As I heal from the cult experience one of the things that I can observe clearly is that I am recovering the ability to connect to people. To call them and have informal conversations and to care about how they are, to give them energy and not reject theirs or be indifferent.
It clearly feels like healthiness. I am feeling good with myself and as I feel good that awareness for others is possible. Just last year and for many years before that I had lost the ability to contact people. I would not call anyone. What I wish to point out with all this is that when people are very hurt they can’t give and have great difficulty receiving. As if after a while of being neglected people become so insecure about themselves that they keep ratifying the fact that they are not worth the attention from others in every encounter and have a myriad ways of making that happen. Put that in the reel of those who end up shooting people in the streets and you’ll see what is actually happening to them: simple lack of love and contact.
One of my attitudes was and tends to be that people don’t have time for me so if I am going to ask anything from them it must be “important” so that they know I am not wasting their time. As I recover, “important” is just feeling each other’s company. We are having a ball with my godfather who is very aware of the joy of such a thing. After eight months with diarrhea and in bed last year he has gradually been recovering and we can now sit in a coffee shop for a while. I kiss him, hug him and touch him very often and he is the most gracious man I’ve known!
Working with the autistic children and the children with down syndrome what is becoming more and more clear is that the ideal is to reach a point in which we can not only receive but give, both of us. Both receiving and giving are very difficult for people with difficulties in the sphere of their I. It’s interesting that the child with down syndrome that I worked with today, had so much more ability to receive than the autistic child with which I worked who tends to be very unstable and violent but never the less managed to soften out and relax. It is a wonderful thing when they do that and it isn’t at all easy.
Giving and receiving are things people who think they are healthy take for granted but almost everyone I observe has great difficulties both ways and in each sphere of interaction we could eventually point out how the “gift” is incomplete in the different partners.
I would like to carry out a more detailed study of Ton’s and my interaction so that we can look at how we use language to attack each other’s I and what we would need to avoid to let and help each other be. That whole recent interaction with the fofblog has some wonderful ingredients that can allow us to study the inability people have to give and receive, including my self who, instead of following the conversation with Thot Plickens who was receptive, continued being defensive with Ton who was aggressive. It is also notable that the moderator is so overcome by his own biasness that in banning me he was unable to even address me and say, Elena this is not working and you’re banned and give an explanation of why he was doing it, he had to treat me as if I were the object of an experiment and not a person and stated the “Elena experiment is over, I don’t have time for diplomacy”. He had already labeled me and defined me in a place where he would not have to deal with me as another human being so that he could just ban me like an object. If a moderator doesn’t have time for diplomacy, why is he even moderating which is precisely the Art of Diplomacy? When we emailed each other about my returning to the blog, what I understood we had agreed on was that as long as I wasn’t aggressive with other writers I would not be banned but although Ton and Nigel were very aggressive to me, it was I who got banned. It is very good to observe these things so that we can understand how independent individuals act in “unison” when they share an attitude against someone else because it’ll give us concrete insight into how bullies actually behave in Schools in our present times so pervasively that young children are committing suicide.
To round up the ideas, I am trying to establish frameworks of possible exploration. The ability to give and receive in no matter what context is the issue and how that ability is affected in human interchange: in physical contact, in a dialogue, while eating around a table, in a classroom, in the streets in traffic as much as people walking, as doctor and patient, …. This study would probably be around the revivification of Ethics.
That’s nice! I’d never understood what ethics was about and the idea that ethics is the art of being with each other is… beautiful!
On these blogs we can also see the many difficulties we have to give or receive. One aspect is that people have tremendous difficulty in sharing themselves. There are huge areas they seem to need to hide and present only what they think is “approvable” in public. Some talk too much about their own self and the others reject that, others only talk about others negatively while still others can only address subjects in general terms but never actually stick themselves in it or some talk about ideas but hardly anyone actually dialogues.
Where I am aiming at is the idea that a true dialogue vivifies all the individuals involved in it just like children “playing”, fortify each other. That the dialogue itself has a power of its own, a power that not only does not belong to each of the individuals or both of them, but that has its own sphere of action which is actualized by the participation of the individuals but at the same time is independent of them. Just like a game which exists when the players play it but is at the same time independent of the players. Tennis cannot exist without the players but it is also not subjected to those players and what tennis does for the players in the physical sphere has objective consequences for both players just like a dialogue has objective consequences for the people participating in it. The “life” for the body that the exercise gives tennis players is equivalent to the “life” for the soul that the dialogue offers the speakers. Those two different “LIVES” that tennis and a dialogue give out have an objective reality that can be qualified as clearly as if it could be quantified. That is what we’ll be able to assess clearly in the Age of the Logos.
These things might seem obvious but what is not obvious today is that we are not practicing activities that vivify us and are therefore starving our selves of life. Individualism means that people are living on their own, even if they are with other people most of the time and have lost the ability to connect so much so that when they connect the interaction tends to deplete them rather than vivify them. We can see this clearly in the fofblog when it tends to die and in Ton and my recent interaction. That disconnectedness is deadly and the suicide and homicides so current in our Age of Desolation are the result of such disconnectedness. I’m talking mostly about people in cities, who work all day trying to be efficient and who are loosing contact with their families who they have come to perceive as a superfluous and often uncomfortable interruptions.
No matter what activity we are doing, people in the western world have lost the vivifying connection with LIFE in loosing the sense of “COMMUNITY”. We can see “community” in the way musicians from India interact with the public. Amongst the public, the “master” is always accompanied by some of his apprentices who will together with the public express their admiration with loud sounds that act as inspiration in a dialogue of love. They mutually feed each other and in that dialogue the master is able to be the medium for the music that is a “creation of the moment”, an improvisation following certain rules. So every “raga” is an original “raga” and “creation” vivifies the participants as it plays itself out. Behind this practice is the understanding that NOW is NOW and has never happened again or will ever happen after. That LIFE IS IN LIFE, not in the individual who is its recipient as much as its giver but who CANNOT vivify himself or others by shere credit as is supposed to happen in false “authorities”. What makes people “authorities” is their capacity to transmit LIFE, not their title.
The poverty in the west lies precisely in the fact that teachers think students have to be quiet because those are THE RULES and order the rules because they don’t have the power of love to silence the listeners into receptivity. Likewise doctors, politicians and even artists often have to rely on the institution and not their own capacity to keep the public in its “place”. The illness in our societies today is that life is in prison and free people are banned.
Through a true author, life lives itself out and all in the concert are “blessed” with it.
An author is at the service of life while a dictator and a false guru condition “life” to be at its service. That is authoritarian power and it is institutionalized in society in the forms of behavior people must adopt and in the people themselves. “Authorship” is an aspect of love and not of power because in true creation what an “author” has the capacity to transmit is “LIFE”. We are starving in the Western world because true authors have no role and are banned from the status quo and the institutionalized cult to power. People who can speak are those that have submitted and that need to submit others to feel at ease to speak. Those are one and the others are those who are making money for someone and then are also granted the privilege to speak. What is killing us is that we’ve institutionalized “life” which is why the internet is the most democratic invention of our times and might free us from the “institutionalization of life”.
FREEEEEEEDOM!! Freedom for life! That is always what the heroe dies for.
It is always good to be with you!
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