Wednesday 31 December 2014

Conduits for emptying one's bowels

Attitudes Towards Immigrants | Clarissa's Blog:



Like I said elsewhere above — and I was being more literal than facetious — people need to excavate their bowels. They need to shit. This is something I think Melanie Klein recognises implicitly. And of course Nietzsche notices it once or twice. The Kleinian notion of projection is in the recognition that the infant has to get rid of its feces and so projects those outwards. The “other” becomes the dirt, the excrement, which the infant is not capable of dealing with on its own.
I think for many people this urge to shit is very urgent and extreme. The more they have unconscious fears that they may be evil or dirty, the more they require an aqueduct to take their dirt away from them. Intellectual left-liberalism has built a very efficient one in the intellectual abstraction of “evil colonialism”. Much of contemporary critical theory is forms a system that allows left-liberals to use this toilet to get rid of their ever-present sense of guilt and shame.
If you take away this conduit, or imply that they ought not to use it, they really do lash out at you in the same way as someone who has an extreme bodily urge would do. They would not understand the source of their own rage, but if I tell them that I am not an evil person because I have been colonial, they seem to find this very distressing. I have deprived them of their current means to empty their bowels. This may cause them actual bodily pain.
I’m sorry to have to do this, but they need to find some other way and means to shit apart from on ME.

Effects of Narcissistic Abuse





 
Right.  That makes a lot of sense about suggestions going in much more deeply when you are in a hyper-adrenalized state.  I had huge pressures on me to "adapt" as a migrant, but I was simultaneously being attackef from all sides by people who had identity issues of their own.

Zen is not for westerners? Ego detachment and diminished self esteem





 
yeah.  Shamanic doubling is the capacity of the self to stand outside of the self -- i.e. non-attachment.

Zen is not for westerners? Ego detachment and diminished self esteem





Interesting that he says the unconscious seems to watch you from the outside.  So, the true self is on the outside and the ego is on the inside, then.



That is most interesting!



In my thesis I wrote that the goal of shamanism is to see oneself from the outside.

Attitudes Towards Immigrants | Clarissa's Blog

Attitudes Towards Immigrants | Clarissa's Blog



One of the weirder things that happened to me was that my agenda of what I saw as adapting to the modern, new situation, was ideologically attacked so heavily. I was just trying to please and appease, but people saw in this something very sinister. They accused me of playing games with them and trying to be what I am not and of not knowing who I am and of deserving punishment. And this is the weird thing, that by going out of my way to do what I imagined was expected, I invited these attacks.
I saw on a YouTube video recently the principle that if people feel they have a moral obligation to you but they do not have a legal obligation, they will resent you heavily and punish you to vent their feelings. I suspect, once again, that people feel they need to have this nefarious “other” colonial identity to measure themselves against, and when I do not present myself to them as evil, they become outraged.

Attitudes Towards Immigrants | Clarissa's Blog

Attitudes Towards Immigrants | Clarissa's Blog: "I know that I used to come across weirdly to some people because the left-liberals themselves have a self-image that they are fluffy and very harmless, but it is much more complicated than this. A lot of them have a strong feeling that they are trying to get rid of the fascist without and the fascist within. And they are very confused about fascism. Even professors and other types who should know more, do not really understand fascism. I know there was a common misunderstanding in the industrialized West that the war in Rhodesia was fought over racism and that nazi types would be welcome there as mercenaries. But the conservatism of Rhodesia, although far right, was more akin to Leave it to Beaver than German or Italiam fascism. The image formed by people in the industrialized West was, for the most part, very, very wrong indeed. It is as if they had aggregated all their evil in one spot and said, “We hate our colonial selves and we consider it to be fascism.” 



As a result of this confusion about identities (and as I have implied there was also a hell of a lot of projection) I had to cope with a very confusing psychological and social terrain. It was so intense and in a way just so ongoing that I really lost sight of who I really was, or had been, growing up in Africa. I started to take on the idea that I must be an evil “fascist”. In fact I found a lot of defensive ability in embracing this extreme and false image that was projected onto me. It was like if a lot of mice appeared together and kept asserting, “You must be a very vicious cat with very fine hunting capabilities!” Realy it was quite laughable the way people kept giving me power, although initially, before I had figured out what was going on, I did get pretty much pulverised. Because if a lot of mice have decided that you are a very vicious cat with proficient capabilities for hunting them, you had better turn out to be that way, or else they are going to make you suffer — I mean to the extent that you are vulnerable.



In any case, progressives, up to this point, seem to desire and demand and require ‘fascism’ and they have often required it from me — not real fascism, but hunting prowess. They are alarming stupid and lacking in psychological self-awareness, which is why I keep insisting that they need to come to terms with their colonial roots — their shadow side. Up until now, they haven’t done so, I assure you.

SHAMAN PROTIP: What You Should Know About Television

Historical structures of ethical behavior, subjective and objective

Attitudes Towards Immigrants | Clarissa's Blog

Attitudes Towards Immigrants | Clarissa's Blog





No wonder I also developed a fear of those on the liberal-left. Which is weird because I am very, very liberal. I think had I been more conservative and only associated with those who were so, I would have had a much easier time in my life.

Tuesday 30 December 2014

CPTSD and Borderline Made Simple







Reminds me of the whole content of Marechera's MINDBLAST, OR THE DEFINITIVE BUDDY.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1591251.Mindblast_Or_The_Definitive_Buddy

This had a whole lot to do with complex ptsd, political disempowerment and shamanic doubling (a common means to escape from psychological trauma and try to recover one's wholeness)

The Zombie Witchdoctors of Narcissistic Abuse





 
When I stayed with my Zimbabwean friend, he told me that there were people who could cast a spell to get someone to work for them the whole night.  When they woke up, they wouldn't remember what had happened, but they would feel drained.  Another Zimbabwean myth is of the dwarf spirit, who is sexually insatiable.  At first you may purchase such as being, to do your bidding, but eventually instead of you dominating it, it dominates you and you can't get rid of it.  There have been serious (I think) newspaper reportages of people trying to use dynamite to blow up tikoloshes.  One spiritual healer blew up herself and her client in an attempt to kill it.

The One Belief Change You Need To Blast Through ALL Procrastination?





Very adult ideas:  discomfort should be accepted as a part of life

The Theory Of Timeline Jumping







As I follow your stuff, I find that I don't have the same new age sensibility you have about shamanism at all (if we can use that term, new age, as I don't readily have another).  But even from the academic point of view I have studied, what you say is totally consistent with what I have found myself, doing research.  For instance, in one of your earlier videos you speak about taking all the blame for events, as a means to shamanize.  Drawing from and extrapolating from Freud, we can say that taking on the blame causes one to destroy oneself (an embrace of Thanatos, the destructive principle).  And From Nietzsche, who urged us to destroy "the old law tables", destruction leads to rebirth.  He understood that you cannot create without destroying first.  Also the idea of ego as a limiting factor I found to be suggested in a very, very old, theory about the "triune mind"  (look it up on google).  According to the theorist, the middle level of the mind, which is the mammalian level, keeps us grounded in the present and in the body.  Drawing from the principles he suggests, without this middle level -- (I assume we can safely call it ego) -- one would feel disembodied.  A disembodied ego would be something akin to "spirit".  (I don't think we need to go so far as to assert that there really is such a thing as a disembodied ego that floats around.  I think it is more to do with our neurological wiring.)   

Also, I have found that there really are filters we can have over our mind that makes it so that different people experience the same environment very differently.  It really depends on your cultural conditioning, your character structure, your attitudinal stance, the level of your intellect and inner development and so on.  You end up networking with different sorts of people and hearing different ideas from them.

Handling Rejection | Clarissa's Blog

Handling Rejection | Clarissa's Blog





Oh, I’ve never been impressed by academics who are rude. I have a very deep notion that powerful people are subtle and that they do all their dirty work in a way that actually minimises the dirt. That, to me, is impressive. But once people start to get overtly smelly, my estimation drops from “aristocratic” to “bourgeois”.

African terms of existence

African terms of existence





Between the view of life as basically a moral discourse and as politically dynamic is a huge experiential chasm.  My cultural affiliations -- the ones I feel immediately in my gut -- are with those who see the world in terms of power dynamics not in terms of competing moral discourses.

Maybe this relates to the violence in my blood, that sensibility that comes from being born African. If you speak a close enough strain to my language -- that being the language which takes into account that  issues of life are related to issues of power -- then you will be culturally closer to me, even as an enemy, than anybody who espouses that life is basically a matter of making correct moral choices for oneself.

But there it is: the fundamental human schism. And those who speak about morality are often really speaking about power, where those who speak superficially about power are often really moral crusaders. You have to know the differences.

Writer Marechera's critical discourse is about power, and only lightly about morality. And his Western critics ) speak fundamentally in terms of a moral discourse. They even perceive a deeper discourse about power to be "mad", although perhaps this is a slip of the tongue and what they really mean is that is "maddening".

moi


Repost: Marechera as shaman

summary



Marechera’s writing enables us to see the psychological effect of power relations, instead of simply leaping to conclusions about their moral status. His analysis of power relations is not limited to something isolated and set apart for its particular negativity, termed ‘colonialism’. Rather, his psychological methodology is consistent for pinpointing the effects of unjust power relations wherever he finds them.

His writing is philosophical and far-reaching as he is not intent on condemning the latest outrage of his time, but is rather taking a look at what it is in human power relations that can cause them to distort and shred the fabric of the human psyche, but his concern is with the psychological illnesses of society and the possibility of healing them. I deem his approach to be shamanistic, in the sense that traditional shamans directed their work towards diagnosing and healing the ills of their societies, which had resulted from social imbalances of power. Belief in society's totems can insulate the believer against a fear of death. 

 This has relevance to shamanism, for it is a sacrifice of the belief in totems through facing death that allows the shaman to see reality in a way that isn't determined only by his emotional needs. This is what is needful to produce  detachment -- which in turn facilitates (although doesn't guarantee, as this depends on the quality of the character) a greater capacity for an ethical orientation in the long run.

Monday 29 December 2014

Update. (30 December 14). Spiritual maturity, mending distortions, mov...

kwaChirere: Fragments from Zimbabwe war literature

kwaChirere: Fragments from Zimbabwe war literature



BV summoned the rest of the unit who had been covering both sides of the bridge and we marched back to base.
I was too tired, frustrated and annoyed to talk to anyone.
I nibbled a few morsels of sadza and went to sleep some distance from the rest of the unit.
I just wanted to be myself.
The mine exploded next morning at about 8:00am.
I was fast asleep – BV came with the good tidings, he was overjoyed.
For me, it was a shattering anticlimax and all the risks I had taken came like a flood into my mind.
“What exactly did you do?” he asked.
When I told him, his jaw sagged and he snorted: “Pebbles in a pothole? I can't believe it!"

Repost Nietzsche's imperfect shamanism

Nietzsche's approach to philosophy is, above all, shamanistic, as Bataille recognizes in ON NIETZSCHE, where he speaks of Nietzsche as being someone subject to intellectual confusion in a way that brought out novel and divine perspectives.  I do, of course, paraphrase.

His writing clearly invites a mode of personal transformation. However, viewed as a form of shamanism, is an imperfect shamanism, which doesn't really guide one to get to the bottom of the questions of existence experientially. There is too much incitement in his texts to emotionally embrace the values of the philosopher, for a completely investigative approach to be permitted.  His barbs and jibes about gender (for instance) are rhetorically loaded and emotionally appealing to many.

That his approach to philosophy is shamanistic all the same should not be in any doubt. His ethics, far from being non-existent or fascistic (two very superficial interpretations) are based around mastering one's self. But, one does not begin to do so, unless one has already doubled one's subjectivity, so that part of it becomes the master and the other part is the self that is mastered. It is this doubling of the Self that is quintessentially shamanistic, and the key to all shamanistic practice and insights.

That which Nietzsche condemns is that lack of self-awareness.  Without its ethical correlate, self-mastery, one would would not be able to develop the range of ethics that would be proper to one who one really was able to ascend the full ladder of one's being, which means ascending the ladder of human knowledge through awareness of spiritual hierarchy (starting from inner awareness and developing outwards). Notably, the 'Tarantulas', those who wreak vengeance in the intellectual sphere, are condemned in Zarathustra not just for the principles that guide them to pursue their goals, but because of the evidence given by their characters, as viewed on a shamanistic level: They lack the right to do what they are doing since they have no internal reference points -- that is, none of the self-knowledge that would come from shamanistic practice. Rather, they are completely "at one" with their behaviour in a negative cultural dimension, which means that it is behaviour without ethical considerations. As no genuine ethical dimension has ever been part of their experience, they are mere actors of values (know-nothings).

Here is the evidence he supplies for their lack of true knowing:


Their jealousy leadeth them also into thinkers' paths; and this is the sign of their jealousy--they always go too far: so that their fatigue hath at last to go to sleep on the snow. [my bolds]

Note: it is not just their jealousy leading them to act as intellectuals that is problematised, but that from the shaman's perspective (whereby the subject must necessarily double itself up to find its own self-appropriate ethics), that there is an inherent incongruity between their choice (to pose as intellectuals) and their ability to self-regulate their own choice. They are not masters of themselves as intellectuals, and so lack the right to claim this status. The incongruity between what they claim the right to, and what they actually have the right to, marks them as unethical. This is all a shamanistic approach to ethics.

Nietzsche's approach to ethics is shamanistic, but that which he does not do, in his writing, (although the outlines of what it means to shamanise, alone, are pointed out in Zarathustra), is to tell his readers of how to get to the bottom of their beings, to the point where they can create this mode of shamanistic doubling, for themselves, and thus develop, on the basis of this psychological doubling, their own inner co-ordinates for an ethical life.

There is a reason Nietzsche's variety of shamanism does not give us sufficiently knowledge about shamanistic means of self-development. Shamanism has traditionally been at home among hunter-gatherers and those of the lower socio-economic orders of various societies. The first principle of shamanistic knowledge and transformation is that one has to be thrown entirely onto one's own devices, to help one's basic survival. This kind of experience is very much more likely for you if you are living in the wild, or you are made a victim of the vagaries of class society (due to being found at the bottom of it). But Nietzsche wrote for those who were at least of the German middle-class.

Few from the ruling classes of society would have need to get to the bottom of their own psyches in the way that is necessitated for shamanistic thinking. The facilitation of a self-directed approach to ethics would thus have been far from these ruling types, in particular, due to their lesser need for a shamanistic approach (that leads to ethical self-governance) at all. They could more easily just rely upon brute power to keep up a comfortable social status, on the basis of principles that had no relation to self-knowledge.

On a practical level, self-knowledge is not so necessary for a ruling class type of person as it is for those who lack the material power to rule, and so must draw from the very depths of their beings to survive at all. But it was to the latter type of person that Nietzsche's discourse would have had the most genuine resonance, for it is this type who is always on the verge of being shamanised. Instead, Nietzsche alienated this type of person, and chose to speak to those self identified "aristocrats" whose place in society would have provided them a comfortable buffer against shamanisation. This is why Nietzsche has been so badly misunderstood -- interpreted exoterically and "comfortably", rather than from the position of being in the throes of extreme discomfort (leading to self-doubling), which, in our capitalist age of false values and beliefs, is the only position from which one can make ethical decisions at all (now I sound Kierkegaardian!)

Whereas he intended to represent an approach to ethics that would have been more rigorous than any that are in conventional use today, instead his writing seems to have encouraged upholders of the status quo, fascists and misogynists, to think well of themselves -- and to do so without any of the irony present in Nietzsche's own way of thinking.  This failure is because they didn't get where they wanted to be by their own efforts.   There was no attempt to grapple with the issues of life independently, but rather to take wisdom as cheaply as one thinks one can.

Sunday 28 December 2014

One of the deeper shamanic tricks

It’s All About Convenience, Silly! | Clarissa's Blog



One of the deeper shamanic tricks — which is a very costly one, but sometimes necessary — is to simply take the violence on offer into oneself in a mode of emotional equilibrium. It diffuses that way, and after a very long time, finally it is gone. That is what my memoir is about in fact. (Sometimes I even lose track, myself, of how to understand it in articulated terms.)
But I had to cope with the generational violence my family had experienced in this way. Now, certainly, my father had extreme abandonment issues, which began when his father was killed in WW2 and then became most exacerbated by his loss of the Rhodesian war and the consequences for starting again that this brought about. Very, very sad things. One could use the crude modern parlance for similar sorts of emotional reactions to those that he developed, and say that he was “Borderline”.
But one cannot allow oneself to become equally thrown off balance when one is in association with such a person. That was HOW I learned to develop my whole ‘shamanic’ knowledge about what it is to be in or out of balance. Actually it is life and death in some instances just to stay IN balance.
So I learned all about psychological balance and equilibrium and how to maintain it, even when waves of crisis are rolling over me.
That is what I consider to be my shamanic endowment (as well as insights into how balances are maintained).
In the end, a shamanic type may need to bring an end to generationally infused violence by means of absorbing it and diffusing it, so that it no longer has any potency. That is what I finally managed to do. It’s what I write about in the closing passages of the book.
I’m going to write another book, which invokes similar principles of absorbing force and diffusing it, called “parachute landing fall”.

Extreme Douchebaggery | Clarissa's Blog

Extreme Douchebaggery | Clarissa's Blog: "There ARE all sorts of potential correctives when people act in harshly prejudicial ways, but you have to be of the shamanic type to make them happen. One of the most basic shamanic principles is “not doing”. That is to say, if someone performs an act of violence against you, you don’t try to fix things up, mend the relationship or close the gap. It’s not that you don’t care about fixing things up, but you have to understand that the nature of the violence is deeper than that which you can fix. If you keep fixing it, you will actually keep re-creating the circumstances for the same kinds of events to keep occurring. It’s not for you to palliate, therefore, but you can do a lot by allowing the imbalance that has been created by the violence to remain what it is — an uncomfortable imbalance. And all imbalances are uncomfortable.

Shamans see that there are the seeds of a solution in every violent act. For instance it used to be de rigueur to opine that women cannot be understood by anyone. Looking at that paradigm as an engineer would — which is to say dispassionately — one can see immediately how that creates a structural imbalance, whereby communication can only occur in one direction. A shaman does not try to fix this imbalance by taking great strides to ensure that communication occurs nonetheless, despite all the imposed difficulties. Rather, the shaman accepts and even perpetuates the imbalance by means of non-action. From now on communication only occurs in one direction. The shaman, if female, will not be required to communicate…will not require herself to do so.
But this produces great paranoia in the one who has set up the structural imbalance, because it is unnatural not to know what someone else is thinking. But they have made the pronouncement: “Women cannot be understood”. Now they must live with it.
This involves the use of engineering principles to facilitate the betterment of the world. It is not passive -aggression, since emotions would be involved in the latter. The shamanic approach makes use of an understanding of principles of physics as they relate to human pscychology.
Also it requires a lof of self-development, compassion and capacity for self-discipline to make the principle of “not doing” work for you. Most people are lacking in these. Above all, they do not have all these qualities combined.

We Are Wounded To Heal



Yeah, modern medicine freaks me out because it oversteps the mark.  I'm happy to have surgery or real-fix-it-up stuff if the situation warrants, but it cannot be permitted to step in just because my blood pressure is high, as it might be on occasion, or something similar, because those are aspects that I need to resolve through deeper introspection and lifestyle changes.  If modern medicine robs me of my means to introspection it is taking very much away, above all a very large chunk of my subjectivity or self-determination.

What Kind of Poverty? | Clarissa's Blog

What Kind of Poverty? | Clarissa's Blog





Same kind of criticism can be applied when the Yankees complain about their gender wars. It boils down to “some woman took an interest in me but she wasn’t my type, therefore women these days are manipulative and need to be shut down.”

It’s All About Convenience, Silly! | Clarissa's Blog

It’s All About Convenience, Silly! | Clarissa's Blog



I think one of the worst signs of…can we call it decadence? is when you inform people that there are higher and lower levels of things and they freak out and bring out all their reflexively conditioned modern tropes against you. It doesn’t matter that these have no content or that their content is not relevant to anything you said. They will accuse you of being racist or elitist or….god forbid…egotistic (or its clinical sounding correlate, narcissistic) and so on. But there are still higher and lower orders of things. For instance, I used to be extremely ignorant about politics and philosophy and life in general, but I raised myself up to a higher level.

Repost: torn apart left and right

What Rhodesian culture was is very, very, hard to understand.  Even I had a hard time understanding it, because I grew up in it but didn't recognize what either the Rhodesians or the rest of the world were reacting to.  The civil war has already started by the time I was born.  Then it finished when I was 12 and I emigrated to Australia with my family when I was 16.  Once, I emigrated, it was the start of another war, only on a psychological level.  My parents wanted me to be staunchly right-wing, but Australia was a more liberal culture, especially the university system.  My tendencies were left libertarian, although I didn't have a name for it at that time.

So, to be independent, I had to go against everything my parents had an emotional attachment to, in an ideological sense.    It felt like a kind of acceptance of death -- either mine or my father's -- when I eventually realized how hostile my parents had become toward me, when I reached in my late twenties.   I had been bullied at work, for being from where I was from. This labour union workplace considered itself a left-wing social organisation.   Someone there didn't like me because of where I was from, and indeed I was rather socially inept in those days -- too much so to see it  coming or to defend myself.   I had suffered from war trauma, not really my own, perhaps, but that of my father.   He had been traumatized by war all of his life -- first the second world war, which robbed him of his father just after he was born, and then the Rhodesian civil war, which robbed him of his younger brother and sent him on call-up duty, six months in, six months out.

After all this sacrifice and ideological indoctrination against the infiltrating "communists" (the guerilla groups were trained by USSR and China), my father hated anything remotely "left-wing".  It's not that he took the time to understand it. He had to immediately assimilate to an entirely different culture starting from a very low status position. He had previously been a lecturer at the Polytech.   So, he became even more traumatized.

It seems he attempted to solve the problems of his profound, underlying trauma from childhood and beyond and his ideological confusion by lashing out at me. His mother had always been insensitive to him, throwing him into the deep end of every new experience, and allowing others to treat him sadistically at times, without intervening.  So, my father developed the view that I was in some sense his mother.   He became the frightened infant lashing out at her for her insensitivity to his needs.

Needless to say, this was extremely frightening and confusing to me and made it much more difficult for me to re-orient myself in Australian culture.  I'd come from a rural, tribal culture and very little about modernity made any sense to me.  I found it extremely inimical.

My failure to adapt also very much angered my father.  He saw his own failure (in his parents' eyes) in me and my behavior.

However, I couldn't adapt because I was becoming more and more traumatized.  People were treating me like I was a racist and uppity, when I was just extremely shy and didn't actually know anything about people's subjective values or beliefs.

So the right-wingers were attacking me for adapting and the left wingers were attacking me for daring to migrate to Australia. And people were still very angry, even ten or fifteen years after the war. Family members had been killed in the war, and many Rhodesians wanted to kill anyone who expressed any left-wing tendencies. This was a primitive rage.To leave the conservative culture of Rhodesia is akin to trying to leave the Aum Supreme Truth Cult. Leftists in demand of their pound of flesh make this almost impossible to achieve. If anything, the loss of the war made my emotions of betrayal even stronger.  How could you leave a situation when it was so frail and in need?  The war and been tribal and personal as much as it had been ideological.

I developed chronic fatigue syndrome -- which took me many years to recover from.  My body had totally overheated due to this stress.

Most of the onlookers must have believed that this form of suffering was necessary and good for me, for they took the side of anyone who judged anything against me.

Activating The Mirror: Seeing What We Don't Want To See





 
Actually in my case it was much more confusing, as what people seemed to imply were defects (even, indirectly, in the sense that they seemed to indicate something non-specific was wrong) was just a different cultural character structure.  That's like, supposing you come dressed in a fur coat for hot weather.  My reactions were very inappropriate for the particular culture, but not so inappropriate for my own.  In the pressure of the ensuing crisis, I simply threw as much of everything that I could overboard, including large parts of my former self.  Then again, having to deal with this rupture and sudden change to  cultural and historical contexts is why I call myself a historical shaman, not an ordinary one.

Saturday 27 December 2014

Peter R. Breggin, MD: How to Help Deeply Disturbed Persons—Fourth in the...

What About the Civil Society? | Clarissa's Blog

What About the Civil Society? | Clarissa's Blog: "The majority seem to have been defeated, in America especially, by appeals to their worse natures. They actively contend against a universal health system in the US, and drag down their own public school systems by embracing ideologies against teaching. It seems that many want to become or remain sick and stupid. In America, they also want to shoot each other a lot. And there are people who say that if you vote you give a sign that you believe in the voting system, so you must never give that sign."



'via Blog this'

The exaggerated emphasis on ego

The exaggerated emphasis on ego: "An assertion of "difference" thereby automatically becomes a minor league crime, something that suggests either overweening arrogance, or alternatively, acknowledgement of a failure to match up to others' expectations. To be innocently "different" is viewed as being a road to nowhere, when in fact it could just as easily be a road to somewhere useful -- to discovering the innocent differences that reside in all of us, perhaps."



'via Blog this'

Friday 26 December 2014

Repost: The Categorical Imperative and colonialism

The Categorical Imperative and colonialismRevisiting the Oedipus complex:

An incorrect way of reading Marechera is:

1. nihilistically -- as a "postmodern" and as if he were merely rearranging ideas "on the surface", somewhat dadaistically, and in order to amuse himself, whilst not criticising the established orders that he was actually intent on criticising.

Also, via the lens of Post-oedipal blindness.

2.   Since, according to Michael Mack's Freud,  Kant's  Categorical Imperative is "The Oedipus Complex", one ought not to reads Marechera in a kind of subconscious tone of, "Yes, but all the moral answers are already entirely obvious to my abstract thinking mind."  If one does so, your own Oedipus complex is blinding you to what the author has to say about social and psychological complexity.

In fact, more often than not, the points the author wants to make are naturalistic (about society and how we actually experience it without a divine law to mediate its effects) and empirical. "Blindness" is a feature of assuming one has already grasped everything about the world when there is still something more to grasp.

The "Oedipus complex" in terms of the author's own autobiography and experiences may be reinterpreted (of course metaphorically, which is in terms of what I perceive the whole Freudian system of complexes to be -- a huge metaphor about one's relationship to power...) as a form of intellectual gigantism triggered in the genes and perpetuated by not knowing who one's own parent really is. In terms of this, one is never satisfied by having "assimilated language". One is already in doubt whether this language is not the true language, the most efficacious language, the language that will nurture and not mislead one, the language of a true progenitor and not of a spurious host, the language that is likely to last, and not be cast aside by more superior linguistic forms, the language that really is what-it-seems-to-be and not something other.

To introject the father's law through language under these terms is not an easy matter. One may introject the law entailed in a number of languages -- but who is it to guarantee that this is THE language? -- the one guaranteed forever? The resolution of the Oedipus complex through the acceptance of castration is the gateway leading away from awareness and experience of personal impulses and away from the bliss of mystical enjoinment with the world, but into an excessive reliance on the pure potency of language itself.

This produces a cascading quality of experience where one finds more and more layers to the onion of identity.  The self is never to be found in a completed condition, but always somehow perpetually changes before one's eyes. One keeps growing and growing as one assimilates new information about language and about its insinuations about realities concerning us that differ from our self perceptions. At the same time, one keeps shrinking and shrinking (as we find more in the language we had come to trust, which we had already assimilated and introjected as our own law),  turns out to be false. The self is thus constantly in the throes of change. One can never be satisfied with the result because one is never satisfied that truth has been furnished. (Hence the autobiographical quality of Marechera's writing as a kind of self-inquisition regarding the matter of how much truth had settled into him at any one time.)

Any colonial child (for example, I, or Marechera) is the bastard child of an elusive father whose ideology would not stick around long enough for it to have become entirely entrenched. Colonialism is therefore an ideology which produces children with an identity on the move. We fail to  'grow up' in the sense of what's expected, never becoming crystalised and firm. Those who mistake our personalities for those of plants or grass, that have established their identities through their acts and appearance once and forever more, will be variously, shocked and scandalized -- but rarely disappointed. In Marechera's terms, "we are changelings."

Repost: My own sources of emotional sustenance

Some people gain a sense of security and reassurance from following established rules. I'm the opposite.   Reflexively numbed when I follow rules as a matter of principle:   That was how I learned to operate in relation parenting and from early primary school onward.  In extreme cases, it leads to emotional numbing. I come from such a rule-following society, originally. We had to walk in single file everywhere and have various inspections. I can maintain this way of living very easily if I have some outlets, but I can’t maintain it easily where there are alien cultural influences, which I have to dive through mental hoops in order to try to understand them. Then I’m doing too much at once — and in an emotionally shut-down state, that’s never easy. Operating within the system means my feelings do not operate, whereas operating outside  it I can remain in tune with the reality around me.

ON THE PLUS SIDE:  If I shut off, I can handle almost anything so long as it’s kept simple. If I have to deal with subtle relationship issues, I cannot do that. My form of adaptation to stress is not suitable for anything but the most extreme situations. That stands to reason since I was brought up surrounded by extreme situations and adapted to them very effectively. When toeing the line and minding my Ps and Qs, I don’t understand subtle emotional needs, enough (my own or others')  — and that means, if I put himself within the system for a prolonged duration I will also not be paying attention to my own needs. That bodes poorly for my psychological and physical health.  I need to follow my own jagged path in order to restore my overall well being and let the blood flow without restriction through my body, again.

My tendencies with handling emotion mean that I am most effective with a short term crisis. That’s when my capacity for detachment and clear thinking really works out well for me.

Boxing Day Link Encyclopedia | Clarissa's Blog

Boxing Day Link Encyclopedia | Clarissa's Blog





In Zimbabwe, black people call themselves black and white people call themselves white. It’s kind of like when you have slugged it out in the boxing ring to the point that not only are you pretty resigned by now but you have also gained some mutual respect. So it doesn’t matter what you call each other.

Thursday 25 December 2014

Key to thought

People are such morons for telling me what my attitude to "race" is.  In fact I am grateful for the revolution in Zimbabwe, since it saved me from right-wing Christianity.  It made right-wing Christianity an impossibility for me.  It facilitated my shamanic renewal.

The mood of present day Zimbabweans is surprisingly liberated even as the infrastructure crumbles.  There is something intriguing and romantic in this combination of high spiritedness and descent to ruins.

I don't like right-wing ideology.  When a mass of people are liberated from it, that seems like some ecstatic magic to me.  My own liberation was slow and painful.  Better when it happens suddenly and in a flurry.  That's like soaring.

But I'm against fluffy contemporary liberalism because it can't understand even this emotion, which REQUIRES the harshness of the former regime as a backdrop to experiencing this new lightness of spirit.  Contemporary liberalism dispenses with contrasts and therefore I dispense with it.

How it all began

If I were to write my new story of shamanic initiation, I would say it all began when I threw popcorn into the fans and it shattered into millions of pieces but remained hanging in the air, alongside the TV cameras.   That's when I internalized hopelessness, whereas before that I had had hope.

I was constrained, of course, by right-wing Christianity, which was already a part of my nature.   It made me live too much on the surface of things and not see the possibilities in things.  All I wanted to do was to morally perfect myself.  So that I could escape punishment.   But I began to see that my parents saw me not as a person.  They were hitching their expectations on my younger brothers.  And resources were few, including showing what was left for showing an interest.

I would say that this doesn't bother me so much, as I am prone to looking at things forensically or what I term, "as engineering structures".  That was the manner of attitude that came most easily.  Looking back, it seemed I had an exaggerated sense of self-reliance.  I didn't think I needed very much in life from others, but looking back I was wrong about that.  Being wrong is just one of the costs one happily pays to keep a corner of one's pride.

Then I would talk about how I utterly failed to become an adapted migrant.  I knew this is what had happened when I was attacked in the workplace to the extent that I lost my health.  I realized at this point that I had been making all these sacrifices, unconsciously.  I'd even sacrificed my identity so that I had all but forgotten where I'd come from.  Instead, I felt like I had sprung into life at the age of 15 or 16, when I had migrated.

That's what began the path toward initiation, which involved nothing more important than trying to get back in touch with myself at an emotional level.   That was very hard to manage because of the internalised rigid Christian morality and reflexive fear of punishment, that had made me shut down my mind.

The attack made me realize that I had nothing to lose by opening my mind and gaining back feeling sensations.  After all, as I reasoned, I had already suffered the consequences for any sin I could possibly commit.

I began to initiate attacks on the enemy within, which was the instinct to repress emotion.

That instinct had been deeply ingrained during a time of war.

My writing was a means to access deeply buried feeling sensations and to convince myself that I had objective existence -- because sometimes I didn't feel as if I did.






Jennifer Armstrong's Books and Publications Spotlight

Jennifer Armstrong's Books and Publications Spotlight:



'via Blog this'

THE NEW ATHEISM





What you need to understand about NEW ATHEISM you can get to understand by reading the third essay of Nietzsche's GENEALOGY OF MORALS.  That is to say that the NEW ATHEISTS are extreme Christians.  

You need to understand about the historical trajectory of the ASCETIC IDEAL and how that reaches its full blossom in NEW ATHEISM.   Although the HISTORICAL hothouse of it is/was Christianity.

See
http://home.sandiego.edu/~janderso/360/genealogy3.htm

and the second last aphorism, 27:

Christian morality itself, the increasingly strict understanding of the idea of truthfulness, the subtlety of the father confessor of the Christian conscience, transposed and sublimated into scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To look at nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and care of a god, to interpret history in such a way as to honour divine reason, as a constant testament to a moral world order and moral intentions, to interpret one’s own experiences, as devout men have interpreted them for long enough, as if everything was divine providence, everything was a sign, everything was thought out and sent for the salvation of the soul out of love—now that’s over and done with. That has conscience against it. Among more sensitive consciences that counts as something indecent, dishonest, as lying, feminism, weakness, cowardice. With this rigour, if with anything, we are good Europeans and heirs to Europe’s longest and bravest overcoming of the self. All great things destroy themselves by an act of self-cancellation. That’s what the law of life wills, that law of the necessary “self-overcoming” in the essence of life—eventually the call always goes out to the lawmaker himself, “patere legem, quam ipse tulisti” [submit to the law which you yourself have established]. That’s the way Christianity was destroyed as dogma by its own morality; that’s the way Christendom as morality must now also be destroyed. ....After Christian truthfulness has come to a series of conclusions, it will draw its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself.

Christianity

The Christianity which I had impressed on me during my teen age years has restricted my capacity to have emotion.

That restriction has really been very, very intense, and I am only understanding now just how extreme.   It's very, very difficult for me to feel the full range of sensations.  I can do it in areas of my psyche that were not damaged by extreme Christianity (which causes one to shamanize).   I can -- paradoxically enough -- have very voluptuous and connected sexual relationships, since this part of my psyche was never damaged by the extreme Christianity that destroyed other parts.   But to keep the channel open to myself at all times is tough.

Once, somebody whom I had trusted as a friend laid into me with great hostility.  After that, I was unable to access myself for about five years.  I could read my work but it seemed like someone else had written it because I just couldn't get inside of it anymore.

Gradually, through withdrawing from society, I was able to thaw again, but this took time.  Any new injury can take a long time for recovery.  Red wine always can be an effective facilitator, but alcohol is also a depressant.

I have come to understand more about how this right-wing Christianity has done me harm from the perspective of observing how I have changed over time, from the outside -- but also from the position of someone trying to break out.   People, it is said, usually have a core to their beings that is self-involved -- that which we can call it primeval narcissism.  It is assumed by contemporary theorists that they have to train themselves to have appreciation for others.  In truth, I was locked out from myself and had to get back in.

I don't like Christianity or Judeo-Christian constructs, even today, as they produce this mental blocking in me, which is very dangerous for me.  Too much of that and I can overheat.  One has to be able to emote as a basic function of human physiology.

*ONE SIGNIFICANT POINT IS THAT BY DOING A LOT OF SHAMANIC WORK THIS YEAR, I WAS FINALLY ABLE TO ACCESS MY MEMOIR AGAIN, AND THOROUGHLY.  That is something I have never been able to achieve before -- I always only had partial access until this year.

Still, I am very allergic to Christian environments, though, as they lock me in, emotionally.  They lead to a deadening or numbing effect. I start to feel unsure of myself.  I like Asian environments instead, as these are often untouched by Christianity.
















Tips For "Self-Awakened" Shamans





I like this:  "The shamanic initiation is designed to drive you insane."

My shamanic work is against Christianity

My shamanic work is ponderous and slow.  Every time I think I have uncovered and dealt with all the issues, another one appears.

Last night's dream revealed the core.

In the dream, I am ferrying my family around and we've arrived at our destination, which is up a flight of stairs covered in red carpet, to a higher deck, where business transactions can be done.

But my family turn on me.  And that's the weird thing.  The sudden right wing attack.

Actually, it was my mother.  She was trying to get us all aligned to a Christian ideology that she had suddenly embraced most fervently, but in a stealthy and coldly-planned manner.  There's some kind of meeting taking place on the level just below the one I'm on and I'm descending the escalator now.  She's busy on another level, behind a pane of glass, where there are TV camera and sets running all along the top of the ceiling, along the center, and men wearing their banking suits.

I was carrying a small bag of popcorn.  I entered the plush room (much like a casino in flamboyance) and my mother said to me that I had no right to speak anymore because "age and authority" come first.  She gestured to a fresh faced man in an expensive, dark suit.   I pointed out that he was obviously younger than I.  But she insisted that he had much more authority as he could "take down banks".

At that point, I leant over from where I was standing on the escalator and I threw my bag of popcorn into the ceiling fans in the room where she was.  The fragmented residue of popcorn pieces, severed in the fans as in an liquidizer, hung in the air, in front of the TV cameras.   They were the glorious fragments of my demise.  

She said, "Why did you do that?"  I said, "Ask him!" pointing to the banker.  "He has authority, not me".  And the popcorn dust hung in the air.

Then I walked away, feeling ashamed of the reality I had found myself in, and hurt to the core.

That dream almost perfectly replicates the circumstance I found myself in as a teenager.  I had to get ready for school, but my youngest brother was blocking the mirror in the bathroom and biding his time.  I exerted my authority as the elder child, but he shouted me down.  I went to my mother to resolve the issue, but she had transferred all her trust to my brother, and backed his authority to take up the space.

I will say it very clearly, that I have only ever once lost control of my behaviour in my whole life and it was in this instance.  I picked up a full bottle of chutney from the breakfast table and slammed it into the ground as hard as a I could.  It fragmented into a million pieces.

I really do not like right-wing misogyny or Christianity and the whole of my shamanism has been a means to combat the damage this system has already wreaked in my psyche.  The psychological numbing that I occasionally have experienced has come from this.  I try to draw myself down deeper into my psyche through varoius methods, but last night I went the deepest ever, in terms of self-knowledge.





My controversial identity



Westerners do tend to entertain the notion that Rhodesians were nazis, when in reality they were more akin to this:

Wednesday 24 December 2014

Shamanism versus Freudianism, again: creativity comes at a cost

Who Understands Literature? | Clarissa's Blog

Who Understands Literature? | Clarissa's Blog



Well Nietzsche said that the author should shut up once they have written what they’ve had to say, because basically they are driven by spirits that they cannot hope to understand (a shamanic analysis of the writing process in a way).
As for me, I spy a deeper problem, which is that every writer has a sphere of influence or (to put it differently) range of cultural communication. This range, unfortunately (or fortunately) cannot be forced. It may be very limited, as in my case, it seems, because I write mostly about the unravelling of minds due to regime change and civil war. (You will see this cursory statement is by not means an explanation, but a delimitation of sorts.) A writer cannot manage to extend his or her sphere of communication by speaking plainly about their range. They can only acknowledge the likely delimitations. It is mental confusion to think you can build bridges of communication with explanations.

Shamanic destruction

The Success of Putin’s Propaganda | Clarissa's BlogActually, with shamanic destruction, you don’t get to stand so much “outside of” ideology, but under it. You dissove everything and it becomes a flux. Or like melted candle wax. That’s why so many people who go this deep and become shamans even lose their gender, at least temporarily. It all becomes melted candle wax.

Then, after that one’s sense of reality has to be rebuilt.
A real source of shamanic insight comes from this capacity to realize that how one had been previously living had been under the force of ideology — that is, in a sort of hypnotic state.
To know this, from experience, is to have the basis to stand outside of ideology and to notice the extent to which others are still susceptible to ideology.
It’s not that standing outside of ideology puts one in a superior position, per se. To have moved out from its hypnotic control might mean one cannot perform the same roles in the same ways anymore. What if one’s capacity to earn money was dependent on staying under the hypnotic sway?
Shamanism is definitely not the path to moral superiority, but to self-knowledge. It’s a very painful means to this, as well, because nobody likes to be dissolved into so much melted candle wax. The rebuilding stage can be hard. But what one does get, eventually, is an enormous capacity to distance oneself from ideology. Eventually.

Cultural barriers to objectivity