The Law
The Law
I have to appear in court for some mother-abuse-like facts I probably committed. But, my lawyer (a) (ex-in-law) has to arrange a little case first, with a colleague, in front of our nose, to demonstrate his importance.
The judge has to ask me questions (b), exactly eighty, and he has written them down, neatly ordered in his notebook (c). A clerk has a phone (d) call with a witness to collect further information. I have a strange mixture of feelings (e), curiosity, astonishment, boredom, admiration too, with an undercurrent of some fear. They all take great pains to unravel a possible desire (f) of me.
The law of the father, forbidding sex with the mother on pain of castration, should be installed in early childhood, they say - Freud has discovered. What if the father does not exist, or is absent, or has no balls, or never speaks except when he is ordered to say something by his wife? What if the mother herself is an ice age, looking at her child with disgust and horror. I guess Freud had an other kind of parents, and an other reference frame.
Yet the Oedipus complex sometimes comes to life in my mind, because psychoanalysis should find it in my clients, and they now and then ask for it, or think it should be there. I saw some people had indeed hugging and warm parents, and then possibly of course Oedipus might be on the stage.
I never see (feel) the law as being something constructive, always constrictive. When I want to survive, I have to hide in the shadow, the twilight zone, the rim of wood between the golf grounds and the houses. But, in spite of having all this in the belly, experience and looking well and reading and studying and so, learned me that the law could be used to regulate a society.
It could be used to keep the monsters down, or simply to regulate traffic, or to stimulate love and cooperation. What the law is, we have to find out.
I have to take care of two old people in a hospital. The woman has something with her anus (g), and I offer her a sort of salve. The doctor says she ought to save her money for the operation which will cost eighty (h) thousand Franks.
On the playground (i) of the school, I want to say something to my sister and brother. I ring the bell (j), and everybody becomes quiet. The head asks me why I did that, and I say it only is to find my family, or for my family to find me.
My daughters sit in the car, in the back. Then the vehicle changes to a bike, and my daughter falls off because she touches with her foot the shoe-lip (k) of an oncoming lady. I did not know the lip was so hard, she says, after her forward roll (l).
GNOSTICISM AND THE GNOSTIC JESUS (by Douglas Groothuis) (Ref. 3)
Jesus speaks of the kingdom [Thomas Gospel]:
"The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to
know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you
who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you
dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."
Other Gnostic documents center on the same theme. In the Book of Thomas the
Contender, Jesus speaks "secret words" concerning self-knowledge:
"For he who has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known
himself has at the same time already achieved knowledge of the depth of the
all."
[E.] Pagels observes that many of the Gnostics "shared certain affinities
with contemporary methods of exploring the self through psychotherapeutic
techniques." This includes the premises that, first, many people are
unconscious of their true condition and, second, "that the psyche bears
within itself the potential for liberation or destruction." (Ref.
3)
At the moment I read the book of E. Pagels, Beyond Belief, concerning the first hundreds of years in Christian history, and mentioning the Thomas Gospel. In a strange way, I often connect the law with Catholic Christianity, as it looks now, and as I has been taught about it. As now I read more about Mysticism, Zen-Buddhism, Gnosticism and related -isms, my view on religion broadens somewhat, and in one way or the other, I think that analysis brought me much closer to Zen than every other religion or book or belief ever could have brought about in all those years.
Of course, I was interested in religion when I was young, and read about mysticism at age 16, and so you could say that analysis revealed what was, or had been hidden in me in the course of time, but I don't think that is the whole story.
At the beginning of time, after birth, I found a lawless world, surroundings with a weak father, cold mother and ill grandmother, and when desire pushed me to mysticism to get rid of the feeling (there), or to master it in a sort of holy transformation or sublimation, I bumped onto the law of the Church, pushing me back on my bottom, saying I had to master my carnal lusts. Saints were shown to me, having found the way to become holy, following the law of the Lord. In fact they inserted a wedge between my body and my mind, or divided me in a body and a soul.
What might it have been when I met a Gnostic at that time? Perhaps he/she would have shown me Saints having found peace and inner wholeness, encouraging me to do the same. In fact I tried Yoga, and meditation and silence, and it gave me sort of relief, but not enough. What I thought to be the sickness of my flesh was just incorporated experience of what the environment gave me of love, and once it is built in, unconscious, it is out of reach, and no meditation is able to break the walls down keeping it inside and sealed. The walls are symbolized by the law, the lawyer being the gate-guard. Knowing myself was simply not possible any longer.
The law was so hard and rigid in my eyes, because I had no guard of my own, no father showing me the place where I might walk and the borderlines limiting my freedom - giving my freedom to move. There was no freedom. In fact I took the law of Christianity as a guideline, the instructions for use of life, giving me love, speaking me about love, saying me what I had to do with my strange sicknesses. There it was possible to speak about it, show it, give it a place and become conscious of it. There I was told to know myself. But, in one way or the other, what I thought to learn about myself, was simply what others said what I had to think about what it was to be myself. They opened up the gate, and smashed it into my face on entering, or on my way out. I was trapped, got stuck.
That is the history, the tale of my early selves, coming into light on reading the symbol-lists associated with dream-content. Of course, the symbols are strictly personal, and not a single one is complete and universally transferable onto other people, but, I give the list to show how the early impressions of life structure thoughts and visions and views and words and everything else. The collection exposed in the gallery, that's me, what I have to feel and experience when I am, just that.
I am buying a semi-mobile telephone, but in a strange 'electricity' shop. The phone is mobile in the house, but fixed in that environment - sort of wireless fixed phone. There will be possible problems with privacy (m).
Thom 3. [...] The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. (Thomas Gospel). (Ref. 5)
Thom 100. They showed Jesus a gold coin and said to him, "The
Roman emperor's people demand taxes from us."
He said
to them, "Give the emperor what belongs to the emperor, give God what
belongs to God, and give me what is mine." (Thomas Gospel) (Ref.
5)
Matt 22:20. [...] "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." (Matthew Gospel). (Ref. 6)
At one side of the wall, we have the king and his wife, and at the other side we live in our humble hut. God resides in the attic, the most spacey place in the world. In our kitchen we heard at least the voice of the queen, who had a loud trumpet, and therefore we knew we were alive. Without the wireless we would have had the impression of being dead - because there was no real communication or interaction in the hut, and God kept His holy mouth shut as well.
The dichotomy of life, then, was based on a more ancient splitting up of the world, before I was four. In our humble hut it was cold and empty, and next door, where my grandmother lived, it was warm and full of everything. Then there was the normal world and heaven. God did not yet emerge, and the king was far away, in cinema - the King and I, and so, when my parents got out and I got in next door. The garden of Eden was subdivided into two levels. The first high and dry and far away from happiness, the second a little bit lower and warmer - in fact the place where God extracted a rib out of Adam's body to burn Eva.
When I was fourteen then, there was just the world with the King and His law, lawyers and tax gatherers, and the realm of God, in heaven, far away, represented by the Priests giving me absolution for my fleshy weaknesses. There was a notion of me and mine, but that was the weakest of all.
What it is for others, I don't know. The basic representation in the gallery, or reference frame, or unconscious, certainly will be completely different, but, we might read the bible, to begin with, to unveil what others thought about it.
We, in our personal history, learned about the bible, and Mark, Luke, Matthew, spoke about God and the Emperor. We had to give to the Emperor what belonged to him, and to the Lord what belonged to Him. There went our Denaria and were gone for ever.
Saint John of the Cross wrote: "It should be known, then, that God nurtures and caresses the soul, after it has been resolutely converted to His service, like a loving mother who warms her child with the heat of her bosom, nurses it with good milk and tender food, and carries and caresses it in her arms." (Ref. 8).
It was at that time, for me personally of course, that I began reading books about mysticism. Look well at the words above, and, knowing that my mother gave me milk for exactly one minute and then throw me away because I was such a sucker that I gave her big pains, and, knowing that the caresses from my grandmother were warm and tender but ill-laden and finally associated with death, and, you will know that Saint John (!) of the cross was for me a big pain in the ass. The most problematic was the resolute conversion to His service, because here on earth I had nothing to serve with, and in heaven I first should die to be recruited. The door to mysticism was closed and the key hidden in the cellar where it was dark and dirty.
So, the Brotherhood and the Priests gave me advice, because they saw me searching for Enlightenment, to read Saint John of the cross, and Saint Therese of Lisieux:
"Your love has gone before me, and it has grown with me, and now it is an abyss whose depths I cannot fathom. Love attracts love, and my Jesus, my love leaps toward yours; it would like to fill the abyss which attracts it ... (p 256)". (Ref. 9)
Left, my mother at age 14, in 1936, dressing left, having the pole on her left side, or sitting at the right side of the father. Right, the Little Flower, Saint Therese of Lisieux, at age 16, in 1889, having her heart at the right side.
Me, at age 15-18, ready to fall in love with a lady having characteristics of my mother (Oedipus, you know), trying to repress my sexuality, driven into the arms of a flower with an attractive abyss and in love with Jesus. Unconsciously Jesus was my rival, because He could fill the abyss, and consciously I was told to fill my desire with a Saint. The law ordered me to serve the King, be obedient and chaste.
In fact I had a mystic experience at that time, sitting on the sand and looking at sea-sunset. The sensation was very strong an overwhelming, with feelings of connectedness with God and the world and everything. I certainly understood what the Saints where writing about, but the Saints did not understand my personal labyrinth with the snake picking his own tail in the middle of the darkest pool.
The strangeness of the law, by means of the orderings of the Priest and the needles of the Doctor and the burs of the Dentist and the threat of the Tax-Inspector, represented by the Brotherhood Teachers Masters, popped up in an extreme way, although I did not notice that as extreme or strange, when Brother Music and others were extremely interested in Willy, my closest friend. It just was what I lived inside and a confirmation of my early experience in the hospital when Sister Adelaide took me away to do painful things down there.
Of course I don't get out of personal history, caricaturing the story, but, all the way it is a real story, shedding light on real world things happening now and in the very recent past (what is 50 years since the beginning of Holocene? "To observe a Holocene environment, simply look around you! The Holocene is the name given to the last 11,000 years of the Earth's history -- the time since the end of the last major glacial epoch, or "ice age."" (Ref. 12)). And, since I am a real representative of my age, and I made a thorough study of my personal history, I am best placed to write something of human history in this epoch.
Though I never see the same history in clients of mine, my personal experience is strong enough to understand some of the feelings of people seeing me for a personal talk. And speaking of the law they do, and telling about their deep inner secrets they certainly do also, and what I see then is the fight between the incorporated law - what has to be, what is like it is because that is normal - and the inherited explosion of emotions and longings to grow as great as possible, inclusive the spiritual possibilities, mysticism and all faint and dark conscious fluctuations imaginable.
Freud spoke of Super-Ego versus Id, possibly evolving to Ego. Jung wanted Individuation, incorporating the Shadow into Self:
"According to Jung, one must get in touch with the Shadow and Anima/Animus before one can truly get in touch with the Self. The order is sequential, and as tempting as it may be to try and skip the Shadow or deal only superficially with it, it is here that we begin." (Ref. 13)
Then we go to Gnosticism :
"Gnosis is awakening to the deepest Self and Light within. It is the cornerstone of dramatic transmutations of consciousness achieved through theoria, death-and-resurrection initiations and spontaneous awakenings. It is pilgrimage of the self to the Self." (Ref. 14)
And to Zen :
"...This illusion of the self stands as a barrier between the true Self and a perception of reality. One only has to think of the false ideals like materialism and envy etc, which absorb us in our daily lives, to understand the validity of the Zen perception of no -self. This is a realization that is skirted over by many western practitioners of Zen, mainly because of its essential difficulty. But, this is also one of the most significant areas of investigation for the western person wanting to understand Zen." (Ref. 15)
Now, we began this association with the kingdom inside of me, and the one outside of me. Our (Western?) world mostly emphasizes the kingdom outside of me, focusing happiness and mountains of money, growing more and more. In one way or the other our Christian Church (Irenaeus):
Irenaeus was the earliest Father of the Church to systematize those Christian beliefs that would later be accepted as orthodox doctrine and is cited frequently by later theologians. (Ref. 16)
decided to throw away all Gnostic, self centered searching and vividly debating minds on the early Christian world, in favor of an outside world with power and structure and money, having the Truth and nothing but the Truth and all the Truth in their bucket, bumping it onto the heads of everyone in the close vicinity, to build the pyramid on the flanks of which we struggle for the fattest at the very moment.
Of course, Buddha is sometimes depicted fat and well, but that seems to be a symbol for being belly-centered, plainly in contact with the feelings coming from within, see. And that is certainly not the case in what we learn in our cognitive society, where the brains reign everywhere.
So my point is, that Irenaeus has to be put in jail, for his strange behavior in and about the years 250 - behavior of course that was not his personal fault at all, but, because we all want to find the responsible for what went wrong, the bones of the Saint has to be imprisoned for at least 20 years. I will ask my lawyer (ex-in-law) to arrange that for me.
So, where Jesus knocked the merchants out of the Temple,
Catholic establishment let them in by the back door some years later and chased the Gnostics, more than 50% of all Christians at the time, they say. (E. Pagels).
In a strange way in:
"Give the emperor what belongs to the emperor, give God what belongs to God, and give me what is mine." (Thomas Gospel)
The sentence "and give me what is mine" has been deliberately eliminated from the official gospels, where everybody began to take what he/she meant what was 'mine', and not that of others.
Instead of looking inside, to get what is mine, deep in myself, we learned to look outside, and take what there is to be taken, perhaps to give it to the emperor, far away on top of his/her pyramid.
In Brussels I have to take the train to somewhere, but none is riding at the time. We take a substitution tramway to an other train-station. The tram takes a completely other trajectory (n) on a frightening narrow railway (o) and up on a steep hill in town. We will be late.
A rabbit (p) has been prepared in the pot and has to be served on white plates. I do the job, but can't stop plucking pieces off the flesh. The cook, Lieve, blames me for it and my grandfather just looks at me.
I walk through the streets in Knokke, and find lots of shops (q) having changed destination, transformed, renovated, completely become unrecognizable, and I regret it.
We are in a house now, and wait for my granddaughter who takes part in a big vacation-camp (r) at the sea. The children begin to arrive, gathered on the central reservation (s) of the street in front of the railway-station. I hear them babbling and, see them walking slowly in the direction of Gent, but Sofie does not show up and I am worried about it. She probably has been forbidden to leave the line (t), or something like that.
Standing on a bridge over the highway we still hear the chat (u) of the children, miles away. Then we are in Gent, at the Gravensteen (Graven Castle), next to the moat (v). Sofie arrives and proudly shows us a paper (w) she wrote and colored. The piece of paper falls in the water, my daughter tries to catch it with her foot and suddenly falls into the dark water (x). She can swim, but with all her clothes and glasses (y) on it seems not that simple and I am frightened. My wife walks on the water (z) to grab her out.
When I was born, I was the world and the world was me. There were no words, just direct experiences and interactions. With the exception of my birth and the burning up of my back, I don't remember anything of it. Or perhaps the ants, and my aunts yelling when they saw me full of the insects, black moving dots on my legs and arms. The first, birth, I remembers in a sort of rebirthing moment, remembering it as if it happened again. The last I see and feel and perhaps was more than two years by then. The burning of my back I only know indirectly, because they told about it, rubbing my back until it bled and putting sulfur balm on it for the scabies infection.
It was terrifying and painful, but I never experienced it as strange. It just happened. Then, at age three or four, gradually, I remember more and more details of being forced to walk and act in a direction I did not want to go. It feels like the breaking of a horse, with force, in a short moment until submission of the animal takes place. With me the law was installed in innumerable moments of small violence, imposed feelings of guilt, eyes looking at me as if I were a dirt-bin. Therefore, the tram and train railway was such a surprise. When following the rails, straight iron lines, you could come in a place where you never were, and see new things. When you follow the law, it is possible to be free and walk or ride where you want. The law is like a rabbit, very confusing. You can eat it and love it and hug it, and it crosses around in the grasslands like a fool, but the picture in my gallery of the animal is caught into a suffocating cote and it has to be killed by means of slow constriction.
Early Christians were mostly Gnostics, seemingly, and at the beginning of the third century, after the installation of a unifying set of writings suggested by Irenaeus, Constantine made the Catholic law official, suffocating, burning or just banning all the rest of the searching, creativity, imagination and liberty. The water was covered with a layer of concrete, the well hidden deep into the ground.
Instead of walking about, we have to walk on a central reservation, from the moment we become aware of being a conscious being, questioning and curious, we are thrown out of Paradise, just like every revolution is choked after a short time of jumping around (like rabbits). Always new rulers take over, stopping bottom up evolution.
I wonder what I dreamed about the three consecutive generations handling the 'paper'. The youngest wrote it with or within the constraints of the camp, and is proud about her achievement, her copy of the law promising a splendid future, the way to reach the top. Circumstances blow the paper into the deep, and the mother, proud of her own performance, tries to rescue the document, the ticket, and gets confronted all the same with her own unconscious stream by falling into the water. She can manage the situation, and in fact it is the only way to explore the underworld and grow up, but the elder generation has learnt to walk upon the resistive concrete over the frightening depths and pulls her daughter out.
I, we, everybody in my surroundings at the time, would have done the same, preventing me to get involved with the inner world of emotions, conflicts, unresolved problems and family strangeness or 'particularities'. Within therapy, I am obliged to push people into the moat, confronting their shadows, resulting in a bad, uncomfortable feeling and difficult interactions within existing relationships. But, when my own person is concerned, like in the dream, my oldest generations switches to automatic and takes over, rescuing the drowning lady.
This means that resistance against bottom up evolution is strong and automatic from within the most hardened Gnostic, because arguing generally is painful or wakens such dangerous emotions. Once we entered the confrontation, much energy is consumed until things are set to order and a new balance is reached. This is one of the reasons for top down conservatism to rule so frequently.
The law is installed because of:
The reigning structure tries to stay in possession of the throne, and stimulates everything and everybody to reinforce the rules, rewarding the good boys and girls, punishing the bad ones. (see dream 01-08-2004 *, same page)
Discussions and questions destabilize the existing peace, is time and energy consuming and probably yielding nothing or even results in negative or dangerous experimentations, or perhaps only is cost-effective within some hundreds of years.
Staying in contact with your inner emotional world, feelings, bodily experiences, deeper consciousness, dark awareness, mostly is not taught or installed during childhood, frequently is blocked off by the grown-ups, and therefore is covered with a mighty resistance. I think that being in close consciousness of what is generally called the unconscious, results in an emotion-able, emphatic and cooperative personality, which makes the installation of a law ruled pyramidal competition structure a little bit not so urgent.
I am sitting in the train now, with my family and friends. When the family leaves, the friends turn the heating system a couple of degrees higher, and I sweat (aa) like a horse. I ask them to lower it, but they laugh with me, saying I should take off some clothes (ab).
(In reality it is a hot summer morning, and indeed I sweat, but I want to dream further, and stay where I am, covered and well).
I think, within five minutes we arrive, and then the heat-problem will be over. We then come at a clothes shop, and they have lots of sweaters (ac), just like the one I am wearing. Lieve points to one of them, having a slightly different tint as mine, and asks me if I would not buy it. In the meanwhile she tries one on without sleeves, fastening it somewhere with the arm-holes (ad) to the thing she wears under it.
Together with a handicapped boy, I look at a some people, Inuit I guess, raising two ducks (ae). They are making a trip, and each time when they make a stop, the ducks are cared for and caressed. The boy next to me becomes a little bit nervous (af) each time the Inuit show knives and so. Then the scene transforms to a movie on TV, with a big flat screen at the same level of the floor (ag). On a green background the actor takes one of the ducks, caresses it, and cuts its throat in a single tug of his Stanley knife like dagger. The duck bleeds to death in convulsions and the other duck has noticed nothing, although the blade (ah) of the knife falls over the animal and blood is flowing just alongside its beak. Now I see its head is completely white, as if it were a scull (ai), beak open and feeding bottle (aj) still in place.
(In reality, this week I looked down at a duck pond from the fourth floor in a hospital, and wondered about the strange green color of the water.)
========
My grandfather is ill, and resides in a home or hospital. He does not like his medicine (ak) and sits sulking in his room. I enter with a young lady, who is seen immediately by grandfather. He tries to kiss and hug her, and calls her his daughter. Then he sees she in fact is the doctor, and jumps back.
The doctors consider a procedure to take away his will (al) and memory (am) and just have to choose a lifestyle (an) out of a sample card (ao).
(This week I saw somebody on TV, suggesting for a criminal to remove his pathology by a sort of prefrontal lobotomy.)
The dream is directly associated with my Willy-operation (frenulotomy) when I was about three years old. Normally it is a minor procedure, but my mother made me so afraid of it on beforehand, I was pretty nervous and unwilling, and, the anaesthetic had worn off while the sewing was done, on a very sensitive place. I don't know if there was something like an orgasm, with the convulsions I dreamed of, and if it was the case, the pain was masking the pleasure for sure. There certainly was installed a backward association from orgasm to blood, in the sense that when orgasm began, I always feared for some sort of break down of the thing.
The regular pampering - the stops to care for the ducks - from then on was associated with blood, pain and death. As if I was split in two. The dead duck was best off, drawn back in the shadows of the unconscious, the pleasure of the caresses. The other one, remaining after the installation of the new law, lay down there on the cold floor, feeding bottle still present, boned and well.
Normally a boy should be taught by the father what to do with his sexuality, and not slaughtered by the mother because he likes being pampered, cared for or caressed. The association with the handicapped boy, me looking at what has happened in the beginning, resulting in the presence of a crippled kid (shadow, first symbol), is striking.
The shadow tries to leave the underworld, and still is active in the old grandfather in my dream, wanting to take everything that has a skirt on, but not his medicine to be cured of it. Then we are back at the law.
When a crime has been committed, the sinner has to be punished, as if that could resolve the problem. In a small community, when I do something wrong to a member of the group, and immediately get a blast on my head for it, probably I will learn not to do that an other time. In our society the interactions are more complicated and not always direct - it is forbidden to hit back, for example, and you have to leave that to the police, justice, others.
What is more, the devil mostly brakes through a wall of defense against it, built by suppressing and punishing instances, suffocating the monster in the dark. Pieces of the self, aggression, sex, will, anxiety, feelings, emotions, ..., are in one way or the other boned and pickled and sealed in the cellar, instead of having had the chance to show up and be managed in a human civilized way. The punishing generally suppressed the beast from where it escaped, making the original problem worse.
Of course, I would not like to have my family killed and then thank for the honor and just understand the guy who did the evil, trying to bring him in contact with his shadow to prevent him from doing such things in the future, but, I think in jail it should be normal to treat the shadows instead of giving them time to grow and getting worse - what is seemingly done now by law.
In Russia there is a dispute between members of the old communist party and the new politicians.
A ticket puncher, like in the old times at the entrance of the station, to punch a round hole in the train-cards, is taking his meal: some sandwiches and coffee. People are waiting for his punching activity, impatiently. He says having the right to eat, is at the service of everyone every minute of the day, and now, he will eat. From time to time he punches, and then has a little chat with a passenger, eats and drinks a bit, and at least it is my turn.
I ride my van in the garage, laden with antennas and other electronic equipment. In the garage next to mine, a brewer is loading up his truck, and asks me questions. He wants to arrange a construct with four other men to make his business more profitable. First I don't like to answer him, but then I say the group may function properly if, and only if there is a strong leader to stipulate the course.
*Then I think, half sleeping half awake, that above I forgot some reason for installing the law. In small groups and in a normal poor environment, genetic and cultural rules are enough to install the leader. Everybody knows him/her, and follows as such. In large groups, and eutrophic circumstances, nobody knows the leader if he/she does not install his/her own person on a hill, and thereafter establishes the rules to perpetuate his/her reign. The law is then a supplement to the natural evolved feeling for justice and behavior, and fairly unstable and unreliable too.
Installing a law inevitably results in a loss of consciousness, because feeling has to be overruled by law, individual awareness replaced by declarations made by others about the whys and the wherefores. Feeling and direct awareness are overwritten in early childhood, with the aid of teachers and language, and experienced as the loss of paradise. Because of the double decoupling between language (over symbols) and awareness, the play of pointer to pointer interactions, an isolated structure may be installed and experienced afterwards as the normal situation.
To become healthy we have to make the choice between the two extremes. Or we re-become aware of what we feel, directly, by making the unconscious conscious, experience our emotions and awareness as such, or, we push the lack of consciousness to the maximum available minimum, living on the last square inch of what rests above the waterline in our sea of mind, leaving leadership to the boss, there, in the idea he/she represents super-consciousness. But, the new structure has no brains at all, only a faint illusion of consciousness and responsibility for 'the others' - never yet for the parts of the new 'me'. We live in a transition zone, eventually evolving to real multi-people organisms, or falling to pieces after all, reinstalling what was stable some thousands years ago, to grow at a slower rate, but conscious all the way.
Lawyer. He is a very important person, demanding money for just a glance at your personal poverty, and more money to unravel a problem, or to pretend to. I never saw lawyers, and knew vaguely that rich people had better lawyers. Now still I know it. I compare them with champions or advocates in old times, fighting for you when you were not in the possibility to defend your own skin or opinion or whatsoever.
Questions. Are asked and demand answers. The smart one asks if the dumb yet knows what he has to know. Or. Questions are asked by people ranking higher, to know whether the lower one did what he/she has had to do and left everything else. Were you decent and sweet? Questions induce feelings of guilt, the most destructive emotion of all - when it is induced for no other reason than holding people (children to begin with) dumb and powerless. The lower in rank the questioner, the more destructive for the receiver, because he is forbidden to pass the first over.
Notebook. I always wanted to have an important notebook, containing my personal things. But, because nobody ever found me important, and because everybody in my surroundings found me less than nothing, I never found an important notebook, nor a good writing pen. I once got a special pen, not a good one, but one that looked good, and I showed my writings to - or let us say, my writings were seen by - uncle Nessy, and he said that his brother, or sister, or niece or so, had a much better one, and, most of all, she/he had a nice handwriting and still more than that, she/he knew where to write about, see. Not only the questions were destructive, also the statements had something shitty. What on earth could I ever write in my book?
Phone. Belongs to medium important people to begin with, not to my parents. My uncle Adolf had one, because he worked on his own and had clients who needed him personally. My father had clients too, and they needed him as well, but not personally. As a waiter he had to wait until the boss called him. The phone of uncle Adolf was used by my mother to call a doctor when I was ill, just then, and that was not funny at all, because the brute was fond of needles and strange instruments to look into my body in a painful way. The phone was like a ticket to hell, and because I had to be sick frequently to please my mother, hell was just around the corner.
Feelings. Belong in the middle of my stomach, or just below, somewhere in the guts, or still lower, but I don't dare to write about that - never know somebody calls the doctor to cut them out. Nobody ever spoke about feelings, and always associated feeling something with nausea or pain or all sorts of symptoms. My grandfather never felt anything, he said, and he was a healthy man, there.
Desire. That is something just taboo, and without replacement of ugly symptoms or things like that. Desire is hell itself, burning and death. Hugging induces the thing, and because from time to time my grandmother did it, and then less than from time to time somebody touched me, and those people apparently were no devils, I could not imagine what sickness I had when the desire came up without I noticed something came up at all, consciously. What the hell was wrong with me? The installation of the unconscious is demonstrated here.
Anus. The most secret place on one's body, they say and show by hiding it all the time, but, my mother managed to find mine very well, for example to put suppositories in or to wash thoroughly. The suppos did not hurt that much, but were humiliating much more. My family had something with shit and asses. The small ones are made to live in the ass of the big ones, they said, and shit means money, see. So they hated to do what they did - serve for the French speaking tourists, jealously, but they did it all the way, not fighting for an alterative, and preventing their own children to study themselves out of the shit.
Eighty. There is something with the number eighty, probably. First eighty questions, an now eighty thousand Franks for an operation. From then on you are old, and death not far off. Old people are ugly and sick, wrinkled and cripple, just dirt. I heard it often when I was a child, and now again in therapy. As if it is possible to split off death and old age by placing it in others, far away in space and time. Death is taboo.
Playground. I always was a battlefield in a prison, walled in and with closed doors. It is the place of loneliness in the middle of strangers. In one way or the other I was not able to make friends, and when I had one, it was personal and intimate, and I was scared for my feelings about that, so, I made it un-personal and cold. I never understood the wild enthusiasm of the others, yelling and jumping around all the time. As if they were free and not contaminated with the emotion-virus, not thát one I had in my stomach. Everybody was happy and to defend myself, I imagined at last they were dumb and ugly, there.
Bell. The bell is magic. It can quiet down a flock of wilds in a couple of seconds, just like that. On one hand I loved the bell, which stopped the yelling and jumping around. On the other hand I hated the bell, which made us line up in front of the teacher, master, sister, sir, to go inside the prison itself, to listen to the speech, sing silly stuff and do stupid things. The bell also announced the beginning of prayers, with sins and doom and sorrow and fathers and dead and mothers in heaven and miracles and caves with shiny apparitions. Bell in hell.
Shoe-lip. Tying the laces of my shoes was not possible until a certain moment which I don't remember. They said I should not bend down my lip like that when my shoes had to be tied, and that I had to be a big boy and do it myself, but in the same sentence they assured me I could not at all do it on my own - stupid coward.
Forward roll. Once my cousin and I ware playing in an amusement park with a merry-go-round. My cousin fell off and the next chair bumped into his back and made him fall. The chair went over and he rolled forward under the merry-arm, a little bit hunched up and so, with his nose in the sand underneath. The mothers were furious, becouse I made him fall, and did not stop that machine, and that the pearl could have been dead and that I was a monster. There.
Privacy. The house with the phone, next to where we lived at the time, was built at the same time as ours, and, for saving money, they constructed the common wall, separating or joining the two houses, with a 'single stone', which was legally not allowed, but nobody saw, you see. So, when uncle Ademar and aunt Jacoba had a fight, an argument, or words - a little bit lauder than usual, we heard the shouting penetrating the wall. Of course they never had a quarrel, they said, but the wireless told us an other story. You have your friends and family to share feelings, isn't it?
Trajectory. The first trajectory I had to learn was the one from home to school and back. In the beginning an older girl brought me, and I hated it as much as I could, or dared, and once I bit her, and that was much against her liking too. Later on I went to school alone, or with fellow pupils. We caught spiders, poking them with a dry twig until they hung on it at the end of a thread, and swept them into the net of an other spider waiting for pray, and in a minute the intruder was packed-in and bitten to death - prepared for the meal.
Railway. The first trajectory with a railway, was with a tram, form Knokke to Bruges. In fact I don't remember very much about it, but the trip was very important for sure. Later, when we went to Bruges with the train - the tram being abolished - the sensation was overwhelming again, because the monster was so much bigger than the tram, and steaming and blowing and hissing and smoking, but the taste of it was not so delicate as that of the first tram years earlier. It looks as if the memory in those early years is directly written into the inner core of the emotionally scenting and directly reacting body. Probably forgotten interactive paradise, for cognition, but burnt for ever in the clay we are made of originally, and therefore extremely active in present life, always and in every detail.
Rabbit. In fact it should be a cute teddy, but that is not so. I found them first in a dark wooden cage with mesh wire on top, hard to reach at and look over the edge, giving off a strange smell and jumping softly around, sniffing and pulling faces to me, with a questioning look and hanging ears. Aunt Yvonne's father in law had rabbits, and to kill them they were hung, which was a terrible slow death because of their light weight. He, the great mustached constable was a to big coward to kill them by hand. My father sometimes had a rabbit-paw in his pocket, as an amulet, and further rabbit is very good with onions and potatoes and applesauce. A very confusing animal indeed.
Shops. In the first street I remember I lived in there were tens of shops. It was a small street with a shoemaker, a barber, a painter, an upholsterer, a carpenter, a butcher, some grocers, a bicycle repairman, a brewer, a seamstress-tailor, a couple of cafés, three discos, and then just around the corner just the same an other time with a newspaper shop with candy, paper and fire crackers, further a bakery, a greengrocer, an art painter ... . The second street had a little bit less. When I walk there now, everything has vanished, and a small amount of other shops has popped up on other placed, as if the world, with all its orientation points, has changed in a very short time.
Vacation camp. They called it VP, Vacation Patronage, and I thought of it as if it were a concentration camp with guards and brutes, both the supervisors and the screaming children, having nothing interesting to do or to invent, closed up in a mesh wired grassland with a stinking hollow sounding hut in the middle - everything just like at school, but worse. I never had to go there, but they, at home, threatened me with it in case of misbehavior. The terror of the flock with shouting children I knew personally, from school, the cote with toilets and shelter and supervisors comes from school too, so in fact the VP was just a construct in my head until I once went there because I asked it at age 14, when we had moved to the apartment in front of the railway station with nothing to do and no friends in the neighborhood. The VP was just like I imagined, and I never went back. Better a boring day than a day in prison.
Central reservation. It is in the first place a strip of street, between the low hedges between the tram railways, forth and back from the train station to the sea, in the middle of the main street of Knokke, where my father worked. My mother took me with her to bring his meal in the afternoon, and walked on the central reservation when there were too much tourists hanging around for shopping. I probably invented that story here and now, but I know for certain that I liked the place and that there were practically no other people there.
The line. In the line you are lined up, waiting for some terrible time. The waiting itself is not that boring, if there were no other boys in front of me. When I was the first of the row, the neck of the master pointed to me, with his fat short black stubbles just over the collar of his dustcoat. When I saw his face, the stubbles of his beard flanked the grin under the hairs poking out of his nose. I last week met one of the masters in the street, with his wife. He was completely gray by now, and small and a little bit cripple too. It was the one who said he was sick of me after the two years I sat in his class - and it was him who followed me in the two consecutive school-years by the way. I had the impulse, but just kept it under control, to say I still am sick of him until now, pinching his cheek, just like he did during his speech to me. At the time teachers were allowed to physically hurt their pupils, and he was a champion in it.
The chat. You have the chat, the babbling and the screaming. I never liked the shouting, always sought a chat, quietly playing and/or babbling in a small group of so called friends. It reminds me of the babble of my grandmother with her sister or her friend, in the afternoon, with a cup of tea and a cookie.
Moat. When a class went to the Zwin, a wetland just in the corner of Knokke and influenced by the tides of the sea, I was not there because of something I don't remember. One of the pupils fell into the moat and drowned. Later they said there was something with his heart, and therefore he died before falling into the water. There was a strange tension in the air when the story was told.
A paper. When it is written on a paper, it is true - with the restriction of, when it is written by me, it is worthless. The law is represented by the newspaper, the letters falling on the ground at the back of the front door, the prescriptions of the doctor, election prints, family pictures. The most sacred were official papers, written and sealed and signed by a priest or a notary or a teacher. It was like magic, with a secret charm in it.
Dark water. A waterhole, a bin for rainwater, a well, sometimes a lake, all have dark water and is dangerous, asking me to fall in and die. The sea never had that strange attractiveness to me, because you can walk into the surf and safely come out of it again. I never went far enough to feel some danger, with the exception of being on a boat, but that was years later.
Glasses. When you swim with your glasses on, it seems very embarrassing. I have no early memories about that personally because I wore no glasses until my 16th year, when I could no more read the blackboard writing at school. Most people find it strange to think about early experiences as coloring the actual moment, as if you never get off the glasses they (mostly family and close relatives) put upon your nose in the beginning of life. Naturally, when you see things always in the same way, nothing is strange, but when you fall into the water, something special is happening. It is like looking into the mirror, becoming aware of the existence of the machine on your face.
Walking on the water. Jesus walked on the water, at the time. I could not believe it of course, but I believed it all the way. In fact I wanted to walk onto the water too, because people would look at me immediately, and admire me for it. I think we all walk onto the surface of our unconscious water, and it is a frightening experience when we see it or feel it. On of my clients dreamed about walking on unstable floors with emptiness underneath. He could remove some tiles and look in the depth and then did not manage to place them back again. In early times I dreamed about falling and falling endlessly, and nobody was there to pick me up. In Zen we are the waves on top of the ocean.
Sweat. When I was wet in bed, it was not always because of the sweat. When I was four, and the doctor 'had been' at school, I did not want to pee any more, because it pricked too much. The doctor was a kind of brute, pulling violently the (my) foreskin back, for some reason, and he hurt me each time. My dear family knew that very well, and a little bit of practice would have worked magic, but they rather dropped dead than helping me. Of course I understand the situation now. They called the doctor for my Willy-fiddling activities when I was between two and tree years old, and he found some dirt and a problem with the foreskin, so he advised to solve the problem, so the thing could be washed from time to time, but, the family was not interested in dirt at all and never washed it away, never looked at the thing again, and in the meanwhile I had learned not to fiddle while they were looking, but was not clever enough then to practice foreskin sliding. The taboo on sexual feelings was a family tradition, showing a bit of it, a fatal error. Dirty jokes on the other hand were an absolute must. You had to sweat it out.
Take off clothes. Grown up people can take off the clothes of children, that's no problem. This means, for the adults. For the child it could be difficult, when it was not for washing (everything but Willy), it was certainly for poking or sticking needles or other unpleasant happenings. When grown up people themselves took off their clothes, if they ever did, it always was a problem. You (I) could never see it, they always did it on the sly, behind a closed and blinded door, keyholes inclusive.
Sweaters. When I was twelve, pictures had to be made of me for my holy communion, and the photographer wanted to make a man of me, showing my shirt and tie, but, mother wanted me to pull a sweater over it, giving the construction a softer look (although she did not mention her motives then). I reacted, but she won. The pictures were made with the pullover, and me having a distorted face (she said). When I see the picture now, I look more like a sheep.
Arm-holes. Women, then, wore closed dresses, with long sleeves or short ones, sometimes without, and then arm-holes gave some view into the inner situation, some fleshy fat or fatty flesh, but nothing special. Simonne, the grocer's madam, wore a low necked dress, showing the groove between her big boobies. She had a bad temper and did not like me at all, but I loved to see her slicing cheese.
Ducks. In fact it were not ducks, at the time, but geese, when they flew over at night, when temperature was falling. I heard them honking quietly, as if they were on a secret mission. My father said it were freeze-geese, and that every winter they went to the far North, where ice and snow reigned everything. Perhaps he wanted me to understand the contrary, but it was no use. Freeze-geese live in the ice age, and that's it.
Nervous. There was always something wrong with their nerves, they had too much of them or so. I never understood what that meant, but after a while, when all the symptoms I produced on request - nausea, vomiting, shivering, having a bad mood - were attributed to my nervousness, I gradually began to see clear. I had the same characteristics of my parents. Grandfather never took it serious. He had no nerves, he said, and also no stomach, no symptoms, nothing. Perhaps therefore I never saw him as really belonging to the club.
Floor. You have play-grounds outside, and play-floors inside, with a differentiation between cold uniform floors and warm patterned ones.
Blade. Blades are dangerous, and often blood is involved in the manifestation of the object. Grandfather used a special one for shaving - often with blood, mother a very big one for slicing bread - I never saw blood, and then a very tiny one for peeling potatoes. It can be used for cutting wood, I learned, with blood. The big knife also was used to kill the turkey, with gushes of blood.
Skull. When the new church was built, the graveyard was removed and basements dug, and, at a moment, when we went to school, passing the workplace, a scull lay there in the middle of the path. We looked at it, and it looked at us. We were about eight years old I guess, and after a while began playing football with it. I remember tiny little hairs were still there - or that was due to my unlimited imagination. Before that I never saw a skull, not a real one. There were wooden replicas in the church, and pictures in the lessons of religion, and most of all, the symbols were much more threatening than the real stuff.
Feeding bottle. In normal circumstances a feeding is accompanied by tenderness and warmth. The feeding bottle just feeds.
Medicine. Bad tasting and stinking stuff you have to take for your own good, they say.
Will. When you have a will like a man, you may be proud of it. When you have a little will, you could best hide it.
Memory. Young children have no memory, they say. When you feel what you have to, then suddenly young children have a better memory then those who say the contrary.
Lifestyle. The circumstances after birth - maybe before - determine lifestyle. That's the way you look at things, feel things, and it is burnt into your soul for ever. You never get rid of it, and when you try to, the pressure from within to realize or copy the same situation just becomes stronger the more you try. The only thing possible is assuming the basement like it was built, and try to live with it.
Sample card. The first sample card I see is one with pieces of knitting-wool. I could touch the little skirts without anybody noticing what I was doing, until my mother noticed it and removed the rubbish saying that was for girls.
Old balance.
http://www.crystalinks.com/romelaw.html
School-bell.
http://www.newcastlemusic.co.uk/common/
moreinfo.asp?ID=1280
Gnosis and Christianity.
http://www.equip.org/free/DG040-1.htm
Dial the phone.
http://www.brandx.net/graphics/dial-the-phone.jpg
Gospel of Thomas.
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html
Gospel of Matthew.
http://www.faithfutures.org/JDB/jdb055.html
Denarius.
http://www.biblepicturegallery.com/free/
screen-sized%20pictures.htm
St. John of the Cross.
http://www.innerexplorations.com/catjc/st3.htm
Therese of Lisieux.
http://www.geocities.com/baltimorecarmel/
therese/tlconnie.html
San Francisco tramway.
http://vevert.free.fr/San_Francisco.htm
Therese of Lisieux.
(http://www.emmerich1.com/
SAINT%20THERESE%20OF%20LISIEUX.htm)
Individuation.
http://www.wynja.com/personality/jungarchf.html
Self and Gnosis.
http://www.kheper.net/topics/Gnosis.html
Zen Buddhism.
http://ks.essortment.com/introductionzen_riej.htm
Jesus in the Temple.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/
a3b1475ef203c.htm
Tram Knokke-Bruges.
(http://users.pandora.be/delijntjes/
tram%20in%20Knokke.htm)
Constantine.
http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/Canon%
20Law/Nicea/CouncilsSynods.html
Copyright © 2004 A. Syberg
