Elena-Levy Complexes Post 200

200. Elena - November 7, 2009 [Edit]

Following, I’m going to continue the exploration with the article on complexes.

Synchronistically, as I write this article, multiple examples of people becoming possessed by and en-acting their unconscious on the world stage happened for everyone to see. Tennis star Serena Williams “losing it” when she fell into a rage at the U. S. Open, Republican congressman Joe Wilson’s unrestrained outburst, yelling “You lie,” during President Obama’s speech in front of congress, and rapper Kanye West melting down and rudely interrupting and ruining country singer Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards all illustrate exactly what I am pointing at. They were all “taken over by something.”

Elena: The author here is talking about clear, extreme, expressions of “possession” but those people weren’t any less “possessed” before the outburst. If we look at my behavior on the FOFblog, following the author’s script I would have been “possessed” when I finally shouted and laughed at the audience and said I had been patient enough with them and “fucked it all” but that was simply the final expression of the “possession”: the myriad identifications that led up to that moment. ————

Jung writes, “since the world began, mankind has been possessed.” Possession is synonymous with bondage. Jung comments that in states of possession it comes down to “the same age-old experience: something objectively psychic and strange to us, not under our control, is fixedly opposed to the sovereignty of our will.” Possession means being supplanted by something stronger, being taken over and “owned” by something other than ourselves. Jung says, “Wherever we are still attached, we are still possessed; and when we are possessed, there is one stronger than us who possesses us.” We’ve all had moments where we’ve been possessed by something, where we’ve felt “not ourselves,” where we are no longer identical with ourselves. Some of us spend our whole lives living someone else’s life instead of our own.

Elena: We “spend” part of our lives resolving our parent’s “possessions”. When we can “separate” enough from their “possessions” in us, we continue to separate from the “possessions” of our clan and nation until we can reach our own pure archetype. This constant “resolving” of our ancestor’s possessions is “culture”. It is the process of life both socially and individually.————–

We’ve all had moments where “something” has gotten into us, where we feel out of sorts, beside ourselves. When deeper, primordial archetypes seize us, Jung writes, “They easily catch hold of you and you are possessed as if they were lions or bears, say — primitive forces which are quite definitely stronger than you.”
Elena: The author here is talking in an ample sense but I’d like to bring it to our smaller experience. We can talk about “primitive forces” but to understand it better, we can talk about the “patterns” imprinted in childhood. In my process one of the “patterns” that has marked my experience of “abandonement” is the fact that the people around me never have time for love, for spending time with me, with each other. When someone tells me they don’t have time, in the state of high vulnerability that I have been in, I’ve been unable to process that information with the simplicity of the fact, for me it becomes the repeted experience of the fact that mothers, fathers, teachers, husbands, lovers, gurus, presidents, and almost every authority figure that I have ever come across, doesn’t have time. When parents don’t give children time, no matter how much food and comfort the surrounding is, the child feels abandoned, the child does not receive enough soul nourishment to develop healthily. BEING with each other is a “nourishment” and it doesn’t matter whether it is our parents or friends what provide that “love”, as long as it is provided, love heals the“starvation”.

I find this crucial to our understanding of cult life because the main ingredient of Robert Burton and Girard Haven’s ACT is that they don’t have TIME for people. Whenever people don’t want to deal with a problem they make up the excuse that they don’t have TIME. For someone in desperate need of attention, that lack of time may prove fatal in a hospital as much as in a home or an office. The neglect to take care of the person can lead to death and suicide or murder. (If we remember the case of those people that show up in an office and start shooting everyone who they don’t even know but who neglected to pay attention to the man when he was desperate for it, we might understand the process better) It is those little things that trigger the frustration and despair and lead the “possessed” person to act against him/herself or others. (Dragon, is it more clear to you what was happening last week?)————–
At any moment any one of us can become “possessed” by the unconscious in a way such that a more powerful energy than our conscious ego moves and animates us. To quote Jung, “it easily happens to any one of us that we do not act through our own volition. Then I cannot say I do, but it is done through me; something takes possession of me, the very action can take possession of me.”

Elena: Just like such “possessions” can take possession of us, love too is a possession that takes possession of us. Love too can take unconscious or conscious possession of us———-

When we have fallen into our unconscious and compulsively en-act an unconscious complex, we become manipulated by more powerful forces than ourselves. In Jung’s words, a person then becomes “the devil’s marionette. This could happen only because he believed he had abolished the demons by declaring them to be superstition. He overlooked the fact that they were, at bottom, the products of certain factors in the human psyche.” In dismissing the demons as being mere illusions without realizing their psychological reality, we unwittingly become possessed by them. The demons are ultimately split-off, rejected, and disowned parts of the psyche that are experienced as alien and other than who we imagine ourselves to be

Elena: Or at the other end of the spectrum, love can take possession of us and we become creative, light, charming! The “angels”, psychologically speaking, are also very real and they alter our experience of our selves as much as of our lives and the experience of others about one’s self. If we look at me in the FOFblog I was definitely negatively possessed and it was too much for the people to take. Only a few of you were able to bear with it. Nigel in particular was able to bear with it because he’s lived through such experiences and does not judge them or is afraid of them like people who have not experienced them. A few others were able to see the positive aspects beyond them and Dragon, the very positive aspects allowing me to reach out to those aspects and project my self towards them but also become emotionally strongly dependent for some time to both Nigel and Dragon who’ve had to lead me through the nightmare of having been banned. ———-

Jung says, “As a rule there is a marked unconsciousness of any complexes, and this naturally guarantees them all the more freedom of action. In such cases their powers of assimilation become especially pronounced, since unconsciousness helps the complex to assimilate even the ego, the result being a momentary and unconscious alteration of personality known as identification with the complex.

Elena: The way they are dealing with complexes here is no different to the way “mechanicality” is dealt with in Gurdjieff’s System. Everything mechanical would correspond to unconscious complexes. The tragedy in the Fellowship cult and cults in general, is that the gurus impose a behavior of external separation from the member’s life instead of an internal “separation” and “dealing” with the complexes, programming the member to rely on the “teacher’s” will and sacrifice his own. This must be looked at more deeply because there is a very interesting phenomenon in which the “ideals” of an ARC, a human “destiny”, the saving of culture incarnates the cults ideal at the cost of the member’s development. The mass behavior of the members towards the ideal of saving humanity is self imposed and adopted, leaving the members to make supra work efforts to save humanity by sacrificing themselves. It is the mistaken belief that if they can sacrifice themselves they will be redeemed. But what allows that extremely dangerous and harmful IMAGINATION to take place is the fact that the members are so strongly under the influence of their unresolved “possessions”, “identifications”, that they SUBMIT to the father guru figure and allow him or her to subdue their will because the don’t have a will or a mature enough structure within themselves that can separate from the overwhelming conditioning of the cult life.

The internal separation from complexes or identifications that needed to take place on an individual level is taken up by the cult and lived externally by the whole group in relation to society. Instead of separating from his inner complexes, the whole cult separates from society and unconsciously blames it for humanity’s suffering that they are trying to save INSTEAD of individually dealing with their personal history and complexes and resolving them within the community and society at large. (This is the most important issue I’ve yet understood about cults).