Anti-Structure

This will probably be a Slow Lane that many will not enjoy. Why? Because; it is going to be about an idea, then later about me. This idea came to me when I was in graduate school, doing research on a psychological sense of community. It has taken nearly 25 years of experience for me to realize some of the true meaning behind this idea. I hope to share this idea with you, and then begin to explore the complex meaning that this idea has brought into my life. The idea, very simply put, is that the forms that surround all psychological, spiritual and community practices, get in the way. Here’s what I mean.

In graduate school (in the 80s) I was unable to find, in the psychological literature, any references to collective (shared) states of consciousness. This drove me to the anthropological literature; there I found several accounts, having to do with hallucinogens (shamanic use), ritual (by indigenous people) and rites-of-passage (communal rituals). I found the work of Victor Turner, a cultural anthropologist, who’s interest in symbols led him to observe many communal rituals, through which he recognized rituals that evoked a shift from individual to collective states of consciousness. He spent a good deal of his career describing and analyzing these rites, and the states they evoked. His work inspired me to look at the Community-building Workshop (CBW a copyright of FCE) as a contemporary collective ritual process.

While reading Turner I came across a book of his entitled Structure and Anti-Structure. I didn’t really understand the significance of what he was pointing out in this work, until now. At the time, I only understood that if limenality was going to arise collectively (the source of community feelings) then the normal structures of social life have to go away. Now, I think he was referring to something much larger and all-encompassing then that.

Now, I believe he was trying to articulate his awareness that structures, of all sorts, impede awareness of the primeval bonds that we all share.

This realization has grown more important to me. At first, I didn’t know that structures, such as meditational,  psychotherapeutic, or ritual practices and communal guidelines, could so easily, if I held to them too tightly, lead me astray. I found most of these practices to be very useful. But, as time went along, something surprising, and hard to explain, began to happen.

Success came less easily, and I began to resent (at first unconsciously) the very practices and guidelines that once served me. Where once those practices freed me, now it seemed that they were ineffective and even bound me. I came to resent, people in the earlier stages of this awareness, who were practice or guideline “Nazis” to me. The structure these practices and guidelines imposed, were great training wheels, but they actually kept me from riding freely.

Further on in my development, I’ve come to realize that these practices and guidelines do not produce an experience. I do. I mistook the practices for the thing itself. I relied on guidelines to produce community when all along it resided in me. As long as I looked outside myself, as the practices and guidelines seemed to have encouraged me to do, I missed my own capacity, my own responsibility, for being the change I sought. I couldn’t live in community, if, as I once believed, community was only a product of the shared practice of guidelines. I was lucky, perhaps it was my training as a transpersonal psychologist, but I somehow realized community was a state of consciousness, that was more dependent upon me, than on the guidelines and practices.

This has been a good, important, and hard lesson for me. Realizing that what I seek exists outside of practices and guidelines is scary and liberating. Facing my own responsibility for living inside, or outside, of these desired states is another matter. I don’t even know how to talk about the paradoxical nature of what I am realizing. For instance, I am not sure how I feel about the fact that these states exist inside me. Even community, which involves the paradoxical other, is as available to me, as I allow it to be. Community exists inside and outside of me. I know that it is always available, but I am not always willing, or able, to feel it. Somehow my consciousness is implicated.

All I know for the moment is that the practices are not the states I seek and that I have some responsibility, in how I use my consciousness, for living in what I desire. I seem to get the exact proportion of any of these experiences that I can handle. I know now that that says more about me than it does about these states. I seem to be the structure that is in my way. How paradoxical, because I am what has enabled me to get this far too. Happily, though I don’t always rely on this knowing — emptying, letting go, and jumping into the grave — are all anti-structural.