Archive for the ‘Concepts’ Category

Adriana Tanese-Nogueira

Naivety is a natural state of the child’s soul, a spontaneous condition of the beginning of life. Everything is new and has to be explored, because of ingenuity we venture, trust, test and learn. And here lays the final goal: learning.

With the years passing by, naivety should give place to wisdom, which consists in some bitter notes and some sweet ones. It happens though that when ingenuity slips away, it is substituted by sorrow before life and the world, leading to disbelief and misanthropy. This is one of the reasons for people to cling to naivety as a way to preserve their childhood and optimism toward life. In doing so, however, they don’t save the “inner child”, rather they remain childish.

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Adriana Tanese-Nogueira

Conscience is discernment. Having conscience is leaving the blurry vision, the confuse understanding and the misty feeling. Having conscience is seeing with clarity through mind’s eyes, disentangling, dividing and uniting. It’s getting oriented and finding the way.

Conscience in thinking

Mentalities are everything in life, they demarcate the horizon, what one thinks one can do or must do. The decision taken depend on one’s Read the rest of this entry »

Adriana Tanese-Nogueira

You have been living in this house called Ego for a long time. It has several rooms and you have your favorite spaces. Some corners of the house are constantly illuminated, because you spend much time there and know each detail of them. There are rooms where you only go sometimes, they mean sporadic experiences depending on opportunity and company. Each one of these rooms, with their furniture, sounds, colors and objects, tell about you. And you are accustomed to them.

One day, walking through the house, you notice a closed door. From under it you only see darkness. The door was unknown to you, and Read the rest of this entry »

Being oneself and being “different” is an idea that gained space in general culture. Accusing someone of being stereotyped it’s considered offensive, for that means trivializing his or her personality, and basically it’s calling such person stupid. Stereotypes are always corny.

However, who dismisses easy talks and ventures into the road of “being oneself”, will soon discover that it’s not as simple as words make believe. This question is the core of most of individual problems, of suffering and social misfits. Comprehending it in a proper way is the first step to face the challenge in a constructive way that moves toward a solution.

“Being oneself” means differentiating oneself from the environment and culture in which one has born, grew and live. It means “becoming oneself”, expressing the unique characteristics that make a person be an individuality and not a clone of a given model. This differentiation occurs in many aspects: in the way of thinking, feeling, understanding, proceeding, choosing, and in the priorities and behavior. It’s easy to realize that it’s something complex that doesn’t happen quickly. This process is technically called Individuation. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you observed how much crated we are in pre-determined models? There are molds for everything. Choose yours, withdraw it from the grocery shelf, go to the cashier and pay. Now, you have happiness (because of course you buy it).

It’s true that an economical transaction is part of happiness. But if money is necessary, it’s certainly not enough. Besides money one needs some psychological and social conditions. We like to be with certain people and to feel good with them. But it’s not sufficient having them close by for happiness magically pop up and mainly to Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s be straightforward: bad dads and bad mom do exist. Nobody would like to have them, very few admit having them, but that’s reality. Generating a child doesn’t automatically make the parents better people than what they were before. It must be stressed that dads and moms are people, exactly like your neighbor, your colleague and your enemy. People.
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There are psychological disturbs that occur deep within our sentiments and thoughts and are fed by external factors that escape the grasp of traditional psychology. In Spiritism, they are classified as “obsessors”, evil ghosts that torment individuals.

An obsession is “the domination of one’s thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc.”

Possessed by their own obsessions, obsessors, in their unconscious aspects interfere in people’s life without their victims be aware of them, well blended as they are within people’s psyche. We suffer suchlike infiltrations more frequently than we believe. In deep psychology, we translate this idea as having subconscious contents that are reinforced, enhanced, and promoted by other unconscious dynamics.

Only thanks to a great deal of self consciousness and observation can the influence of an obsessor be detected. The action of an obsessor is subtle and disguised: it amplifies a worry or preoccupation, enhances a thought or doubt, increases its victim’s agitation and anxiety. Obsessors always wane tranquility and serenity.

An obsessor has access to us because of a present or past relation. Although we might think the relationship to be “good and resolved”, there are other phenomena beneath the rug, such as occult interests, non assumed intentions, fears… and etc., which leads the person to want the control over another – control that also happens beneath the rug, that is, at the unconscious level.

The people who act as obsessors not necessarily are conscious of what they do. It’s naïve to think that we have to whole control of ourselves. There are unconscious claws that don’t let go what cannot be dropped. Meanwhile, on the outside, that is on the conscious level, life goes on apparently normal. However, strange reactions occur, unexpected thoughts or unpleasant feelings, sleepless nights, obsessive ideas we are not interested in cross our minds and we don’t know why. Deciphering the visible reality it’s not enough. One needs to penetrate the invisible.

There are different types of obsessors according to their origins and bond with us. The most famous is the obsessor who comes from a past life, when a dramatic event occurred whose disturbed emotions weren’t overcome yet. That bond remains and persecutes the other person. The obsessor’s goal is to damage, and he’ll feed whatever can harm the person.

But obsessors can also be alive people we know, with whom, usually, we have a strong affective relation. The bond didn’t end or it’s not solved, but got complicated in a vertigo of side effects, symbols and psychological complexes that affect the entire personality. The obsessor may have fixed on the other person because of the essential value she or he embodies. The obsessor identifies this person as an important symbol he must have to feel better.

Or else, the obsessor has divided feelings, rationally supports a choice, sentimentally lives the opposite. What is denied by the ego remains as an unconscious link reinforced by the very conscious rejection: the more the mind denies, the bigger the unconscious obsession becomes. The victim will be persecuted by the obsessor’s invisible presence, his desires and anxiety – always on the unconscious level.

A third possibility, and this one more common and “light”, happens when someone manipulates in an obsessive way the perception of the another person in order, for example, not to have this person getting aware of the conditions of their relation, therefore avoiding its end. The obsession in this case is the other side of a smiley and calm face.

The obsessor’s performance has traced here belongs to the wider cultural panorama where thinking and feeling are understood as forms of energy. We attract the same frequency of ours. Somewhere within us there is or there was an opening that allowed the obsessor to penetrate. In fact, every one has gaps, nobody is compact, or at least it’s hard to keep balanced. It suffices to have a doubt, a gaff to welcome “evil spirits”. With the unbalance and confused environment we live in it’s easy to be affected.

On the other hand, some choices open the doors to the pestilence to come in. Using alcohol and drugs is an impeccable way to gape the gates to any kind of evil influence. Drug’s purpose it lowering the consciousness level, which is a wholesome thing when it’s done under the protection of specific symbolic rituals, or otherwise, when it’s time to go to sleep. Besides these moments, reducing the state of awareness is the same of walking at night in a forest full of voracious wolves.

The best antidote against obsessors and manipulators is the process of awareness of what happens within us, that is, self knowledge.

Forget the horrible movies scenes, with drooling, shouts and wide open eyes. Exorcism, which is “removing a devilish spirit from a person”, is one of the possible methods do solve a real problem. However, in order to work traditional exorcism must rely on a truly powerful exorcist, something that we miss nowadays. If there is an actual shortage is of a positive spiritual power. It only remains psychology, it’s not by chance that the Middle Ages are gone.

Psychology borders two distinct worlds: the physical and the spiritual. We have emotions that cure the body and others that harm it. Happiness and serenity bring health, organs that work and delay aging; fear, anxiety and insecurity lead to stuck births, heart strokes, addiction and a series of others unpleasant situations.

On the other hand, what we call spirit can only be perceived by our psyche, on the contrary it would be like purport seeing the physical world without using our eyes (I remind here that I’m not doing theology but psychology). Every human experience is psychological by nature, because we are a psychic system. Thus, the spiritual dimension, whatever it is, manifest itself in that transitional space between two realities, in the blending of two elements, the psyche and the spirit, when one turns into the other.

Jung would call this world “archetypal”. Spirits and archetypes are two words with potentially the same meaning but belonging to two different paradigms. The first one draws immediately attention to itself, the second appeals only to those who know something about Jungian psychology, on the contrary it sounds “weird”. One is emotionally charged, the other seems abstract. However, there are real chances that these two words mean the same thing, even because the concept of “archetype” is not so defined as we would like. Everything that is not consciousness lives on the shadowy banks of the unconscious.

From the psychological point of view, exorcism is meant to be necessary when an external force (to the person’s awareness) penetrates in the person’s inner self (that is, it becomes perceptible by the conscious psyche) and acts over the individual against his or her will (that is, against one’s “normal” way of thinking) twisting one’s thoughts and actions. That shows the action of complexes (ego’s) or of archetypes (collective unconscious/spiritual world’s) over a person in spite of one’s consciousness and intentions. Their actions is always negative because violate human free will. In practice, it means that a person does things that don’t make sense with what this person says, uses to think or would like to happen. It’s like a football player who suddenly starts scoring against his own team and, on top of that, gets infuriated if somebody point that out to him.

Up to hear this is psychology, a tough neurosis… but until when? When is it a case for an exorcist? When the scores against one’s team (personal life hurt, family knockout, work and future in peril, etc.) are too many. It means that the “malignant spirit” is taking more and more space.

Possession is different from madness, in the latter the ego’s control is totally lost and with it the rational logic is gone (although a symbolic logic is present). Continuing the example above, it would be as if the football player would start dancing in the middle of the field instead of playing. In the possession, on the contrary, the traditional logic remains but it’s wildly distorted. The possession is generally momentary, having a person alternating between playing right and playing against. The logic of the negative possession is about destruction (disguised or explicit), there’s a kind of impetus towards razing things (including the dear ones) and limits, mainly the ones imposed by the “light” (order and consciousness) and its representatives. It’s like a powerful rage that wants to end up with everything – intentionally. But this is not what the person wants and besides he doesn’t acknowledge this “rage”, although in that moment he is submitting to its devastating force and actually fully embodying it.

This picture is frequently found among alcoholics and possibly other drug addicts too. Experiences of this kind are always negative because they nullify individual freedom and dumb a person, that is, one doesn’t think right anymore although one thinks he does and defend oneself against the opposite hypothesis until death. We can explain this condition as the possession and enacting of the negative aspect of a determined archetype that is acting beyond awareness, which, in this way, perpetuates its power and reduces considerably the person’s chances to realize what’s going on. To this obstacle, the individual’s pride is added (one of the seven capital sins!), which turns extremely painful to face one’s weakness and one’s domination by shattering forces unfamiliar to one’s will.

It’s here that a nice exorcism would save years of suffering to individuals and families, putting the person in conditions to be ready to start a therapy without all that agitation and yells, without the deranged aggression and the obtuse self destruction. Life is too short.

“The goal the collective sets for itself it is always to produce a life and a common life style that are the less possible disturbed by the individual active forces, not caring if these forces have low or high values.” (Erich Neumann, Deep Psychology and a New Ethics, p. 19).

We long to be normal and accepted, for thus we fit in the pack. That’s a human value and necessity. As Aristotle said, “humans are political animal”, where “political” means social. We need to gather, to be together; we are important to one another more than we’d like. Everyone wants to have friends and good neighbors and harmonious family. Yet it is so difficult.

The “normality” we look for is a cracked image of an idealized human being who not only does not exist but is crafted on a disputable model. The individual uniqueness smacks into the collective standards, and many people can only keep being grouped because they lived in a kind of continuous trance. Their physical presence doesn’t really mean their agreement, as their willingness to belong to something strains their souls to forget itself.

Any society to survive as a whole establishes a pattern of humanity and forces individuals into it. That’s the nature of societies (see Durkheim for a sociological reflection). Individual’s nature if it needs a stable and safe environment to develop, it also roots into evolutionary movement. “Individual” means not divisible. A person is a unity that stands alone although needs companions and group. Plus, human beings are historically defined by their ability to transform their lives conditions and thoughts, which is in straight opposition to the collective expectations upon its members.

Thus, if we think from the collective point of view “normality” means the average John Smith. Thanks to many John Smiths we have a stable society (not on civil war) with its own identity and characteristics. However, to fit into John Smith’s pattern one has to sacrifice a certain amount of one’s personality and originality. In each society there are many variations of John Smith’s ID but the essence is the same, therefore many people think they are “different” when they actually are wearing just a modified version of the same paradigm.

The John Smith’s paradigm has its own amount of values and potentiality, and it’s not necessarily bad. But on the long run it will become tight and suffocating for its own nature is dumb. Society is not an alive entity, it depends upon the individuals, the only ones able to makes changes. But since they have been raised in the social “John Smith’s normality” they feel wrong when doing of even wishing anything different. Wrong and guilty.

This conflict blows up during adolescence. That is an atrocious period of human life, because it is in here that the most dramatic battle between uniqueness and standards, originality and pattern, individual and collective is fought. As any adolescent knows the collective harasses unmercifully. No pity is bestowed to the young soul who doesn’t fit. Who dares to be and speak differently and agaisnt any of the John Smith’s variations will be stoned.

On the other hand, if we look at “normality” having the human history as a backdrop we realize that “normal” is the movement toward change, defined as:

• more knowledge
• more individual independence towards social roles
• mode individual independence towards religion’s dogmas
• more enlightened political views
• more consciousness
• more sensitivity

Therefore, in the human history revolutionaries are the normal ones and the passive John Smiths are the abnormal. However, what is good for the big picture means hardship for the non-John Smith person in their daily life. We nowadays thank Einstein and Newton, but the first was a bad student looking goofy and dumb, which must have been a heck of a childhood; the second one was almost considered autistic, a solitary young man, bullied at school and moving away from places and people. That was not a fun life.

In the present as in the past we live the same conflict between the individual and the collective. The latter only changes, opening up and evolving, because of the effort and struggle of the new individuals, which to obtain their place in society must overcome battles and deal with their own suffering and misunderstanding.

Today this fight is spread around in multiple little and big troubles. We live shifting times. Like millions of ants busily working, there are many people wrapped up by their own inner voices claiming for new paths. They need to know that it’s on their blood and sweat that a new road will be open for everybody. And also that being aware of the big picture will give them strength and courage. That’s being psychologically enlightened.