PSYCHOSCAPES

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Let your soul occupy you

“Remember this: Most likely, the corporate state has, to some degree, colonized your mind, as it is well on its way to destroying the ecosystem of the entire planet.

“Conversely, let your soul occupy you. While there might be an ongoing effort to scour Liberty Park of liberty, they cannot do likewise to your heart without your consent. Turn the tables on them: Evict the corporate occupiers from the public realm within--as all the while, you challenge propaganda whenever it crosses your path…on the streets, at your workplace, at family gatherings, and on social media-- because a lie left unchallenged begins to be accepted as truth. And worse, invades, colonizes and exploits (and often kills) a portion of the soul of the world…”

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“The ground is shifting below our feet and this phenomenon involves more than the echoing footfalls of marchers and the trudging of militarized formations of riot cops on city streets worldwide.

“The first vibrations, closer to tremors, transpired because the ground below us has been fracked of dreams...the void engendered seismological activity. Now, from Cairo, Egypt's Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square in Athens, Greece to Liberty Park, in New York, New York to Oscar Grant Park, in Oakland, California, we have become like tuning forks, in sympatico with the resonances of the tormented earth.”

The above quotes are from an article by Phil Rockstoh published on Wednesday, November 23, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website or at FaceBook.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Occupy Delusion

I had an “aha moment” while reading a piece in today’s NYT by Benedict Carey: Finding Purpose After Living With Delusion.

Carey's article is about people with schizophrenia who are now arguing that their delusions are not solely from a biological illness “but also in fears, longings and psychological wounds” stemming from their environment. Now, he writes, these psychiatric veterans are coming together in increasing numbers.

It struck me that Finding Purpose After Living With Delusion is a perfect metaphor for the Occupy Wall Street Movement which is also people coming together, much like a huge support group, to validate each other while disputing the prevailing attitude that their problems are due solely to personal failure and incompetence.

“It’s a thrilling time,because people with lived experience are beginning to collaborate in large numbers,” says Gail Hornstein, author of Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meaning of Madness. “They are developing their own theories, their own language about what their experiences mean from the inside.”

Just like the Occupy Movement: people coming together to share their own felt experience about what it actually feels like to be poor, hungry, uninsured, unemployed, homeless and hopeless.

And more than that, what it feels like to have society turn its back on them and call them losers because they no longer play the only game that counts in America: Buying things. Shopping until you drop.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Occupy Peace

The Perimeter Between Us and Them J. Stimmell: Vietnam 1966

War is a place of fear, and fear is a place of borders. Fear requires us to dehumanize our enemies and, in the process, to dehumanize ourselves. Borders should not provide a justification for dehumanization. That is a trick of militarists who are in need of enemies, real or imagined, to make the war system work for them. But there is another way to deal with enemies, and that is to turn them, by our actions, into friends.

We need to stop fearing each other and treat each other with kindness. Consideration for the 99 percent does not stop at a country's border. We are all humans together, and we need each other to be fully human. We need to embrace our common humanity. In the nuclear age, war is far too dangerous; it has the potential to end civilization and most life on the planet. Peace is an imperative. We need to find a way to occupy peace, which begins in our hearts and must expand to encompass the world.

The above quote is from an Op-Ed by David Krieger published on Truthout on 11/23/11
Thank you, Pat, for sending me this.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Grounded in the present moment on Thanksgiving

Taking nothing for granted
Battered yet standing tall
Last collard in our garden
Grounded in the present moment

"If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to over indulge today and then on Black Friday* grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire…

But (w)hat a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear."

– quote from A Thomas Merton Reader
*my addition

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Are you running in circles like a mad dog?

"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist...destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

–above quote from Cojectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton–

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

When the operation of the machine becomes so odious

Police Survellance Tower
OWS at Liberty Park, 10/8/11. J.Stimmell@2011

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."

The above is from Mario Savio's famous speech at a Free Speech Movement demonstation in Berkely CA on 12/3/64 – a call to arms that, in many ways, ushered in the wave of activism that came to be known as The Sixties.

May the Occupy Movement be the catalyst to usher in a tsuami of activism in our even more urgent fight for peace and social justice in the 21st Century!