Osama bin Laden dead!

Declan Walsh in Islamabad and Richard Adams in Washington

guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 May 2011 04.00 BST

Osama bin Laden is dead, Obama announces

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind al-Qaida, is dead, President Obama announces from the White House

Osama bin Laden, the criminal mastermind behind al-Qaida and the world's most sought-after terrorist since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has been killed by a US operation, President Barack Obama has announced.

In an address to the nation, President Obama said Bin Laden was killed in a "targeted operation" in Abbottabad, a highland town north of Islamabad, last night.
The operation started with an intelligence lead last August, and culminated in an operation involving a "small team of Americans". "After a firefight they killed bin Laden."
None of the Americans was killed. Pakistani co-operation "helped to lead us to him" he said.
Osama's body is in possession of the US, according to the first reports from the US television networks.
As the news spread, crowds gathered outside the gates of the White House in Washington DC, singing the national anthem and cheering.
President Obama made the highly unusual Sunday night live statement to announce the news at around 11.30pm eastern time.
Bin Laden's capture comes eight years to the day that President George Bush declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq. As president, Bush declared he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive" – but it is now the unlikely figure of Barack Obama who has been able to announce the final triumph as US commander-in-chief.
This is a turning point in the global "war on terrorism" that has been waged since 9/11 - and the news will reverberate around the world.
The news comes as an unparalleled boost for US foreign policy, the key aim of which since 2001 has been the disarming and dismemberment of al-Qaida, and coincidentally probably ensures the re-election of Obama in 2012.
As a candidate during the 2008 election campaign, Obama repeatedly vowed: "We will kill Osama bin Laden." And so it has proved.
The Obama statement was scheduled originally for 10.30pm, but the need to inform US congressional leaders caused the delay.
In the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, one western diplomat described the news as a "game changer" – not just for al-Qaida, but also for US foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, a region embroiled in turmoil and violence since 2001.
"I'm overjoyed," said the diplomat. "But what this exactly means is really not clear."
Some analysts fear bin Laden's death could spark a precipitous US withdrawal from the region, with the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan still unresolved.
It will likely also reconfigure relations with Pakistan, where the CIA is engaged in a controversial assassination campaign against senior al-Qaida figures using Predator and Reaper drones.
"He's dead," said an official with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, declining to give details other than to say that it was "highly sensitive intelligence operation".
The official said he was "not at liberty" to give further details on the killing, including on reports that Pakistani intelligence was involved in the operation. "We'll release more information later this morning," he said.
Abbottabad is about two hours' drive north of Islamabad, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. It is not part of the tribal belt, where the CIA drone strike campaign has been concentrated, but is home to the Pakistan military's main training institution, the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul.
The fact that bin Laden was killed outside the tribal belt in Pakistan will raise questions about how the six-foot four-inch fugitive, one of the most famous faces in the world, managed to escape justice for so long.
Pakistan's intelligence services have largely co-operated with the US in capturing al-Qaida fugitives - some of the most notorious figures seized since 2001 were caught in Pakistan's cities such as the architect of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.
In recent months US military and intelligence officials have publicly complained that the ISI has been assisting the Haqqani network, an al-Qaida-linked militant network that straddles the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.


From me -
My immediate reaction is mixed. I wonder if this man has really been the total force of power. He clearly has been at the helm of whipping up the force in the first place. So he is dead. One man. Is it even him? Well my conspiracy theories all kick off. But what else could this mean - what a scary world we live in. And I so would like a little peace haven away from dependency with the grid. Am I too scared to take the risk? Trust that all will be OK. I would not want to stop the work and learning that I am doing. There are some things that require funds - transport, living costs would still apply. If I could live in a community .... that's another Blog.
I think I feel a little shocked that he is dead. He has been such a big name of blame and yet so inaccessible as a real person - somewhere behind the scenes.
And then all the conspiracy theories purported by Michael Moore Fahrenheit 9/11. There was evidence of liaisons between the Bush family and the bin Laden family. And of course disasters around the world enable the super rich to move in and make even more money.
There is something quite distasteful about the hanging of Saddam Hussein - but then I was silly enough to watch that on You Tube. A kind of morbid fascination. Awful.
What will happen now? Who will the US blame now? What will happen in Afghanistan and Pakistan - someone will be taking over, it is not the end or is it? Could it possibly be?
I pray and hope for peaceful resolutions instead of all this disparity and raging angst.
I am scared for us all
Bliss
XX

Intimacy

Intimate Relationship as a Spiritual Crucible

By John Welwood
Living with someone we love, with all the joys and challenges, is one of the best ways to grow spiritually. But real awakening only happens, says renowned psychologist John Welwood, in the charnel ground where we acknowledge and work with our wounds, fears, and illusions.

While most people would like to have healthy, satisfying relationships in their lives, the truth is that everyone has a hard time with intimate partnerships. The poet Rilke understood just how challenging they could be when he penned his classic statement, “For one person to love another, this is the most difficult of all our tasks.”

Rilke isn’t suggesting it’s hard to love or to have loving-kindness. Rather, he is speaking about how hard it is to keep loving someone we live with, day by day, year after year. After numerous hardships and failures, many people have given up on intimate relationship, regarding the relational terrain as so fraught with romantic illusion and emotional hazards that it is no longer worth the energy.

Although modern relationships are particularly challenging, their very difficulty presents a special arena for personal and spiritual growth. To develop more conscious relationships requires becoming conversant with how three different dimensions of human existence play out within them: ego, person, and being.

Every close relationship involves these three levels of interaction that two partners cycle through—ego to ego, person to person, and being to being. While one moment two people may be connecting being to being in pure openness, the next moment their two egos may fall into deadly combat. When our partners treat us nicely, we open—“Ah, you’re so great.” But when they say or do something threatening, it’s "How did I wind up with you?" Since it can be terribly confusing or devastating when the love of our life suddenly turns into our deadliest enemy, it’s important to hold a larger vision that allows us to understand what is happening here.


Relationship as Alchemy

When we fall in love, this usually ushers in a special period, one with its own distinctive glow and magic. Glimpsing another person’s beauty and feeling, our heart opening in response provides a taste of absolute love, a pure blend of openness and warmth. This being-to-being connection reveals the pure gold at the heart of our nature, qualities like beauty, delight, awe, deep passion and kindness, generosity, tenderness, and joy.

Yet opening to another also flushes to the surface all kinds of conditioned patterns and obstacles that tend to shut this connection down: our deepest wounds, our grasping and desperation, our worst fears, our mistrust, our rawest emotional trigger points. As a relationship develops, we often find that we don’t have full access to the gold of our nature, for it remains embedded in the ore of our conditioned patterns. And so we continually fall from grace.

It’s important to recognize that all the emotional and psychological wounding we carry with us from the past is relational in nature: it has to do with not feeling fully loved. And it happened in our earliest relationships—with our caretakers—when our brain and body were totally soft and impressionable. As a result, the ego’s relational patterns largely developed as protection schemes to insulate us from the vulnerable openness that love entails. In relationship the ego acts as a survival mechanism for getting needs met while fending off the threat of being hurt, manipulated, controlled, rejected, or abandoned in ways we were as a child. This is normal and totally understandable. Yet if it’s the main tenor of a relationship, it keeps us locked in complex strategies of defensiveness and control that undermine the possibility of deeper connection.

Thus to gain greater access to the gold of our nature in relationship, a certain alchemy is required: the refining of our conditioned defensive patterns. The good news is that this alchemy generated between two people also furthers a larger alchemy within them. The opportunity here is to join and integrate the twin poles of human existence: heaven, the vast space of perfect, unconditional openness, and earth, our imperfect, limited human form, shaped by worldly causes and conditions. As the defensive/controlling ego cooks and melts down in the heat of love’s influence, a beautiful evolutionary development starts to emerge—the genuine person, who embodies a quality of very human relational presence that is transparent to open-hearted being, right in the midst of the dense confines of worldly conditioning.

Relationship as Charnel Ground

To clarify the workings of this alchemy, a more gritty metaphor is useful, one that comes from the tantric traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism: relationship as charnel ground. In many traditional Asian societies, the charnel ground was where people would bring dead bodies, to be eaten by vultures and jackals. From the tantric yogi’s perspective, this was an ideal place to practice, because it is right at the crossroads of life, where birth and death, fear and fearlessness, impermanence and awakening unfold right next to each other. Some things are dying and decaying, others are feeding and being fed, while others are being born out of the decay. The charnel ground is an ideal place to practice because it is right at the crossroads of life, where one cannot help but feel the rawness of human existence.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche described the charnel ground as "that great graveyard, in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried." Samsara is the conditioned mind that clouds our true nature, while nirvana is the direct seeing of this nature. As Trungpa Rinpoche describes this daunting crossroads in one of his early seminars:

It’s a place to die and be born, equally, at the same time, it’s simply our raw and rugged nature, the ground where we constantly puke and fall down, constantly make a mess. We are constantly dying, we are constantly giving birth. We are eating in the charnel ground, sitting in it, sleeping on it, having nightmares on it... Yet it does not try to hide its truth about reality. There are corpses lying all over the place, loose arms, loose hands, loose internal organs, and flowing hairs all over the place, jackals and vultures are roaming about, each one devising its own scheme for getting the best piece of flesh.

Many of us have a cartoon-like notion of relational bliss: that it should provide a steady state of security or solace that will save us from having to face the gritty, painful, difficult areas of life. We imagine that finding or marrying the right person will spare us from having to deal with such things as loneliness, disappointment, despair, terror, or disintegration. Yet anyone who has been married for a long time probably has some knowledge of the charnel ground quality of relationship—corpses all over the place, and jackals and vultures roaming about looking for the best piece of flesh. Trungpa Rinpoche suggests that if we can work with the "raw and rugged situation" of the charnel ground, "then some spark or sympathy or compassion, some giving in or opening can begin to take place. The chaos that takes place in your neurosis is the only home ground that you can build the mandala of awakening on." This last sentence is a powerful one, for it suggests that awakening happens only through facing the chaos of our neurotic patterns. Yet this is often the last thing we want to deal with in relationships.

Trungpa Rinpoche suggests that our neurosis is built on the fact that:

…large areas of our life have been devoted to trying to avoid discovering our own experience. Now [in the charnel ground, in our relationships] we have a chance to explore that large area which exists in our being, which we’ve been trying to avoid. That seems to be the first message, which may be very grim, but also very exciting. We’re not trying to get away from the charnel ground, we don’t want to build a Hilton hotel in the middle of it. Building the mandala of awakening actually happens on the charnel ground. What is happening on the charnel ground is constant personal exploration, and beyond that, just giving, opening, extending yourself completely to the situation that’s available to you. Being fantastically exposed, and the sense that you could give birth to another world.

This also describes the spiritual potential of intimate involvement with another human being.

Another quote with a similar feeling comes from Swami Rudrananda (known as Rudy, a German teacher who was a student of the Indian saint Swami Nityananda), further describing how to work with neurosis in this way:

Don't look for perfection in me. I want to acknowledge my own imperfection, I want to understand that that is part of the endlessness of my growth. It’s absolutely useless at this stage in your life, with all of the shit piled up in your closet, to walk around and try to kid yourself about your perfection. Out of the raw material you break down [here he is also speaking of the charnel ground] you grow and absorb the energy. You work yourself from inside out, tearing out, destroying, and finding a sense of nothingness. That nothingness allows God to come in. But this somethingness—ego and prejudices and limitations—is your raw material. If you process and refine it all, you can open consciously. Otherwise, you will never come to anything that represents yourself … The only thing that can create a oneness inside you is the ability to see more of yourself as you work every day to open deeper and say, fine, “I’m short-tempered,” or “Fine, I’m aggressive,” or, “Fine, I love to make money,” or, “I have no feeling for anybody else.” Once you recognize you’re all of these things, you’ll finally be able to take a breath and allow these things to open.

Rudy suggests that we have to acknowledge and embrace our imperfections as spiritual path; therefore grand spiritual pretensions miss the point. In his words, "A man who thinks he has a spiritual life is really an idiot." The same is true of relationships: beware of thinking you have a “spiritual relationship.” While loving connection provides a glimpse of the gold that lies within, we continually corrupt it by turning it into a commodity, a magical charm to make us feel okay. All the delusions of romantic love follow from there. Focusing on relationship as a spiritual or emotional “fix” actually destroys the possibility of finding deep joy, true ease, or honest connection with another.

Sooner or later relationship brings us to our knees, forcing us to confront the raw and rugged mess of our mental and emotional life. George Orwell points to this devastating quality of human love in a sentence that also has a charnel ground flavor to it: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, and that one is prepared, in the end, to be defeated, and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”

This then is the meaning of the charnel ground: we have to be willing to come apart at the seams, to be dismantled, to let our old ego structures fall apart before we can begin to embody sparks of the essential perfection at the core of our nature. To evolve spiritually, we have to allow these unworked, hidden, messy parts of ourselves to come to the surface. It’s not that the strategic, controlling ego is something bad or some unnecessary, horrible mistake. Rather, it provides the indispensable grist that makes alchemical transformation possible.

This is not a pessimistic view, because some kind of breakdown is usually necessary before any significant breakthrough into new ways of living not so encumbered by past conditioning. Charnel ground, then, is a metaphor for this breakdown/breakthrough process that is an essential part of human growth and evolution, and one of the gifts of a deep, intimate connection is that it naturally sets this process in motion. Yet no one wants to be dismantled. So there are two main ways that people try to abort this process: running away and spiritual bypassing.

The problem with running away when a relationship becomes difficult is that we are also turning away from ourselves and our potential breakthroughs. Fleeing the raw, wounded places in ourselves because we don't think we can handle them is a form of self-rejection and self-abandonment that turns our feeling body into an abandoned, haunted house. The more we flee our shadowy places, the more they fester in the dark and the more haunted this house becomes. And the more haunted it becomes, the more it terrifies us. This is a vicious circle that keeps us cut off from and afraid of ourselves.

One of the scariest places we encounter in relationship is a deep inner sense of unlove, where we don’t know that we’re truly lovable just for being who we are, where we feel deficient and don’t know our value. This is the raw wound of the heart, where we’re disconnected from our true nature, our inner perfection. Naturally we want to do everything we can to avoid this place, fix it, or neutralize it, so we’ll never have to experience such pain again.

A second way to flee from the challenges of relationship is through spiritual bypassing—using spiritual ideas or practices to avoid or prematurely transcend relative human needs, feelings, personal issues, and developmental tasks. For example, a certain segment of the contemporary spiritual scene has become infected with a facile brand of “advaita-speak,” a one-sided transcendentalism that uses nondual terms and ideas to bypass the challenging work of personal transformation.

Advaita-speak can be very tricky, for it uses absolute truth to disparage relative truth, emptiness to devalue form, and oneness to belittle individuality. The following quotes from two popular contemporary teachers illustrate this tendency: “Know that what appears to be love for another is really love of Self, because other doesn’t exist,” and “The other’s ‘otherness’ stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm, the realm of form.” Notice the devaluation of form and the human realm in the latter statement. By suggesting that only absolute love or being-to-being union is real, these teachers equate the person-to-person element necessary for a transformative love bond with mere ego or illusion.

Yet personal intimacy is a spark flashing out across the divide between self and other. It depends on strong individuals making warm, personal contact, mutually sparking and enriching each other with complementary qualities and energies. This is the meeting of I and Thou, which Martin Buber understood not as an impersonal spiritual union but as a personal communion rooted in deep appreciation of the other’s otherness.

A deep, intimate connection inevitably brings up all our love wounds from the past. This is why many spiritual practitioners try to remain above the fray and impersonal in their relationships—so as not to face and deal with their own unhealed relational wounds. But this keeps the wounding unconscious, causing it to emerge as compulsive shadowy behavior or to dry up passion and juice. Intimate personal connecting cannot evolve unless the old love wounds that block it are faced, acknowledged, and freed up.

As wonderful as moments of being-to-being union can be, the alchemical play of joining heaven and earth in a relationship involves a more subtle and beautiful dance: not losing our twoness in the oneness, while not losing our oneness in the twoness. Personal intimacy evolves out of the dancing-ground of dualities: personal and trans-personal, known and unknown, death and birth, openness and karmic limitation, clarity and chaos, hellish clashes and heavenly bliss. The clash and interplay of these polarities, with all its shocks and surprises, provides a ferment that allows for deep transformation through forcing us to keep waking up, dropping preconceptions, expanding our sense of who we are, and learning to work with all the different elements of our humanity.

When we’re in the midst of this ferment, it may seem like some kind of fiendish plot. We finally find someone we really love and then the most difficult things start emerging: fear, distrust, unlove, disillusion, resentment, blame, confusion. Yet this is a form of love’s grace—that it brings our wounds and defenses forward into the light. For love can only heal what presents itself to be healed. If our woundedness remains hidden, it cannot be healed; the best in us cannot come out unless the worst comes out as well.

So instead of constructing a fancy hotel in the charnel ground, we must be willing to come down and relate to the mess on the ground. We need to regard the wounded heart as a place of spiritual practice. This kind of practice means engaging with our relational fears and vulnerabilities in a deliberate, conscious way, like the yogis of old who faced down the goblins and demons of the charnel grounds.

The only way to be free of our conditioned patterns is through a full, conscious experience of them. This might be called “ripening our karma,” what the Indian teacher Swami Prajnanpad described as bhoga, meaning “deliberate, conscious experience.” He said, “You can only dissolve karma through the bhoga of this karma.” We become free of what we’re stuck in only through meeting and experiencing it directly. Having the bhoga of your karma allows you to digest unresolved, undigested elements of your emotional experience from the past that are still affecting you: how you were hurt or overwhelmed, how you defended yourself against that by shutting down, how you constructed walls to keep people out.

Another term for directly engaging our karma might be “conscious suffering.” This involves saying “yes” to our pain, opening ourselves to it, as it is. This kind of yes doesn’t mean, “I like it, I’m glad it’s like this.” It just means, “Yes, this is what’s happening.” Whatever comes up, you are willing to meet it and have a direct experience of it. For example, if you’re hard-hearted, you have a full experience of that. Then you see how acknowledging this affects you and what comes from doing that.

Bhoga involves learning to ride the waves of our feelings rather than becoming submerged in them. This requires mindfulness of where we are in the cycle of emotional experience. A skilled surfer is aware of exactly where he is on a wave, whereas an unskilled surfer winds up getting creamed. By their very nature, waves are rising fifty percent of the time and falling the other fifty percent. Instead of fighting the down cycles of our emotional life, we need to learn to keep our seat on the surfboard and have a full, conscious experience of going down. Especially in a culture that is addicted to “up,” we especially need our “yes” when the down cycles unfold—to be willing to fall apart, retreat, slow down, be patient, let go. For it’s often at the bottom of a down cycle, when everything looks totally bleak and miserable, that we finally receive a flash of insight that lets us see the hidden contours of some huge ego fixation in which we’ve been stuck all our life. Having a full, conscious experience of the down cycle as it’s occurring, instead of fighting or transcending it, lets us be available for these moments of illumination.
While the highlands of absolute love are most beautiful, few but the saints can spend all their time there. Relative human love is not a peak experience nor a steady state. It wavers, fluctuates, waxes and wanes, changes shape and intensity, soars and crashes. “This is the exalted melancholy of our fate,” writes Buber, describing how moments of I/Thou communion cannot last too very long. Yet though relationships participate fully in the law of impermanence, the good news is that this allows new surprises and revelations to keep arising endlessly.


Relationship as Koan

Relating to the full spectrum of our experience in the relational charnel ground leads to a self-acceptance that expands our capacity to embrace and accept others as well. Usually our view of our partners is colored by what they do for us—how they make us look or feel good, or not—and shaped by our internal movie about what we want them to be. This of course makes it hard to see them for who they are in their own right.

Beyond our movie of the other is a much larger field of personal and spiritual possibilities, what Walt Whitman referred to when he said, “I contain multitudes.” These “multitudes” are what keep a relationship fresh and interesting, but they can only do that if we can accept the ways that those we love are different from us—in their background, values, perspectives, qualities, sensitivities, preferences, ways of doing things, and, finally, their destiny. In the words of Swami Prajnanpad, standing advaita-speak on its head: “To see fully that the other is not you is the way to realizing oneness … Nothing is separate, everything is different … Love is the appreciation of difference."

Two partners not holding themselves separate, while remaining totally distinct—“not two, not one”—may seem like an impossible challenge in a relationship. Bernard Phillips, an early student of East/West psychology, likens this impossibility of relationship to a Zen koan, a riddle that cannot be solved with the conceptual mind. After continually trying and failing to figure out the answer, Zen students arrive at a genuine solution only in the moment of finally giving up and giving in. In Phillips’ words:

Every human being with whom we seek relatedness is a koan, that is to say, an impossibility. There is no formula for getting along with a human being. No technique will achieve relatedness. I am impossible to get along with; so is each one of you; all our friends are impossible; the members of our families are impossible. How then shall we get along with them? … If you are seeking a real encounter, then you must confront the koan represented by the other person. The koan is an invitation to enter into reality.

In the end, to love another requires dropping all our narcissistic agendas, movies, hopes, and fears, so that we may look freshly and see “the raw other, the sacred other,” just as he or she is. This involves a surrender, or perhaps defeat, as in George Orwell’s words about being “defeated and broken up by life.” What is defeated here, of course, is the ego and its strategies, clearing the way for the genuine person to emerge, the person who is capable of real, full-spectrum contact. The nobility of this kind of defeat is portrayed by Rilke in four powerful lines describing Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel:

Winning does not tempt that man
For this is how he grows:
By being defeated, decisively,
By constantly greater beings.

In relationship, it is two partners’ greater beings, gradually freeing themselves from the prison of conditioned patterns, that bring about this decisive defeat. And as this starts reverberating through their relationship, old expectations finally give way, old movies stop running, and a much larger acceptance than they believed possible can start opening up between them. As they become willing to face and embrace whatever stands between them—old relational wounds from the past, personal pathologies, difficulties hearing and understanding each other, different values and sensitivities—all in the name of loving and letting be, they are invited to “enter into reality.” Then it becomes possible to start encountering each other nakedly, in the open field of nowness, fresh and unfabricated, the field of love forever vibrating with unimagined possibilities.


This essay is adapted from a talk given at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Copyright 2008 by John Welwood. All rights reserved.

John Welwood, Ph.D. is a psychotherapist who has been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for more than thirty-five years. Although not explicitly autobiographical, this article traces his journey through his twenty-year marriage. His books include Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart.  


Bliss
xx

Walking the walk

Human Nature, Buddha Nature

An interview with John Welwood

In the 1980s, John Welwood emerged as a pioneer in illuminating the relationship between Western psychotherapy and Buddhist practice. The former director of the East/West psychology program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, he is currently associate editor of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Welwood has published numerous articles and books on the subjects of relationship, psychotherapy, consciousness, and personal change, including the bestselling Journey of the Heart. His idea of “spiritual bypassing” has become a key concept in how many understand the pitfalls of long-term spiritual practice. Psychotherapist Tina Fossella spoke with Welwood about how the concept has developed since he introduced it 30 years ago.

You introduced the term “spiritual bypassing” 30 years ago. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, could you explain what it is? “Spiritual bypassing” is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks. When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to try to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. We may also use our notion of absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as a basic hazard of the spiritual path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current karmic situation.

What sort of hazard does this present? Trying to move beyond our psychological and emotional issues by sidestepping them is dangerous. It sets up a debilitating split between the buddha and the human within us. And it leads to a conceptual, one-sided kind of spirituality where one pole of life is elevated at the expense of its opposite: absolute truth is favored over relative truth, the impersonal over the personal, emptiness over form, transcendence over embodiment, and detachment over feeling. One might, for example, try to practice nonattachment by dismissing one’s need for love, but this only drives the need underground, where it is likely to become acted out in covert, unconscious, and possibly harmful ways.

What interests you most about spiritual bypassing these days? I’m interested in how it plays out in relationships, where spiritual bypassing often wreaks its worst havoc. If you were a yogi in a cave doing years of solo retreat, your psychological wounding might not show up so much, because your focus would be entirely on your practice. It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues show up most intensely. That’s because psychological wounds are always relational—they form in and through our relationships with our early caretakers.

The core psychological wound, so prevalent in the modern world, forms out of not feeling loved or intrinsically lovable as we are. Inadequate love or attunement is shocking and traumatic for a child’s developing and highly sensitive nervous system. It damages our capacity to value ourselves, which is also the basis for valuing others. I call this the “relational wound“ or “wound of the heart.”

There is a whole body of study and research in Western psychology showing how close bonding and loving attunement—what is known as “secure attachment”—have powerful impacts on every aspect of human development. Secure attachment has a tremendous effect on many dimensions of our health, wellbeing, and capacity to function effectively in the world: how our brains form, how well our endocrine and immune systems function, how we handle emotions, how subject we are to depression, how our nervous system functions and handles stress, and how we relate to others.

Modern culture and child raising leave most people suffering from symptoms of insecure attachment: self-hatred, disembodiment, lack of grounding, ongoing insecurity and anxiety, overactive minds, inability to deeply trust, and a deep sense of inner deficiency. So most of us suffer from an extreme degree of alienation and disconnection that was unknown in earlier times—from society, community, family, older generations, nature, religion, tradition, our body, our feelings, and our humanity itself.

How is this relevant for how we practice the dharma? Many of us originally turn to the dharma at least in part as a way of trying to overcome the pain of our psychological and relational wounding. Yet we are often in denial about or unconscious of the nature or extent of this wounding. As a result, being a “good” spiritual practitioner can become a compensatory identity that covers up and defends against an underlying deficient identity, where we feel bad about ourselves, not good enough, or basically lacking. Then, although we may be practicing diligently, our spiritual practice can be used in the service of denial and defense. And when spiritual practice is used to bypass our real-life human issues, it becomes compartmentalized in a separate zone of our life that remains unintegrated with our overall functioning.

Can you give some more examples of how spiritual bypassing takes shape in Western practitioners? In my psychotherapy practice, I often work with dharma students who have practiced for decades. Often they have developed some kindness and compassion for others but are hard on themselves for falling short of their spiritual ideals, and their spiritual practice has become dry and solemn. Or being of benefit to others has become a duty, or a way of trying to feel good about themselves. Others may unconsciously use their spiritual brilliance to feed their narcissistic inflation and treat others in manipulative ways.

People with depressive tendencies who grew up with a lack of loving attunement in childhood have a hard time valuing themselves, and they may use teachings on no-self to reinforce their deflation. Not only do they feel bad about themselves but they regard their insecurity about whether they’re okay as a further fault—a form of me-fixation, the very antithesis of the dharma—which further fuels their shame or guilt.

Meditation is also commonly used to avoid uncomfortable feelings and unresolved life situations. For those who are in denial about their personal feelings or wounds and who have a hard time expressing themselves in a personally transparent way, meditation practice can reinforce a tendency toward disconnection and disengagement. It can be quite threatening when those of us on a spiritual path have to face our woundedness, or emotional dependency, or primal need for love.

I’ve often seen how attempts to be nonattached are used in the service of sealing people off from their human and emotional vulnerabilities. It’s painful to see someone maintaining a stance of detachment when underneath they are starving for positive experiences of bonding and connection.

So how do we reconcile the ideal of nonattachment with the need for human attachment? Good question. We need a larger perspective that can recognize and include two different tracks of human development—which we might call growing up and waking up, healing and awakening, or becoming a genuine human person and going beyond the person altogether. We are not just humans learning to become buddhas, but also buddhas waking up in human form, learning to become fully human. And these two tracks of development can mutually enrich each other.

If we hold a perspective that includes the two developmental tracks, then we will not use our notions of absolute truth to belittle relative, personal feelings and needs for connection. Even though personal feelings and needs may have no solid or ultimate reality, shunting them aside is likely to cause major psychological problems.

The great paradox of being both human and buddha is that we are both dependent and not dependent. Part of us is completely dependent on people for everything—from food and clothing to love, connectedness, inspiration, and help with our development. Though our buddhanature is not dependent—that’s absolute truth—our human embodiment is; that’s relative truth.

So we can be both attached and nonattached? Yes. Nonattachment is a teaching about our ultimate nature. Yet to grow into a healthy human being, we need a base of secure attachment in the positive, psychological sense, meaning close emotional ties to other people that promote connectedness, grounded embodiment, and well-being. As the naturalist John Muir wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.” Similarly, the hand cannot function unless it is attached to the arm—that’s attachment in the positive sense. We’re interconnected, interwoven, and interdependent with everything in the universe. On the human level we can’t help feeling somewhat attached to people we are close to.

So it’s natural to grieve deeply when we lose someone we’re close to. I’ve heard that when Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche attended the memorial service for his dear friend and colleague Shunryu Suzuki, he let out a piercing cry and wept openly. He was acknowledging his close ties to Suzuki Roshi, and it was beautiful that he could let his feeling show like that.

Since we cannot avoid some kind of attachment to others, the question is, “Are we engaging in healthy or unhealthy attachment?” What is unhealthy in psychological terms is insecure attachment, for it leads either to fear of close personal contact or else to obsession with it. Interestingly, people growing up with secure attachment are more trusting, which makes them much less likely to cling to others. Maybe we could call that “nonattached attachment.”

Unfortunately, we can easily confuse nonattachment with avoidance of attachment. Avoidance of attachment, however, is not freedom from attachment. It’s another form of clinging—clinging to the denial of your human attachment needs, out of distrust that love is reliable.

 So avoidance of attachment needs is another form of attachment. Yes. In the field of developmental psychology known as attachment theory, one form of insecure attachment is called “avoidant attachment.” The avoidant attachment style develops in children whose parents are consistently unavailable emotionally. These children learn to take care of themselves and to not need anything from others. That’s their adaptive strategy, and it’s an intelligent and useful one. Obviously, if your needs aren’t going to be met, it’s too painful to keep feeling them. It’s better to turn away from them and develop a do-it-yourself, detached compensatory identity.
What happens in a sangha community if a lot of members have an avoidant attachment style of relating? Avoidant types tend to be dismissive of other people’s needs because they’re dismissive of their own needs.

Might this account for some of the relational problems in our sangha communities? Definitely. It causes people to feel justified in not respecting each other’s feelings and needs. Not surprisingly, “need” often becomes a dirty word in spiritual communities.
People don’t feel free to say what they want. Right. You don’t say what you want because you don’t want to be seen as needy. You’re trying to be nonattached. But that is like an unripe fruit trying to detach itself from a branch instead of receiving what it needs—which will allow it to naturally ripen and let go. When our spiritual practice is way ahead of our human development, we don’t fully ripen. Our practice may have ripened, but our life hasn’t. And there’s a certain point when that gap becomes very painful.

So you’re saying that spiritual bypassing not only corrupts our dharma practice, it also blocks our ripening into whole and integrated individuals. Yes. One way it blocks development is through making spiritual teachings into prescriptions about what you should do, how you should think, how you should speak, how you should feel. Then our spiritual practice becomes taken over by a kind of spiritual superego—the voice that whispers “shoulds” in our ear. This is a big obstacle to ripening, because it feeds our sense of deficiency.

One Indian teacher, Swami Prajnanpad, whose work I admire, said that “idealism is an act of violence.” Trying to live up to an ideal instead of being authentically where you are can become a form of inner violence if it splits you in two and pits one side against the other. When we use spiritual practice to “be good” and to ward off an underlying sense of deficiency or unworthiness, then it turns into a sort of crusade.

What are the consequences of dismissing how you feel? From my perspective as an existential psychologist, feeling is a form of intelligence. It’s the body’s direct, holistic, intuitive way of knowing and responding, which is highly attuned and intelligent. Unlike emotionality, which is a reactivity that sweeps you away, feeling helps you go within and connect with where you are. Unfortunately, traditional Buddhism doesn’t make a clear distinction between feeling and emotion, so they both often tend to be lumped together as something egoic to overcome.

What kinds of tools or methods have you found effective for working with difficult feelings and relational issues? I’ve developed a process called “unconditional presence,” which involves contacting, allowing, opening to, and even surrendering to whatever we’re experiencing. During this process I help people inquire deeply into their felt experience and let it gradually reveal itself and unfold, step by step. I call this “tracking and unpacking.” You track the process of present experiencing, following it closely and seeing where it leads. And you unpack the beliefs, identities, and feelings that are subconscious or implicit in what you’re experiencing. When we bring awareness to our experience in this way, it’s like unraveling a tangled ball of yarn: different knots are gradually revealed and untangled one by one.

As a result, we find that we’re able to be present in places where we’ve been absent or disconnected from our experience. Through reaching out to parts of ourselves that need our help, we develop an intimate, grounded kind of inner attunement with ourselves, which can help us more easily relate to others where they are stuck as well.

I’ve found that when people engage in both psychological and meditative practice, the two can complement each other in mutually beneficial, synergistic ways. Together they provide a journey that includes both healing and awakening. Sometimes one way of working is more appropriate for dealing with a given situation in our lives, sometimes the other is.

How does compassion factor into this approach? The word compassion literally means “feeling with.” You can’t have compassion unless you’re first willing to feel what you feel. Opening to what you feel reveals a certain rawness and tenderness—what Trungpa Rinpoche spoke of as the “soft spot,” which is the seed of bodhicitta [kindheartedness].

It’s vulnerable. Yes. That’s the sign that you’re getting close to bodhicitta. That rawness is also quite humbling. Even if we’ve been doing spiritual practice for decades, we still find these big, raw, messy feelings coming up—maybe a deep reservoir of sorrow or helplessness. But if we can acknowledge these feelings and open ourselves nakedly to them, we’re moving toward greater openness, in a way that is grounded in our humanness. We ripen into a genuine person through learning to make room for the full range of experiences we go through.

How do you know when you’re indulging or wallowing in feelings? That question always comes up. Wallowing in feelings is being stuck in fixation fed by going over and over familiar stories in your mind. Unconditional presence, on the other hand, is about opening nakedly to a feeling instead of becoming caught up in stories about the feeling. For example, if the feeling is sadness, wallowing might involve fixating on a story like “poor me,” instead of directly relating to the actual sadness itself. So delving into feelings might sound like indulgence, but I would say that the willingness to meet your experience nakedly is a form of fearlessness. Trungpa Rinpoche taught that fearlessness is the willingness to meet and feel your fear. We could expand that to say fearlessness is the willingness to meet, face, include, make room for, welcome, allow, open to, and even surrender to whatever we’re experiencing. It’s actually quite brave to acknowledge, feel, and open to your need for healthy attachment and connectedness, for example, especially if you’re relationally wounded. Indulgence, on the other hand, means fixating on the need and being run by it.

What would help our sangha communities develop better communication and greater emotional transparency? We need to work on relationships. I see relationship as the leading edge of human evolution at this time. It’s the arena where it’s hardest to remain conscious and awake.

We could start by recognizing the fact that spiritual communities are subject to the same unconscious group dynamics that every group is subject to. People in groups inevitably trigger each other’s relational wounds and reactivity. It’s important to see that everything we react to in others is a mirror of something we’re not acknowledging in ourselves. Clearly recognizing this could help us work more skillfully with communication problems in the sangha.

So people need to be doing their own personal work? In conjunction with their spiritual practice. Maybe we need to develop some simple ways in Western dharma communities to help people work with their psychological material.

We also need to learn how to speak with each other personally and honestly, from present experience, instead of parroting teachings about what we think we should be experiencing. And there needs to be what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “deep listening,” based on learning to listen to our own experience. Attuned listening is a sacred activity—a form of surrendering, receiving, letting in. We need to recognize this as part of our spiritual work.

Thich Nhat Hahn said that to love is to listen. Yes. We also need to develop a tremendous tolerance and appreciation for different personal styles of embodying the dharma. Otherwise, if we settle for a one-size-fits-all dharma, we are doomed to endless holier-than-thou competition and one-upmanship. While we all venerate the dharma, we each have different ways of embodying and expressing it. So vive la différence, it’s a beautiful thing. Fully honoring individual differences could go a long way toward reducing sangha in-fighting.

One last question about attachment in relationships: Are you saying that to be truly nonattached, one has to be attached first? In terms of human evolution, nonattachment is an advanced teaching. I’m suggesting that we need to be able to form satisfying human attachments before genuine nonattachment is possible. Otherwise, someone suffering from insecure attachment is likely to confuse nonattachment with avoidant attachment behavior. For avoidant types, attachment is actually threatening and scary. So healing for avoidant types would involve becoming willing and able to feel their needs for human connectedness, instead of spiritually bypassing them. Once that happens, then nonattachment starts to make some sense.

The late Dzogchen master Chagdud Tulku made a powerful statement about the relationship between attachment and nonattachment. He said, “People often ask me, do lamas have attachments? I don’t know how other lamas might answer this, but I must say yes. I recognize that my students, my family, my country have no inherent reality…. Yet I remain deeply attached to them. I recognize that my attachment has no inherent reality. Yet I cannot deny the experience of it.” And he ends by saying, “Still, knowing the empty nature of attachment, I know my motivation to benefit sentient beings must supersede it.”

I find this a beautiful articulation of nonattached attachment. Including human nature alongside buddhanature in this way, while situating them both in the largest possible context, is tremendously powerful.

 Intimacy

 

Inviolable suicide

Commemorating those who remove themselves from the gene pool ...

http://www.darwinawards.com/

A suggestion - any of my dark thoughts I should turn them upside down and find the comic in them, like Spike Milligan did.  And then he suggested little sketches  .... mmmm.

Well my latest cure for depression ... obviously  not tried and tested but if all fails at least suicide will look accidental

1. Get a car engine
2. Get some spark leads, wired up appropriately to the engine
3. Get a friend (who will later turn the engine over)
4. Sit comfortably, holding the other end of the spark plugs, on end in each hand
5. Ask friend to turn over the engine.
I guess a tthis point fools will picture the friend picking the engine up and turning it upside down.
It may work - but there won't be much of a spark
6. Check if feeling better (if you get to this point). You could get the friend to ask you questions to help.

I can envisage the silliness of a cartoon of this.

Bliss
XX

Mirror neurons and pain synaesthesia

An axolotl - apparently when given the thyroid hormone it reverts to its land-dwelling ancestor. Amazing! Dr Ramachandran has been studying acromegaly - it seems there has been an excess of growth hormone resulting in people with the disorder reverting to an earlier stage of evolutionary man - square jaws and and ridged eyebrows.


Dr Rama seems to be brilliantly involved in many explorations of syndromes and the physicals of the brain. He is exciting and pioneering in his research. So many questions. No time to research it all. I should be studying - more avoidance!!
Although of course the topics are closely related and relevant.

I wonder if Dr Rama's mirror neurons he mentions, that seem deficient for example in people with autism, are linked at all with the recent investigations into pain synaesthesia. People who feel other people's pain - in extreme, i.e. limping at the sight of someone else twisting their ankle.
JB is certain my seeing of colours is a type of synaesthesia. I have not linked the colours with anything specifically occurring. I will try and note it.

Dr Rama has also observed how time goes faster when people are flirting. The olfactory bulb is smaller in people with autism and also with schizophrenia. Interesting. I wonder if this would link at all with Prof Fallons' psychopath brain. Ah an example of genetics potentially affecting individual behaviour but the influence of the environment triggering or not the disposition. That is a part of one of my essays and we are permitted to use material outside of the course (referenced of course).

Surely autism is a genetically influenced condition that occurs environment or not??


Time Magazine 19April2011
Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the first time?

The answer to both questions is yes. The study of psychedelics in the '50s and '60s eventually devolved into the drug free-for-all of the '70s. But the new research is careful and promising. Last year two top journals, the Archives of General Psychiatry and the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, published papers showing clear benefits from the use of psychedelics to treat mental illness. Both were small studies, just 27 subjects total. But the Archives paper--whose lead author, Dr. Carlos Zarate Jr., is chief of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Research Unit at NIMH--found "robust and rapid antidepressant effects" that remained for a week after depressed subjects were given ketamine (colloquial name: Special K or usually just k). In the other study, a team led by Dr. Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona gave psilocybin (the merrymaking chemical in psychedelic mushrooms) to obsessive-compulsive-disorder patients, most of whom later showed "acute reductions in core OCD symptoms." Now researchers at Harvard are studying how Ecstasy might help alleviate anxiety disorders, and the Beckley Foundation, a British trust, has received approval to begin what will be the first human studies with LSD since the 1970s.

Psychedelics chemically alter the way your brain takes in information and may cause you to lose control of typical thought patterns. The theory motivating the recent research is that if your thoughts are depressed or obsessive, the drugs may reveal a path through them. For Leary and his circle--which influenced millions of Americans to experiment with drugs--psychedelics' seemingly boundless possibilities led to terrible recklessness. There's a jaw-dropping passage in last year's authoritative Leary biography by Robert Greenfield in which Leary and two friends ingest an astonishing 31 psilocybin pills in Leary's kitchen while his 13-year-old daughter has a pajama party upstairs. Stupefied, one of the friends climbs into the girl's bed and has to be pulled from the room.

A half-century later, scientists hope to unstitch psychedelic research from their forebears' excesses. Even as the Clinical Psychiatry paper trumpets psilocybin's potential for "powerful insights," it also urges caution. The paper suggests psilocybin only for severe OCD patients who have failed standard therapies and, as a last resort, may face brain surgery. Similarly, subjects can't take part in the Ecstasy trials unless their illness has continued after ordinary treatment.

Antidrug warriors may argue that the research will lend the drugs an aura of respectability, prompting a new round of recreational use. That's possible, but today we have no priestly Leary figure spewing vertiginous pro-drug proclamations. Instead we have a Leary for a less naive age: Richard Doblin. Also a Harvard guy--his Ph.D. is in public policy--Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986 to help scientists get funding and approval to study the drugs. (Doblin, 53, says he was too shy for the '60s, but he was inspired by the work of psychologist Stanislav Grof, who authored a 1975 book about promising LSD research--research that ended with antidrug crackdowns.) Doblin has painstakingly worked with intensely skeptical federal authorities to win necessary permissions. MAPS helped launch all four of the current Ecstasy studies, a process that took two decades. It's the antithesis of Leary's approach.
All drugs have benefits and risks, but in psychedelics we have been tempted to see only one or the other. Not anymore.

Mmm
He defended the use of the drug LSD for its therapeutic, emotional and spiritual benefits, and even believed it showed incredible potential in the field of psychiatry. Leary also popularized the phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out". Both proved to be hugely influential on the 1960s counterculture. Largely due to his influence in this field, he was attacked by conservative figures in the United States, and described as "the most dangerous man in America" by President Richard Nixon.
(information taken from Wikipedia)






Discuss the statement that "differences in genes between people can contribute towards differences in their behaviour".
The point I wish to make is that there are currently just a few conditions that occur regardless of the environmental situation. Therefore whilst genes clearly play a major part in creating the predisposition towards an individuals behaviour, genes alone are not the only contribution in the main. However reductionists would argue that humanity is seated in the physical brain which is purely genetic. I can use the diseases that will occur as the evidence for this part of the argument but things like Prof Fallon who so far has not shown signs of murdering anyone (tee hee) is evidence that environment can change the course of the predisposed behaviour - although his family suggest he is emotionally detached. Mmm more evidence in favour of -
The plasticity of the brain might be evidence that changes can occur - the development of stem cells etc, are evidence of something but I am not quite sure how to put this yet.
My real point is that clearly genes are a major contribution but cannot be considered the only cause towards differences.
Oh twin studies have shown twins separated at birth have certain inherited personality types - probability and heritability calculations.  But then there is also the argument that they are often adopted into families with similar backgrounds.
I need to read Chapter 1 Book 1 all over again to draw out relevant points and evidence of my argument.
Well at least  have a bit of a plan. Though I can see how my argument is evolving already.
Like Dr Rama said - have a bit of fun with the science.
Terminology, points to be made, evidence etc will all bolster the marking points.


As for how I am - well it's a little like a car engine nearly firing. I want to be able to return to work next week. Not for the job conditions, the work I love, financially I need to as my income starts to reduce to half as from this week I think. I will have to ask my dad for a loan and am terrified of his judgement. I hate being the failure he sees in me. Contributes to me not accepting myself and I am already in a deep state of that!
I think I am coming more to terms with the fact that the relationship I had is well and truly over. Whilst I had deep feelings for the man himself, I can see the dysfunction in my choice of entering into it after it initially being something that was connected strongly with sexual arousal. This did develop but I think I really want to be loved by a man of my visions. I really think I wanted the man to be that but of course it turned out, evidently, that he is not that man at all.
There is that sense of something being wrong with me if he were then able to go off and develop something as per my imagined love. But the truth is if he does find that contentment either in his own behavioural choices or how I imagine loving can truly be, then I would be truly happy. I would like to find it myself. What I want to learn in the meantime is how to be loving with myself. Then I can be even more certain of what is OK for me.
I do agree with SC that I need to have time to heal the wound tat I have kept re-opening. It just seems so sad that it's at this stage in my life and not earlier. However, that is the path I have travelled - I have had a lot of fun along the way. Truly. Even in the drinking drugging stages, although they brought me to my knees eventually. And at this stage the path took on a different direction. One that if I can stay with it is one of light and spirituality. Like I say it's like an engine firing and nearly catching, sometimes, catching and other times not even sparking.
I feel the catching and then dropping off. This is progress.

I am still convinced that hormones have contributed massively to the mood swings. I noticed this morning that I haven't felt extremely high in the past few days. Also that the darker thinking is on and off during a day. It seems to come on after lunchtime. I wonder if wheat is contributing or maybe sugar. I have read I think in the past research that these can have an influence. I noticed yesterday I had no appetite around lunchtime. I did not feel hungry until the evening.

So anyway, there is a change. Right now I want to get on and study. I am not sure if I will attend Art Natters. I will see how the studying goes.

Bliss
XX

I need a teacher

The Bitey Lip Bit

Morning - I will write until 9:30 and then I have to start my studying. Today seems a brighter day.
Yesterday was low all day. Dark thoughts! I went to the AA meeting, I answered honestly when people asked me how I am feeling now - up and down. I shared about the opening topic gratitude with some ease. I related to the grungy text I was sending to my friend that very morning. I hadn't meant it to be so gloomy and realised it as I was writing it. It was the truth so I didn't cancel it but I was able to add to it all the things that immediately came to mind that I am grateful for.
I am especially grateful to such great friends. I have been able to see them every day whilst I have been feeling so low. They truly are like a loving family.
I have to laugh at me . I sit there listening to people who seem to treat me like I am a newcomer just because I am not feeling so well. Perhaps I do sound like a newcomer, I probably do as with SLA and food I am really not in recovery often.
Anyway it is interesting to watch my ego at play. How important it becomes in my thoughts that they think well of me in some way. "I have 10 years recovery don't you know!!" All hoity toity. Of course I was able to observe this and smile at myself and keep my biting my lips.
Where I haven't bitten my lip and felt really ashamed afterwards was during the royal wedding. Caught up in all the pomp and ceremony and enjoying it, I kept giving snippets of info as to when my mum and dad have been involved and invited to various events involving the Queen and other members of the Royal family. My mum was such a Royalist. It's so egotistical to repeat these things. Tell all how important my mum and dad were. They weren't of course at all important but my dad likes to do the same. Gloat and boast about this encounter or that. And it's all just nonsense really.
I couldn't keep my mouth shut - blah blah blah. It's probably much worse in my mind than anyone actually noticing. But I would prefer to stay humble and not need to mention it at all. I took AB to Buckingham Palace so whether she realised that was special or not I don't know and I don't ave to try and gain any status bigger than I am. It doesn't benefit me. They like me anyway.
Blah blah blah
I observed something else. I love all the ceremony, pomp and pageantry. But I also don't. I don't like how easily I am sucked into it all and become one of the masses. It's like being persuaded by advertising. I think it means that my mind is weak and I don't have any original thought. It's the same with music. I hate it when I am caught by one of those commercial catchy tunes, or films that are made to please the simple masses. I want to be complex and unique in thought etc etc. This too is ego. Just enjoy what I enjoy in the moment. I am unique. I am also part of the mass. I play my part as me as there is no one else like me.
There has been an importance in others seeing me as different. I think this might originate from hearing the negative judgements made about people. Bundling people into boxes and coming to conclusions about them. I didn't want to bundled together like that. It is as if I need to break free of those confines. And yet the simple thing is just to be happy as myself where ever I am and however I am. It's good to be a thinker and ask questions about things I am told, or hear. or see. It's that inquisitiveness that keeps the world magical and expanding. And it's that curiosity too that helps me to decided whether I do like this or that or them. But without negative judgement in the first place. I can accept a piece of music, for example, for it's existence. Learning more about it will help me as me decided whether I as me like it or not. And that's OK.
So it was fun and historical watching the Royal Wedding yesterday. It was interesting hearing the comments made by my friends - how self-assured she looks and comparing her with a 18 year old Diana Spencer. How people speak for others, when we don't even know them. Making assumptions. I listened to RB wanting everything to be romantic and lovely. So when comments were made she made everything lovely. But not in a realistic way, speaking for the people on the screen. It seems suddenly when in the public eye everyone knows them inside out. Ha ha ha
Interesting little observations of interactions, wanting to be very involved and KNOWING.
I did wonder how the Middleton family were feeling about suddenly being launched into the Royal family. It's another great story in history. I suppose every Royal family creates fascinating stories.
I did find it sad when the commentator was talking about statues etc along the way as Prince William and Harry were being driven to Westminster Abbey, and there is nothing to mark the existence of Princess Diana. It seems as if she has been eradicated from the public eye. But there were people in the crowd who did not allow the memory of her to fade. Now that will always be a mystery I suppose - but whatever I have no doubt those young men will have thoughts for her. It's seems such a  long time ago.
This period of the Royal family will be an exciting time in the history books. It's no King Henry VIII or Elizabeth I but my there have been some tales to tell. I hope some of the naughtier bits are recorded somewhere and someday the whole truth can be revealed. Of course with time indiscrepancies matter less as no one would be directly affected. I think the public might be horrified if they think they had been duped by the Princess. Amazing after her death how the Royal family once again closed their ranks and we learn less about the insides of their lives than when Princess Diana was out and about revealing all.
Te conspiracy theory can sometimes seem to have substance. How I love intrigue and drama he he he. I am sure this seeps into the ego as well.

I really want to write about my visit with SC. So I need to extend my writing until 10 and then come what may start my studying. Essay one is about the ways which genetics affect human behaviours and individuality of that. The study about genes and cells has been fascinating and gives me the biological element but I need to re-read other parts of the course to bring that into individuality and evidence with behaviours. I haven't quite got the picture yet of the essay to be able to draw that info out yet.
It's normally how it seems to work best - a very basic outline of what I want to get across in each paragraph - then return to find the details and evidence.
I need to think about that today.
Then I need to start the report on the experiment we have been doing. Counting proteins in sections of rat brains. Yuch.

So SC. It was a very helpful session. He reminded me of me. Because I tend to forget that I live with this core damage. He draws it so well and I have a real clear understanding of this....

This shows the concept that as babies we are bundles of vulnerability and anger. In my own opinion I think babies are bundles of more but I agree that there is the demand for needs to be met which is driven by a version of anger. And of course yes babies are totally vulnerable and cannot survive without caregivers providing. The provisions come in the shape of nourishment of course but also nurturing. This means being held and feeling security, love contributing to that security, because if there is love then there will be a strong commitment to provide. There is also teaching and other day to day automatic givings to a baby that is loved. There is evidence of a lacking in the brain development of babies that are not held. In the Romanian orphanages where the babies did not receive any physical contact and there are spaces in the brains. Sadly this never recovers as the importance for this brain development is within the first 5 years. And there are deficiencies in adult life.
Anyhow this diagram shows how the nurturing wraps the anger and vulnerability with all the other things - confidence, love, learning - development basically. Should the infant or child be subjected to any sort of trauma, then a the wound goes straight to the vulnerability and anger. The person then goes about life with this exposed to the world. It will show as well. And unconsciously people will be aware of the vulnerability and the anger, sometimes occurring together and sometimes not. So when this person is re-traumatised the vulnerability and anger are re-triggered.
How I can relate to this is that in my vulnerability, I have a strong desire to be loved. In my ignorance, there was no consciousness to my choices, I became a slave to a Master. I felt loved and nurtured. I was entirely vulnerable. Unfortunately this person was just doing what he does. I believe that he was not consciously aware of the vulnerability within me. However. I am now aware that there are a lot of vulnerable people "playing" at this. I am not judging this as a whole. There are questions I have as to the sexual needs but I can see that perhaps within a relationship that is already loving and assured there is room for games. But where there are strangers meeting strangers there is a potential for issues. Anyway that is not my point, it's simply a question to raise and explore. But those in it would be unlikely to own potential psychological issues at force.
Anyway, anyway. So there I was vulnerable and looking to be loved. In my vulnerability I discovered that I was aroused through sexual acts that were out of my control - so controlled, a bit of a dark exciting side,  unknown, pleasing someone else ... etc. There are more things that the arousal came from I suspect but those immediately come to mind. It would be interesting to speak with a Master who is self aware and not just acting still on the internal arousals. Anyhow, Master took this to another level and offered love. I was taken right in and adored him. But the trauma occurred when I learnt that he was lying and continued to lie. What was so shocking, was that there was no need. I had been entirely happy to be nothing more than a slave. So the confusion came when he told me one thing and it was if he threw me away each time when he did another. This of course is my issue nothing to do with him and what he was doing and is reasons for doing it. He was unaware of the inner me. I was unaware of his true wants and needs. I thought I was as open as I knew how to be about what I was wanting and needing. I did not enter into the arrangement wanting him to be my lover.
I can relate back to the trauma in the first place.The sexual, mental and emotional abuse as a child. It was dark, I was controlled, I was scared and yet I only knew that really to be love. It was given and it was taken away at the will of my father. He can still reel me in and then chuck me away even now.
So whilst Master was not my father, there was a re-traumatising. In a different way.
Now the diagrams show how the wound means that there is anger and vulnerability exposed and these explode out. Over time though the person develops caps to try and keep the rage and vulnerability in. So things like an eating disorder, alcohol, drugs, work, sex, money, etc etc addiction if you like can be one sort of cap. It's so powerful that it might take lots of different caps to keep the rage and vulnerability in. But when the wound is re-opened it all spills out again.
I think the vulnerability in me gets me into the situations in the first place. The vulnerability is whooshing out all of the time. When the rage explodes it is powerful but has never been contained as a child. It was just shut off. No one was there to hear and believe and help. That is not said with blame. It's just how it was. I feel sad when I write it because I know my mum loved me and tried to look after me but she was also trying to climb us into better and better. She was a live-wire too and sitting at home looing after a baby was not for her. My dad was the perpetrator. I do have understanding for him too. He was a mixed up man. War weary with no support. His own childhood was full of trauma with even less support than I had and then all is own vulnerability and rage taken into the army where they just latch onto that and create a mean killing machine. That's what he was. How on earth would he have any knowledge about being a father. He has always said he knew he should never have had children. I have always taken that as a direct link with me. But when I stand aside I see exactly what he means. However, he did have me and had a duty as a father not to violate that privilege.
People are so unaware of the things they do and the ways in which they affect their children. Children are different and aware of different things. Each one has a right t be nurtured just as they need to be. Parents are often too busy these days pursuing their own needs. And are unaware of the harm they do. There is no right or wrong way but awareness is so important.
(I wonder if Master would want his daughter playing the way he does with women. I wonder if he puts that out of his head. That s my anger rising. It is none of my business and do not know the way his kids are, only from what he told me. I hear rage and I hear inward thinking. That is all I know. He is not wholly there though ad I did witness that. And of course had not been for a much longer time. In fact his changes probably made him more there than he has been in the past. This is all assumption based on what he told me and I observed. Not fact. This is me thinking and rambling, it snds judgemental and is my continuing hurt, wanting the man I wanted to be able to love to be something else. He is who he is and that's that. The reality is I do not judge when I remove myself from the equation.)
Back to me as this really is not about anyone else. I really did love him. The trauma was reignited and then the rage started to explode. I didn't like the person I saw Iw as becoing in this rage and also that the rage was uncontainable or that's how it felt. Together with the sifts of hormones within me I became unable to deal with the explosion occurring and was copletely in trauma again. The wound wide open exposing my anger and vulnerability. I collapsed.
I have asked before and asked again about the healing. Is it possible to heal. I thought when I was entering into the M/s relationship that there was a safety in it. Exploring the sexuality that has always been there and never before toyed with in this way. But the wound was still very fresh. SC suggested that I need to get everything into recovery. Food, sex and love, of course alcohol and drugs (goes without saying) etc etc. I need to be attending meetings, espcially OA as the food and the sex and love are so entwined. I need to start working with a sponsor - that means finding a sponsor in SLAA again. I need to be setting bottom lines, basically everything in that area needs to be solid!
I need help containing the rage - and that can come through the rooms, friends, support, and therapy. And over time the wound will heal.
I was saying jst yeaterday I think that I would never find a man attractive who doesn't have a little bt of a dark side and that is an adventurer and is intelligent and questioning. I found JH attractive but it was the Master dark side that was the intital meeting between us. He said that he was new to it himself. There was a lovingness from him and I even right at this moment all the things that were glorious to be with I still see that so strongly.
So it is difficult to imagine that with my healing there will be change in my needs. I will not need that dark side. Even as I write it I feel the sense of mischief and excitement that comes with it. I must turn to the light when I sense that in me. I can do that to and feel fresh air and lightness and sheer awe at the wonder - it's upward and airy. Just the things I heard from the Bishop of London yesterday feel wholesome and so much better than that heavier and all encompassing darker side.
It's difficult to let go of I guess for anyone that has had that input as a child and I have. With the dark side of my dad came fun and when he was attached he took me along with him. I felt held by someone who seemed strong and nothing could happen to me whilst I was with him.
That makes me so tearful because I want that still but don't know how to have that without all the SHIT!
I can see it SC, I really can. I want to be free of it but am scared that I am letting go the very life of me. The dark side seems to be energy and motivation at times.
It's then that I think there is no point. I am too old and there is no future and fuck it - lets do away with me now and end the misery for me and anyone else.
I amscared to do it yet welsome it strongly. I get a sense of calm as I think about not existing anymore. It would be final.
Yet I want to feel the meaning of words like I heard yesterday. I want to be close and engaged with people that can think and feel like that.
I feel an indescribable feeling when I think of love and connectedness, and wisdom and truth, balance. The Universe. It takes the dark side too. It is wholesome. Without knowing the darkside it is not possible to turn away from it. I guess there are people who only see light from the moment of their existence. This are truly enlightened souls. I am on a journey of discovery and would I really want to cut that short.
Sometimes it seems so. Then when I turn to the light I can see what learning I have, experiences have shown me so so much! I can embrace that.

Bliss
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