Beyond the person

The 91 year old mother of a friend of mine recently died, or left her body as we say. She had been born on the island of Corfu, where she learnt Italian, and grew up in Egypt where she learnt English, French and presumably Arabic. She then went to live in Israel where she and her partner spoke English (of a fashion) at home - their common language as her partner was from Poland. They came to Australia from Israel in the 1960s.

This woman had dementia, and as the dementia worsened, she reverted to speaking to everyone in Italian, (the later and more superficial layers of her being peeled away...? I have noticed this with my dad, who is reverting in some ways to his earlier identities, without the layer of religiosity which got added in his fifties.)

What is interesting is that my friend's mother went into hospital with pneumonia, had a horrible time of it, (as chronically ill people often do have in hospitals) and emerged far more lucid than she had been for years. She decided she did not wish to continue to live (in/with a body) and refused to eat or drink til she died.

This tale is similar to accounts of devotees of Ramana Maharshi, such as Major Chadwick and S. Cohen and Maurice Frydman, who had all become incoherent but suddenly "emerged" to make clear statements about the true nature of their being before the body died.

Invention dumber lebenty seben

Having trouble keeping floppy adolescents upright? Are you a parent whose child flops on you in shule? R U a teacher who faces rows of slumped adolescents staring blankly at their forearms or school jumpers. We have come up with a cost effective solution, Presenting: The teenage hangar:


We did not have a teenager to model the device readily available ( we could not get them off the computer) so instead we used a more rigid stand-in (forgive the pun), but one which nevertheless should give customers a good idea of the potential of the new device.

Reminders to self

People with advanced alzheimers may be some of the free-est beings on the planet – only for that part of us invested in the notion of personality is the break down of memory – the glue which sticks “the person” together – threatening.

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Narrative therapy:
What should be internalised is externalised (Wall Street etc) and what should be externalised (shame, powerlessness, anger, hurt) is internalised...so there is aweful confusion...not, of course, that there are any shoulds
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Yes I can cope on my own, but can I thrive on my own?
Yes you can cope on your own, you can continue, but can you shift into more truth, more authenticity, more discipline, more spontanaiety, more joy on your own?
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Those of us who are lucky enough to find ourselves in situations of relative peace would do well to treasure it and not seek out war.

“I would say that one of the most important kinds of unpleasantness is boredom, so much so that I think that one of the hell gates that leads to maturity, to satori – the great awakening – is the abilitry to stay with boredom, not to try to jump out of it, do something interesting, or use it for complaining. (Fritz Perls, 1967, Four Lectures, p.43)

Nisargadatta voices a similar sentiment: “Once the mind is quiet, keep it quiet. Don’t get bored with peace, be in it, go deeper into it.”

The phenomenon of reluctance amongst non-Orthodox Jews

How do you get them to shul? With food, with guilt, with pleas to save the dying or near extinct animal of Judaism. But to ask them to come to shul to commune with the Divine, to find strength and clarity for their life challenges - this doesn't work, because people don't really know if they believe in a G-d or what that word means, because their world views are essentially consumerist-secular, and because they have never had that world view challenged in a systematic and fundamental (not fundamentalist) way.

Then how about getting them to come and connect with each other? Existential isolation and disconect is one of the biggest of the modern sufferings. Well, no, because prayer services as currently constituted do not facilitate the exchange of experience - after all tefila (prayer) is not an encounter/support group, unless we mean encounter with each person's understanding of G-d/HaShem.

It seems to me that shules - temples - synagogues are the perfect place for support groups to be held...one for middle aged dads, one for middle aged moms, one for singles, one for gays, one for adolescents, one for grieving people, one for new parents, one for people wrestling with illness, one for people seeking bliss. Such groups build real communities of meaning, and should precede prayer, the surrendering to the higher power. Indeed I doi not believe authentic prayer is possible without the prior clearing of the inter personal backlogue many of us carry.

Another challenge is communal prayer. Judaism has traditionally valued communal prayer over individual prayer, but communal prayer, humans being social animals, engenders all the pomp, hypocrisy, concern about apperances and role playing that get in the way of an authentic contact. In reform synagogues, where most of the congregants are Jewish ignoramuses who dabble in Judaism to keep a vestigal connection of something to something alive, people bob and bow when they think they're supposed to, look around to check if its ok to sit down now, page through the prayer book desperately trying to find something to read, peer at attractive congregants etc. In ultra orthodox shtiebels people mumble the words like automatons, asleep and numb to themselves and the other, or seek kavod with expressions of piety or their physical location in the shul.

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Are Evangelical churches really run by Christians?

When Jews are disproportionately represented in certain areas and certain countries, for example in 'the media' in the USA, conspiracy theorists immediately attempt to impute that there is something sinister or problematic with this.

I was wondering how this might work with other ethnic groups and sectors. For example are Afro Americans dominating basketball and boxing too much? Why is the Catholic Church run exclusively by Catholics? Why are there not more Jewish and Moslem bishops in the Vatican? Is the Catholic Church threatened by diversity? And why are all the rulers of Moslem lands Moslem? And their governments, media, judiciary, armies, and police force staffed exclusively by Moslems. When will we see a Bahai president in Iran? And when will Malaysia appoint a Hindu or Christian chief justice?

What about the over representation of women in women's groups, or the complete domination of horse racing and trophy hunting by the 'caucasian race'?? When will the conspiracy to exlude Jains and Bhuddists from the hunting and pro gun fraternity end? And why are evangelical TV channels staffed and funded by evangelicals. is there something they don't want us to know?

Understanding Existential Therapy

Existential therapy, by focusing on choice, authenticity and what Satre called 'being condemned to freedom' helps clients eventually leave therapy with an increased tolerance for the uncertainty of life. Medelowitz and Schneider (2008) claim: "More sure of oneself, one embraces the challenges and responsibilities of life without knowing precisely what lies beyond" (p.322).

Despite the existentialists claim that they brought a flexibility and dogma free approach to therapy, it seems to me the above quotation is only really a paraphrase of something Freud had said some 100 years prior: "you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness."

Perhaps Woody Allan (nee Allen Konigsberg) highlighted the gains one can make in existential therapy best: "...mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to utter hopelessness and despair, the other to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

Engagement and inattention

Many people all over the world identified with the struggle in South Africa. The struggle for the rights and human dignity of the majority of South Africans rightly and fortunately attracted passive and active sympathy from people around the world. But once the struggle was no longer sexy, and dissolved into the ambiguity of a post-Apartheid dispensation where crime. corruption, misgovernance and perhaps a national discourse dominated by falsehoods have created (or perpetuated) an unstable, unsafe and unequal society, people have lost interest. (it is an inescapable irony that many of the things white racists predicted would happen in a post apartheid dispensation have) Wellwishers around the globe still cite Mandela as an example of a secular saint, but beyond that feel no responsibilty for what has materialised.

I wonder if the same kind of dynamic is perhaps kicking in with other trendy causes, such as the Palestinian one? Some people may do their best to reshape or replace Israel, in the name of the assertion of Palestinian dignity, and then, if the Jewish homeland is dismembered or so emasculated that it is eventually replaced by another corrupt or fundamentalist or dictatorial Moslem state, people in Scandanavia and San Francisco will shrug their shoulders and turn back to their lives...