This story starts a very, very long time ago. I’m never clear as to how much of the foundation story to tell. I was, as someone might have said, a very, very old person in terms of my maturity, and yet I was only fifteen. I wasn’t knowledgeable, courageous or insightful. In fact, I had missed out on a lot of opportunities that are conventionally given to immature people to test themselves and find out what their strengths and weaknesses are going to be.
So I had to work everything backwards. I had to kind of get into myself from outside, and I had to do this at a later stage than everybody else had. In fact, I had to do it when the shell of my outside nature had already formed. I was in the ridiculous position of a chicken that had to peck its way back into the egg it had originally come from, to be born again. The reason why this was necessary, and hardly an option, was that my subjectivity was not highly developed. I was very capable of complying with objective orders and would do my best to comply with almost anything expected of me, without question. But I had little subjective inwardness – therefore little energy or knowledge for resistance. I had not developed introspection. I had no capacity for defensiveness, even when some people said something that obviously wasn’t right. It seemed like people acted in a lot of pointless ways in relation to me, but I had no concept of anything being offensive.
Some things were maddening, like my father’s sudden rages. He would suddenly be spitting chips that he had decided the family should go out and I hadn’t gotten ready in time. He considered this a sign of deliberate and outrageous contempt, not slowness. A lot of my father’s rages can be understood in the light of his military training: follow orders, pick up camp, move on quietly. If you didn’t do these things, despite not having had his form of training, he would go ballistic. Then we would learn just how far from perfection we were, in his eyes.
So I had the opposite tendency to self-involvement or an ability to focus only on one thing. My whole self would become naturally scattered into the environment, but because of private property and the lack of an open terrain to roam, my feelings would boomerang and leave me feeling emptier than ever. If I could try to gather them and focus on one thing, I could begin to restore meaning, quality and value, but I hadn't learned to concentrate my forces yet, or to hypnotize myself so that I seemed to be only in one place at a time.
I was left with an impersonality disorder. I basically kept a watchful eye on authorities and tried to survive: that was my “personality”. I have tried to explain, many times, to Westerners, that I have not seen the world according to their structure of the psyche, for instance their own is formed – this was never to any avail. I guess if you grow up during a war, emotions are rationed and nurturing is not overdone.
So it became gradually clearer to me that I was poorly equipped to handle modernity. I didn’t even understand what people were saying to me most of the time – I mean the emotional connotations or insinuations. I could understand the words, but not the contents.
My father couldn’t, wouldn’t help, because he’s just fall into a rage at the sign of any failure, which he read as non-compliancy. My mother was pretty much in the same boat as me, in that she didn’t understand herself, nor was she capable of acting on anyone’s behalf.
It may have seemed to people that I was very immature, but the reality was that I was overly mature prematurely. That’s not the same thing as being immature. It wasn’t that I had avoided my lessons or rebelled against authorities. My whole goal in life was to appease authorities, not to rebel against them.
I had a very, very difficult time, where I was becoming increasingly harsh with myself whilst experiencing depleting emotional resources. I had to fill up on emotional resources as I had become ill. The thing is, I didn’t really like anything around me in the new place, and couldn’t relate to it emotionally. I’d liked horses before, and wild rides in our semi-rural terrain. I’d had friends who were a lot like me, being solitary types but capable of deep friendship and mutual pleasure in the world around. I’d had a life before that wasn’t much in terms of power or personality, but it had nourished me.
Providence steps in, sometimes. During my hardships at work (which were hardships for others, too, causing tears), I turned a corner in the city and was in a major bookstore, where shelf after shelf were filled with Nietzsche books. That’s when I first began reading his books, buying a different one each week or so. I didn’t really understand him. The first book I purchased was HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN, and that made me feel queasy inside. All the absolutist Christian doctrine I’d embraced, which was swimming in my head, seemed to be turned around and upside down. In my naivety I presumed that this was the contemporary Western dogma that was opposed to my internalized Christian dogma. Everything seemed to be chaotic and churning.
I couldn’t understand what I was reading and took to the bath tub with all my books, where I would lie for hours, reading through and trying to get a handle on modernity. There were, occasionally, a few glimmers of hope, when I came across this aphorism, for instance:
“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.” It made me realize how much I had been making myself sick.
Anyway. All this is background which goes to providing the basis as to why I first embraced and then rejected Paradigm Y.
2
Professor X had been my teacher as an undergraduate, and when I decided I had to learn more about reality, of which I confessed to still knowing very little, even in my thirties, I got in touch with him again.
He was a fine fellow; more in touch with his sensuality than most of the faculty. But as it turned out, he really wholly and dogmatically embraced Paradigm Y.
Now, I was on a path of my own, which I didn’t understand that that time. Actually, it was a path where I had to initiate myself, by breaking down my outside shell to let myself back inside my own being.
I wanted some cues, some tips, from him. I would write to him often, as I am writing to you, and I would say things like, “My soul seems back to front compared to everybody else’s. What should I do?” Or I would depict situations where I thought it was necessary to enhance my basic narcissism, which seemed to be lacking.
He’s never comment on anything personal I had said, but because I needed him to empathies' with me (my implicit and un-spelled out goal of initiation), I just assumed that he had understood more than he had.
All the time, though, he was writing me off as an hysteric. I understand this now, but didn’t realize it then.
The point is, I had to initiate myself, and this meant following an intuitive path. I couldn’t know where it would lead. If it led me to embrace Hitler, I would embrace Hitler. If it was something else disgusting, like Bataille, then I would temporarily have to look into Bataille. A thirsty person does not reject a drop of water, even if the source of it is unclean.
Perhaps uncleanliness itself was a source of growth? I’d been clean all my life, and had always obeyed instructions without thinking too deeply.
These were intellectual questions I had to ask as part of forging a shamanic path whilst writing my PhD.
Anyway, he didn’t give me any clues about anything.
Even when I said things to him in person: no clues. I would have liked some insight and some mentoring. We’d often get together for drinks.
He seemed to think this was all unnecessary.
There were some things, you know, that were very real that I’d been dealing with. It was only just dawning on me at this point that historical forces create a tsunami of psychical effects that are real. I’d had to deal on my own with my father’s suicidal tendencies and with his rage. I’d had to try to make all sorts of impossible adjustments on my own and I had never mourned the past in the way that I should have done. I would say the whole society was still in post-war 1940s, before the invention of mass media, or psychoanalysis, or individual identity, or anything much really. I think that as a contemporary type, along with all other contemporary types, you can’t imagine such a situation, and think it must be something to do with me in particular, but I assure you we were thoroughly time locked. In reality the more advanced wing of the system of culture I was from was mostly in the 40s. In other ways, we were in the 1870s. It’s very tiresome for me to have to keep explaining this to people, since they never seen to grasp it.
So I said to him (and this was very late in the game, when I was a critical stage of pulling my thesis together), “You know, some things are actually real.”
This was the sentence, I believe, that flipped him over the edge. We had both been very patient until that time.
I have mentioned, of course, that my father said as lot of crazy things to me when he was unstable. This professor decided to pick up on these and assault me with those crazy things.
At this point, I began to realize that Paradigm Y is just another form of authoritarianism in a disguise. It’s actually very condescending and doesn’t allow that people like me could have actual insight into the world, or be capable of following an intuitive path to freeing oneself.
Also the professor showed he had no insight into human reactions. Specifically, I had stated that my father had deep fracture lines of trauma and expressed only distorted ideas during his rages.
So now the good professor seemed to have these fracture lines as well, in my eyes, on the basis of his emulation of my father. I kept away from him, because he seemed to be becoming unstable. I also felt very guilty (as I did in relation to my father), that perhaps I was the cause of his instability. That made it very difficult for me to complete my thesis with a clear perspective, because I had only a limited time to do it, and I felt guilty and confused by this reaction, which had effectively undermined my dependence on paradigm Y to explain anything. To embrace anything relating to Y seemed to be to take everything in exactly the wrong direction – towards the pathology of guilt and madness. Imagine being pushed down -- back into this mad relationship with my father that I'd been working so hard to avoid? I felt myself losing my sense of purpose, everything becoming diffused and scattered. Perhaps madness and guilt were inescapable after all?
3.
Anyway, I wondered often what I must have done or said to make him reveal his hand like that – and very much to his own detriment as well as (temporarily) mine. I think it was the suggestion that his paradigm did not deal with reality, but just dismissed everything experiential as merely “an emotional reaction”. Emotion is epiphenomena and pathology. Someone who complies with authority smoothly doesn’t need it. The point is to get into harness. Everything else is smoke.
I think, in short, that my background, with an actual experience of war and the costs and benefits of it, made my reality a threat to a social order where desire is the only currency permissible. “Desire” – and not reality itself.
So I had to work everything backwards. I had to kind of get into myself from outside, and I had to do this at a later stage than everybody else had. In fact, I had to do it when the shell of my outside nature had already formed. I was in the ridiculous position of a chicken that had to peck its way back into the egg it had originally come from, to be born again. The reason why this was necessary, and hardly an option, was that my subjectivity was not highly developed. I was very capable of complying with objective orders and would do my best to comply with almost anything expected of me, without question. But I had little subjective inwardness – therefore little energy or knowledge for resistance. I had not developed introspection. I had no capacity for defensiveness, even when some people said something that obviously wasn’t right. It seemed like people acted in a lot of pointless ways in relation to me, but I had no concept of anything being offensive.
Some things were maddening, like my father’s sudden rages. He would suddenly be spitting chips that he had decided the family should go out and I hadn’t gotten ready in time. He considered this a sign of deliberate and outrageous contempt, not slowness. A lot of my father’s rages can be understood in the light of his military training: follow orders, pick up camp, move on quietly. If you didn’t do these things, despite not having had his form of training, he would go ballistic. Then we would learn just how far from perfection we were, in his eyes.
So I had the opposite tendency to self-involvement or an ability to focus only on one thing. My whole self would become naturally scattered into the environment, but because of private property and the lack of an open terrain to roam, my feelings would boomerang and leave me feeling emptier than ever. If I could try to gather them and focus on one thing, I could begin to restore meaning, quality and value, but I hadn't learned to concentrate my forces yet, or to hypnotize myself so that I seemed to be only in one place at a time.
I was left with an impersonality disorder. I basically kept a watchful eye on authorities and tried to survive: that was my “personality”. I have tried to explain, many times, to Westerners, that I have not seen the world according to their structure of the psyche, for instance their own is formed – this was never to any avail. I guess if you grow up during a war, emotions are rationed and nurturing is not overdone.
So it became gradually clearer to me that I was poorly equipped to handle modernity. I didn’t even understand what people were saying to me most of the time – I mean the emotional connotations or insinuations. I could understand the words, but not the contents.
My father couldn’t, wouldn’t help, because he’s just fall into a rage at the sign of any failure, which he read as non-compliancy. My mother was pretty much in the same boat as me, in that she didn’t understand herself, nor was she capable of acting on anyone’s behalf.
It may have seemed to people that I was very immature, but the reality was that I was overly mature prematurely. That’s not the same thing as being immature. It wasn’t that I had avoided my lessons or rebelled against authorities. My whole goal in life was to appease authorities, not to rebel against them.
I had a very, very difficult time, where I was becoming increasingly harsh with myself whilst experiencing depleting emotional resources. I had to fill up on emotional resources as I had become ill. The thing is, I didn’t really like anything around me in the new place, and couldn’t relate to it emotionally. I’d liked horses before, and wild rides in our semi-rural terrain. I’d had friends who were a lot like me, being solitary types but capable of deep friendship and mutual pleasure in the world around. I’d had a life before that wasn’t much in terms of power or personality, but it had nourished me.
Providence steps in, sometimes. During my hardships at work (which were hardships for others, too, causing tears), I turned a corner in the city and was in a major bookstore, where shelf after shelf were filled with Nietzsche books. That’s when I first began reading his books, buying a different one each week or so. I didn’t really understand him. The first book I purchased was HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN, and that made me feel queasy inside. All the absolutist Christian doctrine I’d embraced, which was swimming in my head, seemed to be turned around and upside down. In my naivety I presumed that this was the contemporary Western dogma that was opposed to my internalized Christian dogma. Everything seemed to be chaotic and churning.
I couldn’t understand what I was reading and took to the bath tub with all my books, where I would lie for hours, reading through and trying to get a handle on modernity. There were, occasionally, a few glimmers of hope, when I came across this aphorism, for instance:
“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.” It made me realize how much I had been making myself sick.
Anyway. All this is background which goes to providing the basis as to why I first embraced and then rejected Paradigm Y.
2
Professor X had been my teacher as an undergraduate, and when I decided I had to learn more about reality, of which I confessed to still knowing very little, even in my thirties, I got in touch with him again.
He was a fine fellow; more in touch with his sensuality than most of the faculty. But as it turned out, he really wholly and dogmatically embraced Paradigm Y.
Now, I was on a path of my own, which I didn’t understand that that time. Actually, it was a path where I had to initiate myself, by breaking down my outside shell to let myself back inside my own being.
I wanted some cues, some tips, from him. I would write to him often, as I am writing to you, and I would say things like, “My soul seems back to front compared to everybody else’s. What should I do?” Or I would depict situations where I thought it was necessary to enhance my basic narcissism, which seemed to be lacking.
He’s never comment on anything personal I had said, but because I needed him to empathies' with me (my implicit and un-spelled out goal of initiation), I just assumed that he had understood more than he had.
All the time, though, he was writing me off as an hysteric. I understand this now, but didn’t realize it then.
The point is, I had to initiate myself, and this meant following an intuitive path. I couldn’t know where it would lead. If it led me to embrace Hitler, I would embrace Hitler. If it was something else disgusting, like Bataille, then I would temporarily have to look into Bataille. A thirsty person does not reject a drop of water, even if the source of it is unclean.
Perhaps uncleanliness itself was a source of growth? I’d been clean all my life, and had always obeyed instructions without thinking too deeply.
These were intellectual questions I had to ask as part of forging a shamanic path whilst writing my PhD.
Anyway, he didn’t give me any clues about anything.
Even when I said things to him in person: no clues. I would have liked some insight and some mentoring. We’d often get together for drinks.
He seemed to think this was all unnecessary.
There were some things, you know, that were very real that I’d been dealing with. It was only just dawning on me at this point that historical forces create a tsunami of psychical effects that are real. I’d had to deal on my own with my father’s suicidal tendencies and with his rage. I’d had to try to make all sorts of impossible adjustments on my own and I had never mourned the past in the way that I should have done. I would say the whole society was still in post-war 1940s, before the invention of mass media, or psychoanalysis, or individual identity, or anything much really. I think that as a contemporary type, along with all other contemporary types, you can’t imagine such a situation, and think it must be something to do with me in particular, but I assure you we were thoroughly time locked. In reality the more advanced wing of the system of culture I was from was mostly in the 40s. In other ways, we were in the 1870s. It’s very tiresome for me to have to keep explaining this to people, since they never seen to grasp it.
So I said to him (and this was very late in the game, when I was a critical stage of pulling my thesis together), “You know, some things are actually real.”
This was the sentence, I believe, that flipped him over the edge. We had both been very patient until that time.
I have mentioned, of course, that my father said as lot of crazy things to me when he was unstable. This professor decided to pick up on these and assault me with those crazy things.
At this point, I began to realize that Paradigm Y is just another form of authoritarianism in a disguise. It’s actually very condescending and doesn’t allow that people like me could have actual insight into the world, or be capable of following an intuitive path to freeing oneself.
Also the professor showed he had no insight into human reactions. Specifically, I had stated that my father had deep fracture lines of trauma and expressed only distorted ideas during his rages.
So now the good professor seemed to have these fracture lines as well, in my eyes, on the basis of his emulation of my father. I kept away from him, because he seemed to be becoming unstable. I also felt very guilty (as I did in relation to my father), that perhaps I was the cause of his instability. That made it very difficult for me to complete my thesis with a clear perspective, because I had only a limited time to do it, and I felt guilty and confused by this reaction, which had effectively undermined my dependence on paradigm Y to explain anything. To embrace anything relating to Y seemed to be to take everything in exactly the wrong direction – towards the pathology of guilt and madness. Imagine being pushed down -- back into this mad relationship with my father that I'd been working so hard to avoid? I felt myself losing my sense of purpose, everything becoming diffused and scattered. Perhaps madness and guilt were inescapable after all?
3.
Anyway, I wondered often what I must have done or said to make him reveal his hand like that – and very much to his own detriment as well as (temporarily) mine. I think it was the suggestion that his paradigm did not deal with reality, but just dismissed everything experiential as merely “an emotional reaction”. Emotion is epiphenomena and pathology. Someone who complies with authority smoothly doesn’t need it. The point is to get into harness. Everything else is smoke.
I think, in short, that my background, with an actual experience of war and the costs and benefits of it, made my reality a threat to a social order where desire is the only currency permissible. “Desire” – and not reality itself.
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