He devised something like a still, in which water was boiled in a pot, with furs overhead, which caught the condensation, and dripped it back down, purified.
Now, this may have been a past life memory. If my between-lives self is anything like my present self, I like to roam. I’ve been everywhere, man.
But symbolically, it answered a question I had been asking myself: how do I heal wounds of lack? How can something become present which has always been absent? How do you set about doing this work consciously and directly?
Answer, you don’t. What you do is enter into these knots–and everything which is not flowing is best understood as a knot, although an eddy on the side of the river may be a good metaphor too–and allow them through gentle focus, gentle interaction, to become vapor. One moment they are knotted, solid, and tight, and slowly they melt. The chemical definition of sublimation is transitioning directly from a solid to a gas.
Now, all knots can be assumed to be admixtures of the good and the “bad”, the fresh and the rotten, the wholesome and the unhealthy. By “melting” these knots, the good floats up, and the rest disappears.
Freud, of course, used this metaphor too, for the process of converting socially unconscious impulses into more appropriate ones. The sexually repressed person becomes a great pianist.
But returning to my oft-repeated claim that Freud was nearly always ALMOST right, but prodigiously wrong in important respects, what we can say is that if the sexual impulse gets tied into a knot through an inability to express sexuality healthily, then yes, it creates social dysfunction. But the opposite is not leaving it as-is–primitive, needy, continual–but rather INTEGRATING it. You release ALL energy when you release ANY held energy. You can look at your sex, when you are healthy, feel it, find ways to express it, and make it a daily part of your life. You are not repressing it, but EXpressing it.
So too, say, with violence. Inner rage does not get sublimated to, say, an obsession with peace. When you untie this knot you find that a part of you has an innate need to set boundaries, and to feel safe expressing a core sense of self. Once you do this, the capacity for violence does not vanish, but it is possible to limit it to appropriate times and places, where it is genuinely warranted.
It is obvious to me the Left has not processed its rage and frustration. They call for peace, but not intelligent peace, not peace based on a principled adherence to common sense notions of human rights and human dignity.
And obviously when I speak of “The Left”, the concrete referent is people who adopt and push this Weltanschauung. You cannot not be bitter and angry, and still want Europe to fall to people who think it quite acceptable to beat their wives and rape kaffir women.
This last lecture is not necessary, but today, particularly, I am left contemplating the spectacle of masses of people so blinded by hatred that NOTHING Trump has done or could do would suffice to satiate their rage.
“HE IS NOT US”, I hear them scream. “No”, is the answer, “no he is not”. And thank God for that!!!