Inward Facing Mirrors

Thoughts engendered from reading R.D. Laing, E.F. Schumacher's Guide for The Perplexed (those already having all the answers will not like this one) and some Buddhist writing. Laing, in particular suggests that our culture is sick and that only those who are crazy with some narrow "normal range" can feel safe from being ostracized.

My 6am arrival at the beach is all but blown, because of this damned site. It's not my fault. It beckoned unto me. Yeah, that's the ticket. Therefore I had to write just a little something to release me from its clutches.

I'll get to The Curse of the Beautiful Woman and the other backlog of things. It is nice having a backlog. It offers the same assurance as a full refrigerator. I used to feel a little hungry and would open the refrigerator door to take a look and that alone did the trick. Maybe it was just knowing that there were things for later.

For a long time I wanted to write about something but I never did. There were these formative ideas from an author R.D. Laing regarding how we perceive one another. For me these ideas are like background music...very sweet, haunting, lovely background music which can at times explode into a symphony but which usually is content to whisper softly its quirky, catchy little tune.

In Laing's book, the Politics of Experience, he makes his premise perfectly clear within the first paragraph of the introduction.

Our social realities are so ugly if seen by the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie

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Laing claims that our alienation goes to the roots and that it must be the starting point for any serious reflection on human interpersonal relations.

At all events, we are bemused and crazed creatures, even to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even from an ideal standpoint that we can glimpse but not adopt

...and possibly learn from, I'd add.

Man ensures his alienation, from not only others but himself, only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings

As Laing explains it, his book is an attempt to document some forms of our contemporary violation of ourselves. He proceeds to build a conceptual framework from which interpersonal relations can be discussed. Some call this social phenomenology or interexperience.

We remain hidden from each other. I will never see your experience of me and you will never see my experience of you. I cannot experience your experience. However I do experience myself as being experienced by you and you experience yourself as being experiences by me. One seeks to make their experience of another evident by their behavior.

Laing questions deeply asking whether it is even possible to be ones self and even whether love and freedom are possible.

I experience myself as Pat and as experienced by and acted upon by others. Behavior is a function of experience and experience of another is mediated by the other's behavior.

It is Laing's contention that man is alienated from our own experience. So how does this happen?

Firstly, he says that our capacity to think is limited except in the capacity of our deluded self-interest. That has been my experience...that all but a rare realized few are mere shadows of what they project and that most are predictable consistent in what they chose to project, a far cry from that which might be gleaned from behavior. Our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth, and love.

Laing characterizes "normal" as a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of self-imposed destructive action on experience and that "normal" is radically estranged from the structure of being. Laing contends that statistically "normal" forms of alienation are deemed acceptable while others are labeled "mad" or "bad."

Alienation is being asleep, out of ones mind and unconscious. Children are taught to lose themselves and give in to the absurdities of adulthood and the "realities" of a world in which "normal" people have killed over 100 million of their fellow "normal" men in the last 50 years.

If our experience is destroyed by alienation our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.

We can be estranged from ourselves by obfuscating ourselves and others. However this same estrangement can be imposed on us by others to the extent that we are interdependent. We are acted upon by others and changed by the reflections of ourselves that we experience in others...those inferences made from experiencing the other experiencing me, experiencing them, experiencing me...

As we experience the world so do we act. By alienation we are stripped of our experience and thusly we are stripped of our deeds and when our deeds are as Laing puts it, taken from us like toys from the hands of children, we lose our humanity.

Our behavior, deeds or actions can be creative or destructive and as Laing describes predominantly validating, confirming, encouraging, supportive, enhancing or invalidating, denying, discouraging, understating and constricting.

Laing contends that in a world where the normal state is one of alienation that most personal action is destructive. It is our defense mechanisms that alienate us from ourselves and these defense mechanisms are actions that one takes on their own experience. On top of that we then dissociate ourselves from these actions, these self-imposed distortions of our own experience.

Defense mechanisms not only engender personal actions. They can be what Laing describes as transpersonal.

If Jack succeeds in forgetting something this is of little use if Jill continues to remind him of it. He must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to make her keep quiet about it, but to induce her to forget it also.

Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on "bringing it up." He may invalidate her experience. This can be done more of less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imaginations : "It's all in your imagination." Further still he can invalidate the content : "It never happened that way." Finally he can not only invalidate the significance, modality and content, but her capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so into the bargain.

We've all seen this. It can also work both ways. Above, Jack could have been Jill and Jill Jack. I have male acquaintances who practice this subtle form of manipulation endlessly on hapless victims who were led to believe that his charmingly animated schtick was a result of knowing her which in turn, made her feel to be a vastly more interesting person than otherwise, given that one's experience of her seemed so positive. Eventually as the magic wears off the defense mechanisms rear their ugly heads the destruction begins. It is needless to say that these acquaintances don't find themselves paired with the smart ones... Luckily, there is someone for everyone.

Those without insight just ache and wonder what happened in the aftermath. All of these scenarios which seem to play out endlessly lead to questions about what underlies apparently predatory behavior and how in such a situation there can be love. Where could there ever be any traction for pulling oneself out of such a mire?

After having described interpersonal experience he moves on to something altogether different, the experience of negation, adding that we are afraid to approach the fathomless and bottomless groundlessness of everything. This absence of things can only be described in terms of the things that are not there.

In reference to man's apparent ability to create something out of nothing Laing has much to say but I find clearer words from one of the earliest female bloggers, Enheduanna of Akkad, a city-state in the north of Mesopotamia from approximately 2300 BC who quipped:

That which has been created, no one has created

Laing characterizes the pre-existent nothing from which creation arises as being the outer reaches of what language can state. Silence cannot be spoken but sounds can make us listen to the silence. Man enables being to emerge from non-being and that the creative experience is one of being the actual medium in which creation occurs as opposed to being the progenitor of the thing created.

Creative man can celebrate the occasion of great liberation when he makes the transition from being afraid of nothing to the realization that there is nothing to fear.

Laing claims that it is easy to be mangled by the creative process and by dwelling at the hellish borderland between being and non-being were it not for the imagination required to anticipate the hell and its potential consequences.

He describes the peril of man as a creative magician who in the face of a void of meaning and values or inadequacy conjures up meaning, succor and values out of nothing. This ability to conjure up a hope so overpowering that it cannot exist in the real world is the danger which has led to a variety of self-destructive acts by artists.

It is those who have a perilous awareness of the non-being we take to be being (pseudo-wants, pseudo-values, pseudo-realities -- delusions) who give us the acts of creation that our culture both despises and craves. Poetic words, sounds in a movement and rhythms in space attempt to capture personal meaning out of the sounds of a dehumanized world...bridgeheads into alien territory and acts of insurrection, the power of these abstracted patterns generating new lines of force whose effects are felt for centuries.

This zone, the zone of no-thing, or the silence of silences, is the source. We forget that we are there all the time.

From the point of view of a man alienated from his source, creation arises from despair and ends in failure. But such a man has not trodden the path to the end of time, the end of space, the end of darkness and the end of light. He does not know that where it all ends, it all begins.

He has not stared into the abyss that is himself and made the transition from being afraid of "nothing" to the realization that there is nothing to fear.