Reviewing events of the past few days, I am reminded of the near impossibility of finding the TRUTH about any particular topic.

Here are three examples from this week alone:

1. I watched the documentary, Cowspiracy, a film on Netflix co-directed by Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn. It reveals a number of disturbing truths about the global animal agriculture business. A few choice facts: Raising cattle is responsible for 51 percent of global warming. To create one pound of hamburger meat requires 1200 gallons of water. And, 90 percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is caused by converting that forest into into grazable land. Some critics take issue with these facts but my own research validates them. Perhaps even more troubling, Greenpeace refused to allow its executive director to be interviewed for the film. The Sierra Club did, as did representatives from organizations like Oceana, which support the seas. As a viewer, you learn that these organizations, which operate as businesses themselves, downplay the environmental hazards of animal agriculture. They fear losing members. Instead, they emphasize conservation, weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, and so-called sustainability. Therefore, an arguably more troubling fact is the biased viewpoint these allegedly environmental organizations share about global warming.
2. The New York Times claims that, while unlikely, it remains a real possibility that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory just blocks from where the virus was thought to originate. Few believe it was released on purpose. However, and again, highly credentialed individuals, like Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, consider a lab leak a real possibility. The NYT article notes, “China’s integral role in a joint inquiry with the World Health Organization made its dismissal of the lab leak theory difficult to accept, Dr. Iwasaki and 17 other scientists argued in the journal Science this month.”
3. Just this morning, Vladimir Putin, when questioned about the poisoning and incarceration of political opponent Alexei Navalny, pointed out how organizations like Black Lives Matter, or the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, shows how we Americans deal with political dissent in the same way as him.

These three seemingly random examples illustrate the problem finding out truth in our era of mind-control, an age of propaganda exceeding anything George Orwell could have possibly imagined.

How could Greenpeace, an environmental organization trusted by millions, distort truths about global warming to its members?

How could right wing conspiracy theories about China releasing the Covid-19 virus from a laboratory possibly be accurate?

And how could anyone dare suggest that the poisoning of a political dissident by weapons only available to nation states, namely highly toxic chemical agents, resembles a Black Lives Matter rally?

It is crucial we all WAKE UP to how we are exposed, on historically unprecedented level, to untruths.

We should adopt the wisdom of the late Tom Hayden who proclaimed:

Question Authority!

We should ingest every alleged fact with doubt, and then use our diligence to find out what’s accurate.

Truths do exist.

However, and like no previous time in the history of civilization, our minds are massively manipulated by the media, we are surveilled, and our very way of thinking is invaded.

A way out exists, but it requires some effort.

Thomas Jefferson believed the American democracy rested on an “educated public.”

That’s no longer enough.

We need to not only prop up our educational institutions, but also we must also teach people throughout the world to greet information with skepticism, check multiple sources, and put energy into truth seeking. It cannot be passively acquired.

Before recommending immersion into Mr. Bellow’s brilliant fictional worlds, I wish to apologize for disappearing the last few months. I plan on keeping this blog going—probably weekly—as I have for several years now. It offers me a vehicle, perhaps more accurately a ventilation pipe, for sharing edgy psychoanalytic, literary, and philosophical reflections not consonant with the usual academic writing.

BTW, and herein lies the distraction, I started a subscription newsletter
earlier this year called:

Journeys to the Unconscious Mind

It costs $70 per year, the lowest fee that Substack (the sponsoring
company) allows. The newsletter is intended for practitioners of psychoanalysis, patients of psychoanalysts, or anyone interested in the field or in related areas like psychodynamic psychotherapy, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, depth psychotherapy, or Jungian psychoanalysis.

In my view, and as I note in the first few issues, these modes of clinical practice share more commonalities than differences. Psychoanalytic psychotherapists facilitate transformational encounters whether they be five-times-a-week or every two-weeks.

If you, or anyone you’ve ever met is interested, please invite them
to sign up at:

https://www.unconsciousjourneys.com

And, now, shameless self-promotion complete, I turn to discussing the
enviable genius, Saul Bellow.

His work reminds us that understanding human subjectivity results not only from carefully listening to others, but through reading literature, viewing art, and listening to music.

Of course, some formal training in depth psychology is important. A
structured apprenticeship would be best. You learn a great deal from meeting with different types of patients over the years, and receiving guidance from experienced supervisors helps. However, all clinical psychology programs, ranging from the cognitive-behavioral to the formal psychoanalytic, would advance their educational quality by teaching the arts.

Psychoanalytic training programs typically require a year-long, in-depth
reading of Freud. A detailed reading of Shakespeare offers at least equal, perhaps greater, relevance in terms of understanding human beings. 

Which topic of the human experience does the Bard omit?

A year of philosophy would prove similarly beneficial as would a year of art
history. But, alas, psychoanalysis remains ensconced in the scientism dominant when it emerged. Psychoanalysts keep trying to be scientists when they are anything but.

Lacan (2008) advises “psychoanalysts to notice that they are poets” (p. 44).  

Consider the insights about the human condition illuminated by these few
excerpts from the contemporary man-of-letters, Saul Bellow. He exemplifies the power of literature to facilitate understanding of real people. I share a few paragraphs from Bellow’s novel, Humboldt’s Gift, followed by comments.

The novel tells the story of one writer idealizing another. The protagonist’s
relationship with author he admires, Humboldt, descends from the status of dear friend to dark enemy. Along the way, Humboldt falls to pieces.

The story itself is compelling. Vividly displayed are failed friendships, troubled marriages, deceit, betrayal, greed, and competition—a rainbow array of human fallibility.

Here comes the first excerpt:

There came a time (Early Modern) when, apparently, life lost the
ability to arrange itself. It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. From, say, Machiavelli’s time to our own this arranging has been the one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project (p. 29).

The so-called modern period refers to the height of the belief in scientism.
As Nietzsche warned, the death of G-d would lead to a crisis of meaning. He
foresaw the Holocaust and other tragedies of the 20th century. Humans believed their lives could be reduced to algorithms. The humanities fell into disfavor. Even just recently, STEM curriculums have excised basic writing requirements.

How could anyone write about science, technology, engineering or mathematics if they don’t know how to clearly communicate?

I’m no scholar of English literature. I can only surmise as to Bellow’s
meaning. He seem to refer to the organic unfolding of a human life replaced by the technical. Before the modern period, humans lived more attuned to nature. They had no choice. You lived in the same village as your parents. You modeled their lifestyle and career. The distance between the natural and the technological was vast. Authorities dictating choices were limited to the family, the elders, or perhaps local governments.

Since the Modern Period, alleged experts regularly proclaim how to live,
subtly removing persons’ sense of agency. Current examples range from Dr. Oz to Oprah. How better to describe this loss of agency than to call deference to these alleged specialists “one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project.”

The mass media, more than ever before in human history, tells us how to
think and feel and behave. Look around. People are glued to their mobile phones and their computers. Individuals are killed, in ever increasing numbers, by drivers distracted by their cell phones. This is just one example of mind control exceeding Orwell’s wildest imagination: people are too immersed in their technology to even notice those around them. 

In the final analysis, we make our own choices. Most of our lives play out
uncontrollably, understood by some as fate. It is crucial to direct your own limited powers with the most authenticity possible—in caring for self while also loving others. It takes courage to look inward, discover your own individual desires, and live them out in a meaningful yet ethical way.

Along these same lines, Bellows later writes:

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and death (p. 203).

Is this what prevents mobile phone addicts from looking up, sitting still,
being present? Mass media outlets like the ever-growing Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Tik-Tok, and similar platforms shape minds, molding
them, manipulating them. They tailor news feeds to the specific interests of
users, creating ever more isolated bubbles of information.

Knowledge is siloed.

Tribalism grows.

People fear aloneness more than ever before.

Perhaps if they stand still, breathe the air, take in the view, and experience their emotions, the stasis, boredom, anguish will rush in.

No wonder retail stores play background music.

No one wants to be alone.

We’ve become phobic.   

Better to not dare it.

Best to return to the ever-present digital display.

Striving for engagement, meaning, and fulfillment in life reverses the
ever-present threat of boredom.

No one delivers these to you.

You can only find them within yourself.

Fear, even more than boredom, additionally serves as a mechanism of power. Just a few weeks ago, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a horrid front-page story describing the death of an 80-year old psychologist. He had already been double-vaccinated—rendering the tale even more troubling. If you read further down the page, metaphorically buried in the fine print, the author acknowledges the chances of such a fatal post-vaccine, Covid-reaction were .008 percent! This level of risk approximates the chance of you getting killed by a car while casually walking along a residential street, or being struck by lightning or by an airplane engine falling from the sky.

Why feature, on the front page no less, such a frightening and yet meaningless story? 

The article illustrates the immense power of fear-mongering. Perhaps, in
Bellows’ defense, fear trumps boredom. Most people, aroused by fear, falsely believe some purchase, or looking forward to a weekend, will soothe them. But these solutions never work.

Being present to the moment raises the risk of boredom, fear, and other dark emotions rising to the surface.

Still not much of a leap in topic, the next excerpt from Humboldt’s Gift
describes why some young men find meaning in going to war:

… I now found relevance in the explanation T. E. Lawrence had given
for enlisting in the RAF—’To plunge crudely among crude men and find myself…’How did it go, now? ‘ … for these remaining years of prime life.’ Horseplay, roughhouse, barracks obscenity, garbage detail. Yes, many men, Lawrence said, would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand (p. 284).

Here the same theme plays out:

Why face boredom, or even fear, if you can find intense distraction in
killing others or risking being killed yourself? And, imagine the stimulation of horseplay and roughhouse along the way?

You take control of the uncontrollable.

Continuing in the same trend, Bellows writes:

Now I begin to understand what Tolstoy was getting at when he called
on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live (p. 483).

That citation requires no explanation.

It follows from the above.

Finally, I turn away from life’s insights to the simple brilliance of Bellow’s
writing. The following few sentences sufficiently prove, in and of themselves, why schools and universities must continue to teach communication skills.

Watch how much Bellow’s packs into three sentences:

We made our approach over the steely patch of evening water and landed at La Guardia in the tawny sundown. We then rode to the Plaza Hotel imprisoned in the low seats in one of New York’s dog-catcher taxis. They make you feel that you have bitten someone and are being rushed to the pound, frothing with rabies, to be put down (p. 321).

The first sentence communicates travel, the time of day, the look of the water, and geography.

Can’t you feel it?

The next sentence elicits an image of the Plaza Hotel, even if you’ve
never seen it. The taxi ride becomes visceral, the “low seats” and the “dog-catcher” feeling. Then, the finale, the emotional sense of the ride itself, intensity, anxiety, the feeling of having bitten someone and frothing, readying yourself to be put down.

Professors of psychology and psychoanalysis take note.

Writers like Saul Bellow convey more than any textbook of abnormal psychology, psychophysiology, or clinical psychology ever could. They impart the wisdom possibly gained by years of clinical experience, only more tightly and brilliantly packaged. If you want to delve into the intimate lives of others, then read fiction, go to the theater, watch the cinema, listen to the music. They deliver the mythology guiding our subjectivities.

References

Bellow, S. (1975). Humboldt’s Gift. New York: Penguin.

Lacan, J. (2008). My teaching, Trans. D. Macey. New York: Verso.

Must You Feel Empty and Lonely?

Usually inspired by J. Krishnamurti’s words, these excerpts from his teachings left me troubled:

People running away from emptiness, incompleteness, loneliness, are not different from what they seek to avoid; they are it. You cannot run away from yourself; all you can do is seek understanding. You are loneliness, emptiness, and as long as you regard the feelings as something separate from yourself, you live in illusion and endless conflict. Only when directly experiencing your own loneliness can there be freedom from fear. Fear exists only in relationship to an idea, and an idea is the response of memory as thought. 

Having spent more than four decades practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I thought most people, myself included, struggled with these emotions because of childhood trauma.

Feeling empty and alone?

You must’ve been unattended to in some way, ignored, rejected, neglected.

Krishnamurti proclaims:

Not so.

I struggled with this excerpt for weeks. He’s just a philosopher, after all, a writer-of-ideas, of Indian descent, thoughtful, reflective, intelligent.

But does he have some lock on the truth?

Of course not.

And, yet, I wondered, could it be true?

Couldn’t a secure attachment, as the scientifically-oriented psychoanalysts call it, ensure an inner feeling of peace and stability? Of the presence of others? Of some kind of an essential nature?

Apparently not.

Readers following this blog know I’ve also resumed daily meditation, minimally one-hour per day, for more than a year now. It seems, to me, the practice only introduces you to greater levels of loneliness and emptiness.

Perhaps it’s just the true nature of things?

It seems that, in the final analysis, a wonderful, loving childhood, combined with a neuro-typical biology, will lessen these dark emotions.

It will not and, indeed, cannot eliminate them.

At most, I’d note, meditation, yoga, and similar practices simply accustom you to the lonely-empty feeling. Or, if on a deep, spiritual quest, you might begin to feel part of a greater whole, an endless one or a nothingness.

Either way, the sad feeling cannot go away.

That impossibly optimistic existentialist, Albert Camus (1956/1991), writes,

There is not one human being who, above a certain elementary level of consciousness, does not exhaust himself in trying to form formulas or attitudes that will give his existence the unity it lacks. (p. 262)

Go ahead.

Try anything.

Try formulas or attitudes or religions or philosophies.

Psychoanalysis itself offers systems of belief, from the Freudian to the Relational. Religion offers more, as does politics, group identities, feminism, nationalism, ethnicity, geography, history, and so on ad infinitum.

Try one of these on for yourself—if you haven’t already.

See if the empty, lonely feeling vanishes.

I’m no nihilist.

I believe, instead, we must find our own truths, our own authentic way of being, of living.

Ideally, we learn to balance our desires with those of others.

Community matters.

We exist, kind of, as individuals, but always in a context. The air and water and food and civilization and humanity live inside and outside of us.

Elsewhere, Krishnamurti writes:

If one wishes to find that which is truth, one must be totally free from all religions, from all conditioning, from all dogmas, from all beliefs, from all authority which makes one conform, which means, essentially, standing completely alone, and that is arduous…

Arduous?

Are you kidding?

References

Camus, A. (1956) 1991. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Vintage.

Krishnamurti, J. (1964). Think on These Things. New York: Harper and Row.

Krishnamurti, J. (2007). As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning. Prescott, Arizona: Hohm Press.

Atlanta Shooting: The Rush to Oversimplify

My Dearest Readers,

[Before delving into a possibly life-endangering topic, I want to shamelessly self-promote a newsletter. It costs all of $70 per year, but you will get 50 issues/year. The newsletter is intended for depth psychotherapists, their patients, and anyone interested in the psychoanalytic field. To find it, cut and paste this url into your search engine: www.unconsciousjourneys.com. Thanks so much! Alan]

Hate crimes are awful.

More often than not, they are clearly delineated.

Here are a few recent examples:

If you just search for federal hate crimes, you’ll see that on August 6, 2020, a man assaulted an African-American man for reasons of racial hatred. On July 9, 2020, the Texas man responsible for the mass shooting at the El Paso Walmart was charged with hate crimes. His clear intent? To kill Latino people. Finally, on June 20, 2020, a New York man was charged with federal hate crimes for making anti-semitic threats to a Jewish resident of Stratford, Connecticut.

In sharp contrast to these three horrific incidents, the young man who killed six Asian women, and one Caucasian man, on March 16, 2021, was driven by multiple motivations. Hate might have been among them. However, it seems clear it was the lesser one. He sounds like a sexually-obsessed, religiously perverse, mentally-disordered, and compulsively sexual 21-year old male.

The thesis of this post concerns our cultural propensity to oversimplify.

I watched, with horror, as the biased media, on both sides of the political spectrum, rushed to hype this tragic episode as a hate crime.

Why worry about oversimplification?

Because it’s a form of propaganda.

It feeds fear in people around the world, heightening their proneness to loneliness and emptiness which, in turn, leads them to purchase useless items to lessen their mental pain.

Besides, our culture has enough trouble holding onto free speech these days.

Hate crimes are real.

They are, by definition, despicable.

But please watch out for the international pandemic of oversimplification.

Consider the myriad motivations causing the perpetrator, Robert Aaron Long, to admittedly commit these shootings.

He is, according to him and others who know him, engaged in compulsive sexuality over which he likely feels guilt and shame. Perhaps an excellent example of primitive mental functioning, he probably projected these negative emotions onto the massage parlor workers. Killing them, unconsciously, eliminated the sources of his guilt.

Ridiculous, I know, from a rational perspective.

But a real possibility from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Building on this motivation, fanaticism, in any religion, is associated with cognitive rigidity. It is likely Mr. Long demonstrated such rigidity—also a characteristic of all the personality disorders. This trend might add weight to the prior motivation noted.

Also, Mr. Long underwent treatment for his compulsive sexuality at an evangelical treatment center—hardly the standard of care for treating addictive behavior. What if they imbued him with a sense of shame for his “sinning?” That certainly would have contributed to the primitive splitting clearly evident from his homicidal behavior.

Another possibility, still similar, surrounds him projecting his own disturbed sexual issues onto workers at these massage parlors. In other words, he figured, unconsciously, eliminating them would eliminate his problem. Again, bizarre from a rational standpoint but the unconscious lacks rationality.

Provocative for gun advocates, we also cannot eliminate the contribution of the easy access to guns in Georgia. Here in California, you have a wait at least a week to obtain a gun. Not so in Georgia. Mr. Long allegedly bought the weapons he used to kill his fellow human beings the same day. There was no background check. “Most background checks, if there’s no flag on it, take about 100 seconds,” says Robyn Thomas, executive director of Giffords Law Center.

Now, hate may well also have been part of the problem. Donald Trump’s foolish leadership, featuring repeated racist comments like “The Kung Flu” or the “Wuhan virus” infected many people prone to simplification. Much earlier, Trump displayed an ongoing propensity towards public racism. On Sunday, July 14, 2019, he tweeted regarding four female freshman congresswomen: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.” He was referring, of course, to Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali American; Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, an African American; Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, a Palestinian American; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a Puerto Rican. 

So, yes, hate needs to be considered as a factor here.

However, the evidence so far argues against it.

Imagine if Mr. Long were gay. He would have killed men. (The world’s propensity to oversimplify which is another form of splitting which is the most primitive ego defense mechanism). In that case, Long would have been accused of crimes against men.

In the final analysis, and whatever his motivation, Long’s behavior was heinous, evil, and cruel.

Of that no doubt exists.

A final irony, this kind of oversimplification, namely banner headlines in newspapers proclaiming Asian Woman Hate Crimes and similar BREAKING NEWS flashes on TV sets, is exactly the kind of thinking that creates racism in the first place.

Let’s all grow up, reflect carefully on the unending complexity of human motivation, and attend to media giving balanced rather than fear-mongering reporting.

On Being a Zen Retriever

Have you ever noticed, as I do, how much of the day you spend, well, taking things out and putting them away?

When I write, usually in my small backyard, I retrieve a laptop, notebook, a few pens, and some files.

When I wake up, I retrieve coffee grounds, heat up water, grab the french press, and put a few pieces of bread in the toaster.

When I garden, I retrieve gloves, a spade, left-over bags of soil, and whatever new plant I’ve bought, or whatever old one I’m moving.

When I head to my office, I retrieve my appointment book, mobile phone, reading glasses, sun glasses, and left-over food to eat during breaks.

When I teach at Rose City Center on Fridays at 11a, I retrieve the article-of-the-week, again a notebook and pen, usually my laptop, and then find the Zoom link to connect to the students.

When I take in one of the few patients who consult me in person, I retrieve my face mask, a sanitary wipe (for opening doors), a coffee cup, and then I open up a window and turn on the fan.

When I prepare for bed, I retrieve my hypertension medication, ingest it, and then retrieve toothpaste, toothbrush, mouth wash, and soap (to wash my face).

You get the idea.

How much time do we all spend each and every day RETRIEVING things?

Isn’t it maddening?

If you added up the time you spend retrieving, and then replacing, you’re probably looking at, say, perhaps two- or even three-hours a day.

Recovering from my nearly six decades of maniacal, anxiety-ridden, Type-A behavior, I still find myself feeling rushed when retrieving.

More than once, my wife has quipped:

He gardens like a man going to war.

It is pathetically true.

To further my recovery, and since much of talking or writing is really just to oneself (out loud), I offer a few words of advice which, I hope, I shall heed myself:

1. Bring your full attention to your existence as a type of dog, naturally a retriever, and surrender to it.
2. Attend to the experiences themselves, i.e. how it feels to put the laptop in a briefcase, or the spade in your hand, or the medications in your mouth.
3. Observe yourself rushing, if you feel as I do, and chill out by following ideas 1 and 2.
4. Remember to breathe! I often find myself holding my breath while doing these retriever and replacement actions.
5. Surrender to the reality that, oh well, a good chunk of your day mimics the behavior of a hound dog.
6. Consider practicing meditation, or even doing a one- or multiple-day Zen retreat. As it turns out, retrieval is a minimal part of those experiences. Years ago, I did several one-day retreats in which, as I recall, I retrieved NOTHING. Perhaps, I passed a tray of vegetables and rice around during the silent lunch period. That was it. (But, then again, I needed to retrieve my meditation pillow, my car keys, clothing, etc, to go there).
7. CRUCIAL: Vary your routine as you perform your retriever-like tasks. If you always start breakfast with toast, switch it out. Or, do the toast before the coffee. This is an old Zen idea. They literally recommend taking a different route to work every day to keep the experience fresh and bring you in the moment.
8. Despite idea 6, forget about any possibility of really avoiding retriever-like behavior. You can’t. No matter how minimalist a lifestyle you desire, you’ll still retrieve. If you move into a 200 square foot storage container, you’ve still got to cook, make your bed (hopefully), get the mail, pay your bills, etc.

That’s it.

On this lovely Sunday in Southern California, I had the delusional belief that retrieval might, just perhaps maybe, be minimal

I was wrong.

So far, I’ve retrieved binoculars, juice-glass, tea-mug, notebook, laptop, cell phone, files, books, a few pens, and, lucky-me, a small cigar (which then required me to retrieve a lighter, lighter fluid, an ash tray and more).

G’luck.

Surrender to the Tao!

Defecation, Fornication, and Dissociation

A most troubling triad, I know, but here’s the point:

Every single day, unless you’re eating extremely poorly, you poop at some point.

It’s a good thing, ridding the of body waste products. Feces is often the subject of jokes among second graders; apparently, it becomes a more frequent topic of conversation among the elderly.

But, the theme today concerns what people don’t talk about, what they compartmentalize.

Defecation is certainly one of them.

It’s an extremely personal matter.

The experience might be enjoyable; it might be painful, i.e. hemorrhoids.

In any event, and hopefully, it’s followed by wiping your anus using toilet paper or the like. (In case the pandemic finds you in short supply, then a newspaper, tissue, or paper towel may serve as a useful substitute).

Unless you’re weird, you then don’t really think about it.

But, now that we’re talking about it, you (again hopefully) had that experience in the last day or two. After turning on the bathroom fan, lighting a match, or spraying out whatever deodorized cleansing agent you prefer, the experience vanishes from your mind.

Perhaps this is due to its unpleasant smell.

Or, perhaps, this is because it reminds you of your creatureliness, your status as a hominid, as a (supposedly) intelligent descendent of the great apes.

In any event, the forgetting about it is an example of normal dissociation.

It falls away from your typical subjective experience.

Arguably on the opposite side of the continuum, but also concerning private parts, fornication or, more kindly, sexuality, is also something we tend to separate out from our minds.

We might think about it a ton; we might fantasize about it even more.

But do we freely talk about it?

No.

You might discuss your sexual behavior with individuals extremely close to you.

But, more commonly, you don’t.

You might discuss it with a psychotherapist, or a physician.

Much more often, you keep it to yourself.

Why?

Because it’s considered private, for one. If you’re having a great time with sex, you might elicit envy or jealousy from friends. If you’re having a tough time, you might feel embarrassed and ashamed.

If you tell some folks, like your parents or your children, then you’re violating social norms.

Your audience will think you are, using the slang word, pervy.

Sexuality also involves our creatureliness—a component of our worlds from which we tend to distance ourselves.

So here we are, traveling through this strange journey called life, and we devote considerable energy to ignoring important parts of our personal experience. Or, at least in the case of sexuality, we keep it private.

My thesis concerns the fundamental dominance of dissociation—a psychoanalytic concept I consider the source of all evil.

Let me be clear.

I’m not advocating for advertising your bowel or sexual habits.

I already explained why it’s private.

But it’s normalcy highlights the ubiquitous nature of dissociation.

Just as common as our propensity to compartmentalize, we also dissociate in problematic ways.

Consider tribalism as just one negative example.

We tend to gather in tribes.

We then spontaneously think our tribe is better than the other.

For example, democrats are better than republicans, monotheism trumps idolatry, and recycling is better than throwing your bottles and cans in the regular trash.

These are fairly benign examples.

Two days ago, we witnessed an extreme example of tribalism. A group of Trump supporters, white supremacy groups, and fascists stormed the capital of the United States. Their actions killed a few, terrified many, and sent a frightening message about democracy’s fragility across the globe.

How does this relate to defecation and fornication?

It’s simply a more extreme form of dissociation, of compartmentalization.

It represents an abject denial—returning now to our common ape-like heritage—that we humans are, quite literally, all related to one another.

When you’re beating up capital police, breaking windows, occupying the offices of congress-people, and threatening to occupy “the peoples house,” you’ve lost sight of, well, who the people are.

You think it’s your tribe. It’s not, because all human tribes are subsets of the greater human one—humanity itself.

The beauty of democracy, as an ideal anyway, is that it addresses our commonality as one human family. It’s flawed and fallible, for sure, as evidenced in the power of lobbying groups, special interests, corrupt politicians, and the like.

Nonetheless, democracy at least tries to serve the greater good, the commonality of the people regardless of race, ethnicity, or tribe-membership.

What’s the takeaway?

To reflect on the normalcy of dissociation, as it occurs with bodily waste elimination, and we do it with sexuality.

But, please also consider its perversion, the risk of dissociation morphing into an outright malignancy.

It’s perverse, malignant presentation nearly broke us, traumatizing liberty-loving peoples around the world.

Meditating One-Year In: Five Reflections

Without conscious plan or intent, I began meditating, on a daily basis, one year ago.

I’d learned the classic Zen method of sitting meditation, Zazen, in the 1980s.

On occasion, I’d practice it. In 2019, I practiced more regularly, but still not daily.

Beginning January 2020, I got in the habit of starting my day with a half-hour of Zazen. Meditation became part of my daily routine, squeezed in between breakfast and working out. Then, perhaps facilitated by the pandemic, I added a second, 30-minute period each and every day.

Here are five reflections on the year-long experience, offered to inform others similarly interested.

The first thing I noticed, lasting a few months, was self-consciousness about breathing and heart rate. I noticed myself starting breaths; I noticed the sound of my heart beating. After a few months, these perceptions fell away. Naturally, the breathing and heart beats continued, but I no longer noticed them.

Secondly, and reminiscent of the concern Arjuna’s expressed to Krishna (who instructed him in meditation) in the Bhagavad Gita, I noticed my thoughts racing. Krishna claimed the mind resisted quieting, that it flew by as if in hurricane-like gusts.

Specifically, Arjuna asked:

For the mind is restless, turbulent, obstinate and very strong, O Krishna, and to subdue it is, it seems to me, more difficult than controlling the wind.

That sensation has yet to pass but, with practice, my thoughts slow down while meditating.

Meditation can be practiced in myriad ways.

In Zen, you simply sit and focus on your breathing. You focus on the abdominal muscles flexing in and out, or on the sound of the breath entering and exiting your mouth.

That’s it.

It’s simple.

The third observation, closely related to the rapidity of thought, concerns categories of thinking. For only the past few months, I’ve noticed myself identifying classifications, like I’m thinking about “my to-do list,” or “my plans for tonight,” or “I’m mentally writing right now.”

Thinking has slowed, yes, and emerges now in categories.

The next experience, the fourth one, sounds mystical.

On occasion, and at various points during the day, I find myself feeling as if I’m passing through plasma. I feel more aware of the air around me, the objects I see or pass by, like the walls of a room, the side of a building, or a tree or flower.

It’s a fleeting sensation.

Who knows for sure, but I believe the walking-through-plasma relates to a growing sense of one-ness, of the connectedness of all things.

The fifth and last one is certainly the most mysterious. And, yet, it is often described in Buddhist and Taoist literature.

It concerns the ego as delusion.

For extremely brief moments, perhaps nanoseconds, I experience the loss of the sense of self.

Scholars of eastern religion, like Krishnamurti, use phrases like:

Meditation without a meditator,

Or,

Thoughts without a thinker.

That’s it.

To quote Elvis Costello’s lyrics to Alison:

My aim is true.

I just wanted to share my experiences with any of you journeying along the same meditative road.

I cannot possibly recommend practicing meditation enough.

It frames your days; it provides a re-set; it slows the mind; it brings peace.

In our fast-paced worlds of mobile phones, email, and post-truths, identifying any truth seems particularly important.

How can learning to live more in the moment—the only real experience because all else involves imagining the future or the past—be anything but good?

Achieving the fearful state of “caught up” on the Blackest of Black Fridays, mid-Covid, after illegally traveling by airplane, overeating, over-drinking and, worst of all, over-thinking, I stumbled upon these startling words on p. 203 of Saul Bellow’s book, Humboldt’s Gift:

This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

Should a day after Thanksgiving even exist, I ask you?

After the feast, with its horrible historical origins, comes talk, television, board games, video games, movies, telephone calls, emails, a Zoom conference or two, texts to your dearest loved ones.

Then, the time just runs out.

Bellow nails it with the death and anguish stuff, continuing:

For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate.

In the novel, readers witness the descent of playwright, novelist, double Pulitzer-prize winner, and overall romantic Charlie Citrine. Citrine, in turn, memorializes, in gripping detail, the break-down of his closest friend, Von Humboldt Fleisher, who he surpasses in literary achievement, fame, and success. Humboldt emanates a cruel envy. He ends up in Bellevue. He dies of a heart-attack in an alley, alone, penniless, loveless.

It’s almost enough to distract from the horror of an empty day, a day in which the emptiness promises fulfillment from retail purchases of one type or another.

Purchases never do it.

Experiences might.

But you can’t hold ’em.

Should you even try?

The Buddhists and Taosts preach against it.

All hang-ups result from attachments, desires, or wishes—all phenomena preventing you from being here now—they proclaim.

And, what if being here now feels painful?

You breathe through it.

The point of the novel, I think, as well of this post, is a reflection on romanticism.

The Romantic Period arose in reaction to the rise of science, the objectification of all things. It was a movement in arts and literature, reaching its height in the late 18th century. The artists involved emphasized inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.

For the record, then, and as evident, it ain’t always romantic.

An Ode to Dr. Larry Brooks

Fractal geometry, way beyond my comprehension, refers to how a part of an object mirrors its larger version.

In essence, then, a leaf predicts the form of a tree.

A rock predicts the shape of a mountain.

I offer one story, one fractal, as a symbol of the life of Larry Brooks, PhD.

A friend, and a fellow psychologist, Larry lost his life in a tragic if absurd manner earlier this year.

I offer an angle, perspective, viewpoint—a fractal—representative of Larry’s character.

Friends and family will gather in early December to memorialize him.

I’d go, but I’ll be out of town then, feebly celebrating the holiday season.

I’m hoping this fractal about Larry will add a memory to the dream of his existence.

Also, perhaps, it will remind readers of the preciousness of our lives.

Larry, who I’d heard of through the grapevine because he practiced in Glendale, near me in Pasadena, reached out to me after my first encounter with endocarditis in 2008. I’d had the bacterial infection, eroding my aortic valve which required surgical replacement in July 2008.

Larry had a similar medical misadventure a few years earlier.

We became fast friends, bound by the heart.

Rather proudly, we’d both taken good enough care of ourselves to avoid a heart attack.

We were blameless.

Endocarditis is like getting injured in an earthquake, we told one another.

Heroin addicts contract endocarditis, not successful, middle-aged white guys.

We don’t put needles into our arms.

Larry and I had lunch a few times.

He shared his interest in social dreaming.

Larry believed our dreams blur into the interpersonal, even the transpersonal.

Not my interest but, alas, the magical idea certainly captured him.

We drifted apart due to such our living generally divergent, busy lives.

At some point, Larry and I had a completely ridiculous argument, traceable mostly to my own anger problems. I had a stupid fight about the SGVPA. What that is doesn’t matter. Larry failed to show up for a meeting with its leaders, intended to resolve the conflict. I felt pissed off.

True to who he was, Larry owned his avoiding the meeting. He apologized, in his typically non-defensive manner. Arguments troubled him, he said. He was tired out by conflict.

We had a break-up lunch, at Stoney Pointe, in Pasadena.

However, we never really broke-up.

After that ridiculous disruption, our meetings became less frequent.

On some astral level, though, the friendship remained.

Larry ran supervision groups, provided psychotherapy, and dove deeper into his interest in social dreaming. He was an avid practitioner of relational psychoanalysis.

In November 2018, when my prosthetic aortic valve became infected, which would require another surgery, Larry unexpectedly called me.

He told me he heard about my second endocarditis/surgery “through the grapevine.”

I was frightened, of course. In a second open-heart procedure, the mortality rate leaps from three to 15 percent. It’s tough to dig through the scar tissue, the thoracic surgeon unemotionally told me.

Here on the phone was Larry Brooks, that sensitive man, that man into dreams, telling me he’d had a second cardiac surgery just the July before.

He offered to take me to lunch.

That’s the kind of man Larry was.

Here’s this old friend, now out of touch, contacting me because his old friend faced a medical misadventure like his.

Larry wished to share his experiences, to offer reassurance.

And so Larry drove his hybrid automobile out to Glendale. He picked me up at my home, mid-day on a Saturday. We drove to La Cabanita for Mexican food.

I’m pretty sure we shared something with mole sauce.

We probably shared a beer as well.

We talked for hours.

Larry told me of his second cardiac surgery experience. It involved replacing his mitral valve. “It won’t be as bad as you think,” he assured me, describing his slow road to complete recovery.

Anyone could feel the love and care emanating from this man, now in his late 60s.

The people sitting near us, the waiters, the people walking on the sidewalk, those inhabiting the greater Los Angeles area, felt the vibe.

It was just pure kindness, pure love.

It involved no quid pro quo.

Naturally, and of course, I never imagined that would be the last time I saw Larry Brooks.

After my second surgery, which went well, Larry and I shared a few texts.

Then, our roads diverged again.

Earlier this year, in March I think, Larry Brooks was killed by a speeding car.

Apparently, he was taking a mid-day walk near his Glendale office. Some kid in a Lamborghini raced through an intersection, killing Larry instantly.

At that moment, Larry was not a somebody, not a successful, brilliant psychologist and family man.

He was just a guy walking across a street.

Larry had no clue what was about to happen, that his existence would be snuffed, extinguished, erased, ended.

The kid in the speeding Lamborghini was arrested, charged with involuntary manslaughter.

It felt somehow just, even good, to hear of his arrest.

However, that kids life has probably become a disaster now.

Is that fair?

Who nows.

Meanwhile, this kind man, Larry Brooks, who managed to maintain a long term marriage, rear two children, and help hundreds of hurt souls, is gone.

Carl Jung brilliantly believed that what we consider our selves, our egos, are pure fiction.

We live in dreams.

Larry would readily agree.

Larry’s death shifted the dream world.

It left a gap, an absence, a lack.

It will never be filled.

Why?

Because there was only ONE Larry Brooks, PhD.

And his life, not only representing kindness, also symbolizes the precious, unique, treasure of this one and only life we have.

There was Larry, healthy, thriving survivor of two open-heart surgeries, just taking a walk.

Just crossing a street.

And, then…

His expiration date came.

It seems to have been painless.

Yet, it was his end, the end of that unique fiction.

What a reminder to celebrate, to cherish, the unfolding, mysterious life we live.

For sure, Larry would want us all to know that.

Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators chanted this phrase, as relevant now as in 1968, while being beaten and arrested by police outside the Chicago Democratic National Convention.

It works well as a rallying cry for our upcoming election.

Set aside the endemic corruption part of any governmental system.

Set aside the frighteningly powerful influence of corporate lobbyists.

What’s left?

Even with these and other many flaws, the US remains the world’s best experiment in democracy existing today.

Our democracy proved that, given the many flaws in the Hilary Clinton campaign, and the truly remarkable salesmanship and marketing skills of Donald Trump, the American public, or at least the electoral college, elected him president in 2016.

OK.

Many were ecstatic to bring in a businessman, a DC outsider, a new American man to clean up the swamp.

Many were shocked.

Nearly four years have passed, and any even minimally-educated person sees Trump’s true colors as:

A myopic, narcissistic, impulsive, non-cooperative, bullying, short-sighted, ego-maniacal, greedy, corrupt, unstable, exploitative, dangerous, simplistic, poorly-educated, isolationistic, autocratic, divisive, mean-spirited, racist, orange-skinned, obese, thrice-married, adulterous, nepotistic, inept, unqualified, lying, cheating, stealing, naive, tax-evading, self-promoting, opaque, phony, and unfeeling 74-year-old man.*

Unfortunately, the democratic party failed to proffer an Obama-like person of charisma and class.

However, it managed to select Joe Biden, a man of empathy and character, a hard-working public servant with nearly 50-years of experience. He is more than qualified to tackle the myriad—and some truly existentially-threatening—challenges facing our country.

The whole world is watching.

They are waiting to see if the American experiment can still work.

Only ten days to go until the world will see if our democratic system can vote out a near-evil salesman who reality-TVed his way into the presidency and, in his malignant place, vote in a truly qualified leader.

*I attribute this sentence to my finally reaching the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, entitled Penelope.