Cathexis

I was very fortunate as a young child, but it took me many years to realize why. I was what would be called LD, or learning disabled, in today’s world. I did not begin speaking until I was old enough to have my parents pretty worried about it. Family legend has it that one evening we were all sitting around the dinner table and my parents were discussing what they should do about the fact that I couldn’t talk. My brother, who is almost three years older than I am, piped up and told them that in fact I could and did talk, but only to him. They found this hard to believe, so Mike grabbed my bowl of ice cream (I love ice cream) and wouldn’t give it back to me until I asked for it. Which I did. My parents were stunned. It was the first time they had ever heard me speak.

I am also dyslexic. One definition of dyslexia is difficulty in interpreting words, letters, and other symbols. The key word here is “interpret.” Interpret according to what criteria? Interpreting something is a way of making that something fit into the neat box of our personal/social conditioning. When we begin to interpret, we are stepping away from the actual reality of the moment into our conditioning.

I wasn’t exactly a whiz in school. I was not good at being hypnotized. As my mother loved to point out, things would come in one ear and go right out the other. The programming was not working, not because I was fighting it, but because it just didn’t seem to have anything to grasp onto.

At an appropriate age, my brother proved to me that our father was Santa Claus by showing me that all of the little gifts that we left for Santa were hidden away in my father’s den closet. Well, I can’t say I was very disillusioned, as I had always found the whole thing a little hard to buy in the first place. I may have been LD, but I wasn’t stupid, so I never said anything. I loved getting gifts as much as anyone. Years later, my parents finally figured out that we had stopped believing in Santa quite a while back.

By this time in our lives, Mike and I were made to attend church and Sunday school for awhile. And there were a bunch of grown-up, supposedly intelligent and successful adults believing in stuff like a judgmental and wrathful God, who was also loving and forgiving, but only if you did exactly what you were supposed to and believed exactly what you were told to. It took me some time to realize that they really believed all of this stuff was true. More than that, they really believed that we should believe it, too. That really scared me. My question then, and still, is: “How do you know?” Their answer: “We believe!” Well, if I’m going to “believe” in something, I’m going to “believe” in Santa Claus. Simpler story. Nicer guy.

I had learning problems. My poor mother was very concerned about this and began telling me on a regular basis that I had better get through college or I’d be a ditch digger for the rest of my life. (Actually, digging ditches isn’t so bad. Part of what I did as a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam war was dig ditches out in the woods. You had job security, as no one wanted your job. And the supervisors seldom bothered you, as they didn’t want to have to jump down into the ditch and show you how to do a better job!) My mother finally succeeded in getting me worried about all of this and so I read self-help books, learned self-hypnosis, hung around with very smart girls (a practice I continue to this day), and basically tried to “learn” to give a whole bunch of meaning and significance to things that, on first glance, certainly did not appear to have much meaning or significance at all.

Basically, what I was learning to do was cathect. This was the doorway to hell. Or, as one of my gurus liked to call it, America Maya Land. Take your pick.

The word “cathect” comes from psychoanalytic theory. It means to invest our libidinal energy (creative life force and emotional energy), consciously or unconsciously, into giving meaning and significance to particular ideas, events, objects, or people.

I eventually began to learn to give significance and meaning to money, education, status, cars, houses, political parties, certain people, and, above all else, spiritual and religious teachings and the gurus that offered them. The good news, although I didn’t know it at the time, was that I am LD.

Since I was now seeking significance and meaning in life, I naturally turned to the spiritual path. One of my first teachers was a very powerful and charismatic guru. He walked the walk in that being in his presence did trigger radical and mystical states of consciousness, some of which brought about profound transformations.

He claimed his mission in the West was to bring about a meditation revolution. I already knew the tremendous value of meditation, so I was all for it. My fantasy was that as disciples we would sit at his feet for hours a day in profound states of samadhi, so I spent two summers at his ashram training to be a teacher and meditation center leader and spending as much time in his presence as I could.

What we actually did at his ashram was spend hours a day chanting our brains loose. One of the chants we did every morning for about an hour and a half (it seemed like an eternity to me) was about the glory of the guru. According to this chant, the guru is not a human, but the grace-bestowing power of God. The guru is God. In fact, the guru is greater than God. The guru, with infinite power and wisdom, has taken human form as this little old Indian man, and if we had any sense at all, we would worship the very ground he walks on. And so we did!    (This article continues…)

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