Mindfulness

 

I came across an interesting passage in John Fowles’s book A Separate Peace. Gene, the protagonist, has deliberately but secretly made his best friend fall off a tree branch out of envy, shattering his leg. Now he is dealing with the guilt:

“I spent as much time as I could alone in our room, trying to empty my mind of every thought, to forget where I was, even who I was.”

This may explain the common misconstrual of the Buddhist practice of “mindfulness” to mean emptying your mind of any thoughts, concentrating only on immediate sense perceptions. 

It is a form of escapism, that might take the place of alcohol or other drugs.

But it is accordingly not a way to confront your problems or to solve them. It is certainly not a way to deepen your spiritual life or improve your mental health.

A pre-raphaelite take on the Greek goddess of memory.

The actual Buddhist term we translate "mindfulness" is related to the word “remembering.” As we might say "keep in mind." It is filling your mind with thoughts. It is carefully examining the past.

We all need to do this. The guilty will resist it mightily, but they need to do it more than anyone.

Madness and MacBeth

 

Erinyes

Going through MacBeth with a student—the play that made me first love Shakespeare. And it occurred to me this time through that Shakespeare’s theory of madness is quite different from that of modern psychiatry. 

They treat it as if a physical illness. He thinks it is a spiritual, a moral, problem.

“Unnatural deeds

Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds

To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.

More needs she the divine than the physician.”

“Consider it not so deeply….These deeds must not be thought

After these ways; so, it will make us mad.”

Shakespeare must be listened to, because he is the greatest psychiatrist who ever lived. His greatest accomplishment as a writer is how he gets into the minds of all his characters, even the darkest villains, and expresses so clearly and sympathetically how they think. He knows the human soul.

MacBeth and Lady MacBeth go schizophrenic in classic fashion. MacBeth starts hallucinating as soon as he contemplates the crime. Lady MacBeth eventually sleepwalks and talks to herself. I once stayed in a schizophrenic’s apartment. He did too.

Not to say all schizophrenics go mad due to a guilty conscience. Shakespeare himself suggests not all. “Yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep, who have died holily in their beds.” 

The reason this particular sort of schizophrenic goes “schizophrenic” is from a guilty conscience. They have committed a sin so serious their conscience will not leave them alone. This conforms too with the Ancient Greek idea of the Erinyes. They will track you down for vengeance no matter where you go and what you do.

Of course, in a Christian world, there is no sin as such so serious. Lady MacBeth, or MacBeth,  are Christian, and presumably know this. The problem is that they have so committed their very fate to the sin; they cannot accept the consequences of repentance. It would mean, in their case, by law, losing the crown, and losing their lives.

That is perhaps how narcissists feel. This particular type of “schizophrenia” comes from narcissism. Whether or not literally so, the typical narcissist cannot admit fault, for in their own mind it would mean losing their imaginary crown, having crowned themselves, and losing their life, their settled self-identity.

What modern psychiatry calls narcissism is really vice. Formulaically pride, the chief of all the vices, but it could also be any of the others. This is how vice works. The perp gets so committed to the sin they decide there is no way out. Then they start to hear footsteps, Erinyes, behind them.

“Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?”

“No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting.”

There is fear in that statement.

MacBeth when he hears Fleance, Banquo’s son, has escaped his assassin:

“Then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect;

Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,

As broad and general as the casing air:

But now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in

To saucy doubts and fears.”

And he promptly begins to hallucinate the ghost of Banquo. Fear and doubt are the triggers.

The same thing happens to King Lear. Lear is obviously a “narcissist,” in modern psychiatric terms. When his self-image as king is rocked, he goes mad. Here too there is, or ought to be, a guilty conscience. He has grossly played favourites among his children.

That too is perhaps, in cosmic terms, so great a sin it commonly cannot be admitted.

Guilty Silence

 

I count as a professional communicator. I have written professionally for many years. I teach students how to write. I have some success as a poet, having won international prizes. That counts as communication on an especially deep level. I am a past president of the Editors’ Association of Canada.

Indeed, challenges in communication are my special joy. I have lived abroad, and prided myself on establishing deep and honest communications with people of diverse cultural backgrounds very different from my own. I also do well at deep and honest communications with small children; and even with schizophrenics.

This is what comes from growing up in a family where there was no honest communication. But that is a story for another day.

Yet there is still forever one group with which I am never able to communicate. Those who fear communication, due to a guilty conscience. Here, there is nothing I can do.

Any attempt to speak openly and honestly with such people will lead to being personally attacked, either openly or subtly or in the back; or, if you are lucky, the other party will only cut off communications abruptly. They will, in the social media context, “unfriend you.”

The alert reader, will realize that this is a growing problem in our society. This is cancel culture, deplatforming, shouting speakers down, and all that. This is also "denial."

Anyone who resorts to that is admitting their own guilt over the issue; they have something they desperately want to hide.

Nobody demands a contrary view be silenced, or refuses to listen, because they think it is wrong. Nobody gets upset about claims that black Africans built the pyramids, the Chinese discovered America in 1442, the earth is flat, or the sun revolves around it. All these theses are merrily published without objection. One only seeks to silence views one cannot counter.

This being so, what do we know?

The left’s insistence that claiming fraud in the 2020 election, or the 2022 election, is “attacking our sacred democracy,” an “insurrection,” and must be banned on social media platforms, is proof that, if the 2020 and 2022 elections were not stolen, the left at least did their best to steal them, and do not want this investigated. Conversely, the fact that the Republicans did not become agitated when Hillary Clinton claimed the 2016 election was stolen from her, or Stacey Abrams the governorship of Georgia, shows the expected reaction from someone who has not in fact been engaged in fraud.

Similarly, the insistence by “Trans” people that they be referred to by their preferred pronouns, and they not be “dead maned” is proof they know they have not changed their gender.

Other examples are ready to hand: the extreme overreaction to the trucker convoy by the Trudeau government shows they know their vaccine mandates and vaccine passports were unwarranted and done through an ulterior motive.

And so it goes; we must not be naïve here.

This issue of guilty consciences and the resultant attempt to prevent communication is an especially serious problem for the arts; for the arts are all about deep and serious communication. This is why the arts these days are moribund. Anyone who dares to say anything deep and honest, interesting or important is sure to face severe headwinds at every level. And there is no art without this.

Why is this a growing problem? One reason, I expect, is that thanks to Alice Miller and other psychiatrists and psychologists, or the past several generations we have raised our children to be narcissists. But that piggybacks on another fatal problem: abortion; which rides in turn on the move to uninhibited recreational sex that started in about the 1950s.

Perhaps we have the psychologists and psychiatrists to blame for that as well.

The way past this, individually or as a society, must be an initial admission of having done wrong. When it is your conscience condemning you, you cannot receive absolution by silencing others. And there is nothing they can even say or do to absolve you. This follows the formula familiar from the Catholic rite of confession. You must admit that you did wrong, sincerely repent, and make every effort at reparations if possible.

How likely is that to happen? On an individual level, it can happen. Ask Alcoholics Anonymous.

It seems likely to be harder on a social level. Yet perhaps Germany is an example. They seem to have mostly gotten past their guilt in the Nazi period; even if the Nazi period itself was prompted by a refusal to accept guilt for the first Great War. The US seems to have gotten past their guilt for slavery; even if the era or segregation in the South was a refusal to accept that guilt for a century.

This, at least, is something to pray for. Perhaps hope for, for our grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

What Are Guilt and Shame?

 

Xerxes and his readers have spent the last week trying to decide what the words “guilt” and “shame” mean.

This is superficially odd, of course, because both words occur in the dictionary.

The obvious reason is that they do not like the dictionary definitions. Because they imply the existence of good and evil.

From the Oxford English Dictionary, the ultimate authority:

Guilt:

The fact of having committed, or of being guilty of, some specified or implied offence; guiltiness.

The state (meriting condemnation and reproach of conscience) of having wilfully committed crime or heinous moral offence; criminality, great culpability.

Shame:

The painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonouring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one's own conduct or circumstances (or in those of others whose honour or disgrace one regards as one's own), or of being in a situation which offends one's sense of modesty or decency.

Whenever folks start tinkering with the meaning of words, you know they are up to no good.

The worst culprit here is psychology, the main intent of which is to strip modern life of moral considerations. Thereby actually generating rather than healing most of what we call mental illness.

A therapist writes to Xerxes, “Guilt is an uncomfortable feeling resulting from the commission or contemplation of a specific act contrary to one's internalized standards of conduct."

By this definition, a Nazi who kills Jews is guilty of nothing. Indeed, we must all strive to be psychopaths.

And the issue with shame, according to her, is not that we have done something wrong, but that it might cause us to withdraw from others. We ought to be more shameless.

And a parent must never say to a child, “shame on you.”

A perfect recipe for breeding psychopaths. We are now beginning to see the results of this sort of parenting in society at large. It has been forty years—two generations—since the publication of The Drama of the Gifted Child. Narcissism is everywhere, and social norms are breaking down.

A Christian—presumably Protestant—respondent writes: “We are assured in our absolution each Sunday that God removes both our guilt and shame.”

No he doesn’t. He removes the consequences. The eternal punishment for sins is waived, and only if you feel shame. We are still obliged to do penance, in this world and the next. 

Anyone who declares themself righteous, who ignores the mote in their own eye, is a Pharisee. This is the high road to Hell.

It seems that many people are now on it.

A Daughter's Gratitude

 

Some years ago, my daughter drew a card for her Mom on Mother’s Day. It was brilliantly done, and I shared it on Facebook. She has immense artistic talent.

But it drew two disturbed comments from female friends. Posted publicly, apparently with no thought that my daughter would see them. One wrote “Uh-oh. There’s something wrong here.” The other accused my wife of abusing her.

For she had written on the card, “thank you for not aborting me.”

I explained to the friend who saw this as proof of child abuse that, so long as abortion was legal, it was simply a fact that every Canadian woman made a conscious decision whether to abort a child or not. Our daughter, being an intelligent child, surely just realized this.

“But,” my friend countered, “she should have been reassured that she was loved, and would never have been aborted.”

But abortion happens before the mother meets the child, and knows anything of their personality. If her life was spared, it was only by either her mother’s good morals or by her good luck.

In the Philippines, where abortion is illegal, nobody was troubled by the card.

My friend concluded by declaring me “delusional,” unfriending me, and never speaking to me since.

I think the experience shows that Canadian women often have a guilty conscience over abortion. And that the human tendency, when made aware of a wrong or injustice, is most often not to right the wrong, but to object to its being mentioned in polite company.