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[Rant-mode…. activating… can’t……. control…… must…… ELABORATE….. long…….. message…. ALERT ALERT]
Hi Sypha,
I just wanted to respond to your (obviously heartfelt) message with some general thoughts and pep-talkery.
In my experience (I was raised semi-catholic by my Roman Catholic Dad) it seems that the fundamental tactic of the catholic church is to make you feel deeply, bodily guilty about yourself. You are a sinful little creature and that’s just the way it is. This is a mechanism meant to anchor a deep-seated fear and respect for authority in the populous and hence to make it easier to control. Most importantly, it denies that you are capable of thinking for yourself. I mean, who gave this bunch of ageing, celibate, all-male transvestites the right to dictate the way you and I behave, who we fuck, when we can go where, what we are allowed to think about?? The pontif is infallible, so the theory goes. But who apoints the pontif? The council of cardinals. Well, how do we know that they are infallible? And so on; you can go on reasoning like this and become stuck in an infinite regress, with no solution.
You just have to keep reminding yourself of this stuff, you know? You’re a powerful, emotional, sexual, rational, amazing being. No less than a work of art. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a raving cunt. Dogmatists will always be mistaken (woops, was that dogma?) because they are coming from a position of absolute and unmistakeable truth. They have The Truth and anyone who disagrees must be a terrible person or a heretic. The only dialogue that would be possible here is one where you are told what to do. Which, strictly speaking, isn’t even a dialogue at all, (that presupposes that you have some sort of chance to respond/engage). Never mind how ludicrous or repugnant the doctrine you are arguing against, you will always be WRONG beause you are disagreeing at all. The important thing is to avoid being drawn into this game/matrix – full stop. Lift your frame of reference ‘outside’ of it where you can apply another, more coherent way of looking at your experience – perhaps you want to apply a magickal filter, or a humanist one, or a buddhist one or a communist one, or a …….
Although I do realise it’s not as easy as that at times. Hmm. Mainly because you are fighting against your own body and it’s conditioned fear-reflexes. Anyway, while I am loath to suggest that there is an author out there that can ‘make it all better’ for you, but let me suggest someone you might want to think about reading:
It was your physical reaction to the residual cathologuilt that made me think of the books and lectures of Robert Anton Wilson. I don’t know how much you now about ‘Old Bob’, but he was raised an Irish Catholic in 1930’s New York and rebelled against it (in theory, at least) from around his adolescence. However, it wasn’t until he had undergone radical amounts of bio-energetic psychophysical therapy (in his 30’s, I think) that he realised he had never been free of the ‘clutches’ of his catholic past – He realised that he’d been spending much of his time subconsciously preoccupied with the demons and anxieties that had been foisted upon him at childhood by a group of emotionally stunted nuns – essentially he had imprinted the ‘info-phobia’ reflex that tells you that the world is essentially a dangerous, unfriendly sort of place and that you should be very careful ‘out there’. This had, in turn, exacerbated loads of his physical ailments such as post-polio syndrome, conjunctivitis, eyesight problems, muscle fatigue, stomach cramps, all kinds of shit.
Anyway, i’m running on the assumption here that you’re not familiar with Old Bob, so allow me to recommend 'Cosmic Trigger' (there’s threee books, but the first one is probably the most powerful). Wilson expounds in some beautiful writing his own relationship with catholicism, the bio-energetic therapy he underwent (developed by Wilhelm Reich) and subsequant breakthroughs and how this allowed him to activate the magickal and intuitive ‘circuits’ in his brain. The parallels with your situation seem pretty close.
Sorry for the rant, but I can’t seem to write anything in small portions.
Sunny Jim |
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