The weakened root system

I think if you look at the structure of my psyche, what you find is a structurally weakened metabolic self.  This does not mean that I do not have very strong COMPONENTS of a metabolic self – but there is a STRUCTURAL flaw.

 

I think this flaw developed firstly, from an early age, because of my father’s episodes of rage, especially in relation to whether or not he perceived we were conforming to social norms.  If he perceived that things were not perfect, he would fly into a rage.  Since conformity was not possible either – (the demand was too ambiguous and fraught with uncertainty) – I developed a tendency to flip a switch and not to be present very much, in relation to these rages.

 

That was, I think, the basis of an early metabolic flaw.

 

Later, when I was compelled to migrate, right at an age where I was just establishing an adult identity, I lost my roots.  This was like being a tree with no roots.  Without their very rugged and forceful vitality, I suffered from a compromised immune system and caught every little virus going.

 

The fact that I continued to be attacked for my identity made it very difficult to put down roots.  People were basically implying, “Your roots are bad.  Start again!”  So I kept trying to start again.  But one does not simply start again at the age of 16, with a different character structure, different loyalties and different notions of the world.  The fact that I took their injunction seriously and tried to start again meant that I did not have the stamina in certain situations to persist through them.  I kept trying to be like what the average Westerner expected me to be, but as this involved denying my basic metabolic instincts and adopting those that were not mine, the amount of energy it took to repress reflex and think non-reflexively was more than I could muster.

 

From the other side, my father kept attacking me for the opposite reasons that others were inclined to attack.  He was angry to the extent that I was even capable of adapting and putting down roots.  This made him feel like the whole war in Rhodesia had been for nothing.  To the extent I made a life for myself, I was considered wayward and a renegade.

 

The accumulated effect of this was to make me feel it was very, very dangerous to have a metabolic self – that is, a self that is firmly rooted in its own visceral sense of meaning and value and an implicit understanding of the social order.

 

When people attacked my metabolic self – my Rhodesian identity and experiences up until the age of 15/16 – I felt disoriented and unable to experience emotion.  My capacity to have feelings or awareness of my surroundings, apart from a narrow, tunnel-vision, simply disappeared.  

 

The basic structural flaw, as well as further events that continued to exacerbate it, made adaptation to modernity pretty much impossible for me.  I have tried – but I just keep switching off from complex emotional engagements with things when attacked at the root level (when people criticize my automatic or early organic programmed reactions).  It’s not that I am hurt by criticism, by any means – it’s just that I cannot draw any meaning from it, and it leads to a separation from my own emotions, so that I do not understand even myself.  I feel organically detached.

 

So, this is what led me into shamanism.  In a sense it is the fact that I don’t really have an identity that is allowed to settle in.  When others take it upon themselves to destroy the existing structures and to constantly attempt to remold you, you do not have an identity that you can actually work with.

 

Consequently, you learn to see things in an unusual way.  In particular, political and social boundaries and the methods used to guard and protect them become much more obvious.   Also, mechanisms of control within systems become clearer to observe.

 

For me, being always on the outside of things by necessity is what affords a shamanic perspective.  Unfortunately, what is observed from the outside it almost impossible to convey to those on the inside of the system, whose egos and personalities have been built into the cultural and social structures they inhabit.

 

Shamanism is a little bit pointless.  But one has no choice but to persist.