Adding a final wall to the far end.

I was employed as a swimming coach for two pools in the mud, that hadn't been filled in yet, in a dream two days ago.  One of the pools was filled with water, its boundaries formed, and a very strong young woman arrived there to swim.   A clearly tough teenager, bikini-clad, she began to complain that her father had kicked her to discipline her.   I began to smile at that and said, "Sorry, I shouldn't say this, but it just amuses me because I do kickboxing and  we get kicked all the time."

In the dream, there were no repercussions for insensitivity and everything went, as we say "swimmingly".

It has taken a long time, not far from being the longest time ever for analyses to be made, for stuff to be thunk through.   I've finally managed it, however, an understanding of my natural states, and what makes me think the way I do.

First structural level of difficulty:  the conviction that I'm not nearly sensitive enough, but that I were I to attain a sufficient level of sensitivity, the world would be mine, indeed I would be able to thoroughly redeem it.   Until then, I had to constantly second guess myself and put myself through a program of self-scrutiny.

The successful people, it seemed to me, were those who could convey the flavor and the texture of their moods to those around them, so that others would understand these implicitly and leave those people alone.   The nature of this formulation was that I would achieve sensitivity -- so as to be free of the burden of having to keep trying to attain a greater degree of sensitive awareness.  My aim was not to be a better person, but not to have to worry about fitting in -- that was, to win the right to be insensitive, by proving that I could be very sensitive, if necessary.

This bizarre psychological complex has defined my sense of purpose in relation to what I consider to be "Western culture".   To try to make myself more in tune with it, in order not to have to be in tune with it, has been my stressful, underlying preoccupation for so long.   I didn't realize it was possible to give up this endeavor until now.  

Psychology is stranger than fiction.  We allow ourselves to be programmed with certain notions; ideas that promise us specific results, without even realizing what the program is, or why particular results ought to be logically anticipated and expected.

My father lies stetches out his legs behind this, of course, and as I surmised whilst writing my memoir, this is unrelated to any Oedipus complex (which means, of course, it is -- and suddenly my image has taken on gargantuan modernist proportions).My responsibilities were elsewhere, to redeem my father from the legacy of an insensitive mother.   This was the knot my memoir attempted to undo -- although I didn't have a name for the dilemma at the time, nor was I able to express it by means other than a sketchy outline.   I had to be sensitive for him, so that I would be free to swim, so far as familial responsibilities go.

On the therapist's couch

It is likely there is no need for someone who has figured out how reality, inclusive of societies, political programs and the like, is structured, to require therapy. Even Freudian analysis, (or Jungian), which Clarissa seems to argue is devoid of a dogmatic agenda, relies on drawing one out on the basis of one’s internal construction of authority.

A question never addressed by such therapy is what if one’s internal construction of authority happens to match the external structure of authority as it presently is? That is, one may fear a certain manifestation of authority because it creates a clear and present danger to one’s well-being.

If this kind of reality did indeed match one’s perceptions of it, there would be every reason to be emotionally distressed. However, psychoanalysis typically maintains that experiencing a distressing emotion means one is unable to grasp reality as it is — that is, in a demonstrably “non-hysterical” manner.

So the very question of authority and how it functions in terms of actual power relationships is effectively scuttled by psychoanalytical treatment.

It may be that one is is need of dealing with the aftermath of relationships that have long died, but psychoanalysis begs this question, rather than addressing it.

Intellectual shamanism differs from this psychoanalytical approach because it addresses the issue of power as a real force in the world.  It may lead you to understand, "Yes, something seems to be attacking you because it is in fact attacking you.  Now, learn to see that clearly.  It may take some time.   Take a deep breath and consider your strategies."

Thinking African thoughts

I recently solved all my psychological issues in a snap by accepting that I was never going to "adapt"; that is was impossible for me to adapt ever, and especially now considering my maturity in life.  Ever since then, I've had a much greater amount of energy to spend, I'm thoroughly relaxed within my skin, and I don't over-think anything.  I don't have any sense of residual guilt about anything.  

Sometimes pushing and pushing oneself doesn't work out.   There's no point in it.   You've got to do what you feel natural with; go in the directions that already feel natural.  

As I glide away from previous position, which was an attempt to try to hold onto the peripheries of Western culture, to keep open any future access points for "fitting in", I find my mental state is clearer, my goals easier to establish and fulfill.  I can talk to people without risking offending them, since I am much more at ease with myself.  Everything is working out much better, now that I've accepted I am African at root, and will never be Western and that I don't have to try.

My original quest to be "Western" was not driven from deep inner needs in the first place, but from my father's injunction that I ought to put on a false, happy face and endeavor to praise the Westerner in his existing circumstances in order to win approval and social acceptance.  Given that this was never my project to begin with, but one borne out of duty, it is very easy to give it up.

I do have a natural ease with people who are simply enjoying life and I have never aspired to be anything other than myself, except when bound by duty, so I have everything to gain by simply enjoying life on its own terms.  I enjoy it so much more this way that I have actually forgotten what my original dilemma was about.   I know I was driven into it by financial concerns, since conformity equals financial prosperity.  Apart from this skeletal knowledge, I no longer have access to my previous states.   I just think the world has opened up and it is no longer necessary to be Western anymore.   My job pleases me greatly since it involves work with another culture.  Apart from that, I move around Australia and feel African thoughts; think African ideas.  Nobody knows that I am doing so, and it seems to alleviate a lot of tension.

Religious Trauma Syndrome

QUOTE:

What’s the problem? 

 We have in our society an assumption that religion is for the most part benign or good for you. Therapists, like others, expect that if you stop believing, you just quit going to church, putting it in the same category as not believing in Santa Claus. Some people also consider religious beliefs childish, so you just grow out of them, simple as that. Therapists often don’t understand fundamentalism, and they even recommend spiritual practices as part of therapy. In general, people who have not survived an authoritarian fundamentalist indoctrination do not realize what a complete mind-rape it really is.
Religious Trauma Syndrome

More:

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2008/08/were-you-born-in-cult.html

A night to remember

Opting to break with civilizing comforts in order to recover my sanity, I decided to sleep in the swag last night. If you don't know what it is, behold the picture posted for you above.

As there was nothing on TV last night, I made my way to my destination rather early, and just before it rained.   It seemed a strange act.   My triceps still hurt from a strain on Monday and my body felt rather stiff and barely recovered from exertion.

I clambered into the tent with resignation.   I couldn't get a clear thought and I just wanted to sleep. That is, I kind of wanted to annihilate the present, grey and in-between reality for the sake of a more hopeful tomorrow.

Then it began to rain.   That would have been okay.  Light drizzle constantly above my head was a new sensation, but one I could get used to.  I drifted off.  I went to sleep -- but it is never advisable for me to sleep in conditions where the air does not circulate effectively.  I get nightmares.  In every instance where the window and the bedroom door were shut, I've suffered from perturbing hallucinations.

I would have thought there was enough air coming in through the back window of the swag, which I had extended to be slightly open.  There was something flapping, though, and in my dream I felt I was in a crib, or in my tomb.  Two hands were reaching in and touching me on either side, but they were just the canvas flapping.  And yet they seemed maliciously intent on reaching:  denying their existence as they vanished and returned again as dream states started to take over.

I woke up fully, and malevolent intent was all around me.  Danger was now close by, with every thudding of the rain in empty buckets in the neighbor's yard, with every way the wind was rearranging the environment.

I went back to sleep, but something was weird.  Part of my spirit was leaping up, and out of the black density of the swag, my coffin.   It leaped with animal frenzy in through the back door of the house with kangaroo feet.  There I barely uttered, "I had to get away from them!" and Mike seeing me there, immediately rushed to console me with his knowledge:  "Yes, I know... I know..."

As it was, I woke up suddenly and reconsidered my options.   I felt for sure that should I break my resolution and unzip the protective fiber, black matte above my head, a dinosaur would certainly reach in and gobble me for dinner.  I'd have to do it very quickly and then get inside -- away from what was lurking -- in the smoothest manner possible.

Reaching up a foot above me, I somehow found the zip -- which was amazing in itself, since primitive minds cannot fathom the existence of modern utilities.  I tore open my container and saw the sky was milky, with pale pastels -- hardly a committed night, but far from day, and something in-between.

I grabbed my bedding and my pillow and fumbled at the door, marveling at the possibility that technology like door handles would ever succumb to dire emotional needs.

I finally got the door to yield and entered, carrying everything I needed for my internal migration away from madness, evil and external sources of panic.

Mike was also hazy with somnambulism on his way to the toilet, and screamed at my approaching silhouette.

Returning to life from death was my pleasure in the next few hours.

Set women free!

People need to start getting my African sense of humour.

Here's an opportunity.

Vicissitudes

Like anyone else, I can hate myself sometimes -- but this is extremely rare and I see it as a passing storm. I hated myself when I was overtired and preparing for my martial arts exam. I began to think, “Who is this ape going for her martial arts exam!”

Most of the time I am too amused at some new aspect of my experience to dislike myself as such. My inner life is very, very vivid. Lately I have had a dream twice that a hotel I was staying in has been destroyed whilst I still had a room booked permanently there. I think this has to do with my final rejection of postmodernist theorizing and my realization that I had invested so much of my subjectivity in that. It feels weird. The new hotel is more complex, but not for me, and I don’t mind leaving it.

It's deep

Mike and Jennifer

Psychoanalysis Versus Psychiatry at Wash U « Clarissa's Blog

Psychoanalysis Versus Psychiatry at Wash U « Clarissa's Blog

Therapy is certainly one of the hardest route to finding answers to life's questions. Despite this, if the therapy sessions were really open-ended, without any core dogma, people who really wanted to get answers concerning their lives would have the best possible scope for doing so. Even then, they may not succeed, but only move ahead incrementally.

Regrettably, most therapists have a central dogma or moral ax to grind. Wilfred Bion had an excellent idea that the therapist has to enter a state of not knowing or state of infinite possibilities of knowledge, when confronting a client for the first time. This is good in theory, but we can’t really wash away our socially and culturally conditioned expectations.

Very soon, even a good therapist would start to get agitated if the patient/client didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear. If the client already has a basic theory of knowledge that differs from that of the therapist, this will not be easily inculcated into the therapist’s paradigm, which is likely to lead to charges of psychological resistance when perhaps the resistance is rather more intellectually and ethically founded.

knife disarms

Call the Midwife

Miranda Hart on Call the Midwife: 'There isn’t much comedy delivering a baby' - Telegraph

The TV drama, Call the Midwife, depicts exactly the kind of culture I grew up in.   The division of labor along gender lines, the moral authority of women and the simultaneously naive and stoic attitudes to life were part of what I was used to.

The humor is the same as that of the Rhodesian culture and the nurses uniforms look a lot like our high school summer attire.

You can imagine why suddenly moving from an early 1950s (rural) culture to a culture of the mid-1980s was appalling for me.   I experienced it as a sudden descent into the ugly on almost all levels.*

Some people would try to make out that I had psychological issues with regard to making this adjustment.  But really, they were largely cultural concerns.

That I am married to someone more than a couple of decades older is also indicative of how much an old-fashioned attitude appeals to me more than a contemporary, materialist disposition.

---

* And, I must add, apes punishing me for not liking aspects of Western culture does not make me like them more.

Valerie Solanas

Mary Daly had  insights, but they only go so far in terms of unpicking the patriarchal puzzle.  She, too, ends up adopting a position of dogmatic essentialism.

You cannot critique essentialism with essentialism.  That is as absurd as becoming a postmodernist theorist or an identity politician on behalf of left wing causes.

She quotes Valerie Solanas' views that men are basically passive.   This insight is half true.   There is nothing essentially passive about men, at all.  Only when they make their deal with their God or Idol that they will feel no emotion, in order to climb higher women, do they begin to lose their power to direct and control their own lives from within.  Thus via their Faustian deal do they become empty.

Emptiness, however, is not a natural condition and this state of being certainly does not pertain to all men.

African perspectives and ideas

Psychoanalysis Versus Psychiatry at Wash U « Clarissa's Blog

My response here:

This is interesting because Dambudzo Marechera was thought to have developed schizophrenia, by someone who knew him well, but with my understanding of African culture, I had the suspicion she was inadvertently censuring him for not being more European in his mind and attitude.  There is a great deal in the African way of doing things that has the quality of being chaotic and unpredictable.   I have a degree of that in myself, and there is no way I'm crazy.  It's a form of adaptation to uncertain and unpredictable circumstances.   People who can tolerate a great deal of chaos are surprisingly resilient and don't react with horror or despair to lots of very difficult circumstances.  Rather, we view them with humor.

I've had a lot of people view my humor as horror and/or despair, especially with regard to my memoir, so I think there is a lot of inability, on the part of Westerners, to really get in tune with African perspectives and ideas.

Pushups and SITUPS before the main part of the grading

grading: stick disarms.

Grading: Wrestling techniques

Whores of the Court

Whores of the Court  QUOTE:

Diagnostic Courses, or How to Tell What's Wrong

If you can't come up with a diagnosis, you can't send a bill. So it is obviously important that students be taught how to tell if someone is suffering from any of the hundreds of disorders cataloged by the American Psychiatric Association in its bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. 

Of course, there is not sufficient time in three short years for detailed study of all the literature on the existence and treatment of the myriad of billable disorders and their dozens of symptoms. It would be impossible. Remember, there are some four hundred problems and disorders, each with a number of putatively distinguishing symptoms that can reveal themselves in tricky disguises. Students just can't memorize all this material, and in any case, clinicians believe that it is really not the sort of material one can learn from a book. Any number of practitioners will assert that diagnosis is more an art than a science, and that, as such, it is best learned in the field at a master's knee. The success of this approach should be apparent to all upon contemplation of the conflicting diagnoses routinely offered by testifying psychoexperts at any criminal or civil trial involving a dispute over someone's mental state. After all, it is not surprising that different artists make different forms from the same raw clay. Different masters reveal different truths. (p 77)

I find this book quite interesting, although in the ultimate analysis, most USA books end up only perpetuating a useless polarization between left and right, which obviates actual thinking.

UPDATED:  Although I think she tends to tread a rather extreme line of skepticism toward any therapeutic knowledge, for instance in attacking Judith Herman as well Vietnam veterans claims of having PTSD, I agree with her in essence that the human psyche is nowhere near as fragile as contemporary culture makes it out to be.  In fact, I constructed my shamanistic paradigm of psychological regeneration in recognition of this.

Who Thinks That Sex Segregation Is Good for Women? « Clarissa's Blog

Who Thinks That Sex Segregation Is Good for Women? « Clarissa's Blog



If the writer of the original article, that the above one critiques, had been a postmodernist, she could have managed an even more subtle take-down of feminist values by pronouncing that there are numerous patriarchies, indeed as many as there are individual women to perceive them, and that everybody's experience of oppression was necessarily hidden from the view of anybody else, by virtue there being nobody free from neurosis, and that it would be ethically wrong, because hurtful, even try to find someone who had become free.

This is how postmodernists like to burrow into their neurotic postures, whilst blocking the means to freedom for everybody else.

Grading: pacing MYSELF

kata: grading

End of the grading

Pad round three of three

From the last round of sparring for grading

I wasn't going as hard as I could, as I had to pace myself for other exciting adventures. Half way through, my helmet lost its stuffing, so I have cut that bit out and the resultant confusion. This was effectively the fifth three-minute round, as I'd had to do a sparring drill with my partner before my own required four sparring rounds.

Change oneself, or change the world

Dame Eleanor Hull: “Sometimes being a feminist is an on-going internal struggle with childhood conditioning.”

This is how it was for me. And sometimes you don’t realize what you need to work on in yourself, because everybody keeps telling you the opposite. People have some very cliched ideas about those who end up victimized or dis-empowered in situations. I can tell you for sure that had I followed the strategies implanted in my psyche by my childhood conditioning AND YET REMAINED IN MY CULTURE OF ORIGIN, I would not have walked into a minefield — at least not one I had no chance of recognizing.

My problems were related to the incongruity of my childhood conditioning with the culture I had migrated into.

And people kept telling me, “You just need to stand up to bullies.” Certainly I was already doing this in an extremely forceful way, but I had no conception of the invisible transactions I was making within my environment, which were based more on feudalistic principles (as a superior power, you watch my back — and I’ll bring in the goods), than capitalist, individualistic notions of how to survive and make one’s way.

Anyway, I’ve solved my problems largely. My relationship with Mike is devoid of sexism. I’m sure most people would not be able to imagine how fine it is since most people seem unable to imagine a non-sexist relationship.

Also I have found work — but not enough — with feudalistic dynamics.

I can change myself a bit but not entirely, as you can tell.

Reading skills and preaching to the choir

I find that no matter how clearly I write, Americans and many Australians typically misread what I am saying, in order to propound the ideologies they have already embraced.   This shows people read what they expect to see, often basing their expectations upon what they have decided to be true about my identity.  

I can't tell them anything about my identity, or course, if they don't have an open mind.   Over and over again, they want to teach me a lesson about how to behave, as if I had to learn from them that racial discrimination exists.   

Nuance, as well as conditional clauses escape the comprehension of many Americans and their Australian counterparts.

Rear defence

Shamanic initiation and good mental health

There is a deep human need to make over one's self-image in a mirror of moral perfection.

Then, you realise that the dirt of life IS life itself -- and then you kind of go into a state of shock and then you recover from that and you are much healthier -- less in need of defending oneself against others on a psychological level and more capable of doing it on a practical level.

And I think I have just described one outcome of shamanistic initiation, at least as it was for me.

like magic!

Ubuntu

What market research says about me

Mike says because I'm African everything always becomes so weird and chaotic.

IMPROVING MY KATA 2

Toil and trouble

When I first read Judith Lewis Herman on Trauma and Recovery, I was excited, because she showed that post-traumatic stress disorder was directly related to the sense of being betrayed by one’s community whom one had relied on for support. The fact that trauma is so profoundly connected to betrayal forms the basis for her view that therapists must necessarily acknowledge the realities of the trauma their clients have experienced. This enables those who have suffered to rebuild a bridge to reality, after it has been severed.

I’ve been through a very long process, which began with trying to experience my inner sensations so that I could assimilate them with my present choices and reactions. My emotions had become severely repressed.

Going back into my country’s history to try to understand how trauma was experienced also gave me a deeper understanding of my mental states.

Finally, I still felt something was off, because I was constantly disappointed by the actions and behavior of those around me. The last part of the jigsaw was to realise I’d been projecting and alienating the better parts of myself into others, thus setting me up to be deceived (and betrayed!) when their real views and attitudes led them to behave differently from what I would have done.

So, my inner work has been exhausting and finally exhaustive.

I did try to achieve some of it by occasionally attending therapy, but due to the lack of awareness of the various therapists, my historical and cultural background — the pivotal dimension of my problems — was never addressed. Mostly, the therapists became hostile, because of course I was projecting into them the necessity of providing knowledge and salvation, and they did not have access to enough of the right sort of material to get even close.

Rampant everyday psychosis

What I really miss is a “can do” society, where you can say, “Look there is a problem here,” and people would say, “I see. Let’s see what we can do about it!” Then, they actually address the issue in a reasonable and helpful practical manner.

That doesn’t happen and instead everything is reduced to invisible perceptions and psychological forces and power interests and psychosis, ultimately. If you don’t face reality as it is actually happening, but try to reduce it down to something that only happens in your head and in the heads of others, you are crazy.

There’s very little that would need psychologizing in a rampant fashion if actual problems were attended to.

Nobody knows how to do this anymore, or nobody wants to. In the case where somebody is bullied, the bully and the bullied are supposed to get together and talk through each other’s differences, as if power relationships were equal.

It seems that much of current psychological theory is pushing everything in precisely this wrong direction. There are realities outside of our heads, and the sooner we deal with those effectively, the less likely they are to become “psychical forces”. Otherwise, you reduce everything to psychosis and make being crazy the everyday social norm.

Another part of a round

sparring round

Reactions, overreactions, culture and psychoanalysis

Clarissa and I have been debating whether there is something a little strange about psychoanalysis.  From my point of view, there is, but from hers not so much.

She argues that I would need to enter therapy to be able to judge its merits.  I don't need to enter psychoanalysis, actually, because I have spent a several years, possibly about fifteen, discovering how my mind words, what my preconceived ideas are, and where I fit in the world.  This has taken me so long because there was nothing that could function as therapy for me, apart from reading and learning.  Indeed, a great deal of my attempts to get help from others turned out to be the most stringent counter-therapy imaginable.

You see, I don't "overreact".   I have the capacity to absorb a lot of pain, a lot of punishment, before I even begin to react.   If you imagine the British ideal of the stiff upper lip, as British colonials we took that tendency to the final degree.   A war was going on around me for all of my early life, and my family and those around me barely reacted.  We turned on the TV every night to hear how many of our own might have been killed.   Sometimes the names mentioned were those known to my family.   We still didn't react.   When my father's brother was killed in action, we received a phone call from my granny as we were just preparing to go out.  I answered the call and passed the receiver to my father.  He heard the news and fainted whilst still clutching the receiver.  He said, "Philip was killed," and then we went out just as we had planned.  There were no tears.   We just walked quietly, looking at  flower gardens in the pale summer sun.

The matter was never mentioned again.  We don't speak of it. Just like very little of emotional value is shared between me and my family.   We are still colonials, in that sense, holding ourselves to a different standard of emotional propriety than everybody else.

I tend to be naturally reticent because I want to be sure I've analysed a situation accurately before I speak.   That's why it can take me ten or twenty years to formulate my views and express them in what I take to be a balanced way.

Suppose I do eventually speak, that is, "seek therapy", after numerous years, what I have to say will have been very carefully thought through.   The typical ideological formulation, that women simply "overreact" to everything, simply won't cut it.   I don't overreact to anything.  I under-react.

A system that is looking for reactions, to analyse them, will not find anything I have not already analysed over a twenty years.   I've analysed everything to death.  I've understood that the way I express myself is almost always subject to misinterpretation, because considered analyses I've made over a couple of decades are easily treated as if I'd just come up with them on the spur of the moment.  They're presumed to be "emotional", hence overreactions, when in fact it has taken me altogether too long to come up with any emotion at all  -- even longer to begin to understand what the emotion points to.

To be treated like I'm trying to escape the issue, as if the meanings of my distress over the years are self-evident, is not only presumptuous, but intellectually and ethically demoralizing in ways that I cannot begin to express.  How does one become emotionally engaged with anything if someone is always ready to tell you that your ideas and experiences have a different meaning from those you have discovered?

That is my experience in Western culture.   Africans understood this form of emotional repression and conditioning implicitly, but Westerners always want to tell me that I mean something else -- something insidious, something more veritably "colonial" and, consequently, evil.

That has been my finding over twenty years or so, in situations where I have sought to discuss issues arising from my past in therapeutic or social circumstances.  To say I haven't experienced this kind of attitude, or that I am "overreacting" is the response I would expect. I don't overreact.  Westerners may do, when they express their emotions in reaction to events that befall them.  Western women may be the quintessence of overreaction, for all I know, according to how they are viewed by Western men.  One can't defend oneself against an accusation without first pinpointing the nature of the misreading.  However, any focus on the enduring cultural misreading of my views and attitudes is taken to confirm the thesis -- that I must, of necessity, be concerned with what others think, if I am going to the trouble to address this.  This is the dead-end of psychoanalysis.

I don't need to discuss anything in terms alien to me.   I'd prefer to enjoy the company of those who do understand what I'm getting at implicitly, without it having to be explained.  Consequently, I won't try to explain emotional repression, or prolonged endurance of trouble, or the madness of African experiences to any who do not already understand these.

This is a practical solution to a problem I've been unable to fix over many years.  It's not a moral solution and it's not a cry for attention -- by that, I mean, "It's not a moral solution.  It's not a cry for attention."  It may seem so when translated into Western terms.

But, if I was to say, conversely:  "Avoiding too much emotional engagement with Westerners is really a moral solution for me, and it's a cry for attention," I would all the same still prefer the option of a simplified and culturally easy life where I didn't have to make sure everything I said wasn't being constantly bent out of shape and made to mean its opposite.  So, take it whichever way you like it. It's either one or the other, or perhaps both, and surely I have failed, once more, to communicate at all.

From now on, I will be resting and residing with those who know me, because they are like me.

On psychoanalysis

Freud did diagnose Dora as a hysteric, so you can be assured that diagnoses and psychoanalysis go together, at least if Freud is anything to go by.

The internal logic of psychoanalysis is the more you resist a diagnoses — and we have established that diganoses are in fact made — the more that diagnosis is likely to be true.

If I say “I don’t like psychoanalysis” it means I desperately need psychoanalysis. If I say, “patriarchal ideology is oppressive” it means I am oppressing people for stating this.

Do I need to enter a situation where this logic would be imposed on me in order to prove to you that I understand what I am talking about?

Actually, if I entered such a situation, I would certainly never be able to prove anything at all, because the logic I have described would silence me.

I am resin

Actually, I break.  Not me, but you.

Metaphysical obstructions

In the past few weeks I've dropped excess cultural baggage.  Only this time, it is not the stuff of my youth.  Rather, it's the items I've picked up along the way, for what I had previously taken to be metaphysical truths have turned out to be simple ideologies.

As Nietzsche saw, there are some formulations that will appeal to certain types of people more than others.   Nietzsche's skill was to see the deep psychological tactics that some people try, and others inadvertently get hooked by.  He saw beneath the surface of appearance, to what was actually taking place when people sought to increase their status in society.   There are those, for instance, who do not take part in life, who are ascetics. They're always offering advice, but they're not inclined to take part in the experiences they recommend.   They plausibly suggest that if one were to succumb to their metaphysical view of the world, everything would turn out right.   Their metaphysical ideas are not tested by experience, but stand above the realm of experiential thought.  There is only a loose correlation between metaphysical ideas and any practical outcomes.

There's no direct causal link  between self-development and affluence.   Self-development may take you off the road of even wanting or caring about being successful in any normative way.   Similarly, intelligence does not lead to power, although a  mediocre intellect will latch onto offers to seem valuable to others.

As a child, I never experienced an inner drive or goal to appear to others as necessarily "intelligent" or "helpful".  When I reached Western culture, I thought it was my obligation to nurture an image that appeared in this way.   I had not developed the understanding I have now, that this injunction stemmed entirely from metaphysics, albeit having acquired a "substratum of reality" as Nietzsche says, from the faith invested in it by the masses.   Intelligence does not necessarily have a social use, nor does it need improving or saving the world.   Individuals who have intelligence may do that, but they are not driven to do so by any underlying principles governing reality -- because there is no compulsion for intelligence to show itself in a predetermined format, no matter how socially necessary or desirable that format might be.

Metaphysical formulations don't show reality but cloud it.  Since the time of my childhood and early adulthood had no use for these constructs, I'm abandoning them.   I don't need their obstruction.  I will forge my own way from now on.

Repost

The fogging of feminist critiques by patriarchy is all too common, not least because it is taught by patriarchal systems that "women" per se are only able to communicate about personal issues not real ones. So, what we are encountering here is, in a very material sense, patriarchy's immune defence against a hostile critique.  Feminism is not a hostile critique of men, but of a system that keeps men and women at each other's throats.

The fearful and/or angry reaction has its roots in feelings, spouting forth in many men, that in and of themselves they are not attractive to women.

Men often underestimate their capacity to be appealing, just for being men, that is for their intrinsic qualities like personality and intelligence and so on. Patriarchy is therefore a compensatory system for this (often delusional) sense of something lacking in the nature of one's unfurnished being . The emotional certainty that many men express is the ideological certainty that no woman would like them as they are, in their truly spiritually/psychological naked state. Without puffing themselves up with titles or money or pretending to be more intelligent than they are, they assume women would reject them.

Feminism represents a challenge to men to simply be who they are, on an equal level with women, without trying to be something else -- above all, without trying to be something more than women are capable of being (appealing, perhaps to factors biological) to shackle women into a relationship based on power.

The feminist challenge to be what they actually are frightens many men because they don't think it is based on reality.

Many males feel certain that women do not actually want anything as straight-forward as feminists imply, but that women are expecting more than that. Such men's fear that men cannot live up to women's expectations becomes translated as "women are fickle". Many men may also suffer from fear that they would be abandoned by their women, unless there is something compulsive at work like the ideology of patriarchy which preaches female inferiority and therefore keeps women partly shattered, or some act of law that will prevent women from leaving men.

It's not the case that men recoil from women acting outside of their traditional roles. It's more that many men,but not all, cannot imagine maintaining a relationship that isn't based on force.

Don't mind me, it's just the science speaking

Ecstatic experience

To reduce knowledge to material reality, as some might try to do, is altogether unnecessary and unreasonable. It is enough to know that there is a kind of morally indifferent material reality that does not correspond to our needs and wishes all the time, but can be made to do so sometimes. This form of knowledge is magical in a very inspiring sense, since it makes out that reality is both inside of us and outside of us at the same time. This viewpoint is ecstatic, exciting, as well as potentially dialectical.

Typical Western thinking, by contrast, is nearly always binary -- nearly always an either-or proposition: either we believe that our destinies are totally in our hands or we deny we have any power and accept victimhood.  According to intellectual shamanism, we take part in a reality larger than us, which sometimes we can influence and other times not, but in any case the participation itself is ecstatic.

Share if you agree!

On the concept of a "core self"

It really depends on whether the “core self” is an ideology, or whether it really is a core self. I think if it’s an ideology, it will have to be rigid. If not, it can be relatively organic and consistent, but will also change over time. Some people are highly suspicious of any change and view it as a sign that one lacks credibility or decisiveness in action. This view is held especially among those of the right. Can you imagine if a child is brought up to fit an ideology concerning identity and is never allowed to change? Either they are lucky and the identity imposed on them matches their inner “core self”, or else the imposition of a rigid demand prevents the actual core self from being expressed.

On the human propensity to feel guilt

Nobody is necessarily “guilt-ridden” in an extreme way, but everyone would be susceptible to guilt under certain circumstances. There is a lot of potential for irrational guilt to appear in the human psyche. For instance, take survivor’s guilt. Nothing is more irrational than that. People feel guilty when they survive a disaster and others close to them did not. That’s just one example.

Nietzsche thought that people felt guilty in relation to their ancestors — but only if their culture was in ascendancy. Then the psychological pressure to do the right thing builds up. If one’s society is in decline, one feels no such guilt.

Then there is of course Melanie Klein and the idea that the infant grows up into an adult who feels the need to make reparations to the mother because of their childhood aggression. Once again, this is meaningless guilt.

These examples show, however, that humans are susceptible to feeling guilty. That is why one of the central themes relating to Jesus is salvation from our sins.

Christianity, up to a certain point, embraces a shamanistic perspective. Beyond a certain point, it is extremely anti-shamanistic.

training 6 SEPTEMBER

It's amazing how much difference it makes to be smaller than your opponent. I don't really expect to be able to take out this guy's front leg. I had an experience once where I tried a take down on a stronger person and had the marvy result of dislocating my knee ligament.

pETULANT fRENZY

in the back yard

Is the Right-Wing Psyche Allergic to Reality? A New Study Shows Conservatives Ignore Facts More Than Liberals | Alternet

Is the Right-Wing Psyche Allergic to Reality? A New Study Shows Conservatives Ignore Facts More Than Liberals | Alternet

In recent years, the field of moral psychology has been strongly influenced by a theory known as “moral intuitionism,” which has been championed by the University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Dealing a blow to the notion of humans as primarily rational actors, Haidt instead postulates that our views of what is right and wrong are rooted in gut emotions, which fire rapidly when we encounter certain moral situations or dilemmas—responding far more quickly than our rational thoughts. Thus, we evaluate facts, arguments, and new information in a way that is subconsciously guided, ormotivated, by our prior moral emotions. What this means– in Haidt’s famed formulation –is that when it comes to evaluating facts that are relevant to our deep seated morals or beliefs, we don’t act like scientists. Rather, we act like lawyers, contorting the evidence to support our moral argument.

Presumably, this is why you would really need to stand aside from your moral prejudices to obtain a mind-expanding vision of a reality that is closer to how it really is.

Learning new kata

Repost: heterogeneity

Heterogeneity is expressed when we do something which doesn't have the value of promoting us or emphasizing our abilities with regard to a production context. It is behaviour for its own sake, and not for the sake of the good of society. A troll  is one who engages in heterogeneous behaviour. Perhaps the troll mistakenly thinks that he is placing himself against the productive behaviours of others, through his trolling. Trolling becomes his very minor and affected way of expressing his heterogeneity, which he achieves by subjectively placing himself against the behaviour which he thinks produces public value.

There are positive manifestations of heterogeneous whims, although it is in the nature of heterogeneity that one can never prove aspects of heterogeneity publicly, no matter how good they seem. All expressions of excitability and pleasure which do not serve to put you into the positive books of some denizen of the production process could be considered positive aspects of heterogeneity (at least, as I am inclined to think of them.)

Well, I'm off to grade some martial arts students.

Sponsor a Uterus

Rooting out metaphysics

Metaphysics is essentialism.   In other words, it involves positing that eternal essences pertain to things -- be they individuals, groups or sexes, or to humanity itself.  The idea of "human nature", if unqualified by a recognition that this is influenced by historical change, chance and contingency, is metaphysics.

Metaphysics has the capacity to develop into whole philosophical and cultural systems, nonetheless its ideas are not provable by science.  Indeed science may provide the basis for disproving many metaphysical notions.

The common assumption that men are the essence of rationality, whereas women are the essence of emotionality can be questioned by science at a very basic level, by presenting the physiological fact that both men and women have both the capacity to experience emotion and to use reason.

Since metaphysics furnishes our lives with meaning even though these meanings are without substantiation, metaphysical assumptions can be hard to root out of our thought processes in general.

The witchcraft continuum 2

Why say that psychoanalysis has elements of Judeo-Christian metaphysics in it that are logically consistent with a witchcraft continuum?

For a start, when one looks at the structure of psychoanalysis, along with one of Freud's significant cases, one sees that how guilt is always at the source of any psychological tension, not in the sense of the patient having committed a crime in real, tangible reality, but rather that lying and self-deception is considered to make up the fundamental part his/her being.   In this sense, the patient is always the criminal, Oedipus, having killed his father and had sexual intercourse with his mother, and consequently blinded himself.   That this crime is held to be true on a metaphysical level, rather than a real one, doesn't mitigate the logic that one must seek the cause of one's problems in one's own actions. The patient is always the quintessentially guilty party.   Outsiders may be relatively innocent, unless they turn the torchlight on themselves and thus reveal their similar, primeval guilt.

Let us now consider the case of Dora, one of Freud's significant cases and noted therapeutic failure.   Dora's parents were wealthy Austrians.   My understanding is that her father was having an affair with another woman and in order to keep quiet someone who had noticed this, he was attempting to palm his daughter off onto that guy for her to have a sexual relationship with him.   Here's the story from the point of view of a Freud researcher:

In 1898, when she was fifteen, Dora was brought to Freud by her father. Alongside her physical symptoms and general sullenness, she had developed, according to her father, an irrational belief that his close friend Herr K. had made sexual advances toward her. Freud’s initial response to Dora was not at all what her father expected: Freud concluded that her account of Herr K.’s behavior was accurate, and he agreed with her that her father had in effect handed her over to Herr K. as the price for his own affair with Herr K.’s wife. Freud’s response to Dora also seems to surprise Masson, who, in The Assault on Truth, alleged that, having abandoned the seduction theory, Freud routinely attributed his patients’ stories to fantasy, thereby excusing the abusive actions of adults. In this instance, however, Freud initially took the side of reality against fantasy, and of the child against the parent.

But, Masson complains, Freud’s loyalty to Dora was short-lived, his original alliance with her soon giving way to opposition. Instead of accepting that she simply found Herr K.’s attentions unwelcome and was understandably angered by her father’s self-interested betrayal, Freud insisted that Dora’s hostility to Herr K. was unreasonable and her anger against her father excessive. Indeed, Freud regarded both her intense aversion and her anger as manifestations of her hysteria. After all, Freud reasoned, Herr K. was a prepossessing man still in his thirties: Dora should have been aroused, not disgusted, when he embraced and kissed her (at age fourteen), just as she should have been flattered by his serious romantic interest in her. Freud even suggested that the whole matter could have been satisfactorily resolved had Dora married Herr K., which would of course have freed Frau K. to marry Dora’s father.

[Paul Robinson Freud and his Critics  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · London © 1993 The Regents of the University of California]

According to Freud, there is nothing wrong with being sold into patriarchal sex-slavery, whereby one's own views, timing and intentions are overruled by one's father.  Rather, one should welcome it whenever it happens instead of being "hysterical".  Here is more from Robinson, who writes sympathetically on behalf of Freud:

Freud suggests, in particular, that Dora was unconsciously in love with Herr K. and very much desired a romantic relationship with him. Her unconscious attraction explains why she reacted so violently both to Herr K.’s sexual advances and to her father’s contention that she had merely fantasized them. There was in fact an element of fantasy involved in her situation: the advances were real enough, but they were not entirely unwelcome. Dora’s extreme disgust disguised feelings of self-reproach. She had, in effect, gotten what she could not admit she wanted.

Dora had desired to be metaphysically raped by both her father and Herr K (and subsequently by Freud).  Of course this is not a physical rape of the mind, but a psychological one.   When a witch says, "I wasn't cavorting with Satan and I strenuously protest the assertion that I ever wanted a dalliance with the Dark Lord," she is in fact admitting her guilt.   She wouldn't be over-reacting to an honest question by a respectable Christian gentleman concerning her alleged fantasies unless she knew that the assertions made by the Inquisitor were -- quote -- "really true".  Or does that even make any sense?  She no doubt felt guilty about not following the patriarchal mores of her culture.  Freud would have known that that is the nature of Superego -- to induce social conformity and makes us feel badly when we breach it.  But, defying social convention is not the same as lying to oneself.   Dora defied her father because she was true to herself and she nevertheless felt guilty because by being true to herself, she was going against social convention.   In other words, as hard as is for the patriarchal mind to imagine, Dora and her father were two different people.  What's more, Dora had a different idea about social conventions than her father did, even though the weight of public opinion was in line with "father knows best".

Freud is of course no inquisitor of the middle ages as he never professed to read minds nor take the side of rape apologists. If that were so, it would be enough to tip us all over the edge of hysteria*. [joke]

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*It should be noted that I do believe in an unconscious mind.

The fact that many people will not perceive the deep nature of patriarchal hostility toward women, but opt for the easier path of attributing hysteria to those who point it out, is a function of their unconscious minds' displacement and projection.  

Psychoanalysis and the witchcraft continuum

Psychoanalysis is more often than not of the tradition of the Christian Inquisition, in that it wants to establish some intimacy within the sphere of evil.

We may be familiar with the Medieval notion of witches, being those who were morally corrupted by the devil, to the point that only torture or death could "save" them.  Such spiritual corruption attributed to women, both young and old, was considered to put them at odds with the divine truth, the absolute metaphysical reality, including the ability to be aware of their condition.   Only through continually wearing them down over a number of days and sleepless nights, could those accused of witchcraft be even brought into awareness of the sinister nature of their deeds.   Otherwise they would deny their evil, because the devil was in them.

Much of contemporary psychoanalysis also puts individuals, especially women, at odds with "The truth".  This divine truth is always patriarchal ideology, especially in the Judaic formulations of a Freud. According to these formulations, the truth is never self-evident, never on the surface, but always has to be rummaged for.  Original assertions have to be discarded, whilst one waits for a moment of unguarded speech, at which point the accused will inevitably acknowledge that everything she had said was back to front.

This is the moment the priest/inquisitor had been waiting for.   He had known it was coming all along as the process of disregarding whatever the " witch" had said whilst applying pressure to say something else inevitably brings this about.

One does not vigorously deny anything, unless those allegations happen to be true.  Vigorous denials are a sign of the spiritual warfare for one's soul, with God and the Devil battling each other for supremacy.  To assure God wins, the woman has to die, and it is always a shame when she doesn't go to her death gracefully.  That's when the stage plans are in danger of being ruined.

The priest must battle valiantly, therefore, against Satan's forces, to win the moment of forced intimacy in which "the witch" confesses to her crimes and is willing to go to her death for her sins.  This is the moment the priest had been waiting for -- when he and the "witch" are one, in crime and forgiveness.

This fundamental reversal, where the one really guilty of a crime (the priest) causes his victim to confess to an outrageous level of sinfulness and guilt is the stage play constantly repeated in every patriarchal system, especially those of Abrahamic derivation.  Psychoanalysis is no different whenever it posits the existence of an unconscious at odds with normative communication.

If one denies what has been stated many times, in order to find a residue of "truth" in what has not been said, then one is guilty of belief in witchcraft.