I feel like I try my hardest not to stay in a state of blame. My instinct is to blame. It’s like I’m hardwired for it. So I have to try and bring myself back and look at how rational I’m really being.
But if I had to blame one thing for the current chaos in the world I see around me, then that thing would be ideology.
Ideology is the attempt of our mind to impose a vision of “how things should be” upon the world around us. If only we all behaved like such-and-such, then life would work - stuff like this.
And we get attached to our ideologies. We fight for them. We even kill for them. Our attachment to religious and political ideologies has created countless wars and endless misery down the centuries.
Can’t we just agree to stop being ideological? Would that work? Or would it just be another ideology?
Ideologies attract us, I think, because we are afraid of just how raw and unpredictable life can be. They give us a means to both abstract ourselves from the immediacy of life and to have a schema for how life works and our role within it. We have a fear of being completely “in” life and abstracting ourselves in this manner reduces that fear.
And when an ideology appears to work for us, we naturally seek to extend it to others. Of course, it is this act of offering our ideology to other people that invariably results in all the horror and chaos. Because maybe they reject it. Or maybe they oppose it with a different ideology. And, of course, they need to be told! They need to get it that our ideology is the good one and not theirs. And, a few steps down the line, we’re on the brink of war.
I think the real problem with any ideology is that, when it is threatened, all the fears that the ideology is keeping held down within us begin to surface. We likely aren’t even fully conscious that this is what’s going on when our pet ideology receives a challenge from the outside. We may not even experience a sense of fear. We just feel a deep need to oppose the threat.
I read recently that, over the last year, huge numbers of people have started to experience burnout, not through over-committing to their work. But rather because they felt compelled to oppose ideas others had, on social media. The compulsion drove them to spend hours daily at their screen, frenziedly trying to assert their ideology and rebut a counter-ideology.
So the problem seems to be that it is not easy for us to back down from an ideological position once we have taken it. We prefer to try and bolster it up instead, even if that means we have to spend countless hours either fighting online or researching stuff we don’t really care about, to try and prove that we are “right.”
That means that the issue is really the fear that sits within us, that our ideology is keeping in check.
I have been on my own journey with ideologies and the feeling that I need to be right. What helped me immeasurably was developing more sensation in my body. As my awareness could re-enter my body, so the sense of fear dissipated. If I wasn’t “right” about something, it no longer became such a big deal. Okay, got that wrong. I could just re-adjust how I perceived things. The sense of liberation was immense.
I began to get as much pleasure from simply feeling my body as I did from engaging in mental behaviours. I began to get so relaxed that I actually needed some stress at times to wake me up a bit!
For me, all of this happened because of my involvement with body-based therapy and especially Bioenergetics and Reichian Breathwork - the styles I teach. They say that you need to practice what you preach and that has certainly been true for me.
If this post has intrigued you or resonated with you, then I would like to reassure you that you can come out of stress. If you are willing to do the work that these types of therapy entail, you will find that you can pick up and put down ideologies without a feeling of threat. You will become more relaxed and more practical about things that give you fear or that you need to amend. In a changing world, you will find that you can develop immense resilience.
The therapies that I teach aren’t the only way to re-enter the sense of the body. But they are one way, they do work and they are available in many different formats.
Check out my work at the links below.
My books on Amazon - amazon.com/s?k=Devaraj+Sandberg
My online courses - bioenergetics.org.uk/course-list/
My one-to-one sessions - bioenergetics.org.uk/one-to-one-sessions/
My workshops - bioenergetics.org.uk/events/
I love the text by Jos Slabbert on the taoist sage that says "The Outsider: The sage is timeless. He lives outside the collective paradigms and ideologies controlling and manipulating society at any given time. He seems immune to even the subtlest efforts of indoctrination or manipulation."
https://chippit.tripod.com/taoist_sage.html
So ideologies are manifestations of dissociation or derealization?