Thread by @the_wilderless

Starting with Politics of Experience & The Bird of Paradise, partially cuz is has some of my favorite Laing sections,

https://twitter.com/the_wilderless/status/1353545033903824896

And partially cuz it’s the only book I have brought 2 copies of with me through multiple countries, cuz my first copy got too worn but I didn’t wanna lose my notes

This part is from late in the book, but captures something about the attitude.
Laing very much refused to be beaten down into submission—even while constantly looking around and calling out the dereliction of the world, he refused to sink into it

Right in the intro to book is about where I got Laingpilled as a young man.
“We are potentially men.”
“A shriveled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be.”

I grew up in a small midwest community where the overwhelming vibe was an acceptance of just kind of letting go. You get married at 19, have a kid, and just coast for the rest of your life, there’s not much more for you.

This book was one of the first powerful statements I saw that pushed along my feeling that “good enough” wasn’t good enough. That striving is something to be embraced, not mocked.

It’s a little thing, but to lil teen me, it was something I desperately needed.

1967, he published this. And not a week goes by I don’t see someone in this part of twitter re-discovering the same exact thing for themselves.

Re-reading this, I wonder how much this ties in with IFS.

How much of us needing to co-ordinate our different “Parts” is just a healthy normal part of being human,

And how many of our Parts are actually more like “shards”? Things that ought to be unified, but got ripped up?

An excellent way of phrasing our child-brainwashing system.

We need them all to be imbeciles with the highest IQs we can feasibly give them.

Yes, we’ve taken a wrecking ball to the world, and we’ve all talked a lot about the ways that this has fragmented, panicked, broken us,

But I see less discussion these days of the above point:
The arrow doesn’t go straight from “Broken world” to “our broken minds/souls/relations”

Before we could break the world, we had to first break ourselves so we wouldn’t mind breaking the world.

I’ve never gone through Vervaeke’s stuff, but does he touch on this at all? My vibe is that he talks about how modernity has fragmented our minds.
But does he touch on the ways that it was necessary to break our minds BEFORE going all-in on modernity? And the downstream of that?

Again, published 1967. Now so commonplace it barely warrants comment.

Deeply ambivalent here, but let’s take a moment to appreciate the accuracy and poetry of “the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother”

I’m not big on the line of thought that “we evolved for X, and thus we should do X now.”
We evolved to fit our environment, and if X no longer fits our environment, fuck it.

But as a middle- and high-school teacher, I’m deeply, bodily aware of how accurate it is to say that most of our interactions with children are directly aimed at destroying most of their potentials.

And yet. This does call to mind something from Ortega Y Gasset:

Pruning off possibilities is a necessary part of growing up. And inevitable. Fighting it, trying to keep all possibilities open can be harmful.

So I’d like some more nuance on the discussion of destroying children’s potentials and possibilities. It’s not an unfettered bad.

Control of which questions are valid is far more powerful than control of which answers are available to questions.

If you tell youths a question is itself invalid, it doesn’t matter what answers they find.

Like, for example, if you tell a 18 year old that Laing is trash

R.D. Laing going haaaaard on the Modern Family

One of my sayings as a teen was “Family is just mandated Stockholm syndrome” so you can see why I connected with this book.

The “Us and Them” chapter is exhausting me right now. It’s all too relevant and too much to say, and it’s night where I am, so I’m just going to put up a could quotes from it and go to bed

“Towards a Praxis of Egregore Slaying,” by R.D. Laing

I’m out for tonight. Tomorrow I’m going back through probably the chapter of Laing that has most influenced me over the years, “A Ten Day Voyage.”
It’s about someone’s clinically schizophrenic experience, which they went through and came out the other side of,

Which means its about the question of the degree to which a mental illness can be just an unresolved situation in wait of resolution, rather than a chronic thing that will continue your whole life.

This section has fascinated and terrified me for years

Re-reading this final chapter was emotional for me—it’s affected my thought a lot over the years, mostly the last two pages or so

Before jumping into the content: here’s a video of the guy the chapter is about. It’s worth a look for the music alone
ht @Leonalobster

Here’s a couple of his pieces

The actual experience itself is both interesting and not. We’ve all had or read about psychedelic trips, meditation breakthroughs, similar experiences. A lot of similarities with Jesse Watkins, just that his took 10 days.

What’s more interesting the implications

He was taken to a hospital and received pretty mild care—largely because this was the early 1900s, they didn’t have much more to do than “give him mild sedatives and put him in the padded room if he gets too loud”

After awhile, he refused the sedatives, and had a feeling that he has to take care of this, and the sedatives are stopping him from doing that.

So… he takes care of it. Details are sparse, but it seems to have been an intense experience for him.

The last 2 pages of the chapter have followed me for years in their implications, so I’m just going to present them here in chunks without comment

To repeat that last line for emphasis:

“They will try to cure us. They may succeed. But there is still hope for us that they will fail.”

This is what’s followed me about this particular book for so long.

That if you spend your life in such a way that abnormal, mystical experiences occur, they will be largely indistinguishable from madness by most professionals working today.

And while these mystical experiences can be gone *through* and have been gone *through* for all of history, ending in a return to the “normal” world, in a transformed state…

There’s a very real possibility that being “treated” for this “psychotic break” will end with you being

Stuck in an aborted spiritual state. Where you should have a spiritual guide to help you, you instead get lab coats shoving pills down your throat.

Some are lucky enough to have these experiences as part of a tradition that knows how to deal with them, or to be somewhere where they are uninterfered with, and can get through it on their own,

But how many people with chronic “psychotic episodes” are just interrupted mystics? Potential buddhas, stunted with lithium and thorazine?