I mentioned a dream several posts ago, which could easily be interpreted as a desire to return to the womb. Or perhaps as a recreation of my birth. Whatever.
Once you have analyzed, in psychoanalytic fashion, some myth or dream, what then? For Freud, the process always devolved down to sex. Whatever elevated ideas you thought you had, were really just sex. Everything is sex. This is an extraordinarily destructive doctrine. Nothing means anything, then we die. This is what is being taught in colleges around the country.
“Life as sex” is what I term a tubaform. It is a prism through which you can break down the world. To my mind, the question is not “is it true”, but “is it useful”? Plainly, we do not have, and never will have the eyes of God, but empirically we can and should ask questions like “was Freud’s materialistic atheism an empirically defensible doctrine”, and “are our higher sentiments not unconnected with sex in any visible way, and can we not therefore discard his experimentally unanchored dilettantish suppositions in favor of ideas we like better?”
We are told that open expression of sexuality is “honest”, and pretending otherwise is “dishonest”. But look at San Franscisco. Are they happy? They are all divorced, leading lives where no one trusts anyone, and they are, in the end, alone. Why is kink.com located there? Because that is where they belong. The end result of emotionally detached sex is the recognition that detachment is in fact the primary reality of the relationship. All that happens when you tie someone up and hit them is you physicalize an already existing reality. You actually make it more bearable, by diluting the emotional pain. BDSM has its place, for people living in a certain unhealthy way. It is simply preferable to the alternative, which in modern days is often suicide from the grief of unanchored solitude.
Let me return to the myth, though. Take my dream, of descending through a birth canal, a constricting space, into an open space, that progressively reveals qualitatively richness and light to me. This is also death and rebirth, is it not, that combines the physical experience of discomfort and anxiety, with a relief that is tied to long-extant cultural traditions?
Your personality is characterized by a qualitative gestalt. It is a whole, stitched together from many parts. To change in fundamental ways, you have to “power down”, then power back up. You have to die, then be reborn.
If I could be said to have a “heavy”, an anchor, a guru (heavy is the literal meaning of guru, and I have long seen this as symbolizing a stone at the bottom of an oceans currents, to which I can tie myself to achieve some stability) it is Jack Schwarz. I had two interesting dreams of him, in which I do believe he conveyed needed information, which in my case was modeling emotional/spiritual states which I needed the capacity to feel.
Be that as it may, he spoke often of the need to die daily, through meditation. When you really relax, you let go, you die in a sense. In Yoga, the relaxation pose is called the “corpse posture”.
In our modern day, the single thing we lack most is the capacity for deep, deep relaxation. We hold on so tight to who we are, and what we do, that we actually stiffen and die in our capacity for experience.
Oi: need to go. I’m lucky to set my own hours, but I have things that need to get done.