Cooked in our own stew of cynicism and hopelessness

Howl Reborn

By J.D. Suss    

12/03/06 "Information Clearing House" -- --- The words I am writing and you are reading are the very fabric of illusion.  Language, along with screen-mediated images, are the virus-like carriers of mental/rational consciousness.  This is the mind structure of the age – ego-self parading its articulate novelty, while repressing and dominating other, more poetic structures of mind; King Reason in a (now more subtle) patri-centric mode, professionally made-up, controlled, socially correct, flings courtesy and false bravado in equal, unthinking measure – never mind its detached head whose feelings and emotions are as disconnected from its heart as its being is alienated from nature; nevermind its defensiveness, its rushing along onto the next topic, its trammeling of dialogue in a cesspool of bureaucratese, soulless prattle, code words, corporate-speak, dissimulation, and happy chatter.  Eye follows eye in a thought-filled vacuum, as brain after brain vampirizes whatever rushes across the windscreen of the mind.  With synaptic impulse, rational discernment snaps the verbiage into cognizable word-thought.  Judgments are passed.  Positions, pro and con, are neatly, quietly taken.  But soon, as fingers start tapping at keyboards, as talking heads begin to gush, all will erupt onto the stage electronique, into info-bytes fed over routers worldwide – polemic-as-entertainment debuts on news talk shows.  We are publicly feeding mammon in a psychic mirror world we have devised to be our socio-cultural meeting ground – a noospheric junkyard where the punditocracy fight like junkyard dogs for camera lights, for media ratings – a stage-managed agenda, crafted daily by media moguls who dance like puppets on the leashes of hollow-headed corporate minions, who in turn dance to the black-and-white monochord of their legal departments – all info-image-makers in the entertainment biz. 

Enjoy your illusion as it is re-represented to you here.  In this bit of advocacy, this platform, this soap-box monologue – readers are further inculcated into the phantasmagoric.  On this soul-making planet known as hell, the disenfranchisement of our more developed human potential groans on.  Weary, the lead-heavy soul thrashes about in a disenchanted world, in an empty-handed search for a reality, newly borne but out-of-reach.  It screams in agony for authenticity.  It wanders in a daze.  It looks in vain, crying, “My people, my people, where are my people”?  It knows not its own folly – just as the reader/watcher is fed a daily fix of pablum-news, these words will fill the mind, reorient, discombobulate, precipitate a disorienting dilemma – perplex, provoke, stimulate the sensorium of mental delights into a puzzling new wonderama. 

The industrialized powers have triumphed.  The world around us is made up of persons, places, things, activities, qualities, states of mind – wherein ceaseless activity follows the sun, archetype of the masculine, of the individuated ego.  And even in the artificial luminescence of controlled environments, sleepwalking night gaunts patrol a suspect perimeter.  Our safety is assured by paranoid policy wanks; huge amounts of kill-power are store-housed and paid for dearly by citizen wage-slaves.  Science, laws, order are paid for too.  Professional bureaucrats, installed by a corpocracy for half a century and more, bring colorless continuity to a national security state.  Western techno-wizardry is exported and emulated and comprises a new, financial colonization.  Inscribed within the fortresses of mega-buck global multinationals – the new area-wide demi-governments – are insatiable growth credos.  Installed within are Zen-oid organizational developers who clone the humanistic lingo and teach the tricks of enlightened ways in seminars, their polished emulations having the desired effect.  Managers of all levels return, glossies in hand, ever ready to consult the manual of clever deceit and slick new mind control methodologies. 

Research methodologies are the very instruments of consensus in the natural and human sciences that are used to continue propping up the illusion called consensual reality.  Consensual reality polls “reliable sources” who subscribe to “facts”: objectified, normative values in an “it-world” in which they are the observers and the subject of their research is the observed.  More recently, new participatory models are being used in which the observer (or co-participant) as much observes his or her own self and is observed by others in a more qualitative, more egalitarian empiricism.  New methodologies such as these simply enlarge the research field, give more breadth to a study.  But they barely change the basic premise of the consensual reality, which is hard-wired into human beings at birth and is nurtured throughout our lives by way of social conditioning.  What reality is this?  Who are these “reliable sources”? And what exactly is this social conditioning, this culture-trance? 

Consensual reality is a material universe localized to the immediate lived space, in clock-time, (real or noospherically recreated) which – while it recognizes the existence of something beyond itself – still only thrives almost exclusively in this thought-mediated, space-time, bio-physical dimension of dualisms.  Archeo-magic and mythic structures of consciousness – collectively known as the unconscious – resurface occasionally from their suppressed latency, in dreams or fantasies.  If we apprehend them at all we often discount them as superstition, confabulation, dejavu, or irrational nonsense.  In fact, these are messages sent by the psyche, the soul, from this rich, almost gone-and-forgotten template which was traded long ago for a partial, reified, uni-dependent mind-world composed of and dependent exclusively on mental/rational consciousness – ego-selves battling and distracting one another while recognizing the banal commonality of a mundane playing field.   

While humanity speaks in high-falutin’ language about our noble aspirations, it in fact grovels around in a cave with its science and research – G.I. Gurdjieff’s “android,”[i] Idries Shah’s “automaton,”[ii] Alfred North Whitehead’s “merely well-informed man,”[iii] modern-day Sophists endlessly recapitulating through hairsplitting dialectics.  We are constantly conditioned to a consensual reality and our true selves are “sleeping,” are waiting to be unbound from Prometheus, from a runaway and over-inflated archetype – the ego-as-self.  As we have know, at least since Immanuel Kant[iv] articulated the process of self-delusion (but which we conveniently forget), we act and react according to pre-programmed data which has been absorbed since birth and to which we are likely genetically predisposed. The desire for excitement and sensual pleasure is mutually reinforced in our interactions with others and the multitudinous distractions humankind has created for itself – TV, movies, newspapers, spectator sports, our stereos, computers, etc.  We are caught in Plato’s cave[v], we are Shah’s “islanders.”              .    

Not to deconstruct so much as to expose for scrutiny this paradoxical absurdity on which the modern world has totally invested itself, let us take a deeper tour of the abyss.  Let us strip away the preconceived lunacy and myth we call science, laws, education, career, culture which we forever re-breed.  While intellectual giants and mystics have come along and continue to appear, calling out to humanity how it has diverged into this blind “progressive” alley, people inevitably mistake incarnated beings for their messages.  They erect monuments to them as enlightened individuals and call them disciplines or religions; most follow some brilliant theorist or guru, etc. – gurus whose egos so cleverly delude themselves and others.  Like sheep to the slaughter, they lose in this effort the message that could have been internalized but rarely is.  Books containing wisdom and helpful guidance are left behind.  The contents are interpreted to fit the variegated delusions of the readers (these words too – beware!).  Still, each book, each guidance and encouraging word IS the struggle of humanity to come to terms with the suffering required of soul-making.  To find some peace and contentment in this hell of ours, to improve the lot of those who will follow us – we are called to look and learn and better the conditions in this hell to the best of our abilities.  This does not mean following some dogmatic, procedural formulaic toward informed autonomous reason, or devoting oneself to some arational enlightenment handbook.  Yet this is what the majority of humanity does.  They do it out of ignorance of the heights to which their human potential can soar; or, they wrongheadedly follow some path that they have come to believe will take them there.  And in the end, alienated from their own co-creativity, they die as deluded as they were born.  The world – hell – remains; the mammon – our ego-selves – still hungry. 

Birth.  Nine months prior to this often traumatic event, the perinatal, is a crucial time for human development.  Stanislav Grof has clinically studied the perinatal.[vi]  His discoveries indicate that traumas experienced from the perinatal through the birthing process are imprinted onto our minds.  As we grow and develop, these traumas begin to manifest as dissociations.  The dissociations, together with imprints from post-birth traumas, dictate how our personalities form, including the counter-developmental behaviors that often result.  Jean Liedloff in her book, The Continuum Concept[vii], explains further how infants deprived of in-arms love suffer certain handicapping conditions that forestall healthy development.  How utterly crucial this time is!  Mainstream psychology does not even recognize Grof’s perinatal period as a part of the cartography of psychological human development.  Western culture would throw the baby into the nursery at once where it is deprived of its mother, its world.  At home, the baby will go to a crib.  When out strolling the baby goes into a stroller.  How many strikes are against us before we can even walk? 

The above researchers, using research methodologies, gave us valuable insights.  Shall we trash research and its methodologies?  Certainly not.  Should we investigate how their results may be limited and how they might be properly applied none-the-less?  Surely.  Has the human mind benefited from their studies by informing us how our minds might better evolve?  Yes indeed.  Are their results ignored, belittled, or explained-away?  I believe they are.  Why?  Why indeed? – this is the point: because what they have explored and the conclusions on which they have expounded do not fit into consensual reality and is foreign to Western culture-trance. 

Childhood. Kids first bond with and learn from their mothers.  If that bond is tenuous or that mother has her own set of developmental problems – and as a result has little to teach – that kid is going to start life with severe limitations.  There are so many factors that enter into this fragile period of life, e.g., the degree of care and nurturing, the development of the father, the relationship between the parents, the influence of other adults, siblings and other children, the physical surroundings.  The most crucial factor is: how much love, time and proper attention is given to the child; has the behavioral modeling that is going on around and about the child been positive?  The child is being introduced and initiated into the family system.  Its world view is being imprinted here.  How healthy is that family system, that world view?  If it is seriously flawed, the child is likely to suffer because of those flaws.  A child will try to mimic the behaviors to which it is exposed.  How is the child treated by others?  Taunting and teasing by others that goes uncorrected can leave emotional scars that may never heal. 

Underlying all of this behavioral and developmental psychology is the consensual reality being formed for the child.  The child is both active and passive participant here.  It is not long before the child joins in the consensus that “yes, this is our shared reality” – Mommy, face-titty-hands, sleepy; touchy-touchy, flashy-squeaky-music toy-toys; talky-talky, Daddy-brother-sister-others? doggy, kitty, house, TV-talky-talky, big music sound!, toilet flush, kitchen, loud-soft, more talky-talky, machine sound, car sound, bird sound...  The world of the infant is primarily mediated by its sense of hearing, (just as the ears, according to Jean Gebser[viii] are the predominating organ of the magic structure of consciousness).  The perimeter of its world gradually opens up.  The other senses become more and more aware as rudimentary thoughts are prompted, linked, given meaning – the child is the involuntary recipient of the family hermeneutics – they interpret his or her surroundings, intoning at first with baby talk, with praise or reprimand, with physical handling within the environment.  In this way the child heuristically “makes sense” of its surroundings, slowly differentiating according to sound, touch, taste, and their associations.  The language the child is born into – especially the structure of its grammar (e.g., how object-oriented is it?) – can influence how relational and embedded it perceives itself to be within the reality it comes to adopt.    

Timothy Leary described how to re-condition (brainwash) any person in his book, Neopolitique[ix].  One need only repeat the experience of this reality-weaning of the infant.  A person is first isolated from loved ones and then made totally dependent on the captor for food, for approval, for conditional love.  The cooperation of the conditioned subject is rewarded more and more until that person adopts the mindset or worldview or consensual reality of his or her captors. 

Of course the consensual reality is different for an American child than it is for a child in Siberia.  Even a child of the American south will have a slightly different set of values than a child born in, let’s say, California.  Besides nationality and regional differences, language, race, gender, religion, class, ethnic origin, etc., all play essential roles in the consensual reality.  We might say that like Ken Wilber’s deep structures and surface structures[x], consensual reality is a deep structure and culture-trance is a surface structure.  Consensual reality informs us of and situates us in the dominant Western materialist dimension, which is filled out by the time/space dualism inhering in mental/rational consciousness.  Culture-trance is more circumstance-specific.      

School.  There is some social conditioning that begins with interactions with neighbors.   But when it comes time to go to school at about five years of age, this is when local societal influences are pooled and the rudiments of culture-trance are traded and examined and further refined.  How we dress, interact, and are herded by the classroom teachers all indoctrinate children.  Kids are shown how to share and play games, sing the songs of their nation; they are given coloring books with sketches of some aspects of consensual reality and told to prettify them with their crayons.  Soon they are taught how to read and write.  They are taught about their history and government, arithmetic, science, their grammar, etc.   With each subject studied, with each group or one-on-one activity children are inculcated further into the trance-like socio-cultural identity.   

For many children there is a “home identity” and a “school identity.”  In this schizoid-like state, they proceed with their indoctrination.  They absorb whatever they are exposed to.  They mimic their adult overseers and other children.  The transmission of culture, or the social cloning process, has begun.  In the late afternoon and evening they are further programmed by family, TV, and whatever other influences await them there.  Home becomes a further training ground to “try-out” what they learn from teachers and especially from other kids in school.  They experiment with parallel modes of behavior.  Still, it soon becomes very clear exactly what the normative culture is and children are expected to internalize it. 

While socialization is necessary and important in development, where does socialization end and conditioning begin?  How are they different?  What exactly happens to children at this stage?  What are the negative implications?  How do these early school experiences lay the groundwork for the rest of their academic lives?  How can what happens here be improved upon?  How can we “dis-entrance” pathological conditioning while preserving healthy socialization patterns?   

As the contents of the magic/mythic consciousness of childhood are systematically suppressed, is society not colonizing the minds of children by further implanting – by way of culture-trance – a mental/rational consensual reality, and thus making future colonizers of them?  Both the esoteric traditions and depth psychology recognize the need to de-condition ourselves or unlearn common patterns of perception.  Jack Mezirow and others who study how we learn refer to a re-evaluation and a changing or re-orienting of our “meaning perspective.”[xi]  

Still, the saga continues through later childhood.  In adolescence, puberty brings its own new set of strange challenges.  As hormones begin flowing, as the voice drops in males and females start menstruating, as bodies change so do thoughts and attitudes change.  It is a time of convulsive flux.  With effectively no ritualistic rights of passage in the Western world, wherein the community outwardly recognizes the shift into adulthood, teenagers must make their way as best they can.  They find themselves in a trumped-up world of suffering absurdities which uses the balm of romantic love and an array of entertainment devices as a counterfoil to attain some deranged semblance of balance.  In this sensuous playground of excess and half-baked delights they mostly engage in narcissistic forays with one another.  Bohemian excurses rule the day and night.  Adults are seen as unhip, square, straight, uncool – idiot sell-outs who are completely out of touch with the pulse of the cosmos.  In fact, the teenagers are in large part right – this is their last stand as proclaiming simulators of human liberty.  But the ways they choose to react are equally inane.  With “fun” being about their only objective – which means playing, drinking, using drugs, being irresponsible in a hundred different ways – they fall prey to their own escapist tendencies.  They go to the other extreme from that of the robotic adults in reactionary, rebellious compensation for some vaguely felt deficiency within.  At long last they come back to the fold, like the prodigal returnee, finally ready to embrace the whole consensual, culture-trance shittaree.   

Professors are there to greet them on the thresholds of their grand new adventures in self-regulation.  Off to college they go, where many will re-experience the redolence of those carefree teenage years.  They are kept in check by these proto-bosses known as professors who stand ready to rate them down for any perceived offenses against the academy.   The socio-cultural pressure from professors and peers alike seems to orient them to a yielding routine of compromise.  At graduation, they have prepared themselves for a life of the further routinized behaviors of “making a living” and “raising a family,” “assuming a mortgage” and “mowing the lawn.”  That is, they become their parents. The cycle is perpetuated.  The world is replenished with more dead souls-set-in-motion on the planet, oblivious to the sacred trust of their now-lost human potential (except with the lip-service they pay to this notion of something beyond themselves – exteriorized from them – as they were taught all along).   

And God sits on his cloud and weeps, drying his tears with his long white beard.  Hah!                                                                                           

For the “normal heterosexual” generally, the rest of adult life is spent enlarging one’s material “piece of the pie.”  A job is procured, an apartment is rented, money is saved, a marriage takes place, kids are on the way, by-and-by a house or apartment is purchased, salary raises are hoped for and cherished, expenses multiply in tandem with wealth, littlediversions are had to retain one’s sanity – movies, theater, sports, music, computer, community involvement, clubs, etc...   

The cycle begins anew with one’s own kids.   

For a more atypical person, the above takes place in some permutation or other.   

As retirement approaches, one looks back, reminisces, watches TV, eats, and awaits final perdition, usually in the form of a nursing home (these days called a “care facility”).  In the golden years, a limited wisdom of some sort has amassed itself in one’s being.  It is often nominal.  The person finally dies in bewildered befuddlement.   

Throughout the lives of most people living in the dominant, modernist paradigm, this type of drama plays out.  With consensual reality hardwired into the psyche early in life, with agreed-upon symbols comprising the cultural ecology, one’s culture acts as a symbiotic stimulus toward an ever-fossilizing trance-manifestation of “life disenchanted.”   

How might such a vacuous life be prevented or at least avoided?  What might be envisioned here are many small societies of perhaps 10 to 15 people who meet weekly, and which are similar to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.  But instead of beginning with the admission, “I am an alcoholic,” each person begins with the assumption, “I am a dissociative.”  That is, members of this society believe that every person in the perinatal and the infant and childhood years underwent some sort of trauma.  This trauma induced some type of psycho-bio-energetic dissociation or block that interferes with one’s way of being and doing in the world.  It is in coming to terms with these dissociations that wholeness is recovered.  As wholenesss – the “personhood” or “the personal” – is recovered, the human mind can thrive and evolve toward the next holon of its development, toward the transpersonal.  The transpersonal includes yet transcends space and time.  It is integral functioning of mind in an informed, aperspectival unity.  (Huh?…Wha’?)  In this collaborative group, without a resident therapist to dominate and control, the group slowly pieces together their wholeness as individuals nested in community.  Such a “Dissociatives Anonymous” society might be thoroughly thought out.  Like AA, there can be a loose 12-step process and a text.  But it must avoid devolving into yet another self-help group that provides medicaments to glaze over and make more palatable this consensual reality and culture-trance.   

Keep reading for methods that might be suggested for retrieval and integration of these dissociated parts.

All Howled Out

The foregoing “tour through the monstrous deformity most call ‘life’,” while it generalizes and seems to represent the worst case scenario, is every bit as pessimistic as it sounds.  Even those who deviate from normative expectations and set themselves up as a “resistance to the machine,” only find themselves bit players, stooges, in a melodrama wherein everyone acts out his or her part.  They are the target fodder for the more conventional camp to direct their rage, each providing for the other a projection of their own worst debilitating fears.  They mirror in this dualist dance, through this contrived competition, the very polemical distraction that allows them to thrive and remain employed.  Liberals, conservatives, socialist radicals, revolutionaries, anarchists – all devoted to noble causes – arouse emotion in others, which has the endpoint in a mutual feed that unwittingly satiates all egos involved.  Even artists, writers and musicians are recruited into the ranks of each camp.   Like well-fed farm animals they moo and bleat, whinny and cluck around in the barnyard, integral players in the dominant Western culture-trance that props up consensual reality as it manifests today.  The great mass of the uninvolved just watch, with the eye of the mental/rational, the great play on the stage of the world.  It is news – reality – as entertainment.  Even hated commercials, which are meant to program our consumerist desires, have become “infomercial info-tainment.”  This use of commercials is quite the pop art absurdity extended – advertisement foisted into the reality of an already unreal, deceptively dissociative consensus.   

Then there are the holier-than-thous who have dropped out of the rat race.  They have decided not to sully their clean hands with this worldly life.  They retreat into solipsistic selves and communities.  Here, they create an insular place in the sun, really re-creating all of the societal elements but in “redeemed” form.  Extreme examples might be the Amish or the Sephardic Jews who set themselves apart with the appearance of an earlier age.  But other examples abound.  New Age groups might be another, or just the lone meditator who holds aloft exploration of self as the holiest of missions and the exclusive quest of the sacred pilgrim – real love and true compassion for others be damned (except when it is convenient or someone is watching, of course).   

To avoid becoming cooked in our own stew of cynicism and hopelessness, there is one other, major saving grace that is common to humanity besides love, and that is – humor.  Whenever conventional consensual reality types, their counterfoils or the holier-than-thous get to sounding too serious, this signals a real catastrophe.  It lets us know that they have forgotten how narrow and limited their consensual reality is – that they have forgotten about the paradox of being human in an entranced cultural ecology and the utter absurdity of it all.  Laughter lets out the uptight vibes that constrict our breathing and hold in the demons that entrance.  Laughter, like love, unites like a universal, magic elixir.                                                                                                

Why We Howl

If nothing else, I want this rage-of-an-essay to establish that human beings are trying to find a way out of the paradox box of language.  We have centered our lives around language games and our socialization depends on language.  Indeed, the seeing eye of language and the word-thoughts of symbols are the base upon which culture-trance and consensual reality are built. Even the foregoing rant was a hopeless cry in the face of the forces that propel us into our own mind-dwarfed backwardness.   

Stuart Sovatsky presents a blueprint for escaping the reality paradox of consensual human life[xii].  Esoteric paths through this wilderness – e.g., neo-shamanism[xiii], Sovatsky's kundalini jazz,  Grof's holotropic breathwork – I believe represent ways of exit out of our boundedness.  We are in bondage to the intellect – the mental/rational – and we cannot use the mental/rational to overcome its own embedded limitations.  So, no matter how many books I read, no matter how many authors have gone before, or how expanded or borderline the research methodologies might be – even if I read the textual prescriptions of the ancient sacred traditions – without an experiential tapping into what those texts intimate to us (and which, for example, Sovatsky and Grof seek to contemporize) there can be no authentic self-discovery.  One might only be Piling h.igher and D.eeper, doing the mental-rational, consensual reality culture-trance dance.  Somehow we must opt-out and take up the injunction.  If we do not develop ourselves as real human beings, we simply continue to partialize the world by proceeding as partialized beings presenting a partial view in all that we do.  Instead, we might seek ways of integrating our consciousness, of embracing the transpersonal.  It is nothing less than enlightenment – and the good news for modern man is, this enlightenment is not as inaccessible as is commonly “thought.”  

The genius of all spiritual leaders is not what they write but their very “beingness” and “givingness” of themselves to humanity.  If we just take (those non-writers but big speakers) Socrates and Jesus as examples, then we might imagine that being spiritual means to be before one’s time; that spirituality is nothing more than what Gebser's aperspectival, integral achronon really is – Wilber’s centauric-vision/logic and beyond; Kegan's 5th-order consciousness [xiv] and beyond; lateral thinking; systems thinking; all these descriptions of transpersonal being... The difference is, the time is here, the time is now, the way has been prepared.  Perhaps academics, scholastic thinkers, authors, researchers are all just muttering to themselves like psychotic cellmates in the dank caves of a place called the academy.  Just maybe clerics, monks and nuns of every stripe too, are babbling their messages incoherently as they stroll through their own la-la lands.   

So...we howl.  We use language as an emotive sound, not as a symbol.  As with the canine, we let loose our primordial cry into the vastness of puzzle space where it resounds in the bottomless pit of time and registers in our hearts as a signifier of impermanence – it throws us for an instant into the magic depths; we bound back through the absurd horror of how we have lost touch with our immortal selves, as we push onward via a direct perception of self, this world, and a renewal of our senses.