SPIRIT~~~~
A great reason why I explore, and blog, and a whole host of other things I do, is a kind of ever-rekindling, and encouragement of my spirit, of my playfulness, and an encouragement for others to also share with me in my explorations.
What do I mean by 'spirit'? The word 'spirit' is a loaded term and has been much misunderstood I think in both the orthodox religious, and secular world views. In the former all-pervading and oppressive religious worldview they conceive of, and/or make sure their believers do, that 'spirit ' is in the sky as an 'all good creator god' who is different and superior from 'HIS' creation. In other words they do not allow a sense of 'spirit' in 'nature' and also, of course nature including our nature and the body and sensuality.
Any talk or action that would experience the spirit of nature was considered bad and of the 'devil', because they preached a 'word of God' from their Holy Book which claimed that humans were born in sin, and warned about the 'flesh' succumbing to the temptations of the Devil who wanted our souls for everlasting damnation . We however--the ones waking up to this matrix-- know them not only by their actions but by what they say, and a typical cliched reaction from spirit-in-the-sky believers to any talk of nature being full of spirit is : "Love the creator, not his creation", thereby implying their dualistic cosmology and maintaining a psychological and physical sense of division between nature and spirit.
In the secular world 'spirit' has been dismissed altogether. The duality has gone to its oppos-site extreme. According to the scientific materialistic mindset there is only 'matter' and no 'spirit'! Yet the connecting mindset between these two supposed different worldviews, the religious, and secular, is this idea that spirit is not utterly interfused with nature or matter, and therefore is it any wonder that in both worldviews they distrust and demean playfullness. This anti-playful attitude is not only shared by orthodox religion and western secularism, but also by ancient schools connected with the mysteries. So for example in the ancient Greek pagan Pythagorean school, laughter was a punishable offense, as it was so for the early Christians!
Austerity manifested outwardly in countenance is a hallmark of Pythagoras. He never laughed, and neither did his disciples. Bremmer cites examples among Christian desert hermits: Pachomuus chides Silvanus for boisterous laughter and forewarns a monk who will be visiting a neighboring monastery not to laugh. Melania tells her sisters to not laugh too much. Pambo reportedly never laughed, nor did Anthony according to Athanasius, who borrows the description from Porphyry's description of Pythagoras (as mentioned above), as does Sulpicius Severus in describing the hermit Martin. [source]
What do you imagine when I say that term 'spirit'? Most of us make images of words. For many, the word 'God' conjures up an image of an old dude with a beard wearing a golden crown with a stern face, and this idea has been painted by famous artists of the past which concretes the image in the mind for many people both consciously and unconsciously.
So what about 'spirit'?
Spirit as flowing playfulness. It is like when a child is full of the joys of spring, and jumping, rolling, screaming with excited joy, and in its element, and the old saying when seeing this is 's/he is full of spirit'. For many others, school enforcers for example, and even parents, high spiritedness, energy, 'unacceptable behaviour, can get classed as 'ADHD' and is drugged with drugs they aren't apparently at war with!
The animal who all of a sudden starts playing and bounding about. Or it could be a musician who is one with their music and this intense expression makes you also feel deeply moved, and you feel an interconnection with their spirit and spirit of music. I like these analogies because there is no assumed, and implied, separation between concepts and/or images of 'matter' and 'spirit'.
I was recently walking on a Spring day, seeing the trees beginning to leafing, and blossoming, and the clouds forming amazing shapes, and different subtle hues and shades, and the air full of unexplainable scents, and heard the birdsinging intermingling with these observations and feelings surging through my body, and all this life I sensed to be pregnant with meaning, with energy, and spirit, and it inspires in me playfulness, laughter, wild eyes, but as an adult in this world it is not the done thing to suddenly start drooling and bounding about in ecstasy, singing in abandon, and laughing insanely, because you may get funny looks and gossiped about by the 'normates'. You feel you have to hold it in when you not in the 'right place'. But that is what I mean when I think of spirit. This playful spirit being allowed expression, but this can also mean intense emotions---allowing the flow of the most deep expressive feelings, and not blocking them, but encouraging them their freedom to be.
One of the deepest insights I have gotten from psychedelic experience is the healing medicine of laughter.
Whereas if you see children or adults or animals etc who seem very upset, broken, lacking energy, they feel like they have lack this sense of fun and joy and energy and spirit. People who have been abused by culture, family, friends, and seeking help from the so-called mental health movement often become like this.The Greek etymology of the term 'schizophrenia', for example, means 'broken heart'.
Feeling utterly broken or dis-spirited, because their real feelings and spiritual needs are not even made aware of by a culture based on a religious and scientific orthodoxy, because of its toxic medication, and ECT, and complete lack of respect for their feelings and humanity---so we become broken and depleted of energy and spirit.
Worship of the super-real
In Nazi Germany free spirited playfulness was a criminal offense, and was characterized as "degenerate" and pathological. Artists who explored the playful creative unconscious understanding of reality in their art had their works confiscated and paraded around by Hitler and the Nazis as an example and warning to others of how degenerate humanity can sink if they do not worship at the Aryan alter of pure-blooded normalcy and realism.
The art they approved of is actually termed Realism, or Romantic Realism (an artistic genre also favoured by Communist regimes]and can be described as opposite of what was disproved about. Hitler is quoted as saying: "Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and
fields blue ought to be sterilized." [source]
For this fascist mentality the only 'reality' allowed is one looking and feeling like this, a painting by the Realist artist Ernst Leiberman, titled, By the Water
Not like this, The Scream, by Edvard Munch :
Entartete Kunst
"By 1937 the Nazis had removed more than 20,000 modernist artworks from museums and galleries, bringing them together for Entartete Kunst, a touring exhibit whose sole objective was the scorn and derision of modern art. Artworks were crowded into the Archäologisches Institut in Munich and given hand-scrawled mocking captions. Poorly hung and intentionally displayed with inadequate lighting, the artworks were surrounded by slogans like, Incompetents and Charlatans, An insult to the German heroes of the Great War and Nature as seen by sick minds. The exhibit became one the most successful displays of modern art in history - the first blockbuster art show, with around 3 million people viewing it before its thirteen-city German and Austrian tour was completed in 1941.
The Degenerate Art show was actually held in contrast to the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibit), where Nazi-approved realist paintings and sculptures were displayed. Held annually in Munich from 1937 until 1944, historic, idyllic and mythological German subjects were treated in romantic, academic and classical realist styles. Artists like Ernst Liebermann, Sepp Hilz, Ivo Saliger and many others, presented scenes that extolled traditional family values, motherhood, health and work, athleticism, rustic peasant life, faith in leadership and glorification of the military. Such works could be deceptively benign, as is the case with Libermann’s By the Water. Many looking at this painting today would merely see an "apolitical" study of three nudes - yet, it’s an outstanding example of the Nazi celebration of beauty, sexuality and physical culture through classical aesthetics. Nudity in art was never censored by the Nazis, providing it helped to communicate fascist ideology. In part that entailed the idealization and objectification of femininity, while extolling masculine strength and physical superiority.
So we can see what is going on with the worldview which seeks to suppress the playful spirit of exploration of reality. It tries to control consciousness. We can envisage their mode of operation using water as a metaphor for consciousness as it has been very anciently, the very ocean being in the waters of the Goddess.
The divided-from-themselves-and-nature control-freaks rather seek to build and fortress and guard and maintain hard, ungiving, concrete rigid grid-like shallow pans which keep the water regimentally flowing in specific channels, and often kept stagnant, in linear directions, and not allow the free-flowing playfull curious ungraspable life-giving nature of water which seeks out fractal passages, and deep depthless underground terrains for unbounded explorations of life.
Carl Jung's dislike of Expressionist art
This fascist demand for the 'real' with their comic-book ideal of the
superman, the pumped-up Aryan figure who is 'super-normal' set in a
'super-normal setting'. This superman figure is the "eidolon", or Olympian god
who was in the ancient Greek theocracy cut off from himself, from humanity, animals, seated aloft on some distant mountain, and having no spiritual interfusion with nature,
animals, plants, ecstatic immersive experience.
Monica Sjoo in her book Return of the Dark?light Mother or New Age Armageddon? writes how the intellectual, reactionary, 'channelling' of New Agers differs deeply from the more ancient immersive shamanistic plunge into ecstatic abandon, where your sense of yourself can become unknown within the play of the Chaos of the mystery of reality, which includes, not excludes, animalistic energies, and interfusion with nature. This is the un-conscious as in the more-than-human realms where all life and death has its dynamic roots. All of this sense of spirituality becomes demonic (Christian) and
pathological (Nazism / Psychiatry/Psychology). Even Carl Jung
did not understand its expressions in modern art claiming it reminded him of his patients
art.
The psychologist Carl Jung once asked: 'What is wrong with our art , that most delicate of instruments for reflecting the ...psyche? How are we to explain the blatantly pathological element in modern painting? Atonal music?' Jung himself painted and drew, and encouraged his patients to do likewise. But when the art historian J.P.Hodin tried to persuade him to write something about the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, in 1955, Jung refused, saying that he could not pretend to have much to say about modern art: 'Most of it is alien to me from the human point of view and too disagreeably reminiscent of what I have seen in my medical practice'. [Dreaming With Open Eyes: The Shamanic Spirit in Twentieth Century Art and Culture, Michael Tucker, page 56]
So it is seen from his statment he shared a similar view of modern art with his fellow Germans the Nazis, and his attitude may for some people be quite surprising for after all, wasn't Jung the one who 'discovered about humanity's 'Collective Unconscious', and was seemingly accepting of unusual experience, even writing about his own 'descent' into the 'collective unconscious'? The answer to this quandry can however be found via some 'feminist' (or I prefer, women who expose the patriarchal matrix) writers who point out Jung's typical androcentric aversion to the real meaning of the unconscious. His version, in modern parlance was a 'limited hangout'. He would of on one hand view 'the unconscious' as rightfully being connected with the Goddess, but yet create paranoia of her/its 'dark' aspect as being seductive, dangerous, and which could, unless supervised by a male-dominated therapeutic model, 'swamp the human consciousness'.
Although in Jung we find a psychology that is matrifocal in nature, as compared to Freud's patrifocal perspective, Jung's preoccupation with finding wholeness and achieving individuation also requires, Keller argues, a matricidal impulse.105 "His theory," she writes, "supports our suspicion that the matricidal symbolism not only expresses but provokes the Western development of a separate and andromorphic ego."106 That is, "the whole self at which individuation aims requires ultimate reconciliation...with the slaughtered mother",107 even if the individuation process presupposes an ego defined by separation from the mother.
Referring to Jung's Symbols of Transformation, Keller indicates how Jung came to the conclusion that the achievement of psychological maturity requires the dismemberment of the mother, symbolized by dragons or serpents. This, she notes, is reminiscent of the foul deed performed by Marduk in the Enuma Elish. It is only through the slaughter of the "monster," known as woman, that the hero established the world. In psychological parlance, symbols of dragons and serpents refer to the unconscious. Thus the maturation of the warrior-identified self requires that ego-consciousness be freed from the grip of the "deadly" unconscious. "Deadly," writes Keller, "presumably because it prevents the emergence of conscious individuality."108
What Keller means by 'the mother, symbolized by dragons and serpents' is meaning the Mother, and/or Great Goddess, in her Dark underworld aspect---the aspect most feared by the patriarchal mindset which manically seeks to control consciousness, keeping it left brain, superficial, and dumbed down, and fears 'distortion' of 'reality' which is viewed as 'chaos', and either being demonic, or pathological.
In so-called 'post Jungianism' Psychology we see yet again this fear of the dark aspect of the Goddess .
James Hillman, the so-called Father of Archetypal Psychology couldn't agree with psychedelics or "shamanic revelry' ;
Thomas Szasz, even though a
foremost exposer and critic of the mental illness myth yet cannot seem to understand the actual meaning of the
ecstatic experiences that so-called mentally ill people may undergo, and he has
been termed a rationalist which may account for his left brain approach. That on one hand will realize that 'schizophrenia', for example, is not a biological disease, yet will fail to understand the deep spiritual meaning of the visions.
"Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic
for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake
medicine for magic."
You can sense for example with this worldview from Szasz that he might struggle to accept a deeply inspired healing with psychedelics where spirits are met with and who help heal the body and mind. He seems from his quote to have a downer on magic.
So, anyhow, this mindset reveals a fear of 'chaos',
is 'left-brain', and fears its 'right brain', and the unknown/darkness of reality, and is divided from it, and
wants to suppress and control it. Even though a person may use left-brain analysis to critique the oppression, I don't feel they go deep enough to the source of this crisis if they ignore the real meaning of spirituality.
. When the body mind which I would term the bodymindenvironment (because we and our surroundings and culture are interfused) naturally
tries to restore balance and heal itself which is usually called 'schizophrenia', 'bi-polar', 'psychosis', and so is the very the community caught
in this trap or matrix, this self-healing is called 'demonic' and/or 'mentally ill',
and in need of exorcism or 'treatment', and therefore the community can only continue to not understand and resolve these crises of individuals which make up community.
James Hillman would offer his 'medicine' (words) and yet denounce psychedelics, the original sacred medicine, and Szasz would allow the 'schizophrenic' freedom from the oppressive embrace of psychiatric power, and yet not understand--I don't feel--the spiritual quality of the so-called pathological experiences, including what they mean in a political context. For Szasz the 'mentally ill' person who freaks out and kills someone should not be protected by law for being possessed by strange visions, voices etc, and be treated as a normal criminal and put in jail, but cannot seem to see that because these experiences a person may have are not biological disease does not make them not real. Of course a person can pretend to have such experiences to get off from going to jail, but the community must rather understand that these deep visionary experiences can be very real and need people who are not ignorant of spirituality to be there for support.
From 'Demons' to 'the Unconscious'
The
Christians feared 'demons' and the devil' and what they believed was
seductive manifestations of all that entailed such as 'lusty sexuality', and even
dancing, forms of music which they believed titillated sensuality. The Age of Reason that followed Christendom feared 'the unconscious' for similar reasons.
Whereas before the good Christian was warned about the devil thus:
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: [ 1 Peter 5:8 ]
The 'paranoid' Bible believer was dogmatized to have to be always be on guard and huddled together praying in monasteries for protection from the spirit-in-the-sky against prowling evil, for the person in the proceeding so-called Age of 'Reason' and 'moderners' the 'danger'
was now to be on guard against one's own psyche or else suffer being 'swamped by the unconscious'. Same old shit different terminology.
What the control-freak elite do is manipulate imagination via their myths, propaganda, and
occultism. By prohibiting psychedelics, or sacred medicine, and promoting either their worldview of religious orthodoxy and/or its supposed antagonist (which really shares exactly the same worldview) a Satanic ethos with its
conformity, and egotism, worship of the will, and its inevitable worship of materialism,
aggressive pursuit of individual success and fame, love of sadism, and
murder, and cyborgism ('Transhumansim'), and making it all seem cool to
lose one's liberty (whatever is left) by becoming willingly a robot, and puppet, with a false promise it will 'upgrade' one's
humanity. Fucking ironic considering actual exploring of human and more-than-human potential is
suppressed on all sides by the mindset offering the 'ameliorative' as dualistic religions, 'success',
cyborgism, or psychiatric medication!
Obsessive clinging to 'reality' on LSD
This seeking to control 'chaos' can become an obsession. Stanislav Grof who was a LSD psychotherapist and dealt with hundreds of people who underwent this therapy claimed that people classed with 'Obsessive Compulsive Disorder' when given even very high doses of LSD would fight their plunge into the unconscious realms, and this psychological blocking manifested as reality looking 'super-real as highly defined contours and shapes:
My experience indicates that the degree of sensitivity or resistance to LSD depends on complicated psychological factors rather than on variables of a constitutional , biological , or metabolic nature. Subjects who in everyday life have the need to maintain full self-control and have difficulties in relaxing and "letting go" can sometimes resist relatively high dosages of LSD (300-500 micrograms) and show no detectable changes...Occasional sudden sobering, which can occur at any period of the session and on any dosage level, can be understood as a sudden mobilization of defenses against the emergence of unpleasant traumatic material...[Severe] obsessive-compulsive neurotics are particularly resistant to the effects of LSD.
This picture [] reflects the sudden mobilization of psychological defenses against the emergence of traumatic unconscious material in an LSD session. The subject feels absolutely sober, and the environment feels "more real" than usual. The objects in the room are sharply demarcated from each other and have fortified contours. [Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, Stanislav Grof, page 28]
In the book Grof shows an illustration of the experience a person may felt when this 'super-reality' suppressing letting go happens. It looks similar to a Mondrian painting, titled Composition II in Red Blue and Yellow (It is interesting that in researching for this I was to discover that in the period he was doing this style of painting as shown here he was said to be obsessively compulsive!) [source]:
When the word 'the unconscious' is printed or said how do you think of that term?
Do you think of it--have the image of it--as being somehow just individual and not connected with the environment?
Or maybe you think of the 'collective human unconscious', but yet again, doesn't this give you the image of it only being connected with 'humanity' and our concerns? But I don't see it like that. I am aware these terms derive from psychiatry and psychology, and as seen they come from a worldview with the typical patriarchal limitations.
The way Grof, for example, conducted his LSD session with his 'patients' was to basically cut them off from their outer surroundings, and so he would have them wear music headphones, and eye shades, and lie prone so they could go inward into 'their unconscious'.
He set great store by this focusing on the 'inner world', and would downgrade the kinds of experiences one might have with eyes open as being 'superficial' in comparison with the exploration of traumatic memories, and a journey through what he claimed was the "cartography of the human unconscious', as he described it, all the way to the 'transpersonal realms'.
I am not here to claim that these kinds of introspective experience are not fruitful for some people, but I do not, from my own psychedelic experience, and experiences I have heard from others, underestimate the 'eye-open' approach of psychedelic experience. This can include observations and feelings in nature, but also observing the culture in action--actually, or also on the TV, and seeing deeper into the spectacle of it. Isn't this what Expressionist artists were doing, and then translating what they were imagining, seeing and feeling onto canvas, and other media? I feel that this kind of spiritual exploration and expression disturbs people who have investment in the culture, including very much so highly paid 'mind-doctors' known as psychiatrist and psychologists who may not welcome their 'patients' or 'clients' rocking the boat too much. Yes weare encouraged an 'spiritual inner fulfillment' but not the serious questioning of the established structure of authority which as I am hopefully showing is steeped in patriarchal assumptions about reality. For isn't it the job of the mind-doctors to 'fit us in' to the culture?
This control freakery is all around isn't it? The way they construct and lay-out towns and cities, in the rigid grid-like linear ways, and notice how this is being mimicked all over the world so that one city is looking like all others, and they try and build the tallest phallic-looking skyscrapers to out do other cities; the surveillance in every town, the sense of being watched by authority wherever you go (however they don't like to be watched themselves by the public with personal cameras!); the demand to be 'normal'; children forced into schools where they drill them into the conformity of this obsessive control freak civilization; all the way to the manic mowing neighbours who will mow and mow the grass not allowing one dandelion, one daisy, a chance of a day in the sun, and kill any 'weed' in sight! They now have these super-powered water sprays which they aim at their their driveways, etc., likely killing any life that dare try and defy the dead flat lifeless sterilized concrete deserts that these people seem to want more and more around them.
So, if your on my wavelength here and seek answers to this matrix of control which controls our outers and even inners (or tries to) you might wonder like me:
what can we do?
I feel we must then nurture our playful spirit, because they obviously want to crush it, and channel our energy towards their own agenda.
Who are 'they'?
The control-freaks.
The ones who pass laws, and support, and don't speak out against, for example, a war against psychedelic vegetations and potions that can inspire this playful creative spirit, as did the Nazis with their 'war on drugs' known in German as Rauschgiftbekaempfung, ('Fight against Drugs').
Psychedelics, or Sacred Medicine, can deeply help us see through what is being done to us and others by helping us become aware what we are being made unconscious of, which is maintaining this oppressive matrix, and when we become aware we then have more power to act, and to heal our broken spirits, rekindling our naturally playful natures.
