Tag Archives: Unconscious

A Lamentation of Reality’s Intransigence

Leave a reply

Today I am going to continue my “assault” on reality, the quotes necessary because “reality” is impregnable to the attack of one simple bloke like myself.  What makes it so invincible is its subtlety; it can’t be seen with the naked eye.  Its premises are commonplaces, most of which a society cannot be left without.  But so many can be lived without and a society is better off when they are given the light of day. One simple example from my youth in the American South involves racism—television shows were “white”; NFL quarterbacks were “white”; and miscegenation was verboten.

This “reality” that I am here kicking around ordinarily has the capacity to slowly evolve, to adapt to circumstances even against the down drag of inertia.  But in certain moments of history, there is tremendous “down drag” as the evolution appears too drastic and frightening to much of the population.  This leads to the socio-cultural ferment that we are currently witnessing in the United States, and even in the world.  This has led to civil war in the past.

We can’t escape the unconscious dimension of life which shapes reality.  Oh, well, we can simply assume that it does not exist and passionately insist that we know exactly what are doing.  But we don’t.  There is always more to the picture which is a frightening notion to most people. It is so frightening that people will cling desperately to their certainties and usually will find a leader who will be their champion.

If you are curious about this tenuous nature of reality, you might find the following book of interest, “The Social Construction of Reality” by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman.

Knowledge is Capricious

Leave a reply

Daniel Boorstin, a noted American historian declared in his book, “The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself,” that, “More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowing.” Boorstin in this quote had gleaned from his study of history that the comfort of “the feeling of knowing” often, if not most of the time, would triumph over knowledge itself.  Throughout history we have records of cultures in which “the feeling of knowing” proved to lead to their demise while letting that “feeling” give way to some critical thinking could have allowed them to continue, though with a moderated view of reality.

It is comforting to feel that one knows, permitting one to “know” that one knows.  It is so comforting that human nature has hard-wired us to prefer “knowing that we know” in the interest of preserving our tribe.  But when the world grows so small…as we are now experiencing…then “knowing what we know” begins to compete with other tribes who “know that they know” with equal conviction. Then violent conflict ensues unless leadership is available which will direct us to tolerate the notion that diametrically opposing ideas of reality can co-exist. There is no need to attempt to obliterate “them” just because we see “them” as, “not knowing correctly.”

The core issue is the comfort of “feeling that we know” not understanding the wisdom of poet W. H. Auden who told us that, “feeling knows no discretion but its own.”  Auden knew that our view of the world is not a rational matter, but one whose origin lies beneath the surface in the murky realm of feelings, closely akin to the unconscious.  But to recognize this truth is to take away the certainty that we can have in believing our beliefs and discounting anything or anyone that threatens them.  Another word for this realm of feelings is the heart, that center of our being which is unlocked only when we are willing to forego the tyranny of rational thinking and permit the grace of a non-tyrannical rationality which is quickened with the intuitive wisdom of the heart.

*****************************

Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

“A Punch in the Gut” from Tom Robbins

7 Replies

My religious background has given me an appreciation for the “prophetic function” in which “outliers” in a culture have the gift of seeing what others cannot see and being so brazen as to announce it.  Reiterating what I’ve said before, I think that in our present day this “prophetic function” often appears from the “outliers” who are artists, musicians, and writers.  Religion does not offer us this “prophetic function” in most cases as it is so often a tool of the culture, having imbibed of the essence of the culture and became a purveyor of its values.  I stumbled across the following wisdom from novelist Tom Robbins on Facebook this morning, cutting right to the heart of so many of our country’s deep-seated issues:
Have you risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief?… Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one’s clichés…Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions….Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet.

“Real courage is risking one’s cliches” really is a punch in the gut.  We have no idea we are merely mired in a world of cliches until we find the courage to toy with the notion that maybe we are.  And we always are more so than we wish to think.  Poet Adrienne Rich once noted, “Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.”  This is true individually and collectively.  Our country at this present historical moment has an opportunity to look at some of its most pernicious assumptions.

 

 

Shakespeare’s View on Madness

Leave a reply

One of my readers responded to a recent post about collective insanity with the observation that “we are all crazy but some are crazier than others.” And Shakespeare certainly felt this was so, describing life as a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

I have studied and taught history and practiced as a mental health counselor. These experiences have given me an opportunity to utilize my Enneagram 6 “observer” skills and I often pine, “Why do they do what they are doing? Why don’t they see they are making such poor choices and simply ‘stop it’”! But fortunately I have always been self-reflective and turn the same focus on my own self and see that I too am my own worst enemy and, when practicing as a therapist, should have taken the advice of Jesus who told us, “Physician, health thyself.” But I knew that I couldn’t and that I, like my clients, was doing what W. H. Auden said we would do, spend our life, “Waging the war that we are.”

I, like you and the rest of our brothers and sisters, are driven by forces that we can never truly understand and we are often merely “the toy of some great pain.” This subterranean energy that pulsates through our lives at its deepest level contains a dimension of sheer insanity. But, most of us are lucky and are able to sublimate this madness into mere neurosis and muddle through our lives and keep this “idiotic tale” under way. We seem to follow the mantra, “The show must go on!”

I have come to realize that Shakespeare understood madness so well because he had a “tad” of it himself. “You spot it, you got it!” Hamlet noted, “What’s mad but to be nothing else but mad.” Shakespeare knew that to be truly mad there was only madness without the “pauser reason” which could check thoughts and impulses that are beyond the pale. He knew all of us are mad but some of us have that gift of that “pauser reason”, that neo-cortical capacity to self-monitor and give consideration to other people. Without it we are “nothing else but mad.” And to be “nothing else but mad” is really very comfortable; for those ensconced in that self-imposed prison are cut off from concern for external reference. Criticizing them is, to borrow an expression from my dear mother, “like pouring water off a duck’s back.”