some thoughts in passing

I NOAH MAN PASSING THOUGHTS AND THE RADIANT FLATULENT APORIAN DUKKHA OF HIGH SELF-EPISTEME

                                            Prolegomenon

“There is so much I contact and cannot unravel, inverted insides which spread into the present-moving-forward, like ripples on a lake.  I peered into spaces that had made rooms inside of me, and when I entered, passing through memory's door, I sat, made bottomless by the mystery of what had passed.  Their unreality I strove to touch, because these passed rooms were a present within me, their riddles still urgent and unresolved.”

This gorgeous Borgesian stream of self consciousness of Noah’s speaks to the interior labyrinth of mind as it seeks to “unravel” the infinity of which we call “self.”  Self is an aporia, an insoluble contradiction of perception with limbs but no head, with heart but with no way of soothing its insufferable beating. 

“There is so much I contact and cannot unravel” begins the journey of self.  I contact, therefore I am.  And because I am, I cannot unravel. And because I am, there is only unraveling.  And because I am, there is space to contain (or uncontain) this raveling and time to waste unraveling in a stream of incessant thoughts.  And we know that time and space are the constructions of a mind that unravel and coexist in the unraveling as each other’s dark mirror.  We might even say that space and time unraveling is an “infinite jest,” a self-parodying consciousness “of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"  This abhorrence is the nausea of the unraveling mind.  In fact, time is space’s “inverted insides” as time is space’s crawl “like ripples on a lake” through an afflicted life we call circumstance or fate.  Is not this ostensibly synchronous meeting with Miguel also not part of this fate?  But, what keeps this illusion of self in play?

“I peered into spaces that had made rooms inside of me, and when I entered, passing through memory's door, I sat, made bottomless by the mystery of what had passed.”

Yes, we know the effulgent `I’ is the scaffolding, but what gives it the movement, the flow of tense?  Can we agree that it’s “memory?”  Yes, “memory’s door,” the doors of perception where as we enter find the marriage of heaven and hell:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

Noah or, more accurately, Noah’s mind or, more accurately still, mind imputed with an individual consciousness named Noah, seeks awareness of what he calls “the mystery.”   And here opens up the entirety of ultimate reality, the vast expanse of what is, as it is, that we all strive for, consciously aware or not: the attempt to transform the “unreality” of mind into the reality of true seeing.  For in [the memories] “unreality I strove to touch, because these passed rooms were a present within me, their riddles still urgent and unresolved.” 

You see, even in the pain and awe of mystery is the desire to reach, to transcend what we now are when we aren’t.  Sanguinity notwithstanding, there is the virtue of goodness in desire beyond the pale ventures of fancy (but, this hints at the metaphysical trap of an absolute, shame on me :)

And so here it is, subjectivity unpacking its memory bank and reaching out for meaning with its tentacles of linguistic-grabbing feelers and compulsively spinning its imaginative web through a stream of association in a protestation of hope.  But, what is meaning in this post --or, I should say, “trans” -- Sartrean throwedness of meaninglessness?  We are the postmodern progenitors of that meaninglessness who now no longer live under a canopy of illusory comfort.  There is no God. There is no self, and there is no longer even an ideology or master narrative to tame the terror of our mortality and the groundlessness the loss of self-existence lends itself to.  We will never again in history have a stable self-presence because, as the postmoderns have revealed, the continuous proliferation of signifiers denies meaning any fixed foundation.  

But, what is most amazing is not the fact that our existences are fictitious, but that we have become aware of our capacity to construct these fictions.  That we, the most anxiety-prone beings have finally broken through the repression that Freud so brilliantly described (in a way similar to Copernicus and Darwin before him) to see through ourselves before a complete ecocidal self-annihilation.

                                          I met a man named Miguel

“I met a man named Miguel.”   For some reason I find this phrase brilliant.  Perhaps it is because it is what it is, as it is, like Suzuki’s translation of Basho’s Haiku: “Into the ancient pond/A frog jumps/Water’s sound!”  “I met a man named Miguel.”   The rest of the story following Noah’s introductory brooding self-inquiry circles around this phrase, and the man, Miguel, like birds of prey hovering overhead.  Whether he realizes it or not, Noah is obsessed with death, and the exquisite details of his narrative (and indeed as in all his narratives and poems) are dripping with it (“[and] smelled as if the last cigarette had been smoked there a few weeks ago.”).  But, I will argue (who asked????) that this obsession is not the morbid, necrophilic dispursement of images psychologically connected to his scatological preoccupations; no, these death throes engender the death of the self, as inferred by his other preoccupation, spiritual insight.  You see, there is no spiritual insight that burnishes the self; for a spiritual insight to be true, the ego needs to be buried. 

And so, in this beautifully woven mosaic of visual consciousness, Noah is reaching.  At first, for Miguel, “that thickly dreadlocked man whose Spanish came forth slow and sad.”  But, then, for Miguel’s story of loss and nostalgia, in some languorously archaic or archetypal chthonic connection to the Native American, as if both Noah and Miguel are praying in front of a sacrificial altar of stone dripping with the blood of history. 

“…once he sought in me a way to reach them, wondered if I had seen their reservations and witnessed their tears.  He played me their music.  He wanted to make their story his own, to kiss the sandy ground where they bled and died.  We knew he never would.  He was silent and private and desperate.  He could not help but show me a soul torn from its own belonging”.

 Who is this Miguel in Noah’s consciousness?  Who is this Noah trying to “render” Miguel and the “impossibility” of his presence, which he “encountered, just one moment in the unreal living of these vanished spaces”?  It is the brooding that claims my attention, the deep desire to find something he can almost taste but not articulate because perhaps he cannot feel it and make it his own.  What is this mystery, what Noah calls the “still contained…unknowing”?  What is this self that knows or fails to know, or grieves because something slipping away is the dying of what is always dying, the clinging and grasping at our mother’s breast, the God or gods that once gave us comfort in the terror of our inchoate awareness of our irremediable separation from nature, from ourselves, from each other? 

Perhaps this is the mystery, the mystery of connection and the way connection seems so unskillfully sustained or realized or felt.  I, along with Noah, find myself grieving of all the lost connections and the connections desolated and extinguished by violence and misunderstanding and fear, all of which we call ignorance.  But, as long as that “impenetrability” continues to be “pierced by echoes,” and even if those echoes are “haunting the present with a reminder of unknowing--doors left unopened,” we must realize, we must come to understand, that those losses are merely shadows on the wall of consciousness that appear real only because of our attachment to a brooding self that sustains them; a perpetuating fostered by the belief in an independent, permanent self, and so, disconnected or worse, unconnected to all beings, indeed, all phenomena.  But, to realize this, we must first find our(selves) through our “Miguels” and perhaps feel as deeply as we can over and over until the mask of fear is unveiled and the shadow of realness for the last time drops away to make room for the ever-present light.

I am bathing in your posts. 

bubbles which disappear as soon as you think you see them.

I can’t recall how it started. Alex was working on the opera and I had Richard. Maybe that was the problem. He showed up in my life unexpected. I don’t know where the cdonnection came from but it was instant. Did I know what he had done when we first met? Did I care?

The investigation was long and he was always there, helping me out. They say killers want to be caught but this was an exaggeration of the fact. He would talk to me in riddles and games. Always a smile on his face. No one noticed how much time we were spending together?

He had me make a doll. To show me where he cut her up. I did it, willingly. Sometimes I would stop and wonder what the hell I was doing. How could he make me laugh like that? They found her torso in an old public swimming pool. I never asked why he did it. He left and I went back to whatever it was that I was doing.

Some time later I was in a sporting goods/hardware store. He had come there to show me something? Or had I called him? The police were there as well. I found myself keeping in step with him, following him like a curious child. He would touch me sometimes, on the shoulder or the small part of my back in such a warm, loving way. I couldn’t help but forget who he was. What he was.

We stood facing an epic wall of tiny drawers. Screws, fasteners. He opened several of them and pulled out small objects. They were mementos from his life but they were mementos from my life. He pulled things that hurt me but he did it softly. Then, for the first time I was afraid of him as he told me to look for the last thing. I could feel it as I got closer. It hummed inside of me. I reached out to the drawer and started crying, screaming at him that he was a monster. He held me and I can't recall if I ever looked inside the drawer.

We wandered around the aisles, the police officer keeping me company. Slowly I felt bad about what I had said. I realized that I was never afraid of him until then and I wanted so much to say sorry. We started finding more things. Hidden around the store. Evidence that had never surfaced. Mixed up. Pills, pottery. A woman, sales rep, told us about something hard to reach.

She then went into the bathroom to try to dispose of the baby she had killed earlier. He sniffed her out like a patrol dog.

We had lunch after that. I was finding it difficult to let him go. His eyes were the soft part of my skin. I vaguely wondered how it was possible that he could be here alone with me. He confessed to the murder. Was it one? Or were there many? I could not deny this strong attraction that I felt and I’m not even sure whether or not it was edged with shame.

For a moment I could see his thoughts which were my thoughts. They were of absolute consumption. Total merging. We could be one. His eyes never left me. Faithful and calm; even though I was the one who turned him in. I was the first betrayal.

I woke up wondering one thing…

Is my Animus a serial killer?
 

What a dream?

I am screaming out to Om.   What do you think of this one?   Come on man.   This is your gift - unwrap the present!

was a boo boo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fscUhJGzWSI

On Friday, a friend of mine told me his ex-girlfriend was getting married and it left in him this heavy feeling he just couldn’t quite grasp.  I asked him to get under it more, which he knows means to go deeper into the feeling and allow himself to enter a more free associative stream of thought.  The way I contrast the free-associative from our usual way of thinking is that it privileges the feeling side of thought rather than the more logical and rationally-ordered side. Getting under is a metaphor for tapping into what is unconscious and feelings represent the portal and entry point of that awareness.  Another way of saying it is that the method of association draws out what is repressed, that is, it potentially reveals what has been rejected from conscious awareness.  Freud formulated many brilliant ideas and repression might in fact be the most seminal.  What he observed was that feelings and thoughts too painful to confront had to be repressed in order for the individual to adapt to socially determined constructs deemed “normal.” But, these repressed experiences were dangerous, for, as Jesus was attributed to have said, “If you do not draw forth what is within, what is within will destroy you; if you draw forth what is within, what is within will save you.”  What Freud and psychoanalysis since have observed, was that the awareness of what has been repressed, vis-à-vis psychological insight, will relieve painful psychic (and often physical) symptoms.

Psychologically speaking, that is all well and good, but what Freud believed was ultimately at the bottom of repression – sexual impulses – brought psychoanalysis to metaphysical conclusions that leave some doubt.  Which brings me back to my friend.  He shared with me that his ex’s engagement reminded him that at 35 he’s still not married and it makes him feel ashamed.  And it leaves him with this gnawing anxiety that he won’t live up to these expectations he has had for himself.  Ah, anxiety!  There it is.  There is that beautiful questioning drawing forth what is within.  But, what in fact is within?  Or, more precisely, what is ultimately within that leaves my friend in a perpetually state of lack, not living up to this or that? 

Ironically, I remember my analyst, who ascribed himself as an existentialist, saying that Freud didn’t go far enough.  "Death is the problem, love is the antidote;" that is, awareness of our imminent death potentially leads to love.  One form (or rather, disguise) of death anxiety is objectification of experience and people, sitting back and not "having the experience." Yet, this flight from death awareness itself takes the form of death.  One of the most profound paradoxes of love is that a deep awareness of death gives us increased openness to love. We begin by first stripping away the judgments, labels and protestations and getting under the subject/object split by acknowledging to ourselves that we "exist." 

It sounded great at the time, but I had a very interesting question.  If we never experienced death, how can we have death anxiety.  Without the experience, death itself is nothing more than a symbolized displacement of something we have experienced: loss and groundlessness.  I felt the best we can do is say we have anxiety around a psychological death in whatever form mind has already experienced it in its fragile negotiation of needs.  What Freud and my analyst were not able to let go of was the game of ego itself; that the problem is not the tension between sexual impulses being met or not met, or our battle of life in its awareness of death, for example, but of thinking itself.  To see the self as constantly fighting a lack of this or that, the game of dualistic ping-pong leaves an infinite Sisyphean trail of unfullfilment and suffering (the dukkah of dis-ease).  What I think the ultimate problem is, is our commitment to self-existence most intractably held in our belief of a self, a self that is born, dies, loves, loses love, fails, succeeds, etc.  And the anxiety we ultimately suffer from is the loosening of that self whenever its solidity is challenged (which is constantly). 

Now, in my friend’s case, this self has been constructed around a larger series of cultural selves: the male self, the Jewish self, the 35 year old self, the self of social standing and socioeconomic standards for success; the with or without wife and family self, etc.  You get the picture.  In each of these identities, there is an expectation and its opposite, which represents a lack.  As I explained to my friend, we might place all these identities across a horizontal axis, each translatable as different symbols for self.  To translate means to carry over ( L. translatus).  If we meet one expectation, such as, getting married, we then move on to a new anxiety around having children, and then making enough money and setting up a retirement account and then whether we’re leaving enough money to our children when we die.  Our lives become a series of anxieties based on culturally-determined realities regarding who we are, and so meaning devolves into, “Did I meet my expectations/goals.” 

Until he (and all of us!) gets underneath that horizon of cultural identity and questions the validity of self-existence itself (and the nondual awareness that will emerge out of that dialectic/interrogation), therapy will never really reach the therapeutic, which is transformation of his very awareness of mind’s delusive belief in its own solidity (independent and permanent).

Before he left, he said he really understood what I was trying to convey, but what do I do?   I smiled and told him the story of the wife who got stuck on the toilet, or rather, in the toilet.  She yelled for her husband who was at a loss and called a plumber.  She said, “Harry, I’m exposed!”  Quickly, he removed his yamika and put it over his wife’s genital area.  The plumber finally came and looked everything over carefully and said, “Well, I could get you out pretty easily but the rabbi is a goner.”

I am afraid of running out of time which I guess in someway can also be death since where are you when your time runs out? Dead. I’m afraid that I had such a late start in life and I never seem to be satisfied that I am going to catch-up. If I look back at the sociological imposed roles you mention in your post Om, I see that all of the fears that align with running out of time are completely aligned with these roles. Will I be successful in having a child by the time I am 40? Will I be able to buy a home in this market? Will I save enough for my children to have a good life, for us to retire? I can go on and on with the what if's, but as I was sitting and thinking about this and them I realized they all aligned to what society says is the norm and what comes next in your life. I feel like if I just knew how much time I had I could work within those parameters. It is easy to say, sure live like each day is your last or as if you will live forever but fear is real; fear is memory of disappointment in childhood or needs not being met that prevented true and pure growth from taking place. So are you saying that always achieving and thriving and grasping for the next step in this ever going merry-go-round that is spinning of societal expectations is all just powered by fear/memory of fear?  Can or do you ever want things in your life like career success, marriage, children, home ownership, financial success, etc that are not guided by fear? I’d have to think so. 

It is not a coincidence nor insignificant that psychotherapy has taken on religion’s search for meaning, at least in the increasingly self-centered, secularized Western world.  Much like religion, psychotherapy offers consolation to a self separated from its nature and the world; yet, in a peculiar way that fortifies, defends and promotes the self.  To this end, religion offers myths, narratives, and rituals, while psychotherapy proffers its own version of myth, clinical theories.  Instead of man’s relationship to God, psychological theories construct models of human functioning in an attempt to explain the abnormal (individual) against the (collective) standard of normalcy.  The danger of theory (from Gk. Theorein, “to look at”) is similar to that of myth, but perhaps more so.  Theory potentially shapes the superficial contours of meaning for the purpose of adaptation rather than cultivating perspective (from L. perspicere, “to look through”), in the forms of critical thinking and deepening awareness through feelings toward the higher aim of transformation.  Even insight, which the more psychoanalytic theories tend to emphasize, is often defined against the same backdrop of normativity.  And so, insight means distinguishing what is normal versus what is abnormal.  This is what I would call an ontology of convention or normativity. 

Because psychotherapy historically sought to align itself with science (and still does), it removed the fictive aspiration of embodiment through personal narrative and thus reduced myth to its weakest, most simple and superficial versions.  This is what I call the myth of pathology.  In the myth of pathology, personal crisis loses its opportunity for transformation and tragically remains mired in the symptomological. 

In the myth of pathology, psychotherapy rides the dangerous wave of accommodation and conventionalizing meaning.  By reducing the therapeutic to symptom-reduction, for example, the shared story of myth responds more to communal needs, and most often including the need to justify existing power relations.   To superimpose the symbols of theory on a “self,” with the ultimate objective of strengthening its social status, rather than deconstructing its very way of thinking, is the surest way to genocide from mass psychic asphyxia.  The fictive is the only way out of this mess because the fictive is imagination deploying its poets and logicians in the very battle of its life.  Its ultimate goal is to destroy the very self with the hope of, not a pyrrhic victory, but rather (re)vitalizing the very paradox that liberates it from suffering.  The fictive is the logos for the masses as mythos, shared narrative. 

This is where psychotherapy begins: with the story.  But, the story must be and stay personal, and radically so; it must not devolve into the social myth that reinforces and defends current social values or practices, though these are included, too, as part of the myth.  For the personal and the social are never separate, though the personal, in its therapeutic pilgrimage, seeks to transcend the social.  Indeed, the true therapeutic aim is for the personal to transcend itself, that is, to transform its very way of knowing and therefore being, from self-existent to absolutely interconnected.  This is the ultimate goal, if you will, of the therapeutic: nondual awareness.  It begins with the self looking like itself; then the self no longer looking like itself; to finally self looking like itself, but through the paradox of nondual awareness: where suffering exists and is not real; where birth and death exist and are not real; where self exists but exists only conventionally. 

I have a vision for psychotherapy (vision has a unique etymology and means not only seeing, or holding in the imagination, but it also means “I know.”  It is a knowing, a foresight, which suggests not so much being able to see into the future, but rather a seeing as if past and future aren’t real, or rather are already present now.  This is what I call faith -- This is why I believe, through intention, we can overcome the fate of our psychological history with faith.).  The aim of psychotherapy is transformation, but it begins with inquiry, and the inquiry begins with:

1. Why we are here (in therapy) as an individual consciousness (a perspective of Psychology, subjective motivational experience).
2. That we are here (a perspective of Ontology, levels of being).
3. Ways we are here (a perspective of Epistemology, levels of knowing).
4. How we are here (a perspective of Phenomenology, the essence of consciousness as experienced from one’s subjectivity).
5. Why we are here as a collective consciousness (a perspective of Teleology, of consciousness directed toward the perfection of its own nature).

As can be inferred, the key factor of change is psychological and introspective, and begins with interpretive scrutiny as a basis for knowledge.  It is a developmental shift from identification to empathic immersion into our own thought process so that we can begin to emphasize the importance of thinking and dialogue.  The therapeutic not only tolerates the dialectical tension of opposing identities and viewpoints, and the accompanying ambiguity of process-oriented activity, but is a way to mitigate the belief in the self as a strategy against failure or lack. This last point is critical because it shifts the belief in the therapist as “healer” to the therapist as facilitator in the healing process.  Importantly, this is a shared process away from power and idealized authority as armor against failure and lack to interdependency, dialogue and mutuality as paradoxical positions of self-empowerment, self-care and faith. 

Thus, as seekers in the therapeutic process, we come to the inevitability of holding in mind our paradoxical position of mutuality while also feeling the impact and the asymmetrical burden of responsibility and power we assume.  And it is the burden of knowledge as power itself that is the responsibility.  As the self strengthens and then dissolves through the process of individuation and separation, the engendered guilt and anxiety we necessarily encounter must be psychologically contained and without the reassuring certainty of any real structure.  There is the inevitability of identification with the ideal of mutuality and uncertainty, with subjectivity and the dialectical and dialogical as modes of relating and overcoming conflict.  But, it is in the vehicle and process of thinking, and the tools of knowledge and interpretation that resolve the dilemmas that give rise to the authority position, and remedy against the potential of these new values as counter-ideals, which potentially encourage their own version of conformity.

In my vision, I see consciousness as evolving, in a bending towards the sun, like a field of sunflowers.  We the seekers are like climbers on ropes, pulling with bodies and arms upward, feeling for the footholds and crags, yet seeking the wider view outside (ex-stasis) the strictures of rope and pull -- the holds and spaces time erodes in the shaking out of self.  And we hold out our hands like discovery, swiftly slipping into the contorted mystery where there is a swelling within, like a great mountain against the greens of earth rippling into the reds, white and gray of sky.  And, in the end (which is always the beginning), the therapeutic self wants to let go, wants to surrender like the black feather of a crow floating effortlessly around light-- or like a blue flame slow burning beneath the heart.

Now that I finished my post on psychotherapy, I could wash it down with this one.  Thank all of you for your thoughtful responses.  You saved me from having to respond to myself.  Emily, I completely understand the “enormous fear and anxiety” you have and continue to experience with the loss of your loved ones. The pain can be so great that it gets trapped in the body and so feels like a physical loss as well.  Your question about how to live with the knowledge of loss is indeed the question but not the only question.  There is a deeper question that speaks to the meaning of that loss.  It is the “why” of loss that, when penetrated becomes the “what” of loss.  What I mean is that the answer to why we lose our loved ones -- and eventually even ourselves – leads us to the spirit of life itself.  Through the deep feelings of loss (and we must move all the way through!), the moving through the profound sadness, anger, guilt, and depression (In Kübler-Ross’ “grief cycle” she identifies the stages of shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and finally acceptance) potentially opens for us the most fundamental questions of death itself: its meaning in the context of life.  Yet, to understand its core or ultimate meaning requires that we understand the self that loses; that is, Who is this self?  I believe that until we ask this question, we will never truly understand the meaning of death and, more importantly, its binary opposition, life. 

To come to realize the illusory quality of self (that it exists but is not ultimately real) does not mean to never again experience loss; it merely means that the loss we experience feels less and less like utter loss; that the faith one holds is based on a very deep wisdom that no longer separates life from death and death from life and, as a result, transcends the attachment to and identification with the belief in an independent, permanent self that both lives and dies.  Instead of a self that lives and dies, we become transformed into living (or, as James might say, “earning living”). 

The key to your experience of loss is this: “so I imagine that loss occurring again and again.”  This is the spin cycle of suffering, when we replace the imaginative of thinking with thinking without imagination, or the obsessive thinking of fear.  You are correct to say we “need a strong sense of self to discover who he/she is and to continue to push the boundaries of what one knows and can tolerate.”  Yet, this self must push the boundaries to their ultimate end, which ultimately ends the self as an independent, permanent self.  Again, it doesn’t mean the self no longer exists; it merely means the awareness we have cultivated through the radicalization or deconstruction of self vis-à-vis the negative dialectical process of self-interrogation (self-inquiry), the dialogical process of shared intimacy, and meditation practice now reveals two distinct but related experiences: the conventional reality of self and the ultimate reality of no-self.  I can only tell you that when I realize this ultimate reality, I do not suffer.  And when I am not “fully” experiencing the nondual, I suffer but rarely without also experiencing joy.

Megan, I find your question about time very compelling.  You say you are afraid of “time running out.”  Running out of what?  What would happen if time only existed as self exists, without independence nor permanence?  For a self that no longer exists independently necessarily can no longer experience time as running out.  Time in fact, becomes less and less relevant because there is only, as Eckhart Tolle phrased it, now.  The reason time takes on this very rigid conveyor belt-like quality is because we believe it runs in this linear, permanent manner.  Because of our deep embeddedness in a dualistic reality, we believe dualistically, that is, that collectively we are composed of separate, independent parts called individuals embodied in a world further divided in every aspect of consciousness; and that these divisions (called binary oppositions) are real.  This includes self and world, matter and mind, life and death, tenses of time, real and not real, bad and good, etc. 

Now, one point you raise is particularly interesting. As a woman, if I reach a certain age and can no longer have children, how can one say that this isn’t “real”?  The answer would be exactly the same: that the fact exists that she can no longer conceive and therefore bear children; however, the fact of no longer conceiving is not separate from how she experiences this fact.  If she has an intractable belief that giving birth is what gives the greatest value to her life, she will absolutely suffer.  But, if she examines all the causes and conditions around her desire to get pregnant and ultimate failure to do so, and the causes and conditions surrounding her beliefs about her life’s purpose and meaning, I wonder how this “lost” opportunity of having a child will be experienced.  See my point?

I am grateful I read this post at the end of my day and not the beginning. I read it a little while ago and it hit me like a hot wave of fire, a ton of bricks came falling from the sky and burst my little bubble. I was so taken aback I shut my browser, left the room and laid on my bed just dazed.  I tried my hardest to shut your questions out of my mind but instead old memories just came bursting through and as much as I tried to just shut down and go to sleep I can’t. So here I am, struggling with the words, pushing past the anger and temper tantrum that is wanting to rear it's ugly face. Not sure how I’m going to write or even what I am going to write.  But all I can say, do is give you my honest feelings and words, so here goes.  

I don’t know if you are trying to push my buttons Om’s but you found them, you have pushed on a nice big one, right over a nice fat raw nerve, it’s pretty deep and its pretty painful. And I know what you are thinking and at a different point I might be thinking this too—great. Exactly the point of the intimate dialogue let’s find that point and get underneath it exam it, pull it apart—find meaning, create growth and transformation. Well I’m sorry because I cannot play this game with you right now. Please not now, you have already broken my bubble don’t push me over the edge. (Got your seatbelt?)

Don’t fuck with the woman with the swelling breasts and rollercoaster hormones, not today, not now, not this week. Why don’t we play this game in two weeks when I get past my first trimester and the dark cloud hanging over week 10 has past? Are you just trying to get me to admit that I am scared, well you win, here you go…. I AM SCARED! SCARED TO DEATH! And I am doing my best to let it go and not let it take up home. But challenging me with these questions today, this week, all they did was rewind me of that horrific day last May when I sat in the sonogram room expecting a normal quick visit and instead like an atomic bomb was shocked into reality with the harsh, insensitive burst from the technician as she said, this is not what we wanted to see. As I sat there in shock and sobbing fear for twenty long agonizing minutes while I waited for my doctor to show up so she could officially confirm and tell me that development had ceased two weeks earlier and there was no longer a heartbeat, no heartbeat, no heartbeat, no heart, no blood flow, no additional growth, no cell development, no new organs and growth-nothing...I was walking around with a non-living being inside my womb for two damn weeks. An experience of loss and death from the inside out, something I hope I will never have to experience again. My dreams, my hopes, my aspirations for this new life, for our life ahead, all melted in front of me. Each one fell abruptly to the floor with my heart and nothing remained but pain, devastation and shock. 

You and I both know that this time is very different and that my chances of success are much higher and even though I’ve been being cautions thus far, the last week or so I am honestly starting to hope and get attached as I get closer and closer to the twelve week milestone. But something about these questions are just too much for me right now, and so you see I can not play with you my friend, I can’t talk about what it would mean to not have a child and why I even have these aspirations if this is how this story ends be them my own or some societal role I think I want to fit into while carrying hope once again inside my swollen frame. I just can’t do it—the pain and devastation from the last time I reached this week, week ten is still way too real.  

James, Thank you for your response. Your kind, compassionate, wise supportive introspective thoughts were the first thing I read when I awoke this morning. A great confront and reassurance that what I was feeling and so vulnerably shared was fully recognized and understood. A gift for me, as I can deeply feel your understanding of my struggle; in fact, I think I just watched the last few remnants of that fear pushing out. I think I might finally be able to let it all go. 

Last night when I was finished writing I felt very calm and collective.  I moved a few feet from my computer to a futon in my computer room, wrapped myself in my yoga blanket and sat. I listened to my mantra as I repeated in my head, I’m whole, I’m healing, I’m love, I’m light, I’m joy; I am whole, I am healing, I am love, I am light, I am joy, over and over for as long as my tired body would sit there. Hearing the intentions of those words in a very different way and slowing closing out the last bits of discomfort that had arose. I continued, I am whole, I am healing, I am love, I am light, I am joy until I knew that I was ready to leave it all behind and go back to bed for the night.

 I woke this morning with my hands on my belly as if to protect my unborn child and myself from the fears of loosing her before her development is complete. And yet I didn’t feel so fearful at all. It was such a subtle and beautiful thing to wake to; to maybe for the first time in the last few months fully understand my commitment to this being and unbelievable process and most importantly my awareness of the underlying current of fear that has been flowing through my unconscious.  I’ve done such a good job of letting go this time around and really making space to let my body take everything that it needs when it needs it that I did not have any idea the magnitude of that fear that was floating along, waiting for the chance to flair up and bubble over. Apparently, it was all there all along or Om’s questions about not being able to have a child wouldn’t have set me off so strongly. Now that I’m looking at this from the other side I see that I needed to come face to face with that last remnant of fear so that I can move into the next stage of this pregnancy on the best possible footing and trust that I’ve done everything in my power to create the most ideal growing situation and the rest is out of my hands at this point. A true gift for sure.  

In Om’s case I think I was more shocked and disappointed that he didn’t realize he was pulling me into a minefield. I forget sometimes how difficult it is to recall all the finite details of the private conversations we have off the blog as well as the challenging and pushing of each others boundaries to create growth on the blog and the amazing balancing game he plays to keep that all in check everyday. The relationship we all experience here and some of us in the ‘real’ world as well is so complex and unconventional and sometimes that creates the greatest challenge of all. Sometimes I build him up to be this super human because I’m not so used to the unconditional support, there isn’t a day that goes by that he doesn’t check in to see how nauseous I am feeling or if I’m feeling anxious and getting enough rest. He listened and supported every step of eight weeks of fertility treatments, and was there the day we went in for artificial insemination and was waiting to hear when we came out how it went. Was the first person I texted when we saw the heartbeat on the ultrasound monitor and again  when we heard it for the first time and sometimes is the only one in the world that can understand just how overwhelming this whole process is. So when he proves to be just human after all the shock and disappointment is pretty strong. Some of that is and was true transference of my experiences with my father, and some of it disappointment.  I’ve never been good at creating barriers and establishing my limits with others I was always too afraid of the getting involved in the conflict. I must feel pretty safe in this space to have been so open and honest and to have drawn a clear line of my limits.

It was less than two years ago that I was appalled at the ability of you all to share so openly and honestly in such a public forum with strangers. And so that apprehension became my practice and challenge, my goal of joining this community to learn to not face forward with shame and guilt first and thus coat my experiences or hide those that embarrassed me. To come here with honesty even when I struggled immensely with guilt, regret and shame after hitting send. I know that now that I’ve gotten comfortable with saying, here I am, take me as I am and sharing some pretty telling and honest things that the next step is learning to be able to share the feelings and experiences with discretion and not have to share every darn detail and especially learning to release the ego from the experience. I’m working on that, in the meantime though thank you for being out there, for being on the receiving side of my brutal honesty, for truly hearing what I had to say and recognizing my feelings. Especially for your wise words my blossoming friend. Thank you, thank you, thank you.   

This week I met a new friend who very much feels like an old friend.  In and through her I have experienced one of the purest examples of inauthentic living.  And yet, because she lives inauthentically so absolutely, she is only a thin (un)veil(ing) away from authenticity.  Her inauthenticity is so deliberately impulsive and self-destructive that, if she doesn’t totally destroy herself, she will rise above her pain and terror, like Rilke’s angel:

But could you handle it? Were you not always,

still, distracted by expectation, as if all you experienced,

like a Beloved, came near to you? (Where could you contain her,

with all the vast strange thoughts in you

going in and out, and often staying the night.)

When we speak of the authentic (from the Greek authentes "authorship;" from autos "self" + hentes " being"), we go deep into the pocket of self and the anxiety that trembles there.  You see, the authentic doesn’t lack anxiety because it hasn’t yet shed its dualistic shield against groundlessness.  It still smiles its narcissistically pristine ideal.  But, behind the shield being lurks there, waiting, as if skulking in its imminent lament:

Of summer come in his great good time

To the sultry, biding herds, I said,

Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,

And I lie down but to sleep in bed,

For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

n       Dylan Thomas

I see authenticity not as thing-like nor thought-like but more process-like.  It is the pure motion of to-wards, and what drives it is intention.  Intention is the most beautiful. It suggests both attention and stretching (intentus "attention," from L. intentus (fem. intentia), pp. of intendere, to stretch).  In the authenticity of self-being, through the deepest attention one attempts and therefore intends to stretch beyond her own present condition of being self-conscious to-wards self-awareness to-wards being awareness. 

My definition of authenticity is important because it stretches across both the psychological and philosophical and thus enspirits being (what we call “spiritual”).  My friend lacks the authentic because she fills herself up almost moment to moment with lack as if to mitigate the more authentic experience of terror and grief she feebly armors herself against.  What she really lacks, however, is a voice to draw out the pain and cradle it with understanding.  This is what the therapeutic provides: the cradling of relationship which contains, frames, refrains, retrains and flames the voice of authenticity, through the language of feeling and the feeling of language stretching to-wards understanding.

Though she doesn’t need to realize that true authenticity is rooted in the very nature and essence of things as empty and knowing, respectively, her new-gained psychological knowledge of self will prepare the way to-wards transcendence of her pre-authentic state of wishing-but-not-yet-knowing.  You see, wishing is the child’s version of desire as knowing is the seeker’s version of desire, both of which are reaching to-wards the authentic.  Counterintuitive as it seems, the inauthentic is not opposite of the authentic, death is.  The inauthentic means (points to) a psychological rupture has taken place in the seeking of connection (relationship) and tragically something has gone so awry as to drive the child into dissociated and repressed states of chaotic craving.  And so, in the inauthentic, craving replaces becoming and destructiveness replaces being.  In the inauthentic, what is continuously being created (love) recklessly gets torn down, not because the child wants to die, but because the child needs control over an unformed and (de)formed self. 

It’s not that the inauthentic refuses to be, it’s just that the rage snipping at the shadow of her terror demands to be not as a protest of failed love and protection.  What she will hopefully begin to learn is not to not be so that being, as the seed of authenticity, will transfigure her fighting against to-wards a fighting for, but not (or rather no longer) by, herself.  This is the art of the authentic: the forming of self through informing and reforming to-wards the unforming of what will ultimately be, not the inauthentic or authentic, but the non-authentic of nonintentionality.

my friend, a very busy businesswomen, has been overwhelmed by her schedule and trying to figure out how to balance her home and work life.  she's a self-admitted control freak and seems to have to organize and plan everything.  her husband, however, is more laid back and tends to wait for the last minute for tasks which, of course, drives my friend crazy.  anyway, my friend was sharing her husband's rationale for waiting until the last minute. "things change," he says, "so why do something and then find it was unnecessary?"  two weeks ago, she asked him 3 times to buy some cat litter.  she got tired of asking. i said, "well, it makes sense in a way.  what would happenif he bought the litter before it was needed and and the cat died?" 

the next week she came in for a visit and scowling, said,

"You killed my cat!" 

i was a bit jolted.  "What?" 

She repeated, "You killed my cat." 

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"last week you said that if my husband buys the litter before the cat actually needs it, my cat might die. the next morning i woke up and went to feed the cat, and he was dead."

I was talking to two very dear friends of mine – one male and the other female -- about an observation I made. I shared that a number of my male friends have seemed to “disappear” and I suggested it might be due to the fact that I’m “too” intimate.  I told my male friend I was happy he was able to tolerate me.  Could this be true that men have difficulty staying in male relationships that require a sustained intimacy?  In deepening our discussion, I suggested that in male development there may be the repressed desire to be (emotionally) penetrated which, when associated with and displaced onto the reified symbol of that desire, sexual penetration, results in the projected sublimated manic defense against penetration we call competition.  In other words, since I can’t tolerate my desire to be penetrated by you (and, in turn, to penetrate you), I will compete against you for that other, culturally acceptable and thus safer desirable object, mother.  Since it is fair to say that our psychological constructs are socially determined, and that we do live in a homophobic culture, there might be some truth to this observation.  If we take this hypothesis further, and if competition replaces intimacy as a mode of relating, the degenerative form of that desire to penetrate and be penetrated is the perversion of patriarchal power relations, the result of which is destructiveness (including genocide and ecocide).  A tragic end to Tragic Man.  And the culprit, once again, repression.

The philosophically savvy psychoanalytic theorist, Heinz Kohut, describes `Tragic Man’ as the result of a failed creative self-expression: "the realization through action of the (life) plan laid down in [man’s] nuclear self…. Here the undeniable fact that man fails more often than he succeeds leads me to give this aspect of man the negative designation Tragic Man, instead of ‘expressive’ or ‘creative man’."  I am interested here in the relational creative form of male self-expression, intimacy the deep connection between human beings as a sustained emotional recognition.  And, more specifically, I am compelled by this failure of creative self-expression as intimacy.

To cultivate self-expression means to construct a “tension arc” between strivings and values.  We might define a “tension arc” as the essence (knowing) of individual consciousness establishing dynamic structures of desire the completion of which makes creative expression possible.  Tension refers to both intention (intendere, stretching) and discernment balancing the developmental strivings of pleasure and self-expression.  Strivings and values cut across all culture spheres, ways of being, and ways of knowing. 

The tragic is the failure or foreclosure of one’s ability to reach intimacy.  Notice how intimacy is constituted in self-expression and creativity.  In intimacy we express and create each other.  So, what happens to men in our culture where the value for competition completely obviates the need for male intimacy between men.  As I wrote in a post last year,

“Every male needs to find a Double, a soul mate or soul friend with whom he can communicate openly, with warmth, affection, and love. While the gay movement recognizes this need in its affirmation of passionate, creative, and caring relationships among males, the archetype is not limited to those who call themselves homosexual. Rather, it is at the foundation of every man's innate desire for intimacy with other males, starting with his own father."

In redefining the homoerotic, I alluded to Herman Hesse’s Platonic vision of male relationships, which speak more to Eros as Ascent: “spiritual transformation of a primordial sexual drive which, when cultivated, opens up to vast expanses of subtler meanings than sex.”  For ken Wilber, Eros refers to the evolution of consciousness where intimacy is a spiritual principle of unity and where Love seeks greater and greater union:   

“That which was dis-membered must be re-membered.  This re-membering or re-collecting or –re-uniting is the Path of  Ascent, which, Socrates says, is driven by Eros, by Love, but the finding of greater and greater union – a higher and wider identity, as we have been putting it.  By means of Eros, says Socrates, the lovers are taken out of themselves and into a larger union with the beloved, and this Eros continues from the objects of the body to the mind to the soul, until the final union is re-collected and re-membered. 

Eros, as Socrates (Plato) uses the term, is essentially what we have been calling self-transcendence, the very motor of Ascent of development or evolution: the finding of ever-higher self-identity with ever-wider embrace of others.  And the opposite of that was regression or dissolution, a move downward to less unity, more fragmentation.”

And so, what we have here is the masculine energy flow tapping into the larger cosmic order, and which is reflected in Greek thought as two sides of Eros; in the first, the primeval deity who embodies “not only the force of erotic love but also the creative urge of ever-flowing nature, the firstborn Light for the coming into being and ordering of all things in the cosmos, and, in the second, “harnessing the primordial force of love and directing it into mortals.”  These is the spiritual and psychological aspects of the principle of Eros and, like all metaphysical principles, they are susceptible to degenerative forms.  What determines which form it will take (generative or degenerative, respectively) is the relationship, at first, as the ground of awareness, and in its recapitualted mode, as interpersonal human relationships.  For our pruposes here, the psychological strain is the mode of Eros that seeks and uses intimacy as a way to develop psychologically. And. Specifically, regarding male relationships, if cultural awareness, instead of degenerating into its competitive mode, emphasizes the need for male intimacy and mastery of self-awareness, repressed strivings for male intimacy will not go awry.  Of course, this is a very crude generalization of what it a deeply complex process but I felt well worth developing on the blog.

     I've recently been told by my wife that I have a wonderfully intimate relationship with our son.  I hadn't really thought about it much.  I kiss and hug him at every opportunity and refer to him as "Sweety" and I suspect that these outward appearances give the impression of intimacy. 

     I thought about the ongoing work with my daughter, a few years older than my son, in opposing the shitty competitive feelings that have been popping up from time to time within her while regularly stressing that the most important thing in the world is to be kind and gentle...and try to do your best (she's recently reminded me that there are times when it's not only OK, but advisable, not to do one's best).  I am trying to share the same with the boy...but he's still very young.

     I suppose that what I've produced on this topic isn't much of a revelation...but I offer it, anyway.  That little boy is one of my only friends.  While I recognize that this sounds a little sad to many, I'll clarify by sharing that it's by my choice (to take the edge off a bit).  Anyway, as one of a very small population, and as one who will be so dramatically affected by me and our relationship, I suppose I've made a sorta' unconscious decision to make him the best friend possible for me. 

     I recognize that such intentions may cause more harm than good for parents and their children, but I suppose that I feel that I have married someone mindful enough to be able to rely upon to identify if I'm doing harm.

     My best friend must be kind and gentle.  I do have a lingering issues with football (and especially fantasy football), but I'm largely funneling it into a do-my/their-best-and be-happy thing.

     My father would sometimes pick me up in his two seater Mercedes convertible to get a milk shake after my high school football games.  This was unusual as there was no intimacy in our relationship and a painful absence of any intimacy during the experiences.  I once found pieces of egg shell in it and he admitted he was asking them to put raw eggs in the shake with the hope that it would help me get to a better playing weight for football.

     If there's truth to the observation that I have a truly intimate relationship with my son--and I think there is--it's because of the desire I have for both him and me to be happy.  I haven't found happiness in victories nor achievements.  My greatest happiness has come from feeling appreciated and loved...and being granted perhaps the greatest blessing of all--to be able to try my hardest to appreciate and love others (albeit a few others given my way of being). 

     I believe the kind and gentle message won't steer him or me wrong.  It's ironic that I'll eventually also have to confront him to some degree as popular culture begins to fuck him up...perhaps this is "tough love"?  As I try with his sister, I just hope to remain kind and gentle enough during the upcoming confrontations--and effusive in my appreciation and love--to provide something for them both to hang onto to remain afloat... 

 I’ve been enjoying the conversation on male intimacy from the sidelines since it started last week. There is some really interesting stuff in here and great perspectives. As a non-male I was thinking it would be best to let the conversation unfold with the men in this community and enjoy being a fly on the wall but Nico’s recent post made me feel it is okay to poke my head in just a little.

As Nico mentioned in his post about being able to relate and share more with females; I have experienced this as well. I have always been able to relate more with males than females and have had some very intimate relationships with men which I felt were always such great gifts, it was like I knew this secret identity of these men, their true identity. They felt safe to open up and share more of their perspectives, emotions and unique thoughts on different topics and were just more comfortable to relate on a deeper level with me than our male friends. Whenever we were around our greater group of friends or other males they became a lot more closed off and less intimate and as Noah, you pointed out so eloquently either competed or felt the need to overpower opinions or shrink back from the more dominant male. One of my closets male friends still gets frustrated within this dynamic, because his role has become the funny guy, the entertainer of the crowd, he complains to me that when he does have something serious to say or challenges the way the other males think they do not take him seriously. He says, they think I am just a clown. Men in our group who are not as quick and witty as him also feel alienated because they feel his humor is a personal attack on their own voice and he uses it to cut them down a notch. That said, the sad thing is all of these men want to penetrate deeper with each other and be recognized for their contribution and have no idea how to.

Noah,- I hadn’t really looked at male competitiveness from the standpoint of a stronger voice/more experience/more dominant presence/opinions before. When I generally think of competition and competitiveness among males I think of the physical, sociological and economical competition. But you bring up a very valid point and perspective, something I hadn’t thought of before.  If you feel alienated by a stronger male voice and do not agree with the point of view of that voice then your only choices are to overpower/over shout or withdraw.

Eggs- Thank you for sharing your tender interaction with your children and how you try to teach them to be gentle and kind. Do you think that it was easier to have an intimate relationship with your son because of your previous experience with your daughter, or do you think you would have been this way with him if your son had been born first?

My husband recently said a very surprising thing to me (I am pregnant with our first child) he told me that he had decided he wanted to know the sex of our child because if we were having a boy he needed time to get used to the idea. I at first was very angry, hurt and disappointed, I misunderstood and asked him how he could judge/ or even think of treating and/or loving our children any differently based on their gender. He explained that it wasn’t that at all it was just that he really wanted a girl, has been waiting a long time to have a daughter and he would be different/it would be different to raise a son and needed some time to get used to the idea. I understood better, and a little more after reading this thread why it would be so different for him. It still surprises me a little that he’d feel this way. And then I sat down and thought about it and was really honest with myself and seeing that I am better with relating to males, I realized I’d be different with a daughter as well so he was just processing it on a more conscious level than I was at that point. He is always very amazing with our nieces and nephews and I hope one day when we do have a son that he is able to allow himself to be just as intimate with him. 

All, in all, I can’t speak from the male perspective but have really learned a lot and had a lot to think of by all of your sharing and perspectives’, so thanks!     

OM.  In one of the delicious essays of `Constructing Masculinities,’ Homi K. Bhabha’s “Are You a Man Or a Mouse?” the author tells us about how the artist, Adrian Piper,  makes us aware “of the complex, perhaps contradictory relation between historical needs, political desires, and the destiny, even density, of our gendered selves.”  Makes us aware is the phrase that stopped me in my tracks.  Now, I have been attempting to unpack my own beliefs and attachments to masculinity for most of my life but, more significantly, this dialectic praxis process dismantling, I have come to realize, is merely (and I don’t mean merely as less significantly) but one reification and expression of selfhood, the core of which makes any of our many identities even possible.  And so, this epistemological high-five of makes us aware is really what this and any other philosophical text (or authentic spiritual/religious practice) is essentially, fundamentally about.  It’s true that I have a love for language and, because I am so easily seduced by the word, barely get a chance to finish anything I read.  One phrase, indeed, one word, such as putative, will leave me in ecstatic (from the Greek, ekstasis, to step outside) embrace with consciousness.  Ecstasy is the correct word here because of its tension and intention, to stretch awareness beyond what it presently knows.  Language does that for me; the more abstract and semantically open, even ambiguous, polysemous, or contradictorious in the ways it mentally tosses me about, challenges mind’s complacency and penchant for the “pre-fixed,” the need for existential safety and structure.  In this way, I seek the feminine’s desire for penetration and the intimacy there waiting.  I deeply desire what is there beyond the that of conventional reality.  I feel trapped in identity, suffocating under the oppressive armor of my identities, especially the masculine as ideology and representation, which has conflated the phallus and penis of male desire.

I have no conflict or pain around the masculine and feminine forms, as they are expressed aesthetically, energically, and even sexually; it is the ideology of belief and value and, deeper still, the reification of form as independent, permanent structure, sui generic, that causes catastrophic calamity in the species human, the being human, the human seeking being.  This ideological foothold in the literature is called discourse, where power is buttressed in the very language which speaks to specific repeatable relations to objects, subjects and other statements which become institutionalized and rigidly boundaried.  Gender is of course a main interest in understanding discursive practices.

In many of the essays I read, the word “disturb” is used for the practice of drawing attention to the “prefixing” of the rules and roles of gender and sexuality.  I like this.  Disturb, from L. disturbare, means to "throw into disorder."  Thus, masculinity, like many other reified forms of discourse, must be undermined, subverted from its manifest destiny of patriarchal dominance. Or, as Bhabha eloquently puts it, “Masculinity, then, is the “taking up” of the enunciative position, the making up of a psychic complex, the assumption of gender, the supplementation of a historic sexuality, the apparatus of cultural difference.” 

I ask what my father would have done with this realization, if I could have made him aware of the delusions in his mind around his identity.  This is truly the luminosity of language striking at the very core of that which imprisons us: our minds.

NOAH. He makes us aware.  Yes, I like that phrase too.  To make one aware.  You made me aware of the insubstantiality of gender.  Does that mean that you also made my awareness.  What is the difference between aware and awareness?  Aware is a state of being; to be aware is something I am.  If I am aware, I must have (posses?) awareness.  Awareness is what one has when one is aware.  Maybe I can say that to be aware and to have awareness are semantically about the same, and so being (aware) like awareness is what one is...

But also, apparently, to be aware (awareness?) is made.  He makes us aware.  How does one make another aware?  What does that even mean?  Do you ever simply think about what language means in this way?  Obviously, and clearly this is why you see the dismantling of fixed gender identities and their oppressive consequences as intimately entwined with language itself.  Maybe even of the same substance.  Because when we start to become aware of how language is, and how language isn't, the ephemerality of thought and identification itself creeps into us and makes us question. 

That's why I'm being completely silly and utterly serious when I ask what it means to make awareness in us, or through us, or of us.  Actually, there are two ways I can think of to view that word make.  One is to impel or force.  He impels us to be aware.  He forces us into awareness.  Or, he creates us aware, creates in us awareness.  Its funny how all these orations sound so theological masculine paternal.

I circle around the question of  awareness (consciousness).  I sit in restaurants and stare at other people's conversations and wonder if they also find being a 'self'-aware person aware of self and aware of awareness itself so inextricably paradoxical, untenable, undeniable and completely surreal as I do.  At least, this is what I was thinking the other day sharing a meal with my Father. 

She makes us aware.  The artist creates in us, via our mirroring with her art. an awareness that we are creators.  (I have never seen Piper's art).  And this is empowering because it challenges and disturbs our attachments to a belief that what we have inherited is fixed and Real.  We are actors and makers too, she is aware of this, and makes us aware by showing us. 

True intimacy is not chaos.  Penetrating the fear of the formless, disturbing our old complacency, perhaps we may create trans-gendered structures through which we may touch Love.

OM. Whether we are talking about masculinities or femininities, the subject of awareness, making ourselves aware, is the primary subject of interrogation.  When you dismantle the ground of consciousness (mind), all the categorical signifiers, such as gender, dissolve along with self.  What this means is that the “transcendent subject” --an image (idea) itself which is phallically formed – as an independent “being,” socially, or relationally pre- and beyond- existing, is culturally constituted, or constructed.  In Buddhist terminology, the self and all its categorical accouterments, is empty. 

As Nietzsche proclaimed, “there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming: ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.” (italics mine).  This “deed” represents the very productions (categories) we are here discussing, as well as the language itself (discourse) we are using to discuss it.  What we call self – and the dominant male self in particular – is, as the philosopher Foucault would argue, “an effect of power.”  And so, Noah, to address your wonderfully discerning perspective, the belief in the “you” and the “me” in “You made me aware of the insubstantiality of gender,” potentially leads to the very asymmetry you critiqued in your last post addressed to me:

“In confronting the strength and enormity of your voice, Om, I can feel frustrated, angry, and beneath that anger, of course, afraid.  Afraid of being drowned, of losing my own voice before I even find it.  In addition, the predefined roles that exist culturally and experientially, with respect to age, occupation, etc, all come together to stimulate a strong psychological pressure to either a) accept, submit, or assume the voice you are speaking myself, or b) resist that voice with a powerful voice of my own, assert my own presence and worldview as stronger or at least able to contend with yours.  I hate both choices.”

When the fluidity and conditionality of “self” are either repressed or misunderstood (synonymous with Buddhism’s “ignorance”), the perceived “strength and enormity” of the masculinized other, at best, potentially forecloses intimacy (leading to isolation) and self-awareness (leading to suffering).  At worst, of course, is violence and destruction. 

If one clings to this notion of independent self, it follows that one would then believe in the ultimate power of the authoritarian voice (eg, God) as making “awareness.”   The creative context of “making” becomes the sole possession of the authoritarian creator.  However, in the pluralized context of intersubjectivity, when one conditionally makes the other aware, it is now viewed as a mirroring function of awareness itself, and the conventional self of individual consciousness sustains the gaze of the mirror despite the fearful and threatening projections it engenders (“Afraid of being drowned, of losing my own voice before I even find it.”).  In this less valorized position, we can experience ourselves as “actors and makers too, she is aware of this, and makes us aware by showing us.” 

NOAH. I want to explore what this less gendered way of relating would feel like.

You know that I fully agree with the totally sensible realization you advocate: that there is no fixed independent permanent self.  But now I  need us to distinguish between 'self' and 'subject' more explicitly.  When you speak of self awareness, and its foreclosure in relationships impeded by masculine power structures, what I think you ultimately mean is awareness of no self.  But I think one could easily become confused by exactly how you mean that word, self. 

I would like to think that no-self does not mean no-subject.  When I visualize this word, subject, I think of interiority, I think of space beneath surface, of conditions and perspectives,  of the being that inheres in doing.  Better, the being that inheres in relating.

And it is the carefully investigated and revealed specificity of subject that seems to express universality.  Does what you call pure consciousness, or pure awareness, have subjectivity?

When you speak, it is the language formed and expressed through you as an (inter)subject, with its specific karmic history and meaning making, that reaches and me, and through which we create awareness.  The gift we give each other, then, is perhaps a deeper and more expansive subjectivity, less constrained by structures of power or attachment to self. 

Thus if I say, what you think of as your self is not real, it is in a sense false, that does not (to me) mean that your experience of subjectivity is false, only falsely limited to what you call self.   "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite [empty]. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

This is how I feel that awareness is creating and becoming, commensurate with subject's creating and becoming, constructing and destroying structures both physical and intellectual in its ever expanding growth.  For my western mind anyway, subjectivity is a powerful vehicle for creating awareness. 

I feel myself caught in the dialectic tension here between being and non-being and at least for the moment, am hitting a wall in my ability to find a form with which to express what I am saying. 

But I feel it in that extraordinary silence in the first thunderclap of a storm, before the rain starts to fall, when the light has infinite depth you can hear the expectant hush of every blade of switch grass.  It is the way in which my sense of being begins to expand, almost feeling and knowing as every part of that infinite space. 

Or when I reach the end of a run and my pulse feels so grounding.  Awareness begins at my heart and breath and creeps away until I am only a part of what it contains.  That is the feeling I would most like to bring into my relationships, so that the place from which I speak and know is no longer filling the screen, but may exist as a center from which relation is possible.  There is less protectionism there, my sense of 'self' gives way to a more open subjectivity.  Certainly one that is less concerned with maleness.

NEXT RESPONSE, OM

It is a quiet time for me right now.   I am here, reading, but words seem to be deep within or there are no words yet.  I am not sure.   I deeply appreciate the exchange between Om and Noah.  I am letting the posts play in my head like music, listening over and over again,  tapping my toes, letting my fingers glide on  air.  Perhaps, you can feel the movement.  Listen, the next time you sit.

I would like to write, I really would. I seem to fall silent, more and more so – perhaps this is just an indication of the intense inner shift that I am experiencing that I don’t fully understand myself. Sometimes I feel as if I am holding my breath, instead of breathing, and other times I feel as if I am breathing in the entire world.

My time at Joseph’s House has, contrary to what some might think, has focused my attention, not so much on death but on  joy and why it has, up until most recently, seemed to be sitting beneath sorrow rather then beside, as a companion. I have always been aware that the psychological journey meant peeling back layers, the taking apart in order to put back together, but the spiritual journey is no different – one influences the other. It seems that everything I do right now causes a chain reaction of feelings that rise to the surface with such speed that I can hardly keep up with one before another swims past. At any point I can interpret all of this as a psychological falling apart, the disintegration of self, or as a shift of understanding – a demand that I accept what comes and allow everything that I feel come into the light. It is frightening and I don’t always love what I see. But, then – I have to love it. I have to love everything for what it is, for telling me what I need to hear. Sometimes I feel sick to my stomach. I see everything. I see how easily I let things hurt me – how I want to be needed and hate to be needed. How I want to feel at the center and yet, there is no center. How, what I feel is universal and has to be let go, blown into the air, for it gets in the way of being, of being with joy, of seeing the brilliance of the dogwood tree in full bloom outside my window. There is a tug in both directions. Sorrow and joy. Joy and sorrow. There is so much suffering in the world.  There is so much joy in the world. I see easy and peaceful deaths and I have witnessed death where there is profound psychic pain.

I heard on the radio yesterday, Teri Gross interviewing WS Merwin. He said that the greatest gift his parents gave him was how they died – they had no fear. To me he was saying how his parents lived life. Without fear of death, there is a full embrace of life.

I am writing as an act of faith. To explore what is inside me – to find a way to be without judgment, to accept, to wave goodbye, to let come what needs to come whether laughter or tears. The working towards intimacy is the work towards self. I can only go as far with others as I am willing and able to go with myself.

 What is happening to me?

I feel insane sometimes – a split. One moment I am very centered, very connected and alive and the next moment a voice, my voice screams at me, “Life is too difficult. I wish I were dead.”

I am not kidding. This happens. I wake up in the morning all prepared to leave the house and something minor happens and I swell with self hatred, find life difficult, my life without purpose. Then, I settle, start walking, begin to notice what is around me. The voice recedes temporarily. It has been like this for weeks, months. The voice of despair and self-hatred is familiar. I have known it all my life - but that is the point, this voice is habit. It has been a part of me for a long, long time. I have been working with it to put it to rest, to let it idle, to let it dissolve in this other way of seeing and being. I thought I had made great progress, but lately it has been rising up, lashing out, coming at me with an intensity that has been frightening.. And that’s just it. It is fighting. The old voice, the habit, will not die without a fight. It has had such powerful position all these years and it is making a valiant effort to stay alive. I realized that this morning. I would not say it like having a great epiphany, since I am not sure I believe in them – but it was like a gentle understanding that had been underground for months waiting to be watered.

I took his voice, held it’s hand like an old, vulnerable friend, and while standing on the porch of Joseph’s House talking to the director and another volunteer, introduced it. “This is the voice that I woke up with”, I told my new friends. It told me that I hated life and wanted to die this morning. It’s not true.

“You have that voice, too?” the director said to me. We looked at each other. “I am so glad to know that.,” she said. “It really helps.”

Yes, I have that voice. The important word here is, have. I have it. It does not have me. I am not a victim to it. I own it. And now it is up to me how I handle it, how I treat it, how I stop listening to it, while honoring that it comes from me even if it isn’t me any longer. It has as much power or as little power, as I give it. I am not saying it will not follow me again, or set out to haunt me, or be waiting when I forget what is important in life – but I have been awakened to it in a way that puts lots of space around it.

The most important thing in life is right now. This moment. Sitting here giving form to what I am feeling. What is most important in life is what I do now – right this second, when I get up from my desk and leave this room. This is the most important thing in life. Now. And now. And more.  Now. 

It is a warmth

the kind of glow only known by those

who have experienced pain

and expression in that pain.

The warmth of air molecules pressing on my back.

Kissing between my shoulder blades.

It is that pause when I know for certain

that I had just emptied out

only to be filled one more time.

It is quiet in this space where thoughts have traveled and mingled. It is empty here, but I am not alone, for I carry voices with me. I hear you and imagine you in my mind. I visit here the way one returns to a place they used to live, to wander around the space and marvel how different everything looks and feels. In this sweet silence everything has changed. I am not afraid to be alone as I once was, for I am never really alone, unless I allow myself to feel this way.

It is impossible to articulate what my meditation practice has shown me. There are no neon lights, no shooting stars; not even a well lit path. I just breathe. I just open up, build space around me and then carry this opening back into the world. It has not been easy – there is a dismantling, some stark sights ( insights), some disturbing voices, unkind memories – they don’t just disappear, but they are learning to take their places. But how they shout at me and sometimes get the better of me, but they are less toxic than they once were. I recognize them as friends who want me to be more of who I was than who I am becoming. I love them anyway, and maybe even more so, for their suffering.

Each time I go to Joseph’s House, I am aware that I am entering into the unknown. Of course, this is true everywhere I go and in everything I do, but Josephs House brings the darkness to the light. In waking up to death, I see life all around me. When I am in the service of others my heart, my openness, my compassion has nothing to do but expand.

There are experiences that I cannot share in my everyday life. At least not in a casual way, not with people who I sit next to at a dinner party or those I encounter casually on the street. Here, I feel free.

I was in the kitchen of the house earlier this week. I took a few hours to work with my dear new friend, an Irish Priest, and another volunteer. We decided to scrub the kitchen. As I was working, one of the new residents, J came in. She is young – 33 – and dying. She is frail; one side of her body is paralyzed and she walks, (not well,) with a walker, stumbling and bumping into things. She is unable or unwilling to speak much. It is haunting they way she stares and says so little. There is so much there. You can feel her depth, her intelligence.

I put down my rag and grab onto her before she falls. No one is following her and she is in a hurry. We move as quickly as we can to the bathroom, but it was too late. It is messy. Down her legs, on her clothes. Once in the bathroom, I see that her insides have exploded. I have a moment of panic. This part of care is new to me. I think for a moment of calling one of the staff to come and help. But no. I can take care of this. K. an AmeriCorps volunteer peaks his head in and looks at me with eyes that say, I can help you, but you can do it. He is the one who always seems to be there when a new challenge frightens me. I ask him to get me wipes, more clothes. I motion that I will take care of the rest . I am ready. My mind is working fast. I need to keep J safe, make sure she is clean, but more importantly,I need to be present to what I am doing.  I have a quick flash, a memory, of being a teenager in the hospital, very ill, and sick with diarrhea. I see the back of a nun’s habit – she is washing my underwear in the sink by hand. She has just taken care of me as if the situation, the mess, the odor, is as ordinary as sitting down to breakfast. And now, standing in the bathroom, I see that it is.. This is just what a sick body does. I stroke J’s. hair and say, “ I’m so sorry you have to go through this.” Then I proceeded to clean her. I find myself apologizing for being so clumsy, so slow. We look at each other. We are falling into a deep space together, holding each other. It is a moment of grace.