Граница — это любовь: Хизер Линн против культуры «no contact» и алхимия Solve et Coagula

The Boundary Is the Love

Источник: https://drheatherlynn.substack.com/p/the-boundary-is-the-love

I come from nothing. I come from less than nothing. I have been a teenage runaway. I lost my parents at an early age. I have been homeless. I have eaten out of the garbage. I have been kidnapped and assaulted. Impregnated and abandoned. I have been alone.

The things people say to me cannot hurt me, because I know what it is to feel like nothing already. I know what it is like to have nothing.

Do we really ever have anything, though?

Most people, when they hear the word boundary, picture a wall. Something cold, defensive, slightly hostile. The opposite of love.

The older traditions saw it the other way around. A boundary was the thing that made it possible for people to come together at all. Without the line drawn, there is no relation. There are only two things becoming one thing, which is not love. That is dissolution. Dissolution is what the cultural script of modernity has been calling love.

The alchemists had a formula for this. Solve et Coagula. Dissolve and coagulate. The first separates, breaking what looks like one thing into the distinct elements hiding inside it. The second brings those elements back together into something more refined than what you started with. Skip either stage and there is no “Great Work,” only failed chemistry.

Modernity has been performing the solve on everything in sight. The atomization is everywhere now. Marriages dissolving. Friendships thinning into parasocial relationships with strangers on screens. Families splintering over politics. No contact as a first response rather than a last resort. People are more separated from each other than at any point in recorded history. Cutting people off has become what gets called self-love. Half the formula has been learned and the other half forgotten, and the result is a culture of selves so fragmented they have lost the capacity to coagulate back into anything.

The opposite failure exists too, and it is the older one. Two people losing themselves in each other and calling the loss of self love. The cult member dissolved into the leader. The marriage where one party has disappeared into the other. The friendship that is really a codependency. Both failures come from the same mistake. They treat love and boundary as opposites instead of as two stages of the same work.

This is the piece I needed to write because I needed to understand why the boundaries I have drawn in my life have felt, to other people, like rejection. I needed to understand why the cultural drift toward no contact, cut them off, delete the account, never speak to them again feels hasty to me even when the impulse behind it is real. I also needed to understand what to do about my own comment section, which is the immediate occasion for the piece but turns out to be a much older problem dressed in modern clothes.

Some Background I have been a pretty private person. Yes, I write publicly. Yes, I have been on TV, on podcasts, and that sort of thing, yet I try to keep a distance between my public life and my family life. So much so that some people have been quite confused. My Google analytics come back with the top questions that are asked about me: Is Heather a Christian? Is Heather a Satanist? Is Heather a Republican? Is Heather a Democrat?

I am not a team player. I am independent. I have beliefs, and I have an inculturation, of course, but I also have the training to recognize both, which is the only honest starting point for the work of getting to anything called truth. Though my first Substack was about standing firm in my convictions because the devil owns the fence, there is still value in not getting buried too deeply on any side.

You can never make yourself not inculturated. The process begins, according to the research, before you are even born. Anthony DeCasper and William Fifer’s 1980 study in Science showed that newborns prefer their mother’s voice within hours of birth, and the 2013 Moon, Lagercrantz, and Kuhl study in Acta Paediatrica tested infants roughly thirty hours old and found they already perceptually distinguished vowels from their mother’s language from those of a foreign one, evidence that the native phonemes had already been learned in the womb. The mother’s language is already inside the child before the child has drawn a breath. This is linguistic anthropology meeting prenatal neurology, and it is the structural reason that pure objectivity is a fiction.

The instrument has been tuned before the music starts. Even cats are inculturated. Susanne Schötz at Lund University, in the Meowsic project, has documented regional dialect variation in cat vocalizations; the cat in Stockholm does not meow the way the cat in Skåne does. If the cat cannot escape its linguistic programming, neither can you. Neither can I. Anyone who tells you they have no bias is lying, or they just fail to see that that is their bias.

When I write or try to discuss ideas, I am doing so out of curiosity and collaboration with my readers. When I came to Substack, I was not prepared for the kind of attention it got. What I mean by prepared was having to understand when to put up boundaries and when not to. It is common knowledge that nobody should be mixing it up in the comments, or, God forbid, reading the comments and taking them to heart. Thankfully, I am not chronically online, even though I produce online. I am able to close my laptop and go and enjoy life away from the digital realm.

When people hurl insults, like when I have been called an uneducated, childless, spinster, cat lady, it cannot insult me. I can look at the degrees on my wall and know that I am educated. I will admit to having a few cats, but I have been married for years and have adult sons in their twenties. Even if these “insults” were true, I would not be insulted.

Cat lady? Guilty as charged. 😸 I am not here to be loved. I am here on a mission.

But as the numbers here have grown, I have noticed something changing in the room itself. Threats of bodily harm arrive in direct messages. Comments appear that show the commenter has plainly not read the article.

I am a free speech absolutist, which is one of the reasons I came to Substack in the first place, and I do not want Substack itself to be in the business of moderating speech. Nor should they. Substack is also not a town hall, unlike how other platforms have positioned themselves. It is a carefully curated community and publication. The experience of people who are working in good faith, who want to push back, who want to have an intellectual exchange, gets compromised when the thread is full of people who are not.

So tonight, we are going to look at the question of boundary setting.

The Disposable Age Take the contemporary fashion for going no contact. I went no contact with my family myself, but only after years of an extraordinarily abusive household, and I ran away to do it. Going no contact is not as fun as media makes it out to be. You lose your support system in exchange for your safety, and the trade is real. Young people now use the phrase casually, as if cutting off a sibling who irritated them carries the same moral weight as escaping an abuser. Divorce has undergone the same flattening. It used to be a tragic last resort. It is now the first move, and the language around it has softened until almost any friction can justify it.

The deeper problem is that we have made everything disposable, including each other. Shoes used to be repaired. Planned obsolescence has trained us to throw away rather than repair, and the habit has migrated from objects to relationships. Marriage, friendship, family, all of it now operates under the same logic. Rather than do the work of repair, we let the thing rot and then discard it. We are hyper-disposable, and we are starting to apply the same disposability to ourselves.

It is purely reactionary. It is running from problems. Take that observation from a former runaway. Boundaries are important, but we can make them too harsh, we get tyranny, zero tolerance policies, censorship, and cancel culture, and in the very worst of cases, loss of life.

I remember the first paper I ever wrote in second grade, the one I actually bought a cover sleeve for, was about religious toleration. The concept I learned then was that you make a discerning choice: this is not inherently dangerous or harmful to me, and so I will not infringe upon another’s rights. I will just tolerate it. The Latin underneath the word is tolerantia, from tolerare, which did not mean to put up with something. It meant to bear, to carry a weight.

Tolerance, in its older sense, was an act of strength, not passivity. It was the capacity to remain present to disagreement without being deformed by it.

Over the course of my childhood, that older concept got replaced by zero tolerance. Meaning, there was no room for error, even as a child. Everybody is on edge. Sort of like what we saw at the peak of cancel culture. One wrong thing said and you are done. One accidental ignorant comment by a boomer uncle at Thanksgiving means he is automatically called names and no one speaks to him ever again. If he has to die alone because of it, well then that is exactly the karma he receives.

Nevertheless, all of that zero tolerance only serves to create the strongest barriers around everybody, and the only thing that serves is the tyrannical state. We cannot have such strong barriers. We have to work harder to find ways to build borders around ourselves and our countries, or we cease to have either.

On the other hand, the fully fortified state, though, like North Korea, is its own kind of danger. So is the lone wolf with no support system, no obligations, no one to come home to. Both are failures of the same kind. Hyper-distinction without union; a wall so complete that nothing flows in either direction, including life.

The key, again, is balance and that takes discernment. I wrote last week about the practice of refusal, and the two are the same skill on different levels of abstraction.

What the Old World Knew About Chaos The ancient world had a more complicated relationship with chaos than the modern reader expects. Chaos was not the enemy. Chaos was the substrate. The primordial waters from which everything was eventually made.

Genesis 1:2 calls the pre-creation state tohu va-bohu, formless and void. The Spirit of God hovers over the waters. The Spirit does not destroy them. It moves on them, broods on them, prepares them. The first creative act is to separate light from darkness, water from water, sea from land. Six days of dividing. The world is what the chaos becomes when form is introduced into it. Take away the waters and there is nothing to form. Take away the dividing and the waters never become a world.

The Babylonian Enuma Elish tells the same story in a more violent register. Marduk does not annihilate Tiamat, the goddess of the primordial salt water. He splits her body. The upper half becomes heaven, the lower half earth. The chaos is not deleted. It is given shape and made into the cosmos. Tiamat becomes the sky you are looking at. The Egyptian Heliopolitan cosmogony has Atum bringing forth Shu and Tefnut, air and moisture, from himself. The Greeks have Gaia and Ouranos, earth and sky, lying so tightly together that nothing can be born until Kronos forcibly separates them. The Norse have Ymir slain and divided, his flesh becoming the earth, his blood the seas, his skull the sky.

Geb, god of earth, lies below the sky-goddess Nut, held apart by Shu, god of air. The Greenfield Papyrus, c. 950 BCE. Creation requires a balance of both. Pure chaos is sterile because nothing in it is yet distinct enough to be anything. Pure order is also sterile because there is no raw material left to shape. The world is what happens at the meeting of the two, when chaos receives a line and the line has something to draw upon.

This is the part the modern boundary discourse misses. We are taught that chaos is the problem and order is the solution. The older traditions taught that chaos is the substrate of every creative act and that the work is not eliminating it but giving it form. The bad marriage, the failing friendship, the difficult sibling, the strained country, all of these are chaos waiting to be formed. The discipline is not cutting them off but rather finding the line that lets them become something.

The Egyptians named the principle that holds the line Ma’at. She is the goddess of cosmic order, truth, balance, and justice, all bound up in one figure with a single ostrich feather rising from her crown. Her opposite is Isfet: chaos, lies, violence, the will to do evil. The Egyptians were unusual in one respect. They did not believe that Isfet could be eliminated. They believed Isfet sat at the edges of the ordered world at all times, waiting for any failure of attention to come pouring back in. The pharaoh’s job was not to destroy chaos. It was to maintain order against chaos, every day, forever. Ma’at and Isfet were partners as much as opposites. The world existed because of the tension between them, and would cease to exist if either side won completely.

The Crowned Two The alchemists of the European Middle Ages, working in a tradition that drew on Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and Egyptian sources all at once, pictured the resolution of chaos and order in a single image. They called it the Rebis, from the Latin res bina, “double thing.” It appears most famously in the tenth woodcut of the Rosarium Philosophorum, published in Frankfurt in 1550. A single crowned figure stands on a winged dragon, male on one side, female on the other, holding the sun and the moon in either hand. It is the coniunctio oppositorum, the union of opposites, the final stage of what the alchemists called the Great Work.

Rebis from the Viatorium Spagyricum (1625). What is easy to miss about the Rebis, until you sit with it, is that the two figures have not melted into one. They are still two. He is on his side, she is on hers, and the crown sits on both heads at once. The dragon underneath is still alive, still winged, still a dragon. The alchemists were not picturing the elimination of opposition. They were picturing the bringing together of opposites that had been first carefully distinguished through the long earlier stages of the work, the separatio, the nigredo, the albedo. You cannot fuse what was never separated. The Rebis is the union that preserves distinction inside itself.

The dragon underneath is the chaos the crowned figure has learned to stand on rather than be drowned by. Neither the dragon nor Isfet is gone. The chaos at the edge of the garden is not gone. The Rebis is not the figure that has defeated the dragon. The Rebis is the figure that has learned how to stand on it.

This is the image I want to leave you with. The mature self is the crowned one, standing on the chaos that formed it, holding sun and moon, still two and somehow also one. That is what proper boundary work is in service of. Not the elimination of the dragon. The capacity to stand on it without being eaten by it.

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The Practice The fourth-century desert hermit Abba Moses, when asked for a word of teaching, said something that sounds simple and is not. Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. The cell was the bounded space. The cell was what made the teaching possible. Without the cell, no teaching. Without the boundary, no self capable of being taught.

The contemplative traditions built specific exercises for the discernment this kind of teaching requires. Seneca, in De Ira 3.36, described an evening practice he learned from his Stoic teacher Sextius. When the household had gone quiet, Seneca examined his day and asked the three questions Sextius had asked him:

What bad habit have I cured today. What fault have I resisted. In what respect am I better.

Seneca called his own version of the practice pleading my case daily before myself.

The practice was older than Sextius. The Carmen Aureum, a Pythagorean text attributed to Pythagoras himself, instructs the student to let not sleep close your tired eyes until you have weighed each act of the day three times. Where did I go wrong. What did I do. What duty did I leave undone. Two traditions, separated by centuries, arrived at the same conclusion. The day must be reviewed by the person who lived it, in honest quiet, before sleep.

Here is a version of the practice suited to the work of this piece. Once a day, before sleep, sit with three questions.

Where did I feel more alive today, and where did I feel less? Who brought the life and who took it?

Where did I mistake a wall for a boundary, or a boundary for a wall?

Where in my life is there chaos asking to be given a form, instead of being cut off?

The answers to these questions will not be tidy and are not meant to be. The point is to recover your faculty of choice before the world hands you its version. Most of what you need to know will surface if you sit with the questions long enough.

I will see you on the path. 🕯️

—Heather

Stepping into a new day. Not “love and light.” Not “doom and gloom.” Just Tradition.

Further reading: Epictetus, The Discourses and Enchiridion, the Robin Hard translation from Oxford. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Benedicta Ward's Cistercian Publications edition. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, the Stephen Mitchell or Ursula K. Le Guin translation. For the Pythagorean evening review, Johan Thom's translation of the Golden Verses (Brill, 1995). And Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life for the contemplative practices of late antiquity.

Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.