Robert Augustus Masters Q&A Part Fourteen
April 16, 2006
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A. Arthur/adastra asks:
1. On p. 83 of Freedom Doesn't Mind Its Chains, you say:
“When unillumined passion, passion that has been kept in the dark or faraway, and disembodied rationality meet – or collide – there ensues a kind of fertilization, spawning crazed loops of logic that snare us in their rigidly grooved treads, leaving us penned up like so many articulate cattle in our minds, lost in dustclouds of stampeding thought, overly susceptible to the siren call of lines of reasoning that are far from healthy or humane.”
Could you elaborate on this passage? In particular, could you give some examples of the kinds of disorder this unhealthy combination can lead to?
2. How would you advise someone to deal with strong feelings of jealousy or possessiveness in the context of a sexual/romantic -or formerly so - relationship?
3. Someone recently sent me the following poem by Marge Piercy:
To Have Without Holding
Marge Piercy
Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.
I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.
~~~~
I find the stance the poem appears to be advocating both challenging and compelling. (At first I thought it was advocating polyamory but currently see it as potentially describing “conscious monogamy” as well.) It speaks to me of deeply bonding and committing fully to someone while fully respecting their autonomy, as well as realizing to your core that anything can change – that if you truly love that person you need to allow them room to change and grow, be and become as they need to do, even if that means the loss or change of the relationship you've committed to; as opposed to consciously or unconsciously attempting to limit or contain them.
This poem has been caroming around inside me, cross-breeding with your comments on immature monogamy, mature monogamy and polyamory, so I'm curious...what are your thoughts and feelings on this poem and my subsequent musings? How does this fit with what you've been saying on the subject of relationships?
4. What are some projects you're working on or considering currently?
Robert answers:
1. The passage you quote is not an easy one to elaborate on without including the context from which it arose, so I am going to begin by including the essay from which it was taken, and then comment on it.
THE BODY AND “I”
Is the body just the mind’s way of conducting business, is it merely a container for the ego or soul, is it simply an assembly of tissue, bone, and blood, or is it something more, something else?
“The flesh” has gotten negative press for millennia, being overassociated with sin, carnality, moral weakness, and disease. Many of us don’t seem to like our bodies very much. Or we may like them, but not want them to change.
So what’s a body to do?
Let’s begin by considering the “where” of the body. In looking at our body, we may find ourselves looking down upon it. But is it really “down there”? Is our belly below us? And if so, from whose point of view? When we view our body from the vantage point of our cranial headquarters, it may very well seem as if we are above it, and not necessarily just in a physical sense.
It. The very relegation of the body to the status of a concretized “it” — an assembly of matter to be looked down upon, if only geographically — is but a confession of somatic estrangement or disconnection. (And if we are thus disconnected, out of touch with our own body, we are going to have great difficulty relating with sensitivity and ecological savvy to our collective body, the body of Nature, whatever our philosophy.)
“It” gets sick, old, infirm; “it” isn’t attractive enough, healthy enough, strong or resilient enough; “it” betrays us, embarrasses and disobeys us. In short, “it” brings us down. The litany continues — the body is unpredictable, unreasonable, too hot or too cold, too tired or too wired, too thick or too thin, too this or too that, constantly demanding to be filled, then emptied, again and again making trouble. But for whom? Or what?
James Joyce describes one of his characters, Mr. Duffy, as living a short distance from his body. That sense of separation or dissociation, when sufficiently dramatized, makes up much of the basis of the “I” that relates to the body as a literal “it.” This “I,” this self-obsessed, uneasily governed coalition (or mob) of habits, appears — at least to itself — to be a solid self, a discrete entity, a tenured indweller, a non-contingent somebody truly separate (or independent from the rest of existence.
However, as sages have long pointed out, “I” is not an entity, but an activity. A choice. It is not something we have, but something we are doing. Even now.
“I” generally acts as if it is living in (or is trapped within) the uppermost reaches of the body, but this assumed “positioning” is, as I’ll later discuss, a misinterpreted result of “captured” attention, rather than a concrete reality.
In its ossified, tenaciously reinforced subjectivity, “I” is not only literally uptight, but seems to exist over against a universe, inner and outer, of objects (that is, whatever apparently is, or can be classified, as “not-I”), including the body in which it seems to be housed.
In its misguided appropriation of “mind over matter,” “I” automatically presumes to possess the intelligence and vision, while the body becomes the depot of dumb, appetite-driven animal-ness, requiring the near-constant supervision of “I” and its various programs.
Such is our dominant cultural attitude toward the body. We may take good care of it, but we still don’t usually get very close to it. We may park it on the latest aerobic machine at the local fitness center, making sure it works up a decent sweat, but even then, how attentive are we really to it? Not just to its contours and huffing and quadriceps protests, but to its interiority, its deeper needs, its innate rhythms, its cries and memories, its organismic presence. Our minds may be elsewhere, glued to magazines or to the TVs facing the rows of exercise machines. Or just mechanically wandering through recent events or future plans.
When we get ahead of ourselves, what happens to our body? Before long, it starts acting like a neglected child, pulling at our attention with various desires, appetites, impulses — yanking us back from the future, hauling us in like an errant kite, pulling us back into the present, very possibly a past-polluted present, but nonetheless the present. Or our body may find so little success in its attempts to get our attention, that helplessness eventually sets in, leading to depression, apathy, and illness.
If the more subtle messages of the body are not attended to, then more overt or dramatic signals will likely follow. If these are not given enough attention, then even more blatant signs — extreme illness, serious malfunction, and so on — may arise. Like the steed that needs not the whip but only the shadow of the whip, we need to heed the language of our body when it is but a whisper, and heed it with our full, undivided attention.
Conscious embodiment.
Through its lack of somatic anchoring and attunement, “I” usually is poorly informed or just plain confused about our basic needs. Nevertheless, it is capable of a free-floating consideration of many views. At its best, this ability to think about thinking can provide a certain stability — or “fair witness” grounding — for the tolerance and egalitarian logic of healthy rationality. Unfortunately, such positioning tends, because of its frequent estrangement from feeling, to be rather dry and abstract, typically favoring the intellectual over the experiential, the dispassionate over the passionate, and the objective over the subjective.
The disembodied rationality of “I,” regardless of its possible cogency, is too committed to a merely mental inquiry to have a genuinely beneficial impact on any significant scale. It is too busy dissecting and taxonomically sorting the already overcooked to have any intimacy with the raw, or anything else that might “dirty” or taint the sterilized, neatly perimetered sanctums wherein it conducts its inquiries into the human condition. Is it any wonder that the working class has commonly carried such a strong suspicion of the so-called intelligentsia and its erudite analyses of bourgeoisification, class struggle, and so on? Epithets such as “egghead,” despite their crudity and usual malice, are not that far off target, pithily pointing to the from-the-neck-up malady — the overoccupying of one’s head — that infects much of academia.
The language of disembodied rationality is a morally inflated — as in “I’ll defend to the death your right to call me an egghead” — and fleshless shell, a calcified, cleverly articulated latticework of sterilized, politically correct phrasing, avoiding street-talk, sensuality, and emotional passion in much the same that a Brahmin might avoid a Sudra (or “Untouchable”) in India. A Brahmin may assume that contamination has occurred even by being in the vicinity of a Sudra.
Similarly, the passions have been conceived of as polluting the clear waters of reasoned discourse for thousands of years. It is still not uncommon to view emotions as being “lower” or more “primitive” than reason, doing little more than clouding the skies of rational thought, or muddying objectivity.
Thinking clearly is thus often associated with dispassion, or a muting of and distancing from one’s emotions; moral decisions are allegedly best made when passion and feeling are either “safely” out of the picture, or are functionally peripheral to the decision-making process, much like children excluded or kept at a distance from parental discussions. However, when we put emotion aside, or too far aside, we distance ourselves from our body, as if it has nothing worthwhile to contribute to what we’re considering.
For the kind of rationality that favors or relies on dissociation from emotion, the body is the shadow, a carrier of obstructions to rigorous inquiry, again and again driving twisted bolts of passion into the cool of reasoned thought, thereby polluting or even aborting our objectivity.
When unillumined passion, passion that has been kept in the dark or faraway, and disembodied rationality meet — or collide — there ensues a kind of fertilization, spawning crazed loops of logic that snare us in their rigidly grooved treads, leaving us penned up like so many articulate cattle in our minds, lost in dustclouds of stampeding thought, overly susceptible to the siren call of lines of reasoning that are far from healthy or humane.
Those who feel compelled, for whatever reason (including aversion to sentences like the previous one!), to dissociate from their emotional and physical dimensions, may find a certain sanctuary and self-legitimization in the vistas of disembodied rationality, as Evelyn Keller makes clear: “A science that advertises itself by the promise of a cool and objective remove from the object of study selects for those individuals for whom such a promise provides emotional comfort.”
A disembodied rationality means a disembodied inquiry, a questioning confined to “headucation.” Its programs for human betterment and advancement cannot really flower — except as plastic blooms — since they are rooted in artificial soil, far from the blood, sinew, and nerve of human suffering. Its theorizing is generally far from intimate with actual practice — even as it learnedly theorizes about bringing theory and practice together — for its intent is not to actually embody what it is saying, but rather to enlist support for its arguments.
No real compassion. Only politically correct “caring.”
How can we genuinely love if we are cut off from our own bodies? How can we have compassion for others when we have little or no compassion for what’s frightened, broken, stumbling, dysfunctional, or irrational in ourselves? Instead of using our thinking mind in the service of who we really are, we get caught up in exploiting its attributes, using its reasoning and contextualizing powers to distance ourselves from the very pain we need to face, feel, and integrate. That is, we tend to employ the cognizing capacity of our brain to reduce our more difficult or painful feelings — or at least the message of such feelings — to mere information that can then be manipulated in any way “we” want.
But to engage in genuine inquiry does not mean squatting with supposed awareness “above” our marginalized, shut-away, or otherwise shunned pain. Such cerebral escapism or avoidance is of no more value than is indulging in reactive feeling, and in fact is perhaps even more hazardous, because its irrationality is better camouflaged. A healthy rationality is not an escape from body and feeling, but rather is informed by them.
The practice of distancing or dissociating ourselves from our emotions, especially our apparently darker or more uncomfortable emotions, can seriously disrupt our ability to think clearly and act morally. Recent neurological research demonstrates that an impairment in emotional capacity (as perhaps caused by damage to brain regions essential for emotional processing) can actually retard one’s ability to make sound decisions.
Back to the body does not at all mean jettisoning our intellect, but rather allowing it — cognitive intelligence — to synergistically coexist with the social, somatic, emotional, spiritual, moral, aesthetic, and survival dimensions of intelligence.
Back to the body is not an atavistic exhortation, nor a regression, but simply an invitation, a call to return to an embodied now, a now which is centered not by egoity, but by intrinsic awareness, a now in which the personal and the transpersonal are in fitting embrace. In this, my intention is not to put down egoity, but to permit it its most fitting context. Ego is not the villain, the culprit, the spoilsport, the toxic boss, but rather is simply an activity — however multi-headed — that we very easily identify with, at the expense of our body.
To find out “where” the body is, we need, among other things, to closely examine our assumptions about our relationship to our body. Let us, for example, consider the notion of being “in” a body. To assume that we are in a body not only reduces the body to a container, a housing project, a thing, but also implies an out for us, an exit, a potential escape or getaway. After all, how could we even consider going out of the body if we didn’t already believe that we were in it?
But who is in it?
And exactly where is “in”?
Read on...
END OF ESSAY
Disembodied rationality (commonly known as “being in our head”) is not rationality devoid of feeling, but rationality that’s so disconnected from feeling that there’s very poor communication between the two. Such rationality sits not with feeling, but above it, surveying everything from its densely walled headquarters. Feeling, of course, still arises, but, having no intimacy with such rationality, becomes but its hired help, its thirdworld labor force, doing its dirty work.
When disembodied rationality meets unillumined feeling, the result is far from life-giving, leading to activities that, however ugly or atrocious, get the best rationalization that power can buy. An example: Naziism (a survivor of Bergen-Belsen described that deathcamp as having an air of extreme rationality). Another example: colonization of ”backward” peoples. And another: betrayal. The list goes on and on, confusing rationalization with rationality, perhaps obscuring the fact that rationality in of itself is a necessary developmental stage of cognition that serves our well-being (and the well-being of all) if it is allowed to ripen in intimate conjunction with feeling and compassion.
Rationality that overseparates itself from feeling (and being) is an irrational rationality.
2. How to work with jealousy or possessiveness? First of all, acknowledge them for what they are; admit that they are present. Second, don’t try to get rid of them; instead, explore them, dig deep, mine their depths for what lies at their core (if possible, work on this with a good psychotherapist). Third, get them in healthy perspective; allow them to be there, but don’t let them run the show (psychotherapy and meditative practice are very useful here). Seat them where you can keep an eye on them, so that when they start to act up, you see it immediately and can take steps (like shifting perspective) to keep them from overwhelming you. This is not easy, but gets easier with practice. Attachment comes with relational intimacy; jealousy is made possible through attachment; and a more mature, awakened love can come through jealousy, if we will but cut through its melodramatics and go to its heart...
It’s useful to know jealousy well, so let’s take a deeper look at it, keeping in mind that jealousy and envy differ, and that what follows is mainly about the kind of jealousy that arises when there’s a threat (real or not) to our closeness with our intimate other...
Jealousy, especially sexual jealousy in a relational context, can be exceedingly painful, as anyone who has writhed in its straitjacketed fires knows all too well. Most of us strive not to provide fertile conditions for jealousy, but it still manages to sprout up, with a green not of sun-embracing reach, but of venomous force. However, jealousy is not some inherently evil or negative feeling, and nor does it necessarily have to be a problem.
What matters is what we do with our jealousy. Do we get lost in it, thereby embodying its point of view? Do we try to rise above it, acting as if we’re beyond possessiveness, thereby denying ourselves full access to our depths? Or do we condemn it, sentencing it to life imprisonment, thus walling away the very vulnerability of which our jealousy is but a twisted, overly dramatic confession? Or do we abstract it, talking about it with forced, terminally level rationality and unnatural calm, even as we half-wonder why our emotional life is so flat and dull?
Do we believe in our jealousy so strongly that we do irreparable harm to one we love? Or do we run from it, avoiding any circumstances that resemble the one that originally catalyzed our jealousy? Or do we deny that it is actually happening, while we slowly die inside, painting good cheer and non-possessive smiles over our collapse of heart? Or do we make good use of our jealousy, giving it room to breathe and move through us while not submitting to its viewpoint?
Jealousy is a painfully intense dramatization of being rejected, whether the rejection is real or imagined. The perceived threat of rejection (or even increased insecurity), however slight, may be enough to trigger jealousy, especially if we already don’t feel very stable in our relationship.
Jealousy is the outraged cry of thwarted possessiveness, sometimes being hard-fisted, cruel, rabid with indignant logic, and sometimes being sunken, mushy, jammed with self-pity, crammed with boxed-in sorrow, submitting to an unnecessarily hellish tomorrow. But whatever form it may take, jealousy often features a compulsive drive to blame the offending other for what is happening to us, as if to somehow legitimize our extreme contraction of being.
The core of jealousy’s message is: “You don’t love me!” or something similar, implying colossal rejection, as of an infant by its mother; accompanying this is another, implicitly held message: “If you loved me, you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing!”
How easy it is to get marooned in the wastelands of rejection, especially if our history has predisposed us to being readily hooked by rejection. And what an art it is to stay open, present, and loving -- or at least connected to the possibility of loving -- in the midst of real rejection: There may be anger and tears, and all the symptoms of jealousy, but there will be no significant withdrawal of self, nor any indulgence in blaming; there may be force, but not violence; there is vulnerability, but not mushiness or sunkenness; there is real sadness, not reactive sorrow; and there is a clear willingness to go right through jealousy’s dark realm, rather than just a righteous positioning somewhere within it; and most of all, there is love, or at least the all-out commitment to making room for it, rather than uptight, loveless waiting to see if the other, the one who has apparently rejected us, is being loving, or is going to become loving toward us.
If we will only love when we are already being loved by the other, then we are prime candidates for deep jealousy, for we are then chronically on the search for signs that we are not being loved, miserably sniffing around for evidence of abandonment or betrayal, reducing ourselves to neurotic sleuths, sinking into overdone suspiciousness, again and again demanding, however indirectly, that the other consistently demonstrate or prove his or her trustworthiness. Such demonstration, however, is rarely enough for us, for we, in our jealousy, won’t trust anything except our mistrust and doubt regarding the other. In short, we then expect betrayal, and even, in a sense, crave it, so as to recreate (almost always unconsciously) infantile or childhood scenarios of unresolved rejection.
The lesson here, at essence, is to love, or to remain truly open to being loving, even when we are clearly being rejected. The form of such love is not meek or passive, nor necessarily all-accepting of rejection; rather, it is potent, dynamic, passionately alive, quite capable of fiery yet clean anger, more than willing to call bullshit bullshit (as when the other deliberately does things to catalyze our jealousy, so as to feel more powerful). Such love does not shrink in the face of rejection, and nor does it piously stand aside. It radiates forth, generating an environment that simultaneously cradles and renders reactivity transparent.
When we complain that we not being loved, we, in our very complaining, are not being loving, but are only barricading ourselves from fully feeling our woundedness; we are, in effect, actually rejecting what is most vulnerable in us, doing to it what is being done to us (or what we imagine is being done to us) by the one who is “making” us jealous. Real love does not reject the other, but it may reject something that the other is doing.
Jealousy is the open abscess of unillumined possessiveness, the endarkened sensation of betrayal-catalyzed separation and insecurity. When untouched by awareness, jealousy is a mean-spirited temper tantrum, a coupling of twisted anger and lopsided hurt up on a toxic soapbox, righteously ranting about right and wrong, making too much noise to hear its own true song.
When held and penetrated by real love, jealousy eases its defences, becoming but the uninhibited expression of relational hurt, a heart-opening confession of possessiveness, a sharing of deep feeling, leaving us sobered, unmasked, and more loving, more at ease with our possessiveness, no longer struggling for either ownership or detachment, no longer enslaved to the possibility of potential rejection, no longer afraid of jealousy, and no longer so bound to being in relationships that, through their unresolved neurotic patterns and lack of real grounding, provide excessively fertile conditions for the arising of jealousy.
3. A beautiful, raw-hearted poem...The pain she describes so well appears to be arising, in part, through her repeated opening to being in an “open” relationship, but it also applies to the pain that comes with fully opening to love’s demands, whatever the context may be.
To open to deep relationship is not only to open to deep love, but also to open to the inevitable pain of such relationship. Real love does not remove us from hurt, but rather opens us so wide and deep that we make room for it. The stretching implicit in this sometimes hurts like hell; all we can do then is not turn our pain into suffering. The very hurt that arises through deep relationship can, if embraced, break our heart open to a deeper life. Fierce grace.
4. Writing projects: A book of poetry that includes a CD of my some of my poems that have been set to music and sung by my wife Diane; a book about mature monogamy; a book about dreams, dreaming, and the dreamer; a book about sex.
Other projects: Creating more apprenticeship programs in Integral Psychotherapy, Bodywork, and Groupwork, as well as further developing groupwork for couples who want to awaken through deep relational intimacy.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A. Arthur/adastra asks:
1. On p. 83 of Freedom Doesn't Mind Its Chains, you say:
“When unillumined passion, passion that has been kept in the dark or faraway, and disembodied rationality meet – or collide – there ensues a kind of fertilization, spawning crazed loops of logic that snare us in their rigidly grooved treads, leaving us penned up like so many articulate cattle in our minds, lost in dustclouds of stampeding thought, overly susceptible to the siren call of lines of reasoning that are far from healthy or humane.”
Could you elaborate on this passage? In particular, could you give some examples of the kinds of disorder this unhealthy combination can lead to?
2. How would you advise someone to deal with strong feelings of jealousy or possessiveness in the context of a sexual/romantic -or formerly so - relationship?
3. Someone recently sent me the following poem by Marge Piercy:
To Have Without Holding
Marge Piercy
Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.
I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.
~~~~
I find the stance the poem appears to be advocating both challenging and compelling. (At first I thought it was advocating polyamory but currently see it as potentially describing “conscious monogamy” as well.) It speaks to me of deeply bonding and committing fully to someone while fully respecting their autonomy, as well as realizing to your core that anything can change – that if you truly love that person you need to allow them room to change and grow, be and become as they need to do, even if that means the loss or change of the relationship you've committed to; as opposed to consciously or unconsciously attempting to limit or contain them.
This poem has been caroming around inside me, cross-breeding with your comments on immature monogamy, mature monogamy and polyamory, so I'm curious...what are your thoughts and feelings on this poem and my subsequent musings? How does this fit with what you've been saying on the subject of relationships?
4. What are some projects you're working on or considering currently?
Robert answers:
1. The passage you quote is not an easy one to elaborate on without including the context from which it arose, so I am going to begin by including the essay from which it was taken, and then comment on it.
THE BODY AND “I”
Is the body just the mind’s way of conducting business, is it merely a container for the ego or soul, is it simply an assembly of tissue, bone, and blood, or is it something more, something else?
“The flesh” has gotten negative press for millennia, being overassociated with sin, carnality, moral weakness, and disease. Many of us don’t seem to like our bodies very much. Or we may like them, but not want them to change.
So what’s a body to do?
Let’s begin by considering the “where” of the body. In looking at our body, we may find ourselves looking down upon it. But is it really “down there”? Is our belly below us? And if so, from whose point of view? When we view our body from the vantage point of our cranial headquarters, it may very well seem as if we are above it, and not necessarily just in a physical sense.
It. The very relegation of the body to the status of a concretized “it” — an assembly of matter to be looked down upon, if only geographically — is but a confession of somatic estrangement or disconnection. (And if we are thus disconnected, out of touch with our own body, we are going to have great difficulty relating with sensitivity and ecological savvy to our collective body, the body of Nature, whatever our philosophy.)
“It” gets sick, old, infirm; “it” isn’t attractive enough, healthy enough, strong or resilient enough; “it” betrays us, embarrasses and disobeys us. In short, “it” brings us down. The litany continues — the body is unpredictable, unreasonable, too hot or too cold, too tired or too wired, too thick or too thin, too this or too that, constantly demanding to be filled, then emptied, again and again making trouble. But for whom? Or what?
James Joyce describes one of his characters, Mr. Duffy, as living a short distance from his body. That sense of separation or dissociation, when sufficiently dramatized, makes up much of the basis of the “I” that relates to the body as a literal “it.” This “I,” this self-obsessed, uneasily governed coalition (or mob) of habits, appears — at least to itself — to be a solid self, a discrete entity, a tenured indweller, a non-contingent somebody truly separate (or independent from the rest of existence.
However, as sages have long pointed out, “I” is not an entity, but an activity. A choice. It is not something we have, but something we are doing. Even now.
“I” generally acts as if it is living in (or is trapped within) the uppermost reaches of the body, but this assumed “positioning” is, as I’ll later discuss, a misinterpreted result of “captured” attention, rather than a concrete reality.
In its ossified, tenaciously reinforced subjectivity, “I” is not only literally uptight, but seems to exist over against a universe, inner and outer, of objects (that is, whatever apparently is, or can be classified, as “not-I”), including the body in which it seems to be housed.
In its misguided appropriation of “mind over matter,” “I” automatically presumes to possess the intelligence and vision, while the body becomes the depot of dumb, appetite-driven animal-ness, requiring the near-constant supervision of “I” and its various programs.
Such is our dominant cultural attitude toward the body. We may take good care of it, but we still don’t usually get very close to it. We may park it on the latest aerobic machine at the local fitness center, making sure it works up a decent sweat, but even then, how attentive are we really to it? Not just to its contours and huffing and quadriceps protests, but to its interiority, its deeper needs, its innate rhythms, its cries and memories, its organismic presence. Our minds may be elsewhere, glued to magazines or to the TVs facing the rows of exercise machines. Or just mechanically wandering through recent events or future plans.
When we get ahead of ourselves, what happens to our body? Before long, it starts acting like a neglected child, pulling at our attention with various desires, appetites, impulses — yanking us back from the future, hauling us in like an errant kite, pulling us back into the present, very possibly a past-polluted present, but nonetheless the present. Or our body may find so little success in its attempts to get our attention, that helplessness eventually sets in, leading to depression, apathy, and illness.
If the more subtle messages of the body are not attended to, then more overt or dramatic signals will likely follow. If these are not given enough attention, then even more blatant signs — extreme illness, serious malfunction, and so on — may arise. Like the steed that needs not the whip but only the shadow of the whip, we need to heed the language of our body when it is but a whisper, and heed it with our full, undivided attention.
Conscious embodiment.
Through its lack of somatic anchoring and attunement, “I” usually is poorly informed or just plain confused about our basic needs. Nevertheless, it is capable of a free-floating consideration of many views. At its best, this ability to think about thinking can provide a certain stability — or “fair witness” grounding — for the tolerance and egalitarian logic of healthy rationality. Unfortunately, such positioning tends, because of its frequent estrangement from feeling, to be rather dry and abstract, typically favoring the intellectual over the experiential, the dispassionate over the passionate, and the objective over the subjective.
The disembodied rationality of “I,” regardless of its possible cogency, is too committed to a merely mental inquiry to have a genuinely beneficial impact on any significant scale. It is too busy dissecting and taxonomically sorting the already overcooked to have any intimacy with the raw, or anything else that might “dirty” or taint the sterilized, neatly perimetered sanctums wherein it conducts its inquiries into the human condition. Is it any wonder that the working class has commonly carried such a strong suspicion of the so-called intelligentsia and its erudite analyses of bourgeoisification, class struggle, and so on? Epithets such as “egghead,” despite their crudity and usual malice, are not that far off target, pithily pointing to the from-the-neck-up malady — the overoccupying of one’s head — that infects much of academia.
The language of disembodied rationality is a morally inflated — as in “I’ll defend to the death your right to call me an egghead” — and fleshless shell, a calcified, cleverly articulated latticework of sterilized, politically correct phrasing, avoiding street-talk, sensuality, and emotional passion in much the same that a Brahmin might avoid a Sudra (or “Untouchable”) in India. A Brahmin may assume that contamination has occurred even by being in the vicinity of a Sudra.
Similarly, the passions have been conceived of as polluting the clear waters of reasoned discourse for thousands of years. It is still not uncommon to view emotions as being “lower” or more “primitive” than reason, doing little more than clouding the skies of rational thought, or muddying objectivity.
Thinking clearly is thus often associated with dispassion, or a muting of and distancing from one’s emotions; moral decisions are allegedly best made when passion and feeling are either “safely” out of the picture, or are functionally peripheral to the decision-making process, much like children excluded or kept at a distance from parental discussions. However, when we put emotion aside, or too far aside, we distance ourselves from our body, as if it has nothing worthwhile to contribute to what we’re considering.
For the kind of rationality that favors or relies on dissociation from emotion, the body is the shadow, a carrier of obstructions to rigorous inquiry, again and again driving twisted bolts of passion into the cool of reasoned thought, thereby polluting or even aborting our objectivity.
When unillumined passion, passion that has been kept in the dark or faraway, and disembodied rationality meet — or collide — there ensues a kind of fertilization, spawning crazed loops of logic that snare us in their rigidly grooved treads, leaving us penned up like so many articulate cattle in our minds, lost in dustclouds of stampeding thought, overly susceptible to the siren call of lines of reasoning that are far from healthy or humane.
Those who feel compelled, for whatever reason (including aversion to sentences like the previous one!), to dissociate from their emotional and physical dimensions, may find a certain sanctuary and self-legitimization in the vistas of disembodied rationality, as Evelyn Keller makes clear: “A science that advertises itself by the promise of a cool and objective remove from the object of study selects for those individuals for whom such a promise provides emotional comfort.”
A disembodied rationality means a disembodied inquiry, a questioning confined to “headucation.” Its programs for human betterment and advancement cannot really flower — except as plastic blooms — since they are rooted in artificial soil, far from the blood, sinew, and nerve of human suffering. Its theorizing is generally far from intimate with actual practice — even as it learnedly theorizes about bringing theory and practice together — for its intent is not to actually embody what it is saying, but rather to enlist support for its arguments.
No real compassion. Only politically correct “caring.”
How can we genuinely love if we are cut off from our own bodies? How can we have compassion for others when we have little or no compassion for what’s frightened, broken, stumbling, dysfunctional, or irrational in ourselves? Instead of using our thinking mind in the service of who we really are, we get caught up in exploiting its attributes, using its reasoning and contextualizing powers to distance ourselves from the very pain we need to face, feel, and integrate. That is, we tend to employ the cognizing capacity of our brain to reduce our more difficult or painful feelings — or at least the message of such feelings — to mere information that can then be manipulated in any way “we” want.
But to engage in genuine inquiry does not mean squatting with supposed awareness “above” our marginalized, shut-away, or otherwise shunned pain. Such cerebral escapism or avoidance is of no more value than is indulging in reactive feeling, and in fact is perhaps even more hazardous, because its irrationality is better camouflaged. A healthy rationality is not an escape from body and feeling, but rather is informed by them.
The practice of distancing or dissociating ourselves from our emotions, especially our apparently darker or more uncomfortable emotions, can seriously disrupt our ability to think clearly and act morally. Recent neurological research demonstrates that an impairment in emotional capacity (as perhaps caused by damage to brain regions essential for emotional processing) can actually retard one’s ability to make sound decisions.
Back to the body does not at all mean jettisoning our intellect, but rather allowing it — cognitive intelligence — to synergistically coexist with the social, somatic, emotional, spiritual, moral, aesthetic, and survival dimensions of intelligence.
Back to the body is not an atavistic exhortation, nor a regression, but simply an invitation, a call to return to an embodied now, a now which is centered not by egoity, but by intrinsic awareness, a now in which the personal and the transpersonal are in fitting embrace. In this, my intention is not to put down egoity, but to permit it its most fitting context. Ego is not the villain, the culprit, the spoilsport, the toxic boss, but rather is simply an activity — however multi-headed — that we very easily identify with, at the expense of our body.
To find out “where” the body is, we need, among other things, to closely examine our assumptions about our relationship to our body. Let us, for example, consider the notion of being “in” a body. To assume that we are in a body not only reduces the body to a container, a housing project, a thing, but also implies an out for us, an exit, a potential escape or getaway. After all, how could we even consider going out of the body if we didn’t already believe that we were in it?
But who is in it?
And exactly where is “in”?
Read on...
END OF ESSAY
Disembodied rationality (commonly known as “being in our head”) is not rationality devoid of feeling, but rationality that’s so disconnected from feeling that there’s very poor communication between the two. Such rationality sits not with feeling, but above it, surveying everything from its densely walled headquarters. Feeling, of course, still arises, but, having no intimacy with such rationality, becomes but its hired help, its thirdworld labor force, doing its dirty work.
When disembodied rationality meets unillumined feeling, the result is far from life-giving, leading to activities that, however ugly or atrocious, get the best rationalization that power can buy. An example: Naziism (a survivor of Bergen-Belsen described that deathcamp as having an air of extreme rationality). Another example: colonization of ”backward” peoples. And another: betrayal. The list goes on and on, confusing rationalization with rationality, perhaps obscuring the fact that rationality in of itself is a necessary developmental stage of cognition that serves our well-being (and the well-being of all) if it is allowed to ripen in intimate conjunction with feeling and compassion.
Rationality that overseparates itself from feeling (and being) is an irrational rationality.
2. How to work with jealousy or possessiveness? First of all, acknowledge them for what they are; admit that they are present. Second, don’t try to get rid of them; instead, explore them, dig deep, mine their depths for what lies at their core (if possible, work on this with a good psychotherapist). Third, get them in healthy perspective; allow them to be there, but don’t let them run the show (psychotherapy and meditative practice are very useful here). Seat them where you can keep an eye on them, so that when they start to act up, you see it immediately and can take steps (like shifting perspective) to keep them from overwhelming you. This is not easy, but gets easier with practice. Attachment comes with relational intimacy; jealousy is made possible through attachment; and a more mature, awakened love can come through jealousy, if we will but cut through its melodramatics and go to its heart...
It’s useful to know jealousy well, so let’s take a deeper look at it, keeping in mind that jealousy and envy differ, and that what follows is mainly about the kind of jealousy that arises when there’s a threat (real or not) to our closeness with our intimate other...
Jealousy, especially sexual jealousy in a relational context, can be exceedingly painful, as anyone who has writhed in its straitjacketed fires knows all too well. Most of us strive not to provide fertile conditions for jealousy, but it still manages to sprout up, with a green not of sun-embracing reach, but of venomous force. However, jealousy is not some inherently evil or negative feeling, and nor does it necessarily have to be a problem.
What matters is what we do with our jealousy. Do we get lost in it, thereby embodying its point of view? Do we try to rise above it, acting as if we’re beyond possessiveness, thereby denying ourselves full access to our depths? Or do we condemn it, sentencing it to life imprisonment, thus walling away the very vulnerability of which our jealousy is but a twisted, overly dramatic confession? Or do we abstract it, talking about it with forced, terminally level rationality and unnatural calm, even as we half-wonder why our emotional life is so flat and dull?
Do we believe in our jealousy so strongly that we do irreparable harm to one we love? Or do we run from it, avoiding any circumstances that resemble the one that originally catalyzed our jealousy? Or do we deny that it is actually happening, while we slowly die inside, painting good cheer and non-possessive smiles over our collapse of heart? Or do we make good use of our jealousy, giving it room to breathe and move through us while not submitting to its viewpoint?
Jealousy is a painfully intense dramatization of being rejected, whether the rejection is real or imagined. The perceived threat of rejection (or even increased insecurity), however slight, may be enough to trigger jealousy, especially if we already don’t feel very stable in our relationship.
Jealousy is the outraged cry of thwarted possessiveness, sometimes being hard-fisted, cruel, rabid with indignant logic, and sometimes being sunken, mushy, jammed with self-pity, crammed with boxed-in sorrow, submitting to an unnecessarily hellish tomorrow. But whatever form it may take, jealousy often features a compulsive drive to blame the offending other for what is happening to us, as if to somehow legitimize our extreme contraction of being.
The core of jealousy’s message is: “You don’t love me!” or something similar, implying colossal rejection, as of an infant by its mother; accompanying this is another, implicitly held message: “If you loved me, you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing!”
How easy it is to get marooned in the wastelands of rejection, especially if our history has predisposed us to being readily hooked by rejection. And what an art it is to stay open, present, and loving -- or at least connected to the possibility of loving -- in the midst of real rejection: There may be anger and tears, and all the symptoms of jealousy, but there will be no significant withdrawal of self, nor any indulgence in blaming; there may be force, but not violence; there is vulnerability, but not mushiness or sunkenness; there is real sadness, not reactive sorrow; and there is a clear willingness to go right through jealousy’s dark realm, rather than just a righteous positioning somewhere within it; and most of all, there is love, or at least the all-out commitment to making room for it, rather than uptight, loveless waiting to see if the other, the one who has apparently rejected us, is being loving, or is going to become loving toward us.
If we will only love when we are already being loved by the other, then we are prime candidates for deep jealousy, for we are then chronically on the search for signs that we are not being loved, miserably sniffing around for evidence of abandonment or betrayal, reducing ourselves to neurotic sleuths, sinking into overdone suspiciousness, again and again demanding, however indirectly, that the other consistently demonstrate or prove his or her trustworthiness. Such demonstration, however, is rarely enough for us, for we, in our jealousy, won’t trust anything except our mistrust and doubt regarding the other. In short, we then expect betrayal, and even, in a sense, crave it, so as to recreate (almost always unconsciously) infantile or childhood scenarios of unresolved rejection.
The lesson here, at essence, is to love, or to remain truly open to being loving, even when we are clearly being rejected. The form of such love is not meek or passive, nor necessarily all-accepting of rejection; rather, it is potent, dynamic, passionately alive, quite capable of fiery yet clean anger, more than willing to call bullshit bullshit (as when the other deliberately does things to catalyze our jealousy, so as to feel more powerful). Such love does not shrink in the face of rejection, and nor does it piously stand aside. It radiates forth, generating an environment that simultaneously cradles and renders reactivity transparent.
When we complain that we not being loved, we, in our very complaining, are not being loving, but are only barricading ourselves from fully feeling our woundedness; we are, in effect, actually rejecting what is most vulnerable in us, doing to it what is being done to us (or what we imagine is being done to us) by the one who is “making” us jealous. Real love does not reject the other, but it may reject something that the other is doing.
Jealousy is the open abscess of unillumined possessiveness, the endarkened sensation of betrayal-catalyzed separation and insecurity. When untouched by awareness, jealousy is a mean-spirited temper tantrum, a coupling of twisted anger and lopsided hurt up on a toxic soapbox, righteously ranting about right and wrong, making too much noise to hear its own true song.
When held and penetrated by real love, jealousy eases its defences, becoming but the uninhibited expression of relational hurt, a heart-opening confession of possessiveness, a sharing of deep feeling, leaving us sobered, unmasked, and more loving, more at ease with our possessiveness, no longer struggling for either ownership or detachment, no longer enslaved to the possibility of potential rejection, no longer afraid of jealousy, and no longer so bound to being in relationships that, through their unresolved neurotic patterns and lack of real grounding, provide excessively fertile conditions for the arising of jealousy.
3. A beautiful, raw-hearted poem...The pain she describes so well appears to be arising, in part, through her repeated opening to being in an “open” relationship, but it also applies to the pain that comes with fully opening to love’s demands, whatever the context may be.
To open to deep relationship is not only to open to deep love, but also to open to the inevitable pain of such relationship. Real love does not remove us from hurt, but rather opens us so wide and deep that we make room for it. The stretching implicit in this sometimes hurts like hell; all we can do then is not turn our pain into suffering. The very hurt that arises through deep relationship can, if embraced, break our heart open to a deeper life. Fierce grace.
4. Writing projects: A book of poetry that includes a CD of my some of my poems that have been set to music and sung by my wife Diane; a book about mature monogamy; a book about dreams, dreaming, and the dreamer; a book about sex.
Other projects: Creating more apprenticeship programs in Integral Psychotherapy, Bodywork, and Groupwork, as well as further developing groupwork for couples who want to awaken through deep relational intimacy.
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posted by adastra at 12:43 PM
