Everything that breathes is holy. William Blake
I am everywhere. The ocean is my blood, the hills are my bones. August Strindberg
It would appear that nothing is immune from man's pathology of shrink-wrapping and packing and boxing in, not the self, not children, not Christ or the Buddha, not anything. The Buddhists speak of 'monkey-mind', the grasping, attaching pathology of a mind that has been hemmed in too much by convention, construct and code. I believe it is now worse than that, because let's face it, in the Buddha's time, there was a lot less of the flurry of nonsense that we now see today, a lot less boxes. There was no IKEA or WalMart, or Amazon, or Ebay.
Today, man suffers from a self-imposed 'Ikea-Mind' which, as it suggests, is flat-packed, filled with a set of abstruse instructions and a how-to manual, and is invariably missing a vital component. It also takes ages to put together. That's to say nothing of the box it comes in, which also, precluding a PhD in cardboard engineering, takes a lifetime to open.
Man hasn't just allowed his multiple in-boxing to happen by those out to profit from our soul's downfall, but he has positively egged it on, bamboozled as he is by the instructions and the promise of product. He has, furthermore, vacuum-packed it - this mind - so that it is a sort of standalone entity completely closed off from everything else. Gone is the open-flowing system - the healthy breathing (holy) entity - and in comes the hermetically sealed closed system, so closed that he actually encourages the destruction of the environment that feeds and waters him and allows him to breathe.
‘We live in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking’, writes Ronnie Laing in The Politics of Experience. ‘When the ultimate basis of our world is in question we run to different holes in the ground, we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations. We attempt to live in castles that can only be in the air, because there is no firm ground in the social cosmos on which to build'.
More boxes to hide into, more boltholes, more corks and plugs...
In Glasgow, there is an expression to be 'oot yer box', usually referring to an ecstatic experience involving controlled substances. However, the controlled substances are not entirely necessary. When I myself indulged in taking ecstasy and other drugs, I often thought that the drug itself, the pill or capsule or tab, was simply a 'key' that unlocked the vital chemicals already present within you. To a large extent that particular insight was true, and it is thus possible to get oot yer box without taking drugs, to be ecstatic without the need to 'pop an ecky'. It requires, however, more than a few days to master this Way, more than just a little discipline to engdender it. In fact, it requires a complete turnaround of one's mind and an ongoing correspondance with the greater self which in turn involves the gradual unpacking and putting together of Mind, not one's own per se, but simply Mind all and one. To be sure, it's a lot easier popping a pill, and we only have to look at the state of our chemically induced society (the Pharmaceutical Companies are our real governments!) to realize how dependent we have become upon them, and correspondingly, how lost (mindfully) we have allowed our selves to become.
The mindful person truly has to abandon society at every level, has to go out on his own, leaving behind pathology and sickness, and artificially induced health, to become whole again. He has to commune with birds and trees, collect his self at the coast and in the hills, if he is to understand his own naturally ecstatic essence. This all involves working for one's self, and thus giving up all work outside that might hinder this. The sage and the poet, and let's not forget the shaman, (and we're not talking in any commercial sense here), needs space to breathe, to allow his self to rise to the surface, fully; his relatives before all else are space and silence, solitude and song. The moors and the hills are his studies; his books more important than any of his two-legged friends.
Ecstasy is a long time in the making, but make it he will, and when eventually he does, it is there for good. No pills, no drugs, no boxing in is necessary. All becomes clear. Man becomes his essential self: the ecstatic visionary. Blake said as much when he referred to men living too nervously, locked in to the endless hellish cycle of 'getting and spending'. Everything that breathes is holy, he wrote. But man is no longer so, because he has flat-packed his self; he has sold it out, desecrated it; he has had all the life sucked out of it. Man is no longer whole, but a set of instructions, a series of pathologies on two legs. Mental Health is the new big business of the 21st century. Mania, now, like homosexuality, is an accepted flaw.
The madmen we institutionalise are not really mad. It's just that, through our madness, we think them so. But it is really us who are mad. Ronnie Laing made a case for this, as did Foucault, and Cooper and others. But no-one listened. Instead, they all went back to their newspapers and televisions. Camus was to write in La Chute (The Fall): 'A single sentence will suffice for man: he fornicated and read the papers'.
At roughly the same time, Ronnie Laing stated his case for the fall of the human:
[W]e have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and ensure the minimum requirements for biosocial survival - to register fatigue, signals for food, sex, defaecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing. Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.
Within the howling busy-ness of the city, of the family, of the media, of all those frequencies forcing themselves upon you, it is nigh on impossible to hear yourself think, nevermind to find your way back into the exacting silence of Mind. The self becomes desiccated, shrivelled and shrinkwrapped in an eco-nomics devoid of ethics and ecology. Indeed, eco-nomics becomes so separated from everything else, it deserves another name. From the autonomous is born the automaton. Man is now a solid commodity, farmed and sold as a fully-fledged machine. Human experience has thus been colonized. We have the commodification of the experience of space, of the experience of time, the growing desensitisation of self through technology.
There are people in those institutions, some of the ‘schizophrenics’, the ones with monstrous conglomerations in their heads (look no further than Walt ‘I contain multitudes’ Whitman, or August ‘I am the hills’ Strindberg), who are the sensitive ones, the ones who know that deep down something is seriously wrong with the way things are, but ‘lack the mind’ (amentia), and the conventional cognitive wherewithal to express it. We think them mad for it. But really, it’s only that we, the sane ones, are more easily led, more outwardly subservient, often to the point of servility and obsequiousness.
I have always thought that we in Glasgow have no excuse for our madness, in spite of our industrial heritage and all that. We are surrounded by hills and lochs, by nature in abundance that hasn't yet fallen foul to the demented profiteers. We have some of the most exquisite coastline in the world right on our doorstep; we have some of the finest libraries too, Glasgow University (a cathedral of cathedrals), and The Mitchell (the largest reference library in Europe), as well as countless excellent smaller ones by virtue of Glasgow City Council. We have no excuse living in Glasgow to be so bloody ignorant of our selves. [We also have a very generous welfare system! that can help us in those time of unavoidable (!) unemploy].
So start stripping the layers that have been heaped upon you; tear them off these masks and constumes. Get into the hills, and down the coast; develop your relationships with silence and space, solitude and song. Question all who try to encumber you, for they are the enemies of Mind. Forget about the accumulation of stuff and money!
Identity (and Mind for that matter), you will soon realise, in your increasing nakedness, is not what you put on, it's what you take off.
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