Excerpts from Ira Einhorn's new book Prelude To Intimacy

From: "J. Nayer Hardin" <nayer@compurest.com>
To: <ira-einhorn@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [ira-einhorn] Solutions and Ideas from Ira Einhorn's

new book Prelude To Intimacy
Date: Monday, October 17, 2005 3:17 PM

Linkable edition of this article on
http://www.computerhealth.org/einhornwritingsamples.htm

AVAILABLE AS A HARD COPY OR AN EBOOK

http://www.lulu.com/content/162719

Who Am I  - Pages 19-20 
Impact of the 60's - Pages 53-55 
Networking - Page 16 
Healing - Pages 62-63 
American Society - Page 63 - 64 
Culture - Page 75 
Europe and Ghosts - Pages 100-101 
Prison Life - Page 81 
Reading - Page 88 
Creativity - Page 90 
Stress - Page 96-98 
Vulnerability - Pages 107-108 
Computers - Page 172 
 

For more information contact:
James Sorrells

Email:  redemp@sonic.net

FROM: PRELUDE TO INTIMACY BY IRA EINHORN

Who Am I  - Pages 19-20

According to Jungian typology, I am an intuitive/feeling person. I'm
not conscious of "thinking" all that much. Rather, most of the time
my mind is clear, and I act intuitively without much conscious
thought or deliberation. Things emerge for me, often instantly,
rather than being mulled over, for I live fully in my body. I also
grasp things as a whole. Hence, I am blessed to be able to work on
very complex problems, even in areas of human endeavor in which I
have little factual knowledge. On the other hand, for me the more
factual knowledge the better. I have always literally devoured books
and as much high-level information as I could get my hands on.
Whereas I love complexity and complex problems, I have always lived
simply and love the unencumbered. For me, there is no contradiction
between my intellectual interests and how I choose to live my life.
In fact, one supports the other.

When the paranoia of my situation would arise, it came from an
emotional, visceral response of fear and danger which would then
obsessively plague my normally clear mind for a time. Those emotions
would play and replay their neuro-endocrinological dance, usually
damping out after a day or two. At that point, the incident would be
finished, and I could return to my normal, two drinks above par,
life, no less enjoyable in Europe than in the U.S., at least on a
basic level. But, I have never lived on a basic level.

Impact of the 60's - Pages 53-55

The sixties were still fresh in everyone's mind, and most of the
people I had associated with in Eire had had some taste, however
small, of possibilities loosed by the experiences of that time. The
smell of change had been in the air, and many had experienced what
they considered to be a superior way of living together. A mode of
life we associated with a change in consciousness, a sense that the
discreet boundaries of the reigning framework somehow limited
awareness and the behavior that flows from awareness, i.e.,
virtually everything. Sounds abstract but it isn't. Just think of
the difference between waking up with a smile on your face or a
scowl, the feelings evoked by bright sunlight versus dark, heavy
clouds, the way the world looks when you are elated in contrast to
the way it looks when you are depressed.

When I worked with business executives to any depth, I would explain
these differences with the implication that if they lost their
temper during the course of the day, it was best to write off the
next couple of hours. Anyone truly in touch with themselves knows
that decisions are not a process of the mind, alone. The body is
deeply involved in all important decisions, and the increasing
denial of this truth in the developed world is part of our
increasingly pathological behavior. In spite of the goodies –
consumer products – that surround us in ever-larger amounts, it is
obvious to more and more people that our way of life is both
destructive and without meaning. Disease patterns, drug use, and the
utilization of mind-altering prescription drugs are examples, but
the escalating, dysfunctional behavior of young people (murder,
suicide, drug use, etc.) is the clearest indicator of the problem;
the younger you are, the less protection you have against your
environment. It takes a while to learn how to suppress what is
actually happening; the young are always the best indicators of the
future.

The awareness of the importance of the body in decision-making is
known to anyone who has studied or practiced eastern philosophies or
who has utilized any of the arts emerging from the human potential
movement; recent work at the edge of western thought is confirming
such ideas. Doubters should turn to Damasio's  Descartes' Error:
Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994). The mind is a latecomer
to the evolutionary process, the neo-cortex in particular, and
floats upon a vast pool of embodied knowledge that we are now
ignoring at our peril. The brain is a part of a biological system of
daunting complexity, a player in a complex game. To think of it – or
us – as a whole as merely complex computers is to practice
destructive reductionism. The failures of AI (artificial
intelligence) to live up to claims and expectations should make us
aware of how easy it is to mistake our projections and metaphors for
reality. But, let us not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Clearly defined logical problems, a very small subset of what human
beings face, are best solved by known mental techniques. Deep Blue's
recent victory over Garry Kasparov  is a perfect example. The
problem is the over-reaching of the brain into areas where it is not
sovereign – the hubris of thought, not the use of it.

The issue can be understood under the rubric of context, whether we
are dealing with personal mental states manifest as a smile or a
scowl or external surrounds like the sun or clouds. We have all had
numerous experiences in which changes in context produced dramatic
changes in behavior, however temporary.  Discussions on issues like
these led me to form a seminar on the history of the context that
presently determines or at least influences life in the western
world.

Networking - Page 16

My life in England was a very rich mix of different milieus in a
heady brew of 60s explosion and English hospitality, a whirl that
often began with mid-morning tea and ended with a 3:00 a.m. Chinese
dinner with Heathcote Williams , John Michell , and Francis Huxley .
Wales (Stafford Beer , George Andrews  and others), Cornwall (Colin
Wilson ), and Bath (Peter Gabriel ) were integral parts of the
circuit at various times. And, I rarely was in London without seeing
Arthur Koestler  for a long session of drinking and marvelous
conversation.

When one's roots and interconnections are cut away, a black hole can
await. I had run a huge network for years that had provided
information of all sorts to an international group of scientists,
scholars, writers, political activists, and corporate leaders. It
was financed - it may surprise some - by Bell of Pennsylvania, and
it evolved from my work with Andrija Puharich  and Uri Geller  on
psycho-kinesis and consciousness. The network grew to include people
in 25 countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, people with
instant planetary recognition among the cognoscenti. Information
flowed to me, and I redirected it, aided by Pennsylvania Bell for
the duplication and mailing.  When something happened in many "edge"
disciplines, I heard about it, quickly. I was not only in the flow,
I was the conduit for much of the flow.

Healing - Pages 62-63

All of this aided my adaptation, a process I went through a number
of times, and one does learn, painful though it might be. As
Nietzsche wrote, "That which does not kill me will make me strong."
A kernel of truth in that statement but one that does not fully
cover the situation. I have indeed become very strong, but the
fractures lie within and must be healed if the being is to remain
whole.

This healing is a slow practice that few understand and that
requires the help of another. It is a work of continual repetition,
a return to the site of the trauma which is sutured onto those
childhood tropisms that dwell deep in the realm of the pre-verbal,
the chora, after a term employed by Julie Kristeva, a French
psychoanalyst, feminist, and author of many books. It is difficult
to describe for it is a process that is ongoing. It became possible
for me only when I had a life partner.

American Society - Page 63 - 64

How arcane, you might say, how recondite, how beside the point, but
think of what is going on in American life and increasingly
throughout the world where the market-oriented consumer society is
rooting out all the old world patterns and destroying every rhythm
that resists. Norman Mailer's words ring clear: "We live in a time
that is interrupting the mood of everything alive."

Consider this: 90% of American families are described as being
dysfunctional; over 50% of marriages fail; the incidence and
prevalence of stress-related illnesses are growing exponentially;
job security is a dream of the past; sexuality, one of the major
forms of release available to contemporary city-dwellers, who are
cut off from trees, grass, and bird-song, is now fraught with peril
and ringed round with the odor of death; child abuse is endemic;
pedophilia is on the rampage; destructive substances are available
anywhere and everywhere there is money to pay for them; teenage
crime is a growth industry (think on the sad case of Malcolm X's
grandson), and perhaps worst of all, teenage suicide, a devastating
response to this spreading illness of infinite consumption, grows by
leaps and bounds.

A long list that adds up to total fragmentation and a continually
increasing stress on every one of us no matter how rich we may be
and how protected we feel. That is the problem that clearly links my
struggles to the common experience, extreme though my situation may
seem. The problems of stress and the affect of sundering and
fragmentation on a system is non-linear; it lives in the world of
Thom , Prigogine , or the Santa Fe Institute , i.e., complexity
theory, rather than the linear world of Newton or Lagrange. Like the
climate, the change can be sudden. The climate in not just going to
change in the far-distant future, it is changing before my very eyes
as I write. The operative terms are catastrophe (in a mathematical
sense) , strange attractors , and far-from-equilibrium systems.
The problems I have wrestled with for one-third of my life are
increasingly the daily problems faced by everyone, but please do not
misunderstand me: this is not a how-to book but rather a report from
the frontier, like my fifth novel, a snapshot of an emerging world.
This is the world we are all living in, though few are as yet
willing to admit the extent of the problem, and most reach for
partial, non-achievable, utopian solutions or retreat
into "quietism, cynicism or despair," to quote a letter from Martin
Jay , professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley
to my erstwhile alias, Eugene Mallon.

Culture - Page 75

Culture is the organic process of a lived life: it grows us and we
grow it. It is not a suit of clothes that one can change at will.
Living with a woman who grew up in a totally different culture than
mine, whose language of the heart is not English, has only
reinforced that awareness for we spent twenty-four hours a day
together and did so with short breaks for almost ten years. That is
more time together than most marital partners spend in their
lifetimes. I know about cultural differences and expectations from
the experience we shared as deeply as any two could manage, breaking
down walls of difference that separate even the most devoted lovers.
Most of what we do in life is not thought about but is rather a by-
product of the culture that creates us. Like mother's milk, we take
it in without thinking yet still find ourselves at times stymied by
the small tropisms out of which a life is fashioned. It did not stop
Annika and me, but what work it required, what patience! Who today
will take the time? Who is allowed the time? It should not come as a
surprise that many are beginning to talk about a post-emotional
society and that more and more people, who supposedly love each
other, treat their loved ones as replaceable throwaways, to be used
up and disposed of. Most of the women friends that Annika met in
France merely tolerate their mates. No one has spoken of love to
her. How very sad.

Europe and Ghosts - Pages 100-101

I had finally become a person to talk to rather than a Svengali of
sex, for which I was thankful. I knew it was just the beginning,
however, for what we had done together, with all its attendant past
associations, had to be parsed, worked through, brought out into the
light of day. Otherwise, buried memory festers and spreads
malignancy throughout the being, a problem that was to become a
large part of my life's work. After a number of years in Europe, I
realized that most of Europe was full of hungry ghosts, unresolved
memories of the horrors of the Holocaust that weighed heavily on
everyone, slowing draining the life away.

The corpse of the Holocaust needs to be disinterred, autopsied, and
given a decent burial, an impossible task for over forty years
because the trauma was too large to face, and the focus on the Cold
War eclipsed all else. Now, it is surfacing slowly, perhaps too
little, too late. European leaders are too busy pretending about a
United Europe to pay attention to the real problem: unresolved
memories of traumatic proportions. They are as out of touch with the
problem as was President Chirac in the recent election that brought
an extreme rightist to great prominence.

Europe is paralyzed, and American hegemony is not the entire reason
for the problem. I spent six years studying the Holocaust and
repressed memory. I wrote a novel about it called Cantor Dust. I
have also spent ten years with a woman who is wrestling with the
same problem on a personal level, so the problem became mine and
slowly absorbed all my time, resist though I might. The terrain is
relatively unmapped, and the work is the most difficult I've ever
encountered, but the effects of not dealing with the problem are
everywhere in this Europe without a soul. During 1996-97, I spent
much time with a Holocaust survivor, a man whose life was an emblem
of the problem that few really understand, an awareness that my
reading of some of the vast literature made all too clear. I had
just begun an intensely focused study of the psychological roots of
the problem and had written 40 pages of a new novel when Friday,
June 13, 1997 erupted into my life.
 
Prison Life - Page 81

What a metaphor of our times: a TV in virtually every "cell," but no
light to read by! In addition, if I am extradited I will spend the
rest of my life in an American prison. I repeat: In spite of these
circumstances I am a happy man for I love and am loved at a level I
had not thought possible, and I have lived out that love with a
wonderful woman in an almost ten-year struggle against our
respective backgrounds.

Reading - Page 88

Reading is life's blood for me. It nourishes me like food, extends
my range, and allows me to experience emotions in a quiet room that
when encountered later, I can better deal with. I am not that
concerned with its ontological status for I know how to use it and
do. I enjoy a good critical argument, but I prefer a good poem or
novel. I find the imaginative act more important than the critical
act and know that Melville or Proust or Joyce will still be read
when Derrida is a distant memory; it is the lasting I'm concerned
with when I teach and when I read: it says something about value and
depth.

Creativity - Page 90

Yet granted that understanding of limits, I must say that the
creative life is always pushing against the limits, exploring the
edges, conquering new territory. That seems to be the function of
creativity: opening up new possibilities that others will later
structure into more coherent wholes. It is a form of a gift to the
whole for once the light bulb is imagined, it is the property of all
of us – to use and forget that it was invented at a discrete time
and place by someone, for that is how we are: very forgetful.
Creativity is a blessing, but it is also a burden for it creates a
restlessness that tends to disrupt the smooth surface of ordinary
life that the majority seems to settle into whenever the opportunity
allows.

Stress - Page 96-98

Stress may now be an academic discipline, complete with all the
accoutrements that go with it: endowed chairs, journals,
conferences, etc. But when I began to study stress, it was still a
battle over the work of Hans Seyle , whose research led me back to
Claude Bernard , Hughlings Jackson , W.B. Cannon , Kurt Goldstein's 
work on the organism as a whole, Arthur Koestler's  brilliant
overview in Insight and Outlook, and a small library of other books.
I developed a basic theory that I presented to many audiences, and I
often used methods of presentation that induced what I was speaking
about, methods based on my study of Artaud and Brecht.  One such
talk at a well-known, elite psychiatric institute produced a near
riot and led to hours of discussion, much admittance of guilt, and
finally to a commitment to run a drug counseling center that was
being created in the building in which I lived, just fifty feet from
my apartment! 

Stress is the key concept necessary to the understanding of modern
life; it lies at the basis of a whole series of family-related
illnesses and is a large factor in alcoholism and drug addiction.
Stress is itself addictive as I first noticed when people who spent
most of their time in the city visited any of my summer retreats:
they couldn't stand the peace and quiet for it enabled or forced
them to listen to themselves (their bodies) as stimulus replacement
for the constant drone of the city. What they heard was often
devastating. The same effect can often be observed in high-strung
people when they receive a massage. Stress is so endemic in
contemporary life that its absence may be noted and missed.
Pollution is a form of environmental stress, just as stress is a
form of body pollution. Stress can be thought about in terms of
information that the body can't handle while pollution is material
the environment can't reabsorb within the context of its functioning
cycles. They both produce pathologies in terms of "normal"
functioning. Sufficient overload of either will produce a bodily
distress, such as certain types of cancer or a change in the
environment, even a climatic change. Most contemporary behavioral
pathologies have a high stress component as part of their syndrome.
The fear of stillness and silence that seems to be spreading is an
obvious stress response as is the incessant listening to TV news.
When you live for a period of years as I have, without media, you
became intensely aware of how stressed most people are, how unable
to sit quietly or live without noise.

Techniques for stress reduction have become a growth industry.
Embracing stress and using overload consciously is one way of
producing psychic breakthroughs, but it is not to be recommended for
it is extremely dangerous and rarely successful, yet that was what I
was in the midst of with my exquisite nymph. Some deep trauma was
playing itself out again and again, obsessively as trauma will, and
my willingness, my allowing, had become part of a process that was
hard to grasp, like trying to swallow the ocean.

The process continued as before, and the tenderness increased as did
the warmth both inside and outside of bed. An opening was occurring,
a crack in the mirror that was certainly related to the altered
state and the sexual frenzy…but don't ask me how. Most people will
find what I am describing hard to believe, but I am a veteran of the
60s, and I have spent an enormous amount of time exploring the
various realms of human consciousness with an armada of tools,
including the most powerful psychedelics then available. I am used
to daylong excursions into psychic spaces that would frighten most
people to death. A group of us worked on and off for a while with
DMT, a psychedelic that zips you out of your body in a microsecond.
I've learned how to sit quietly and observe in the midst of some
very strange states. I have also had extensive experience with
hypnotism, out of body (OOB) experiences, eidetic imagery, tantric
Buddhism, and a number of other esoteric techniques. I worked
closely for a number of years with Andrija Puharich who spent his
life studying such states and the powers attendant upon them. My
local neighborhood in Philadelphia, Powelton Village, was often a
dumping ground for very disturbed former psychiatric in-patients,
ambulatory schizophrenics, a number of whom I spent much time with.

Vulnerability - Pages 107-108

Vulnerability is something that most men of my generation – I was
born in 1940 – have a difficult time recognizing, let alone
expressing out loud. We were taught to suppress it, present a strong
face, tough it out, etc. To change such deeply engrained character
traits is not an intellectual decision but the deep emotional work
of a decade. Work that involved great struggle for I was opposing a
long tradition, reinforced by millennia of the religious tradition
from which I issued. To admit deep need and vulnerability to a woman
was an emotional experience of great intensity, one that opened up
deeper possibilities for both of us and led us into depths that few
ever touch for real love and sharing is out of style nowadays. The
busy life that most people now lead fosters functional relationships
of mutual tolerance rather than love. A sad substitute for the
intimate involvement that is possible with another.

But that was the experience of a more mature man. In 1985 I was
still leading my American life though I lived in Eire, in reduced
circumstances to be sure. The forces of habit run deep for they are
burned deep into the physiology, an integral part of the body's
structure. It is as difficult to change a deeply engrained habit as
it is to change one's voice or one's gait. It can be done, but the
work is enormous and few succeed. Think about all those years lying
on the psychoanalytic couch with success in some cases to be sure,
but rare and after years of intense work. We are creatures of habit!
Change is more difficult than the superficial psychobabble of the
last thirty years would lead us to imagine. Possible, but very
difficult.

Computers - Page 172

Then, miracle of miracles, my newfound friend took me to a computer
shop in the next town and before I knew it, I was keying in my novel
on a small word-processing computer. I got up early every morning
with the goal of keying in one chapter. Since I am not a touch
typist, it took time, but I had time. In eight weeks it was done. I
now had a completed novel, stored on a computer no less, and the
rest of my life to live. The writing had been a way forward, a new
path to follow. Deep inner work was to replace what I had lost, a
focus for my enormous energy and omnivorous reading, but that was
only one point of support. I needed two others, a place to live and
someone to share it with. I began to formulate a wish on that long
train ride back to London, a wish that soon became the beginning of
a new reality.