Disability Issues

I thought about this recently when I went to a meeting about the coming day of action in April. The meeting was held upstairs in a rather nice old pub, but one of our number couldn't come because she couldn't manage the stairs. She is classed as a disabled person, although I didn't know that until quite recently - I just thought she was a small person with wonky hips.
This led me to wondering what a "disabled person" actually is.

Tai Chi
A couple of years ago I used to teach a beginners' class in Tai Chi. One of my students was also a student activist on disability issues and asked me if I could teach a disabled person to do Tai Chi.
I couldn't answer her.
The reason is that she wanted a simple yes/no answer and there wasn't one I could give. From the point of view involved in teaching Tai Chi there's no such thing as a "disabled person", there's just a person. That person may or may not be able to do certain things, and the teaching would therefore take that into account on an individual basis.
To explain a little more clearly: If a person can't touch their toes, is stone deaf, has only one arm or has balance problems from cerebral palsy then I can probably teach them Tai Chi. If a person is blind or confined to a wheelchair then I probably can't - although I'd give it a good old try first!

Car Parking
I understand the usefulness, from a governmental perspective of considering certain people with certain difficulties as "disabled". It's useful for someone who can't walk very well to have some kind of guaranteed car parking near to where they want to go. It's also useful for a governmental agency to be able to classify people by their ability to earn a living, or need for state benefit. This sort of thing is, though, surely as far as the classification needs to go.

Pigeonholes
Regular readers of my rants will probably have guessed what I'm getting at by now: Pigeonholing! The necessities stated above notwithstanding, I've noticed a tendency amongst people to consider "disabled" as a category of person. This is what my, supposedly politically enlightened, Tai Chi student was doing.
It's probably a linguistic thing - we tend to categorise things into simplistic types so that we don't have to think about them properly. Reactionaries and activists rely on this tendency a lot - it dehumanises the enemy and makes them easier to throw things at. Most people do it. I've heard men talk about women and women talk about men as if they're all the same. I've heard whites talk about blacks, pakistanis talk about jews, and cleaners talk about caretakers - all using that same unthinking group categorisation.

A "Disabled Person"
Is it possible to say, then, that people with a blue parking pass for their car are all the same? My friend who didn't like the thought of the stairs probably would say not, and I think she'd be right.
To think in terms of a "disabled person" (and I'm as guilty as anyone else) as opposed to a person who can't perform a particular activity, or has a bit missing, belittles the person. It puts them into a little box labelled "disabled" - one might as well put them in a box labelled "broken" and have done with it.

I'm thinking about the many, many people I've met over the years and a lot of them have been considered disabled, officially that is. My mother is disabled, as is an ex-lover and my friend mentioned above. I know a deaf artist and a one-handed artist. A good friend has schizophrenia. I've known drug and alcohol addicts and a woman who lost a leg in a motorbike accident.
That's just a select few. The question is what, apart from governmental categorisation, have they all got in common? The answer is, frankly, sod all - except one thing.

They're all people.

Let's keep pigeonholes for pigeons.

Love,
Seán

Who Me?

In my last post I made a statement which I think might need a little working on:

". . . I'm trying to be who I am and not what I've been made."

It seems a pretty glib thing to say at first, but what does it actually mean? I know what I have been made because I am very much the sum of the last 40-odd years of experiences, learning and buggering things up. Everything I have done and everything I have had done to me has resulted so far in the person typing this.

Me
Physically I am the results of two sets of DNA, which has blessed me with wavy hair, bad eyesight and the family nose, and a lot of physical experiences which have had a variety of effects ranging from trained thigh muscles to permanent scars. In other words, I'm just like any other person on average. But this is just the physical side and - even though I believe that a person is not a body or a mind or a soul/spirit but an inter-related, ever-changing combination of all the above - I'm going to discount the body as not who I am.

What I'm getting at here is a question that has plagued religious and spiritual thinkers and philosophers since forever - If I am thinking, who is the I that is doing the thinking. If I am a combination of the primal me and everything else that has made me, who is that primal me and how do I find him? In fact is he a "he"? Maybe he's a "she", an "it" or even a "they"!

Paganism
As a good Pagan boy I try to live by a deceptively complicated guideline known as the Wiccan Rede. I'm not a Wiccan, but then again I'm not really an anything specific - pigeonholes are restrictive and get on my nerves - but the Wiccan Rede is useful. It goes:

"An it harm none, do what you will"

This is open to interpretation, as are all rules and guidelines. My own works something like this: using the proviso that as little unnecessary harm of any kind is caused to everyone and everything around you, including yourself, then do your own will

"Doing your will" is a very Thelemic bit of jargon and not one I like much because it conjures images of some complete and total deadlegs from whom I would prefer to be disassociated. The trouble is that I'm not sure I can think of a better one. As James Curcio has said, Will is synonymous with Identity, but Identity in action. To do your will is to be yourself just as hard as you can manage. This takes us full circle back to the original question: who is the me that I must be to be who I am?

Circles.
So far this article is going round in ever-decreasing circles and will soon disappear in a puff of smoke up it's own arsehole. Before it does, perhaps it's time to look in a different direction.

Pope Tim Leary and Saint RAW the Optimistic, both following others and being followed in their turn, have shown that we can change how we are made. Using various techniques we can alter our socializations, our behaviours, our attitudes and our habits - and we can do it ourselves. Brainwashing techniques have shown that even the most deeply entrenched beliefs can be reversed, and advertising and propaganda show us that new beliefs and attitudes can be injected into the human mind with very little difficulty. How many people with dogs even noticed the smell before the Shake & Vac lady danced backwards across her living room?

When one wants to alter oneself in the ways suggested by Wilson and Leary there is usually an aim in mind, even if it's only to become more open-minded. The aim of finding the True Will is in stripping away the layers of social conditioning and beliefs until all that's left is the pure primal self. This isn't really changing oneself, which is like changing one's mental "clothes" - it is more like stripping completely naked. (Good grief, I'm on nudity again! It's becoming an obsession.)

A Radical Thought
The concepts of primal Self or true Will imply a certain belief - that there is such a thing. It's the assumption that the human being has a single, eternal and unchanging central core which has become known as the Soul. What if this isn't true?

I'm not proposing that we are all soulless automata or that there is no spiritual dimension at all to the human being, only that it's not a separate and eternal thing. If the human soul is as capable of change, growth and deliberate alteration as the mind and body are then how much more wonderful it surely is. It means that I am not some abstract thing distant and separate from my mind and body, but a soul/mind/body gestalt where all the bits blend to become indistinguishable at the edges. It implies that when my body dies and changes its state by becoming part of the soil fertilizing a tree whose buds feed a bird, then so do my mind and soul in their own ways.

It also implies that all creatures must be like this and therefore, by a process of extension, so must groupings of creatures - like families, societies and forests. I am part of my family and a separate individual at the same time; my children are part me, part their mother and individuals in their own right at the same time. Could there be, therefore, a family soul which joins us and is within us in the same way that we form a gestalt as individuals all together under one group concept? If there is it is made of the combined souls and DNA of the parents within the children, but the parents' souls are made of their parent's souls ad infinitum. Extend this far enough and you end up with a universal physical/intelligence/spiritual gestalt which covers and includes everything that exists/does not exist, has/has not existed and will/will not exist - ever!

Big thought!

Have I answered my question, though? Probably not, except to say that I think I'm getting there. Not only can the true I be found, I can decide what I ought to be. I think!

Love,
Seán