A friend of mine posted a link on my Facebook wall the other day to an interview with Adam Phillips. Here are my thoughts on this interview:
I really like his observation that if you have to wait too long for satisfaction, you will kill the very thing that would satisfy you when it finally shows up. So true! If you starve a human being long enough, she won’t be able to digest food when it is finally given to her. I also am really impressed that he mentions the topic of scarcity as a forbidden topic. Spot on.
But… I feel he totally misses the most important stuff, which is that human beings in the majority of cases never really “become themselves” due to trauma and social programming. So then you are always doing things that don’t resonate with your real nature, AND when you attempt to do things that DO resonate with it, you are too inept to do those things successfully. This is the real root of “frustration,” IMO.
This naturally is most easily understood with respect to “romance” which this interview keeps coming back to – because let’s face it, it’s what it’s all about and everything else is bullshit. People want to feel loved for who they really are and they want to have amazing orgasms with the people who love them so. Or something like that… lol
People who have this sort of experience don’t care about anything else except that they stay healthy enough to keep enjoying their good fortune, and people who don’t have this sort of experience often suppress awareness of their root misery and flounder about in a sea of suffering over secondary issues to avoid dealing with the primary ones.
These ever-growing popular ideas that love is shit, sex is over-rated, all relationships are co-dependent, etc. is a sad testament to deep, unresolved parental (mostly) traumas in the collective psyche that are exploited by forces which want to “evolve” people out of their basic humanity.
The incredible sorrow beneath all the “frustration” is that the human being never has a chance to actually become human in a loving, orgasmic sense of things. We spend cradle-to-grave as the caterpillar and never become the butterfly, and due to not acknowledging this horror, all of that biological energy that should and COULD be applied to transformation gets channeled into violence of every sort imaginable in response to the horror of our existence – with the resultant suffering becoming so great, one can’t even find one’s way out of the delusion any more due to being blinded by the pain.
My personal solution to this misery is to resolve the trauma and cast off the inappropriate social programming by whatever means necessary (to be a little hip-hop about it) before one gets too old for it to matter anymore – although, this is the hardest thing to do and there is no guarantee of success. At best, it will probably be a bittersweet victory dependent on how long it takes for you to succeed. At least, that has been my personal experience.
