The World’s Night
...things come and go in a deeper rhythm and
people must be taught to listen to it, it is the most
important thing we have to learn in this life.
World’s Night
A Cultural and Epoch of Addiction
Human’s self asserting will to “control” life
Epitomized by our use and addiction to technology,
and power
Schlinder’s List
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World’s Night
Monomaniacal will to control life for the purposes of
power, security, and comfort
Everything that threatens that control - death, love, pain,
mystery of life - is warded off and objectified.
We no longer “live the mystery”
World’s Night
Monomaniacal will to control life for the purposes of
power, security, and comfort
Everything that threatens that control - death, love, pain,
mystery of life - is warded off and objectified.
We no longer “live the mystery”
What does music, art,
literature, film...
Mean to you?
Is is for pure entertainment?
Does is caution you to stop and contemplate existence who and what yo are are?
Or do you believe that it’s just a product of “the egoic
mind”?
Implications for Counselling,
Psychotherapy, Education?
The human comes to want and afterwards expect easy
answers
•
“How To Do It”
Rather than insights that leave with a new reverence for
the questions of human life or reverence for life’s processes
and mysteries
I - “It” - Relationship
We have become objects in each other’s world
The Danger is the Danger
We live in a risk society
We must reach sooner into the abyss
Entering the Abyss
Realize our catastrophic situation
Return to the ground of being
•...The heavenly powers
•Cannot do all things. It is the mortals
•Who reach sooner in the abyss. So the return is
•With these. Long is
•The time, but the true comes into
•Its own.
•
Hölderlin
Facing the World’s Night
Feel and acknowledge
universal suffering
It is not and solely and “I” hurt
Etty Hillesum
Personal resentment,
bitterness, childishness, are
inappropriate reactions to the
“world’s night”
Facing the World’s Night
... It is all as one in me and I accept it all as one
mighty whole and begin to grasp it better if only
for myself, without being able to explain to
anyone else how it all hangs together... I wish I
could live for a long time so that one day I may
know how to explain it... If I am not granted that
wish... Then somebody else will perhaps do it.
Facing death / facing addiction / we face life
Is part of the whole
To learn to not turn away
We reach “now” into the abyss
Live and love recklessly - not become ascetics in
a cave
Stop our grasping for some other experience
some other time, something better over there
Facing the World’s Night
An Epitaph for Turning
Toward Wholeness
All that matters is the deep inner serenity for the sake of
creation... I do believe it is possible to create, even without
ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply moulding
one’s inner life.
- E. Hillesum
Dislocation Theory and the
Globalization of Addiction
The Dislocation Theory of Addiction:
Setting the Tone
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Dislocation Theory
Bruce Alexander
Professor Emeritus of Psychology at
SFU
Addictions result from failure to achieve the level of social
acceptance, competence, self-confidence and personal
autonomy required of individuals in the society in which
they live.
Background
• Addiction is an overwhelming involvement with any pursuit
what so ever (including, but not limited to, drugs or alcohol)
that is harmful to the addicted person, to society or both.
• We are still crying out for an explanation for addiction - and
there yet remains no consensus.
• Our currents theories have not impacted the addiction
problem... Thus the globalization of addiction “continues”
Psychosocial Integration
• We are disconnected from from inward
and outward identity
• This lack of psychosocial integration is
•DISLOCATION
Dislocation
• Also know as
a “soul wound”
• Poverty of
Spirit
Psychosocial Integration
• Interdependence
• Sense of Identity
• Oneness with nature
• Connection to the “divine” / “spirit”
• Wholeness
• Worldly Soul
Dislocation
Dislocation can endure for a time, but prolonged
dislocation eventually leads to despair, shame,
emotional anguish, boredom, bewilderment, it often
precipitates suicide and of course is responsible for...
•
• Addiction
Free Market Society: How Far
does the Rabbit Hole Go?
• Established “free” market
societies require the
continuing presence of
powerful control systems.
• Carefully engineered
management, advertising,
taxation, and mass media
techniques keep people
buying, selling,working,
borrowing, lending, and
consuming at optimal
rates.
Rabbit Hole (cont.)
• This deliberately undermines the
countervailing influences of new social
structures that spontaneously arise in modern
families, offices, factories, etc.
• Thus, opportunities to reestablish new forms
of psychosocial integration are suppressed.
Rabbit Hole (cont.)
• This deliberately undermines the
countervailing influences of new social
structures that spontaneously arise in modern
families, offices, factories, etc.
• Thus, opportunities to reestablish new forms
of psychosocial integration are suppressed.
Opening the Door
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