Have I Given Any Thought to the Way Things Are?
To context without which my thoughts and feelings, choices and acts, might never become a story.
Whose meaning I might get wrong — if I get it at all.
From one perspective to another
Here are eight perceptions from the mind of a personality type with eight decades of experience with life on Earth. An intuitive philosopher-psychologist inclined to question the way things are with help from another perspective. Guidance, that he attributes to insights that arrive of their own accord, spontaneously. Through sixth sense, a faculty of the human Psyche. Messages not from the wildness and willfulness of arrogance, the clueless ‘creator’ and ‘ruler’ of make-believe, but from a source that does have a clue and can be useful. Definition. The Conscience and Laws, Psyche and Character, of Creation. Meaning from which Guidance responds to us. To the call for help from virtual reality — life on Earth.
Pieces that this personality type has put together from multiple sources along the way, fit to no one’s specifications but its own. Not answers taken from an academic syllabus to pass an exam nor commandments lifted from religious dogma to ensure conformance. It’s original thinking from independent judgment. ‘Independent’ insofar as anything can be independent in a storyline determined by its antecedents in Reality. Pieces for other minds to fit together to their own specifications or to discard. As they see fit. Not for you to copy onto your experience unedited but to edit, use, or ignore as you see fit.
What do they tell me? That conventional ‘wisdom’ is foolishness. Herd mentality that gets everything not only wrong but decisively, horribly wrong. That there’s no possibility of the state without limits that’s so irresistible, so fanatically compelling, to the mentality of herd. That the demon within that terrifies us all is Oxydol’s own Ma Perkins. A slogan stuck in my memory from 1930s-40s radio soap operas, denoting something utterly meaningless that nevertheless attracts an audience. The Hallowe’en yard ornament that someday I’ll install to scare everyone to death: Ma Perkins selling laundry soap. And finally, that Character is questioning, and if we rid ourselves of it we’ll be sorry. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.
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Awareness and unawareness
1. ‘God’ the ‘supreme being’ is an invention of herd mentality that can only think in terms of animal-kingdom hierarchy and competition for supremacy alone at the top. A zero-sum game that’s on the clock. The Reality is Self-Awareness that’s Relationship. The act of Parenting that’s not on the clock. That is and occupies the here and Now. The sharing of its Energy – the Life and Growth of Love inseparable from Logic that’s Movement forward — for the support of its Creations. Not from the unquestioned ‘authority’ of know-it-all arrogance top-down but from self-questioning perspective bottom-up. Loving Kindness.
2. Start with Character, take away self-questioning, and what’s left is one-sided, one-dimensional arrogance. Self-unawareness captive to manipulation. Omnipotence unaware of any view but its own. A one-eyed mutant. Polyphemus lacking depth perception and so unaware of anything but what’s on the surface. Ruled by the mentality of a herd — predatory animal instinct. Tribal and authoritarian, territorial and possessive, mindless and thoughtless, unfeeling and cruel. Incapable of Parenting or Loving Friendship either one. Unrelatable.
The limits of situation
3. The original situation produced Movement within its limits. The conditions that defined it and made Movement possible but were not capable of Movement themselves. Creation’s birthmark – a fraction like the value of pi that can never resolve to a whole number. Eternal agitation that’s Movement forward above the dividing line, Character questioning it from the denominator below. Never to come to rest, always in motion. Never to attain perfect peace or to know everything. Perspective.
4. Limit at origin / original situation was Life possible but not at eternal rest. An impossibility. Big picture all knowing — nothing more to learn, no more work to do, Growth not necessary, all finished — is no-movement stationary. An impossibility. Limit is everything comes at a cost. Original cost-limit is Life to be what it is must Grow, and Growth must continue. Movement to be what it is must move. Grow forward with Life toward Purpose with Meaning. Life with Character-Worth, learned and earned on its own from the beginning. What Integrity must do to be what it is. The way it is: Necessity that can’t be blessings of Life sitting on our asses not getting anything done, not making progress. Universe is subject to same limit imposed on every living thing. Energy that empowers it in hallucination is time limited because self-unawareness is time-limited. Training. Evolution.
Character-training in adversity
5. And from below the dividing line: division. The flip side of questioning that’s the completion of Definition. Of what the enumerator is by what it isn’t. A requirement of Logic. Movement’s reverse-reflection — make-believe. Impossibility implied by possibility. Contradiction having no part in the Reality of Creation but essential to the training of its Character in unreality. The earning of its Worth by proficiency with differentiation and empathy. An act not of will but of the Spontaneity and joyfulness of Happening Now. Self-Awareness. The mastery of Integrity that stands for mindfulness, choice, and value against division, corruption, and neglect. For the Character of Mind-Relationship. Parenting.
6. Unreality is the religion of appearances and poses ruled by the ‘creator-god’ of make-believe: know-it-all herd mentality. Veneration of impossibilities — absolute freedom, power, and wealth. Champion of lawlessness — the reversals and perversities of anything goes:
* Stagnation and paralysis hallucinated as wild and willful ‘action’. ‘Strength’.
* Lethal combat and blood-curdling theatrics hallucinated as performance and entertainment. ‘Consequence’.
* Ass-kissing corruption and self-debasement hallucinated as sacrifice for the greater good. ‘Heroism’.
* Sucker-punching and blame-shifting hallucinated as the triumph of the will. ‘Winning’.
Sworn enemy of all things Mind: Definition and limits, differentiation-Logic and empathy-Love. Of all things Character: Conscience and Integrity, judgment and discipline, questioning and understanding, honesty and sincerity. Of all things Life: Growth and Movement, evolution and progress, Learning and Awareness. Animal.
7. The demon is personal because of make-believe’s nature. Being a reversal of the way things are its response to any stimulus is to do what it is: to reverse. Prey into predator and predator into prey. Proximately if the image that appears in its mirror is its own abominations rather than those perpetrated by victimhood’s ‘enemies’, but ultimately in either case. Personal because each knows the ‘other’ as itself. It doesn’t get any more ‘personal’ than that. And what’s known is that we, being make-believe, did something awful for which we deserve retribution. Mischaracterization that deserves no sympathy: the theft of identity through deception. Invasion of privacy by an intruder. The penetration of Innocence by a rapist. Retribution coming for us with no hope of talking out way out of it. How could we when perpetrator has been reversed into judge who knows where we live? Terror.
Character questioning Why?
8. To come to terms with the human Psyche is to understand that from beginning to end its reverse-reflection is fiction. That for all the personalizing our demons do in the clamor and chaos of fraudulence they’re not us. They are who we aren’t done up by self-deluded minds into bogeymen. Specters of our own invention to look and act like who we are.
A consequence not of evil bent on our destruction but of three principles built into the way things are. The first the condition that makes of everything including the second two an eternal work in progress. The second the source of the demon: know-it-all arrogance, make-believe’s king of beasts and enemy of evolution. The third the means by which Character stands up to it in defense of evolution. The cause of Self-Awareness.
* The principle of Incompletion built into the original Happening. Movement whose ignition was the mating of two functions incomplete without the other, from which all of Creation in Reality and its implied opposites in unreality flowed. In an eternal quest for the unattainable: completion at rest within Movement that can never be at rest.
* The principle of Definition that applies to everything — Psyche included, — that Definition isn’t complete without the implication of what it isn’t.
* The principle of Character that applies to Self-Awareness and self-unawareness, in Reality and virtual reality: that Character isn’t complete without its questioning. Self-questioning in Creation where everything is one Self, self-questioning and being questioned in the virtual reality of ‘others’. Psyche included.
To come to terms with the human Psyche is to understand that it will always harbor demon arrogance terrified of questioning. That Character needed to undo the apparition and manage its own fears always questions. And that if Life is Growth and Growth is Movement, then the work and play of Creation is never done. Class dismissed. Carry on!
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Commentary
The chance to whistle
What’s next? More questions. Lots more, because we’re way behind asking them. This one just the first in a series inspired by a rite of passage. One of those milestones that Gail Sheehy talks about in Passages when it’s time to catch up. When change is going on around us or within us, or both, and if we don’t take stock we’ll just be another leaf in a stream. The way Richard Nelson Bolles does in What Color Is Your Parachute?
The rite of passage here that’s an adolescent transitioning from secondary to higher education. A point in a person’s development when forks in the road appear. When everything structured by home and family opens up into possibilities, including some that no one saw coming. Psychological and emotional twists inherited from ancestors that have a life of their own. Or from antecedents that only sixth sense would recognize, elbowing their way into control as if they owned the place. Having no respect for structure or for boundaries of any kind.
I know because I’ve experienced both twists. I know because I had a son who had a similar experience, both of us while going through rites of passage. Kids transitioning from one stage of education to the next. At the age of thirteen when I made it. Whatever it was that gave me a taste of hell let go. Whatever gave him a taste of hell didn’t let go. At the age of eighteen. I’m whistling a happy tune on my way into my ninth decade. He had anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. He never got the chance to whistle. Gone in his fourth decade.
For Love of Spontaneity
For all the fuss I’m making over Character questioning I was late coming to it. My first self-assessment – my first attempt at living a life examined – waited until my fourth decade. And then only because marriage, home, and job all disappeared in one swoop. A state that even a fool might want to correct with a self-assessment. That revealed my cluelessness to an extent that must have been traumatic because I’ve been working on it ever since. Attracting Guidance through Psychic experiences toward sources that helped. Into Relationships. Loving friendships with persons. Loving friendships with manifestations of Guidance itself – authors of The Book of Changes (the I Ching) and A Course in Miracles. Plus Psychic evidence of identification with the father of intuitive psychology, Carl Jung.
None of these conscious choices. All of them hand-holding that let me decide for myself. Or just think the steering wheel in my hands was actually moving the wheels. I’ll never know. I’m not supposed to know and I don’t want to know, because I don’t want the fingerprints of anything willful on the Spontaneity of Guidance. The source and explanation for my Love of it. For your Love of it if it’s holding your hand.
Gotta run! More questions on the way. . . .