Month: March 2014

Yesterday, the day after my last post, I had to do work in a psychiatric office.  I was somewhat discomfited to see a brochure for Electroconvulsive Therapy, and looked–to the extent of my ability out of the corner of my eye–at the poor souls who were landing there, likely not happily, and perhaps not of their own choice.

I thought: how AWFUL to be remanded to these people for what in most cases is normal human suffering.  I saw several of the shrinks.  They wear sweaters, and smile in the fashion I have come to expect from back-stabbing, ladder climbing VP’s in large corporations.  Their sincerity has every appearance of being sincere.

Yes, I am a cynic, and I do realize that there are genuinely good people in the “mental health profession”, but what in the process builds this?  What builds genuine love, joy, happiness, generosity of spirit, openness, kindness?  Freudian analysis?  Are you fucking stupid?

Consider, too, this phrase “mental health professional”.  It implies both that this person is as qualified as anyone on the planet can be to discuss the process of what we call mental health, AND that they themselves exemplify, that they DO mental health, better.  We all know, I think, that in most cases this is a lie.  Not all such “professionals” are full blown neurotics, but I suspect most pipe-fitters and electricians are more honest, and more genuine.

In some respects, of course, the burden of listening to litanies of failure and woe all day every day, knowing that your therapeutic arsenal is very weak, that you are fighting tanks with bows and arrows, must be tiring.  There can be no question that sedation of various sorts creates relief, but there is no skill in this.  You could train most nurses to do it easily.  Nor is there much skill in simply listening.

Any skill there may be consists in helping people feel heard, in inspiring confidence, in helping feel cared about genuinely, and in facilitating self healing in others.  It consists not in putting oneself on a pedestal, nor quite putting the patient on a pedestal, but sitting on a park bench, and having honest fruitful conversations, at the end of which your “patient” realizes for him or herself how the healing process must proceed.

I have been creating a sort of artificially induced spiritual emergency for myself, and it has been very productive.  And what I am increasingly seeing is the extent of the madness around me.

Can we not say that academics who refuse to even consider, much less accept, the existence of evidence that would force them to alter their paradigm, in whatever field, are effectively having negative hallucinations?  That they are NOT seeing what objectively is there?  Does not mainstream psychology posit all hallucinations as symptomatic of mental illness?

What safeguards are in place to vet the sanity of those who go into journalism?  If their goal is to see and report what is in front of them, but they suffer both from negative and positive hallucinations, how can they do this job?  What prevents intellectually gifted but emotionally grotesque human beings from going into the one field which, more than any other, creates our sense of shared reality?  Nothing.

Imagine on the other end a psychiatry which actually DID do a thorough job both of ensuring that all prospective therapists went through careful training which included abreaction, and the perinatal matrices?  What if they graduated, consistently and universally, as actually decent, humble, attentive, warm human beings?  A new priesthood might bring on a new social order.

Should we call it dreaming to see something which should be there but is not?  Is it dreaming to see how the world could live in peace and harmony and happiness?  I don’t think so.  I think it is those NOT capable of this that are dreaming.  They are engaging in negative hallucinations in which they do not see the possibilities which are objectively there.

I can find fault with virtually all of our political and social order.  To be sure, we do many things right.  We have crafted peace over very wide areas.  Through free trade and free markets, we have brought global prosperity unlike anything ever seen in human history.

But culturally we are losing precious resources, like the capacity for moral judgement, and the effective use of principle in both thought and behavior.  Both of these underlie, clearly and beyond any possibility of dispute, the on-going failures we see in generalizing wealth and well-being, and in generating and sustaining shared senses of meaning and purpose, hope and joy, privilege and pleasure.

I have long avoided the macabre.  I haven’t read Edgar Allen Poe, and have written, here and elsewhere, at length about my misgivings about horror movies, and violence in media in general. 

I continue to have those misgivings, to some extent–particularly for young minds and spirits–but I am growing.  I am expanding.

And what I am seeing is that you cannot find what you have hidden in the dark if you are afraid to go there.  Psychological growth, in the sense of finding and untying various covert and often deeply unconscious knots, is a bit like a scavenger hunt.  Our psyche is like a house where half the rooms are lit, and half are not.  The things that matter are scattered uniformly.  You can find the obvious easily enough, but it takes some patience and blind fumbling to find what is hidden in spaces you cannot see.

I am beginning to understand evil, and how to cast it out from myself.  We all have it; we are all capable of it.  We are all moral midgets in some respect.  We all not only fall short, but cast out the light, at many times and places in our lives.  You can only avoid this process by finding all of your evil, and digesting it.  I am tempted to say by accepting it, but that is not quite right.  You observe it, and after a time the light of attention causes it to become weaker and less dense, and eventually it dissolves and dissipates.

There is no actual darkness in this universe.  What we see as darkness are shades we draw across the windows in our souls, that keep the light from coming in.

I am reading a book by Stan Grof titled “Healing our Deepest Wounds”, which was written more or less at the request of Vaclav Havel, as a summary of his work.  He himself recommends “Psychology of the Future” as a best overview, but I already had this book when I learned that.

And being me, I am contemplating.  One unfortunate thing I noticed in interacting with him in person is that I retain huge unprocessed emotional energy regarding Father archetypes, which he unquestionably is.  He is a sincere, decent human being, deeply knowledgeable, and has accomplished a great deal.  He has never particularly sought nor avoided the limelight.  He has simply, as far as I can tell, tried to do good, useful work.

I tend, though, not to respect any authority.  In some cases this is good.  I think much of Western culture in the sense of material progress has arisen because of our ability to go beyond those who came before.  Rather than value their work for its own sake, we break it, rebuild it, and make it better.  Again, this applies mainly to the material domain.  Spiritually, of course, we are if anything moving backwards.

All this to say, of course, that I thought I was a bit clumsy, but there is nothing I can do about it at the moment.

But I would like to focus a moment on his work, which remains relatively unknown to many, particularly in Western Europe and the United States.

In a nutshell, what he did was vastly expand the domain of human consciousness, and thereby the domains of healthy, appropriate thoughts, emotions and behaviors.  This is enormous.

Among other things, he offers a mindset and therapeutic understanding which could easily bring thousands–perhaps more–of people currently classified as psychotic within the realm of the well adapted, without drugs.  Such an inclusion would both require and ENABLE a vast expansion of our collective understanding of what it means to be human.

When we think Depth Psychology, for most this is either Freud or Jung.  Freud is what academic psychiatrists study, and Jung tends to be popular among people who read Joseph Campbell, or who can’t bring themselves to accept Freud’s materialism, or following psychodynamic reductionism.

Freud initiated the idea that early childhood experience is vastly important.  He stumbled, as I have said, early on on the idea of hysteria being the result of traumatic early sexual experiences, and he developed a method (no doubt drawing on earlier or contemporaneous work) called abreaction of eliciting deep feelings–of fear, of being trapped, of being angry, of being sexual, etc.–allowing them full expression, and then letting them subside.   This method worked.

Jung proposed the idea of the Collective Unconscious.  What he found is that certain deep themes seem to be a shared property of humanity as a whole.  But Jung seems never to have pursued abreaction at all.  Here is an entry whose very brevity indicates the relative unimportance of this in my view critical discovery within the history of Depth Psychology: Abreaction.

Here is a comment on Jung’s use of abreaction:

 “though traumata of clearly aetiological significance were occasionally
present, the majority of them appeared very improbable. Many traumata
were so unimportant, even so normal, that they could be regarded at most
as a pretext for the neurosis. But what especially aroused my criticism
was the fact that not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy
and had never happened at all”.

Asked about Rank’s theory on birth trauma, Jung replied, as I understand it: We are all born.  That was that.

But Grof had the unique privilege of being a psychiatrist in clinical practice allowed by law to give doses of pharmaceutical grade LSD to patients in controlled clinical settings, over a period of many years.

And what he found was that the birth trauma very much does not only remain with people, it remains at a very deep level, and in many cases, unprocessed, it colors the entire complexion of a life.  This is enormous.

All of the traumas Jung ascribed to fantasy could quite easily be seen, within this paradigm, as symbolic manifestations of traumas which could not otherwise expressed.

And again, if a newborn goes its first week without nursing, we consider this a traumatic event in modern practice.  We know that little babies who do not get enough affection and love react with withdrawal and other symptoms which persist into adulthood.  There is little serious question about this, even within the mainstream.

What then is the magic event which turns a baby from a Tabula Rasa the moment before its umbilical cord is cut, into a sensitive and delicate creature the moment afterwards?  The idea is preposterous.

The reason I looked (cursorily, I must admit, for the moment, although the basics seem clear enough) into abreaction at all was that I asked Stan a question that I think he had not recently considered the answer to.  I asked him: do you think the reason that psychiatrists reject the idea of perinatal trauma is that they have no effective tools with which to deal with it?

I thought this was a good question.  It seems obvious enough to me that ALL MD’s, psychiatrists included, tend to relish the power relationship implied in having unique, presumably socially useful knowledge.  What happens when they don’t have an answer, even in theory?  I once asked a martial arts teacher if the name of technique X he had shown us wasn’t actually Y.  I did not realize it at the time, but I put both him and the other students into a sort of existential crisis whose depth I only grasped when they were able to collectively sigh relief at him finding that technique in fact was best called X within the school we were then studying.  This was instructive to me, in itself.

Practically, psychiatry medicates and “pathologizes” whatever it does not understand.  This is not skill: it is high grade and expensive imbecility.

The problem is exacerbated once one grasps the HUGE importance of the psychoanalysis all psychiatrists have to undergo, which in the magical space within which these people operate is supposed to work to resolve them of all psychological conflicts which might interfere with their intent of becoming superior human beings.

Granting that perinatal trauma not only exists, but is of HUGE, enormous clinical importance, would cause a rift in the complacent world views of these people.  It would, within their world view, imply that they themselves are incompletely analyzed, that they have not sufficiently prepared themselves for their sacred role as divine mediators between the realms: sanity and insanity.  Hell, some of them may even be nuts themselves, despite being declared “clean”, and particularly since this is in fact the case, the objective truth, in my view, this notion, this very path of thought, is insufferable.

And add to this of course the mechanistic bias of almost all contemporary “science” (Scienceishness?  Scientocity”) and you eradicate the realm of the Transpersonal/Collective Unconscious as well.

I have to run, but this is how the lunatics got in control of the asylums.  More to say later.

Few thoughts, a dream.

What if Jesus and the Buddha–the two I think of when I think deep spirituality–were really just apprentice spirits?  What if the Earth is a primitive spiritual backwater where souls learning the craft of ministry, of teaching, come for their first practical experience?  What if all Jesus and Buddha did was communicate what is obvious to all spirits even slightly more advanced than us?  What if they only seemed advanced and infinitely higher on the qualitative horizon because they were, but only relative to us? 

What if you have to save a planet to get your first spiritual “promotion”?  What if you have to save 30 for your second, a galaxy for your third, and 30 galaxies for your fourth?  What if there are a hundred promotions?

It is worth doing thought exercises both in the very large and the very small.

An image that came to me the other day is that of our own world as a sort of fountain, where virtue flows up and down, in roughly the same way, but constantly changing.  How high does the water surge in a fountain?  10′, plus or minus 2′?  That is history.  That is cultural highs and lows.

What if this level of the universe has always been like this, and is destined always to be like this?  What if you can’t alter the role this level of reality must play in the grand scheme of things?  What if Lao Tzu’s essential pessimism about any final, lasting improvements is the wisest stance?

Last night I dreamed I was trying to protect a parade from a group of demons. In my dream, I had done this exercise many times before, and always won.  I had a number of compatriots.  But I was overconfident, poorly armed, and we were overwhelmed.  I was immune, but many were taken.

And I was led in my dream to a stand where people were supposed to come to be saved, but were instead turned into zombies.  I tried to fight them, but I was powerless to stop them.  Then I was flying, and I could see an ocean of souls moving about like the zombies in World War Z.  Trillions of them, oceans of them, climbing on one another, forming planet-sized waves, in constant motion, constant agitation.

Then I came back to the stand, and saw a computer and realized there was a second layer to these people, and that behind all of them was a Buddha spirit.  The way to save them was by clicking on the Buddha icon.  I “activated” 6 and then woke up.

In recent days I have been more or less offering myself to Death.  This has many symbolic resonances, and I do not want to kill it with overanalysis, but will make a few comments.

First, this is not morose in the slightest.  It seems to be eroding a standing fear I have had, and is actually making me calmer and more relaxed.  I am smiling more.

Second, we assume that the “good guys” always have to win, and I reached a point some time ago where I never have uncontrolled darkness in my dreams. I control things.  I can create weapons, fly, walk through walls, float through ceilings, exist underwater, etc.  But is this most wise?  Behind the darkness of what we might even call the Satanic, there is rebirth.

I am constricted in my emotional and perceptual movement.  I am not fully free.  And think about this:  if being who you are is sanity, then changing who you are qualitatively–even choosing not to be who you are, but no one else either–is a type of madness.

If I am always me, I am limited to being me.  I cannot as easily, figuratively, float in the clouds and flow in the streams, and find comfort deep underground.  I am not fire and wind.  I am not the rustling of leaves, the cackling of hens, or young deer looking for tender young greens.

To do these things, I must leave myself, and as already posited, not being yourself is a type of madness.

In Sanskrit they speak of the ego as the “I Maker”.  It forms the I, but the point I want to make is that this construction process is continuous.  It never stops.  You are being built at the same time you are breaking down.

Who are you when you are lost completely in a beautiful scene?  Who are you when you are so lost in a lover you lose track of time and reason?  Who are you in a meditation so deep you lose consciousness of your body?  You are what underlies the work of the “I-Maker” (ahamkara).  You are something else, which may as well be called “that” (and of course has been).

Here is the point I draw, here: ONLY when you are helping someone realize their inner Buddha spirit are you helping them, truly.  Nothing else matters.  Anything else, and you are simply lost in an endless ocean of motion, without mind, without meaning.  Samsara CONSISTS in getting hungry, sick, old, and dying.  This is nothing new.

As I have said often enough, I think that without periodic lunacy, we all go mad.

The madness of much of our modern world is that madness can be eliminated.   Qualitative outliers–the random, the unpredictable, the inherently uncontrollable–can be vanquished.  Perfect order can be achieved. I mock this order in my Inquisitor piece by offering an image of Sade salivating over a billion piles of perfectly arranged ash.

But it truly seems to me that the transhumanists want something like this.  They want order, order that is as transcendent as their materialistic biases allow.  They do not want qualitative reorganization through mania, through visions, through useful delusions and hallucinations.  They do not want the uncontrolled, the Dionysian, the ecstatic, EXCEPT when and how they want it, via drugs–and later software–carefully programmed to create an exact and predictable effect.

Let me ask this question: if a drug existed which when taken would give you the same thrill solving the equation 2+2=4 that Einstein got in deriving General Relativity, would you take it?  What if the thrill were LARGER, exponentially so?  What if the feeling could be induced in you of ecstasy that lasted for days?

What if you could be made to fall in love with your phone?  What if chemicals could be administered which not only mimicked the best, highest qualitative feelings of being in love, but surpassed them considerably?

What role does conscious awareness play, what role logic, in this universe?  What purpose does life have?  If we can take drugs which create the FEELING of purpose while floating aimlessly in a backyard pool, can we say that the concept of “meaning” has meaning, that it is something more than a biochemical sensation? 

I say yes, definitely so.  I say that mechanistic understandings of life make these sorts of mind experiments possible, but that in the final analysis, life is not coterminous with biology.  This is a metaphysical point, and a critical one; and one at that well supported empirically.

We can discuss these issues, and failure is not inevitable.  We do not have to abandon principle at the first sign of resistance.  We do not have to feel guilt at not always being “nice”.  We can stake claims as to what it means to be human, and counter the claims of those whose empirical backing is much weaker.