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coercion
November 2009 
Homelessness
Posted on May 21st, 2009
by 
I-P
I-P
I live in a commune where people often put things "up for grabs" when they're done with them. That's how I came across the book-on-tape version of John Grisham's "Street Lawyer", about an attorney who leaves his career with a big firm to become an advocate for homeless people. I often listen to books on tape when working weaving hammock chairs or something, so I "grabbed it", thinking it might be good for that. This is not a review so I won't say anything about the quality of the book as a whole, but its got me thinking about homelessness and my experiences with it, so I thought I would try to process what it brought up in me.
It strikes me that I can sympathize even a little with the feeling of stigma the idea of "being homeless" conveys in the book, even though it's been almost ten years since I experienced homelessness myself (mostly in different cities on the west coast). This feeling is somewhat worrisome to me since I certainly don't remember feeling more "out of it" in those times then I usually feel these days.
Actually I've always kind of felt that I was born "out of it" relatively speaking and I have never really regretted that circumstance. My homelessness was, if anything, part of my attempt to stay out of it--even to get further out of it if I could--at least until I could figure out what "it" was exactly and what I could do to heal "it". Given my, I guess unusually extreme, sensitivity to the insane nature of our collective and individual lives, being homeless seemed to me to be somehow an appropriately extreme response to our general situation. I certainly had a hard time seeing any real " at-home-ness" in the lives of the people whose fate and situation I was supposed to be envying. At the time I believed (and said) that i would rather be in the situation I was in than in that of any of the various "respectable slaves" (whether a high or low ranking slave was immaterial) I saw around me. I actually pretty much still feel this way, though I am less in denial about the real stresses I was experiencing during that time.
Its interesting to me now to compare my situation then to my present one in the light of some of Alifie Kohn's statements in his DVD and book "Unconditional Parenting". Kohn compares the use of rewards to those of punishments in raising children and finds them similarly destructive in the sense that both methods teach selfishness and (what I would call) an inherently alienated and dissociated identity-politics.
For example, threatening, beating, or otherwise punishing, ones child for, for example, kicking his sister has the ultimate effect of encouraging the child to think--not about the fact that the sister does not like to be kicked--but about what will happen to his or her self if they do the kicking (and someone finds out about it). In the very same way, rewarding or promising to reward for a child for not kicking their sister or for being nice to her does not encourage actual concern for the other person for their own sake but rather for the reward they expect to receive themselves in return for compliance. Of course this confirmed, as Kohn's works usually do, the intuition I have always had about such things, but in this case a further idea, a "blue collar"/"white collar" distinction along the same lines, immediately occurred to me as well.
What I thought of was how, when I was homeless I spent a good deal of time alone because, among other things, a lot of homeless people are coming out of situations (such as broken homes, jail, or the military) in which a physical-punishment-oriented lesson of "bully or be bullied" had been transmitted with varying degrees of success , and the result did not make for a very appealing social environment. Nowadays I live (as I had at the private high school I had attended on scholarship before the "homeless" episodes), with more folks whose initiation into sick culture involved more upper class homes and more collage education and who therefore probably have more experience with "white collar version" of alienation in which coercion is usually very indirect, and the "carrot" rather than the "stick" was the more emphasized version of behavioural control. The main lesson most of them learned I suppose was more was more something like "manipulate or be manipulated" than "bully or be bullied".
Of course, these are just generalizations, and in both situations there are people trying to avoid both the white collar and blue-collar forms of alienated relating, but the upshot of the fact that in a sick culture there is almost no escape in society from some part of this "control continuum" (of which the "stick" of physical violence and the "carrot" of manipulating praise are just the extremes), is that I spend just as much time by myself here as I did when I was on the street, and ultimately for the same reason.
Anyway, the little stigma that I feel around the idea of someone "being homeless" bothers me, because it might be sign that, despite my own experience and knowledge, I have contracted some degree of the phoniness, self-delusion and denial of those who think that they are somehow "better off" than such people. I remember reading an interview--it was either with Carlos Castaneda himself or one of his associates....well I just Googled the interview, which was with Castaneda. He remarked on a time when he was trying to get Don Juan to feel sorry for the plight of the Yaqui Indians , and Don Juan said, "Yes, It's a very sad thing but, you see, your situation is also very sad, and if you believe that you are in better condition than the Yaqui Indians you are mistaken. In general the human condition is in a horrifying state of chaos. No one is better off than another. We are all beings that are going to die and, unless we acknowledge this, there is no remedy for us." I've always seen things pretty much the same way, so the idea that I might have contracted (I guess just by osmosis) some degree of this "I'm so fortunate" denial-pity-and-fear-enabling" sensibility regarding "homelessness" or anything else is pretty disturbing. Almost makes me think about leaving here and becoming a tramp/bum or whatever it is I was again.
I have also been thinking about doing that in terms of what I think I have learned about myself through my encounter with "the Michael Teachings", which I discovered when I was living an Hawaii years ago. Its a long story, but I ended up getting a free channeled personality reading (the channel just looks at your photo an blurts out your metaphysical i.d. in terms of this specific cosmological system that involves reincarnation. I am sure its sounds kooky but the whole thing really makes sense to me to at a certain level, though I can't say I actually hold it as a creed. Anyway, besides being, among other things, an "Idealistic Scholar with a King essence Twin and a Goal of Discernment/Sophistication" (all of which makes sense to me having read the explanations of these somewhat misleading terms), I am also supposed to be an "old soul" (though a relatively "young" old soul, there being seven levels to each soul age).
Anyway, it is said that "old souls learn trough terror" and I can certainly remember experiencing a good deal more terror on the streets of various cities than I've experienced (outside of a few vision quests) since I have been here. I'd like to think that I wouldn't hesitate to leave my current situation of relative comfort and security in pursuit of whatever kind of terror is capable of teaching me more of what I need to know to be a more effective catalyst of healthy culture, (if I could get inner consensus on what that kind of terror would be).
Of course if I stay here and continue to grow in healthy culture I can imagine things getting ultimately pretty scary here well, with the advantage that the fear would probably be of a different kind than what I've been through before. Still,becoming homeless again is certainly an option and is infinitely preferable to becoming some hippie, "corporate light" version of the "respectable slave" that I disdained when I was younger (and there are probably almost as many self-employed slaves as otherwise).
I don't disdain such people now, and I am not even interested in pitying them, but I do have a real commitment not to end up, through cowardice, collusion and self-delusion, just becoming a part of the general situation in such a way that I am really only helping to make things worse. I would not only risk death but even seek it if that seemed to be my only alternative.
I would never commit suicide as either a rejection of the world or of my self, but I would certainly choose death over the fate of betraying myself and the world. I mean, I'm going to die anyway, why not go before that happens. I guess there is some analogy here of the attitude of say, someone in the French Resistance during WWII choosing suicide rather than possible betrayal of their cause under torture if captured. In both cases its a very difficult judgment call, probably more difficult for me since in my case betrayal is more likely to happen quietly and unannounced (as a result of seduction by the tranquilizing effect of relative comfort and security), than through any Guantanamo-like experiences. My situation is much more common in that way.
Apropos of which, I was listening to Naomi Klein speak recently about her latest book "Shock Doctrine". She made a comparison between "our" governments response to the fear and confusion that the 9/11 terrorism inspired and the goals of torture. She quotes a certain torture manual as explaining that the idea behind torture methods is,( through pain, fear, and disorientation etc), to bring the victim to a state of "regression" in which the torturer is regarded more or less like a father figure {it occurs to me now that the situation revisited is the same one of infant helplessness in comparison to looming parental authority that I referred to in my post about Shame as being the source of our first phony self-image and self betrayal}. At the point that this regression is reached, the hard part is over and the torturer can expect to be given whatever information he or she are asking for. I think Klein was saying that the disorientation and fear of insecurity of the 911 terrorism attacks was used by Bush to keep the American people in a similar state of regression, so that they would give the government (as "the protecting father") carte blanche to do whatever it wanted in response, including take away many of their own rights.
I think the analysis was pretty good except that i would have said that the terrorism situation was just an acute version of what has always been a chronic situation between those offering protection and security in exchange for obedience and those accepting the bargain. Ultimately the fear of insecurity and the denial of death and change will always lead to slavery in one form of another. The post 9/11 situation was just the acute end of a continuum that has a more mundanely chronic--if more subtle--fear/self-betrayal dynamic at the other end.
Is this situation the same kind of "control continuum" I alluded to earlier, a continuum with "Security", "Respectability" and "Prosperity" on the "Carrot" end, and "homelessness, insecurity, and "acute Terror" (as apposed to the chronic terror underlying "security") at the "stick" end of the continuum? If so, then it would seem that the whole continuum, being just a continuum of the same kind of thing, is presenting more or less a false dichotomy, Micheal Teachings or no Micheal Teachings. Presumably though, it is not the same, and the willingness to experience, acknowledge (and transcend?) terror in pursuit of growth, healing and freedom is not just an extreme version of the suppression of chronic low level "terror" in exchange for the illusion of security and respectability . Obviously it is not. The difference would be that facing terror consciously (even if cautiously) with a sense of meaning and purpose is fundamentally different from living in denial of it, whether the terror one is facing is low level chronic or high level acute.
This last qualification (about it not mattering whether the terror is low-level chronic or high-level acute) seems to me to open up various new possibilities in the pursuit of freedom. If we all live in low level terror of "homelessness", death, or whatever, then we live in low level terror. Which is to say, in a real sense "low level terror" is our "home". Which is to say our home (our whole life situation really) is a prison. Which is to say that, in an equally real sense, (if a true home is not really the same as a prison) we are "homeless" already.
Perhaps collectively realizing the pseudo security and pseudo-fortune of our current "fortunate" situations (and the real low-level terror that keeps us in them) is more productive in the long run than rushing out to chase some acute terror, especially if the motive for this latter is really some kind of ego thing (i.e.;"see, I'm not afraid to be homeless so therefor I'm better than you").
What this seems to mean is that I should really be considering myself "homeless" already and that I have always been homeless to some extent, at least in relation to various socio-economic situations I have been in. After all, should anyone feel at home--or want to--in any situation which is enabling, (or even just not effectively challenging), such an exploitation and slavery-based sick economy and culture? If people can come together in acknowledgment of this chronic low-level terror; of this chronic and chronically denied homelessness and slavery, as a part of the sick culture we all suffer from, then the work, however scary it may still be, of co-creating a sane world for everyone would seem to have begun. Of course the terror of fully acknowledging this everyday fear and misery--and of abandoning the false comfort of feeling somehow 'better" or "more fortunate" than anybody else (even though it also implies not being "worse" or less fortunate" than anybody else), is probably a greater terror for the ego then the terror of dealing with actual pain and deprivation and confusion.
But, I don't mean to suggest that this homelessness and fear is our natural condition or even our deepest reality, I am only saying that trying to suppress or deny it--or cover it over with mystical "affirmations" to the contrary--can only lead deeper into inner and outer apartness, denial, and slavery; to getting even farther away from our true Home.
It strikes me that I can sympathize even a little with the feeling of stigma the idea of "being homeless" conveys in the book, even though it's been almost ten years since I experienced homelessness myself (mostly in different cities on the west coast). This feeling is somewhat worrisome to me since I certainly don't remember feeling more "out of it" in those times then I usually feel these days.
Actually I've always kind of felt that I was born "out of it" relatively speaking and I have never really regretted that circumstance. My homelessness was, if anything, part of my attempt to stay out of it--even to get further out of it if I could--at least until I could figure out what "it" was exactly and what I could do to heal "it". Given my, I guess unusually extreme, sensitivity to the insane nature of our collective and individual lives, being homeless seemed to me to be somehow an appropriately extreme response to our general situation. I certainly had a hard time seeing any real " at-home-ness" in the lives of the people whose fate and situation I was supposed to be envying. At the time I believed (and said) that i would rather be in the situation I was in than in that of any of the various "respectable slaves" (whether a high or low ranking slave was immaterial) I saw around me. I actually pretty much still feel this way, though I am less in denial about the real stresses I was experiencing during that time.
Its interesting to me now to compare my situation then to my present one in the light of some of Alifie Kohn's statements in his DVD and book "Unconditional Parenting". Kohn compares the use of rewards to those of punishments in raising children and finds them similarly destructive in the sense that both methods teach selfishness and (what I would call) an inherently alienated and dissociated identity-politics.
For example, threatening, beating, or otherwise punishing, ones child for, for example, kicking his sister has the ultimate effect of encouraging the child to think--not about the fact that the sister does not like to be kicked--but about what will happen to his or her self if they do the kicking (and someone finds out about it). In the very same way, rewarding or promising to reward for a child for not kicking their sister or for being nice to her does not encourage actual concern for the other person for their own sake but rather for the reward they expect to receive themselves in return for compliance. Of course this confirmed, as Kohn's works usually do, the intuition I have always had about such things, but in this case a further idea, a "blue collar"/"white collar" distinction along the same lines, immediately occurred to me as well.
What I thought of was how, when I was homeless I spent a good deal of time alone because, among other things, a lot of homeless people are coming out of situations (such as broken homes, jail, or the military) in which a physical-punishment-oriented lesson of "bully or be bullied" had been transmitted with varying degrees of success , and the result did not make for a very appealing social environment. Nowadays I live (as I had at the private high school I had attended on scholarship before the "homeless" episodes), with more folks whose initiation into sick culture involved more upper class homes and more collage education and who therefore probably have more experience with "white collar version" of alienation in which coercion is usually very indirect, and the "carrot" rather than the "stick" was the more emphasized version of behavioural control. The main lesson most of them learned I suppose was more was more something like "manipulate or be manipulated" than "bully or be bullied".
Of course, these are just generalizations, and in both situations there are people trying to avoid both the white collar and blue-collar forms of alienated relating, but the upshot of the fact that in a sick culture there is almost no escape in society from some part of this "control continuum" (of which the "stick" of physical violence and the "carrot" of manipulating praise are just the extremes), is that I spend just as much time by myself here as I did when I was on the street, and ultimately for the same reason.
Anyway, the little stigma that I feel around the idea of someone "being homeless" bothers me, because it might be sign that, despite my own experience and knowledge, I have contracted some degree of the phoniness, self-delusion and denial of those who think that they are somehow "better off" than such people. I remember reading an interview--it was either with Carlos Castaneda himself or one of his associates....well I just Googled the interview, which was with Castaneda. He remarked on a time when he was trying to get Don Juan to feel sorry for the plight of the Yaqui Indians , and Don Juan said, "Yes, It's a very sad thing but, you see, your situation is also very sad, and if you believe that you are in better condition than the Yaqui Indians you are mistaken. In general the human condition is in a horrifying state of chaos. No one is better off than another. We are all beings that are going to die and, unless we acknowledge this, there is no remedy for us." I've always seen things pretty much the same way, so the idea that I might have contracted (I guess just by osmosis) some degree of this "I'm so fortunate" denial-pity-and-fear-enabling" sensibility regarding "homelessness" or anything else is pretty disturbing. Almost makes me think about leaving here and becoming a tramp/bum or whatever it is I was again.
I have also been thinking about doing that in terms of what I think I have learned about myself through my encounter with "the Michael Teachings", which I discovered when I was living an Hawaii years ago. Its a long story, but I ended up getting a free channeled personality reading (the channel just looks at your photo an blurts out your metaphysical i.d. in terms of this specific cosmological system that involves reincarnation. I am sure its sounds kooky but the whole thing really makes sense to me to at a certain level, though I can't say I actually hold it as a creed. Anyway, besides being, among other things, an "Idealistic Scholar with a King essence Twin and a Goal of Discernment/Sophistication" (all of which makes sense to me having read the explanations of these somewhat misleading terms), I am also supposed to be an "old soul" (though a relatively "young" old soul, there being seven levels to each soul age).
Anyway, it is said that "old souls learn trough terror" and I can certainly remember experiencing a good deal more terror on the streets of various cities than I've experienced (outside of a few vision quests) since I have been here. I'd like to think that I wouldn't hesitate to leave my current situation of relative comfort and security in pursuit of whatever kind of terror is capable of teaching me more of what I need to know to be a more effective catalyst of healthy culture, (if I could get inner consensus on what that kind of terror would be).
Of course if I stay here and continue to grow in healthy culture I can imagine things getting ultimately pretty scary here well, with the advantage that the fear would probably be of a different kind than what I've been through before. Still,becoming homeless again is certainly an option and is infinitely preferable to becoming some hippie, "corporate light" version of the "respectable slave" that I disdained when I was younger (and there are probably almost as many self-employed slaves as otherwise).
I don't disdain such people now, and I am not even interested in pitying them, but I do have a real commitment not to end up, through cowardice, collusion and self-delusion, just becoming a part of the general situation in such a way that I am really only helping to make things worse. I would not only risk death but even seek it if that seemed to be my only alternative.
I would never commit suicide as either a rejection of the world or of my self, but I would certainly choose death over the fate of betraying myself and the world. I mean, I'm going to die anyway, why not go before that happens. I guess there is some analogy here of the attitude of say, someone in the French Resistance during WWII choosing suicide rather than possible betrayal of their cause under torture if captured. In both cases its a very difficult judgment call, probably more difficult for me since in my case betrayal is more likely to happen quietly and unannounced (as a result of seduction by the tranquilizing effect of relative comfort and security), than through any Guantanamo-like experiences. My situation is much more common in that way.
Apropos of which, I was listening to Naomi Klein speak recently about her latest book "Shock Doctrine". She made a comparison between "our" governments response to the fear and confusion that the 9/11 terrorism inspired and the goals of torture. She quotes a certain torture manual as explaining that the idea behind torture methods is,( through pain, fear, and disorientation etc), to bring the victim to a state of "regression" in which the torturer is regarded more or less like a father figure {it occurs to me now that the situation revisited is the same one of infant helplessness in comparison to looming parental authority that I referred to in my post about Shame as being the source of our first phony self-image and self betrayal}. At the point that this regression is reached, the hard part is over and the torturer can expect to be given whatever information he or she are asking for. I think Klein was saying that the disorientation and fear of insecurity of the 911 terrorism attacks was used by Bush to keep the American people in a similar state of regression, so that they would give the government (as "the protecting father") carte blanche to do whatever it wanted in response, including take away many of their own rights.
I think the analysis was pretty good except that i would have said that the terrorism situation was just an acute version of what has always been a chronic situation between those offering protection and security in exchange for obedience and those accepting the bargain. Ultimately the fear of insecurity and the denial of death and change will always lead to slavery in one form of another. The post 9/11 situation was just the acute end of a continuum that has a more mundanely chronic--if more subtle--fear/self-betrayal dynamic at the other end.
Is this situation the same kind of "control continuum" I alluded to earlier, a continuum with "Security", "Respectability" and "Prosperity" on the "Carrot" end, and "homelessness, insecurity, and "acute Terror" (as apposed to the chronic terror underlying "security") at the "stick" end of the continuum? If so, then it would seem that the whole continuum, being just a continuum of the same kind of thing, is presenting more or less a false dichotomy, Micheal Teachings or no Micheal Teachings. Presumably though, it is not the same, and the willingness to experience, acknowledge (and transcend?) terror in pursuit of growth, healing and freedom is not just an extreme version of the suppression of chronic low level "terror" in exchange for the illusion of security and respectability . Obviously it is not. The difference would be that facing terror consciously (even if cautiously) with a sense of meaning and purpose is fundamentally different from living in denial of it, whether the terror one is facing is low level chronic or high level acute.
This last qualification (about it not mattering whether the terror is low-level chronic or high-level acute) seems to me to open up various new possibilities in the pursuit of freedom. If we all live in low level terror of "homelessness", death, or whatever, then we live in low level terror. Which is to say, in a real sense "low level terror" is our "home". Which is to say our home (our whole life situation really) is a prison. Which is to say that, in an equally real sense, (if a true home is not really the same as a prison) we are "homeless" already.
Perhaps collectively realizing the pseudo security and pseudo-fortune of our current "fortunate" situations (and the real low-level terror that keeps us in them) is more productive in the long run than rushing out to chase some acute terror, especially if the motive for this latter is really some kind of ego thing (i.e.;"see, I'm not afraid to be homeless so therefor I'm better than you").
What this seems to mean is that I should really be considering myself "homeless" already and that I have always been homeless to some extent, at least in relation to various socio-economic situations I have been in. After all, should anyone feel at home--or want to--in any situation which is enabling, (or even just not effectively challenging), such an exploitation and slavery-based sick economy and culture? If people can come together in acknowledgment of this chronic low-level terror; of this chronic and chronically denied homelessness and slavery, as a part of the sick culture we all suffer from, then the work, however scary it may still be, of co-creating a sane world for everyone would seem to have begun. Of course the terror of fully acknowledging this everyday fear and misery--and of abandoning the false comfort of feeling somehow 'better" or "more fortunate" than anybody else (even though it also implies not being "worse" or less fortunate" than anybody else), is probably a greater terror for the ego then the terror of dealing with actual pain and deprivation and confusion.
But, I don't mean to suggest that this homelessness and fear is our natural condition or even our deepest reality, I am only saying that trying to suppress or deny it--or cover it over with mystical "affirmations" to the contrary--can only lead deeper into inner and outer apartness, denial, and slavery; to getting even farther away from our true Home.
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