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Frohe Ostern

Equinoctial greetings earthlings!

The equinox represents the biannual moment at which everywhere on Earth is experiencing days and nights of the same length. A moment of global unity therefore.

In Europe it represents the beginning of spring and the feast of Ostara which became Easter. Perhaps you did not know it, but Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first full moon which follows the spring equinox – a very strange formula to celebrate the anniversary of a supposedly historical event. The symbolism of going into the tomb, dying and rising again is an ancient one in Euro-Mediterranean mythology, explored at length in Frazer’s Golden Bough. 

Ostara was Eos/Aurora, Ushas in the Vedas, Zora in Old Slavonic, the Indo-European goddess of the dawn, worshipped still as Aušrinė in Lithuanian folk religion. Her name is cognate with “east”, the direction of the rising sun, as found in the names of the Ostrogoths and of Austria, as well as with aurum, the Latin word for “gold”. In fact her origins are certainly pre-Indo-European. She is “consistently identified with dawn, revealing herself with the daily coming of light to the world, driving away oppressive darkness, chasing away evil demons, rousing all life, setting all things in motion, sending everyone off to do their duties“.[1] She is “the life of all living creatures, the impeller of action and breath, the foe of chaos and confusion, the auspicious arouser of cosmic and moral order called the Ṛta in Hinduism”[2] better known to us as Tao or Dao and quite possibly linked to the Anglo-Saxon goddess Rheda, also attested by Bede and derived from the Indo-European word for “to flow” which gives Latvian rīts (“morning”) and in English, to rise. The rising is followed by the dawn and ushers in the sun in his fiery chariots. Even in Christian mythology, Christ is seen as the way and the light, symbolized by the widespread use of gold in Orthodox church design.

These facts of nature and its inherent, unchangeable characteristics inspire us in this season to celebrate life and new beginnings.

Tuer le Père

In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), the authors take issue with Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex as a structuring account of the development of male sexuality and socialisation. This myth, they argue, instead is to be understood within the social function of the bourgeois nuclear family to repress desire. It directs libidinal energy into the form of a classical drama motivated by the extreme constraints imposed by the bounds of permitted sexual expression in bourgeois society, but is in no way a universal framework within which to understand infant development.

Viewed in a broader context, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s project is to answer, psychoanalytically, the great question posed by Spinoza: “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” Evidently, a form of social organisation generating the negation of self-interest was required by patriarchal societies to avoid the all-too-obvious outcome epitomized by the Mutiny on the Bounty: what we could call the “f*ck it I’m out of here” reflex. In his genealogical studies, Foucault correlates the development of some of the key institutions underpinning patriarchy with shifting social conditions, but does not endeavor to elucidate the underlying psychic forces which render the Freudian civilizational sublimation possible. Freud himself, of course, eventually posited a primary masochism. But primary masochism is only a condition of possibility, which still needs to be channeled into a structuring discourse in which it is reconciled with the pleasure principle.

Deleuze and Guattari derive their faith in the disruptive power of desire from ideas such as Nietzsche’s Will to Power and ultimately Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. Though this has been criticised on the grounds of being a metaphysical abstraction and even an apotheosis (desire in practice seems often apolitical or even pro-consumerist), it remains clear that sexual desire in particular, regardless of the extent to which it underpins, through a process of sublimation, other kinds of desire, is suppressed and managed in capitalist society in order to achieve a degree of buy-in to a fundamentally alienating social order in which individuals pursue goals misaligned with their interests; and it is difficult to deny that a world in which it were set loose would be a very different one. In that sense its revolutionary import is indisputable even if its ethical consequences are undefined. At the same time, the social production of scarcity self-evidently generates a world in which important desires and needs of a great majority of people go unarticulated and unmet. In this sense, the expression of these desires in the political realm is an evident precondition for recasting the social order.

Foucault proposed that the book could be called Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life, using the term “fascism” to refer “not only [to] historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini… but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” (in other words, secondary masochism). He argued that putting the principles espoused in Anti-Oedipus into practice would involve freeing political action from “unitary and totalizing paranoia” and withdrawing allegiance “from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality.“

Anti-Oedipus, therefore, is a figure come to emancipate desire. But perhaps the issue with the Oedipal complex is not so much its contestable developmental inevitability as its proposed need for and form of resolution.

At this point I may simply intuit arguments that Deleuze and Guattari already make and which I have simply not sufficiently studied, for which I beg indulgence. Oedipus, of course, kills his father unwittingly but Ressentiment against the authoritarian impositions of the father within the nuclear family seems an inevitable and healthy development, as does the need to structure the development of the infant into its adult role in society, a responsibility, to whomsoever it belong and to whatever ends it be exercised, which one cannot simply neglect. This conflict, therefore, is inherent in the reproduction as well as the evolution of social norms. It seems, though, that Freud was right to reject a parallel Elektra complex for the female child; the object of Ressentiment is always the father as embodiment of the arbitrariness of the patriarchal order and the violence with which it seeks to perpetuate the existing social norms, easily perceived by the intuition of the child as blatantly at odds with the requirements of its nature. Resentment of the mother is secondary to the extent to which she buys into and underwrites this paradigm, or derives from her lack of courage in not resisting it.

This struggle, however, can easily be short-circuited and under differing social circumstances need not arise at all, just as, no doubt, it does not arise, or only in an attenuated form, in those families or other social units which have withdrawn consent from (or never given consent to) its unpitying dictates.

For, just as with problematic categories such as femininity and masculinity, the concept of “father” is an evident social construction which is highly overdetermined. From God the Father through filial piety, and from the President to the schoolteacher, the omnipresent Father demands obedience but offers little more in return than a highly conditional ticket to participate in the same alienating cultural forms with only relative advantage over one’s fellow human beings. By way of contrast, however, in primitive societies, paternity may have been absent as a concept worthy of any interest at all, and authority was more diffuse and contextual, female as well as (perhaps more than) male. [1] Even in early modern times, and into relatively late modern times, most people outside of a small elite were raised in a multi-adult environment, and often older living ancestors may have enjoyed greater authority over the clan than immediate parents. These societies did and do not lack any essential social function of cultural transmission (in due course they were complemented by apprenticeship and the school).

Of course, our contemporary social resources for child rearing may be considerably less generous than those available to our ancestors. Nevertheless, rather than accept his lot as a lightning-rod for adolescent frustrations, I suggest that the father engineer his disappearance. It is time to withdraw allegiance from this concept and, even acting within a narrow social unit, for “fathers” simply to define themselves within the childrearing context as benevolent and committed adult males. Just as I have long since abandoned inherently problematic labels like “heterosexual”, and notwithstanding its longstanding cultural pedigree, I feel no more need for this one. For to paraphrase Judith Butler, “[The father role] is not to culture as [biological paternity] is to nature; [it] is also the discursive/cultural means by which [fatherhood] is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts”. And whilst there is no Archimedean point available to us outside of culture, “to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.” [2]

NOTES

[1] Ryan and Jetha, Sex at Dawn (2010), ch.6
[2] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1989)

A love letter to 2020

New Year’s Eve used to be nice.

As long as I can remember though, here where I am it’s always been pretty grim. And it seems only to get grimmer, with increasing vandalism and violence.

Worse than this, all this antisocial tumult is clearly feeding a disturbing vein of intolerance and far-right sentiment.

Viewed from one angle, the 2010s look like a lost decade. After the financial meltdown of 2008 it was clear we were at a social and economic watershed. In the 2010s, however, all we did was muddle through with a band-aid or two applied to this leaky dinghy whilst the seas only became rougher. We doubled down on our obsolete system of financial capitalism knowing full well it was long past its sell-by date. We capitulated in the face of orchestrated hate campaigns ably designed to promote our most atavistic sentiments and those prepared most grossly to incarnate them. Meanwhile the urgency of action to limit and mitigate climate change became increasingly apparent, but it seems the gulf between those who cared and those too frightened to think for themselves only widened.

The right has played a classic game of divide and conquer, but the left has cruelly disappointed. Obsessed with political correctness and the most obscure of progressive causes, it has alienated its own base and delivered them into the hands of the most cynical of its opponents. It has been largely unable to go beyond its Marxist paradigm and rethink social policy for an age in which capital formation has become redundant and the relations between capital and labor have radically shifted. Both the right and the left are committed to keeping the masses in a state of waged or unwaged serfdom.

It seems that only a fool would look forward to the 2020s, and rightly I think morosity predominates. But it does not serve us and it is full of dangers. In the end we will have the world we dream of, and if we allow ourselves to dream the dark dreams prescribed us by others, we choose the side of darkness with them.

Not so long ago, many of us were quite upbeat about social changes. We felt that, on a deeper level, consciousness was evolving. We knew that the new ideas we were striving for and so desperately needed were so alien to every concept developed in the last 10 000 years of human history that no one could ever have expected them to be articulated and adopted in the space of a few years. Yet it really seemed that we were making a start. What went wrong?

I think the alarming manifestations of human savagery we see all around us today are a consequence of the fact that these dark forces feel no longer safe in their subliminal rabbit holes. We have drawn bigotry and cynicism out into the open. With a face and a name we should be able to fight them much more easily. But we are terrified by accumulated trauma and resort, ourselves, to the tools of hate they have taught us are the only way.

The 2020s will only put humankind on a path to a better future if we stop employing the tools of our enemy. The patriarchy feeds on violence. Even when it loses, it wins.

We need to stop seeing the other as an enemy out there and start seeing it as a manifestation of our own unresolved conflicts. Something we need to understand, empathize with, learn from and heal, not try to eradicate in a paroxysm of allopathic folly. We need to be angry that things are the way they are, but not that people are the way they are. We need to reclaim civil space, but not ghettoize those who are condemned to reject us by our inability to understand and care for them.

The purveyors of violence are not a tiny minority but merely the tip of an enormous iceberg of persons given no stake in society as a result of our collective inability to imagine and navigate the transition to a post-industrial, more caring future. They haven’t failed; we have failed them. It’s time to acknowledge this.

The Archetype of Woman as Redemptress: psychodynamic, literary and patriarchal aspects

In this article, I suggest that the tendency on the part of men to endow female romantic partners with redemptive force, reflected in Jung’s notion of Anima, derives from a failure of socialization in puberty. Although culturally sanctioned, this misconstrues the potency of erotic relationships to reshape the psyche, substituting the confined ego project of redemption for the more open-ended one of spiritual emancipation; it also undermines erotic polarity and as such is largely self-defeating.
Continue reading “The Archetype of Woman as Redemptress: psychodynamic, literary and patriarchal aspects”

Apocalypticism and the next social revolution

History suggests that millenarian fears of social breakdown are a device which has often been generated and instrumentalized by the establishment in moments of existential threat. Even if such fears reach the extreme stage of collective psychosis, this does not mean there is a real prospect of such breakdown, and in fact the social conditions which have sometimes underpinned descents into authoritarianism in the past are fundamentally different at the present juncture and hardly seem prone to reconstitution. Insofar as such fears bring latent conflicts into the open, whilst they certainly raise concerns and have unpredictable consequences, they also offer an opportunity to unmask these conflicts and to reshape social institutions. Continue reading “Apocalypticism and the next social revolution”

Trump versus Clinton – political psychology and patriarchy

If the US Democratic party had chosen Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate – which of course they didn’t, but that’s another subject – there seems little doubt that he would be on course for a landslide in today’s presidential election. Instead, we might wake up tomorrow and find that it is Donald Trump: despite his displaying an abundance of characteristics any one of which would classically have sunk the chances of any previous presidential contender. The world could very easily, therefore, have been very different from how it will now be even if Clinton wins. And yet surely any voter who would have voted for Sanders would rationally prefer Clinton to Trump. What explains the dynamics of this process?

Continue reading “Trump versus Clinton – political psychology and patriarchy”

Consumerism and spirituality

 

There is a popular meme in the new spirituality movement according to which we are destroying the planet due to an unspiritual desire for more and more goods, often driven by an ego need for status. If we were to live more simply, the argument goes, we wouldn’t have all these problems. So shift consciousness in this direction and there you have your solution.

I need to blow a few holes in this beguilingly appealing theory. It may well of course be true in the aggregate that we are consuming resources at an unsustainable rate, as it certainly is true that we in the developed countries are incentivising people who are not yet consuming resources at this unsustainable rate (and there are fewer and fewer of them) to start doing so in order to create markets for our stuff (in other words, to get hold of their stuff in order that we can have even more stuff, because otherwise they would have no money with which to pay us).

Nevertheless I do not think this has much to do with status, it is essentially driven by a desire to enjoy life. Holidays, good food, comfortable accommodation, education, transport, culture, nightlife and similar major expenditure items in the budgets of households in developed countries dwarf the contribution of goods like personal electronics and discretionary luxury spending on cars and clothing. The idea that the demand for any of this first class of consumables, which is dominated by spending on services, is to any appreciable extent motivated by a desire simply to impress others I personally find extremely strange and at best highly anachronistic. For items like healthcare and related services such a hypothesis is even more outlandish.

So no, there is no excessive ego component in the demand function for most discretionary expenditure in developed countries and my hypothesis is that spiritual growth is going to have little to no impact on the demand side of the macroeconomy. It might be that some people adopt a radically different lifestyle which really impacts macrodemand, but most people are simply going to consume differently, or the mechanism of reduction in macrodemand is going to be a consequence of decisions which impact earnings thereby strengthening budget constraints, rather than any enlightened attitude to consumption. But the capitalist system will find its workers; as mechanization plays an ever greater role it does not need many of them and it will not struggle to seduce those it does. Changing attitudes to consumption will affect the structure of demand, as we already see, but not its overall level.

By castigating consumer behavior, we are really missing the target; we are failing to think in systems terms. What we really need is political action on inequality; we need to catalyse innovation and empower people rather than reducing vast masses of the population to this peculiarly post-modern form of serfdom in which the product of their labor is not even really needed, but simply exacted in order to obtain acquiescence to a political and economic order which serves the interests of a small elite which is no longer constrained even by the need to create social value. In this way, it can be obtained that the dominated classes pay ever more to obtain ever less, thereby maintaining and extenuating disparities and reconciling the system to its increasing inability to produce net wealth. By imagining the problem to be ourselves, and more specifically our own consumer behavior, we merely disempower ourselves by generating guilt. This discourse does not undermine the capitalist order as it presently functions, but concords with it.

In other words, we will not be free as long as the system is in place and there remain persons unscrupulous enough, or simply unenlightened enough, to operate it. Nothing will happen unless we take power into our own hands.

Luckily, in democratic countries, we still have some reasonable prospect of doing so even if the odds may be stacked against it. We need to seize this opportunity through social and political engagement, cultivating righteous anger and not merely organic cabbage. We need economic growth, even if we may need to define, frame and measure it differently, because it is synonymous with the liberation of creative energies that are today enslaved. The call to live within our means becomes too easily a call to acquiescence in the present disastrous order of things in which it matters little what people think or say, because money is in charge, not us.

I do not dispute that there is great spiritual value in cultivating simplicity and in doing our part to send the right price signals to the economy by buying what has intrinsic value rather than what does not. Nevertheless, our very ability to buy anything at all depends on a system which is not only inherently unjust but also tremendously inefficient. Under the paradigm of austerity, reducing personal consumption has become an accommodation to this system, in most cases involuntary: not a revolutionary act against it.

The web of life

 

Many of us I guess are used to the idea that we are interconnected with all life here on the planet, and that what affects one ecosystem, even seemingly far away, affects us all. It may, however, seem a little abstract, even pious for some.

In fact, this interpenetration is way more basic than we realize. This was brought home to me by listening to Dr Mark Davis on Chris Ryan’s podcast recently talking about the gut microbiome. We do not only consume other organisms, rely on them for regulating atmospheric CO2 levels or depend on  them in some other metaphysical way. They are inside us – in excess of 90% of the DNA in our bodies is non-human (mostly bacterial) DNA. A whole new order of life was recently found living in our guts. Bacterial cells (because they are much smaller and simpler) outnumber human cells in our bodies by orders of magnitude. Bacteria and other microbes perform essential functions in human physiology: we have “outsourced” many jobs to them. The mitochondria in our own human cells, and many other cellular bodies, were once bacteria or viruses.

So the web of life penetrates our own bodies very deeply. But more than this: it actually IS our bodies. It would be perfectly artificial and not make much sense to define a human body as consisting only of human cells containing human DNA. Those cells are only part of a  much greater whole. The consciousness we possess does not reign over an exclusively human organism, but a massive ecosystem predominantly composed of organisms which are genetically unrelated to the human brain cells which supposedly run the show. And just as endogenous neurotransmitters began evolutionary life as exohormes, communicating between rather than within organisms, so mechanisms we have developed – thought, speech, behavior and probably other communicative functions – link the entity we call ourselves into the wider whole. I am not, of course, saying that the skin is not a relevant boundary, but it is not an absolute one.

So it is not really that we are connected to the web of life or dependent on it. In fact we are the web of life, one manifestation of it; and when we disturb it, as becomes increasingly clear, we do not have to wait generations to see the consequences because they are indirect. They are right there inside us.

 

Telling The Truth

 

Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, an account of the pick-up artist (PUA) subculture which I discussed in an earlier post has just published his new book, The Truth. The book describes, as I understand it, with a great deal of candour and personal courage, his process of transitioning from what we might call an obsessively promiscuous lifestyle to a committed open (or at least, not fully closed) relationship with his wife Ingrid. It’s Strauss’s journey, but also – certainly by the provocative title – seems to purport to be more than that.

I should say that these remarks are not based on a reading of the new book, but mostly just on what he said in his recent podcast with Daniel Vitalis. It may be, therefore, that I misrepresent Strauss to a certain extent (which I’ll gladly correct if I can be convinced of it); but in any case, what I will go on to describe and then criticize in this article is a position, I think, that many men are adopting, from whatever angle they come at it, in response to certain obvious facts of our social biology, namely our non-monogamous nature and our desire nevertheless to form deep and intimate bonds with members of the opposite sex, combined with the cultural reality they encounter. This is therefore not a book review, but a critique of that position. It isn’t necessary to listen to the podcast to understand my comments, though I do encourage you to.

Many of Strauss’s erstwhile PUA fans will no doubt be ready to poo-poo the book as a cave-in, and Strauss himself states in the podcast that some have seen it as a defense of monogamy, even a repudiation of his earlier persona, which he insists it is not. That’s fair, though he does bear responsibility for this inevitable media spin (which he doesn’t seem to have been too concerned to avoid). Strauss’s point seems to be that obsessive promiscuity is unsatisfying and successful polyamory hard to pull off, polyamory itself being, in a certain number of cases, a lifestyle choice or label which covers up an inability or unwillingness to go deep in relationships. This being so, Strauss might best be seen as a “pragmatic monogamist” who construes the term not as prohibiting extra-dyadic sex but as requiring, as I understand it, such sex to take place, if it does, on terms which are mutually agreed within the couple and transparent. He puts this forward in the discussion simply as the position to which he has come, not as a universal model, though given this his marketing seems disingenuous. I interpret him as not being opposed to polyamory, but simply skeptical of it in practice.

It might seem that Strauss and I share a lot in common; I too have written about some important misgivings related to the way polyamory is conceptualized and lived in practice (or, let us say, some of the practices which the word is used to cover) and I agree with him on the importance of commitment, communication, transparency etc, at least in that ideal world in which we decidedly do not live.

There is, however, something rather unexamined, it seems to me, in Strauss’s discourse. Vitalis illustrates this in the podcast when he speaks of his sense of shame at hiding extra-dyadic dalliances from his partner, a position he is very uncomfortable being in because he feels it lacks integrity. I would certainly agree with this, but even if we have to live our life as best we can within the constraints we have inherited, it still behoves us to examine this sense of shame critically, something neither Strauss nor Vitalis in the podcast hints at doing. Vitalis, however, offers himself a clue as to the origin of his sentiments in describing his attitude as a child towards his mother: ever fearful she would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, he was very careful to avoid doing anything which might provoke such an overreaction. As children, of course, we seek to please our mothers because we need their love. Our mothers, on the other hand, often simply take from us what they want, being far more skilled and better placed to obtain it due to being adults and in a monopolistic position of authority. We need to be very careful to avoid the widespread error of reproducing this asymmetry in our adult relationships, and especially of doing so unconsciously, failing to recognize this as a cultural construct rather than an innate difference of social biology.

It will inevitably happen from time to time, in a dyadic relationship, that some courses of action in which the man is inclined to engage may cause discomfort to the woman. This should (ideally) be discussed, of course, and it also needs to be recognized that the woman may have insights into this situation which the man lacks; these should be listened to. However, it cannot be that the man simply does not engage in actions which make his partner uncomfortable; that she has some kind of veto on his behavior (or he on hers). The position of discomfort has a lot to teach us, and ensuring the comfort of the other at all times is a very unrealistic demand to place on oneself. This applies no less in matters sexual than in any other sphere of life. If one backs off from confrontation simply because one fears it, then one loses an essential part of ones freedom and ability to live an authentic life. We cannot rescue monogamy with the artifice of imposing upon it unhealed parent-child patterns of behavior.

In my life, I have seen that it is important to listen and communicate, but it is also important to be brave: not only important for oneself, but also for the relationship and the other. An implicit and festering situation of subordination strikes me as a major risk factor for relationship longevity. I share their desire to be open, though I do not think this is an ethical commandment; indeed, sometimes (as Dan Savage never tires from pointing out) exactly the opposite may be true. However, I am also going to do things which make my partner uncomfortable if those are things which I am convinced I need to do. I will take into account her vulnerabilities and the long run, but they are only factors among others.

There is no inherent reason to be ashamed of ones interest in pursuing any kind of relationship with another person, nor of actually doing so where this does not constitute a material and real (rather than unilaterally imagined) threat to the investment each partner has made in the primary or reference relationship. In this regard, it is irrelevant whether this behavior causes discomfort and even whether it brings about the end of the primary relationship entirely. One may certainly refrain from a course of action in order to avoid those outcomes: but consciously, not based on shame. One must, at the same time, also understand that change and challenge brings growth and new opportunities. If one shies away from this out of fear, the relationship will stagnate and may anyway eventually perish. One would want to be quite confident that in the long run the asymmetry in the relationship is not going to give rise to resentment, the rising tide of which may – and I think often does – pass unperceived under the radar of ones social identity until it is too late.

Strauss argues that we have neuroplasticity and our biology is not the last word. Of course this is correct. But any ability we may have to pursue any sort of relationship which may loosely be called monogamous still begs the question of why we should do so. There may be pragmatic grounds – including that it is a better personal choice than a life of obsessive-compulsive unsatisfying sexual liaisons and that it is a socially stable reference point, an available (if adaptable) paradigm: the path, in other words, that it sounds like Strauss has trodden. But such grounds are no more than that; they are not “The Truth”.

Seeking stillness in ecstasy

 

We know to seek stillness in the face of adversity and to draw strength from it. Yet many of us forget, or do not even think, to seek stillness also in the face of ecstasy.

Although we seek ecstasy, we fear also its power to overwhelm us. We move its locus into the mind, seeking ways to control it. Our ability to neutralize the power of ecstasy in our lives is extraordinary, and we hardly remark it, so identified are we with suffering and so sure that its transcendence is the path to source. The tantric way, of course, is to seek awareness in the face of all overwhelming emotions and passions, regardless of how they are labeled by our minds.

To my mind, this does not represent a withdrawal from experience or a dilution of ecstasy in an ocean of equanimity. That the meditative state is one of equanimity is a widespread and profound misunderstanding. A state of equanimity can probably be cultivated by prolonged training of the mind, but such mortification of the mind is as far from the core of the mystical experience as  any form of “mortification of the flesh” is from somatic trance: they are both comparable asceticisms and both are life-renouncing.

The reason we seek stillness is to allow us to enter into the ecstatic experience more completely: acknowledging that, in fact, we are (or something within us is) ambivalent about union with the divine. We seek stillness in all circumstances of life to set aside fear and to replace illusion with reality; by which I do not mean some sanitized, undifferentiated reality, but the actual expression of spirit in the particulars and peculiarities of our human experience.

If you are anything like me, when you are down and facing challenges you meditate like crazy, you seek the light; yet when the fog starts to lift it’s back to business as usual. If this is so, then it has an important consequence: it means the universe has no way to awaken you other than to send you adversity. A key to cultivating a meditative attitude to all of life and allowing joy, not only adversity, to serve as a messenger is to remember that, however ecstatic the moment may seem, there is more beyond it that we are not experiencing; and we are not experiencing it because we hold back from it out of fear. This fear is not really any different to the fear we experience under circumstances which appear to threaten us: in both cases, it is the ego trying to hold on to the position it has usurped in the flow of our lives, and whether it impedes our enjoyment of life or our serenity in the face of adversity it separates us from the flow of source and the power inherent in it to change and direct our lives. As we become gently aware of this fear, we can begin to unmask it and cultivate pleasure, instead of suffering, as the gateway to ecstasy that it is meant to be.