I‘m reading Emotional Genius by Karla McLaren, an out-of-print book that has two parts. The first section presents a model for the human identity based on Jung’s quaternity, and argues that our modern psychological and social problems stem largely from imbalance between the four elements of our identity. The second section presents a process for increasing awareness of the four elements, and looks at ten emotions that we mostly consider “negative” emotions to be suppressed, and how by channeling them properly we can appreciate their essential purpose and restore the balance.

This article is about the first section, since that’s as far as I’ve got so far.

I’ve written about the quaternity at least obliquely before, from a knowledge/learning perspective two years ago and in a short winter story I wrote four years ago. The diagram above uses the most widely-used four directions orientation (north at the top, and yes, some people think air/mind should be north and earth/body-senses should be south). The mapping to the seasons and times of day, and the animal identifications, are from aboriginal models, such as the Chulash.

The model asserts that in order to be whole, we must learn to keep these four elements of our identity in balance. When we are born, they are in balance, as this lovely quote from Robert Bly, cited in the book, proclaims:

From birth, we are taught to suppress and deny our emotions, and that some emotions are inherently good and others bad. McLaren asserts that all emotions serve a vital rebalancing purpose that is unachievable when we don’t allow it to be expressed naturally. So either we repress it, or we let it explode in improper and unhealthy expression. Our education system worsens the situation, and McLaren argues that our industrial-scale schools are essentially morally run by the children themselves by default (they are too big and teachers too busy to worry about this aspect of children’s “education”). As a result, thanks to the effect of bullies and other emotionally damaged and unbalanced children, we all become unbalanced to some extent.

This is one form of trauma, and McLaren believes we are all, as children, traumatized to some extent. And since as many as half of all children are sexually, physically or psychologically abused by adults when they’re young, this trauma is epidemic.

Our modern society’s way of coping with this is to live in our minds — to let the air/mind quadrant of our identities dominate. We squelch our emotions (often without much encouragement, if we suffer personal trauma; with encouragement from traumatized children and incompetent adults otherwise). We ignore our senses, replacing perception with conception (reinforced by the school system). We are taught to distrust our instincts (they are “irrational”). So we end up completely out of balance.

Children (and adults) who are traumatized by abuse, deprivation or the horrors of war tend to learn to dissociate, take themselves out of reality. This, McLaren says, is a normal, healthy coping mechanism, but when the trauma is recurrent or chronic it can lead to a chronic unbalanced identity, as emotions are repeatedly either suppressed or expressed in violent and unhealthy ways. The solution, she argues, is to learn to channel the emotion in positive ways. The tribal initiation rituals used by many indigenous communities teach this skill: the intitiate is carefully separated, then exposed to an ordeal that is modestly traumatizing, and then welcomed back in a critical third healing part of the ceremony. McLaren prescribes five exercises to teach a process to identify imbalances and restore balance using a similar ritual model (I’ll talk about them in a future article).

When our emotions are out of balance, we tend to use one or more unhealthy coping mechanisms. One of these is dissociation (common among abused children and women, and PTSD-afflicted war survivors). Others will turn to addictions, distractions, escapes, and numbing techniques.

While I don’t usually put much stock in psychological analysis, I found this diagnosis of psychopathy quite compelling. Our society is awash in addictive, distractive, and numbing behaviours, and a large part of our economy (alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, prescription and non, sugared, salted and fatty foods, pornography, gambling, day trading, shopaholism, spending and debt addiction, porn and violent entertainment, TV and the Internet all feed entirely or substantially off these unhealthy and unbalanced behaviours). Bullying and other violent psychopathy is evident in school, gang and prison culture, crude initiation rites, and the psychological violence that prevails in many homes and workplaces.

In fact, I’d go even further. I have argued before that our entire culture has become a prison culture. Just as rats in an overcrowded and resource-starved laboratory begin (as Edward Hall showed) to exhibit universal psychopathic, traumatizing and traumatized behaviours (hoarding, violent attacks, suicide, and finally eating of the young), I think our whole modern culture is expressing this mass trauma and psychopathy.

I think we’re past the point at which we as a culture can hope to restore the balance that prevailed for the first million years of our presence on Earth. But that doesn’t mean we can’t, as individuals, learn to become more aware of these imbalances in ourselves, and do some very useful personal healing.

In fact, in occurred to me that my list of the “ten things that I do” are, to some extent, therapeutic, each designed to bring my identity into balance, since like most people I have lived far too much of my life inside my own head and am therefore far too unbalanced in favour of the air/head quadrant.

I also confess that I can relate to the stories of childhood trauma, not to as severe a degree as many children faced, but enough to explain, perhaps, some of the depression that has plagued me for much of my life.

More about the book when I’ve finished.

Addendum Feb 7/09: Melinda Fleming has drawn my attention to a recent post by Karla McLaren in which she acknowledges giving up her ‘healing’ practice, and shares some doubts and cautions about how much can be accomplished using ‘new age’ methods, and some of their excesses. This is not a repudiation of the value of self-healing therapies or a wholesale embracing of more traditional methods, just a caveat that, in her experience, healing is a complex and very challenging process, and that there are no magical solutions or shortcuts.

I’ve always tried to be honest in this blog, but for the past year I’ve been deliberately vague about some of the details of my life, for personal reasons*. It’s reached the point where a certain cognitive dissonance has crept into my writing, and left a lot of readers puzzled. I think it’s time for me to come clean. So I’ve updated the final part of my About the Author bio. Now you know. With that as context:

I sent a draft of this article to six extraordinary women, because I wanted to know if they would see its contents as an act of irresponsibility, as a betrayal, or even as the ravings of someone who’s coming unglued. Their response to me was overwhelming, as has been the response of all of you, dear readers, picking up on my “cranky” intro to my weekend links post. I am so lucky to have you in my life. I am humbled by your wisdom, your appreciation, your love for this wild and inarticulate stranger who has blathered on in these pages for precisely six years now, and I have learned so much from you. Namasté. Salute. Dayadhvam.

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I feel as if I’m on a precipice. The other day I wrote a faerie story which describes this sense that, after all the changes that have happened in my life in the past three years, even greater changes lie ahead for me in 2009. Earlier this month I wrote about the desire to become light, as if (as my old friend Rayne picked up on) I was resetting, deciding whether I was “ready for the voyage”, setting my lands in order, just waiting for a sign. (For those who put faith in the wisdom of the I Ching, its counsel for me, poised on the precipice and asking if now was the time, was hexagram 14, TA YU, which would seem auspicious, a sign of sorts.)

For the last year I have been simply practicing, with no set objectives or intentions, these things:

In the process, and largely thanks to those I have come to love as a result of these practices (those in the Gravitational Community box in the right sidebar, and especially Cheryl and Tree), I have learned a staggering amount, about myself, about how the world really works, and about what I am intended to do and to be.

My instincts are propelling me forward, to make even more changes, to simplify my life dramatically, to become truly the space through which stuff passes:

I am filled with impatience, with fury, with a sense that my own fears are holding me back from this journey, from what comes next, what is meant for me. What underlies that fear is all the gunk that I have acquired over the years, gunk telling me what is the correct and incorrect way to behave, and live.

That gunk has a name: Culture. The very word, with its agri-roots, implies control, tending, keeping in line. Culture tells us what others have a right to expect of us, and what we must do to live up to those expectations. Culture tells us that the punishment for not doing these things is social ostracism — loneliness, unacceptability, unpopularity, reproachment, exclusion, abandonment, rejection and punishment. You must be obedient, says our culture, or there will be dire consequences. Without us, says our culture, you cannot survive — you will starve, freeze, wither away. You will be left alone.

It’s a compelling argument: Those of us who have studied how the world really works, and imagined better ways to live and make a living, all acknowledge that love, conversation, community, and collaboration are essential elements of the way forward, that we have to be together and work together. If our culture imprisons us, separates us, we have no hope. We have to stick together, stay within the culture, work within the system.

There is no reason, we might think, why we can’t create our own communities outside or on the edge of that culture. Yet we cannot. Our culture holds all the cards — it controls the education system, the political system, the economic system, the technologies and infrastructure. It is the author of the language whose structures and meanings wire the very neural paths of our brains from the moment we hear and speak our first words. We dare not walk away unless and until we have nothing left to lose — until the risk of trying to make a bankrupt, crumbling, crashing culture last a little longer exceeds the risk of starting all over, with nothing. And culture of course is all of us, our peers, our families, those we love, not just those with proportionally more power and influence, not just them.

And the counter-cultures lure us like sirens, telling us they are different, that if we join them we are fighting the system, when we are not. The counter-cultures are so steeped in the monolithic modern human culture that they can’t see that they are just a part of it, co-opted, inadvertent pawns that lull us into believing we have a choice, that there are alternatives, when there are none. Heath and Potter in The Rebel Sell:

The answer does not lie in activism, in counter-culture, in revolution. Despite Heath and Potter’s wishful thinking, solutions “compulsory for the entire population” will only be forthcoming in a totalitarian state, and then not in the interests of that population. And certainly the answer does not lie in technology — as John Gray has argued so eloquently, every new technology creates many more problems than it solves.

The answer lies not in salvos from, or experiments on, The Edge, but beyond it, over the edge, the precipice. And, horror of horrors, we have to go over it, plunge into the abyss, alone. We have to walk away, and start over. Give up on everything we believe, everything we fear, scrape off all the gunk that is sticking to us, holding us back. Inviting those we love to walk away with us, knowing that they will probably decline, because they are still addicted to the culture, still believe that counter-culture, elections, revolutions, activism, collective consciousness, education, faith or technology will somehow work, transform the culture in time or allow some tiny new culture to survive in its nuclear shadow.

It is this cynicism about working within or against the system (it is all one and the same) that, perhaps coupled with my inherent laziness, has caused me to give up my ambitions to do the hard work so many people want me to start, to lead. Just damned well do something, they implore. When I put “building working models” on my list of things to do, my ‘intentions list’, my instincts cautioned me, told me there was something wrong. My sweet spot, they reminded me, is imagining possibilities, not realizing them. I’m a writer, a dreamer, an artist, not a builder. Like Colleen, I like to start things, but have no stamina for the shovel-work, the sweat, the waiting, the negotiating and problem-solving, the damned details. (Alas, I lack Colleen’s wonderful sense of humour about it all.)

So I’m crossing that item off the list of things I practice doing, and now the list of practices is entirely, well, impractical (or if you’re British, impracticable). So if you’re waiting for me to stop talking and do something concrete, something physical, better give up now. Other than words and ideas, my practices have no product.

So what does this mean, this walking away, this jumping off the edge, this starting over? While I’m still unsure, I think it might entail:

What might this ‘walking away’, this ‘starting over’ look like? Evelyn walked away, I think, a couple of years ago. Her blog was transformed from Silicon Valley marketingspeak to a nomad’s mystical, colourful explorations of meaning and declarations of wonder, and then, more recently, dwindled to a trickle. She gave away everything she owned and now travels, lightly, where her heart tells her, with no destination, no home. Cheryl walked away, last August, and is embarked on an exploration around Australia with her beloved Marlo. John Francis is an environmentalist who not only walked away, he took a vow of silence for 17 years (thanks Tree for the link).

The idea of living in a one-room cabaña or yurt in some warm rainforest (the one pictured above was where I stayed in Central Belize last year), near the beach, naked, eating local vegan food with a few nutritional supplements, blogging and writing fiction, saying nothing, and paying attention and exploring and learning about my immediate ecosystem, falling under the spell of the sensuous, really appeals to me. A footprint as small as humanly possible. Inviting people I love to come and stay as long as they like. Maybe that, instead of an intentional community, is what I should walk away to, where I should start over, and how I can be, simply, a model. And perhaps one month a year I should select and travel, by foot, around one area far from this tropical home, just to learn, to connect, to get new ideas to write about in my fiction. Sound familiar? Patti got me started thinking about this.

I don’t know. But let me know what you think anyway. Call me irresponsible. Call me lazy, romantic, nihilistic, escapist. Tell me this is not a natural life, because I’m using my savings to import a few things I can’t grow locally, or because it’s antisocial, misanthropic. I can take it. I can still be persuaded not to jump off the edge, not to do the ten things in the list above, not to start over, and instead to stay in our culture’s gravity. It’s pretty comfortable here on the ledge.

But it’s no longer such a long way down.

* Basically I didn’t want my ever-worrying father to know about the breakup, because he means the world to me, and he’s been so ill and stressed this past year I didn’t have the heart to tell him the relationship he thought was so perfect, and so good for me, is no more. Tonight I spoke with him, and he’s fine with it. Whew.