Thoughts that welled up from within while I let my paint brush paint and my saxophone play. When thoughts turned to words on paper, homework done, then got out of the way. Not offended that Mind welcomed itself since Family couldn’t have fit the pieces together otherwise. Since I would have gotten nowhere.
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Happening and Not-Happening at the Beginning
Reality
Love and Logic chanced upon one another at an intersection. Each on an evolutionary path, and their paths intersected. Love headed south to north, Logic west to east. Love growing, Logic learning. Setting a precedent for the reverse-reflection of metaphysics: objects colliding. Planets and stars, black holes and galaxies. Particles in and outside the Large Hadron Collider. Human-animals in and outside relationships. The properties of Love and Logic were the properties of parts that weren’t functional on their own but, when assembled, were functional. As though each had evolved from a design specification for the assembled product that anticipated their crossing paths. At the precise point in their evolutions when they were ready for it.
The result was foundational. Happening defined by the conditions that produced it. Situation within limits. The absence of a design specification that predetermined the nature of Happening and where its path led next. Dependent instead on the nature of Happening. Its Logic. An intersection of parts that belonged together but needed no manipulation by an ‘other’ to bring them together. Guided instead by a primal condition of unsustainability. The limit of situation at the beginning that was the absence of a design specification that predetermined the nature of Happening and where its path led next. That was the presence instead of characterization from within. Qualities of Character that distinguish Love as Affect and Logic as Principle.
Self-characterization. The principle of initiative central to Creation that needs no predetermined design specification to enable and empower it.
My Dad ran a family construction business and teased me, when I was a child, with the idea of a ‘sky hook’. Maybe a running joke at the office, when I’d wondered how an object had wound up where it was and this was his good-natured explanation. That comes to mind while I’m imagining how things came to be, because if they’d come to be with the aid of predesigned specifications it would have been the equivalent of a sky hook. Something already happened to make Happening happen. ‘Foundational’ preceded by foundation. Whose purpose isn’t to answer a question or provide an explanation but to tease gullibility and get a laugh.
The weight carried by ‘Affect’ and ‘Principle’ in the vocabulary of Integrity belies their humble origins in the situation at the beginning. The mystery of how Life-Creation evolved with Motivation out of a do-it-yourself kit, the only possibility for Happening if there was nothing else around to make it happen.
No mystery once the coming together of Affect with Principle brought forth a third principle. Relational. The need for ‘something else’ to combine with Integrity satisfied by the basic nature of ‘Creator’: that it contains the ‘something else’ within itself. Each doing its duty: Affect relating to Principle, Principle relating to Affect. The dynamic that’s responsible for all of Life-Creation in Reality and life on Earth in virtual reality. Relationship. As distinct from the conception of supremacy alone at the top favored by tribes set upon one another by hierarchy. Convinced that it only takes one to tango. A test of patience willing to refer to life on Earth as ‘virtual’ reality when per-vertual reality would do.
Virtual reality
Movement that’s relational – the only condition of existence that could survive in unsustainability. In a situation where the only possible answer to What’s the answer? is What’s the question? Gertrude Stein to Alice Toklas. What’s the situation? What are its limits, how do we make sense of them, and then we can hazard an answer. Hopefully, if we get it right. For now anyway, until the unsustainability of a self-contradicting fraction taps us with its billy club and it’s time to move on. To more versions of the primal situation feeding off of one another in the sequence of evolution. Questions without a one-size-fits-all answer; situations defined by their limits; Movement being the primary limit that begins with Integrity. The Principle of the thing, its Worth certified by Affect, its appraiser. The substance and foundation of whatever it is that makes it worth listening to. Its Character. Initiative capable of kick-starting Movement forward with evolution.
The coming together of the feminine gamete with the masculine gamete to form the original single-cell zygote. To plant the original tree of Life, Learning, and Family. A distinct break with the situation of not-happening at the beginning. The metaphysical precursor of human-ape breaking with ape. Both instances precipitated by Happening for which there is an explanation but not accessible so long as Sapiens has no use for it. Caught up in the lure of mis-understanding. Virtual reality. If it were accessible then event and explanation both would belong to unawareness. Mind hallucinating virtual reality but not aware of Reality itself. Mind out of its mind, inclined toward absurdities like a two-year-old. Herd mentality willfulness capable of willing whatever it wants. Pete Hamill’s ‘Shazam!’ Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Plan Z’: “Peace in our time!”
The bedrock of Reality that’s impervious to corruption is ‘idea’ in its essence. The idea of idea that’s Affect fused with Principle. The germ of Spontaneity-Love fused with Order-Logic. The spark of recognition from Relationship. Happening that never was, and can never be, ‘happened’ by will if ‘will’ implies force already ‘there’. The animal instinct of a predator to arrogate the power of Movement to itself. To contain that which cannot be contained: Movement self-motivating in the Now. The source, product, and companion of Energy that’s Mind-Relationship. A conception of Creation in Reality that never was, and can never be, conceived by herd mentality. By psychopathy.
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At the Beginning: Relativity and Eccentricity
Eccentric. adj. l. Departing from a recognized, conventional or established norm or patterns. . . . 2. Deviating from a circular form or path, as in an elliptical orbit. 3a. Not having the same center: eccentric circles. b. Having the axis located elsewhere than at the geometric center. n. 1. One that deviates markedly from an established norm, especially a person of odd or unconventional behavior.
Imperfection
‘Whatever was ‘there’ or whatever ‘happened’ at the beginning was foundational. Was where Happening-Movement started. Nothing thinkable or discernible preceded it. Design if it was ‘flawed’ was because there could be no design. Or ‘perfect’ either because ‘perfect’ would be the end not the beginning. The crowning glory at the top not humble foundation on the bottom.
‘Unsustainability’ at the beginning doesn’t refer to a flaw in its situation’s design. It refers to the nature of its self-questioning. The essence of Creation with Character that can never presume perfection. That forever after must approach destination from the angle of perspective, perpetually off center and off balance. Forced by the vagaries of Movement to forsake the main highway onto winding detours. Chancing eccentricity, the disgrace and embarrassment of not blending in. Of being marginalized, a fatal flaw that would get in the way of Happening, of Movement, if it weren’t.
- When there’s no ‘in’ to blend in with. Structurally off-center and unsustainable, an engineer’s nightmare and a mathematician’s bugaboo. A fraction that – who knows? – might suddenly resolve to a whole number or else computer science wouldn’t keep trying. When maybe someone should just ask artificial intelligence since it’ll have all the answers eventually and humanity can find another line of work.
- When if Creation weren’t self-questioning at its foundation it wouldn’t be worth a damn even if it could exist. Once perfection is attained the point of striving has been reached. Its crowning jewel goes on display at the Louvre and its creators can join Renoir for an eternity of promenading along the Seine. What’s left to master if ‘mastery’ is the possibility of perfection and the point of Creation? What mountain is there left to climb?
‘Unsustainability’ refers to the limits of situation at the beginning that can’t be perfect. To the limits of possibility that can’t be ‘absolute’, the arrogance of perfection at once ludicrous and menacing. Presumption subject to no boundaries, exempt from questioning when it crosses them. When it reverses ‘function’ from usefulness to uselessness because it’s replaced it. Rendered change for improvement moot since it’s taken care of it. Thus dispensing with Movement and evolution too, for Creation that’s the work and play of Life. For Family since there’s no need for more fruit to bear, flowers to bloom, or branches to grow on its Tree. No need for healing when wounding is done.
Help managing the tension
The birth of Affect that evolved into Love-relating needed the boundaries of Logic to help it recognize who it was. It needed limits. The dividing line between the eccentricity and honesty of Creation that embraces Definition and the psychopathy and dishonesty of ‘perfection’ that avoids it. That can’t look itself in a mirror that asks who it is, flaws and all. Can’t bear to reflect on the inevitable error of its ways and their costs: generations of lives and careers, study and resources, wasted on finding a cure for psychopathy.
Perfection that’s absolute is the self-appointed enemy of the idea of ‘limit’. Limit is the intolerable offense to perfection that’s imperfection. From the beginning ‘situation,’ ‘Happening’, ‘Movement’, ‘Creation’, were subject to limits and therefore imperfect. ‘Sustainability,’ idealized by the presumed stability of no-movement, is in Reality delivered by Movement toward the unattainable goal of resolution. ‘Eternal peace’. By the application of Affect married to Principle to bring meaning and purpose to situations that can’t stand still. That can’t come to permanent rest when their foundation is but a tectonic plate. Afloat on currents of irresolution, shifting beneath their feet. A constant threat of irreparable harm when shift turns to quake.
A circumference whose ratio to its diameter always comes out to the same fraction. Whose enumerator 22 is condemned to an eternity of being divided by 7, a denominator that won’t give up. Enumerator earning its Worth by moving upstream against the current generated by its denominator self-questioning, in constant need of help managing the tension caused by its would-be divider. The nihilist that would reverse all striving, all meaning and purpose, into validation of itself. The absurdity of absolute perfection. Impossibility claiming sustainability for being perfect, absolute and unchanging. Unmoving and unmovable, infinite and infinitely strong. The reverse of the situation at the beginning, pathetic for the weakness of its relativity.
Chronic agitation
Re-reversed by the fact of relativity intuited by eccentricity. In the person of Albert Einstein, too independent-minded for jobs in academia and so obliged to remake history at a patent office. What would be the character of Creation, the nature of the Affect and Principles that brought it about at the beginning that was so limited? That was accompanied by implications the reverse of common sense? Eccentricity. There being no perfect circumference or fraction in perfect balance. No foundation in perfect equilibrium. No ‘perfect’ anything but only Affect and Principle, the substance of Life.
The capability of Ignition that could set things in motion but incapable of aiming for the center when there was no perfect circumference with a center to aim for. No foundation in perfect balance that could support Creation in perfect balance. Unable to aim for the ‘center’; being perpetually off balance, what else could Creation and its Creators be but eccentric? “Deviating,” “departing,” “odd or unconventional,” when there was no possibility of an “established norm or pattern,” “a circular form or path,” “a geometric center” to adhere to?
Then who are we but eccentrics who would use Sapiens’ empathy and differentiation, Affect and Principle, to chart a course of sustainability on a sea of irrationality? Gifted with the ability to move forward, the only possible response that’s sustainable in a setting defined by its unsustainability. Constant, chronic agitation that’s unresolvable to absolute perfection. Proclaiming itself to be the ultimate ‘good’ when perfection is the enemy of the Good. It’s psychopathy, the flip side of eccentricity.
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Non-Dualistic Liberal Eccentricity
Humanitarian values
Part of life on Earth that doesn’t always present opportunities to relate to the human-animal with dialogue, intelligence, and grace. As it didn’t when Napoleon’s troops muscled their way into Goethe’s Weimar residence and had to be rousted by his future wife. A woman of temperamental muscle as Goethe the academic liberal was not. As it didn’t when Union POWs, street thugs from New York, took over the stockade at Andersonville and exploited their fellow POWs until Character resisted and they were hung. When there’s no possibility of relating to a beast. To unconditional opposition demanding not dialogue but unconditional surrender. I will defeat you. Capture, consume, abuse, and waste you. You have no choice but to submit to my will.
Picking a fight that calls upon Character to fight back. Armed with weapons stronger than temperamental muscle: Free Choice and Integrity. Not to engage in a pointless contest of ‘wills’ with an apparition but to come to terms with Self that’s either real or not, there or not. “I would meet you upon this honestly’, the line from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion that speaks to the boundaries of the moment. Where it gets personal. As when Rick Blaine squared around and addressed Ilsa Lund: “Go ahead and shoot.” Standing Love’s vulnerability up to presumption that would wound it. Honesty meant for consumption within as much as without, where the only verdict that’s definitive resides. Honesty with ourselves.
In situations that offer no path to escape except at the cost of Character. Opportunities to round out our training by demonstrating that we are the Person – the human – we claim to be. To ourselves and others, not a make-believe act. On the right side getting it right. To demonstrate that we aren’t captive to a hypnotic state that puts us on the wrong side of evolution. The bully demanding the fight that only it can ‘win’ – on putting us in cages, physical as well as psychological – would erase Character were we to set principle aside. To avoid difficulty in favor of comfort, the path of least resistance that perpetuates the rule of cruelty. Joining the brutes at Andersonville instead of standing up to them. Doing whatever it takes in an animal kingdom of hierarchy to replace it with self-governance. With the humanitarian values of humanity.
Second-to-none in passion
The liberal temperament is a Mind-centered personality type whose Psyche draws inspiration and motivation from Character defined by empathy and differentiation. Humanitarian values and principles that distinguish human from animal. Conscience that’s personal-individual as distinct from not-conscience that’s material-tribal. The difference between political liberal humanitarian individual rights and left tribal material needs fairness and equality. The ‘enemy’ of ‘liberal’ is the psychodynamic of the illusion that deceives human-animal into misidentification of Self. Into reversal of Reality-Creation when it falls under the spell of external-objective ‘reality’. Virtual reality, when body senses establish reciprocal relationship with an external material setting that’s hypnotic. Hallucinating, distracting, and manipulative.
Liberal’s remedy is the re-reversal of make-believe’s reversal of Movement-Creation from bottom-up egalitarian metaphysics to top-down authoritarian hierarchical physics. From relationship self-motivating Happening from within Mind / Self-Awareness to its reverse-reflection antithetical to happening at all. To Relationship, to animation, motivation, and Mind / Self-Awareness. The means employed by the liberal persuasion toward this end is explanation that leads to understanding through the arts and literature in an attempt to liberate Mind captive and addicted to misidentification and misunderstanding from the distraction causing it. Parting Self from awareness and enabling the illusion to perpetuate itself through self-unawareness.
The means employed by the liberal persuasion to fight is its mental faculties and life-tension management talents for extending Love and expanding Logic. For interrelating and interconnecting among Persons as distinct from competing and combatting among tribes. The liberal Psyche is unsuited to physical combat as the Mind-centered personality type is unsuited to body-engineered behavior. It has no talent for it other than the side of ‘human’ that’s animal. Yet it’s second-to-none in passion for reaching its goal. For supporting family function and warding off dysfunction with the healing power of empathy. So that Person won’t be self-deluded by the allure of body-sensed virtual reality. To be drawn into misidentification with tribal animal and from there into combat by tribal-animal Machiavellian psychopathy. By the rank ethos of expedience.
The means employed by the liberal personality type is eccentricity. Characteristic of the lake sprite questioning who we are beneath the watchful eye of the mountain above. Where dwells the hermit on his solitary path to insight. Both idiomatic of the way things are that’s eccentric. Given its destination, direction, and meaning not by parameters fixed in space but by relational within itself. Perspective that’s ever interesting for being self-motivated and spontaneous, unconventional and unpredictable, Creative and original. A bit off-center when there is no objective ‘center’. Necessarily and unapologetically eccentric.
Indivisibility that’s Relationship
Albert Einstein was an eccentric who didn’t blend in with academic uniformity. Which is why this world-class thinker was toiling away at a patent office when he daydreamed relativity and convulsed ‘realism’ with a new reality. A contrarian indifferent to herd mentality convention. Hard to get along with. A kindred spirit to Socrates. Standing on principle that he respected rather than going along to get along with ‘sociable’ that he couldn’t respect.
Both became historic standouts, formative influences on the dominant paradigms of Western thought. When their talents for ethical philosophy and physics combined with their eccentricity to attract notice. When resistance to herd blending in brought about change beyond their immediate circumstances, adding their perspectives to the pool of limits that evolve into situation. The situation in their case that’s life on Earth no less, our planet being, among other things, the evolutionary step-child of the original Situation. Adding another way of looking at things composed of talent plus passion plus resistance to blending in. Eccentricity.
Principle incorruptible because standing on indivisibility. The bedrock of Movement functional at its origin because grounded on functions that could not be denied. That were what they were because they couldn’t be anything else. The attribute of being the thing itself. Love itself. Logic itself. The Creators and orchestrators of Movement itself. Definitive for being Definition itself. Where the buck stops and the rubber meets the road. The Necessity of the way things are. The way it is: Change for the better. Evolution toward the Good. Motivated and guided by Conscience.
Lovers in the flesh
Whose reverse mirror-image is the nihilism and neglect of going nowhere. The pose of ‘indivisibility’ from perversity on the underside of Definition. ‘Virtual reality’s’ magic kingdom of division and conquest ‘ruled’ by the divider-in-chief. By the infallibility of ‘perfection’, the enemy of rules that’s the one-and-only rule. The promise of anything goes where nothing goes. Its ‘liberty’ and your slavery. The ‘indivisibility’ of make-believe where nothing makes sense. Self-contradiction that’s appearance tethered to impossibility, terminally inaccessible and unrelatable.
Psychopathy. The appearance of sustainability that’s on the beat not off. On base not off. Blending in with ‘social norms’ and so presumptively ‘reasonable’. ‘Balanced’ upon foundation that’s firm. Firmly at one with ‘realism’ when the foundation detected by experimental science is agitation. Quantum that’s particle with mass and wave that’s frequency. Entangled with other quanta yet separate, whose properties shift depending on whether it’s being minded. The ‘foundation’ of ‘objective reality’ that’s anything but ‘firm’. It’s crazy.
Eccentricity would like to be nice. To be easy to get along with, but how can it be if the way things are isn’t objective uniformity but subjective eccentricity? If Character that’s honesty can’t buy into a lie. That uniformity rules and it’s nothing but an act of will. An invention of make-believe. Herd mentality. Eccentricity is perspective capable of leaning in every direction. Always incomplete, a work in progress striving for balance. The hermit on the mountain: awareness of the risk of stumbling in the dark, aware of the need for guidance from the light.
The ‘function’ of unawareness is to reverse itself into dysfunction. The unawareness of mind into acute sensitivity of body. To the touch of virtual reality. Pleasure that’s sensuous. The interaction between body senses and sensed physical-bodily environments. Quasi lovers. Caressed and validated by psychopathy’s constant attentions. The filming and photographing, visiting and exploring, the four corners of Earth and every nook and cranny within it. Sensation that’s virtually impossible to part with. Bodily senses and ‘objective reality’ romancing each other. Immersion in the ‘action’ that’s life on Earth. An addiction, to say nothing of pleasure that’s sensual: the interaction between bodies. Lovers in the flesh. The former flooding Mother Nature with tourists, the latter with bodies. Unsustainability.
The function of the lake sprite
“Hurt to the quick” is touching that goes all the way to foundation of Self-Awareness Mind-Relationship product. To bedrock beneath Love plus Logic: Affect plus Principle. To penetrate to this level is to penetrate to the origin of Life-Creation. The state of Movement where it began and begins anew with Movement. The marriage of Love with Logic that’s the marriage of Affect with Principle. Spontaneity with Order, attributes of the Quick. The spark of Life and the source of hurt. “The quick and the dead.”
The Quick that’s Self-Awareness. Activation. Awakening. The state of Mind Sapiens exists to attain as a surrogate for its metaphysical Mind-Self within its hallucination. It’s origin Mind-Self’s mission to patrol the limits of Life-Creation Reality including the limits of situations within it. Produced by the Movement of evolution, of works in progress. To manage the dividing line between the upper and lower side of Definition. Armed and enabled by being bi-lingual. Speaking the language of Movement and its reverse-reflection. Armed with awareness of Life-Creation Reality and with the reverse awareness of self-unawareness. Practiced in the choice between the two having experienced the costs of choosing in error. Certified free of influence not of its Self. Of any ‘externality’ that would debase it because aware that it’s a manipulator of its own invention. An impossibility.
In contrast to eccentricity. The function of the lake sprite. Guidance protected by its nature from addiction to the bait of manipulation, the lures of psychopathy. By its inability to blend in with the crowd. With anything ‘social’, ‘tribal’ or ‘herd’. By the nature of eccentricity, the lake sprite questioning playfully subject to no one’s control, incapable of harm. Protected by the boundaries of its mate the mountain. Logic. The boundaries of Principle. Of Necessity, the way things are that doesn’t take shit from anyone. Indivisible. Incorruptible.
Attributes of Worth
The work of managing tension between the Good which is eccentric and imperfect and the ‘perfect’ which is wrong and psychopathic. In the absence of circumference with a center to aim toward, a sky with a North Star to navigate by, a target with a bullseye to shoot at. The only coordinate orientation would have to be relational. An object other than oneself to relate to so that we can get our bearings. Our limits that define where we are essential to Movement if it’s to have meaning. If it’s to have a destination (Love) and direction getting there (Logic).
Affect without Principle and Principle without Affect could neither one attempt movement on its own. Lacking destination and direction, Relationship and Conscience. Lacking the relational coordinate with meaning and purpose that launched Movement forward. Happening conceived as something cared for evolving toward something to care about. The Worth of relational from the beginning, its parts brought together by mutual attraction, motivated from within to care for one another. Not by the self-regard of will, selfish, manipulative, and negative, but by the sharing of Self-Awareness, expansive, spontaneous, and positive.
The attributes of Worth. Family being there for one another. Whose origin and prototype, role model and ideal, is the self-motivated pairing of Love with Logic that ignited Movement with meaning. That gave it direction and purpose that it could never have if derived from a pre-fabrication: the know-it-all ‘god’ of make-believe. The animal in human-animal. Herd mentality. The king of beasts: psychopathy.
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Eccentricity in Reverse: Duslistic and Manipulative
Touched
The vampire bidding us welcome to his Transylvanian castle. Whose nemesis is Dr. Van Helsing. Eccentricity. Tension that never lets up between the coffin in its crypt with its cold, clammy contents, and ingenuity impervious to its addictive lure and immune to its hypnotic spell. Original thinking that isn’t captive to any one perspective but thrives on insights from them all. Until discovery arrives of its own accord out of the mix, as if it were there all along. As if to avoid will having anything to do with it, help with ‘answer’ must beat ‘question’ to the finish line. With Guidance tailored to the limits of the situation that already implied it.
The formula for ‘whatever works’? Not if whatever works can’t be a formula. Spontaneity’s trade secret waiting for a know-it-all psychopath to hack into it. The last one to go at the end of Earth’s current mass extinction: the know-it-all psychopath plotting to monetize it.
Eccentricity’s gift to Sapiens’ evolution is help with the solution to a problem: how to liberate the human Psyche from psychopathy. So that Sapiens, who would be better than ‘animal’, may liberate itself from animal. A problem so impractical by all accounts that to suggest a solution is to court shunning. And yet whole professions and industries are devoted to finding answers, mitigating its effects, and cleaning up its messes. While not entirely despairing at least reluctant to offer hope. Pricked by hints from disciplines and happenstance alike, that there’s a pony around somewhere to account for this pile of manure. That we could find if only we keep looking for it.
If our world is a bit touched then to be thought of as out of touch may not be cause for shame. This from an eccentric who would remove the same lure, the same hypnotic spell with which the vampire seduces its victim, from the manipulator of the vampire. The vampire being a manipulation employing the same means of its own manipulation on those it’s manipulating. A fool, viral and addictive, programmed by the manipulator making a fool of it. Who only knows to replicate its manipulator and itself by making fools of others. No more ‘alive’ and ‘sentient’ than software code that only needs a fix to remove the glitch.
The butt of the joke
The lure dangled by the manipulator of origin. The shiny pendulum that draws awareness out of Psyche and leaves only the darkness and irrationality of unawareness behind and in. The original magic kingdom of make-believe. A ‘paradise’ of ‘perfection’ hallowed in every cemetery by “Rest in Peace’. The virtual reality we know as life on Earth. Our planet of the chimps. The shiny pendulum that mesmerizes the psychopathic mindset. The body-centric personality type that can’t extract enough pleasure from the sensuous and the sensual. The ecstasy of a theoretical location manager who’s located where he belongs in the relationship between the physical lure and the physical senses taking it. In the addiction of one for the other, for without the other the one could never exist. Literally.
Eccentricity’s cure for psychopathy and the end to its bloodsucking. Understanding the nature of our reality, that it’s virtual. That it’s manipulative and toxic, making fools of those who suspend disbelief. Who enter its darkened chambers and find satisfaction in surrendering themselves, mind, body, and soul — sovereignty and integrity — to its promises of unlimited whatever. So long as they consent to remaining under its spell. So long as they remain in denial of the truth: that they chose their debasement and they can choose to regain their Integrity. That the freedom and power they wield is derived from the source of their imprisonment, a pose of mastery they can drop anytime they want. When their reverse-awareness shifts from the fun to be had making fools of others to awareness of the fools they’re making of themselves.
Van Helsing’s stab in the dark
Dr. Van Helsing proved to be immune to Dracula’s hypnotic power like the eccentric that he was but not to the tyranny of sensory perception. That held sway over Bram Stoker his inventor and Plato. Classical Greek philosophy, that gave us the Allegory of the Cave to reflect on from inside it rather than from where reflection calls for it. From another point of view that isn’t trapped by sensory perception. From objectivity that isn’t compromised by the subjectivity of the knower including itself in the known. Material ‘reality’ referring back to itself for verification. Who is my authority? Me.
What would put the genie back inside its bottle if it can’t belong to material ‘reality’? Virtual reality, and thus can’t be the body? If it involves the psychology of Mind? Of Movement, which would be the psychology of motivation. Whose wellsprings challenge behavioral therapy and correctional justice to go deep beyond their limits. To puzzle every discipline with a Rubik’s Cube that can’t be solved without mastery of the root of it. Psyche. The Mother of all Psyches from the metaphysics of Creation. That emerged into the light of Self-Awareness when Love-Spontaneity teamed up with Logic-Order to ignite Movement with Creation in the Now. Mastery of the psychology of psychology whose best effort to date may still be Jung’s “collective unconscious.” A stab in the dark.
Eccentricity didn’t bring Stoker’s horror story to its end. Though it ended its run still immune to the vampire’s hypnotic spell Van Helsing ultimately gave way to his author’s convention. A stake through the heart. End of body end of horror. Stoker’s bow to the same realities of connection and communication that limited the Mind of Plato.
On the wrong side of the dividing line
When Mind that’s not so limited could conceive of another ending. Uncompromising non-dualism. The start to a solution offered by Jesus in A Course in Miracles: a flat denial of the premise behind sensory perception and every major field of inquiry. That Reality is real and virtual reality too. That the metaphysics of Mind and Creation sharing the same space with its reverse-reflection opposite – physics — makes sense. The merging of origin with a derivative, an implication that owes its ‘existence’ to not-origin. The merging of function that is with the part of its definition that isn’t: not-function.
What is the solution offered by A Course in Miracles but a reminder: that there’s a logical boundary between what is and what isn’t? That to manage it requires awareness that though they’re on opposite sides of Reality and incompatible, they’re two sides of the same coin. Inseparable parts of one function, each with its logical place in the way things are – in the grand scheme of things. Each with its brand of usefulness that requires that they stay out of one another’s way. Not to be confused with one another. Not for the boundary that divides them to be ignored as though it didn’t exist, for then we’ll face the consequences. The reverse side of the coin flooding the zone with an onslaught of psychopathy.
Because it does exist. And in fact its management makes the difference between whether Sapiens continues its evolution forward or languishes where it is, in a neverland of ambiguity and ambivalence. Uncertain how to answer the great questions of life on Earth. The who, what, when, where, why, and how of things. Misled as we are by confusion over the dividing line. By psychopathy, borne of ‘realism’s’ insistence that if it’s there at all it’s there to be crossed. The mentality of the animal brain.
A failure of differentiation and empathy, attributes meant to distinguish Sapiens-ape from ape. Manifest not just in blood-and-soil tribal barbarity but in the rigorous discipline of professional standards, that insist that bodies and their senses are the gold standard for all judgments concerning reality. Identification, measurement, evaluation, interpretation, and verification. Body idolatry by any other name. Getting it exactly, harmfully wrong. Self-dealing by psychopathy that will remain on the wrong side of the dividing line until Integrity reclaims its rightful place. Until evolution moves forward with function intact, no longer divided against itself.
What change of Mind would end the hypnotic spell that stands in the way of Sapiens’ evolution?
Guidance
Psychopathy. . . eccentricity. . . mind. .. psyche. . . . Terms taken from the vocabulary of Understanding that’s also misunderstanding. From the language of communication that’s also the language of division. The Tower of Babel. What it means when the psychodynamics of Plato’s Cave can’t be understood from within the Cave by the mind of Plato that’s part of the allegory. “Including the knower in the known” refers to the circularity of ‘scientific’ reasoning that insists on limiting the free spirit of inquiry to questions it’s already answered. To putting it in a cage. When the ‘knower’ is so far included in the ‘known’ in Reality that there’s no distinction between the two. When in fact there’s nothing to be ‘known’ that can’t be un-known by questioning in Happening that’s Movement. Instantaneous change. Leonardo DiCaprio, “Catch me if you can.”
The nature of the way things are: Movement. Psychopathy being its reverse gives the novelist William Styron no choice but to ‘go deep’, despite his laudable restraint given the nature of the subject. Conditions that underlie every expression, every concept, of experience. To meet up with psychopathy face-to-face is to confront the reality that we can’t be the ones to deal with it. To have any effect on it since we in our virtual reality are at a far remove from where it comes from. The original situation that gave rise to its host, to which it is the self-appointed ‘enemy’. Presuming to muster an effective offense against its foolproof defense with the pitiful tools at our disposal could be suicidal. A better course would be to get out of the way. To let another perspective handle it. Eccentricity.
Theoretical physics claims that escape from our physical universe into another is possible by approaching a black hole from a particular angle. As mathematical problems can be solved by approaching them from a particular perspective, demonstrated by practitioners like Alexander Grothendieck and Jon von Neumann. One that departs from the main road. “Welcome the Detours.” The title chosen by Andover’s Head of School, Raynard S. Kington, for his welcome to incoming students in the Spring issue of Andover Magazine. Students who, like Caltech newbies I’ve spoken to, seem to have everything planned out. Eccentricity doesn’t do that. It “walks a line,” in the way that Paul Klee puts it, an artist who starts with a line on a canvas and lets it take him on an original journey one step, one line, at a time. Until creation comes into view. As the music of jazz legend Sonny Rollins came into sound, when he put preparation aside and let spontaneity and his sax do the rest.
Personifications
As my own writing did in Washington forty-five years ago, when all it took was a word to get things going. The germ of an idea, until sentences were beginning with no idea where they would end. Letting the dynamic between idea implying and mind inferencing carry the storyline forward. Without a clear distinction between idea and mind, implication and inference. Everything squished together where boundaries hold together the attachments that differentiation divides. The creativity of Creation. Where eccentricity to be its offbeat self must embrace notions of what isn’t good along with the Good. Divider along with questioner, two sides of the same coin. Psychopathy along with eccentricity, joined at the back side, where one side leaves off and the other begins. Front to back. Where eccentricity to be its useful self finds a use for its reverse. Function of function by function for function.
Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, a metaphysician among other talents, was the go-to guy to track down and eliminate Dracula because Dracula was his reverse self. Siblings in a sense, one toxic, the other immune to its toxicity by virtue of being its reverse. And host. Family. The better angel of the vampire’s nature, inoculated by blood against his offshoot’s craving for it. Had Bram Stoker removed his story’s atmospherics from Transylvania to the metaphysics of its origin Dracula would have received his comeuppance in a decidedly different way. Where instead of grisly stakes piercing screaming hearts at sunrise the audibles would be of the monster being shipped to a museum. Coffin, wardrobe and all, to Madame Taussaud’s Wax Museum or Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Either way, harmless storage until the monster could be let loose in a different situation.
Where there would be a point to being frightened out of your mind: the reverse of his origin and ours. Where Dracula is first among equals on Hallowe’en, the scariest, most lovable spook in the front yard. And also make-believe’s worst nightmare come true. Virtual reality. The whole thing made up of whole cloth. Life on Earth that’s overrun with psychopathy. Life-like Draculas who are anything but lovable. Unrelatable. The ‘ego’ in A Course in Miracles and the ego in the pile of manure without a pony.
Whose story can’t be told by anyone in and of this life. By me or Plato or Alexander Grothendieck. If it’s virtual reality and we’re buying into it with sensory perception and self-deluded Psyches. It has to be told from a perspective not so compromised, that’s familiar with the metaphysics of its origin. A messenger from Self-Awareness who can pass effortlessly between the physical and metaphysical worlds. A polymath like Van Helsing fluent in both languages that’s immune to self-unawareness. To the fears and suspicions, seductions and intimidations, emanating from its darkness.
The function Guidance. Whose personifications vary with situations depending on the type called for by their limits. In the case of the Course a variation of the biblical Jesus, respectful of other ways of looking at things but also of questioning. Including itself, having no desire to be a ‘bible’ set in concrete or the know-it-all who authored it. Respectful of some aspects of religion but, withal, hardly compatible with ‘Christianity’ and its ‘universal’ ‘Church’. A hierarchical temple of self-contradiction and self-dealing, pious and righteous mixed with hypocrisy and corruption. Arrogance astride the perfection of ‘infallibility’ citing itself. Direct, exclusive, and unquestioned descendance from its putative ‘founder’, who had he been heard would have thrown the money-lenders out of the temple all over again. The ‘animal’ side of human-animal let loose in a virtual reality of anything goes.
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Conflicting Perspectives from Personality Types
Guidance from a better way
Jesus found a use for Freudian psychoanalytics when feuding Freudian psychotherapists at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital sought help from “a better way” and got it. Help with weaning themselves off their addiction to psychopathy in their own language. His message personalized as it had been some two thousand years before, only to have it misrepresented once again. This time not by hierarchy but by professional bias. By the Course’s self-appointed ‘primary teacher’, a psychotherapist and champion of Sigmund Freud, whose mission was to elevate his master’s voice to divinity with Jesus, the Course into an endorsement of Freudian psychoanalysis, and his students into a captive audience. All to teach Carl Jung a thing or two.
A breathtaking lapse of judgment and Character. Psychopathy engaged in its characteristic pursuits: striking poses; manipulating facts, perceivers, and believers; brazen hypocrisy; and dehumanization. The last the coup de grace administered by the predator when its prey was made aware of its abuse. As the Course’s students were when its ‘primary teacher’s’ foundation published his last unpublished work, not in the habit of questioning perfection and so unaware of what it was doing. Taking sides in the rift between Freudian ‘scientific’ psychology and Jungian intuitive psychology.
Between ‘realists’ and ‘idealists’, the divide in philosophy that pits a personality type derived from another against its host. The host and original type, mindfully striving toward a higher level of awareness than animal, its derivative the animal dead set against it. The original type’s reverse-reflection, dead set against Movement, creative Self-Awareness, function, and Creation. Immovability anchored to an unchanging status quo. Paralysis that’s make-believe. Nietzsche’s ‘superman’, the heroics of existential combat on a grand scale, sound and fury signifying nothing. The ‘realist’ addicted to the ‘here and now’. A hallucination. Reversal’s claim to supremacy in its magic kingdom of hierarchy: king realist seated on his throne of contradiction. Virtual reality. Life on Earth. Make-believe.
King realist: body-centered, mindless, willful, predatory, and psychopathic. A perception that could readily be dismissed since it comes from a theorizing no-body if it weren’t put together from sources not of me or my virtual reality. From perspectives of the kind given professional legitimacy by Carl Jung. Insights from intuition demonstrably not ‘scientific’ though, as he stresses in Psychological Types, creativity would be impossible without them. They aren’t beholden to sensory perception beloved of ‘realism’ for their legitimacy, nor to the judgment of a planet of the chimps. Insights from sources brought to my attention through the psychic phenomena I recognize as “Guidance.”
You are here
Beginning with the Jesus of Sunday mornings at the Wallace Memorial United Presbyterian Church, where as a boy my mind fixed on Psalter Hymnals, chandeliers, and stain glass windows. On anything but the sermon, while my Psyche was apparently taking it in. Absorbing details that, over time, came together in the story of a Person. Character, whose loving kindness and vulnerability, honesty and relatability, proved stronger than any attempt to assassinate it. Who reappeared to conscious effect years later, when I devoured A Course in Miracles and constructed my own index. Seven long index card trays of cross-referenced notes from which I constructed guidance on topics for group discussion.
Later in the same decade in which I was guided by a spiritual seeker to the Tao’s Book of Changes (I Ching) and Jungian psychology. The same friend who led me to the Course. While attending book discussions at the Jung Educational Center in Pittsburgh I constructed a personal mandala from Tarot cards. A year later, in Morgantown, I was given a zodiac wheel by an astrologer, though the logic behind it didn’t interest me then and I made no use of it. Other sources came by other routes – transcendental meditation, Ira Progoff’s dialoguing, Myers-Briggs / Jungian personality type theory, Roger Woolger’s past life regression, Edgar Cayce and the Association for Research and Enlightenment, a spiritual reading with Sue Burton, Tarot, and Radha Suomi Satsang Beas. The last with limited enthusiasm since, like yoga and chakras, it got the body in the way of understanding and working with Mind.
So that I could manage my psychopathy. My animal nature, that over time came into clearer focus with the help of the sources just mentioned. Sources augmented by psychic experiences with no attribution. Strikingly in 1965 and 1979, then less so when Loving Friendship with their source made itself at home. Altogether putting me in front of a directory. A kind of New York subway system map that depicted my situation and placed me within it. You are here.
Bottom-up from the top
The structure of personality types that consists of two tiers of functions, one above, the other below, with a distinct dynamic between them both uniting and dividing. A source of tension within the human Psyche that’s driven my growth but at a price. Difficulty with relaxing. Incapacitating when I’ve allowed it to overwhelm my physical and emotional limits until I finally learned its lesson. Over time, to take my hands off the wheel. To trust Loving Friendship with the part of my Psyche that seemed to know what it was doing and had everyone’s best interests at heart. Affect with Principle, empathy with differentiation, Love with Logic. The Tao motivating the I Ching with spontaneous Guidance for a wide range of human experience. Sixty-four hexagrams to fit that many situations including mine that called for wisdom and got it. That called for Friendship and got it.
The phenomenon of the psychic: intimacy with our innermost selves that’s uncanny, transformative, and personal. Able to move us forward because it’s Movement. Ignition at the beginning brought about by Relationship. The creative force sought by writers like me, artists like Paul Klee, and musicians like Sonny Rollins, when we situate ourselves in the here and now and seek to be moved. On the stage of performance, with our motivations and talents untethered from the limits of self-regard that would seek to replace their source with itself. The self-appointed enemy of Life-Creation and Spontaneity. Make-believe. Psychopathy.
Top-down from the bottom
The bottom tier of the structure of personality types. Whose part in the dynamic between the two tiers is to push upward and against the top tier. Resistance to Movement forward that isn’t reciprocating. Pushing down and against the bottom tier, and so no matter how much personalities aligned with the bottom tier want to imagine themselves engaged in heroic combat with a vicious beast it’s all theatrics. The ‘enemy’ is their own construct conveniently provoked into offending so that they can be demonized and hacked to pieces. Dismembered and dehumanized. A fantasy — lurid, mesmerizing, and addictive. Leaving behind a mess for the top tier to clean up, a necessary cost of Movement forward.
You are here seems to put me to the far left of the top tier and my psychopathy at the far right of the bottom tier. The distinction being the human side of my Psyche – Sapiens – vs. its animal side. The animal brain, a.k.a. herd mentality. A distinction that may be so central to the human-animal identity that it overlooks itself. Because of sensory perception’s outward orientation, the likely reason that Carl Jung concluded his autobiography with an “unexpected unfamiliarity” with himself. The Mind behind personality type theory, intimate with its faculties for self-discovery and aware of the limits of extraversion, but too close to his subject to detect it.
Human-animal vs. animal, the distinction at the root of Sapiens’ struggles with psychopathy, yet for all its impact on human endeavor it isn’t given its due. The arts and literature, science and philosophy, psychology and theology, wax prolific on variations of a target they habitually miss. With outpourings of Shakespearean verbiage and poetic allusion, Aristotelian and Kantian ‘logic’, quantum gravity exotica, Freudian neurotica, and theological apocrypha. Wall-to-wall mythologizing.
Psychopathy making it up as it goes along. Its genius for seeking answers where they can’t be found. For avoiding the face in the mirror that’s us: individual animals conditioned by cranial ‘sociability’ to think of ourselves as ‘human’. Humanitarians. Destined to act by cranial origin as animal. Predatory and Machiavellian, primed for survival at any cost. The face of dysfunction behind the mask of function. Inhumanitarians. Beasts with a distinctly ‘human’ talent for organized mob violence. For tool-making technology capable of dominion over nature. Perishable when opened and in need of refrigeration when its habitat overheats to extinction.
Humanitarian family
Humanitarians, inhumanitarians, and the interplay between them brought to clarity by the evolution of personality type theory. Beyond the threshold to metaphysics where Jung, Myers, and Briggs stopped to the nature of Mind, that
- It’s one function composed of two — Love and Logic that belong together and function together;
- It functions as two — Growth and Free Choice that belong together but must function apart because of the nature of Free Choice and the Worth of Creation, that both require Character with Integrity;
- Growth is Self-Awareness of Necessity; Free Choice is Self-Awareness by Choice;
- Parent and Child, the latter an extension of the former: origins of one Family held together in harmony by Energy at the direction of Mind. With different versions and different functions of Self-Awareness to perform, connecting in their being while functioning apart;
- Choice must choose to earn its Awareness — Integrity and Character, Freedom and Order — from the bottom up without interference from Parental awareness of Self, as sovereign children must grow free from ownership, possession, and control by animals — the personality types of self-unawareness. Inhumanitarian parents.
- Management of the boundary between Mind in its two states, Self-Awareness and self-unawareness, Movement and its reverse make-believe, is entrusted to Child grown to maturity in the arena of self-unawareness.
- Grown to the competence to Choose Freely aware of the nature of Mind and its Creation: Loving Friendship among equals. Aware that it can never be its reverse: competition for supremacy among unequals. Corruption that’s ass-kissing, self-destructing hierarchy. ‘Perfection’.
- Free Choice grown to the Worth of Character with Integrity, uniquely qualified to manage the boundary. Free always not to accept it, always at risk of choosing in error, but never without the gifts of Love and Affirmation from Perspective that’s imperfect. From its Parents – Family being there for one another.
Unfuzzy dice
From the nature of Mind to Otto Preminger and “The Anatomy of a Murder.” The pieces of personality types arranged like exhibit A in a courtroom drama. Target in the crosshairs going about its business. Introspecting and reflecting, deliberating and choosing within the limits of Conscience. Discretion, discipline, and Order. The judgment of maturity and responsibility that’s an articulation of Worth. A statement of what the target stands for here and Now. The controlling consideration: Mindfulness. Character. Integrity.
In the crosshairs of the perpetrator. The divider going about its business – dismemberment of target and statement both. By the reversal of introspection that’s extraversion. Predatory animal instinct to the exclusion of intuition, sensory perception to the exclusion of depth perception. One-sided and one-dimensional, with all the sophistication of a cartoon character. By the reversal of deliberation that’s wildness without definition. Mindless ‘action’ to the exclusion of Affect and Principle. Sapiens minus empathy and differentiation – back to the apes. By the reversal of Worth that’s willfulness. The nihilist who stands for nothing. Immature, irresponsible, and unaccountable. The ‘freedom’ of magic to be and do as it pleases. Make-believe.
Where Jung, Myers & Briggs posited introversion, intuition, thinking, and judging (INTJ) I’ve posited introspection, reflection, thinking-feeling, and judging (INT-FJ). Not so different except for the merging of thinking with feeling. An offense to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, whose disdain for human folly assumed that, of course, feeling is irrational and therefore incompatible with thinking. Fiction shared by philosophy from antiquity down to the present day, when Love and Logic are incomplete without the other. This is fact.
Where Jung, Myers & Briggs went seriously awry was what they made of ESFP. Extraversion, sensing, feeling, and perceptive.
- Understanding that ‘extraversion’ changes orientation without understanding the consequences. What it implies about character resistant to self-questioning, that it replaces integrity with toxicity.
- Falling for body-brains’ magic trick, the replacement of what’s here by what’s not-there. Objects perceived by five senses engineered for that one purpose — hallucination. What every street-wise self-deluder can’t be seen without: the latest fashion in virtual reality.
- Attributing feeling to a beast that can’t abide limits of any kind let alone niceness. Let alone the thoughtfulness of empathy that could never be objectified by playtime at the VOID.
- Attributing boundarylessness – the free spirit of devil-may-care living-in-the-moment carpe diem fuzzy dice – to willfulness. The law unto itself that would lure the gullible into its magical kingdom of anything goes. Where nothing goes unless it wills it. The boundary.
Stretching the limit of gullibility
The line of work that Isabel Myers thought ESFPs suited to is “service with a smile.” Or some form of entertainment where they can’t get into trouble. Presumably, since she also tagged this type with an inclination toward “wrongdoing.” Were she and Jung around today would they recognize the type’s dominance of the headlines? The acronym that fits starts with ‘E’ and ‘S’ for sure. But it can’t end with ‘F’ and ‘P’. The name drawing attention to itself ends with a ‘W’ and a ‘W’. For wild and willful. Or with a ‘P’ and a ‘W’: predator and willful.
We’re describing the ‘animal’ on the body-centered tier to the ‘human’ on the mind-centered tier. The distinction that accounts for the tension troubling the human Psyche ever since Sapiens began its escape from captivity to a beast. That accounts for the swings back and forth from civility to appalling incivility, the idea that the former is soft and weak, the latter hard and strong, and therefore cruelty is the order of the day. Family not being family and if it is, not being there for one another. Provoking, abusing, silencing, and erasing one another instead. Obedient to the imperatives of blood and soil. Arrogance and victimhood. Triumph of the will.
Triumph of our animal brain, the amygdala. The wild and willful animal within. Mr. Hyde, over the prefrontal cortex that would ‘socialize’ it. Dr. Jekyll. One of countless signs from within human-animal self-unawareness of awareness that we’re part of a story. That it’s our story, and maybe it’s important that we get it right. As we could be doing if we remove personality type theory from the library’s stacks and bring it out on stage. To perform its rightful role in the story of Mind that’s Movement. Happening in Reality as opposed to the not-happening of virtual reality.
Despite his groundbreaking achievement Jung himself seemed scarcely to have made consequential use of it. Distracting himself with trivialities in Psychological Types – what Freud thought about this or that – when he could have made Freud’s personality type his first subject. Freud is illustrative of the questioning Mind-centered type that’s been divided (corrupted) by make-believe self-dividing. Others like him that tilt toward arrogance are Friedrich Nietzsche and Stephen Hawking, while Sylvia Plath does wonderfully with victimhood. Jerry Martin, a former chair of Colorado University’s philosophy department, stretches the limit of gullibility with his book God: An Autobiography. Brazen flimflammery on a par with Mari Perron’s A Course of Love, though she lacked his credentials.
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Psychopathic Thuggery: Freudian
A pattern of reversals
What could unite many who get into the act and don’t lack credentials is their manipulator make-believe’s craving for professional preeminence. A form of ‘specialness’ associated with the ‘ego’ in the psychoanalytics of the Course, applicable without doubt to Sigmund Freud. And, by extension, to the Course’s self-appointed ‘primary teacher’, Kenneth Wapnick. The Freudian psychotherapist whose make-believe manipulator seems to have been Freud himself and his mission to elevate his godlike hero to preeminence. Religious as well as professional now that his word could be linked to the word of ‘God’.
Had Jung drilled down into Freud the person instead of being playacted by a manipulator he might have recognized a pattern of reversals:
- From Introspection’s Self-Awareness to hysterical avoidance of it. Expressly dismissive of anything “mind” that would crowd ‘brain’s’ centrality to ontology and phenomenology both. That would put a limit on the limitless. On attitude, the ‘absolute’ and its adjunct idolatry. A fortress of denial constructed of externals. Bodies and brains, meant to preserve self-unawareness without against the reality of Self-Awareness within. Mind, that functions without bodies and brains.
- From sixth-sense Guidance to a five-sensed know-it-all. The warthog rooting around in the underbrush claiming the mantle of ‘science’. From human reflection through Intuition that’s Love-empathy / Logic-differentiation — Relatability — to animal competition for supremacy in a magic kingdom of hierarchy. Not-empathy / not-differentiation – unrelatability.
- From Choice, the free spirit of inquiry motivated by Affect, guided by Principle, to dominance capable of neither. To wildness intolerant of all limits, captive to the myth of ‘action’ where Movement has been reversed to inactive. To ‘instinct’: predatory ‘action’ whose source and master is the gut. Feed me!
- From boundaried Judgment to unboundaried willfulness. Maturity, disciplined and considerate, responsible and accountable, to immaturity, undisciplined and inconsiderate, irresponsible and unaccountable. To the lawlessness of arrogance-victimhood: a law-unto-itself.
Mindful type dedicated to the pursuit of Self-Awareness and Relatability thus reversed and corrupted in its Freudian version to the preservation, enablement, and empowerment of self-unawareness and unrelatability. Through the reverse of Introspection, Reflection, Choice, and Judgment. Functions of humanitarian Mind reduced to functions of animal-body: extraversion, sensing, ‘action’ without deliberation, satisfaction without consideration. Unsavory attributes of the know-it-all in possession of its make-believe: unrelatability and inaccessibility. The presumption of supremacy that’s unquestioned authority. Resistance to questioning.
The two-year-old
That frustrated Jung while his type was alive with questions. The fruits of insight from Intuition, existential threats to the willfulness of an atheistic ‘god’ whose divinity rested on its unquestioning. Not for any reason but for the presumed right of authority that’s ‘divine’ to be above questioning. By definition. The ‘power’ assumed by some of history’s main attractions but also by everyday extras. Like authoritarian parents, minds self-divided by the same manipulator, pleased to be among the privileged. To be ‘special’, when their ‘specialness’ lies in their talent for ‘sociability’. The appearance of equanimity. Introspection that’s reflective. Reasoning that’s thoughtful and principled, balanced and conscientious. Questioning that’s open-minded and inquiring. Judgment mature and considerate. Contradicted by flagrant self-regard beneath appearances: close-minded and inaccessible. Unquestioning, willful arrogance. The ‘relatability’ of a two-year-old.
Freud the parent in their collaboration, Jung the child. Mentor to mentee, whose breakup came across like a spat between two-year-olds. An embarrassment for two accomplished professionals. Leaders in their field and psychologists no less, supposed to be the standard-bearers in functional relationships for chumps like us. Rodney Kings who wish we could all just get along. When it was Freud the senior partner — the appearance of ‘reasonable’ — in the role of the two-year-old. The inevitable psychological consequence of reversal that throws balance into imbalance, harmony into disharmony, function into dysfunction.
Into another Reality
Though it does have one redeeming quality. A source of motivation. It’s said that Freud and Jung ended their collaboration hating one another. Who’s to say? But if lives and careers can be driven by passion fury can be part of it. Personal experience suggests that this particular emotion at this level of intensity will summon a response from the Psyche. Either to deck the bastard or to channel rage into constructive causes. To put emotional energy from tension to better use than childish tit-for-tat name-calling.
Which Jung evidently did when he did for psychology what Michael Faraday did for physics. When Faraday intuited the electromagnetic field, the step in between Newton who hadn’t figured it out and John Clerk Maxwell, who converted Faraday’s insight into the calculations for electronic telecommunications. Jung took psychology from a state equivalent to Newton’s separate objects, where the force interconnecting them into one system was undetectable, and detected it. Detected the Psyche by intuiting its attributes of Mind, that heretofore had been artificially confused with brains. Freed psychology from its rut of body-idolatry — self-centered, one-sided, and one dimensional — to explore a range of new possibilities beyond self-regard. Beyond the physical toward the metaphysical. Context that finally offered the possibility of meaning beyond the dictations of stomachs and genitalia. Beyond the limits of animal brains loosed upon a planet of the chimps, at the mercy of their physical senses.
Jung’s intuition evolved through Myers-Briggs into personality type theory which continues to evolve into an instrument for Self-Awareness. Essential to grasping the mechanics of Guidance and its use for Understanding Sapiens’ story. Where human-animal fits within the evolution of Mind that cannot stop at the threshold of metaphysics.
For all the commotion made by Freudians over the Course’s use of their master’s psychoanalytics, it was Jung’s openness to the possibilities of Mind that accompanied Jesus across the threshold. Into an aspect of the story of Mind that’s not bodies, not brains, and not our physical universe. It’s another Reality, and it doesn’t answer to the limits prescribed by neuroscience or any other kind of quantitative, objective, materialistic, one-dimensional ‘reality’. To the limits of self-regard: idolatry of body, idolatry of self. The worldview of a narcissist: ignorant, arrogant, and self-centered. An animal.
Species of butterflies
From Freud’s perspective, a questioning Mind-type self-divided into its reversal, Jung’s ‘offense’ wasn’t a position taken in matters of professional dispute. It was disobedience. Equivalent to blasphemy since Freud’s manipulator-ego equated itself with ‘God’. Having convinced its captive that it had committed regicide – assassinated ‘God’ and usurped its throne. Jung’s questioning was disloyalty equivalent to questioning the ways of Plato’s Cave master, punishable by excommunication. Crucifixion. Dismemberment and dehumanization, since that was the sense in which Freud advertised his ‘atheism’. How could he believe in another ‘God’ if he was ‘God’. How could the truth-denier in the White House respect others’ facts when they’re not his facts?
Freud was Psyche, owner and soul of his namesake profession. What else could there be to psychology than Freudian psychoanalysis? It was his turf. Who was Jung, his subordinate and inferior, to suggest otherwise? ‘Psyche’ was whoever and whatever he said it was. Mind’ wasn’t friend; it was the enemy. Jung and his occult-dabbling intuition had gone over to the enemy.
The species of butterflies that Jung, Myers & Briggs pinned to their corkboard drew a sense of recognition. The archetypes and their arrangement within our Psyches ring true enough — introversion-extraversion, intuition-sensing, thinking-feeling. So that they’re actionable:
- An aid to family relations where child development and correction call for awareness of differences on everyone’s part, as well as willingness to grow on everyone’s part. An ideal that I may have witnessed in my own and others’ families, but, if so, I’m not aware of it.
- An aid to supervision at work where friction and teamwork don’t mix. Where it can be assumed that we’re all different and adjustments are part of everyday life.
- An aid to a social life where inflexibility and sociability don’t mix. Not so much to a political life. The land of herd mentality where the only ‘type’ that matters is the one in charge.
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Psychopathic Thuggery: ‘Realism’
Exterminating thugs
Yet where my brush and my sax have taken me, along with sources internal and external, is away from a museum of natural history. Away from kitchen tables, cubicles, and sports bars. It takes me to a court room. At Nuremberg, where casualties are face-to-face with evidence of atrocities to understand why their perpetrators commit them. Judge Jackson putting it to Hermann Goering after reviewing footage from the camps and Goering is still protesting his innocence. ‘Resettlement’ was the idea.
When extermination was the idea. Once Barbarossan arrogance crossed the border into the Soviet Union to target a myth. Its demon — ‘Bolsheviks’ and Jews. Mortal enemies of the Aryan race. An indiscriminate blending of men, women, and children, to be subjected to racial hatred, visceral and unrestrained. To lust for mob violence, a tribal beast gone berserk. Victimhood bent on vengeance. ‘Mentality’ doing what comes naturally to a herd: mindless rampage. ‘Sociability’ doing what comes naturally to a tribal species of ape: ‘socializing’ on its own terms. Dominance. Rapine. Dehumanization. Extermination.
The magnitude of the perpetrator and its crimes mimics the vastness of the universe. More than a temptation to move on: insistence on it. To preserve sanity and not to overwhelm it with the unfathomable. With complexity. Knots tied up in knots by reversals upon reversals. Psychopathy.
Real live beasts like Hermann Goering. Psychological beasts like Sigmund Freud. Goering the body-centered type derived in reverse from the Mind-centered type. Freud the Mind-centered type divided by its derivative-reverse. Goering’s schtick friend or foe, fight or flight, win or lose. Mate, slave, property or food. Use or waste. The binary not-choices of animal instinct, whose Darwinian ‘variations’ owe their origin not to spontaneity but to hierarchy. To comparisons, the pax Romana of might makes right. The etiquette of bigger ape gets the spoils. ‘Harmony’ at the price of relatability. Of humanity.
Psychopathy that’s tribal rather than personal is well known for its atrocities. What’s less known is what makes it so: the Hermann Goerings and Joseph Mengeles among us. Not-personators in the guise of persons entirely overtaken by tribe. Goose-stepping Aryan National Socialists in their case, to whom ‘personal’ is not only an insult. It’s proof of weakness. An invitation to the death that it deserves. Predecessors of Stephen Miller, the not-personating white supremacist thug in the White House, peddling Nietzschean superman supremacy. Blood-and-soil tribal invincibility. The ‘law’ of the jungle.
Champions all of the supremacy of ‘social’. Its marketing brand updated from swastika to “truth social.” Not a symbol to be worn on a sleeve but mischaracterization to be shared. A gathering point for mischaracterizations in a brave new world of conspiracy theories and artificial intelligence, where literally anything goes. Where the boundaries between truth and false, fact and fiction, real and unreal, are intentionally blurred. For the same reason that faith in electoral politics is undermined: to relieve anti-social at the core of ‘social’ from its limits. So that the beast that’s animal-human may have its wildness, and predatory willfulness will have its ‘triumph’– Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ over Mind. Technological perversity in service to political perversity.
Eccentrics like John Dillinger and Anton Chigurh are also anti-social and dangerous. They share the same personality type. Desperadoes and filmland psychos who make a point of crossing boundaries, take what they want by force, and so are easily picked off. Distinguishable from their ‘social’ look-alikes by one crucial difference: they aren’t hiding. Behind psychopathy’s pretense that it’s one of us, an act that evades discovery in a world designed for it. Of virtual reality. A magic kingdom of animals competing for supremacy in hierarchy, self-identified as tribes ‘thinking’ with herd mentality. Where all it takes to evade recognition is to duck down into a subway system and disappear into a herd of masks.
‘Realism’s’ ‘winning’
Yet psychopathy whether ‘social’ or not, hidden or not, is still an unsavory collection of traits, toxic, dangerous, and sick:
- Impaired empathy and remorse
- Superficial charm
- Immunity to stress
- Outward appearance of normality
- Callous and manipulative self-serving behavior with no regard for others
- Manipulation for personal gain
- Arrogant and deceitful interpersonal style
- Inflated and grandiose sense of self-worth
- Lying and deceit
- Deficient affective experience: lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callousness and lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions
- Psychoticism – tough, aggressive, or hostile tendencies
- Irresponsible lifestyle: impulsivity, sensation-seeking and risk-taking, financially parasitic lifestyle and a lack of realistic, long-term goals
- Fearless or thick-skinned
- Self-assurance, unrealistic optimism, brazenness and imperturbability
- Fearless dominance
- Lack of internalizing
Childlike wishful thinking. The willful thinking of a two-year-old. The mindset of a cartoonist like Pete Hamill, the Brooklyn street fighter of his youth who willed his life into a cartoon. Given over to feats of heroism, magical thinking, and bodily appetites. Hedonistic love of pleasure in alcoholic excess and barroom camaraderie. Lacking maturity. Lacking limits, and therefore lacking patience required for thoughtfulness. For regular order, differentiation and empathy, deliberation, judgment, and discipline.
Prerequisites all for personal relationships that depend on Conscience. That thrive on intimacy and trust and starve on a cartoonist’s thirst for ‘action’. For Ayn Rand, another exterminating thug, the ‘objectivist’s’ ideal of the action hero: masculinity brandishing his ‘fountainhead’ with his prize, femininity adoring her prize at his feet. The ‘only thing’ that’s ‘winning’ for ‘realism’: orgasm.
Cartooning shallowness. Crippling insincerity forever suspected of being up to no good because stealth by its very nature is up to no good. Animal instinct the predator. Wild and willful, alert to the opportunities and dangers of whatever is ‘out there’, terminally unaware of what’s in here. Ever suspicious of anything not detectable at the end of its nose. Its all-important five senses that wouldn’t be caught dead being ‘seen’ with insights from intuition. From sixth sense, the Mind’s eye that sees what’s up. The nose that sniffs out bullshit, the hallmark of entertainment’s make-believe. Senses wrongdoing because that’s what’s up. The nature of the beast: up to no good.
Dabbling in self-delusion
The characteristics just listed are all catalogued by personality type theory. By Isabel Myers who made inroads into the mysteries of our other self, guided by the work of the intuitive psychologist Carl Jung. Neither classified their discovery as ‘psychopathy’ but that’s what it is:
Psychopaths are social predators who charm, manipulate, and.. . plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts and shattered expectations. . . . Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please. . . without the slightest sense of guilt or regret. . . . Psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellian, three personality traits that are together referred to as the dark triad, share certain characteristics, such as a callous-manipulative interpersonal style. . . . The ability to adapt, reappraise and reassess a situation may be the key factors differentiating Machiavellian from psychopathy. . . . Many have suggested merging the dark triad traits (especially Machiavellian and psychopathy) into one construct. . . . – Wikipedia 07/21/26
Psychopath / psychopathy. n. A person who engages repeatedly in criminal and antisocial behavior without remorse or empathy. . . . Mental disorder, especially antisocial personality disorder. – American Heritage Dictionary, 5th ed.
A Course in Miracles and Jungian intuitive psychology are disparaged by ‘realists’ as dabbling in the occult. When the sources ‘realists’ are addicted to are practicing self-delusion. Shiny pendulums holding their gaze in a hypnotic trance while their Psyches’ pockets are picked. It was to break psychopathy’s victims out of psychosis that the Course arrived some fifty years ago. To help Sapiens with its task of managing the divide between Psyche and its reverse psychopathy, because getting rid of the psychopath isn’t an option. It’s been built into the way things are from the beginning.
To be continued. . . .
First draft 07/17/26 / Posted Saturday 09/19/26