Episode 253 - Facing the Cannons (NOT!)

About this Episode

Shibboleth's are often true in part. Maxims are true in part. But they are never, or at least rarely, wholly true.

One such maxim is a current fashionable imperative, Face the Cannons. The idea is that when you are confronted with opposition or antagonism, your best bet is to look it squarely in the face and permit it to do its worst. Somehow in that acquiescent transaction, your foe will lose its power and kind of flow through you and get de-potentiated.

There is a truth to this. Frank Lake used to talk about "assimilating the negativity" of one's life. He had, in practice, an important therapeutic point.

And yet! There seem to be certain "antagonists", certain oppositional forces -- some of them inside a person, some of them outside -- that resist the treatment. Certainly, there exists pain in our lives so acute that the prospect of facing it directly is too heavy for words. In other words, facing it, practically speaking, is almost impossible.

This podcast talks about THAT particular and specific pain -- THAT concrete negativity which is simply too much for one to bear, let alone welcome. I submit that you may well be conscious of such an element in the composition of your life. It is an element that resists assimilation, and even the hope of assimilation.

What then? Well, here I invoke our old ally Dennis Wheatley, not to mention America's most perceptive preacher; not to mention Jesus and St. Paul. There are some things, just a few but they're decisive, that resist acquiescence. Rather, they call for flight or, if worst comes to worst, that miraculous life's lesson known as "How To Throw a Crucifix".

Hope you like the music for this one, too! Especially the last track, "Easy To Be Hard", which unmasks a certain fashionable form of hypocrisy in the now.