“As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavor; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world” we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies, we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and to ensure the minimal requirements for biosocial survival- to register fatigue , signals for food, sex, defecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing. Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.”
RD Laing ‘the politics of experience’
Many years ago when I was about 21 I discovered RD Laing ‘The Divided Self’ , which was one of many valuable books I read that helped me be comfortable with my psychological state and the way I navigated the world. Recently I picked up his book ‘The Politics of Experience’ and within the first chapter he brilliantly articulates what became obvious to me way back as a teenager. But on the eve of starting the deep dive into my own life via autobiographical storytelling, and the eve of my sons 18th birthday, I read some passages that really capture my reasons for making the decisions Ive made in my own childrearing and in all aspects of my life. Early on I saw the truth of the above quotation, and I vowed never to be the ‘normal man’. Ever since I can remember, my first memories are realizations that I was ‘mad’ and not like the creatures around me. As I got a little older, the fact of madness haunted me. Just beyond the curtain of everyday life, the Madwomans Whisper called to me, beckoning me to follow into realms little understood, and which excited me, yet also left me vulnerable to the alienation of the common crowd. And instead of cowering in the face of madness, I have done my best to live out my truth in defiance of the mediocrity of modern expression. Ive raised my son to be a sovereign individual willing and able to step away from the consensus, with confidence in acting in a manner far from the ‘maddening crowd’.
“What we call “Normal” is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive action on experience. ..It is radically estranged from the structure of Being.
The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms’.
There are forms of alienation that are relatively starnge to statiscially ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing stage of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘ normal’ majority as bad or mad.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man’.
Society highly values its normal man. It educates its children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.
Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things.
If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive.
If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.”
RD Laing ‘the politics of experience’
How we experience ourselves and the world around us, including other beings, shapes how we act and how we think and how we create structures to contain our lifeforce. Our experience has been intentionally manipulated. The fog of delusion that humanity lives within is imperceptible to the average person, except through the vague feeling-sense of what is missing. In performing a ‘retrospective’ of my life, up to this point, at 43 years old, I intend to do soul retrieval to all those sparks of Life and Self that are trapped in the psychic gulag of my hologenetic Body of Experience. The act of re-entering these spaces, to free these selves, and to articulate and tell the story of my own Mythological existence, is to do my part in reMembering Wholeness. It is my Gift to the larger Body that I exist within, to tell my story and to untangle the knots of energy that bind my power to old dreams and dramas and to deliver my own Self as the birth pains of Sovereignty make any other life impossible. Theres no way out but in. Into the Body, into the Cellves, into the tIssues and into the Fascia which is the crystalline template holding the seed.
BlissNinja 