Four Sins – Broken Bonds

Joseph Chilton Pearce spoke and wrote passionately on the way medical-technological birth negatively impacts what was generally termed ‘bonding,’ the continued merging, shared meaning, and reciprocal dynamic imprinted during pregnancy and extended after. Bonding, in this primal meaning, is not simple affection. It is an identity-defining, and self-world view forming “experience,” not something abstracted by the intellect, as a name and social expectations. (see Pregnancy, Birth and Bonding and Bonding and the Intelligence of the Heart.)

Themes: 
bonding
self image
culture

A Simple Case of Mistaken Identity

You will not find a more distilled or concise description of our personal-global challenge:

Without bringing about order inwardly, psychologically, you cannot possibly have order outwardly. And the crisis is there. We think the crisis is national, economic, social and so on. The crisis is not out there! The crisis is really inward and we’re unwilling to face that.

J. Krishnamurti
with Michael Mendizza

Themes: 
culture
freedom
self image

Natural Giving

Years ago I described two feelings or perceptions of self or me-ness. The first is a physical proprioceptive-self. That is, the feeling of this body separate from and moving in the larger environment. And, there is an autobiographical-self, the accumulation of associative past experiences, pleasers and pain, fears and joys, the latent memory of which stimulate or trigger, the re-membered past in the present. And, of course, the abstract intellect then creating personal images of self, that is me, from these collected ghost images. Though discrete these two ebb and flow moment by moment, forming what we call our social ego.

Themes: 
self image
nurturing

Who Are We Really?

If there is a common cause for our individual, social- cultural and global pathologies it is simply that we are not who we think we are. A wise Tibetan close to the Dalai Lama noted: ‘egos exploiting egos is the source of all our problems.’

We hear a lot about egos and egotism but I challenge anyone to actually identify and find his or her ego. You can’t. It is not an entity independent from our imagination. What we think of as our ego exists only as our personal virtual reality and yet it is the source of all our problems; very strange, indeed.

Themes: 
self image

We can't solve a problem at the level of the problem

Forgive me for restating the obvious. It is really very simple. Rape, domestic violence, child abuse, depression, addictions, chronic anxiety, fear, rage, most chronic diseases; diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s, many hormonal cancers; breast, testicular, heart disease, ALS, attention disorders, bullying, gangs, male-female inequity, poverty, the failure of education, corporate exploitation of human beings and the environment, you get the point, are expressions of failed or impaired capacity to relate nonviolently with other human beings, society, culture and with nature. All are attachment disorders, attachment being attuned, empathic, respectful, caring relationships.

Themes: 
culture
parenting
self image

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