The Art of Extreme Self-Masochism

It is not often that I visit a wellknown cyber library of New Age/Ascension cult-waffling, yet it can be good for a laugh.

Take this recent offering:

It all started with the dishwasher. After a good night's sleep, I walked into the kitchen one morning to make a cup of tea and found my husband loading dirty dishes into the top rack. I stood quietly by, taking special note of how he "tossed" them in without much concern for how they were placed. Once he was done and safely in his office, I, knowing full well that the dishwasher needed to be loaded correctly, walked over, opened the front of the machine, and proceeded to rearrange what he had done. Just then, Beavis* walked back into the room.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Nothing," I replied, looking guilty as hell.

"No really, Butthead*, what are you doing?" he demanded.

I quickly explained how important it was to put the dishes in the dishwasher in a certain way to insure that they'd be cleaned properly. Before I could finish my well-honed argument, he exclaimed:

"That's ridiculous. They'll get clean regardless of how you put them in. Why don't you just tell the truth? You're a control freak and since I didn't do it your way, you need to fix it."

I felt like a little girl caught in the act of stealing candy at the corner store. I stood there, head bent, looking down at my slippers.

"Butthead," he explained, "what do you think goes through my mind when I come into the kitchen and find you redoing what I just did?"

I looked up with a sheepish grin on my face.

"It makes me say 'Why bother? It's never right and she's just going to do it over anyway.' So I don't help out and that's why you end complaining that you never get the support you need. Rather than receive my help, you criticize it."

Ouch. I hate when you're face to face with the person who knows you better than anyone else in the world and there's no where to hide.  Beavis was right. I was a control freak and when it came to asking for or receiving help, I got an automatic "F."

(* names changed because it's MY blog and I can write what I like)

Damn right!   An automatic "F", for Butthead who doesn't realise she is in a highly manipulative and psychically abusive relationship with a partner who knows that she prefers the dishwasher to be loaded properly ~ that this is a small detail that is important to her.  How easy would it be for Beavis to take the time to load the dishwasher Butthead's way once in a while......to make the effort.....once in a while.

You tell me who the real control freak is here and just how adept the freak is at getting the other person to believe that they are the one with the problem?  Daddy's Little Girl just might wake up one day to what is really going down with the Dishwasher Clown who lurks around the corner and waits to ambush her with a surprise attack. 

Oh well.....this is the stuff and nonsense that New Age nitwits thrive on...and when one considers the amount of energy it takes to run a dishwasher and the amount of water it uses, this calibre of anecdote is more EGO-friendly than eco-friendly.

Here's three syllables to meditate upon:

Hand Washing

As in wash your hands of a partner who knows what irritates you and just keeps on doing it anyways. Honey, that's a way clever sadist.  But I guess all these amusing little anecdotes help sell your crappy books.

Angel of the Gap: guerilla astrology

Astrologically, a Jupiter sextile Sun aspect has been popping balloons and burning boats from 23rd May and will keep locking and loading until 1 June 2012.  A cosmic Jovian wave that will carry me to the outlying reef of the Venus transit across the face of the Sun a few days later.  Last Venus Transit I will see in my current physical form.  I cannot remember being aware of the first in 2004, only that that was the year in which the life I had planned went pear-shaped and nothing prepared me for that.

I lay back in the arms of the cosmos, floating contentedly in the ocean of timespace, knowing that in the gap between 8 June 2004 and 5 June 2012, I have been well prepared to receive the spirits of aloha and kokua and to fulfill a vow I made when I was very small; to do something to help people - like - my Mother.

To help people find my mother agreeable?  And to which mother do I refer - biological, Earth, divine or archetypal.

To help people who bear a resemblance to my mother; is that what I meant?  Again, do I refer to a biological mother or the Great Mother or to Earth as our mother.  As we are all composed of the same elements of earth, then we all bear a resemblance to that mother. 

As for our biological mothers. Well, we all fear that we'll turn out just like them!  Nobody wants to be just like their mother.  It is an off-the-cuff remark: a Pholian jibe that strikes most of us in a chironic Achilles' Heel.

Recently, I learned of the mortal passing of the 'Angel of the Gap' - Don Ritchie - a local hero who
lived near The Gap at Watson's Bay in NSW for over five decades and in that time he talked at least 160 people out of committing suicide.

People like my biological mother.

The philosophy of angels is simple, uncluttered, and contained in 33 words or less. Mr Ritchie said:

 "Never be afraid to speak to those who you feel are in need.

Always remember the power of the simple smile, a helping hand,

a listening ear and a kind word."

Yesterday, was a way freaky Friday kind of day in which I experienced the whole of this angelic philosophy which we really need in our knapsacks while we journey on this planet amongst golden imbeciles.

Andrew Hamilton, the consulting Editor of Eureka Street, writes of suicide being the new leprosy.
Close but no cigar.  There is nothing new on this Earth, only people who have grown new ways in which to see that which has always moved amongst us.

I have come to feel that the practice of astrology, especially natal astrology, is one of the more sublimely insidious ways in which that which has always moved amongst us, seduces the majority to float contentedly in the sewer of timespace; whilst contemporaneously infusing them with the belief, that they are actually getting someplace.

 'Five men were sent on a mission behind enemy lines.

Four never returned.

The one who came back was badly wounded.

He died before he could tell what happened.'

This is a story designed to exclude the hearer.

We have to ask ourselves, those of us who work in the Mysteries, those of us who are in the healing professions - getting our hands dirty, up to our elbows in the psychic filth of other peoples energies - we have to ask ourselves:

......who prepared me for this.....and what the fuck!

At some stage, some of us realise that we are Shamans for the Where-the-fuck-are-we? tribe and there is really nothing you can do about that, except stay alive as long as you can, do what your skills allow you to do, and remain as good-humoured as you can about the human propensity for mass delusion: mad crowd disease.

Venus last transited across the face of the sun in 1882.  Might account for the eco-steampunk neo-druidic trend that has been around for a while.  Either that or folks are grokking the costume design of  Mad Max and Waterworld and are, once again, romancing the Trickster, the Loki, the Heyókȟa

Serious play.
Deadly fun.

Heyókȟa functions both as a mirror and a teacher, using extreme behaviors to mirror others thereby forcing them to examine their own doubts, fears, hatreds, and weakness. They provoke laughter in distressing situations of despair and provoke fear and chaos when people feel complacent and overly secure, to keep them from taking themselves too seriously or believing they are more powerful than they are.

Andrew Hamilton writes: "In Western societies suicide has the same aura that leprosy once had. It also evokes the same fear, which in turn leads to exclusion and to silence. It is seen as the inexplicable rejection of the most fundamental human desire to live. This is the foundation stone of all attempts to find meaning and to shape a human society.

Perhaps this explains why in some cultures, which allowed human life to be taken with cavalier freedom judicially and militarily, the bodies of those who have taken their own lives were treated ignominiously. They were buried outside the common graveyards, and even subjected to ritual execution. It marks a fear that suicide may be contagious and corrode the fabric of society.

The families and friends of those who have taken their own lives suffer doubly from this exclusion. It is hard not to feel at times that people who have taken their own lives have rejected our love, and have chosen to exclude us from their lives. Because suicide is so inexplicable, relatives and friends also commonly feel excluded from conversation. They feel unable to speak about what matters to them".

Serious fun.
Deadly play.

The thing with suicide is that there is no taking backsies and being enamoured with Death, romancing the gravestone is just a hidden way of demonstrating that you do not like your Mother: Earth as mother that is.   Y'all might like to think on that.

To play

Catch a face before it slides
from the plate. Screw in

an unblinking eye. Into one
corner hammer a tent peg

so a smile flaps but
holds good. Now shrug on

an amorphous coat. Hurry.
No. Panic won't make for fast-

buttoning; think reattaching
lead to dog, lock-picking,

wire-cutting. The fork-hand
easy but the truculent right:

a fist, a nest of magnets from
which you pry the index out

and fit it the length of that
silver spine, while those

around you spill the loaded die.

~ Aiden Coleman



 References:

Suicide is the New Leprosy
Vale, Don Ritchie
John Fire Lame Deer
Aiden Coleman, Poet

The Topsy Turvy World

Detail from Netherlandish Proverbs (also called The Blue Cloak or The Topsy Turvy World) is a 1559 oil-on-oak painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder which depicts a land populated with literal renditions of Flemish proverbs of the day.

Bruegel's paintings have themes of the absurdity, wickedness and foolishness of mankind, and this painting is no exception. The picture was originally entitled The Blue Cloak or The Folly of the World which indicates he was not intending to produce a mere collection of proverbs but rather a study of human stupidity. Many of the people depicted show the characteristic blank features which Bruegel used to portray fools.

Many Hands Make Light Work

To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

~ Marge Piercy

The Size of the Fight for the Pluto in Virgo generation

Living in revolutionary times is only wonderful and romantic when you are in your teens and twenties. When you are over fifty, it messes with your retirement! Because, like it or not, when you are older than forty-something, you are established, even if you’re not part of the Establishment. ~ Lee Lehman

Sputnik was launched October 4, 1957, with Pluto at 1 Virgo. The first moon landing on July 20, 1969 had Pluto at 23 Virgo. But before you wonder about the 23 degrees, consider that the last landing on the moon was by Apollo 17 in 1972 – the year that Pluto’s retrograde cycle took it back into Virgo for the last time.

It’s very easy to see the “can-do” engineering attitude as Virgo. For this brief moment in our history, nerds were cool. But let’s be honest: this was the space race – the USSR and the USA were in a contest over national pride. In other words, what we saw being played out through Virgo was the overbearing mutually assured destruction contest of superpowers, which also resulted in an insane arms race that continues to have severe environmental danger 40 years later.

Thinking about these past passes, I propose the following adjustment to our understanding of Pluto’s transit through a sign: Pride goeth before a fall. We can accordingly note that, while the Pluto in Virgo engineers succeeded spectacularly in getting us to the Moon – we didn’t stay there! We didn’t develop a colony, we didn’t follow up with an observatory. The moon launch became a dead end instead of becoming the gateway to the exploration of our solar system. President Kennedy perfectly embodied the Pluto in Leo call to put a man on the moon – but he said it while Pluto was in Virgo. The vision that got us there couldn’t encompass the concept of knowledge and engineering for its own sake – once the deed was accomplished, the funding was cut. We went for the wrong reason, and having gotten there, couldn’t sustain it. Pluto in Leo was gone, Pluto in Virgo spent, and the needs of Pluto in Libra would direct our attention elsewhere.

In the words of President Lyndon Johnson: “It's unfortunate, but the way Americans are, now that they have developed all of this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just piss it all away.”

Extracts pirated from Hope in the Time of Pluto in Capricorn

The Emperor Wears Pajamas

You are handed a life, and if you're lucky enough and smart enough, you become the person you want to be. My life is in direct response to the way that I was raised, which is true for everybody. Much of it is still connected to the boy who dreamed the impossible dreams. If you don't remember who you were, you don't know who you are. And I love the boy who dreamed the dreams. ~ Hugh Hefner (1926 - )

Did she make you cry
Make you break down
Shatter your illusions of love
Is it over now--do you know how
Pick up the pieces and go home.

Rock on--ancient queen
Follow those who pale
In your shadow

Rulers make bad lovers
You better put your kingdom up for sale

Did she make you cry
Make you break down
Shatter your illusions of love
Is it over now--do you know how
Pick up the pieces and go home.

~ words by Stevie Nicks

 For the coming Venus Transit of June 2012, we can use archetypes and imagery to imagine the Sun (representing persons in power) as a great lord or king, such as Midas, with the golden touch, who sits on his throne controlling everything with his gold; in fact, all he touches turns to gold. Everything he sees is for his use and everything has a dollar value. Our king is nearly exhausted with this tiresome ‘golden touch,’ when, from out of the shadows, glides a graceful and beautiful goddess in flowing robes.........Annalee Smith, TMA, April 2012

Playboy leaves Town

Kiss My Ring

There is much kerfuffle and speculation within astrological circles about the annular eclipse and I found myself ponderosing about Saturn.  Found myself thinking:

If I emptied myself of everything I have read about the qualities astrologists have applied to Saturn, then what would I know about Saturn?

Turning to astronomy, I know that Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun - the sixth or the sickest planet?

I know that Saturn is twice as far from Earth as Jupiter and that its most distinctive feature is the complex system of rings that surrounds it.  Saturn has a large family of moons.

I also just found out that my username in a well-known astrological forum, happens to be the name of one of Saturn's moons : Phoebe, which travels backwards.

The planet Saturn is visible to the nake eye for about 10 months of each year, and it looks like a bright yellowish star.  Except planets don't twinkle.

If we stripped Saturn of all its negative associations and looked at it the way we look at any other planet, we would approach its natal meaning and its lessons by transit with the assumption that the laws Saturn governs would be taught to us by the most cosmically efficient and graceful means possible. We will have noticed that the universe functions this way with the other planets, and we would expect Saturn to be no exception.

Imagine what our lives would be like if encountering an obstacle were just like any other event… except that we paid more attention.
~ Extracted from 'Saturn Without Suffering' by Jessica Murray, 2005

A little suffering is good for the soul ~ Leonard 'Bones' McCoy

  

Of Sky Gods, Mitans & Ordinary Tortals: Carrying the Fire

"...when the psyche is dominated by Prometheus with no integration of Saturn....Promethean energy then tends to be embodied in compulsive and unintelligent forms: rebellious in ineffective ways, stubbornly eccentric or nonconformist, unreliable and undisciplined, constantly proclaiming new ideas with neither substantial basis nor lasting value....Prometheus needs a structure for his revolution, and Saturn is that structure." (Tarnas Prometheus the Awakener 95, p112)

British-born, Canadian Gerry Goddard was an astrologer, metaphysician, transpersonalist, consultant, writer, teacher and scholar whose special interest was the bridge between foundational astrology and the field of post-Jungian transpersonal studies. He held an honours BA in philosophy from the University of British Columbia and a degree in library science from the University of Toronto. Gerry died unexpectedly in November of 2007 at the age of 64.

Not Drowning, Waving

Freud believed that in states of mental disorder, the suffering person can be lost to the world of form and definition, and dropped into a formless chaos of undifferentiated life, where the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain.  This is why psychotic patients often report that they are 'at sea' and cannot distinguish the outlines of objects, such as chairs or tables, because their perception is blurred, and everything appears to be in a swirling chaos.

Psychosis plunges us into an oceanic void which precedes form, where everything is intermixed with everything else, and nothing can be perceived as separate from the chaotic stream. Jung would call this the descent (or nekyia) into the undifferentiated life of the consciousness, although it shares with spiritual experience the overriding sense that 'all things are one', that everything is connected and nothing is separate. However in psychosis this is far from a pleasant or elevating experience. It is deeply destructive and the ego seems to drown in the ocean of being, rather than be swept along blissfully by its current as in states of transcendental meditation or spiritual rebirth.

This is a vital point of difference that we need to make clear. What the mystic or guru experiences as a state of bliss can be experienced by the psychotic as a terrifying nightmare of disintegration. The waves of preconscious existence can be destructive, like a tsunami or tidal wave, but they can also bring healing if we relate to them in the right way. The ocean of being is the same ocean in madness and transcendence, but the difference between spiritual awakening and psychosis depends on the nature of the consciousness that encounters the ocean. Here we might learn from observations made by anthropologist Joseph Campbell in Myths to Live By:

The difference [between the mystic and the schizophrenic] is equivalent to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instructions of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.  Can he be saved?  If a line is thrown to him, will he grab it? . . . What I am saying is that our schizophrenic patient is actually experiencing inadvertently that same beatific ocean deep within that the yogi and saint are ever striving to enjoy; except that, whereas they are swimming in it, he is drowning.

Jung warns that if the ego 'lacks any critical approach to the unconscious ... it is easily overpowered and becomes identical with the contents that have been assimilated'.  He says it is a 'psychic' catastrophe when the ego is assimilated by the self'.  Jung insists that the ego must find a 'right relation' to the unconscious, and this involves, first of all, the ego preserving its integrity in the face of the ocean of being that makes up the collective unconscious.

Image sourced from: california photo scout

If the ego is not properly formed, if it has been damaged by trauma or eclipsed by devastating inner or outer experiences, it is not in a fit state to make contact with the ocean of being. When the ocean comes towards it the ego will drown, because it needs to hold its integrity before the onslaught of the unconscious. If it can't hold its integrity it is lost in the water and becomes a subhuman fish swimming in the sea, or, more fatally, it dissolves into the ocean like an aspirin dropped in a tumber of water.  In states of psychotic depression or anxiety, dreams will indicate that the ego has been submerged under a wave, or lost to some distant galaxy or star.  The metaphors will constantly change, but the message will be the same: an eternal force has obliterated the temporal personality. This becomes problematical, as I will explain, if the sufferer is a follower of a cult or creed which views such self-obliteration as a spiritual achievement.

Classic symptoms of such 'psychic dissolution' are inflation, depression, paranoia, mania, catatonia and bipolar disorder. In each of these states, the ego has been eclipsed and replaced by archetypal contents that substitute for the personality - the ego has been assimilated by the unconscious. In severe cases of psychosis, this may involve identifying oneself with an archetypal power or figure, in which the person claims to be Jesus, Caesar or Napoleon.  Whoever the chosen figure is, it is apparent that the ego has been annulled by the unconscious, which has wiped out the human element and replaced it with an archetype that exerts a destructive impact.

Extract from Gods and Diseases: Making sense of our physical and mental wellbeing by David Tacey, Associate Professor in Humanities, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Published 2011