Repost

For a long time, I have been very clear in my mind that a shamanistic approach to life is completely at odds with a patriarchal one. Consider how patriarchy obstructs one's vision of the world, by compelling the patriarch to believe that life is simpler than it is.

A patriarch has adopted an emotional outlook, which has become formulised in an ideology of some sort. The key purpose of the patriarchal strategy is to flatten out the landscape so that nothing novel can enter within range. The only configurations of life that approach the patriarchal throne will be those that have already been anticipated.

Clearly, the problem with this strategy is that life is full of novel elements, and because of this, one could encounter all sorts of things that one had not anticipated. This is a problem indeed -- but as I said, patriarchal thinking deals with this problem of novelty by flattening the environment.

"Flattening the environment" is a strange expression, which needs explaining. For how does one flatten that which is intrinsically abroil with novelty and strangeness?

Even the ocean has its currents and its unpredictability, after all.

The way that patriarchy flattens, then, is by refusing to see what it actually there. More accurately, patriarchal thinking oversimplifies the world, so that what was peculiar, rare, and ornate, appears to be instead, austere, common-place and rather simple.

Extremely patriarchal cultures protect themselves from complex reality with the hijab, but most patriarchal cultures practice some form of reality simplification and intellectual asceticism.

"Thinking", such as it is permitted to take place within a patriarchal culture, still happens at a very low level, but it is rigid, predictable, unengaged, and uninspired.

A shaman, by contrast with our reality-undaunted patriarch, is one who lives in order to encounter what is novel.  this person specifically unblinkers the facility of vision for this purpose of catching life in its strangeness and variations. Keeping things at a distance with an ideology that commands, "You must be severely flattened, conceptually, (if not always entirely in actuality, before you can enter my presence!" is not shamanistic. 

Rather, it is cowardly (a characteristic that the shaman can never be accused of having).

The patriarch, however, believes that his attitudinal stance is fearsome.

He's right -- if cowardliness can be considered fearsome. (As an entrenched character trait, this can be frightening to behold.)

To have to rely upon someone who regularly expresses this character trait could be terrifying indeed.

Imagine having to rely upon a pilot who does not have the maturity to fly the plane after all, and you will understand why women sometimes consider that they must make every effort to improve the state of mind of their resident patriarch. 

My tendency -- being a skydiver by nature -- is simply to abandon hope.

Repost

One of the reasons why subtlety FUNCTIONS EFFECTIVELY as part of the masterly disposition is that it simply requires less energy. Another reason is that one is much more likely to keep one’s position in a state of power if one’s actions are smooth and virtually undetectable. Another is that, because this mode of behavior has developed over the evolution of history, similar types recognise others by their mannerisms.

Not being subtle is the prerogative of the powerless — and it is a real prerogative -- however I do not desire it for myself as it does not fit my disposition.  

It is the height of masterfulness to be able to use subtelty EVEN WHEN one has very little power. I call that almost shamanic subtelty. To exercise subtlelty from a position of disempowerment requires a lot more knowledge and experience than to exercise it from a position of real material advantage.

It works best when someone is playing a crude hand against you. They are actively showing their disrespect by playing with you crudely. That gives a clear signal that they do not expect masterfulness. In that case, the key is to keep a clear head. You don’t want to hurt them (that would be crude), but you want to remain masterful.

The problem with those who are not masterful is that they play their hand. They are so convinced of winning that they underestimate what they have put at stake.

It is basic judo. You defeat them with their own arrogance.

I will reduce myself via biologism?

THAT'S THE EXPERIMENT
By the way, I'm still having fun with the video focus mechanism, whilst letting you know of the consequences of embracing the current age's ideology of biologism (the idea that our biology gives us all the meaning we need to live a human life).

My "gut instinct" has a masculine taste

CF.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/18/244526773/gut-bacteria-might-guide-the-workings-of-our-minds

Repost: shamanic terms

If one considers the three tier system posited by the shamanistic world view, which can be seen to have rough correlation with Paul MacLean's TRIUNE BRAIN (as a loose theoretical construct, rather than as necessarily a scientific one), one can theorize both the possibility of ascent and descent from the here and now of everyday bodily awareness.

Either one ascends by detaching from the body (and from the immediacy of its emotional needs) or one descends still more deeply into the inner structures of bodily drives and dispositions (most conventionally called 'the unconscious').

The term, "dissociation", which in this case involves, in one instance, transcendence (moving away from the body without losing the existence of the body) or, alternatively descending more deeply into it (without losing the possibility of returning to normal consciousness of bodily states within the here and now) does not, therefore, imply emotionalism.  (NB.  The meaning of "dissociation" is definitively pathological according to contemporary psychology, nonetheless the ingestion of psychoactive drugs was to enable the spirit to fly away from the body, in traditional shamanic lore.)

My adapted use of the term is intended shamanically, to suggest obtaining a distance from oneself, through experiencing doubling, which involves moving away from being fixed in time and place by the body, back and forth into the future and transcending and descending (into heaven and hell -- abstract thinking versus visceral torment -- in relation to the limited confinements of the physical state of being).

Repost: Critiquing Donald Meltzer

He ties in sexual energy with the direct access to (what I would call) the lizard brain's various modalities of consciousness -- power awareness, knowledge awareness and so on. (I am due to once again review his book, The Claustrum.)

I believe the point at issue here is that one stumbles across some explosive internal psychical energy that enables one to shift between the various levels of consciousness from high to low. Meltzer, who writes in the  tradition of Melanie Klein and object relations, has alighted up sexual energy then, as the energetic means by which consciousness shifts. Of course he also doesn't speak of shamanising, but rather of modes of pathology.

Taking from him, indirectely, I can understand, in theory, the psychical melting power of sexual desire -- however I'm  also  inclined to think that rage, even more than sexual energy, is able to open doors of awareness if one's mind has been blocked for too long.  But that is shamanism, not psychoanalysis, since the latter pathologises anything that deviates from established notions of convention.  Meltzer, by the way, is hostile to the use of sexual energy in ways that don't create adherence to already existing forms of reality.  It is possible that his conceptualisation of reality is not deeply philosophical.

Talking shamanically once again, once one has entered R-complex consciousness, one has access to a whole modality of thinking whereby identity and power become pliable to other parts of human consciousness.

Rage gave me the energy to move in ways defensive and offensive -- as if I had suddenly advance to a totally different level of understanding, that was separate from normal, everyday consciousness, and yet not apart from it.  It is likely that, because negative emotions were entirely denied to me as a person being brought up in the Rhodesian feminine modality, to acknowledge and express them gave me insights into an entirely new channel of communication that others had been using on a different frequency all the time.  I tapped into their frequency and thus I understood a great deal more than I had previously done.

And speaking shamanically, again, I did not,  at any stage, lose my 'reason'. Indeed by accessing an awareness of the power complex, all my actions could become multiple times more accurate and instrumental.  My awareness of this level was also at the same time a movement that transcended it, but in knowledge not in blind oblivion of it.  

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THE ALLEY

Object relations psychoanalysis teaches us that as humans we retain many of the intrapsychological devices concerned with ego self-regulation, from our early childhood. As adults we defend our position within the status quo by projecting, for instance, the qualities of masterliness upwards within a hierarchy, so as if to perceive our social context as if our own superior qualities were emanating from elsewhere, from those in the strata of social hierarchy above us. (Menzies Lyth). Likewise, in order to adapt to the logic of a pre-existing social hierarchy, we may be inclined to project downwards, onto those in the social strata below us, our negative psychological qualities, being those we find less desirable in ourselves – in the terms of Menzies Lyth, we project downwards our incompetencies.

To project upwards or downwards elements of ourselves means that we lose touch with those particular elements. Along with the infantile, but nonetheless adaptive tactic of projection is the splitting of the self, so that parts of the self are acknowledged as being “really me”, whereas others are dissociated from, as being “other”. The loss of parts of oneself – whether that be in the form of the sense of ones competency or the sense of one’s human fallibility (as the loss of the sense of this is also a loss in terms of self-understanding) comes under the contemporary or “new age” shamanistic rubric as “soul loss”. The restoration of the “soul” – that is, of one’s true self, existing in a form that isn’t compromised by social and political necessities – is the key to shamanistic healing. It is not just the individual who is restored and made whole by virtue of “soul retrieval” [term: Ingerman]. Society as a whole needs restoration from the states produced by primeval splitting, in order to move from stress-related (pathological) modes of coping towards a healthier model of relating within the social whole.

“The Alley” is a play that deals with this issue of societal and individual healing, through an encounter with the split-off aspects of the self. The play examines the traumatic legacy of post-war Zimbabwe (post the second Chimurenga that ended in 1980). Marechera is keen to show how the dissociation from the past and therefore from aspects of one’s self, in post war Zimbabwe, leads to a mode of forgetfulness that is the forgetting of the self. In such a condition, one goes through life without the sense of who one really is, or how one got there. One needs to face the trauma of the past in order to affect “soul retrieval” – that is, in order to become who one is, again.

In “The Alley”, a black and white tramp struggle with their tendencies to forget, as they fraternise in the streets of Harare, unable to recognise the cause of their demise. They had both fought in the war of liberation on opposite sides, and they had both had the privileged status of career lawyers, before making their descent into the grey mists of fugue and loss of social status, entailed in living the hobo lifestyle. Marechera borrows from Beckett – in particular from “Waiting for Godot” – in his idea of exploring the life of tramps through an aesthetic and conceptual lens of forgetfulness. His approach involves more of a psychological and political study of post-war Zimbabwe, however, rather than being concerned with an existential statement of the human condition, which is how Beckett has generally been read.

The complication that Marechera introduces in “The Alley” is the question of gender and how that impacts on how trauma and recovery are experienced. Whereas Beckett also subtly implies a gendered aspect to his play in naming one of his male tramps Estragon (which sounds like estrogen), Marechera takes the issue of gender much further, in order to show that post-war trauma in his contemporary Zimbabwe of the eighties, had a distinctly gendered quality. His mode of writing is both slapstick – Cecil Rhodes is introduced as “Cecilia” – and tear-jerking. This tragicomic mode is designed to break down the current ego-defences of the audience, with their current stress-based and probably pathological adaptations to the social world. It is designed to guide us, through laughter and tears, to see the real tragedy of those whose lives and potential were sacrificed during the bush war. Only then, upon recognition of what was sacrificed and lost, can a real restoration of the soul begin to take place. As is common in Marechera’s writing, the aesthetics of the play are based upon the tacit psychological understanding that others often constitute the “other” that is really a part of myself, and not something entirely separate from me. Just as we might be inclined to socially eschew the other for being black or of the wrong gender, so we are also socially invested in maintaining the status quo that keeps others at a hierarchical distance as the psychologically dissociated aspects of oneself. To be compelled to know the other, through tears and laughter, is to come to know the socially alienated aspects of one’s self – the aspects denied when one adapts to a social role, within what is normal in society: a social hierarchy.


Marechera’s work is anarchistic in that he shows to us the link between psychological self-alienation and societies that are organised on the basis of political and social hierarchies. The cost we pay for the latter is in terms of the former. In terms of the patriarchal and socially conservative society that was post-war Zimbabwe (and as it still is to a very large degree), Marechera’s exploration of the gendered base of traumatic dissociation is very radical indeed. Marechera shows that Rhodesia, on the sides of both black and white cultures, has had a patriarchal history, and leaves a patriarchal legacy to those in the present. To fully heal, society has to face that which it has dissociated from – which is hidden behind “the wall” of consciousness, in the unconscious or semi-conscious parts of the mind. Marechera points out that whereas the black and white men fought each other like “dogs in heat” ( p 46) , redirecting their erotic impulses towards aggression, those who really paid the emotional cost of the war were women – specifically the daughter and sister of the black and white men (who are represented by the two tramps).

The traumatic reality that hides behind the wall is the damage done by this excessive “sexual” self-indulgence of the bush war to the women whom the men had no doubt sworn to protect. Rhodes – the black tramp – has been given slightly greater authority by author in terms of the moral ground for fighting for his liberation. It is he who introduces his “other” – the white tramp, Robin – to the spectre of his sister, Cecilia, who was raped and murdered by the Rhodesian forces, and now abides behind “the wall” of consciousness.

RHODES: Your daughter, Judy, is right there with her. I can see them. They are kissing.

Robin’s daughter, in turns out, was also a victim of the war, raped and murdered by the black “comrades”. Only when the brick wall in the alley is struck, with determination to know what is behind it, does it give us these traumatic answers concerning the cause of the tramps’ pathologies. Rhodes to Robin, is speaking again with a margin of greater authority than his colleague has the right to:

I used to suffer from world weariness, but the wall says that too was nothing. I cannot get away from you, though that’s the only thing I want from life, from the whole last ounce of the universe. You also want to get away, but like me, you can’t, and for the same reason. I am your wall, and you are my wall. And the game we tried during the war of mounting each other like dogs in severe heat has not yet been settled. ( p 46)

The way to healing is to confront the traumatic and dissociated (and feminine!) aspects of these men’s psyches, which lies behind their wall.

WORKING WITH A HEIGHTENED AWARENESS OF SUPEREGO

Repost

Identity politics is primeval -- rooted in the pre-Oedipal*. It always evokes a "metaphysics of presence" (term from Derrida); the "good breast versus the bad breast" (terms from Melanie Klein).

Those who say that they are postmodern, and yet invoke identity politics at every turn are engaging in primeval sorcery, because they believe that they see more at hand than is actually capable of presenting itself to them.

A "metaphysics of presence" is fundamentally an erroneous or "magical" way of seeing. It is erroneous because it oversimplifies what is actually there to be seen and understood. It is "magical" because this mode of seeing is creative and inventive, actively constructing what it claims to perceive, rather than passively observing it.

The "metaphysics of presence" is unavoidably postmodern, since the postmodernist must make initial reference to presences that "appear" to him or her, before deconstructing these appearances through clashing them against other "appearances". The postmodernist, then, is involved in masking as well as unmasking, and plays the role of a kind of magician.

Ultimately, what is lost -- psychologically and ontologically -- though the mutual clashing and splintering of opposed identities is not the firmness of reality as such(as with a postmodernist interpretation of the world), but the firmness of the boundaries of identity. It is these that shatter and fragment, leaving only the core of a vulnerable human essence (Note: not as an "absence" but fundamentally as a "presence" of core humanity, stripped of its identity postulates. This is the nakedness of the human soul that we encounter at the end of Black Sunlight.)

In Marechera's writing,  the pure essence of human experience is on display, with the other signifiers of presence (such as race and gender) shattered and gone.

We are thus "wrecked out of our wounds", according to Marechera.  In this particular case, which is far from being postmodern, what wrecks us is also that whicht redeems us. We rediscover our true humanity as a human core only after experiencing an overwhelming imposition of the metaphysics of presence through a visceral encounter with opposing and contradictory identities. It is this encounter that wrecks us "out of our wounds".  Intellectual shamanism thus takes us way beyond postmodernism and its fascination with identities.

The postmodernist, who retreats periodically to his or her island of skepticism, cannot lay claim to the same sort of shamanistic experience of reading.

NOTE: *Jungians see this early childhood level of consciousness as being simply different from the rational, adult norm.  It's a realm of transformation and mystical consciousness.  We all have components of that  in us; the ability to see ourselves as part of life's  great "oneness".

WORKING WITH A HEIGHTENED AWARENESS OF SUPEREGO

Get a better working knowledge of your own mechanism of self-condemnation, which would bring you into utter servitude and utter fearful conformity. Down with the Islamic State! Up with freedom of individual expression.

The psychology of the new left

Whether they are sometimes postmodernists, sometimes free-thinkers or sometimes Stalinists, there are those who consider it their moral duty to upbraid you on you alleged unconscious racism. They get their feelings hurt when you tell them not to do that or that you have already developed a political and intellectual conscience of your own.

Millions of Australians are feeling very, very upset : Abbott - The West Australian

Millions of Australians are feeling very, very upset : Abbott - The West Australian:



'via Blog this'

Shamanic feminism? Looking at things from the outside-in

To understand the potential of intellectual shamanism for feminism, one has to be able to take a perspective from the outside-in with regard to an understanding of emotional expressiveness. Those brought up under extreme authoritarianism will not always find it easy to emote, or indeed to access effectively their own personal thoughts.

THE INTERNAL DYNAMICS OF SUPEREGO SHAMANISM

A very important video, that ought to clear up some misunderstandings.
I believe that many people can feel threatened when they sense that others map the psyche differently from how they do. I'm trying to show why we don't need to see superego shamanism as a threat, but as a way of defeating an internal threat. I'm sure that sometimes one may wish to defeat external threats by seeming dangerous to others, but in my case the real point is to defend one's existing psychological range, in relation to oneself only. Those who have a different structure to their mind, because of their different historical positioning, will tend not to implicitly understand this process, so will try to impose guilt and shame. This leads to a dropping off of performance, because if the voice of internal condemnation gets too loud, one is unable to access one's own emotions and feelings, which means one is unable to gain access to the feelings of others and determine if they are reasonable. Superego shamanism is a practice and an ongoing cure for those brought up in very harsh circumstances, who may feel their voice of reason being drowned out by criticism.

Some guy posted this

The Real Tragedy about Colonialism

25 February 2015 at 13:09

Almost daily one reads shrill laments about colonialism, mostly from folk who never even experienced any of it. The complainants are adept at blaming long dead Caucasians for the current socio-economic plight of our African people across the continent.
Zimbabwe which, as at Independence in April 1980, had the best resources,infrastructure and human capitol in Africa, now languishes in the bottom four (4) poorest nations on the planet. Members of the“ignorant masses”, quislings and beneficiaries of incompetent, corrupt governments routinely sally forth, claim and posture that the reason for the very bad state of affairs in African countries is to be laid at the door of colonialists and even something now called “neo-colonialists”.
These claims are made as regards countries that have been independent for over 50 years and, in the case of Zimbabwe,33 years.
They bandy these accusations about while loving and lusting for just about everything that can hardly be called “African” such as modern homes, money, clothes, cars, televisions … etc … etc … [see picture].
Of course this mindset has been promoted,encouraged and instilled by the incompetent and corrupt governments we have as a sure fire strategy to distract our gullible people from the real cause of their plight.  When people are crying about imaginary enemies, they are blind to the current reality. The 3rd Reich did this in Germany by postulating the Jews as the problem.

Just recently, none other than the President of South Africa, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, had the nerve to claim that load shedding ofelectricity, in his incredibly resourced country, was due to apartheid that ended some twenty-one (21) years ago. The obvious reason was, in fact, incompetent management of energy resources.

When indulging in these “blame storming” rants about the invasion of Africa by colonialists, it is also the norm to postulate Africa as having been a peaceful continent in which the “goodness” of African culture abounded. The harsh reality of the subsistence level, "iron age", strife ridden, and highly patriarchal, despotic and tyrannical way of life then largely endured by struggling tribes, is simply glossed over as apologists for Africa’s current failure mount their attacks and excuses on the colonialists.

The reality is that colonialism was inevitable. From the time Cain killed Abel the culture of “venture forth, increase and multiply, invade, conquer and subjugate” had been the universal culture of man on this planet. The Greeks did it; the Romans did it; the Vikings did it; Genghis Khan did it. Ghengis Khan is credited with having killed more humans in his invasion of Asia than were killed in the last two world wars. There is hardly a region that did not have this experience. Our people simply ignore this historical reality and especially that our very own King Shaka Zulu, Mzilikazi and Lobengula did exactly the same thing in this region. Their mfecane campaigns depopulated whole regions in these parts. Cecil John Rhodes and Shaka had exactly the same culture, i.e, that "might was right". It was the way of the World back then.
The World only changed its mind about the culture of “might is right” in 1948, when it signed off on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations after two (2) bloody World Wars and the Holocaust.

Like the rest of the World and Africa, this region was hardly a place of peace, order, prosperity and brotherly love. For instance Zimbabwe was a region that had been invaded by Mzilikazi, who arrived from the South. When the colonialists arrived the region was in the grip of Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi,who was despotic as regards his own Amandebele people and tyrannical as regards the rest. Lobengula would throw a spear into the ground and his impis would then go in that direction and raid, kill, maim, rob and rape all and sundry encountered as a matter of routine.
The reality therefore was that life was tough for our people in Africa ... very tough indeed.  It is a truism that the little mosquito had most of Africa in check, ensuring that regions could never be overpopulated on account of malaria.
What brings this into very sharp focus is the issue of the slave trade. Africans were just as complicit in the slave trade as were the masters of the ships that arrived to collect them.  It was Africans that delivered and sold their own to the slave ships.
As said, this region was no different. It was a harsh, brutish struggle for survival for all our people who had not yet even advanced to having invented the wheel, that the rest of the World had for over 4,000 years.

What Africa did have in somewhat limitless abundance was wild life. It is nigh impossible to describe how richly blessed Africa was as regards fauna and flora. Great herds of antelope and elephant roamed freely across vast plains. Noble animals such as lion, rhinoceros and leopard lived and flourished in abundance. 

I had a glimpse of what it was like when I visited Botswana in September, 1975. Botswana was a huge country and sparsely populated, just as Africa had been. It was then the fourth (4^th) least developed country in the World.
Sitting in camp at Savuti we were surrounded by wild animals of every description, including lion. Wildebeest grunted, buffalo bellowed, baboons screeched, hyena wailed, elephants trumpeted, lions roared one night ... until the very ground was vibrating in response to a crescendo of quadraphonic sound that went through to my very soul.
At that moment my own mortality and insignificance in the grand scheme of things was brought home to me with intensity that has never left me. In an instant I realized that I was just one part, a teeny weenie part of a creation that is actually unimaginable.

In that grand scheme of things animals were dominant ... very, very much so.
Man was but just one part of an infinitely variable, beautiful tapestry of vibrant life in which animals were dominant.

Alas it is no more.
Selfish, brutish, acquisitive and mercenary man has cruelly invaded, conquered and destroyed the wondrous world that Africa once was.
Our people have actually materially benefited from colonialism, in that they were picked up to join the rest of the World with its technological advancements.  To-day some are adept at using PCs, that are products of that advancement, to complain, point fingers and blame.

But it is Africa’s animals that have suffered … suffered terribly … with many now facing extinction.

To-day many of our African governments with Botswana. led by President Ian Khama being an exception, are fully complicit in the decimation of Africa's richest heritage, having been corrupted by an avaricious,  acquisitive and mercenary culture.
That is the real tragedy of Africa.

Video 34

THE SCOPE OF INTELLECTUAL SHAMANISM

Not everything is competitive individualism

Power and compassion at the same time

The powerful lure of the contemporary ideology of biologism

Defining the scope of "Superego Shamanism"

Not everything is competitive individualism

Defining the scope of "Superego Shamanism"

Recognising that there are different channels of communication

Repost: THE STRUCTURE OF THE PSYCHE AND CONCEPTUAL RIGIDITY

Revisiting the Oedipus complex:

An incorrect way of reading Marechera is:

1. nihilistically -- as a "postmodern" and as if he were merely rearranging ideas "on the surface", somewhat dadaistically, and in order to amuse himself, whilst not criticizing the established orders that he was actually intent on criticizing.

2.   Since, according to Michael Mack's Freud,  Kant's  Categorical Imperative is "The Oedipus Complex", due to its rigid structural imperatives relating to morality, one ought not to reads Marechera in a kind of subconscious tone of, "Yes, but all the moral answers are already entirely obvious to my abstract thinking mind."  If one does so, your own conceptual rigidity is blinding you to what the author has to say about social and psychological complexity.

T points the author wants to make are about society and how we actually experience it without a divine law to mediate its effects and empirical. "Blindness" is a feature of assuming one has already grasped everything about the world when there is still something more to grasp.

I perceive the whole Freudian system of complexes to be a huge metaphor about one's relationship to power.   In terms of this, the Oedipus complex leads to a division between the primeval self and the intellectual self, such that one is never satisfied by having assimilated language. One is in doubt whether this language is not the true language, the most efficacious language, the language that will nurture and not mislead one, the language of a true progenitor and not of a spurious host, the language that is likely to last, and not be cast aside by more superior linguistic forms, the language that really is what-it-seems-to-be and not other.

To assimilate the father's law through language under these terms is fraught. One may introject the law entailed in a number of languages -- but who is it to guarantee that this is THE language? -- the one guaranteed forever? According to my understanding of the logic that must hold sway over psychoanalysis as a structural mode, the resolution of the so-called "Oedipus complex" is facilitated through the acceptance of "castration".   This resignation to being controlled by the orthodoxy of power is the gateway that however takes us away from self-awareness and direct experience of personal impulses and above all mreoves one from mystical enjoinment with the world.  One enters into a fraught relationship with language itself through an excessive reliance on its pure potency.

This produces a cascading structure to reality, where one has to deal with more and more layers of the onion of identity.  The self is never viewed in is whole state, but always somehow perpetually changes before one's eyes as the levels of the self have been covered over more and more with layers of convention. In a lopsided manner, one keeps growing and growing as one assimilates new information about language, about its implications and insinuations that separate us from our primal layer of our self-perceptions. At the same time, the primal self keeps shrinking and shrinking as we find more in the language we had come to trust, which we had already assimilated and introjected as our own law,  turns out to be false. The self is thus constantly destabilized. The truth about one's condition ever recedes and reality has an elusive quality.

On the other hand, there is historically engendered instability.  A child of the colonies, for example, I, or Marechera, is the bastard child of an elusive father whose historical presence would not stick around long enough for an ideology to have become entirely entrenched.  Recent colonialism was, therefore, an ideology which produces children with an identity on the move. I am sure that Marechera and I failed to  'grow up' in quite the sense that those of a more predictable culture would have expected.  Perhaps we never become crystallized and firm.  It is a mistake to take us for plants or grass, since we are changelings.  We are capable of shocking and scandalizing through our non-acquiescence to expected norms, but we are rarely disappointing in our imaginative prowess.

Repost on immaturity

Outlaw MRAs! | Clarissa's Blog





He also keeps using the expression of "clamored" up the stairs (twice now), when I think he means, "clambered" (like an ape).



Really the thing to do when one is down and out is to laugh at oneself.  I also had similar troubles around his age crying every Christmas, for reasons that I didn't know why ....maladjustment and not feeling any nourishing sensation from life.



The key is to access the negative part of the dialectic better -- one's own trauma. I hadn't acknowledged my tremendous losses in being uprooted from Africa and hence I hadn't mourne.  And sexual messiness.  You have to take risks, if you can find anything attractive or interesting that can lure you in.   Of course women are a little different from men, at least in my own experience, because at that age (22 or so) I wasn't interested in sex, but more in exploring nature and the environment, which I needed to be a sensual experience at that point. Then again, I was also very repressed.



But I can understand, at least abstractly, what he is going on and on about.  Other than this, I'm from Africa where a strict hierarchy was in place and one is never on top, so I would never have had that sense of entitlement to go around killing people.


Certainly, one has to grow OUT OF one's immaturity and there are ways to do so.

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Key to Marechera’s "shamanism" was his ability to gain astounding insights whilst cognitively undergo a level of ego deflation (which, of course, he relates to us in a state of mind that is moderated by cognitive maturity). This is a useful state of mind employed by artists, that Anton Erenhzweig terms “dedifferentiation” (and which pertains, in psychanalytical terms, to the "pre-oedipal" field -- the strange sense of power dynamics that one locks into in early childhood).  At the most primal level of this infancy stage, thing melts into another, whereby male and female, black and white identities do not yet exist. Once all the solid elements of reality have been reduced as part-pieces of a primeval “oneness”, the hidden relationships between these elements can be explored.

Facing them in their relatively molten state of cognitive “dedifferentiation”, Marechera is able to see new alignments of the dynamic forces that constitute identity, and to reintegrate the elements at will, into his artistic and Utopian political vision. What is shamanistic about this is that he appears to see, as it were, the spiritual counterparts of concrete social and historical identities, as being more than fixed in the solidity of the Rhodesian world, in terms, for instance of the crystalline identity of the white master and his black servant. Instead, Marechera’s viewpoint is inherently redemptive (politically and artistically), for he views those he comes across in terms of their creative but repressed potentialities and not just in terms of their limits within the historically contingent reality.

One’s identity in the primal field is also a product of probability – as in the novel, Black Sunlight.  If 'wave theory is unto particle theory as the unconscious is to the conscious mind,' a shamanistic turn might be wave theory is to particle theory as is primal self in relation to its actualised fact (and contextually limited actuality). Work produced on the basis of a cognitively dedifferentiated sense of the world, may be grasped by the reader not logically -- that is in terms of cause and effect, or in terms of a subject and his field -- but intuitively and holistically at a subliminal and visceral level.

Marechera’s contemporary shamanism is creative as well as being politically purposeful. It evokes  the three stages of artistic process defined by Anton Ehrenweig. There is first the breaking down of reality, by deliberate cognitive dedifferentiation, next is the rearrangement of the elements of cognition in a new artistic pattern (did the ancient rock painters engage in this same process?). Finally, Ehrenweig points to a stage of reassimilation of the features created in the work of art, under the guidance of unconscious processes, into the conscious awareness of the artist who created the work. This final stage lies behind the paradoxical outcome of the shaman’s psychological “great health” (despite his obvious maladies) as well as the artist’s higher level of insight compared to others.

Ref.

Godwin, Robert W 1991. Wilfred Bion and David Bohm: Toward a Quantum Metapsychology. . Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 14 (4):625-654

DEPICTING THE STRUCTURE OF VIOLENCE

TUMBULAR 15

They would cold-bloodedly murder two of my best friends, take them out and shoot them in the chest.  I realized I wasn't perfect since I was also tainted with the impurities of the historical past and no doubt my own imperfections reflected badly on them.  I was harsh and brutal and had walked with muddied feet.  I had to clear out my own backyard if I wanted any favorurs, but where to start?  This room was filled with pig shit.  I mean, I'm also tainted.  What was that noxious smell, the one that persisted in following me everywhere.  Whence the repugnant odour?

 I couldn't make any plans for tumbulations.   My best plans seemed not to ever to work.   They were all messed up in some way or another. Before the ink was dried, there appeared a vile residue over all of my papers, everything.  Nobody would believe in evil spirits, but it is as if there were some, hungry, waiting.

I'd started again, patiently, with an ever-increasing determination to do things right,  but it kept getting messed up again during the daylight.  The fingers of light had wreaked havoc through the small blinds.  This was no photographic darkroom, nor had it been intended as one, but rather a semi-restored bunker or block house, half above the ground, half submerged.  They'd set it up for me.  I don't think they'd thought too deeply about it.    I had to go through the process of working, but they never looked at the results.  The point was to make us suffer, not to gain by productivity.

That's why they never looked at the results.  I understood I was to be paraded around the city with my hands tied behind my back.  They promised this would remove the taint all three of us had acquired during the infantry stage.  That was when we were trying to be soldiers.  They'd taken all our weapons and given us lessons.  These lessons came in there parts.  The first was learning to doubt our own history and to put our memories of it aside.  The second was learning to attack oneself rather than others (once again in this mode of self-doubt).  The third phase is what they called politely rehabilitation.  It involved sitting in this darkened room and coming up with ideas for tumbulations. Needless to say our models for tumbulations were not meant to be effective, as our failure was intended to further demoralize ourselves.   This was for our own good; to bring us out of the infantry stage so that we would only look back on it with horror.   We learned to expect the daily degradations as good for us, because our training in the infantry stage had made us indifferent to all pain, or even partly welcoming of it.  We'd learned our lessons.

But they still shot my two best friends, as if they'd never learned a thing.   And we learned from that, too, that any future success with any designs for tumbulations would be kept to ourselves.  We'd build one, a really super one, and we'd get ourselves out of here.  That was the fourth lesson.  It was imparted although it was never actually taught.

Minus the Morning: Jennifer Armstrong: 9781326160180: Amazon.com: Books

Minus the Morning: Jennifer Armstrong: 9781326160180: Amazon.com: Books

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I’m not close enough to tell if American religiosity is hysteria. What I do notice is compared to British crime dramas, Americans tend to make out that there is such a thing as real, palpable, evil — and not just psychological states.

This assumption, that people are, at their baseline, nasty, appears to me to thread itself throughout American culture. For instance, see my conversation with cliff arroyo yesterday, where I was trying to get across the idea that men who are anxious to read women as highly emotional creatures will end up mis-reading any failure to confess all one’s emotions as signalling intent to willfully manipulate the other. Cliff constantly misread everything I’d written as if I were saying: “Yes, women are deceptive or manipulative.”

This is the effect of the weight of religiosity on America. It has entered even secular life, to the point that neutrality is hard to understand. I’m not saying America is the only country with this problem. Australia also has it to an alarming degree, in its embrace of identity politics, which does not allow anyone to take a neutral position without seeming to harbor some evil intent or manipulative orientation.

A secular view would dispense with the notion that we all have knowable but hidden motivations. Communication becomes hindered to the extreme when “demographic” or “identity” suffices to clue others in one “hidden motivations”, which do not actually exist, but are ascribed to one.


2.  About the commonly held view that women are emotional and manipulative: this whole assumption makes communication seem to be redundant. Of course, the key word here is “seem”. If women externalize their minds, via the medium of emotion, one always knows what they are feeling. That would be logical.  Each woman would be an open book. First, she’s crying, now she’s acting hysterical in another way, now she’s belly-aching about the other thing she belly-aches about. No need to ask her what she’s thinking, as it’s written all over her. That is, unless she is deliberately withholding something in a way that isn’t true to her emotional nature. Well, it’s true to her manipulative nature, but not to her emotional nature — that is, true to her evil side, but not to her good side, which is where she allows herself to be read like a book. She’s holding something back, probably acting “like a man”, and this necessitates the pratical effort to  attempt communication with her for the first time.

But communication on neutral premises is impossible for a religious mind-set. To such a mind, one must find out what has corrupted her true female emotionalism, giving the impression that she’s holding something back.  One must find the hidden, nefarious motivation she is harboring.

This search for something evil is mistakenly called “communication” by those tainted with religiosity.

And real communication....?

Passion, genuine language, emotion and gender

The disbelief in one's own very existence

Three part video on the descent into biologist culture from a spiritual/heroic one, the differences in expectations of power and maturity and gender relations in a traditional, patriarchal society.The crossroads between tradition and modernity (3 parts)

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If, when people speak to you, the movements of your mind are reflexively vertical, you may benefit from superego shamanism.  If they are reflexively lateral, you will not.

For me swift lateral movements are very difficult in a competitive setting, because they take longer.  My mind has to go through a few vertical, analytical movements before I can move to the next stage and relate laterally to the world.  This means that I am systematically intra-personal rather than inter-personal.   I must do a lot of intra-personal checking before I move onto an inter-personal level.   By contrast Westerners are very, very quick with relating laterally.   All their energy systems are geared toward it.  The realm of the social defines reality for them, most of the time.

For me, the abstract intra-personal relationship defines reality.   That makes my reality hard to see and preturbs some people, but I work hard to insure my  decisions follow ethical lines.

FURTHER SUGGESTIONS

The vertical movements are likely driven by certain hormonal frequencies/inputs, which have already formed channels in the brain during the time of development (in gestation and in early childhood, for  instance).  Adrenaline may be key to formation factors that lead to reflexive vertical movements.

Lateral movements may be influenced and formed by Oxytocin -- although not the full story since this would not automatically explain competitive lateral movements.

Descents into the lower reaches are facilitated by Melatonin.

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There are various degrees of patriarchal posturing, and mind reading.

The hallmark of a patriarch as such is always mind reading. If we are to define him, this is somebody who believes he or she can look into one's mind and know what is in there. Often enough, he simply draws his conclusions without engaging in any kind of conversation. At other times, he does engage in actual conversation, but then overrides any communication that has taken place. He supposes that despite what someone says, she actually meant something else.   And he knows this just because he does -- because his patriarchal ideology makes him an adherent and practitioner of mind reading.

Other kinds of mind reading take place in patriarchal society on the basis of a secondary effect of this kind of common attitudinalising by the arch patriarchs.

There is the assumption that one's thinking must simply take place within a patriarchally circumscribed context -- in other words, that it must be defined by one's partisanship in relation to a particular political or social camp. And, any particular camp, quite naturally, has an arch patriarch to lead it. If one is not partisan, then one is assumed not to think at all. In that case, there is no point asking you what you think! Just assume that no actual thinking is taking place. (But this is a kind of reverse mind reading, or negative hallucination, taking away from the substance of thinking that is actually there.)

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Shamanic self defense works by understanding what is invisible to most -- that is, how emotional energies are channelled. This is not Christian passivity or turning the other cheek. This is not forgiveness.

 When someone is in a state of emotional aggression, they need to release that energy away from themselves in order to feel comfortable. Patriarchal society provides them with a natural means to do this, by blaming women. However, individual women can refuse to be a conduit for this aggression. Note, too, that most times an aggressive patriarch doesn't realise he or she is being that way. They just feel they feel in a morally righteous mood -- but that justification covers a lot of hostility, hatred and mean-spiritedness. People can release their aggression into you if they can get you to counter-react to their act of hostility. Even trying to justify or vindicate yourself can feel like a satisfactory counter-reaction to the aggressor. So, you have to refuse to do this. Sometimes the aggressor is looking for an explanation that will give meaning and justification to his behaviour or his life. You have to deny any explanations. Just step back and you will deny him or her the link to you that they want to use in order to diffuse their pent up aggression. That will mean they have to face their own aggression by themselves -- a novel experience for them, surely.

It's a internal event, though, you won't see them physically beating themselves up, but mentally and emotionally, they will be struggling.

Note: This is also not passive aggression, since there is no emotion involved on the part of the one who responds in this way and above all there is no intention for the aggressor to "guess what I feel". The connection between would-be aggressor and intended target is severed. Therefore he will be thrown onto his own devices to face the world in accordance with his particular level of development.

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Re:  The Seduction of Unreason The Intellectual Romance With Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism by Richard Wolin

Jennifer Armstrong:
It's really not an "intellectual romance with fascism" that either Nietzsche or Bataille had. There are fundamental aspects to both of their philosophical approaches that are in profound opposition to the ideology and practice of fascism. Most significantly, Nietzsche and Bataille are anti-authoritarian. They are trying to develop the individual, through encouraging exploration, self-invention and confrontation with challenges. This aspect of their philosophical approaches is about as anti-fascist as you can get. After all, a fascist is someone who has a fundamental desire for authority and want to find his or her particular place within a hierarchy of power.

WOLIN:

"One of the crucial elements underlying this problematic rightleft synthesis is a strange chapter in the history of ideas whereby latter-day anti-philosophes such as Nietzsche and Heidegger became the intellectual idols of post–World War II France—above all, for poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles
Deleuze. Paradoxically, a thoroughgoing cynicism about reason and democracy, once the hallmark of reactionary thought, became the stock-in-trade of the postmodern left.7 As observers of the French intellectual scene have frequently noted, although Germany lost on the battlefield, it triumphed in the seminar rooms, bookstores, and
cafés of the Latin Quarter. During the 1960s Spenglerian indictments of “Western civilization,” once cultivated by leading representatives of the German intellectual right, migrated across the Rhine where they gained a new currency. Ironically, Counter-Enlightenment doctrines that had been taboo in Germany because of their unambiguous association with fascism—after all, Nietzsche had been canonized as the Nazi regime’s official philosopher, and for
a time Heidegger was its most outspoken philosophical advocate— seemed to best capture the mood of Kulturpessimismus that predominated among French intellectuals during the postwar period. Adding insult to injury, the new assault against philosophie came from the homeland of the Enlightenment itself.

One of the linchpins of the Counter-Enlightenment program
was an attack against the presuppositions of humanism. By challenging the divine basis of absolute monarchy, the unbelieving philosophes had tampered with the Great Chain of Being, thereby undermining morality and inviting social chaos. For the anti-philosophes, there existed a line of continuity between Renaissancehumanism, Protestant heresy, and Enlightenment atheism. In Considerations
on France (1797) Maistre sought to defend the particularity
of historical traditions against the universalizing claims of
Enlightenment humanism, which had culminated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of August 20, 1789. In a spirit of radical nominalism, the French royalist observed that he had encountered Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and even Persians (if only in the writings of Montesquieu). But “humanity” or “man in general,” he claimed, was a figment of a feverish and overheated
philosophe imagination. “Man” as such did not exist.8

An assault on humanism was also one of French structuralism’s hallmarks, an orientation that in many respects set the tone for the more radical, poststructuralist doctrines that followed. As one critic
has aptly remarked, “Structuralism was . . . a movement that in large measure reversed the eighteenth-century celebration of Reason, the credo of the Lumières.”9 In this spirit, one of the movement’s founders, Claude Lévi-Strauss, sought to make anthropology useful for the ends of cultural criticism. Lévi-Strauss famously laid responsibility for the twentieth century’s horrors—total war, genocide, colonialism, threat of nuclear annihilation—at the doorstep of Western humanism. As he remarked in a 1979 interview, “All the tragedies we have lived through, first with colonialism, then with fascism, finally the concentration camps, all this has taken shape not in opposition to or in contradiction with so-called humanism . . .but I would say almost as its natural continuation.”10 Anticipating the poststructuralist credo, Lévi-Strauss went on to proclaim that the goal of the human sciences “was not to constitute, but to dissolve
man.”11 From here it is but a short step to Foucault’s celebrated, neo-Nietzschean adage concerning the “death of man” in The Order of Things.12"

The supposed opposition between "humanism" and Bataille/Nietzsche/Foucault/Deleuze type "irrationalism" is conceptually mistaken. Of course, this is how it has played out in history -- as two distinct streams of thought, whereby one has effectively cannibalized the other, or at least it seems that way. (As an aside, I went back to Zimbabwe recently and revelled in the humanistic mindset of most people there. Post-modernist post-humanism has not caught up with them, although they are very much enmired in Christianity, also. In general, it is a situational time warp that reminds one of the value of one's fellow human being. One can love humans, again, within that context, where humanism largely prevails.)

In the deeper sense of Bataille, Nietzsche and Deleuze, they are interested in undergoing a stage of madness, in order to come out the other end in a better and stronger condition. Their implicit goal is to get rid of blind authoritarianism (although not necessarily recognition of authority), especially that which is linked to an idea of a god above, which maintains order. In terms of this, the means to the end is "madness", but the goal is a superior kind of sanity to what we experience as normal and necessary, today. The whole emphasis of all three of these writers is a circular movement from everyday normality (a form of insanity in many respects), into true insanity, into a state of superior sanity. It's a large scale historical programme which is supposed to bring "the individual" into being in a true sense, for the first time in history. The "irrationality" that these writers seek to work with is not the end goal for humanity but a stage in the process of humanity's self-transformation.  And they are working with the irrationality that already exists, trying to get it to be more self-reflective and self-transformative.

In my view, what we already have today, under the rule of class dynamics and bureaucratic pressure, is quite substantially the "death of man". The individual doesn't matter. What she produces and the length of time in which she produces it (and then, ultimately, its value on the market), is mostly what retains meaning in this day and age.

Bataille, Nietzsche and Deleuze ought to be viewed as messengers foretelling this 'death of man' and warning against the error of losing reverence for ourselves in a post-Christian era, rather than those who brought this situation into existence. They attempt to bring us back to our senses, via a circuitous route, passing through the madness we have already embraced.

But Wolin is keen to shoot the messenger.

TUMBULAR 14

If we could crawl out of our bunker at night, we could begin to create the launch pad for the TUMBULATIONS.  We had to be very stealthy, because although we no longer raised much suspicion due to our immense, feigned passivity, we still had much to lose if we were caught.  The point was to clear the scrub and get rid of all the grass and unevenness and then we would have a pretty flat ground area, covered in nothing but some softening dust, so that should it blow up into the air and form a cloud out tumbulation would be slightly disguised, but not much.

Realistically, the only enemy the tumbulations had was the force of gravity, but we could not afford to underestimate that.   As we had built an organic component into the design of our tumbulations, this would also become attracted to other organic components on the surface of the earth.  Should we have enemies who raised their level of emotional antagonism to our project very much, the tumbulation would sense this organic component of their opposition and would be attracted gravitationally downward.

This was one of the limitations of having an organic element to our work.   The upside was that gave us a chance to control the device semi-telepathically should it run into any mechanical difficulties.

The hard part was getting the launching pad flat enough to satisfy our sense that we had done our best service to reality.  Remember, we were serving history as this was a large part of what made up our present reality.  Should we fail, then the past would also fail, as it call came down to earth in a flurry of mechanical mis-wiring.  A smooth exit from the launching pad was a definitive part of our success.  The ape would fly the craft and the system had every chance of functioning effectively, giving us hope that our mission here had had some meaning.  

The impact of Rhodesian patriarchy & resulting character structure

TUMBULAR 13

Officialdom closed the toilets along the beach area so that you had to shit in the bushes.  The dangerous thing was thrusting your butt into the shrubbery, because there it could have been bitten by any dugite.  I did not relish that idea. I had the minor consolation that my excrement would be landing on his or her head.  In the end being bitten would not feel hurt.

In any case not if they killed all the nuns in the world could they get us to repent.  They would keep on killing them.  I went to Resthaven on that weekend; we had to wander around in the baking sunshine and digest the killings, which had no meaning to me, a child.  So many ways we had to make recompense --- like lying on the bed in the midst of an afternoon when we had rather be out running or visiting a Christian retreat where we would have "a rest" and let the adults try to process their traumas, which we had nothing to do with and were never adequately explained.
You stuck your arse-end into the trees and expected not to get bitten by a dugite.  That was the least of our worries in a land that was mostly forgiving, but not like much of Africa which was on the flipside.

Noni the cat had not visited us for weeks, which was probably a sign or our neglect and general deterioration.  We were starting to take things for granted, such as the idea that it was better to have an easier life than to have one that is difficult.   Risks were on principle to be avoided.

I accepted that as a necessity although a large, repressed part felt terribly diminished and put-upon.

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TONY AND JANE CHRONICLES

The consciousness of appearance.— How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-à-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer,—I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the conciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish: as a somnambulist must go on dreaming lest he fall.—Nietzsche GS

Tony and Jane are clearly dreamers – cultural somnabulists – caught up in the ramifications of living in their post-liberation-war contemporary Zimbabwean culture. Tony clearly has aspirational desires, initially to keep his head above the water. He is a dreamer of a conservative sort. Such is the nature of his dreaming solely within the conservative paradigm that he cannot see that nature of Jane, or of her dreaming. Her dreams take her outside of the cultural paradigm of conservatism, in which Tony resides. The nature of her dreaming exposes her to animistic dangers that Tony, with his limited scope on his own life, is unable to protect her from. The conservative male dream that one becomes the head of the suburban household not just by toeing the line at work and but by embracing narrow reason in one’s life’s goals is shown to be severly undermined by the daemonic forces brought into play within the nice suburban home, on the basis of Jane’s dreaming. Tony and Jane – or Tony-Jane, as the author occasionally refers to them, for their dreaming is compensatory of each-other’s shortfalls in participation in life – are participating as products of their society and culture. Only a shaman can enter their world, through dream-states, in order to appraise the situation they are in for what it is.  He can truly laugh and critique the absurdities that ensue because of their blind cultural participation in the status quo. Shamanic thought passes between dream and reality and reflects the degree to which a life which they could fully call their own is not within the reach of many.

What is the psychology of contemporary modernity?

One part of the shift from tradition to modernity involves a psychological softening, with the use of forces other than direct power. On the other part, we have a seemingly irreversable removal olf the psyche from any sense of the natural and organic, because the processes of thinking become more mechanical and so are estranged from modes of immediate experience leading to self-understanding. Modernity also significantly embraces (I have found) arrested adolescence as its core state, at this historical juncture. This does not mean life is devitalised as such, only that to have a significant intellectual impact at this historical point, one must tailor ones ideas and delivery to appeal to those who have developed their world views in middle-school, but not beyond.

More on the impending executions in Bali: RAMBLING THOUGHTS 2

Repost: aliveness

I woke up this morning after dreaming heavily. Whilst in the borderlands between wakefulness and sleepiness, I suddenly caught sight of what seems to be the most elusive issue, but the central one relating to shamanism.  It is also the most difficult to express, since language, being a static self-contained philosophy in its own right, doesn't really address it.  Also the ideologies of humanism and other systematizations of theory cannot bring it directly befoire our mind's eye.

The issue is the nature of being.  Being is the faculty by which we interface with the sacred.   So long as being is passive -- which is its normal state -- being cannot be sensed, smelled or felt.     What can be detected whilst being is passive are expressions of knowledge and insight.  But these are not being.  They are almost the opposite of being, since they can deflect attention away from being, making the core of life seem to be about how much knowlege one had obtained, or whether one had developed insight into anything.

But shamanism is not about knowledge and insight.  These are just the epiphenomena of being.  Shamanism is about discovering being, which is elusive.

Here's what Bataille discovered about being.  It can't be discovered whilst one is sitting still.   It has to be shaken up.   Being only comes to light when it is volatile.   In its resting state, in its apathetic or complacent state, it seems like nonbeing.

So Bataille and Nietzsche -- the core of the philosophies -- is to make one's state of "Being" (one's aliveness) volatile.   That way, this state of aliveness can be known.   Awareness of it for the first time is shamanic awakening.

Language, of course, betrays this sense of things, because it is too facile.   Some people will say, "Well, of course, we know we have being, because it's mentioned right there in the text.   In fact they will say this, but next minute they will imply that they are trying to develop their knowledge and insight about fixed things in a fixed world.  This is proof positive that they do not in fact understand about being.  At best, they must have  lost sight of it.

Static being erases itself.   All that one sees is the shell of knowledge it has left behind.   To be self-satisfied with one's being, or to confuse being with one of its outer shells -- social identity, personality or knowledge -- is to lose sight of being.   Those things are either static or slow moving and do not encapsulate being.

The great philosophers of being -- Nietzsche, Bataille and Marechera -- do not fit well into frameworks that maintain a static view of things:  academia is one of these.   I have often wondered what made me so uneasy about the ways that critics took Marechera apart with such facile motions.   It seems they erred in not understanding the core issue of his writing, which was to make being more apparent.   To cause being to appear in his writings, he had to stir it up and make it volatile.   But people took this volatility as a threat or a sign of pathology, rather than seeing that through allowing being to be tormented, a relationship with the sacred is established.

But no matter -- the critics focused on the external form, the shell, whilst debating whether his writing had social or political utility.   Of course, postmodernists also do the same to Nietzsche, which is moronic.  The degree to which they don't know anything about being can be measured precisely in the lengths they will go to preach morality to others.   Morality spells the closing off of being.   When the circle of experience becomes closed and one is cocksure about one's knowledge and one's place in the world, one begins moralizing.   Some people never stop moralizing after this point.   They've lost access to the sacred - maintained through the volatility of being -- and this is their revenge on others.    To be static in one's overcertainty about things is spiritual death.

But no matter.   A prematurely closed circle around one's being means no more torment of one's being.   One is what one is what one is.  The sacrilege only appears in a demand that others simply be "what they are" -- which means they are obliged by me to remain just how they appear to me.   This is childish vengeance against the sacred -- but it is not uncommon among academics.   They want things to be fixed by their piercing eyes.

You can tell they don't know anything, because one's obligation to the sacred is not to remain fixed, but to stay in a volatile state, so that one may communicate with it.   A really good shaman -- which I am not -- will also be able to impart in words some of the ecstasy of his interaction with the sacred to others.

The cost of being a good shaman is that one must allow one's wound in one's being to constantly be reopened.   One does not communicate with the sacred otherwise.   This sort of relationship with reality is what Bataille terms not "torment" but "torture".   If one allows oneself to be tortured,  the relationship between being and the sacred becomes salient.   Ancient shamanism does not mince words about what shamanic initiation implies -- the initiate's organs are taken out, boiled and counted and then replaced.   This is a depiction of torture followed by spiritual rebirth.

A shamanic initiate is therefore not one who ought to be summarily dismissed with remarks about so-called pathological states, or by remarking on a lack of social utility or a failure of originality.    All of these issues could hardly be more beside the point.    Indeed, experiencing pathological states, not having any social function and falling short of all measure of originality may be the cost a shaman has to pay in order to gain access to the sacred.    To pay the cost no matter what one loses in the process is an act of courage that goes way beyond my present capabilities.   Marechera could do it.  But me, I am at the bottom of the ocean floor, happy for now if others mistake me for a shell.   When I do eventually move, I know it will feel like torture, so I wish to delay that process of regaining volatility.

I hope I've explained about the nature of shamanic being and the encounter with the sacred.   Passive beings can't do it as they lose sight of the sacred in a non-volatile state, but the volatility of being is nothing short of torture and shamanic initiation is ritual torture or extreme violence that suddenly befalls someone, that cannot be fully resolved.  Those who don't understand this tend to miscategorize shamanic writing to make it something they can more easily relate to.   They say very weird things in this vein, for example laying the charge that Bataille's writing is "left fascism".

They demand more political and social utility from the writing.   They moralize, or seem to be observing states that they take to be self-evidently pathological.   In most cases, they stay on the surface of being, unable to see down to the level of the sacred.  To understand being, they would have to risk their own beings, but they won't allow themselves to experience any amount of torture, so they stay where they are, which allows them to grasp much less than what the writers have expressed.   They remain static and their very language betrays a resistance to knowledge of the sacred.   The fact of shamanic experience upsets them, just as being pierced through or watching as this happens to others is a horrifying prospect.  It's easier to choose not to see what has just occurred.

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A divided consciousness endlessly moralises and its moralising is an expression of erotic yearning.   It doesn't desire others so much as its own wholeness.  The sense of loss and lack that underlies the moralistic mindset leads to a continous outpouring of desire to mend reality as such.   Reality is deemed to have been broken but it is the individual divided from their self who is damaged, not reality.

I used to believe the lie that my society was no more and therefore I could never go back to it, but that idea of things was not factual, but the expressed disappointment of the adults of my society.   Conscientiously, they had deemed they could never go back to a revolutionised society, for that would have betrayed the valued they had fought for and Christian beliefs.   But in reality, it was they who has been hurt by losing the the domestic war, not reality itself.  Emotionally, of course, our minds do flow along the channels, cracks and crevices that our own beliefs have established in the outside world, but the idea that there had to be a perfect fit between one's own mind and an external structure of reality is just that of the disappointed eroticist longing for itself.  In insisting that one has to have only these specific rocks, these particular trees, and these alone, one expresses the degree to which the mind is divided from itself.

To be separated in this way is agony -- but it is also the Western condition.   Severe separation from oneself happens with the onset of moral reasoning.   It is likely that this separation leads to moral reasoning and not the other way around.   If one already has all that one needs one does not go on endlessly about the damaged nature of the world.

By contrast, severe mid-life crises, ineffectual revolutions, broken relationships and ways of reading literary texts that miss the point all indicate a severe self-separation.   If one doesn't know what one is thinking, one will strike out in the wrong direction.   The older one is the harder it is to repair the inwardly ruptured self.  That's when life seems to appeal to one erotically, but the damaged pieces will not fit together.   Still, it is as if the calling comes from outside.  In reality it's just the inner self divided from oneself that creates this effect that seems to make it look like exterior circumstances are beseeching you.

It's not one fault.  One fixes oneself inwardly be reconnecting to the primal drives, above all by becoming more aware of the surrounding noises of violence and sexuality.   These are not far off, but are pressing inward against you.   You reject them because they're negative but they are only so because you haven't connected them with you.   They are your integral whole.

Once you are united with yourself, violence and erotic appeals no longer seem to come from the environment in ways that are unsettling.   They are known and anticipated because they are a part of you.

It doesn't mean you won't be violent and unsettling, or that you will have achieved your goals morally, but when you are complete you are no longer intellectually confused and victim to the games of others. 

Rambling video about "the Bali Nine"

There ought to be no compulsion to embrace a purely biologist notion of existence

There ought to be no compulsion to embrace a purely biologist notion of existence from Jennifer Frances Armstrong on Vimeo.

TUMBULAR 12

With the clarity of one who had never been attacked, they proclaimed that we ought to get our minds in order for the execution of our dirtier and more disgusting bed fellows.  This was to teach us to be strong.  Our strength would be in our all-embracing sensitivity, which had to be instilled in us, or otherwise we were liable to go off-track and writhe in our own shit.

The way forward was to embrace diversity, especially the diversity of children, whose minds being as yet socially unconditioned were much purer.  We'd received the contaminating effects of social experience and now we were wallowing in it.  A child can teach the lesson of the open heart.

The point was to not so much focus on our own desires for tumbulations but to find ways to make ourselves useful and stand-in mothers and wet nurses.   I meant this was to be our symbolic role, although it never could be explained to us with any precision, for then the task would lose its charm, which was essential to it.  We tossed in cockroach infested blankets in the mean time, waiting to be allotted our role, the rehabilitating role.

Being tossed around in your own disgusting mess in the middle of tumultuous nightmares is revolting, but it's what adults turn into, we are told.  You are mad.  That is adulthood.   Not the distant lights of the historical past when we knew no better than to run around and kick the shit and act with impunity.  None of use used to care in those days and it's certain many died whilst we were stirring up a storm.  You've got to behave like a reasonable person if you're going to earn respect..  After learning how to live all over again, we may not be given wings but we would be angels.

I prayed to Noni to keep her distance because I didn't want her damaged in any of this.  There must be still some vestige of the wild.  The further she remained the better.  Then I would be able to recall her when I needed her, and should she still be there, I'd feel the warmth of her wild, black paw.

The days dragged on and melded with the nights, so that everything seemed the same.  We couldn't remember anything.  We forgot how we used to fight, slithering on our bellies in the infantry stage.  And to be frank we'd hated it back then, but that when we still had hope.   Now we had the brighter promise of a cradle bed, but all that was brought to our attention was our excrement.   Had we never fought, we would never have been attacked and our minds would have been cleared of all the dirt and filth we now found inside of them and like the infants' minds we were being trained to serve, we would have clarity.  But it felt like a cockroach was ripping across my mind in the undergrowth and being shot at too.