The Hollow Man writes to Leo

Today I had a meal at a restaurant at the summit of a hill high above Whale Beach, one of Sydney's picturesque northern beaches. The morning sunlight reflected brilliant white off the broad expanse of the Pacific. Frothy waves licked the sand far below reminding me of the view from 36 floors above Surfers Paradise that I shared with Leo.

After a sumptuous breakfast I flicked my phone and found an email I had written to Leo after he'd returned to Argentina.

I had the apartment cleaned today. I'm sure the agent will be happy with it. Today I was very busy because it was my last day at work and I had to get my remaining customers' paperwork completed before the end of the day. In the end I was pleased with the number of sales I made here in the Gold Coast. My boss wanted me to stay longer but couldn't get it approved. But now I am glad to be leaving. It's not the same for me now.

When I came home I cooked turkey breasts with potato and peas. I thought of you and our delicious dinners together. I miss you like hell! It's surprising. I look at the surf, I play with your orange "Smiley Face", I hear music, I clean the oven, I wash your sheets and towels, I see your keys on the table, I want to text you through the day, I watch the sky at night, and especially the moon, and I want to turn around and see you. In the morning it seems so strange to boil the water for my coffee and know that you can't hear it and know that when I look towards the study I see the stupid blue sofa and not the curve of your sleeping back. I'm surprised by the way this makes me feel a tightness in my guts.

I realise that I lived a long time without having a friend like you. I now know how empty such a life would be without a friend. I thought I didn't need to care. But I do. You made me care, and respect and listen and learn and enjoy and share. Thank you.

I remember telling you that I could afford to live in the apartment alone, but I wanted to share it because living with someone was more "human". Perhaps I didn't notice at the time, but you made me more human.

I wish you happiness, safety, freedom, creativity and love.

I felt I'd just been slapped on both sides of my face, once by Marco's neediness and once by his generous love. His feelings seem more real than my own right now.

Worldboy at Home - a Temporary Eden

This is the global paradise, the tainted garden of eden, where worldboy makes his temporary home. Click on the images for full panoramas from the video "The Feast of Trimalchio" by Russian video artists AES+F.

Search for the video "The Feast of Trimalchio" in 3 parts on YouTube. The piece premiered at the 2009 Venice Biennale and is now showing in Australia.

An Intelligent Life - It's What You Do

My previous post was about faith, belief, will, thought and finally just being. To establish the conditions for a new life and break down old habits, to end the downward spiral of depression and hopelessness one needs to change one's beliefs. This includes one's beliefs about oneself.

The techniques of meditation and mindfulness are key to this process, which is as much about disabusing oneself of false notions as about establishing faith in new ones. It's destructive creation! We are leading to a new understanding of ourselves and others. Beyond the self our relationships with others have a powerful effect on our understanding of who we are and where we are going. Patterns that we have established in our relationships over a lifetime can be ingrained, worn-in, habitual and enormously debilitating and destructive to our mental health and our interactions with others in intimate contact with us.

To fix these relationships and truly grow we need to change our behaviour, not just our thinking, since without behavioural change, there will be no lasting cognitive changes.

In his book "An Intelligent Life", psychiatrist Julian Short aims to help us make our lives happier. His message is about love, individuality, relationships and self respect. (He draws a distinction between self respect and self esteem). In describing the book http://www.anintelligentlife.com/thebook.html he says:

If we are not sick or in some way physically threatened, there is no emotional problem that is not caused by either our fear of being alone, unloved and rejected or our fear of weakness, belittlement and loss of control. Because of this, the quality of relationships is central to our self esteem and to our happiness and therefore central to An Intelligent Life.

To feel good, we need to act well. We see ourselves in the mirror of other people's reactions and if we want to like the person we see, we need skills for loving and getting love while maintaining our adult equality and making sure our own needs aren't swamped by others. Looking after ourselves means looking after our relationships.

Thinking is one kind of action, and our actions are in a feedback loop with our feelings. Acting well helps us feel well. Friendships and relationships of some level of intimacy and meaning provide us with the ground or stage where such actions play out. Not only that, but they open us up to love and encourage a sense of belonging.

For those of us who suffered a disrupted or disordered attachment to our primary caregivers as children this sense of belonging is something very precious. Julian Short argues that a threat to this belonging, a fear of being alone, is the cause of emotional problems. The book details how our relationships not only provide the opportunity for us to develop self respect through a sense of belonging but also by enabling us to act with kindness, to act better, and therefore earn that respect from others too.

The counterweight to this is self assertion, which is like a territorial defence of individuality. As has been shown in assertiveness training, when practiced in a positive, caring way, this self assertion also contributes to our self respect.

In my previous post about the book "Eat Pray Love" I was inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert's realisation that freedom, mental release, could be achieved through control of one's thoughts. Julian Short seems to be saying something similar, that individuality and self respect, even happiness, can be achieved by controlling one's behaviour.

The concepts of understanding and discipline seem to be intertwined here, and we seem to have arrived at the same ancient truths espoused by various religions via an exploration of philosophy and modern psychology.

Of course, progress on this path is easier said than done, this is the path of The Hollow Man, whose essential goal is authenticity and whose reward is self respect. What could be holding him back from achieving his true dignity? Fear.

But there's nothing to fear but fear itself! For no loss will ever be as great as the loss of attachment that broke his selfhood as a child.

Eat Pray Love - An Inspiration

While critics have expressed irritation at the solipsism and  self-centredness of the protagonist in Elizabeth Gilbert's popular memoir "Eat Pray Love," there is some enlightenment to be found in her journey. Initially impatient with her self-indulgent episodes I began to feel sympathy for the woman. If nothing else, she was good at expressing how it feels to be in pain, and how lost one can feel at the bottom of that particular well of loneliness.

So I began to give her the benefit of the doubt, and isn't that the beginning of faith? She began the book on the road of The Sinner, with a big hole inside her that she tried to fill with Italian food. This sojourn comforted her for a while, but fortunately she had planned to move to India to feed her soul as well. This is where she embarked on the path of spiritual growth, the path of Moonchild, The Adventurer.

Here's what I found interesting. It describes her discovery of the meaning of free will versus fate and how this can develop into faith. The task she describes is the essential task of The Adventurer, to exercise will, to control one's thoughts, if you like, rather than have them control you.

We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses – one foot is on the horse called "fate," the other on the horse called "free will."

....I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.

This last concept is a radically new idea for me... This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can't learn to master your thinking, you're in deep trouble forever.

On first glance, this seems a nearly impossible task. Control your thoughts? Instead of the other way around? But imagine if you could? This is not about repression or denial. Repression and denial set up elaborate games to pretend that negative thoughts and feelings are not occurring... instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they came they arrived, and then – with great forgiveness and fortitude – dismissing them. This is a practice that fits hand-in-glove with any psychological work you do during therapy... Of course this all takes practice and effort... It's constant vigilance

Sometimes we forget that the discussion of free will is actually about that joyous concept called freedom. By examining and controlling our thoughts we are exercising our freedom to be self-determining. In Eat Pray Love Elizabeth Gilbert says, "I need to do it, for my strength. Devo farmi le ossa is how they say it in Italian. 'I need to make my bones'."

Do we not make our own soul?

"The true God is the God within us," is how Robert M. Wallace says it in the first chapter of his as yet unpublished book to be found on his website http://www.robertmwallace.com where you will also find chapters from his book "Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God." The personal growth that we achieve by travelling the various paths through the dreams of The Sleeping Beauty is a kind of destructive creation similar to that described by the philosopher Hegel. Embracing contrition we create forgiveness. By controlling our thoughts we create our freedom. By exercising and examining our inner life we admit God within us, though God is beyond everything. This is a kind of faith, perhaps you could say it's a philosopher's faith in a philosopher's God.

Curiously, once your life is transformed by this faith, something takes over. One day my psychiatrist told me, "Just be." That was the answer to my question about what the end result of my therapy should be, how I should live once I had defeated my depression and my mental illness. So what I now realise, and have yet to achieve, is that through exploring freedom one discovers faith and beyond faith one just is. With no need for belief, the answer is just to be yourself. This is probably when you come close to knowing the God within you, your soul, and acting for your soul in the external world you are, I guess, someway toward living in harmony with what Christians call God's will, or what a philosopher might call transcendence.

The above quoted works are copyright of their respective authors and are quoted on the basis of fair use.

Moonchild

Eventually the little boy must have fallen asleep because he awoke at dusk having had the strangest dream.

He dreamt that he was in a large, sunny, public square in the centre of an ancient foreign city standing in front of a huge temple which was mounted on top of many massive steps that led up to its high columned entrance. It reminded him of a pyramid.

People were arriving at the temple to worship, or to celebrate something. A religious man was calling to the faithful, beckoning to them, herding them up the steps. Men, women and children seemed happy as they passed him, making their way up to the temple.

When most of the people had gone inside, something struck him as strange: he noticed that all about the great stone steps were life-sized statues of deer and golden calves. They were all posed standing, looking up as if expecting to be petted. Had this been a children’s park and not a religious temple the stone and metal animals might have seemed cute or amusing, but here they seemed ominous, alien, strangely cloying and fake.

He walked closer to one of the deer when no-one was watching. It didn’t look like a real deer exactly, but like a three dimensional cartoon deer. This was not art depicting nature, it was something masquerading as something else. It was like a child’s toy enlarged and exaggerated to a size that was faintly disturbing. It was clearly meant to represent innocence but it conveyed nothing but extravagant artifice.

Soon there were no more people outside and dusk descended on the plaza. As darkness fell, the crowd rushed out of the temple shouting and laughing hysterically. There was violence in the air. People set about smashing the statues of deer and calves, knocking their heads off with steel poles or big chunks of stone. From everywhere people came with pieces of wood from which they constructed a very tall tower on the plaza in front of the temple. There they threw the broken statues onto a great pile which they set on fire. Someone had caught the religious man and tied him to the wooden tower. The flames leapt high into the air all the way to the top of the tower which creaked and leaned as it burned hotter and hotter throwing showers of sparks into the air.  Each time this happened it only excited the crowd more. Moonchild was afraid that the tower might collapse on top of him, so he backed away into the shadows. Meanwhile the crowd had become mad, mad with fury and a kind of decadent joy. Soon the temple itself was on fire. The plaza was bright with firelight which cast their faces in shadows and light that made their grinning expressions and wild eyes all the more grotesque.

Moonchild waited until the tower had collapsed into a pile of black cinders and ash. By this time all the people had gone. It was a scene of waste and destruction. The stone and metal animal statues that had survived the fire now looked even more evil, staring at him as if to say, “It wasn’t our fault; why don’t you believe us?”

 

Will The Real You Please Stand Up?

I used to want and expect someone, a counsellor, a lover, a psychiatrist, a priest to cure me. I thought they owed me the answer to my problems and had it in their power to relieve me of my pain. After all, they were professionals, for the most part, who were qualified or positioned to see my pain. It must have been clear to them that they should use their skills to perform surgery on my mental state and cut out this tumour in my soul. Why didn’t any of them do it?

I recalled that toward the end of another of many sessions in which I had been railing against my parents and their faults and failures that my counsellor told me,

“Now you need new parents, don’t you?” “Yes!” I said, happy that finally someone could see what I wanted.

“Well, you’re never going to get new parents. No-one is ever going to re-parent you.”

“What? You mean that I’ll never get over this and nobody can ever help me?”

“No. Nobody can do that for you.”

“I thought that was what love could do. I thought I just needed to find the right person. Doesn’t everybody have a chance to find their soulmate?”

“That’s not the job of a lover or a spouse. They’re not your parents. Nobody else is.”

“Now what do I do?”

“You have to parent yourself.”

“What?”

“You have to become your own parent.”

“I can’t.”

I felt like I’d just driven off the road and come to a halt wedged in a ditch.

“I can’t be a parent to me or anybody else! There’s no way I’d want to be a parent. I don’t need that kind of burden. What a pain!”

“You have no choice.” He told me.

“What! Not only do I not want to parent myself, who would want me as a parent?”

“Only you can do that for yourself. You have been looking for your inner child. Why? Why else but to become his parent?”

“I can’t. That’s too hard, and besides, I don’t even know this inner child. I don’t even care enough to do all that work.”

“Nobody said it would be easy.”

I began a quest for the answer to the question “Who am I?”

If you’re like me, you have been hiding in a shell. You have been numb, invisible, silent and fearful for so long that you have stopped growing. Your personality is not yet integrated. It is barely pre-formed. It is quite likely "arrested" at one or more infantile or childish stages of development. This is not to further shame you; I mean to reveal the basis and extent of your vulnerability. Without your shell you would have literally broken down.

Inside your shell you may well host several personas. They are not mature or fully formed and exist in contention with each other. These proto-personas are your split-off selves. You have created these splits to accommodate your responses to the outside world. They each embody different needs and respond to different desires and fears. Imagine them as aspects of yourself that you may encounter in a dream. You are still asleep. Each micro-persona, each split was born of an unfulfilled need or an unresolved pain. They are dreamers. A dream is a two-sided coin that either represents a wish, a desire unfulfilled or a fear unresolved. We all have had both good and bad dreams. Psychologically dreams are neither good nor bad, but necessary; they are all the expression of the unresolved hopes and fears of our unconscious. These are our true motivations in life. To describe motivation another way, it is a form of internal tension. When we dream our brain is attempting to resolve tiny fragments of tension. This is the tension we feel when we fear something we can't avoid. This is also the tension we feel when we long for something we can't have. We are drawn upwards by our hopes and we feel ourselves pulled down by our fears. Do you sometimes feel yourself hanging by a thread?

What happens when we satisfy one of these desires? The thread goes slack and we feel the tension go away, at least for a while. The same release of tension happens when a perceived threat is removed or defeated. We feel triumphant, at ease and the chains pulling us down into the abyss fall away, at least for a little while. The name for this release is Dopamine. We are pulled up and down by the neurotransmitters in our brains that respond to, but do not cause, our hopes and fears. Our hopes and fears are created for us internally in our genetic inheritance before we are born and outside ourselves in the dozen or so years afterwards.

Abusers try to annihilate our hopes and implant fears where there should be none. Imagine what happens inside our little worlds. The motivation and reward system that enables us to grow is damaged. Each infantile and childhood phase of development is incomplete, leaving a proto-persona that remains with us for life, unfinished and undeveloped. This infant or child has infantile or childish hopes and fears that have never been resolved and so he or she contains unresolved tension, which develops into pain. Instead of developing as a whole person, we abandon our immature selves while their hopes and fears are still unresolved before they can grow into mature, fully formed personalities.  At each new stage of life we try to begin again, but as we are defeated in our developmental task we split off this unfinished persona and cover it with shame, moving on again, but each time with more “baggage”.

By the time we reach adulthood we have accumulated several split-off selves like old toys in the attic. The problem is that we have not replaced them with a fully formed adult personality because adults aren't formed overnight. It takes a lifetime of healthy infancy and childhood to form an adult.

Never at a loss for a strategy for self-defence we have created this shell around our split selves. The shell is a fake adult personality constructed to help us pass in the real world. Our real selves were never validated so we have built a fake self to earn the validation we need to get on in life.

The unfinished infantile proto-personas are all still inside the shell. What happens? They are still full of the tensions I mentioned earlier. It becomes hard to contain all of these unresolved needs and so we act out. We give expression to our infantile desires and fears. Adults in the world around us may find this amusing at first, but you can imagine some of the consequences.

One of the consequences might be to satisfy our Dopamine starvation by artificially raising the level. This leads to all sorts of addictions.

Some people live with long-term clinical depression. Others seek medication. Others embark on a life of crime or thrill seeking behaviour.

There is another way.

The Sinner

The Sinner has rarely heard a kind word said about her yet she can see the merest hint of goodness in others. She is truly unhappy and lonely, but she puts on an air of carelessness. She knows that to feel truly happy she must cast aside her cares and her shame. She must love herself like she would want others to love her and she must stop longing for fulfillment at the hands of Mr. Right. She’s never met him and she’s never going to.

She would love to take care of someone like a mother does. She is warm and forgiving. She is playful and sensuous. She tells you that you are lov-able and you must only choose companions who will appreciate you for your goodness and who will love you back. You must do it when it is good, not just when it feels good.

Control greed and addictions; avoid splurging on lavish meals. Cook and provide for yourself. Develop friendships instead of anonymous encounters. Work on self-esteem and self discipline. Comfort and care for yourself con-sistently rather than with luxuries. Attend to your health and fitness as part of your routine. Set realistic goals but forgive yourself when you don’t meet them as long as you resolve to try again. Reward yourself once you have achieved a goal. Remind yourself that you deserve to be happy, this will be a new feeling for you.