Wisdom from the Sage of Okefenokee
You’re humbled by what? By the sheer power of affect. That connects persons the way that the electromagnetic field connects objects. An elemental force that, once you’ve sensed it, puts aside any notion that you’re its equal. You’re not.
It belongs to another order of things. Beyond mastering or harnessing by anything ‘human’ or ‘animal’. An infinity of distance and intimacy. A concentrate of affect and delicacy. That manages with the lightest touch to convey a sense of belonging unlike any other. The warmth of empathy. The tenderness of gentle loving kindness. And yet you’re in the presence of a force that cannot be denied. Stronger than anything you can imagine.
Have I been touched by it? Everyone has. We’re touched by it now. At the level of our Psyche way down deep. Layers below what our brains and bodies can detect. What is it? Awareness. The light within that guides us. The Soul that connects us. Our Conscience. Functions we depend on for making good stuff happen that doesn’t always happen. Tell me about it! Guidance, connection, doing what’s right — all got thrown out of whack by a strange idea. That in a state of unawareness we can make anything happen by an act of will. Or make it not happen by willing it away.
Intriguing! Tell me more about this wonderful — I mean strange — idea. Nothing happens in a state of unawareness that’s all appearances. Products of acts of will whose ultimate end isn’t to make anything happen. To create anything of lasting value, but to fool the ‘creator’. Into what? Into imagining that something’s getting done when the reverse is true. Not only is nothing getting done; the doer and the doing are getting undone.
How can this be? Manipulations of appearances can only be acts of will. No originality or individuality. No morality or standing for anything. No creativity. Just affecting poses and making stuff up. Everything focused on imagery and judged to be worthwhile or worthless accordingly. Self-imagery especially. Looking like a champ even when your manipulations put you in the loser’s circle.
Does the truth ever come out? When the ruse is inevitably taken too far, it does. The make-believers and their acts of will, their theatrics and facades, aren’t ‘self-actualizing.’ They’re self-defeating. We have met the enemy and he is us. Yes. As Pogo once declared. The Sage of Okefenokee. For all the fireworks that attend championships, there’s nothing to compare with the spectacle of history’s great defeats.
Meaningless, endless hogwash
‘Strength’ stands or falls on the logic of its ideas. ‘Willpower’. The word alone sweeps all before it. Mess with ‘God’s will’ and you’re in for it. The ultimate reality check for hubris.
Not true? Will’s vaunted effectiveness is predicated on an absurdity. That Movement can’t arise from the functions behind it. Functions that, by their nature, must precipitate Movement in order to be what they are. The absurdity is rooted in ignorance since willfulness is the antithesis of awareness. Of mindfulness, and so it has no ideas of its own. Only misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Mind’s ideas. The idea of Movement. Function. The idea of Definition that enables causes, effects, and their explanations to be definitive.
Everything willful taken flight instead on the wings of make-believe. Shazam! Let there be light, and there was light. “God’s will.” Captain Marvel and his Act of Will. There’s a difference? No. It’s all magic. ‘God’ or Captain Marvel, take your pick.
Appearances lend themselves to the magic of manipulation because they’re objects. Made so by being placed “out there” by body-brain senses that detect them. They and their detectors being all of one piece: a closed-loop system of objectification. A stage set complete with cameras, theatre complete with projector. All that’s needed to stage an act is willfulness wielding a riding crop. A master of theatrics. Cecil B. DeMille gifted with an instinct for entertainment. For satisfying the craving of his audience for release from captivity. Captivity to what? To the way things are in a world of appearances. Meaningless, endless hogwash.
The centered of self and the empty of head
Nothing can exist without being part of evolution. Nothing that evolves can do so without Movement. Without being alive and growing, relating and creating. Nothing can exist without being part of Creation. Having Worth. Standing for a cause. Going somewhere with Purpose.
Where Guidance is Awareness stuff happens because it isn’t willed. Where misguidance is unawareness stuff seems to happen because it is willed. As it would in the half-light of a dream state. Virtual reality. Real enough for me. Real enough since everything is Mind whatever its state; Energy and Mind are inseparable; and Energy makes it happen. But nothing more than a hallucination, nonetheless. Seemingly ‘real’ because our bodies’ senses are sensing what’s not there.
But also critically because Energy put both there, senses and sensed. Huh? Mind unconscious or self-unaware has descended into an illusory state and Energy with it. Energy commissioned by self-unawareness to produce a time-limited hallucination is the flip side of eternal Life. Dying energy. The phenomenon characterized by physics as ‘entropy’: everything coming apart. Until ‘the end of time:” inertia. Dream over.
‘Willpower’ isn’t good? If it took anything ‘will’ to account for Movement then seeking an explanation for Movement would get us nowhere. We would have to wonder what causes will. ‘Will’ being misguidance imagines itself to be the source of everything including Movement. There at the beginning. The ‘Creator’. The ‘Definer’. Its undoing is Understanding. The product of Mindfulness explaining. Acts of feeling and thinking, empathy and differentiation, for which will has no talent. Its skill is for finessing it with magic. With the tomfoolery of entertainment. “Special effects” that delight the centered of self and the empty of head.
Question: the antidote to pretense
What does cause will? A series of gags that belongs in the annals of Vaudeville. Equally delightful and ghastly That began with the first instance of self-questioning in the sequence of evolution. The implied opposite of the original Movement. A logical companion piece that necessarily accompanied Change in the absence of a baseline condition with which to define, measure, and compare it. A reverse mirror-image reflection. With no definition of its own, yet essential to the definition of the Movement that implied it. Impossibility without which the definition of possibility is incomplete. ‘Movement’ can’t be without tipping its hat to not-movement that can’t be. Nothing can. Everything Mind. Everything that’s Real self-questioning in theory.
Everything unreal self-questioning over on its flip side. The condition of everything in the absence of a big-picture baseline — the mythical all-encompassing, all-powerful ‘answer’. That, because it’s an implication, a reverse mirror-image reflection, can’t be. An unreal ‘effect’ that can only have an unreal ‘cause’. Gussied up in entertainment grandeur — cinemascope, technicolor, and 3-D against a background of Egyptian pyramids. But, for all that, nothing more than pretense. Great special effects, but no way ‘cause’.
The antithesis of Movement that’s not-movement owes its ‘happening’ to the Reality to which it’s attached: Movement. To that which it has presumably replaced and obviously has not. An unreal impossibility noisily declares its ascendance while attached to, and dependent on, possibility. Starting off in character with its first mischaracterization. The big lie.
Utilitarian, nonetheless. For the flip side of ‘answer’ has a function. The indispensable service of the mirror to self-examination: question. To Self-Awareness, the ultimate end of character-building in the presence of moral rot. Ass-kissing hierarchical corruption. Self-degrading, self-defeating willfulness terrified of mirrors. Of questioning that has its number. The antidote to pretense. To the devastation of nihilistic ‘entertainment’ that will stop at nothing to deceive and destroy. Until all is reduced to the reverse-reality that’s make-believe: ‘Virtual reality’. ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Not-movement. Not-motivation. Immobility. Stagnation. Paralysis.
Do you mind?
Functions of Mind are moved to do what they are: functions that are because of what they do. What they are for. Their nature. Their usefulness to the larger function of Mind. To an entire interrelated system of functions performing what they are for: expressions of Movement. That add up to the coherence of one grand cause made up of many causes. The cause of Life. The Worth of Creation. Evolution with a purpose. An ideal that can never be reached in the absence of one all-encompassing big picture. An impossibility.
What impossibility? The ideal of coming to rest in perfect peace. Ain’t gonna happen. Why not? “Coming to rest in perfect peace” when there’s no static big picture to begin with can’t be any kind of a destination if it returns us to an absurdity. The spaceship shot off to the farthest reaches of the universe that ends up in our back yard. As physics predicts that it would. The situation that’s actually ‘ideal’ moves. It’s never ‘at rest.’ Ergo eternal life. Never without questioning. To tout the blessings of a mythical state, resting unquestioned in a state of perfect peace, is to tout the absurdity of not-movement. Not-Life. R.I.P. indeed!
No big picture with a big answer means everything is fragmentary. Fractionated. Varieties of perspectives that necessarily don’t know-it-all. And therefore, being in constant transition, needing direction when there’s no one fixed destination. Required by their nature to question. Dependent on Guidance that can only be worth following if it’s based on the source of Movement. Connected to it. Part of its nature.
What is ‘Movement’? Where is it guiding us? Always to relationship. The logical imperative implied by the state of fragmentation: bringing and fitting things together. Like Columbo? Yes. The character portrayed on TV by Peter Falk. Compulsively rearranging objects that were out of place in the room. That weren’t properly fit together, so he could apply his talent for Logic – fitting the pieces of a crime together — without distraction. A compulsion that I share if not the talent. You’re a nut case too? Apparently. Logical thinking spills over into a behavioral tic: fitting objects together in my space or they’ll be a distraction.
By the way, do you mind if I brush the speck of – dandruff? – off your shoulder? I do mind. May I remove your two front teeth?
Birthright of our Psyche
What’s driving Relationship? The being of Loving Kindness that’s the doing of Loving Friendship. The infinite power of attraction between the two founding functions of Mind: Love and Logic. One the source of Life that grows, Friend that relates. The other the source of Learning that expands, Thought that implies. Both to infinity, because Life and Learning by nature can’t be what they are in the presence of Movement, of evolution, can’t end. Time that constrains life on Earth is all about beginnings and endings. Movement composed of Love and Logic, Life and Learning, knows neither beginning nor ending.
You’ve introduced your subject with the idea of ‘beginning’. Human language defined by time has no word that I’m aware of to represent the idea of beginning outside of time. Only the sequence of Logic that moves from premise to conclusion, idea to implication. In before-after sequence, so in that sense there is a beginning. The original thought or premise from which all of Logic’s implications flow. The original movement of Life from which all of Love’s relationships flow. Linked inseparably to one another in companionship. Loving Friendship, by the quintessential power of attraction. Order’s boundaries linked to Love’s feeling without which there can be no values, no discipline, and therefore no direction.
What Carl Jung termed the “rational process,” thinking and feeling together. The beacon of light from Self-Awareness, birthright of our Psyche. Denied to self-unawareness so long as willfulness gets in the way.
Hacked to pieces on a butcher’s block
Your ‘sequence’ sounds like an assembly line. What comes out the end? A third function that could not exist if the two original functions, Love and Logic, had not come together. The function we think of as ‘Mind’. One Mind because it’s all of one piece, inseparable. Interrelated by Love-Relationships, interconnected by Logic’s Implications. The finished product, active because equipped with a battery and an ignition. Love plus Logic, Spontaneity plus Order. All of it powered and held together by Energy in the Now. All of it the source of Movement. Movement the source of Evolution and Creation. All under the Guidance of Conscience. Written into the Constitution of Creation: the way things are.
The classic martini ordered up by Double O Seven: Shaken not stirred? Mindful not willful. Not a monolithic singularity: the misguided idea of a know-it-all ‘God’ ruling ‘supreme’ over its domain. That it somehow magically, mysteriously willed into being. But Relationship that shares and expresses itself spontaneously – naturally, organically — through Life-Creation composed of relationships. That enables and empowers the Ideal of Loving Friendships through its Relatability.
Is there a name for this Mindful-not-willful concoction? None that’s universal I’ve thought of so far. ‘Mind’ works for me because of how I define it, as ‘relationship’. But that’s not its meaning generally. ‘Mind-Relationship’ does convey its meaning but it’s unworkable. Awkward. Abstract and unfeeling. Nobody would be moved by it, and we need to be moved.
We’re at a linguistic impasse. Human attitudes toward their beginning fail in their mission because they fail to humanize. We are persons when we get ourselves right but our sense of who we are, where we come from, and what we’re about isn’t personalized. Religion venerates; psychology dissects; philosophy abstracts – all of it rendering Mind and Psyche like a dead horse. Distancing instead of relating.
Careful not to offend the sacred tenets of science, the ultimate in subjectivity masquerading as objectivity. As though its source and purpose were object instead of subject. A physical universe that can only be understood ‘scientifically’ if we could just break it down into its component parts. Keep dividing it until the substance at its core is finally revealed. An approach whose logic is based not on the Logic of Movement but on the absurdity of its contradiction: the mythical big picture. A static slab of meat that can be hacked to pieces on a butcher’s block. When the truth is we’re dealing with Life that’s in constant motion. Subject not object. Organic not inorganic. Moved and moving.
My hero!
Maybe ‘Parents’. Yes. The function of Relationship between the feminine and masculine principles in Creation. The illuminator of Self-Awareness that shares and expresses itself and performs yet another function vital to the Worth and authenticity of Creation. The bearing of a Child. An extension of Mind-Parents offered the indispensable function of Free Choice. Offered? Why not given? Because Choice to be Free must itself be freely chosen. Everything about the Child must be free of interference with its development. The work of art that it is to become must be its own creation.
Then it can’t connect with Guidance? Guidance is built into the Soul of Creation. Its Psyche, inherited from the original formative event at the beginning. Spontaneous and not willful. Guidance from an act of Spontaneity cannot pass on direction from willfulness. With the Growth sector of Creation where Mind-Parents preside it’s ingrained in the process. There are no boundaries to cross.
Within the Choice sector it’s different. There are boundaries to cross, and it’s the mission of Character with Integrity to manage its boundaries. For Free Choice to differentiate between the voice of Guidance and willfulness and always to choose feeling over insensitivity, empathy over cruelty. My hero! Rick Blaine’s hill-of-beans speech to Ilsa Lund on the tarmac cemented Casablanca’s moment in human aspiration. The choice by character with integrity of Freedom over littleness. Moving, was it not?
Someday grateful
Hand me my hanky! There was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship” that brought the story to an end. More mush for the sentimental, and that includes me. Me too! But as moving as patriotism and friendship can be, nothing moves the human Psyche like Love between parent and child. While feeling between Love and Logic personalizes ‘Parents’, while it makes Mind-Relationship relatable because of its function, there’s nothing to compare with the bond between Parents and Child.
How do you explain it? I try to explain it with words in my essay, “On the Flip Side of Questioning.” It’s the one source of feeling that reliably brings me to tears. And unless you’re a parent, yourself, I don’t know how you could experience it. Words can’t do it justice. Nothing of this world of appearances is equal to it. Probably more artistry – imagery, prose, poetry, and lyrics — are devoted to trying to explain it than any other subject.
I’m a child. Can children feel that way toward their parents? Their functions are different and so are the feelings associated with them. The robin red breast feeding its nestlings is the human feeding emotional support into its young. The nestlings-young return the favor when their parents age and need support. But by then personalities and mindsets have hardened with friction and distancing. Formidable obstacles to get past for the tenderness of gentle loving kindness. An approximation that’s even then hard to put into words.
You experienced unconditional love for your parents. I have. My heart may have been opened by a parental version of the child’s innocence and vulnerability. Imagining I was in their presence the moment they became empty nesters. After twenty-one years of being there for their children, only to be abandoned by them. The way it could have felt. My heart wasn’t opened by helplessness and dependence but by respect and gratitude. Bottomless, for their gift of life. For its material protection, less so for the warmth of emotional protection. Yet relatable for being human. All of us imperfect. Family for what we couldn’t do for one another as much as for what we did do.
You wrote about that. Yes. In “Why Not Perfect?” We tried. As I’ve tried. Something of their gift that I’d hoped to hand down when I came here. For which I might someday be grateful? Maybe. Despite its flaws.
Swooning over disgusting male dictators
It’s counter-intuitive for the human mind, conditioned by hierarchy and constant competition, to replace a monolithic distant ‘God’, a ‘supreme being’, with Mind that’s Loving Friendship. With Parents who support from the bottom up rather than rule from the top down. Through Guidance that’s helpful and spontaneous rather than dictatorial and willful. Even harder to understand that one Mind is two Minds.
There you go again! Two Minds two Relationships. Love with Logic, Parents with Child. One Self with one function composed of two. Its one function only possible because it’s composed of two. “All success depends on the effect of mutual attraction.” That’s how the I Ching puts it in Hexagram 31. If it’s just one Self can’t it be one Parent? From ‘God’ to ‘Mind-Relationship’ is enough of a stretch. From ‘Parent’ to ‘Parents’ is counter-everything. Yes. Is nothing sacred? In a land turned inside-out and upside-down, where anything goes, nothing is sacred.
Besides ‘God’, misguidance saddles communication with ‘Father’. Equally unhelpful, equally offensive. If anything, more hierarchical and authoritarian than ‘God’. Women might object except that so many are besotted with maleness. Otherwise ‘God’ and ‘Father’ would have been deposed from their thrones long ago.
Mean to God. Now you’re attacking women. Have you no decency? I’m just getting started. The female attitude toward male is fatally ambiguous, A stark example of self-questioning degraded into self-defeating. Weakened and divided by its own nature. Empathetic at its best, when brought into motherhood. Manipulative and conniving at its worst, when fatherhood degrades into the dead weight of authority and child degrades into mother’s instrument of retaliation. You’ve been reading too much Greek mythology. How did we get on this subject anyway? So I can retaliate against women who’ve annoyed me. By being mean to me, of course. But also by swooning over disgusting male dictators who make a mess of life for everyone.
Where Snoopy’s bullet holes came from
Where were we? Getting used to the idea that Mind that’s one is Mind that’s two. Ugh! Mind-Parents and Mind-Child. Why do we need ‘Child’? Because we need two functions and they can’t intersect. Where we have to get used to another conundrum. Things that must connect while they function separately. Keep out of each other’s way like Siamese twins leading separate lives while locked together in the same body. I’m not enjoying this. Do you want to understand stuff or not? Girls just wanna have fun. You weren’t serious when you started asking questions? No. I made a terrible mistake. Can I change my mind?
I’ll try to make it simple. We need Child because Creation needs Free Choice or it’s just a bag of wind. Nothing has worth unless it’s chosen and choice is free, without willfulness corrupting it. Free Choice can’t spring forth like Athena from the brow of Zeus fully developed. It has to build itself from the ground up, one choice at a time. With experience. From Child to grownup. Immaturity to maturity. With Guidance, because the wisdom of maturity is understanding that it can’t get there from here without seeking help from Guidance for answers to its questions. Guidance from the origins of Movement with Love and Logic together. That can’t be bought, owned, possessed, or controlled. It must be missed when it’s absent and welcomed when it’s present. Insights from intuition that come of their own accord.
If you say so. I’m sorry. I tramped on your lines. You can say them next time. There won’t be any next time. I’m starting a new act. You can collect your pay on the way out. Parents-Mind can’t mess with Child-Mind because if they do it will corrupt Free Choice. So they remain connected but neither one interferes with the other’s function. The connection is Guidance, the constitution and Conscience of Creation established at the beginning. By Spontaneity uniting with Order, Love with Logic, to activate Mind and illuminate its Self-Awareness with Relationship. Switch, contact, ignition! We’re off!
I always wondered what happened at the beginning and now I get it. Where the bullet holes came from in Snoopy’s dog house. I’ve personalized humanity’s origin. A World War I flying ace. Nice touch – white silk scarf. Good-looking guy. Makes him relatable.
The full-fledged grownup
The task the Child has been given is our task. And what I was trying to get across with “On the Flip Side of Questioning” is the Parent-Child Relationship part of it. The importance of empathy. Being there emotionally for the young but also for one another in adulthood. Because our fundamental nature is Child. Fundamental because the metaphysical Self imagining us in its WWI trainer cockpit is a Child. Its Psyche compromised by its reverse-reflection. Contaminated and corrupted. A psychopathic mess. Human. Yes. Needing emotional warmth to heal as much as our bodies need food and water.
It’s self-defeating to forget that we’re a sub-species of ape. Animals who behave like animals. Even more so to forget that we’re children. Why more damaging? Because being Free Choice can’t translate into doing Free Choice so long as we lack the judgment of maturity. So long as self-centered immaturity degrades into arrogance. The mindset of absurdity that imagines itself complete without Guidance. The know-it-all with all the answers. Resistant and insistent. Wild and willful. Defiant. A danger to itself and to others. Begging for help.
Choice won’t be free in our world until we’ve grown up. Until the Child within has grown up, and when it happens we won’t need this world anymore. We won’t be any kind of animal, and we won’t need training to become better than animal. ‘Child’ in Creation will still distinguish Mind-Free Choice from Mind Parents-Growth but it will no longer signify immaturity. Our metaphysical Self will have earned its wings. It will be a full-fledged grownup.
Our full-fledged brat
Huzzah! And with that I fledge and fly away. Where are you going? Out of the nest and into the wild blue yonder. To my physical divan above the clouds, where Dav Pilkey’s latest Dog Man awaits my reading pleasure and my nails their filing. But. . . If I’m an animal it’s to its needs I must attend. We’re not done! Your Parents. . . Yes, them. They’ll have to wait. Being a full-fledged brat isn’t so bad. I rather enjoy it. So if you’ll excuse me (burp!). . . .