There is so much going on in each still frame of eternity, but most of the times we fail to see it. Our collective focus follows a conception of time symbolized by an arrow going forward as in “We will go back to normal” and “this 2020 will end”.
Focusing on the future (future sales, future achievements and goals) we overlook the present, throwing the baby with the water, burying the gifts in the garbage of our traumatized minds, following the chronological impressions of our march toward death.
Yet the punctuated experience, fertile moments that seem to arise following their own rhythm, is immune to global pandemics and recessions. It follows a pattern hard to grasp that has been described in the past with concepts like synchronicity and other exciting yet still obscure rationalizations.
Welcome to Kairos, the realm of the critical, opportune moments when a gap opens in the experience. In the Kairos Readings I offer brief moments of writing, reflecting frames that try to capture what pops up around me while my mind plays whack-a-mole with fragments of Truth.
In this effort I am following the suggestion from a fictional character of a movie:
“The quest is to be liberated from the negative, which is really our own will to nothingness. And once having said yes to the instant, the affirmation is contagious. It bursts into a chain of affirmations that knows no limit. To say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence.”
Otto Hoffman, Waking Life (2001 movie by Richard Linklater)”
There is no high level order of organization (hierarchy) in these reflections. Instead I follow an urgent and impulsive desire to collect specimens of thoughts, ideas in progress and abstract images, set them aside to desiccate to the heat of attention.
A DENSE WEEKEND
This past weekend was rather intense for me. The intensity of the experience comes from two cognitively and emotionally poignant online meetings I attended on Saturday and to a visit to the Magical Workshop on Sunday.
I call the Magical Workshop a patch of coastal pine forest in the heights of Tenerife, because it contains a variety of lessons and miracles constantly unfolding in front of those eyes that want to see. The MW is nothing but a franchise of interconnected magical workshops that have been in the business of creating since the advent of life on Earth. Each location is special and unique, yet it is distributed and available in many formats near you as well. I suggests you visit them whenever you can and get acquainted with the miracle of creation.
DREAMING IN BLACK AND WHITE
The first event I attended on Saturday was a Social Dreaming. Despite running an online social dreaming series myself it feels always very liberating and ludic to be a participant. I also enjoy spending two hours of connection with people I don’t know but that share the same interests. I am grateful to Nandi Mhlongo and Anne Morgan for organizing and hosting this Social Dreaming. The theme of the Social Dreaming was Light and Darkness.
Amidst the complexity and richness of the meanings emerged in the two hours of the social dreaming experience, two feelings left a strong impression: awkwardness and envy.
The origin of the word awkward suggests the idea of going in the wrong direction, against the grain sort of movement. We can feel socially awkward in a particular context, when we are infringing a norm or having an awkward (clumsy- umconfortable) moment. Diversity and otherness (being in the “out-group”) creates friction, as well as crossing borders entering unfamiliar territories. The prison we bring inside doesn’t feel too awkward until the door of the cell opens and we are forced to a decision.
We also feel awkward when we meet new people, especially when we are ignorant of their culture, ideologies and experiences. Yet humankind has made of encounters and communication a key element of the species. Why are we steel feeling awkward?
ENVY works on me pretty much like for (I think) everybody else. In ENVY we desire an advantage that is missing in us, a comparison with the Other able to summon and energize a pellet of self pity and delusion for our own dissatisfaction.
If we have internal locus of control, it’s our responsibility, and we suck and self pity devours us. If the external locus of control is dominant, then it’s the system, the President all the way up to the Illuminati.
I am aware how my lifestyle and the privilege I carry with me for just being born in the Italian territory from a family of pale skinned Homo Sapiens can be object of Envy. I at the same time suffer from Envy when I think that my life will be qualitatively better if I had certain advantages, physical traits or assets I recognize in others. Most of the people that celebrate their successes online make me feel envious, as the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
Structural inequality and a cognitive tendency to exert control by defining what surrounds us are a fertile terrain for harboring feelings of Envy and Awkwardness. It is a paradox because in both situation we feel bad: Because we stand out (AWKWARD) or because we don’t (ENVY)
Those two elements seem to connect again with a path of inquiry that disturbed me for a long time. The disturbance comes from the paradoxical nature of the problem of dualism, that makes itself evident in identities.
As we choose (or are trained) to see forms out of backgrounds, black over white, young against old, rich vs poor and so on, we naturally label things in an attempt to appropriate them, to achieve ”stability of form”. It is the natural yet socially encouraged formation of our identities, but as cognitive psychology and neuroscientists observed, ”we are making perceptive illusions reality“.
The Anthropologist Francesco Remotti described the process quite eloquently:
“Identity is often (almost unavoidably) conceived as related to time, but also and especially like something devoid of change, protected from the flow of time. The identity of an individual, of an “Ego”, is considered like a structure of the psyche, like something that remains beyond the flow of facts and circumstances, of attitudes and events and this permanence is not seen as a residual category, instead it is seen as a tough core, the perennial and reassuring fundament of individual life”.
Against Identity, Francesco Remotti (my translation from the Italian)
If identity is chronologically stable rather than fluctuating then systemic social classes and roles serve the very pattern of oppression and exploitation we see clearly in the wrack left behind of the very planet we grew out of.
There is always a feeling, an intuition, probably a hope that by challenging those identities, borders and prisons, by engaging with them in the depth of the darkness of dreams we could be able to transform, modify re-establish new structures up in the light of social life, maybe even crack open the oppressing structures of the rules of convivence.
If we end up inhabiting identities informed and reinforced by social systems, how and where we meet again as equals?
HOW DO I BRIDGE THE GAP?
I entered a Jungian meeting a couple of hours after the social dreaming of South Africa, with this question echoing inside my bones. These gaps that keep us separate, the borders caging us, the chessboard that allows movement only to certain pieces according to formalized rules, the stripes of black and white of a referee jersey were residual thoughts spinning in front of my mind’s eye.
The C.G.Jung Institute of Santa Fe (NM) organized a meeting called “OUR COUNTRY IN CRISIS”. They did so every November of the past four years. Jacqueline Welsh, Donald Kalshed and Jerome Bernstein engaged a Zoom pool of almost 100 people in sharing reflections on the state of the US nation, to explore “wether the fast moving, shocking changes in our individual and collective lives are propelling us towards the edge of destruction, or, wether they are heralding and unexplainable transformation, an invocation, and essential re-formation – or both?”
A woman of Native American ancestry whispered in the room full of people: “There is a little voice, a breath, in the pain and discomfort I am feeling. Yesterday it was the pain around my shoulder blade. The voice is there, it is the Spirit trying to communicate with me and with the ones around me.”
The sum of all those whispers, all those voices form a bigger traumatic conversation. As in many somatic experiences, there is something appalling in the air, and even if you can’t exactly see or hear it, even if you can’t grasp the words, you can feel the breath and its distant voice through your body.
The language of pain and suffering take residence in a number of outlets: Dreams and associations; Arthritis; Media and fake news; Everyday conversation among people filled by violence and anger; Gossiping and darker emotions which attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts. The list is longer.
I enjoyed hearing voices asking questions, telling others where they were emotionally, expressing personal situations, commenting on the actual state of theirselves and of the nation. Participation was encouraged and a real part of the meeting. Although I have recently left physically and emotionally the USA there are tendrils that are still attached so even though I was technically an outsider I felt I belonged to the gathering.
In the second hour, Donald Kalshed, PhD, Jacqueline Welsh, PhD and Jerome Bernstein, M.A.P.C., NCPsyA., tried to address those challenges in the light of collective psychology offering jungian insights on the social turmoil happening around. The conversation and the talk were very rich. Few important points hit the target and dropped a seed in the soil of my psyche.
TWO SOULS IN MY BREAST
Echoing Goethe in Faust:
You are aware of only one unrest;
Oh, never learn to know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.
Unto the world in grossly loving zest,
With clinging tendrils, one adheres;
The other rises forcibly in quest
Of rarefied ancestral spheres.
If there be spirits in the air
That hold their sway between the earth and sky,
Descend out of the golden vapors there
And sweep me into iridescent life.
Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands
To carry me to distant lands,
I should not trade it for the choicest gown,
Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.”
Donald stressed the dimension of internal warfare, with the present of a deep cleavage, a split division we harbor inside as a reflection of our current outer divisions. The polarized political environment is a reflection of the fragmentation we owe to media and technology which disingenuously are fracking for our attention to extract as much profit as they can.
When we give up the inner civil war and avoid to host the conflict we decide to side with one and only of the factions thus living a contradiction that affect the ability to love all our parts, refusing to integrate traumatized areas of ourselves.
Hypothesis: Do we bridge the gap by loving and having compassion to our internal enemy?
From Jacqueline’s speech I extracted a thread connected to the previous one, the internal dance and warfare both destructive and creative, shaking our structures and making space. Maybe opening space for the new? The force in action seem to be the Alpha narcissistic emotion, the addiction to power and dominance with its perils.
Hypothesis : Do we bridge the gap by tending over the ruins created by our own narcissism?
The Alpha narcissism set perfectly the scene to Jerome’s description of our pathologized ego, the illusory separation of our species from nature that give us this sense of dominion over it and that is threatening our own survival, making this planet inhospitable. We are confronted with a switch of paradigm that is psychic: Being the psyche more than the brain this upturn does not only affect our own health but brings destruction and suffering to all living beings.
Constantly challenged by our own need survival we lost connection with Nature: the more we survive the more addicted we become to our defensive strategies. We already survived, the old psychic paradigm must leave space to a paradigm of conservation, care and regeneration.
Hypothesis: Do we bridge the gap by abdicating to our sense of sovereignty and making space for the exploration of our own collective psyche?
A “WILD KIND OF WISDOM” NECESSARILY FEMININE
The apocalyptic catastrophe and the collective psychopathology seem real and big enough to force humans to face their arbitrary social structures, like patriarchy, capitalism and other ideologies that seem to organize and inform collective behavior.
My inner reaction to this problem is of course dualistic and ambivalent, despite my best intentions: The two souls harboring in one chest for me in this very moment are HOPE and DESPAIR.
– Hope is usually my horse of choice, pulling in one direction. It allows me to let go of the illusion of control and despair for survival, knowing that there is enough intelligence and love in the universe and that my important and unique contribution is necessary to a system moving toward greater organization
– Despair arise from the evidence of entropy and the success of pattern of dominion, the primacy of short term exploitative patterns over long term, expensive reparative actions: The cost of TRIAGE exceeding the capacity of the system to regenerate at a successful pace. Nothingness is the basis of reality.
The reconciliation of those co-existing souls came the very next day.
THE VISIT TO THE MAGICAL WORKSHOP
With a full day of abstract ideas and hypothesis bombarding my brain I went into the Magical Workshop.
This island of Tenerife is like a University with different departments all nearby and connected. There is the underwater world, the coastal shores, the volcanic highlands, mountains and deserts, all within 1 hour drive from where I am docked.
This Sunday the classroom of choice was a coastal pine forest shrouded in clouds. In this workshop I can bring my thoughts and see if they survive the severe test of Nature.
In the wet north face of the island I walked through meadows and forest in search of chestnuts. But the beauty of a track disappearing into a thick pine forest lured me into a world of magic and made me abandon the main trail.
There I experienced the deep interconnection between species, the moss harboring mushrooms feeding worms, the smell of decomposition and regeneration as a sweet scent taking consciousness far and beyond, rocks crumbling into dirt massaged by lychens the slow and firms microscopic tendrils fitting into the gaps of matter.
The incessant transformation and change was just happening harmoniously. For sure I was a witness of death and pain and survival, but in the overall frame, seen from afar, the whole was a thriving ecosystem filled with beauty and vibrant with energy, a view of the forest from the very bottom to the high canopy as a harmonic warfare, wrestling embracing, exchanging, piercing, nesting, with species harboring species all the way to the invisible realms.
It is an example of interdependence and connectedness that we also experience in Society but that we try to control, manage, curb: In one word DOMINATE, favoring certain identities over others.
We live on top of each other to the point that our vicinity is threatening now that we harbor and breed potentially deadly virus in our throats and lungs. Yet we cannot avoid it. We still need each other, for nourishment, for defense, for growth. Simbiotic relations are the only win-win situation, the only sustainable model against the simplified psychopathological mathematics of game theory.
Trauma loses its power when it’s crystallized and hold separated, unaccounted, ignored by the collective. We can’t dominate trauma and if we try to do so it it will dominate us. The power of regeneration that is constantly at work in a forest disappears when one species becomes dominant. Instead when we accept trauma as a regenerative force we can heal again, we can share resources and repairing happens by itself.
There is no winning, just co-evolving in an embrace filled of oneness. Going back to embrace each other (or to have an honest heart to heart call these days) is the only way to sustain, grow, regenerate and evolve.
Small-scale solutions impact the whole system
Like the microcosm is an order that reverberates in the infinitely big, I want to believe in fractal solutions to collective trouble.
I am trying to slice portions of kairos and see what’s attached, like pulling a wonderful flower and inspecting the roots. If the hypothesis is right what is present in the here and now around the senses of a rather insignificant member of Homo Sapiens could also connect to similar and different experiences from another member of the species able to read and interpret these words. If it’s useful it will reverberate, if not it will die.
In this suspended and quiet time of analysis I attempt to transplant the roots and re-imagine connections, mapping the trails of thoughts to generate waypoints for future use.
The metaphor here is the one of the gardener, who selects and believes in the utility, beauty and creative impact of particular species and try to create the right conditions for them to grow and thrive, mindful that it is the ecosystem itself the final ruler.
Failure is part of the process and it should happen despite our best intentions and as the humble gardener knows. Survival is not guaranteed.
Revolutions are when the mass of change surpass the capacity for the container. It is ok to get rid of the container if we prepare a new one. We are approaching that at speed of light.
I don’t know if I yet have an answer to the question on how I bridge the gap. When lychens stick their roots into the rock, mountains crumble, when mountains crumble a beach arise and so forth. It may be that revolution in our consciousness is coming to us through severe conflict and inner civil war. But this is just an idea we nee to test in the Magical Workshops, meanwhile if I see a gap I will try to enter and inhabit it.