"The parasite invents something new. It intercepts energy and pays for it with information. It intercepts roast beef and pays for it with stories. These would be two ways of writing the new contract. The parasite establishes an agreement that is unfair, at least in terms of previous accounting methods; it constructs a new balance sheet. It expresses a logic that was considered irrational until now, it expresses a new epistemology, another theory of equilibrium." [Michel Serres, Le Parasite]
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high on the list of treasured failures from post-world-war 20C counterculture is the intentional community. premised on utopian visions of off-grid living, self-modulating enterprise, whole foods and congregational sex, it promised much, but in practice delivered mixed, if not disappointing results. the need for consistent and organized hard labour amidst the whine and roses coupled with the shifting tides of an ideologically-derived motive base made for an often ineffectual admixture of committed actors and free-loading pimps. harnessed profit-lust and capitalist frenzy never seemed more absent and wanting when compared to the imperfect responsiveness of the cagey human, now in groove to the beat of a diffident, me-generation drummer. mercantile fascists, one recalls, did nothing but a standout job, erecting the utilitarian precisions that got the trains to run on time and the sterile, flavourless fruit of globalization to even the most isolated bodega. the bar had been set. unfortunately the meta-committees of peace and love frequently collapsed under the stress of besting it, let alone achieving comparable marks.
we're now fortunate enough to be on the other side looking back at these earnest circuses of old just as 21C humanitarian anarchists, militant pacifists, shamanic revolutionaries and mystic prank alchemists prepare for a new round of disengagement from status quo delineations...
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the fatal flaw in the social experiments of the 60s and 70s was the angle of ascent. we don't have time to reconstruct new empires or create novel infrastructures and protocols for either the urban or rural logistic. we only have time to subvert existing stages toward ends never intended by the complex which built them, that putrefying, zombified interest that seeks complete cultural and metaphysical suppression of human flowering.
part of the problem fifty years ago was naivete, the irresistible urge to invert the agenda, nevermind its sheer impossibility of scale. trying to establish new harmonious nuance with habitat while at the same time seeking to bend the natural order to suit mere survival slowly eroded a modern frame of reference accustomed to the politics of leisure, personal psychological space, and plentiful assets for the construction and furtherance of art and romantic love. amid the biodynamics, psychotropics, and clannish dramaturgies, the engines of parts and labour ground to a halt.
thusly, it's become hyper relevant to review the technology of the conceptual parasite, purge it of its negative connotations, recognize the genius of its posits and its indispensable, enduring contributions to the play.
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"Precisely what is a parasite? It is an operator that interrupts a system of exchange. The abusive guest partakes of the host's meal, consumes food, and gives only words, conversation, in return. The biological parasite enters an organism's body and absorbs substances meant for the host organism. Noise occurs between two positions in an informational circuit and disrupts messages exchanged between them (noise or static in informational theory in English is translated as parasite in French). Thus the parasite first presents itself in a negative guise; it is viewed as a malfunction, an error, or a noise within a given system. Its appearance elicits a strategy of exclusion. Epistemologically, the system appears as primary, and the parasite as an unhappy addition that it would be best to expel. Such an approach, however, misses the fact that the parasite, like the demon and the third man, is an integral part of the system. By experiencing a perturbation and subsequently integrating it, the system passes from a simple to a more complex stage. Thus, by virtue of its power to perturb, the parasite ultimately constitutes, like the clinamen and the demon, the condition of the possibility of the system. In this way the parasite attests from within the order the primacy of disorder; it produces by way of disorder a more complex order." [Josué V. Harari, David F. Bell, Journal a plusieurs voies]
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THE ARTIST AND THE MYSTIC:
ULTIMATE PARASITIC HEARTWHORES WHO DARE
the artist injects themselves betwixt input and output, penetrating the equation formulae responsible for the industry-centric, consumerist pap of contemporary lifelessness, sucking up systemic resources like siphoned-off corpuscles, ready to apply the grid's own energy units towards a perpetual sunrise of anarchy and indulgence for the purpose of self-other-object confrontations and expanded knowing. the enlightened parasite relieves society of its monopoly board pieces and shits out a freedom of expression that knows no borders, the very liberation most feared by game enforcers everywhere. this disturbance which art, love, and nature magic creates is the sine qua non currency of exchange. it lends the parasite their righteousness of affect, even while the system's recursive propagation loops are irretrievably broken in the encounter and left bleeding for all to enjoy. such is the genius of parasitic reconnoitering.
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"At the origin of human relations one finds the irreversible logic of exchange without return: always take, never give back. And behind this anthropology, the parasite. In its absence, a homogenous stasis of balanced exchanges existed, characterized by the perfect reversibility of all processes - paradise, without time or history. However, the parasite violates the system of exchange by taking without returning; it introduces an element of irreversibility and thus marks the commencement of duration, history, and social organization. The parasite exchanges paradise for a problematic of beginnings, namely, the beginnings of human relations." [Josué V. Harari, David F. Bell, Journal a plusieurs voies]
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at the intersection of intentional communities, bey's temporary and permanent autonomous zones, and the anarchical parasite feeding and thriving on systems of corruption, is the mobile autonomous zone. like the pop-up, its technologically fluent and tapped into matrix on its own terms. it can make use of the transience of disposable objects and infrastructures to make things happen in geopolitical spaces of either short or long durations. it can harness the productivity and goal-directedness of organizations and communities within ultimately unstable, modulating and differential habitation patterns. its net of connectivity is diffuse, permeable, tensile, adaptable, and extremely portable. it outputs product in transit, while nesting and resting, while eating and fucking. it transacts its exchanges on sidewalks, in backrooms, in boardrooms, on air and wifi waves. it grows its food in backyards, in abandoned fields, in pails and boxes, on rooftops, and along highway medians. it showcases its objects and events directly, obtusely and in an unstoppable flow. it buys what it needs and creates channels for progressive micro and macrobusinesses when it can't share in new networks of common-philosophy mainframes.
FORECAST
we'll build new homes in old houses and new houses from old roads. we'll augur in new formats for the stewardship of the land and the commons of the people. we'll dismantle power ideologies not through the tired corporations of war, but by unhinging the ideas upon which power narrowly rests. we'll expose the conventions of current thinking for the mirages they are and apply new, more open lenses to the faculties of this animate, living earth. there will be universities in freak coffeeshops and adopted art ghettos and the reclamation of all libraries, all laboratories, all chaingang wisdoms. we'll divorce science and militia by coming between them with our hot blooded and wise inamoratas. machine medicine will die with the dishonoured corporate model and be replaced by multivalent humanist enterprise. we'll perform singly, in duos, in small troupes and large swaths of unified people. we'll come to embrace our differentiations and learn to work with adversarial dynamics. we'll fall in love differently, make love differently, define our bonds in new sun-glinted metals and wildly mutated body fluids. we'll enjoy a shared ground built on the journey not the destination. we'll eat better, more slowly, and more often at the group table. we'll take work and play out of their boxes and graduate ourselves from such silly distinctions. we'll discover that weapons are but ideas; that without maintaining-cause-ideas, armaments and internecine violence can't continue to exist, and that ideas are a whole lot easier to deconstruct than bombs.
yeah, the e-volution won't be televised. but that's because it's ready to go viral. kick it.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
on caroline myss' woundology
it took me a while to even come round to reading caroline's work in this area. i've been reluctant mostly out of a sense of outrage. people from diverse walks of life are permitted to speak casually or powerfully to their historic experiences, but victims are supposed to shut the fuck up. like gabor mate suggests, and i'm paraphrasing, they get fucked over once, and then fucked over again and repeatedly for being fucked over the first time. or as hitchens puts it in service of a whole other profiterole, you're made in the image of sickness and then commanded to be well. even the term 'victim' is putative at best and can't be spoken with anything like the respect and consideration it deserves. but lest i be understood to be suggesting here that victims and victimhood ought to be invested icons for the times, let me deconstruct.
i agree with just about everything caroline has to say on being stuck in the wound and not healing, and as to why it seemed to take the collective trauma of the warring 20thC to bring the chaotic flowering of the 60s and 70s and its healing new age to the task of highlighting our myopia about our 'civilization' and what was going on behind closed doors, man being more often a wolf to his fellow man than shepherd.
it seems safe to generalize that emerging human phenomenon seeks to explore itself until it becomes the opposite inevitably called forth in this persistent pendulum swing of the ages. certainly there's a winsome rhythm observable in all cultures. we blossom quite naively into too much of a good thing that quickly needs must defecate in it's own mouth and die before the tension of opposites that it represents can be neutralized, bringing forth a progressive tertiary position that itself will be undone as it degrades into its own either/or tautology.
progress in the matrix is three dimensional. we aspire to the vertical, expand in manifestation in horizontal spread where the quadrangle of matter shows up in stark illuminations just which deva and dakini of mind is cornering respective pockets. when we get tired of the inevitable triteness of these four corners of argument (light and dark aspects of the dyadic equation) we aspire again to stand on the heads and shoulders of exhausted archetypes and take up the span of the next ladder rung, moving on up into infinitely more nested and nested hierarchies of intellection and bio-wisdom.
thusly, we've come to fear and resent victims because as caroline points out, the wound has power, but its the power and charisma of a stalemate. we're collectively locked into writhing in the dried blood and muck because we're ripe and ready for a shaming. we want it and need it badly but just can't quite bring our pride, our blindness and ourselves to its threshold. in fact, those that resent the wounded most are those who've never directly encountered the darkness of the truth of human nature, a truth we give endless nuclear-level power to for all our pious and self-righteous disowning.
we resent victims because we want to pretend that these stories and case reports are rare or exaggerated, that life is more good than bad rather than often being right down the middle. victims remain stuck in their wounded glory because collectively we haven't emerged at the next level of resonance that can take in their stories without snide judgement and 'get over it' smugness. we haven't accepted that we are collectively capable of inflicting the wounds in the first place. not us, with our bleached white teeth, promisory religions, and positivist consumer tautologies.
of course its not the world that can do the changing. even in the bible it says that the less advantage you have, the harder you'll have to work and the more unfairness you'll have to creatively adjust to. in the long gaze of justice it would seem only righteous that truth and reconciliation become cultural facts at the level of street, neighbourhood, and family table before anyone gets pressed to 'get over it.' yet just as important, and in the same spirit, we need to look at the way we treat those who abuse and betray the human trust. we push our 'monsters' to the margins and sequester them in prisons which baste the 'criminal' in juices of resentment, anger, and more slow burn lust for vengeance against innocence and apparent lucky advantage in the world. thusly do victims keep holding space for the pain of life to match our denial, while offenders hold space for lack of respect and love for life to match our hubris.
on a personal note, reading caroline's thoughts on woundology, when i finally allowed myself to stop resisting, was an abiding re-revelation. i've met many of the stereotyped 'survivors' like those described and i have to admit i lost much in the way of my own self-understanding by viewing them as examples of something of which i'm not representative. this allowed me to feel somehow superior to the behaviour and yet remain in my unchecked outrage and wound-holding at the same time.
this wound-holding was also, i was happy to at last see clearly, a huge source of eros and passion in my life. this pain of mine defined every relationship, friendly, casual, or otherwise. in squeamish hindsight it strikes me to admit, it seems i've been constantly on the hunt for someone to take in every detail of the sorrow i've worn, expecting my intimates to go back in time with me and rewitness every moment, every agony, every betrayal. staying in touch with my past was something that had become a daily, even moment-to-moment practice, especially when i conned myself into thinking i was living in the present and its rush of activities. in truth, no experience could be engaged afresh. especially in interpersonal matters, it was beyond me to respond with a blank slate or without my set of prejudgements and scripts. i brought the canvas of my history with me and assumed a role and character fit for those stories... a center-stage role for myself at the expense of other people's own needs and feelings, a grandiose healing and indulgence being my implicit, demanding expectation. worst, i excellently played at being a fuck-up so as to permit the sleepwalk with my masochist into the arms of actors suited to replaying old plots, confirming the worst of my self-concepts, repeating deep harm.
fact is, i've been withholding this 'healing' turning point even while demanding it of life out of displaced identity issues. without my pain and my history i have no idea who i would be. none. and yet this is the rite of passage that all must inevitably haul ass to cover ground on, because no fixed identity can carry us forward the whole distance of our lives.
uncertainty is only a stress when we forget that there's still a silent witness and a complete knowing within us. we can lay down the past to one side and consult the void in its wake for answers instead of old scripts with confidence that there is someone, a me, inside there. but to do this, we have to have the courage of the flying leap and be thoroughly disenchanted with preserving personal history. no small feat, but then again, nothing worth doing in this world ever is.
from earliest memory i've been looking for my liberator to come. he is me and he, at last, has come...
i agree with just about everything caroline has to say on being stuck in the wound and not healing, and as to why it seemed to take the collective trauma of the warring 20thC to bring the chaotic flowering of the 60s and 70s and its healing new age to the task of highlighting our myopia about our 'civilization' and what was going on behind closed doors, man being more often a wolf to his fellow man than shepherd.
it seems safe to generalize that emerging human phenomenon seeks to explore itself until it becomes the opposite inevitably called forth in this persistent pendulum swing of the ages. certainly there's a winsome rhythm observable in all cultures. we blossom quite naively into too much of a good thing that quickly needs must defecate in it's own mouth and die before the tension of opposites that it represents can be neutralized, bringing forth a progressive tertiary position that itself will be undone as it degrades into its own either/or tautology.
progress in the matrix is three dimensional. we aspire to the vertical, expand in manifestation in horizontal spread where the quadrangle of matter shows up in stark illuminations just which deva and dakini of mind is cornering respective pockets. when we get tired of the inevitable triteness of these four corners of argument (light and dark aspects of the dyadic equation) we aspire again to stand on the heads and shoulders of exhausted archetypes and take up the span of the next ladder rung, moving on up into infinitely more nested and nested hierarchies of intellection and bio-wisdom.
thusly, we've come to fear and resent victims because as caroline points out, the wound has power, but its the power and charisma of a stalemate. we're collectively locked into writhing in the dried blood and muck because we're ripe and ready for a shaming. we want it and need it badly but just can't quite bring our pride, our blindness and ourselves to its threshold. in fact, those that resent the wounded most are those who've never directly encountered the darkness of the truth of human nature, a truth we give endless nuclear-level power to for all our pious and self-righteous disowning.
we resent victims because we want to pretend that these stories and case reports are rare or exaggerated, that life is more good than bad rather than often being right down the middle. victims remain stuck in their wounded glory because collectively we haven't emerged at the next level of resonance that can take in their stories without snide judgement and 'get over it' smugness. we haven't accepted that we are collectively capable of inflicting the wounds in the first place. not us, with our bleached white teeth, promisory religions, and positivist consumer tautologies.
of course its not the world that can do the changing. even in the bible it says that the less advantage you have, the harder you'll have to work and the more unfairness you'll have to creatively adjust to. in the long gaze of justice it would seem only righteous that truth and reconciliation become cultural facts at the level of street, neighbourhood, and family table before anyone gets pressed to 'get over it.' yet just as important, and in the same spirit, we need to look at the way we treat those who abuse and betray the human trust. we push our 'monsters' to the margins and sequester them in prisons which baste the 'criminal' in juices of resentment, anger, and more slow burn lust for vengeance against innocence and apparent lucky advantage in the world. thusly do victims keep holding space for the pain of life to match our denial, while offenders hold space for lack of respect and love for life to match our hubris.
on a personal note, reading caroline's thoughts on woundology, when i finally allowed myself to stop resisting, was an abiding re-revelation. i've met many of the stereotyped 'survivors' like those described and i have to admit i lost much in the way of my own self-understanding by viewing them as examples of something of which i'm not representative. this allowed me to feel somehow superior to the behaviour and yet remain in my unchecked outrage and wound-holding at the same time.
this wound-holding was also, i was happy to at last see clearly, a huge source of eros and passion in my life. this pain of mine defined every relationship, friendly, casual, or otherwise. in squeamish hindsight it strikes me to admit, it seems i've been constantly on the hunt for someone to take in every detail of the sorrow i've worn, expecting my intimates to go back in time with me and rewitness every moment, every agony, every betrayal. staying in touch with my past was something that had become a daily, even moment-to-moment practice, especially when i conned myself into thinking i was living in the present and its rush of activities. in truth, no experience could be engaged afresh. especially in interpersonal matters, it was beyond me to respond with a blank slate or without my set of prejudgements and scripts. i brought the canvas of my history with me and assumed a role and character fit for those stories... a center-stage role for myself at the expense of other people's own needs and feelings, a grandiose healing and indulgence being my implicit, demanding expectation. worst, i excellently played at being a fuck-up so as to permit the sleepwalk with my masochist into the arms of actors suited to replaying old plots, confirming the worst of my self-concepts, repeating deep harm.
fact is, i've been withholding this 'healing' turning point even while demanding it of life out of displaced identity issues. without my pain and my history i have no idea who i would be. none. and yet this is the rite of passage that all must inevitably haul ass to cover ground on, because no fixed identity can carry us forward the whole distance of our lives.
uncertainty is only a stress when we forget that there's still a silent witness and a complete knowing within us. we can lay down the past to one side and consult the void in its wake for answers instead of old scripts with confidence that there is someone, a me, inside there. but to do this, we have to have the courage of the flying leap and be thoroughly disenchanted with preserving personal history. no small feat, but then again, nothing worth doing in this world ever is.
from earliest memory i've been looking for my liberator to come. he is me and he, at last, has come...
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
healing of the breast is healing of the earth
When I first became aware of the developing flora of my own breasts I also met with a new, more nested and impossible to shake kind of shame. I was maybe around thirteen, a juvenile performer in a folkloric operetta group that toured extensively. There was a group of twenty-something males in the dance group and musician core that eyed with appetence the young girls coming to term as the women their own age either moved off into marriage or the dust bin of excitement conquests gone dull. The accordionist, a man in his thirties, who until this juncture I'd looked up to as a family friend, began to single out my gaze during dance practice, and when certain he was being unobserved, would take his finger and trace out his own nipple through his shirt while staring at me. It gave me a queasy, repulsive feeling to be violated by his intrusions and I felt a deep shame to possess targets for this kind of looking, which I neither welcomed nor understood.
Ten years later while working at the old Movenpick in Yorkville I got hazed for not being a participant in staff parties. A couple of the waiters cornered me in the dish pit and held me by the arms while a rich frat boy shuved an egg into the breastpocket of my white shirt and punched it into my breast to break the shell. Not quite satisfied, he stepped back to reach for a cinnamon shaker so as to sprinkle brown dust over the yolk now oozing out from the fabric of my shirt. When they let go of me and left and I looked down at myself I knew something profound had happened. Even not knowing whether the throbbing in my boob or the humiliation or the sense of being ejected from the group was worst, I knew there was a symbol within a symbol there for me and I remember not immediately moving, even though in my mind I was already seeing myself finishing my cash out, changing and walking home.
Like many women, my breasts have been treated roughly during sex, slapped, pinched, squeezed as though they were insensate, bitten, spit on. Having also gained and lost weight many a time in tide with my shifting need for repelling armour against life in the world, my breasts lost their pert appearance and took on a more pendulant affect which lead to many notable and crestfallen responses when my lack of self-respect led me to partner with men who compared real women with their digitized sisters of perfection.
I'm moved to share these selected highlights because we're not supposed to speak in truth to experiences of this kind lest we be labeled whiners, or complainers, or professional victims. I think its a double standard I no longer care to endorse with compliant silence. I'm also in the grip of an awakening sense that for many women there's a 'me' and then there's my breasts. Something in me separated in shame from them, cast them adrift, banished them from the core integrity of my being, making them the locus for all my self-loathing and masochistic submission to a male cruelty that I alone called forth from my environment in order to punish myself like the flagellant I was, hellbent on a degrading, self-destructive mission. It seems we have no choice but to live out the teachings of early life before we can rewrite the programming in more enlightened script. So be it.
Nature is a focalizer. All of my self-hatred and revulsion for being an imperfect female lives in the breast. Our bodies are vortical maps that we colour in according to our weaknesses and woundings. But that also means, just as we can invest the negatives in our intimate geographies, we can use this same profanity to give us an exact playing field for a reclaiming of personal soil. We can only come home if we've lost our way.
Thusly, and to summarize, if a woman can make peace with the forsaken breast she can undo the vector to disease, and what's more, she can become a resonant buoy for the healing of the wider environment on this earth. I believe in this.
[artwork by the author]
on the senseless ubiquity of sexual show
Its often said that human beings are the earth's units of consciousness. I find this slightly anthropocentric and would expand the definition to include plants and animals as well, particularly in light of what we're discovering of our limited definition of 'consciousness' and 'intelligence.' I've also always been fond of the maxim that to heal the environment we must first heal the environmentalist, for surely the problems which exist at the level of whole planet order can't be addressed at anything remotely akin to that level of organization. Part of the karma of existence, it would appear, is the voluntary/involuntary manner in which all of us, both in our present form, past lineage of ancestors, and future seed form offspring, have taken on the yoke of this soft animal body which mirrors in process and poesis the larger drama at work in the world.
As a woman I feel this at work in our eaten-out, commercialized breasts. We've fallen out of our alignment with the nurturing aspect and the living breathing import of our animus mundi circularity. Instead, we've participated, and lately even conspired with the fetishized eroticization of the tit, turning it from a subjective giving into an objectified, punitive consuming. We exaggerate its swollen, milk-filled readiness with bags of silicon, thinking we're mimicking a soft-porn blow-up doll ideal, when in truth we're emphasizing our alienation from and need to reconnect with core nurturance and plenty.
Perhaps even worse, women who have fallen into the madness of dopaminergic culture express an even more profound disconnect from the breast than the male eye who fetishizes it. Using the paltry refrain of feminist freedom, they bare the breast and desacralize it as a right of expression, forgetting that in so doing they depotentize and cheapen a living symbol, reducing it to a manipulation of the public for purely personal, egoic ends. The cleavage itself is not a thing to be restricted or demonized, but we have lost its power of appropriate use. The cleavage, after all, has a disarming influence, as the baring of a breast was once used in ancient warmaking to billboard capitulation to peaceful ends. Its role in seduction has been lost in tandem with its leeched mysteries.
To claim that somehow it's pedestrian sexualization is a feminist expression of rights and freedoms is to collaborate with the objectification of body parts and the subordination of individuals to group biological characteristics. We become waking tits, pieces of meat, haunches tottering and clacking down the streets in highheels that poignantly reflect our disconnect from the grounding earth. The irony's apparently lost on us that we're now favouring heels as we once favoured corsets for the way they biomechanically distort the skeleton, in this case giving the impression of gluteal development where sedentary laziness often makes for slack flatness, relying as well on the postural torque imposed on the pelvic basin during highheeled locomotion, for it serves to emphasize the lordotic arch, putting the ass and rear access openings into a presentational display empty of sentiment or integrated motivation.
While its just and righteous to take back the negative designations of slut, whore, harlot, hierodule and turn these on their heads in acts of living alchemy, we're sorely mistaken and collectively more than a bit dumb when we take the most narrow, costume-definition of these roles and trot them out as acts of rebellion. Its to take the self-image, flatten it into the two-dimensionality of magazine images and claim victory where only shackles of a different order exist. Bombarded and defiled by the commercialization of sex and self, modern woman mistakes self-esteem for the high-wire act of becoming a degraded advertising of her own empty commodity.
Burlesque, seduction and erotica have a place in the tango of life, but bereft of appropriate roleplay in the current, senseless ubiquity of sexual show, they only serve the mercantile agenda, fooling women into a false notion of emancipation. The femme fatale on the street with a skirt up her crotch and tits on show, giving her powers away in greed for male approbation, taking his degrading growls and desire for her as evidence of her worth, is the clearest picture yet of the stockholm syndrome.
As a woman I feel this at work in our eaten-out, commercialized breasts. We've fallen out of our alignment with the nurturing aspect and the living breathing import of our animus mundi circularity. Instead, we've participated, and lately even conspired with the fetishized eroticization of the tit, turning it from a subjective giving into an objectified, punitive consuming. We exaggerate its swollen, milk-filled readiness with bags of silicon, thinking we're mimicking a soft-porn blow-up doll ideal, when in truth we're emphasizing our alienation from and need to reconnect with core nurturance and plenty.
Perhaps even worse, women who have fallen into the madness of dopaminergic culture express an even more profound disconnect from the breast than the male eye who fetishizes it. Using the paltry refrain of feminist freedom, they bare the breast and desacralize it as a right of expression, forgetting that in so doing they depotentize and cheapen a living symbol, reducing it to a manipulation of the public for purely personal, egoic ends. The cleavage itself is not a thing to be restricted or demonized, but we have lost its power of appropriate use. The cleavage, after all, has a disarming influence, as the baring of a breast was once used in ancient warmaking to billboard capitulation to peaceful ends. Its role in seduction has been lost in tandem with its leeched mysteries.
To claim that somehow it's pedestrian sexualization is a feminist expression of rights and freedoms is to collaborate with the objectification of body parts and the subordination of individuals to group biological characteristics. We become waking tits, pieces of meat, haunches tottering and clacking down the streets in highheels that poignantly reflect our disconnect from the grounding earth. The irony's apparently lost on us that we're now favouring heels as we once favoured corsets for the way they biomechanically distort the skeleton, in this case giving the impression of gluteal development where sedentary laziness often makes for slack flatness, relying as well on the postural torque imposed on the pelvic basin during highheeled locomotion, for it serves to emphasize the lordotic arch, putting the ass and rear access openings into a presentational display empty of sentiment or integrated motivation.
While its just and righteous to take back the negative designations of slut, whore, harlot, hierodule and turn these on their heads in acts of living alchemy, we're sorely mistaken and collectively more than a bit dumb when we take the most narrow, costume-definition of these roles and trot them out as acts of rebellion. Its to take the self-image, flatten it into the two-dimensionality of magazine images and claim victory where only shackles of a different order exist. Bombarded and defiled by the commercialization of sex and self, modern woman mistakes self-esteem for the high-wire act of becoming a degraded advertising of her own empty commodity.
Burlesque, seduction and erotica have a place in the tango of life, but bereft of appropriate roleplay in the current, senseless ubiquity of sexual show, they only serve the mercantile agenda, fooling women into a false notion of emancipation. The femme fatale on the street with a skirt up her crotch and tits on show, giving her powers away in greed for male approbation, taking his degrading growls and desire for her as evidence of her worth, is the clearest picture yet of the stockholm syndrome.
on technological constructivism
A fact rarely appreciated is the extent to which the prevalent human diseases are concomitant symbols, metaphorically continuous with the ongoing ecological disaster of our disharmonic stewardship of the earth. The rapacious increase in cancers, for example, reflects the just-desserts of our cavalier poisoning of the planet, blythely shitting where we eat to use the turn of phrase. The incident statistics of the last two centuries reflect the larger human theme of our own disowned progenerative forces run amok. We destroy to build build build but hardly if ever look to the appropriateness, relative necessity or suitability of our addiction to technological constructivism, much less do we pay any heed to the consequence of our inventions and impositions on pre-existing natural orders.
Like ourselves at the level of herd, our cells at the level of the cancerous individual have lost the checks and balances of disciplined and wise limitation. The rate of cell reproduction overtakes what can be harnessed and employed to maintain any kind of coherent status quo. The formation of infrastructure runs riot, regulatory forces are handicapped, and destruction of macro-organism thru site-specific micro-proliferations is the result. There is no better symbol of KOYAANISQATSI (hopi word for "life out of balance") than our destructive overgrowth and mismanagement of resources come flesh in the cancer diasthesis.
The other major diseases follow suit in their niggling poetic aptness for the times. Diabetes is greed for the sweetness of life at the expense of the other flavours of real nutrition. Cardiac disease is the hardening of the vessels as a maladaptation against the leaking of plasmic life force energy at the expense of heart. These are not fanciful connections drawn to suit a whim. If we fail to grasp the fact that we are poster-children for the particulars of human crime against the planet and ourselves we're doomed to extinguish all hope for healing in the conflagration of our stubborn ignorance.
Like ourselves at the level of herd, our cells at the level of the cancerous individual have lost the checks and balances of disciplined and wise limitation. The rate of cell reproduction overtakes what can be harnessed and employed to maintain any kind of coherent status quo. The formation of infrastructure runs riot, regulatory forces are handicapped, and destruction of macro-organism thru site-specific micro-proliferations is the result. There is no better symbol of KOYAANISQATSI (hopi word for "life out of balance") than our destructive overgrowth and mismanagement of resources come flesh in the cancer diasthesis.
The other major diseases follow suit in their niggling poetic aptness for the times. Diabetes is greed for the sweetness of life at the expense of the other flavours of real nutrition. Cardiac disease is the hardening of the vessels as a maladaptation against the leaking of plasmic life force energy at the expense of heart. These are not fanciful connections drawn to suit a whim. If we fail to grasp the fact that we are poster-children for the particulars of human crime against the planet and ourselves we're doomed to extinguish all hope for healing in the conflagration of our stubborn ignorance.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
folk stories
when i was little girl i was told an old ukrainian folk story which keeps coming to mind these last few days. it was about an exasperated husband. his wife, who he loved muchly, was beautiful and fine in all respects, save one. she was an incurable gossip. not in the malicious sense of gossip in the modern world, but in the old world way of simply repeating as if for truth any word that came her way. she seemed to have no control over this weakness of character and it began to weigh on her husband and affect their quality of life. because of his superior wisdom, he knew it would be fruitless to reproach her directly or to forbid the behaviour. such tactics could only give her weakness more power. so he instead devised an elaborate plan to walk her through to a cure.
one day he hastened to her and spoke of wonders that she really must come at once to see. he walked her to the woods and in the clearing stood a tree covered in sparkling fish, the riverbanks were shored up by loaves of freshly baked bread, a road was paved with salted meat, things of this nature. improbable circumstances carefully staged to defy the rational and tempt the tongue that needs must wag. he took her to half a dozen such enchanted spots in the forest before extracting a promise from her that under no circumstances must she repeat to others what she'd seen. of course, though she tried her best, the momentum of her habit was stronger than her resolve to do her husband's bidding and within no time at all she had rationalized for herself why she should at least tell her most trusted friend of these miracle occurrences.
suffice it to say the story spread like wildfire through the village and quickly word returned to her husband that the secret was out. he then took great delight to show to all the villagers that there was were no fish on the trees, or bread on the banks, or paving stones of salami and reproached the villagers for believing his wife, known to be gullible enough to repeat anything she'd heard. shaming her in this manner he also broke the spell of her unconsciousness. and while she cried a few tears knowing she would never again be taken seriously or have recourse to the gossiping that she compulsively enjoyed, she was not so shrewish as to fail to recognize the sage love and harnessing her mate had gifted her with. and since no one would believe a word she thenceforth said, her habit could atrophy from the shock of a forced closure. the story ended with her husband sweetly teasing his chastised but now awake "little dumpling," and, putting his arms around her, smiling to himself with satisfaction, he took his victory and his transformed/reborn woman with scalded red cheeks and the beginnings of her own shy smile, home.
as einstein said, problems are rarely solved at the same level they play out on. the most intractable human conflicts often have to be seen and understood from a higher, more encompassing perspective. the sleepwalkers have to be lured into productive traps that bring the exact contours of their coma-drama to light. this would also be the spirit behind the maxim of giving someone just enough rope to hang themselves. the idea isn't to cause harm to the person or to behave callously, but to take a gamble, to gift them with the chance to see their own hand in their misfortunes. and the gamble has a charisma, for if it comes into a person's life at the wrong time, they'll only be able to twist from it a confirmation of the world's wounding unfairness, but if it comes at a time of ripeness, the opportunity for self-reckoning and more conscious moving forward is singular and blessed.
at root we all secretly want to be caught out and spared our blindness. we all want to stop projecting our invisible-to-us and therefore subradar actions onto others. no one really wants to persist in blaming outer agents for behaviour and interpretations that in truth solely exist in our own neurotic minds, that come into unfortunate manifestation by our own naive willfulness. and so these traps and stagings of hide-and-seek, benign neglect or tactical abandonments may take off a little flesh and strip us of a little dignity but in the confrontation with the unconscious, if wakefulness is the outcome, a little flesh and a token humiliation is a small price to pay.
when you love someone that you can see for plain is caught in a madness, you can't make it better by waving a magic wand, or telling them what their problem is. transformation is a more cagey and slippery fish. recalling the parable, to end hunger, you don't hand out fish for nothing, you teach their cultivation and harvesting. so to, you can't do the work of hunting down the most productive consciousness and or somatopsychospiritual healing for someone else. they have to do the muck work, they have to take the pains and em-bare-ass-ments, and pull themselves up onto the shore of firmer, clearer visioning. all that a lover of the earth can do is hold space for this and pray for the best outcome possible. and on very rare and beautiful occasions, the one who makes the wish is ably matched by one strong and finally ready enough to actually realize it, no matter how many stumbles and failures and setbacks they meet with along the way.
viva la vida. life is in the spit.
one day he hastened to her and spoke of wonders that she really must come at once to see. he walked her to the woods and in the clearing stood a tree covered in sparkling fish, the riverbanks were shored up by loaves of freshly baked bread, a road was paved with salted meat, things of this nature. improbable circumstances carefully staged to defy the rational and tempt the tongue that needs must wag. he took her to half a dozen such enchanted spots in the forest before extracting a promise from her that under no circumstances must she repeat to others what she'd seen. of course, though she tried her best, the momentum of her habit was stronger than her resolve to do her husband's bidding and within no time at all she had rationalized for herself why she should at least tell her most trusted friend of these miracle occurrences.
suffice it to say the story spread like wildfire through the village and quickly word returned to her husband that the secret was out. he then took great delight to show to all the villagers that there was were no fish on the trees, or bread on the banks, or paving stones of salami and reproached the villagers for believing his wife, known to be gullible enough to repeat anything she'd heard. shaming her in this manner he also broke the spell of her unconsciousness. and while she cried a few tears knowing she would never again be taken seriously or have recourse to the gossiping that she compulsively enjoyed, she was not so shrewish as to fail to recognize the sage love and harnessing her mate had gifted her with. and since no one would believe a word she thenceforth said, her habit could atrophy from the shock of a forced closure. the story ended with her husband sweetly teasing his chastised but now awake "little dumpling," and, putting his arms around her, smiling to himself with satisfaction, he took his victory and his transformed/reborn woman with scalded red cheeks and the beginnings of her own shy smile, home.
as einstein said, problems are rarely solved at the same level they play out on. the most intractable human conflicts often have to be seen and understood from a higher, more encompassing perspective. the sleepwalkers have to be lured into productive traps that bring the exact contours of their coma-drama to light. this would also be the spirit behind the maxim of giving someone just enough rope to hang themselves. the idea isn't to cause harm to the person or to behave callously, but to take a gamble, to gift them with the chance to see their own hand in their misfortunes. and the gamble has a charisma, for if it comes into a person's life at the wrong time, they'll only be able to twist from it a confirmation of the world's wounding unfairness, but if it comes at a time of ripeness, the opportunity for self-reckoning and more conscious moving forward is singular and blessed.
at root we all secretly want to be caught out and spared our blindness. we all want to stop projecting our invisible-to-us and therefore subradar actions onto others. no one really wants to persist in blaming outer agents for behaviour and interpretations that in truth solely exist in our own neurotic minds, that come into unfortunate manifestation by our own naive willfulness. and so these traps and stagings of hide-and-seek, benign neglect or tactical abandonments may take off a little flesh and strip us of a little dignity but in the confrontation with the unconscious, if wakefulness is the outcome, a little flesh and a token humiliation is a small price to pay.
when you love someone that you can see for plain is caught in a madness, you can't make it better by waving a magic wand, or telling them what their problem is. transformation is a more cagey and slippery fish. recalling the parable, to end hunger, you don't hand out fish for nothing, you teach their cultivation and harvesting. so to, you can't do the work of hunting down the most productive consciousness and or somatopsychospiritual healing for someone else. they have to do the muck work, they have to take the pains and em-bare-ass-ments, and pull themselves up onto the shore of firmer, clearer visioning. all that a lover of the earth can do is hold space for this and pray for the best outcome possible. and on very rare and beautiful occasions, the one who makes the wish is ably matched by one strong and finally ready enough to actually realize it, no matter how many stumbles and failures and setbacks they meet with along the way.
viva la vida. life is in the spit.
epigenetic influence
"Whereas the genome was once believed to almost exclusively determine our inheritance, it is now widely accepted that epigenetic influences, especially those occurring in the womb, affect and sometimes even override gene expression at all levels and thereby modify brain development (Gottlied, 1998; Harper, 2005; Keller, 2000; Lickliter and Honeycutt, 2003; Natanielsz, 1999; Petronis, 2001). The maternal environment affects immune function, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer risk (Nathanielsz, 1999; Pteronis, 2001) and even gross physical appearance in some cases (Gottlieb, 1998); it has also been shown to have an especially powerful influence on brain development and behaviour, and may even be considered a source of speciation (Lickliter and Honeycutt, 2003). What is critical from the standpoint of human brain evolution is that maternal effects are trans-generational in that, for example, a mother with high dopamine levels can prenatally pass those levels on to her children and, in turn, they to their children (Harper, 2005; Lickliter and Honeycutt, 2003; Nathanielsz, 1999)."
excerpted from "The Dopamingeric Mind in Human Evolution and History" by Fred Previc
excerpted from "The Dopamingeric Mind in Human Evolution and History" by Fred Previc
so much for genome-determinists!
"The dramatic expansion and increasing functional importance of dopamine systems in the human brain occurred over a long period of time, only partially paralleled by the changes in our physical appearance, and the dopamine rise continued long after our common genetic lineage. For those who believe that the great intelligence of humans relative to the rest of the primate world requires an exalted evolutionary progression, this theory is highly disappointing in that:
1. there is no positing of specific genetic mutations for language or other advanced intellectual functions;
2. no importance is ascribed to the changes in cranial size and shape; and
3. most of our intelligence is regarded as a by-product of physiological adaptation, diet and population pressures.
This theory is, however, consistent with a number of crucial facts, including:
1. the lack of a causal relationship between brain size and intelligence;
2. the tenuous relevance of the human genome to intelligence;
3. the importance of dopamine to our advanced intellect;
4. the specific expansion of the dopamine-rich striatum and cerebral cortex relative to the rest of the brain in humans as compared to chimpanzees (Rapoport, 1990);
5. the known effects of diet and physiology on dopamine function;
6. the sub-Saharan origins of humanity; and
7. the >100,000 year gap between the establishment of the modern human anatomy and genome and the appearance of a variety of cultural artifacts associated with a distinctly modern human intellect.
This theory merges genetic, epigenetic and cultural factors and blends the African gradualistic theory of McBrearty and Brooks (2000) with the general intellectual explosion posited by Mithen (1996), but with his European locus of the intellectual "Big Bang" now placed at an earlier juncture in Southern Africa. In addition, this theory clearly explains why cognitive abilities like language, religion, art, advanced tool-making, mining, long-distance exchange etc. did not emerge as separate genetic selections but rather depended on a more fundamental increase in cognitive potential as expressed in enhanced working memory, cognitive flexibility, spatial and temporal distance (off-line thinking), mental speed, and creativity that could only be found in a brain rich in dopamine (see also Wynn and Coolidge, 2004). Finally, this theory dispels the notion that the evolution of advanced human intelligence was critically dependent on the capacity for speech, since the latter was present at least 200,000 years ago in the first anatomically modern humans and probably another 100,000 or 200,000 years before that in archaic humans (Arensburg et al., 1990), without leading to any dramatic intellectual advances.
By highlighting the epigenetic inheritance of dopaminergic activity, this scenario shows why the emergence of the dopaminergic mind was not associated with a unique, immutable genetic process but rather one that continued to advance long past the establishment of our common genome and anatomy."
excerpted from "The Dopaminergic Mind in Human Evolution and History" by Fred Previc
1. there is no positing of specific genetic mutations for language or other advanced intellectual functions;
2. no importance is ascribed to the changes in cranial size and shape; and
3. most of our intelligence is regarded as a by-product of physiological adaptation, diet and population pressures.
This theory is, however, consistent with a number of crucial facts, including:
1. the lack of a causal relationship between brain size and intelligence;
2. the tenuous relevance of the human genome to intelligence;
3. the importance of dopamine to our advanced intellect;
4. the specific expansion of the dopamine-rich striatum and cerebral cortex relative to the rest of the brain in humans as compared to chimpanzees (Rapoport, 1990);
5. the known effects of diet and physiology on dopamine function;
6. the sub-Saharan origins of humanity; and
7. the >100,000 year gap between the establishment of the modern human anatomy and genome and the appearance of a variety of cultural artifacts associated with a distinctly modern human intellect.
This theory merges genetic, epigenetic and cultural factors and blends the African gradualistic theory of McBrearty and Brooks (2000) with the general intellectual explosion posited by Mithen (1996), but with his European locus of the intellectual "Big Bang" now placed at an earlier juncture in Southern Africa. In addition, this theory clearly explains why cognitive abilities like language, religion, art, advanced tool-making, mining, long-distance exchange etc. did not emerge as separate genetic selections but rather depended on a more fundamental increase in cognitive potential as expressed in enhanced working memory, cognitive flexibility, spatial and temporal distance (off-line thinking), mental speed, and creativity that could only be found in a brain rich in dopamine (see also Wynn and Coolidge, 2004). Finally, this theory dispels the notion that the evolution of advanced human intelligence was critically dependent on the capacity for speech, since the latter was present at least 200,000 years ago in the first anatomically modern humans and probably another 100,000 or 200,000 years before that in archaic humans (Arensburg et al., 1990), without leading to any dramatic intellectual advances.
By highlighting the epigenetic inheritance of dopaminergic activity, this scenario shows why the emergence of the dopaminergic mind was not associated with a unique, immutable genetic process but rather one that continued to advance long past the establishment of our common genome and anatomy."
excerpted from "The Dopaminergic Mind in Human Evolution and History" by Fred Previc
Sunday, March 20, 2011
melanie reinhart on chiron
"There can be an obvious 'unhealable wound' depicted by Chiron's placement, a situation that we cannot escape from although we may try to and which provides grist to the mill of our 'soul-work' for many years. Just as in the myth, however, there is potential resolution and release. Very often this revolves around accepting the unacceptable, the unfair, the incomprehensible; it may mean stopping trying to figure things out and fix them, but instead to simply allow ourselves to be with the experience.
Chiron can also depict a brilliance, something which stands out and defines a person. It can show where we behave or feel like an outsider, a maverick or wanderer, where we resist being tied down, where the constraints of society weigh heavily. There is a wildness, a freshness, a volatility of energy, a certain instability where we can go to extremes. It can also be like 'blind spot' where something is obvious to everyone but ourselves. Psychologically, it could be said that Chiron symbolises part of us that has been split off. It has become dissociated because of trauma or suffering, or simply through a lack of understanding or language to process an experience. Transits act like the classic shamanic process of 'soul retrieval' where that which has been outcast, seeks to return."
Chiron can also depict a brilliance, something which stands out and defines a person. It can show where we behave or feel like an outsider, a maverick or wanderer, where we resist being tied down, where the constraints of society weigh heavily. There is a wildness, a freshness, a volatility of energy, a certain instability where we can go to extremes. It can also be like 'blind spot' where something is obvious to everyone but ourselves. Psychologically, it could be said that Chiron symbolises part of us that has been split off. It has become dissociated because of trauma or suffering, or simply through a lack of understanding or language to process an experience. Transits act like the classic shamanic process of 'soul retrieval' where that which has been outcast, seeks to return."
"There is a Gift in every Wound,
a blessing in every crisis,
a light in every darkness,
love in every emotion,
a silver lining on every cloud,
a lesson in every experience,
a Service in every part of Creation."
"Healing is the gradual awakening
to the perfection
of your life."
(Chiron, channeled by Martin Lass)
a blessing in every crisis,
a light in every darkness,
love in every emotion,
a silver lining on every cloud,
a lesson in every experience,
a Service in every part of Creation."
"Healing is the gradual awakening
to the perfection
of your life."
(Chiron, channeled by Martin Lass)
supermoon fallout
Surely there is a window from heart to heart:
they are not separate and far from each other.
Two earthenware lamps are not joined,
but their light is mingled as it moves.
No lover seeks union without the beloved seeking;
but the love of lovers makes the body thin as a bowstring,
while the love of loved ones makes them comely and plump.
When the lightning of love for the beloved
has shot into this heart, know that there is love in that heart.
When love for God has been doubled in your heart,
there is no doubt that God has love for you.
[Rumi]
the difference between people-shoppers and lovers of the earth is simple for even the tortuously complicated mind. people-shoppers are on the prowl for unmodified, platonic specimens, cells untouched by the poison and vagaries of this imperfect dirt of existence. they look to be transported into the high ideals of beauty, grace and lightness of spirit as evidence of the more noble refrains of which the human coil is capable. they find complexity, darkness, and turbulence unattractive and to be avoided for it mars the grecian marble arches of the refined world under which they wish to make dance. lovers of the earth, however, want to know abject manifestation for what it is and in its fullest possible expression. they see the darkness in every light and the light in every darkness. they can behold the beauty in a florette of a crushed and partially decomposed paper cup surfacing in the filth of old snow. they marvel at the sinew of neurotic inner wrestling and the quiet bell curve of its ultimate neutralizing. they can digest the poignancy of a reaching that never quite makes its mark. they can love the grain of age scarifications and trouble on the brow, occasion to take in freely and deeply both the sulphuric smell of street people and the pulchritude of a rose garden. they know them by their shifting contexts, as mere flecks of duality looking for the dutiful middle-holding that turns both faces to unspeakable jewels.
lovers of the earth do not look to the seed that has just cracked under the garish wetting of the seasons as it tentatively sends its pale, thin scouts thru darkest gravitysoil towards a sun it hardly knows, and complain that it resembles not the lush tomato plant that grew to advantage the year before. they do not pull up the shoots and stamp on the earth that birthed it, exasperating that its but a scrawny, malformed, barren imposer. the lovers of earth alight with the eyes of patience and kindness on any signs of struggle and marvel at the bother of biognosis in action, the lionlambforms who work to bridge the floating sun and the fertile peat of our collective deadweight sheddings.
the pupa is easily judged and rejected for not yet having emerged into its butterfly body by the very agents and elixirs that could hasten its transformation. such ironic unfairness is the strict but firm teacher of ages, for in nature the transformations are self-directed for those who bear the seeds of greatness. the babes are abandoned and left to drift down the river of chance. the birds early tossed from the nest either die or become the strongest fliers. but we humans have our extended period of vulnerability post-womb that haunts us and impels us into relatedness, and as it should be. otherwise differentiation of sex and species would be but an empty play serving no purpose. i spoke recently with a friend who marveled to me the greatness he felt able to achieve with the essential presence of his mate who loves him without reservation. "without my wife, more than half my accomplishments would never come to be. knowing she loves me i can bear the doubts and challenges of the world with an infinite supply of strength that i draw on her account. just knowing she's there for me, can step into my way of looking at things, sometimes commiserating, sometimes drawing me away from my subjective, it all makes me strong in a way i could never unlock when i was doing my own thing."
there are no clear categories to people. we are all assortments of ever-shifting prominences. sometimes we are people-shoppers, looking for the best deal, the features we idolize at the lowest price with some guarantee of road worthiness for our investment. and sometimes we are lovers of the earth where the heartland borders run beyond any knowable circumference to embrace and take in the post-dual cartography beyond black and white and good and evil.
yet, as i am learning, the secret of nature is that the emboldening and fortification of conjugation is available to the singleton as well. for while the lover without is a nice fact to sometimes get your hands on, the inner inamorata is always waiting for our reach to union. even the diner, sitting alone at table, can't be distinguished from the lovers necking in the corner. activities within the heart can't be seen by science eyes or judged for merit by the appraisals of practical fellows.
.
.
.
.
.
dream: 20 mar 2011: on a bench i sit and i have to keep my eyes closed. a boy comes and we kiss passionately and for a while but i know the agreement is that he will flee to mask his identity before i open my eyes, which is exactly what comes to pass.
they are not separate and far from each other.
Two earthenware lamps are not joined,
but their light is mingled as it moves.
No lover seeks union without the beloved seeking;
but the love of lovers makes the body thin as a bowstring,
while the love of loved ones makes them comely and plump.
When the lightning of love for the beloved
has shot into this heart, know that there is love in that heart.
When love for God has been doubled in your heart,
there is no doubt that God has love for you.
[Rumi]
the difference between people-shoppers and lovers of the earth is simple for even the tortuously complicated mind. people-shoppers are on the prowl for unmodified, platonic specimens, cells untouched by the poison and vagaries of this imperfect dirt of existence. they look to be transported into the high ideals of beauty, grace and lightness of spirit as evidence of the more noble refrains of which the human coil is capable. they find complexity, darkness, and turbulence unattractive and to be avoided for it mars the grecian marble arches of the refined world under which they wish to make dance. lovers of the earth, however, want to know abject manifestation for what it is and in its fullest possible expression. they see the darkness in every light and the light in every darkness. they can behold the beauty in a florette of a crushed and partially decomposed paper cup surfacing in the filth of old snow. they marvel at the sinew of neurotic inner wrestling and the quiet bell curve of its ultimate neutralizing. they can digest the poignancy of a reaching that never quite makes its mark. they can love the grain of age scarifications and trouble on the brow, occasion to take in freely and deeply both the sulphuric smell of street people and the pulchritude of a rose garden. they know them by their shifting contexts, as mere flecks of duality looking for the dutiful middle-holding that turns both faces to unspeakable jewels.
lovers of the earth do not look to the seed that has just cracked under the garish wetting of the seasons as it tentatively sends its pale, thin scouts thru darkest gravitysoil towards a sun it hardly knows, and complain that it resembles not the lush tomato plant that grew to advantage the year before. they do not pull up the shoots and stamp on the earth that birthed it, exasperating that its but a scrawny, malformed, barren imposer. the lovers of earth alight with the eyes of patience and kindness on any signs of struggle and marvel at the bother of biognosis in action, the lionlambforms who work to bridge the floating sun and the fertile peat of our collective deadweight sheddings.
the pupa is easily judged and rejected for not yet having emerged into its butterfly body by the very agents and elixirs that could hasten its transformation. such ironic unfairness is the strict but firm teacher of ages, for in nature the transformations are self-directed for those who bear the seeds of greatness. the babes are abandoned and left to drift down the river of chance. the birds early tossed from the nest either die or become the strongest fliers. but we humans have our extended period of vulnerability post-womb that haunts us and impels us into relatedness, and as it should be. otherwise differentiation of sex and species would be but an empty play serving no purpose. i spoke recently with a friend who marveled to me the greatness he felt able to achieve with the essential presence of his mate who loves him without reservation. "without my wife, more than half my accomplishments would never come to be. knowing she loves me i can bear the doubts and challenges of the world with an infinite supply of strength that i draw on her account. just knowing she's there for me, can step into my way of looking at things, sometimes commiserating, sometimes drawing me away from my subjective, it all makes me strong in a way i could never unlock when i was doing my own thing."
there are no clear categories to people. we are all assortments of ever-shifting prominences. sometimes we are people-shoppers, looking for the best deal, the features we idolize at the lowest price with some guarantee of road worthiness for our investment. and sometimes we are lovers of the earth where the heartland borders run beyond any knowable circumference to embrace and take in the post-dual cartography beyond black and white and good and evil.
yet, as i am learning, the secret of nature is that the emboldening and fortification of conjugation is available to the singleton as well. for while the lover without is a nice fact to sometimes get your hands on, the inner inamorata is always waiting for our reach to union. even the diner, sitting alone at table, can't be distinguished from the lovers necking in the corner. activities within the heart can't be seen by science eyes or judged for merit by the appraisals of practical fellows.
.
.
.
.
.
dream: 20 mar 2011: on a bench i sit and i have to keep my eyes closed. a boy comes and we kiss passionately and for a while but i know the agreement is that he will flee to mask his identity before i open my eyes, which is exactly what comes to pass.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
clear the clouds
resist disaster chic and those who prey on sensationalistic escalations. you can't outrun a radiation cloud, nor can you make a home immune from fallout with plastic wrap and duct tape, elbowing for resources at the stores like crazed me-firsters.
prepare your body for the changes, reflect on what the thyroid does and what this shift might presage in terms of metabolic evolution, new global energy formats and collective opportunities...
prepare your body for the changes, reflect on what the thyroid does and what this shift might presage in terms of metabolic evolution, new global energy formats and collective opportunities...
Monday, March 14, 2011
wise advisory from david wolfe
"In light of the meltdown of Fukushima: How to protect yourself and your thyroid against radiation: kelp, ginseng, ashwaganda (recently found to regrow nerves), chlorella, zeolites, fulvic acid, nascent iodine, reishi mushroom, sea salt (also salty miso), botanical (plant-derived) or lipo- vitamin C, magnesium (chlorophyll), selenium (brazil nuts), coconut butter, Megahydrate, Crystal Energy. Spread the word."
NaturalNews has also posted some good tips re: iodine, and for those out on the west coast where there's a run on this supplement amid fears of an approaching radiation cloud, Adams offers some solid tips for where to get supply. be proactive. here's the link... http://www.naturalnews.com/031708_iodine_radiation.html
NaturalNews has also posted some good tips re: iodine, and for those out on the west coast where there's a run on this supplement amid fears of an approaching radiation cloud, Adams offers some solid tips for where to get supply. be proactive. here's the link... http://www.naturalnews.com/031708_iodine_radiation.html
Thursday, March 10, 2011
inconvenient truths
if you have to play an exaggerated fragment of self to curry favour or enchant, its better to throw the game by coming out in wholeness. at least then you'll have your wholeness and a real possibility of moving forward, rather than being fixed in the shards of pleasing behaviour and subtle illusioneering...
the situation as it is
"In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude."
[CG Jung Collected Works, 10, para 325]
"Rahangri then put his question: 'What is the difference between dream and reality? And in dream I include all forms of waking vision.' The poet was surprised, but the inquiry was much to his taste. He replied: 'There is no ultimate difference, for they intermingle, reflect each other, are dependent on each other, cannot exist singly, derive from the same source; each is both illusory and real, and neither is real without the other.'"
[Maurice Collis: The Mystery of Dead Lovers]
[CG Jung Collected Works, 10, para 325]
"Rahangri then put his question: 'What is the difference between dream and reality? And in dream I include all forms of waking vision.' The poet was surprised, but the inquiry was much to his taste. He replied: 'There is no ultimate difference, for they intermingle, reflect each other, are dependent on each other, cannot exist singly, derive from the same source; each is both illusory and real, and neither is real without the other.'"
[Maurice Collis: The Mystery of Dead Lovers]
Saturday, March 5, 2011
the art of sudden awakening
A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concepts of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, "You're nothing but a lout - I can't waste my time with the likes of you!"
His very honour attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, "I could kill you for your impertinence!"
"That," the monk calmly replied, "is hell."
Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight.
"And that," said the monk, "is heaven."
[excerpted from Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman]
His very honour attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, "I could kill you for your impertinence!"
"That," the monk calmly replied, "is hell."
Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight.
"And that," said the monk, "is heaven."
[excerpted from Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman]
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
eye of the spirit in nature
"Archetypally, (the) eyes of death are implacable and profound, seeing an immediate is-ness that finds pretense, ideals, even individuality and relatedness, irrelevant. They also hold and enable the mystery of a radically different, precultural mode of perception. They perceive with an objectivity like that of nature itself and our dreams, boring into the soul to find the naked truth, to see reality beneath all its myriad forms and the illusions and defenses it displays.
"Western science once aspired to such vision. But we humans do not have such objective eyes. We can see only limited and relative, indeterminate truths. We and our subjectivity are part of the reality we seek to see. The eyes (of the chthonic goddesses) see from and embody the starkness of the abyss that takes all back, reduces the dancing, playing maya of the (above-ground) goddess to inert matter and stops life on earth.
"These eyes obviate the patterns and ideals of habitual and collective rational consciousness - the way we see in linguistic confines, trapped within conceptual spaces* that form the world of differentiated appearances. They pierce through and get down to the substance of preverbal reality itself. They see, also, through collective standards that are false to life as it is. Thus they destroy identification with animus ideals. They make possible a perception of reality without the distortions and preconceptions of superego. This means seeing, not what might be good or bad, but what exists before judgement, which is always messy and full of affect and of the preverbal precepts of the near senses (touch, smell, taste). This implies not caring first and foremost about relatedness to an outer other, nor to a collective gestalt or imperative. Seeing this way - which is initially so frightening because it cannot be validated by the collective - can provide what Logos consciousness fears as mere chaos, with the possibilities of a totally fresh perception, a new pattern, a creative perspective, a never ending exploration.
"Such seeing is radical and dangerously innovative, but not necessarily evil unless unbalanced and therefore static and partial. It feels monstrous and ugly and even petrifying to the non-initiate. For it shears us of our defenses and entails a sacrifice of easy collective understandings and of the hopes and expectations of looking good and safely belonging. It is crude, chaotic, surprising, giving a view of the ground below ethics and aesthetics and the opposites themselves. It is the instinctual eye - an eye of the spirit in nature. This is the vision that Ereshkigal and Kali and the Gorgon bring to the initiate. It is the meaning of the vision of the terrible guardian head at Siva's temples. It is awful, and yet bestows a refined perception of reality to those who can bear it. This is the wisdom of the dark feminine that Psyche could not yet sustain - the knowledge she was to bring to Aphrodite, the Greek Inanna, to make her beautiful and eternal. Psyche saw it briefly and fell unconscious, for that age was not ready for such knowledge. Now we need to know this vision, for we are already working with its subtle energies in astro- and atomic physics.
"Psychologically, this mode of seeing, this knowledge, implies that destruction and transformation into something even radically new are part of the cycle of reality. Such knowledge is hard to endure. We try to pretty it up, cover, avoid. But knowing this basic reality permits a woman to give up trying to be agreeable to parental and animus imperatives and ideals. It is like hitting rock bottom, from where they are irrelevant. It relativizes all principles, and opens a woman to the paradoxes involved in living with the Self.
"This cool, objective eye is one basis of feminine evaluation. It does not get deceived by responsible performance or willed achievement, but finds the ineluctable facts in process, the panoply of emotional vectors that give each moment life, and that pass as others crowd into the present, leaving the individual at the mercy of time and processes over which one has little control, but in which one may find a grounding if one can reverence change itself and find one's own way to move with it. Such vision is transpersonal and a power that can protect - so Athena, 'gorgopis' (bright-eyed) and owl-eyed, wore the Gorgon's eyes on her shield."
[excerpted from
Descent to the Goddess by Sylvia Brinton Perera]
*see Antonio T. de Nicolas,
Meditations through the Rig-Veda: Four Dimensional Man, p. 24
"Western science once aspired to such vision. But we humans do not have such objective eyes. We can see only limited and relative, indeterminate truths. We and our subjectivity are part of the reality we seek to see. The eyes (of the chthonic goddesses) see from and embody the starkness of the abyss that takes all back, reduces the dancing, playing maya of the (above-ground) goddess to inert matter and stops life on earth.
"These eyes obviate the patterns and ideals of habitual and collective rational consciousness - the way we see in linguistic confines, trapped within conceptual spaces* that form the world of differentiated appearances. They pierce through and get down to the substance of preverbal reality itself. They see, also, through collective standards that are false to life as it is. Thus they destroy identification with animus ideals. They make possible a perception of reality without the distortions and preconceptions of superego. This means seeing, not what might be good or bad, but what exists before judgement, which is always messy and full of affect and of the preverbal precepts of the near senses (touch, smell, taste). This implies not caring first and foremost about relatedness to an outer other, nor to a collective gestalt or imperative. Seeing this way - which is initially so frightening because it cannot be validated by the collective - can provide what Logos consciousness fears as mere chaos, with the possibilities of a totally fresh perception, a new pattern, a creative perspective, a never ending exploration.
"Such seeing is radical and dangerously innovative, but not necessarily evil unless unbalanced and therefore static and partial. It feels monstrous and ugly and even petrifying to the non-initiate. For it shears us of our defenses and entails a sacrifice of easy collective understandings and of the hopes and expectations of looking good and safely belonging. It is crude, chaotic, surprising, giving a view of the ground below ethics and aesthetics and the opposites themselves. It is the instinctual eye - an eye of the spirit in nature. This is the vision that Ereshkigal and Kali and the Gorgon bring to the initiate. It is the meaning of the vision of the terrible guardian head at Siva's temples. It is awful, and yet bestows a refined perception of reality to those who can bear it. This is the wisdom of the dark feminine that Psyche could not yet sustain - the knowledge she was to bring to Aphrodite, the Greek Inanna, to make her beautiful and eternal. Psyche saw it briefly and fell unconscious, for that age was not ready for such knowledge. Now we need to know this vision, for we are already working with its subtle energies in astro- and atomic physics.
"Psychologically, this mode of seeing, this knowledge, implies that destruction and transformation into something even radically new are part of the cycle of reality. Such knowledge is hard to endure. We try to pretty it up, cover, avoid. But knowing this basic reality permits a woman to give up trying to be agreeable to parental and animus imperatives and ideals. It is like hitting rock bottom, from where they are irrelevant. It relativizes all principles, and opens a woman to the paradoxes involved in living with the Self.
"This cool, objective eye is one basis of feminine evaluation. It does not get deceived by responsible performance or willed achievement, but finds the ineluctable facts in process, the panoply of emotional vectors that give each moment life, and that pass as others crowd into the present, leaving the individual at the mercy of time and processes over which one has little control, but in which one may find a grounding if one can reverence change itself and find one's own way to move with it. Such vision is transpersonal and a power that can protect - so Athena, 'gorgopis' (bright-eyed) and owl-eyed, wore the Gorgon's eyes on her shield."
[excerpted from
Descent to the Goddess by Sylvia Brinton Perera]
*see Antonio T. de Nicolas,
Meditations through the Rig-Veda: Four Dimensional Man, p. 24
nature is a whore
the fecund feminine principle, statistically liable to wounding and degradation in these culminating, dissociative times, retreats into high arctic tundras. she locks down the heart and guards with talons of hyper-cerebral defensiveness. as an adaptive response this makes sense and sometimes brings its own satisfactions, but it's no way to live in the long term.
fortune-favoured of late with the right visionary experiences, drop-ins of intuitive flashes and attendant synchronies, i've been able to finally see for truth this hangover programming of diseased patriarchy still preying on my freedom and potential happiness. we've been raised to disown the gynolatric powers and put on exclusively androlatric garb, the very culture is steeped in these amputative poisons. the particularly afflicted make matters worst, surrounding themselves with especially noxious agents who further the malignment of not only the womanly powers but prevent the inseminating harness of positive masculinity from coming to the fore as righteous consort.
"Constricted, the joy of the feminine has been denigrated as mere frivolity; her joyful lust demeaned as whorishness, or sentimentalized and maternalized; her vitality bound into duty and obedience. This devaluation produced ungrounded daughters of the patriarchy, their feminine strength and passion split off, their dreams and ideals in the unobtainable heavens, maintained grandly with a spirit false to the instinctual patterns symbolized by the queen of heaven and earth."
[Sylvia Brinton-Perera]
any man who looks at a woman as a matter-of-course liar, as suspect, as faithless for having interests and variabilities, as a quanta that must behave, toe the line, suppress her inquiries, tone down her intensity and pump up her body parts, who seeks to dispossess her need of venture and social intercourse with colleagues and friends, who views her assets and charms as things to be guarded for personal aggrandizement instead of let loose for her enjoyment, satisfaction, and life's general pollination, who fancies he can control her personal habits, judge her lifestyle practices, or tame her of her attunement to the cycles of dark and light in nature, is, in particular, a patent artifact of my past.
and while i have an interest in investigating the wounds that have led men to adopt these attitudes toward the feminine, (and women towards themselves), it's not my job anymore to attend these questions or attempt their transformation within the privacy of my personal life. reaching this point of differentiation has been a lifelong journey and not one that i take lightly. in return, crossing this bridge has delivered the most beautiful passion into my life, perfect in its comportment and arrangement, and more fulfilling and stimulative than anything i ever imagined possible. corset-free, it makes no demands of me. it just allows, encourages, and lets me be in my realm to do as i please. heaven.
fortune-favoured of late with the right visionary experiences, drop-ins of intuitive flashes and attendant synchronies, i've been able to finally see for truth this hangover programming of diseased patriarchy still preying on my freedom and potential happiness. we've been raised to disown the gynolatric powers and put on exclusively androlatric garb, the very culture is steeped in these amputative poisons. the particularly afflicted make matters worst, surrounding themselves with especially noxious agents who further the malignment of not only the womanly powers but prevent the inseminating harness of positive masculinity from coming to the fore as righteous consort.
"Constricted, the joy of the feminine has been denigrated as mere frivolity; her joyful lust demeaned as whorishness, or sentimentalized and maternalized; her vitality bound into duty and obedience. This devaluation produced ungrounded daughters of the patriarchy, their feminine strength and passion split off, their dreams and ideals in the unobtainable heavens, maintained grandly with a spirit false to the instinctual patterns symbolized by the queen of heaven and earth."
[Sylvia Brinton-Perera]
any man who looks at a woman as a matter-of-course liar, as suspect, as faithless for having interests and variabilities, as a quanta that must behave, toe the line, suppress her inquiries, tone down her intensity and pump up her body parts, who seeks to dispossess her need of venture and social intercourse with colleagues and friends, who views her assets and charms as things to be guarded for personal aggrandizement instead of let loose for her enjoyment, satisfaction, and life's general pollination, who fancies he can control her personal habits, judge her lifestyle practices, or tame her of her attunement to the cycles of dark and light in nature, is, in particular, a patent artifact of my past.
and while i have an interest in investigating the wounds that have led men to adopt these attitudes toward the feminine, (and women towards themselves), it's not my job anymore to attend these questions or attempt their transformation within the privacy of my personal life. reaching this point of differentiation has been a lifelong journey and not one that i take lightly. in return, crossing this bridge has delivered the most beautiful passion into my life, perfect in its comportment and arrangement, and more fulfilling and stimulative than anything i ever imagined possible. corset-free, it makes no demands of me. it just allows, encourages, and lets me be in my realm to do as i please. heaven.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
longevity
one of the more compelling aspects of the stem cell horizon for me isn't so much the notion of an immortality quotient or cosmetic youthening. setting aside even the fascinating biomechanic leverage for tissue regeneration and disease reversions, the opening up of this research and longevity technologies in general suggests that as a sapiens sapiens species we are now at the point, in terms of psychospiritual progress, where we need no longer rely quite so exclusively on the macro gateway of the hardform death/rebirth mechanism in order to restage the problem set of our grappling. nor, perhaps, do we need to call forth with such hair-trigger destructive appetance the cleansing funeral pyre to achieve clear self-confrontation, or relinquish outworn, limited and therefore necrotic attitudes.
put another way, it means we're at a unique turning point wherein we've at last tapped and are slowly exercising the many means by which we can die and be reborn within a single, given lifespan. this type of broad regeneration and responsiveness is more conservative of the energies, and more elegant in terms of dramaturgic staging and wisdom implementation. it would also allow for upgraded inner researches, greater illumination in self-other-habitat relations, and would prove less reliant on collective needs for gross-level passion plays and their often damaging, traumatic upsets for the conveyance of information or experiential reconnoitering.
this indicates there are new psycho- and somanautic technologies pressing for revelation and use by individuals, further untapped potentials for the complete rewriting of ego interfaces, and new opportunities to benefit from karma bringing forth its dharma in a single lifetime, as opposed to along the course of several. the stones are still skipping across the cosmic fantastic, but we won't be needing the drug of dipping back into the hardest harmonic of regeneration for absolution of intractable conflicts and dead-end, stubborn patternings.
put another way, it means we're at a unique turning point wherein we've at last tapped and are slowly exercising the many means by which we can die and be reborn within a single, given lifespan. this type of broad regeneration and responsiveness is more conservative of the energies, and more elegant in terms of dramaturgic staging and wisdom implementation. it would also allow for upgraded inner researches, greater illumination in self-other-habitat relations, and would prove less reliant on collective needs for gross-level passion plays and their often damaging, traumatic upsets for the conveyance of information or experiential reconnoitering.
this indicates there are new psycho- and somanautic technologies pressing for revelation and use by individuals, further untapped potentials for the complete rewriting of ego interfaces, and new opportunities to benefit from karma bringing forth its dharma in a single lifetime, as opposed to along the course of several. the stones are still skipping across the cosmic fantastic, but we won't be needing the drug of dipping back into the hardest harmonic of regeneration for absolution of intractable conflicts and dead-end, stubborn patternings.
Friday, February 25, 2011
the art of self-analysis
based on current research i've been doing in conjunction with significant dietary intervention, detox, intensive yoga practice, and journaling, its become clear to me that i've developed bipolar disorder with schizophrenic-type psychosis as an adaptation to early adverse experience and aspergers. my interest is to document how such conditions can be engaged and worked with self-reliantly, holistically, and used as biofeedback markers on the circuit back to health and balance.
the aetiology in this case is quite complex, beginning with a neonatal period in foster care marked by extreme neglect of providers and my consequent and complete vegetative regression by 6months. a subsequent period, following a hastily arranged adoption to desperate but ill-suited candidates, lead to a spell of fourteen years of extreme physical and emotional abuse, of the kind sufficient to still be visible upon radiography of pelvic bones. for otherwise well-meaning people with their own impingements of physical illness, alcoholism and post-traumatic-sexual abuse, the stress of coping with an abnormally linguistic and highly precocious child proved too great. degradation of human qualities in the parents was the result.
although extreme and depersonalizing controls remained the norm throughout, the physical violence became untenable around my 14th year following a particularly bad episode that lead to a head injury which in turn raised for the first the possibility of situational disclosure. following on this, the rod was spared and in its macabre place food supplies and basic civility were controlled and withheld, with locks installed on cabinets and cold storage. by 17 i could no longer hold appearances, despite my lifelong and ultimately deeply masochistic sympathy for a broken father and victim-mother. i finally turned to a family doctor for help. his concern was to get me out of the home environment and to medical treatment before i departed for university. unfortunately the restorative clinic he described and i enrolled in turned out to be the general psychiatric unit of the local hospital where more stressors were to be borne.
i drifted in and out of dysfunction until i motivated myself into a film school stream. in spite of a rocky start that included my reaping the price of my programmed-to-bone sympathy for the devil in the form of a short-order of disastrous choices that lead me bewildered into more of the same violences, i ultimately routed a career and a stable chapter of marriage where i encountered the balm of love and understanding for the first time. but as i recovered strength and found some meager promise of success as a restaurateur, the marriage, based in larger measure on the fixity of my wounded dysfunction, failed amicably.
abandonment issues triggered, i then launched myself with vigor into a period of slow dissolution and petulant fraying at the seams. after a misguided and failed reunion with a troubled ex-boyfriend and his subsequent suicide on the eve of my departure, i let go of all self-concern, plunged into depression and substance abuse. a failed suicide attempt brought visions of the kind that caused me to at last snap out of my pain-amplitude and seek a real 'way out.' i turned to a family friend for assistance which led to some healing with one of my abusers. i learned that contrary to the advice i'd been given about the necessity of galvanizing a counter-attack, survivalist posture, it was forgiveness that was essential to my quality of life and sense of purpose.
in the years since i danced on the edge of getting real, preferring to continue to escape much of the pain and insufficiencies i felt with drugs, alcohol and erratic personal behaviour. marginal social and coping skills led me to create opportunities which, when showing promise, were immediately scuttled or run away from, not to mention another round of placing myself in the hands of a few more predatorial opportunists. in the last six years i've had manic swings that've lead me to abandon more than ten employers and cancel every variety of engagement for a variety of reasons ranging from the justified to the completely irrational. i grew increasingly incapable of sustaining most conventional sorts of relationships, especially those of a conjugal nature, and i made repeated blunders in all my personal affairs and social judgements. in spite of talents demonstrated in multiple domains i remain unable to manifest more than the promise of fulfillment and service to society.
yet.
in just two short months of dietary interventions (no meat, no wheat, no dairy, no alcohol, no tobacco, no drugs, eating only plant-based whole foods with occasional baked fish, super minimal grains, cycling in and out of periodic fasting, megadoses of reishi and cordycep mushrooms) and the above mentioned practices, i've been gifted with an objective view on my circumstances that was always slightly out of reach. highly self-analytical and clever, i understand my experiences very well, but this sort of chronic over-analysis left me out of touch with the emotional carnage left in their wake. i now feel more hopeful of integrating my intelligence with emotional attunement, learning to love myself instead of enforcing rigid habits of fear and self-hatred, of exercising wiser choices in my actions, and most important, modulating my social skills to bring myself down from the ice tower and into the play of life with the right companions and larger community of allies.
it was in reading 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman that i was reminded of the healing power of coming clean about the truth. the whole truth. i've often tried to broach this kind of unloading inappropriately, with the wrong people at the wrong time. but in the final analysis, for the cycle of violence, and the exploitation of the once-victimized to end, people like me need to speak their truth, acknowledge their complicity in maintaining suffering where choice is always hiding, and to set about making amends to the life principle that has lent us its persistence. some might say that's what therapy behind closed doors is for, but i don't concur. we need to get our human and often very dirty secrets out in plain view where the sun can melt them.
nature makes her units according to need for this karma machine. thusly, there must be a reason why i've been crafted to have generally withstood the cabinet of horrors to get this far. and while i've made mostly a mess of my recovery and reintegration into what constitutes the normal human family, its only because i've been guided by an unquenchable (if sometimes pathologic) need to give people and life the benefit of doubt.
to reframe, i've been gifted with an understanding of how otherwise decent people can be twisted by their own pain to commit monstrous acts, surely an essential point of view that has broad implications for healing and forgiveness. but i also understand that the people who harmed me in those unconscionable ways were themselves human beings and _not_ monsters. this makes me think that i, like everyone else, have a right to feel a special guiding purpose and a point to my life that i've become newly eager to make good on... for however many chapters i have left.
energy moves through time along a chain of generations that transmits both wisdom and woe. the woe, i've found, can be turned to wisdom, and this is the dross to gold of alchemists' lore.
the aetiology in this case is quite complex, beginning with a neonatal period in foster care marked by extreme neglect of providers and my consequent and complete vegetative regression by 6months. a subsequent period, following a hastily arranged adoption to desperate but ill-suited candidates, lead to a spell of fourteen years of extreme physical and emotional abuse, of the kind sufficient to still be visible upon radiography of pelvic bones. for otherwise well-meaning people with their own impingements of physical illness, alcoholism and post-traumatic-sexual abuse, the stress of coping with an abnormally linguistic and highly precocious child proved too great. degradation of human qualities in the parents was the result.
although extreme and depersonalizing controls remained the norm throughout, the physical violence became untenable around my 14th year following a particularly bad episode that lead to a head injury which in turn raised for the first the possibility of situational disclosure. following on this, the rod was spared and in its macabre place food supplies and basic civility were controlled and withheld, with locks installed on cabinets and cold storage. by 17 i could no longer hold appearances, despite my lifelong and ultimately deeply masochistic sympathy for a broken father and victim-mother. i finally turned to a family doctor for help. his concern was to get me out of the home environment and to medical treatment before i departed for university. unfortunately the restorative clinic he described and i enrolled in turned out to be the general psychiatric unit of the local hospital where more stressors were to be borne.
i drifted in and out of dysfunction until i motivated myself into a film school stream. in spite of a rocky start that included my reaping the price of my programmed-to-bone sympathy for the devil in the form of a short-order of disastrous choices that lead me bewildered into more of the same violences, i ultimately routed a career and a stable chapter of marriage where i encountered the balm of love and understanding for the first time. but as i recovered strength and found some meager promise of success as a restaurateur, the marriage, based in larger measure on the fixity of my wounded dysfunction, failed amicably.
abandonment issues triggered, i then launched myself with vigor into a period of slow dissolution and petulant fraying at the seams. after a misguided and failed reunion with a troubled ex-boyfriend and his subsequent suicide on the eve of my departure, i let go of all self-concern, plunged into depression and substance abuse. a failed suicide attempt brought visions of the kind that caused me to at last snap out of my pain-amplitude and seek a real 'way out.' i turned to a family friend for assistance which led to some healing with one of my abusers. i learned that contrary to the advice i'd been given about the necessity of galvanizing a counter-attack, survivalist posture, it was forgiveness that was essential to my quality of life and sense of purpose.
in the years since i danced on the edge of getting real, preferring to continue to escape much of the pain and insufficiencies i felt with drugs, alcohol and erratic personal behaviour. marginal social and coping skills led me to create opportunities which, when showing promise, were immediately scuttled or run away from, not to mention another round of placing myself in the hands of a few more predatorial opportunists. in the last six years i've had manic swings that've lead me to abandon more than ten employers and cancel every variety of engagement for a variety of reasons ranging from the justified to the completely irrational. i grew increasingly incapable of sustaining most conventional sorts of relationships, especially those of a conjugal nature, and i made repeated blunders in all my personal affairs and social judgements. in spite of talents demonstrated in multiple domains i remain unable to manifest more than the promise of fulfillment and service to society.
yet.
in just two short months of dietary interventions (no meat, no wheat, no dairy, no alcohol, no tobacco, no drugs, eating only plant-based whole foods with occasional baked fish, super minimal grains, cycling in and out of periodic fasting, megadoses of reishi and cordycep mushrooms) and the above mentioned practices, i've been gifted with an objective view on my circumstances that was always slightly out of reach. highly self-analytical and clever, i understand my experiences very well, but this sort of chronic over-analysis left me out of touch with the emotional carnage left in their wake. i now feel more hopeful of integrating my intelligence with emotional attunement, learning to love myself instead of enforcing rigid habits of fear and self-hatred, of exercising wiser choices in my actions, and most important, modulating my social skills to bring myself down from the ice tower and into the play of life with the right companions and larger community of allies.
it was in reading 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman that i was reminded of the healing power of coming clean about the truth. the whole truth. i've often tried to broach this kind of unloading inappropriately, with the wrong people at the wrong time. but in the final analysis, for the cycle of violence, and the exploitation of the once-victimized to end, people like me need to speak their truth, acknowledge their complicity in maintaining suffering where choice is always hiding, and to set about making amends to the life principle that has lent us its persistence. some might say that's what therapy behind closed doors is for, but i don't concur. we need to get our human and often very dirty secrets out in plain view where the sun can melt them.
nature makes her units according to need for this karma machine. thusly, there must be a reason why i've been crafted to have generally withstood the cabinet of horrors to get this far. and while i've made mostly a mess of my recovery and reintegration into what constitutes the normal human family, its only because i've been guided by an unquenchable (if sometimes pathologic) need to give people and life the benefit of doubt.
to reframe, i've been gifted with an understanding of how otherwise decent people can be twisted by their own pain to commit monstrous acts, surely an essential point of view that has broad implications for healing and forgiveness. but i also understand that the people who harmed me in those unconscionable ways were themselves human beings and _not_ monsters. this makes me think that i, like everyone else, have a right to feel a special guiding purpose and a point to my life that i've become newly eager to make good on... for however many chapters i have left.
energy moves through time along a chain of generations that transmits both wisdom and woe. the woe, i've found, can be turned to wisdom, and this is the dross to gold of alchemists' lore.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
long nights...
...researching the fairly recent advent of lateralization in brain function, its relationship to language and the act of externalizing knowledge on the printed page, epigenetics, the role of the thyroid and other microinformational substances in the blood and how all these factors serve to rewrite everything, deconstructing especially all those silly pinker- and dawkins-esque reductios about gene supremacy and brain-centric notions of consciousness...
some preliminary thoughts on ferguson's killer apps
the problem with competition
lauded as the engine and leading contributing factor of western ascendency, and a model for idea-harnessing, habitat-engagement and wealth management.
unfortunately, competitive cut and thrust has also been used as an excuse for exploitative and unjust practices, the squandering and mismanaging of both tangible and intellectual resources, and on an on-going basis, serves to lower the threshold of what people and organizations are willing to establish and accept as base benchmarks of human rights and respect for the planet.
what's more, now that the grand race for space and property acquisitions is nearing saturation point, the competitive dynamic itself, old hat and coming-of-age-banal, can only lead to ultimate and disastrous implosions. as necessary and inevitable a technological development as competition was, and notwithstanding the plateau of conveniences and infrastructure it's delivered us unto, as the song goes, it's just a phase we're going thru... and from here on out, there are better ways to get to rome.
we're on the cusp of a new era of commerce models that will look to constructive tactics for mutual betterment, harmonious use of the commons, and equitable treatment of manpower and units of production. such postures of business and interpersonal relations will not only bring enlightened-self-interest and compassionate stewardship to center stage, they will exponentially build benefit into a system that currently creates more social carnage and blood cost than it does substantive progress.
the problem with science
an epistemological dogma that brought with it a host of transitional advantages, but its basic tenets have been lost in its latter day translations and efforts to dominate power complexes, society at large and the life of the individual.
like organized religion, its counterpartner, science has become a denatured version of an original posture of investigation and is now responsible for enough madness, and obstruction of real inquiry, truth and progress as to shame its founding visionaries.
in future we can look forward to a deconstruction of science's central nexus, both philosophically, as flawed and limiting principles and precepts are exposed for truth, and politically, in terms of its beyond-reproach-or-question investiture with government, universities, and the agri-pharma complex, and the sour fruit such marriages of convenience have produced.
in its place, expect the emergence of a post-scientific approach, one which coalesces a more dynamically comprehensive platform of innovative investigations into the harnessing of matter and energy and ideas, incorporating what hitherto has been dismissed as irrational, unscientific, or 'supernatural hocus pocus' in nature.
the problem with property
the problem isn't with property ownership per se, but the impedances in place which prevent the majority from entering this equity stream. still, property ownership has more to do with serving the anxieties of colonialist expansionism, frontiersmanship, and personal and group security issues, than it does serving the interests of human infrastructure, transmission of assets, or prosperity wishes.
the problem with medicine
advances in infectious controls came in spite of the medical system, as the case of Semmelweis ably demonstrates, and as we harvest the just desserts of our misapprehension and misguided engagement of viruses and bacteria on the one hand, and the whole notion of hygiene, immunity and vaccination on the other, we can set to one side any notion that the history of medicine is purely heroic and a clear win-win for the books.
further, our record in disease management and drug intervention is only now coming to be known in its full and dastardly complexion. if one thing is certain, people have overcome illnesses more often in spite of conventional medical treatment than because of it.
the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth and the disempowerment of women and children; the subordination of the intelligence of the body to white coat conjecture and objectification; the huge cost to society of the physician-endorsed disconnect around food habits and lifestyles, these are just a few of the liabilities of the current model. added to this, as a practical seat of operations, hospitals, diagnostic clinics, and rehabilitation centers are among the most inflationary institutions going, rapidly out-pricing themselves from the reach of either governments or individuals.
look to a future of true integrative medicine and a culture of prevention that brings to the fore all the rapidly-emerging holistic sciences while systemically re-introducing individualized, self-responsible care that sees people taking responsibility for their health under the guidance, not direction, of wellness advocates.
the problem with consumption
as a catalyst for economic growth, need-creation and consumption-chic are ultimately unstable and mostly lead to a host of toxic attitudes and unintentionally humanity-retarding side-effects.
expect a horizon event where manufacturers at last intuit that true innovation and progress, and therefore profitability, come when genuine human interests and delights are served. those who persist in making junk, units of planned obsolescence and/or insisting on the fossil forms of old will learn the hard way. no one ever factors into their economic forecasts seismic events at the level of collective affect that can suddenly shift our spending habits away from bullshit towards value, freedom, and longevity.
lauded as the engine and leading contributing factor of western ascendency, and a model for idea-harnessing, habitat-engagement and wealth management.
unfortunately, competitive cut and thrust has also been used as an excuse for exploitative and unjust practices, the squandering and mismanaging of both tangible and intellectual resources, and on an on-going basis, serves to lower the threshold of what people and organizations are willing to establish and accept as base benchmarks of human rights and respect for the planet.
what's more, now that the grand race for space and property acquisitions is nearing saturation point, the competitive dynamic itself, old hat and coming-of-age-banal, can only lead to ultimate and disastrous implosions. as necessary and inevitable a technological development as competition was, and notwithstanding the plateau of conveniences and infrastructure it's delivered us unto, as the song goes, it's just a phase we're going thru... and from here on out, there are better ways to get to rome.
we're on the cusp of a new era of commerce models that will look to constructive tactics for mutual betterment, harmonious use of the commons, and equitable treatment of manpower and units of production. such postures of business and interpersonal relations will not only bring enlightened-self-interest and compassionate stewardship to center stage, they will exponentially build benefit into a system that currently creates more social carnage and blood cost than it does substantive progress.
the problem with science
an epistemological dogma that brought with it a host of transitional advantages, but its basic tenets have been lost in its latter day translations and efforts to dominate power complexes, society at large and the life of the individual.
like organized religion, its counterpartner, science has become a denatured version of an original posture of investigation and is now responsible for enough madness, and obstruction of real inquiry, truth and progress as to shame its founding visionaries.
in future we can look forward to a deconstruction of science's central nexus, both philosophically, as flawed and limiting principles and precepts are exposed for truth, and politically, in terms of its beyond-reproach-or-question investiture with government, universities, and the agri-pharma complex, and the sour fruit such marriages of convenience have produced.
in its place, expect the emergence of a post-scientific approach, one which coalesces a more dynamically comprehensive platform of innovative investigations into the harnessing of matter and energy and ideas, incorporating what hitherto has been dismissed as irrational, unscientific, or 'supernatural hocus pocus' in nature.
the problem with property
the problem isn't with property ownership per se, but the impedances in place which prevent the majority from entering this equity stream. still, property ownership has more to do with serving the anxieties of colonialist expansionism, frontiersmanship, and personal and group security issues, than it does serving the interests of human infrastructure, transmission of assets, or prosperity wishes.
the problem with medicine
advances in infectious controls came in spite of the medical system, as the case of Semmelweis ably demonstrates, and as we harvest the just desserts of our misapprehension and misguided engagement of viruses and bacteria on the one hand, and the whole notion of hygiene, immunity and vaccination on the other, we can set to one side any notion that the history of medicine is purely heroic and a clear win-win for the books.
further, our record in disease management and drug intervention is only now coming to be known in its full and dastardly complexion. if one thing is certain, people have overcome illnesses more often in spite of conventional medical treatment than because of it.
the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth and the disempowerment of women and children; the subordination of the intelligence of the body to white coat conjecture and objectification; the huge cost to society of the physician-endorsed disconnect around food habits and lifestyles, these are just a few of the liabilities of the current model. added to this, as a practical seat of operations, hospitals, diagnostic clinics, and rehabilitation centers are among the most inflationary institutions going, rapidly out-pricing themselves from the reach of either governments or individuals.
look to a future of true integrative medicine and a culture of prevention that brings to the fore all the rapidly-emerging holistic sciences while systemically re-introducing individualized, self-responsible care that sees people taking responsibility for their health under the guidance, not direction, of wellness advocates.
the problem with consumption
as a catalyst for economic growth, need-creation and consumption-chic are ultimately unstable and mostly lead to a host of toxic attitudes and unintentionally humanity-retarding side-effects.
expect a horizon event where manufacturers at last intuit that true innovation and progress, and therefore profitability, come when genuine human interests and delights are served. those who persist in making junk, units of planned obsolescence and/or insisting on the fossil forms of old will learn the hard way. no one ever factors into their economic forecasts seismic events at the level of collective affect that can suddenly shift our spending habits away from bullshit towards value, freedom, and longevity.
Monday, February 14, 2011
“However, potent brains are not strengthened by milk, but by alkaloids. An organ of such small size and great vulnerability, which not only approached the pyramids and gamma-rays, lions and icebergs, but created and invented them, cannot be watered like a forget-me-not, it will discover its own supplies….The brain is the mutative revolutionary organ par excellence. Its nature was always form, not content; its means expansion, its needs — stimuli.”
[Gottfried Benn, Provoziertes Leben (1941)]
[Gottfried Benn, Provoziertes Leben (1941)]
Sunday, February 13, 2011
loyalty is a false premise
that which must perforce be demanded or expected of us as moral concept or social/romantic ideal is often artificial to life and deconstructive of desired longterm outcome. that which emerges indirectly from a deep commitment to keeping love and wisdom vital, to authenticity of means and engagement, embracing the variegated textures of the life-journey, seems more often to support happiness-expansion and produce the sustainable complexities important to species.
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loyalty itself should perhaps be viewed as a happy, blessed coincident but irregular guest, instead of the dogmatic social contract and intrigue-engine of daytime television that its sadly morphosed into. this continuity experience, of traveling unitedly with certain ideals, habits, and people, is not one we ought pursue for its own sake, nor should we draw credit on it as evidence of some shining quality of character on our parts. instead we could perhaps honour its spontaneous appearance as a mere secondary byproduct of the more important value of being true to the shifting needs of the life arc, working as best we can with impelling forces we resist at our peril, those which rather insist we follow the unique situational and inbred directives tending toward continuous evolution and flow of our only-once-on-earth snowflake matrices.
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loyalty itself should perhaps be viewed as a happy, blessed coincident but irregular guest, instead of the dogmatic social contract and intrigue-engine of daytime television that its sadly morphosed into. this continuity experience, of traveling unitedly with certain ideals, habits, and people, is not one we ought pursue for its own sake, nor should we draw credit on it as evidence of some shining quality of character on our parts. instead we could perhaps honour its spontaneous appearance as a mere secondary byproduct of the more important value of being true to the shifting needs of the life arc, working as best we can with impelling forces we resist at our peril, those which rather insist we follow the unique situational and inbred directives tending toward continuous evolution and flow of our only-once-on-earth snowflake matrices.
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