Category: Articles

Mental health in Belgium

Oh boy, Belgium is the number one per-capita consumer of sleeping pills in the WORLD! And not by a little bit (see p.8 (271) of the report here). 76.5 statistical DDDs per thousand inhabitants means nearly 8% of the population is taking these each day. That may well also hide a difference between Flanders and Wallonia: the figure for France is 66 pro mil whilst for Holland it is only 23 (I say “only”, but that still places them at 15th place in the world). This figure is, or should be, completely shocking.

There are, admittedly, two factors that may contribute to this, but neither of them is reassuring. The first is the underlying state of mental health. This is turn says a lot about how Belgians treat their children 🙁 The second is the facility with which chemical substances are used to repress anxiety, rather than humanistic therapeutic methods which actually help to resolve neurosis and trauma. Such therapy is very hard to find here, much more so than in Germany or Holland. Admittedly it might be that in some other countries, prescription of these substances is more tightly controlled (on either public health or economic grounds) and that some people procure them on the black market, I have no idea. But the figure of 76.5 pro mil is in any case shockingly high.

On top of this, Belgium occupies the 6th place in the rankings for consumption of anxiolytics, with 84 pro mil. The main class of anxiolytic drugs are also benzodiazepines, it is only the molecule and dosage that vary according to the use. So these numbers are to add together. That’s 16% of the population, which must be well over 20% of the adult population (though for all I know they may well also be prescribed to children, especially as of the onset of puberty).

Moreover, exogenous sources of stress in this country are extremely low by the standards of developed countries. Many workplaces are positively soporific, job security (for those who have one) is very high, reported violent crime is rather low – it’s not exactly London, New York or even Paris. It’s a laid-back provincial backwater where living standards are high.

So that’s a hell of a lot of dark family secrets. It’s time to wake up and start admitting it.

On yoga

I love yoga, and the more I practise it, the more I love it. Its physical and mental effects are great.

At least the way I do it (when I do). But i honestly really do wonder on what planet most of its practitioners live. I wonder what their practice means to them. For all seems to be directed against the body, at “conquering” it, at acquiring some illusory peaceful state of mind that must represent the complete triumph of the superego, the ultimate repression of all emotion. Emotions are so unwelcome in the average yoga class, so much a taboo. Let’s pretend to be peaceful, serene – however much we are aching inside.

That’s too bad. An age-old tradition entirely turned against its own spiritual-therapeutic logic and roots, no longer a vehicle of liberation but one more vehicle of social control. Those forces are so overpowering and so in control of us that there is nothing they cannot capture and use to their ends. So hard is it to find the authentic, even a taste of the authentic, within the jungle of these myriad forms of repression.

Happily, apparently not all yoga teachers think like this. So I guess it’s just a question of finding that rare pearl… (of course, in tantra we don’t think like that at all – emotions? bring ’em on 🙂 )

Well I liked, for now, Five Rhythms. Very much in fact. For yoga I will keep looking for someone who will love me more than their ego, and let me be as I am.

Sexual orientation

I inadvertently wandered into a sea of hostility when I posted recently a few thoughts on this subject on the blog of a person self-identifying as bisexual. Although I was extremely supportive and only doing a bit of thinking out of the box, I encountered what can only be described as a ghetto mentality: you’re not one of us, therefore you can’t be on our side. Which I find rather sad.

In the hope of launching a more serene debate, let me try again here. This is, I think, a subject that troubles the tantric community. In tantra there is much talk of the male/female polarity, sexuality plays a defining role and, accordingly, non-heterosexuality is difficult to reconcile with both practice and theory. Osho seems never to have taken non-heterosexuality seriously as a natural phenomenon, and writers like David Deida offer not only a stark dichotomy of the sexes, but also what might be viewed as unhelpfully stereotypical portraits of “superior men” and “superior women”. Sure, all this gets politically correctly glossed as being about “essences” not biological gender and sure, we all have male and female aspects to us, but this only allows the head to be held above water. It is anything but satisfying. At the end of the day some of us are men and others are women, and tantric union occurs between those who are men and those others who are women. Of course some form of union may also occur between men and other men and between women and other women, but this form of union then has no characteristics to distinguish it from any other experience of mystical union with whatever element of nature; it does not occupy an archetypal position, either in theory or in practice.

At the same time, the practice of tantra contributes a lot to the breaking down of barriers to same-sex intimacy. As in society at large heterosexuality is generally equated with homophobia (which encompasses not only a rejection of homosexuality, but often of any form of intimacy between men, even non-sexual), the loss of this barrier is destabilising and may lead some to feel they need to redefine their identity. If I can enjoy intimate touch from men, does that mean I’m gay, or, at “best”, bisexual? For women, who have close biological bonds to their mothers and feel less cultural pressure to be homophobic in the first place, this question may be less insistent. Still women, in my experience, may like to identify as bi, and this for a number of reasons. For a start, there is a much greater demand on the part of men for their female partner to be bi (or “bi”) than vice versa. Anecdotally, at least, it seems that many men are turned on by the idea of their wives playing with other women; in any case many more than there are women turned on by the contrary scenario. Secondly, for men, to self-declare as bi, especially after a period of heterosexual identification, not only runs into society’s homophobia, but also risks being seen as a cover for actual but unadmitted homosexuality. On the other hand, women seem, in my culture at least, to be less at risk of this kind of stigmatization. Lesbianism is statistically less common than male homosexuality, but although in some countries such as the USA more men than women seem to have had same-sex sexual experiences, in others such as France and Australia the reverse applies (see here). Because it is a bigger “deal” for men than for women, women may tend to adopt a wider definition and be more ready to self-identify as bisexual, and self-identification may not accurately portray underlying behavior.

In the course of this debate, which was unfortunately cut short by the blogger in question, it was both suggested by me and put to me that sexual attraction might be a better gauge of sexual orientation than simply the incidence of same-sex play. On a basic level, it may be considered that erotic touch by persons of either sex creates a similar primary response and may be similarly enjoyed without activating or being associated with other layers of sexual experience, in just the same way as other characteristics of the person providing the touch may not be very relevant, such as age, appearance, education and so on, factors which nonetheless play an important role in pre-intimate sexual response, that is, the response to sexual stimuli and signals other than intimate touch. If same-sex touch is not so enjoyed, this is more to do with its mental associations and conditioning, factors which, again arguably, could be considered not germane to determining primary sexual orientation.

On this basis, one could legitimately ask the question of whether the typical hormonal response that characterizes heterosexual attraction, with which I am familiar, is comparable in the case of homosexual attraction and whether such attraction is, then, comparable in nature or somehow distinct. From the little I have found on the subject, the endocrinology appears to be similar for men, whilst for women the results are more difficult to interpret. According to Wikipedia, in a 2004 study at Northwestern University, female participants, both heterosexual and homosexual, became sexually aroused when they viewed straight as well as lesbian erotic films. Among the male participants, however, the heterosexual men were turned on only by erotic films showing women; the gay males, however, were aroused only by films showing men. (I suspect though that a lot of the women were simply yawning at both types of film – and maybe were even more turned on by some gay male porn, which according to some reports women quite like)

Be this as it may, I do wish that homosexual and bisexual persons of both genders would show a bit more interest in engaging with those who call themselves heterosexuals in order to better understand each other’s sexuality. This ghetto mentality I find appalling. And I am pretty sure that many people denied entry to today’s ghetto really just long to talk to other people with whom they in due course would find common ground and friendship (or, for that matter, love).

I hate society’s hypocrisy and discrimination, but personally I am not too concerned by what the answers are, I am only curious. I am open to all experience, yours and my own. Whatever your orientation, sexuality should not be a battlefield, but a celebration.

Important update to our terms and conditions

Recent events have led me to realize certain ingrained patterns in how I relate to important people in my life, and the need to change these.

I have been, in the past, a person with an excessive concern for how other people are feeling, in general and about me. I usually looked for the ways I might be at the origin of their distress and, if I was able to believe I was, how I could put matters right. I needed their affirmation that they still loved me. Seeing human distress, in fact, far from prompting genuine concern and compassion activated a narcissistic script making me see the sufferings of others only in terms of my own. This tendency opened me to manipulation. It comes right from my early childhood and describes my infantile relationship with my mother.

Manipulation, I begin to realize, can take many forms. The word itself sounds very evil. The act, though, is quite conditioned and automatic. People typically manipulate others in order to force them into assuming roles which were absent in their childhood in order to provide themselves with psychic security. Thus, for example, the manipulation practised by a schizoid personality allows them to maintain control and to keep present in a defined role the persons who represent persons absent in their childhood. Such a personality cannot abandon control because to do so would constitute an abandonment of the ego to the flames of its primal dissociation. They will also choose to associate with those who are easiest to manipulate and therefore afford the least risk of destabilising their psychic balance.

Understanding this is one thing, and may help to evacuate some of the anger that the person who becomes aware of being manipulated will feel. The manipulator is acting on an automatism, and doing so because the weaknesses in your own personality make that a comfortable strategy to address (or rather paper over) their own unresolved childhood needs. However, being “understanding” is what comes easiest to the masochist. It sounds good, but it will in no way help. Understanding of this kind does not proceed from the heart and compassion and is difficult to separate from the need to feel understood, to be affirmed in ones identity as someone understanding. This reopens the doors to the same strategies as before.

Even if one is alert to manipulation and resisting it, it is hard to resist not only because of the constant temptation to give in to it in order to buttress ones self-image, but also both due to its obstinacy and unconscious nature on the part of the originator and due to the anger it activates in oneself.

Nonetheless, at whatever cost, one must resist manipulation. It is only by resisting it systematically that the light can be focused again and again on the fact of the manipulation and eventually force the manipulator first to see and then to acknowledge what they are doing and to understand its roots. However, even this sounds like a suspect excessive concern for the welfare of the other. The primary reason to resist manipulation is in order to overcome the pattern in oneself which gives rise to its ubiquity.

The mechanism of manipulation relies on values implanted during early childhood in the superego as to what is “good”, “decent”, “clean”, “normal” and so on. So long as one harbors inappropriate ideas as to what is “good”, ideas which it is easy for the manipulator to uncover and decode, one is open to being manipulated. There are almost infinitely many of these. They have originally all served the purpose of coercing the child into behaving in a manner thought by the parent to be fitting, convenient or decorous. Thus: tidiness, not raising ones voice, thinking of others, eating up ones plate, not displaying ones genitals: any standard which one cannot or does not wish to live by in the contemporary world but the absence of which generates childhood guilt, will do. When you feel guilty because your superego condemns your behavior, you feel bad and I am in control. I now pull the levers which will allow me to get you to do what I want.

Guys, I’m done with this. Done with being understanding. If anyone out there needs to be understood (read, has a fragile ego which they need me constantly to reinforce), well sorry, go see a shrink. I’m not in that game. Yes, I understand. However, please appreciate that I do not care.

In my world, I need grown-up people, as partners. That’s why, if you are over 18, then regardless of age, gender or existing allegiances I’m changing the terms and conditions of having any kind of relationship with me unilaterally and with immediate effect.

1. You are required to recognize that you have problems. I have problems, and so do you.

2. You are required to understand that your problems are your problems. I really don’t care about them and I am unwilling to take the slightest responsibility for them. Any attempt to insinuate that I play the slightest role in their ontogenesis or maintenance will result in angry reminders of the above, and I am more determined to resist it than you are able to persevere with it, so better accept this and give up now.

3. You are required to work consciously and in a determined way to overcome your problems. I do it, you gotta do it too.

4. I do not give a damn what relations we have had in the past, or what experiences we have shared. None of this gives you any rights over me. Pay attention to me in the present. If you want me to be seduced, seduce me. If you want me to admire you, be admirable. If you want me to cuddle you and reassure you, show me at least something that impresses me as to your honesty and vulnerability, so that I can relate to our common humanity and this can catalyse my limited supply of compassion.

5. I’m doing whatever I want. What I want is determined and interpreted exclusively by me. In any case, you may have whichever view of it you wish. Interdependencies will be managed on a basis of equal opportunity for you to do the same, however, in application of rule 2 above, your failure to make use of this opportunity is not my problem.

6. We can, I hope, go beyond these rather cold rules together into the heart of what really matters. This is my deepest desire. But only as two adults. I need to trust you, and I am afraid that my trust is very fragile. I need to know I am safe from manipulation. Safe I, of course, am. But I need to know it. These are sacred spaces, to enter with reverence and lightly. Otherwise, the gates are closed. As ever, I sooner die there of emotional starvation than give access to barbarians.

7. Albeit that all of the above is non-negotiable, perhaps, having agreed, you have something to add. If so I’m listening.

Conscious depression

These days, I am slowly, but it seems surely, slipping into a deep depression. It has been going on for some months and I do not know when or how it will end.

I was clinically depressed in early puberty and so the feeling is eerily familiar. This time round, I am trying a new approach. I am trying to let it be, to respect my body’s decision or need to shut down, physically and emotionally, to withdraw itself and me from those around me and wrap me in a dark cocoon. It is not easy to function like this – indeed in my teens it was impossible. One must accept that others will observe your darkness, the ebbing away of your lifeforce, or at least its retreat into hibernation. That others will in turn shun you, afraid of being captured within your event horizon. This is normal, and as it should be.

This experience, though unsought, is not, I believe, to be feared; not at least any more. I can observe it and write about it and I can believe in, in some mode, its resolution.

Depression is quite fascinating. It is fascinating to see this wall coming up, in the same instinctive way that a shellfish will close inside itself when touched. It is fascinating to see connections to the world dropped, one by one, like the arrival of winter or a foretaste of death. The shutting down of peripheral sensation, slowing of the central nervous system, the feeling of emptiness in chest and belly. To observe what passes and what remains. Where, for instance, is anger? It is there, but quiet; in no way ruffles the deep inner silence. And love? No, there is no love. Love is remembered, but coldly; it is not felt.

I can look at my limbs and it is as if they are not mine; as if no effort, however great, could ever move them from their inertia. The bottle of water across the desk could as easily be a thousand miles away.

Libido shuts down. No pleasures of any kind move me to enthusiasm. They may be, I do not hate them, but I am beside them, they are for others, not for me.

As I retreat within, on this path as infinite as the one outside, there is surely something to be learned of meditation and encounters to be made with myself, with my history and the many psychic scars I bear which never healed. In a way, it is a luxury and a choice. At least for now.

The first time round, I doubtless lost count of the number of people whose advice was to “snap out” of it. But I feel I want to go in, deeper, to understand it, accept it and yes, even be proud of it.

You see, as relative engagement with the world lessens, one may understand how relative it was to start with. The starting point was not a norm, it was a paralyzed coping, hidden and afraid to say its name. It was, itself, a degree of depression, just a degree to which I had become used, which I accepted, with which I even identified, and certainly within which, behind which, I took refuge.

To see this accommodation for the temporary and fragile equilibrium it was is, perhaps, to be freed to move beyond it. When the way forward is blocked, then one can make progress only by going into reverse. I want to know what it really feels like in this unknown country inside me. What lies behind all the mists, the horrors I experienced but perhaps also other forgotten things, precious things abandoned and left behind in the rush to escape and find safety. Cold things, treasures covered in slime or cobwebs, but still there. I have, writing this, little inkling of what they may be – their existence is as pure an intellectual construct as that of some subatomic particles. Be it so.

To recap, I know already a lot. About love, spirituality, childhood traumas and their aftermath and what it is to live as an adult, fully, joyfully. I know exactly how things should have been in my life. But I am not able to realize this journey any further at this point in time, I am quite blocked. I do not blame external circumstance, I just know that I must now dive back within. With my eyes open, an oxygen supply and a line to the surface. Consciously.

Friends, I may be a while, but I am safe this time. That place inside feels dark and numb only because it has not been allowed to be a part of me, has not dared to integrate the surface. But I know it is me, too. It is the feeling, flowing, primal me that has not been allowed to be.

Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebÀren zu können.

Saying yes to life

Like most Europeans, and all masochists, I am a compulsive pessimist. Not only that but I take pride in it and identify with it as if it’s some kind of sign of my cultural superiority.

Actually, of course, it’s a sign of weakness. Feeling superior to people, being able to outwit them intellectually, gives me pleasure because it is an outlet for my repressed sadism. Being always able to gain the upper hand, I am safe in the knowledge that no one can really get to me. I don’t run the risk of being vulnerable and of getting hurt. That means I’m safe; but missing out on life.

For some reason I’ve never quite figured, life on the other side of the pond has evolved in an opposite direction. Or perhaps it has just not “evolved” at all. There is something about the American outlook on life that grates terribly on a lot of Europeans. That little children laugh and play in African villages is still OK, Europeans can feel superior and still benevolently disposed towards these manifestations of joy in a simpler life, more at one with nature. However that Americans have the hubris to believe that they will succeed against all the odds, that they dare to try to infect us with their enthusiasm for frankly daft projects, well, that’s just too much. They strike us as naive, often dangerously so, and  nowhere outside the mountains of Afghanistan and the souks of Baghdad is the Schadenfreude at American failures greater than in the refined salons of European capitals.

Strangely, our own failures (and God knows they are plentiful enough) fail to fill us with the same sense of joy. Actually, they fail to fill us with anything at all; we are blind to the ways in which the European nation-state extinguishes personal initiative in both the economic and private spheres.

I am certain that the American outlook has a good deal of neurosis built into it, too. I am not trying to eulogize it any more than I am trying to deprecate European sensitivities. However, when the result is that genuine joie de vivre is taken by Europeans for a marker of cultural naivete, it should set alarm bells ringing. This is called cynicism, and it is always an ego defense.

The thing is, ersatz Lebenslust is merely amusing, or sad, but it is not threatening, you do not need to defend yourself against it. And if you defend yourself against what turns out to be the real thing, you miss the opportunity to be taken up in a positive vortex; you miss out on living. In fact your ego defenses are the only thing that prevent you from living: the mirror is being held up to your own resistances.

And so it is that I am delighted to welcome tantra teacher Dawn Cartwright to Brussels. When I feel resistance at her enthusiasm, which I do, I am grateful for the chance to examine what it is that keeps me from jumping into the river of life; and then I just let myself fall in love. Life has this quality, that it is very easy to fall in love with; because life is our nature and it seeks out itself. When we are in love, we are dissolved, free, we are ourselves.

Join us 27-29 November in Brussels; fall in love; and, if you can, dive deeply into all of Dawn’s offerings in Europe this fall. They’re on her website at www.dawncartwright.com.

Lingam massage – a few questions

No, I didn’t only pick the title in a desperate attempt to get my Google rankings up! 😉 I really, truly care about the subject 🙂

The standard recipe for lingam massage has been bothering me for some time already. As we all know, it was developed about 20 years ago by an American called Joe Kramer who worked with homosexuals in particular. Now I’m not too sure, but I would guess that the distribution of character types across the homosexual population differs from that of the male population as a whole. From my experience of homosexuals they are more likely to be oral or schizoid types. As we all know, also, the nature of the genital reaction in the male (and in the female too, but that is not my subject here) is very much a function of character type. The rigid and psychopathic types tend to show diminished penile sensitivity while the masochistic type is excessively sensitive. Oral and schizoid types are more likely to show erectile dysfunction.

This has got to have some consequences for how a masseur/se approaches the lingam massage. In my opinion, instead of taking over Kramer’s ideas, we should be experimenting a lot more and discovering what works, how and for whom. I don’t have any doubt that an experienced masseuse (allow me my preference for the feminine form) has developed somewhat of an intuition for this, and probably the growth in interest around prostate/anal massage reflects some of this intuition. Still it would be nice to pool experiences and learn more.

Speaking from the masochistic perspective, I believe there are essentially two points.

The first is the failure of the standard tantra+lingam massage ritual to address the pelvic armoring. This is rather skipped over, with inadequate attention to the perineum and the inguinal fold. Of course I appreciate that the tantra massage is a sensual massage and that it does not aim at deep tissue work, even emotional in nature. Therefore my criticism should be (and is) addressed to other modalities. Nonetheless, insofar as these areas form part of the wider erogenous zone involved in male sexual response, their exclusion in my view detracts from the holistic nature of the massage and has more to do with received ideas of male sexuality than any sound neuroerotic basis.

Secondly, one really should be trying to delay the moment of ejaculation in persons who tend to ejaculate prematurely, and this is in fact what one does in tantra massage. But it makes little sense to attempt to spread the energy into the abdominal and thoracic regions when the pelvic region itself is insufficiently charged. In this case, the energy will be unable in any case to move beyond it and remain on a low level.

In my experience of the massage and my male body, I have the sentiment that there is really something missing here and that we should be developing new scripts. I suspect this is true for other character types also, and also for the yoni massage (although since this is necessarily internal, it may be less flawed). I would very much welcome views on this topic from massage professionals and lovers of tantra massage!

The tao of parenting

By putting the words tantra and parenting together in the same sentence, I thought I should stand a pretty good chance of being top of the Google search rankings for that particular combination 🙂 But actually there’s a rather nice site at www.tantricparenting.org (though it does need to move to WordPress 😉 ). I can recommend it to tantric parents and parents-to-be.

Although I (militantly) support enlightened parenting, it isn’t, though, exactly what moved me to write this article. Rather, I wanted to say what being a father now means to me, spiritually, and how my children don’t just bring me endless joy but also help me on the road (if I am on that road) to enlightenment.

On the whole, we live in a very selfish world, and spirituality is frequently its mirror. This of course makes no logical sense whatsoever when it comes to oriental spirituality, which teaches transcendence of the ego, but that fact alone does  not seem in any way to have prevented its being treated in the West as a consumer good, and often even as a fashion accessory.

Whilst appreciating the appositeness of the question, I have frequently been irked by people suggesting their children were an obstacle to their spiritual practice. In the case of tantra, the complaints are not limited to having no time for yoga and meditation but also one frequently hears that children are the alleged source of diminished sexual drive and lack of intimate space between the partners.

There are a number of objections to this point of view, several of which are, I hope, sufficiently obvious that I can skip them here. Let me just focus on two ideas which I feel especially strongly about.

Firstly, there is no excuse for not creating an intimate space which includes your children, and especially if they are the children of both partners because then they are the very fruit of this intimacy.

Because what is intimacy? It means sensitivity to the other and the creation of an environment in which the senses are heightened, there is more awareness, more attention to detail: to form, design, tastes, scents, music… in which we behave naturally, in opposition to the sterile patterns of behavior that mark contemporary relationships and the contemporary world.

In this intimate world, we are loved, listened to and taken care of. Whether as children, or as lovers, what is the difference?

(Yes, of course I mean what is the spiritual difference? It pains me to state the obvious but at the risk of being otherwise misunderstood by random surfers I will do so: of course the forms that behavior naturally takes with an adult lover are not the forms that it takes with children. Not at all. But the attentiveness, the care and the love are the same, they proceed from the same basis and have the same preconditions. I do not need to tell you what form behavior should take because I have no pretence to formulating an ethical code, even less to imposing it on anyone else, and because these differences are natural, innate and obvious to any healthy individual.)

And secondly, because just as your partner is the mirror of your soul and of your ego, so too are your children; they show you what is beautiful and they show you what is ugly. With this difference: in the case of children it is often a much less distorted image that you receive.

My children are not “just” kids. I try to treat them with as much tenderness and as much understanding as I try to treat my partner and (these days, finally) I probably succeed much better with them than with her, just because it is really much easier, because no one in anything approaching their right mind can really believe that their kids are the source of their problems and that they are a legitimate screen on which to project their own childhood traumas, a realization which, with ones partner, requires an additional level of self-awareness (and whilst it is equally true of ones partner in the final analysis, it is nonetheless so that your partner may be, if not the source of your problems, nonetheless at least not the person most suited to your own spiritual growth; whilst this is never so for your children).

In my encounters with my children, I feel I touch deep truths and deep levels of spiritual awareness; deeper than in most other ways, and certainly more easily and more quickly.

They are not an obstacle to my personal growth. They are very much a major strand within it.

The perils of positive thinking (2)

In my last post, I discussed the so-called Law of Attraction and the “positive thinking” fraternity which makes a great deal of money out of it (thereby, no doubt, proving their point – at least to themselves).

I think it is true that success breeds success and that positive thinking characterizes successful people, but where I really take issue with this stream of thought is when it comes to the prescriptions its practitioners facilely offer. Attempting, sans plus, to generate on ones own part a pattern of “positive” thinking to replace ones habitual mode of thinking is both futile and dangerous.

This is for at least two reasons.

Firstly, the notion that by pure force of mind one can overcome obstacles to success which stem from ones psychic makeup is an obvious fallacy because it is self-referential: psyche and mind are the same thing and to use one to change the other violates the first law of thermodynamics. More generally, this notion is entirely culturally determined and merely one expression of the general cult of mind which pervades Western society and Western thought. It is a prescription of “mind-over-matter” or, equivalently, since mind must be overcoming something internal and not merely external obstacles (if it overcame only external obstacles then there would be no problem in the first place, since the state of mind would by itself already be sufficient to overcome these obstacles, being unfettered and therefore absolutely free), well then of “mind-over-body”. But since mind is the problem, and mind already exerts hegemony over the body, it is obvious that the direction of influence must be reversed for true change in behavior to occur. It must, in other words, be a question of “body-over-mind” or “nature-over-nurture”. The prescription to cultivate positive thinking is therefore precisely wrong: unless understood as a prescription to cultivate the body.

Secondly, this prescription acts to reinforce the superego. The belief that there are good and bad attitudes, good and bad ways of thinking, is one we are all too susceptible to because it has been drilled into us since childhood. We accept that we should filter our thoughts and behavior, and in so doing become the perpetuation of the filters of those who influenced us in childhood, through manipulation and embedded violence.

Even without any exhortation to think “positively”, “negative” thinking attracts not simply social opprobrium but ill-concealed wrath. But what is “negative” thinking? Not only, as far as society is concerned, beliefs that I will fail, that everything and everyone is against me, and so on; attitudes, in other words, which obviously stem from ones own conditioning rather than objective reality. Rather, any challenge to the established order is quickly labelled negative in the same way, and not at all only by those who stand to gain from its perpetuation. This type of “negative” thinking, if itself not entirely objective, expresses what may be quite vital rage at injustice, incompetence, waste, pollution, racism, hatred and so on. It is, therefore, an expression of that commitment and lucidity without which change can never occur. Conversely, “positive” thinking eminently suits everyone with an interest in the established order. But if it can change nothing in the external world, what can it possibly change inside?

In the final analysis, the cult of positive thinking is nothing but a cult of self-hypnosis, of suspension of ones critical faculties and with them ones vitality. Like all cults, it is useful to those within its priesthood and worse than useless to those in its rank and file. Its viability rests on millenia of collective neurosis, with which it is symbiotic.

I invite you into your power, not to judge your thoughts or feelings but to feel them intensely and to know them in your heart; to emancipate yourself from the factors and forces which really hold you in slavery whilst calling themselves your salvation. When you are full of life energy, then you will radiate attractiveness and be able to realize your goals. But to be full of life energy you must embrace all that you are and use the energy you can find in your body to challenge the obstacles that are in your mind. Not positive thinking, but courage, heartfulness and action are the keys to an authentic, body-based, powerful spirituality and the force for change in yourself and in the world.

The perils of positive thinking (1)

Self-help philosophies are big business. The amount of shelf space devoted in bookshops to titles expounding the power of positive thinking is quite astonishing. You all know the kinds of book I have in mind. It is a genre which spans new age and traditional spirituality, applied psychology and business. Alongside the authors are the coaches and therapists, all of whom make a living from doling out lifestyle advice and running therapy sessions and workshops based on the same principles.

On-line the situation is no different. Indeed, many phenomena of this kind have really been boosted by the power of viral marketing. Let us take just one example which is probably familiar to many – “The Secret”, a self-help film produced in 2006 by one Rhonda Byrne. The wikipedia article is here. The central message is that believing in yourself sets in motion a positive dynamic which becomes self-reinforcing, leading to happiness and success – a cosmic law dubbed the “Law of Attraction”. Another classic of this genre is Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, an all-time bestseller, published, astonishingly, in 1937 and still hugely influential today.

I first encountered this phenomenon within what was then called the “house church movement” in the 1980’s. This neo-Pentecostal movement was in its origins quite ascetic, but became increasingly, and to my horror, pervaded by quite different notions coming from the American “TV evangelists”. God wanted you to be rich and successful and, if you weren’t, it was only that your faith was insufficient for the task. (This doctrine never sat well with the evangelical precept of saving grace, but seemed subjectively appealing to many because it chimed with their self-doubt and perception that there had to be a “quantitative” element to salvation, a notion of course familiar to Catholics and Orthodox).

In its secular form of the Law of Attraction, I believe it expresses, albeit very crudely, something quite true, but at the same time it misses something equally fundamental.

What is true is expressed in the popular adage “success breeds success” and has been identified by many teachers. Jesus is reported, somewhere in the gospels, as saying “to he who has, more shall be given; but to he who has not, even what he has shall be taken away from him”.

Funnily enough, though, few if any of the real spiritual teachers I can think of ever ended their days in wealth and comfort; and Jesus himself was crucified. So what’s going on? Was Jesus just talking of “spiritual wealth”, perhaps, something quite different from, and perhaps opposed to, worldly riches?

Of course Jesus did indeed call on people to forego worldly riches on occasion, though only when an obstacle to spiritual growth. Still, I do not think that spiritualizing perfectly down-to-earth utterances is a proper hermeneutic. Rather, the “Law of Attraction” itself implies a duality of destinies, paths either up or down, virtuous or vicious circles. Not only does success breed success, but failure begets failure. This duality is found back, equally, in the salvation doctrines of probably all world religions (though it may be a somewhat simplistic framework within which to interpret the soteriology of Buddhism or some nature-religions, paganism, Shamanism and so forth, which also suggests it may have a lot to do with the role of institutionalized religions in legitimizing the established social order).

This “either-or” of destiny implies that there are two communities and two poles to which individuals gravitate – a pole of success and a pole of failure. Strictly speaking, there is a “Law of Attraction” at work at both ends; and the closer you are to one, the more difficult to break out of its gravitational field into that of the other. Between the two, though, there is also a “Law of Repulsion”. Individuals gravitating towards the upper pole find themselves spending more time with others who are on the same path, and separate out from them by a process of reverse osmosis. This process is analogous to the processes of self-organization giving rise to order in the cosmos notwithstanding the tendency to entropy expressed by the second law of thermodynamics. On the side of those to whom fate has been less lucky, who are in the vast majority, envy and anger develop and are directed towards those more fortunate. For this reason, prophets, even if they seed a new level of consciousness in the human spirit, are almost always martyrs.

So much for the Law of Attraction as a law. As a self-help program, however, there is much more to be said; I will return to this in my next post.