Month: June 2008

  • Object Relations Theory

    Object-relationshipUnderstanding object relations theory gives one invaluable insight into themselves and others.

    Object Relations Theory is the idea that the ego-self exists in relation to other objects, which may be external or internal. The internal objects are internalized versions of external objects, primarily formed from early interactions with the environment (primarily parents).

    Three fundamental “affects” that can exist between the self and the other:

    • attachment
    • frustration
    • rejection

    Object relations is a way the mind organizes information. The mind is always relating and comparing what is happening to the past – looking for understanding and meaning. At a Object-relationssubconscious level, object relations is how we project the past onto the present. We rarely see others or events as they are – we see the past and interact with the past.

    Object relations are not just about people. An idea, and ideal, your car, your house, your situation – all of these are part of object relations in your subconscious mind.

    Object relations theory helps explain “our buttons” and those endless cycles we continue to go through. Digging down into the dark grey matter is not pleasant at times, but it can be freeing.

     

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  • Castration Complex

    KendollThe core of the castration complex is castration anxiety. Castration anxiety literally means the fear that one’s testicles will be chopped off.

    The other day, I was talking to a friend who related to me a dream in which he was a Roman soldier standing at the bedside of his frail, ailing, 80–year old mother. In this lucid dream, he was aware of being this fierce, fearless Centurion and yet, at his mother’s bedside, he realized she had all the power!

    As we talked about this, the castration complex naturally came up. Many people suffer from some degree of the castration complex. Notice I said people and not just men. There are phallic women who have their penises in this pot also.

    As we explored castration anxiety and it’s relationship to loss of love and power, the image of the Ken doll arose. My friend said he felt like a Ken doll standing there at the foot of the bed – all buffed out and handsome with no genitals.

    Most men I know want to hang on to their penis and testicles – so to speak. Few show an interest in discovering and exploring castration anxiety or the castration complex and the issues of love and power around it.

    It was an interesting evening sipping wine, watching the sun set on Mt. Diablo and talking Ken, castration and the missing genitalia fear!

     

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  • Psychological Splitting

    SplittingThe good, the bad and the ugly. I never thought that Eli Wallach was that ugly, but whatever.

    I seem to be more sensitive recently to how much splitting or polarity exists in the world. Good vs, Bad or Good vs. Evil seem to be at the forefront of things. I’m sure this is related to the presidential race and the never-ending, moronic, self-defeating partisan politics that we, in the U.S., are burdened with these days.

    And though political rivals like James Caraville, Bill First and others seem to be able to sit down together to sell Coca Cola when it comes to working together to resolve some of the country’s and world’s problems – the abyss between two sides each seeing themselves as right (so to speak) once again rears it’s ugly head.

    This whole good/bad thing begins in infancy as a psychological process known as splitting.

    At the beginning, in childhood, there is a relationship between the child and the mother, the parents, the environment. When the relationship is difficult or painful, the child deals with it by splitting the difficult from the easy, the love from the hatred. But to do that, you have to do it with your mind, because it is not real. You have to split your perception. You have to split your mind. You have to believe something that is not there. That is the beginning of mental structure. You have to split the reality into this and that, split mother into good mother and bad mother. Well, your mother is never all good or all bad. She is a mixture. So if you split her into good mother and bad mother, and you have to remember this and that, you are creating something in your mind that is not really there. In time, that becomes the mental relationship that you re-enact in your life relationships. So there is the idealized mother, there is a frustrating mother, and there is the attacking mother. And your relationships with those three parts are what become re-enacted in your life as mental relationships. – A.H. Almaas on Psychological Splitting

    This is not something we can blame on improper parenting, it is one of the fundamental dynamics that gets laid down in the brain that forms the rudimentary basis for discrimination, linear thinking and self-reflection. The problems associated with splitting arise as a result of arrested development – the maturation and evolution of the person and the mind stop at a level that continue to rely on “half-baked” goods.

    Maturing to the point where we can see people and situations in their entirety – the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful – is a sign of real progress. It probably won’t help to sell Coke, but it could result in the ability and capacity for more people to work together for something other than profit.

     

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  • Loss of Self vs. Self is Lost

    No-selfLoss of Self – What does it mean? What is lost? Is the experience similar to being lost?

    Buddhism and other non-dual teachings say there is no self to lose. Others say the self is an ontolgical reality that has various levels or degrees of manifestation including those bound and confined within the world of object relations and conceptualization.

    Many are seeking the True Self. Do they want to lose the False Self and find some notion of a new and improved self? I think this sense of wanting to find or be a true self is an inherent dynamic within the soul for authenticity, to be what one really is.

    It’s the concept of that “one,” the individual consciousness, that is in question here. The biggest misunderstanding, as I see it, is conceptualizing or reifying the notion of a true self according to one’s current belief structure.

    The challenge of “spiritual experience” is that it is mostly co-opted by the ego mind. Experience gets categorized and filed according to the past, the familiar and the comfortable.

    Loss of Self at the ego level is mostly terrifying as the mind interprets this as actual death or going insane or some other existential disaster.

    In fact, the experience of loss of self is liberating if one is able to relax into the experience. This involves letting go of the compulsion of staying one step ahead of one’s experience.

    Free-falling into experience as it unfolds without the immediate need to control or understand is challenging. What seems to help facilitate the process is a sense of loving curiosity that is more centered in the heart than the head.

    Looking at the world today, I can only see loss of a few zillion selfs as a positive thing. Indeed, the world might improve overnight if we forget the past and let the self go.

    Does loss of self mean loss of identity, loss of control, loss if the individual? What are your thoughts – experiences?

     

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  • Lighting Up the Now

    If we experience ourselves in our true self-existing condition, we will see that what we actually are is a being of light.

    LightSo says A.H. Almaas in his new bookThe Unfolding Now. Chapter 13 of the new book is titled – Lighting Up the Now – and is available as a free download here.

    We are beings of light in the fluid state—completely frictionless, completely luminous, totally radiant and free. Now, everybody knows that because light has no mass and no weight, gravity does not affect it. So, in our True Nature, we have no heaviness, no thickness, no weight. We are substantial only in the sense that fluid light has a fullness, a bodyness to it. But that fullness, that substantiality, is completely light and smooth. That is the nature of awareness. And because it is light, it doesn’t help us see—it is what sees, it is what perceives. Thus light, awareness, consciousness, perception, sensitivity are all the same thing.

    In this chapter, Almaas asks the reader not to believe, but to imagine – open the mind to the implications of our true nature being light.

    What are the implications of this for understanding what it means to be ourselves? If we apply it to our internal life, we can see that the more we are present and the more fully we are experiencing and being our essential presence, the more we will experience things slowing down. This seems to be a law of time—not that linear time is being altered, but more time becomes experientially “available” to us. Thus, the slowing down of our experience of time will place us more and more in the present. The more we are the presence, the more we are in the present. So, the slowness of time has a lot to do with being in the present.

  • Spiritual Light

    Spiritual-lightSpiritual Light, the Light of God, Universal Light – on the spiritual path, search or journey, we hear many things about spiritual light.

    It seems that light is part of the fundamental nature of the manifested. Some paths say sound (OM). You could argue both in the form of vibration arise simultaneously as the first arising out of the Absolute or Non-Being.

    In his new book – The Unfolding Now, A.H. Almaas has a chapter titled – Lighting Up the Now (free download). This chapter explores some of the ramifications of light as our basic nature.

    From the Big Bang to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Almaas asks us to consider the implications of being a Being of Light. What does that mean in terms of time? What about the body?

    Spiritual light isn’t something we go from here to there to find. Spiritual light is what is actually here appearing to our senses as material form.

    Jill Bolte Taylor discovered this when she had her stroke.

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