How can we free ourselves from mental suffering? How can we unlock what the poet William Blake referred to as “the mind-forged manacles” - those unhelpful, unfounded and inflexible habits of thought which keep us from reaching our true creative potential?
This book provides practical advice on how to achieve this.
But it also offers an imaginative holistic theoretical framework for an understanding of the nature of the universe, the psychological history of the human race and the meaning of life.
How To be Free
by Joe Blow
Smashwords Edition published by
Aussiescribbler
Copyright 2011 Joe Blow
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The Author
Joe Blow is the pseudonym for a man who, though currently happy and high functioning, has had a long history of mental illness, including endogenous depression, bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. This book is the product of a lifelong struggle to integrate flashes of insight and powerful symbols which appeared to him, often during what we might define as psychotic episodes, with observable reality and a rudimentary knowledge of science by appropriating useful concepts from the work of such iconoclastic thinkers as Wilhelm Reich, R. D. Laing, Keith Johnstone, William Blake and Oscar Wilde.
If asked whether this approach and this conceptual framework have provided him with a secure foundation for emotional stability, happiness and flowering creativity, Blow would reply, “Well, so far so good.”
The Love of Perfection is the Root of All Evil
What Is The History of Human Neurosis
The Scary Side of The Imagination
Self-Acceptance and a Troubled World
Compassion is Projected Self-Pity
Fight Against Only That Which You Wish to Become
Violence is Admission of Error
General Advice on Becoming Free
Introduction
The aim of this book is to set you free. But free from what? Free from neurosis. Free from the feeling that you have to obey authority. Free from emotional intimidation. Free from addiction. Free from inhibition.
The key to happiness, mental health and being the most that we can be is absolute and unconditional self-acceptance. The paradox is that many of our problems are caused by trying to improve ourselves, censor our thinking, make up for past misdeeds and struggling with our negative feelings whether of depression or aggression.
But if we consider ourselves in our entirety in this very moment, we know these things :
1. Anything we have done is in the past and cannot be changed, thus it is pointless to do anything else but accept it. No regrets or guilt.
2. While our actions can harm others, our thoughts and emotions, in and of themselves, never can. So we should accept them and allow them to be and go where they will. While emotions sometimes drive actions, those who completely accept their emotions and allow themselves to feel them fully, have more choice over how they act in the light of them.
Self-criticism never made anyone a better person. Anyone who does a “good deed” under pressure from their conscience or to gain the approval of others takes out the frustration involved in some other way. The basis for loving behaviour towards others is the ability to love ourselves. And loving ourselves unconditionally, means loving ourselves exactly as we are at this moment.
This might seem to be complacency, but in fact the natural activity of the individual is healthy growth, and what holds us back from it is fighting with those things we can’t change and the free thought and emotional experience which is the very substance of that growth.
Divide and conquer - that is a key philosophy in military campaigns. And the same applies to the individual. An individual at war with themselves is easily dominated or controlled by others. If we want to become a free individual the way to do so is through individuation, allowing the divided parts of our nature to integrate into a unified whole.
We may feel that there is within us a battle between the desire to do things we feel are right and the desire to do things we feel are wrong. The battle of good and evil.
But what are good and evil?
Good is that which contributes to the health of the individual or the society or wider ecological system of which they are a part.
So what do we mean by evil? We could say that evil is anything which adversely effects the health of the individual or the system. But the term “evil” is a very strong one. Selfishness has a negative impact on the health of the system by interfering with the free flow of material, information or energy. But we wouldn’t consider minor acts of selfishness, like eating more than our share of a piece of cake, to be evil. Evil is a term we use to describe those acts which cause significant suffering or otherwise do major harm. The essence of evil is the imposition of the will. If we take something from somebody against their will - their life, their property, their dignity, their humanity - this is clearly evil. But also it is an act of evil to try to control another’s behaviour through fear or guilt or other forms of deliberate manipulation. The fact that such behaviour has a dire impact on the health of the individual and the social system can be demonstrated when we consider that the worst forms of socially-sanctioned cruelty we know of - the Holocaust, the witch burnings, the Spanish Inquisition, the stoning to death of women by the Taliban - have been the work of societies in which the repression and control of the individual through fear and/or guilt were the norm.
Of course there is such a thing as necessary evil. We have to impose our will on those who behave destructively towards others, etc. But it must be recognised that this does not solve the problem of evil. At best it contains it. But, more often than not, even this is an illusion and the act of using our will to contain evil sows the seeds of more evil behaviour. Only the healing of individuals and of society can actually decrease the incidence of evil.
But what we need to understand, if we are to understand ourselves, is our own impulses to engage in destructive or dominating behaviour towards others.
If we have such impulses they originate in a lack of acceptance of some aspect of ourselves. Hostility towards others or the need to control others is projected self-contempt.
It is commonly acknowledged that the hostility of some heterosexual men towards gay men is due to a lack of acceptance of their own denied homosexual impulses. The same applies to all forms of hostility. Those who wish to hunt animals for sport, or otherwise mistreat them, don't want to accept that they are animals themselves and thus physically vulnerable in the same ways. Those who wish to harm children feel threatened by their disowned inner child. Men who wish to harm women are threatened by their disowned feminine side.
Anyone who is fully accepting of themselves feels no hostility toward others. They may be troubled by the hostility of others and oppose it, but they will not experience feelings of hostility themselves. If a wild animal attacks us, we may be distressed and do what we can to protect ourselves, even to the extent of killing the animal, but, if we are sensible, we feel no hostility towards that animal, recognising that it is behaving according to its nature. Our feelings about the hostility of other humans would be the same if we did not have in ourselves something of what they express in their hostile behaviour. Those who scream for the death penalty after a vicious crime, if not loved ones of the victim, are those who know that they have within them the same kind of rage as the criminal and feel the need for a harsh penalty for such crimes in order to feel secure in their ability to control themselves.
From this we can see that evil behaviour originates in our neurosis (our divided state) and is not an expression of our primary nature.
We also need to look at the phenomenon of selfishness. Historically we’ve criticised ourselves for being selfish. Sin is the religious term for selfishness and religions sometimes teach that selfishness should be a source of shame.
By contrast, some modern thinkers view selfishness as the essential nature of living things. They feel that the imperative for the survival and propagation of the genes is the driving force behind the behaviour of all animals, including humans.
Both of these ways of looking at the human phenomenon of selfishness are mistakes.
We humans are different from other animals in that we have the ability to connect with each other and the world around us through the use of our intellect and imagination. This brings into our emotional life priorities and drives of which other animals know nothing. Our egos are unchained from the necessities of brute survival, and the emotional rewards that guide our behaviour come not just from making babies, but also from finding out why apples fall out of trees or painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Many individuals express the meaning of their lives in emotionally satisfying ways but choose not to propagate their genes. As entities capable of higher reasoning we have a choice. Other animals generally do not.
So if the source of human selfishness is not a genetic imperative, what is it?
Quite simply it is the symptom of a system which is sick and, as a result, in pain. This is perfectly natural. Try hitting your thumb with a hammer, and then try to turn your attention to something other than the pain. It is very difficult. When a living system such as the human organism is sick or in pain the natural thing is for it to turn its attention towards itself. I know from my own experience that when I was suffering from depression it was very hard for me to pay attention to anyone else’s situation or feelings. But when I am happy I forget myself much of the time and concentrate on the interesting phenomena of other people - their lives, their thoughts and their feelings.
It is important to emphasise that this healthy state of outward-directedness is not the same as selflessness. Selflessness if taken literally is a meaningless term. If we had no self we would not exist, since the term “self” is our expression for the totality of which we consist. But we use the term selfless as an opposite to selfish, i.e. to describe a state of mind in which the needs of others take precedence over our own needs. Such a state of mind can occur during an emergency when an individual will risk their life to save someone else. Or it can be a state of mind consciously cultivated through an effort to repress or transcend selfish impulses. But this is the problem with the concept when it comes to trying to understand the nature of the healthy psyche. We can understand the pathological nature of selfishness, but to assume that selflessness is the epitome of the psychological health of the individual carries the danger that we may feel that being healthy means repressing our personal needs or desires in favour of those of others. This would just be swapping one form of sickness for another.
Our selfishness is not wrong. It is appropriate when we are sick and suffering to concentrate on addressing our need for relief from this state. The only problem is that we don’t know how to best help ourselves. We are able to give comfort to ourselves through distraction and materialism, and this is what we should do in the absence of a cure. This is the equivalent of taking aspirin when we have a fever. It won’t cure the problem, but it will make us feel better in the mean time.
The aim here is to clarify the nature of the illness and identify practical approaches to treatment which address the root cause.
Any form of submission, including submission to any kind of ideal, is unhealthy. The healthy individual is one who does only what they wish to do. This is O.K. as the desire to do anything destructive is non-existent in the healthy individual.
The way to eliminate the desire to do anything destructive is through radical self-acceptance. And this is also the cure for selfishness. The pain of neurosis is that of the individual at war with his or her thoughts and feelings. The path to healing is to learn to accept our thoughts and feelings unconditionally.
We live in a society in which hostility and selfishness are the norm. We live in a profoundly neurotic society.
Now to say that our society is a neurotic one and that neurosis is the norm may seem ludicrous or even offensive. But there is a simple test you can use to discover whether or not you are neurotic.
Is your mind more like a playground or more like a prison? If it is more like a prison then you are neurotic.
But don’t worry. This book is a “Get Out of Jail Free” card and a passport back into the playground.
Let me explain here that I have never done any academic training in the field of psychology. I’m not an expert, at least in that sense.
I’m an individual who has suffered greatly from depression throughout a significant portion of my life. And I’ve been diagnosed as being bipolar, having experienced several psychotic breakdowns.
The thinking which has lead to the ideas I express here has been driven by two things -
1. A desire to work out why human society functions so poorly and can lead to such terrible phenomena as the World Wars and the Holocaust. In my adolescence I began asking myself why, if at base what we most want is to be loved, then why don’t we all just love each other. Are killing our enemies and accumulating wealth not poor substitutes for the kind of happiness we could have if we did that?
2. A desperate need to find a way out of a tangled state of despair so great that I twice tried to take my own life.
I offer these thoughts for what they may be worth. I trust that, if there is anything of truth in them, it will prosper, and if there is anything which is a mistake it will be seen as such and rightly dismissed.
All I can say is that these are the thoughts which, for me, have stood the test of time. For the last few years, as these ideas have become more clear in my head and I’ve overcome my reluctance to believe in myself, I’ve been free of depression and my creative abilities have flowered.
Joe Blow is a name used for someone who is nobody special. This is an appropriate pseudonym for me to use because it emphasises that I take no credit for any useful ideas or insights that might be contained in this work.
Nobody creates ideas or truths. They simply exist. We either see them or we don’t. And the fact that we may see them is not a sign of strength or achievement on our part. It takes an act of will to maintain a delusion, to cling to a belief in spite of any contrary evidence. But when we have useful ideas or discover truths it is often because we lack the will or the ability to protect ourselves against them.
I’ve never had a very effective ego, hence my history of depression and psychosis. I’m not a brave individual. I wouldn’t have gone to those frightening places if I had known how not to.
I’m only moderately intelligent. And also only moderately well-read.
I haven’t put much effort into any of this, beyond the effort we all put into keeping ourselves afloat emotionally.
So, to the extent that these ideas may be useful, it is a quality of the ideas themselves alone, and has nothing to do with the individual who gives expression to them. No doubt at this very moment many other individuals are expressing similar ideas, as any of us might if we learn to relax and be simply who we are and not who we think we should be.
The Love of Perfection is the Root of All Evil
Most of us accept that it would be unreasonable to expect ourselves to be perfect, but we still see perfection as an ideal, something to be pursued. And yet to pursue perfection, if such a thing even exists, makes about as much sense as pursuing death.
If anything were ever perfect it would be sterile. It would be a dead end.
Everything wonderful in the whole universe has grown out of imperfection. That is how the creative principle of the universe works.
The universe is a system - a network of energy, some of which behaves in a particular kind of orderly way that we refer to as matter. This matter exists in a web of action and interaction with other matter and forms of energy. And some of that matter is alive and operating under its own internal direction as a subsystem of the whole. And the most complex form of that living matter is ourselves as we look out into the universe and try to understand it.
But how did we come about? Through a serious of mutations, i.e. imperfections. Perfection is a steady-state. But the creative principle operates through variation. An animal, for instance, is born which is not quite right, a mutation of some kind. If that variation, that imperfection, proves beneficial then something new and wonderful comes into existence, a new branch on the tree of life. And all of those imperfections led to us.
And yet we somehow became intolerant of our mistakes and imperfections instead of seeing them as an intrinsic part of the creative process of the universe.
How this unhelpful way of thinking about ourselves took hold is a mystery we can speculate about a bit later. To get an idea of what an insidious hold it has had upon us historically we need to examine the idea of God.
We often have a tendency to personify the impersonal. We talk of Mother Nature or Father Time. Of course there is no actual Mother Nature, but the earth’s ecosystem on which we may put this human face, does exist.
This is the case with the concept of God. There is no God, anymore than there is a Mother Nature, but the creative principle of the universal system is an observable reality. There are laws to the way the universe operates that allow for orderly phenomena and for the evolution of more basic forms into more complex and capable forms such as ourselves. And onto this reality, for our own comfort, we put a human face.
This may sound very cold. But we should remember that all the wonders of our world and the rest of the universe and ourselves are a product of the operation of these laws.
And when we realise that these laws operate within human society in the form of love then we can see that the identification of this mythical figure with a healing or comforting social phenomena is not inappropriate.
But what of the concept of an angry God who asks us to subjugate ourselves to him. This is where the concept of the love of perfection as the root of all evil can best be understood.
By the time the Judaeo-Christian concept of God (differing greatly from those deities of earlier times which often represented only certain aspects of nature or the human psyche) came into being, our society was profoundly neurotic. Civilisation (i.e. repression) had been going on for a long time. A neurotic society is generally controlled by its most neurotic members as long as they are still capable of functioning, because their insecurity makes the control of those less neurotic than themselves an imperative. When we are neurotic, we live in fear of the disowned part of our own nature, and, if unchecked, this fear can manifest itself as the desire to control those who express it or represent it in the external world. For reasons which will be explained later, the human neurosis first appeared in males. It quickly spread to women, but, in general, men tended to be more neurotic. And thus, as we and our society became more neurotic, men felt the need to take control and impose their will to an ever greater degree. Our societies, which in the distant past had been matriarchal because of the primacy of the reproductive role, became patriarchal. This is why God was conceived as not only a man, but an angry, neurotic, intolerant man. Because of the phenomenon known as projection, we create our Gods in our own image, just as we see in the world around us a projection of ourselves.
Paranoia is an important symptom of neurosis. We have a tendency to project the disowned part of ourselves, which we fear, onto others. For example, during the Cold War, capitalists saw in communism a projection of their own conscience which told them that it was wrong to be greedy, and communists saw in capitalists a projection of their own unacknowledged awareness of the futility of trying to repress their greed through discipline.
In a practical sense, fear of God was a way of maintaining the neurotic order of society. One might feel that a sick, miserable, evil society was better than no society at all, a collapse into unstructured barbarism. After all some kind of structure was needed if we were to co-operate enough to develop science and learn to understand ourselves and our world better.
But the major problem was that the root of the sickness was lack of self-acceptance, and by holding God up as an ideal of perfection and preaching that humans needed to abase themselves before “him”, the churches were making the sickness much much worse.
The view of God expressed depends on the individual. Since Jesus was clearly relatively free of neurosis, his concept of a loving, forgiving and tolerant God was more in keeping with an accurate understanding of the functioning of a healthy system.
Let’s take a look at what self-acceptance means in practice.
I’ll use an example from my own life. When I was around 20 I went through a terrible depression. A new mother was staying in our house with her baby. At a point early in the depression an image occurred to me of myself throwing the baby down onto the floor and killing it. In my imagination those present didn’t worry about the baby but turned their attention to me and asked what made me do such a thing. At first I dismissed this thought, but it just wouldn’t go away and over time it came to obsess me, and I thought that I might actually carry it out. After the mother and baby left, when this was no longer a possibility, I continued to spiral deeper and deeper into depression. “How could I even think about such a terrible thing?” I asked myself. “Surely I must be evil. There must be some horrible sickness in me.” And the more I tried to find a solution to this problem the worse it got.
Since then I’ve learned more about what we call Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and discovered that this kind of thinking and the accompanying anxiety and depression are incredibly common.
If I had simply accepted that this was something that my mind had thrown up, and that, since it was a thought and not an action, it was morally neutral, the problem would not have occurred. By “trying to be a good person” and struggling with this thought, I only made myself miserable, and, as a result, for the time I was depressed, a more selfish person, and thus someone who took more from those around him than he gave. So accepting these thoughts would have not just been doing the right thing by myself, but also by others.
We have limited control over what we think or feel. We do have some control. We can distract ourselves or learn disciplines such as meditation. But often this is not a good idea.
The natural tendency in the mind is to seek wholeness. We can make ourselves miserable quite easily by clinging to ideas by an act of will or trying to fight against the ideas and feelings which come to us unbidden.
So what form does this human neurosis take?
The psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich wrote about a phenomenon he called “armouring”. According to him there are two forms of armouring - body armour and character armour. The purpose of armouring is protection from what is inside and what is outside.
Body armour involves the storing of repressed emotions in the musculature of the body. A good example is the archetypal stiff upper lip. Reich found that, by observing the body, one could see the undealt with emotions, and massage of certain parts of the body could bring on a cathartic release of anger, tears, feelings of grief, etc. and free the body up to experience more pleasurable experiences such as sexual arousal.
Character armour is a fixed ego structure - an inflexible, defensive way of thinking about ourselves and similarly inflexible, defensive way of behaving. The behaviour of the armoured individual could be described as stereotyped or habit-bound. This is the opposite of the open, spontaneous approach to life which was our original nature.
Reich described this armour as : “a protection of the ego against external and internal dangers. As a protective mechanism which has become chronic it can rightly be called armour... in unpleasurable situations the armouring increases, in pleasurable situations it decreases. The degree of character mobility, the ability to open up to a situation or to close up against it constitutes the difference between the healthy and the neurotic character structure.” The Function of the Orgasm (translated by T.P. Wolfe, Panther, 1968)
On the larger scale it is possible to relate this to forms of thinking exhibited by groups of individuals. In some groups we find the free expression and exchange of ideas, while others are bound up in unquestioned dogma. Such dogma, which we may find in religious groups or political organisations for example, is another form of armouring aimed at protecting the group against criticism from the outside and the insecurity of free thought and doubt within.
What Is the History of the Human Neurosis?
I’m not a biologist or palaeontologist. This is just a loose theoretical framework which I’ve put together from pieces of other theories and my own imagination.
The process of evolution has expressed itself in a multitude of living creatures, each taking advantage of the potential of its own niche in the ecosystem. The natural system of which any animal or plant is a part places limitations on its behaviour. For instance a population which breeds too much might find itself exceeding the carrying capacity of its immediate environment and having to migrate or die off.
But within these limits, the vitality of the species resides in the fact that each individual tries to maximise its mating opportunities. This is how species become stronger. Since those who are healthiest can win the competition to mate, the stronger genes are propagated more often than the weaker ones.
This process is very effective, but it carries with it a serious weakness. It limits the capacity for co-operation and thus achievement through group effort. These forms do occur in non-human animals quite extensively, for instance in the case of a pride of lions co-operating to hunt an antelope, but the full potential for co-operative achievement is always compromised by competition for mating. Hive insects have a co-operative society which seems to have minimal internal competition, but they also appear to be an evolutionary dead-end, although, unlike the dinosaurs, an environmentally sustainable one.
Humans breached this impasse.
In any animal species in which the infant bonds with the mother for any length of time after birth, the nature of the new-born infant is to be unconditionally loving. Love is simply open spontaneous communication and learning is absorption of information by observation. The infant, being a blank slate in terms of discriminatory thinking, will bond with the mother without discriminating in any way. This is what makes that bonding possible, and explains why some animals will bond with a human and act as if they were the mother. But, in most species, the period of this bond is short because the need to fight for survival in a harsh environment takes over. The individual’s behaviour is determined by an interplay of instincts, which are a part of the physical operating structure of the animal and common to all members of that species, and learned behaviour, either directly competitive or co-operative when needed to meet short term ends such as pack hunting to provide a collective meal.
A capacity for imagination and intelligence is inherent in complex brains. Just as life is an experimental process in which more complex living systems can form over time and survive or not depending on fitness for interacting with, making use of and living within the limits of the environment, so thinking works the same way within the individual brain and the society of which it is a part. Imagination and insight are functions of open spontaneous unstructured information sharing within the brain. This is the opposite of stereotypical thinking, i.e. thinking which follows strict pathways. The brain function of most animals is dominated by stereotypical thinking because, most of the time, this is what works most effectively in meeting the challenges of the struggle for survival and the mating imperative. While there might be times when a little lateral thinking would be beneficial, stopping to think would generally be a liability to survival, so that potential in the brains of those species did not develop.
The longer the nurturing period the more of a chance the species has of developing a co-operative social culture and with it higher intelligence. The mother’s instinct to nurture may be driven by the imperative to protect and foster her own genes, but it shelters the infant’s original unconditionally loving nature, with its capacity for freely imaginative thought, and allows it to flourish rather than be subsumed by the survival imperative. Intelligence and imagination were potentials just waiting for the right environment in which to develop.
Our ape-like ancestors lived in the fertile Rift Valley of Africa, where there was plenty of food and relatively few predators, thus allowing the females to nurture their offspring for a longer time. (The nurturing period of humans is longer than that of any other animal.) This liberated our intellect and allowed us to form a co-operative, non-competitive society. Freed from the battle for survival, we began to look at the world around us and wonder how it worked and what it meant.
Some other species developed close co-operative social bonds and, with them, at least the rudiments of intelligence. One can see these qualities in the behaviour of some of the ape species and also sea mammals such as whales and dolphins. One major advantage that we humans have however is hands with opposable thumbs. The apes are not as intelligent as us, but even if they were, they would not have been able to develop technology with their clumsy hands and thus they couldn’t make full use of that intelligence. And whales and dolphins are stuck in the sea and have no hands with which to manipulate their environment.
So if our origins were idyllic, what went wrong?
There was a problem. While predators were less prevalent they were not nonexistent. The group was vulnerable to animals such as leopards which might find us easy pickings.
The women had to concentrate on rearing the young, so the job of protecting the group from leopards fell to the men.
We are learning machines and thus we adapt to our environment and the nature of the tasks we undertake. Within the tribal home openness and love and spontaneity were the order of the day. But once we went out to kill the leopards which threatened us we had to adapt to a different kind of environment - a hostile one - and a different kind of task - one which required discipline and hostile behaviour from ourselves. If we were to effectively protect the tribe from leopards we had to become like leopards.
Now if this behaviour had been limited to the hunt, everything might have been fine. But it is hard to entirely successfully divide oneself into two separate mindsets, one for home and one for work. The men would have been bound to bring some of the aggressiveness and competitiveness they learned on the hunt back into the previously harmonious tribal home.
All of us were new to this. Our understanding was limited, and what mattered was maintaining the stability of the group. The women were worried that this aggressive behaviour would compromise the harmony of the tribal home and thus have a detrimental influence on the infants. And so they criticised the behaviour of the men. In this harmonious society, criticism of one individual by another had rarely been necessary.
At first this would not have been a big problem, we were still very healthy and thus very flexible. What made it a big problem is that there was no solution. Gradually, over time, it would increase. The more the men felt criticised at home the more time they would want to spend on the hunt. And they went from hunting only predators, to hunting animals for food. Previously we had been vegetarians.
There was one powerful approach to this problem, but it was not, in itself, a solution, and that was sex.
Sex is clearly necessary for reproduction. It fulfills that function in all mammals. But, in more social mammals, it fulfills a second function, that of social bonding. We can see this particularly in the behaviour of very social mammals such as the bonobos and dolphins.
One way to bond with another individual or ease the tension of any form of emotional conflict, is through the mutual exchange of pleasurable sensation. While reproduction requires sexual contact between the male and the female, the use of erotic pleasure for social ends need not be restricted to male/female activity. And thus we find that, among bonobos, dolphins and other species, sexual activity occurs also between members of the same sex.
The bonobos, our nearest genetic relatives, spend a lot of time rubbing genitals. Adult males generally won’t rub genitals with their mothers, but otherwise these genital exchanges are not restricted by age or gender or kinship. Bonobos do not form permanent relationships. And bonobo society is matriarchal. Male bonobos are bigger and stronger, but the females are more closely bonded with each other and thus the centre of power.
This gives us some clue as to what the life of the earliest humans might have been like - matriarchal, no pair bonding to compromise the communal whole and sexual behaviour bisexual and largely indiscriminate, acting as a kind of social glue through shared pleasure.
It is important to point out here that this was pre-neurosis, pre-armouring, and therefore sexuality would not have taken any of the armoured forms that it did later. Armoured sex can be a conduit for anger and, in the extreme, can morph into rape.
The natural response of the women of the tribe to the increasingly rowdy behaviour of the men would have been to try to socialise them through sex. This was already something which was used to foster the bonding of the group, so when there was a threat to that bonding it would be natural to increase that behaviour and focus it on those members who were threatening the stability of the whole.
No doubt the men were also using sex to bond amongst themselves. But sex between the men and the women would have taken on a profound significance at this time.
We have to remember that the basic nature of the men was to be unconditionally loving. This was their nature at birth and was fostered by the nurturing process and the harmony of their society. To the extent that they had had to learn to suppress that nature and copy the behaviour of the leopards, they were no longer whole. They had laid a conflicting program over their original one and this would have compromised their sense of emotional security. While hunting provided an outlet for the frustration of living a divided existence, at base they longed for their new persona to be reconciled with their original nature.
Thus sex came to fulfill a third role. First it was about reproduction. Then it was about social bonding. In the third stage of its evolution it became about emotional healing through a physical union with an individual who represents the disowned part of our own nature. This is how the sexuality of most males became fixated on women and the sexuality of most women became fixated on males. Bisexuality was our first nature, this was our second nature, and soon I will consider the development of exclusive same sex fixations.
But sex, while very helpful in slowing down the process of men’s developing neurosis, couldn’t halt it.
It was around this time that we developed our conscience. The conscience is the code of the society internalised as a part of the individual’s ego. So, at first, we would allow our behaviour to be guided by the criticisms of others. But, not wanting to be the subject of social approbation, at some stage we would start to second guess, we would internalise the rules and tell ourselves off for going against them before anyone else had the opportunity. The pain we felt when our behaviour conflicted with the rules of the conscience is what we call guilt.
The conscience, while it tended to cause us pain and thus make us more self-centred, did keep a lid on extreme expressions of hostility. Later in history there would be exceptions to this in which some individuals and societies developed consciences which saw some kinds of hostility as being in service of what they saw as the good. It was under these circumstances that most of the greatest human atrocities have been committed - witch burnings, The Spanish Inquisition, The Holocaust, “ethnic cleansing”, genocide against tribal cultures and war. Here the concept that some group of people were evil, made it seem to the individual’s conscience that any form of hostility heaped upon them was in the service of the good.
Because the rules of this society were principally those of the females who kept the home together, the men began to become more and more prone to feelings of guilt about their competitive hunting lifestyle. They weren’t actually doing anything wrong (they were taking care of aspects of the needs of the group) but it felt wrong. And the more wrong they felt, the more insecure they became, and the more insecure they became the angrier they became and thus the more destructive they became, and then they really were doing things which they could see were doing harm to the group. And so on and so on. Stopping the process would have required either explaining to themselves and the women what was happening, which they didn’t yet have the insight to do, or saying they were wrong which they knew was not the case. If they didn’t defy the implication that they were in the wrong they would have collapsed into a state of inoperable self-contempt or depression. The more insecure and condemned they felt the more angry and egotistical and defiant they became, and armouring was the form that this took in the shape of their personalities. The initial substance with which we built our armour was repressed anger. This is why, when the armour is compromised, a release of anger or even violence is the result.
Over time, the whole of the group became insecure and armoured. Hostility within the group and the strain of desperately trying to use sex to socialise the men put a strain on the women and compromised the nurturing of the children. We all ended up getting hurt. And, in our pain, we turned within and began to build a wall that we thought would keep us safe.
As we males became more and more egotistical and more fragile in our sense of ourselves, drastic changes in social behaviour had to take place in order to hold the group together.
This was the origin of monogamy. The only way to keep men from fighting over the sexual favours of women was to institute strict controls on sexual behaviour.
Of course this meant that both men and women had to adopt sexual repression. We could no longer simply do what we wanted when it came to our sexual behaviour. But the desires were not gone. We still wanted to have sex with different people, but we had to push those desires down and contain them. In this way, repressed sexual desires became a part of the substance of our armouring in the same way that repressed aggressive feelings had become before this.
This is when fear of sex became a significant part of our psychology and our society. When we were not armoured, sex had been an unthreatening and pleasant part of our lives, and something which was beneficial to our society.
But the armoured personality and the armoured society are built on sexual repression. Erotic feelings are essentially anarchic and could bring the whole thing down. And, unrestrained sexual behaviour in an armoured society leads to social conflict. We keep it all together by not sleeping with each other’s partners and not confronting people with sexual arousing material which might make it hard for them to maintain their self-discipline.
Because our tertiary sexual drive is to reunite with the disowned part of our own nature, we came to select sexual partners whose appearance reminded us of our original state. This is how we developed our concept of female beauty. What we tend to think of as classical beauty is childlike features such as wide eyes, full lips, a slim build, and, in our originally hairy days, this included a shortage of hair. And so this is how we lost our hair. This is called selection for neotony and it explains why we look more like a chimpanzee foetus than we do like a full-grown chimp.
So eventually we became relatively hairless.
Primitive tribal societies often run around mostly or completely nude, but, as we became more armoured and found ourselves carrying around a powder keg of repressed sexuality, the wearing of clothes became a priority for us. They made us feel less personally vulnerable, but also they covered up the flesh of others which was a potential stimulus for our anarchic erotic feelings. If you are hungry, and you are on a diet, it is easier if all that yummy food is covered up. It helps you maintain your discipline.
Now we can see the significance of our myth about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They were naked and lived an idyllic existence. Then a predator (a snake in the story) inspired them to seek knowledge of good and evil (in this case the destructive behaviour of predators, which seemed evil to them in their idyllic state), and, as a result, they developed a sense of shame about their nudity. And they were expelled from the Garden, which is what ultimately happened to us. We became alienated from the natural world and condemned to a life in the wilderness of our own neurosis.
Over time we would develop cities which were external expressions of our own armoured state in which we would shelter from the natural world of which we no longer felt a part. This had the advantage of allowing us to work together in larger networks on the problem of understanding the world and ourselves. On the downside it allowed forms of social alienation such as loneliness, crime and homelessness to flourish. The invention of the internet makes urban living no longer necessary for networking, but we have too large a population for most of us to live any other way. Psychologically this isn’t a problem as the emotionally healthy individual can thrive in a somewhat artificial environment. The only problem is reorganising our lives in such a way that our cities are ecologically sustainable.
Our own early experiences in many ways mirrored what happened to us historically as a species.
When we were born we were an unconditionally loving bundle of physical needs.
We’ve touched on the meaning of love, but let's look at the phenomenon in more detail so that we know what we mean by the unconditionally loving nature of the infant.
It is all too easy to get love mixed up with adoration or compassion. Love is really a kind of communication. It is any communication which comes through the ego rather than from the ego. Love is when we are really with another person rather than somewhere else in our head. Love is characterised by paying attention and being spontaneous. When we are open to love every interaction with others changes us. We are closed off to love when our behaviour is stereotypical, when rigid character traits and ways of expressing ourselves interfere with open, spontaneous communication. This happens when our ego is insecure, caught up in attempts at self-justification, and when we feel the need to repress our feelings, whether of anger, grief, sexuality or whatever, and are afraid to be spontaneous lest it release those scary feelings. When we are able to really be with someone and open up spontaneous communication with them it can be accompanied by the deep feelings of warmth that we associate with the concept of love. But it is important here to concentrate on process rather than experience if we are going to understand the phenomenon. The reason why we generally experience love only for friends, sexual partners or family members, is that these are the people we know well enough not to be afraid to drop our defences with them. Our soul (or original self or inner child) loves everybody unconditionally, but when our ego is insecure it is too scared to open up to that love, except with those who reassure it with their indications of acceptance. This also explains some of the experiences which are common in charismatic religious gatherings. Provide a context in which people feel accepted and united with others and the capacity for experiencing love can surface, giving usually chronically ego-bound individuals a sense of something that seems totally magical and otherworldly. They see it as proof of the existence of a supernatural God and a confirmation of the philosophy of that particular church, while others might realise that the same kind of experience could come if the armouring of their ego had been compromised by the consumption of LSD.
Let’s imagine ourselves first entering the world. We are unconditionally loving and we have needs - to be fed, cleaned, cuddled, etc. We interact with those around us in an open and spontaneous way. At first this may mainly be communicating about our needs - crying when we are hungry, etc. As we learn to walk and talk our ways of communicating, as well as the things we want to communicate about, increase.
The only problem is that we soon learn that not everyone wants to communicate openly and spontaneously with us. Maybe other children do, and our parents when they have the time to relax and play with us, but much of the time we find that adults are not really with us. They don’t listen, or if they do they don’t respond in ways which make sense to us. The feeling for us is like that of a child who enters a playground but finds that most of the other children don’t want to play with him.
One of the most important things to understand about the mind of a child is that children always think it is their fault. This makes sense. If you come into a world, of course you are going to assume that those who already live there know what’s what. To say, “I’m sane and they are all crazy!”, would seem pretty desperate. How were we to know that that was the case? And this is why so many traumas happen in childhood which can warp us for life. “It must be my fault my parents got divorced,” we tell ourselves, or, “I must be to blame for Uncle Pete going to jail, because it was my genitals he was caught playing with.” If all we were dealing with was the thing itself, the effects of most misfortunes and abuses would pass away much more quickly. What causes the really deep scars is self-blame and the ego insecurity and thus obsession with self-justification and questions of self-worth that it engenders. This is what is meant by “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons”. Sin is just a judgemental religious word for neurosis - for the self-obsession of the insecure ego.
Of course, if our parents were able to explain to us that they were fucked-up and insecure, and that it was nobody’s fault, least of all ours, things would have been much easier for us. If we had parents who were blind or deaf or physically crippled, we wouldn’t have felt bad about the fact that we could see or hear or run. It is not a case of our needs not being met. We didn’t need our open and spontaneous communication to be responded to in kind. We were resilient beings who could be happy with however the world worked. The only problem was the conclusion that something was wrong with us.
This feeling that something was wrong with us meant that more and more of our thinking was taken up by attempts to find a way to prove it wrong. Our ego became insecure. This is the time in our development when we would start to “act naughty”. The more we doubt our own worth the more we feel compelled towards acts of defiance. We project our insecurities onto the outside world and then fight against them in that arena. Later in life we may try to prove our worth by scrawling graffiti on a public building, fighting in a war or climbing Mount Everest, but when we are still in diapers we have to be satisfied with stealing candy bars in the supermarket or pulling the cat’s tail. It was at this stage that we became angry. Anger is the emotion with which the insecure ego tries to defend itself when challenged.
This is when our parents had to start teaching us right from wrong. They gave us the blue print for our conscience. At first we might try to obey the rules our parents set in order to avoid punishment, but eventually they would become incorporated into our thinking about our own self-worth. We would feel any failure to live up to these standards was evidence of our worthlessness. We learned to feel guilty.
Two factors in our upbringing contributed to how neurotic, i.e. armoured, we ended up. First was how positive our early interactions with others were, that is how little sense of blame we took onto ourselves to make us feel insecure. And the other was how restrictive the value system was which formed our conscience. (Although this normally happens in childhood, some of us adopt an ideology or religion later in life, thus changing the nature of our conscience.) If our experiences are bad, leaving us angry and insecure, but our conscience is not too restrictive, we needn’t repress those feelings entirely. We might go out to heavy metal rock concerts, take drugs and fuck around, and thus not entirely loose access to our capacity for love, but, if we were born into a fundamentalist religious society, for instance, we would have to repress our rebellious expressions within a very restrictive form of social discipline (not to mention that the strict moral code would be a constant source of criticism to our insecure ego, thus increasing its anger), so we would end up very alienated indeed from our capacity for unconditional love. We could still feel love within the security of our own kind, but that is all.
Sometimes we have a somewhat faulty concept of the nature of childhood innocence. We may think that the innocent child has an angelic nature. This is not true.
At the age of ten I asked my mother if we could go to a Grand Prix because I hoped to have the opportunity of witnessing a racing car driver die in a car crash.
This isn’t the sort of thing most of us associate with the healthy child, but at that time I was psychologically healthy.
I was motivated by curiosity. I felt no hostility towards race car drivers. But I knew that they sometimes died painful deaths in car crashes on the speedway and I was curious to see what someone dying in that way would look like.
As I’ve said elsewhere, our original nature when we are born is one of unconditional love, i.e. we are open to the world and non-judgemental of what we find there. However we have no morality. A moral system is something we learn from adults. And we have no compassion. Since compassion is nothing more than projected self-pity, we do not develop the ability to feel compassion until we become a neurotic adult.
As a child I was emotionally strong, resilient and not easily hurt. I was often bullied, but I don’t think I blamed the bullies for being bullies any more than I would blame a bee for stinging me. I was non-judgementally accepting of others.
One day in primary school, when I must have been about 6 or 7, one of the bullies got me in the toilets, told me to lay down on the floor, pulled down my pants and stuck wet wads of toilet paper up my arse. He told me that, if I didn’t come back and let him do it again the next day I would die. Since I hadn’t found the experience particularly pleasant, I decided not to come to him the next day. “If I die, I die,” I told myself.
This was a temporarily uncomfortable and scary experience, much like a trip to the doctor to have an inoculation, but, in itself, it was of little significance to me.
Now if the same thing had happened to me when I was a neurotic teenager, full of self-doubt because of all of the aggressive feelings I’d been repressing and desperately uncomfortable about my own body because of the extreme form of sexual repression I’d been practicing since shortly after the onset of puberty, the experience might have been an almost rape-like ordeal. I was much more fragile emotionally in adolescence and adulthood than I had ever been in childhood.
I think that what makes childhood a vulnerable time and a time when the seeds of adult neurosis are sown is that it is the time when we are learning the lessons we will try to apply as an adult. We are building a conceptual framework about ourselves and the world. If we learn a lesson which is unhelpful it can warp our adult life up until the point at which we may unlearn it and thus free ourselves from our neurosis.
I think the lesson I learned which made life painful for me as an adult was to turn inwards. I always held onto the concept of accepting others unconditionally, and I wanted to understand them, but I think it must have been made clear to me early on that simply asking a bully why he is a bully was not going to work. I’m not sure if I ever tried it. I think not.
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