nousrose

[nousrose]

Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious. "The vital lie of character" is the first line of defense that protects us from the painful awareness of our helplessness. Every child borrows power from adults and creates a personality by introjecting the qualities of the godlike being. If I am like my all-powerful father I will not die. So long as we stay obediently within the defense mechanisms of our personality, what Wilhelm Reich called "character armor" we feel safe and are able to pretend that the world is manageable. But the price we pay is high. We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character. Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars…Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles - my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.

The Denial of Death

Ernest Becker

[nousrose]

To be able to contain the unfolding process of the daimonic, we need to cultivate a respect for the numinous side of our fears—of darkness, misfortune, illness, and death, or whatever trial the daimon may bring. How easy it is to write, how difficult it is to actualize in our lives. Long is our tradition of disdaining and defending against the unknown, against misfortune. Under our adapted, comfortable relation to life, embedded deep in our bodies, lies a primal fear that the daimon reveals. This fear leads directly to the unlit side of the opposites, yet it waits for the welcoming embrace of consciousness to release its underbelly of love, acceptance, and belonging to each and every experience of our lives. We must tread the battlefield of our reluctance and face the profound anxieties brought out by the emerging daimon before it will reveal itself as a hidden door to the Divine.

Embrace of the Daimon

Sandra Dennis

[nousrose]

In contemporary American self-help literature, the magic word is healing. The term refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficieney and performance. Yet perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation. The neoliberal ideology of self-optimization displays religious - indeed, fanatical - traits. It entails a new form of subjectivation. Endlessly working at self-improvement resembles the self-examination and self-monitoring of Protestantism, which represents a technology of subjectivation domination in its own right. Now, instead of searching out sins, one hunts down negative thoughts. The ego grapples with itself as an enemy.

Psychopolitics

Byung-Chul Han

[nousrose]

The realm of the unconscious is established in the individual when he refuses to admit into his conscious life a purpose or desire which he has, and in doing so establishes in himself a psychic force opposed to his own idea. This rejection by the individual of a purpose or idea, which nevertheless remains his, is repression. "The essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting or keeping something out of consciousness." Stated in more general terms, the essence of repression lies in the refusal of the human being to recognize the realities of his human nature. The fact that the repressed purposes nevertheless remain his is shown by dreams and neurotic symptoms, which represent an irruption of the unconscious into consciousness, producing not indeed a pure image of the unconscious, but a compromise between the two conflicting systems, and thus exhibiting the reality of the conflict.

Life Against Death

Norman O. Brown

[nousrose]

We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting new actors, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, the husband we are trying to forget, in order to re-enact the drama with understudies. And one day we open our eyes and there we are, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal. It is what the old mystics described as karma, repeated until the spiritual or emotional experience was understood, liquidated, achieved.

Seduction of the Minotaur

Anaïs Nin

[nousrose]

The restlessness in the human heart will never be finally stilled by any person, project, or place. The longing is eternal. This is what constantly qualifies and enlarges our circles of belonging. There is a constant and vital tension between longing and belonging. Without the shelter of belonging, our longings would lack direction, focus, and context; they would be aimless and haunted, constantly tugging the heart in a myriad of opposing directions. Without belonging, our longing would be demented. As memory gathers and anchors time, so does belonging shelter longing. Belonging without longing would be empty and dead, a cold frame around emptiness. One often notices this in relationships where the longing has died; they have become arrangements, and there is no longer any shared or vital presence. When longing dies, creativity ceases. The arduous task of being a human is to balance longing and belonging so that they work with and against each other to ensure that all the potential and gifts that sleep in the clay of the heart may be awakened and realized in this one life.

Eternal Echoes

John O'Donohue

[nousrose]

It is a modern error to take mysteries literally—that is, to turn them into problems that then have to be solved. We cannot solve mysteries—we can only enter into them; and then it is we who are solved or dissolved— transformed in such a way that we see the "problem" quite differently, as a delightful paradox.

The Secret Tradition of the Soul

Patrick Harpur

[nousrose]

The difference between someone who enjoys life and someone who is overwhelmed by it is a product of a combination of such external factors and the way a person has come to interpret them—that is, whether he sees challenges as threats or as opportunities for action. The “autotelic self” is one that easily translates potential threats into enjoyable challenges, and therefore maintains its inner harmony. A person who is never bored, seldom anxious, involved with what goes on, and in flow most of the time may be said to have an autotelic self. The term literally means “a self that has self-contained goals,” and it reflects the idea that such an individual has relatively few goals that do not originate from within the self. For most people, goals are shaped directly by biological needs and social conventions, and therefore their origin is outside the self. For an autotelic person, the primary goals emerge from experience evaluated in consciousness, and therefore from the self proper. The autotelic self transforms potentially entropic experience into flow.

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

[nousrose]

The temporary payoff of other addictions—drugs, gambling, food—pales in comparison with what the transcendent Other may offer. It is not just relief from this world's pain, an anodyne to boredom and depression, but a recovery of that fabled Eden one seeks in the neurological labyrinth of our history. Nothing has greater power over our lives than the hint, the promise, the intimation, of the recovery of Eden through that Magical Other. No wonder, then, the dismay, the horror, of losing Eden again, when its precincts were glimpsed from afar. Who would want to live on, having lost it yet again? The repeated loss of Eden is the human condition, even as the hope for its recovery is our chief fantasy. Yet, we all know that the Other, a simple, flawed human being just like ourselves, can never carry the full weight of our Eden project. Nor can we carry the Other's. Those two diagonal vectors in the relational diagram are the most active of all the twelve possibilities. Invariably, as they carry so much weighted history, so much longing, such a large hope, they will collapse. At that moment, one falls out of love, as the culture has it. More than half of all popular songs mourn this loss of the beloved Other. "Who are you," "I don't know you anymore." "You've changed," "You've broken my heart"—that is, failed my Eden project. But since my Eden project, my desire to go home through you, is essentially unconscious, I am unaware of its origin in myself and can only blame you for this great disappointment.

The Eden Project

James Hollis

[nousrose]

Concepts of time are also strongly conditioned in our minds, ideas of past and future. What is it that we call time? We have certain thoughts occurring in the present moment - memories, reflections — we label this whole class of thoughts "past," and project it somewhere beyond us, apart from the present moment. Likewise, we engage in planning or imagining, label these thoughts "future," and project them outside into some imagined reality. We rarely see that "past" and "future" are happening right now. All that there is, is an unfolding of present moments. We have created these concepts to serve a useful purpose, but by taking the ideas to be the reality, by not understanding that they are merely the product of our own thought processes, we find ourselves burdened by worries and regrets about the past and anxieties of anticipation about what has not yet happened. When we can settle back into the moment, realizing that past and future are simply thoughts in the present, then we free ourselves from the bondage of "time."

The Experience of Insight

Joseph Goldstein

[nousrose]

The opposite of anxiety is not calmness, it is desire. Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility of relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known. There is nothing mysterious about the anxious state; it leaves one teetering in an untenable and all too familiar isolation. There is rarely desire without some associated anxiety: We seem to be wired to have apprehension about that which we cannot control, so in this way, the two are not really complete opposites. But desire gives one a reason to tolerate anxiety and a willingness to push through it.

Open to Desire

Mark Epstein

[nousrose]

We often expect others to take care of us while we cavil against the inadequacies of our affiliations and wonder why our roles alone fail to confirm our maturity and provide continuing satisfaction. From this gap between the expectations of our projections and transferences, we may, from time to time, come to realize that we are accountable for how things are playing out. When that realization occurs, a heroic summons follows. What am l asking of the other that I am not addressing myself? I suspect that all of us have a sneaking suspicion that we are deferring this question, this responsibility, and have done so for a long time. This question is heroic because it embodies a shift in our center of gravity from the "other" out there, to the other within. In other words, something in each of us always knows when we are shirking, avoiding, procrastinating, or rationalizing. Sometimes, we are obliged to face these uncomfortable facts when our plans, relationships, and expectations of others collapse, and we are left holding the bag of consequences. Sometimes others get in our face and demand we deal with what we have avoided. Sometimes, we have interruptive symptoms, troubling dreams, and meetings with ourselves in dark hours, and then we must face the fugitive life we are perpetuating.

Living an Examined Life

James Hollis

[nousrose]

Death, in finite play, is the triumph of the past over the future, a condition in which no surprise is possible. For this reason, death for a finite player need have nothing to do with the physical demise of the body; it is not a reference to a corporeal state. There are two ways in which death is commonly associated with the fate of the body: One can be dead in life, or one can be alive in death. Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased all play; there is no further striving for titles. All competitive engagement with others has been abandoned. For some, though not for all, death in life is a misfortune, the resigned acceptance of a loser's status, a refusal to hold any title up for recognition. For others, however, death in life can be regarded as an achievement, the result of a spiritual discipline, say, intended to extinguish all traces of struggle with the world, a liberation from the need for any title whatsoever. "Die before ye die," declare the Sufi mystics.

Finite and Infinite Games

James P. Carse

[nousrose]

All willing arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one; both are illusions; the one is known to be so, the other not yet. No attained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification; it is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive today that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with their constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we can never have lasting happiness nor peace. It is essentially all the same whether we pursue or flee, fear injury or seek enjoyment; the care for the constant demands of the will, in whatever form it may be, continually occupies and sways the consciousness; but without peace no true well-being is possible. The subject of willing is thus constantly stretched on the revolving wheel of Ixion, pours water into the sieve of the Danaids, is the ever-longing Tantalus.

The World as Will and Representation

Arthur Schopenhauer

[nousrose]

Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being. Man is "a being of distances." In the movement of turning inward which traverses all of being, being arises and organizes itself as the world without there being either priority of the movement over the world, or the world over the movement. But this appearance of the self beyond the world that is, beyond the totality of the real is an emergence of "human reality" in nothingness. It is in nothingness alone that being can be surpassed. At the same time it is from the point of view of beyond the world that being is organized into the world, which means on the one hand that human reality rises up as an emergence of being in non-being and on the other hand that the world is "suspended" in nothingness. Anguish is the discovery of this double, perpetual nilation.

Being and Nothingness

Jean-Paul Sartre

[nousrose]

Released from the circle of attempted self-love, the mind of man draws the whole universe into its own unity as a single dewdrop seems to contain the entire sky. This, rather than any mere emotion, is the power and principle of free action and creative morality. On the other hand, the morality of rules and regulations based on rewards and punishments, even when these are as intangible as the pain of guilt and the pleasure of self-respect, has no relation to free action. It is a way of ruling slaves by "benevolent exploitation" of their illusions, and, however far pursued, can never lead to freedom. Where there is to be creative action, it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence. Its interest is not in itself, but in the people and problems of which it is aware; these are “itself.” It acts, not according to the rules, but according to the circumstances of the moment, and the “well” it wishes to others is not security but liberty.

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Alan Watts

[nousrose]

There can be no perfection or rising above all that is natural, only endless cycles of accumulation and erosion, disappearances and emergences played out on every conceivable scale. It is not our job to transcend our troubles and vulnerabilities, but to let the waters run through and over, and do their work. When something falls apart, another thing opens. We cannot know what will be better or worse, only that it will be different.

Weathering

Ruth Allen