In Session (6)
Author notes on the Secret Journals of a Lay Psychiatrist
The In Session pieces are written as “routines.” Most are comedy routines but not all of them. An update: the woman who hooked up with a pit bull at an outdoor cafe is facing up to her role as rescuer. In the second one, I invented an impossible genitalia to satirize narcissism. There are some things you can’t unsee. Like farmers playing squat tag in the asparagus. I satirized the cancel culture as being the neighbors, and in the most recent one explored the opposite of narcissism, the maturation of sexuality into an organ of psychic communication.
I have been very focused for several years on bodywork and hypnosis as ritual practices. I started as a writer when I was young and was good at it, but it was the practice of active imagination that was the object of my fascination. I wrote from dream images half the night and then got up and went to a staff job as a magazine journalist.
The writing style I used at night, when my mind was relaxed, held a mirror to the source of the images to give them a portal into consciousness
Castaneda wrote about Don Juan introducing Carlos to the ally. He instructed him to put a metal frame around a mirror, and sink it beneath the surface of a clear stream. “It occurred to me that the mirror was in essence a hatch. A strange shape was actually trying to climb up through it. It was leaning on the edge of the hatch with a mighty weight and was big enough to displace the reflection of don Juan’s face and mine. I could not see us anymore. I could only distinguish a mass trying to push itself up.”
Don Juan told Carlos that his benefactor had done this with him but the mirror had a wooden frame and was shattered when the ally came through and chased him, terrified, up and down the hills. His benefactor built a circle of fire into which he could escape. Don Juan asked why the ally was chasing him, and his benefactor explained it was because it was attracted to his fear, and that a different emotion would have elicited a different response, that a sorcerer learns to dole out emotion to control the ally’s responses.
The process is called active imagination, and is David Lynch’s process. This is why there are so many YouTube videos revealing the hidden meanings in the images. One image might supply a library of books about the meaning of the image. I find it entertaining that critics of Castaneda argue about whether these things really happened. They are equally valuable whether or not they are literally true.
In active imagination the dreaming images take the lead, and anything else is logistical support. My image of the wrestler as psychiatrist came first, like Sherlock Holmes, he was looking from his window down at the street as a client emerges from a cab. They merged as the wrestler, a man without physical fear, looking down at a sexually attractive woman emerging from a hired car. The attraction between testosterone and estrogen is exaggerated for comic effect.
Maybe the funniest line to me when I wrote it was that the advantage of lay psychiatry is that you don’t have to wait long for the diagnosis. That is very funny to me. Sigh.
That’s it for writer’s notes to this point. I see the wrestler is back at the window, looking down at the public thoroughfare, where a man holding an eagle feather in his right hand looks up and sees him there. I will see where that leads. Adelia wants me to write about pornography in the garden, and I will try, though I don’t really know what to say about a bunch of fucking vegetables, or vice versa.
And a special thank you to Science Duuude, for being a great host.
