Danse Macabre

As I was writing a blog that explores my views on Self-system, itself a pretty elusory task, I realized that there was certain literature I wanted to read so as to deepen the vision I have prior to formulating the first written statement. So I have spent the entire month on reading some of the books, the result of which I will attempt to present in a future post. This theoretical research was the main reason for the large time gap between posts here.

Yesterday, my friend and I spent about an hour at the local History of Religion Museum, which is located very close to my house, just in 5 minutes of walk. Strangely enough, I have never been to that museum before. Although, in some sense, this is pretty explainable, given the case I live in the City of Museums, with literally hundreds of museums being unvisited by me. I wanted to see one Buddhist exhibition on Amitabha's Pure Lands, which is considered as an ontological variation of Paradise in Buddhism, whereas, as far as I understand, according to a post-metaphysical perspective the Pure Lands in question are in fact quite specific domain of altered consciousness tapped into by the means of meditative practice; it seems to be a foundational plane of realized, becalmed consciousness which can be reached during dying.

However I may be mistaken in my interpretation and its details; and it was only the superficial experiential impression I've got during a meeting with one Tibetan Lama who introduced some preliminary Vajrayana practices at a seminar I accidentally attended (it was organized as a preparatory class for initiation into Phowa practice, which I didn't go to anyway). Incidentally, talking to this Lama and witnessing his work was very pleasing. Very, very modest man, indeed. It was intriguing to notice that all the (archaic) rituals are needed mostly as an exterior appearance, a sleight of hand for entertaining the public's attention, while "all the true stuff" was done mostly by the contemplative and psychoenergetic activity of Lama's mind going into profound altered states.

Unfortunately, the Museum's Buddhist exhibition was closed that day, so we were limited to exhibitions on Shamanism, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Early Christianity, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Western Christianity, and Islam (including a tiny little section on Sufism, a very interesting esoteric contemplative discipline within the Islamic movement). We didn't think the overall impression of the exhibitions was satisfying: the most fun stuff in the history of religion, such as gnosticism and isichasm, wasn't even mentioned. The tiny section on Sufism was boring. Neither did I find anything on Meister Eckhart, my transpersonal favorite, although there were a few exhibits on Serafim of Sarov. There was also an exhibition of Viktor Vasnetsov's unknown religious paintings, which I observed with mixed feelings (this famous painter tended to paint faces with weird, bizarre, mad, hysterical eyes which seem to be very far from spiritual grace and peace).

The brightest experience of the Museum, however, was the picture of Danse Macabre, the famous Dance of Death, the great equalizer in the face of Non-Existence. This very notion is so wonderful, so powerful, so multifaceted, and in a way so liberating that I was reading some of the poems beneath the pictures of people dancing with skeletons with a joyful smile on my face.

Emperor, your sword won’t help you out

Sceptre and crown are worthless here
I’ve taken you by the hand
For you must come to my dance

Death and dying can be fascinating. Carlos Castaneda wrote in his books that death is always the best ally in living. In the face of death everything that you think you are and everything that belongs to you transmutates and shakes off its appearance, beneath which there is nothing but a grinning scull which then itself slowly decays until there is only the whisper: "I am no thing." The silence prevails throughout.

Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experientia fallax, judicium difficile

It is striking how ignorant you can be about the nature of your relationships with others. Especially with those who are close to you in some way. You can be in a very friendly relationship with somebody, a relationship that seems okay both to you and seemingly this other person, and yet, as, for instance, Freud noted, there is much more hidden beneath the surface of water; and the visible tip of the iceberg is just a partial and misleading appearance. Once you go deeper, once you dig up archeological remains of your past that resides in your life here and now and then, once you understand and appreciate yours and others' early traumas, you become both fascinated and terrified by what you have blindly denied, projected, swept under a carpet of your defenses.

In the early years life seems simple. There is Good, there is Evil, however you name it. The system you are identified with seems good to you, anything else is bad. People around can be good to you or bad to you. You define people through their relationship with you and your relationship to them. Psychoanalysis says it starts with the Mother: a caring Mother is the image of a Good Mother; a non-caring Mother is the image of a Bad Mother. The same mother manifests to you as two different persons: the one that is Good and satisfies all your needs, and the one that is Bad and doesn't. Sometimes this dichotomy seems to be able to follow you through life, perhaps dividing it into black & white stripes similar to a piano's keyboard.

Later in life the understanding emerges that not everything is about you, and your judgments are just judgments that can be right or wrong to some extent—or both, or neither. Some people are definitely more kind to you than others; some have a more negative attitude toward you; and most just don't give a shit about you. You look around yourself and can find no good, no evil in its absolute form. You still try to make judgment calls, but they don't seem solid to you. Everything looks relative, and you know you can be wrong, and you may even choose to look at things positively, to expect good from other people, and to blind yourself toward evil. This naivete can be very strong, until there is a crisis in your paradigm, the crisis of accumulated awareness regarding anomalies that don't match your expectations of being with others.

Everything looks relative, and yet there is human drama. There are no bad people, and yet the deeds of some of them are terrifying. In many ways, Hollywood has simplified it all extensively. Life is not a Hollywood movie, it is more like a Greek tragedy, it is more like the greatest play that could have ever been written by Shakespeare. In real life, in true everyday drama it is never obvious who your enemy is, for there are no villains with the letters E-V-I-L carved on their foreheads. (Well, some can have swastikas there… but this is just a sign; and the rest relies upon the one who interprets. Most are simply not fluent in psychopaths' language.) You can hardly make a definite judgment about the essence of a person, for human personality is so complex, paradoxical, and multifaceted. And yet once in a while your life depends upon your making a judgment call. It is not easy to know who are false prophets in your living, however "by their fruit you will recognize them." And, as I recently discovered, there is more to that advice than I thought before.

There would be no human drama, if everything were evident. If there were only the good, the bad, and the ugly, you would always know whom to shoot. But there aren't; and you don't. It is impossible for your enemy to betray you, you would expect that; and it would make no sense to call thy enemy's deeds "betrayal." In fact with an enemy you speak in terms of war, not betrayal. It's all quite sincere and straightforward. The very definition of betrayal is that it is done by those from whom you would never expect that. All human drama that directly involves you is created by thy neighbors. Look at the people who surround you. You would never see that coming, that is the point. Look in the mirror. Oedipus killed his own father and fucked his own mother, unknowingly. Stop fucking people close to you—or if you think you can't stop, at least do it consciously, sincerely, without deceiving yourself.

The very art of deception is in making you deceived. People are naturally two-faced, they tend to have many faces. Id, ego, and superego are just three of the most known subpersonalities. There have always been large amounts of data in clinical psychology on so-called manipulative and exploiting types of personality. All their life, from the early childhood (when this could have been important so as to adapt to a pathological social environment) these people have been trained to deceive others, to show them false appearances, to appear before you in sheep's clothing, to be your greatest friend, and to exploit you. In the field of human drama these are professionals. Such people consciously and unconsciously find your weak spots and use them, and one of the basic mechanisms for this is exploitation of transferential/countertransferential dynamics.

If one, for example, has an especially pathological narcissistic personality, that person will easily find ways how to make others serve him or her. Sometimes they do it unconsciously for their egos; in many cases, they learn how to manipulate their unconscious so as to create extensive networks of lies. They can build cults and/or businesses around it by being a "charismatic" leader and making other people do hard work for them through finding weak spots in their personalities. The transference-based deception may last forever, especially if you yourself have serious unsolved issues (such as victim patterns); but when you become aware of the transferential phenomena and break up the pattern, this person will instantaneously recognize the danger you bring to his or her system's stability; and you will be immediately discarded from it by the narcissism's immune system, without any mercy and self-doubt whatsoever. Furthermore, if that person, in addition to being narcissistic, is also highly dissociative, he or she may as well simply dissociate the entire narcissistic schemata, rationalize a sudden loss of a close one, and eventually maintain a good self-image (or at least persona).

How to recognize such a person? Look at the deeds of the overall self, not just the words of his or her persona or social mask. Look both closely and from distance. Look into yourself as well. See the relationship dynamics between you and the other, especially it relates to those who are most important to you. Feel into the body sensations and gestures that you engage in. Hear the words and the inner dialogue spoken. And finally awake to the pattern.