the world always forces us to confront and play with our edges and definitions. well.. let's say the 'world,' yes, but the 'world' when engaged and given the respect of being perceived thru the lens of loving open-mindedness, and an assumption of fundamental coherence and meaning, even when this coherence and meaning escapes or transcends our powers of seeing and interpretation (and, it bears pointing out, this land beyond our powers of seeing and interpretation is where old-fashioned mystery used to live).
you _can_ walk the parallel road of finding the world empty of these cues as to significance and meaning, but that's like walking among the richness of recorded poetry and viewing it with the myopic rigor of utilitarian prose conventions and lowbrow demands for literal transparency.
thing is, i have a horror of violence, i have a terror of feeling revulsion towards things, of saying no to life. yet, this fear and inability to 'kill' certain things off in the matrix of possible can actually rob you of any satisfaction, especially if you wish to be an agent for love and peace in maximal ways. in the same sense that the unchecked growth of nature (which chokes off diversity as often as it rises, free, in differentiated splendor) differs from the cultivated garden that partakes of intersecting nature and human ingenuity (an ingenuity that tries to better the vectors of nature), sometimes we must act and change outcomes by saying yes to the dance, putting on the yoke of our distinct ableness for manipulation, for violence, and the power to make difficult choices.
i have never felt more aware of the burden of being both a tool of civilization and an expression of the deepest roots of nature than i do in a current forced encounter with the asian cockroach. i am a 'trap it and deposit it outside' kind of personality. so its very interesting when the old routines of one's least-examined personality runs into a situation that, well, challenges the blanket righteousness of those old behaviours and personal commandments.
its always the most creative and character-forming challenge, when the old ways of doing things meats (sic) meets with an immovable spot beyond itself which, to be dealt with successfully, may need to be engaged with the very qualities we stealthily reject in the world and ourselves.
i remain a militant pacifist this hour. i don't think problems can be solved by carpet-bombing them, which always struck me as simpleminded, shortminded, and lazy. which makes this encounter doubly interesting, since these insects can go from a couple intruders to swarming thousands in very short order. thusly does the world goad us to make ourselves flesh by making irreversible choices, testing our constructs and mettle in a living labyrinth governed by other, incontrovertible laws.
Showing posts with label adversarial dynamics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adversarial dynamics. Show all posts
Monday, May 23, 2011
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
deconstructing ayn rand
objectivism and enlightened self-interest seem, on face, valid proposals, save they hinge on a proposed human facility, admittedly needful of disciplined development, for reasoned interpretation and focused (ie. delimited) action... the notion that we could possibly escape relativism to see things plain and unfettered by either personal context, mysticism or, worse, primitive imaginal mind. yet here lies the root of twenty-first-century insanity, to grow a human crop at the whip of dry, commercial logic, irrigated not by the chaotic (yet highly organized) infrastructure of bios, spiritus, and the drawl of infinity's backdrop.
rand and her muscular insistence on logic and reductio-materialism emerge as a reactive flowering in the wake of the industrial era, the first to harness the herd to commonly-held aspirations, comforting political demagoguery and line production ambitions. an era that was on the one hand, prudish and god-fearing, on the other, in awe of the coming technological age and its gloss poetry of convenience, fancy, and quasi-eugenic-perfection schemes.
but it was principally the need to collectively organize an uneducated workforce that proved most stifling to what would become the post-war western cult of individuality that latterly led to the me-generation of the sixties, the pursuit of happiness and all its virtues and excesses.
ironically, rand paid the price for her command of mind and certainty of philosophy with an unconscious enslavement to the collective archetypes, fascinated as she was with the inner ideal man of her intense capito-erotic fantasies.
'atlas shrugged' premised group action even while it dared not regard it as 'collective' behaviour given it was effected by a leading elite, the rogue mid-century new intellectual above the common and its ties-that-bind. yet, the acerbic wit and rapier cerebrality was fed and took nourished root in gatsby-esque new-age architecture and design, infantilizing "tiddlywink" (her term for the chaplinesque music of the thirties so adored) not to mention the hubris of the last century's skyscrapers and rhinestone skylines that now lie vulnerable to the very disowned mysticism she feared, that now thrives in modern-age religious intolerance and fundamentalist madness.
rand derided the irrational function because her only model for it was the brute ruskie peasant who took to god or committee like the freaks took to LSD and knock-n-roll. had she been more fortunate, she might have been able to synthesize the nuance and sukha of the immortal human chain of ancestors with her valid protectionism of the right to happiness and free expression... so well (and logically one would add) developed by the zen, the buddhist, the shaman. but in the end she spoke exclusively and deridingly to those inner rivers of numen, idealizing the trite, dry and predictable exercise of practical reason and the autocracy of cash interest.
when she exhorted immortality, quoting a now forgotten greek who said, we don't die, its the world that comes to an end, she was evoking a next-stage thinking that eluded her in life but surely baked her to core first with the loss of her husband and then in her own death.
rand was a necessary atheist, a philosophic wunderkind of her age and i like her very much, but her limit and her sorrow came in not being able to next-stage it and synthesize the two functions that must be married for true laterality and depth to be achieved. such is the task of our era and our players.
rand and her muscular insistence on logic and reductio-materialism emerge as a reactive flowering in the wake of the industrial era, the first to harness the herd to commonly-held aspirations, comforting political demagoguery and line production ambitions. an era that was on the one hand, prudish and god-fearing, on the other, in awe of the coming technological age and its gloss poetry of convenience, fancy, and quasi-eugenic-perfection schemes.
but it was principally the need to collectively organize an uneducated workforce that proved most stifling to what would become the post-war western cult of individuality that latterly led to the me-generation of the sixties, the pursuit of happiness and all its virtues and excesses.
ironically, rand paid the price for her command of mind and certainty of philosophy with an unconscious enslavement to the collective archetypes, fascinated as she was with the inner ideal man of her intense capito-erotic fantasies.
'atlas shrugged' premised group action even while it dared not regard it as 'collective' behaviour given it was effected by a leading elite, the rogue mid-century new intellectual above the common and its ties-that-bind. yet, the acerbic wit and rapier cerebrality was fed and took nourished root in gatsby-esque new-age architecture and design, infantilizing "tiddlywink" (her term for the chaplinesque music of the thirties so adored) not to mention the hubris of the last century's skyscrapers and rhinestone skylines that now lie vulnerable to the very disowned mysticism she feared, that now thrives in modern-age religious intolerance and fundamentalist madness.
rand derided the irrational function because her only model for it was the brute ruskie peasant who took to god or committee like the freaks took to LSD and knock-n-roll. had she been more fortunate, she might have been able to synthesize the nuance and sukha of the immortal human chain of ancestors with her valid protectionism of the right to happiness and free expression... so well (and logically one would add) developed by the zen, the buddhist, the shaman. but in the end she spoke exclusively and deridingly to those inner rivers of numen, idealizing the trite, dry and predictable exercise of practical reason and the autocracy of cash interest.
when she exhorted immortality, quoting a now forgotten greek who said, we don't die, its the world that comes to an end, she was evoking a next-stage thinking that eluded her in life but surely baked her to core first with the loss of her husband and then in her own death.
rand was a necessary atheist, a philosophic wunderkind of her age and i like her very much, but her limit and her sorrow came in not being able to next-stage it and synthesize the two functions that must be married for true laterality and depth to be achieved. such is the task of our era and our players.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
the art of war and other therapeutic encounters
Life is a tactical engagement, a game violently played and for keeps. It serves to recall this, for even as the modern age tries to take the edge off this pathos of human nature, we remain _the_ avaricious manipulator. And while history peals glory-refrains of awesome achievement, its been alongside the loathsome durge of our persistently odious treatment of one another. Still, as esotericum instructs, it's not the task of the human to renounce its particular stain, but to work syncretically with even the most unpopular of facts. So woe be the clinician or naif sportif who enters the fray, the arena of our discontent, without some wry understandings or the aptitude for constructive action. Such is the on-going art of neutralizing....
The concept of the "adversary" or "opponent" is therefore a valuable one, for if the body teaches anything, it teaches we better bite that without contraries there is no progression [Blake]. For purchase, we need a fixed spot to anchor against. For spatial functioning, we need vectors that oppose and play in mutually exclusive direction in order to deliver opportunity to stasis or loss. To express any kind of power, we need a sweet-spot balance between adding/subtracting, digesting/voiding, tensing/compressing. For system responsiveness, the ability to not only steadystate but integrate and adapt, we need both sanctuary and utter destruction, parasympathetic restoration and total sympathetic annihilation (as in of a particle and its antiparticle : to vanish or cease to exist by coming together and changing into other forms of energy).... [Websters]
Each of us at various times has to play the part of adversary to someone else's wish-fulfilment. The therapist does it while holding space for transference resolution. The parent does it when refraining the freedom of a still unformed child. The friend does it when remaining optimistic in the face of misunderstanding. A colleague does it when they listen to the rhetoric of protestation but drag you kicking and screaming out of your sand box anyway. Adversarial dynamics are a fact of nature. They only drag us beneath the threshold of their constructive applications into mere conflict when we take them at face value and with the ego leading.
When the adversarial miasma _does_ take the lead between people its often hard to resist being drawn into the plotline of subjective experience. But its the very thing we gotta develop the smarts to resist if peace on any scale is to be achieved. For the clinician, conflict patterns shouldn't be a disappointment or an invitation to judge but an incitement to travel more deeply into the mystery of the client 'not-me' seeking its own truth and beauty.............. and therefore an invitation to inquiry the very source of healing itself, both the clinician's and the client's. For its the clinician who's there to relieve their own shame and effect transformational growth, it's the client who comes to enable it and work on _them_, never the other way around. [for more on this, check out Hawaiian Ho’oponopono]
The weapons and tactical assaults the adversary reaches for _first_ mark the only fire power the complex actually has, and further, the adversary unwittingly teases itself out onto a limb because it secretly wants the inconvenient exposure and loss of face, it wants to be found out. This is where heart is good to have and is best deftly used.
A case cannot start to unravel until we meet and make peace with the adversary to healing. Its the clinician's responsibility to bear the burden of such polarizations while cultivating the inner space needed to draw the other or the self toward the laying down of arms. Even when it means taking a few darts. Even when it means bleeding a little.
Reminds me how much I love it when people complain about the weather, rail against cloud, the cold or the rain like its all an odium and somehow _personal_. "There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes." [Billy Connolly]
The concept of the "adversary" or "opponent" is therefore a valuable one, for if the body teaches anything, it teaches we better bite that without contraries there is no progression [Blake]. For purchase, we need a fixed spot to anchor against. For spatial functioning, we need vectors that oppose and play in mutually exclusive direction in order to deliver opportunity to stasis or loss. To express any kind of power, we need a sweet-spot balance between adding/subtracting, digesting/voiding, tensing/compressing. For system responsiveness, the ability to not only steadystate but integrate and adapt, we need both sanctuary and utter destruction, parasympathetic restoration and total sympathetic annihilation (as in of a particle and its antiparticle : to vanish or cease to exist by coming together and changing into other forms of energy).... [Websters]
Each of us at various times has to play the part of adversary to someone else's wish-fulfilment. The therapist does it while holding space for transference resolution. The parent does it when refraining the freedom of a still unformed child. The friend does it when remaining optimistic in the face of misunderstanding. A colleague does it when they listen to the rhetoric of protestation but drag you kicking and screaming out of your sand box anyway. Adversarial dynamics are a fact of nature. They only drag us beneath the threshold of their constructive applications into mere conflict when we take them at face value and with the ego leading.
When the adversarial miasma _does_ take the lead between people its often hard to resist being drawn into the plotline of subjective experience. But its the very thing we gotta develop the smarts to resist if peace on any scale is to be achieved. For the clinician, conflict patterns shouldn't be a disappointment or an invitation to judge but an incitement to travel more deeply into the mystery of the client 'not-me' seeking its own truth and beauty.............. and therefore an invitation to inquiry the very source of healing itself, both the clinician's and the client's. For its the clinician who's there to relieve their own shame and effect transformational growth, it's the client who comes to enable it and work on _them_, never the other way around. [for more on this, check out Hawaiian Ho’oponopono]
The weapons and tactical assaults the adversary reaches for _first_ mark the only fire power the complex actually has, and further, the adversary unwittingly teases itself out onto a limb because it secretly wants the inconvenient exposure and loss of face, it wants to be found out. This is where heart is good to have and is best deftly used.
A case cannot start to unravel until we meet and make peace with the adversary to healing. Its the clinician's responsibility to bear the burden of such polarizations while cultivating the inner space needed to draw the other or the self toward the laying down of arms. Even when it means taking a few darts. Even when it means bleeding a little.
Reminds me how much I love it when people complain about the weather, rail against cloud, the cold or the rain like its all an odium and somehow _personal_. "There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes." [Billy Connolly]
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