Articles – Page 7 – Becoming Human

Guru

A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook a query about whether a gentleman called Sadhguru (whose site is here) was or was not an authentic spiritual teacher.

Trying to distinguish true from false teachers is, for reasons I will suggest below, a particular obsession of ours, around which considerable emotion is generated. But really we should be forewarned. If there were true and false teachers, then there would be truth and falsehood, good and bad, and these things there are not. Truth is situated not only beyond good and evil but also beyond truth and falsehood; truth in the non-dual sense does not tolerate or recognize a world in which teachers are true or false, any more than it tolerates or recognizes one in which they are good or bad, right or wrong. This is all a conceit of the mind. Yet we play it, again, and again. This game of the mind closes us to the heart, the only organ with which we can see and understand.

Now, personally, when I am trying to figure out whether a teacher has really “got it” and is saying and teaching something of general value to the human race (and not only to themselves, which is not my concern), I have a golden rule – what they say about sex. Mostly they ignore it, which is not a great sign. However, in this video, Sadhguru is asked a question and in his reply he portrays the sexual instinct, not as bad, but as essentially unimportant and a distraction.

This is objectively not the case. Whatever realms sexuality may or may not open us to – and many of us instinctively sense its relationship to the divine – it is in any case the locus of mankind’s fundamental neuroses. It cannot be worked around or ignored – it needs to be healed. That is, it perhaps can be worked around, but this is no shortcut, it is a very, very long detour. One can well imagine how Osho would have answered; but perhaps even more tellingly one cannot imagine that, in Rajneeshpuram, this question would ever have been asked. It was clear to Osho and I believe it was clear in practice that human sexuality should be unleashed, and that whatever mess one might make of it (provided it did not lead to unwanted pregnancies or disease) was in any case better, and resulted in more learning and personal growth, than the alternative.

Several of the others on the discussion thread, in tending to defend Sadhguru, displayed, to my mind, two fundamental mistakes. Firstly, they used their mind to try to assess whether what Sadhguru was saying was or was not, or could or could not be construed as, compatible with other teachings, such as those of Osho, with which they were familiar and tended to identify. To me this question is entirely unimportant and not very informative. What I say is very compatible, I believe at least, with what Osho said; I feel I know his mind and it is as if we are one mind. And yet, people are not queueing up to follow me, nor I think should they (yet 😉 ). Osho has simply realized, embodied, things that I have not, and these things are transmitted from heart to heart; what he says is just background music to this language of the heart. The relevance of what he says is a sign of his connectedness to the universe, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient, and it could deceive. Secondly, and this underlines the folly of the approach via the mind, my companions seemed unduly concerned to be inclusive; not to exclude Sadhguru, or anyone else, from the circle of qualified teachers, always to give them the benefit of the doubt, to avoid choosing. This should show us that the mind is not the neutral arbiter we imagine it to be. It is at least as concerned to avoid disrupting the ego as it is to uncover truth.

So my very rapid working hypothesis on Sadhguru is that, whilst he may be worth listening to and may have many qualities, he is not pushing his followers on the issues they need to be pushed on and they are not getting the answers they look for and need.

But how do I feel, making this judgement? If I am honest, it provides a certain gratification, but, though I stand by it, it is not very pleasant to really become aware of. In it I find shades at least of anger and destruction, triumphalism and revenge. And yet he seems like a nice guy whom I might well find good company and could in the worst case simply ignore. Perhaps he is indeed a con artist. But it is not my protestations or any views of mine at all which are going to determine whether or not people seek him out or how they feel about what they find.

My joy in judgment and the sense of victory it gives me are primal emotions which serve primal survival needs. These needs, however, are objectively absent here. I find myself hating that he may be loved, admired, respected and resenting my own, uninvited feeling of inferiority. By labelling him a false teacher I foreclose the possibility I might learn anything from him, which gives me nothing. Ultimately, I condemn him for not fulfilling a role he has never asked to play: that of a father figure in whose hands my childish insecurities would dissolve into boundless love and reassurance; and I envy him for having access to love which seems denied to me.

Seen in this light, the sense of victory masks a profound inner defeat. I have essentially said to him, as I have said to my father, “Fuck you, I can stand on my own two feet.” This attitude of defiance, this unresolved Oedipus complex, while it may have been necessary for ego-survival, has become so etched into my behavior patterns that it forecloses ever receiving that which my inner child and my soul desire. And that is very sad, and very lonely.

It is exactly the same thing I do on a daily basis when I foreclose possibilities which come across my path to learn and love, out of a misplaced fear of displacement and manipulation. Even if those I encounter may not come into consideration as gurus. This is because I approach no-one as myself a whole being. Onto each and everyone I project a paternal role, hoping desperately they may meet some unmet childhood need of mine, and being eternally disappointed. Disappointment becomes a lifestyle; it even becomes a solace.

Humankind’s search for a guru is always a search to meet unmet childish needs. This is why, in the search for guru, we are always disappointed. There is no guru unless and until we are guru ourselves; and then all is guru. Thus the quality of the other, their state of enlightenment, is in reality irrelevant. What we call enlightenment is only a quality of awareness, not the essence of being, and it is with the essence of being that we must first come into contact. It may help to be in contact with someone who is aware of that essence of being within themselves; I do not deny it. Yet the surrender we need is a surrender only to ourselves. The false guru is the one who will allow you to believe he (or she) is true; that he or she really corresponds to your childish impulses. In such a relationship, as in any relationship founded on such a presupposition, you will become trapped. If a teacher is desirous to help you, he will never allow you to believe that he is “true”.

This means that another’s discernment can never substitute for your own. So much confusion stems from lack of awareness of this fundamental law! I may be right about Sadhguru, or I may be wrong, but you should not listen to me, or to anyone else, because it is not possible, even for an enlightened person, to answer this question other than directly to your heart, and by inviting you to examine yourself what you would have liked him to advise you on. Essentially, either I do not know, or I can not tell. Whether I am right does not help you to be right; not unless I can become you and this I cannot do through the mind. You must remain open to the essence of being wherever you find it, and you find it everywhere, accepting that the unmet childish needs will always remain unmet, but also understanding that there is no need any longer to meet them, and therefore remaining vulnerable, never judging with the ego-backlash of the mind which hates all, but weighing wisdom with the heart, which loves all. Then you will no longer seek guru, but it will have come to you.

Trauma releasing exercises

I am just back from the three-day introductory training in David Berceli‘s Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE). These exercises and Berceli’s work are well worth knowing. Surprisingly enough, there is no Wikipedia article on Berceli and his work. The article on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) does not mention it either, nor somatic approaches to PTSD at all, even though these have been about for a long time and must in any case be more effective than the “recognized” approaches, CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) and medication.

Berceli (as far as I can see) takes his basic model of the somatic effects of trauma from the work of Peter Levine; in any case the models are very similar. To summarize, the basic idea is that the human animal has (for some reason; we shall come onto this) suppressed a natural response to coping with stress, which needs to be reactivated for healing to occur. However, the two differ considerably in terms of methodology. Levine’s approach, known as Somatic Experiencing (SE), which is quite widely practised in Europe (though not a lot in Belgium), requires exploration of the trauma and the felt sense of the body in response to it. As such, it borrows from Gendlin’s ideas on Focusing and more generally is, it seems to me, within the intellectual tradition of Gestalt therapy. By way of contrast, Berceli’s approach, like most somatic psychotherapy, is more purely process-oriented. As such, it does not require or even directly encourage exploration of the traumatizing events, and particularly not by the therapist; rather, the focus is on what the body is doing in the here and now and on the ways in which the body’s natural attempts to self-regulate are hindered or can be supported. The independence of method from the client’s personal history offers some considerable advantages, since it makes possible group work and relies less on the skills of the therapist.

Berceli’s therapeutic method borrows from Bioenergetics (I may update this article when I have read his books, so check back), rather in the tradition of Alexander Lowen. Its aim is therefore to produce involuntary trembling in the body. Unlike Lowen, there is no element of talk therapy within the method, though Berceli does say that his method can be integrated within others, so leaves the door open to syncretic approaches. Significantly, however, the trembling is reinterpreted compared to the Reichian tradition, to which Lowen remained loyal. Rather than being glossed as the release of sexual/life energy held in stasis by the body, it is interpreted as the reactivation of the post-freezing response of animals described by Levine: “When it is out of danger, the animal will literally ‘shake off’ the residual effects of the immobility response and gain full control of its body. It will then return to its normal life as if nothing had happened“.[1]

Why is this response suppressed in humans? For this, Berceli seems to have no deeper or more convincing answer than does Levine: “Most human cultures tend to judge this instinctive surrender in the face of overwhelming threat as a weakness tantamount to cowardice. However, underneath this judgment lies a deep human fear of immobility. We avoid it because it is a state very similar to death. This avoidance is understandable, but we pay dearly for it.“[1] In other words, the response is suppressed by the ego under the weight of social stigma attached to it. Neither Levine, nor Berceli, as far as I can see, has (or even looks for) any evidence of this claimed stigmatization. Many bodily functions may be disrupted by trauma, but this does not mean that those functions themselves are necessarily stigmatized. Thus this appears to me not very convincing, and basically it eschews a psychoanalytic explanation of ego defenses and their role in the developmental process. There are lots of criticisms which can be easily leveled not only at the model, but also at how the practice relates to it. Most basically, the question arises as to why the practice does not endeavor to, nor succeeds, in simply reestablishing this response and allowing it subsequently to play whatever role it needs to play in the individual’s further experience. Rather it is recommended to continue the practice on an ongoing basis. It therefore does not constitute a “cure” for PTSD, but a door into another dimension of experience. Berceli explicitly encourages such an understanding, and views his work as transformative on a global scale. This is laudable and I thoroughly support it because I believe he is on to something; but it is not convincing theoretically.

The great advantage of Berceli’s exercises over classical bioenergetics (and over Reich’s simplified anatomical model of the biological basis of character formation) is that it is more anatomically informed, and results in exercises which are shorter and easier to carry out. This makes it more suitable for the problem it is intended to address, since persons suffering the physical developmental impact of childhood trauma are often limited in their range of motion. These exercises should absolutely be considered for use in all those contexts where people currently employ Lowen’s exercises (though not his whole framework of Bioenergetic Analysis, which he himself acknowledged did not have the clinical success he hoped for) and its derivates, such as Osho’s active meditations. Because Berceli’s exercises directly solicit and progressively release tensions in the hip adductors, iliopsoas and muscles of the pelvic floor, that is, in all of the major muscles primarily involved in the orgastic response, and they are more easily taught and experienced than existing alternatives, they seem to me the basis for a more effective practice which clients will better be able to follow and stick to (they of course do not substitute for other exercises used in group therapy the purpose of which is rather to generate than to release tensions, which will then be released in other ways).

The other great advantage is that the method can be employed in a very wide range of contexts, from schools to palliative care, contexts in which bioenergetics or anything else “explicitly” psychotherapeutic would have no chance of penetrating. It does not need and does not really have a unifying discourse, which minimizes resistance. People are willing to try it out who would never go near (or for that matter be able to afford) a psychotherapist, and stick with it because, after all, it is only their body doing what it wants to do, and it is hard to be against that.

On the other hand it would at least seem not to be a complete system for spiritual liberation in the sense we derive ultimately from Reich. Berceli applies his technique way beyond the boundaries of PTSD, presumably because people have reported positive effects in those contexts, and has some awareness of the endemic and embedded nature of societal trauma, but the need for wide appeal seems to prevent him from going deeply into underlying societal issues in the radical tradition of much psychoanalytic thought. I am not saying this is a bad choice. Perhaps it is an excellent one. But ultimately, personally and at societal level, one does need to go there. Refusing to do so will always limit the benefits that can be attained.

What Berceli’s discourse seems to me to lack is an understanding that the disruption of the trauma response is ultimately due to the fact that social experience, being so far from the natural state of man, continually regenerates trauma. On top of distorting ego development, social experience also acts in the present. Our shared cognitive models of the world and the human need for relationship continually pull us back to a depressed, unhealthy state, and would do so even if all “residues” of specific trauma were somehow dissolved. We touch here on the manner in which Berceli’s approach is most fundamentally incomplete. It is essentially solipsistic, and presupposes, ultimately as a matter of ideology, the ability of the individual body to regenerate in the absence of regeneration of the collective body and the social tissues, which although they are just as ossified as the somatic tissues, are not directly brought into vibration by the practice. This cannot work. An interpersonal dimension of therapy and practice is absolutely indispensable if we are to begin to reprogram the social mechanisms which propagate and perpetuate trauma.

So I guess that makes me a big fan and a big critic at the same time. However I will do and use the exercises and I recommend them to you to.

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[1] See http://www.traumahealing.com/somatic-experiencing/art_chapter1.html

Bisexuality

I wrote about this in a previous post, but on the basis of my further reading, thought and self-examination, I am going to stick my neck out (as it were).

It seems to me that all human beings naturally enjoy a degree of same-sex play. All categorical rejections of it are a reflection of internalized homophobia. Same sex erotic response characterizes all plural sexual situations, masturbation and, in men, the widespread interest in pornography featuring transsexuals. These days, when I encounter males troubling to identify as “100% hetero” it raises, I suspect rightly, a red flag.

This being so, it becomes useless to apply either the term bisexual or the term heterosexual to persons whose primary attraction is to the other sex. It similarly becomes useless to apply the term homosexual in the contrary case. This is because neither what we term homosexuality nor what we term heterosexuality is actually about sexual behaviour or narrow erotic/genital response. These terms in fact mistakenly take sexual behavior for the whole of something of which it is simply a part, that is, human bonding behavior, and with which it is also not exclusively associated.

I would question whether the term “heterosexual”, as employed in common parlance, usefully refers to anything at all, beyond signalling latent (or not so latent) homophobia. Bonding behavior between the sexes is the norm in our species. When something is the norm, does it need a name other than in specialized contexts? We recognize the existence of albinos without a corresponding term for “non-albinos” (unless that was it). Similarly, while there are certainly antonyms to blind, deaf, handicapped etc., these are not usually emphasized ad nauseam in a person’s self-description, unless the context requires it. Neither should gays or anyone else have to accept that their bonding behavior is conflated with their sexual behavior and the two are codetermined. A perfectly reasonable alternative with improved etymological purity is, moreover, available: the statistically dominant tendency could be termed “heterotropic” and the other tendencies “homotropic” and “bitropic”.

In any case I think we owe it to true bisexuals to stop using the same word to apply to their bonding behavior and to the normal sexual behavior of heterotropic adults. We also do not need this term for heterotropic adults, because all it vectors for them in most cases is shame and meaningless identity crisis. If you are heterotropic but you sometimes enjoy elements of same-sex play, you are not bisexual, you are just more at ease with your basic nature than most of your peers.

Electra

Ich glaube, ich war schön: wenn ich die Lampe ausblies vor meinem Spiegel, fühlt ich es mit keuschem Schauer. Ich fühlt’ es, wie der dünne Strahl des Mondes in meines Körpers weisser Nacktheit badete so wie in einem Weiher, und mein Haar war solches Haar, vor dem die Männer zittern, dies Haar, versträhnt, beschmutzt, erniedrigt, verstehst du’s, Bruder? Ich habe alles, was ich war, hingeben müssen. Meine Scham hab’ ich geopfert, die Scham, die süsser als Alles ist, die Scham, die wie der Silberdunst, der milchige des Monds, um jedes Weib herum ist und das Grässliche von ihr und ihrer Seele weghält, Verstehst du’s, Bruder! diese süssen Schauder hab’ ich dem Vater opfern müssen. Meinst du, wenn ich an meinem Leib mich freute, drangen seine Seufzer, drang nicht sein Stöhnen an mein Bette? Eifersüchtig sind die Toten: und er schickte mir den Hass, den hohläugigen Hass als Bräutigam. So bin ich eine Prophetin immerfort gewesen und habe nichts hervorgebracht aus mir und meinem Leib als Flüche und Verzweiflung.

(Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Richard Strauss’s Elektra)

Let me share with you a painting.

This was done, unprompted of course, by my six-year-old daughter; the little bird on the left is her, the big one on the right, me; and the heart represents what hearts represent.

In sharing this with you, I want to make two points, which, in fact, are really only one point from two perspectives.

But first a brief discursus.

Carl Gustav Jung’s invention of the Electra complex earned him, as we know, Freud’s opprobrium. Freud was unwilling to contemplate a symmetric process on the part of the girl child to the male Oedipus complex which forms such a basic plank of his theory of male psychosexual development. The reason for this appears to have been that the initial infantile oral attachment is to the mother; in the male child, this attachment needs to be broken so that the object of sexual attraction is sought outside the family unit; for the female child the problem is not posed in these terms because the female/female bond to the mother remains. The female child thus would not form any infantile presexual bond and therefore not need to break this bond. As sexual development progresses, objects of attachment can only be sought in the outside world.

The Freudian account, I guess, is by now thoroughly unconvincing to any clinical psychoanalyst, who knows from repeated experience the importance of fixation on the father figure as a source of female neurosis.

In an earlier post, I reflected that Sex at Dawn, due to its deconstruction of the elemental nature of the nuclear family group, might anyway require a reevaluation of the Oedipus and Electra complexes. On reflection, Sex at Dawn does not really imply anything for Freud’s theory: the biological mother has an archetypal role and status in any society. However, I believe psychoanalysts have not awaited the findings of paleoanthropology to start to criticize both Freud’s and Jung’s accounts as reflecting contingent social circumstances rather than universal truths. As such, at the very least the intensity of the psychic conflict alluded to may be primarily a consequence of the poverty of adult social relations, whether male or female, to which children in industrial societies have access. If the mother or father fails or is absent, the available social tissue is insufficient to take up the slack. This would not have characterized pre-industrial, much less pre-agricultural societies, in which the absence of one or other parent is likely in any event to have been a common scenario and therefore one to which the human psyche presumably developed resilience.

Whatever its theoretical basis, however, descriptively the Electra complex seems to have been highly relevant in the environment in which psychoanalytic theory was born. Its clinical relevance probably explains why it is the only concept developed by Jung which made it into mainstream clinical practice. Post-structuralist, feminist and Marxist readings of fairy tales and dowry practices tell a similar story: whether or not the role of the father figure is to any degree biologically programmed, it is certainly to an extraordinary degree culturally reinforced. Jung was neither wrong to see in the neurosis with which Sabina Spielrein presented the shadow of her violent yet charming father, nor to identify a cultural pattern attested from the earliest literate societies (sex-negative patriarchy struck back when Stalin closed Spielrein’s experimental kindergarten in Moscow in 1926 on charges of sexual perversion and Hitler’s troops shot her for her Jewish origins in Rostov on Don in 1942)(1).

I would like, therefore, to bear witness in this way to the astonishing delicacy of the love between father and daughter. In our emotionally devastated world, each generation is still borne anew with all its potential for love. The emotional desert in which we all live certainly contributes in a major way to the semiotic charge of the relationship and its frequently unhappy course. And yet, we instinctively sense that we are in the presence of something deeply sacred – in many men’s experience perhaps uniquely and unbearably so.

In sharing the painting with you, I want to say something to women, and to fathers.

To women, I hope it shows you that, whatever has been your personal history, your love for your father has been a precious part of who you are as a human being. In all likelihood he was an inept, if not appalling guardian of the treasure entrusted to him. The treasure, however, is yours, and remains.

And to fathers of daughters (though frankly, it is really very similar with sons): please wake up and cherish this tender miracle which lights your days. In doing so, remember that we are the servants of our children, and not they of us.

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Notes:

(1) Jung’s proximate source seems not to have been Sophocles, however, but Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Strauss’s librettist whose words are cited at the top of this article.

Baby on board

I’m recently back from a workshop with Rani Willems and I wanted to share these thoughts.

Rani spoke amongst other things about the Enneagram of Personality, a typology of character types formed as basic survival strategies in childhood. I would be type seven, and I can certainly relate to this. My basic strategy was to do everything it took to escape, not simply into an inner world but in terms of a complete break with my home environment and complete destruction of the power of my parents over me. This type is fixated with planning and work, and so was I, until I found myself at University, free, and realized that the cause of escape which had defined my life until then, having been achieved, no longer had a raison d’etre. This led to an identity crisis, and the start of my spiritual quest.

The basic fear of this type is boredom, and the fear of boredom was a constant theme in my childhood. Indeed it still is. My attention span for anything but spiritual matters is limited, and I have gone through interests and careers at a remarkable pace. Though I may admire them, I cannot understand people who are able to devote their life to a single cause, whatever it is.

The basic desire of this type is the experience of life. I would describe this as more than a basic desire in my case, but almost an obsession. It is hard for me to accept that there are aspects of life that I may not experience. Doubtless though, in experiencing them, I find it hard simply to stop and be present to the experience: the next one is always waiting. I also have the vice of gluttony and give in to the basic “temptation” of this type: moving too fast.

When we move too fast, however, we do not take all of ourselves with us. I may imagine myself racing down the motorway of enlightenment (as if any such existed) – but parts of me, my inner child, are left behind.

As they have been always. For me, childhood was an annoyance to be overcome. A weakness I could not allow myself. My inner child was never present to me – as much shorn of existence and personality by myself as by my parents, to whom it never occurred that a child might be a sovereign, complete spiritual being.

At the same time though, childhood was a refuge. I wanted to escape, but I did not want to grow up. Grown-ups were mean, and I found nothing to admire in them, and never imagined myself being one. Childishness was a part of my identity because I knew my soul was in my childish self, and could oppose it to the hostile world of adults around me. In this way, my inner child came to bear the weight of an attachment from my adult self which was a source of comfort; just as such an attachment was imposed on it by my mother, whose personality was incomplete without me.

So my inner child, who never got to be a child, still has to bear the weight of the needs of adults, and his own needs continue to be ignored. Setbacks, frustrations and weaknesses coming from my childish layer are treated by me with intolerance, instead of being seen as a quiet voice inside of me that still has needs and wants to be free.

And yet I love my inner child, because I know his beauty; observing my own son, I can be in no doubt about it. The beauty I doubt is that of the person I have become, and don’t really want to be. I feel a need for integration of which I have barely scratched the surface. In that journey, the most precious assets are those which lie deeply buried inside of me because, at the time, they were a distraction and a weakness I could not allow myself. The same negligence applies, by the way, to my body, the importance of which to me only became evident at puberty. It has always seemed to me that my sexual drives were the one force strong enough to save me from the futility of the destiny that inevitably awaited me relying for salvation on myself alone.

On the spiritual journey, dismissal of ones weaknesses and more generally the non-integrated or subordinate parts of one’s personality is just a sign of ego attachment. If we are travelling anywhere, baby comes too.

Cacocracy

First read this.

Now aside from being brilliant and game-changing relationship advice (it won’t catch on though, mark my words – no one wants to hear the truth that their problems are of their own making, not someone else’s), I want to point out the following.

I am pretty damn sure that almost everyone reading this article, whether they are men or women, and almost regardless even of how strongly they agree with the advice given, in their gut sympathizes with the woman. In fact, I doubt very many people at all – even if, like me, they cried reading this on the train this morning, the delicious yet bittersweet tears of a human being feeling accepted and understood – I doubt that they pause really to think, to dwell on and meditate, the pain of the man.

Vaste swathes of the feminist movement, and of femininity generally, is deeply, indelibly in love with their victim complex. But it is not only women, it is the whole of our culture which is virulently hostile to the emotional, affective and sexual expression of (biological) masculinity and which carries around self-fulfilling stereotypes of “evil, predatory” males and “good, victim” females. And it is very, very hard to resist; to confront it as a man will gain you little recognition as it goes to the core of female neuroses which very few people wish to recognize, and the reaction is likely to be shutting you out of access to even that paltry emotional world of sexual and affective congress that you are allowed to aspire to inhabit. It is, in other words, not incentive-compatible to tell the truth.

We are wedded to the idea that we live in a patriarchy. Some cultural heroes contrast this to an imagined, prehistoric lost golden age of matriarchy. Yet it is a very deep truth, I believe, that both of these terms are meaningless. Male and female can exist in the universe only in equal measure. There can be small amounts of each or large amounts of each, but there cannot be different amounts of each. When neither can flow freely, each will flow in a distorted manner, and these distorsions will be different, but certainly not in any moral sense (there is, after all, no moral sense). And this is what we see – qualitative difference in the expression of the emotional pathology. But not quantitative difference.

I certainly feel compassion for the woman in this story, even if it is hard to feel compassion for someone who is insisting that I make a lie out of my life in order not too much to disrupt her excruciating insecurities. But I also see clearly that making that lie is not simply a least-resistance convenience, without costs. No. It is just as excruciating.

We live in a world where power-over is differently exercised by men and women, in different domains and different ways, but one is not triumphant and the other subordinate. They are simply at war and fight using the tools at hand. Neither can ever win, but they certainly can destroy each other. And this is a reign, not of men over women or of women over men, but of sickness over health or, if you like those terms, of evil over good. A cacocracy.

As the author says (and I hope you read it, but it bears repeating):

There are a few good things in the world. Love is one of them. Love is a gem. Love is one of those rare things in the world that is pretty much good all around. It arises free of cost and does no harm in the feeling of it; it only elevates and brings joy.

I know it also threatens. But for a moment let us please look not at how it threatens but at how it brings spontaneous pleasure. For a moment, why not ask how this gift of human consciousness might serve as the true starting point for relationships? Why not take a risk and see if we can operate on the principle of universal love? What might that show us?

What if it were possible for this man to have an infinite amount of love? What if his love does, in fact, grow the more it is exhausted, the way a muscle grows the more it is exhausted? And what if it shrinks when held immobile, the way a muscle shrinks when held immobile?

And what if your arrangements about sex were a separate matter? What if you were to grant him the freedom to feel what he feels and express it to you as best he can, including the understanding that he tell the complete truth to you, including the truth of whether he has been having sex with this woman, or kissing this woman, or touching her at all? What if you were to abandon all thought of controlling what is to happen next and abandon yourself to the truth, to seek the truth like a thirsty traveler, to lap it up with no thought of what to do with it?

What if we were to use our short time on earth to learn as much as we can about each other by telling each other the truth and listening to the truth? What if truth is painful only because stripping away illusion is painful? What if relationships are a set of dance moves learned in elementary school? What if we have it mostly backward? What if it turns out that what we consider the most healthy relationship is the one that cleaves most fearfully to its model of illusion? What if a “troubled relationship” is merely one that has begun to admit a little truth into its choreography of fairy tales? What if “trouble” is the beginning of “health”?

Exactly. What if trouble is the beginning of health?

One last point. In some comments on this article on Facebook, certain people were tempted to agree with the author on substance, but accused him of adding unnecessary “spiritual mumbo-jumbo” to his case.

The problem with this is that some people are just convinced that human beings are a wretched, mean creature, always selfish, never to be trusted. They hold this view of me, and, presumably, also of themselves (at least I hope they are at least consistent to this very minimal degree). These people will never be persuaded otherwise. There is no hope whatsoever that they will get what the author is talking about unless they can open their eyes to the glory of what surrounds them, figure out that this glory is also inside of them, and finally understand that it is inside of everyone. Yet one can only point it out, and hope. This is what the author does, and I hope I am adding my voice to his.

Sex, pain, and the death instinct, revisited

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been reading a book by Joachim Bauer entitled Warum ich fuehle, was du fuehlst (“Why I feel what you feel”), which is basically a mixture of science and conjecture about the function of the human mirror neuron system. It turns out that the same neurons fire when we perform an act ourselves and when we see it performed by someone else, and this, it is argued, lies at the basis of our ability to experience empathy and to intuitively read the emotional state and intentions of the other.

A leitmotiv of the book is the idea that social interaction performs an essential role in neurobiological development. Famously, though probably apocryphally, Frederick II is said to have conducted an experiment whereby children were raised without hearing human language; deprived of this stimulus, they are said to have died. Perhaps more believably, controversial experiments on macaque monkeys have shown that, deprived of social contact, they develop psychosis. This conclusion is not new, but it appears we are starting to uncover some of its neurobiological foundation.

Controlled scientific experiments cited by Bauer in the book show that social exclusion can generate pain in the same centers that register physical pain. We have for some time known that the perception of physical pain is not a simple function of external stimulus, but also factors in, and fundamentally, psychological aspects – what that pain means, or is thought or feared to mean, to the perceiver. Now further we know, and this is backed up in a 2005 paper by Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Liebermann, entitled Why It Hurts to Be Left Out, that purely social factors can induce pain which is similar in all respects to “physiological” pain (indeed, it is physiological pain).

Interjecting a couple of points of my own here: firstly, pain is something we are wired to avoid. Indeed, we avoid it instinctively, even if we are consciously prepared to confront it knowing it has certain benefits (or more accurately, is a by-product of processes which have such benefits). The greater the pain we experience, the more we privilege its avoidance over any rational assessment of the benefits to ourselves of enduring it. Secondly, what is already true for physiogenic pain is true, of course, a fortiori for psychogenic pain (or perhaps I should call it “sociogenic pain”), namely the pain we actually experience is a function of our psychological state at the moment of the stimulus. There are common features, perhaps, but there is no standard human response to life events which modify our social constellation such as bereavement, loss of ones job, retirement and so on. Just as touch, which might otherwise procure pleasure, will feel painful when applied at a point where we have open wounds, so also the same life event will be experienced by some even pleasurably whereas it might have the most excruciating effect on others. In medicine this is called hyperalgesia.

Indeed, this is true to such an extent that it leads to a necessary qualitative distinction in any discussion of psychogenic versus physiogenic pain. Certain life events, such as bereavement, are probably universally painful in at least some degree, and therefore comparable to fractures, burns, stings and so on. In other words they signal to us a real and universal need to bring the healing resources of the body to bear on the wound inflicted. The vast majority of situations and events which cause psychogenic pain, however, are not like this at all – our reaction to them is intensely personal and someone else’s reaction to the same events could be totally different.

As I am in the business of giving personal development suggestions in this blog, and not just describing things, allow me then to say that it is extremely important to make this distinction. There are many things in the world in relation to which vast swathes of the population are in a neurotic state. It is thus statistically common to observe a similar reaction to these things in many people. Nonetheless, this does not make these things natural or inevitable sources of pain. They may even be natural sources of pleasure.

This is likely the case in many instances where many people – men and women – experience sexual jealousy. There are many grounds to suspect that observing ones partner and other people one loves being sexually intimate with others, or to learn about it or hear of it, is in fact naturally pleasurable, and was experienced as such in our Urwelt. Just to cite a few: there is the vicarious experience of pleasure which I mentioned before; the social bonds which it creates to the new sexual partner; the prospect of half-siblings improving the life chances of ones own offspring; the prospect of ones own enhanced sexual gratification as a result; and so on. Perhaps most convincingly, there are people who enjoy it. There are not many who enjoy objective sources of physical pain.

Nonetheless, many people experience this as pain. What to do? It is easy enough to say that one should stick out the pain and eventually it will die down and be replaced by pleasure. However, as any sufferer from chronic pain will tell you, this is not even necessarily true, much less is it a sufficient motivation to endure a potentially long and painful journey to a seemingly uncertain destination.

I do not have a simple answer either, but I think some reflection on what causes this hyperalgesia may point the way. Already when it is understood that the person suffering from jealousy experiences physical pain, it becomes clearer than it might otherwise have been that their reaction to this experience is, to a significant degree, outside of their control. Anger or recriminations in relation to it are pointless. Indeed, worse than pointless – such a reaction invites the sufferer to feel guilty, deny their pain, or submit to the other, refreezing and reinforcing the factors which led to the experience of jealousy in the first place.

Jealousy is felt as alienation – a withdrawal behind the defenses of the ego and a loss of the sense of contact with the world, a sense which was clearly tenuous to begin with. Alienation in childhood becomes self-fulfilling prophecy in adulthood. The cycle can only be broken by showing empathy and connection – not by withdrawing it and leaving yet another victim abandoned carelessly on life’s highway.

And this really brings me back to the essentiality of social contact, of touch and of sexual expression also. It appears that there is nothing in humanity’s basic repertoire of interaction which is merely “nice to have”, which we can ignore or neglect without fear of consequences. The idea of freedom without community – cultivated the world over as a spiritual value – is in fact a nonsense, or at best something which is only possible on the basis of a very strong foundation of community in the past.

Bauer tells familiar stories and some less so. That the passage into retirement is an explanatory variable for mortality rates. How couples seem so often to die in close proximity to each other. But also of how persons condemned for their crimes by the community to expulsion, voluntarily take on themselves the duty to die. The biological stress engendered by social exclusion is a self-destruction program, eerily like (though Bauer does not make the connection), Freud’s posited death instinct (Reich’s response to which I discussed here). And I guess this makes some sense, both because there does, after all, appear to be such an instinct in the animal kingdom* (though this certainly does not mean that Freud’s treatment of it was correct) and because it is something that many character types may intuitively understand – not only masochists.

Persons experiencing jealousy have an injured sense of connection to the world, such that they need to hold on to symbols of that connection and turn particular people (often partners, but also kids) into such symbols. They respond to perceived threats to those symbols – perceived through a magnifying lens of paranoia – with self-destructive behavior, just like those on whom the tribal shaman has pronounced a curse.

All too often, fearful of the intensity of this reaction – which is truly akin to a reaction to a life-threatening situation – and burdened anyway with their own sense of shame and guilt, their partners will apologize, try to reassure, try to salvage the fragile trust which existed, or seemed to, before. It is in the nature of things that this is not possible. This type of connection to the world is too tenuous and artificial to be anything more than a band-aid on a gaping wound. What the jealous partner needs in such moments is empathy, grounding, and connection – not desperate attempts to re-become a shattered symbol, but the shattering of the symbolic and its replacement by the real.

Genies do not go back into bottles. In such moments we can meet as demons to each other, or both decide to meet as humans. Almost everything in life that generates emotional pain has great potential for healing, but it is a potential which almost always goes unexploited because the insecurities are not just on one side, but on both. When we decide to meet as vulnerable, hurting beings it may just be that we finally realize we are not, and cannot be, alone.

Notes

* Illustrated at cellular level by the process of apoptosis, and also observed in many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder where the underlying monotrauma results from a direct human agent.

Our tribal nature

Since Sex at Dawn, it is finally beyond doubt that humankind is not a monogamous creature. Nonetheless, there are lot of details still to be filled in as regards the exact role of sexuality in the social organization of our species, both past and present. In this regard, we are only possessed at present of a few, tantalizing clues. However, both brief introspection and sheer logic suffice to conclude that sexual behavior in our species does not serve simply or primarily as some kind of casual, diffuse and undifferentiated social glue. Such an extreme view appears to be a gross simplification even for bonobos.

What I have observed, purely from self-study and from listening to others who have similarly tried to understand themselves, is that there remains a fundamental difference between men and women as regards their emotional response to situations in which their sexuality comes to contemporary expression, at least when it is expressed within a holistic response to another individual where attraction is felt on a number of levels. This difference appears to me to be irreducible to purely cultural and contingent factors, and to play a plausible role in primitive societies as well.

Sticking to bonobos, and we should be careful in extrapolating too naively to our own species, we know that they live in philopatric groups. This means that the male composition of groups is constant over time, whilst females migrate into groups other than that in which they were born. Whilst homosexual behavior takes place in both sexes, it appears to play more of a bonding role amongst females, whereas amongst males its role is more as an outlet for sexual tension and to reinforce mating hierarchies: males exhibit markedly less intra-sex solidarity than females.

Now I have not read anything about this, applying either to bonobos or our own species, but the question obviously arises of the factors which come into play in inciting a female to join another group. There is clearly a push factor – the desire to avoid incestuous pregnancy – but it is still necessary to choose the new host group. It is hard to believe that this choice is entirely left to chance.

Looking at our own species – methodological rigor is not claimed – and trying to think a little bit how this would have worked in primitive tribal societies (though contemporary evidence should also be available), I have remarked and postulate that men, when they feel a high degree of attraction to a new female (“fall in love”), seek to bring her into the tribe. “Falling in love” does not cause men to wish to abandon their existing family and other social ties, though it may be so strong on occasion and encounter such opposing forces that this less-preferred option nevertheless comes out on top. Essentially, male sexuality is inclusive. Males also have a strong wish for new females to bond with existing females and will make efforts in this sense, however fruitlessly and apparently, perhaps, naively. Bonding with existing females will be a factor in the ultimate inclusion or otherwise of a new female in the group. Translated into contemporary society, the bottom line is that men do not want to leave their wives (never mind their children), but at the same time do wish to offer protection and security to new sexual partners as well.

On the female side, other forces are at work. A woman who feels a deep attraction to a new man is likely to feel a desire to be with him, and to consider abandoning her existing social roles in order to realize that goal. The frustration of this desire can result in dramatic behavior, à la Madame Bovary. It is nonetheless held in check by certain factors, principal amongst which are children and female friends. To leave her existing mate is less inconceivable for a woman than for a man and sentimental ties are less important relative to the force of her new passion.

In bonobos, for a female to leave a group would mean to leave her immature children behind. The males will never rejoin her, and the females, once they enter into adulthood, are unlikely to. I do not know if females ever produce children in more than one group but am guessing it is most uncommon. It’s likely that a female who has become a mother remains henceforth with the group in which that event has occurred. Romantic attachments to extra-group males, whilst they might still happen, would not achieve the critical momentum necessary to sever existing ties. Female sexuality eventually settles into a more nurturing and more inclusive form, but the initial choice of group is made on the basis of a single male considered as a desirable mate – not on the basis of an assessment of the group as a whole.

This postulate shows us how what we now consider as “monogamous” sexual attraction may have existed and played a role in the social processes leading to the formation of primitive tribal groups, in particular to resolve the problem of choice of group faced by the newly adult female. In this perspective, it is not something anomalous grafted onto a fundamentally polygamous nature. When, however, it encounters contemporary social structures, it misfires for several reasons.

Our existing “tribes” are tiny nuclear families or, at best, kinship groups. Woman have been given legal rights (without my taking any view on these rights) which make it likely that separation from children will not be a cost of divorce. Under these circumstances, leaving the “tribe” is much easier. This creates a risk of breakdown in the tribe which a man’s efforts to strengthen the tribe by bringing in new females and new children may only hasten. The same drives which developed, in other words, to generate stable social structures under the constraint of maintaining genetic diversity, now generate unstable social structures in which childcare inevitably suffers.

This picture is not, perhaps, as hopeless as it sounds. In primitive times also, many factors would have frustrated the wishes of many individuals, and yet these factors would not have led to massive neurosis and social breakdown. We are far more robust to disappointment than we perhaps realize.

That certain desired outcomes cannot be realized is not in itself the problem. The dramatically dysfunctional outcomes that we see all around us are rather due to the fact that we cannot even own the truth of our nature and respect that of the other. Under these circumstances, it is not only particular wishes that cannot be accommodated, but the whole prospect that such wishes will be accommodated, ever and to any degree. This systemic, existential frustration generates ill-feeling and potentially violence and abuse which goes on to undermine our tiny tribes from inside, making their undermining from outside ever more probable.

As ever, a wise and adaptive response can only come through awareness and empathy.

Passion

I am just back from a weekend at the Humaniversity. It’s always a pleasure to go there, for the feeling of community and the sense of making a difference in the world, one life at a time*.

The theme was “passion” and we explored it from different angles, all of which was very worthwhile, but in hindsight I realize that, surprisingly, the theme of sexual passion was not evoked. Were we just unwilling to go there? And what is the relationship between sexual passion and passion for life and its pursuits and pleasures more generally?

I definitely suspect that (unsurprisingly) there was a good deal of sublimation going on. And in art as in life. The reluctance or oubli of even a relatively enlightened public to talk about sexual passion mirrors what we do when we throw all our energies into projects of manifold kind, but neglect our inner fire.

And believe me, this is a problem. Because it is that inner fire we are asking to fuel our projects. But only, just so. Only to the extent we and society find convenient. We like a little fire in our fireplace, but we are afraid of the big fire that consumes all.

Sexual passion is about surrender. Surrender to the moment, to our partner, to our own body; surrender to any consequences, beyond our fears. And although many cannot genuinely surrender to it, even occasionally, sexual passion is our birthright.

It is popularly supposed, including in esteemed circles, that only unhappy people can be geniuses, creative artists, world leaders in different fields…. and this is a troubling problem, because we can all think of plenty of examples that seem to confirm it. We can also think of examples of people who seem to be happy, but because of this are much less driven to change things in their environment, much less active on the public stage. Many of us think that, as Cicero suspected, only the thirst for power, status or personal gain motivates a position in public life. With rare exceptions, happy people attend only to problems on the margin of society, mitigate its discontents, but do not challenge the embedded violence at its core. We are also accepting of “negative” personality traits in our leaders – at least up to a certain point. We imagine only a psychopath can truly lead us, or want to. So much for the philosopher-king.

Sexual passion, frequently, leaves us feeling happy, even beatific, but if it drives us to anything at all, then it is to only one thing: to possess (impossibly) the object of that passion, to place it beyond the fear of loss, to tame it in order to ensure its continued availability. Lovers have gone to legendary lengths to ensnare the object of their love. They have sometimes abdicated power, status and security to do so. Only very rarely have they have gone on, as a result thereof, based upon this passion, to lead the world.

What is the answer to this apparent dilemma? Well, we should first note, I think, that if sexual passion were such a universal narcotic, wouldn’t it be more tolerated, even embraced, by established power structures? That exactly the opposite is true should be a clue. If male sexual drives (but not true passion) are indeed tolerated, the real heart of passion in the body of the woman is not. We have tried since time immemorial to stamp it out, and we continue today. Is it only because of the threat to family structures and property, or do we also have an inkling of a deeper threat, a threat not only specific, to particular families and property, but general, to the whole capitalist, patriarchal worldview and the power structures based upon it?

Happiness, indubitably, placates us, reconciles us to the circumstances of our life, dulls the need for change. Happy people are not usually behind those social forces clamoring for change. These are rather angry people – with every right, of course, to be angry.

This, I believe, is true however only up to a point. The appearance of truth tells us in reality only something about the rarety of the state of bliss we nonetheless imagine to form part of our experience. If experienced at all, it is fleeting only, sensed – and immediately retreated from. No one is surrendering to it. We are all ruled by fear.

Happiness is a state we need to cultivate and get used to. If we experience it only intermittently, we are always caught in a desperate search for more. Once we fully surrender to our natural passion, however, when we learn, as the Vigyan Bhairav tantra exhorts, to stay with the fire and avoid the embers, we are happy, but we are also charged. The experience of sexual passion then ignites us to an understanding of the natural state of the world, and the extent to which we have strayed from it. Then passion becomes truly omnipresent, but only with unsublimated goals. It incites us to bring justice, beauty and joy into the world. To give voice to anger, perhaps, but not to discontent. Rather, to be the living embodiment of another way of being. Sexual release may dull us temporarily, but sexual satisfaction is only a myth. The experience of ecstasy leads us invariably to compassion, and empowers us for change.

Note:
* Please note that, while I have a lot of respect for the therapists and their work, this should not be read as a blanket endorsement. Discover your needs and find what works for you.

Porn as meditation

In which I blast my blog into the outer reaches of cyberspace. Well, we’ll see. There is no intention to court controversy, but, as always, there are some things I just have to say.

Google these two words – porn and meditation – together, and what you’ll get is mostly links to pseudo-oriental “treatments” for (so-called) “porn addiction”. Although many people enjoy (so-called) porn, and sex-positive activists have generally embraced its production and consumption, at least within certain limits/genres, it seems that it has yet to make its way into the mainstream, or even any sidestream, of new spirituality. Continue reading “Porn as meditation”