The Way of Love, the Teaching of Jesus Christ, and the Prime Minister

 

A long one for Christmas Eve. Sorry.

I've got to admit it. I agree with the PM. We disagree about many things but this time I think he's right.

Jesus would stand for doing this thing, as far as one is able and as far as people do not have medical reasons not to. It's part of love for self and others. Just like mask wearing, as far as not exempt, is part of love for others.

If God can be said to be anything, God is love. God is acts of love. Theopraxy teaches that God is the good we do. I write as a nontheist but feel free to read a theistic God.

There's no place in love, kindness or mercy for horrific and anti-human teachings like the dangerous delusions of preachers calling on their followers to not wear a mask or be jabbed or to do anything that might protect them and others. I think Jesus would do more than overturn tables in their churches.

"Love one another" is pure Jesus. It's the "mandatum," the command that Maundy Thursday is named after. I'm not so sure that constant lies, making political choices for poverty, corruption, certain laws currently being passed, racist comments and homophobic insults are aligned to the teaching of Jesus. In fact I'm sure they're not.

Neither is the unjust lack of sharing of vaccines across the world or the way money has been put above human lives so frequently. Not being jabbed won't help anyone or improve justice so do get jabbed but we all know of the global vaccine equity.

The sentiment from Boris Johnson falls flat, even solely within the subject at hand, coming from a man who refused even to mask up at Hexham hospital recently and whose delays last year are said to have caused 30,000 extra deaths. Or from someone who doesn't keep the rules he sets and lies about not keeping them. None of that is anything like any interpretation of Jesus.

Then again, not one of us perfectly lives out that massive radical way of love. I definitely don't. To go with that teaching ascribed to Jesus, I don't just have one coat. I don't have two. I have quite a few, including some I don't even wear now.

But that's a bit too literalist and takes no account of life in first century Palestine. Having multiple coats wasn't really pointing at you or me - knowing the people who may have read this. To have multiple coats then was a sign of being rich, not being poor of one of the millions who are "just about managing."

Yes, I don't walk the way of love anything like I'd want to even with all the mental health fun. That's not just being hard on myself or hating myself. There's plenty of truth there too. There are things I do and things I leave undone. I definitely don't love myself as I should either. I'm nontheist but that part of the confession still stands, as it does for all of us.

Most of us don't love ourselves enough either. These days the question is often asked, "Would you think about someone else the way you think about yourself?" Most of us honestly answer with a no.

The words ascribed to Jesus are of justice, freedom, inclusion, equity, mercy, and all the other things many governments and powerful people often remove. They are an aspiration, not an excuse for poorer people to beat themselves up for not being quite poor enough or for the dissociative to punish herself for her limitations.

Those with two coats in our society include those who go to Eton, splaff cash on champagne while not knowing how much bread costs, tear up money in front of homeless people, and make themselves richer while not thinking it would be possible for them to live on the income most people have.

Jesus said to love your enemy. The way teaches that somewhere at the core of Boris Johnson is that theistic or nontheistic God. That BJ has "divine" splendour too even while lying about parties, alcohol and much much more serious things. The lies deny that core and for that he is to be pitied. For he gained the world but perhaps lost his soul in privilege, power, and being allowed to get away with so much for so long. I hope he awakens to more teachings of the Jesus of love. Preferably in a progressive way rather than the ultra-regressive ways of the religious right.

Sometimes the way of love is very difficult!

I want to learn to walk it better though, as far as I am able. That seems a good intention no matter how many times I fall from it.

Dropping a juggling ball is reason to keep juggling, not to give up. And loving Boris Johnson is never giving the Prime Minister or the government a free rein to commit evils far from the way of love. Love calls out injustice.

The Garden of Eden, the Uncursed Serpent, Myth Making, and Lectio Divina

CW: The Bible. Treating it as myth. But treating it much more seriously than I ever did when believing it true or was the Word of God.

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I've been thinking about the Garden of Eden, the Serpent, and art.

When God pronounces the curse, the Serpent is doomed to crawl on its belly forever.

So what did it look like before? Art has traditionally pictured the pre-curse Serpent as a snake. But that raises questions such as how a snake would get around in other ways. Was it a flying snake? Or did it hop?

Logically, it must have had legs that it lost when it took pity on Eve and Adam in the ignorance of morality that God had meant them to have. Or it must have moved in a way no creature does today.

Obviously the story, like many others, is a myth story written and compiled by people with a very different world view to our own. It's not history and cannot rationally be taken as factual for all the lessons we may or may not choose to draw from the story, ideas, and images. Anyone taking it literally has to dump pretty much all we know about genetics, the evolution of humans, and much else that we've learned.

Obviously there was no Serpent convincing the unreal Eve to eat any literal fruit. The question of its appearance is a mind game, a bit of fun rather than a serious scientific quest.

Like many things in many religions it should only be taken as storytelling with a purpose, and a purpose we mostly don't share. You have to play very confusing mind games if you can't believe it's literal truth because you know humans and apes had a common ancestor but the entire story of salvation and Jesus you've been taught falls apart if it's metaphor or myth. You end up telling yourself that your only hope lies in something that you know deep down isn't true. So you hide from knowledge to avoid despair and end up hiding misery too.

But what if it were all real?

What would the Serpent have looked like before the curse?

If you were employed to make a movie of the first chapters of Genesis, what images would you choose? The saccharine Eden of children's books or something else?

The Serpent was not a snake. Then again, seeing it as a proto-snake brings up lots of problems and implies that God didn't just want the righteous drunk Noah to survive global genocide and ecocide but the Devil in snake form too. And it talked, something that a snake can't do due to lacking almost every essential piece of anatomy to develop the skill.

I found a sculpture. A modern piece, created in 2014 by Mark Dion. It's like nothing from any book I've seen. "The Serpent Before the Fall". The photo is taken from "When Snakes Could Walk: Contemporary Artists Take on the Garden of Eden."

It's an artist's idea of course, a visualisation of a story or myth that gives little physical description. But I rather like a quadruped Serpent. A Serpent walking makes as much sense as God walking in the garden.

Imagine Eden. Place yourself in the story. Be Eve. Be Adam. Be the Serpent. Be the walking around not knowing where the only humans were God, far from the omniscient deity of Christianity.

What would it feel like to be them? Would you act as they did? Would you tempt? Would you eat? Would you curse and banish? Would you hide good and evil from beings made in your own image?

What would Eden be like were you the characters, the designer? And would the rest of the book have been any different if it had been you?

Mind games. Meditations. Lectio Divina. Enquiries into yourself. They're all possible paths into myth. Perhaps the story can't shine lights on a god or on facts or on what our species has learned. But maybe, just maybe it can still illuminate something of who we are today. So can Greek myths, Tolkien and Maya Angelou although there's far more truth-fact in the latter.

Mark Dion, “The Serpent Before the Fall” (2014), installed in ‘Back to Eden’ at the Museum of Biblical Art (photo by an author for Hyperallergic)

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Memories of Meditation, Hallucination, a Bored Angel, and an Assault.

There's a bunch of distressing DID/OSDD related things that's been happening in meditation/mindfulness practice recently. I made an attempt at describing it last night in a blog post.

It's nothing like what was going on in meditation four years ago when we had psych drugs added into our mental and physical landscape:

"My head went a little weird in the meditation. Is this okay? I think so.

When we closed our eyes (or gazed at a flame or whatever else helped) we were told to think of what was to the left, right, Etc.

To the left I saw a group of creatures. Somewhere crossed between eagles and lizard-like dinosaurs. They were battling and fighting but no threat to anyone outside their group because they were entirely absorbed with each other. And no matter how much they fought none of them ever seemed to be injured. Beaks and talons ripped but they couldn't hurt each other.

To the right was an angel. Just some angelic guy keeping watch with an almost expressionless face. Leaning on his sword and seeming to be a bit bored due to having very little to do except watch. No battles to win.

In front was a giant bear, standing high and erect on its back legs and beating its chest a bit like a gorilla. And roaring but that was more like a lion. I don't think he was angry. That was just his way and the truth of his being.

Behind me was what I initially took to be a vampire creature but learned was a giant human bat type creature. It spread out its wings and wrapped me in its protection.

The earth below was solid and vibrated with an intensity such as if it wanted to escape and reveal itself.

And above? Light. Light falling, playfully. Colours of the rainbow and beyond in rays, falling upon me and surrounding me in something like a large soap bubble and the way rainbows play upon them in the sunshine, but far more so and the rainbows rejoiced. I have no sufficient words.

And then, from thinking of what was around me as requested, I moved into my body. And became a little more at peace. I confess I desired to lie down and sleep, comforted by place and the various creatures around me and to bask in that light.

Now, I don't know if that's what was meant by "think of what's to the left of you" but that's what happened."

It was worse because I was with the kind of people who would have been astounded by all that and almost want to raise me up as some kind of advanced soul and potential guru for whatever religion I wanted to create when in reality I was just prone to hallucinations due to the drugs the doctors put me on.

Perhaps hanging around gullible New Age folk wasn't the best idea when being even nuttier than normal. On the other hand at least it inspired acceptance and gentle exploration of the strangeness rather than fear or the desire to add to the drug cocktail and suppress myself further and as I've later learned, even psychosis is meaningful. Admitting the strangeness to any psychiatrist I ever saw would have been a worse option.

That's the history of humankind though isn't it? The madman is seen as the dangerous devil or devil possessed who needs banishment to places like Bedlam or lazar houses to protect society or who needs healing even if the curative method kills him. Alternatively he is seen as the source of wisdom, the medicine man, the teacher, the shaman. The middle ground has been lamentably rare, especially in western societies.

In retrospect I sort of miss some of the hallucinations. Not the terrifying ones of course. But some of them were great fun. Angels in churches. Roman centurions walking through cafe walls. Victorian carts on the streets. Vivid rainbows and beams of all colours from the sky. The increasing strangeness in meditation. The way I was "baptised" by Poseidon in a large rock pool on the coast. All caused or at least vastly increased by drugs screwing with my brain but enjoyable.

I was the madwoman. And some wanted me drugs or hospitalised while others wanted to see me rising to teach just as others who talk with angels have been raised up. It's been a relief to find a path closer to reality. Whatever reality is.

I walked away from the New Age folk after a while. Partly because I decided that much of what was being said was demonstrably bunkum - faith is fine but not when opposed to reason or to what's clearly true. Some of the things sincerely believed are stranger than anything I ever hallucinated by sight or hearing. As a believer in some strange things I was mostly prepared for a while to fit in well with other believers in strange things. Some strange things are still psychologically beneficial.

Mostly though I left because of the amount of people I met who claimed to be advanced souls and who wanted me to give up being transgender or who wouldn't call me "she" because as advanced souls they knew it didn't matter and in any case in another life I might be a woman anyway. Don't you hate it when people attempt to justify bigotry by a claim to holiness or wisdom or the intervention of a deity or Spirit?

The worst of those people was the "healer" who said that and then copped a grope of my breasts in a healing session and claimed it didn't matter because I'm a man so they're not breasts. Were I in a better mental state at the time, on that day still with sufficient DNA on my top as physical evidence, there would have been police involvement for that one when as it is I won't say who the bastard was in case that ever comes back as legal action against me. No evidence for my case so it would be me in trouble for being sexually assaulted.

I wonder how many women are in similar situations of being victims who cannot speak out for fear of legal consequences against them. I'm guessing there are a great many and it seems highly likely considering how often an accusation against a person is followed by dozens of others and we've all seen the statistics and reasons why even rape is so often not reported and how tough it can been to convict a rapist. Probably every one of us knows people who are in those statistics though we may not know of their experiences.

That's the first time I've told that story. I certainly wasn't meaning to tell it. It almost told itself and I allowed it to be typed.

Mindfulness and Dissociative Identity Disorder: Difficulties and Experiences of the Present

CW:  Abuse.  Descriptions of abuse and related feelings 

The following was written in less than an hour.  It's a first attempt at expressing some of what is going on for me at present.  Things are being very hard but this week does feel better.  It's not because any of what follows has got easier but because I've been able to walk ten days in a row and that helps immensely in ways I'll write about one day.  Walking and being under the sky and in green spaces is good for me.  The most grounded I've been in the last ten weeks of practising mindfulness was not when practising mindfulness but when being among the trees, experiencing the reality of weather and, without any effort or conscious intent, connecting my senses with my self and with the world beyond me.

In uncertainties of identity and future, in anxieties of the world opening beyond the almost comfortable solitude, I looked again at an old way of coping and support that never worked out that well. I resolved to give it another try. Perhaps we did not treat it fairly enough first time round. Or second or third time round. Perhaps we didn’t give it a chance to work it’s magic and didn’t give ourselves enough time to build up skills in feeling better. I would try mindfulness again as taught by good people at a local centre with no hint of religious dogma or cultic involvement or pressure to sign agreements or join organisations. The safest of people.

Mindfulness had always been difficult as a practice, as a set of interlinked meditation forms. I understood the theory, understood that attitudes as well as practices had been drawn from their Buddhist sources while leaving Buddhism behind. No altars. No prayers. No talk of how the Buddha is here and can talk with you. No mantras repeating qualities of deities or the divine. None of the things that mean the claim Buddhists sometimes make that they follow a philosophy not a religion is nonsensical. None of the things that I never wish to approach again.  I know perfectly well that mindfulness helps a lot of people.  I also know that it doesn't help everyone and can harm some people which makes the "one size fits all" approach often seen in mindfulness groups and in the chronically underfunded mental health services of the NHS a potentially risky thing.

What remained in mindfulness as taught in that centre I still found hard even five years ago when attending sessions and groups regularly for six months.  Not because of the content and intent of the practices but because of difficult effects upon me when I was still grappling with finding the language to describe autistic experiences and had no awareness of dissociative ones.  I don’t need to write about a past in which I lacked a particular piece of self awareness and in which a fundamental, essential truth was buried so well I couldn’t see signs in the earth.  I truly couldn't.  Three years ago I told a psychologist I never had dissociative experiences.  Because of other things I'd said he didn't believe me even though I believed it and our exploration together revealed things that surprised both of us.

Coming back to the practices has shocked me.  Body scans. Breathing meditations. Kindness meditations.  A set of wise attitudes.  There is nothing wrong with any of those things.  I wasn't expecting any particular problems especially as I've grown far more relaxed and content and confident in areas surrounding autism over the last five years to the extent that while I am autistic the traits and strengths and difficulties it presents are no longer a big part of my self-identity.  Being autistic is just a set of positive or challenging factors that are just what they are.  Much of the time at least.

Yet for me the results have been devastating and it’s taken everything I have to hold myself together, lost in a traumatic past and dissociative present.

In body scans I’ve had flashbacks. Memory fragments that I’d lay aside were they not consistently accompanied by harsh emotion and harsher terror. In breathing meditations the emotions rise from dissociative parts with whom I have no conscious connection. In meditation and beyond my dissociation has increased dramatically. Living in this moment rather than decades ago in moments I can’t remember has been almost beyond me. I drift. I lose time. I lose the narrative. I can’t make sense of my own life or history. In psychology terms I’m destabilised and my reading has taught me that it’s not unexpected for these kinds of meditation given what’s inside me or us.

“Consider the back of the knees. What do they feel like?” The back of the knees! Flashbacks come unexpectedly. I have no way to expect or to guard myself. No way to prepare for the rush as I feel myself, in child body, forced to the ground and feel someone’s knees pressed into the back of mine as I am held down. And I am frozen. Unable to move, to scream out, to live. Lost in hate, in guilt, in powerlessness, in dirt.

“Count the breaths … now just notice how it feels in this moment.” I notice and cannot feel anything in this moment. Cannot be in this moment or exist in the present or experience joy in the sunlight or sadness in the face of another news headline. Notice. Notice. One day I stopped. I wrote down the feelings. They’re not mine. They belong to another within my or our system, to someone I don’t know but who has held memory, held feeling, held the destruction so that I could survive.

I feel … violated

I feel … dirty

I feel … broken

I feel … worthless

I feel … shattered

I feel … lost

I feel … lonely

I feel … fearful

I feel … hated

I feel … destroyed

I feel … no understanding

I feel … wasted

I feel … sick

I feel … I am the wound

I feel … pain

I feel … crumpled

I feel … ended

I feel … pointless

I feel … weak

I feel … ashamed

I feel … empty

I feel … gone

I feel … too much still here

I wrote that list in thirty seconds during the meditation. What experience do those feelings come from? I don’t know. When did it happen? I don’t know. I can’t see how what is recovered can fit into the things I know for sure about my childhood and all the books of photographs that I looked at so often since then. I did too. Those albums stayed on shelves and I never saw them taken off once a year had passed and they had been shown off to family and visiting friends. I would go through every one of them regularly through adulthood. Every college holiday, every visit later. Every photo album. Every picture. Filling the impossible holes and major memory gaps with pictures and stories told around them.

Out of meditation. The feelings don’t ease. Once they’re out, they’re out. Increasing rather than decreasing in power. I feel those things.  Constantly although they are not "mine."  Yes, they are mine, from my life but they are fragmented somewhere in this dissociative system.

I am lost. I am broken. I am violated and worthless and a thing to be used and hated. And I feel shame, guilt, and then feel more guilt for feeling things I know aren’t rational because it was never my fault. Worthless, worthless, shitty, shitty Clare who should not be alive.

But that’s not the end of it. There’s a physical side too. With every flashback, with every visible feeling comes physical pain. Increasing pain. Every joint. Every muscle. I am hurting more and more and pain killers don’t help just as they don’t help with the greater headaches from dissociation and the effort to remain present in some way. I fight so hard. Without strength I would have lost the ultimate war in recent weeks just as I could have lost it repeatedly almost every year I can remember enough to speak of through self rather than pictures. My fingers, hands, wrists, arms. They’re the worst for frustration and for wishing for an end to it all.

In the middle of all that I began to wonder whether mindfulness was meant to be producing such effects. It seemed a strangeness, a mystery that simply noticing your body, your breath, or offering a kind thought could produce such extreme reactions and lead me determined to get through it but having to wonder at times if it was possible in the long term. Obviously the flashbacks came while meditating but was that just a coincidence or was it a consequence of the meditation combined with the post-traumatic, complex dissociative situation we’re in?

The latter, as it turned out. I learn that mindfulness can severely destabilise someone like us and that outside of tailored trauma-informed and dissociation-informed support and trauma-informed mindfulness practices it can be highly dangerous. We need to read more about this. We need to study and learn and find out what is and isn’t going on and to see what the best courses of action may be based on knowledge rather than just instinct or the often conflicted mess of feelings and thoughts within.

I am back at the point where the GP and a prescriber have been worried about us. I’m back to regular appointments to check I’m still keeping going and next week I’m going to ask for more help and possible re-referral back to a specific psychology service. Yes, I will push to be added to another waiting list and this time it’s a waiting list that leads to another waiting list.

As for mindfulness. Should I just stop? Should I finish the nine or ten week course and so get through teaching on all the attitudes at least once? As I type, the next session is in an hour and a half and I’m meant to be logging on for a guided meditation practice in five minutes. In that practice I’ll be going my own way to a large extent because that seems less dangerous.

While persecutors call for self-harm and while I got to the point of having to clear out everything I ever wrote including all the pieces people wanted me to try to publish I personally want to stay alive, stay in one piece. I am worth that. I’m worth better treatment than I give myself. I'm also worth better than those who have been close friends but desert me whenever I am struggling.  I’m glad to have learned that. It took time and work and repeated loss to learn.

I need to be online in a few minutes. No. I don’t need it. It’s not a need. It’s interesting how the sense of guilt even follows for a drop in event run by people who are the antithesis of cult.

I will be online in a few minutes. Persevere for now but taking greater care and drawing away whenever needed.

Yes, we persevered.  The meditation form tonight was a body scan. We got past the back of the knees this time. Then, “What can you feel in the lower back?” Okay so I can now feel someone’s hand rubbing across my back. Rough hand. And I see yellow and smell tobacco, stale and strong and I feel like vomiting and feel helplessness and terror and like I’m drowning in crude oil.

I tend to call that a flashback. But I’ve decided I shouldn’t use the word perhaps because these are events and emotions that I cannot consciously remember because they are not mine/Clare’s. They’re all held by others in the system, a system that seems to be made of fragments without substantial form and of parts that have volition and character and who can talk and make decisions and who I currently don’t have a lot of communication with although I hear them. When I say flashback the assumption others make is that it’s of an event I can remember and which is held by me. The experiences are similar but they’re definitely not the same.

And when I’m advised to let it go and let it pass? I can do that with my own emotions and memories and thoughts, at least to some degree. I’m by no means perfect at that and can dwell in places that don’t need dwelling in. But can I do it with emotions and memories and thoughts that aren’t my own? No. At least not right now. I can no more do it with the skills I have and with the lack of communication I have than I could let go of the feeling of molten lava or the sound of screaming if played at 130 decibels through my headphones.

That’s not an adequate metaphor either because those things are external. I can’t let go of the experiences that aren’t mine but which cry within me so forcefully any more than I could let go of needing to breath if holding my breath. Determination doesn’t work. Kindness doesn’t work. Awareness and acceptance and not wanting change won’t work. That need to breath is real and denial is ridiculous. Even that isn’t an adequate metaphor for what it going on or what that hand felt like or what that tobacco smelled like or the emotional states that have been held and crushed for so long.

After the experiences of that body scan, we still went to the teaching session afterwards.  The final session of the ten week course.  We made it to the end and my head is intensely painful now and I have some lost time during that session so probably someone else was fronting for a bit.  With the session being held on Zoom and our camera and microphone both turned off that won't have affected anyone else's experience which is reassuring to me.

I have typed enough. It’s barely a beginning and as a first attempt hardly expresses anything clearly. There is much I’ve missed out. Inner experiences. The increase in dissociation even while letting the reality of the external slide past in meditation. I haven’t written about what happens whenever I close my eyes and that might be the most distressing and tiring thing I have at this point.  Even blinking is a strong glimpse into the darkness, one I can't avoid for long.  I’ve not described it. Was that intention or just forgetfulness?

There’s much that’s totally unclear even in my own head. Perhaps I am unable to express or explain right now. That’s okay. I accept that. Mindfully.