Delight
5th August 2015, 18:22
I was very taken with an Atlanta Journal article in the 80's that connected the idea of cancer with the way that cities spread, leaving an inner city of devastated neglect and abandonment then chaotically and disorganizedly swallow up the natural outskirts in sub-burbs. Spreading and spreading with no "reason" the cities eat up everything.
I am taken with the idea that we model the inner in the outer world. Looking at the metaphysical source of disease I am sure there is a similar metaphor as I understand it. The core of us may have lost purpose, sense of connection and ability to balance, then cells develop chaotic growth.
Being alone, being lonely, being artificially separated from what one loves, losing connection, communication and continuity seem to me to be at work on our immune sytems and I am interested in how we can reconnect these circuits of aliveness and community.
We might ask whether there is a connection between man’s destruction, ravaging, and polluting of the earth in modern times and the increasing emergence of cancer? It is an important fact that cancer was essentially absent in the American Indian culture prior to the white man’s invasion. A moment’s reflection reveals that that invasive behavior was not unlike cancer itself, and its proliferation beyond the bounds of sustainability confirms it.
In many cancer patients we see a powerful psychological growth cut down or cut off. It is as if something very alive in themselves was killed. When a person severs some living connection to the self, the ego in effect tries to assimilate the self. Instead, the wounded self begins an inevitable course of assimilating the ego. It may come out in psychosis or in cancer, but the person is reduced to eating himself, feeding on his own flesh, rather than on the fruits of the earth whose spirits he seems to have violated in himself.
Cancer has been described as a type of suicide, a way out, a mode of death, as one of the ways we choose to die. It has even been described as an alternative to psychosis. Bodily destruction and images of bodily consumption are frequent in psychosis, and the dreams of cancer patients too are filled with images of bodily rending and consumption. Rather than the cancer consuming them, they may be consuming themselves. Cancer means living in the borderland between this world and the other.
In Ovid’s tale of the myth of Erysichthon a similar story is woven. Erysichthon takes a company of axemen to the sacred grove of Demeter to obtain sufficent timber for an elaborate banquet hall. He is warned by the female spirits of the trees to desist for his plan. Intent, despite all warnings, he cuts down the sacred oak of Demeter. In so doing, he angers this gentle Goddess to a fury nearly unparalled in Greek mythology. She inflicts upon him an insatiable hunger. After exhausting all possible food, he devours himself. This is a particularly graphic image of a victimization in relation to the Goddess of growth and increase.
Disease is not a personal failure nor punishment. It is an opportunity to love yourself and discover an even greater Self. It can drive us toward overcoming the past, both personal and collective. In this quest we find the true self. The disease is a gift, an agent of transformation. Even death can be a challenge, opportunity, or flowering. Death is not a failure, except for an overly-controlling heroic ego. But it strips us of illusions.
In keeping with holographic notions, when one part of an organism manifests symptoms, every other part and level of it is also in a similar state of dis-ease, including in the celles and genes. The whole is in any part, as fractal geometry shows us; the same structure keeps appearing at all levels. For truly deep and profound healing, the whole organism must healing including at the cellular and genetic levels.http://www.oocities.org/iona_m/Chaosophy2/CancerandCRP.html
Loss of connection to feeling "well placed" with a rooted sense of what is most valuable seems a refrain in many ways now. Atlanta Georgia in the 80's was growing fast. Everything was changing and the best of what was there seemed to be threatened by this "Growth" as chaos.... Transient, unrooted and modern but losing trees, losing any countryside around it, losing to the "cancer" of unrestrained "rela estate" development.
I am taken with the idea that we model the inner in the outer world.
Being cut off from one's roots seems apropos to my husband's family life tragedy. The themes of separation and feeling all alone, too much alone to bridge the gaps, unable to cope with the way life was going, being so lonely one turned to artificial means like TV and shopping, being artificially separated from what had been natural, losing connection, communication and continuity were there from the beginning to an end.
My husband came form "mountain people" who moved to the city to find work. Lots of people must move away from their roots to have a life that is based on "good jobs",hoping to move back later. This family still retained the farms they were raised on. After my husband left home, something went wrong with his mother's mental health. She isolated to her room and the shopping channel and TV preachers. This was not all what my husband recalled of his mother in early years. She slept all day and was obsessed with sin and shopping for the latest stuff.
My husband's father worked his good job and stayed away from home...then he retired in 1999. This was a stress and within a year, my husband's father shot himself in the chest in an argument with his wife...at least suicide was the police report conclusion. He had been slightly depressed and unhappy with being retired. He had started prozac. The night before, he packed and planned to move away to the mountains to restore his homeplace.
My husband was shocked. He could not get his head around this event. Contemplating how this death happened brought up much turmoil. A few months later, my husband was diagnosed with glial cell brain cancer...a glioma stage III.
Within a year, my husband's mother moved in with here father near our house. The witness to the death, my husband's sister stayed in the house where the death occurred. One night, she died in her sleep of an elevated blood sugar (at least that is what the autopsy said). She was found a few days later.
Just a few months later, my husband's mother's father died, leaving his farm to his daughter. Then my husband's mother died suddenly a few months later. All these deaths were in 4 years time and in the fifth year, my husband died. I thought he had a tremendous will to live. IMO finally the inner tragedy of losses overwhelmed him. he just could not reorganize to a new state of physical health and went elsewhere IMO.
One healer had noted the irreconcilable conflicts of mind that my husband held. He did not know how to make sense of the tragedy of loss. He had once depended on a happy family who loved one another. The truth that a great ravaging of hatred within the family had led to the losses was not sensible...perhaps the happy family he had imagined never existed. So sad and so common in our tales of tragic endings.
WHAT IS CANCER? (http://www.oocities.org/iona_m/Chaosophy2/CancerandCRP.html)
Cancer is a family of diseases often characterized by rapid and relatively unrestrained proliferation of undifferentiated cells that invade bodily organs and tissues and spread from original growth sites to distant areas in the body. It is an invasive, powerful growth which consumes and destroys vital life processes.
The word ‘cancer’ strikes horror and dread, bringing images of the physical body eaten away by the ravenous advance of a consuming malignancy. But, it is not only a physical malady; it initiates a dark night of the soul. Cancer attacks, seizes, and consumes life, threatening existence. Cancer may be one form of the inevitable price modern man pays for separating himself too far from the life of nature. As much as 80-90% of cancers may be environmentally “caused.”
Cancer often emerges within six to eighteen months following some major emotional loss, especially if the suffering individual falls into a “hopeless-helpless” frame of mind. Loss can kindle loss of the will to live, libido turns inward, and feeds on the body, (Simonton, 1978).
The unitarian concept of cancer sees the malignant component of all its varieties to be the same. This component is not spontaneously created but represents the most primitive cell in the life cycle, the trophoblast cell, gone awry.
In alchemy, massa confusa refers to the “chaos” of elements in active conflicts and hostility with one another. All bonds are broken, all connections dissolved. It is a state of complete disorder and undifferentiated chaos. The cancer cell likewise is undifferentiated and chaotic in its organization and spreading growth.
The psychological approach to the treatment of cancer is likely to be most effective when the cancer itself is regarded as the massa confusa which must be differentiated and transformed. The alchemist reduced the disorder of the alchemical chaos by his devotion to his operations and putting himself in a condition in which the “miracle” of transformation was possible, with God’s help.
Cancer erupts in those whose psychology has prepared the way for susceptibility. Cancer cells grow within us all the time. But there is a natural suppresive mechanism -- the immune system -- which operates to inhibit the growth of these undifferentiated cells.
Psychoneuroimmunology has shown us that the immune system is extraordinarily sensitive to psychic influences. Feelings and thoughts become molecules which modulate the neurology and chemistry of our bodies to influence our ability to attack malevolent material in the body through mind/body feedback loops.
Up-Welling: Healing From Within
The same powers of creativity that gave birth to the universe and unfolding forms of the natural world are present and reflected in the human mind and imagination. Creativity in nature and mind manifests its power through "authentic exchange," nuances of operations emerging from creative center. In these exchanges, the kinds of emergent self-organization described in complexity takes place, leading to the power of "collective creativity." One manifestation of this is the power to remold our social institutions including the healing arts.
A holistic Emergent Healing Paradigm is proposed rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories -- our models of nature's own forms of self-organization. It is suggested that emergent healing depends on nonlocal principles and self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mindbody of the organism. It is further suggested that the interactive field present in the healing situation can be amplified intentionally through resonant feedback -- therapeutic entrainment -- to facilitate intervention in the psychophysical healing process. A metaphysical context is provided to justify such a paradigm shift from the purely causal mechanistic healing model. A viable research direction is indicated by examining cosmology, the role of the human family, epistemology, and a mode of ethical reasoning.
Each of us can learn to balance and optimize inner growth, intimacy, physical and spiritual health -- to discover emergence beyond our emergencies.[URL="http://transmodernalchemy.iwarp.com/whats_new_8.html"]Transmodern Alchemy (http://transmodernalchemy.iwarp.com/whats_new_8.html)
I want to explore more of what Iona Miller proposes as not just about the individual body but the collective BODY
Cancer is an expression of the natural growth process gone awry. Physis is a verb that means “to grow” or “to be” -- “what things really are.” To Aristotle it meant “that imminent thing from which a growing thing first begins to grow.” There are two ancient conceptualizations of physis -- (1) change as flux itself, without source or goal, and (2) change as cure, growth, or creative evolution.
Berne (1968) used physis to represent the major motivating force of cure, individual aspiration, and collective evolution. He formulated his view as “The growth force of nature, which makes organisms evolve into higher forms, embryos develop into adults, sick people get better, and healthy people to strive to attain their ideals.”
Berne, along with Jung and some theorists in humanistic psychology, had a larger vision that took into account the healing and creative instincts which can transform both the sex and death drives. Berne thought that physis was the evolutionary healing growth force of nature, inwardly-directed libido, or even more basic than libido. He saw eros, thanatos, and physis (sex, death, and growth) as the background of all psychological experience.
Physis is not derivative of libido or mortido, although aspects of each can be used to understand it. Physis is larger and more impersonal, infusing eros and thanator in its creative, healing, and evolutionary quest. Physis is at least an equal and probably much more fundamental and basic force. It is a generalized creative drive toward health, the basis of human motivation and transcendence. It is a primal source of flexibility and resilience, serendipity, and spontaneity -- even spontaneous remission.
Berne (1972) had the idea that the autonomous aspiration of a human being rises from the depths of the Somatic Child (oldest, most archaic, or undifferentiated ego state) and transcends the limit-inducing pressures of the script, which is shaped by the matrix of love (affection) and death (destruction) in our earliest relationships.
The process of self-devouring can be reversed through self-creation, enrichment procured from one’s own depths. The concept of metanoia can be viewed as nonlinear evolutionary change. Change happens at a turning point. Evolutionary development, the path of physis, is not always linear, incremental, easily anticipated, and progressive. It may proceed by discontinuous leaps or turns which may be unpredictable, disruptive, and creative.
PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC TREATMENT OF CANCER and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS (http://www.oocities.org/iona_m/Chaosophy2/CancerandCRP.html)
I am taken with the idea that we model the inner in the outer world. Looking at the metaphysical source of disease I am sure there is a similar metaphor as I understand it. The core of us may have lost purpose, sense of connection and ability to balance, then cells develop chaotic growth.
Being alone, being lonely, being artificially separated from what one loves, losing connection, communication and continuity seem to me to be at work on our immune sytems and I am interested in how we can reconnect these circuits of aliveness and community.
We might ask whether there is a connection between man’s destruction, ravaging, and polluting of the earth in modern times and the increasing emergence of cancer? It is an important fact that cancer was essentially absent in the American Indian culture prior to the white man’s invasion. A moment’s reflection reveals that that invasive behavior was not unlike cancer itself, and its proliferation beyond the bounds of sustainability confirms it.
In many cancer patients we see a powerful psychological growth cut down or cut off. It is as if something very alive in themselves was killed. When a person severs some living connection to the self, the ego in effect tries to assimilate the self. Instead, the wounded self begins an inevitable course of assimilating the ego. It may come out in psychosis or in cancer, but the person is reduced to eating himself, feeding on his own flesh, rather than on the fruits of the earth whose spirits he seems to have violated in himself.
Cancer has been described as a type of suicide, a way out, a mode of death, as one of the ways we choose to die. It has even been described as an alternative to psychosis. Bodily destruction and images of bodily consumption are frequent in psychosis, and the dreams of cancer patients too are filled with images of bodily rending and consumption. Rather than the cancer consuming them, they may be consuming themselves. Cancer means living in the borderland between this world and the other.
In Ovid’s tale of the myth of Erysichthon a similar story is woven. Erysichthon takes a company of axemen to the sacred grove of Demeter to obtain sufficent timber for an elaborate banquet hall. He is warned by the female spirits of the trees to desist for his plan. Intent, despite all warnings, he cuts down the sacred oak of Demeter. In so doing, he angers this gentle Goddess to a fury nearly unparalled in Greek mythology. She inflicts upon him an insatiable hunger. After exhausting all possible food, he devours himself. This is a particularly graphic image of a victimization in relation to the Goddess of growth and increase.
Disease is not a personal failure nor punishment. It is an opportunity to love yourself and discover an even greater Self. It can drive us toward overcoming the past, both personal and collective. In this quest we find the true self. The disease is a gift, an agent of transformation. Even death can be a challenge, opportunity, or flowering. Death is not a failure, except for an overly-controlling heroic ego. But it strips us of illusions.
In keeping with holographic notions, when one part of an organism manifests symptoms, every other part and level of it is also in a similar state of dis-ease, including in the celles and genes. The whole is in any part, as fractal geometry shows us; the same structure keeps appearing at all levels. For truly deep and profound healing, the whole organism must healing including at the cellular and genetic levels.http://www.oocities.org/iona_m/Chaosophy2/CancerandCRP.html
Loss of connection to feeling "well placed" with a rooted sense of what is most valuable seems a refrain in many ways now. Atlanta Georgia in the 80's was growing fast. Everything was changing and the best of what was there seemed to be threatened by this "Growth" as chaos.... Transient, unrooted and modern but losing trees, losing any countryside around it, losing to the "cancer" of unrestrained "rela estate" development.
I am taken with the idea that we model the inner in the outer world.
Being cut off from one's roots seems apropos to my husband's family life tragedy. The themes of separation and feeling all alone, too much alone to bridge the gaps, unable to cope with the way life was going, being so lonely one turned to artificial means like TV and shopping, being artificially separated from what had been natural, losing connection, communication and continuity were there from the beginning to an end.
My husband came form "mountain people" who moved to the city to find work. Lots of people must move away from their roots to have a life that is based on "good jobs",hoping to move back later. This family still retained the farms they were raised on. After my husband left home, something went wrong with his mother's mental health. She isolated to her room and the shopping channel and TV preachers. This was not all what my husband recalled of his mother in early years. She slept all day and was obsessed with sin and shopping for the latest stuff.
My husband's father worked his good job and stayed away from home...then he retired in 1999. This was a stress and within a year, my husband's father shot himself in the chest in an argument with his wife...at least suicide was the police report conclusion. He had been slightly depressed and unhappy with being retired. He had started prozac. The night before, he packed and planned to move away to the mountains to restore his homeplace.
My husband was shocked. He could not get his head around this event. Contemplating how this death happened brought up much turmoil. A few months later, my husband was diagnosed with glial cell brain cancer...a glioma stage III.
Within a year, my husband's mother moved in with here father near our house. The witness to the death, my husband's sister stayed in the house where the death occurred. One night, she died in her sleep of an elevated blood sugar (at least that is what the autopsy said). She was found a few days later.
Just a few months later, my husband's mother's father died, leaving his farm to his daughter. Then my husband's mother died suddenly a few months later. All these deaths were in 4 years time and in the fifth year, my husband died. I thought he had a tremendous will to live. IMO finally the inner tragedy of losses overwhelmed him. he just could not reorganize to a new state of physical health and went elsewhere IMO.
One healer had noted the irreconcilable conflicts of mind that my husband held. He did not know how to make sense of the tragedy of loss. He had once depended on a happy family who loved one another. The truth that a great ravaging of hatred within the family had led to the losses was not sensible...perhaps the happy family he had imagined never existed. So sad and so common in our tales of tragic endings.
WHAT IS CANCER? (http://www.oocities.org/iona_m/Chaosophy2/CancerandCRP.html)
Cancer is a family of diseases often characterized by rapid and relatively unrestrained proliferation of undifferentiated cells that invade bodily organs and tissues and spread from original growth sites to distant areas in the body. It is an invasive, powerful growth which consumes and destroys vital life processes.
The word ‘cancer’ strikes horror and dread, bringing images of the physical body eaten away by the ravenous advance of a consuming malignancy. But, it is not only a physical malady; it initiates a dark night of the soul. Cancer attacks, seizes, and consumes life, threatening existence. Cancer may be one form of the inevitable price modern man pays for separating himself too far from the life of nature. As much as 80-90% of cancers may be environmentally “caused.”
Cancer often emerges within six to eighteen months following some major emotional loss, especially if the suffering individual falls into a “hopeless-helpless” frame of mind. Loss can kindle loss of the will to live, libido turns inward, and feeds on the body, (Simonton, 1978).
The unitarian concept of cancer sees the malignant component of all its varieties to be the same. This component is not spontaneously created but represents the most primitive cell in the life cycle, the trophoblast cell, gone awry.
In alchemy, massa confusa refers to the “chaos” of elements in active conflicts and hostility with one another. All bonds are broken, all connections dissolved. It is a state of complete disorder and undifferentiated chaos. The cancer cell likewise is undifferentiated and chaotic in its organization and spreading growth.
The psychological approach to the treatment of cancer is likely to be most effective when the cancer itself is regarded as the massa confusa which must be differentiated and transformed. The alchemist reduced the disorder of the alchemical chaos by his devotion to his operations and putting himself in a condition in which the “miracle” of transformation was possible, with God’s help.
Cancer erupts in those whose psychology has prepared the way for susceptibility. Cancer cells grow within us all the time. But there is a natural suppresive mechanism -- the immune system -- which operates to inhibit the growth of these undifferentiated cells.
Psychoneuroimmunology has shown us that the immune system is extraordinarily sensitive to psychic influences. Feelings and thoughts become molecules which modulate the neurology and chemistry of our bodies to influence our ability to attack malevolent material in the body through mind/body feedback loops.
Up-Welling: Healing From Within
The same powers of creativity that gave birth to the universe and unfolding forms of the natural world are present and reflected in the human mind and imagination. Creativity in nature and mind manifests its power through "authentic exchange," nuances of operations emerging from creative center. In these exchanges, the kinds of emergent self-organization described in complexity takes place, leading to the power of "collective creativity." One manifestation of this is the power to remold our social institutions including the healing arts.
A holistic Emergent Healing Paradigm is proposed rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories -- our models of nature's own forms of self-organization. It is suggested that emergent healing depends on nonlocal principles and self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mindbody of the organism. It is further suggested that the interactive field present in the healing situation can be amplified intentionally through resonant feedback -- therapeutic entrainment -- to facilitate intervention in the psychophysical healing process. A metaphysical context is provided to justify such a paradigm shift from the purely causal mechanistic healing model. A viable research direction is indicated by examining cosmology, the role of the human family, epistemology, and a mode of ethical reasoning.
Each of us can learn to balance and optimize inner growth, intimacy, physical and spiritual health -- to discover emergence beyond our emergencies.[URL="http://transmodernalchemy.iwarp.com/whats_new_8.html"]Transmodern Alchemy (http://transmodernalchemy.iwarp.com/whats_new_8.html)
I want to explore more of what Iona Miller proposes as not just about the individual body but the collective BODY
Cancer is an expression of the natural growth process gone awry. Physis is a verb that means “to grow” or “to be” -- “what things really are.” To Aristotle it meant “that imminent thing from which a growing thing first begins to grow.” There are two ancient conceptualizations of physis -- (1) change as flux itself, without source or goal, and (2) change as cure, growth, or creative evolution.
Berne (1968) used physis to represent the major motivating force of cure, individual aspiration, and collective evolution. He formulated his view as “The growth force of nature, which makes organisms evolve into higher forms, embryos develop into adults, sick people get better, and healthy people to strive to attain their ideals.”
Berne, along with Jung and some theorists in humanistic psychology, had a larger vision that took into account the healing and creative instincts which can transform both the sex and death drives. Berne thought that physis was the evolutionary healing growth force of nature, inwardly-directed libido, or even more basic than libido. He saw eros, thanatos, and physis (sex, death, and growth) as the background of all psychological experience.
Physis is not derivative of libido or mortido, although aspects of each can be used to understand it. Physis is larger and more impersonal, infusing eros and thanator in its creative, healing, and evolutionary quest. Physis is at least an equal and probably much more fundamental and basic force. It is a generalized creative drive toward health, the basis of human motivation and transcendence. It is a primal source of flexibility and resilience, serendipity, and spontaneity -- even spontaneous remission.
Berne (1972) had the idea that the autonomous aspiration of a human being rises from the depths of the Somatic Child (oldest, most archaic, or undifferentiated ego state) and transcends the limit-inducing pressures of the script, which is shaped by the matrix of love (affection) and death (destruction) in our earliest relationships.
The process of self-devouring can be reversed through self-creation, enrichment procured from one’s own depths. The concept of metanoia can be viewed as nonlinear evolutionary change. Change happens at a turning point. Evolutionary development, the path of physis, is not always linear, incremental, easily anticipated, and progressive. It may proceed by discontinuous leaps or turns which may be unpredictable, disruptive, and creative.
PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC TREATMENT OF CANCER and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS (http://www.oocities.org/iona_m/Chaosophy2/CancerandCRP.html)