War of the eagle

Till the moment is right

I won't give up the fight

I'll keep pushing till I break through the barrier

(Tina Turner)

Good morning.

Today I would like to bring together a piece I wrote over two years ago, and my thoughts of just the last few days and weeks.

Just as an exercise in thought and to see how it all turns out.

The piece I wrote was in Dutch, as was the whole of the book I wrote back then, and it was called ‘anarchy and the Other’. Perhaps in the view of my more recent thought this is still an interesting title that calls for a very promising approach.

You see just now, I was thinking about an eagle who had developed a fear of flying. He was sitting there high up in his nest, and he couldn’t remember, and all he felt was fear of spreading his wings. And I cried.

For the eagle was me, and it is not just me I believe, I believe it is each and every person who has lost his power.

How do we lose our power?

Well it all starts at a very young age, with what I have described many many times by now as the installation of the ego, the place and time where we bow our heads and hide our light to make room for the noise and the weight of the shadow.

I have talked about how this is initially, I believe, a matter of guilt.

Guilt is such a special emotion, that psychoanalysis has even conceived of a special state, one of the three structures she has analyzed, for the condition where it is absent.

Psychoanalysis talks of neurosis, psychosis and perversion. Perversion is the absence of guilt. So guilt is a major emotion, when it comes to defining the structure of the human psychodynamic.

I believe neurosis is where the three registers are cooperating, the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. When the symbolic no longer functions, it is because the emphasis has shifted towards the dynamic and tension between the real and the imaginary. And when you drop even the workings of the imaginary, you are left with the pervert as a being of the real. The baby without the ego.

But that is not what I want to get into.

I want to talk a little about how at first, the ego comes and belittles us with accusations of being wrong and faulty, inventing defects and managing to make us feel the burden of guilt, for which we bow our heads, and hide our shining. When we no longer shine, the shadow can be in our presence.

To go directly to the level of society, I believe this is where we find the field of the controlling and punishing force of police authority. We should always bow before the police, bow and cooperate, because we have done something wrong, we have been bad, and now we are told so. And the police are always right. The people are always wrong. The people are criminals at heart, who can never be reminded enough of that. The people should be kept under surveillance and never be able to live free and just be themselves.

Now the ego would not be complete without the Other, the field of behaviors and roles that we are allowed to choose from. This transition from the state of guilt the ego drapes the human soul in to the state of working to make it up and pay off the debt, in an attempt clearly to relieve oneself of the burden, is where Lacan positions the Oedipus. The entering into the neurotic life of the tribe that is called the way of the Other.

Again, zooming out into the social world, we find here the law, the prescription for the behavior that is introjected. Depending on the kind of debt we feel we have to pay off, we make a resolution to do this or that. This is the oedipal choice, the particular identification with the Name-of-the-Father, motivated by a burdened state of the original oneness.

The law is written in society by the politicians. So it is the politicians that dictate what behavior we can display in order to relieve us from our original debt. And we should always work hard, for we are sinners.

The church has aided the state for centuries, in keeping the people bent, ashamed and obedient.

And then there is the money.

I believe money is just a game. It is just a result of our way of thinking. It is a way to act out this habit of paying off our debt. We can do so with money. So money is a way for us to handle our burden of the original sin, that the shadow drapes over the soul in order for its light not to destroy the dark cloth of his being.

So when we want to be free, as a people, as a soul, we find that the mind starts raising hell. When we want to let our light shine and raise our heads and stretch our bent and broken spines, we find it hard to face the world. But it is not the world that is so hard to face, it is the mind that is keeping us from innocently gazing into it.

In the mind, the ego is resisting the free flow of awareness, just like the politicians and the police are repressing the free movement of the people.

Never minding whether I like spiders or not, sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, I would like to portray the mind and the ego as a kind of spiderweb. The web is the law, and at the heart of the law, at the heart of the mind, is the creator of it, the spider, the ego, the police.

So don’t be mistaking, the imposition of guilt is there making us try to find ways to redeem ourselves, and the ego takes pleasure in this, but for sure all of this serves nothing more than the perpetuation of the ego’s life and existence. It is the ego’s fear of death we experience when we try to open our eyes, to open our spirits, to let out the shining of our light.

We are murder to the ego, just being the light we are, for it is darkness, and it cannot exist if we are fully there.

We are dangerous.

So the ego has us bowing our heads in guilt and paying it off indefinitely. And thus, it can stay alive, the occupier of our souls and spirits.

Now if we were to start paying off less, that would not be such a problem I think, but if we attacked the center of the spiderweb, the spider itself, if we were to refuse the guilt, that would be a disaster. That would be like shining a light straight into the heart of darkness.

Gone, would be the darkness.

And the darkness hates to leave.

The shadow hates to die.

But it cannot kill us, it can only repress us. That which it restrains always returns, Freud has taught us. This is the return of the unconscious, the insisting of the drive and this is where we find the reason for the repetitious uprising of the repressed contents of awareness.

The law of the game between the light and the shadow, is that the light never dies, and it always tries to break through again. This is what psychoanalytic aid is all about, to help bring the light past the shadow, so that the repetition can end and the soul can know peace.

But the shadow can die. When our soul shines fully, when we come to a full realization of our spirit’s power and consciousness, when we have fully drawn back our libido, our hearts from the ego, the shadow, it has no more ground to stand on, it has no more place to be.

And that is enlightenment.

To zoom out again, to the level of society, an enlightened society would be where there is no more feeling small, no more bowing and no more paying off the debts. It would be where the police have disappeared, in full fear of death for sure, after we have cast our light upon it and the web it has made, the law to uphold, is no more the place from which to choose our ways.

Our power would no longer be outside of us, in the hands of politicians and police, our power would live within, in our souls, in our spirits, in our flesh and blood and within our hearts.

This is maybe what I mean by saying ‘anarchy and the Other’. It is that we should take the power back, return from this unworthy and depressing way of organizing and start living from the heart.

In freedom.

In ecstasy.

In joy and in the light.

For now, we see that the whole system is keeping us in a state where our light never meets the world, where our hearts will never touch the spirits of this planet.

The whole system is working against our creative force, it is working against our power, it is keeping our instinct compromised. It is keeping us from living, it is keeping our bodies from moving. It is very sick, this way of social organization in the neurotic fashion.

We should all be perverts!

Like the babies.

So what I wrote over two years ago, was that I was really finding it bedazzling how we try to move forward by pushing everything back. How can we ever grow and get higher if we are keeping everything down and everything smaller? We cannot live efficiently if we are using all of our powers to keep ourselves from moving, from living, from being.

How can you ride a car, when you are only pushing the brakes?

It is irrational, it is insane!

And it is sad, and the only one laughing is the shadow.

The policeman, the politician, the priest and the economist.

The ones doing the preaching and cashing from our efforts of redemption.

The ones being paid to make us feel guilty.

So this is the world we live in, some are laughing, and some are bent and suffering. And the ones laughing are laughing exactly because the others are bent and suffering. They are enjoying it, they are benefitting from it. The hurt of the common man is the joy of the other.

So what about psychoanalysis? When it is trying to help the light bring forth itself and shine into this world? Why have psychoanalysts not been more socially active?

And perhaps this is where I must bow my head, and say I am guilty. Speaking in the name of psychoanalysis, I am guilty, guilty of not thinking it through enough. Guilty perhaps of having thought it through, but not opening my mouth.

For psychoanalysis, in all its big mouth attempts to free us from resistance and repression, has nevertheless sided with the ego. The sermon it preaches is that we need the ego, or we would turn into animals. Perhaps into horses or buffalo roaming free on the prairies.

We cannot be like animals, we cannot be perverts.

Moreover, if you want to move from the neurotic structure to the pervert one, you would have to face psychosis. You would be overwhelmed by the guilt-enforcing mind and all of its plights and obligations. You would go mad. You need the Other. You need the mind. And you surely have to want an ego.

So what if we go insane?

Jim Morrison asked ‘could any hell be more horrible than now and real?’. It is a question that is worth considering.

Maybe some are afraid to die, when they think they are the shadow, or feel the need to act so.

But others could raise their heads, and they could find the light, and they could shine and they could stand up straight and tall.

The last could be first, and the first, last.

Justice.

Is this system worth upholding?

Or is it a disgrace?

Is this a world to be proud of?

Is our form of life intelligent?

Repressing the masses for the profits of a few?

Is that so great?

And what if some are afraid to die, and what if, in all of their despair facing the light in your eyes, they try to drive you mad, with preaches of guilt and duty?

Their fear should not be yours.

Let them be afraid and let them die.

And just like the light within man’s heart, return and return, insist and repeat, and never give up rising up once again.

And we will return to the Garden, and we will live in the kingdom of the Goddess, the love within our hearts from our dearest Mother.

We will be starlight on Earth, where shadows will be no more.