THE world’s goriest mass killing of animals has just taken place in Nepal to honour the Hindu Goddess of Power, Durga.
A victim of religious madness. Click on pic for more images of bloody slaughter at the Nepalese festival
Thousands of animals, according to this report, died in a horrible manner during Friday and Saturday as the Nepalese celebrated the festival of Dashain, amidst protests from animal rights activists.
The animals are herded from remote districts and neighbouring India into Nepal’s cities, where goats are dragged home behind shoppers and commuters.
Yesterday was the main day of the sacrifices. At just one temple in the heart of the capital 54 buffaloes and 54 billy-goats were beheaded.
The Nepal Army was also scheduled to make their own offering of 108 buffalo calves to the goddess.
Durga, the Hindu Goddess of Power
The goddess’ favour is believed to protect against accidental or violent death, and in the same spirit, some sacrifices are dedicated to individual vehicles or weapons.
But in recent years, the more than 1,000-year-old custom has offended the modern sensibilities of animal rights organisations, who have spoken out in public against the state-subsidised sacrifices.
Over a million animals were sacrificed last year in Nepal, according to Animal Welfare Network Nepal, which has launched the Stop Animal Sacrifice Campaign.
In a letter to the Government, the group said:
Nepal is the world’s key implementer of animal sacrifice, a practice that promotes superstition and violence, drains the poor and prevents Nepal from becoming a truly advanced country. Decapitating a bleating buffalo or goat should not be the symbol of the Nepali civilisation. The animal rights campaigners have also targeted the five-yearly festival of Gadhimai in the plains district of Bara.
Last year 16,000 water buffaloes were slaughtered at the festival, where people make sacrifices of any animal they can afford, including rats, pigs, chicken, goats or pigeons.
Despite the campaigns, there appears to be little shift away from the practice by the public.
Filmmaker Aman Adhikari said:
People share a very tight attachment with their culture and religion, which makes it very difficult to discourage animal sacrifices during festivals.
His film In God’s Pond shows how inhabitants of Khokna, 10 kilometres south of Kathmandu, drown baby goats in the local pond to protect their own newborn children from a similar fate.
There are some young people who would like to break away from the tradition. But they can’t get away because it’s something they have grown up with and the local belief is very strong.
Attempts by the government to withdraw support for the rituals have not been popular. In 2008, a proposed cut of the budget for sacrifice animals met with strong protests from local communities.
Bibi Funyal, photographer who covered the festival last year, is quoted here as saying:
I was assigned to film the festival. At first I seemed okay but when the killing started I suddenly found my knees shaking. In the beginning the butchers were able to cut the heads of the buffaloes in one stroke. Later they seemed to get into a frenzy and did not kill properly. I would take them a long time to severe the heads. The buffaloes were mooing – it was a terrible sound. The babies were searching for their mothers, not understanding what was going. At some point a baby buffalo came up to me and it touched my tripod. That was when I felt I would be passing out if I continued filming. When I left the place I had to step over thousands of bodies and heads and wade through animal blood. It was something I will never do again, even if they offer me an award.
Lucia de Vries, an international animal rights campaigner added:
Now that I observed the festival I am convinced that these killings are among the worst forms of animal cruelty in the world. I pray that when the images come out the international community will agree that we have to stop this. To kill thousands of buffaloes without any humanity, by starving them for 2-3 days, by not tethering them, by carrying out the beheading publicly by butchers in a frenzy, and by mixing the dead with the living, is something unimaginable and totally unnecessary. I have a sense of failure and feel we have let these beautiful, loyal creatures down entirely. I appeal to all concerned citizens to do whatever is in their ability to stop the killings at Gadhimai.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
October 17th, 2010 at 10:53 am
I suspect that the individuals involved in this grisly festival would not be as cruel to animals when they were at home on their own. Groups act differently and when you add in religion as an enabler and an excuse… anything can happen.
October 17th, 2010 at 10:58 am
“The goddess’ favour is believed to protect against accidental or violent death”
Except in the case of non-human animals, presumably.
October 17th, 2010 at 11:05 am
This just makes me sick. Those poor, poor animals. These Eastern religions such as Hinduism are underestimated. They are just as loony and dangerous as all other religions.
What utter, utter bullshit.
October 17th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
Another example of the sickness that lies at the core of all these superstitions. Scrape away the patina of the bullshit about religious morals and you will very soon come across cruelty of an appalling severity. This Hindu crap is just a particularly sick example. As for their goddess Durga – I suppose this demented nonsense is the kind of stuff that we are supposed to treat with respect because it is religious. This invented sick bitch really makes me puke.
October 17th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Illustrations of Hindu gods are always hilarious, they rival the RCC baubles for tackiness. Ganesh the elephant god is pretty funny as well. Oh, I just remembered, I think it is compulsory to respect and not laugh at Ganesh due to some people’s deeply held beliefs.
As for this orgy of barbaric bloodletting, I think that it is very sad that there are groups of humans still stuck in the stone age when life could be so much better if they could just ditch these superstitions. These sacrifices are supposed to persuade the gods to smile on people and they never seem to notice that the effect is always the exact opposite.
October 17th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
What is done with the bodies of the animals killed in that way? I know a lot of Nepalese people back home (my old town is home to many retired Gurkhas and their families) and the one thing they all had in common aside from the Army was that their folks back in Nepal were flat broke. These people are really, really poor. After being killed in such a horrible and unnecessarily cruel manner, are these animals eaten by people who could probably do with the nutrients, especially the iron and protein? Or are the bodies burnt or something else equally as wasteful? How much of the meat would even be fit for consumption after this treatment? Hope nobody thinks I am being callous by wanting to know. But the situation really begs the question, doesn’t it?
October 17th, 2010 at 1:37 pm
‘These sacrifices are supposed to persuade the gods to smile on people and they never seem to notice that the effect is always the exact opposite.’
Indeed. Their last king up there was almost certainly a regicide who machine-gunned his family, Cosa Nostra-style. He wasn’t first in line to the throne. The elections were then seized by Maoist guerillas who rampaged through the countryside, demanding protection money, Cosa Nostra-style (see a pattern here?). Durga is in the bathtub or on the crapper or similar for sure, if she isn’t able to stop people ruling this little Himalayan kingdom like gangsters.
October 17th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
I don’t mind eating mind, but sacrificing an animal in such a way seems worse than having it slaughtered as quickly as possible. Apart from the suffering and barbarity of it, it seems a huge wage of proteins in such a poor part of the world. And with all the stuff that’s going there, I wonder if this Durga can be pleased by anything at all, just like ‘our’ Abrahamic one.
October 17th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
I had never heard of this before.
As Homer Simpson said:
“No offence Apu, but when they were handing out religions, you musta been out taking a whizz”
October 17th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
According to the linked article, the meat is taken back to the villages and eaten. It is not clear if there is some sort of charitable distribution of meat, but conspicuous offerings at religious festivals is a common way of asserting status among wealthy individuals.
Personally, while animal sacrifice is stupid and unworthy of humans, if all it involves is muttering some magic words while killing an animal you were going to kill and eat anyway then I guess there is no actual harm done. But this spectacle does increase the fear and suffering of the animals, wastes a lot of valuable protein and increases health risks.
And the advantages? Well, I suppose the blood induced frenzy might have cathartic effects, but I doubt they are wholesome.
People criticize halal butchery, and that is fair enough, but at least the key principles are that the animal should not see other animals die, should not be in a state of fear and should be killed with a single stroke by an efficient and well equipped expert. In other words, not a bloody shambles of hacking.
October 17th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
I always thought the Hindu religion revered animals considered them holy and that hindu followers were veggies -Stupid me
October 17th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Read this over my breakfast this morning, which was off-putting, to say the least. Is this a mainly Nepalese variation of the religion? You’d think it would have attracted more attention if it were widespread.
Michael, are you confusing it with Buddhism, maybe?
October 17th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Depends who you ask on the vegetarian question and Hindiusm. I live in a Gujurati Hindu community and very few people here eat meat, at least above a certain age. The second and third generation kids are more likely to have a sly burger in town away from their parents but even amongst youngsters most are vegetarian.
But Punjabi Hindus eat meat much more often – plenty do and plenty don’t and it seems to be either a whole household will or won’t, regardless of age, etc.
Bangladeshi Hindus, a relatively rare group, eat meat like it’s going out of fashion. Well, actually it’s largely fish but you get the point.
I find the best way to handle full on Hindu beliefs is the same as with any others – existentialism. Witness the absurd spectacle, feel depressed by the problems it brings to innocent kids pushed into it. Acknowledge that even feeling depressed is an authentic experience and go about making my own meaning for my own life.
And yeah, Hindus could teach Catholics a lot about gaudy tat. Every home has a shrine in the sitting room and a shrine is just not a shrine until it’s buried in tinsel. My neighbour has a 3 foot sticker of Hanuman in the rear window of his car.
That’s the thing about confronting reality, it’s difficult and inherently disturbing. Such deep appetites for magic and frantic clutching at illusory safety. To accept nobody is ever safe and that we all will have an ending is a sign of emotional maturity and Hinduism is just one more flavour of denial. There’s a guy on my street has a sign in his window – claims to be a ‘Scientific Astrologer’ (talk about an oxymoron) and he does palm readings in his front room. Raking it in and sending away the weak of mind and fearful happy for a while. Reinforcing unhealthy psychological defences is a pretty shitty way to earn money.
Yeah, it’s always Islam first, then Christianity but stupidity and venality know no bounds. People are trying to open another Hindu school nearby and I suggested that faith school are inherently socially divisive. Needless to say I didn’t win over anyone. People cling to other people who will serve a function for them. If I tell you this stuff is true then you tell me it is true right back and then we both feel safer. Everyone else can sit and spin and we’ll get on to brainwashing each other.
Doesn’t make any of it true though.
Yeah brainwashing has a special place in Hinduism and Buddhism. In a local shop where I sometimes buy a snakc they have a picture of a Hindu god replete with flashing LED’s and a plastic frame (like I said – tat). This thing has a tinny speaker which plays a mantra on eternal loop. I can hear it now just typing this. Anyway I asked the young kid who sometimes serves in the shop if it doesn’t drive him insane as it literally chants all day every day. He told me he doesn’t hear it. Now I know this kid is streetwise and think she’s a gangster and wouldn’t be seen dead at a mandir, but he’s moved beyond hearing it. What the hell is it doing to his brain? Over and over and over a pattern of synapses are firing in response and hardwiring his brain – permanently. Meanwhile the rest of the people in the shop merrily all potter around in their co-created and sustained fairy tale.
This is not a life worth life, it’s a life in permananent retreat, in the grip of abject terror, such that authentic engagement cannot be countenanced.
Just look at that picture of Durga. Then watch a Bollywood film and see if you spot a common theme – the outright refusal to live in the world as it is. Let’s face it, some people, and I’m including every race and culture here, are just not very sophisticated intellectually.
Anyway, on a lighter note – here’s an example of Bollywood tat. If this is what they can do when ripping of Michael Jackson just think what else they can make a hash of. This is not about race, my partner is Asian and has two degrees. This is about stupid, which is nurtured and sustained in the world through the childish clinging to faith, which is damaging all of our prospects. I’m entitled to mind. Enough heaviness, this might give you a chuckle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWit8ckPkxg
October 17th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
@Thoreau:
Brilliant post. Thanks.
On an ancillary issue, I wouldn’t give much hope for the current attempts to halt the extinction of so many species. The mass of humanity have their minds so damaged, their clarity of thought so confused by religion that the interdependence of all life is an alien thought. The Roman Catholic hierarchy, aided and abetted by the BBC and the UK governent, are going hell for leather in the opposite direction to saving the planet. They want humans to breed as much as possible whereas that is the main problem.
Ratzinger, as we now know, is seriously demented. Even the RCs are accepting this: the Director General of the BBC excepted.
October 17th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
I guess the point I’m trying to make with that clip showing the Bollywood knockoff of Thriller is simply that there is a huge market for this junk. There are many, many people who take this crap seriously. I know PhD’s who sit and watch this crap every evening but won’t go near Schindler’s List or Citizen Kane.
In my street this evening people are sitting at home watching Zee TV and they just love all the happy-clappy nicey nicey shit. In films bad guys always have walrus moustaches and dramatic music plays when they crop up. There is always a helpless babe who clutches her hands to her face and pulls a ludicrously exaggerated ‘shock’ face. The hero always comes oin with triumphant music and spends more time jutting his jaw out then acting. It’s beyond parody, the most hackneyed formulaic drivel possible. Every film has the same handful of plot elements, set pieves and invariably a saccharine happy ending which makes you gag in it’s contrived sweetness. Along the way they throw in a few crass sterotypes and cobble together a plot. Overacting to the Nth degree is everything. Forget subtletly, nuance and ambivalence. Bollywood makes the ‘A-Team’ look like Tolstoy. An episode of ‘On the Buses’ feels like Shakespeare after sitting through this.
It’s condescending mindless pap of the lowest standard. Real lowest common denominator stuff.
And why is the common denominator so low? I think in large part because relgion stunts people’s minds and provides them an easy way out of the hard questions. You end up with millions of adults who demand play school levels of naiviety in their films and music. Nothing dark, brutal or real. Just toothpaste advert smiles, all the depth of a puddle. Sex is non existent, violence is cartoonish and magic is real. Miracles happen and everyone is happy by the end. Good guys win and bad guys get their comeuppance. It’s like ‘Scooby Doo’ aimed at adults.
The goodies are beautiful, the baddies are ugly, childlike wide eyed innoncence is relentlessly pushed and it’s an exercise in style over substance. I swear they make Doris Day films look like Antichrist.
This guy is one of the biggest stars. People literally go mad for this stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....playnext=1
This is a clip from one of the huge smash hit films of recent years. It’s ridiculous beyond words.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI3SoxbV2ng
Forget anything remotley thought provoking – there simply is no demand for it – people want grotesquely idealistic happy-happy joy-joy love stories with a car chase and a happy ending.
I don’t know about you but 30 seconds of that and I feel something vital in me dying. Adults actually spend good money to sit through hours of this. Is it so crazy to suggest that the kind of mindset that is satisfied by this shampoo ad. universe is one crippled by religion from birth?
The usual response to this is to suggest that people know fine well what hardship and suffering is and who are we to question their childish escapism. That doesn’t wash though – how patronising to think people need their daily regression to playschool just to stand still.
People raised on religion have no appetite for gritty realism. Which is a shame, given that’s where we’re all actually living.
Religion closes minds to what is there. In a world full of people determined to hide from angst it trains their minds to do just that. This is a profoundly anti-social thing to do.
October 18th, 2010 at 3:41 am
Good points, Thoreau. As you noted, Hinduism and Popery seem almost kindred faiths, and not just in terms of their love of prole-feed tat and drag-queen-level bad taste. Both are schizophrenic systems; both are monotheistic at the top end, with conceitedly clever theologians pontificating away, while at the “mass-market” end both pander to the most ignorant village superstition. Also, at the bottom end both are polytheistic, whether it’s Hindus doting over jolly old Ganesh or Catholics blithering for intercession from some supposed saint.
October 18th, 2010 at 11:19 am
‘And with all the stuff that’s going there, I wonder if this Durga can be pleased by anything at all, just like ‘our’ Abrahamic one.’
Well, the analogy is a good one… especially when you mention that the god of Christianity, Judaism, Islam etc is the God of Abraham. It was he who was supposed to sacrifice his actual son because God told him to. Then God said no at the last minute, and sent some animal or other to be killed instead – because a death was necessary, and it didn’t matter whose. Abrahamic or polytheistic, both involve worshipping a bloodthirsty bully.
As for Hindus and vegetarianism, the idea of a vegetarian diet was – as far as I know – stolen wholesale from Buddhism during a kind of Hindu Reformation period. This was the same time when Buddha was declared to be a Hindu god (in a successful attempt to stop haemorrhaging followers). It was well over a thousand years ago, but nevertheless, if you want to know why not all Hindus are veggie, look no further. The Brahmins all used to do animal sacrifice in the original Hinduism, but that ancient reform has changed the situation so that some will not even touch a beetroot as it is ‘too similar to blood’.
October 18th, 2010 at 11:19 am
Perhaps Joanna Lumley can do for the animals of Nepal what she did for the Gurkhas. Let’s hope so.
October 18th, 2010 at 11:25 am
@Thoreau
I enjoyed your posts.
The slaughterers could argue they’re performing a religious duty but the scale and brutality of the Festival of Dashain must attract sadists from all over. Given your knowledge of Hinduism, how do you regard the mindset of the butchers?
October 18th, 2010 at 11:27 am
‘People are trying to open another Hindu school nearby and I suggested that faith school are inherently socially divisive.’
Depressing. Hindu kids were a large part of my nominally C of E primary school when I was growing up. It was never a big deal and as a very young atheist I was jealous of the fact they were allowed to skip assembly. This experience is probably quite normal for many of us. It may come to seem a Utopian dream to the current generation of infant school kids. Humans understand each other best when we’ve actually met one another, but that’s not the point of this – of course it isn’t. The point is instilling children with ridiculous dogma and avoiding allowing them the tools to question it.
October 18th, 2010 at 11:29 am
Neuseline:
‘Perhaps Joanna Lumley can do for the animals of Nepal what she did for the Gurkhas. Let’s hope so.’
An excellent point. She was in some paper recently, gabbling about how we get cancer because we eat meat, which would obviously explain why that disease has felled vegetarians I know. Is she going to apply her morals to this bloodbath or are these scruples just to be applied to ‘westerners’?
October 18th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Garlic
I think you will find dear Joanna’s attacks apply only to Westerners. I soon found her a pain in the butt.
October 18th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
@ Broadsword
Regarding the butchers – well I think it’s a textbook case of what mental health practitioners understand as splitting and reaction formation. Splitting involves a kind of compartmentalising of experience to keep opposing concepts (e.g. good and bad) away from each other, to avoid having to live with the discomfort this brings (the good person has their downsides and whilst still good enough this is also a bit dissapointing). A reaction formation is basically when express the opposite of what we feel, usually to an exaggerated degree, in an attempt to deny a tabboo urge. In vegetarianism the denied urge is one linked to the oral sadism stage of libidinal development, also known as the cannibalistic stage.
In the earlier oral stage a baby derives pleasure and freedom from the torment of it’s appetite (experienced by it’s unreasoning being as an attack on it’s existence) by suckling. This moves into the oral sadistic stage, co-inciding with the baby beginning teething, where biting, chewing and gumming start as an attempt to incorporate the external source of goodness – usually recognised as the onset of aggressiveness. This is a tricky stage as the external source of goodness/safety might be destroyed if consumed leaving the helpless baby in the grip of overwhelming angst. There may be anxiety about destroying the love object and there can also be anxiety about revenge attacks (excessive aggression is projected outwards into the love object, suddenly flipping into a persecuting monster out to destroy/consume – this is often what little kids think the monster in the wardrobe is, their own hostility projected into their environment as it feels to threatening to contain it all).
Anyway, people who spend the whole time denying to themselves and each other that they have any ‘bad’ feelings get together once in a while for an uncontrolled orgy of violence – the dam breaks, or in this case they mutually agree to let off steam at a fixed date. Think of the Amish and Rumspringa-squared. I’m not surprised in the slightest. Look at the much vaunted (and heavily idealised) pacifism of many Hindus – they still manage to riot and kill Muslims by the hundreds from time to time, albeit with enormous provocation or in revenge. Which pacifists still wouldn’t do.
People who deny the inescapable dark side of their nature are prone to extremes as it doesn’t get sublimated into harmless channels or expressed verbally, but gets bottled up and acted out, sometimes in one enormous gesture.
Some Hindus go further than killing animals, and of course, we should remember this Nepalese festival would be abhorent to virtually all Hindus. None of the Hindu practices disucssed hear are remotely mainstream.
You may be interested in the Aghori – a Hindu sect who practiced cannibalism, many claims suggest they still do:
http://factoidz.com/the-aghori.....mortality/
http://www.religionnewsblog.co.....annibalism
Here is a clip of one supposedly in action. Be warned though, this is very heavy stuff and from a gore site so please use your discretion – it’s someone allegedly eating someone, what were you expecting?. You might well not want that on your browser history and it is certainly NSFW. Expect porn ads and moronic, racist and disturbing comments. However, if you can live with this it is interesting footage:
http://theync.com/media.php?na.....ect-aghori
Also read some stuff on cannibal nuns somewhere, perhaps in the Phillipines? Can’t find a link at the moment.
How far is it from transubstantion? It’s not wine and a wafer – it’s meant to be literally blood and flesh.
October 18th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
The only thing I detest as much as theological doubletalk is psychobabble. Anyone who wants to spout wild guesses about human behaviour should become a bartender. And the real Thoreau would not have confused the contraction it’s with the possessive adjective its.
October 18th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Hello William,
The psychobabble you refer to is indeed only a narrative, a conceptual framework for exploring the mind, but a powerful one with practical uses. Nobody seriously claims it is any more than just another way of looking. However, neuroscience is providing reams of empirical evidence to show how such concepts and working models map remarkably well onto actual brain functions, down to the synaptic level. The unconscious and repression have identified correlates and many more concepts are being accounted for.
As for the typos? Try to not be so anal.
;o )
October 18th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
“The unconscious” and “repression” and “anal” are fantasy concepts that exist only in the minds of the psychoquacks who invented them.
If you say that using it’s instead of its twice in two lines was a typo, I will take your word for it. We all make typos.
October 18th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Well you can call them fantasy concepts or narratives, the differences are semantic. I’m not claiming this is objective ‘truth’. It’s an ‘as if’ way of thinking about the mind. It’s an extremely potent one and one extremely applicable one.
Mentall health practitoners cannot reach into brains and tweak them but they can employ metaphors which help achieve personal meaning – which does lead to permanent changes in underlying brain structure, lessening of disturbing affect, problematic thoughts, behaviours, etc. This can be observed in the moment with various imaging techniques and is an enormous growth area.
Is it a fantasy concept? Sure, but it alludes to actual mechanisms that we can measure and modify.
October 18th, 2010 at 7:39 pm
@Thoreau
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my question.
Interesting thoughts, much appreciated.
B
October 19th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
I have no problem with anyone who recognizes that concepts invented by psychoquacks are nothing more than metaphors. I use the metaphor, “certifiably insane”, to describe people like Glenn Beck, knowing full well that the term is a metaphor for undisciplined thinking and behavior. See the books of Thomas Szasz.
October 19th, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Nice people eh. I really don’t know what to say about this. The last time I commented on our enlightened rag-head friends I was called a racist! Do we need to clarify here? I am not racist. I just don’t like ignoramuses treating animals like this. How low does ones IQ have to be to behave like this? I am not racist I am in-fact better in every possible way to these rag-head Bastards. As I have said before the sooner the world is split in half the better, one half for the religious the other for atheists. There is no point in trying to communicate with people who believe animals should be treated like this. I believe the world would be better without them. Please before anyone of you oh so open minded clowns whine about my intolerant comments please explain to me why anyone should tolerate barabaric stone-age arse-holes? It makes me sick to read this is happening in the 21st century but the idiots who make excuses for this make me twice as sick.
October 20th, 2010 at 12:28 am
The rag-head line is problematic on a couple of levels – firstly it’s used euphemistically to refer to Muslims, at least in some English speaking countries, so that could confuse a story about Hinduism. Secondly it’s also used as a racial slur by various far right groups, in the vein of ‘sand nigger’ and that sort of thing. Anyone not white, black or oriental is a rag-head, which sort of gets messy very quickly.
Well splitting the world isn’t going to happen any time soon. The solution is education – but there is not enough political will. The elites in every religious country on the planet are highly educated and mostly only make a publis show of religiosity to keep the proles fooled. In private they know the tremendous power of religion for pushing and pulling people – and that can sometimes be harnessed for non relgious agendas.
Why invest in something that threatens your hold on power?
October 20th, 2010 at 12:47 am
@ William
Glad we cleared that up. I did preface my screed with the observation that this was how a mental health practioner may understand this phenomenon. I guess I assumed that that was one POV amongst many and in no better a position to make objective claims on ‘truth’ or ‘validity’ than others. I have a thing for empiricism myself, having a science background. Trouble is it’s not so easy to mesh with, by definition, intensely subjective experiences – like having a mind. But mind is an emergent property of the brain – there is also the brain cells and synapses level underpinning the whole edifice.
Oral types really do chew their nails and touch their lower face much more than most and literally do pucker up, sooothe themselves by touching face and neck, etc. when anxious – but that’s rooted in their amaygdala and pre-frontal cortex and so forth. But to capture the tendency to mouth things and experience heightened awareness in the mouth under the headng ‘oral’ helps categorise very regularly observed and repeating patterns, accurately predict how these might change over time and discuss with others in a sort of shorthand.
It’s a way of tracking how people shift through nebulous but recognisable and idenitifable states. Very useful metaphors through their applicapability. Hundreds of thousands of hours of clinical experience predicts typical outcomes when a handful of things are tried out with a person prenting in a particual mindset. The metaphors are the tools used to get a handle – they’re hooks on a situation which give purchase and traction. If the set (or sub-set) of feelings, thought and behaviours we agree to call ‘oral’ are evident then I know it’s statistically much better to withdraw/foster intimacy/whatever.
They get grouped together into various schools of theory and so forth – seperate domains which can be strung together or handled in their own right. Metaphors are the only tools mental health professionals have most of the time. They’re co-created agreed reference points or anchors from which you discern movement along different axes.
And yes, people who use them a lot forget to preface with the ‘as if’ proviso. They know they’re ‘as if’ but that’s jargon for you. : )
What I find cool about them is how neuroscience is revealing all manner of brain processes, on a physical level, which map on to widely used concepts, often amazingly well. Finely honed metaphors, totally bizarre ones in some ways and covered in the fingerprints of their originators but what they’re representing is far from rational.
October 20th, 2010 at 12:52 am
The last sentence in the first para should read “… and in NO better position to make claims…”
Must be one of the Freudian tits.
October 20th, 2010 at 12:57 am
Hmm… Weird, another comment was here and is gone now.
Being moderated perhaps?
October 20th, 2010 at 10:52 am
@ thoreau
I use the term rag-head to describe a religious ignoramus who happens to wear rags wraped round their thick skull. In the case of this article they also appear to like torturing innocent helpless creatures because of their delusional belief in a god. This only proves if there was a god (and there isn’t) he is rotten to the core and deserves no respect nor do his followers. The term rag-head applies to all religious idiots with rags wrapped around their heads regardless of where they were born or what colour they are. Wrapping your skull in rags in a hot place makes no sense, a hat is understandable but loads of rags just shows how stupid these people are.
October 22nd, 2010 at 1:19 am
@ Graham
I totally understand your frustration. I’ve virtually stopped posting on here and I unsubscribed from jesus and mo for the same reason. It’s very strange how ‘freethinking’ seems to work on these sites.