Being biologically male or female is an accident of conception - time we got over it, don't you think?

In the most simple terms, I am a person before all else.

All the cultural labels are imposed upon the person and they form a cultural persona - a mask, a veil worn for approval and through dull habituation internalised - thus 'fitting in' to a hierarchically violent cult. Babies are people, persons from the get go. We all are. Rather than externalise our emergent selves, we are forced to endured internalisation of the cult's approved proxies.

My maleness is an accident. Of conception. Of something that happened in the womb. Nothing I did. It just happened that way.  Nonetheless I am a man. Male body.

When I was a late teen I recognised in myself, within, that I was 'androgynous' in that I was neither male nor female as played out by those around me, in the character of my mind and psyche. Or at least when I discovered the word 'androgynous' and put it into that context I felt it made sense of my inner reality. I did not feel the roles laid out by culture fit within me. I could not talk about 'women' the way other men did. I wanted to meet minds. I was interested in bodies too, and shy with that, yet it it was the mind that I was really interested in. The person. Who are you, what do you think?

And because I did not understand that the discomfort I felt (around culturally imposed male and female roles) and behaviours was accurate I thought that there had to be something wrong with me, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not internalise those values. I have always felt deeply uncomfortable around the typical male - female behavioural dynamic. When members of either biological sex talk of the others as if they were another species I always felt something was deeply wrong.

I think I need to get over it. I am not the only one. Women are not a separate species, a mystery. Women are person, minds embodied. So here goes. I now understand that those cultural imposed conditioned roles are intrusions into the psyche of the person, they are what we call part of poisonous pedagogy.

Poisonous pedagogy, in Katharina Rutschky's definition, aims to inculcate a social superego in the child, to construct a basic defence against drives in the child's psyche, to toughen the child for later life, and to instrumentalise the body parts and senses in favour of socially defined functions.

https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Poisonous_pedagogy

There's a long history of culturally male behaviour that punishes women for not complying with male demands for sex as if access to women's bodies was some kind of inherent right. Incels are one expression of that. Women as chattels is another. Pornography has elements of that too. Eroticism less so. The idea that masturbation is not really sex. The bluster that penetration is an expression of that 'right to sex' by virtue of phenotype that is entirely a cultural construct.

There is no inherent right to sex with anyone other than oneself. There is a need, indeed, but it is primarily for intimacy and for procreation - and even so it must be governed by informed egalitarian consent unsullied by any form of power differential, formal or informal. We see a long of anger in the male culture, a lot of pain around this. We see a lot of punishment of women around this. It is there. It cannot be denied or played down. The impacts are too vast, too disruptive of conviviality, mutualism and collective coherence. I do not feel in any way diminished when a majority of women protest - "too many men, too many times, too much impunity". I know they are not talking about me. I get how they must feel. Not least because of what my close female friends have disclosed and what I have seen myself, and how I have intervened at different times in my life to stop harassment and abuse. I do not feel the need to say 'not all men'. At all.

----

Being biologically male or female is :

a) an accident of conception, yet not in the same what that the class one is of is an accident of birth. Class is created by a hierarchy cult. It is not natural at all. Class is artificially imposed. Obviously the Hierarchs hold that class is natural. They have to believe that or their self assured stated withers before their eyes. Being biologically male or female is :

b) really easy, I don't have to do anything at all. Being proud of it is silly. Humility is a more accurate approach.

c) Avoiding the dominant culturally imposed definitions of what maleness/femaleness means is difficult. That is something to be proud of, glad of. It is difficult. It is scary. And yet it must be done to become the full person I am. My body and mind is in evolutionary terms so much older than this dominator culture, by a million years or more. Personhood is older than this culture. Personhood is deeper than anything this culture has ever philosophised. I laugh at the history of Philosophy mostly for it's lack of sensitivity. Way too serious, not playful. Not like my being at all. Where is the philosophy of nurture?

d) I experience my natural personhood as asexual, non gendered and I feel this sense of self is way more sensitive than the dominator cultural value sets delineate. Super alive. Super alive to the world and to feeling. Super sensitive. Playful. Creative. Joyous. Kind. Vulnerable. My music is not male. My writings are not male. They are both of the person I am. And when I feel maleness and this male sexuality, I delight in it, on my own and with my partners. It's got nothing to do with anyone until I consent. It's nobody's business. Until I choose to invite contact and that is always in the context of the other person. It's personal, it's person to person.

e) The struggle or discord between that natural ancient evolutionary base - the person - and the cultural overlay - the persona - is immense and intense and it is a taboo subject. The cultural overlay is a wound.

I internalised an identity given to me by a bully cult. It never fits. I have never been comfortable with that inside me. I have learned that it is not of me, does not belong with me. I decide what maleness means in as much as I am a person, who just happens to be male, and the maleness is a small part of me, it is not the whole of me, not by any stretch. Maleness is an aspect of my body and how that relates through my personhood is for me to define, to decide. Emergent.

f) I think there are many culturally conditioned males who are taking it personally when women are speaking as persons in such large numbers demanding that this misogyny, this unwanted attention, harassment and sexualised violence that is happening as a daily occurrence in so many lives MUST STOP. Now! I also know there are bullies and professional predators who are gaming all of this, for power. They are grooming the cultured males and females for political, economic and psychological advantage. I know there are cultured males and females who do see the wound of this behaviour and want it to stop and are confused as to why it is happening at all. I get that some feel a strong male or female identity and that it's a big part of who they are. I hope it is emergent for them, rather than a cultural internalisation. All of us are caught between a rock and a hard place within the culture that is a hierarchy of power and violence.

f) I think that there is a fear to see the wound that the women are drawing attention to. And I think it is in part that for culturally indoctrinated men to see it, to be really honest here, to submit to the truth as it really is to lose that culturally imposed identity, that internalised value set of the good male, or the bad male, whatever - it was not what I was born with, but by golly it is who I am now - is something can be perceived as, or imagined as a loss of self, a dissolution, a death of sorts.

When it's a liberation. It IS a liberation. To be truly male is to nurture.

g) What if we are not really men, not really women, we are really persons, and we need to meet and live as persons in order to deal with this dreadful wound?

h) How much of the dominant culture collapses in that realisation?

Boys! Our maleness is an accident. Of conception. Of something that happened in the womb. Nothing you did. It just happened that way.

I think we need to get over it. Free our minds. Our hearts. Come home to who we really are. You do know there is no such thing as a male brain, a male liver, a male kidneys, or even male lungs?

Kindest regards 

Corneilius 

 "Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

Cosmologies and the social material reality - a conflict of interest

On Cosmology in the context of these difficult times, all difficult times.

"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another."

The Garden Path

I hold the view that every person has the ability, and thus the natural right, to craft their own Cosmology. We are all imaginers even as we imagine entirely different things...

After all, that is a function of autonomy, as a living human being, as a person, within a family or community. One's own imagination is both tool and gift, and a pleasure - and yet if it is distorted, it can become a trap. cPTSD reveals to us some of the ways that the imagination can become distorted. 

Thus it follows that no person has the right to extend their cosmology to others, beyond themselves as an imposition. We can share our imaginings, explore their ways out of interest and variety and at the same time there is no  natural right to indoctrinate others, no right to demand resources or money for 'lessons' in any given cosmology, and certainly no right to create, maintain a following of believers.

All of that is manipulation, it is exploitative. These are all ways of accruing power over others.

I set that in the context of the shared space between us, the Common.

This is the ground upon which we walk, it includes the air we all breath, the water cycle pathways from which we drink, which water our foods,

The Commons is shared by and includes all creatures as neighbours, even the ones hunted for food.

And of course, the Commons includes the psycho-social material space between us as biologically aware intelligent social organisms and that requires an evidence based approach on all matters that affect that shared spaced. 

There's a fundamental balance in this. This is the space within which entire forests thrive. It is how complex ecosystems function - accurate information flowing through the commons. The Oceans are another commons.

In matters of the shared commons, I respectfully suggest that nothing less than all the evidence available can stand as the basis for action. 

Where we don't know, we must acknowledge that and then we study to know honestly, for only then can we answer those questions and take appropriate action. Which can include doing nothing at all. Leaving a forest to it's peoples is a way of doing something genuinely nurturing by doing nothing.

Therefore I suggest that belief and personal cosmology are inappropriate and unsafe a foundation in the domain of action within any  shared space, within the commons - a belief might pose a question:  even so, that can only be answered by direct evidence.  Until then, it remains an unknown.

I suggest then, that we keep our personal cosmologies as part of our art-imagination-play, a colourful hue, a filter if you will allow, within the white light of the whole - the family, community, culture, our shared environment.

That is the Egalitarian way. 

Personal Autonomy, Collective Evidence based action.

We now understand that a large part of the continuity of this balance is, in social bio-behavioural terms,  maintained primarily out of the conditions of parenting - from conception then birth through the first 18 -24 months of  life, where the fundamentals of emotional self regulation are formed and learned, in the brain to brain relationship between infant, toddler and primary care givers. 

Under what conditions, social and material, is early years care conducted?  Do they distort the default states that our biology clearly mandates for healthy behavioural learning and personal growth towards self mastery?

These are cultural behavioural markers, bench marks if you will of the prevailing relationship dynamics.

What are the cultural relationship dynamics and how do those reflect knowledge or belief - in essence, the question is do they conflict with biological defaults.?

The new brain meets a mature brain which nurtures and protects the new brain until that brain is ready for wider associations and participation. That is a default, a biologically mandated process.

We see the body, we do not see the internal organs, we do not see the inner workings of the clock. 

Allan Schore's work, following on from Prescott and Bowlby, with much improved scientific tools, and a vast body of work, describes the biology of emotional development, of self regulation and mastery of one's self - these are essential for autonomy and effective community 

He describes the carer brain to infant brain dynamics that we do not see :  what happens neurologically, what hormones, what cascades of proteins, what linkages are growing within both carer and cared for - all mediated by the security of the shared space between them.

Robert Sapolsky describes the wider unseen biology, beyond the carer to cared for, the world of truama, stress, hierarchy, 'human' behaviour and culture.

A baby that is set aside, crying itself to sleep, as a regular occurrence will develop and habituate a neurology and endocrine state as if that trauma state of feeling abandoned is normal - over a lifetime that distortion creates stresses on the body, that emerge as disease.

This is, of course, a simplification of the work of these intelligent, diligent Scientists and writers. Their work is, to a degree, a simplification of the carefully, honestly observed biological level complexity of how we develop into healthy mature organisms or not - they describe that level of biology in order that we see the evidence, that it informs us more accurately.

Knowledge is the base from which accurate intuition emerges. 

With all that in mind I wrote a short piece in 2017, when I was hoping for a shift in parliamentary power from the Oligarchs to the people via Momentum, Corbyn with what I believed the large sector of the electorate being decent human beings would want

What are the metrics of healthy Governance?

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-metric-for-governance-uk-election-2017.html

In this piece I lay out some very simple principles, which are the requirement for an evidence based policy formulation by any group of people concerned with the shared commons, the spaces between us.

 

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe, in a Buckie sort of way....  you know what I mean."

Political Power Health and Safety Check required, immediately.

 

Milosovic

 

Blair

 

The Vatican

These three images are just a hint at the dynamic of how insitutional power is reflexively defensive of it's position and manages harms that are exposed in ways that ensure they remain in power. The individuals at the top have usually internalised that power, and identify with that rather than the people over whom they have that power.

Loss of empathy is inherent. Hubris is common. Arrogance is the norm.

Established Power needs to be submitted to a full health and safety check, by the people.

That is pure common sense logic. However, there is a problem….. we have a problem.

Institutions, power and honesty.

“School tends to be a dishonest as well as a nervous place. We adults are not often honest with children, least of all in school. We tell them, not what we think, but what we feel they ought to think; or what other people feel or tell us they ought to think.

The fact is that we (the adult world) do not feel an obligation to be truthful to children.

We are like managers and manipulators of news in Washington, Moscow, London, Peking and Paris and all the other capitals of the world.

We think it is our right and our duty, not to tell the truth but to say whatever will best serve our cause – in this case, the cause of making children grow up into the kind of people we want them to be, thinking whatever we want them to think.

We have only to convince ourselves (and we are very easily convinced) that a lie will be ‘better’ for the children than the truth, and we will lie. We don’t always need even that excuse; we often lie only for our own convenience.”

Written in 1964, by John Holt who had thousands of hours of observation of children in schools across America. He wrote a few superb books on children and learning, and energised the homeschooling/unschooling movement in the USA.

How much does this insight resonate today, in 2017, in the UK?

Institutions are power centres.

Schools are also power centres.

It’s where we learn how to behave within an institutionalised power hierarchy.

‘No child left behind.’

Power Centres will always reflexively seek to defend that Power. Those who hold high office will often internalise that value completely. To the exclusion of healthy common sense and empathy, to a psychologically unstable degree.

There are examples in every area of society – Religion: the Vatican and Pedophilia – Politics, War and indoctrination : HiIlsborough, Chilcott, Levenson I – Health and Safety : Amoco Cadiz, Bhopal, Flint Water Supply, Fracking. Can you begin to see the pattern of behaviours?

There are plenty of examples in schools where matters of abuse or negligence or bias have been hushed up.

There are plenty of schools where teachers have been ‘convinced’ to support the diagnosis of ADHD and the subsequent drugging of children as a class room management strategy, etc etc - (more than my job/income, food, shelter, family is worth to challenge this is understandable, the teacher is being bullied institutionally and knows not to irk the masters).

And, in all of this activity, in so many areas of civic and commercial insitutional culture we see minor officials, lower ranks coerced to comply with the instructions of the powerful, to defend the institution rather than acknowledge the harms and be exposed. Iraq.

This is an easily identified pattern, with a massive evidence base that is quite reliable.

Established Power will use its power to protect itself.

The People are not to challenge that.

We see the powerful hire the best and most expensive legal teams to oppose ordinary people with relatively little comparative power, where the battle is one of financial resources, with one side far wealthier than the other….

We see out of court settlements.  “It could take years, take the offer!”

We do not see the full evidence.

We do not see justice.

Fines.

No criminal indictments.

The powerful will defend their position of power at all costs.

That is why Public Inquiries have failed to deliver Justice.

Power Hierarchies impose pressure to perform downwards, upon all subordinates, and failure to follow instructions by higher ranking personnel leading to loss of job for the lower ranking personnel is one of those intentional pressures.

Even when an order or instruction is illegal, amoral, destructive, negligent or corrupt, that pressure remains a potent leverage in today’s public and private Institutions. Who wants to be a whistle blower? Who would brave that storm?

Cover ups and mitigations do happen, and never by accident.

Political, economic, ideological and religious power demands that the holder be a bully, and bullies are more attracted to power than those who are not bullies.

The bully who is driven by the institutional environment to be more effective becomes professionalised. Fully committed.

That degree of committment to gaining and holding power is a social problem, a root dysfunction, a foundational malady.

Only when power is taken up as a shared responsibility of the grass roots tax payers, the people who both fund and who work in Civil Society will we have a safe, honest social political system.

Those who hold too much power will not yield it willingly.

Teresa May is demonstrating that right now. She is for the bullies. She backs Trumps call for Air Strikes against Syria, whilst the nation reels from a horror the Government (New Labour, Tory and Lib-Dem) created in Grenfell Towers. Air Strikes against urban areas with social housing..........

What does that really mean?

I am also talking about the culture at the lowest ranks in the hierarchies of power.. how debilitating and threatening the presence of poverty and disdain is, how corrosive it is.

There are many people who will seek to defend their bias, internalise their opinion as fact, deny the evidence, mitigate the responsibility at all levels.

I am interested in the psychological experiential root, rather than then violence itself, and I want to understand how that afflicts us all, and how do we recover from that, to what degree is recovery possible in the current environment?

We here at the grass roots must work for our own recovery as part of the resolution.

We also have to organise and protect our civil society, administer our shared resources with wisdom and enhance the environment of our community.

We cannot wait for the Established Power to awaken, to come to it’s senses, to re-humanise, to recover.

We must get on with it.

If we do, and I think many of us are, and more are joining in every day, then perhaps it is more likely that Established Power can be submitted to a full health and safety check by the people.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Rape, Power and Activism

Rape is one of many abuses that are effectively cultural markers, made so by their prevalence in certain societies and the absence in others...

Industrial Society rapes the soil (pharming), the ground (mining), the sea (over fishing) abuses workers (low wages), other cultures (Aboriginals, Indigenous peoples) and the rapist rapes the victim, the child rapist rapes the child and it is NEVER just about the action of  mining, digging, fishing, the sexual assault.

In many ways these are the medium through which that kind of Power is expressed. And whilst the experience of each kind of assault is horrific, and for those who suffer it, a serious and debilitating trauma from which the action and the motivation are extremely difficult to distingish, those who seek to help the suffering in the long term, those who are concerned with activism in these areas must always keep in mind that the issue is very much about Power.

It is also about the POWER to avoid the truth of the outcomes for what is acted upon, what is abused, who is victimised that is the real issue.... that avoidance allows the abuser to retain Power, and is in essence the immaturity of a consciousness that refuses to address the outcomes of it's behaviour, which always leads to more abuse and creates lots of traumatised organisms in it's wake, which is NOT a biological mandate.

And it's a behavioural issue, so it is tractable which is to say it is a matter of choice,  there is this element of volition and thus the behaviour open to being resolved, changed.

However it requires a clear and unprejudiced observation of the behaviour and outcomes, a kind of fearlessness and determination textured with a degree of empathy and psycho-cultural understanding applied as behaviour, processes, policies and ethics for those changes to occur. This is critical.

This is about data, evidence and the insights of Survivors of rape, and other abuses, an insight that is all to often ignored or masked by the rage of the bystander community.

1. Abusive Behaviour emerges when populations or individuals (animal or human) are stressed, traumatised and exposed in particular to chronic stress and are unable to resolve it, resolve the situation within which they find themselves, and this occurs most often in hierarchical systems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4UMyTnlaMY

2. Studies of older cultures reveal that there IS a spectrum of behaviour from abusive to empathic, and that the primary predictor of abuse emerging in any given culture is the degree to which the natural child mother bonding processes are disrupted, stressed...

http://www.violence.de/prescott/bulletin/article.html

http://www.violence.de/.../Profiles_Peaceful_v_Violent.pdf

3. These studies of pre-conquest peoples reveal part of the reason for that empathic state is partly sensory experience : towhit the existence of a sensory acuity or liminal awareness / liminal consciousness as a key element of an operational experiential reality in interactions between people within a healthy optimally functioning societal social system.

http://rewild.info/anthropik/vault/sorenson-preconquest/

4. Recent studies on the consciousness of babies reveals a similar potential, and recognises that it requires appropriate nurturing behaviour from it’s caring community to fully deveop,

http://www.eheart.com/cesarean/babies.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23401-emerging-consciousness-glimpsed-in-babies.html#.UpTQ4ydoJAk



5. Recent research over the past 40 years into child development, including brain development, bio-chemistry of hormones, how the immune system works or no, all point to a biological mandate towards empathy, connection, intelligent co-operation as expressions of optimum biological health.

www.birthpsychology.com - resource center for these kinds of studies...

I urge you to review these materials, and it WILL take some time, it is time well spent....

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

What is Natural?

Every creature. eats, shits, and dies. and in all three processes materials are passed on to nurture more life for all life. That is nature.

Mome creatures when abused or stressed abuse or stress others. That's natural.

Most creatures, when treated well, will not do this. That's natural.

Some people think Dominant Industrial Culture is superior to nature. That's un-natural.

Some people think the costs born by those who are bombed, whose lands are degraded, whose cultures are made extinct are 'worth it'. That's un-natural.

Some people know that the Dominant Industrial Culture is toxic. That's natural.

Some people ignore that fact, due to conditioned self alienation, insecurity and adverse psychology. That's natural.

The Dominant Industrial Culture cannot metabolise it's effluents. That is un-natural.

The effluents of all other living process can be metabolised by natural processes. That's natural.

We have the choice to metabolise the adverse affects of our experience and conditioning and to make compost of those that nurtures life from the outputs. Or not.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe