Wednesday 31 July 2013

SRIS

Supposing an ape who thought he was human went on a voyage to develop his self-confidence by proving he was capable of being human in the eyes of others.  The ape did everything he thought would be required of him to prove he was not only capable of being human but was a superlative human being.  Despite this, his self-exhibition only provided evidence of  uneven qualities.  His physical powers and fearlessness were marvels to behold while his emotional awareness was limited and frankly apelike.

He clambed forth with great hope in his eyes, fighting human battles for them and defeating evil, but the evil within humanity in its refusal to see him as worthy of equality and respect could not be extinguished.

He fought their battles for them but they respected him not.

African 'shamanism' and the struggle for EXISTENCE

What you would hope for


Anathema

Homeschooling Is Finally Condemned in the National Media | Clarissa's Blog

It's not just parents who can't see that parental bullying is problematic.  Nobody wants to see it, even when you point it out.   They assert that even to see that there is parental hostility means you have evil within.  So they try to purge your evil, because they don't like what you see.  They like the three wise monkeys:  see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

But my memoir addresses the issue of evil.

People read it and criticize my character, pointing out its flaws.

I don't mind, really.   That is actually a very good start when people are actually able to focus enough to pinpoint what they take to be flaws.  I'm more than happy with that.

It's the people who can't even speak in concrete terms about the situation, because they feel it is too shameless to address such issues, that evoke my disdain.

They make oblique statements about how they would rather not associate with me.

Ian Smith's Rhodesia

What's wrong with Western feminism part 2: METAPHYSICS AS A SOCIAL CONS...

What's wrong with Western feminism part 1: BIOLOGISM as a CULTURAL CONS...

Western liberals

Feministe’s Favorite Fraudster | Clarissa's Blog

It’s very weird that Western liberals continue to defend these guys (Putin and Mugabe). Or at best, they remain silent. It’s some kind of ideological need to side with something that is definitively non-Western. In a way, and I know this sounds odd, but it seems to be related to having too cerebral a perspective and not really being able to imaginatively put oneself on the ground where the action is taking place. Being a few steps removed from the experience of living in Russia or Zimbabwe, and viewing these issues through a lens of abstract morality, means the conclusions one draws are kind of crazy. I think a lot of this is caused by binary thinking about good and evil. American liberals like to feel generous, so they do not want to label a third world leader as doing wrong. The default position is “Western colonialism is evil, therefore third world leaders are good.’
As Nietzsche said, if you start your measurements with designations of evil, and good is only an afterthought, then there is probably something really messed up with you. Healthy people begin with a feeling (not necessarily a concept as such) of good, and then consider unfavorable actions as “bad”, but only as an afterthought, and not with much focus or obsession.

USA liberalism

Feministe’s Favorite Fraudster | Clarissa's Blog

It’s rather pathetic biologism. He implies that women have to pop out babies. He’s combating US liberalism in all his remarks, which is interesting, because that was one of the forces that put him in power.

Tuesday 30 July 2013

To facilitate a difficult crossing

What facilitates a difficult crossing is amputation -- one then crosses the gulf between one's self and humanity with less conflict.  Amputation means to lose at least one part of one's psyche.  That loss sends one away from the community and in search of one's missing part, to make up the whole.

Bataille refers to a figure without an executive center -- a head.  To lose one's spiritual head means one departs from the community that has a head, and learns to move according to instinct, the body's  directives, and ideas that come to mind on the spur of the moment.  The non-rational parts of existence become more obvious.   Without a spiritual head, one is no longer acquiescent to the demands of hierarchical figures.

One crosses the bridge to the self more easily when one no longer hears or sees in the same way as the community:  their visions and auditory hallucinations are different from one's own.   Then one goes in search of the meanings of one's own visions and voices.   Madness on a group level is no longer beguiling.

To sacrifice a part of one's mind leads to one's fuller existence. I sacrificed my regulatory higher mind with its moral ambitions and inhibitions, to find another sense: concrete reality locked in a particular time and place.  This facilitates the crossing, but not the outcome.  The two ought not to be confused.

What is an initiate in knowledge?

It means to cross a line where one hopes to gain reassurance from others to the side where one has been wrecked out of one's wounds -- which is to say, one has lost hope and gone beyond one's previous psychological neediness.

Losing hope may be essential to the shamanistic project.   It facilitates the "dangerous crossing" from one side of reality to its opposite side.   On the one side is the community and its reassuring sameness.  It promises you a certain amount of recognition and psychological support.  The unknown beckons on the opposite bank.  By means of self-reliance one crosses, on trembling feet.

An initiate of knowledge is one who has succeeded in crossing that tender wire that moves from "community" to "self".   Community can facilitate this move quite dramatically, by making you lose all hope in it.  It's less appealing make the crossing whilst the community still appears to offer warmth and support.  Once one realizes that these are promises that can never become realities, a gradual and painful move toward the self can commence.

An initiate of knowledge is one whose knowledge comes from the inside.   This sounds simpler than it is, because most people would not trust themselves sufficiently to become their own guide and commanding officer.   It takes a lot of understanding of one's own perceptions to be able to judge whether those perceptions are trustworthy of not.  Trial and error will also help.  The crossing is difficult.

The opposite side to where the community holds its vigils is the ledge on which one may rest, called self-knowledge.   Once one has integrated the knowledge acquired through the difficult crossing, one can call oneself almost an initiate of knowledge.   Assuredly, one will appear like a skeleton to others, and too fraught, and hardly a possessor of knowledge at all.

Still, one must rest and get accustomed to the new vision, from the other side of the chasm.   There's no going back, well not exactly.   One may cross back again, but will not be the same.  The community will no longer recognize one of its own.  The dependency signs are simply absent.  In the past, one craved to be "taken seriously".   The group once understood this as a sign that you were one of them.   Now, they're not sure what to make of you.   A desire to be taken seriously is, of course, a sign of willingness to submit to others and their views and perceptions.  But you're no longer submissive exactly.

Perhaps you are expecting to be submitted to?   Some may imagine so, but there is no evidence of this either.  One does not take seriously enough the needs of the community to give them some standard of idol to revere.   Something in the dynamics of reality has changed forever.

If one takes the needs of community less seriously, it is because one has less need of the community oneself.  It has become possible to be self-reliant.  From experience it is also apparent that one does not make the first step towards self-reliance without a sense of the gravity and terror of this moment.  For the first time, one has become one's approving or disapproving double.  In place of the community and it's judgments are one's own. Are you the judge and avenger of your own morality?  Even if you imagine that no double of you is really warranted during a tenuous crossing, one springs forth in any case.

When you are still crossing:  you are condemning and vilifying you like crazy.

But then there is a fire to warm you, which you've made yourself , and your are at the other end of the difficult crossing. You've now have your respect by combating and deflecting or addressing all the issues you've developed as a point of attack against yourself.  You felt like you were falling to pieces from the savagery of your assaults.  Your inner organs have been violently extracted, washed and replaced.   You take care to count them all.  It seems that none are missing -- you have made it, in one piece.

You're no longer down on yourself, but you wonder what the hell you've been through.  Such a simple crossing, looked so easy from the other side, turned out to be almost the death of you.  Those you had thought to be your friends turned out to be your most intense enemies, whilst those not like you now seem to be akin in spirit.

Something else has changed too.  You no longer seem to take yourself so seriously.  Before, you took all matters relating to you so gravely because you were unsure of yourself.  Now you've made your way to yourself.   You need no longer be insecure.   Mischief and irony,along with calm tranquility, tend to prevail in your nature.   Your morality, having been tamed, now approves of everything you do.  If others think that taming was easy, they must attempt to cross in the same way, to find their way to themselves, if they can do it.

Or maybe it is better not to try it and just rest where you know you are secure.

Repost

One of the problems with a certain prevalent mal-development of western consciousness is the growth of a tendency to believe that “perceptions” and “reality” do not correlate or intersect. It is considered “masterful” to take the position that somebody else’s perceptions have nothing at all to do with reality. Perhaps only one’s own perceptions are really able to dominate reality appropriately — separating truth from falsity in an exact way.
This, in my view, is why many people speak forth with the expectation of struggling but not with the expectation of achieving something real. Because to “struggle” is to put forward one’s perceptions into the public realm. But the perceptions would have to be perceptions of reality itself for the putting forth of one’s perceptions to have any chance of changing reality. But most people are conditioned to believe that we cannot change reality, only perceptions: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
So, pointless struggle becomes very common indeed. One gives up on changing reality all for the liquid joy of expressing one’s perceptions in pure form. Expressing one’s perceptions becomes a compensatory compulsion due to being deprived of a notion of reality, and not having any clue what reality is.
In terms of the effect of embracing perceptions as reality itself, and ignoring that there is a reality that is independent of perception (such as global warming, the reality of miscommunication and twisted reasoning, and so on) many westerners speak at cross-purposes to themselves and others. It’s a Tower of Babel.
Rational thinking has become a lost art, and catering to each other’s “perceptions”, by treating all perceptions (no matter how outlandish) as if they were already valid components of meaning itself  (when reality can never be ascertained ) has become more common. In other words, social interactions have become politicized in such a thorough way, that current stakeholders are easily able to keep out newcomers who do not play this game of manipulating perceptions. Rationality has had no or little stake in western cultural consciousness due to the advent of this egoist subjectivist approach which accepts that what is real is the aggregate of common opinion, and nothing else besides.
A rational person cannot be expected to succeed in such a society unless they first prostitute themselves by playing a highly irrational game.

Existential Queries | Clarissa's Blog

Existential Queries | Clarissa's Blog

I’ve never had any problem with dogs –or horses for that matter. They’re not equals, but on some occasions, which are rare, you do need to defer to their animal instinct. Sometimes horses see things before you do, and sometimes dogs can be very useful, for instance when one has lost one’s way. I was once led back out of some very confusing bushland terrain by my dog. I would have been lost otherwise, which could have been quite dangerous. Dogs and horses quickly learn what they must or must not do unless it is an emergency.

Feminism undermines primal relationships?

Rebirth, Transgression and the Gender Wars

The chimera

How a softly spoken woman looks to some Australians, the minute she has leadership power

And now she's gone the memory of Auschwitz will never leave those who hated her for her gender.

Post-feminism

Not That Girl | Clarissa's Blog

I can't understand the need for this kind of satire anymore, but okay.  I think that what is crazy is the way that right wingers commonly interact with women,  but if you are gazing at the world through a gauze of metaphysics, this can be hard to see.  Once you start to see, however, the other party can feel disturbed by the revelation that certain types of thinking were contrived rather than natural.  You really do need to hone your perceptual skills to see what it going on, though, like honing your skills to observe a feint in boxing.  Sometimes metaphysics can seem like common sense, even though it distorts reality substantially.  The most deceptive kind of metaphysics is that which appears to be cajoling you into accepting a more real form of reality,whilst actually undermining you.   It can be quite subtle and may not even be intentionally manipulative.  For example, For instance, someone recently addressed me with language that suggested we ought to adjust ourselves to accept the limits of "real people in the real world".  My response was:  "Well maybe you think I am asking you to give me some tips about these real people who exist in the real world?"   Is it possible that I am 45 and have not yet come upon these people?

Had I been a different person -- all moral and earnest and willing to be guided -- I might have been swindled out of self-reliance to the point of allowing another person to see for me.   A kind of genteel good will of that sort can lead one astray.

There are other tricks a master magician can use like the demand that one not focus excessively on oneself.   On the surface, that seems like a reasonable injunction, but it's not what is on the surface that matters.   It's just the beginning of the undermining, where one learns not to take oneself or one's needs seriously.  One has to take seriously only the needs of those nebulous "real people in the real world".   As for oneself, one has slipped and lost one's foothold in reality.  One is no longer one of those "real people" and one no longer trusts oneself to know what "the real world" is.

A boxer should keep grounded -- never be led in by a feint.

Repost

Nietzsche was my “psychoanalyst”, at least in the first instance. The limitations of Nietzsche are that he does not deal with the question of patriarchy. Like many a contemporary male, he sees no particular problem with this in terms of causing mental health issues. He is prone to essentialise gender.Marechera was my second, much deeper and more self-aware “psychoanalyst”. He deals with issues both of race and gender. One understands through him how society is constructed so that both race and gender constrain as well as determine psychological development. Marechera comes from my culture, which is also more primitive than that of European of contemporary Western culture. My problems were sourced in this culture, not in Western culture, which meant that Western therapists had not the background that would have enabled them to get to the bottom of any of my concerns. As a result, there was meaningless talking around the issue — or, if pressed concerning the urgency of finally addressing my issues, the therapists would become extremely abusive.  Marechera, Bataille and Nietzsche, in the reverse order, taught me about a different way of being, which I call shamanism. 
  1. Shamanism is a mode that mixes the recognition of extreme trauma with a mode of speaking that is extremely ironic. It’s not to everybody’s taste and is indeed confusing, since most people believe that genuine injustices ought to be taken seriously and with the greatest sense of moral deliberation. 
  2. Shamans are, however, “wrecked out of their wounds”, which means that they've reached such a base level of extreme skepticism about morality, and its capacity to do any good, that they can only treat the world ironically, henceforth.

Pill Poppers (BBC Documentary)



are you sure you need that pill?

Heed the new age of anxiety rather than bemoaning it | Darian Leader | Comment is free | The Guardian

Heed the new age of anxiety rather than bemoaning it | Darian Leader | Comment is free | The Guardian

Anxiety is really immature fear.  It needs to be treated seriously so that boundaries can be defined.  Great article.

Another reason why "terror [is] the totem of truth", resonates?  Once we define our terrors, we understand our worlds much better than before, when we were stuck in the twilight zone of our anxieties.

Kenyan man wants ruling against Jesus Christ by Pontius Pilate overturned

Monday 29 July 2013

The pineal eye?

Full Moon Could Spur Bad Sleep, Study Suggests

[W]e, like every other species on Earth, evolved on a particular planet with a particular set of astronomical cycles -- day and night, full moons and less full -- and our circadian systems adapted. It’s hard to say where the internal clock is in, say, a flowering plant, but in humans, it’s likely in the suprachiasmatic nuclei, a tiny region of the brain near the optic nerve involved in the production of melatonin, certain neurotransmitters and other time-keeping chemicals, all in a rhythm consistent with both its terrestrial and cosmic surroundings. Physically, human beings may be creatures of just this world, but our brains -- and our behavior -- appear to belong to two.

[emphasis mine]

More on sleep.


Amanda Palmer: Dear Daily Mail

As Marechera says, terror is the totem of truth.

Rilke, from the opening stanza of the Duino Elegies:

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
greater existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us."

Repost

First, a qualification:  I'm with Jungians in accepting that not everything about "pre-Oedipal" thinking, including magical thinking, is necessarily entirely bad, false and regressive.

After all, if we accept the premise that at the earliest stages of childhood development, we all experienced the world in this way at once stage.  To then hold that early childhood a purely negative or purely psychotic state is to impugn it.  Rather, it is more logical to imagine that early childhood gives us the raw material for becoming adults, including the liquidity that enables us to transform from a raw state of infancy to particular cultural expressions of adulthood.

So, there is likely a creative and productive potential to pre-Oedipal thinking.  Yet, if adults want to harness this force effectively, they must do it by doubling their consciousness, so that a more mature mindset does not lose complete control of those aspects of the self that remain irrational.  Unless this particular sense of shamanistic doubling is enacted, we would  be left with unharnessed and wholly unconscious pre-Oedipal states -- which would then be destructive and simply regressive.

Ujheley gives a great explication of pre-oedipal states. Her writing and other texts I have investigated, suggest that part of this regressive mode of thinking involves an attitude that words, once said, are irrevocable, having an effect on others that we would equate with the same force of revelatory truth. Thus, from this regressive perspective there is no human fallibility, no possibility of struggling within an arena which includes both truth and error. Rather, by speaking my words, I make them definitively TRUE.

This literalist interpretation and speaking is of course extreme and odd. Ideas do not become TRUE just because we speak them. Yet, from the perspective of one who sees and experiences the world through the pre-Oedipal modality, all words spoken have what seems to be the FORCE of truth -- just because he or she has no internal means for defending against them. Without the means to fend off other people's judgements, for instance by putting them in perspective, (since emotional perspective is exactly that which one who is stuck at a pre-Oedipal level lacks), words themselves seem to be truths, that one must compulsively accept. Thus a word, once spoken, can never be modified.

Fundamentalist Christians often seem to process information in this way. From my personal experience, this mode of consciousness also happens to be a feature of right-wingers' political consciousness in many ways. Indeed, the vulgar ideology expressed by the Bu(l)shite neo-conservatives, that "The reality based community only researches reality, where we are the ones who actually create it," would seem to stem directly from a regressive pre-Oedipal consciousness, whereby merely speaking your ideas suffices to turn them into intractable truths.

Joke-telling, however, relies implicitly upon the listener's capacity to tell the difference between reality and illusion. Thus, things I have uttered in a very light-spirited, humorous vein, have often been used against me by right wingers, who go with their accusations with a reprimanding tone: "You once confessed that you were [some negative or shameful thing]!"

Boxing Footwork - Retreating at Angles

Boxing - Side Step Drill to Create Angles

Sunday 28 July 2013

Boxing - Beginner Sparring Set-ups and Combos Part 1

Dalia Hosny


Lack of familiarity breeds contempt

 If I move into a state of feeling fraught my readings do become more interesting.   Maybe not more accurate, but more intriguing.

It is emotionally costly, though, and probably physically so, that I am better at accessing these ideas when I go to extremes in intoxication or endurance.   And all the same, what I think people would benefit most from, these days, is a very sober, very simple and direct remapping of reality. My revelations only come with huge investiture:  mine.  And the returns are not so good.  People imagine that they are the sober ones and that I am insane.

It’s not rigor, anyway, that is needed for this kind of writing I can do, but the ability to catch waves – which are forms of energy.   If I do this kind of thing, I sacrifice rigor.   Rigor and stream of consciousness use different parts of the brain.

In Marechera’s writing, it LOOKS like stream of consciousness, but he has actually internalized a lot of information and it roughly forms a system.  But nobody can read his writing, pretty much.  I mean they don’t read BLACK SUNLIGHT for what is actually in there.  They don’t read it as a whole perspective, but rather they start by looking for motifs they are  familiar with, and then they say, “Oh, well, it seems he is a sexist” or “he’s down on himself and it a racist”.   This is about the level at which most people are capable of reading.

They gingerly put one toe into the water and quickly retract.   But the thing is, they really believe they have read the book and come to terms with its essential message.   And everybody else thinks they have read the book as well.   But they’re just talking to themselves about something they think they already know.  They haven’t gone beyond themselves, yet – out of themselves and INTO the book.  

Standing on the outside of the pool, accusing the writer of being self-involved, they remain where they are forever.

Thursday 25 July 2013

Deliwe Funeral 18-19 November 2011 - Mbare Harare Zimbabwe

I finally diagnosed myself with a "baseball injury"

Life lessons and spiritual progress

Nobody should view my writing as suggesting ways to spiritually advance or gain life lessons.   I'm sorry, but can we lay-dees get over the idea that reality offers us spiritual lessons?

I shed reality.  

It's fine to pick me up for your new age or spiritual chronicle -- there's nothing good about my morality.  It is designed to to take away your sense that there is anything to learn from one other; to put you on your own.

Women are their worst enemies. I've handled problems on my own.  The outcome has been intellectual shamanism.

I had to handle grave, grave emotional issues on my own.  People said:  "Your writing does not communicate anything.  It is an undifferentiated forest fire of emotions."

The result of a couple of decades of this was that I burned and desecrated reality.   If you want some of my reality, it is of the charred sort. One could be annihilated.

Should people pick up anything I say and want to make out that I'm giving lessons on how to handle negotiations, or how to learn more deeply about oneself, they are welcome to try to use what I have said this way.  Welcome to my wasteland of disbelief.

I'm not trying to help you see life in a better way, I'm not trying to give you tips on how to handle the worst of it.  The problem is: once you latch onto an identity, you take us all backward with you.   For instance, you embrace a female nature that puts to shame all my hard work to prove that women aren't inherently hysterical.  I despair of this, but you want this female nature because it comforts you.  You reinstate the old ways without thinking once what this would cost me.

I wrote a memoir.  None of it was meant to teach life lessons or to raise the female profile.   I never had a goal so specifically feminine as that.   I immerse you in my disaster:  you are very welcome.

I'm not here to help.

If you're looking for some assistance, may I suggest my enemies in patriarchy?   They always give each other fuzzy, reassuring feelings:  women are the same as ever; men are the same as ever.  You're no longer on the precipice of pain or menacing catastrophe.  There is help at hand!  There are life lessons to be learned, within the measure of one's feminine or masculine existing nature.

I don't believe in this of course, but this is what is said and thought.   It's what's expected from my writing, even though it's clear this is not the content of my writing.

Nietzsche thought is would be quite the cosmic joke if old biddies a few centuries on were to find gentle platitudes to console each other with from his tome, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA.   It's hard to get the message that books have a broader purpose than to instill life lessons.

I'm not trying to tell you what is what.   I'm not trying to emotionally engage with you to "smash the patriarchy".

I only have disaster and chaos and madness to impart.  

Bataille, identity politics and the psychology of "evil"

Straw Man fallacy: Richard Dawkins learned practically nothing in polit...

The atheist community gender wars are irrational and pointless

The intellect. It's not a system of formal logic, so how does it expres...

YouTube gender warriors and the necessity of feminism

Top 5 Boxing Mistakes

How to See Punches Coming

Boxing Bounce Footwork

Wednesday 24 July 2013

INDIVIDUALISM

Individualism was completely unknown in my country of origin.   We had no consumer culture, no competitiveness and no individualism.
Not only was it unthought-of to go against the grain of what everybody else was doing, it usually wasn’t necessary.  There were so many rewards in just being part of the group.  It was an outdoors society and there were many ways to enjoy the environment and other people’s company in the outdoors, so one could get rid of any build up of anti-social emotion in that way, before it even erupted – at least normatively that was so.
The symbiotic relationship with the outdoors goes a long way to explain why people didn’t consider it necessary to develop individuality.  It wasn’t felt as something missing, because life was full to busting without anything lacking.  One certainly had no use for social recognition, because one already had belongingness without having to earn it.  Nor did one have a need to compete, because the tribe you were in took care of it’s own.  This was a pre-capitalist society and, for the most part, pre-industrial.
There was a certain amount of social censoriousness, but only foreigners seemed to catch our notice at times.   There were also those who behaved in a modern way, and they were not approved of by my parents.  Imagine being divorced?  imagine drinking too much and then using a swear word?  imagine trying to get your money out of the country by buying a posh car.  These were non-standard forms of behavior, and they seemed to speak of mental instability. 
I didn’t have my parents’ knowledge or beliefs as I was led to feel that whatever occurred in the adult world did not concern me.  As far as I was concerned, I was totally free.  I always had enough enjoyment, especially in the outdoor world.
Consumerism was very weak , because there were no shops that catered to the later fashions.  Many of the higher quality goods were made locally, but were not fashionable.  Items were occasionally imported from South Africa, but these were out of the price range of most of us.  Personal possessions were hand downs or rickety, but nobody seemed to mind.
There was a certain element of black and white political thinking that afflicted the adults, but not us.  Politics was for adults.  Children did not become adults until an indefinitely postponed date.
In general, though, keeping up with the Joneses was not painful, as they were not going far.   This must have been why a lot of people “forgot” to develop individuality.  It just wasn’t demanded.
It wasn’t exactly an issue of authoritarianism pervading our lives.  In many ways that authoritarianism was quite lax and muted.   Rather it was that there had been no alternative system available to contrast with this lax and lazy authoritarianism.   Nobody had brought one about – and that was partly because our borders had been closed.   Nothing much got in, in terms of foreign notions of ideas.  Until the early eighties, we were hermetically sealed.
The idea that self-development is one’s responsibility comes in at a later stage in history.   We hadn’t reached that stage yet when I was growing up.  Marechera was one of the first forerunners of this new, exciting individualism.
People simply didn’t feel morally responsible for themselves.   If I had a problem that was out of my control, I would speak to one of the adults, and they would sort it out that evening.
Everybody would comply if an adult pointed out that it had become necessary to do something differently.   Everybody trusted everybody else in their community, so guidance was acceptable and not deemed to be individual interference.
In all, the system worked and not just slightly: It was effective as a whole.
Now, what is not so effective is to move out of a system that was working into one where totally different principles of organization are imposed.   Also, if one already had a character structure that was suited to collectivism, operating with an individualistic character structure can be like becoming a toddler and learning to walk again.   As my father said, “It’s like you have to build up a whole pressure system inside of you just to keep others off your back.”
Then there is the other aspect of Western notions of moral responsibility.   If you find you don’t already have everything you need to operate within a society, especially after you have become adult, you are deemed to be morally negligent.   There is never the possibility that you were simply not present (in the literal, not figurative sense) when others were being taught their moral lessons and responsibilities. 
On the flipside, which concerns my apparent negligence in understanding and appropriate behavior, those brought up in contemporary Western societies also do not understand the works and demands of adulthood as they pertained to my original society.   Despite my not being aware of it, I had already incorporated a lot of the lessons about how to be an adult in Rhodesia or Zimbabwe.  I had learned, for instance, tremendous emotional self-reliance of the sort that I do not see when I look around me.

So when people have attacked me in the past, stating what they can see of me, but only from their narrow cultural perspective, they have not allowed that I can also see their weaknesses as they appear from my perspective.   For instance, they lack stamina and resolve.

The Century Of The Self Episodes 1-4 FULL

How I nearly became mad

This story starts a very, very long time ago.  I’m never clear as to how much of the foundation story to tell.  I was, as someone might have said, a very, very old person in terms of my maturity, and yet I was only fifteen.   I wasn’t knowledgeable, courageous or insightful.  In fact, I had missed out on a lot of opportunities that are conventionally given to immature people to test themselves and find out what their strengths and weaknesses are going to be.

So I had to work everything backwards.  I had to kind of get into myself from outside, and I had to do this at a later stage than everybody else had.  In fact, I had to do it when the shell of my outside nature had already formed.  I was in the ridiculous position of a chicken that had to peck its way back into the egg it had originally come from, to be born again.   The reason why this was necessary, and hardly an option, was that my subjectivity was not highly developed.   I was very capable of complying with objective orders and would do my best to comply with almost anything expected of me, without question.  But I had little subjective inwardness – therefore little energy or knowledge for resistance.  I had not developed introspection.   I had no capacity for defensiveness, even when some people said something that obviously wasn’t right.  It seemed like people acted in a lot of pointless ways in relation to me, but I had no concept of anything being offensive.

Some things were maddening, like my father’s sudden rages.   He would suddenly be spitting chips that he had decided the family should go out and I hadn’t gotten ready in time.  He considered this a sign of deliberate and outrageous contempt, not slowness.  A lot of my father’s rages can be understood in the light of his military training:  follow orders, pick up camp, move on quietly.  If you didn’t do these things, despite not having had his form of training, he would go ballistic.  Then we would learn just how far from perfection we were, in his eyes.

So I had the opposite tendency to self-involvement or an ability to focus only on one thing.  My whole self would become naturally scattered into the environment, but because of private property and the lack of an open terrain to roam, my feelings would boomerang and leave me feeling emptier than ever.   If I could try to gather them and focus on one thing, I could begin to restore meaning, quality and value, but I hadn't learned to concentrate my forces yet, or to hypnotize myself so that I seemed to be only in one place at a time.

I was left with an impersonality disorder.  I basically kept a watchful eye on authorities and tried to survive:  that was my “personality”.   I have tried to explain, many times, to Westerners, that I have not seen the world according to their structure of the psyche, for instance their own is formed – this was never to any avail.  I guess if you grow up during a war, emotions are rationed and nurturing is not overdone.

So it became gradually clearer to me that I was poorly equipped to handle modernity.  I didn’t even understand what people were saying to me most of the time – I mean the emotional connotations or insinuations.   I could understand the words, but not the contents.

My father couldn’t, wouldn’t help, because he’s just fall into a rage at the sign of any failure, which he read as non-compliancy.   My mother was pretty much in the same boat as me, in that she didn’t understand herself, nor was she capable of acting on anyone’s behalf.

It may have seemed to people that I was very immature, but the reality was that I was overly mature prematurely.   That’s not the same thing as being immature.  It wasn’t that I had avoided my lessons or rebelled against authorities.  My whole goal in life was to appease authorities, not to rebel against them.

I had a very, very difficult time, where I was becoming increasingly harsh with myself whilst experiencing depleting emotional resources.   I had to fill up on emotional resources as I had become ill.   The thing is, I didn’t really like anything around me in the new place, and couldn’t relate to it emotionally.   I’d liked horses before, and wild rides in our semi-rural terrain.  I’d had friends who were a lot like me, being solitary types but capable of deep friendship and mutual pleasure in the world around.  I’d had a life before that wasn’t much in terms of power or personality, but it had nourished me.

Providence steps in, sometimes.  During my hardships at work (which were hardships for others, too, causing tears), I turned a corner in the city and was in a major bookstore, where shelf after shelf were filled with Nietzsche books.   That’s when I first began reading his books, buying a different one each week or so.  I didn’t really understand him.  The first book I purchased was HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN, and that made me feel queasy inside.  All the absolutist Christian doctrine I’d embraced, which was swimming in my head, seemed to be turned around and upside down. In my naivety I presumed that this was the contemporary Western dogma that was opposed to my internalized Christian dogma.   Everything seemed to be chaotic and churning.

I couldn’t understand what I was reading and took to the bath tub with all my books, where I would lie for hours, reading through and trying to get a handle on modernity.   There were, occasionally, a few glimmers of hope, when I came across this aphorism, for instance:
“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”  It made me realize how much I had been making myself sick.

Anyway.  All this is background which goes to providing the basis as to why I first embraced and then rejected Paradigm Y.

2

Professor X had been my teacher as an undergraduate, and when I decided I had to learn more about reality, of which I confessed to still knowing very little, even in my thirties, I got in touch with him again.

He was a fine fellow; more in touch with his sensuality than most of the faculty.   But as it turned out, he really wholly and dogmatically embraced Paradigm Y.

Now, I was on a path of my own, which I didn’t understand that that time.  Actually, it was a path where I had to initiate myself, by breaking down my outside shell to let myself back inside my own being.

I wanted some cues, some tips, from him.   I would write to him often, as I am writing to you, and I would say things like, “My soul seems back to front compared to everybody else’s. What should I do?”  Or I would depict situations where I thought it was necessary to enhance my basic narcissism, which seemed to be lacking.

He’s never comment on anything personal I had said, but because I needed him to empathies' with me (my implicit and un-spelled out goal of initiation), I just assumed that he had understood more than he had.

All the time, though, he was writing me off as an hysteric.  I understand this now, but didn’t realize it then.

The point is, I had to initiate myself, and this meant following an intuitive path.  I couldn’t know where it would lead.  If it led me to embrace Hitler, I would embrace Hitler.  If it was something else disgusting, like Bataille, then I would temporarily have to look into Bataille.  A thirsty person does not reject a drop of water, even if the source of it is unclean.

Perhaps uncleanliness itself was a source of growth?   I’d been clean all my life, and had always obeyed instructions without thinking too deeply.

These were intellectual questions I had to ask as part of forging a shamanic path whilst writing my PhD.

Anyway, he didn’t give me any clues about anything.

Even when I said things to him in person:  no clues.   I would have liked some insight and some mentoring.  We’d often get together for drinks.

He seemed to think this was all unnecessary.

There were some things, you know, that were very real that I’d been dealing with.   It was only just dawning on me at this point that historical forces create a tsunami of psychical effects that are real.   I’d had to deal on my own with my father’s suicidal tendencies and with his rage.  I’d had to try to make all sorts of impossible adjustments on my own and I had never mourned the past in the way that I should have done. I would say the whole society was still in post-war 1940s, before the invention of mass media, or psychoanalysis, or individual identity, or anything much really.  I think that as a contemporary type, along with all other contemporary types, you can’t imagine such a situation, and think it must be something to do with me in particular, but I assure you we were thoroughly time locked.  In reality the more advanced wing of the system of culture I was from was mostly in the 40s.  In other ways, we were in the 1870s.   It’s very tiresome for me to have to keep explaining this to people, since they never seen to grasp it.

So I said to him (and this was very late in the game, when I was a critical stage of pulling my thesis together), “You know, some things are actually real.”

This was the sentence, I believe, that flipped him over the edge.    We had both been very patient until that time.

I have mentioned, of course, that my father said as lot of crazy things to me when he was unstable.   This professor decided to pick up on these and assault me with those crazy things.

At this point, I began to realize that Paradigm Y is just another form of authoritarianism in a disguise.   It’s actually very condescending and doesn’t allow that people like me could have actual insight into the world, or be capable of following an intuitive path to freeing oneself.

Also the professor showed he had no insight into human reactions.  Specifically, I had stated that my father had deep fracture lines of trauma and expressed only distorted ideas during his rages.

So now the good professor seemed to have these fracture lines as well,  in my eyes, on the basis of his emulation of my father.   I kept away from him, because he seemed to be becoming unstable.  I also felt very guilty (as I did in relation to my father), that perhaps I was the cause of his instability.   That made it very difficult for me to complete my thesis with a clear perspective, because I had only a limited time to do it, and I felt guilty and confused by this reaction, which had effectively undermined my dependence on paradigm Y to explain anything.   To embrace anything relating to Y seemed to be to take everything in exactly the wrong direction – towards the pathology of guilt and madness.  Imagine being pushed down -- back into this mad relationship with my father that I'd been working so hard to avoid?   I felt myself losing my sense of purpose, everything becoming diffused and scattered.   Perhaps madness and guilt were inescapable after all?

3.

Anyway, I wondered often what I must have done or said to make him reveal his hand like that – and very much to his own detriment as well as (temporarily) mine.   I think it was the suggestion that his paradigm did not deal with reality, but just dismissed everything experiential as merely “an emotional reaction”.    Emotion is epiphenomena and pathology.   Someone who complies with authority smoothly doesn’t need it.   The point is to get into harness.   Everything else is smoke.

I think, in short, that my background, with an actual experience of war and the costs and benefits of it, made my reality a threat to a social order where desire is the only currency permissible.  “Desire” – and not reality itself.




FINALLY... A Mainstream Journalist Speaks Truth on the Trayvon Martin Tr...

Draft Chapter 25

chapter 25.


Call ups were becoming more frequent and it was increasingly harder to get out of them.   This particular call up was with Fifth Battalion.  We were sent put on patrol and our section commander was in a bit of a muddle.  We found ourselves walking in zigzags though the bush in the night.  This is a very superb way to get shot.  You walk into your own stop groups  -- the people you put out there to stop terrorists.   When I pointed this out to him, he changed direction.  We walked through the bush and then we settled down and a group of them decided to set up some claymores.   Then we lay down to rest.  I remember some insect bit me on my back.  It was like a red hot needle pushed into my back.  While we were lying there, I heard a machine gun start up about two miles away.  This was our other stop group.  It was started off by screaming, and this screaming went on for about ten minutes.  I thought a woman had walked into the stop group and got shot.  That screaming haunts you for years afterwards.

Then I lay on my back and looked straight up and I asked myself if it was likely there'd be a satellite there,  and then I saw one.  But you can't even talk about it because you are in an ambush position and your whispering could result in yourself being shot.  It was a curious thing to see a satellite out in the middle of the bush.  I was in Ruya river area. 

Later that night it rained.  It absolutely pelted down.   Everything we had got soaked.  I used to point my rifle downwards so the rain wouldn't  run down the barrel.   I never had to fire it, so I suppose that was good enough.  I used to clean and oil it fairly regularly. 

The next morning, we got told to go to a certain grid reference to be picked up.  This happened to be next to an old church.  So, I got all  my equipment out and laid it in the sun to dry,  which worked.

Some bloke arrived from another group and asked if he could swap raincoats with me.  I don't know why.   I told him that my raincoat leaks, so it wasn't a good idea for him, but he insisted.   So he took mine,  I took his.   I later discovered that his raincoat was perfectly good and didn't leak at all.  I had done a home job in waterproofing mine, by covering it in soap.  The idea I had was, you rub soap on it, then you pour vinegar on it and the vinegar turns the soap into oil.  This hadn't worked.

Some time previously,  when walking through Mt Darwin,  I had bought a piece of foam rubber from a shop to use as a pillow.  You'll be surprised when you are out in the bush how a pillow can make your life a lot better.  It was quite a substantial piece of foam rubber, about two inches thick.  

We got picked up by the trucks and we continued walking through the bush and found ourselves walking up towards an escarpment.  when we got to the top of a rise,  we found ourselves looking down into a valley,  with some unusual rock formations, one of which was shaped like a long train.   It was known in the army as 'the train'.  Then, I realized I'd dropped my pillow, so I ran back to get it.  I ran for about half a kilometer.  I'd dropped it in a river bed.  That was a bit dangerous, dropping something and going back for it,  but I was quite glad I got my pillow back. 

We were now ordered to move to another grid reference and wait for transport.  That arrived in the form of helicopters.  One of my  companions  disappeared so I went looking for him and when I found him, he'd moved some distance into the bush.  Ii asked what he was doing here and he said, well he was 36years old, so why should he go up in a helicopter.  I got to thinking I'm 35.  Why do Ii want to go up in the helicopter?   When I first found him he said he was looking for his spoon.  Then, I was looking for my spoon too.  Ever since then,  if I get myself into a situation I don't want to be in,  I start looking for my spoon.

Then the choppers came in and lifted everyone into battle,  but we stayed behind and nobody noticed.

When they brought them back, I overheard one of our officers talking.  He said he found himself in a gully and he came around a corner, there was a terrorist right in front of him.  So he picked up his rifle and the terrorist picked up his rifle and they found themselves facing each other with their rifles.  He put his finger on the trigger and pulled it and it just went click.  The terrorist did the same and his rifle just went click.  Everything depended on who reloaded quicker.  The terrorist decided to put his rifle down. 

That evening,  listening to the radio,  I heard Ian smith say that the situation in the North East where we were  was deteriorating.  Then we got picked up and moved to a camp in Mount Darwin.  

Monday 22 July 2013

Back to front soul

The model of the psyche used ubiquitously in all the academic texts expresses that emotions are difficult to control, especially in their natural state.  It seems to require the mechanism of civilization to keep them regulated.  Such views are expressed through Freudian psychology and anything linked with it.  This also seems to be the theory underlying contemporary educational practice.

To view the natural state of human beings as emotional and out of control, requiring dampening, controlling and diverting mechanisms, is entirely opposite to my self-understanding and experiences.  To say so is to go against the contemporary orthodoxy, but I am fundamentally calm when I am left alone -- even as a child, I always seemed to be so.  It's civilization I find demanding, because it always seems to coax from me various states of emotion that are deemed appropriate to specific situations.  I've tried to produce these emotions on demand, in the past, and I've always had to fight myself in exhausting ways.

Speak to me calmly and quietly and tell me what's required in any given situation, and I am most likely able to respond effectively.  But when change and adaptation is addressed as if it were a fundamentally emotional issue, I find I don't know what to make of it.  I'm inclined to use my rational mind to adjust, but then I am told to think in terms of how to manage people's feelings.   It's like being told I must do everything with my left hand when I'm right handed.

Those who instructed me thus must have believed they were doing right by addressing themselves to what they took to be my underlying emotional nature.  But my real, underlying nature is rather more rational and detached.   The only way I can interpret an instruction meant to speak to my "emotion" is to first enter the social realm where these emotions have strong currency.  Then I need to try to work out conclusions of my own as to why certain cultural weight is given to certain specific actions.

Working things out back to front like this is very confusing and takes a huge amount of emotional effort.  Before long, I am exhausted -- and I seem not to have made much progress with the whole problem.

It then becomes necessary for me to withdraw.

2

Because Western society maintains this model of what would be in my terms a "back to front soul", the very language that I would like to use to describe the problem also becomes corrupted -- and I become choked.

It is necessary for a paradigm that has it's image of the psyche in reverse to maintain that I must have "emotional issues" that prevent me from adapting to demands.  It may be assumed that the forces for good in society are morally bound to wear away a powerful ego that will not succumb more easily to normative social demands.

This attempt, by those who wish to be of help, to wear me down in order to improve my situation was ongoing until recently.

Addressing themselves to what they saw to be my fortress of resistance, they attempted to bring me down to Earth, by saying I wasn't as great as I thought I was.   (What they thought I thought I was, obviously, was something great.)  I had a lot of this, "You're not so fine as you think you are!" and I've always wondered what it was supposed to mean on a deeper level.  When I have had such statements addressed to me, they have arrived at the moments when I have already become flummoxed.  Right at that point, when I am fully out of my depth, I will be told I need to realize that I am not fantastic.  This is supposed to help as if it would behoove me to acknowledge something, anything, apart from my awareness that I am sinking.

The danger of asking for guidance is to get morally reprimanded.  To ask for support with a complex issue produces the same result.  The response is addressed not to my intelligence, but to what is presumed to be my emotional state at the time.   Then, I have to go through all the backwards steps of analysis to try to gauge why someone thought that a particular state was my specific emotional state at the time.   I generally can't figure this out.

If I try to express that I can't figure this out, I am told I have another emotion:  self-pity.  Apparently I am wallowing in it, and that is why no problems can be addressed either now or in the future.


3.

My experience is that Western society has always demanded that I transform myself by moving onto an emotional plane.  It demands that my primary level of processing ought to be much more emotional.  If it were, then social censure and criticism would shape me in the way I ought to be formed.

The assumption must necessarily be that I am not yet fully formed, but in a state of molten fury.   Others need to take control and give me meaning, shape and direction.

I am told, by the way, that this has nothing to do with gender roles in Western society.  Rather: that attributing emotional states to each other is what all members of society do to everybody else, that there has never been anything strange about my situation.  If I think so I surely am "just being emotional".


4.

The attitude that many people had, that they already simply knew what was inside my head, without having to find out, gave them a supernatural aura for me.   I honestly supposed that maybe they did actually know something I had not discovered yet, about myself.   This wrongful supposition (as it turned out), nonetheless gave me much incentive to try to discover the architecture of Western emotionalism.  Perhaps, with all my effort, I could even become its cornerstone.

This project has since been abandoned as so much brick and ruin.  In place of the towering radiance of Western omniscience, I now impose a simple placard in my mind, with just a few words scribbled.  They are:  "projective identification".   In simple language, Western culture has only ever conveyed one phrase and it is:  "YOU are the emotional one!"

Had I deciphered this meaning and attitude from the beginning, I would not have wasted all my time.  But it was the last thing I had been expecting, frankly.

5.


Western culture is a tar-baby.  The more you fight it, the more it sticks to you.  This is what occurred, but this was all my fault.


6.


To be cast into the wilderness is not a hardship -- not like Western culture deems it to be.   It's not even all that difficult.    The pervasive idea that personal experience is just a forest fire of undifferentiated emotions is clearly wrong.

Cultural barriers to objectivity