The Romanticism of Realism

The way people write about Venus-Neptune natives, you’d think we were all born with rose coloured retinas. These writers would have you believe that us idealistic, artistic types are doomed to pursue relationships with wife beaters and serial cheaters, all the while viewing everything through a romantic haze… until the veil of illusion is torn away. Venus-Neptune, they say, is too sensitive for the grime and grit of reality. They prefer to have their relationships floating above it all in a heady ether of sweet nothings and grand romantic gestures… until the veil drops, the mundane is revealed and the attraction dies.

I have the conjunction in a tight orb. And I believe the “dread the dropping veil” way of seeing things is deadly for the maturation of a Venus-Neptune native so I’d like people to stop promoting it. Any veil, when unrecognized and used without discernment, has the potential to skew one’s reality and lead to bad decisions. Instead, I see people suggesting that reality is the cause of suffering for Venus-Neptune when it is usually the illusions of the veil that brought them to suffer unnecessarily.

To be quite frank, while your imagination is probably quite a wonderful one, you do yourself a disservice in discounting reality, which can be far more wonderful, exciting and challenging than anything your unconscious projections could cook up. For it is when you rid yourself of your prejudices and see reality more clearly, that the real strength of Venus-Neptune can unfold. Venus-Neptune will give you the capacity to love what is real – even if it is sharp and crude – in a profound, beautiful and truly redemptive way. Without a deep connection to reality, a veiled relationship is but an onanistic, intoxicating mockery of what that relationship could have been.

I think most people writing about Venus-Neptune have it completely backward. Venus-Neptune is not for the weak because it is infinitely patient, infinitely forgiving. It is not martyrdom/saviour/victim love – that is when Venus-Neptune love is torqued into a perversion of itself, twisted to serve the ego. No, Venus-Neptune, when free of illusion, indicates a natural ability to demonstrate limitless compassion, understanding and empathy for all the harshness, ugliness and darkness out there in the world. And such an endeavour is only for the strong.

 

A surfeit of everything

Driving today, alone on the road in the dark, navigating the roads of a foreign land, I opened my CD jewel case (yes, I still own some of those things) and found it empty. Annoyed, I turned on the radio which happened to be set on a classical music channel. And to my surprize, the strains of Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque rose from the speakers. I was stricken with a surfeit of something indescribable and tears welled in my eyes. How can it be that my life, so insignificant and random and meaningless to most others, so very small and unrecognized, can still contain so much? When I think of all the people I pass by with their own lives, I ask myself – what have I not seen? What kind of wonder, terror and beauty do they know and hold that I do not know of? How many little surprizes fill their lives to bursting?

From one foreign land to another; in time I will be traveling to two very different nations, but both with a recent history of genocide. How many lives lost that so many know not of? How many tiny hidden everythings were buried in those mass graves?

Sometimes I love and hate my life in equal measure. The older I become, the keener the edge of my finitude. There are days when I feel that I cannot bring myself to do what my heart demands of me and that I was simply not built to have such a brutal, fearless organ.

But it is nice to be surprized.

 

Mind Matters Three: Desire

I recently attended the annual Mind Matters conference, hosted by the Jungian Society and the University of Toronto’s Buddhism and Psychology Students’ Union. Unfortunately, the out-of-town speakers were unable to attend, due to inclement weather, but José Cabezón sent his presentation and a copy of his lecture while Paul Fulton sent a recording.

The year’s theme was desire, of which each presenter gave a very different perspective, although all four had a background in psychology. The entire conference was taped and I believe will be posted on YouTube, so instead of describing what each professor spoke about, I thought I might write briefly about desire in a distinctly modern context. Because it seems to me that desire in modernity is conceived of very narrowly – often in ways that satisfy basic biological drives or in the context of consumer goods – and perhaps because of this narrow view, modern people are in some ways, very lacking in desire. For all our tendencies toward instant gratification from material goods, our neurotic obsession with food, our pervasive preoccupation with sex, we lack a lust for life.

I’m not sure if we can call our modern culture as one of desire so much as a culture of irrational, sometimes rabid, often anxiety-riddled consumption. And sadly, in a kind of puritanical American context, desire becomes twisted into something ugly: addiction, vice, “guilty pleasures” and so on. At best, desire is hijacked into incentive seeking behaviour where we reward or treat ourselves (you deserve it!), a kind of immature mentality in which people are taught to feel entitled to the adult version of a cookie or a gold star simply for behaving well. What happened to ardent desires for more profound, less transient things? A healthy community, or for a deep connection and engagement with nature, or to collaborate in a team? If we cannot yearn for such things the way most people burn with a fervent desire for material (and often unnecessary, disposable) goods, I don’t know how much positive change we can expect to make in the world.

I think the first step to addressing this dearth of more complex, other-oriented desires is to learn about how desire is manufactured in modernity. To start you off, here’s a documentary that was recommended by the president of the Jungian Society about Edward Bernays, father of public relations and population control.

 

Thank you: around the world in 2012

I thought I would share some stats about who has visited the O.div blog (under the “cut”). Unsurprizingly, the lion’s share of the blog’s visitors come from nations where English is an official language, but I was surprized to see some S.Asian countries ranking so highly on the list. A major chunk of international visitors have probably clicked into the site via image searches, or other ways that have nothing to do with the content of this blog. Still, it’s kind of neat to see.

For everyone who has dropped by and has bothered to read my ridiculously long posts, thank you. It is truly a privilege to be able to experience the here and now, and then to share my funny dispatches with my friends and with you, whoever you may be, from my little corner of reality.

When I was a teenager, my primary goal was to have a progressive day, a day in which I would brush against the boundaries of what I could handle, or be plunged into the thick of it. Day after day, I would pray to be brought to my knees, to be rent to pieces. In this way, I hoped to alleviate myself of my fears, my ignorance, my arrogance, my self deceptions. As an adult, I eventually found gentler, subtler methods to pursue my teenaged dreams. But a progressive day can still make my lips curl back into a grin, baring my teeth to the whole world.

For all my visitors, know that out there, other people are wishing for your happiness and peace, even if they don’t know you. But reality calls, and to answer it is not easy. We will all suffer, we will all fail and we will all die. Happiness and peace alone cannot make your existence complete, cannot teach you what it is to be a human. So please permit me to wish you a new year with some truly progressive days.

Love,

Isthmus

 

true ethics are ontological

Last month, I had a chance to see L.Gen. Roméo Dallaire speak at a fundraiser for his foundation. They screened the film, Shake Hands with the Devil, a documentary (not to be confused with the 2007 drama) about his visit to Rwanda a decade after the genocide. I highly recommend watching this film as L.Gen. Dallaire shares his insights and observations as well as his process in coming to terms with the genocide. (The film also briefly features James Orbinski, whose documentary, Triage, also follows a different man’s path to rebuilding meaning after bearing witness to one of the greatest human atrocities in modern history.)

I have long struggled with the question of why, in extreme situations, some people retain their humanity and make ethical decisions at great personal cost, while the majority do not. I have worried this issue over and over in my mind over the years, turning it over, seeking greater understanding. I was never satisfied with the pat answer “because it was the right thing to do.” Clearly, in situations that are so unambiguous, when human lives are at stake, there is a right thing to do, but that “rightness” is not nearly enough to motivate the majority of people to make the right choices which is why our world looks exactly the way it does today. I asked L.Gen. Dallaire about this during the Q&A. I asked him if he had observed any patterns or factors he’s observed in people who do make the ethical choices.

 

Review: 21st Century Yoga

After following the blogs of Carol Horton and Roseanne Harvey for quite some time, I was pleased to learn that they were collaborating as editors on an anthology of essays dealing with contemporary yoga in N. America. Both think body electric and it’s all yoga baby grapple with the tensions we find in N. American yoga and I was looking forward to reading 21^st Century Yoga, which I hoped would give writers the room to delve deeper into the nuances and complexities that shorter blog posts cannot accomodate.

No matter what your stance is regarding contemporary yogic debates, all of the essays will likely help spark new ideas in your mind about yoga, especially if you are already thinking about issues that have crop up frequently on the blogs of Horton and Harvey. The essays are also written in a very accessible manner; I read the whole book in one sitting!

 

Praha: magické město

I’ve returned from a sojourn in the gorgeous city of Prague. Prague is my kind of city, a place that has no patience for fakery and yet, indulges in heights of fantasy and the fantastic; that exudes the harsh pragmatism that all northern cities seem to have, yet also spits in the face of minimalism. Incidentally, it is also where the legendary magicians, John Dee and Edward Kelly, practiced for some years.