Posts Tagged ‘missunderstood’

Archetype of the Outsider Outcast

Like many other animals, humans are very territorial and suspicious of anyone who is in some way different. Thus, living as an immigrant or child of an immigrant; being abused or abandoned in some way by ones parents; not having the skin colour or language of the majority; having a malformed body or being ill in some way; having greater intelligence or a different mindset, can all lead to a sense of being an outcast, and thus a connection with the archetypal feelings of abandonment or alienation. This has been such a common experience throughout the evolution of the human body and mind, that it is a powerful archetype and still strongly at work in individuals and groups today, where alienation is common.

Living out this particular stance in life leads to various attitudes that people throughout the ages have used to survive. There may be an intense form of independence, or hidden feelings of anger toward the nation or society one lives in. One may rebel against being a part of normalcy, even to rebelling against ones personal sexual characteristics; or else one hides within a formed group such as a religion. There is often a powerful drive to fight to become recognised as part of the group, or even become an active against what is the norm, being a criminal or even murderer.

The alienation can also occur because for one reason or another you cannot live within the patterns of behaviour accepted, or built into, your family or social group. This is particularly evident in religious or political groups, which, to function well, require a high degree of conformity.

There is often a high level of anxiety linked with this stance, as there is a great deal more vulnerability living outside the group than there is in being an integral part of it. The extant story of Adam and Eve is a fundamental expression of this sense of being outcast from ones very self – not even possessing oneself. In some degree we all feel as if we have lost our home – the place where we would be at ease and welcomed – and we long for it. See Adam and Eve

There is a very positive side to this archetype however, and it is one that is enormously potent in our times. This is described in the following words by a man meeting this archetype.

I committed myself to this direction of the outsider, and yet to a love of life. I need to remember that. I am not sure if I had said it clearly in my language for my son, but I need to say to my son and to those who tread this path, “This is an ancient path. It was first opened by people who were outcasts from their tribe, or their race. Maybe they were outcasts because of disease or illness. They deepened this path because they either descended into despair or developed a new life, a new awareness, a new relationship with themselves and the world. They changed something inside of themselves, and that change became a possible new pattern for other human beings. Some of these people, in today’s world, would be judged as crazy or unbalanced in some way, perhaps fanatics. If we look back into the past we see there were groups of people living the life of hermits in deserts or in isolated places. Some of them tortured themselves in various ways, such as starvation or flagellation. It was out of such strangeness that a new type of inner life developed, a new way of relating to the world arose. Of course, those early pilgrims on that path were unclear about what they were doing, and were often confused, and so included many strange and unnecessary practices.

But through their lives they began to form the possibility of a new direction for human beings, a new inner or mental life. It developed alternative ways of experiencing oneself, or living in society, and of discovering ones inner resources. And out of those many lives and the new ways they developed of relating to their mind, their body and the world around them, a new paradigm has arisen that I see is now transforming the unconscious life of many people. It is reprogramming them while they sleep. It has great power because it is so relevant in today’s world where enormous numbers of people feel alienated from what is going on around them. 

However, we cannot really understand this archetype of the outsider or outcast without some understanding of what has been called the serpent power, or in India, kundalini. A great deal of mystery has surrounded this, probably because it was not clearly understood, but in practical terms the serpent power is the psychobiological energy that expresses in you as the many processes and functions of your body and mind. It is like the electricity that flows into a house, that while it is not the picture on the television screen, or the movement of the cooling fan, is the power underlying all the many things arising from electricity.

The serpent power, your psychobiological energy, is at the same time the energy underlying your physical movements, your digestion, heartbeat, your emotions, awareness and thinking; and also a potential that has not yet been expressed or manifest. It is particularly relevant to the outcast because he or she does not express themselves in the same way as the ‘normal’ or average person. Very often their sexual expression or social expression is not flowing easily. All that energy backs up like water behind a dam. It creates a pressure that will seek to flow somewhere. In many cases it moves into neurosis. In other words, because it is not flowing outwardly and satisfyingly into social and sexual relationships, it may turn inwards, enlivening the usually unconscious and disturbed patterns of feeling. Then the person lives out neurotic ways of expressing sexually and socially. They may for instance express anti social behaviour in violence or destruction. They may express in destructive sexual behaviour, or be even more introverted into deep depression.

Example: “Meeting death, the bodiless state, is just like another big fear. It is like the fear of going it alone without mum and dad. Can we face just consciousness? Can we live in the world of the mind minus the body? Can we live in the body minus mum and dad?”

“Yes, I’m not doing too badly. I’m not a genius, but I’m not doing too badly. I feel unafraid of the bodiless state because I have experienced it and can exist in it. Like swimming, I can swim a few strokes so have no great fear of water.”

“There was a crazy thing mankind did in these spiritual disciplines. They are so simple. They are simply to get you out of this matrix of consciousness. Once you become an individual in waking consciousness, and you just learn to suppress any of the desires a little bit – fasting – sex – any of them – you make a little pathway of your own. That is your individual consciousness. So simple. That is your own matrix, not the patterns of the general herd or species, within the universal pathways of consciousness around you.”

“It seems that frustration of the universal drives creates a different pattern in the whole. This pattern is used, and if it is strong enough, can exist outside of physical existence in an energy, consciousness, state.”

“I think, in modern day terms I’ve got it. I have got it. It’s free of all the old moralism. That was how they saw it, in the past, and that was how it works. But I have got it.”

I then had masses of realisations or insights into many things. My experience of death, now, added to my other experience and united to form many new ideas or realisations. In experiencing death I was left with consciousness. That consciousness was beset by fantasies, fears, ideas, but it did not lose itself in them, was not swallowed up or drowned in them. If it had been, it would not yet be ripe to exist in the bodiless state.

Also, it struck me with tremendous force that the experience of waking consciousness in the body, however we explained it, was reality. Death, however we explained it, was also reality. What was happening was that I continued to experience this changed reality of death.

But the normal human behaviour is simply one of the ways we as mammals can express. The life process itself can be expressed in an infinite number of ways, as we see in the different creatures on the earth. The fact that we are as we are is simply the result of the global, environmental and social changes we have faced. What some of the ancient outcasts found was that there are possibilities beyond the normal and beyond the neurotic. They drew out of the potential in the serpent power the possibility of what we call enlightenment, a life beyond the limitations of the ‘normal’, beyond the pain of everyday living. That is how the practices of yoga, Tai chi, and many of the other personal disciplines of mind and body arose – as methods of expanding the potential of the serpent power.

Out of this some religious organisations or leader figures made rulings that their followers should not express sexual love casually or at all. The reason for this is probably dual. Firstly the frustration of the sexual flow leads to the build up of the serpent power, and thereby offers the possibility of personal transformation. Secondly, religious organisations are like large business corporations. They have enormous property and staff to deal with. They need money and goods to do that. When we flow to someone sexually and emotionally our money and goods flow to them as well. Sometimes we share our all. If it is blocked in the individual, it flows to the religious organisation or figure who tells us to block it. It does this because they promise salvation or a better life. The organisation or guru assumes wonderful charisma because the serpent power, unable to flow in its usual way, fills such a relationship with great emotional and sexual feelings. Blocking sexual and emotional flow in followers can therefore be a way of directing funds to the organisation or leader figure.

Meeting this archetype is therefore a meeting with the need to identify the causes of our expulsion from our own happiness, our own ability to love and feel loved; our own resources of fruition and creativity in this life – now. It is a time of decision about what we will do with the energy diverted from the ‘normal’ into its new channels of expression. See Individuation

The other side of the archetype is whether you can abandon or transform the life you have lived, a life that doesn’t satisfy you, and is one in which major parts of you are left buried or imprisoned. The paradox is that we may have cast out – denied – parts of ourselves, and so feel outcasts. Here is an example of such transformation.

Example: “I was in a prison cell waith two other men. I felt it was in Spain somewhere. We ate, slept and defecated in the cell. I was standing at the bars of the cell, and had the impression I had been in the prison for years. I was shouting and cursing the people who had put me in the prison, full of hate and self pity.

One day as I stood raging at the bars I suddenly realised that my years of shouting had availed nothing. The only person who was upset by it was me. I was the victim of my own anger and turmoil. It was as if I had been haunted all my life by ghosts of anger and passion. I dropped the attitudes or ‘ghosts’ and was free of them. Years went by and one by one I recognised and dropped other habits of emotion and thought that had trapped and tortured me. I realised I could be totally free within myself.

One morning I woke and sat up on the mattress on the floor that was my bed. The last ghost of inner entrapment fell away. A fountain of joy opened in my body, pouring upwards through me. It was so intense I cried out. My cell mates called a warden because they thought I had gone mad. They stood looking at me as I experienced radiance so strong I felt as if I must be shining. I was aware my joy poured into them, although they thought I was possibly insane. I could sense the enormous change in me influencing them, and I knew it couldn’t help but change them also. I realised that I might never be released from the prison, but it didn’t matter as I had found a fuller release than simply walking the streets. Even though remaining behind prison bars, I would still be touching people’s lives deeply. Nothing would ever be the same again.”

Useful Questions and Hints:

Do I feel as if I am not really connected or identified with the society in which I live?

Have I been led to develop different ways of using my mind and developing innate abilities than those around me?

Am I still locked in anger about alienation, or have I moved to recognising the benefits of not being immersed in my surrounding culture?

Have I learnt to be a shape shifter – if not try Being the Person or Thing

See Summing Up – Definition of Spiritual – Life’s Little Secrets – Avoid Being Victims

 

The Mind of a Newborn

Excerpt from The Mind of Your Newborn Baby

by David B. Chamberlain, Ph.D.

North Atlantic Books: Berkeley, CA 1998

10th Anniversary edition of “Babies Remember Birth” (1988).

What do you see when you look at a newborn baby, bright-eyed, gazing straight at you? Is there really a person there? Silently frowning or beet-red with rage, can this baby think and feel? For its small size, a newborn makes a powerful, compelling noise, but is it actually saying anything?

Until recently, there were many theories about newborns but few known facts. For uncounted centuries, infants have been separated from the rest of us by a veil of ignorance. As close as we have been to them, we did not know how amazing they are. Common wisdom about babies was based on the obvious limitations of their size, weight, and muscle power.

Consequently, babies were described as sometimes adorable but incapable, subhuman, pre-human, dull, and senseless, and treated as such. Twentieth-century science has held that infant cries were only “random” sounds, their smiles only “gas,” and their expressions of pain simply “reflexes.” Misinformation about the newborn has made parenthood more difficult and infancy more miserable.

A brighter future has been dawning for infants. In the last twenty-five years, research on the newborn has flourished. An unprecedented combination of interest in infants, investment of large sums of public and private money, and innovative methods of study has resulted in new information, much of it surprising. Contributions to our widening knowledge of the newborn come from diverse fields of science from embryology to psychology. This book gathers the most important facts from this wide literature for a general audience, especially new or prospective parents.

Leading researchers now sing the praises of infants. Harvard’s Berry Brazelton calls them “talented”; Hanus Papousek, a German pioneer in infant studies, calls them “precocious”; famed pediatrician, Marshall Klaus calls them “amazing.” Professor T.G.R. Bower, one of the most innovative of all infant researchers, declares that newborns are “extremely competent” in perception, learning, and communication.

Babes have come of age in our century. Because so much has been discovered and momentum is still building, I think this will prove to be the century of the newborn, the time when we finally reach a full and factual knowledge of who they are. At the beginning of this century, only a handful of scientific papers about infants could be counted worldwide. By mid-century, almost five hundred could be cited. In the 1960s and 1970s, serious reviews of this literature suddenly had to cover at least two thousand books and papers. This information explosion continues. Infants have been measured inside, and out, filmed with cameras permitting analysis down to microseconds, watched for hours on end, and tested in clever experiments. Results show that they pick up information constantly and learn from their experience much as we do.

One of the exciting aspects of this new knowledge is the verification of infant abilities at earlier and earlier ages. Timetables estimating the ages at which particular talents are expected to appear have had to be revised again and again, bringing them closer to birth. Many abilities are innate and adult-like, surprising investigators and ruining theories. A fundamental rule of developmental psychology -that all complex behaviors must start as simple behaviors and develop gradually-has become obsolete. Surprisingly, many behaviors start out complex. The truth is, much of what we have traditionally believed about babies is false. We have misunderstood and underestimated their abilities. They are not simple beings but complex and ageless, small creatures with unexpectedly large thoughts.

Babies know more than they were supposed to know. After only minutes of exposure to its mother’s face after birth, a baby can pick her out from a gallery of photos. Babies recognize the gender of other babies, even when cross-dressed, provided they are moving-something adults cannot do. They are mentally curious and eager to learn. Consider how smoothly the senses are coordinated at birth: eyes turn with the head in the direction of a sound; hands go up to protect eyes from bright light; the first time at the breast, the baby knows how to suckle and breathe in perfect synchrony; they shriek and pull away from a heel lance.

The territory of life before birth has also been charted as never before. Through the wizardry of the scanning electron microscope, fiber optics and special lenses, ultrasound imaging, and other measuring devices and laboratory techniques, we now have a comprehensive picture of development of all parts of the physical system before birth. These discoveries have added to our understanding of the baby’s many talents.

Neuroscientists have discovered the timetable for development of the entire nervous system, For example, studies show that the sense of taste begins functioning around fourteen weeks after conception, and the sense of hearing around twenty weeks. After only eight weeks of gestation, stroking the baby’s cheeks with a fine hair produces consistent reactions indicating that tactile sensitivity has already been established. During gestation, all the structures are set in place that will enable the newborn to use the sense of smell as well as any adult. Similar preparations are made for use of a wide range of visual talents. Learning before birth has even been demonstrated in many experiments.

A host of scientific discoveries provides formal verification of what many parents and grandparents have known all along: newborns are real persons. Parental enthusiasm about newborn abilities used to be dismissed as vanity, bias, or hallucination. Now science confirms that infants are social beings who can form close relationships, express themselves forcefully, exhibit preferences, and begin influencing people from the start. They are capable of integrating complex information from many sources and, with a little help from their friends, begin regulating themselves and their environment.

Myths about Newborns

1. Babies Don’t Feel

Some nurses and doctors are still telling parents that babies don’t really feel things, that they will not suffer during medical procedures, or miss their mothers if taken away to a nursery. Anesthetics have not been considered necessary for infants undergoing surgery. Hospital delivery rooms, obstetrical instruments, and medical routines were all designed before babies were thought to have senses and thus with no regard for babies’ comfort. Rooms are frigid, lights blinding, surfaces hard and flat, the atmosphere noisy, the handling of newborns too upsetting. Newborns are routinely traumatized and punctured.

Generation after generation, an unlucky majority of American male babies have been subjected to circumcision for dubious medical religious, cultural, and cosmetic reasons. I can only assume that parents have tolerated this in the mistaken belief that the baby will not know he is being tortured. He will.

Babies considered unable to feel are easily victimized; they become non-persons with minimal rights. An earlier, more deadly, form of this view provided justification for infanticide (mostly female), practiced widely through most of human history. In modern times child abuse, the once secret violence of parents, is exposed to public view. Infants may be the last large category of persons to be fundamentally misunderstood, discriminated against, and abused.

In 1975 French obstetrician Frederick Leboyer called for a new approach to birth without violence. His colleagues denied the need for change and publicly recited the myth that babies do not really feel or care. The newly discovered truth is that newborn babies have all their senses and make use of them just as the rest of us do. Their cries of pain are authentic. Babies are not unfeeling; it is we who have been unfeeling.

2. Very Poor Brains

Probably the most damaging myths about newborns are those about their brains. Reasoning from the gross anatomy of the brain at birth, scientists concluded that it was “primitive” and poorly developed. And, because it was only about one-quarter of its eventual weight and volume, it was incapable of “higher” functions of thinking, meaning, and memory.

For a hundred years this assumption has governed both medicine and psychology, supporting abuses in obstetrics and pediatrics that are accepted as a normal part of birth. Without a brain, babies could have no experiences, accumulate no history, possess no self-consciousness or intelligence^×in effect, could not really be present. This myth has artificially delayed the beginning of active parenthood and prevented public recognition that newborns are persons. The reasoning is this: no brain, no person; no person, no need for parenting.

In retrospect, brain experts made one of the classical errors of science by dissecting the brain to find out how it works. The problem is that the brain works properly only if it is whole. Separate parts are not the system. Most serious was the error of severing the brain from its connections with two other systems, the endocrine and immune systems. Medicine officially divided the territory into three different specialties: neuroscience, endocrinology, and immunology. Current research shows all three are elegantly linked in one fluid central intelligence system.

That the whole brain is more than its parts is illustrated by a debate that has lasted for decades over the myelin sheathing that insulates nerve fibers. I ran into this wall personally when I started to tell colleagues about the birth memories my clients were reporting. Their immediate reaction was that such memories were impossible because the myelination of nerve tracks was not complete at birth and therefore signals could not flow properly through the nervous system. The truth is that myelination begins in some places only a few weeks after conception but is not completed until adolescence. It is no measure of what a baby’s brain can do.

3. Assembly-Line Brain

Another basic misunderstanding about the infant brain was that it was like an engine on an assembly line, not expected to work until the last part was installed. Compounding this error was a prejudice that the parts of the brain formed first were “primitive” and less valuable, while those added last were much more sophisticated and important. A half-truth at best, this theory has kept scientists and parents alike from appreciating intelligence before birth and has justified inhumane practices at birth. If the sophisticated, “advanced” parts of the brain were not yet developed, the reasoning went, the baby could not have meaningful experiences. Memory and learning were out of the question.

The cerebral cortex, the symmetrical left- and right-brain structures lying at the top of the skull, is formed last and does have those special convolutions, the latest evolutionary wrinkles that give humans a competitive edge over other creatures. However, it was false to conclude that the cortex was not working until finished and that the rest of the brain could not engage in complex activity. Long before the completion of the cortex, complex systems for breathing, sleeping, waking, crying, spatial orientation, and movement are already functioning. The senses of taste, touch, smell, and hearing are fully operative and coordinated. Even vision is advanced at birth, although the visual portion of the cortex is not yet fully developed.

4. Babies Can’t Think

Until recently, brain experts generally agreed that the newborn, like the beloved storybook character Winnie the Pooh, was “of very little brain.” A recent book on the nature of the child by a noted Harvard psychologist says the cortex of the young infant resembles that of an adult rat.

With such poor equipment, how could a newborn think? Academic psychologists use big words to deny infant mental activity: pre-symbolic, pre-representational, pre-reflective. In other words, babies are without words and cannot think. This relates to another myth-that in order to think, you must have language. Recent investigations have shown that babies do a lot of thinking, with or without language. You will see evidence of this thinking when your newborn purposefully reaches out, gives an inquisitive look, frowns (or screams) in protest, gurgles in satisfaction, or gasps in excitement. Newborns also listen intently to their mothers reading stories and prefer to hear again those heard weeks before birth. And note this: they listen attentively as long as mother reads forward, but will stop listening as soon as she reads backward (nonsense)-another indication of good thinking.

More tellingly, infants are great dreamers, according to studies of brain waves. They dream much more than you and I do. Meticulous observation by scientists of infant body movements and facial expressions during dreaming shows that they act and look just like adults do when dreaming. How could they dream without thinking?

5. No Sense of Self

Without physical senses and a fully furnished brain, the myth goes, there can be no sense of self and of other selves. Psychoanalysts have declared that infants are “autistic” and unresponsive to social signals; they are not ready for relationships, certainly not for communication. “Solipsistic” was the word renowned Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget chose to describe newborns, meaning that they were out of touch with the outside world and totally preoccupied with themselves. This theory is no longer defensible. Although Piaget was a pioneering theorist in developmental psychology, he did not have the advantage of our present knowledge of newborns. He taught that it might take a newborn eighteen months to escape from being “egocentric” and to regard himself as an object among others.

Students of Piaget continue to state this view. Boston psychologist Burton White writes that newborns are helpless, cannot think, use language, socialize with another human, or even deliberately move about. He claims that for the first few weeks of life, a baby is not very interested in any aspect of the external environment.

If you accept this view, you will be discouraged from having intimate dialog with your newborn and be deprived of the many gifts your baby is prepared to give you. You and your baby are linked, not alien from each other. Your performance is a duet, not a solo. Babies watch intently for changes in your face and can instantly mimic expressions of sadness, happiness, and surprise. Babies listen with incredible precision to adult speech. Films show that they lead as well as respond in dialog with parents.

If babies were lost in their own world, they would not be so good at analyzing and responding to sounds. They will stop eating, even when hungry, to listen to something interesting. If they hear other babies crying, they will usually be moved to cry with them. If they hear a recording of their own cry, they may suddenly stop crying-an indication that they recognize themselves.

Psychologists have been finding precursors of self-consciousness before the age of two or three, when self -awareness had been thought to begin. One authority writes that infants discover they have a mind and others have minds when they are nine months old. Child psychologist Colwyn Trevarthen of the University of Edinburgh believes that interaction between people is innately human and can be seen in newborns.

6. Babies Don’t Need Their Mothers

This myth justifies keeping newborns in hospital nurseries and away from their mothers, a practice said to be necessary to ensure the babies’ health. The opposite is true. From its mother the baby receives antibodies to ward off infections, as well as individual attention not available in a nursery. Lying next to mother helps the baby regulate its own body temperature, metabolic rate, hormone and enzyme levels, heart rate, and breathing. Separation of mothers and newborns is a physical deprivation and an emotional trial.

Mothers know deep within themselves what scientists are just discovering-that relations between mothers and babies are mutual, reciprocal, even magical. A baby’s cry triggers release of the mother’s milk, the only perfect milk on earth for babies. Breast-feeding after delivery speeds expulsion of the placenta and protects the mother from hemorrhaging. In addition, there is a vital power in the baby’s look and touch to turn on feelings and skills necessary for successful mothering. Babies- need to hear their mother’s voice, learn her sleep cycles, and recognize her body odors and facial expressions. Babies need to know their mothers are all right.

7. The Age Myth

Age is a status category that works against infants. Without realizing it, we tend to discount age groups different from our own: embryo, fetus, newborn, child, adolescent, or elderly. Somehow these “others” seem woefully inferior, disabled, and incapable of being persons as we are.

Generally, younger means lower status. We think a baby is not real enough to listen to, to learn from, or to protect from inhumane treatment. The baby will become a person at some later time-perhaps when it can walk, talk, or go to school.

Myths aside, babies seem to act as individuals long before birth, engaging in spontaneous activity to suit themselves, expressing preferences for certain sounds, motions, and tastes, and reacting to danger in the womb. Once born, from Day One, they engage in many complex activities integrating sounds and sights, regulating their work and rest, and demonstrating bona fide learning. Using their communication skills they engage you in dialog, establish intimate relationships, and, without your realizing it, they begin teaching you how to be a parent.

Emotion, a language for all ages, is worn on babies’ faces. We are late in acknowledging this. Watch your infant for expressions of happiness, surprise, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, interest, and distress.

Such is the mind of a newborn baby!