Status – Traou an Dour

Are You a High Status Being?

Are your behaviours appropriate with your status?

I now belong to the invisible, that is people of an autumnal age and relative scruffy appearance. Apart from my physique and relative lack of clothing on a cold day, there is very little to mark me out. For around here I am on the meaty side. I drive an eleven year old car and shop with the other grey hairs at the supermarket of a weekday morning. I know many of them by sight now.

Christmas has just passed. It was for us, pretty much like any other day in the year. We have no important societal dates, one day is very much like another, they blend. We do not have to plan holidays. We are retired. We have not had a “holiday” in four years. They recognise us at the local farm equipment store, garden centre and DIY store. When I take my micrometre callipers to measure stuff there nobody bats an eye.

Today an impatient wanker in a BMW could not wait to overtake us in the Sisyphus wagon on the way home from the green waste tip. He was obviously very important and in a rush. I suspect that the acquisition of a BMW made him feel demonstrably high status. Look at me I have a penis extension.

There is a lot of snobbery in the world. People may feel squeamish about clearing a sewerage blockage with plumber’s rods.

“Darling, how awful. Better get a man in to shift the shit and paper…”

I reckon that one of the problems that I have with people is that I do/did not brown nose enough. There are those who are accustomed to being brown nosed and when it is not forthcoming, they get offended. I am supposed to perhaps throw my weight about and be all demanding. I should be snobbier and elitist.

The time for that has long passed.

I can fit in on the battery stack with lags just out of gaol, I can talk with the mole catcher and the hunter.

People it seems to me have a really big hang up pertaining to social status, rank and the like.

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Are you a Pretorian or a plebian?

What is your self-diagnosis?

Are you an important, big cheese, high status being?

Personal Development, Towards Freedom

Towards Freedom – Power

It may seem a little out of place to start discussing power in the context of freedom and equanimity, but it is necessary. Until you have more than a notion of your relationship to power and with power, it is difficult to have balance. Power of course has many meanings, there are many types of power and it comes in all shades. There is power in the sense of dominance, power in the sense of ability, power in knowledge and power as in material plane enforcement. Power is a vast topic itself. Some people have power, that can be positional or organisational power, it can be personal power, it can be muscular power or sexual power. There is the saying that power corrupts, though it need not, it often does. Humanity has a bit of a thing for and about societal power; it has a status hang up.

If you wield power in the sense of political or corporate power, it is unlikely that you will have equanimity and peace. This is because people are so often fighting for power. Even if your powerful position is secure, by the very nature of that position you will be required to make decisions. Those decisions are a responsibility of positional power and rarely do they come with serenity and peace. It is not the fate of most people to learn what high positional power means and those so called are in for a bit of a tough time. All societies have leaders, and these are of varying ability and quality. Some seek power with a thirst. And it is many that are so drawn who end up abusing power. Power has many traps associated for those drawn to it.

In the context of freedom, it is useful to figure out what has power over you and then adjust that situation. Things that have power over you can be as simple as arachnophobia. If a simple spider makes you come out in a sweat, then you are not free of spiders. A tiny creature can evoke a massive drama. It is not the spider’s fault, it is your reaction. For whatever reason you have a fear and a drama associated in your mind with spiders. Chances are this is disproportionate. Few spiders attack humans just because there is nothing better on the TV to watch. People have hang ups about a host of things and this restricts their liberty. Anything which can evoke drama upsets balance. If small creatures have power over you, then what does that say about your level of mental control and balance?

Similarly, because of co-dependency, there are many people who have power over you. Some will go out of their way to manipulate you into a dependency and if you are so oriented you might even seek such people out, whether consciously or not. There are a multitude of buttons available to others for the pressing of. If at the pressing of a button off you trot into drama, then that button and the finger thereupon, have power over you. It can evoke drama and lack of control, you are off balance and flailing around. It is in this dependency and co-dependency that people give their power away to others. If you want to be free, then you do not need other beings having emotional power over you.

Many of the things that have power over you are to be found in the truck load of baggage which most adults carry with them. There may be shame, wounds, ambitions, unresolved conflict, grudges, guilt, vengeance, fear, unrequited love etc… The list is often long and until you have clarity on where the button comes from, it will stand proud and beckoning. It is in unpacking the baggage and by examination that one can begin to understand and slowly loosen the power over which is held. To be relatively free of buttons is to have more freedom generally. One is not beholden to the past and the narratives of it, which if we bear in mind the likelihood of selective perception are in any case often inaccurate. Memories and history are prevalent members of the set of buttons which are the indicators of something that has power over. A skilled manipulator can spot these a mile off and press them at will.

If you seek freedom, then you must defend it. This may sound ever so slightly bellicose, but one has to fight to extract oneself from situations in which things, people and ideas have power over you. The past has power over most and reorienting the past in such a manner as to be free of it, is no easy task. The common dream advertises that building memories for your dotage is a good thing, but who can really live in a sepia or rose-tinted world? It is not real. It is imagined and unreliable of recall. To build “memories” is to never be free of them. This is perhaps slightly radical but do consider this. If you live in a mish mash recollection of the past, what do you make of the present, if you even notice it all? To be bound thus, is to not experience the now.

I have used bound, shackles and manacles already in this text, emotive words of slavery and imprisonment. It is up to you to figure out if I am by metaphor over egging the pudding. Until the duvet of illusion is pulled off, there is a cosy familiarity which can seemingly be justified.

Of course, in any material society there will be people and organisations that have temporal power over the circumstances of your life. Short of going off into the wild, this will always be the case. The freedom of complete anarchy is not currently possible in large society, this need not impinge overly on your state of mind, your mental freedom. One can see it for what it is, do the minimum necessary to be a “good” citizen and not feel overly oppressed by the apparatus of state. Within this framework it is possible not to succumb to ideological power over. People will do whatever they do, they will think whatever and opine ad infinitum. None of this need impact on your own equanimity. One does not have to agree, or argue or succumb. If your own mind is clear it is not overly perturbed by the folly and behaviours of others. Unless they are directly intent on harming or manipulating you, they are not direct threats. In keeping your centre, you can rise above it. If you cannot resist the pull of hive or herd mind, then it has power over you, which means you are not yet free of it.

As you begin to see though your own façade, understand your self and get close to your true nature, you will be acquiring power in the sense of knowledge. That knowledge pertains not only to you as a being but to other beings. This knowledge then opens up choices, possibilities for you which were hitherto not available, you have more personal power and more freedom. Freedom is in your choice as to how you respond to whatever life throws at you. There will be a reduced rigidity and an enhanced flexibility of living. With more personal power comes the temptation to exploit that power and perhaps use situations and others to your “advantage”. With all growth in personal power comes temptation. In the absence there are few choices. When there is a plethora of choices available some will not be life enhancing. If you are so inclined, you may use your personal power to exert power over others. As alluded to above that way is not freedom. How can one be free if one enslaves? It is not possible.

I have briefly touched on power here. Learning to handle new found personal power is a part of the walk to freedom. Keeping oneself grounded and developing humility offsets the temptation of power, which can enslave. In this sense knowledge is power which without wisdom and discernment can be a dangerous thing.

Musings, personal, Questions

Are You High or Low Status?

My dream this morning got me thinking about status. The British royal family can be thought of as having a high status or standing. The likelihood of me speaking privately with William is very low. We do not move in the same circles and never have.

The other day the gardener who we had round for a quote very much enjoyed our garden, our park. In France there is a sensible system in which if you employ a gardener then you can claim a tax credit up to 50% of the money you pay him, provided you use a particular protocol. This provides him/her with national insurance contributions and works at eradicating the black economy. So, if you paid the gardener 2000 euros, your personal tax threshold would be elevated by 1000 euros. When I told him we do not pay enough tax to get any rebate he had a long “does not compute” moment. Big house and below the tax threshold was a non sequitur for him. He realised that he made more money than we do, and by quite a bit. 30 euros an hour is what he quoted us. If continuously employed he might make 40-50k euros a year. The house had inadvertently caused him to overestimate our financial well being and there is an idea that all Brits are loaded, which is not based in fact.

Our status here is generally as one of Les Anglais and there is an expectation that we do not speak / understand French. Most of the Brits here are our age or older. Many make little effort with the language. I have been treated like a generic Brit. One nurse was surprised when I argued back. I later took her a Wikipédia print out about Imperial College, and she backed off. The pharmacist knows I am a bit odd. I took her a chemical structure of cetirizine to ask for it. She knows now that I have read some Camus. Our status here is as generic retired brits, who have a big house and two old sheds for cars. The haematologist knows that I looked up gene translocations in Myeloma and understand electrophoresis. They know at one level that “teacher” is watching. Visually I look like the Bretons and so with scruffy cars we kind of fit visually into the landscape.

So apart from the medics, nurses and pharmacists we are your common or garden, perhaps mildly eccentric, retired les britanniques and hence at the lower end of the status / hierarchical spectrum.

It is likely at first pass that a being of a more elevated status than us would not treat us as equals.

Physical plane status is very much an invention of human socio-political “mind”. Though I am not sure if it is entirely mental, there are emotional and physical contributions to status. I am reasonably muscular and quite “stacked” for a 58 year old, so I do have a physical presence. I can remember a high status Oxford undergraduate woman “perving” at my biceps, not so long ago. But the physical truth is that I move in a fairly spastic manner these days. I am not endowed like a stallion which seems to be one of the metrics for status these days.

Status only really exists in a social context. It is man-made.

For many, footballers, “only fans” models and reality TV stars are high status. They do not give a toss about Nobel laureates. In universities a Nobel prize is tantamount to deity. A Buddhist monk in Tibet is of higher social status than a Buddhist monk in Croydon. Though both might be bemused.

It is a funny old thing this status thingy.

Many of the people I used to know are fairly high status individuals now. They may be lauded for this, lauded for that. They may even have extra postnominals and the holy grail of an FRS. Media may seek their opinion, their utterance. It is an interesting thought experiment for me to imagine how they might now relate to me physically up close and in person. That will not happen, methinks. They too move in different circles from me. Courage was not their forte. They may have many measures of esteem…

When viewed from my understanding of the social-political context, I am not important. I have no power, no kudos and what little I have will diminish as I get more decrepit. Soon people will be talking loud at me in case I am mutton-Jeff {deaf}. Pardon. I have nothing shiny to offer people by association.

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Are you of higher status than me?

On which plane?

Are you a more important being?