames.

Bringing our anger into our heart is not only an act of love for ourselves, but for all beings, since such a practice increases the odds that we will not let our anger mutate into aggressiveness, hostility, and hatred, but rather into compassion-centered activity.

In no longer abandoning or destructively harnessing our anger, we move a step closer to being and standing up for the very love that we most desire from others.

Anger can be love — may we permit it to be so. Gender and Anger in Intimacy

The disempowerment of women has, among other things, meant the suppression and devaluation of their anger. Where male anger, despite anger's supposedly "lower" origins, has in many circumstances — war, contact sports, vigilante heroics — often been viewed as healthy, morally justified, or even ennobling, female anger has generally been viewed far less favorably, as illustrated by our less-than-flattering labels for angry women. He's assertive, hotheaded, pissed off, just letting off some steam, taking care of business; she, on the other hand, is just a nag or bitch.

Thus have anger-in or anger-suppressing practices tended to be more expected of women than of men. Anger is culturally held as less legitimate an expression for women than for men. The result is that for many women anger is largely unavailable as a resource.

A woman marooned from her own anger is likely going to have a harder time maintaining healthy boundaries; she may feel more helpless, more fearful, more prone to despair and depression. When her anger cannot be depressed — that is, kept or pressed down — its energies may be routed into resentment or bitterness. And what a pity this is, given that anger can be, including in its fieriness, a form of caring. In my work I have often seen a woman's rage — full-out, clean rage — cut through the cognitive muddling of her partner or other men, waking them up to what they're actually doing.

For anger to be a resource in relationship requires not only that it be permitted its innate vulnerability, but that it also be valued, and valued equally, in both women and men. So long as female anger is treated as something less worthy of respect than male anger, relational approaches to anger will remain superficial or unproductive.

Anger asks not for domestication, but for an honoring of its wildness, a receptive, suitably expressive outlet for its elemental, primally alive nature. Unfortunately, the wildness in men often tends to be either crushed or channeled into mere savagery (however sophisticated), and the wildness in women just as often tends to be smothered, reduced to various forms of nagging, or trivialized as mere bitchiness.

Women have been much more subject to domestication and niceness implants than have men, and yet I have observed again and again that heart-anger usually comes more readily to women than to men. A possible reason for this is that women generally are more willing to bring some caring into their anger, whereas men are typically more prone to converting their anger into aggression.

There is more to this, however. The active/dynamic (or going-toward) capacity commonly attributed to men, in contrast to the corresponding passive/receptive (or taking-in) capacity commonly attributed to women, may have some truth in certain areas, but not very much at all when it comes to psychological/emotional life. Much of marriage counselling deals with the far more active roles that women generally take — for better or for worse — with regard to the interior life of their relationship. Thus it is no surprise that women would tend to be more accessible to heart-anger, since they are, in general, already more inclined toward both caring and taking an active or even challenging role in the arena of psychological/emotional communication.

A woman's impassioned and resolute shaking up of the relational status quo — disturbing her partner's complacency, disembodied rationality, or supposed expertise — can be a potent awakening agent. And vice versa. Anger and love can exist at the same time in a mature relationship!

Imagine a new image: The warrior of intimacy, female or male, who can give anger with full-blooded yet compassionate and vulnerable intensity, and who can also receive anger — not absorbing or swallowing it, nor playing martyred target for it, but simply responding to it nondefensively, letting it in not like an invader but like a guest.

Expressing and Receiving Anger

Brian and Tina are at a stalemate. Both are articulate and insightful, yet they are stuck. Their knowledge — both are therapists — does not seem to be making any difference. He wants more commitment from her, she wants less pressure from him, and both are unhappy. She says she feels guilty about her lack of commitment to being with him, so we talk about her guilt and its roots, but still there is little life in the room.

They are both clearly angry and very much under control — firmly in position, armed in their attempted openness, trying to be non-combative in their combativeness. The stage is set.

"Face each other," I say, "and keep eye contact." Tina briefly raises her hands slightly, palms out, smiles, and delivers some more dead-end insight. "Do that again with your hands," I say, "and breathe deeper." She grins. I see a flash of shame. Her hands are sliding up and down the outside of her thighs. "What do your hands want to do?" I ask her.

In an instant, her hands are on Brian's knees, pushing him back. Immediately, she pulls back, smiling, changing the subject. I ask her what she's feeling as she smiles, and she says that she's angry, and that she's withdrawing from him. Tension fills the room. We briefly talk about how easily she puts herself down for not wanting to be closer to him; even to directly give him her anger would be, she says, a kind of giving in. And so on. Brian is hurt, but still present.

"Let's try a different tack," I suggest. "Tina, I want you to express your anger to Brian as fully as possible, but without any words." She no longer can smile. I have her hold her a pillow between her hands, to be squeezed as hard as she can. A half minute or so passes. I can see and feel her rage, but she is silent. I ask her where she is most tense, and she says her throat and jaw.

Suddenly, she leans forward, screaming at him, her sounds deep and powerful; she is clearly not acting. Brian now looks much more awake — and caring. Tina is full-blooded in what she is allowing, and is simultaneously very vulnerable. Tears mix with her rage. Less than a minute later, I have her interlock hands with him while she bites down on a towel that I pull on; this loosens her jaw and neck. For a minute or so, she pushes against him, biting very hard, her eyes pure fury and hurt. Then I have her let go of the towel and his hands. Silence, and a deeper silence.

Both had complained of not having enough of a soul-connection, but now it is evident that they are plugged into a very real intimacy. He, unlike many men, did not pull back or "disappear" in the face of her raw anger. They are not through their difficulty, but are now in a place where they are far more capable of getting through it.

The expression of anger and the need to take action are not necessarily the same thing. The direct expression of anger-energy is simply an act of exposure, whereas the need to have events go this way or that has more to do with power and control.

Restricting anger expression to verbal combat only keeps it from being as healing a process as it could be if it were to also — under the right conditions! — to safely include the nonverbal expression of undisguised and uncensored anger (as illustrated in the vignette above).

When anger is "uncaged" in a suitable environment at the right time, it often will, after a minute or two of full-throated, full-bodied release, be accompanied by fitting words and phrasings that potently articulate the heart of the matter. Thus can skillfully steered anger-out become more than venting, more than a merely eliminative strategy, eventually mutating, to a significant degree, into heart-anger.

In a relatively awakened relationship, the actual intent of our anger can, at least some of the time, be safely verbalized, openly and specifically. At times — if there is enough trust, love, and mindfulness — the confession of such intent may need to be also physically expressed (as when anger is particularly intense, edgy, or gripping) through wringing a towel, pounding a pillow or sofa, or engaging in other similarly nondestructive expressions of such energy.

To expose our darker reactive intentions with clarity, vulnerability, and perhaps some degree of dramatic exaggeration, can be, even though it might appear otherwise, an act of love, providing an illuminating — and valuable — inside look at our uglier urges, soul-crushing habits, core wounds, and their attending anger.

Openly sharing what we are ashamed or afraid of in ourselves makes us not only more intimate with such qualities, but also with each other.

Even so, we may still go to great lengths to avoid exposing or sharing not only the more shameful or embarrassing imperatives of our anger, but also its passion. Getting righteous during our anger may be pointless, but no more so than submitting to our partner's demands (tacit or not) that we: (1) not get openly angry; (2) spare them such raw intensity; (3) prove (through suffocating, sterilizing, or at least muting our anger) that we are loving; and (4) in short, let them in this particular situation remain in control, "safely" removed from the heat of our anger.

If we are on the receiving end of anger coming from our partner, particularly heated or wide-open anger, it may be very tempting to deny them significant access to us, even if their anger is being delivered cleanly. We may interrupt, deflect, minimize, or try to detour their intensity of feeling (and/or content), perhaps informing them that they are out of control or behaving irresponsibly, saying to them in so many words, "Can't we do this another way?"

This apparently reasonable request, however appropriate it might be at times (as when the environment is not sufficiently supportive of an "uncivilized" exchange, or when anger is being abusively expressed), is usually an avoidance of anger, as well as a confession of not being intimate with our own anger. That is, if we don't successfully defuse or mute our partner's anger at us, it might catalyze our own anger into a more active form, and the more opposed we are to this, the more we will tend to oppose, obstruct, or sabotage our partner's direct expression of anger.

We may even — without raising our voice, of course! — demand from them in the midst of their anger that they demonstrate that they do indeed love us. To do so may mean that they have to cease being angry (or at least looking angry), given that our prevailing model of love very likely does not include an angry-faced or wrathful love. If anger signals the end or absence of love for us — as it might have in our past — then we are going to have a strong investment in suppressing it, both in ourselves and in others, stranding ourselves from the realization that anger and love can both exist at the same time.

For anger to enhance intimacy, it needs to be met with nondefensive, empathetic listening (which does not necessarily mean that the partner listening should suppress his or her own anger!), listening in which agreement or disagreement with what is being said or conveyed remains secondary to our empathy and caring for the other. Such is the essence of receiving anger.

Rejecting our partner's anger — not aggression, but anger — simply short- circuits it. This generally encourages the stockpiling of anger-energy and frustration, along with a resulting pressure to find other outlets, such as the subtle cruelties of passive aggression.

Anger that is rejected, anger that is denied compassion, anger that is vilified or ostracized or declawed, is the very anger that corrodes and sabotages intimacy.

Sharing anger in an intimate relationship does not always have to remain a serious affair. Playfulness and healthy anger expression are not mutually exclusive. Skillful teasing in the midst of anger may in fact create more room for hearing what is really being said, testing the health and resiliency of our edges, keeping us fluid, even if our bones are brittle with age. Such teasing is the leavening of healthy criticism. It puts down our sweaty fretting and fussing without putting us down.

In the fierce heat of anger, a happy-to-be-alive feeling may sometimes emerge — especially when deep intimacy and trust are present. Some signs of anger may still linger, but there will also be a deep and natural empathy, plus a spaciousness which allows integrity to surface, tears to stream freely, humor to upstage righteousness, and love to shine bright.

When anger and love are permitted to coexist — as happens most commonly in being-centered relationships — intimacy cannot help but deepen.

Anger does not disappear as we awaken, and in fact may become even more fiery, but burns cleanly, serving the well-being of all involved.

Landlocked Blues

If you walk away I'll walk away
first tell me which road you will take
I don't want to risk our paths crossing someday
so you walk that way I'll walk this way

and the future hangs over our heads
and it moves with each current event
until it falls all around like a cold steady rain
just stay in when it's lookin' this way

and the moon's laying low in the sky
forcing everything metal to shine
and the sidewalk holds diamonds like a jewelry store case
they argue "walk this way," "no walk this way"

and Laura's asleep in my bed
as I'm leaving she wakes up and says
"I dreamed you were carried away on the crest of a wave
baby don't go away, come here"

and there's kids playing guns in the street
and one's pointing his tree branch at me
So I put my hands up I say:
"Enough is enough,
If you walk away I'll walk away."
(and he shot me dead)

I found a liquid cure
for my landlocked blues
it will pass away
like a slow parade
it's leaving but I don't know how soon

and the world's got me dizzy again
you'd think after 22 years I'd be used to the spin
and it only feels worse when I stay in one place
so I'm always pacing around or walking away
I keep drinking the ink from my pen
and I'm balancing history books up on my head
but it all boils down to one quotable phrase
"If you love something give it away"
A good woman will pick you apart
a box full of suggestions for your possible heart
But you may be offended, and you may be afraid
but don't walk away, don't walk away

We made love on the living room floor
with the noise in the background from a televised war
And in the deafening pleasure I thought I heard someone say
"If we walk away, they'll walk away"
But greed is a bottomless pit
And our freedom's a joke we're just taking a piss
And the whole world must watch the sad comic display
If you're still free start runnin' away
'cause we're comin' for ya!

I've grown tired of holding this pose
I feel more like a stranger each time I come home
So I'm making a deal with the devils of fame
Sayin' let me walk away, please
You'll be free child once you have died
from the shackles of language and measurable time
And then we can trade places, play musical graves
till then walk away walk away walk away walk away
So I'm up at dawn, putting on my shoes
I just want to make a clean escape
I'm leaving but I don't know where to
I know I'm leaving but I don't know where to.

William James FTW

"Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness... There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.

No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded".

- William James

Thunder Road

The screen door slams
Mary's dress sways
Like a vision she dances across the porch
As the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey that's me and I want you only
Don't turn me home again
I just can't face myself alone again
Don't run back inside
Darling you know just what Im here for
So you're scared and you're thinking
That maybe we ain't that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright
Oh and that's alright with me

You can hide `neath your covers
And study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers
Throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a savior to rise from these streets
Well now Im no hero
That's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl
Is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow
Back your hair
Well the nights busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back
Heavens waiting on down the tracks
Oh-oh come take my hand
Riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh-oh thunder road, oh thunder road oh thunder road
Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey I know it's late we can make it if we run
Oh thunder road, sit tight take hold
Thunder road

Well I got this guitar
And I learned how to make it talk
And my cars out back
If you're ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The doors open but the ride it ain't free
And I know you're lonely
For words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free
All the promises'll be broken
There were ghosts in the eyes
Of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burned out chevrolets

They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they're gone
On the wind, so mary climb in
Its a town full of losers
And I'm pulling out of here to win.

Another cracker from Carl Jung

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being".

- Carl Jung

Carl Jung on his integrative interests, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections

"My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism".

- Carl Jung

Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run (acoustic)

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

In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected,and steppin' out over the line
h-Oh, Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young
`Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

Yes, girl we were

Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your dreams and visions
Just wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims
and strap your hands 'cross my engines
Together we could break this trap
We'll run till we drop, baby we'll never go back
Oh, Will you walk with me out on the wire
‘Cause baby I'm just a scared and lonely rider
But I gotta know how it feels
I want to know if love is wild
Babe I want to know if love is real

Oh, can you show me

Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard
Girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors
And the boys try to look so hard
The amusement park rises bold and stark
Kids are huddled on the beach in a mist
I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight
In an everlasting kiss

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody's out on the run tonight
but there's no place left to hide
Together Wendy we can live with the sadness
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul
Oh, Someday girl I don't know when
we're gonna get to that place
Where we really wanna go
and we'll walk in the sun
But till then tramps like us
baby we were born to run

Oh honey, tramps like us
baby we were born to run

Come on with me, tramps like us
baby we were born to run



http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

15 Authors

The Invitation Guidelines: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who have influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag at least 15 of your friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing which authors you choose. To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste the rules in a new note, cast your 15 picks and tag people in the note.

Ken Wilber – Changed my life more than any other.
Jon Kabat-Zinn – The father I think we all should have had.
Raewyn Connell –Profoundly opened my eyes to vision-logic, gender and politico-culture.
Henry David Thoreau – A romanticist of the same ilk as me.
Judith Pickering – Deepest understanding of mature love I’ve ever seen.
Carl Jung – Taught me to trust visionary experience, and my own soul.
Michael Washburn – Made legitimate my multifaceted consciousness and it’s volatility in the service of transcendence.
Walt Whitman – Just like Thoreau, we’re nature romanticists in the same way.
Chuck Palahniuk – Taught me how to turn a phrase.
Michel Foucault – Made me understand the value of a pomo and post-structural perspective (… and don’t give me the story about how he denied those titles).
Sigmund Freud – Without him, none of this would be.
Tara Bennett-Goleman – The only book I had for six months while I had a nervous breakdown in South America. I studied it from top to bottom, and it, in one sense, saved my life.
Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger made real the subtle tragedies of our contemporary condition.
Robert Bly – Taught me about the absent father.
Tim Rogers (presuming poetic lyricists can be included as poets) – The poet I wanted to be through my entire youth.


http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Here Is My Co-Pilot - Holly Throsby

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RutXiR8TGQ

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com