On Marriage

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On Marriage

We here, this day, invite love into time

Green force sourced fire which desiring uncurls

To summer’s meadow-ripened fragrant thyme

And rose pinkèd dawn whence joy hence unfurls

Though roses thorn do bear our troubled strife

Their pointing pricks through enhancing to chance

Each day alway to be best of our life

Capturing rapturing flowing to dance

Dancing that flowers between us to speech

Translating through grace mere you into Thou,

Thou art my all in all though each from each

Sparki-kindled kiss created through

Which meeting’s meaning our worlds unfold,

In weight and height and time love’s story’s told.

Legislating for Minorities: A Threat to Democracy?

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We focus on legislating for minorities. This serves to divide; since these are treated as separate groups. How does this fit with democracy, which surely is rule by the majority?

A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” John Rawls

One of the problems is that there is a loosening hold on shared values wherein society protects and honours all, especially the weakest and those furthest from some “norm”. Without such fundamental shared morality then we are left as a nation of “isms” – racism, sexism and the like. A place where those who are left out have no choice but to band together and fight – as a separate group.

Europe’s moral code, and hence America’s, was founded in Christianity. This no longer serves to bind us, but is there a secular equivalent to “love your neighbour as yourself”? John Rawls put forward this idea.

“A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” John Rawls

What a wonderful ideal. A society and politics I would follow and fight for…

Weaving Candyfloss

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It seems to me what we call “me” – our ego – is spun up as we develop from a foetus. Something like candyfloss at the fun fair where a stick is held within a spinning sugar stranding machine so that this wonderful pink confection arises seemingly from nowhere. I remember the mixture of awe and anticipation as a child as it magically appeared from nowhere.

If that’s a helpful image, then what is the stick from which our ego is spun? In a material sense of course it is our genes and the physical bodies of our parents. The sugar that adheres is our bodily experience. Our ego is a confection of embodiment. Our particularly experienced ego, our very selves in this life are the latest manifestation of emergence that has been unfolding since the Big Bang and the accretion of the earth and moon 4.6 billion years ago and the emergence of life 3.7 billion years ago. Life evolving through single cells and dinosaurs to humans. We are just the latest, and not the last, expression of life. What though is the point of our ego, It will die. What trace will be left, and for what purpose? This candyfloss will re-merge with all that is as our individual body fades. Why have this sweet separated space in which we become?

Carl Sagan said “ we are the way the cosmos gets to know itself”.

And that knowing is through relationship with other parts of the embodied universe. In that way something new emerges. Something like fabric created from weft and warp of individual fibres – each in turn spun from plaited ropes of our individualities.

Maybe a way then to think about this is imagining our individual candyfloss combined into a rope or plait with others?

Empathy, Maternal Reverie and Counter-transference

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Donald Winnicott developed our understanding of child development. He was analysed and deeply influenced by the thinking of Melanie Klein. What he is perhaps best known for is his concept of “maternal reverie”, the deep contemplative connection that mothers have with infants. This allows the neonate to have the confidence to start the journey toward their own ego and their separation from all-that-is. He also had the idea that what was needed was a “good enough” mother. That is to say, perfection isn’t needed, rather just showing up and connecting with love.

Donald Winnicott

Counter-transference as a tool for empathic understanding

 

What is less known about him is his development of modern counter-transference. This is perhaps the fundamental way in which therapists help their patients. The word was originally coined by Freud, but used by him in a completely different way. Winnicott understood that non-verbal connection can be used to understand and help patients. Essentially it is using ones own feeling state as an indicator of the internal world of the analysand (patient). Feeling is the fundamental way in which we make our decisions. Feelings are non-verbal and therefore inchoate.

The extensive training of psychoanalysts does involve substantial learning, reading and discussion. Perhaps the most important parts though are the years of infant observation and of personal analysis. This latter allows therapists to understand what internal feeling states belong to them and to set these aside. By doing this they can use their own “self” to feel what their patient is feeling, to harmonise with them. This is Winnicott’s counter-transference.

This has all now been underpinned by research and neuroscience, for instance through the developing field of neuropsychoanalysis. But we don’t need science to tell us any of this. Haven’t we known this the dawn of time about the fundamental importance of empathy?

Man’s Despair (and Repair?)

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Another friend of mine took his life last month. I resonate with his despair. It seems to be that there is an issue for men in our sixties. What comes to me is that society asks a few individuals to adopt the guilt and weight of the wrongs of previous generations; and that this burden can be unbearable. It seems to me that men of my generation and background (I am 68 and middle-class British) are also coping with 1,000 years of female oppression.

James Hollis – insightful Jungian analyst – wrote “Under Saturn’s Shadow”, a book in which he surfaces the ways in which the patriarchy also oppressed men.

James Hollis who wrote …

”Under Saturn’s Shadow”

In it he describes men’s isolation from each other and their feminine side – as we were expected to labour, fight and often die. Feminism releases men from this; however the role-expectation was crystallised in those of us brought up in the 1950’s and 1960’s. We feel the need still to fulfil a role (breadwinner, protector etc) that is no longer appropriate. It’s like having an appendix. Unnecessary, but it’s still there but without a role.

On top of this there is a projection of the wrongs of all those generations of patriarchy onto these role-less shoulders. This is our work; but some middle aged men find this too difficult to cope with.

James Hollis puts it like; this referring to the patriarchy which had an interest..

”not in the individuation of the person, but in the integration of the unformed person into the collective definition of tribal masculinity. Still, take away such psychically charged images of identity, take away the wisdom of the elders, take away the community of men, and one has the modern world”.

.. and again..

”Surely the greatest tragedy for men in regard to the feminine principle is that their fear alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force. This alienation from self obliges alienation from other men as well. Often their only connection with each other comes through superficial talk about outer events, such as sports and politics”

And our repair? It’s in the work..to live with vulnerability, to find our feminine and thus a different masculinity. To attempt to become gentle men.

Sitting by the Well

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Marion Woodman, a Canadian Jungian Analyst, was a source of deep and accessible wisdom. She recorded a series of talks as “Sitting by the Well”. These are compelling listening. They offer entrancing insights into the wisdom to be gained by listening to and through our body.

“The body has a wisdom of its own. However, slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be 
released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative dammed up energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in” Marion Woodman

https://videopress.com/v/QdvIjsjg?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

She points out that the word – matter – shares a common root with – mater ; which of course means mother. In the years before her death in 2017 she talked technological evolution as matter itself coming to consciousness. This echos the work in the 1950’s by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for instance within the “Phenomenon of Man”.

”Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Others also focus on embodiment as the intersection of spirit and world – for instance David Bohm, TS Eliot and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What distinguishes Marion Woodman is that in her talks and writing she grounds this into easily understood and practical steps.

I really recommend anyone to listen to Sitting by the Well, . Most audible book services offer a free trial period, within which you can hear them…

Change, Fear and Hope

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All is always in flux. Change is really all that is permanent. We have two attitudes to this. In one, we are backward looking. We want to slow or stop change, to live in the past. This leads to life full of fear. We are nonetheless dragged along with the movement of all that is. I guess there is another approach, which is to bury our head and anaesthetise ourself. Drink, drugs, materialism..

The other approach is to dive in to the flow and look forward with hope, expecting good. This does require us to abandon and live at least partly outside our ego – becoming willingly identified with all others. Effectively to love our neighbour as ourselves.

None of us, certainly not me, find this easy. But it seems to me that this is at least an aspiration..

Self and Reincarnation

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I understand that the “illusion of self” is a central tenet of Buddhism? It seems to me that this (the self) is an appearance of stability and boundary that arises out of continuous flow. This is borrowed directly from David Bohm ( “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”). John Dewey put it like this ;“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action” .

Why then, and on what basis do Buddhists conceive of re-incarnation. What is being re-incarnated? No soul, no self. What then keeps coming back? This seems to me to be a fundamental inconsistency which arises out of focus on boundary rather than wholeness.

Surely, if self is an illusion – then this is a release from self, itself?! Indeed a release from death. What is not there in the first place cannot presumably cease thereafter?

Teilhard de Chardin would have it that all of matter is evolving toward consciousness. Separately he has it that there will be an “Omega Point” where each realises that we are all-in-all to each other – and that all energy is Love and God.

In that case surely our “self” is an illusion. We are already part of what Martin Buber would call the “eternal Thou”. We only have to realise it. Put another way, for Buber our “I” does not exist except in relation to “Thou” – with a reality of “I-Thou” that opens us to our relationship with the “eternal Thou” (I think I have that right?). In that case our “self” doesn’t exist. Indeed ignoring the “Thou” only gets you to a kind of Freudian thinking – “I-It” materialism –  the self-reflective dead end of narcissism.

So. I am attracted to Buddhism, but don’t buy their take on reincarnation; or at least I don’t understand it. More work to be done!

Laughing on the Far Side of Fear

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Just push

Much of my life has been haunted and shaped by fear. I don’t believe I am unique in this?

I have found an answer that works – at least for me. I made the decision to confront my anxieties and terrors. I faced the possibility of meaninglessness and existential angst. To push into it, rather than pulling away…

I kept a diary during the process, with some excerpts below. I found that as I considered them fears vanished. Like nettles, they don’t hurt when held tightly; they simply fade away. Is existence meaningless? For me, that idea is now just odd. It no longer makes sense.

It turns out that this is an old discovery, Quoting TS. Eliot “dark, dark, dark.. we all go into the dark” yet “in my end is my beginning”

Extracts from my diary

“Consideration of any “thing” entails full exploration of its meaning, including all contexts and antonyms.

Fear is a context that shades meaning of each “thing”.

The unknown arises because  fear prevents its consideration.

Therefore fear, unlike joy, disgust or sadness, has to be subsumed in order that the unknown “thing” can be considered. That is, it must be seen as context, separately from the “thing”.

This perspective is achieved by accepting the worst feared outcome, by plumbing the depth of possibility.

Death is an antonym of, and also a context of life. The opposite is also true.

Fear of death is a surface reflecting our ego. It is a narcissistic mirror at the boundary of the ocean of existence. It’s reflective property is a barrier to our consideration of existence.

Fear of death prevents the conscious consideration of a deeper monster – existential angst – whereby we fear utter meaningless of infinite non-existence.

When existential angst is plumbed it is found to be a chimera, a confection of our ego; however it must be confronted and experienced for this this truth to be released.

It is by swimming naked in the infinite sea of potential meaningless that meaning emerges.

It is through integration with nothing that number and all “things” are realised.

It is through this mechanism that death is dissolved through a wider perspective, so that the joy of unification with “all that is” is glimpsed as the truth. “All that is” is synomymous with “the word existing beyond time”.

Some do not have to travel this path to truth. They are most often securely attached and live confidently (with trust). This is most often a gift from their parent, who held them in maternal reverie through their perilous crossing to the world of “things”. They are blessed