This video sheds light into the nature of love, relationships, the "New Age" movement, reality-creation, quantum physics, objectivity vs. subjectivity and how it all relates to the topics of "conspiracy theories", psychopathy, and the importance of esoteric self-work.
Reader Comments
Not to nitpick or . . .
. . try in any way to subvert the topic's superb presentation but there's a spelling error on the SOTT.net banner page and that you can see at 0:31:05 into the movie.
It's "Independent" not "Independant"
A small thing I know but even so . . .
Your movie properly spends much time on the -- work -- that is coming more objective world- and Creation views and while this is certainly necessary it is difficult in the extreme due to the great power to distort that is the basic survival skill known as repression.
Often seen as a bane, which unresolved it certainly is, the fact is that early in life this unconscious ability saves us from awareness of tremendous pain of many, many kinds; many of which pains were -- at the time -- sufficient to have killed us.
As physically more mature beings however we are now, and given the right therapeutic environment, capable of literally re-experiencing that which we never fully experienced and thereby progressively free ourselves from the mufti-faceted, lifelong blindnesses that is repression's outcome.
The best book on the subject of which I am aware is Dr. Paul Vereshack's, "The Psychotherapy of the Deepest Self" available in PDF and free of charge at this [Link] . Scroll well down the page to see the link . . .
I cannot too highly recommend this . . .
. . try in any way to subvert the topic's superb presentation but there's a spelling error on the SOTT.net banner page and that you can see at 0:31:05 into the movie.
It's "Independent" not "Independant"
A small thing I know but even so . . .
Your movie properly spends much time on the -- work -- that is coming more objective world- and Creation views and while this is certainly necessary it is difficult in the extreme due to the great power to distort that is the basic survival skill known as repression.
Often seen as a bane, which unresolved it certainly is, the fact is that early in life this unconscious ability saves us from awareness of tremendous pain of many, many kinds; many of which pains were -- at the time -- sufficient to have killed us.
As physically more mature beings however we are now, and given the right therapeutic environment, capable of literally re-experiencing that which we never fully experienced and thereby progressively free ourselves from the mufti-faceted, lifelong blindnesses that is repression's outcome.
The best book on the subject of which I am aware is Dr. Paul Vereshack's, "The Psychotherapy of the Deepest Self" available in PDF and free of charge at this [Link] . Scroll well down the page to see the link . . .
I cannot too highly recommend this . . .
An excerpt from Vereshack
I think Vereshack's book referenced above is so important that I'm taking the liberty of placing here his second chapter, "How the Central Nervous System Gets Damaged" as to my mind it is the clearest, most succinct and approachable introduction to the subject I have read in over 40 years of study.
While Gurdjieff talks about the lies we all tell ourselves and the value of "shocks" as restorative agents I find
these notions lacking and suspect respectively.
Of much greater value it seems to me is the view that when young we acted to protect ourselves in the short term yet in the long term bring great harm upon ourselves due to societal lack of awareness of:
a) how vulnerable we are as children and,
b) the great need for therapy that directly engages the harm done us all.
=========================
How the Central Nervous System Gets Damaged
It is the business of the Central Nervous System (CNS) to contain the powerful buried material of childhood in order to prevent suicide or homicide.
The CNS does this by allowing the slow leakage of these pressures in a highly disguised form. For example, the rage of one child may become the cutting knife of the surgeon, thus containing it and leaking it out across a lifetime in a highly constructive way. In another child it may become the cutting edge of a knife during a street brawl. Yet again, it could become the cutting article of a professional critic.
Whatever the disguise, the impulses come from the same place, the white hot inferno of the unconscious which is shaped and channeled by the mental mechanisms of defense into all the shades and textures of adult behaviour.
We are the living disguise of a primitive and powerful childhood self.
When we seek Depth Therapy, we ask the therapist to penetrate and remove our outer civilized self so that the wounded and infected parts of our being may be laid bare, drained, and thus permitted to heal.
Therapists work at different depths; each depth has its method and its necessities. Only a few of us attempt to handle the white-hot stuff of the unconscious directly. Most therapists remain near the surface while the sharks remain asleep in the depths.
Therapy is impelled forward by the same thing that impels all behaviour: the need to finish what is unfinished, and to obtain what is needed. What therapy clients seek more directly than others in ordinary society is to uncover and express aloud this early pain; the situations that caused it and the results in adult life.
When the client connects with unconscious material and brings it across the great river of defensiveness into conscious awareness, healing begins. Previously frozen processes melt, enter the mainstream of mental phenomena and become integrated; losing [thru this process] the power to warp thought, feeling and behaviour from a hiding place inside of us that we cannot see.
Let us look at childhood damage and see what it is we are trying to heal.
There are only two ways that an adult can hurt a child. In the first way, an adult can withhold itself, its presence, its empathy, and its physical and verbal support. From the child's point of view this is called, in the jargon of our profession, “object loss”. The parental object is missing. The child begins to starve slowly and inexorably; the tree of its life, without nourishment, stunting and twisting like a plant when nutrients are withheld.
The second thing an adult can do to hurt a child is to intrude into its world with verbal, physical or sexual abuse. In the jargon of our profession this is called “object intrusion”, and once again the tree twists.
Most childhood damage contains both of the above elements. A beaten child for instance, is intruded upon and also suffers a major loss of empathy.
Trauma does not have to be sudden and dramatic. It can happen in small ways over a long period of time.
The inability on the part of parents to properly listen to their children, without inserting their own thoughts and feelings into the child's mental life, is one of the most damaging kinds of parenting. This interrupts the growing self with a constant denial of the child's inner reality and feelings. This failure of empathy and the endless application of rules and beliefs that override and do not honour the child's own processes can, over the years, destroy the intrinsic self-balancing mechanisms of the growing brain and wreck self confidence and self esteem
This failure of empathy can leave, in the end, as much pain and disability as actual physical harm.
"Mommy, mommy . . . my teacher was mean to me today."
"Now dear, the teacher was only trying to do his best."
This lack of allowing the child to explore its feelings -- when they occur -- tens of thousands of times across the growing years, seriously disables the supple processes of the young mind.
The finest book I know which deals with this issue is, "Parent Effectiveness Training" by T. Gordon.
When negative influences impinge upon the child, how does the tree of life twist and stunt? Very simply, the child seeks to avoid pain by suppressing not only the pain but [literal continents] of mental process as well. Thoughts, needs, feelings and behaviour which might lead to the pain, or in later life recall the pain, are shunted into the unconscious and with many of its processes taken off-line (to borrow the language of computers), a child consciously and unconsciously builds a self which will lead to safety and the fulfillment of its needs. Rebellion, or avoidance and compliance with its world, begins to take precedence.
In the suppression of the child's real and organic self, the unconscious becomes filled with pain and unmet needs which no matter how carefully we try to hide them, make themselves known in many subtle ways, wrecking our adult life.
The damaged child becomes two adults:
1- First, the false outer self emerges, within which to a certain extent we all dwell. This self has been constructed to keep inner pain at bay. It does not see itself, or should I say we do not see ourselves as false and we will fight like cornered rats or even make war to maintain our view of reality regardless of external truth. [Here is Gurdjieff's notion of "lying" to ourselves, rather better fleshed out . . . ]
2- The second self is the underlying damaged child who still lives in a pressure cooker of anguish, fear, rage and sadness. In the case of the damaged child we have both an increasingly chaotic unconscious and a decreasing strength in the self which has to contain it. Thus the self becomes brittle, frightened, easily provoked, and swept by storms and ineffectiveness in life. We misunderstand our world and overreact to it. These forces are immensely powerful. For instance, consider a child left unheld in its crib. At first it cries out for attention and then sinks into a depression and finally dies in a condition known as marasmus.
Place yourself for a moment, if you will, inside that dying child and you will begin to appreciate the forces with which I deal. Those of us who take our patients back in time to re-experience this level of pain directly are subject to the most unbelievable degree of feeling and therapeutic necessity. Our world in the depths of the mind is sometimes seemingly bizarre.
The therapist does battle with a false self locked around a core of pain
which it does and does not wish to feel.
Now -- obeying this central paradox of depth therapy -- we must journey with our patient to the center of these chaotic places. The release achieved when this material is brought to the surface is the only and final real relief we can find. Around this paradox all deep healing takes place.
To put it briefly, feel it and you will be greatly freed from it.
It is astounding how the vast majority of psychotherapists and the vast majority of clients -- will do anything -- to avoid this truth.
Psychotherapy has fled from this understanding and built in its stead castles of theory, as I have said, to keep its practitioners safe from the feelings a deeply regressed patient will trigger in them.
I was trained in classical methods of thought as a resident in psychiatry and it has taken me twenty five
years and more than thirty-two thousand hours of psychotherapy to penetrate the ornate buildings of
psychodynamic theory and bring forward the simple truths which I share with you today.
My methods work for those who can utilize them.
I have treated more than one thousand patients.
I know what I am talking about.
Paul Vereshack, 1993
I think Vereshack's book referenced above is so important that I'm taking the liberty of placing here his second chapter, "How the Central Nervous System Gets Damaged" as to my mind it is the clearest, most succinct and approachable introduction to the subject I have read in over 40 years of study.
While Gurdjieff talks about the lies we all tell ourselves and the value of "shocks" as restorative agents I find
these notions lacking and suspect respectively.
Of much greater value it seems to me is the view that when young we acted to protect ourselves in the short term yet in the long term bring great harm upon ourselves due to societal lack of awareness of:
a) how vulnerable we are as children and,
b) the great need for therapy that directly engages the harm done us all.
=========================
How the Central Nervous System Gets Damaged
It is the business of the Central Nervous System (CNS) to contain the powerful buried material of childhood in order to prevent suicide or homicide.
The CNS does this by allowing the slow leakage of these pressures in a highly disguised form. For example, the rage of one child may become the cutting knife of the surgeon, thus containing it and leaking it out across a lifetime in a highly constructive way. In another child it may become the cutting edge of a knife during a street brawl. Yet again, it could become the cutting article of a professional critic.
Whatever the disguise, the impulses come from the same place, the white hot inferno of the unconscious which is shaped and channeled by the mental mechanisms of defense into all the shades and textures of adult behaviour.
We are the living disguise of a primitive and powerful childhood self.
When we seek Depth Therapy, we ask the therapist to penetrate and remove our outer civilized self so that the wounded and infected parts of our being may be laid bare, drained, and thus permitted to heal.
Therapists work at different depths; each depth has its method and its necessities. Only a few of us attempt to handle the white-hot stuff of the unconscious directly. Most therapists remain near the surface while the sharks remain asleep in the depths.
Therapy is impelled forward by the same thing that impels all behaviour: the need to finish what is unfinished, and to obtain what is needed. What therapy clients seek more directly than others in ordinary society is to uncover and express aloud this early pain; the situations that caused it and the results in adult life.
When the client connects with unconscious material and brings it across the great river of defensiveness into conscious awareness, healing begins. Previously frozen processes melt, enter the mainstream of mental phenomena and become integrated; losing [thru this process] the power to warp thought, feeling and behaviour from a hiding place inside of us that we cannot see.
Let us look at childhood damage and see what it is we are trying to heal.
There are only two ways that an adult can hurt a child. In the first way, an adult can withhold itself, its presence, its empathy, and its physical and verbal support. From the child's point of view this is called, in the jargon of our profession, “object loss”. The parental object is missing. The child begins to starve slowly and inexorably; the tree of its life, without nourishment, stunting and twisting like a plant when nutrients are withheld.
The second thing an adult can do to hurt a child is to intrude into its world with verbal, physical or sexual abuse. In the jargon of our profession this is called “object intrusion”, and once again the tree twists.
Most childhood damage contains both of the above elements. A beaten child for instance, is intruded upon and also suffers a major loss of empathy.
Trauma does not have to be sudden and dramatic. It can happen in small ways over a long period of time.
The inability on the part of parents to properly listen to their children, without inserting their own thoughts and feelings into the child's mental life, is one of the most damaging kinds of parenting. This interrupts the growing self with a constant denial of the child's inner reality and feelings. This failure of empathy and the endless application of rules and beliefs that override and do not honour the child's own processes can, over the years, destroy the intrinsic self-balancing mechanisms of the growing brain and wreck self confidence and self esteem
This failure of empathy can leave, in the end, as much pain and disability as actual physical harm.
"Mommy, mommy . . . my teacher was mean to me today."
"Now dear, the teacher was only trying to do his best."
This lack of allowing the child to explore its feelings -- when they occur -- tens of thousands of times across the growing years, seriously disables the supple processes of the young mind.
The finest book I know which deals with this issue is, "Parent Effectiveness Training" by T. Gordon.
When negative influences impinge upon the child, how does the tree of life twist and stunt? Very simply, the child seeks to avoid pain by suppressing not only the pain but [literal continents] of mental process as well. Thoughts, needs, feelings and behaviour which might lead to the pain, or in later life recall the pain, are shunted into the unconscious and with many of its processes taken off-line (to borrow the language of computers), a child consciously and unconsciously builds a self which will lead to safety and the fulfillment of its needs. Rebellion, or avoidance and compliance with its world, begins to take precedence.
In the suppression of the child's real and organic self, the unconscious becomes filled with pain and unmet needs which no matter how carefully we try to hide them, make themselves known in many subtle ways, wrecking our adult life.
The damaged child becomes two adults:
1- First, the false outer self emerges, within which to a certain extent we all dwell. This self has been constructed to keep inner pain at bay. It does not see itself, or should I say we do not see ourselves as false and we will fight like cornered rats or even make war to maintain our view of reality regardless of external truth. [Here is Gurdjieff's notion of "lying" to ourselves, rather better fleshed out . . . ]
2- The second self is the underlying damaged child who still lives in a pressure cooker of anguish, fear, rage and sadness. In the case of the damaged child we have both an increasingly chaotic unconscious and a decreasing strength in the self which has to contain it. Thus the self becomes brittle, frightened, easily provoked, and swept by storms and ineffectiveness in life. We misunderstand our world and overreact to it. These forces are immensely powerful. For instance, consider a child left unheld in its crib. At first it cries out for attention and then sinks into a depression and finally dies in a condition known as marasmus.
Place yourself for a moment, if you will, inside that dying child and you will begin to appreciate the forces with which I deal. Those of us who take our patients back in time to re-experience this level of pain directly are subject to the most unbelievable degree of feeling and therapeutic necessity. Our world in the depths of the mind is sometimes seemingly bizarre.
The therapist does battle with a false self locked around a core of pain
which it does and does not wish to feel.
Now -- obeying this central paradox of depth therapy -- we must journey with our patient to the center of these chaotic places. The release achieved when this material is brought to the surface is the only and final real relief we can find. Around this paradox all deep healing takes place.
To put it briefly, feel it and you will be greatly freed from it.
It is astounding how the vast majority of psychotherapists and the vast majority of clients -- will do anything -- to avoid this truth.
Psychotherapy has fled from this understanding and built in its stead castles of theory, as I have said, to keep its practitioners safe from the feelings a deeply regressed patient will trigger in them.
I was trained in classical methods of thought as a resident in psychiatry and it has taken me twenty five
years and more than thirty-two thousand hours of psychotherapy to penetrate the ornate buildings of
psychodynamic theory and bring forward the simple truths which I share with you today.
My methods work for those who can utilize them.
I have treated more than one thousand patients.
I know what I am talking about.
Paul Vereshack, 1993
not to nitpick but, after the word [link] you didn't place a period..........a small thing I know but even so to think that someone of your obviously high academic standards would miss this obvious grammar error is almost unbelievable.
What a compendium
It is a very dense, info-packed movie that i had to stop several times to be able to absorb all the thoughts (and did i really?).
What did l_e_cox say? Yes, truly just like a MANIFESTO. Thanks SOTT for bringing it up again - somehow i missed that whet it first came out.
It is a very dense, info-packed movie that i had to stop several times to be able to absorb all the thoughts (and did i really?).
What did l_e_cox say? Yes, truly just like a MANIFESTO. Thanks SOTT for bringing it up again - somehow i missed that whet it first came out.
It could be seen as a kind of manifesto.
It is extremely theoretical and its vocabulary is extremely advanced.
Thus, many will not see it as very accessible.
And that I see as the great unmet challenge of this movement.
People need technologies to help them improve conditions.
We must deliver those technologies.
Some will never reach beyond their immediate need.
While others will want to know: What makes this technology work?
And then we must be prepared to explain.
And in a way that makes sense to that person and doesn't alienate them.
Every individual has a right to their own universe.
But each also has a responsibility to this one. For none of us would be here if we had not agreed to it at some point along the line.
I agree that to put all one's effort into one's own universe constitutes a denial of one's responsibility to this one.
Yet we are speaking to an audience that is really very tiny. They mostly consist of people who have the training, the resources and the opportunity to take on some of this responsibility and act on it. When they don't, we are offended. But that only means that we are more aware! How do you get those people to cross that bridge? This is our next great challenge.
Will we get any help in this? I sure as hell hope so! But if I had to speak for my own group, I can say for absolute sure: We aren't counting on it!