Fritz Perls, “Let Go of Your Mind and Come to Your Senses.”

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The story of my life has been one of discovering my own body.  That is a silly or inane thing to even say from the perspective of my background; for, “what is more apparent than our body?” I would have asked back then. But my life experiences and clinical practice, not to mention explorations of the gamut of human sciences, has led me to realize the wisdom of the quip by Fritz Perls in the 1960’s, “Let go of your mind and come to your senses.”  Perls realized just our disconnected Western culture teaches us to be from our “senses” and the affective or “feeling” dimension of life.  Carl Jung had a relevant point, noting two kinds of thinking…a)directed thinking which is designed have us fit in with the social milieu we are born into; b) and imaginative thinking which allows us to find a bit of “free-play” with this necessary “directed thinking” so that we can avoid being an ideologue.

This “dis-embodied” thinking is very much related to the Western attitude that we are separate and distinct from mother nature, this wonderful earth, and see it as something to satisfy our ravenous appetites.  But disembodied thought is dangerous.  I’m reminded of a line from the poet W. B. Yeats, “O God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  He who sings a lasting song thinks in the marrow bone.”

Just this morning I ran across a relevant thought from D.H. Lawrence about this alienation from our earthly or earthy roots:

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox.  This is what is the matter with us.  We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.  D.H. Lawrence

 

Last night God populated the street with threatening poses that grew increasingly dense: closed faces briefly lit by yellow streetlights; eyeballs flashing warnings in the gloom; mouths reluctantly exhaling into the thin haze of hopelessness. “Give nothing away,” I said. “Give nothing away.” But things were being taken. In Spokane, God nearly froze to the […]

via The City of God — Short visits with an honest God

The Coronavirus Has Beset Our Political System and Culture

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Michael Bloomberg has the best possibility of beating Trump in November, the only one with the wherewithal, financially and tenacity, to defeat the coronavirus that has beset our political system…and entire culture..  But, given the “free-press” which is itself a “tyrant” of sort, the myriad down-sides of Bloomberg are coming to the light.  I’m going to predict what will happen here:  while the Republicans saw Trump’s evil exposed to the light of day even before his nomination, an exposure which continued to take place during the campaign, and is still underway during his administration, the GOP has, and will, “stand by their man.”  They have been, and are, determined.

The Democrats need a similar resolve and can have that without allowing the coronavirus to attack their own willfulness.  And with Bloomberg, this might involve accepting into their fold a man with a sullied background who with his own “willfulness” can “slay the giant” of Trumpism.  By doing so, this would require a bit of humility to admit into their fold a man who has less than solid Democratic sentiments in his background.  The Democrats might then have to recognize, “Hmm, maybe we have our own dark dimension of willfulness which is why we failed to consider a huge segment of the American population in recent decades, a decision which made this segment conclude that their best bet was Trump.”  The Democrats need a “strongman” at this moment in history and I have no concern that they would then assume a supine position before him as has the GOP down with Trump.  They will bring back to our political life, “checks and balances.”

Here, I am posing as a political commentator.  But my concern here is not so much politics as the dynamic that is in play in our political system and culture.  This is a struggle with diversity, including the realization that there are two ways of looking at the world and that these “two ways” can learn to live with each other. The ego, collectively and individually, always wants to eradicate other ways of looking at the world.  I am a Democrat because I believe they best represent the offer an “inclusiveness” to our country rather than an “ex-clusiveness.”  There is room for all of us, but only if we have the courage to respect those that represent our “other,” those that we tend to dismiss as “them.”

As so often, the wisdom of W.H. Auden sums this up, “We wage the war we are.”

Thoughts About a Chattering Monkey Mind

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In the following epigram, one of four epigrams under the title “Four Poems after Callimachus” by Stephanie Burtt, I discover the presence of a cautionary self-reflection with anyone who deigns to write…even in the humble milieu of the blogosphere.

(Epigrams, 60)

Lucky Orestes.
          If you know his story,
you probably think that saying so makes me a jerk.
Fair enough. But I’ve been losing my mind
in my own way this week: Orestes lost his,
but at least he didn’t insist
on asking his loyal companion to read and critique
his own book-length original fictional work.
That’s why he kept Pylades as his friend.
True friendship can exist.
          As for me,
I need to learn how not to speak,
when not to hit send.

I am “full of words”; yes, even too full of them, like Elihu in the book of Job who noted, “My belly is full of words, like a taut wineskin, about to burst.”  And that is ok; all of us have our “belly” full of something and I’m glad my stubborn willfulness is sublimated into verbiage as opposed to less benign “stuff”.  But I’m certainly learning how to “not hit send” more often and the same discretion is being exercised in my daily life.  It makes me remember a bromide from a pastor in my youth, three filters through which should pass anything we might say—-1) Is it true?; 2)Is it kind?; 3) Is it necessary?  Number three is really challenging, putting about anything we do or say into question.  I recall the tune from the ‘60’s, “Silence is Golden” by the Tremeloes.  My meditation experience of the past ten years gives rise to these thoughts about silence.  This practice continues to remind me of the chattering of the monkey mind and how that much of this chattering can take the form of “noble” thoughts.  It often is still “chattering.”  W. H. Auden noted, “We are afraid of pain, but more afraid of silence.”

A “Coronavirus” Has Struck Our Political Heart

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The coronavirus has struck our nation’s political heart.  I here am alluding to news from China that the physician who first attempted to alert his country to the presence of that virus, Wi Linliang, a 34 year old opthamologist, has now died of that virus.  When he first attempted to sound the alarm, he was told to stop and was detained for “rumor mongering” which, according to the Washington Post, is what happens in China with any news that threatens the social order.  In an autocratic political regime, fear abounds and any information that might create unrest is quashed…even if that “unrest” might be a temporary necessity.  An autocratic regime, or mindset, is just a two year old ego on steroids.

Mitt Romney mustered up the courage to warn the Republican Party, and the nation, of the “virus” of certainty which has found a voice in the person of donald j. trump. The problem with certainty of this ilk is that it is so rigid, based upon internal frailty and vulnerability, that it cannot allow any contrary thought.  In the history of this blog, I have likened it unto a group who might think that the moon is made out of cheese; once its members have invested heart and soul into that belief, they cannot be dissuaded. Any outside perspective that might deign to “intrude” will be disallowed, castigated and even attacked in favor of unexamined premises and preconceptions, regardless of how foolish or insane they might appear to others. This is because these “unexamined” premises and preconceptions are merely a house of cards, lacking any firm foundation in the “bowels” of the heart.  The more this cauldron of reptilian brain energy is confronted, the greater will be the venom and opprobrium that will be offered in response.  It does not have to be “reasonable”; it just has to be teeming with the vim and vinegar of certainty which will always be validating to those who lack existential, i.e. “spiritual” grounding.  And now the speciousness, the vacuity of the American soul has found a mouthpiece in the person of “the donald” who is the veritable “toy of some great pain.” (Ranier Rilke)  This “pain” is the anguish which spiritual teachers, such as Jesus, offered “the balm of Gilead” but not in the form of a “rational” palliative, but one in the form of faith.  This faith, however, is more than a rational construct and obsessive devotion to dogma, but something that springs from the depths of the heart.  And you cannot “think” your way into that mysterious dimension of life that drives us all; “faith” begins to blossom when you tap into that “Mystery.”

I will never forget that Mitt Romney moment.  He is deeply conservative and deeply religious; but in that moment his religiosity reached deeper into his heart than his political affiliation.  Conservatism is a vital dimension of any body politic; my country’s conservative voice is deeply frightened and has resorted to an autocrat to find its footing.  There must be other “Mitt Romneys” who will dig into their heart and find that courage to speak up if our country is to get out of this “two-year old ego mania” that we are now witnessing.

Back When I Knew I Was Right….

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I got saved when I was eight years old and I knew that the Holy Spirit came down, “like a dove”, and entered my soul and was then guiding me in “all truth and righteousness.”  I had been taught that this was the truth, and the Bible clearly told me that was so, and the Bible was the Word of God.  I knew that no one could quarrel with God.

But now I have grown up, some six decades later.  “When I was a child, I spake as a child,” but now I see just how I had self-deluded.  I do not blame this on the faith tradition I was born into; they were doing their job, offering me the rudiments of a faith, one in which I still find great value. When I began to grow up in later teens and then in my twenties, I could have found the courage to think for myself but I refused to do so, opting to draw the blinders even more tightly around my consciousness.  The notion of my finitude, that my very view of the world was a flimsy, a cauldron of the timidity and insecurity that characterized my life at that time, was a vein of thought I could not handle.  The specious “certainty” offered me a citadel that I was not able to discard at that time.

But now, as I view the tragedy that is gnawing away at the soul of my country, I see so clearly how that certainty is deadly.  It is deadly in that it is so effective at thwarting the vulnerability that is intrinsic to being an “alive” human being.  As long as one can cling to certainty, and whatever contrivances that give him that certainty, he will be “fine” in his deluded sense of reality. And when this certainty is not checked, is allowed to metastasize, something like Trump is likely to happen.  If we are lucky Trumpism will be checked before it reaches its full-flowering with an expression of Isis lunacy.self

In My Youth Romney’s “Kind” Were Not Even Christian!

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In my youth, as a Baptist in the South, Mormons were not even Christian…in our estimation.  Today he is demonstrating “Christian” courage that I’m only now beginning to tippy-toe into.  He is about to speak truth to power by being the only member of the Republican Party to vote to remove Trump from office.  He has already faced intimidation from his party and now it will increase tremendously.  When group-think dominates a party, or any group, any one who dares to defy that toxic kool-aid will face exclusion.  That is why as a youth in the Baptist fold I kept to myself questions that were bubbling in my heart as the need to “fit in” was too important to me.

I am addressing here the toxic dimension of “belonging”, when “fitting in” becomes a tyrant and group-think is allowed to take over.  And, yes, even with noble veins of thought like the teachings of Jesus, toxicity can creep in when the ego, described by the Apostle Paul as “the flesh,”  is not recognized. I hope that Romney will gain courage under the tremendous pressure he will now face.  He has not been as outspoken as he should have; but now he has nothing to lose.  He will certainly be “primaried” by his party but he should use this opposition to “out-Christian” the “christians” who have sold their soul for “thirty pieces of silver.”

Addictive Thinking and Our Political/Spiritual Morass

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The abysmal morass that is gripping my country today is just a matter of “thinking.”  I sometimes tease my friends on this subject with, “Hey, why don’t God just stop us from thinking.  All the problems would then go away.”  But, of course, the problem is actually deeper than our thinking as our thinking flows from our heart and as Woody Allen once noted, justifying his marriage to his step-daughter, “The heart wants what it wants.”  We think what fits our heart’s intents and it is easier to just go with where our thinking takes us than dare to look into these intents.  Looking into these intents is to risk opening Pandora’s box and our identity in a sense is predicated on not venturing there.  But not “venturing there” leaves us with an impoverished identity, a rigid ego structure that can make us very successful, even give us a very “good” life, but one that is missing the riches that could be had by that “venture.”  The poet Ranier Rilke noted, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”

William Butler Yeats, the famous Irish poet, addressed this mind-body disconnect with the powerful prayer, “Oh God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  They who sing a lasting song must think in the marrow bone.”  Thinking is intrinsically a dissociative developmental accomplishment but in maturity…if things go right…we can acquire the ability to let our thinking be influenced by our emotions, i.e. “our body.”  We will then be able to ‘feel” and “think” together, no longer being captive to our preconceptions and premises, described by W. H. Auden as the thinking of “a logical lunatic.”

The issue here is “the heart.”  My heart is still tainted by my literal-thinking past in which I somehow imagined it existing in my depths in some concrete form.  This concretism allowed me to think that I “knew” my heart, that I could grasp with my intellect its machinations, as well as treasures.  My culture taught me that this was possible.  For decades I’ve been learning that the heart is a mysterious dimension of my experience that cannot ever be fathomed by “thinking.”  But here, I am tackling “with words” to put into words a dimension of human experience that cannot be put into words.  That dimension is the “Divine Spark” which is the Ineffable and therefore a mystery, known only by “that still small voice” in the depths of our hearts which is “heard” only in silence.  There are parts of me to which this makes “no sense” at all for those “parts” are the hyper-rationality that I escaped into in my youth with the nudging of my culture.  Well, “nudging” is putting it mildly.  Cultural dictates are overwhelming to a child which is why they are so difficult to become aware of at any age.  They are intrinsically subtle and the egoic mind is not designed for subtlety.

We are now witnessing in my country what can happen when reason is in subjection to unacknowledged depths of the soul.  The acknowledgement of these depths evokes the feeling of being out of control, an illusory sense of control which reason has given us.  The religious dimension of this catastrophe was prophesied by Paul Tillich in the mid-20th century when he wrote, “A religion within the bounds of religion is a mutilated religion.”  Tillich knew that the resulting faithlessness of religion would facilitate the spiritual darkness in which we are now living; for, religion locked in the “logical lunacy” of reason does not require any faith though it does facilitate the seduction of certainty.

An Exploration of Trump’s “deity”

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I’ve long noted a rock-solid “belief” that many Trump supports have in him, so firm it is almost like he is a god.  I do think that divinity is an issue with him, though it is a dark divinity.  Carl Jung pointed out that the notion of god, if explored deeply and honestly, would always expose the ambivalence of the heart.  A theological term, aseity, is relevant.  This term means “in and of and for itself.”  In Christian theology this is often called the pleroma or the god-head.  This is the god who is the prime mover, able to move others but incapable of being moved by anyone or anything outside of himself. This is a valuable term for an exploration of Deity but when it is discovered in a human being, to any degree it will be malignant narcissism and catastrophic in its consequences.

This Trumpian darkness has been present throughout Trump’s life.  For example, in 1995 walking into the dressing room of Ms. Teen USA beauty pageant where young girls were in various stages of undress or nude.  He explained later, “Well, I owned the pageant.”  And he frequently voiced in public…video is still available… his lascivious designs on his daughter Ivanka.  God’s can even intrude into the incestuous realm.  In the 2016 campaign he avowed, “I can stand in the streets of Manhattan and shoot someone” and not lose my support base; this is being proven almost daily.  In the impeachment furor currently underway, his minions are speaking in explicit terms of Trump’s invincibility and inviolability, Lindsey Graham declaring earlier in the week, “All I can tell you is from the president’s point of view, he did nothing wrong in his mind.”  Someone quipped on Twitter, so astutely, that the same could be said of Jeffrey Dahmer.  Then yesterday Alan Dershowitz contributed to the aseity-complex demonstration, declaring that as President there are no limits for Trump, adding that if he deems his re-election as President is best for the country he can do what he needs to obtain that re-election.

Group-think has enveloped the Republican Party and is threatening the entire country.  Their investment, their “faith” in this dark “savior” is so intense that they’ve pledged more loyalty to him than they have any awareness of.  They have “drank the Trumpian kool-aid” and it is more deadly, in the long run, than the Jim Jones flavor.  People who have been devoured by group-think have lost the ability to “think” and are completely subservient to premises which they will not dare to look at.  This reminds me of an intense argument I had decades ago when I was in college with a girl friend who was studying law.  My argumentation was proving too much for her and she suddenly, in exasperation declared, “You are arguing to make a point and I’m arguing to stay alive.”  We later explored that exchange and I learned she meant that she was arguing to “stay on top” or win the argument and found herself in dispute with someone who merely wanted to make a point. She could not handle “losing” the argument though winning/losing was not on any agenda I had in mind.

The problem in Congress on display here…reflecting a problem in the American soul…is that the GOP is “arguing to stay on top” making compromise impossible.  If they did not suffer from that Trumpian insistence on “being right” as in “not being able to concede the possibility of ‘being wrong’”, they would be able to see that there are national interests that supersede this fracas and focus on any of these problems would diminish the internecine hostilities.  But this is not a matter of reason.  They have “dug in” with Trump, dug in so deep they cannot get out, and he knows it.  Their judgement is impaired and you can’t reason with someone or “someones” whose judgement is impaired in this fashion.  On a lighter note, but actually not so light, they might wonder at some point, “Hey, putting a man who is so insecure about his penis size that he had to reassure the entire world about the matter on Tv was not such a good idea.”

Carl Sandburg and Greta Thunburg

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I forgot to append a Carl Sandburg poem yesterday to my musings about Greta Thunburg.  And I admit I am a bit sheepish as the poem likens her unto a weed, but I have a hunch she will readily identify and appreciate the “likening unto” a weed.  She is used to it.  She has always been different and has become accustomed to it  She and I have that in common…and I don’t think her “diagnosis” is far removed from mine.  Perhaps more on that later.

Greta is accustomed to being “out there.”  And the awareness of being “out there” can be so terrifying that one is driven into a pathological orientation to life. It can drive one into such a radical estrangement that one feels the world is “out to get me” and thus something to be fearful of; this is paranoia.  This paranoia can find expression so readily in political and religious orientations, always pitting one view of the world against the rest of the world.  This profound distrust fails to realize that we can never escape the reality that we are in and of the same world and the attempt to escape this realization is at our own peril.  The “them” that we loathe is “us.”

Please read this beautiful wisdom from Carl Sandburg:

There is a desperate loveliness to be seen
In certain flowers and bright weeds on certain planets.
With the weeds I have held long conversations
And I found them intelligent
Even though desperate and lovely.
The flowers however met me with short spoken.
“Yes” and “No” and “Why” were their favorite words,
And they had other slow monosyllables.
They seemed to find it more difficult
Than the gaudy garrulous bright weeds
To be intelligent, desperate, and lovely.
Take a far journey now, my friend, to certain planets.
Meet then certain flowers and bright weeds and ask them
What are the dark winding roots of their desperate loveliness.
See whether you bring back the same report as mine.
See whether certain long conversations
And certain slow practices monosyllables
Haunt you and keep coming back to haunt you.
For myself, my friend, I have come to believe on certain planets anything can happen.

(“Bright Conversations with Saint Ex” by Carl Sandburg)