Of all the strange stages of being human, old age seems the most odd. And neither philosophy nor reason offers much help.
Here I am, with diverticulitis (‘You must eat fiber. You must not eat fiber*’) and agoraphobia (and really what is there to go out for?); growing physically weaker; lonely and bored, mainly bored; and no obvious need for me to be here.
I never used to ask, ‘Why am I here?’ The question never arose. I had purpose in learning and later in writing. But now?
Sometimes it seems that my continued existence as a human being is simply an animal process (George Frankl once mentioned that the human skeleton could last for 140 years - which interestingly is exactly one half of the Biblical three score and ten) and apparently has nothing to do with human free will. When I continue this train of thought, I think that I would gladly move on to the next stage of existence which must be more exciting than this. But then I become afraid.
Boethius’ in his Consolations of Philosophy ‘argues that despite the apparent inequality of the world, there is, in Platonic fashion, a higher power and everything else is secondary to that divine Providence’**.
Frankl talked of the Life Force and said that the energy released seeks form. I must assume that energy released sought the form of me; and accept that when there is no form of me, the released energy will seek another form.
It is an exciting thought, and it is difficult to wait. But I must be patient.
* US spelling from US websites ** Wikipedia
NB I write of my own experience; doubtless many other old people enjoy themselves!
On Being Old 2
Geewhiz.
This is the way it seems to me:
that in older age, from about 45 to 50 and on, the individual replays significant incidents in his or her early life, both phylogenic, and ontogenic;
that an individual who has endured ontogenic, personal, trauma in infancy, which remains unresolved, will of necessity relive those events. As we are aware, the species continues to relive phylogenic traumatic events.
It seems that to relive events is a factor given in nature, as it were; that human beings must relive past events; that to relive these events is part of being obedient. We must obey the mother.
I have observed individuals reliving traumatic events from infancy: one grandmother reported that her very young granddaughter kept saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ The grandmother reported that the child said this in a terrible voice and with a terrible expression on her face. It became clear that the grandmother’s own mother had become destitute and contemplated suicide, and had told her child, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ in a terrible voice and with a terrible expression on her face. So the grandmother relived that early experience by repeating these words in this expression to her granddaughter. For more than seventy years this woman had kept the traumatic event in her unconscious, but had eventually revealed the event to her granddaughter; and then to me. (I was able to reassure the child’s parents.)
And often in the past I have observed mothers behaving to their children as their own mothers behaved to them. In the past I did not quite understand what I was seeing.
In my own case, now, I see that I am repeating events of a traumatic time in my own family. I was a strong and healthy child; mother insisted that I was weak, and kept me confined to bed at the slightest sniffle, and restricted my activities (‘Be quiet! Keep still!’) My mother was exhausted, and I guess felt the need to contain me. But life for me then was very, very dull, frustrating and difficult. In my condition now, I see that I am repeating that phase of my infancy. During the day, I am listless and very bored; I am physically unwell, and must grasp the fact that my energy now must be contained as it was then, so that I become physically ill. But in the evening I become better, livelier and am able to work, to paint. From this, I understand that my beloved father came home from work and gave interest and activity to my life, and took my desperate mother’s attention away from me. I am reliving past events, but exactly.
As a child, I consoled myself with the thought, ‘When I’m grown up …’ Now that I am old, I console myself with the thought, ‘When I am no longer human, I will be free,’ and this thought delights me!
But it is not quite healthy.
Over in Eire, the south of Ireland, there has been a successful referendum to legalise abortion. But in Ulster, Northern Ireland, there is discontent among both Catholics and Protestants who do not want abortion legalised. Ulster is the only part of the UK where abortion is still illegal; it is appalling that anyone should tell any woman that she must bear the child she is carrying. It is degrading to the woman. But from my stand point, it is worse that an unwanted child should be brought into the world. It must be that the anti abortionists are victims of the myth that all mothers feel overwhelming love for all their children, which we now know is not the case.
An unwanted child is a disgrace to humanity and to the Life Force.
On Being Old 3
Some time ago, I mentioned that we relive the past in old age. We relive the ontogeny, the individual experience of growing up; and we re-experience the phylogeny, the evolution of our species. It is necessary in this work to distinguish the ontogenic from the phylogenic. In this work, it seems natural to me to use my own experience of infancy, and I am able to see that some of what affects me now is the breakthrough of aspects of my own past. However, it seems equally clear to me that much of what I am experiencing now is phylogenic, relates to the experience of our early ancestors when they were the equivalent of infants now of 3 ½ years old.
At 3 ½ years old our infants scream in rage and terror. This is a breakthrough of the repressed memory of an ancient trauma.
At 3 years old our infants relive the glory days: the phylogenic trauma they experienced at two years old is now in the past, the difficulties have been overcome, they are on top of the world! Then suddenly at 3 ½ the infants are overcome by terror, and rage.
We may understand that our early ancestors at the equivalent age were enraged by a new trauma; that their rage was partly a response to a sense of betrayal; they sensed that they had been betrayed. And there was further maturation delay. But we will understand that the rage was mainly a consequence of terror.
From my own experience, I now understand that our early ancestors at this stage were trapped between hunger and great fear. I do not know precisely what caused that fear, a sudden ice age, very probably. Whatever the natural disaster was, it made getting food very difficult; and we may speculate that it is here that they were compelled by hunger to hunt the great beasts, to organise the hunt, to risk their lives in a very hostile environment, to kill and eat other creature in order to survive. They had lived well and been happy, and we may well understand their psychological conflict in a time of such danger. Human nature is fundamentally good, and we may well understand that the campaign of killing other living creatures further distanced our ancestors from the reality of life, as one of many species. The trauma was conflict added to conflict. (Incidentally, I do not condemn people now who eat meat, as long as the animals are well cared for while they live: as we see, our survival depended on eating meat.)
But I do not yet understand this awful backache. It has been speculated by many that backache is the result of coming down from the trees; our ape ancestors were not made to walk upright, nor to walk for distances, and this is surely a factor in backache. George Frankl mentioned to me that backache was associated with constipation. On consideration, we see that there are different types of constipation: difficulties defecating is the most obvious; then there are the moral and emotional difficulties, when we cannot digest the horrors of our civilisation; the harsh lessons of our phylogeny; and for some of us, the harsh lessons of our ontogeny. And there are two other factors: the sense of carrying a great burden, too great for one back; and the knowledge that one’s free will is limited, even overcome by other individuals, by our early education, by our civilisation, by our phylogeny: we may not, are not allowed to, are prevented from doing what we want to do; we may not be ourselves. All these factors may cause or contribute to backache. And the cure is? Why, to recognise the causes, face the difficulties, analyse and understand and so resolve them.
And the breathing difficulties? Fighting for breath in the middle of the night, choking and gasping? For me, it is a lifetime of repressed memories. breaking through in symptoms. Others have asthma, which you may see discussed on the net. But what causes asthma? They say it is an inflammatory disease, but what causes the inflammation?
We are the architects of our own lives; but Ego, the Dominant Ego is not a good architect. Would one choose to be ill? Would Ego make the decision to be ill, to suffer? I think it would be a pernicious nonsense to believe so. But there is some part of my being which has decided, has chosen to be ill. When we are ill, we are told that we must fight; Ego says we must fight the illness. But that is to fight oneself. It is more promising to learn to understand the roots of illness.
When I was nine years old I had bronchitis, the same symptoms which I have now, fatigue: the tight chest, difficulty breathing, congestion of mucus, and constipation - a quick search of the net does not show a connection between bronchitis and constipation, I have always inferred a link.
So what was happening to me in my life at 9 years old? I was back from Switzerland and living in chaos with my parents, where I had to share a bed with my 15 year old sister who very much resented the arrangement; my father had become a Catholic and sent me to a convent school, which was very bad; as a new girl I had no friends; the beautiful little girl had died in the ‘care’ of the nuns. Not a happy time. And it is no wonder that I found life so frustrating and frightening that I found it difficult to breathe; my spirit withdrew and my body became restricted.
And what was happening to our ancestors at the equivalent of 9 years old? They were in the middle of the long period spent at Olorgesailie making stone axe heads, which psychologists call the latency period in childhood. And at this time in our evolution our ancestors were in a continuing maturation delay: they could not have children, which means also that they could not have the comforts of sexual pleasure. As soon as I learned of Olorgesailie, I recognised it mirrored in our own modern lives: the years of boredom spent in school, mostly inactive at a desk; the years spent labouring in factories each worker performing the same small task day after day, year after year, or in offices typing endless meaningless correspondence and reports, which no one properly reads, which are filed and lost in archives, or spent in endless dreary humourless meetings; the long dispiriting journeys to and from work. And though we are more relaxed about sex in western society, we officially want our children to go to university, continue in education, which is maturation delay. Wasted life.
Being old, I re-experience the difficulties of my childhood, and that in turn is a re-experience of events during human evolution.
Not very encouraging! But it must be examined; so many people experience so many difficulties when they are old, and as we see, when they are young, too.
Life is not meant to be suffering. Life should be glorious, or at the very least pleasantly interesting.
I do not know of a quick cure of our human ills, but I do know that our human lives and the life of our planet would be much healthier and more pleasant if every child born was wanted. I wasn’t wanted, and I cannot see that my parents wanted many of my siblings. And I know that my siblings didn’t want me! My two full blood sisters had witnessed the death of their baby brother when they were toddlers four years before I was born, and when I came into their lives, they were terrified that it would happen again. My very presence represented horror to them.
From time to time, I read or hear of the bond of love between siblings, but my own experience and my observations of others, make me think that loving bonds in families are rare. I have witnessed the distresses of infants presented with the reality of the new baby; I’ve witnessed terrible brutal behaviour by young children on younger siblings; I’ve observed older siblings systematically destroying the character of younger siblings - and I have experienced some of this myself. And I know that the older siblings are obeying the unspoken wishes of the mother.
It has been too easy to talk of bad behaviour in children, to lay the blame for family distresses on the relationships between siblings. Now that George Frankl has proved that human nature is fundamentally good, all babies are born good and loving, we must revise our thinking.
Though some men do behave badly to their wives and children, are brutal and drunken, it has been too easy to lay blame for family difficulties always on the male.
Within the family the mother is the single most important person in the world; the mother is the power. It would be very wrong of me to blame my mother for the distresses of our family. She, poor woman, was abandoned at the age of six months by both her parents, sold to the grandmother so the parents could start a new life with the older children in America. But even without this, it would be wrong to blame the mother. It is wrong and actually stupid to lay blame: laying blame leads to protestations of innocence and pointing the finger at someone else - ‘It weren’t me, the baby done it’ - laying blame does not help resolve the difficulties.
We do not lay blame. But we look for responsibility. The mother is the power, and mothers must take responsibility. Recognise that being a mother is very difficult; do not have a child if you are unsure that you can bear the responsibility; and if you do have a baby, know for certain that your baby loves you.
Seven and half billion humans are on the planet; our sheer weight of numbers is killing off our fellow creatures here. We are destroying the world, and we are very often very miserable!
Frankl once decided to have a t shirt with the message Let the People Think; he asked me to design it to his specifications; another of us had it printed; we tried to sell it.The People weren’t interested. Oh, do please let us start thinking.
On Being Old 4
But memory is not a separate part of the human psyche. Memory is a given in nature, all creatures have memory. It is important that we recognise that we are not to blame for our memories: we have memory.
A rescue cat exhibits extraordinaray behaviour whenever any large and loud voiced man is brought into her home: she rushes around as if she were trapped, running up and down the stairs as if in terror of the man, and though the door to the garden is wide open, still she darts around, showing that she is very afraid of such men; this cat is calm with small and soft voiced men; and we may recognise that she has been very badly treated by a former owner, who was a big and loud man. The birds in the garden, and the fox, and other wild creatures, all keep clear of human beings; having learnt that we are dangerous, they remember. We do not say, therefore, that remembering is a function of the Freudian Id, or the Dominant Ego, or The Myself, or of any part of the human psyche.
Indeed, the Dominant Ego spends a lot of energy ‘forgetting’, blocking traumas, both phylogeic and ontogenic traumas, and it is this attempt to block memory which causes so much of our difficulty. We cannot ‘forget’; memory persists; and though Ego pushes bad memories underground, those memories breakthrough in perverse behaviours and in illnesses. The attempt of the Dominant Ego to suppress bad memories, also impacts on good memories, so that pleasure is denied. We must bring memory to consciousness, so that we may analyse, understand, overcome our difficulties, and learn to trust and enjoy life.
On Being Old 5
Experience of ontogenic trauma, particularly in infancy, leaves the individual more vulnerable to, and more aware of, phylogenic traumas - though we are all vulnerable to those dark aspects of the evolution of our species. It seems that an early trauma tears the fabric of the child’s natural confidence and feeling of universal well-being, so that the security of life and love itself become questionable.
The phrase Second Childhood describes that state in old age when the individual seems to regress to infancy. Nowadays we are more likely to hear the words dementia or Alzheimer’s than Second Childhood; old age has become pathologised and many individuals very much fear dementia in its various named forms. Old age, as so much else, has also become chemicalised - research shows changes in chemicals of the brain, and the pharmaceutical companies make huge profits. George Frankl recognised that chemical changes are a result of changes in the way the individual thinks, rather than the other way around: chemical changes are not a cause, but a result, a consequence of changes in thought processes within the individual.
Human nature is fundamentally good, all babies are born good and loving. With Frankl’s proof in mind, we may begin to recognise a positive in Second Childhood; we may begin to see that The Myself seeks to re-emerge from the decades of subservience to the Dominant Ego. We may then see that symptoms of what we call dementia result from this struggle between the Dominant Ego and The Myself. It is a struggle between parts of the individual’s psyche.
One of the function of the ego, as Freud observed, is naturally to teach the young. A function of the Dominant Ego, perhaps the main function of the Dominant Ego, is to repress. Our early ancestors suffered from terrible events which they could not understand, which they felt guilty of having caused, and which they could not resolve. The ‘solution’ seems to have been to deliberately ‘forget’, to push all the terror, guilt and rage deep into the unconscious, to try and deny that the events happened, and thereby ‘prove’ we were not guilty. We see very clearly from our behaviour as a species, that this solution has not worked.
One outstanding problem of this policy of repression, is that anything associated with the original event must also be repressed, until for many the experience of being human is something like living by a black hole into which everything disappears. I have used before the example of mother and toddler walking in the park; the child goes ‘missing’; the frantic mother eventually finds him gazing enraptured at a bed of flowers; the mother is harsh in her relief, shouts at him, calls him a very bad boy, and says, ‘You must never do that again.’ The child has been looking with love, body and soul taken up, at a bed of flowers. The most important quality in the child’s life, any child is love. And the child is emotionally far more involved with feelings than with words. The child in this case interprets his mother’s angry words, ‘You must never do that again,’ as ‘You must never love flowers again,’ to ‘You must never look with love again,’ and eventually, ‘You must never love again’. Her anger with what he knows to be loving behaviour, brings love, the goodness of love, into question.
The Dominant Ego provides compensations and throughout our lives we try to accept these compensations for the loss of certainty our species has suffered, money and status, ambition etc, the striving for which becomes a black hole into which everything may be sacrificed, see Frankl’s The Failure of the Sexual Revolution.
And all the while, all through the wars, the politickings, the struggles, great disappoints and some achievements, The Myself is trying to find expression, until in old age many begin to question the Dominant Ego and its compensations, may begin to see that ‘all is vanity’, and that the compensations do not compensate. But it is difficult to question the Dominant Ego; the taboos are very strong, very firmly set in our collective human psyche, and we are as a species very afraid.
In the end of course, we all die and are free. But meanwhile it is the work of The Myself to consciously seek a way to bring the Dominant Ego to a clearer understanding of what life is really about.
On Being Old 6
We must be very brave when promoting the idea of the one child family. Mothers can sometimes get upset at the thought, and some do take it very personally.
One older woman I mentioned the idea to, said, ‘But I’ve got four children!’ and she looked at me very reproachfully.
Another older woman who reads this work and has a fine reputation for goodness and wisdom, does not promote the idea of the one child family; she told me that she is afraid of her daughter who has five children, and does not dare to upset her daughter.
But of course, the one child family does not act retrospectively; there can be no suggestion of that; but a hope that starting now, women will limit their child bearing to one.
I hear all sorts of things. A woman who mentioned a man with no siblings and had to bury his parents alone; the speaker was horrified at the presumed loneliness of the man. (But doesn’t he have friends? And doesn’t that woman know how lonely life is for many people who have many siblings?)
On the BBC news website there is a feature on the one child family in Europe. Though the people interviewed seemed loving, the thread running through the piece was money.
There was a TV documentary about 10 years ago, which showed footage of a large group of children about 3 years old. These infants had been sold and were being trafficked, but were intercepted at the border, somewhere in the Middle East, I think. In Africa or India - sorry to be so hazy - a mother was interviewed, and said she had sold her 12 year old son to a local fisherman. In some cultures, large families are seen as necessary because the children are expected to provide for the parents: the more children you have the richer in money you will be eventually; and never mind that meanwhile the parents and their young children live in great poverty. And there seems to be a large number of women in some countries who see themselves as farm animals, producing children as marketable products, from which financial profit is gained. And, of course, girls are literally sold to husbands. This is a sketch of some activities in poor areas of the world.
We all know that sex is sometimes sold for money. But children and money? This must be challenged, in rich countries as well as poor countries.
I had a conversation with a woman who was the eldest child. She complained that her siblings had made her life miserable, and she agreed that the one child family was the best idea. We’d been talking for about half an hour, when she said, ‘But of course, if you can afford more children that’s okay,’ as if all the psychological distresses among her siblings were unimportant.
I am the youngest of a large family and I do believe that I should not have been born: a huge amount of real psychological misery would have been avoided if my parents had stopped at one child.
But this almost universal confusion between children and money is devastating to the well-being of the species, and the planet.
People obviously do not think about the morality of it. People do not question the link between children and money. This link is so deeply engrained in the human psyche that it apparently seems ‘natural’. It is not natural.
We know that there is an almost universal link between faeces and money. We may therefore recognise that the link between children and money comes from a confusion in the psyche of our early ancestors between the vaginal product and the anal product.
A few years ago, I had an image of a female ancestor; she was intelligent and beautiful; but she was confused; she indicated something in the undergrowth which had come from her body and which caused her confusion; but I could not see whether what she was pointing at was her baby or her faeces.
As both Sigmund Freud and George Frankl observed faeces = money. But children/faeces = wealth? It seems preposterous, but the link is there.
The link is obvious among poor communities who sell their infants and children. It is less obvious in the richer world, but the link is still there: the link between finance and children - can we afford to have a child? - is clear. Added to the link between money and faeces, we recognise that children are confused with faeces.
On Being Old 7
It is a moral question. That ancient female ancestor knew that she was good, and it puzzled her that any product from her body could be bad; at that stage of our evolution, faeces had become bad in the understanding of our ancient ancestors; and that led to the doubt of the goodness of the baby, the other product from her body: as if she were saying, ‘I have produced the badness of the faeces; the baby is also from my body, so how can I know it is good? Can my one body produce both good and bad?’
At two years old many of our infants suffer constipation. We may speculate that this doubt began to afflict our ancestors at the equivalent era of human evolution. We may consider that a traumatic weather event led to a change in diet, which caused digestive difficulties in our ancestors. We may understand that at this time food was scarce, and that our ancestors poisoned themselves trying to fill their bellies with unsuitable and indigestible stuff. We may recognise that they felt bad, that is they felt unwell, and that the bad feeling in their guts became confused in their minds with a bad morality: they felt bad - ill - which made them feel that they were bad - immoral.
We have earlier in this work speculated that gold came to be seen as the idealised faeces. But we may understand that the moral confusion relating to the two bodily products, the baby and the faeces, has not been resolved.
I read the newspaper every day and am increasingly demoralised. Does Jeremy Corbyn know what he is doing? Doesn’t he understand that anti-Semitism is a curse? Tyrants come in many forms, but Corbyn seems an unlikely tyrant. Or is it simply politics? Is the Uk Labour Party so desperate to get into power that they use whatever means seem likely to get them into power? Like the Blair-Brown administration which gave us such disasters as the Iraq war and the selling off of the gold reserves at the lowest market. Or perhaps Corbyn is merely a puppet figurehead, with puppet masters pulling his strings. We watch them strutting and smirking and we recognise the signs of tyranny. The UK Labour Party wants communism in the UK and the leadership seem willing to embrace anti-Semitism in order to get communism.
The increasing nastiness of behaviours here and in many countries, the smirking and strutting, the anti-Semitism, we may recognise that all these perverse behaviours are caused by a deep dark fear, which lurks in the human psyche. And I do not understand this fear.
The fear itself is very real. We give it different names. All the common phobias which so many people suffer from, the agoraphobia and claustrophobia etc, these are manifestations of the fear. And we may consider that all our perverse behaviours come out of this fear.
The great fear is, of course, buried in strong taboos: we are so afraid that we seek to protect ourselves by burying the fear in a deep well of taboos. To cure ourselves we must understand the fear, and to do that we must face the fear. This is not helped by certain experts who insist that they are right. There is a common fallacy that childhood memories are implanted: that someone who says that he or she can remember being two years old, or younger, must be mistaken and is only remembering what adults have talked about in later years. This is simply not true. Individuals can and do remember incidents from very early life, incidents which have never been discussed by others, sometimes tiny incidents which only the individual was aware of. Neurologists who dismiss such memories because they have not found neurological evidence, are looking in the wrong place. An infant who has not yet suffered the phylogenic traumas has a different brain structure from older individuals. Or, to put it the other way, older individuals who have suffered the effects of phylogenic traumas, have different brain structures from infants who have not yet suffered those effects. The effect of phylogenic traumas changes the brain structure.
And do other animals suffer the great fear? We all endured the conditions of evolution.
The fear is real. Are the causes of the fear real? We have projected the fear outwards and have produced the angry Goddess and the angry God; we have produced enmity, war and all the ghastly, barbarous cruelties. We have projected our fear onto the natural world and onto each other.
The fear is internalised: it lives within us, where it causes physical disease. And the fear seems impervious to reason: we may tell ourselves that it is not real, but we don’t believe it!
It is as if we have been asked to do the impossible. And what is that impossibility?
One of the effects of psychological trauma is that the affected individual believes himself or herself to be responsible of causing the event. One of the effects of those early phylogenic traumas was that our ancestors felt guilty and denied themselves pleasure, including the pleasures of loving. The impossibility is then that we seem to be required to live without the vitally necessary pleasure of love.
We are fundamentally good, but we cannot be true to our fundamentally good selves without love and the pleasures of love. It is well known that perversity arises when love and the pleasures of life are denied. Where the confidence in the goodness of self is undermined, where the anal product becomes bad and is confused with the vaginal product, where we are doubtful of love, then we are faced with a terrifying dark nightmare.
It may be that some individuals are satisfied with loving God, and it seems true that some are satisfied with love of money or of power, but the majority are dissatisfied. The majority want simply to love and enjoy the pleasures of love and life.
On Being Old 8
And then there is the equation love = money. Women are bought for sex; the dowry, bride price, and in prostitution. Payment in cash or kind gives the man the socially accepted and legal ‘right’ to have sex with the woman. You may say that sex us not love, but sex is one of the natural expressions of love, and the equation love = money stands.
It is often said that gold, money, is compensation for what we have given up, and I have believed this. But now I speculate that gold, money was originally seen by our ancestors as a cure for their psychological distresses.
In the infancy of our species, as an effect of traumatising events, our ancestors were compelled to change their diet, and suffered digestive difficulties as a result. We may speculate that while experimenting with different foods, they poisoned themselves, and that eating new foods often caused constipation: they could not properly digest what they ate, though they must eat. We may well understand that our ancestors at this phase of evolution were often very uncomfortable in their guts. We may speculate that gold was pointed to as the ideal faeces, the beautiful, luminous, golden faeces of the goddess. We remember that our ancestors were in the infancy of our species, and responded to events as infants among us do now. Our infants now, if they are lucky, have a kind mummy and daddy to help them through the difficulties of growing up. But our traumatised ancestors were the mummy and daddy, and did not have the benefit of a kindly adult to help them. The responses of our traumatised early ancestors were infantile, and we may recognise that our ancestors came to feel that the golden faeces of the goddess would cure the distresses that they suffered in their guts. Gold became magic.
The human brain is very complex.* It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to track the progress of our human relationship with gold - money. But somewhere in all those physical twists and turns in the brain is the evidence of the thought processes, the impulses, and the desperation of our early ancestors. And somewhere in the comples human brain is the pathway of the confusion between the vaginal and anal products, which seems almost to have resultsed in greater value being placed on the money rather than the baby.
We find that money is everywhere, in everything we do. We are trapped in a giant spider web of money. I cannot eat without money, be clothed and housed without money, I can’t even wash without money unless I live by a stream, because water is sold to us (and soap isn’t free). And as we see from the statistics, life = money: the wealthy live longer than the poor. So we have become entirely dependent on money - gold.
I do not suggest that we suddenly stop using money: the shock would be too great, and we would be in chaos. But I do know that we must learn to understand our unhealthy and weird dependence on money, and begin to look for other ways of sustaining life.
------------ *Neurologists measure the brains of infants using the adult brain as the standard. Perhaps by using the infant brain as the standard, the neurologists might find surprising results in the adult brain. Measuring the adult brain against the infant brain, neurologists might well find evidences of the effects of early phylogenic traumas.
On Being Old 9
Babies obey the mother. Babies and young children believe what they are told by the mother and other adults in the family circle, and older children. The lessons learnt in infancy become ‘the truth’ which usually remains throughout life. This accounts for many ills in our global civilisation, including anti Semitism.
The anti Semitism in the UK Labour Party may be caused partly by cynicism among the leaders of the Labour party, who may reckon on gaining more votes among Muslims than from Jewish people, simply because there are very many more Muslims than Jewish people in the UK. But if there is widespread anti Semitism among UK Muslims, that is due to early teaching by parents; the child reckons, ‘Mummy says the grass is green, therefore the grass is green. Mummy says they are bad people, therefore they are bad people.’
But there is something else going on, something much deeper in the human psyche. we may see that hatred of and discrimination against people of different race, colour, nationality or creed, is a sign of fear. We are afraid to love.
No. That isn’t true. We do not love each other. We love things fearlessly. Many people love money. My mother loved money. She was a generous woman, and offered to give me money every time I went to see her. I always refused, until one day I said yes; my mother immediately looked very sad, her eyes got bigger and her face grew longer and sadder; until I had to laugh and said, ‘It’s alright. I don’t want any money!’ And she was happy again and said, ‘I don’t like giving away my money,’ like a confession. She loved her money; she worked hard for it, and tended it carefully, nurtured it; she was too canny to put all her eggs in one basket, and squirrelled it away in many different banks. There are many people who love money, and it’s real love.
We love things: clothes, paintings, cars, houses. Books. All kinds of things. We love our pets. My mother loved her money but she couldn’t love her children; or to be more precise, she couldn’t show her love for her children. Perhaps she did love us, but she kept it a close secret.
Of course, my personal experience colours my perception of the world. I am aware intellectually that there must be parents who do love their children; but I know there are many parents who do not. The baby loves but too often the mother does not return the gift; and following her lead often the father and older siblings do not return the gift.
In the first part of this long, long work I have written of the causes of our difficulties in expressing the natural love, the love that we are born with; that we are afraid. Our fear of loving each other is one of the after effects of those ancient traumas, and is part of the Great Fear. We can overcome that Great Fear only by learning to love ourselves and each other. Sadly, we are trapped in a very vicious cycle.
There isn’t a quick fix, there isn’t a magic key to unlock our fearful hearts. But we can help the species and particularly the children by limiting each family to one child. Singletons may fantasise about how jolly life must be in a big family; but from observation, I note that single children are more confident in adulthood. The single child has confidence in its place, its undisputed role within the family; and this confidence is never undermined by the birth of one or more younger children. The single child is never hurt by ghastly ‘sibling rivalries’; the single child is never confused by multiple split loyalties. There psychological advantages of being a single child and what are the disadvantages? Loneliness? Friendship dispels loneliness. And many individuals with many siblings suffer profound loneliness and isolation inside the family.
Earlier in this work we have discussed the origins of anti Semitism, and seen that it may have arisen during the later matriarchy, at a time just as the Thaw began when the behaviour of the leading matriarchs became impossible; we may well speculate that they demanded terrible sacrifices; and we may understand that the wife of Noah recognised that she must get her family to safety.
But the Great Fear is much older than that period. And our terrible habit of destruction through the natural world started much earlier than the end of the last ice age. (Search: Hunters, not climate change, killed giant beasts 40,000 years ago.)
It seems either that we like senseless killing, or that we try to overcome the terrible fear by killing off ‘the other’, the giant beasts, the Neanderthals, anything in the natural world which we feel menaced by - which is practically everything in the natural world. And we looked for human scapegoats, too.
A man (with two MAs) asked me what I write about. It’s a puzzle how to answer that question. A man with two MAs has some education, after all, but what does he know? So I said social psychoanalytic theory, and then added that basically it seems that humanity is suffering from post traumatic disorder.
But that does not excuse our perverse behaviours. I am so terribly distressed by the attitude of the present leaders of the UK Labour Party. How can they be so base?
I am English and grateful to be English. We no longer rule the seas, we don’t have an Empire any more, we’ve lost that overweening power. And we’ve certainly made mistakes. But we stand for something, some sliver of morality, and if that goes then I fear for the world. I do believe that by its grossly immoral attitude, the present leaders of the Labour Party put us all in danger.
On Being Old 10
For several hundred years, Christianity and Islam were at war; the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which was Muslim and reported to be brutal occupiers, conquered much of Europe and were evicted only in 1922. Now, with mass immigration of Muslims into Europe, we are all expected to forget the past and live peacefully next door to each other. This is quite a tall order.
However, there is one great advantage of the Muslim migration into Europe: whether we are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Agnostic, Atheist or everyone else, we are all able to begin to see each other properly.
We cannot prove that God or Allah exists; we cannot prove that God or Allah does not exist. We must acknowledge that the idea of God or Allah does exist in human consciousness.
The Holy book of Judao-Christians is the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. The Holy book of the Muslims is the Quran. All these works are said to be the Word of God or of Allah; and all these works are open to interpretation: human beings interpret the Word of God and of Allah.
For instance, hijab, which is related to modesty. There is hijab of the eyes, where men are told that they must not look lustfully at women to whom they are not married. Muhammad tells men to guard their eyes and their private parts. Muhammad tells women also to be modest. One interpretation that I have read, says that Muhammad means that a woman must cover her breasts and her private parts. As far as I can find, Muhammad does not say that women must be totally covered from head to foot, and this total body covering of women seems to be an interpretation of the Quran. Interestingly, it is said that women must extend the ends of the headscarf to cover their breasts, and from this we may recognise that wearing the headscarf pre-dates Islam, and may speculate on the origins of the headscarf: it may be that wearing the headscarf was originally meant simply to keep the desert sands out of women’s hair, or we may speculate that wearing the headscarf had significance in pre-Islamic religion. I have read that Muhammad does not mention female genital mutilation in the Quran; though some Islamists claim that Muhammad did mention FGM elsewhere. I strongly speculate that FGM is a pre-Islamic religious practice.
Anyone who worships God or Allah recognises that God or Allah gave women their bodies; it is blasphemous to mutilate what God or Allah has given.
On Being Old 11
Sometime in the 1980s George Frankl talked to me about the angry goddess, and the ancient practice of sacrificing the beautiful young man, to the goddess so that his fresh, young blood will feed the earth, make the earth fruitful, a ritual of the late matriarchy. Frankl mentioned the myth of Dionysus, who is torn to pieces by the infuriated Maenads, but he is reborn and suffers the same fate over and over again.
With the coming of patriarchy, the dominance of the gods over the goddesses, such rituals would cease. But Frankl drew the comparison between Dionysus and Jesus, the god made man; his worshippers eat his flesh and drink his blood, and adore him while he is forever dying in the agony of crucifixion. We see that patriarchy did not succeed in preventing such rituals.
We are told that the goddess Athena had no mother but was born from the head of her father Zeus; and we may recognise that Athena was a patriarchal goddess. The Erynnes, angry goddesses, insisted on blood vengeance, and Athena sent them underground, but she did not defeat them; she promised them that men would still worship them.
And in our own time, a beautiful young man is sentenced to 1,000 lashes, the sentence to be carried out over 20 weeks, starting in January and ending in May. It seems very clear to me that his judges are unconsciously sacrificing him to the ancient matriarchal goddess, so that his blood will make the earth fruitful.
A week or two ago in Pittsburg, a man murdered 11 people in a synagogue, and wounded many others. He said ‘all Jews must die.’ Many of the victims were elderly; the people were attending a religious service. Was the gunman really so terrified of these inoffensive individuals that he felt he must murder them? Perhaps he was.
Is it possible that anti Semitism arises out of the unresolved battle between the matriarchy and the patriarchy? Over 3,800 years ago, the Jewish people began to worship the one God. They were the first to turn their backs on pantheism, the first to accept the idea of a single God. While the Jewish people honour women, they do not have goddesses. Is that why so many people over so many centuries have persecuted the Jewish people, while at the same time saying that they accept the Jewish idea of God.
We know, you and I, that the goddess does not exist. But we may speculate that in the unconscious of many individuals and groups, the goddess does still exist and that they feel she might still be angry. We may recognise that many people still may feel that they must appease her.
On Being Old 12
We may assert confidently that the goddess does not exist, but we must acknowledge that the idea of the goddess does exist. And we must recognise that there are different interpretations of the idea of the goddess.
A recent photograph of Jennifer Lopez shows her half naked and draped in a green cloth. Her body is very toned; she is wearing very high heels, which separate her from the ground somewhat; her head is haloed by the wall decoration behind her; and the expression on her face is aloof, distracted, and perhaps serene. I surmise that Ms Lopez is representing her interpretation of the idea of the good goddess.
On the other hand, we have the Incel movement; the young men who are angry because they are involuntarily celibate, and they blame women; they seem to feel that women are being intentionally cruel by refusing to have sex with them. We may speculate on the way in which the men of the Incel movement might view the goddess; perhaps with a mixture of desire and loathing.
We would do well to recognise the power of the idea of the goddess. Humanity is male and female. The male god supplanted the female goddess, when patriarchy replaced the matriarchy; and we have discussed the causes of the rise of patriarchy. But the goddess was not destroyed: she was sent underground. Patriarchy has protected women, but has also perhaps overprotected women, and women naturally resent the chains. Fighting will not help; understanding on all sides is vital.
———--
Look out for phylogenic behaviours which we have not discussed. For example: some children of 10 years old do suddenly break out, they seem to regress to an earlier phase of development, have tantrums, become unruly; this behaviour is not universal among children of this age, but it is not uncommon; I know of three instances, a girl and two boys. One of the boys, the youngest in his family, had an older brother and sister, he was sent into the system, taken to a child psychiatrist, ‘analysed’ and drugged; the other boy was the middle child with an older sister and a younger brother, and he suddenly became difficult, didn’t want to go to school, hated his lessons, and only wanted to play football; his father reported that the school wanted to have discussions, get the child to see a psychiatrist and so on, however, the father was alarmed and determined to solve the matter himself, he bribed all his children to be ready in time for school and to behave well when they were in school, the boy soon became tractable, but the father was still worried that his son might be unstable; he discussed the difficulty with me, and we saw that the boy was frustrated by restrictions at home imposed by someone at home, ie his mother or sister, and by the restrictions placed on him at school by his teachers; and that there was nothing wrong with the boy who felt that he didn’t belong anywhere, wasn’t listened to, and was simply kicking against the pricks. The third of these examples, was very frustrated by the strict limits imposed on her by school and by her many older sisters, but fortunately avoided the system.
Where does such behaviour among some ten year old children come from? At 10 the child is in the middle of the latency period. The latency period represents a long maturation delay. We have discussed that the latency period coincides with the period beginning 900,000 years ago, which our ancestors spend making stone hand axes at Olorgesaille and similar sites. We may very well recognise that after hundreds of thousand years some of our ancestors became highly frustrated sitting making stone hand axes, and that they broke out, challenged the matriarchal rule and tried to break free. We recognise that the rebels were unsuccessful - the latency period did not end until puberty finally ended the extended maturation delay.
There are other clues to our phylogeny in the behaviour of some young children, and older children, which may be identified and analysed. Arson is a terrible crime, but we must recognise that in our history the role fire maker and fire keeper was vital to our ancestors; the fire maker was highly respected and valued. Now, anyone can strike a match and make a fire, and in millions of homes there is no need of naked flames at all, we have gas and electricity. A person whose ancestral role was as keeper of the flame is rendered useless. By all means punish the crime, but understand the history.
————--
I keep thinking of an event when I was thirteen. In my parents house, we had a small child and her carer visiting. My parents, perhaps another adult and I were in the living room chatting, when the toddler came into the room. She was very cute, a real poppet. She came in very self possessed, stood in the centre of the room and ordered us to be silent. We stopped talking briefly but someone said something, and the Poppet became cross and again made us be quiet. She stood and scowled imperiously at us, while we sat obediently quiet and looked at her. The Poppet then leaned back and tumbled over. The spell was broken. We laughed, not unkindly, and the Poppet laughed, too.
To our eyes, she was a cute little child; within herself she was a serious person with some serious purpose.
Why did three or four adults - counting my 13 year old self as an adult - why did we obey this little child? We did obey, we weren’t playing, we obeyed the mini tyrant. And exactly how old was she? Not 2 years old, because she wasn’t yelling; not three years old, because she wasn’t dancing about unable to sit still; not three and a half years old, because she wasn’t screaming in rage and terror; and certainly not older than that. Perhaps she was nearly 2 years old, or perhaps nearer three years old. I do know that the Poppet had difficulties; her father was entirely absent, and she was now separated from her mother, being looked after by an older woman, who was kind, but not the beloved mummy.
Why did we obey her? Why do adults obey tyrants? Did tyranny start when our ancestors were the equivalent of 2 years old, reeling from the shock of phylogenic trauma? Did some individual stand up and say, or intimate, ‘Shut up and listen to me!’ ?
In some way, this incident with the Poppet seems to be connected with my current state. It seems that the ages and events of our human phylogeny are playing out within me, and that I am unable to resist the re-enactment within me of these events in human development. It is as if all my ancestry is crying out for recognition, and for resolution of their difficulties. It is, after all, my job. But I do think that being old weakens resistance. When we are young, we are equipped with blindness to the horrors of the distant past, and the Great Ego determines, or tries to determine, that we do not feel the pains of our ancestry. But Great Ego weakens with age.
We know, anyway, that the Great Ego does not prevent ‘it happening again’. We are very often reminded of ancient events by present behaviours. In old age it seems that we have the opportunity to look at those ancient disasters and try to understand what went on within the psyche of our early ancestors.
————--
Always remember Frankl’s proof: human nature is fundamentally good; all babies are born good and loving.
And always remember Frankl’s method: reason with love.