Tag Archives: Norman O. Brown

Vulnerability, Faith, and “Opiate of the Masses”

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Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, observed in his book, “The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language” that self-awareness is a very subtle and  often misunderstood phenomenon.  According to him, “Imagining that we have arrived at a satisfactory level of self understanding is clear indication that we have not in the least.”

Self-understanding is the process of becoming conscious.  And this is a task that we never finish completely though it is so comfortable to convince ourselves that it is.  The resulting certainty allows us to function in the smoothly-oiled social machinery of day to day life but only at the cost noted by W. H. Auden, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  At some point in life we need to be able to challenge the smug certainties that we are ensconced in and tippy-toe into the risky domain of faith where we deal with the vulnerability that makes us human.  Otto Brown noted, “To be, is to be vulnerable” and until we have learned to live with some degree of vulnerability we have not become human. But use of this word “faith” is risky territory as it brings to mind religion and often there lies one of the most pernicious traps available to mankind.  For, “god” which often is the key figure in faith can often be merely another escape, a veritable opiate as in Karl Marx’s observation, “Religion is the opiate of the masses”

Psychotherapy & Negative Capability

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Poet John Keats offered the term negative capability to describe his ability to embrace a host of subjective experiences that most people avoid.  In a letter to his brother in 1817 he defined negative capability in these terms, “…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reach after fact and reason… in order to allow, as yet unimagined, creative possibilities to emerge.”

In an article in Contemporary Psychotherapy, Diane Voller applies this notion to her work as a therapist, declaring, “‘Negative capability’ is the advanced ability of a person to tolerate uncertainty. This does not mean the passive uncertainty associated with ignorance or general insecurity but the active uncertainty that is to do with being without a template and yet being able to tolerate, or even relish, a sense of feeling lost. ‘Negative capability’ involves purposely submitting to being unsettled by a person, or situation, and embracing the feelings and possibilities that emerge.  (http://www.contemporarypsychotherapy.org/vol-2-no-2/negative-capability/)

Voller introduces the concept of “space” to describe the intimacy of a close relationship that can be found in therapy or with any care-giving relationship, professional or personal. This is the ability to get out of oneself and realize that the distinction between “me and thee” is not as definite as we are taught that it is and yet avoiding the pitfall of co-dependency.  It is the ability to enter the domain of “no-boundaries” even as one maintains his/her own “boundaries.”  The 13th century Persian Sufi poet Rumi best described this essential spiritual skill, “Out beyond the distinctions of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field.  I will meet you there.”  Rumi keenly grasped the need of getting beyond the distinctions of “me” and “thee” if we are to enter sacred space with another person and clinical work is intrinsically spiritual.  Or it should be.

Voller is simply putting on the table for therapists and care-givers the notion of vulnerability.  It is so much easier to practice clinically when one is ensconced in jargon and “shop-talk”, hiding behind a diagnostic knife which always keeps the client “out there” separate and distinct from oneself.  And relevant to vulnerability, my mind always comes to a pithy observation from Norman O. Brown, “To be is to be vulnerable.”  If one is invulnerable, he/she lacks ‘be’-ing in the world.  He/she is just another object in a world full of objects, devoid of any spiritual (i.e. “spacial”) presence.

A Lesson from a Rabbit

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Becoming real means finding the courage to wade into the difficult dimensions of human experience, a courage which is usually the function of the wear and tear of daily life, the relentless oppression of those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”  Becoming real means you find the courage to tippy-toe…at least…into the “unreal” in that you find that what was once so certain is no longer certain, discovering only then an inner core which has always been present but unexplored due to your lack of courage. Becoming real is a liminal moment, approaching the boundaries of existence itself which is always humbling. Becoming real is finding what Paul Tillich described as “The Courage to Be” which always means flirtation with non-being, its presence announced by intense anxiety.  Norman Brown summed it up pithily decades ago, “To be is to be vulnerable.”

Here is a beautiful summary of this experience from the children’s classic, “The Velveteen Rabbit”:

What is real asked the Rabbit.. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”  (“The Velveteen Rabbit,” by Margery Williams. see http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html)

 

 

Embedded in our Own Thoughts, Part 2

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Embedded thinking, part 2

We are naturally embedded in our own thinking because thinking…at least in the West…is inherently linear.  But it is possible for those steeped in this “linear-thinking” to find the courage to “step back” a bit from that comfortable cognitive grasp of his world and in so doing find that his world view is finite but nevertheless valid.  This “stepping back” is the exercise of a meta-cognitive muscle that we have the capacity for but is frightening to use for one who has made an inordinate emotional/spiritual investment in the world view that circumstances has given him.  This is precisely what Jesus had in mind when he chided those who have “Ears to hear but hear not, eyes to see but see not.”  Jesus recognized that being conscious, that is being spiritually alive, involves more than simple regurgitation of a mind-set and view of the world that one acquired by accident of birth.  And, if I might speak for Him now, he is telling people like me who were “Christianized” by accident of birth that mindless regurgitation of Christian dogma and teachings…and doing so with like-minded souls…can easily find us amusing ourselves in an echo chamber, which, borrowing a line from Goethe, is  “like kittens given their own tails to tease.”

Thinking is linear because of our “fall” into the time-space continuum, or that which is known as “reality.”  In fact, in the Genesis Creation story, eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is an illustration of falling into “thought” which always bifurcates our world even as it “bifurcates” our selves.   At that point we have been “categorized” and begin to exercise a “categorical imperative” to carve-up into dualities what had been a unified field, creating “good and evil,” male and female, right and wrong, and…yes…even Democrats and Republicans!  Linear thinking has created this world we live in and perpetuates it….and may it ever be!  For without linear thinking, our world would crash and burn immediately.  But when linear thinking runs amok without the God-given gift of “the pauser Reason” the world will still face calamity; for, any phenomena carried to an extreme becomes problematic and even dangerous.  Ideological extremism illustrates for us daily what can happen when someone or some groups gets too carried away with their “noble” and “enlightened” ideas.

Meditation has helped me immensely on this issue.  And though my “monkey mind,” incessantly running to and fro and chattering without cease, it has been given pause and this “pause” has been pregnant, allowing me to open my heart to hidden dimensions of life.  With even my lame success at meditation I have learned more intimately that “embeddedness” in my own thought has been a cognitive prison and this insight…cognitive and emotional…has been redemptive.  And that “redemption” has allowed me to experience being “out of control” which has come to me as simple anxiety.  Of course, this “simple” anxiety is not “simple” at all as it brings me face to face with my own human-ness which is always experienced as vulnerability; Norman Brown noted, “To be, is to be vulnerable.”  And it has been fear of this vulnerability that has kept me locked in this cerebral prison, the escape from which is still in progress and will be in process for the rest of my life until at last I cast off this “mortal coil” and return to my Source.

I’m planning on this “transition” not taking place for decades!  For, “fallen” though this world may be, it is a beautiful world and I am increasingly delighted with the simple but profound beauty which surrounds me every day.  The only issue is, and always has been, “Will I pay attention?”  And, paying attention is relative to the meditative lesson of looking beyond the end of my nose, peering outside of that “small bright circle of my consciousness beyond which lies the dark.”  It is in that “darkness” that I see glimmers of light and these “glimmers” are the best that we can hope for. For these “glimmers” are the brilliant flash of light that we are blessed with when we find the humility to simply “see through a glass darkly.”

Waging the War We Are

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“We wage the war we are.” This poetic quip by W. H. Auden is probably the quotation that I use most often in this venue and even in the whole of my life. And, this is no coincidence as I am realizing and experiencing that my life has been one “hell of a battlefield” all of my life. Only now am I finding the maturity and courage to dive into this fray and be a more “present” factor in my life.

This paragraph itself reflects this warfare as I posit the notion that there is an “I” which is only now willing to engage in this fray. That reflects a schizoid dimension of my psyche, a division in the soul that is present with all of us when we have the courage to acknowledge competing and conflicting voices in our heart. Simply stated, it is recognizing there we have a consciousness as well as an unconsciousness, a division that is very painful to acknowledge due to the pain of the chaos that this realization will lead us into. It makes us aware that we are always out of control is some way in that our conscious reality is more complicated than we think, that in some sense it is a contrivance we have ensconced ourselves in to deal with the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” during our very brief sojourn on this lovely planet. Or, as Norman O. Brown put it decades ago, “Our ego is but a veil we have spun to hide the void.”

Now that realization will cause us to experience some “shakin’ in our booties!” That realization and experience in the depths of our heart will humble us which is necessary before “Life” can begin to flow through us. And “Life,”, which is intrinsically a “flow,” is scary if we dare to embrace it fully; for doing so will bring vulnerability into our life, a frailty which at times can become very intense. It is much easier to just avoid “Life” and toil lamely and banally through our “three score and ten,” on automatic pilot, basking in our unquestioned assumptions, speciously comfortable in in the “small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which likes the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken) I shared months ago my interpretation of a verse in Hebrews, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God” to mean “It is a fearful thing to fall into ‘Life’” It is a “fearful thing” to come alive….one might even say “to be born again.” I kind of think this is what Jesus had in mind.

An after thought to offer is that this same “waging of the war we are” is also relevant to us as a social body, as a culture and even as a species. And I intend to “hold forth” on that matter next time.

 

 

NOV 15, 2014

 

“WAGING THE WAR WE ARE” AS A GROUP

 

  1. H. Auden’s observation, “We wage the war we are” also applies to human collectives. Carl Jung eloquently described the “collective unconscious,” one example seen often in mob psychology where otherwise law-abiding people can have subterranean demons stirred up to the point of violent behavior. And sociologists and anthropologists…and other social scientists…are adept at delineating how our connection with social groups influences our behavior much more than we ever would like to acknowledge. Psychologist ________ has very interesting recordings on YouTube and TedTalks in which he show evidence that my “firm conviction” to be a liberal Democrat is not without unconscious motivation just as Conservative Republicans are also driven by similar needs.

 

Even the species as a whole can be compared to an individual child, still early in development, struggling to integrate fragmented impulses into a working, harmonious whole. Just in my lifetime, with technological advances like computers and the internet, our world is so much “smaller,” so much more a “whole”, and we are so very near, yet so very far, to being able to come much closer to world peace and harmony than ever before. We have the means, but lack the will. And I recently came across someone who pointed out the “coincidence” that terrorism has emerged as a formless (i.e. “stateless”) expression of the violent dimensions of our collective unconscious. Jung would say that our collective unconscious is telling us that all of our accomplishments deriving from our conscious need for structure and organization, are finding their complement in the chaos of violence. It is as if our collective unconscious is reminding us, “Oh yes. Technology and progress is great. But it comes by sublimating repressed violent impulses and these violent impulses need to be given attention.” The goal is to continue to seek meaning and coherence in our world while simultaneously acknowledging and addressing the violent unconscious impulses that are within us all. And this can be done through sublimation such as with religion, literature, art and mythology. But I issue a caveat re religion—“Danger, danger Will Robinson.” For religion can easily become just another form of violence as we see so often today.

 

“Closed canon” equals a “closed mind/heart”

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n the “closed canon” reflects a refusal to venture beyond the confines of one rational consciousness, or even to consider the possibility that such an enterprise is possible. Emily Dickinson beautifully described this encapsulated, endungeoned mind/heart in the mid-nineteenth century with the following poem:

The Soul selects her own society,

Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

Her choice of words describing selective attention– “closing the valves of attention like stone”— is intensely vivid and cold. This is the quintessential person that Eric Hoffer had in mind when he wrote, “The True Believer.” These people live in a hermetically-sealed prison and will probably gravitate toward a social/denominational group in which people of a similar persuasion are similarly ensconced on “the heath of the agreeable, where we bask, agreed upon what we will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light of the collected lie.”  (W.H. Auden) This is the “group lie” or “group think” which sometimes is described as “epistemic closure.”

This rigid certainty has infiltrated to conservative right of the American political spectrum which is replete with hyper-conservative religiosity. This close mindedness gave rise to the ludicrous phenomena in 2012 of running a presidential campaign whose slogan, upon close scrutiny, was simply, “We hate Obama.” In in the budget battle of last fall, more than one of them were quoted saying, “We are right” on the issue and in a key Republican committee meeting on the issue they concluded with prayer and a spontaneous singing of the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” And it is no accident that this wing of the party is vehemently against scientists’ warning of global warming and are anti-science in general. They might well be saying, “God said,I believe it, that settles it.”

Life is uncertain. No matter how much we try to deny it, we are extremely vulnerable little critters whose biblically assured “threescore and ten” might prove considerably shorter at any moment. But it is this vulnerability that makes us alive, that reflects a “quickened” spirit, which is what Jesus had in mind with his observation that to find our life we must lose it.  As Norman Brown put it, “To be is to be vulnerable.”

 

 

 

 

the Ultimate

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In fundamentalist Christianity there is the oft-used phrase, “in the word” as in “I’m in the word a lot now-a-days.”  I’ve been there, done that, and it has its place.  I now am “in the word” daily though my “word” has broadened to include non-Christian holy writ, spiritual teachings (contemporary and historical), and literature (past and present), philosophy, and religious tomes.

I’m aware of how much brain-washing is involved here.  It is a way of indoctrinating ourselves, filling the void that we are with something we deem important to keep that void from sucking us up.  It is part of maintaining the identity that we formulated a long time ago, that identity being “a veil we spin to hide the void” (Norman O. Brown).

So, what’s the point?  Is brainwashing all there is?  Am I merely espousing nihilism here?

I think the answer is to realize that the “stuff” that we have filled our minds and heart with must have meaning beyond itself.  This “stuff”   (words, images, ideas, etc) is important but it has no meaning unless we have an ultimate reference point outside the realm of time and space.  I think it was Gabriel Marcel who once noted that “words have meaning only when they burgeon forth into a region beyond themselves.”  So, when it comes to spirituality…at least…does our ideology, our words, our dogma “burgeon-forth into a region beyond themselves” or is it merely so much flotsam-and-jetsam that we have glommed onto to stave-off the existential abyss that we live in.

As a culture…and I could broaden that to “world culture”…I fear that we do not have an ultimate reference point.   Or to put it more correctly, an “Ultimate Reference Point.”  Therefore we “glom on” to “stuff”.  We are materialistic.

slippery slope of spirituality

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“With devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself,” noted Shakespeare (Hamlet).  Spirituality is a perilous journey for it so easy to become “humble”, failing to recognize that one is just being smug or arrogant.  As I like to put it…and this comes from personal experience, “Humility comes hard to the humble.”  Eckhart Tolle’s concept of “egoic consciousness” is so relevant to spirituality.  And this pseudo-humility, this “devotion’s visage and pious action” usually stems from taking oneself too seriously.

If honesty intrudes on us, we will often have to admit that our spirituality is just a song-and-dance which serves the purpose of assuaging our lonliness and isolation.  It is part of the aforementioned (in an earlier post) effort to “spin a veil to hide us from the void.” (Norman O. Brown)

Read here how John Masefield summarized this matter:

 

How many ways, how many different times

The tiger Mind has clutched at what it sought,

Only to prove supposéd virtues crimes,

The imagined godhead but a form of thought.

How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,

Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,

Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,

Only to prove themselves the things of awe,

Yet, in the happy moment’s lightning blink,

Comes scent, or track, or trace, the game goes by,

Some leopard thought is pawing at the brink,

Chaos below, and, up above, the sky.

Then the keen nostrils scent, about, about,

To prove the Thing Within a Thing Without.

 

More “loss”

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Renunciation -- is a piercing Virtue --
The letting go
A Presence -- for an Expectation --

Emily Dickinson was a very complicated and very troubled woman.  But as she wrestled with her demons, she found words available as a solace and skillfully articulated her anguish.

In the above poem, she was wrestling with loss and risking a descent into madness.  “Renunciation” was the term she chose for rejecting the “common sense” world she lived and breathed in—a “presence”.  This “presence” can be thought of as her egoic consciousness (see Eckhart Tolle), a bit of fiction she had subscribed to which plugged her into that “common sense” world.  Norman O. Brown once noted, “The ego is a veil we spin to hide the void.”  Emily’s “veil” was precarious at best.

In another one of her poems she described this loss of egoic consciousness as “a funeral in my brain.”  And then she concluded the poem with the lines:

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down–
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing–then—

Note that she “hit a world at every plunge.”  So, even though the demons of madness were besetting her, she found a world at every step and then “finished knowing—then.  Her ego survived the descent.