Emotions: Conflictions of the Soul
Much of basic psychology today instructs us to beat down our negative emotions by "getting out of our minds and into our lives." It is called acceptance and commitment therapy.
Certainly such advice can be valuable to those of us who are living lives full of what psychologists call the "negative self-scripts", or influence emotions, that we generate from feelings of low self-esteem, guilt, self-consciousness, and feelings of inferiority. To overcome these negative self-scripts we are instructed to develop "self core skills" with mindful self-scripts based on affirmation, assertion, focusing, humanizing, and tension-sensing to rationalize and diminish the debilitating negative emotions we all live with. We are to use the polarity of our two basic kinds of emotions -- innate emotions and influence emotions -- to wage a war between our soul and our mind to keep us on the straight and narrow.
There is something of "wild gnosis" in this kind of psychotherapy in that its premise asks us to make an actively conscious commitment to the now, and to go out and do in the now. You may recall from previous essays on this blog that Tau Rosamonde Miller of the Church of Gnosis coined the term wild gnosis and defined it this way, in part: "Awareness of Wild Gnosis arises in a quiet mind, in a dimension not touched by chronological time. We find it when we are fully in the present -- not before and not later, but here and now."
Psychologists talk of the differences between our intuitive-self, or "inner-self", and the influenced-self, or "habit-self". These differences are the conflictions of the soul, and they are very real and extremely dangerous when actively in conflict. They are often subtly opposed, and we may not even recognize which "self" our thoughts are coming from, but it is simply easier, and oftentimes more socially acceptable, for us to react to our surficial habit-self thoughts than to reach deep inside our hearts and examine the inner-self , but failure to recognize and understand the inner-self causes great restlessness within the human psyche, and great restlessness causes mental and social problems that, according to Carl Jung, mankind has not even begun to understand. Jung called the problem "understanding the truths of the blood."
We are all individuals living in a collectively conscious world, and yet, as individuals, we fail to understand not only one another, but ourselves. We all have a long way to go, for we have not even begun to understand the differences between the inner-self and the habit-self, and, alas, we seem to be like a world of sheep being driven intentionally by a higher power away from the nurturing reconciliation of these conflictions of the soul.
In our patriarchy, we are driven by the secular and sacred influences of the society this misogynistic world has imposed upon us, for there is abundant evidence that mindless inner-chaos and confusion is preferable to the mindful inner-peace of the maternal compassion and nurturing of a matriarchal society. In a world ruled by higher power (the Pisces Ideal), chaos and confusion enhances the ease with which the masses can be oppressed and dominated through duplicitous social laws and thought control, regimentation, and force. Only this morning I read in the New York Times this unbelievable statement by an Iraqi government leader, talking about his plan to pay men to marry Iraqi war widows: "If we give the money to the widows, they will spend it unwisely because they are uneducated and they don’t know about budgeting. But if we find her a husband, there will be a person in charge of her and her children for the rest of their lives."
There is, therefore, an inherent danger in the psychotherapeutic practice of acceptance and commitment therapy (or ACT) when we as a collectively conscious entity, living our secular and sacred lives under the oppressive control of others, fail to understand our lives' purpose or our roles in a purely patriarchal society. The therapy, taken at face value, seems to encourage us to accept life as it is -- just to grin and bear it. It seems to encourage resignation to subjugation, to ask us to accept persecution and repression without question. While we learn to control our emotions and our anger, and develop commitment and acceptance, and even obedience, we may well be being unintentionally conditioned to apathetically accept future roles as faithful feudal subjects who peacefully, unquestioningly, serve a higher order. As psychic peers, the male logos (also the animus in women) strives to dominate the female eros (also the anima in men).
This is the natural way of a male-dominant patriarchal society. Those who dominate will continue to dominate until the collective consciousness of the inner-self and its innate desire for freedom, peace, and love grows strong enough to overcome the habit-self of our individual consciousnesses. But today we are a very long way from reaching that natural balance between the emotions of the soul and the rewards they offer; and, in fact, we may very well be being led down the wrong path. It seems to me that ACT is only half a loaf because it fails to recognize the axiom that all useful inventions can be used for either good or evil, depending upon the situation at hand. Understanding and reacting to the malevolent purposes of our situation presently at hand is the other half of the loaf. Until we have the whole loaf, we are doomed to a life of confusion, futility, oppression, and subjugation.
So what do we do in the meantime? My advice is to use the basic "self core skills" to combat the war between the truths of the blood to deal with our conflicting emotions, but to also dedicate our lives to the never ending search for knowledge and understanding -- toward knowing what our lives are all about and why we exist at all. I, for one, know it's not to lead a life of confusion, oppression, futility, oppression, and subjugation. We must never stop questioning authority either, for if we do, we have lost our own humanity and our destiny without ever knowing why or blessed with even so much as a "fare-thee-well".
Copyright (2009) by Albert Lloyd Williams
Certainly such advice can be valuable to those of us who are living lives full of what psychologists call the "negative self-scripts", or influence emotions, that we generate from feelings of low self-esteem, guilt, self-consciousness, and feelings of inferiority. To overcome these negative self-scripts we are instructed to develop "self core skills" with mindful self-scripts based on affirmation, assertion, focusing, humanizing, and tension-sensing to rationalize and diminish the debilitating negative emotions we all live with. We are to use the polarity of our two basic kinds of emotions -- innate emotions and influence emotions -- to wage a war between our soul and our mind to keep us on the straight and narrow.
There is something of "wild gnosis" in this kind of psychotherapy in that its premise asks us to make an actively conscious commitment to the now, and to go out and do in the now. You may recall from previous essays on this blog that Tau Rosamonde Miller of the Church of Gnosis coined the term wild gnosis and defined it this way, in part: "Awareness of Wild Gnosis arises in a quiet mind, in a dimension not touched by chronological time. We find it when we are fully in the present -- not before and not later, but here and now."
Psychologists talk of the differences between our intuitive-self, or "inner-self", and the influenced-self, or "habit-self". These differences are the conflictions of the soul, and they are very real and extremely dangerous when actively in conflict. They are often subtly opposed, and we may not even recognize which "self" our thoughts are coming from, but it is simply easier, and oftentimes more socially acceptable, for us to react to our surficial habit-self thoughts than to reach deep inside our hearts and examine the inner-self , but failure to recognize and understand the inner-self causes great restlessness within the human psyche, and great restlessness causes mental and social problems that, according to Carl Jung, mankind has not even begun to understand. Jung called the problem "understanding the truths of the blood."
We are all individuals living in a collectively conscious world, and yet, as individuals, we fail to understand not only one another, but ourselves. We all have a long way to go, for we have not even begun to understand the differences between the inner-self and the habit-self, and, alas, we seem to be like a world of sheep being driven intentionally by a higher power away from the nurturing reconciliation of these conflictions of the soul.
In our patriarchy, we are driven by the secular and sacred influences of the society this misogynistic world has imposed upon us, for there is abundant evidence that mindless inner-chaos and confusion is preferable to the mindful inner-peace of the maternal compassion and nurturing of a matriarchal society. In a world ruled by higher power (the Pisces Ideal), chaos and confusion enhances the ease with which the masses can be oppressed and dominated through duplicitous social laws and thought control, regimentation, and force. Only this morning I read in the New York Times this unbelievable statement by an Iraqi government leader, talking about his plan to pay men to marry Iraqi war widows: "If we give the money to the widows, they will spend it unwisely because they are uneducated and they don’t know about budgeting. But if we find her a husband, there will be a person in charge of her and her children for the rest of their lives."
There is, therefore, an inherent danger in the psychotherapeutic practice of acceptance and commitment therapy (or ACT) when we as a collectively conscious entity, living our secular and sacred lives under the oppressive control of others, fail to understand our lives' purpose or our roles in a purely patriarchal society. The therapy, taken at face value, seems to encourage us to accept life as it is -- just to grin and bear it. It seems to encourage resignation to subjugation, to ask us to accept persecution and repression without question. While we learn to control our emotions and our anger, and develop commitment and acceptance, and even obedience, we may well be being unintentionally conditioned to apathetically accept future roles as faithful feudal subjects who peacefully, unquestioningly, serve a higher order. As psychic peers, the male logos (also the animus in women) strives to dominate the female eros (also the anima in men).
This is the natural way of a male-dominant patriarchal society. Those who dominate will continue to dominate until the collective consciousness of the inner-self and its innate desire for freedom, peace, and love grows strong enough to overcome the habit-self of our individual consciousnesses. But today we are a very long way from reaching that natural balance between the emotions of the soul and the rewards they offer; and, in fact, we may very well be being led down the wrong path. It seems to me that ACT is only half a loaf because it fails to recognize the axiom that all useful inventions can be used for either good or evil, depending upon the situation at hand. Understanding and reacting to the malevolent purposes of our situation presently at hand is the other half of the loaf. Until we have the whole loaf, we are doomed to a life of confusion, futility, oppression, and subjugation.
So what do we do in the meantime? My advice is to use the basic "self core skills" to combat the war between the truths of the blood to deal with our conflicting emotions, but to also dedicate our lives to the never ending search for knowledge and understanding -- toward knowing what our lives are all about and why we exist at all. I, for one, know it's not to lead a life of confusion, oppression, futility, oppression, and subjugation. We must never stop questioning authority either, for if we do, we have lost our own humanity and our destiny without ever knowing why or blessed with even so much as a "fare-thee-well".
vvv
Copyright (2009) by Albert Lloyd Williams
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