Category: Articles

On the energy economy of the masochistic body type

Some thoughts from personal experience on this topic. This entry is mainly based on self-analysis, on the basis of which I draw some general conclusions; I freely admit the methodological flaw in this way of reasoning (and even more so since I am not a “pure” example of this body type*), but those who are interested in a more systematic account will anyway refer to the literature on the subject. So:

By virtue of repeated violence and threats of violence during early childhood, the masochistic body type (“Maso”) develops two sets of marked body patterns.

Firstly, spasticity of the following muscles or muscle groups: (i) buttocks and thighs (gluteus medius and minimus, pectinius, quadriceps, rectus femoris, and the hip adductors); (ii) the deep pelvic and perineal muscles (the pelvic floor, which consists of three muscles, and the perineal pouch, see here for photo) involved in defecation and urination as well as in maintaining posture and (iii) the transversus and rectus abdominis muscles.

The original purpose of tensing these muscles was to protect the genitals from damage. The need to protect the genitals also has a symbolic interpretation and charge, insofar as it represents an attempt also to defend the ego from assault. The spasticity of these muscles is naturally paired with a lack of tonus in the muscles which move the hip and pelvis upwards and outwards.

Associated with this, a pattern of breathing is developed in response to pain and assault whereby oxygenation of the pelvic region is reduced, and thereby also its sensitivity to pain. This appears to involve primarily the transversus abdominis muscle, which is the deepest of the abdominal muscles and inserts into the linea alba (the line which runs from the solar plexus downwards). Spasticity of this muscle effectively shuts off energy flow along the front of the body, separating the pelvic region from the abdomen. It also limits the depth of abdominal breathing.

In addition to this, the Maso develops constrictions in the jaw and throat, running as far down as the solar plexus and also involving the pectoral muscles. These constrictions aim at inhibiting the vocal expression of anger and pain. The effect of constrictions in this segment is also to draw the shoulders forward and to compress the sternum from the manubrium (upper part of the sternum) which is compressed by the clavicles until the xiphoid process (region of the solar plexus).

In combination, these two groups of muscular spasticities arch the spine in the form of a C, a posture which expresses and communicates resignation and defeat.

Such spasticities develop in early childhood and inevitably have a permanent developmental impact at the skeletal level. The anatomy in particular of the pelvis/hip area is affected by the imbalance between muscle pairs which results from permanent tension in the adductor muscles.

The Maso’s energy economy is characterized by a high level of primary energy in the genital region but a limited ability to circulate and use this energy, requiring discharge at low thresholds, or otherwise manifesting as anxiety. Essentially, the Maso is unable to tolerate a high level of energy is his body, because of the fact that this energy overcharges the genitals. Compulsive masturbation is a way to avoid anxiety. Anxiety manifests itself because the discharge of energy has been blocked. As anxiety increases, discharge scripts are cathected. These scripts are typically sexual in character and develop into more or less developed forms of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Such scripts may be actually enacted, or merely direct the expression of sexual desire. The masochistic character also has a tendency to overuse and possible abuse of alcohol. In my case there is also a tendency to compulsive eating and obesity, which is a common, but I am not sure whether general, characteristic of the body type.

Clearly, the therapeutic challenge is to loosen these two sets of primary rigidities and to deepen the breathing so that the pelvic area is better oxygenated.

*) As regards physical body armoring, however, I think this type predominates, both based on self-observation and on theoretical grounds which I omit.

Our love affair with nonsense

One advantage of undergoing depth body psychotherapy is the anger that it releases; from which my readers can surely benefit. Here goes a rant, therefore 😉

I am of the view that tantra is nothing more or less than an exploration and acceptance of who we really are as sexual, spiritual beings.

To embrace tantra is therefore to rebel against thousands of years of repression and manipulation of our identities by others, and to reclaim the bodies that we live in for ourselves. It’s a revolutionary engagement; nothing can be more revolutionary.

I could also add to my definition the mystical heart of tantra, which is the doctrine of non-duality. But it is not really a doctrine; it is really an evidence, if you know yourself.

To realize this evidence and to enact this rebellion, no-one needed to invent something called “tantra”. Humankind has been doing this forever, in a multitude of cultural forms. I do not believe that anyone, in any period, in central/south Asia had access to any unique insights regarding this problem. At best, it was locally possible in some periods to go further in exploring this path than others elsewhere had done. Nonetheless, this truth of the human condition is around every corner and accessible to everyone. It is a pure evidence, and it has become even more so as scientific knowledge has accumulated.

Being doctrineless, tantra is wonderfully compatible with all forms of authentic knowledge that exist, both scientific and spiritual. A movement calling itself “tantric” can reinvent itself constantly and is perfectly justified in doing so, since its practices are judged only by the canon of utility, and not of  truth. Collectively, I believe we have discovered much about what is useful on the path of self-development; I believe we have discovered nothing about what is true.

It is, of course, understandable, indeed inevitable and even (maybe) desirable, that tantra – like other spiritual movements – manifests itself in movements and communities with a concrete form, and which develop allegiances, language and rituals of their own. This development both aids the spiritual growth of community members and is necessary to the propagation of the message and methods of the group. I have nothing, even, against its “branding” and I am very tolerant of quirkiness in its self-conception and self-expression.

But let’s remember that the very nature of non-duality implies that no doctrine can be “right”; all language is metaphorical and contingent. Nothing is more than a pathway to self-knowledge, and an infinite number of such pathways exist.

Which makes me wonder why so many self-proclaimed tantrikas give such a damn about lineages, ancientness of traditions, Hindu deities and so on; and even when they don’t, still path lip-service to a host of tantric myths and try to anchor what they are doing in the authority of the past.

That seems to me paradoxal, since tantra is all about living in the here and now…

This attachment to form, ritual and myth raises some more fundamental questions about what the nature of tantra is, and about the spiritual marketplace we inhabit, within which movements identifying themselves as tantra compete for attention.

It won’t have escaped the attention of even the most casual observer that this marketplace is unusually crowded, with numerous generic, branded and even patented therapy methods, bodywork modalities and spiritual practices competing with each other in terms of the hyperbole of their claims of efficacy.

The most successful (in terms of the following they attract) are usually those that promise the most for the least effort, or which particularly suit the personalities of the would-be disciples : notably in terms of those individuals’ desire to avoid personal responsibility for their spiritual path (or physical or emotional healing or well-being) and cast this on to the willing shoulders of ego-driven gurus.

Why is this so?

In my view and experience, leaving aside exogenous life events like illness and bereavement, and solitary practices like prayer and meditation, there are only two things which can effect long-term positive change in personal behavior. These are (i) love and (ii) work designed to release underlying tensions in the bodymind.

Furthermore, as far as love is concerned, I am convinced of its power but I am unsure of its duration if it is not accompanied by abreactive work.

Tensions in the bodymind being manifested physically (although they are not purely physical in their etiology), a physical dimension to such work is indispensable.  That leaves a broad panoply of activities which are not without value, though their relative value may be discussed (and may vary from person to person). However, it excludes, at the same time, a vast bunch of stuff which is of little value, no value at all, or quite negative in terms of its value because it distracts people from real solutions to their problems. For example, Tarot, numerology, mandalas, angels, mantras, crystals….It also puts into perspective the possible value of other modalities whose only reasonable mode of effective action is through the love and acceptance they communicate (though also limited energetic effects as well as autosuggestion are possible). In this category I would place, for example, reiki (see here for a review of its clinical effectiveness). I would be still more skeptical about other physical methods which do not involve significant manipulation, such as sophrology.

All of these modalities, apart from competing with tantra in the aforementioned spiritual marketplace, are, perhaps surprisingly (at least to me) actually embraced by many people who practice tantra, as a complement to their own practice.

This is, I believe, very damaging for the credibility of the practitioners concerned and for the layman’s understanding of what tantra has to offer, which is nonetheless so brilliantly set out in books by Osho and others.

At my last workshop with Advaita, I was particularly pleased to hear two spiritual myths debunked, myths with which many tantra practitioners coexist quite happily.

One was the notion of karma. According to Advaita (I paraphrase her), this is an immoral notion designed to encourage resignation in the face of violence. We are born with no form of original sin, whether Christian or oriental. On the contrary, we are born innocent and we are corrupted by parents, teachers and society. I entirely agree with this important, and objectively indisputable, moral standpoint.

A second was the zen notion of emptiness. According to zen, one should strive after emptiness in order to feel compassion. I think I understand this one and for me I have no problem in embracing that notion. Yet when Advaita says that we can only feel compassion from plenitude, it is a vastly more helpful conception to normal people. What prevents us from feeling compassion is what prevents us from feeling ourselves. And the search for emptiness can all too easily become a quest to repress feeling and emotion.

Having brilliantly debunked these concepts, though, why stop there?

I don’t doubt that it’s profitable to peddle the kind of nonsense you can find on www.schoolofawakening.com, for instance; but is it helpful to the soul? And therefore, is it ethical?

In any case, tantra it is not.

Death and the Maiden

Trying out post-by-mail from my mobile phone. Advance apologies if there are any issues with the post!

"Ich bin nicht wild, sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen," pronounces Death in the eponymous poem about a young girl’s fear of an untimely end.

And the figure of a nubile, unclothed girl in an embrace with the gory, macabre personification of death has fascinated many artists over the centuries, perhaps seeing in her the ultimate representation of life, or simply of human vulnerability and frailty.

Yet what of death, indeed? Untold stories have been created by humankind to postpone or relativize its embrace. It seems to me, however, that death is something very trivial. It is simply the inevitable end of life. As such, it is not at all problematic, it has no consequences whatsoever, and except for taking appropriate prudential measures tied to ones family responsibilities, it may be completely ignored.

So live now. Stop making excuses. And by "now", I don’t mean in five years’ time, or even later today. I mean, NOW!

Virtue in education, ou comment faire de bons Belges…

I was at a party organized at my daughterÂŽs school today, and I had another epiphany.

When we chose the school (I’m happy to say she’ll change next year – whether that will be an improvement is of course not preordained), we noticed that there was a very big emphasis on codes of behavior. It was kind of a bit too much, but nothing objectionable that one could put one’s finger on. On the contrary, who could disagree that it was a good thing to learn to listen to others, to take their feelings into account, to be on time in the classroom, and many other laudable aims and intentions?

Plenty of parents hope that school will instil in their youngsters a sense of discipline and standard of behavior which they, as parents, feel they have failed to do at home. This takes on occasion extreme forms in response to desperate parenting failures. We rather hope that school is a place where our children would have fun and learn self-expression; in the right environment, we would expect the rest to follow without any need for compulsion. But of course we also know that not everyone brings up their children like we do, giving the teacher a more difficult job, and we wouldn’t want our daughter to be terrorized by children that are out of control, so I guess we thought we could live with the school’s approach.

As expatriates, and given that she would only spend one year in the school, we haven’t been very closely involved in the life of the school. The only thing that I have found constantly disturbing in this school is the lack of tenderness and joy on the part of the teaching staff. They don’t smile much, and treat children brusquely to say the least. But otherwise – a normal school. Nothing really to complain about.

The event was themed around tolerance of diversity, with plenty of other laudable themes thrown in for good measure – like environmental stewardship and so on. Pretty much as I would imagine American high schools – full of public displays of allegiance to the school’s moral code. Except we’re talking here kindergarten and primary.

I have lived in Brussels for 20 years, so I pretty much know the place. It has been my experience that many members of the educated population present a sycophantic public persona, which is apparently polite and very conflict-averse, but behind which the rage is barely masked – utterly unprovoked verbal aggression is not difficult to solicit from the most innocent of comments or questions. So one might wonder whether this school is typical or counter-cultural.

A casual glance at the faces of the parents present at today’s event, at their body language, or casually eavesdropping on their conversations convinces me that as far as the parent population is concerned, it is typical. And of course I cannot fast-forward 20 years, but both self-selection and the conservatism of social institutions make it highly likely that the children as adults will not be so very different from their parents.

So is the moral education not working?

Of course it is not working. Moral education does not work. We have been amply warned by Nietzsche of the social role and the effects of Morality, and we should have listened better. What is Good flows directly from Lebendigkeit, vitality. The extinction of resistance to the behavioral code you wish to impose can only beget outcomes that are, at the very best, socially convenient; the anger locked inside expresses itself exactly as I have already alluded to.

The insidiousness of this is that it is so hard to argue with and stand up against. Almost no-one will understand you. Don’t we want our children to grow up to be good citizens? To prosper through their connections to their peers?

And so the groupthink marches on, and the Gleichschaltung is assured of success.

There is one word for this: manipulation, and it is a power game whose true nature yields rapidly to analysis. Exactly as many manipulative mothers, my own included, constantly remind(ed) their children of how much their behavior disappoints them, hurts them, how “good boys and girls” don’t do things like that.

Well fuck you. Children owe no duty to their parents in a world where parents have no regard for their children. Children are easy to exploit and emotionally manipulate, but Macht macht kein Recht, power is not morality.

Just before going to that party, I was reading another article from the school promoting the doctrine of non-violence, I believe in the Marshall Rosenberg tradition. I of course agree that when our spontaneous reaction to something is a violent one, we should try to come to an understanding of why that is and maintain our emotional states in consciousness – which is not quite the same as rejecting violence, but it comes close enough in practice. Everything that is said in that article sounds right – about understanding the different perspective of the other, how one’s own psychic wounds predispose one to certain emotional reactions and so on. The problem is that this discourse will inevitably be instrumentalized, implemented in such a way as to impose anyway the will of the more powerful individual by manipulation.

The words don’t matter; only the motivation and consciousness matter, and these will not be changed by words. The realization of this was what underpinned the great post-colonial emancipation movement; and when violence is provoked, it is also legitimate and understandable, even if it is not always wise or enlightened. Even if the original provocation was very well disguised in seemingly philanthropic dress (behind closed doors, be assured the violence is as real). Then, as Sartre put it in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les DamnĂ©s de la Terre, “this irrepressible violence [in response to colonial exploitation] is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself”.

These days I am shaken by rediscovered violence from my childhood. I love it, I feel alive, each time I abreact it (of course I don’t hurt anyone; or myself) I come into a new space of greater consciousness and joie de vivre. As for aggression, it is positively sacred in my eyes.

My children don’t need to be brainwashed into subscribing to pretty ideologies and to the relationships of power which vehicle them and are profoundly opposed to their own sense of self.

Social incidence of sexual abuse

@phdinparenting on Twitter, the author of the simply great parenting blog www.phdinparenting.com (obligatory reading for all readers of my blog who have small children) reasonably enough asked me to back up my statement there – in response to her question on the subject – that approximately 100% of people had suffered from sexual abuse as children.

The answer doesn’t need a lot of space, but more than 140 characters for sure, so I am posting it here!

I have basically three reasons for making this statement (although I admit a certain residual hyperbole):

1. My experience in numerous personal development workshops, in which people who never suspected they had been the victims of sexual abuse, have realized through the therapeutic work, that in fact they had. This implies that any self-reported survey must underestimate the real incidence of the problem. (In any case, we also know that even people who ARE aware they have been the victims of sexual abuse, often do not talk about it, even anonymously).

2. Retrojection from people’s current behavior and attitudes to sex, based on my understanding of the psychoanalytic basis of such attitudes. Sexual neuroses are very widespread and must have their origin in pregenital sexual experience, even if (see the next point) no actual physical abuse has occurred. (Freud famously concluded from what he thought was overreporting of pregenital sexual abuse in therapeutic contexts that childhood sexual fantasies, and specifically the Oedipus complex, played a major role in the development of neurosis. I am not so sure that Freud was not simply unwilling or unable to accept the extent of actual abuse in society.)

We do have data on sexual dysfunctioning – we know (lower bounds for) the incidence of, for males, premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction, though we have less idea, because we have less basis to measure it, of the incidence of penile insensitivity; and for females, of partial or complete anorgasmia and of less common conditions (in the female) like what has been colloquially called “sex addiction”.

3. Most importantly, I probably have a wider definition of sexual abuse than is commonplace, but I would like to defend this definition; it is real sexual abuse because it leads to sexual neuroses (I have a correspondingly wide definition of sexuality itself).

Thus, whilst I am quite confident that the incidence of physical sexual abuse is high enough (ie too high, and at least 20% on a conservative consensus estimate), I would also view as sexual abuse all of the following:

  • Genital mutilation in both sexes
  • An attitude towards the child’s sexuality which is based on adult perverted sexual scripts, regardless of whether or not these have actually been acted upon (but in some measure, I am sure they almost always have)
  • Bizarre, unnatural and perverted attitudes to sexuality generally (I’m very tolerant and these are not morally loaded terms for me, but the lack of a healthy model can only have the effect of at least blunting the child’s natural sexual development)
  • Poor or inexistent sexual education, especially timely information about periods and ejaculation
  • Parenting behavior which degrades or humiliates the child, even if not explicitly in its sexual identity

And that’s a short list – I could go on.

We should also remember that the sole force capable of corrupting the child’s sexuality is not the parents – unfortunately, if at least you believe you can get parenting right. Parents are not all-powerful. Other adults in the child’s environment may abuse it sexually and many of the indirect forms of abuse are, I believe, totally endemic in the school system, at least it is my experience (or let’s say it is my deep fear, because I don’t get to sit in my toddler’s classroom).

So, in short, societal violence and attitudes to sexuality basically corrupt us all. Actual sexual acts between adults and children are themselves endemic, but if you escape them, their direct ripple effects to society anyway result in everyone being caught up, if not directly, then at very close quarters.

I haven’t the slightest doubt that if we could simply respect the sexual identity of children, we would transform society beyond anything we can even imagine today.

Of Gods and Goddesses

Our general understanding of the ontogenesis of polytheistic systems in the space which came to constitute the Indo-European world is approximately as follows, and owes a lot to Marija Gimbutas.

Prior to the Indo-European incursions, the religion of Europe, but probably also of central and south Asia, was essentially matriarchal in form (or “matristic” to use Gimbutas’ preferred term). The central Goddess-figure embodied fertility, the earth and procreation, and by extension the nurturing values of motherhood. The ancient world also knew, however, a variety of other female goddesses having varying personalities and attributes. The Triple Goddess is widely attested, representing the phases of the moon and the phases of the life of a woman through youth, maturity and old age. Other Goddesses offer other role-models or express other, “darker” dimensions of womanhood – think of Kali, Astarte or Hera.

Gimbutas doesn’t make a big point of it as far as I know, but we need to supplement this description with certain other elements. Primitive religion certainly knew divinities who were emanations of natural phenomena – the Sun, moon and other planets; rivers and seas; mountains; the weather, and so on – all the forces to which primitive humans were subject or which filled them with awe. We do not know if these divinities were endowed with gender from earliest times. All pre-Indoeuropean languages of Eurasia which are attested (Basque, Etruscan, Kartvelian, Iberian, etc) do not have grammatical gender, so the assignation of gender to forces of nature was presumably not self-evident. It seems also likely that phallic cults predate the Indo-Europeans; certainly they do so in the Indus Valley civilization, but it seems very likely that the various phallic gods attested from European religion – of which the most notable would be Priapus and Pan – in fact belong to a pre-Indoeuropean stratum of religiosity which recognized not only the nurturing role of the earth-mother but also the complementary roles of both sexes in procreation, something reflected in the metaphysics of ancient near eastern creation myths as well.

Into this somewhat pacific universe characterized by a complex female and rather simple male divinity accompanied by various nature-divinities, erupted the Indo-European warrior class which bore androcratic religious traditions, mirroring their social organization; these traditions then took precedence over, though they existed alongside, traditional beliefs.

It is easy to speculate that, whatever complexities there may have been in pre-existing cults devoted to male fertility (sublimited as the essence of the male in the word “virility”), these were swiftly ousted or relegated to a secondary position by the rich array of male divinities which the conquerors brought with them. Where it suited them, nature-divinities could also easily be shared out between the genders and, indeed, on more than one occasion have their gender changed from female to male, as happened when traditional Tibetan religion (Bön) was supplanted by Tibetan tantric buddhism.

The Goddess, on the other hand, while subordinate to the male divinities, suffered from no such process of substitution and continued to merit the devotion of indigenous populations. Even in her much-disguised Marian incarnation, numerous local specificities and attributes continue to exist to this day. In Ancient Greece she seems to have survived particularly well, and with the rise of neoclassicism, Goddess worship found its way back into the mainstream of the European tradition, albeit in disguised forms. Many men practise it in a transparently pagan form to this day – there is a mass market for portrayals of beautiful women inaccessible to the majority of males, and I would take issue with the feminist notion that they are routinely viewed by men as mere passive and frequently degraded objects of their sexual satisfaction (although within pornography itself, this unfortunate tendency is probably on the rise). These (abstractions of) women are routinely honored by their male acolytes with the giving of their semen.

Regardless of how accurate this account is from a historical standpoint, it pretty much represents, I believe, our collective preconscious – the array of symbols available to us denoting female and male. Masculinity is associated with a reduced set of militaristic attributes which characterized also the ancient Indo-european male pantheons, whereas femininity is associated with a much wider set of creative, healing and nurturing attributes of which males have no ken.

Whenever it is admitted that men may also possess or develop such attributes, this is invariably referred to as “getting in touch with their feminine side”. Women, on the other hand, rarely get in touch with their “masculine side” – the phrase would rather imply capitulation to the paternalistic world order (which I decry as passionately as anyone).

As a man, I have one thing to say to this: Quatsch!

It is not acceptable for me that women get to relate to such a funky bunch of goddesses, and I have to look  in the poverty of the militaristic traditions of a bunch of destructive barbarians for inspiration as to what my masculinity means. Yet in the Shiva/Shakti dualism, Shakti is the clear inheritor of all pagan Goddess traditions, whereas Shiva, at core, is the Rudra of the Rig-Veda, “fierce like a formidable wild beast”. Not only do I not accept this, moreover – I consider it a ludicrous distorsion of who I am, and a pervasive, destructive cultural meme which impedes anything approaching a full expression of masculinity in the modern world.

Have I committed here tantric theocide? I hope so. For the Oedipus myth teaches us powerfully that only when the father is overthrown can the son come into his power.

Society 2.0

There is a lot of debate (whether any of it is informed in nature, I have no idea) about how the interactive internet – aka Web 2.0 – will impact on society at the level of individuals’ behavior and the tolerance of diversity. Many people seem to fear that the knowledge that much of what one does is now in the public domain will make people more conformist and paranoid, trivialize social debate and make society grey and vulnerable to the worst kinds of populism. What is already hardly carried out in public for fear of social opprobrium will be pushed back into greater and almost total obscurity. Very few people seem to be of the opinion that self-publishing (and indeed third-party publishing of ones personal data) will have the opposite effect: make people more aware of diversity, more willing to differentiate their public persona, and more tolerant of others.

The weight of opinion around this topic is quite easy to understand, and not particularly easy to argue with. It is not obvious that, on the whole, differentiating one public persona is incentive-compatible; in a world where reasons to reject people – in professional and social fields – are much more in demand than reasons to admire them, revealing who one truly is – unless who one truly is happens to match the greyness society demands – seems to suffer from a prisoner’s dilemma. On the other hand, the drive for self-expression runs deep in human nature; one needs only to recall the bravery of anti-totalitarian movements around the world to be convinced of this: what revolution was ever, in the narrow sense we are used to thinking in, incentive-compatible for those who led it? Eppur si muove. In business school we are taught that differentiating ones product and operating in a profitable niche is a much more fruitful strategy than succombing to the “commodity magnet”: the race to cut costs and appeal purely on price is a cutthroat one indeed.

So there are at least some arguments on either side, however easy it is to be pessimistic. But my point is not this. I do not, in any case, believe that social outcomes are preordained; social conditions underlie the trajectory of history, but free will, charisma and leadership nonetheless play a role out of all keeping with what one might naively imagine. As it is said in Zen, it takes only one candle to dissipate the darkness. Social prognostics may entertain others; I am more interested in moral action and social change.

And in this regard, things are clear. I suspect, in some very approximate sense and on the important assumption of continued if imperfect democracy, that this game knows two long-term equilibria: one in which there is a large set of conformists and a small set of individualists (which shrinks much more if minority rights are undermined by the large set of conformists), and one in which tolerance of diversity becomes the norm.

The outcome will depend on you and I; on the small acts of heroism whereby often unsophisticated individuals stand up for what their heart tells them is true and right, at least somewhat regardless of personal cost. Managing one’s on-line persona is reasonable (and there’s a lot of guidance on how to do it) – first impressions matter. Yet allowing paranoia to prevent us exploiting the huge potential of the worldwide web for personal development and social change is not. Someone determined enough could uncover a lot about my identity and use it maliciously against me, I have no doubt; but I think it is morally incumbent upon me to take that risk which is the reverse side of the tremendous opportunity I have to change people’s thinking and behavior for the better. And that’s what leadership is about.

Ich schĂŒtze deine Lebendigkeit

Welcome to my new mantra. I would like to recommend it to parents and schools the world over.

This came to me in German on the plane back from Istanbul and I don’t quite come up with the translation I want (that in itself probably says something about the alienness of the concepts from our daily reality), but in German it’s absolutely perfect. I defend/will defend/am defending/protect your vitality/vivaciousness/spontaneity/natural Ă©lan, something on those lines.

We devote, as a society, as educators and as parents, a tremendous amount of effort towards extinguishing the natural high spirits of children. It’s embarrassing, inconvenient, annoys others or ourselves, brings (and indeed it does) unfortunate consequences in terms of accidents or social opprobrium. And I am not saying education is unnecessary: clearly children need to learn to live in the world as it is, and to defend and protect themselves. Yet our profoundest duty is precisely the reverse – to allow our children to carry their spontaneity and aliveness through into adult life.

So this is my promise to my children; I hope it may also be yours.

Ennui

On his excellent blog, my friend (teacher?) Dirk Liesenfeld recently posted an article discussing (in German of course) a question that we probably all have asked ourselves – what happens once you reach enlightenment?

As a child I asked myself a similar question – doesn’t heaven sound really boring? Of course that’s actually a bit of a different question since here we are talking not about individual life perpetuated after death, but about continued life before death when all striving is nonetheless over. Still these questions have in common that they both cast doubt on how hard one should try to attain salvation and, in particular, is there any great rush?

Dirk describes us two scenarios. One leads to physical death and/or insanity (that one is particularly unappealing), the other to living in an almost unnoticed state of bliss, as pure love. Statistically the former case seems to predominate – though that may of course just be because the latter cases make a lot less noise. You get crazy, he says, in particular when the whirlwind of enlightenment tears up the roots of your humanity. There is nothing wrong with that craziness, per se, but it must seem unattractive to a potential disciple and certainly it seems a bit of a waste that someone who could share so much with the world doesn’t end up doing so. Though whether the world has the slightest interest in listening is, of course, another question.

The problem I have is that to feel estranged from daily life really doesn’t require one to be enlightened. It doesn’t even require one ever to have experienced tantra or any other authentic spiritual experience. It requires no more than a certain sensitivity to the complete madness and cruelty that surrounds us and its shocking juxtaposition to what is truly of value and beautiful. One of the main obstacles to spiritual growth must be, surely, the unbearableness of that shocking realization of human suffering, Weltschmerz. How much of it, indeed, can one person bear without going crazy?

In the world I know, the one I know in my heart I mean, all things are sacred. The joy that we experience in contact with others and with the world around us is beyond words. People love each other. No one would hurt a child. And this is not some idle utopia, nor even confined to tantra workshops, it is a part of my daily reality.

A much greater part, though, is spent being painfully reminded of how much the few positive things I can bring into the world are massively outweighed by the brutality of the established order. That’s both depressing and a major weight around my shoulders. It seems likely that this great mass of deadly inertia affects me negatively much more than I affect it positively.

Although I do not think my views are exceptionally odd or unnatural, I do find it very difficult to make any connection with the way most people think. It tires and bores me to have to listen to their stereotypes, prejudices and hatefulness. It tires and bores me to have to explain that, no, I don’t think like that and, yes, life is quite fine without such ludicrous baggage around my neck (or is it, in fact? for it is also rather lonely).

My partner and I organized, once, a party in lingerie. Half of our friends were so shocked by the very idea of this that they haven’t spoken to us since (and that’s the ones we dared to invite – of course there were plenty who never even got onto the guest list). Of those who did come, some were convinced we intended an orgy. Others, a few, came and had fun. But not one has tried anything similar, and most have not even invited us back to anything at all.

Personally, I simply didn’t and still don’t get what the issue could be. Isn’t that just fun? And as for any sex occurring – isn’t that both very unlikely and not a big deal? So what exactly is going on? Why do the most varied people suddenly gang up against me whenever I want to be just, well, normal, honest, natural? And why is it so hard to find anyone else on the same wavelength?

I have frankly no answer to this question. The only thing I can say is that if even the slightest authenticity is so difficult for the world around me to bear, there seems little point in settling for half measures.

Relationship as therapy

“L’enfer,” said Sartre, “c’est les autres” (Huis clos, 1943). And yet, as he recognized, it is a hell we in fact make for ourselves – a hell which results from a lack of any other perspective on ourselves than that furnished by those around and close to us, and an inability to dissociate our own emotional state from theirs. Plenty of us find ourselves in this hell, with no means to escape it. And yet, we continue to seek intimacy and we freely subjugate ourselves to the disciplines of life in community for reasons which frequently cannot be reduced to merely rational, material considerations or the workings of the “Selfish Gene”.

The ways in which we go about making life a hell for each other, and some of the reasons why, are notably addressed in a debatable but still suggestive branch of psychoanalytic theory called transactional analysis, well known through the books Games People Play (1964), What do you say after you say hello? (1975) and I’m OK, You’re OK (1969). These present rather gross simplifications of character dynamics and certainly do not constitute a complete theory of the underlying psycho-biophysics of emotions (which is still very poorly understood). Nonetheless, transactional analysis captures in terms which are easy for a layman to understand the basic dynamics of emotional interaction in repeated games.

In Games People Play, a number of easily-recognized patterns of interaction in relationships are described, which can be readily observed in our own experience. Many of us know, for instance, the frustration of trying to persuade or encourage someone to do something eminently reasonable or desirable (lose weight, give up smoking, change their job and so on), and being met by an inexhaustible barrage of semi-logical objections to it – that is, objections which adopt the rhetorical form of logical argument but without any substance – which eventually cause us to give up. This is the game Berne called Why Don’t You? Yes But (YDYB). Other common games include those in which the interlocutor is invariably cast as responsible for the interviewee’s misfortunes, those in which self-pity trumps all other considerations, games of entrapment, of emotional blackmail, and so on. Contrary to what Berne believes or cares to admit, however, all of these games are clearly marked by infantile interaction and are easy to interpret in classical psychoanalytic terms. They all constitute a projection onto the interlocutor of motivations and properties attributed to a primal figure such as a parent and the acting out of the interaction in terms of the scripts learnt in childhood to defend against these motivations when they were threatening and to solicit them when they could be reassuring. In other words, they are resistances to the threat to the ego which the interlocutor poses by virtue of his or her otherness.

Although it does not seem to have been widely recognized, the scenarios which arise in a psychotherapeutic and in a relationship setting have a great deal in common. In fact, psychotherapy is essentially relational in nature and relies on transferences of the type referred to in order to decode the nature of the neuroses which derive from the infantile experiences. A psychotherapeutic relationship has, of course, a defined framework and a conscious directionality and motivation which are presumably lacking in most general-purpose relationships. It hopefully also rests on an asymmetry of roles and on a greater emotional maturity on the part of the therapist. The point I would wish to make is, however, that also the general relational context provides ample material and opportunity to decode and self-decode the nature of character neuroses. It does so at less cost and with more ubiquity and it can certainly be advantageous to deal with transferences, resistance and conflict in a relational setting in a way which affirms and develops the authenticity of the participants to the relationship rather than – as appears anecdotally to be the norm – by avoiding conflict and shutting down communication.

From a spiritual point of view we may go further than this. The search for a partner in life and love is the basic spiritual drive which we all share. It is rarely thought of as a drive for therapy but it is homomorphic to this drive because the direction it takes expresses our desire for completeness and self-transcendence, to find Otherness in the Other, l’alteritĂ© dans l’autre; to replace neurotically constructed, ego-defensive reality by the base of otherness in which our self finds creative and autonomous expression. Because it is so colored by our prior experiences and insecurities, and by the embedded psychosocial violence which underpins these, the search for a partner no doubt frequently results in the most inappropriate pairings which do nothing to advance the spiritual growth of the partners (or their offspring). Quite on the contrary, such relationships frequently constitute a mutual Faustian pact to avoid confronting ones tortured inner child. Yet we also see from our experience that relationship is the enabler of spiritual growth. The experiences that have helped us grow as individuals all have names and faces attached to them.

In the end it is up to us to allow our relationships and our personal spiritual growth to interact in such a way that they are self-reinforcing; and to be lucid enough to draw conclusions in those situations which have become unproductive for us as human beings and to make decisions in consequence. Regardless, though, of the prospective longevity of a relationship, relationships offer us at all moments the opportunity to learn about our resistances to change and to look beneath them to the elements of our psychic makeup which determine them – provided we can separate what is objective and reasonable in our assessment of the relationship from our subjective emotionality in connection to it. This is not easy because such emotionality takes many forms which are difficult to recognize, especially to ourselves. Emotionality can look very “unemotional” or it can take a disguised emotional form (such as compassion) – the form it takes depends on our character and how we learnt to manage existential threats when we were children. My emotionality is no better than yours, however convinced I may be that I am being reasonable and you are not. Both are windows into the psychic injuries which we have endured. Relationships are not a contest, and the almost universal search for power within them can only frustrate the potential they have to bring healing and self-development. This has, therefore, to be seen for what it is – behavior learnt to defend ourselves from infantile threats that no longer exist, and a violence against the integrality of the very other whom we cherish and seek.