What Do The Toes Knows?


For the past couple of days I've been corresponding with a friend who made the mistake of asking if I know the work of Barbara Marciniak. I once worked (briefly) with an addiction therapist who asked me to read Marciniak, as well as The Celestine Prophesy, in preparation for working with her. I was appalled. I felt like these addicts were being sucked into an insane asylum, for which they were paying through the nose. I began trying to explain my problem with this kind of unconscious matriarchal material in a letter, but I spent so much time on it I had no time to write a separate blog. So I adapted the letter into the blog.

I get nervous when I start to get too close to someone else's belief system when I am on the "rational" side of it.  I remember reading a book in which this man began to debunk commonly held belief systems operating sans evidence.  He said it began when he was in college, and learned to read palms.  He got great feedback and a reputation as something of a seer.  Then someone convinced him to try an experiment.  He was to read as he always did, but instead of following the system of what is meant by the lines, he was to provide the opposite of what he was seeing.  To his amazement, he got the same positive feedback, that he was accurate.  It led him on his quest to demonstrate that these forms should not pass through the intellect's critical screening process. They should remain on the other side of it, in the realm of the irrational.

William Burroughs pointed out that psychic powers are not rational, and so cannot be tested by rational means.  They are powered by emotion, and people are connected by emotion.  They forget that because they have telephones and email to give them a more rational experience of connection.  : )  So the tests in which somebody is trying to discern by psychic powers whether there is a square or a circle on a card is just silly. These powers are in the body, not the head.  Burroughs said, "you have more of it in your big toe than in your head."

Very rational people want these belief systems to have mental software, because it's the only software they can run.

The body has it's own software, and moves toward pleasure and away from pain based on the quality of the emotional vibration it experiences. It connects to instinctual energies in the earth, which makes it material, or matriarchal.  This is the realm into which the hero has to journey in order to get the philosopher's stone, or prime substance of wholeness. He takes consciousness into the darkness, spirit into matter.

So, body intelligence is very powerful and is ruled by the Mother Nature archetype.  This archetype is very luminous and very seductive, and being related to it, one experiences being one with nature and the planet and everything else.  Why not?  It is the container.  Everything is there, and so anything can be lit up and revealed to be there.  It is rather like shining a light in the darkness. What it falls on will be revealed truth.

In the rational sphere, what is not true is eliminated to allow one to reach the point, or the truth.  It can make decisions, separating things in order to differentiate, define, order, calculate, compare and contrast. It is the ladder on which one can climb out of the squishy unformed irrational feminine.

That is why masculinity is a sword, while the feminine wholeness is a ring.  The sword cuts.  That is the power of the masculine archetype.  Christ said "I come with a sword" because he was historically placed at the point of evolution where people began to use their heads to control their emotional responses.  A slight gap in consciousness developed, by which the emotional response could be censored.  This had great survival value, as you could hold your tongue or smile at a moment when the inability to control the first response would get you killed, or kicked out of bed, leading to a failure to reproduce in either instance.

Survival value is the determinant in evolution, and this was a big one.

Prior to this shift the dreamer was not in the dream, but looking into it as if from through a window.  After the shift, he or she could appear in the dream as a recognizable character.  The character was the ego image.  Sometimes this character will have a confrontation with another character in a dream, one not recognized as oneself.  The other character might be for example an older and more mature ego image, when a person is holding on to an inappropriately younger self-image. The dreamer will be identified with the younger image and so wonder who this older one was who seemed to assume such power. Eventually the dreamer recognizes his or her more mature image. Hopefully, anyway ...

Almost everyone who is going to seek help with personal development can deal with the most pressing and difficult of life problems. What they want is to escape a painful condition which never goes away, and that is a failure to move to an age appropriate ego maturity, where they surrender their parents as something other than two other ordinary people. They take the projection of the archetypes off them. "My mother is not my mother; my father is not my father. My father is in heaven."

This is why a good analyst will never, ever, give somebody advice as to what they should or should not do.  The main problem is that the person believes there is somebody more qualified, more knowledgeable, more advanced, more spiritually connected, or in possession of some special knowledge which they don't have. Thus it seems that somebody else can tell them the best course of action, or the best decision. If the therapist does this, thinking he or she is giving them good advice, they are feeding the problem, not solving it.

The problem with dependency, whether it is acted out by an addict or unconscious in a co-addict, is that it can't be solved by transferring dependency to other escape mechanisms.  So a high quality analyst won't be cajoled by flattery of money or anything else into doing anything at all to feed the dependency.  Certainly he or she won't come up with a new escape mechanism in the form of being lifted up in either a rapture or a flying saucer, depending on the propensity of the addict toward antique or modern furnishings.

The object is to get the other person to the place where he or she realizes that we are all in the human condition, and that the only service that can be provided is opening up the situation and demonstrating an expanded range of options.

It is the analysand who has to begin to make independent choices, and realize that the human psyche is shared by all of us. We are constructed to have an ego mediating between complexes, primal drives, and the demands of the outside world. All of us know the seduction of just leaving this human life behind and joining with a divinity.

If we begin to have ego identification with an archetype, or divinity, there will be a great deal of phenomena, which can make the person feel increasingly special and divine. This will happen whether the direction is downward toward the female archetype or upward toward the male archetype.  In either case the person is surrendering the ego's mediating function. The "hobbit" nature of the ego is being abandoned in favor of an inflation of the power drive, as the qualities of the archetype are assumed by the ego. This inflation process is necessarily followed by a deflation of equal and opposite magnitude.





It doesn't matter if somebody is becoming increasingly identified with the mother or the father polarity, because in either case, one is losing the primary function of the mature ego, which is moving between the masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious, in order to keep them in balance and in a respectful relationship to each other.  This will be reflected in relations with the opposite sex.  They will reflect the relationship of masculine to feminine in the psyche of the individual.  In young people the relationship is unconscious, which allows the woman to not see that the man holds her unconscious masculine, and vice versa.

In a mature person, there will be awareness of both polarities, and of the need to give them equal respect and consideration.  This will attract a similarly balanced consciousness in other people.

But back to the attraction to the archetype.  

Whether it is the great mother or the great father, the energy is numinous and other worldly.  It seems self-evident that it would be a good thing to be one with this great energy, especially for someone who is trying to escape death.  The problem is a fear of death, of nothingness, combined with a sadistic or masochistic reaction.  If one has total control through rationality, then escape is through rational means, such as obeying all the laws and scriptures and professing faith.  If one has control through surrender, then there is the strategy of surrendering to death as a form of control over it.  Death is non-existence, and so the surrender would be of the identity.  If you have no identity there's nothing you wanted to hold on to anyway so fuck death and the horse it rides in on.

Identification with an archetype sets up a major ego regression.   For as beautiful and impressive as these archetypes may be, they do not have a lot of range.  They have huge energies because they are the polarities of the system.  Father sky wants to rejoin mother earth because he loves her so much.  But there will be no room for new life if no space is held between them by the new hero.  The archetype is a one trick pony, while the conscious ego has range and access to either archetype.  It relates to them, but does not identify with them.

If there is to be respect for and balance between the major archetypes, then the critical faculties can't just be discarded as inconvenient in the face of something one wants to believe.  This is the invasion of the masculine realm by an aggressive matriarchal power drive.  Likewise, there can be no imposition of rational structures to control the body's instinctual and emotional reality.   It gets it's instructions from below, not above. Neither can invade the other's territory. There has to be a mediator between them to prevent a constant power struggle.

The expressions of the body come forward in art, in dance, in lovemaking, in sport, in poetry ... their power is in their vibratory quality, or beauty, not to mention the little chore of surviving: not eating poison food, balancing the blood sugar, digesting, eliminating, that sort of thing.

Rational masculinity provides the diamond sparkle of intellect to sleeping beauty, as well as a good rogering to make her receptive to something besides her own unconsciousness.

This is the best clarification I can give for why I am opposed to therapists and writers and channelers and so forth, who prey on dependency.  With the particular therapist I encountered, her unconscious matriarchal power drive was obvious, and she had no business dealing with addicts or anybody else, really.  What comes to mind when I think of her is the Walrus, in Alice in Wonderland, tricking all the little oysters into coming to dinner.

walrus.jpeg

Posted: Wed - December 19, 2007 at 04:26 PM