Thursday 31 October 2013

The real cause of misandry

Repost: Limits of therapy

1. When you look deeply into it what are therapists  trying to do? 

They are representing themselves as experts in "human psychology". This is a field that relies upon an abstraction and generalisation from certain kinds of human behaviour in the possibly relatively near past. But people's lives are generally more complicated and specific than these generalizations can express. 

What does one gain from therapy? One's life must be simplified to fit the generalizations based on common experiences, or else, perhaps one could try to make use of the generalizations about other people's problems to see how they might apply to your specific instance. 

It seems to me that there remains a significant risk in terms of losing a great deal of one's life's previous intelligibility in talking to a therapist. What may have been important but specific to one's own experiences can be all too easily lost to the power of generalizations.


2.One might seek them for the pursuit of psychological knowledge. In contemporary industry, I have rarely seen it put to good use. The knowledge becomes an instrument of torture rather than a method of release. 

The problem of knowledge in terms of the way it is applied in Western culture gave the writer, Georges Bataille, reason to coin the term, "non-knowledge" as indicative of deep inner experience because contemporary knowledge tends to overlook the meaning of being an experiential subject and tends to produce, instead, narrow objectification and conformity.  But to know the limits of one's thoughts is real knowing.

Conservatism in Academia | Clarissa's Blog

Conservatism in Academia | Clarissa's Blog

Conservatives extend this notion to individuals as well. At one point everything was beautiful and perfect, but then disaster came along and my feeling was hurt forever and now I have eight different personality disorders and can’t lift a finger to assist myself.
Or. Original sin overtook me. Now I am corrupted.
Wallowing in extreme helplessness because the perfect order is no more.

Can ‘dramatically different cognitive styles’ explain tea partiers’ rage? | The Raw Story

Can ‘dramatically different cognitive styles’ explain tea partiers’ rage? | The Raw Story

Repost: tribal forces

Maybe it is true that culture has become too heterogeneous (also too primal and self-indulgent), and that this has created problems with communication (since clear communication is necessarily homogeneous and also primal, relying on sharing commonalities). I detect a communicative chasm between myself and another whenever I hear them seem to proclaim that they are "completely free to do what I want", because what they consider freedom is rarely something that I would have any interest in doing. Yet, I have no means to communicate this to them.  They are free to SMS 'Big Brother" or free to work long hours in order to pay off a mortgage? These things would be nightmares to me, but I have no way of communicating that, in a way that is taken neutrally and objectively. Far more likely, someone will attack me if I tell them that their world is not my world, and their desires are not at all like mine.

This superfically expressed cultural of individualism (actually, egotistic solipsism, which I, myself, have explored and experienced as part of my self-induction into Modernism)  becomes ursurped in practice by a narrow and emotional tribal force .

Since an assertion of one's experiential differences is culturally taken as a criticism of the flavour or nature or quality of another's experiences, then one must certainly refrain from acknowledging differences. To do otherwise would invite censure or misunderstanding, or hurt egos and confused relationships. So the apparent freedom, understood and expressed in terms of being "free to do whatever I want" ends up with the majority adopting very defensive stance,  where what is really acceptable is to do  "whatever it is we are all already doing."

Wednesday 30 October 2013

Moralists attack the meaning of robust experiences




We can't understand the really, really good people now, especially in literature.  We sit on the edge and dip a toe in the water, rather than plunging fully into life.
Cf.
1. http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/i-certainly-can-have-that-ability-at.html

2.  http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/lamentations-for-eat-pray-love.html

EAT PRAY LOVE as shamanismLITE

I read recently how Bataille, having written INNER EXPERIENCE then recoils in horror: not once, but  twice.

The first is that it is misunderstood by philosophers.  I did something philosophers never do (he said) and wrote in a way that lacked rigour.   

The second is that muddle-headed people, whom he considered superficial to the extreme, hailed him as a new mystic.

He states:  I wrote in a way that just let go of everything, like I was slipping off to sleep.   (Bataille's shamanism involves what he calls as a loss of consciousness.)   As a result, the sleepy-minded and the mystics embraced me as one of them.   I'm not like them at all, but I inadvertently opened myself to that identification.

EAT, PRAY, LOVE is the book that the glib mystics of Bataille's time thought that he had written.   Just slip off your rock wherever you happen to be perched and the universe will take care of you :
http://youtu.be/mjay5vgIwt4?t=2m3s "If you could clear out all that space in your mind, you have a doorway.  And you know what the universe will do?  RUSH IN!!"
Well, that is the initiatory experience expressed in terms that will appeal to naive people.  Fall from the summit, lose your attachments to the things that bind, and the universe itself with patch you up, bestow you with its blessings and send you on your merry way.

At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for "balancing." " Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker
A similar story of feminine ascapeeism is SHIRLEY VALENTINE (1989).  This narrative doesn't have a mystical aura but also addresses the crisis of femininity in women who have never taken up the practise of having serious thoughts.

Shirley's a middle-aged Liverpool housewife, who finds herself talking to the wall while she prepares her husband's chip'n'egg, wondering what happened to her life. She compares scenes in her current life with what she used to be like and feels she's stagnated and in a rut. But when her best friend wins an all-expenses-paid vacation to Greece for two, Shirley begins to see the world, and herself, in a different light.
Upper class bichon frise  meet your lower-middle class spaniel counterpart!

But it's not just their class status that sets them apart.  Nor is it even that one is a Yank and the other a Brit.   Rather, in the first instance, the Yankee engages in ShamanismLite.

Ideal for women who don't want to break into a sweat whilst partaking of their rite of passage, ShamanismLite everything and more than Chris Lilley singing LEARNING TO BE ME.




But let us return to the matter of Bataille and his superior writing.  There is rigor and depth there, but not in the use of philosophical or literary conventions and certain nothing like what people have made of initiatory rites in the approaches shown above. When they desire or expect an easy journey, that is all they'll see.

The question remains as to how to cope with the consequences of all of the inevitable misreadings that more complex shamanic writers always seem to attract.  The most delusional notion of mystics is their idea that the universe has any natural or reciprocal relationship to you.   It doesn't.


Repost: Black Orpheus

If Marechera’as self-exile from the world of conventional mores had a reason, then that reason was to repair an internal sense of loss. According to Alan Collier Ostby, H. Ellenberger (The Discovery of the Unconscious, 1970) says traditional healers saw psychological problems in terms of “soul loss” (Otsby p 166). Contemporary object relations thinking of the psychoanalytic school speaks, instead, in terms of “object loss”, however the qualities of sickness they are describing are phenomenologically similar, one presumes, apart from the obvious factor of cultural differences, which contextualise this inner sense of loss in different ways. To place oneself into a mode of temporary exile facilitates an opportunity to recover the lost “object” that is experienced as a lost part of one’s self. The partially regressive return to the “womb” — that is to a state of mind in which reality is dealt with on simpler terms than those on which a healthy adult would normally be inclined to deal with it — can be facilitative of healing. Restoration of the lost object would restore one’s hope in humanity, enabling re-integration into the social realm of everyday human relations. Suchpsychological regression turns one towards the psychologically receptive mode that pertains to the pre-oedipal field, wherein reality appears to be defined less by society and more by one’s internal object relations. This state of being involves the apertures of the mind narrowing to reduce the data taken in from the outside world, in order to emphasise the particular nature of the internal dynamics of love, hate and knowledge (ref. Bion) that make one idiosyncratically who one is. Marechera’s refusal to adopt the mantle of social conformity, in order to fit into his society, was based on his need to continue his “soul journey” to find the lost parts of his being that would enable him to feel whole.
What were these parts in particular, that he felt he had lost? Indications from reading his book of Hararean exile, Mindblast, give the strong impression, through many different textual “clues”, that what he sought was the continuation of a peaceful Zimbabwean society, from childhood on up, that would have nurtured him as part of it. The breakout of civil war (the second Chimurenga), which began in earnest around 1966, around the time that Marechera’s father was suddenly killed in a road accident, destroyed the sanctity of everyday life for the teenaged Marechera. This loss of internal security, a loss emphasised still more in his mind through the increasing intensity of war in the society at large, robbed him of the sense of security he required in order to feel “at one” with himself. Henceforth, he could no longer believe in “society” and had lost it as an object of love. Having lost his belief in this object – society – he also lost his feeling of security that would have enabled him to be at peace with himself. In a shamanistic sense, Marechera was suffering from “soul loss”. His stint as a tramp on the streets of Harare were an attempt to simplify life in such a way that he would be able to focus his mind on finding something valuable and emotionally precious that would stand in as a replacement for that original loss, and would have enabled him to integrate himself more effectively into society. (Unfortunately, his life was cut short, so he was unable to fulfil his project, and we don’t know what the outcome of it would have been had AIDS not intervened.)
In Mindblast, Marechera uses the term, “womb”, to describe Harare. It is a “womb” for Marechera not just in the sense that it is the place with which he identifies as the core and origin of his Zimbabwean identity. It is symbolically the womb because it is the place where he seeks to lose his self, in order to find it anew, and in a better way than before. Like Orpheus, he is in search of his lost other half, and he hopes to find it again, in the world of the dead, and to bring it home with him. In Mindblast, Harare has the quality of being both a “womb” (a place of psychical regression) and a quality of being “hell” — in which the author struggles with a sense of the ethereal nature of his art in relation to a counterveiling reality of the practical nature of the middle-class lifestyles, artistically empty and lacking in depth.

Political persecution and losing one's religion

Lacking truth, desiring rigour

Ja'mie King Moments: We Can Be Heroes Clip 2

The women are revolting: a polemic? - YouTube

The women are revolting: a polemic? - YouTube


The first part of the video, where I compare women to chewing gum is particularly revolting. It seems, from the video link, however, that American women are the most "revolting" as respondees to the Hegelian dialectic.  (Hegel was an advanced Christian of his time.)
This video will be downvoted -- because nobody likes "revolting" women!
Cf.
1.  http://www.womenagainstmen.com/media/feminism-is-a-hate-group.html

2. http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/identifying-patriarchal-interactions.html

Tuesday 29 October 2013

Religious initiation

When NaNoWriMo Becomes Pathological | Clarissa's Blog

When NaNoWriMo Becomes Pathological | Clarissa's Blog

The idea that we all have a little genius inside of us just waiting for the right moment to break out is a self-indulgent notion that was perpetuated back in the 80s.  I think it has almost run its course, although in the meantime, it has been used to run a lot of self-help industries and to curtail the power of teachers:  "How dare she speak in that way to my little Johnny, who seems like a lazy person to outsiders, but after all could be a genius in the making?"

Liberation from this madness consists in a return to the aesthetics of ordinariness.  

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/ordinariness.html

The Nietzschean issue of consciousness

Bataille takes up Nietzschean issues as to how language and consciousness have a tendency to limit experience so that it remains within a modality of slavishness.

Consciousness might well be a pathology, suggests Nietzsche.  It curtails instinctive modes of being.  Language itself facilitates a trend to ignobility, because it was developed to communicate needs on a tribal level, Nietzsche says.   In effect, that which emphasizes the needs of the group does not readily lend itself to individualism.   Rather, language has a whirlpool effect, pulling individualism toward mass agreement and conformity.   Even whilst the creative individual struggles to escape, language has this centripetal effect.

The slave as rebel

You can't use your rebellion ironically, to perfect your slavery, if you are on the MASTER end of the Hegelian dialectic. (Only the slave can rebel.)  That's because you are one side of the dialectic, which means outside of the dialectic, which makes you free. That is one place where one is immersed in nonknowledge.

In fact, Bataille says that a natural and sovereign path was always open to the one who did not bow his will to any superior force, person or principle. There were "princes", he said, who had no need to rebel, so long as they confronted death at every moment and accepted the caprice of fate.

Pictures tell a thousand words




From the past

At the heart of what is wrong with much of contemporary culture is a bifurcation of objectivity and subjectivity.
The worst variant of misconstruction I have encountered is the idea that what you experience is “merely” subjective, whereas what others think of you is actually objective and true. This is the fallacy that objectivity is determined by greater numbers. This is the quantitative notion of objectivity.
Then there is another variant: Everybody who is “anybody” knows that objectivity is the quality that males possess, by virtue of his anatomical structure — which leaves all women to wallow in the clay pits of their “subjectivity”.
The problem with this view is that it is the perfect recipe for destroying any possibility of communication. To separate objectivity from subjectivity, separates the unpredictable, spontaneous or contingent nature of experience –indeed, experience itself — from what is “objectivity” out there (that is, mechanistic facts).
This makes one who is “objective” perfectly expendable. I can look up those facts I need on my computer, or do other kinds of research for them. There is no need at all to have a person around who can furnish me with particular facts.
On the other hand, if women are entirely subjective — by which we mean, non-factual — then there is nothing to be communicated either. Mood without content may be subtly communicable, but it is generally boring, empty, and disappointing as it stands, without the addition of any further thoughts.
The purely objective person and the purely subjective person are both imaginary entities, which in practical terms would be entirely devoid of humanity.
Do not presume, then, to tell me that you know better about my experiences than I do. To take such a position is hardly objective, but rather involves a presumption to be in command of a mode of universalising subjectivity.
Simple logic should have told you that this is yet another impossibility.

Monday 28 October 2013

Emotional repression & adaptation

anti-apathy

I had been caught in apathy in recent days.   It is possible to live, as it were, at the top of your being, as if in a mode of passive transcendence.  Not to engage is easy: It pretty much defines psychological normality.  To risk oneself is considered unnecessary by those who believe they have found their path in life.   It's not rational as it takes one off one's path.  Also it uses up energy, sometimes substantive amounts.

I realized, though, that I can't seem to write anything anymore, which is not how it was during the time that I was risking myself.   Normative states produce the opposite of the messianic tendency in that one has nothing to say anymore and doesn't care who does or doesn't hear it.

By contrast, all innovators are a little off-balance.   By the same token, it seems one has to gamble with the possibility of losing one's balance if one is to become inventive again.

Since I could not write and cannot write, I took the gamble of becoming more outspoken, even to the point of going to war if necessary.   My goal was to become more aware of aspects of myself I had ceased to notice or that hadn't been apparent before.

It worked -- and in a way that is a little strange.  I didn't sleep so well last night as I had consumed a lot of green tea to try to settle my stomach, which had itself been afflicted by a strong coffee draught the day before.  She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.   As twilight states go, this state of being sleepy to the point of dreaming but still wide awake was remarkably gratifying.  I managed to combine my deeper levels of emotion, which are normally repressed, with my more conventional state of being.   This is a strengthening.

At he deeper level of my psyche there is a lot of violence born of war and a corresponding emotional numbing.   To go deeply into this childhood state awakens the possibility that I may not feel, at all, what I am feeling -- which is an alarming way to be.   A dream makes feeling my thoughts and processing this state more effective and palatable.

I dreamed my father and I were walking idly along.  I said to him, "Why must we take everything so seriously, rather than just enjoy ourselves as other people do?"

"How do you mean?" he asked.

"Well, when they grab another person under the elbow and do a take-down in martial arts, they just enjoy it."

Well, apparently I take things seriously, said my subconscious.

At the basic level of not being able to process emotions, I have to work through all things systematically.   I take things very gravely, as if I were tasked with getting to the bottom of severe passions that I cannot fully understand.

If I don't get to the bottom of them, I lose my soul, my sense of being.  I must work hard to facilitate a dialectic between this basic, rigid state of being at war, and some lighter, more fleeting moment.

The alternative is that I am doomed -- and the sense of doom is already palpable.

Last night I conquered apathy and forced a deeper integration.  I do need to allow -- and not deny -- that I am warlike.   This warlike conditioning was from the attitudes of people all around me.

To acknowledge this troublesome aspect of my psyche means that I can write again.  Not to do so means living on the surface, feeling relatively happy but not achieving much, which leads to growing anguish and pain.

From Hegel to Bourdieu and back again, as necessary

How we ignore violence: avoid at your own peril

Unreflective ideological trolls

Unreflective ideological trolls

madness then and now

Repost: tautological notions

I find the idea that “The weak” could be bred out of humanity, through history, to be quite naïve. The problem with “weak” is that we define this term socially. To some minds, “weak” is the incapacity to endure assaults day after day. To others, “weak” is the lack of creativity, the incapacity to innovate, the tendency to prefer the tried and tested at the cost of something new.
 
Humans are so diverse that they embody all sorts of possible conceptualisations of weakness and strength. Arguably, it is this very diversity that is needed for humans as a group to survive.
 
BY CONTRAST, if we look at what Darwin meant by “the fittest” that are assured survival, his conceptualisation is much more tautological than value-laden. The fittest to survive are precisely those that happen to survive any particular environment or conditions. The fittest to survive a very oppressive workplace, for instance, can often be those who do not really register much, emotionally or intellectually. They just do what they’re told.

Sunday 27 October 2013

Unconsciously internalized ideology sabotages your ideology




Which of us deeply understands our ideological programming?  I don't mean your individual quirks and tics but those unconsciously internalized programs that span broad societies and groups and are historically, rather than individually, engendered.  I give examples from my own experiences and observations.

Lacking truth, desiring rigour

TRUE RELIGION AND SHAMANIC INITIATION


This video comes in three segments. They address the meaning of true religion, shamanic initiation and its relationship to knowledge and the heights and depths of consciousness that make up the shamanic experience.  I draw my knowledge from Bataille and Nietzsche predominantly, but also from my own experiences.

Ten Things That Cause Leaky Gut - Primal Docs

Ten Things That Cause Leaky Gut - Primal Docs

Leaky gut, or intestinal permeability, is a condition in which the lining of the small intestine becomes inflamed, damaged, and porous, allowing undigested foods, bacteria, fungus, and other foreign invaders into the sterile environment of the bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream these toxins trigger the immune system, causing inflammation and leading to a long and varied list of symptoms. Chronic conditions associated with leaky gut include depression, joint pain, Crohn’s disease, food allergies, eczema, psoriasis, asthma, autoimmune diseases, and more.

Sounds repulsive but it is probably more common than we think.

From my overview of related material, I can gauge that probably the oils we consume are not that good for coating the intenstine properly.  Avoiding Omega-6 fatty acids vegetable oils and opting for coconut oil may be a way to significantly improve one's health.

Butter is bad – a myth we've been fed by the 'healthy eating' industry | Joanna Blythman | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Butter is bad – a myth we've been fed by the 'healthy eating' industry | Joanna Blythman | Comment is free | theguardian.com

'The anti-sat-fat message has been used effectively by food manufacturers to woo us away from whole, natural foods, such as butter, which is only minimally processed, on to their products, which are entirely the opposite, such as margarine.' Photograph: Jupiterimages/Getty Images/Comstock Images

Judeo-Christian trolls





The LOGOS & tautology (taking oneself seriously): versus the rupture of the being, which is to say going beyond. 

***I'm not against true religion, but spare me your unconscious actors -- your trolls!

Saturday 26 October 2013

Knowledge and nonknowledge (Bataille)

Fist Position for the Left Hook

The rhetorical battle between modernity and old-fashioned character

Weird ramble, back from training

ordinariness

Ordinariness, in shamanic terms, is wholly different from the ordinariness of the bourgeois housewife.  Let me put it this way, in terms of Bataille's appraisal of Nietzsche.   Nietzsche, he said, was a kind of ultra-Christian, who aimed to succeed in uncovering the truth as much as possible.   That drive to success is the substance of moral transcendence.   His morality transcended the everyday Christian's morality.   It was more precise, more driven and more rigorous in its embrace of truth.   Finally Nietzsche succumbed to shamanic ordinariness.

The will to transcend is also the will to fall, Bataille surmises.   When Nietzsche's mind was broken down and he embraced an old horse in Turin, seeing reality anew, through tears and ecstasy, he encountered shamanic "ordinariness".  This is how the will to transcend leads to immanence, its dialectic opposite. There is only so far one can go in terms of transcending societal and philosophical norms until something snaps.

Bataille depicts Nietzsche's situation as an ICARIAN COMPLEX.  I'm inclined to the view that his appraisal makes sense in terms of physics alone.  You can't strain against societal norms forever, because the heat of the sun eventually melts one's wings and gravity claims another victim.

But perhaps Nietzsche desired this specific encounter with ordinariness all along, Bataille supposes.   It's not an ordinary ordinariness, after all, but one tinged with the perspectives of where one has been -- the heights one has scaled.

This notion of immanence is then very different from that of the bourgeois housewife who is locked inside her animality with a closed circle of consciousness all around her.   (Simone de Beauvoir makes a very astute critique of this other sort of state.)

Where one has been will tend to color the meaning of where has arrived, so that the same word doesn't depict the same sense of knowledge.

When I speak of taking minibuses through Zimbabwe, some people think I am talking about immanence in the obvious or "bourgeois housewife" sense, but I insist that I am relating my experiences in terms that are shamanic.


Normalizing culturally engendered differences

When a Woman's Libido Slows, Is It a Result of 'Disorders,' Boredom or Is It Normal? | Alternet

Really, people have to stop yanking at themselves and pretending it is science.   The more culturally engendered gender differences are explained away, the further we get from the truth.  Take this, for instance:

When Dr. Bella Ellwood-Clayton began to research female sexual desire, she found a commonality among women in long-term relationships -- one that many of us can surely relate to. While, initially, women’s libidos tended to match their male partners', as the relationship progressed, sex fell lower and lower on the list of priorities.

Another manufactured myth to make old biddies feel better about their trampled lives.


Renewed, finally, at last

I finally managed to renew myself again.   I found my way back to myself, another time, once more.

I said to my subconscious last night, take me back to a warzone.  

Then suddenly I was asleep.  I came downstairs into the hotel lobby, where all the staff were gathered as if for a meeting, crowded into one large hall.  Someone said they had been called down there by some aggressors who had since left.  I looked up and three masked men were still standing there, their faces covered in blue hessian.   They were very tall and thin like Ethiopians, but strong.  The situation was still dangerous.  

Luckily for me.   I find my soul restored when I am back at war.

Friday 25 October 2013

The negation of the negation

There exists a handicap that is far from physical.  If you have internalised a whole lot of false premises to the point that they have become instinct, you will feel thwarted in various aspects of your life.  People will act in ways they are not supposed to.  Your relationships will fail without you having any clear idea as to why.

The philosophy of the redemeer has worked its way under your skin to the point that it has become flesh.  Now you are dizzy and twisted.   You make endless sacrifices but then you latch onto the sadist who wants to exploit you, because his words somehow ring true, appealing to your twisted instincts.  

This redeemer haunting your soul needs to be exorcised so that you will rely on yourself alone.  

1.  One must negate the validity of his commands by training one's instincts to do the opposite to what he says.

2.  One must then negate the original presence of the messiah in one's heart.  This is the negation of the negation -- the only way to become free.

Weird Students | Clarissa's Blog

Weird Students | Clarissa's Blog


Perhaps there’s not enough irrationality in them. You need imagination, the capacity for pointless enjoyment, etc. to keep going.

WHIP ME GOOD


  • Hockey’s irresponsibility has reached new heights. Treasury documents prove he is deliberately blowing out deficit and debt to score political points – unnecessarily giving the RBA a capital injection, against the advice of Treasury.  Here is the clear advice: ''Institutionally, there have been no recent precedents for the Commonwealth to provide the RBA with a capital injection. To do so could create the perception that the RBA's viability and capacity to conduct monetary policy was beholden to the government and risk undermining the credibility of the RBA as an operationally independent institution.''  Mr Hockey has spent $9 billion for political purposes when a capital injection of that size was neither desirable or requested.  http://m.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/swan-took-treasury-advice-not-to-shore-up-rba-fund-20131025-2w7d8.html
    Hockey’s irresponsibility has reached new heights. Treasury documents prove he is deliberately blowing out deficit and debt to score political points – unnecessarily giving the RBA a capital injection, against the advice of Treasury. Here is the clear advice: ''Institutionally, there have been no recent precedents for the Commonwealth to provide the RBA with a capital injection. To do so could create the perception that the RBA's viability and capacity to conduct monetary policy was beholden to the government and risk undermining the credibility of the RBA as an operationally independent institution.'' Mr Hockey has spent $9 billion for political purposes when a capital injection of that size was neither desirable or requested. http://m.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/swan-took-treasury-advice-not-to-shore-up-rba-fund-20131025-2w7d8.html
    Like ·  · Unfollow Post ·  · Promote

Thursday 24 October 2013

Transgression

Transgression takes energy because you have to have enough force to push the two polarities of your being apart.  Most so-called "normal" people can't afford that energy and so are completely at one with themselves.  But they betray their better beings that way, as they don't feel enough depth in their psyches to even begin to question why things are they way they are.

Three More Years of This You Say – Fair Dinkum. « The Australian Independent Media Network

Three More Years of This You Say – Fair Dinkum. « The Australian Independent Media Network

‘’If the economy is in such a dire state, how did it retain its triple-A credit rating throughout the turbulent post-GFC years? And was the IMF mistaken in asserting only this month that Australia is expected to outperform all major advanced economies until at least 2018? Please explain this apparent contradiction to those of us who don’t have the benefit of an economics degree”.

Disgusting things

Habitual states of mind accustom you to different modes of life.  It seems obvious, but  this is far from being self-evident.  When we become accustomed to our own states, especially when they neatly correspond to the demands of our environment, we don't notice that these are actually rather specific states that allow you to adjust to a particular environment.   We had adapted and the circle around us has been closed to other states of mind.

Those who need to cope with violence daily often immerse themselves in a psychology of violence, so that when the crunchpoint comes, their psychological states are already perfectly attuned to combat.   Not everybody has to do this, but if they must, there would be nothing worse than having a mismatched psychological state for the job.

When I was being attacked at work those many years ago, I gradually learned to move closer to states of mind that enabled me to cope with the psychological violence.   I had already been experiencing that violence at home, in the years prior to the workplace situation, but I had never really taken those particular attacks seriously.   When the attacks come from a family member, you don't necessarily think of them as violence.   But that perspective changes when the hostilities come from outsiders.   Then, stupid, docile ignorance gives way to a dawning self-awareness along with sudden recognition of what has taken place all along.

When one is reliant on the higher mind alone, like working solely with colour vision, one does not see things.   One has to change from cones to rods -- from colorful excitement to sombre black and white vision.   Then one perceives that there are attacks and there are non-attacks.  One puts aside the self-consoling emotion that there are just different levels of unfortunate 'misunderstandings'.   Discernment kicks with  infrared vision and one sees things one had never seen before.

That was my original shamanic initiation, in straightfoward terms.    That when I learned that in fact allowing the negative emotions to come to the fore was necessary for survival.   It's the negativity of vision that gives you  your infrared, so you start to see what was there all along more clearly.

The lesson to keep aware of one's negativity and not to see all things in bubbly colour has stayed with me ever since this time.   To stay alert, every so often I immerse myself in knowledge of disgusting things.  Sometimes these things are just other people.  Sometimes they are myself.

True story.

Overestimating the commonalities of experience



We have some similarities as humans, but a great deal of who we are is predetermined by our historical circumstances, especially the aptitudes and accumulated spiritual resources of our ancestors. Let's not over-universalize the human condition. To understand our differences and to work hard with what we have accumulated from this past is at least as important as understand what we have in common.


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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (English)

Wednesday 23 October 2013

REPOST: THE IMPACT OF CULTURE ON PERCEPTION

For more about this, read my autobiography — and try to understand how Westerners might be viewed by someone with a very different cultural perspective (myself at 16).
A main cultural difference I see is that even in Zimbabwe — which has had huge racial conflicts — the culture/s there do not go in for identity politics with anything like the same self-certainty and gusto that they do in the West. This is due to the differences between white and black Zimbabwean culture and Western ontological categorising tendencies — we are not viewed as being so different from each other, rather we are seen as contrasting and conflicting tribes.

Death spaces

death spaces of signification (Taussig) = nonknowledge  (Bataille).

where language stops meaning something = ecstasy.

Ecstasy is a shamanic state.

Lacking truth, desiring rigour

Tuesday 22 October 2013

I've neglected my writing

Because I've been involved in clarifying, weighing and communicating my ideas by other means -- YouTube and email correspondence predominantly -- I have been neglecting my writing.

I want to return to writing in a more driven way.  The detour I've been taking has been to understand my potential audience and the limitations that are involved in having any sort of an audience.   Language, it seems to me, is culturally engendered and inculcated, and this is to a higher degree than I'd imagined when I was writing my PhD.   At the time I had presumed a greater universality in relation to meanings and ideas.

To understand that language is limited means one must start to write with this in mind.  One has to know oneself and where one is positioned in relation to certain chains of meaning.  I have a clearer idea of this now, thanks to a certain Internet interlocutor who nonetheless departed in a huff due to our differences over Christianity.

I'm not against Christianity for others, if they wish to partake of it, but being chastized and advised by others is not for me.  Using others' reports about me, as conveyed by me, as if it were objective truth about me, also shows a remarkable lack of psychological sophistication.   What others report, what others say, can be a form of madness.   There are no divine perceptions, just the human thread of meaning, which by being pulled produces distortions in the original fabric.  To pull on the thread is to unravel my meaning and my sense of what is valuable.   It does no service to objective truth.

And to be plain, it is not even an effective form of oneupmanship.   It reveals itself, rather.  To tear apart meaning by pulling on the negative aspects of it reveals that one has a passive orientation to life and an indifferent attitude to friendship.  It's passive -- because one accepts that meaning is superimposed -- and indifferent because one places equal worth or more on what strangers may say, without bothering to court the one with whom one wishes to be friends.

This is the kind of audience I do not wish to write for, not because there's something wrong with them exactly, but because they're unlike me in values and perception.   My goal in life is not to morally perfect myself, but writing in a way that doesn't appeal to Judeo-Christian mores tends to invite the sort of criticism I have found to be pointless.   It can be pointed out, for instance, that I don't have feminine virtues along the lines desired by believers.   Or it can be said that I don't take advice from those who only want to pull my threads of meaning.  More generally, it might be noted that there are improvements to be made.

All of these observations have their basis in fact.  But fact is fact.  It isn't friendship or something elevated like that.   It's not depth of insight.   It's not anything really.   We all have facts as the baseline of our existence.   Those relate to our basic concrete nature, our inescapable contingency.   Just as I can point out that aspects of the audience's life do not transcend basic, concrete facts, they can point this out about me.   Where we differ is that I don't see that having facts about me is indicative of sinfulness.   Yes, we are flesh, not spirit, but that's not a sign of degradation -- It's just normal.

I see myself as an advocate for a form of normality that has fallen into disrepute.   It's a false reckoning to say that I am trying to be special, when I'm not attempting such a feat. I'm aiming to be ordinary.   But then I do have very special reasons for this  -- in that I don't think many people know what ordinary is.  They revile the ordinariness within themselves.   But because they aspire to be more than what they are and fail, they imagine I must be feeling the same way.   I don't -- my failures more than anything else have returned me to myself.    I am inordinately happy with the way things have turned out.   I like to be myself, which has a good sensation to it.

Don't get me wrong:  this is hardly a passive mode.   It's just that I've conquered my worst fears and can settle in and enjoy life.  The kind of life I've worked hard to achieve is not within the boundaries of community, but on the sidelines.   That feels comfortable to me.   I want to write for people who enjoy a more detached perspective.

That is all.

XXX


Cultural barriers to objectivity