In this article, I suggest that the tendency on the part of men to endow female romantic partners with redemptive force, reflected in Jung’s notion of Anima, derives from a failure of socialization in puberty. Although culturally sanctioned, this misconstrues the potency of erotic relationships to reshape the psyche, substituting the confined ego project of redemption for the more open-ended one of spiritual emancipation; it also undermines erotic polarity and as such is largely self-defeating.
Continue reading “The Archetype of Woman as Redemptress: psychodynamic, literary and patriarchal aspects”
Tag: Osho
On sannyas names
Since many people I know on Facebook have been wondering why I have now adopted there my sannyas name instead of my birth name, I thought it worthwhile explaining a little bit what this means to me.
I have dealt with the meaning of sannyas itself in other posts, notably here. To avoid misunderstanding, it is absolutely not a badge of membership of any organization or religion. As Osho has said, “By becoming a sannyasin you are not becoming a part of a certain organization – this is not an organization at all. By becoming a sannyasin, you are becoming courageous enough to accept a certain fact: that man exists in aloneness.”
But what is the importance of the change of name, and of the name itself?
Clearly, the name has no particular importance. A name is just a name. Names are not endowed with magical properties. I like my sannyas name, it does not mean anything to me (in Sanskrit it means something like wilderness, being the origin of the word “jungle”).
In fact, what is important about it is precisely this: that it has no meaning. If it had meaning, it would shape me. I would try to become it. This is not the point at all. It is not about becoming, but about unbecoming.
As long as we believe we know, we are ignorant. It is only when we acknowledge our ignorance, that knowledge begins. This is why I find it important to drop my birth name. Not that there is anything wrong with that name, and of course I continue to use it in all sorts of contexts. The problem with it is the problem with any birth name, and that is that it has acquired meaning; I imagine I know who that person is, and others do too. Yet all this meaning has not emerged organically from the core of who I am; it has largely been constructed by others and by myself in opposition to others before I was conscious enough to understand.
In order to make a fresh start it is very important to recognize that I do not know who I am. Who I am is a mystery to me, a marvellous journey I have scarcely even embarked upon. I do not know Jangali. When I write the word, it is unknown to me. Therefore I choose it. I don’t know if this is what Osho had in mind. But I think his message was on the same lines: people came to him identifying with an image of themselves, and he just found this funny, and wanting to get them asking questions by playing with them.
It is not that I have assumed a new identity; rather, I have disassumed the old identity, all identity, all notion of myself and all willingness to be defined by others. Those who think they know me find it easy not to listen. They have expectations as to what they will hear, and this is then what they do hear. I want to invite you to stop imagining you know – anything – and listen; of course not just to me, but to each other, to the birdsong and the change of seasons, to the laughter and the silence….
I cannot of course prevent Jangali coming to mean something. It will become a personal brand. Perhaps if that all becomes too much and gets in the way, I will change it again. But at least it will be a label whose meaning is derived from the journey of my adult, spiritual self.
Osho on relationships (again)
This Osho quote was a new one for me. I can so absolutely identify with this, it is kinda scary 😉
(found on wildtantra.com)
“…Any relationship between man and woman is playing with fire and particularly if you start also being a meditator then you are surrounded by a wild fire because so many changes are going to happen for which you are not prepared and cannot be prepared. You are going to travel in an unknown territory every moment every day, and there will be many times when you will be left behind or your partner will be left behind, and this will be a deep anguish to both. And in the beginning when it will start, the natural inference will be as if our relationship is finished, that we are no more in love. Certainly you are no more in the love you were before, that old love is no more possible, that was animal love. It is good that it is gone. Now a more higher quality, something divine is going to take place, but you have to help each other. These are the real difficult times when one comes to know whether you love your partner or whether your partner loves you. When these great gaps arise between you and you feel going far away from each other, these are the moments crucial of a fire test; that you should try to bring the other person, who is left behind closer to you. You should help the other person to be meditative. The natural idea will be to bring yourself down, so the other is not offended. That’s absolutely a wrong attitude. You are not helping the other, you are hurting yourself. A good opportunity is being lost. When you could have pulled the other towards highs, you have descended yourself. Don’t be worried that the other will be offended. You make every effort to bring the other also to the same space, to the same meditative mind and the other will be grateful, not offended. But these are not the moments, when you should depart from each other. These are the moments when you should keep with every effort the contact with the other with as much compassion as possible. Because if love cannot help the other in transforming the animal energies into higher spiritual energies, then your love is not love, not worth calling love…” Osho
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.
With the kisses of his mouth
I just finished reading Monique Roffey’s “With the Kisses of his Mouth”, an astonishingly forthright – if frustratingly incomplete – account of the author’s exploration of her sexuality following her breakup from her former husband, through casual sex dating, swinging, tantra and new age practices.
The book is so personal that I have hesitated in how to review it. It feels like I have become a party to confidences which normally stay safely confined in workshop spaces, as if a private diary had been left on a train and discovered by me inadvertently. In short, it seems indecent to respond publicly, and even more so in a critical, if I hope sympathetic tone. On the other hand, the decision to publish so uncensored an account belongs to the author, and puts her views on record. By virtue of this it makes a leap from subjectivity to intersubjectivity, occupying a shared space which is also mine. I also get a sense that part of the author’s purpose is to invite readers to react. So here goes with my thoughts.
There are already several reviews out there. Julie Myerson’s in The Guardian is excellent and I largely share it. The book has an engaging character despite its literary flaws, and this is essentially because, at all times, one senses the author is being breathtakingly honest – to the point, indeed, of a degree of dullness at times. Literary critique should however be carefully distinguished from the slutshaming disguised as esthetics that has evidently motivated a number of her reviewers, and which I feel no obligation to reproduce.
As I have some familiarity with the settings portrayed in the book as well as with the quest that underlies it – and care about it also – my own review is from a different angle.
There is no denying this is a courageous book. It captures a lot of the flavor of tantra in the UK, and also of the other places the author visits and discusses, insofar as I am familiar with them – Cap d’Agde for instance. I am glad she is proud of her sexual quest and willing to say so. This is a major contribution to creating a sex-positive climate for her peers, from which we can all only benefit. However, I do find the book, as an account of a quest which is ultimately and obviously spiritual – as the title of the book, taken from the Biblical Song of Songs implies – painfully self-absorbed.
Moved by the author’s predicament, one reads on hoping at some point she will transcend the limitations of her own tragic discourse on love and achieve a new triumphant synthesis; and yet ultimately this is not so. This gives the book a feeling of incompleteness and anticlimax which I found frustrating. The attempt at a synthesis at the end feels little like one, and more, in fact, like a distraction from the themes discussed throughout the book.
Viewed from Europe, with most of my experiences in Osho-related and German milieu, which stress humanistic psychology and meditation rather than sex and esotericism (much less BDSM), the UK tantra scene the author describes – accurately I believe – looks erratic, veering off into new age meanders the purpose of which can only be to escape the path inward. Roffey’s book is absorbed with the question of who she is: but not yet really as a spiritual enquiry; it comes across still primarily as an attempt to salvage the ego. The author’s journey – perhaps also her decision to publish the book – appears as a quest for an intellectual and/or relational refuge which would finally allow her to affirm that how she is, is actually OK. This quest, by its very existence, however, is evidence she is still consumed by doubts on this score. Her inner dialectic between salvation and self-doubt is markedly narcissistic and ultimately, I found, also became for this reason tedious in the retelling (scarcely a word attempts to establish a bridge between writer and reader; all this is left to intuition). Yet there seems to be little or no awareness of this indelicate degree of self-centeredness. It would have been the job of her spiritual teachers to point this out; I am a little disappointed if they have not. (Astonishingly, Osho is dismissed in the book as “much vilified”; in my view there is no more profound and practical teacher, and it sounds like Roffey knows him only at second hand).
The dilettantism of the author’s quest is illustrated especially by her discussion, in the closing pages, of Quodoushka and her valedictory declaration that she has discovered herself to be “monogamous”.
Now Quodoushka, apart from being hilariously funny (and hard to spell), has little else going for it. It is a patent and unimaginative fraud, as the link to the Wikipedia article makes amply evident, best known for (and in Roffey’s account largely limited to) a somewhat bizarre character typology based on genital types. In contrast, however, to the Reichian analysis of character, or the one offered by the enneagram (discussed by me here and here) – the purpose of which is to uncover and deconstruct patterns of childhood conditioning and to return to essence – the Quodoushka typology relies on allegedly objective anatomical features to categorize people into categories which they then can hide behind, but never change.
Conceivably there might be elements of truth in this typology, though I highly doubt this given how ridiculous it is. But in any case the spiritual point of this – other than the convenience of escapism – eludes me. Ultimately we are one; it cannot be that acquired character traits have in fact some indelible nature. And more particularly, it cannot be that some of us are “monogamous” and others not, or suffice for our salvation that we accept such a conclusion and move on. It can only be, as I have argued time and again on this blog, that those who stress monogamy have sensed certain truths but missed others, and those who stress polyamory may have lofty ideals but still often fail to engage with the challenge of unconditional love for actual real people because it is too painful a mirror of themselves.
One may, perhaps, accept that one is conditioned in a certain way and likely to remain so conditioned; but then ones spiritual quest is at an end. And this is not the kind of end to which, in my eyes, such a book should point.
I in no way want to denigrate what the author means by identifying as “monogamous”, but her adoption of this label seems to preclude further enquiry and, against the backdrop of a hoped-for epiphany, is wildly disappointing.
Roffey uses the term “monogamous” as if she knows what it is. But she, and we, do not know what it is, at all. We have no idea, or rather a wealth of conflicting ideas. “Monogamy”, as uncountable studies show, is an essentially contested concept. The behavior she recounts in the book moreover – with, if I am not wrong, some pride and satisfaction – is hardly “monogamous” in any identifiable sense, past or present. She seems simply to conclude that it lacks something and remains unsatisfying – and thereby prepares the bed for her inane critics and the chorus of self-justifying I-told-you-so’s.
This “something missing” she leaves, in line with the dominant social mythology, to serendipity, to the future, to a force outside of herself. The hackneyed, and overbearingly dehumanizing, “knight in shining armor” projection which so disappoints in every encounter man has with woman: that moment of realization that it will never be you that is object of love, but only ever a distorted representation of you.
It must be obvious, and it is obvious to all true spiritual teachers, that this claimed contingency of self-realization is only ever a sign of resistance to self-knowledge. What Roffey seeks is what we all seek, and few of us, whatever our relationship status or history, ever actually find, namely the ability to utterly abandon ourselves and to dance in love among the stars. But, to this end, members of the opposite sex, and relationships, are merely vehicles. The turgid institution we call monogamy is antithetical to the desire for transcendence in most cases, and tangential to it at best. Marriage simply is not the logical consequence of the numinous rapture we call “falling in love” which it purports to be. In self-identifying as “monogamous”, Roffey makes an ersatz projection which at the same time precludes what she is looking for – unimpaired and ecstatic love.
My advice to the reader is to reach beyond this well-disguised counsel of despair. Love where love is – as Roffey has been doing in practice – and become aware and compassionate towards the feelings of incompleteness which result, because they are a guide. Monogamy is not a precondition of plenitude. Pace Aristophanes and his drunken nonsense, there is nothing out there for you to find in order to become complete, but only things inside of you, negative self-judgments, to drop. Sex has no importance at all, it is just a celebration of what is. It only becomes important because it is so problematic: the barriers we put in place to our sexual expression tell us almost everything about our conditioned selves and our inability to love. The monogamy fixation, by abandoning the moment and subordinating it to expectations and unmet needs, voids sexual experience of its essence, voids it in fact of what we sense is there and some of us imagine to imply monogamous pre-eminence. Monogamy clutches at stars, for fear they will elude us. But they will not elude us; it suffices to open our heart and they are always there.
Life may certainly be lived in such a way as to be marked by deep union with just one soul. There is no reason why not. However, there is equally no need to choose this or to accord it preference, and still less normative status, blindly unaware of the mixture of motivations that contribute to the moment of rapture and the meaning given to it. By projecting on a man the burden of impossible roles to play, a woman can only estrange herself – and her partner – from self-realization and numinosity.
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”
What’s the big deal? Thoughts on resistance
I’ve recently been led to reflect on the question of what it is that makes us so afraid of looking inside to the circumstances which lie historically at the origin of our neuroses – frequently to the point of utter terror and/or total blindness even to the fact or possibility of repression. After all, we frequently face much more objectively threatening circumstances in life, like major illness and operations, with much more stoicism.
It is not a question that I think standard psychoanalytic theory really has an answer for. Sure, we are afraid to dismantle the ego. However, this unremarked importance of the ego simply appears as exogenous or as a mere mediator between the pleasure and reality principles. Its apparent tendency to calcify very early on is not really explained. One might link this to a biological developmental calendar, but then the apparent successes of therapy in sometimes bringing down the edifice would be very surprising. Why then do we freeze emotions in the body and hold them down long after the apparent, original need to do so is past? Why can’t we (or at least why don’t we), like the animals, just pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and move on – years and decades after the event? When you think about it, it is really, really strange that humankind is the only species that appears to have this strange dysfunction of its innate healing capacity. And even if we have some idea of how to unblock it, we have little idea of what gets it blocked in the first place.
I can only offer some clues as to how it appears to me.
At the basis, we need to remember that our species has evolved in small, interdependent tribal groups, and what mattered for the survival of our puny organism was being smart and acting in concert. This has led, via mechanisms which I shall perhaps discuss on another occasion, to an unparalleled emotional attunement to other members of the group. Most of this, of course, is a deep mystery – we do not know why we have a spiritual instinct and in what ways it differs from other species, and we do not know why it is so important for us to receive and to give love. These things I will have to take as a given, at least for now.
The Rousseauian view, expounded also by Osho, and perhaps bought into by Reich – all for their own reasons which I understand – that “observed” man is the product of social processes which have perverted the pristine and beautiful natural state of man, has, I believe, to be dismissed as naive. Freud was not wrong in believing that civilization required a sort of suppression of natural drives. On the contrary, the mechanism of acculturation is innate in our species and even what most defines it; it is not maladaptive; it is just misfiring under the conditions of modern life.
If we are happy enough to trace cerebral patterns back to reptilian times, I believe we should be a bit more accepting of our less remote ancestors and what they have bequeathed us. A scientific view of our, or of any, species cannot consist in simply choosing (and idealizing) one forebear over others. Thus, we cannot identify with certain bonobo traits merely because we do not like those of chimpanzees. That we do not like the warlike, selfish part of our nature certainly tells us something, but it does not disprove its existence – only the lengths to which the acculturation process goes to redefine and rechannel this truculence through mechanisms which are entirely social – social learning processes which result in the transmission of norms of behavior from generation to generation and group to group, norms which constitute as important, though far more diverse, a part of our patrimony as what is chiseled on our DNA.
If Darwin, evolutionary psychologists and classical economists have all made a mistake, as argued in Sex at Dawn, it is a perfectly understandable mistake, deriving from first-order principles which one may not like (for the reasons I just mentioned) but must defer to. In all higher species we see collective behavior which is imposed by social mechanisms on instincts which are far more egoistic. And ultimately, this process of acculturation is what has led to the second stage of evolution and the emergence of a creature such as man. Indeed, only social learning processes can result in cooperative behaviour – it cannot be innate.
So: guilt and shame are primary emotions and manipulation of them is a primary process.
Seeing this helps enormously, because there is no need any more to feel – well – guilty about feeling guilty. It is hardwired into our species to feel guilty when we fall short of social expectations, as it is hardwired to manipulate this feeling in order to obtain and maintain group cohesion.
I guess we would all like our children to be generous and patient. But that is not their natural state. Even allowing for incipient neurosis at the earliest stage, I do not believe any child anywhere on the planet has ever been born naturally sharing and thinking of others. Indeed, this is implicit in the standard developmental model, and pretty much a logical evidence: the child first has to develop a concept of self before it can develop a concept of others; the concept of the other can never be ahead of the concept of self and there is thus always a self-bias. So, the younger child must learn, and the adult or older child must teach.
What drives the young child to accept the social yoke, and what approach to childrearing optimizes the transmission of needed social norms? On the child’s side, this can only be the need for love and acceptance. I do not see any other candidate. That the sense of self is impacted by social disopprobrium – for when being reprimanded, however patiently and lovingly, the child will feel such disopprobrium – is natural. From its standpoint, love and acceptance are maximized and guilt is minimized when the child is aligned to social norms. In fact, I would even go further than this – it is not just the sense of self which is impacted, but the very fact of self. A human being living in isolation is not human.
Trying to bring about such alignment must, however, take account of the child’s natural rebelliousness and nascent sense of self. If the primary motivation to align is love and acceptance, it is obvious that bringing about long-term alignment through fear and violence is an inferior and unstable recourse, because love and acceptance create bonds which fear does not. However, fear and authority are not maladaptive either – they are highly adaptive to situations of stress and highly effective in such situations. The balance has just been lost because the circumstances in which we have evolved to exist are no longer those in which we do exist – and this estrangement becomes self-reinforcing. The child learns to suppress aspects of its behaviour which are perfectly healthy and unthreatening to the group, just because the former-child-now-adult can’t handle them. This repression and these patterns of behaviour maximize its payoff in terms of acceptance under the circumstances which it is powerless to change. However, they do so at a tremendous cost in terms of vitality, which is passed on to the next generation.
So to return to the question with which I started, it must be that the energy which cathects the fear of confronting our inner traumas when we start to do so, i.e. the energy of resistance, is the same energy which holds the neurosis in place at other times, i.e. when it is unchallenged. In other words, our fear is our neurosis. It follows that it is functionally identical to the fear experienced in response to the primal events – ultimately, in almost all cases, the fear of losing the sense of belonging and thereby of what it is that defines our nature as human.
And yet: we will not. Objectively, no such risk exists as adults, certainly in a therapeutic situation, when all the traumatizing factors belong to the past. Why is this not obvious?
I think I detect the reason, and it is this. In fact, our desire for love and acceptance is never met. It was not met during our formative years, and it is still not met today, because the endemic character of neurosis means that there is almost no-one able to love as we are meant to be loved and as we need to be loved. This is why we cling on to the strategies we learnt as children, although in no absolute sense did they work either then or now – they merely optimized subject to inordinate constraints. In fact, we are not failing to substitute them by a better strategy: there is no better strategy available to us. We have also chosen partners subject to the requirement that our strategies to gain acceptance initially worked with those partners. We have grown up emotionally paralyzed because of a lack of nurturing and we realize that we, all of us, continue to face the same situation, and whilst the needs of an adult are not those of a child, the meeting of those adult needs is the only thing that can start to demine the unexploded ordinance buried in our past.
It’s Catch 22.
The notion that we as adults are sufficient unto ourselves and can get all the sustenance we need from our physical environment, with no need for comfort, touch, contact is just a perpetuation of the lie and the violence at the heart of humanity’s traumatized existence.
Love and compassion are necessary to our physical and mental health as a species, and they are necessary to the therapeutic process and personal growth. Our mind, that place where we feel in control, because it works so well without others, strives after technique, but such technique is meaningless and ineffective without compassion, and secondary when compassion is present.
Facing our traumas is terrifying because we are innately afraid, under prevailing and persistent conditions of emotional starvation, to lose the little acceptance we have won in the world, and with which we reluctantly content ourselves. We lose sight and faith that anything more is possible, even though we know, deep down, that this way of existing is impoverished, is not satisfying and is not human.
What is “falling in love”?
I have just had an intense experience of falling in love with a beautiful woman. Her kiss is still on my lips. I am relaxed and melting into the feeling. It feels precisely like every other time this has happened to me – the same sense of youthful joy, of unlimited possibility, of new beginning.
Who is this woman? She is me. It was all a dream. And yet, having woken up, she seems just as real.
Needless to say, I would not have expected such an experience; although with hindsight it feels very natural. It got me wondering, for the first time, what actually the experience of falling in love consisted in, what was necessary to it and what was not, and what role the other really plays in an experience which clearly can be generated purely by oneself, for there can be no clearer case of projection than a creature generated in a dream.
So I went on line, imagining I must find something intelligent having at some point been said by scientists about this universal and tremendously important human experience. Now, I only did five minutes of research, so I may well have missed something, but I was very surprised to find so little, and in particular nothing which recognized that this experience could be entirely self-generated. It seems to be a commonplace that all kind of feelings become mixed up within falling in love, which may distort or denature it, and which are explained by the individual’s personal history, but everyone who has written about it seems to have been tenaciously attached to the idea that the core experience went past the self, required and was shaped by the other, and therefore that it had meaning in relation to that other. I see now that this is wrong. Yes, it goes past the normal boundaries of the self; but it does not require the other in anything more than a numinous sense, and clearly has implications only in regard to the self, implications moreover which are unanchored in time and space.
All I found on Wikipedia was a reference to one Francesco Alberoni, an Italian popular philosopher with whom I was already a little acquainted, but unimpressed by. According to that article, falling in love “is a process of the same nature as a religious or political conversion”. That seems to ring true. Alberoni emphasizes the power of the experience to dismantle the previous boundaries of the self and to remake them around a new (and social) project with a new sense of meaning. However he goes on to plunge into a long recital of his own metaphysical preferences, the self-indulgent character of which is patent. It seems to me that the boundaries of the imagined collective he refers to are just an attempt to salvage the lost sense of self – and, if successful in this project, they result typically in distorting, perhaps violently, the same sense of others – or ones own sense of reality. Rather, it seems evident, both existentially and philosophically, that beyond the psychic borders of the self, there is no collectivity. In that place, there can be only compassion.
Another thing I’m conscious of is the autoerotic character of the dream. It was erotic in the true sense, not attached to any fantasies of form, and it felt and feels very much like it was of a single piece with the wet dreams I would have as a young adolescent. The same energy and striving is present, only the projection is much more concrete, in that it feels really like another person entered into my life in that moment – perhaps not to stay, that doesn’t matter: but certainly to change it.
And so falling in love is a faculty of my self momentarily to allow its frightened borders to dissolve and to reach out into the space it naturally occupies. Falling in love is recognizing ones own nature as love, whatever the contingent factors, the congruency of drives and interests, which may, at a particular moment, open the door. But falling in love is also to become aware of ones insecurities and the immense weight of aspirations dammed up behind them. In such a moment, it quite literally feels like everything is possible, but one scrambles, in a frantic and chaotic way, to make sense of it all, to cash in on those possibilities, and to create an external world in the image of ones soul. When we see the light, the first thing we look for are sunglasses. And this is understandable, but it is not the summit of the experience. Rather, falling in love is just succumbing to the desire to become oneself. It is just being woken up by something important and primal enough, within oneself, to overcome ones ego defenses.
As usual, of course, Osho has had something to say about it in which I can recognize my experience.
Love is the shallow space in a swimming pool, for those who cannot meditate. But that is the place to learn meditation. And it is the same pool, it is the same water, it is the same kind of phenomenon. You are just unable to go deeper because you have been made afraid even to enter into it. The shallow part has been condemned, and you have been told to jump into the deeper part without knowing how to swim.
So they disturbed your love life by condemnation and they disturbed your meditative life by sheer strategy: because you don’t know swimming, you cannot go so deep. And you don’t have any experience of silence, peace, sheer joy, a little bit of ecstasy, something orgasmic — these will give you the hints how meditation is not a myth. You have tasted it a little bit. It is the same energy field, just you have to go deeper into it.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS when one couple moves into the realm of orgasmic experience? What actually happens? Every point has to be understood. Time stops. For a moment the pendulum does not move, and that single moment seems to be almost eternity. The two persons are no more two — for a moment. They have melted into each other. There is no thought in the mind, for a moment. It is all empty and silent, and these are the things which have to be deepened in meditation.
And once you have tasted them, you will be surprised that it does not depend on the other person. Something happens within you. Something happens within the other person. But it is not dependent. If you can sit silently, if you can manage, by watching your thoughts, to bring a gap, a stop, you will suddenly see time has stopped again. And now it is in your hands, not in the hands of biology. You can keep this time stopped as long as you want. And once you know the secret key….
The key is: no thoughts, no ego, no time — you just are.
Sexual orientation
I inadvertently wandered into a sea of hostility when I posted recently a few thoughts on this subject on the blog of a person self-identifying as bisexual. Although I was extremely supportive and only doing a bit of thinking out of the box, I encountered what can only be described as a ghetto mentality: you’re not one of us, therefore you can’t be on our side. Which I find rather sad.
In the hope of launching a more serene debate, let me try again here. This is, I think, a subject that troubles the tantric community. In tantra there is much talk of the male/female polarity, sexuality plays a defining role and, accordingly, non-heterosexuality is difficult to reconcile with both practice and theory. Osho seems never to have taken non-heterosexuality seriously as a natural phenomenon, and writers like David Deida offer not only a stark dichotomy of the sexes, but also what might be viewed as unhelpfully stereotypical portraits of “superior men” and “superior women”. Sure, all this gets politically correctly glossed as being about “essences” not biological gender and sure, we all have male and female aspects to us, but this only allows the head to be held above water. It is anything but satisfying. At the end of the day some of us are men and others are women, and tantric union occurs between those who are men and those others who are women. Of course some form of union may also occur between men and other men and between women and other women, but this form of union then has no characteristics to distinguish it from any other experience of mystical union with whatever element of nature; it does not occupy an archetypal position, either in theory or in practice.
At the same time, the practice of tantra contributes a lot to the breaking down of barriers to same-sex intimacy. As in society at large heterosexuality is generally equated with homophobia (which encompasses not only a rejection of homosexuality, but often of any form of intimacy between men, even non-sexual), the loss of this barrier is destabilising and may lead some to feel they need to redefine their identity. If I can enjoy intimate touch from men, does that mean I’m gay, or, at “best”, bisexual? For women, who have close biological bonds to their mothers and feel less cultural pressure to be homophobic in the first place, this question may be less insistent. Still women, in my experience, may like to identify as bi, and this for a number of reasons. For a start, there is a much greater demand on the part of men for their female partner to be bi (or “bi”) than vice versa. Anecdotally, at least, it seems that many men are turned on by the idea of their wives playing with other women; in any case many more than there are women turned on by the contrary scenario. Secondly, for men, to self-declare as bi, especially after a period of heterosexual identification, not only runs into society’s homophobia, but also risks being seen as a cover for actual but unadmitted homosexuality. On the other hand, women seem, in my culture at least, to be less at risk of this kind of stigmatization. Lesbianism is statistically less common than male homosexuality, but although in some countries such as the USA more men than women seem to have had same-sex sexual experiences, in others such as France and Australia the reverse applies (see here). Because it is a bigger “deal” for men than for women, women may tend to adopt a wider definition and be more ready to self-identify as bisexual, and self-identification may not accurately portray underlying behavior.
In the course of this debate, which was unfortunately cut short by the blogger in question, it was both suggested by me and put to me that sexual attraction might be a better gauge of sexual orientation than simply the incidence of same-sex play. On a basic level, it may be considered that erotic touch by persons of either sex creates a similar primary response and may be similarly enjoyed without activating or being associated with other layers of sexual experience, in just the same way as other characteristics of the person providing the touch may not be very relevant, such as age, appearance, education and so on, factors which nonetheless play an important role in pre-intimate sexual response, that is, the response to sexual stimuli and signals other than intimate touch. If same-sex touch is not so enjoyed, this is more to do with its mental associations and conditioning, factors which, again arguably, could be considered not germane to determining primary sexual orientation.
On this basis, one could legitimately ask the question of whether the typical hormonal response that characterizes heterosexual attraction, with which I am familiar, is comparable in the case of homosexual attraction and whether such attraction is, then, comparable in nature or somehow distinct. From the little I have found on the subject, the endocrinology appears to be similar for men, whilst for women the results are more difficult to interpret. According to Wikipedia, in a 2004 study at Northwestern University, female participants, both heterosexual and homosexual, became sexually aroused when they viewed straight as well as lesbian erotic films. Among the male participants, however, the heterosexual men were turned on only by erotic films showing women; the gay males, however, were aroused only by films showing men. (I suspect though that a lot of the women were simply yawning at both types of film – and maybe were even more turned on by some gay male porn, which according to some reports women quite like)
Be this as it may, I do wish that homosexual and bisexual persons of both genders would show a bit more interest in engaging with those who call themselves heterosexuals in order to better understand each other’s sexuality. This ghetto mentality I find appalling. And I am pretty sure that many people denied entry to today’s ghetto really just long to talk to other people with whom they in due course would find common ground and friendship (or, for that matter, love).
I hate society’s hypocrisy and discrimination, but personally I am not too concerned by what the answers are, I am only curious. I am open to all experience, yours and my own. Whatever your orientation, sexuality should not be a battlefield, but a celebration.
Meditation
I am wondering whether this is one of the most uselessly misleading words in the English language.
Latin meditari comes from the PIE root med-/mod- meaning to measure, limit or consider (German messen, Dutch meten, cognate with meter), with, for good measure, the Latin frequentative infix -t-
Much more active, mental and ego-driven than this it doesn’t come.
Yet what we mean by meditation is nothing like this at all. This is such a widespread misconception that I really wonder whether this word is actually useful at all, or whether we should not abandon it and find another one.
Although this is true enough of meditation in any spiritual sense, the Osho so-called “active” meditations are particularly obviously nothing to do with measuring, limiting or considering anything whatsoever.
What is a meditation? It seems to me that the Osho meditations are something like a physical embodiment of the Zen koan, a little trick, a seeming paradox to short-circuit the mind and realize a gestalt switch, a momentary discontinuity in the fabric of the personality through which the force of nature can reconfigure it.
Doesn’t anyone have a better word for this than “meditation”?