Category Archives: consciousness

The Ego and Its Recalcitrance

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Two days ago I shared re the need of change and the great pain that can be entailed.  Why is change so challenging and often gut-wrenchingly painful?  It has to do with the ego which is resistant to becoming other than a citadel for self-interest.  When we came into this world we found ourselves in a “world that is always already underway.”  Our family was a context, a “milieu” which was rigidly structured by the emotional and, therefore, unconscious assumptions of the parents and any child that had preceded us.  My research has suggested that our fragile ego responds with a salvivic capability of “assessing” this milieu and formulating its response.  Our “response”, however, will quickly become rigid also which is part of our neurological wiring.  But that rigid structure, regardless of how open-minded we might be, will always be resistant to change.  This rigidity is also “hard-wired” as we need to filter-out much of the “stuff” that comes our way to maintain ego-integrity  If we had no filter…or one that is wired….maladaptively…we would submit to every demand of change that comes our way and our life would look like a “sheet in the wind,.”  

This is where the Pauline “discerning spirit” is applicable.  This quip from the Apostle Paul is an admonishment to employ what Hannah Arendt has described as an, “internal dialogue,” which iis to have  second-thoughts about what we are most sure…especially those “noble-sounding” bromides that we religious people are want to cling to.  Let me paraphrase the wisdom of Paul into a modern bumper-sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Voting, Jonathan Haidt, and e e cummings

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A couple days ago I blogged about the research of Jonathan Haidt which suggested that we vote more in accordance with our feelings than with reason.  Given my poetry-flooded mind and heart, I recalled a quip from e e cummings, “he who pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” I “felt” this was relevant but did not see how so I did note quote it in that post.  Now I understand. 

First, I should explain that cummings was such a recalcitrant that he would not comply with the simple rules of grammar like capitalization, punctuation, the spacialization of the page, and even “proper” use of words and images.  YET, in so doing his poetry conveyed profound wisdom and beauty to those whose mind/heart is “squishy” enough to be open to poetry.  But “wholly kissing” someone really pinged me, understanding that to kiss someone whole heartedly entails an ability to throw oneself into the intense passion of the moment so that he…in some sense…”forgets”… restraint, or concern for “syntax” or structure.  In other words, in that moment of passionate embrace, everything else is put aside. 

The feeling dimension of voting is important because it is very human.  But those who “wholly kiss” their candidate can easily lose respect for the “syntax” or structure and will be willing to overrule any and all other considerations in the election process.  The feeling function in their heart is so intense that they too closely identify with the candidate; in some sense they have melded with him so that he embodies the hidden desires and wishes of their heart.  They have pledged their heart to him, “lock, stock, and barrel” so that he knows he could tell them, “I could shoot someone in the middle of the street in Manhattan and my poll numbers would not fall.” 

This “feeling function,” (see Carl Jung) is a very important dimension of the human heart but can lead to catastrophe if it is not balanced by the “thinking function.”  But it is very easy to find oneself encumbered with tyrannical thinking patterns and motifs that are not subject to the internal dialogue that comes from employment of the feeling function. Thinking and feeling are not allowed to work in tandem, a cooperation which makes us a human and keeps us from becoming a mere ideologue. 

A “Too Much Wine” Discourse Here….

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I must admit it, I’ve had a glass of wine or two.  Maybe even three, given that the deputy sheriff just approached me from my perch in a lawn chair on the road in front of my house, telling me that reading my blog on a loudspeaker in this quiet neighborhood, clad only in a thong and fake arrow through my head suggested I should, “Take it inside.”  Ok, I will admit there was a 4th glass of wine! 

But with this disinhibition upon me, let me report I am furious with the Republican Party for their gross disrespect of their base in which I grew up in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s in the South.  They are totally out of control and are appealing to a base which is so readily amenable to their manipulation.  I grew up there, in a population which was susceptible to such manipulation, and I resent the disrespect to my people who are not stupid, nor ignorant, and can “understand” the political reality that is present if it is presented fairly and without manipulation. 

I am very angry, particularly at fundamentalist/evangelical Christians such as Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress who prostitute themselves before the Trump Demon.  I still have a very strong spiritual dimension to my life, and it will never leave me, but what passes as “spiritual” in my culture is something that is profoundly “unspiritual” and abysmally evil.  This situation is best conveyed by Shakespeare who saw clearly through the religious hypocrisy of his day, noting,  

“Thou hast described 

A hot friend cooling. Ever note, Lucillius, 

When love begins to sicken and decay, 

It useth an enforcèd ceremony. 

There are no tricks in plain and simple faith. 

But hollow men, like horses hot at hand, 

Make gallant show and promise of their mettle. 

“Hollow men” which T.S. Eliot described as straw men, “head piece filled with straw”, always must flaunt their piety.  That is because they lack it so sorely in their heart.  Yes, again, I admit I  have “been there and done that.”  The more guilt-ridden one is, the more he must prove how un-guilty he is, though Jesus taught that we are forgiven for being “guilty”…if we can only acknowledge it.  Jesus knew that we were all guilty. 

Let me confess as a former Christian, who is now more “Christian” than he has ever been…though don’t tell anybody about it, the label is so ignominious in our current time…and the label is totally unimportant to me now.  If anything, I have read the Sermon on the Mount and I am a “follower of the teachings of Jesus.” 

Let me publish this before I sober up!  And the bit about the street side reading of the blog and such was totally facetious!!! 

That “Deep State” That Besets Us.

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I too have a “deep state” that is besieging me!  Yes, “they” or “it” is after me.  Oh, I used to think it was “out there” in the person of all those bad people and institutions who did not “see the light” as I did; but now I realize that my fears and insecurities were misdirected.  That “deep state” was within and will always be…as long as I remain a “paltry” human. I now realize that the “deep state” I always projected “out there” is merely the unconscious, that hidden domain of my heart which I did not have the courage to acknowledge.  And, yes it is a dark and ominous region of human experience, as in Goethe’s observations, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”  My unwillingness to withdraw my projections for most of my life has cost me the store house of treasures in my heart which I catch faint glimpses of every now and then.  But the “beastly” dimension of the heart is always there! 

What is that “beastly” dimension of the heart?  In my experience, including reading and study but certainly including the intricate, frightening dimensions of “experience”, I have found that it is believing what you “believe” in an ironclad fashion, failing to recognize and respect the limitations of our human-ness, especially cognition.  We believe what we want to believe; and even if these beliefs might be very “noble” when we elevate them to sacrosanctity, we risk disregarding the wisdom of the Apostle Paul who noted that at best we only “see through a glass darkly.” 

The problem is “believing in our belief.”  One simple example is paranoia, If you believe the world is out to get you at some point it is likely to fulfill your unconscious wishes and “come after your ass.”  That is because the deep-seated distrust of life that you harbor will eventually spill over to the point that your judgement is gravely impaired, and the legal system will have to fulfill its responsibilities to intervene.  But the core issue is the insecurity, fragility, and terror that reigns in your heart. 

AND, on the matter of “believing in your belief,” I’m reminded of my favorite bumper sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”  So, you believe the moon is made out of cheese???  Why not consider what some of the other people in your world think about this notion?  So, you think “the Lord has ‘raised up’ Trump,” how about toying with the notion there might be some degree of flaw in that vein of thought?  But when a vein of thought is based on profound fear and anxiety that cannot be acknowledged, one will be enthralled with that vein of thought to the point of certainty. 

Aw, the sweet nectar of certainty!!! I remember it well.

Perspective From the Lens of a Camera

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Perspective.  We all have one…and if you are “lucky” you will not be aware of it! By that I am alluding to a wise quip from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur who once noted, “You can’t have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it.”  The “escape” can be frightening, especially if it comes too abruptly. (See the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road.)

Photography has helped bring this matter to my attention.  This morning in The Guardian I discovered an Italian photographer, Olivo Barbieri, whose work is “interesting” with how it takes the happenstance of day-to-day life, captures it with the lens, and presents it to us.  This “capture” is known as “framing” in photography.  In the photography show, attached below, Barbieri displays a very wry grasp of his world and conveys it to people, such as “moi”, who appreciate the “wry” in life.  I’m sure some would look at his work and say, scratching their head perhaps, “Huh?”

Perspective is a life-long concern of mine.  If you read this “font of wisdom” very often, you will see how I focus on the matter, bringing emphasis to dimensions of life to which most people would not pay any attention.  If we lack perspective, we often will be consumed or even devoured by one of which we are not conscious; that can, too often, bode ill for us and those in our world.  Our president, and his disciples, are a current egregious example of this.

Below is a link to the Barbieri story and a copy of one of his pictures.  Several of his pictures are available if you check out the link.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/sep/22/eyes-playing-tricks-olivo-barbieri-italian-photographer-in-picture

Taking a “Gander” at Reality Once Again

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I have spent most of my life “gandering” at reality…as if anyone can do so.  With my intuition, and life-long study of psychology and philosophy, I realize that I was skeptical of reality from the earliest days of my life, even before cognition began to “convince” me that things were as they appeared.  I was born into a strange world and am now seeing this “strangeness” made even more manifest as Trumpian madness continues to maraud across the landscape of our soul. But a caveat is warranted.  “Reality” is not to be objectified as I am claiming to have done; daring to “think “ I have done so puts me outside of reality, beyond the pale, an offence to which I confess guilt.  Whew, what a blessing though it took me most of my life to find the existential courage to accept that lot.

Reality is a nuanced phenomenon, so “nuanced” that we are hard-wired to carve this nuanced world into which we are born into definition so that we can function in a very “defined” world.  But this same “wiring” permits us to find the courage at some point to contemplates that the world of “definitions” we have taken for granted needs a second glance.  But this “permission” is not a mandate; it lies in that “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” where, according to the Apostle Paul lie “the thoughts and intents of the heart” which require openness to the “Other.”

Will a Fish Ever Learn To See Water?

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David Foster Wallace was a noted novelist of the late 20th,  early 21st  century who delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 entitled, “This is Water.”  The title was a reference to the famous quip, “To ask someone to see reality is like asking a fish to see water.”  Wallace used this address to explore the way in which education is usually designed only to reinforce the prevailing reality, i.e. “world order,” and not so much about teaching a young person to think. Wallace encouraged his audience to consider the value of “thinking about one’s thinking” and that failure to do so would be risking spending one’s life as a cog in the machine-like grid-work of a pre-existing socio-cultural matrix.

Wallace knew that meta-cognition was a necessary dimension of human consciousness without which one would be subject to manipulation by the whims and fancies of everyday human discourse, in modern times certainly including the media.  Without maturity in thought one is inclined to be readily influenced by manipulation, susceptible to a demagogue who knows that many people will believe anything if they hear it frequently enough. The demagogue does not to need intrinsic value to what he is purveying in his speeches, he only needs to have some lesser-value…maybe only a self-serving one…as he realizes it will find currency in many minds if they hear it repeatedly and with great fervor.

To state an obvious truth, thinking is a good thing.  To be “human” we must be capable of at least a rudimentary capacity to think and therefore engage in the world.  Without critical thinking to some minimal degree, we will be in the position that Emily Dickinson described as, “a mind to near itself to see distinctly.”  In that event, we will not be actually thinking but will be passively “thought” by a prevailing vein of thought we have found comfortable, living out the prediction of W. H. Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

Here is an excerpt from the Wallace address:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

I’m Hearing, “That Giant Sucking Sound” This Morning!

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Step outside this morning and, if you listen carefully, you will hear that “giant sucking sound” of Trumpism and its abysmal ugliness returning to the void from which it emerged.  That experience, which inspired Edvard Munch to paint “The Scream” is a human tragedy. Donnie is just a little boy like I am, fumbling about on the “granite skirt” (W. H. Auden) of this lovely little speck of cosmic dust.  But, in his early childhood his soul suffered irreparable damage, leaving him without the ability to “play well with others” on the beautiful playground that we call home. He can’t handle the anguish of “I, too, will pass” as in the famous advice of an African-American radical from the 1960’s, “This too shall pass.” (I can’t remember his name.”)  I take hope in the astute wisdom of Voltaire, as the day breaks here in Taos, New Mexico, “Gentlemen, tend your own garden; or as” Eckhart Tolle put it more recently, “Be Here Now.”

“Oops!”

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Hannah Arendt’s work has emboldened me recently to “assail” reality, blessed with some dimension of her “internal dialogue”. Taking a critical stance toward reality is a dangerous endeavor as the attempt to “view” reality entails an assumption that one is separate from it.  That very assumption can easily lead to sheer madness as it implicitly gives one the temptation to think with delight, “Oh boy, I’ve got it!  Lay down world and take it! I’m special, having a word from ‘on high’ that you need to listen to.”  The imperious attitude that one has achieved objectivity is the very same peril that I’m so “arrogantly” hoping to not share here.

The alienation that I labor with always brings to mind the quip from Emily Dickinson, “Life is over there…on a shelf” as if it was a book or a curio on a shelf.  That “blessing/curse” gifted us with the brilliant poetry of Dickinson though I have achieved only a critical viewpoint that I share here occasionally. “Reality” is a set of assumptions and biases that we live by, a body of “givens” that is necessary to be able to wake up in the morning without the task of “making sense” of our world all over again.  When we awaken in the morning, the implicitly agreed upon worldview will still be with us and we will again be able to put our pants on one leg at a time.  BUT, as this “reality” unfolds over the passing of time, it accrues sinister notions that need to be addressed.  In my life, that has involved disavowing, for example, that women are to be submissive to their husbands, that persons of color are inferior to we honkies, and that my spiritual tradition did not have toxic dimensions.  When critical thinking begins to set in, it can leave one with a sense of having become unmoored.  It is frightening to have the insipid experience that, “I don’t see things as I was taught to see them.” But I am today coming to accept this “internal dialogue” that insists that I have something to offer…but only to “offer” and not a view point that I can wield like a hammer.  Remember the old adage, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail?”

I like to describe “reality” as a mere “dog-and-pony show” to which we are taught to subscribe.  Shakespeare described it with the cryptic observation that it was “a tale told by an idiot.” His insight makes me cringe at times when I recall the many times this has been the case with me, and inevitably still is! But the humility of this insight makes it easier for me to utter the famous wisdom of Senator Ted Cruz when I am wrong, “Oops!”

Here I Elaborate Further on Recent Post About Hannah Arendt…

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My last post was dense, convoluted, and “self-reflection” running amok.  That is ok as it was “me” and I shared from this “me” that has helped me stumble through “mite near” seven decades of life. But two days later, I’d like to simplify things…once again, “a mite”…and kick around for a moment “internal dialogue.”

Hannah Arendt described Adolph Eichman as totally bereft of this human quality, not able to stand apart from the mausoleum of thought that he was.  This character flaw of his was symptomatic of the Third Reich which Arendt, in assessing Eichman, described as “the banality of evil.”  This banality is what happens when we are so immersed in our cognitive grasp of the world that we disallow the possibility of other humans having a “cognitive grasp” of their own which deserves respect.

This internal dialogue is the capacity to have a vein of “self-talk” in our heart which allows us to occasionally pause, look at some of the things we are most certain of and ask ourselves, “Hmm.  Maybe this “rock of Gibraltar” in my consciousness merits another look-see.”

There are so many examples in life today of this malady, but I want to put on the table a trivial anecdote from decades ago.  A news clip in the mid-seventies described a man in Dallas, Texas who became so frustrated and angry when his Cowboys football team lost a game that he grabbed his shot gun and blew out the TV screen. This must have stunned his neighbors as a gun shot next door led them to calling the police. I love sports myself and the Dallas Cowboys were, and still are, my favorite team.  I have suffered many disappointments with them over the decades as too often I’ve suffered the ignominy of watching them get beaten.  BUT, I’ve never been THAT upset! That poor bloke, demonstrated what it is to be “a brain stem with arms and legs,” allowing his seat of emotions to overwhelm him and suspend judgement.  He acted without the presence of the “pauser reason”  that Shakespeare has given us. The Grace of God has equipped most of us with this discretion and we are able to check ourselves throughout the day and avoid “acting out” like that.  Without this taken-for- granted contrivance in our heart, we too would that “brain stems without arms and legs” and catastrophe would unfold.

The complicated machinations of the human heart that I wrote about two days ago can be simplified with Arendt’s notion of, “internal dialogue.”  It is this human quality that permits us to reduce that cognitive/emotional tumult with an automatic filter, of “common sense.”  Without this “common sense” that most of us comply with routinely we will wreak havoc on our world.  Only if  we happen to live in a world, or even a little corner of a world that has also suspended common sense and shut down this “internal dialogue,” we can get by with it.

“Lord, in your infinite Grace, help us.”