thinking of a fellow LBP cohort, i wrote this for her birthday, which i think is a root bulb for all conjecture and acquired wisdom on topic of the mortal, morbid voyage...
in every pain
there is the tight bud
of the next state.
xo
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
"And in athletics, all this mysticism of track, and the rapture and ecstasy in sexual experiences - all these are mystical; all related to the loss of ego and its tenacity - yielding to a larger opening. That's what mysticism is, and these are the foregrounds, the shallows of that depth." [Joseph Campbell in "An Open Life," p. 105]
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Monday, June 13, 2011
a must for thyroid health
"Sea vegetables, like kelp, provide organic iodine, which is crucial as a nutrient when taken internally. These natural sources of iodine are essential for a healthy thyroid. Kelp in particular, with its balance of natural iodine with other minerals, vitamins and trace elements, is considered a body balancer, promoting adrenal, pituitary and thyroid health. The bio-availability of organic iodine in liquid kelp can assist in normalizing thyroid disorders, obesity and lymph system congestion. It detoxifies and eliminates heavy metals and toxins, very effectively helping to purify the blood.
Liquid kelp can be used effectively for weight loss by aiding in eliminating excess stores of fat and fluids. Its easily absorbed organic minerals and trace minerals provide energy and stamina, while organic vitamins boost the immune system and act as viral protectors."
read the full profile here...
Liquid kelp can be used effectively for weight loss by aiding in eliminating excess stores of fat and fluids. Its easily absorbed organic minerals and trace minerals provide energy and stamina, while organic vitamins boost the immune system and act as viral protectors."
read the full profile here...
Monday, June 6, 2011
from within to without
jung talks about the necessity of grappling with the unconscious as the sine qua non initiation into the deeper mysteries of an individuated, or integrated, self. as we develop the ability to become aware and tune into the many competing voices and fragments of persona within us, we also become emboldened and newly able to challenge some and nurse others. maybe the saboteur voice that seeks to curtail and kill off possibility for action in the world needs to be questioned, reframed and often outright opposed, while those that urge us to authenticity, challenge-engagement and growth, need be considered, aligned with, even solicited.
in grappling with these subpersonas that would counsel us into purposeless negativity, we should always be prepared for the rite of passage that proceeds whenever we have the courage to tap our inner demons on the shoulder and say, yo. in fact, as soon as we succeed in pulling ourselves out of the trance of identification with this inner opponent, the argument this opponent represents will, as if by magic force, manifest at the level of some outer world enactment. this is correct and to be welcomed. why? its not enough to simply bring awareness to and resistance to bear on the dialogues we're subject to within ourselves. in order to be truly free of the old programs we have to 'act it out,' duplicate the success achieved within, by learning to spot, distinguish, and prevail over agents of adversity wherever we meet these precious teachers.
so take heart. if you have a complex that you've recently become aware of, don't recoil in dismay or fear or self-pity when the dynamic takes form in flesh and blood events in your world. the escalation of engagement is to be welcomed as it presents the opportunity to make good on and put into play the new insights and awarenesses, so long-coming and hard-won. keep to center and make the same gentle but firm insistences with the outer agents as one does with the intrajected forces.
for example, if you've recently emancipated yourself from a powerful voice of old that seems to takes pleasure at every turn to tell you, 'you will fail' by newly refusing to take heed of its discouragement, know that the echo of this recent victory will emerge in an external theater. someone or something will come along and repeat this same message, but more powerfully and even painfully. it will be irresistibly tempting at this juncture to fall into the old habit of taking the discouragement, and ending the quest. please know that the apparent power of these agents is a pure mirage. they arise in generosity to furnish us with the chance to take our act to the next level. duplicating our successful strategy at the level of mind and transposing it to the level of worldly action is the final nail in the coffin for these factors that have outlived their prohibitory usefulness. they will always become persistent in this manner, when their perpetuity is challenged, because they want resolution more than unmolested continuance, they want to be put to rest by our own hands more than they want to prove themselves true. thusly, the moment we achieve dominance of love, self-respect, positivity and hope, versus fear, self-hatred, negativity and despair, these refrains of the old inner opponent bow out gracefully, releasing the stores of energy they once monopolized which now come to our refreshment.
its good to recall that these various subpersonalities, like the inner opponent, or saboteur, come into manifestation as a protective measure during infancy in order to maximize survival potential based on perceived local threats. eventually these perceived threats are no longer local, but the constellated protective agent fails to compute the new conditions, and continues in its work of outputting old protocols no matter how novel the new circumstances. the unconscious, where these factors live, and which underscores all learning and action, is intensely habit-forming. were it not we would never be able to acquire adaptive knowledge nor cope with the vast set of repetitive skills required in daily life.
the counterpose to the unconscious is volitional mind, and like any agonist/antagonist relationship, exercise, challenge and play are required to get the best out of both ends. this is why we must always be ready to question the weight of our acquired behaviours and thoughtforms, and be ever ready to cast aside old containers for life's fresh new wines...
in grappling with these subpersonas that would counsel us into purposeless negativity, we should always be prepared for the rite of passage that proceeds whenever we have the courage to tap our inner demons on the shoulder and say, yo. in fact, as soon as we succeed in pulling ourselves out of the trance of identification with this inner opponent, the argument this opponent represents will, as if by magic force, manifest at the level of some outer world enactment. this is correct and to be welcomed. why? its not enough to simply bring awareness to and resistance to bear on the dialogues we're subject to within ourselves. in order to be truly free of the old programs we have to 'act it out,' duplicate the success achieved within, by learning to spot, distinguish, and prevail over agents of adversity wherever we meet these precious teachers.
so take heart. if you have a complex that you've recently become aware of, don't recoil in dismay or fear or self-pity when the dynamic takes form in flesh and blood events in your world. the escalation of engagement is to be welcomed as it presents the opportunity to make good on and put into play the new insights and awarenesses, so long-coming and hard-won. keep to center and make the same gentle but firm insistences with the outer agents as one does with the intrajected forces.
for example, if you've recently emancipated yourself from a powerful voice of old that seems to takes pleasure at every turn to tell you, 'you will fail' by newly refusing to take heed of its discouragement, know that the echo of this recent victory will emerge in an external theater. someone or something will come along and repeat this same message, but more powerfully and even painfully. it will be irresistibly tempting at this juncture to fall into the old habit of taking the discouragement, and ending the quest. please know that the apparent power of these agents is a pure mirage. they arise in generosity to furnish us with the chance to take our act to the next level. duplicating our successful strategy at the level of mind and transposing it to the level of worldly action is the final nail in the coffin for these factors that have outlived their prohibitory usefulness. they will always become persistent in this manner, when their perpetuity is challenged, because they want resolution more than unmolested continuance, they want to be put to rest by our own hands more than they want to prove themselves true. thusly, the moment we achieve dominance of love, self-respect, positivity and hope, versus fear, self-hatred, negativity and despair, these refrains of the old inner opponent bow out gracefully, releasing the stores of energy they once monopolized which now come to our refreshment.
its good to recall that these various subpersonalities, like the inner opponent, or saboteur, come into manifestation as a protective measure during infancy in order to maximize survival potential based on perceived local threats. eventually these perceived threats are no longer local, but the constellated protective agent fails to compute the new conditions, and continues in its work of outputting old protocols no matter how novel the new circumstances. the unconscious, where these factors live, and which underscores all learning and action, is intensely habit-forming. were it not we would never be able to acquire adaptive knowledge nor cope with the vast set of repetitive skills required in daily life.
the counterpose to the unconscious is volitional mind, and like any agonist/antagonist relationship, exercise, challenge and play are required to get the best out of both ends. this is why we must always be ready to question the weight of our acquired behaviours and thoughtforms, and be ever ready to cast aside old containers for life's fresh new wines...
Friday, May 27, 2011
exciting movement in scholarship that seeks to bridge exclusionary zones of specialization for the betterment of knowledge... this article discusses the pauli/jung relationship as seminal, cautionary, but ultimately a hopeful model for translateralism in research and relationships...
Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung, and the Acausal Connecting Principle: A Case Study in Transdisciplinarity
By Charlene P. E. Burns
The same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.
[Werner Heisenberg]
Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung, and the Acausal Connecting Principle: A Case Study in Transdisciplinarity
By Charlene P. E. Burns
The same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.
[Werner Heisenberg]
still working on a response to ferguson's 'six killer app' theory of western civilization, the research for which has proven a bit more massive than i expected even though my purview and ambitions are seriously modest. my attention deficits and lack of skill with respect to analysis, compilation, and reference organization have finally come to oppose me. good. i like a challenge.
yes, my mind is unruly. yes, in the absence of formal education, i've avoided the ordeal of serious scholarship, making the excuse that by doing things my way, strident and without backup, and unapologetically so, i could keep the kook visionary within alive and unfettered and, most of all, happy. truth is, if i'm to develop and grow as a writer, my habit core, my use of resources, my experiences and presuppositions, these must be turned into an electional architecture.
the main of my approach for the killer app deconstruction will be to demonstrate the archetypal dramaturgy in global systems... in spite of efforts in the humanities to make history seem like a series of unrelated, haphazard and discreet events, there's a very coherent story unfolding... what's more, its accurately and eerily reflected by the one macroscopic array worth examining, the cyclical movement of the planets in the heavens.
its by no coincidence, for example, that every single period of revolution and upheaval occurs in EXACT conformity with the alignment cycle of pluto and uranus as they move through mutual conjunction and opposition. this will be where my examination begins since the factuals are rather incontrovertible and put conventional historical analysis on its ear...
competing for focus, i can't help but let myself get drawn away into an uptake of content i sorely need if i'm to do some writing on one of my pet causes, universal nuclear disarmament and the end of nuclear energy. i'm biting into research summations provided by the global consortium on security transformation, and learning up on the history of the NNPT.
yes, my mind is unruly. yes, in the absence of formal education, i've avoided the ordeal of serious scholarship, making the excuse that by doing things my way, strident and without backup, and unapologetically so, i could keep the kook visionary within alive and unfettered and, most of all, happy. truth is, if i'm to develop and grow as a writer, my habit core, my use of resources, my experiences and presuppositions, these must be turned into an electional architecture.
the main of my approach for the killer app deconstruction will be to demonstrate the archetypal dramaturgy in global systems... in spite of efforts in the humanities to make history seem like a series of unrelated, haphazard and discreet events, there's a very coherent story unfolding... what's more, its accurately and eerily reflected by the one macroscopic array worth examining, the cyclical movement of the planets in the heavens.
its by no coincidence, for example, that every single period of revolution and upheaval occurs in EXACT conformity with the alignment cycle of pluto and uranus as they move through mutual conjunction and opposition. this will be where my examination begins since the factuals are rather incontrovertible and put conventional historical analysis on its ear...
competing for focus, i can't help but let myself get drawn away into an uptake of content i sorely need if i'm to do some writing on one of my pet causes, universal nuclear disarmament and the end of nuclear energy. i'm biting into research summations provided by the global consortium on security transformation, and learning up on the history of the NNPT.
Monday, May 23, 2011
challenges
the world always forces us to confront and play with our edges and definitions. well.. let's say the 'world,' yes, but the 'world' when engaged and given the respect of being perceived thru the lens of loving open-mindedness, and an assumption of fundamental coherence and meaning, even when this coherence and meaning escapes or transcends our powers of seeing and interpretation (and, it bears pointing out, this land beyond our powers of seeing and interpretation is where old-fashioned mystery used to live).
you _can_ walk the parallel road of finding the world empty of these cues as to significance and meaning, but that's like walking among the richness of recorded poetry and viewing it with the myopic rigor of utilitarian prose conventions and lowbrow demands for literal transparency.
thing is, i have a horror of violence, i have a terror of feeling revulsion towards things, of saying no to life. yet, this fear and inability to 'kill' certain things off in the matrix of possible can actually rob you of any satisfaction, especially if you wish to be an agent for love and peace in maximal ways. in the same sense that the unchecked growth of nature (which chokes off diversity as often as it rises, free, in differentiated splendor) differs from the cultivated garden that partakes of intersecting nature and human ingenuity (an ingenuity that tries to better the vectors of nature), sometimes we must act and change outcomes by saying yes to the dance, putting on the yoke of our distinct ableness for manipulation, for violence, and the power to make difficult choices.
i have never felt more aware of the burden of being both a tool of civilization and an expression of the deepest roots of nature than i do in a current forced encounter with the asian cockroach. i am a 'trap it and deposit it outside' kind of personality. so its very interesting when the old routines of one's least-examined personality runs into a situation that, well, challenges the blanket righteousness of those old behaviours and personal commandments.
its always the most creative and character-forming challenge, when the old ways of doing things meats (sic) meets with an immovable spot beyond itself which, to be dealt with successfully, may need to be engaged with the very qualities we stealthily reject in the world and ourselves.
i remain a militant pacifist this hour. i don't think problems can be solved by carpet-bombing them, which always struck me as simpleminded, shortminded, and lazy. which makes this encounter doubly interesting, since these insects can go from a couple intruders to swarming thousands in very short order. thusly does the world goad us to make ourselves flesh by making irreversible choices, testing our constructs and mettle in a living labyrinth governed by other, incontrovertible laws.
you _can_ walk the parallel road of finding the world empty of these cues as to significance and meaning, but that's like walking among the richness of recorded poetry and viewing it with the myopic rigor of utilitarian prose conventions and lowbrow demands for literal transparency.
thing is, i have a horror of violence, i have a terror of feeling revulsion towards things, of saying no to life. yet, this fear and inability to 'kill' certain things off in the matrix of possible can actually rob you of any satisfaction, especially if you wish to be an agent for love and peace in maximal ways. in the same sense that the unchecked growth of nature (which chokes off diversity as often as it rises, free, in differentiated splendor) differs from the cultivated garden that partakes of intersecting nature and human ingenuity (an ingenuity that tries to better the vectors of nature), sometimes we must act and change outcomes by saying yes to the dance, putting on the yoke of our distinct ableness for manipulation, for violence, and the power to make difficult choices.
i have never felt more aware of the burden of being both a tool of civilization and an expression of the deepest roots of nature than i do in a current forced encounter with the asian cockroach. i am a 'trap it and deposit it outside' kind of personality. so its very interesting when the old routines of one's least-examined personality runs into a situation that, well, challenges the blanket righteousness of those old behaviours and personal commandments.
its always the most creative and character-forming challenge, when the old ways of doing things meats (sic) meets with an immovable spot beyond itself which, to be dealt with successfully, may need to be engaged with the very qualities we stealthily reject in the world and ourselves.
i remain a militant pacifist this hour. i don't think problems can be solved by carpet-bombing them, which always struck me as simpleminded, shortminded, and lazy. which makes this encounter doubly interesting, since these insects can go from a couple intruders to swarming thousands in very short order. thusly does the world goad us to make ourselves flesh by making irreversible choices, testing our constructs and mettle in a living labyrinth governed by other, incontrovertible laws.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
the love/hate delusion
the neurotic content of our mind dominates, especially on those occasions when we think ourselves above or in control of our unconscious. truth is, we never _ever_ encounter objective facts in the world, this in spite of the hubris of all scientific methods. we encounter instead the illusions we spin but forget our hand in, the expectations we're hardlocked into but deny of ourselves, the delusions we've lost touch with but once spawned in the mist and orphaned in time.
to the extent that these subtle organizing agents of the small self dominate our perception, the world of phenomena, in all its irrational and impossible to predict mysteries, will arise to match our skew on vision point for point. as jung said, the objective of neurosis is to prove itself true.
the most telling investigative device for the conscientious researcher is to watch how chance circumstance organizes around you when you enter the circle of influence and interested gaze of another. how things dispose by context, what rises to the surface as wardrobe for the encounter, these tell you everything you need to know about how the other person needs to see you, how they need to see themselves when they're with you, how you need to see the other person, and the role you feel compelled to play in the dynamic. if the projection is strong, there will be nothing you can do to offset the arrangement of 'facts' that suit the distortions. in fact, the more you struggle to assert your own truth against that of a projection, the more you become ensnared in a web of appearances.
when the projections serve our idealizations, we fall in love. when they serve our fears, we fall in hate. the aim of inner work and outer yoga is to get wise to the game of the unconscious and to arrive at constantly improving judgement about who to dance with in the veil of illusions, and who to leave twisting in the wind with their script and moviemaking. this applies to ourselves more than the other, since we can only ever take responsibility for our own projections. and if you feel unfairly viewed by the world around you, the question then becomes, what does this serve?
in the end, have the courage to be open to those encounters robust enough to handle the burlesque peeling away of veils. but also have the strength to leave those where the web is too thick and sticky to allow for movement and growth. friendships are like muscle tests. some make you stronger, some make you weaker. choose wisely, enjoy your mistakes, don't give a shit for consistency or fear the trials of finding your own voice and values. authenticity and honest inquiry are the best companions.
to the extent that these subtle organizing agents of the small self dominate our perception, the world of phenomena, in all its irrational and impossible to predict mysteries, will arise to match our skew on vision point for point. as jung said, the objective of neurosis is to prove itself true.
the most telling investigative device for the conscientious researcher is to watch how chance circumstance organizes around you when you enter the circle of influence and interested gaze of another. how things dispose by context, what rises to the surface as wardrobe for the encounter, these tell you everything you need to know about how the other person needs to see you, how they need to see themselves when they're with you, how you need to see the other person, and the role you feel compelled to play in the dynamic. if the projection is strong, there will be nothing you can do to offset the arrangement of 'facts' that suit the distortions. in fact, the more you struggle to assert your own truth against that of a projection, the more you become ensnared in a web of appearances.
when the projections serve our idealizations, we fall in love. when they serve our fears, we fall in hate. the aim of inner work and outer yoga is to get wise to the game of the unconscious and to arrive at constantly improving judgement about who to dance with in the veil of illusions, and who to leave twisting in the wind with their script and moviemaking. this applies to ourselves more than the other, since we can only ever take responsibility for our own projections. and if you feel unfairly viewed by the world around you, the question then becomes, what does this serve?
in the end, have the courage to be open to those encounters robust enough to handle the burlesque peeling away of veils. but also have the strength to leave those where the web is too thick and sticky to allow for movement and growth. friendships are like muscle tests. some make you stronger, some make you weaker. choose wisely, enjoy your mistakes, don't give a shit for consistency or fear the trials of finding your own voice and values. authenticity and honest inquiry are the best companions.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
yin yang
as i was bringing the laundry back to base camp the sun seemed to follow me and for once i did not tense under his glare and heat. today it felt lush and vital and i liked the way his energy waves were releasing the smells from the flowering trees and furious leafing out around me. and then something inside me thought, 'everyone to their own labyrinth goes to toil that we all might experience the circuitousness of perceptive errors, flawed reasoning, and mistaken choices in the same territory where our own escape lays hidden but ever waiting. retain your commitment, be brave, and never fear to discover...' yo.
on this day
shoe diaries. i was making a quick run to kensington market when i happened on a bad boy chef sunning himself in the cool spring sun. we'd once talked of my returning to the kitchen as his apprentice in a new project, and tho this no longer has any real appeal for me (i'm stubbornly trying to find a way to live by other wits), i felt obliged by my lack of economy to leave no invitation unexplored. and since spotting him there was a chance occurrence, i didn't feel i could turn my nose up at it. certainly i like to at least leave room to be lead by life more, my headstrong nature less. well, sometimes...as we caught up and came round to broaching his previous comments, it became apparent he'd moved on from the idea and i felt a certain relief. if i'm really honest with myself, it seems plenty reasonable to conclude that nature's intelligence doesn't wish to see me tied to a stove making violence into plates for a living, and a squalid, unhappy living at that. just then another gentlemen joined the chef. i recognized him as a snobby hipster who owns the art gallery that egresses across the alleyway. and to be even more eviscerating and uncharitable, i'd describe him as a gay man who hates women and so therefore is, well, uncomfortable for anyone with tits to be around. i introduced myself and reminded him of our proximity. he said, 'oh yes, you're the woman with the dog,' with an intonation perhaps better suited to the phrase, 'oh yes, you're the woman with the weeping sores...'
he looked down just then, in that de rigeur effort to be pointedly devastating by taking in an appraising, full-body sweep of someone's person, his dime a dozen but thousand dollar thick black frames rising an inch as he flared and scrunched up his nose, pausing at my rotted out runners, his breath freezing on the inhale. he let his look linger just long enough to leave space for my discomfort and presumably kill any further conversation.
this got me to thinking about how the art scene has lost its soul. it used to be about art, now its an extension of social panache and design cliques. where once there was tangible passion and transfigurative conflicts on the canvas, now there's mere cleverness, technique, and awareness of trendy furniture matchings. the elevation of fashion contexting, the social savvy-meter of the 'artist' proposing their feckless, masturbatory products accounts for why this gallery owner would choose to present the following on his coveted front window as an indicator of what has value in our local creative river...
wow. really?so it makes sense that one of the leading arbiters of what has significance in the toronto art scene would look at me in my rags and commitment to perhaps obscure personal principles and never imagine that i might be an artist, much less someone worth talking to. its one of the reasons i don't even bother trying to flush out the full scale of my manual art abilities. i've already been told on a couple of occasions by men and women with fine arts degrees that my work is merely decorative and of no significance and i can see the logic of this assessment. but i also think there's something vapid about it. certainly i'm not going to let it stop me from going from typepad, to instrument, to brush and pen whenever it suits me and for however long i can manage it.
and yes, its true i've been very foolhardy, drawing out to a maximum the amount of time i can devote to my music, art, and studies of late. i'm beyond bankrupt and will probably loose everything i own in the gamble. but, truth is, i don't care because i don't know how. i don't understand the game the world demands so i just pretend not to give a shit. and while the game is master of us all and will surely make me pay for my insufficiencies and negligence, and probably dearly, there is still a slim chance that i'll somehow manage a rabbit for all my insubordination. for the moment, its not so bad playing the pauper in a downtown of affluent hipsters. for all the withering looks of scorn and judgement, no true heart ever bothers themselves beyond a passing wince with the barbs of dead-eyed automatons.
Monday, May 2, 2011
evolution is not a line
the dramaturgy of transitions which mark the unfisting of a newly separative, self-aware human consciousness (the fall) from the dominance of an earlier unification with nature viz. mythosymbolic-instinctual mind, characterized by a lack of "I" (garden of eden), gives us insight into the liabilities of the experiential posture and garb of visioning we've inherited.
examining this lens of perception and its injunctions to action gives us an archimedean point, a distinguishing leverage against the topor of convention. it permits us to think afresh about how we 'see' the world and entertain perhaps for the first the wild extent to which the values we've carried forward and set into stoney infrastructure are not quite beyond renegotiation.
violence, consumptive paradigms and war-making are concomitant with the psychical pathways established by our first precautionary movement away from a unitary field of consciousness. to the student of human symbols and the inner and outer researches, this seems poetic, given the sword cut of intellection utilized to achieve this great expulsion from the dominance of chthonic forces, the laws of field and jungle with which the plasticine of human ingenuity could not much modulate and dialogue. but it is certainly, without doubt, an adaptation gone astray. that it has crossed into the borderland of recursive dysfunction is the way of all creation. this is not a negative nor some tragedy. its but the failsafe of the unruly promise of nonlinear evolution which presses ever for the novel improvement and the genius of greater internested, multivalent complexity at the expense of outdated, lateral, single-dimensional ways.
just as we can imagine the horror of Kubrick's Hal, the androidal terrors of technologies mastering in distortions of unintegrated functions their human creators, so too do the times, the weather, and the psychic atmosphere permit us to see as if for the first the malformed grotesquerie of the concepts which carry us forward and shape civilization, culture and its environmental theater of operation.
examining this lens of perception and its injunctions to action gives us an archimedean point, a distinguishing leverage against the topor of convention. it permits us to think afresh about how we 'see' the world and entertain perhaps for the first the wild extent to which the values we've carried forward and set into stoney infrastructure are not quite beyond renegotiation.
violence, consumptive paradigms and war-making are concomitant with the psychical pathways established by our first precautionary movement away from a unitary field of consciousness. to the student of human symbols and the inner and outer researches, this seems poetic, given the sword cut of intellection utilized to achieve this great expulsion from the dominance of chthonic forces, the laws of field and jungle with which the plasticine of human ingenuity could not much modulate and dialogue. but it is certainly, without doubt, an adaptation gone astray. that it has crossed into the borderland of recursive dysfunction is the way of all creation. this is not a negative nor some tragedy. its but the failsafe of the unruly promise of nonlinear evolution which presses ever for the novel improvement and the genius of greater internested, multivalent complexity at the expense of outdated, lateral, single-dimensional ways.
just as we can imagine the horror of Kubrick's Hal, the androidal terrors of technologies mastering in distortions of unintegrated functions their human creators, so too do the times, the weather, and the psychic atmosphere permit us to see as if for the first the malformed grotesquerie of the concepts which carry us forward and shape civilization, culture and its environmental theater of operation.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
retro spatial assignments and our 'libido of belonging' are pressing for replacement by more evolved, integral concepts
"Human beings, like all living creatures, take up space; they are driven to occupy particular portions of territory by the libido of belonging. Collectivities cement themselves through place, just as place confirms the singularity of the collective. That this impulse is perpetual also makes it paradoxical. It seeks to confine space and to confine itself to a space, but the impulse to confine and contain is itself unconfined and uncontained. Its tendency is not to sit still, to rather to propagate, to expand irresistibly into other territories. All living creatures are in essence imperialist, in that only the limits of the environment or other beings prevents their infinite expansion to fill all space – the head of the sunflower, blindly discovering and illustrating the Golden Section in its rage to pack as many seeds into the space as possible, aptly demonstrates this. But, if the imperialist is always in search of new territories to annexe, he is also for that reason always looking beyond or taking leave of where he is. Indeed, Serres distinguishes human beings from other species on precisely this principle: ‘Living species are sites of memory; humans take leave of these sites’ (Serres 2003, 58). Or, as he put it in the course of a conversation about his book on angels (1995a), which takes the form of a philosophical dialogue set in an airport, ‘we are the dasein in the sky, not in the land. Do you see what I mean? We are wandering. We are nomads. This is not a new state of things. It is a very ancient state of things. I think the dasein is in the atmosphere’ (Serres and Kunzru 1995).
But what happens when space is saturated or runs out, as may happen with our space, even our airspace? Necessarily, Serres argues, this must mean that we will have to take our leave, not of this or that location, but of space, in the sense of locatedness, itself. The network, the gridding or checkerboarding of finite space, with its determinate and mutually exclusive positions, gives way to a topological ocean of changeable relations. ‘[Soft] connectivity replaces [hard] collectivity’ (Serres 2009b, 20)." [Steven Connor on Serres]
But what happens when space is saturated or runs out, as may happen with our space, even our airspace? Necessarily, Serres argues, this must mean that we will have to take our leave, not of this or that location, but of space, in the sense of locatedness, itself. The network, the gridding or checkerboarding of finite space, with its determinate and mutually exclusive positions, gives way to a topological ocean of changeable relations. ‘[Soft] connectivity replaces [hard] collectivity’ (Serres 2009b, 20)." [Steven Connor on Serres]
postdialectical roots of peace | conflict is frigid
"Thesis is the action of putting something in a place. What is important is the place, and only then the manner of occupying it. Of taking it, holding it, setting oneself up there. Setting one’s foot on it. The foot, here, is the trace of a thesis, and the wall of colors, the noise, is at once battle and racket, the two strategies – material and logicial, hardware and software – of taking place and getting a foot in the door. (Serres 1995b, 53)
This is why, for Serres ‘[t]he form of the squabble is stable and perennial’ (Serres 1995b, 80), and why ‘[f]ury is a classifier’ (Serres 1995b, 82). It is also why Serres has so repeatedly found ways to praise the ceding of place or stepping aside from place-taking:
The blank place is the place of the continuous cession. There is no blank white place, there are only the blank white ones who step aside. There is no blank place, there is only a blank step, the step of giving up a place, there is only the trace of a step, that white foot, exquisite, alive, in the midst of the noise. (Serres 1995b, 78)." [Steven Connor, Michel Serres: The Hard and the Soft]
This is why, for Serres ‘[t]he form of the squabble is stable and perennial’ (Serres 1995b, 80), and why ‘[f]ury is a classifier’ (Serres 1995b, 82). It is also why Serres has so repeatedly found ways to praise the ceding of place or stepping aside from place-taking:
The blank place is the place of the continuous cession. There is no blank white place, there are only the blank white ones who step aside. There is no blank place, there is only a blank step, the step of giving up a place, there is only the trace of a step, that white foot, exquisite, alive, in the midst of the noise. (Serres 1995b, 78)." [Steven Connor, Michel Serres: The Hard and the Soft]
on hard and soft
Take a black box. To its left, or before it, there is the world. To its right, or after it, travelling along certain circuits, there is what we call information. The energy of things goes in: disturbances of the air, shocks and vibrations, heat, alcohol or ether salts, photons… Information comes out, and even meaning. We do not always know where this box is located, nor how it alters what flows through it, nor which Sirens, Muses or Bacchantes are at work inside; it remains closed to us. However, we can say with certainty that beyond this threshold, both of ignorance and perception, energies are exchanged, on their usual scale, at the levels of the world, the group and cellular biochemistry; and that on the other side of this same threshold information appears: signals, figures, languages, meaning. Before the box, the hard; after it, the soft. (Serres, 2008a, 129)
the evolutionary vector of war is from outer plane action for the sake of form plays to inner retention for the sake of transcendental theatrics
It appears that life evolved from animal forms whose soft parts were inside, covered by a hard external casing, into other forms, such as ours, in which everything hard is interiorized as bone, cartilage, skeleton, while the soft is expressed as flesh, mucous membranes and skin. Those who love to fight are unevolved leftovers from a very ancient past, from the dark time when we were armoured. The newcomers amongst us become gentle, wrinkle-bearing: we bear imprints. We are clothed in soft, warm wax, we are tarnished mirrors, a warped, scratched, blotched, diverse surface in which the universe is reflected a little. (Serres, 2008a, 74-5)
janus
Steve Connor on French philosopher Michel Serres, "... observing how much the unproveable faith of the realist in the existence of a world apart from him has in common with the mystic’s faith in the existence of God: ‘Despite this weakness I have never known how nor been able to separate myself from realism, hard, for the idealists, soft, seem to me never to have suffered from the world as such; raised in cotton wool, coddled and protected, the rich, the powerful and their children believe that all the things of the world obey them like their servants.’ (Serres 2003, 65)
"Serres will not succumb to what he bitterly decries as the addiction of the soft; will not, that is, conform to the comfortable assumption that human beings inhabit what they call the sphere of culture alone, or that we are alone in the world (hard). To understand the work done by the ideas of the hard and the soft in Serres work is to measure the reach of the remarkable statement to be found at the beginning of The Natural Contract: ‘global history enters culture; global culture enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy’ (Serres 1995c, 4). For the first time in the history of the world, human history has begun to act on nature; for the first time in human history, that bright little shred of time, nature has become a protagonist in human culture. This makes the separation of the natural and the cultural, of science and the humanities, of things and signs, henceforth not just inconvenient but literally inconceivable. "
"Serres will not succumb to what he bitterly decries as the addiction of the soft; will not, that is, conform to the comfortable assumption that human beings inhabit what they call the sphere of culture alone, or that we are alone in the world (hard). To understand the work done by the ideas of the hard and the soft in Serres work is to measure the reach of the remarkable statement to be found at the beginning of The Natural Contract: ‘global history enters culture; global culture enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy’ (Serres 1995c, 4). For the first time in the history of the world, human history has begun to act on nature; for the first time in human history, that bright little shred of time, nature has become a protagonist in human culture. This makes the separation of the natural and the cultural, of science and the humanities, of things and signs, henceforth not just inconvenient but literally inconceivable. "
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
on the importance of the parasite in emerging mobile autonomous zones (after bey and serres)
"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]
.
.
.
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...
.
.
.
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.
.
.
.
"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]
.
.
.
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.
.
.
.
"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]
.
.
.
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.
.
.
.
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...
.
.
.
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.
.
.
.
"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]
.
.
.
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.
.
.
.
"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]
.
.
.
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.
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
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