Longevity

My African way of relating, because I failed in Western moral discipline school.  I was brought up in a very impersonal way, in a collectivist (tribal) culture.  Even though I am white, we still had this kind of tribal orientation, rather than individualism.   It is actually a kind of wildness.    Here’s the blog post someone accessed recently.  It relates, maybe, the psychological meaning and impetus of our collectivism.  Listen to the harmonizing, because we used to do that naturally, in our every day interactions.     It’s impersonal but energetic.   In my school classes, we would pay attention to the mood that others were just starting to generate, and then we would harmonize with that mood.   . http://musteryou.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/but-tock-skins/  That is the source of my wildness – in the capacity to harmonize, derived from southern african tribalism.

In other ways, I am colonial British.  I was brought up in the 19th century manner, where children were considered something entirely different from adults.    I didn’t engage much with my parents at all.  It was an Alice in Wonderland world, with great scope for freedom.  But the society overall was quite rigidly and hierarchically defined, so my manner and style is quite impersonal.    I just don’t like postmodernism because it is Western and it doesn’t address my needs (which is ok) but claims to do so (which is not ok).   Also postmodernists always batter me with their anti-colonialism.  Their capacities to understand are not deep.

My means to deal with very refined, civilized people is to let them go their own way.  I spent long years trying to understand them and to “adapt” to what was expected of me, but clearly I have failed.  I once spoke to a Mongolian shaman or “Satanist” who said that when people have very different expectations and experiences of their worlds, the thing you DO NOT WANT TO DO is to build a bridge between you and them.   It’s far better that they don’t perceive the ways in which you diverge, because it would unsettle them and they would attack you.  So, don’t try to build a connection.  In fact, make sure you do not allow them to build one.   Keeping people out is as much part of the shamanic style as allowing people in.  Zarathustra saw that when he stated, I draw tighter and tighter circles around myself.  

To do that, though, one has to have deep self-knowledge – enough to realize where one’s boundaries are and where they have to be drawn.  Learning psychological hygiene takes a long time, especially when one’s needs are complex and were forged in foreign climes.   Westerners, especially of the liberal sort, seem to assume I am just like them only more so.   So, for a long time, I assumed I was.   Only I always had trouble doing what was expected of me, as I couldn’t quite get into the groove of Western consciousness.  It seemed to involve some kind of trick of adjustment that I couldn’t pull off.   Also, it meant giving up the wilderness, each time I tried it.   I never wanted to do that and the sacrifice was extreme, but each time, the assumption others made was that I was already just like them and that I wanted to do those things.   So they assumed I wanted to do what I didn’t want to do, and/or that it was natural for me to do those things I didn’t want to do.  

Then, also, with Westerners, there is the fact that they have exo-skeletons and are  soft inside, and may be easily offended by a certain kind of joviality that rubs them the wrong way.   By contrast, my thinner skin is on the outside, but I’m tough on the inside.   I’m confident I can beat anybody in sheer strategy and endurance.    I’ve always found this to be so.   I’m the typical Brer Rabbit type when it comes to Western culture:  “Whatever you do, don’t throw me out of civilization, into the briar patch, where I happen to have been born and bred!”   But the Westerners always get around to taking moral umbrage and throwing me there.