De Natura Rerum

“A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.”
Alfred Adler

The theme runs something like this – how to synthesise the lamas and the lineage, the psychologists with their insights, the slippery wilful mind with its annihilation…
Go on retreat and sit for hour after hour; be silent and feel the pressure of your mind at its margins; dive into systemic therapeutics or experiential magic; let the green and red world behind the world of appearances nestle its battered brow against your awkward shoulder and feel the tears run.

I was thinking about Anne Ancelin Schützenberger and her work with ‘the ancestor syndrome’, how in families there are often correlated dates on which people die in each generation (or get married or become ill or whatever); she uncovers traumas extant in the contemporary French and stems these wounds directly from the 1789 Revolution and subsequent Terror. Makes Tony Blair’s (old piano-grin himself) recent whispered not-quite-sorry about slavery tinkle the ivories of lip service more clearly, doesn’t it? The basic naked principle here, as Freud taught us, is the return of the repressed, or perhaps, dressed in velvet, the return of the unremembered – it matters not. As Adler points out we’re into the ice-sheet of lies, now melting in the frosty mandala of eco-collapse – and remember, the environment doesn’t begin where your skin meets the atmosphere, it interpenetrates your bios, your genus, your history and memory too – inside and out are of one taste.

Sticking with Adler a moment, he also notes somewhere that “Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority” – something to bear in mind for those of us inclined towards feeling – and perhaps this is why (to the best of my knowledge) even the very astute Derrick Jensen has yet to light the literal fuse of his metaphoric weapons and blow up any actual dams. Certainly pertains to therapy and the dance of spaciousness and challenge – something we’ll focus into soon. But first, there are a few others to meet, starting with Virginia Satir. She told us that “problems are not the problem; coping is the problem”, and she was right, just as Jacob Moreno was right to identify the ‘unmittelbare Begegnung’ (‘living encounter’) as the time-limited, here and now, healing-potential of the moment where past and present meet. Just as Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy referred rightly to “violent pursuit of one’s entitlement” as (I can hear Derrick Jensen applauding) ‘destructive entitlement’ that is the root of ‘family pain and hurt’. Can you tell what it is yet? No? How about if I introduce Milton Erickson? Bert Hellinger perhaps? Or Franz Ruppert or Albrecht Mahr? Alright, alright, you’ve got it – we’re steering a course for systemic or constellation based modalities of healing and the ‘knowing field’ approach to the therapeutic dynamic. Let’s pause a moment and take in the view – I can see the vessel emerging out of, say, Hellinger's ‘rules’ (chaos and order appearing together, naturally): – he sees radical inclusion (a systemic conscience requires the re-membering of anyone ‘forgotten’ in any systemic story – forgotten ones are re-folded into presence); he sees temporal hierarchy (in the system ancestors prevail, age counts and the flow of respect for those who went before is an index of constellated health – contrast that with the slippage of PoMo unremembering and the loss of all ‘Founders’); he sees that everyone has their own fate (and because of this no-one can take on another’s fate or replace them); and he sees the ‘unchangeable givens’ (the place where we can only agree to ‘what is’ – where, at the speaking of the permissive ‘Yes’, our fate becomes our destiny); finally he sees the need for a balance of giving and taking (the appropriateness of gratitude, recognition, reciprocity and the spiral flow of ‘upwards giving’ – a system enhancing its capacity to express love). Furthermore, he also sees that non-observance of these ‘orders of love’ leads to systemic imbalance, to hubris, inflation, delusions of grandeur and illusions of our own uniqueness and power.

Its useful at such points to recall that a ‘good intention’ is not always synonymous with a ‘right intention’ from a systemic perspective, for example, the child may try to save the mother, since this will make the child safer as well as remembering the echoed lost one three generations back – however, systemically, the child can never replace the parent – the temporal hierarchy trumps the good intention and an entanglement results – a trauma, a localized dysfunction within a broader system where disharmony is isolated into crisis seeking the shift of awareness.

Are you seeing what I’m seeing? What Hellinger calls ‘contextual is-ness’ becomes all important here – the dynamic balance between what we bring (trailing clouds of glory) and where we stand – an existential experimental razor-blade of now enfolding then. So we carry the wounds of the past, not just the personal past, not just the collective past, not only the transpersonal past, but the weight of life having existed at all. Like Joanna Macy’s ‘Work That Reconnects’ – you and I are a flash in the species past, we could choose to remember having gills, or leaves, or the intention to manifest at all – and in so doing we could approach the stars we are and always were and will become. This is ‘intergenerational psychotraumatology’. It's also Kairos, the place where we notice our fascination with resistance, the phenomena of our own wilful non-healing (as identified by Mark Jones in ‘A Change is as good as a Red’). This represents the edge and the experiment – the ordinary magic beyond the inflations of a needy ego.


It also points full-square at the necessity of continuity, of lineage, we might say. So there has to be a thread reaching back, not only the blood-line and cell-structure of our mitochondrial DNA (although certainly it includes that), but also a pattern of sound holding mind, of symbols leading heart, of imagination on fire with compassionate regard and inclusion. And more, even where lineage still exists in an unbroken and self-realised way, what is still required is a question. No constellation will work without an initiating issue, and no immersion into lineage will be permitted or opened without abisekha – anointing. Where there is a question it is not the question ‘does God exist?’ but, as Chogyam Trungpa shows us, ‘does the question exist?’. He goes on to note that of course, it doesn’t exist, and therefore neither does the asker, nor, by extension, God – yet it exists specifically through the perception of the asker, contextually, not from its own side – the very nature of illusion. He concludes, typically (and joyfully) – “let there be contradiction” as a sign of wellbeing.

I want to end with another consideration, in part from Adler, who says

“No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.”

And in part from the work of Thogme Zangpo, author of the ‘37 Practices of a Bodhisattva’; he writes in stanza 24 that

“the various ills in our life that we suffer resemble the death of our child in a dream”

The dream runs, we grow old and grey but forget to notice that a dream is unfolding, forget that there is dream at all, become stuck to the reality we insist upon that all is at it seems, and as a result surmount our suffering with terror, holding “as truth what is merely illusion”. The child who died was always a dream child. The dreamer who is dying is also a child. There is no distinction between child, dream and dreamer worthy of the name – they are each empty of each other, yet manifesting difference for the sake of a healing flash.

The fruit, the path, the base of all this is the realisation that emptiness exceeds our ego, and that whenever we fail to hold this realisation (which for me is all the time I ever experience) we experience only illusion. We engage with a dancing fog-bound light shifting in deep currents of which we know nothing and perceive even less, yet we insist that we are ‘dealing with reality’ and are full of ‘good intentions’, systemically hamstrung by our partiality. Lacking all lineage, all linkage and flow, we become marionettes in the danse macabre. Let us go to the cemeteries and crematoria, inside and out, Now and Then, and dance until the veils become offering scarves stretching back to the arising of life, forward to illusion’s last breath, and the liberatory orgasm of being.


Kh
28.11.06

IMAGES: Kinkara [Special Dharma Protector for pratitioners of Heruka and Vajrayogini, also known as 'Father Mother Lord of the Charnel Grounds'.] (date unknown) by Andy Weber, Cupid and Centaur (1992) by Joel-Peter Witkin.