Dancing for a cause
South Coast Botanic Garden. What about it? Where you performed your wild Siberian tiger dance, letting your audience know it can’t be caged. We already knew it couldn’t be tamed. ‘Tamed’ allows freedom within a certain set of rules. There for the tiger’s protection if it’s allowed movement between wilderness and civilization. ‘Caged’ is the denial of freedom. Rules opposed to movement. If your tiger’s temperament can’t be tamed then it surely can’t be caged.
And this poses a problem? Something to think about. Why? Maybe you’ve noticed. What? Human behavior in general. What’s going on with our country right now. Circumstances at home. I heard about protests today. Maybe you attended one. “No Kings!” Standing up for Democracy. I can’t tell you whether I took part or even whether I wanted to. All you know about me these days is words you put in my mouth in your letters. Why is that? Because my tiger and I are in a cage. The protesters too? Well, they’re unhappy about something and that’s as good a reason as any.
How did this happen? I was hoping you could tell me. I have theories, that’s all. By now you may have formed an idea of your own that’s better than mine. It would make for an interesting conversation. Why? Because I think being caged is an experience we’ve both had. That’s unpleasant, and it takes some doing to figure out how to stop it. If you have an answer I’m listening.
We wind up in cages because someone or something put us there. Which right away sets up a good-guy bad-guy dynamic. Somebody done somebody wrong. That’s not true? The righting of any wrong can get into a mess of feelings. That’s human. But it needn’t involve assessing blame. People do stuff that’s taken personally when the agent behind it isn’t person. Can’t do anything ‘personally’. To understand provocations is to understand their origin and their purpose: manipulation. All provocations are manipulations, and the response they call for is denial. Deny what? Deny the manipulator what it wants. Don’t give in to manipulation.
Don’t be provoked either? It’s human to be provoked. To act on it. Giving expression to the feelings that it arouses rather than stuffing them. But within the limits you set. Not the limits that your manipulator sets. So you can still make nice with your manipulator? “Love your enemy?” Some think so. ‘Forgiveness’ and ‘mercy’ beat brute retaliation. But the understanding behind it hasn’t generally caught on and that’s a problem. The general drift that took to the streets today is resistance. Historical precedents aren’t reassuring as to where that might lead.
The force aroused by provocation can lead to mob violence. But it has the potential to be a force for good. The opportunity to capture and use it is a gift. The flip side of provocation, which in turn is the flip side of Movement forward. Of Creativity, originality, and individuality. The talent behind your performance art and the call to Freedom that it inspires. I didn’t know I was dancing for a cause. Get used to it. Your dancing style, your personality type, your mindset may all be evolving toward service to a very worthy cause. Helping all of us free ourselves from our cages. Psychological and physical as well, because it’s all the same to the manipulator. Whatever stifles Movement.
Whatever
Who or what is the ‘manipulator’? Why does it need to stifle Movement’? The flip side. Both question and answer critical to Sapiens’ getting it right, both far short of consensus among those trying to get it right. In philosophy, psychology, and theology. Certainly in politics and popular culture, where misunderstanding and disagreement are wreaking havoc. We have, today, a front seat at the great unraveling. If you’d like to be entertained by a demonstration of the manipulation of Movement make yourself comfortable. Rather than have it explained, which of course is boring. But if philosophy and psychology can explain it and explanation can be productive, why not give it a shot? What’s the alternative? Unproductive. Sofa demolition along with the butts sitting on them.
OK. Make it simple. If I can understand it any blockhead can.
Being aligned with the way things are that’s self-questioning is strength. I like strength. Yes. Don’t we all. Where Love combined with Logic is the force that drives all Movement forward. The power of attraction. The force that expresses and shares itself through Life-Creation and the idea of Worth. Being that’s Value and Valued, Loved and Loving, Understood and Understanding, brought into a state of doing. Cause into effect, by Force itself. Energy. The Michael Clayton of Mind-Relationship, only this fixer is Character with Integrity. Its code of honor Guidance, the Conscience and constitution of the Good. The citadel of Free Choice that’s under attack today, within us and all around us. In our grand theatre of appearances.
Thinking ourselves aligned with the way things aren’t is self-defeating. Where the ‘force’ that drives all movement is anti-movement. The reverse-opposite of Movement that achieves its theatrics of something happening by undoing it. By unraveling progress. Risibly in the pratfalls of Vaudevillian ridicule, emotively in the heroics of operatic grandeur. Miserably in the depths of human depravity. The phenomenon Eugene Kogon described in “The Theory and Practice of Hell:” building brick walls so they can be torn down. By concentration camp inmates needing something to do while they awaited execution. Creation combined with destruction: a distillate of the human condition. ‘Life’ on Earth.
Opposites. Light side and dark side. Why dark side? Where does it come from? The flip side. ‘Dark’ implies intent that’s malign when there is no intent. The ultimate in boring since it’s nothing happening by definition. No movement that’s opposed to Movement. That claims to be ‘interesting’ in Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography because fighting is supposed to be interesting. But all it’s about is morbidity. Illusory ‘lives’ limited by time, so why not limit them by violence? When the comings and goings of bodies are supposed be supercharged with meaning. Yes, why not? Fabricate the illusion of meaning when they’re meaningless. Our pointless universe.
Then I’ll just go on with my favorite expression. Yes. ‘Whatever’. The all-purpose comeback to adolescence’s tormenters. But leave my galaxy out of it. My extraordinary talents must have something to rule.
Growth is Movement
Where does the flip side come from? From a fact of life that nothing can be done about. Though mis-directed minds insist there can. Mindsets associated with personality types intent on making real what can never be Real. On shoving it down our throats: the mistaken idea of a ‘big picture’ presided over by a know-it-all. The simplistic notion that accounts for a global infestation. The plague of ‘religion’ that Sapiens inflicts on itself.
Why plague? Isn’t ‘heaven’ where ‘God’ knows everything? No. ‘Heaven’ has legitimacy. Where anti-movement belongs. Where it has an honored place in Creation’s code of honor, but only as an implication. Movement is progress. Anti-movement is doing dumb stuff like tearing down brick walls. Unraveling Democracy and civilization right before our eyes. And you’re telling me that it belongs? Strength that’s self-questioning is being aligned with the way things are. Self-defeating is aligned with the way things aren’t, and yes, it belongs. This had better be good.
You wanted simple, you get simple. The idea of a big picture and its know-it-all makes wonderful sense if we dispense with Movement. No more to learn and no reason to grow if what’s done is done. No tomorrows to worry about if time never ‘existed’ in the first place, moving as it does ‘forward’ in circles. Limited by itself, destined to end, nowhere to go but where? Back to where it started with the illusion of “something happening.” On an island of make-believe where anything is possible because everything that ‘is’ is impossible. The absurdity of the appearance of ‘movement’ where Movement is forbidden. The appearance of ‘life’ in the presence of not-life. Since Life is Growth and Growth is Movement.
Movement requires questioning
You promised simple. Why am I getting a headache? The personality type mindset involved in this nonsense associates itself with an absurdity: opposition to Movement that has to legitimize itself by appearing to be ‘about’ something. To minds that won’t believe it unless it puts on a show. A grand exhibition of answers to satisfy connoisseurs of savoir faire. Know-it-alls. Each with their own made-up domains. That they own and possess, control and manipulate to their hearts’ content. Certain that everything that’s to be known is known because they’re the manipulator. The know-it-all in charge of the big picture. The big answer. An impossibility since it can only be a manipulation. It can’t be real.
Why not? I like the idea. Who doesn’t? Wouldn’t we all like to know everything so we can stop worrying about tomorrow? Stop obsessing about yesterday? But if you think there’s merit in the big know-it-all answer what’s the answer for Movement? For change? Is it not obvious that things change? That once they do minds must recalibrate what they think they ‘know’? Isn’t Creation all about evolving from what’s done into another round of doing? “Going boldly where no one has gone before?” Once the truth of Movement sinks in it becomes obvious. Obvious – yes! Tell me what’s obvious! That the way things are in the absence of a static big picture can’t be answer. It’s Movement. And Movement requires questioning.
A know-it-all opposed to questioning
OK. But why the emphasis? Because if you’re the know-it-all the last thing you can tolerate is questioning. ‘Answer’ must rule, and it can’t do so when it’s hounded by its arch-enemy questioning. An absurdity, of course, since ‘answer’ couldn’t exist if it weren’t prompted by question. But that’s the mindset we’re talking about. Taking Logic itself and turning it inside-out, upside-down. Reversing it. Reversing everything beginning with Movement since everything began with Movement. With the spontaneous force of Love uniting with Logic. The power of attraction. The ignition that activated Mind’s with Relationship, Self-Awareness with the light of Energy, and turned on evolution and Creation with Movement.
Careful! You’re making your flip side sound like dark side. Indeed. You and I belong to the world of appearances where reversal reigns supreme. The moment I take the stage to proclaim my truths I get caught up in the plot. No matter how detached I claim to be, because there’s no detaching from Psyche. Sapiens’ operating system. Its connection to Guidance, and it’s a mess. Corrupted. Accessible to sense but obstructed by nonsense. You’re getting out ahead of yourself. What am I to conclude now before we move on?
That certain facts settle in once we accept that the way things are is Movement and the first of these is that there can be no ‘paradise’ of no movement. The notion of ‘heaven’ where everything’s idyllic because everyone can take the day off. Permanently, with nothing to do. This is not ‘paradise’. Then what is it? Paralysis. Captivity. Being locked in a cage as though you’re a wild animal. The only way that know-it-alls can fabricate the ‘paradise’ they’re drawn to.
They’re wild animal trainers? I’ve described the effect Isaac Newton stated in his third law: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Built into the way things are, whether in Reality or in its reverse-opposite state, unreality. The principle that explains the flip side. Undramatic. Unburdened by Sturm und Drang. The light bulb is going on! Once we accept that there was no big picture-answer know-it-all at the ‘beginning’, then we can shift to another paradigm better suited to Reality and common sense.
The reality of Movement accompanied by a mirror that reflects the absence of the big answer. With the idea of anything goes that cries out for the Logic of direction. For information, awareness, discretion, and judgment. For boundaries essential to navigation. Questioning delivers all this? Yes. It’s essential. To learning and growth. To sustaining all of Life and Creation. Movement by definition is headed into the unknown. Where answers make sense not because they’re already known but because they’re prompted by questions. They’re part of the before-after sequence of Logic.
Sapiens gets it right by seeking answers with questions. We get it wrong when we identify with the flip side. Where the equal and opposite reaction to Movement is a big picture opposed to change and a know-it-all opposed to questioning.
Paralysis by opposition to Movement
Wow! You just said a mouthful! More than you may be aware of. How so? You have personal experience with this mindset. And so do I, with my family of origin and the family I undertook on my own. Each dysfunctional and in the same way, because each harbored this mindset. Each interfered with learning and growth. Arrested development was the result. The opposite of what families are supposed to be about: the nurturing of children’s individuality, originality, and creativity. Of independent judgment they need to venture into the world with self-confidence. With the survival skills they need because they’ve grown.
Because they’re mature. Grownups. Instead of inmates who’ve been released into the wild from their cages. Conditioned to do what they’re told by their owners and masters. At loose ends in a world where they were supposed to be conditioned to think for themselves. To use their own judgment they’ve been encouraged to practice instead of forced to suppress. To stand up for what they believe. For their own interests instead of submitting passively to someone else’s. The someone else sounds like a bad guy? You sure this flip side isn’t dark?
The Logic of it is simple. Though I admit, getting it right requires giving up conventional thinking and that isn’t simple. Nothing harder than changing a mind. Why? The change to Psyche was its insemination with the idea of no-Movement. Paralysis. And it didn’t take place here; in this state we experience as life on Earth. It took place in a larger context that preceded ours and encompasses ours. If you can accept that we’re all part of one Mind, that our supposedly separate minds are all interconnected, then maybe you can accept that it has a Life and a Story of its own. That we’re part of its story, and to understand ours requires that we reflect on its context. On what it’s gone through and is going through now: an attempt at its paralysis by opposition to Movement.
The instinct-willfulness part
There’s a payoff? I’ve got more important things to do than fry my brain on abstractions. Like what? Keep an appointment with my hairdresser. This is more important. Than having a bad hair day? No way! You want out of your cage then you’ll want to know what put you there. That’s not an abstraction. It’s concrete and immediate. What put me there? A mindset that’s human but not human. Huh? Human in the sense that it’s one side of the personality type divide. Not human in the sense that the side it’s on is anti-human. Hello, hairdresser? Can we do this right away?
Put your phone down and listen. The personality type divide that Carl Jung began to explore over a century ago identified certain traits. Katherine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, worked with Jung. They took his ideas further and produced the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. An analytical tool that helps us manage our personalities. Why do we need to do that? So that we don’t get in each other’s way. So that we don’t get in our own way. By being aware of our traits and how they harmonize, or don’t harmonize, with others’ traits.
But of course this wouldn’t concern you. It won’t? Your personality is pleasing to all. So true! I am the fairest. According to my mirror which I’m always gazing at. I’ve noticed.
So, what have you deduced from MBTI? That they got it amazingly right up to a point. And you took it farther. I did, with help of course. Help from what? From the same source that got Jung and Myers-Briggs to where they got. Insights from intuition. I’ll be impressed if your intuition suggested something new instead of making a mess of everything.
They tossed out a bunch of traits and mostly got right what the traits imply. Patterns of behavior that align with certain orientations. Perspectives associated with looking within or without, signals from Mind’s sixth sense or the body’s five senses, whether one reacts to signals with analysis or instinct, and how one behaves accordingly: whether proactively with judgment and discipline or reactively and willfully without judgment and discipline. Though this is my interpretation mixed with theirs. Myers-Briggs didn’t get the instinct-willfulness part.
Like normal humans
That’s important? I think so. When we get the variables right and sort them out we come out with a striking dichotomy. You produced the Power Ball winner after spinning the ping-pong balls. Yes. But I’ll never be able to collect. Poor you. Another victim of circumstance. Genius. . . Just tell me what you found.
That personality traits align into two tiers. The top is centered on Mind, Person, Conscience, and Movement forward. It’s Psyche corrupted by anti-Mind and anti-Movement, but it’s crucially connected to Guidance from the way things are through its sixth sense. Through insights from intuition. So while it’s undeniably human and flawed, it’s still capable of learning and growth so long as it relates to Guidance and is receptive to the principles and values it speaks for. So long as it listens to Guidance, hears it, and responds to it. It’s caged but capable of releasing itself from its cage once it figures out how by using its Mind. Specifically its faculties of differentiation and empathy. That differentiate it from the animal side of human-animal. From ape.
Ah! Then the bad guy is on the bottom tier. There’s fun to be had after all! Your ‘bad guy’ is centered on body, herd, expedience, and movement backward. Backward and down to no movement. It’s the flip side of the one Self-Relationship that initiated Movement at the beginning. Whoa! I said the dichotomy is striking and this is one reason why. It traces back to the origin of everything. We’re dealing with metaphysical archetypes, not species of organisms inhabiting one tiny planet.
Go on. The one Self was formed and activated by the power of attraction between two functions of Mind. That complemented and completed one another to form a third function larger than themselves. The sum that’s greater than its parts. Yes. That I’ve characterized as ‘Relationship’. Oneness that isn’t one-dimensional and one-sided. The “one-and-only” ruling supreme from the top, inaccessible and unrelatable. A monolith. Willful. Willfulness being the dominant characteristic of the bottom tier of personality types. The implication of ‘opposite’ that cannot activate in Reality without contradicting it.
Why is this so? The two functions of Mind-Relationship were integrated at the beginning into one Self by the spontaneous power of attraction. Into the code of the way things are that’s Guidance, built into every aspect of Creation. To be the reverse-opposite, the flip side of the way things are must be many isolated-separated body-brains drawn into many collective body-brains by intimidation and force. By fear rather than attraction. The phenomenon familiar to us as ‘herd’ or ‘tribe’. ‘Human’s’ place in the taxonomy of zoology. caged within our tribes by predatory instinct like animals caged in a zoo. No Country for Old Men. Yes. No place for individuals striving toward humanitarian ideals.
The bottom tier is most accurately described as herd mentality. Though personified and embodied like normal humans; though in appearance it’s no different than “the girl next door,” it’s a herd of wild animals.
Helpless
This doesn’t sound like ‘relationship’. It’s one dimensional and one-sided. Marauding red army ants laying waste to all that lies before them. Mob violence that can overturn locomotives, tear up railroad tracks, and twist them into knots with its bare hands. National Socialist Germany that tore up a whole continent.
I get the idea. It’s wild and willful. The essence of the bottom tier of personality traits intuited by Jung and Myers-Briggs, though they didn’t realize it. My imagination has recently summoned the image of a child left out in the snow and the cold, with nothing but a toy snow shovel for its survival. A symbol of emotional deprivation and a tear-jerker. Nothing more affecting than childlike innocence and vulnerability. Except that in the make-believe world of human apes, a hallucination, this same figure of sympathy can transform into a monster. Because it’s not the product of Movement, Growth, or Creation. It’s the product of psychopathy. An image of victimhood.
Psychopathy? For all our labors to identify the welt at the core of Sapiens’ Psyche, to dissect ‘human’ on its examining table, the proper subject of our study should be our metaphysical Self. Our collective Self distracted by its reverse mirror-image reflection and the phantasmagoria of its hallucinations. A psychopath. “Diseased Psyche.” Defenseless and disoriented without judgment or boundaries. Rudderless. Susceptible to misdirection. Self-unaware and so susceptible to misidentification. Susceptible to deception and so willing to believe anything and equally willing to make up anything. Receptive to anything goes because lacking differentiation and empathy. Having no basis for choosing right from wrong, possibility from impossibility, real from unreal. For choosing at all. Helpless.
Arrogance: the blunt instrument of herd mentality
The condition that our metaphysical Self was in when it confronted its questioning. A state of helplessness. Not the power of attraction that ignited Movement but powerlessness. Why? Where does this fit in the story of Creation? The helpless victim I describe, the sympathetic figure with its toy snow shovel abandoned to the elements, is Choice. Where it fits in the story of Creation is the origin of Creation’s Character. Its Worth and Integrity. Where Character must build itself from the ground up to attain its Freedom. Freedom of Choice. That can’t be the product of handouts that skirt adversity and lubricate its advancement with corruption. It must be freely chosen, with no interference, no thumbs on the scale to add to its costs or benefits. It must meet the most exacting standards of fairness and impartiality..
Our Self at the beginning could be portrayed as a waif, and in our world it helps to do so. But not for the sake of recognition. For the sake of relating when empathy alone can relate. Because the psychopath’s mode of operation – its M.O. — is manipulation. The consequence of its being manipulated by misidentification with its reverse mirror-image. A reflection that, only in our world of impossibilities, activates the flip side. The code of dishonor manifest in the mirror, now brought to life as though it were Real. When it runs roughshod over mindfulness and individuality, reflection and deliberation, judgment and discipline, with animal instinct, wildness and willfulness. The blunt instrument of herd mentality. Arrogance. Unthinking and unfeeling. Insensitive and cruel.
The magic of self-unawareness
Why so? Because to herd mentality the only self worth considering is the herd. Tribal leadership that makes of every relationship a contest of wills, every family a tribe of conformance and obedience. Machiavellian expedience summoned on behalf of the herd to justify its dominance in competition and combat. In an environment of not-personators, ‘Person’ has no relevance. All is clones of teamwork devoted exclusively to the interests of the manipulator-in-chief.
Why the manipulator-in-chief? Because ‘herd’ and its mentality are make-believe. Attributes of the flip side of Movement powered by one Self-Relationship. Unable to move or create on its own. Able only to appear to do so in unreality and then only when manipulating the powers of its host. Our metaphysical Self, the psychopath-chump corrupted by its reverse-opposite self. A reflection with no reflection of its own. A bully given over to self-defeating ownership, possession, and control of its domain. Make-believe. Entertainment. A hallucination of impossibilities, access to which it alone is entitled. A ‘paradise’ of neglect and paralysis. All enabled by the magic of self-unawareness.
They know not what they do
When you and your Siberian tiger are caged it’s by wild animals who themselves have been caged. Who lie beyond human contact. Beyond emotional accessibility because of their unawareness. They believe themselves to be in the right because all is herd and they but do the work of herding. What can be wrong with caging wild animals who could disband the herd with their wildness? Aren’t we all wild animals? Isn’t the herd everything? How can there be costs and consequences, pain and misery, if we have no awareness of it? How can we be accountable for wrongdoing if we’re unaware that there is wrongdoing? And, if so, that we had anything to do with it?
We look into the face of herd mentality and see an appearance. That should respond to our entreaties to be there for us, only it can’t. Like a door painted onto a brick wall, it leads nowhere. Like a reflection in search of its own reflection, it has no use for a mirror. It must find in others what it seeks. By the method with which it occupied our metaphysical Self and turned it to its use: manipulation.
The manipulator is the flip side of our metaphysical Self and we are its projections. Inhabitants of a world of its own making, where ‘herd’ or ‘tribe’ holds sway, and the story of Sapiens evolution is the story of self-questioning turned to self-defeat. Told through the voices of persons confined to cages, individual spirits crushed by herd mentality. Trying from generation to generation to be heard by ears that don’t hear and eyes that don’t see. Us obstructed in our loving friendship by the self-unaware. By know-it-alls in their land of answers. Victims of their own subjugation.
Who deserve our sympathy. But not our obedience. No. Not our obedience. Resistance with resolve, yes. Standing up to the bully. But with empathy. For, truly, they know not what they do.