The most wonderful life.
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.e.e.cummings
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
He says 'poet', where I would say 'sane human being', and some might say 'individual'.
And he says 'fight' and 'work', where I might say 'be vigilant' and 'have insight'.
Now my own feeling is best expressed in subservience and conformity - most of the time. That is to say, that in this game the social contrarian is just as dependent as the conformist. This is a large part of the difficulty, that one cannot give a recipe or method for authentic being. Neither can one measure it, because to measure is to compare, which is to become dependent. To use the necessarily shared language to communicate individuality - is it even possible?
This is a second attempt at a nameless topic-mountain that I previously approached thus.
But perhaps it would be clearer to approach it from the stance of the non-poet, of the thinker, believer and knower of feelings. Take the response to bereavement, for example. One is allowed and expected to feel sadness, loss, confusion, but one might well also feel relief, anger, indifference, even pleasure.
And I hope that you die
And your death will come soon
I'll follow your casket
By the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.
Seldom played at funerals, but the stuff of Nobel prizes, because one should not speak ill of the dead, and therefore one should not have these feelings of anger and so on.
And thus the abusive 'political correctness' which has always 'gone mad', because it represses the reality of feeling. Except that this is not a reality of feeling at all, but a recitation of a 'let them go home' trope, that is no expression of the real feeling of deprivation and humiliation, but a covering up and projection of anger onto strangers because they are safe, not because they are any danger.
Comments (70)
As projections go, putting stuff on the other is not a sure thing. It is always going to be tried, like sticking a fork into grilling meat, but one's results may vary.
So people may say whatever they say to themselves but there is this period of checking to see if they are actually supported.
Some of the people care less than others about the result.
Interesting turn at the end. I'm curious if you had the structure of the post in mind from the beginning or if it came out in the writing? I like the progression.
The end (which I'm reading as a solution to 'what if the real feelings are ugly?') seems to me to offer two possible interpretations
1. The ugly feeling is not the real feeling, because anger is a secondary emotion.
2. The ugly feeling is the real feeling but had been made ugly by being directed at the wrong target. (you kick someone else because if you kick your boss he has the power to ruin your life)
1, 2, both, neither, or all of the above?
Can one deny the reality of depression?
Then, is all that is left is coping?
I suppose this is unimaginable to the idealist or poet?
Comes and goes for me. How about you?
It's a great temptation to answer the question, but if you consider ... you will see it is impossible. There are beautiful and ugly feelings perhaps, if you want to speak so, there are real and unreal feelings certainly I would say. It's not a solution but a warning. One might misunderstand this lauding of feeling to be an exhortation to 'let it all hang out' rather than as an invitation to fifteen years of hard psychological self-questioning.
I do have a theory about depression, but I want to talk about feeling not theory here. Express your depression dudes, don't whinge about it in the usual abstract hopeless comfortable way. At the moment you are talking about each other, or Churchill's black dog; Eeyore does it better.
Myself, I am almost never depressed. I am often frightened, sad , angry, if you want to consider ugliness, but my concern in this is to inject some seriousness into an affect poor world, of philosophy of science and of politics. They all seem to be full of cheap sensation, but ultimately flat and devoid of meaningful passion. A bunch of wankers having sex with robots for no reason.
I recall the unenlightened of yore, a youngish single heterosexual male with __ a strong sense that the next woman I met I might have to spend the rest of my life looking after. This was before swipe left swipe right, when feelings had consequences and thus meaning. It was a condition where 'looking for the one' and 'looking out for her' were united in a sense that every step was crucial and every moment eternal. In the life of passion there is no going back, and every smile is for keeps, every harsh word a murder.
A passionate man is a quiet man.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Is the same true for thought?
I don't know, why do you ask?
Well to whinge in the abstract just a little longer. What little feeling I've allowed myself has lead me to believe that my depression is really anger (turned inward, as the thinker said.) So that's what must be expressed, only that's a tricky one, because there are so many bad ways to express anger. And then the harrowingest thing is if if the anger in turn is really humiliation, or something worse, then there's maybe a zero-level of the unexpressible which can only be covered (which is where Lacan scoops me up & i get stockholm syndrome)
In the life of passion there may be no going back, but that means one thing if your passion is to take care of someone, another if your passion seems to be something selfish and vengeful. It hasn't been 15 years of hard self-questioning for me but it has been near half that. And at this stage, it seems to me like its about learning how to set up a life around myself (outbursting on this forum,rather than real life, is one part of that, not great, but a kludge.) Center's way too volatile to remain there(Pound went fascist, Eliot was an antisemite, and balkan poets fueled plenty of genocidal passions. A lot of poets 'danced their did' and it wasnt pretty.)
Well, thought is similar to feeling in that it is uncontrollable. The only thing that we can control is our breathing. The rest just follows a cyclical pattern
I'd like to talk about control with you another time, but it seems bit out of place here. But in the meantime, consider the views of this fellow:
"Look at old unenlightened riding his bike and wobbling along the road. He thinks he is in control, but he cannot ride a straight-line and a traffic light can stop him. Not to mention the bomb I'm about to detonate under him."
Quoting csalisbury
Right, this is the difficulty that Freud tried to deal with, and that every self-help guru has to deal with. One has insight, and so one does not merely feel, one sees one's feelings and comes to have feelings about them. And then feelings about those feelings. Until one is quite lost.
Come for a walk with me. We go up the road for ten minutes, and we're in a wooded public garden with paths meandering across the side of a steep hill, with flowers and shrubs and bits of rocky cliff, and steps every now and then to take us up a level. It's warm and sunny with a bit of wind, and as we labour up the hill, I ask you how you feel.
And you say, "I'm depressed, but I think my depression is really anger, but the anger might be about humiliation, or something worse."
And I say, "Is it the trees? Or maybe the steps, that upset you?"
Thank you.
But what about internalized anger of the sort:
"I am angry over being angry all the time."
The trees don't care.
I wouldn't dare to speak for the trees, unless I was a poet. But I think they do care, as it goes.
But I was pointing to something more straightforward, that if one is depressed when one's experience is uplifting, then one is in some sense absent - not present with the trees and sunshine. Where are you then?
Quoting Wallows The phrase comes easy but what does it mean? Are not all emotions internal until expressed?
Quoting Wallows
Are you really? It this a feeling or an idea? @csalisbury tells me a story I have heard before, of layers of feeling that are not 'about' the world as it is; the weight of depression that prevents one getting out of bed is nowhere in the bedroom, nowhere within experience therefore, but is a weight of thought. One is not in the bedroom oneself, but in a world of ideation, probably trapped there because ...
{I shouldn't say really, and deprive you of the wonderful working out that the poet glories in, but I can tell you this: }
... because the thought is never finished, it goes so far and then there is a jump, and then one comes back to the same place again, and again. Fear makes one jump.
In my head, where else?
Quoting unenlightened
Well, yes, there's a fundamentally awry loop in the mind of the depressive. A sort of Hegeliian dialectical self-chastising tendency to feel bad over feeling the way they do feel. How does one remedy this seems to be what I am asking?
Quoting unenlightened
I tend to think of reality as some dream world. One where everything, including the trees are part of the world one experiences and lives within. Where the desires and emotions are part of the scenery of the world itself. Mind you, this doesn't imply that one necessarily lives in a horror world of sorts; but, that this world is one and the same as the self projecting or protecting the self from itself. Psychological solipsism of sorts.
It all seems like some "test" if you get the flow here.
Let's look at it physically, though. Is an expression of anger a powerful tool? It may seem so at first glance, but the fossil record indicates that those who live by the sword die by it.
Love is a much more powerful thing. Only through love could a global government be created. And that is the thing that could actually do something about what we've become.
So are you killing us or helping us? The answer is easy to determine: do you spew your anger like a damn heat-seeking missile? Or do you love? If its the former, then shush your whinging. You're part of the problem.
And, how else can one not react with anger for being tested by a poor teacher?
One notch more expressive:
The trees, the wind, the cliffs - they all feel reproachful, as though they had just been joyfully communing with one another and, with my approach, have become icily silent. That you ask me to walk with you makes me deeply sad because I already know that this is how it will go. You have mistaken me for someone else, who does not have this effect, and my wish to be who you have mistaken me for cannot be separated from the surety that I will be revealed as what I am. You may not see the reproach but you will see its effects on me. I will either become morose and withdrawn or I will talk a mile a minute pretending I'm not being reproached. And it will be frustrating and offputting.
I am mad at the landscape for reproaching me & I am mad at myself for having merited that reproach, but then I am also mad at you for making me feel that reproach anew. You can grow used to it after a while, alone, but what makes it sting is to have someone witness it.
At some point something perverse happens and theres a ritual satisfaction in frustrating anyone who invites me to walk. A invitation to walk is a nice gesture, but given the landscape it is also an impossible demand :" I'm asking you to be someone who is not reproached." But that is not a demand I can satisfy.
which leaves one expression, which is mean :
Much like humans go quiet and motionless when in the company of plants. In the circles I move in, everyone goes dead quiet when the plants come marching in into or through the room.
Man I misread it every time.
I wonder if I can persuade you to un-ask these questions with a joke.
Q. What's the difference between a thermostat and a living being?
A. They both respond to temperature, but only life cares about it.
Giving a damn is not a manifestation of anything, it does not succeed or fail. It is the coin of experience.
Quoting csalisbury
Conflict at every level eh? But you know this is all nonsense right? The landscape does not reproach, you are not mad at, but indulge yourself, I cannot unfortunately make you feel, and the thing you hate most is to be alone.
These two, what you say and what I say, are conflicting stories, and I am only manifesting the 'other' side of the conflict that is already implicitly part of your story.
I'm sorry, I know this is deadly serious, let me put it very simply: this is not feeling, but the negation of feeling. It is the evasion of fear of pain, of humiliation, of loss, it is at its root, the deep sadness of a life unloved and un-lived. It is a simple thing covered with many layers to hide it. Never really felt or expressed, and so never finished.
:smile:
But doesn't a baby give a damn? Enough to cry and scream? But I don't think they understand what it is they give a damn about.
Aboutness comes later and it's a loose cannon. Yes, stop and feel the air in your lungs and the earth under your feet, but ignoring the messenger of pain is dangerous. I'm sure we agree about all of this?
Probably. Except...
When does anyone ignore the messenger of pain? I think only when something really important is going on, like a football match, or a ballet.
A baby screams about something, you don't know and they can't say, cold hot hungry tired bored frightened but whatever it turns out to be, they give a damn about that.
A woman ignores it when she doesn't think she has the strength to leave the guy who is abusing her. A man ignores it when his culture doesn't allow him to feel that. A whole population ignores it when their souls would be torn to shreds if they had to face it. A spiritual pilgrim ignores it when he thinks Zen is the higher magic to take him out of his woes. Nope. Woes are still there.
All of these things can result in misplaced emotion. Because I wore a poker face in all those situations, I exploded inappropriately in these others. Because I didn't know how to deal with the deaths of those people, I shut down altogether like the Pawnbroker.
I think I might be misunderstanding your point.
poem about the cover-up, as a cover-up.
I mean what else can you do?
Yes, the source, in general is trauma, and the shut down person is shut into the trauma and forever reliving it as flashback and recreating it out of the materials and characters of the present. Which explains why tyrants and abusers get elected by the traumatised.
Quoting csalisbury
Uncover, dear boy. Does not Ashbury reveal the tragedy of the fragmentation of mind, and surely in the uncovering is the possibility of healing? Do you know if he ever wrote or spoke about being gay?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/09/and-the-occassion-changed-a-tribute-to-john-ashbery
There is the moment, and the trauma one brings to it; at each moment there is the possibility of seeing the fragmentation, and seeing it, not from another fragment as observer, but fragmentation seeing itself - a whole seeing.
Shut down means there's no emotion at all. It's bliss, btw. It can make a person wonder why we have to feel at all. What is so important about feeling that we can't all just be silent inside?
Speaking of death...
[quote= your link]New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it a "remarkable picture" that was "a dark and haunting drama of a man who has reasonably eschewed a role of involvement and compassion in a brutal and bitter world and has found his life barren and rootless as a consequence.[/quote] Bliss? I think not.
I'm sure I know nothing at all about your feelings, I'm just trying to make sense of your posts.
Quoting unenlightened
That stuff is an unconscious attempt to resolve a problem. But it also generates persona, so it's like the work of a doctor: if she was successful in ending all disease, she would simultaneously destroy her own identity as a doctor.
That doesn't have much to do with PTSD or scruples, though.
But the theory you were trying out was that the intellect can't be the realm of unique identity because the format shows signs of being necessarily communal.
Lacan said the same thing about the content of emotion. Babies have no aboutness to their emotions until it's given to them.
So what's at stake with the idea of a true self?
I have often felt that the feeling of losing a loved one falls somewhere on a spectrum, at one end devastation and the other end emancipation and then a million points in between. Perhaps the sudden and unexpected loss of a child would be at the far end of being pure devastation and the loss of a horrible abuser pure emancipation, but the rest points in between. When it's someone you've seen suffer, it does move toward emancipation to some degree. The emancipation can be confusing and even guilt provoking and perhaps in some cases the feeling of devastation might make little sense.
I remember as a child watching my mother's casket lowered into the ground thinking thank God it was finally over, but it never really is. We carry such things to our graves.
I felt the same thing when my dad died last year, but I had schizophrenic feelings of relief, emancipation, and sadness all at the same time. He suffered for a long time which I felt empathy for, but I also felt relief because he was often horrible to me. I felt sadness because his emotional suffering was in part due to my rebellion from his sometimes abusive behavior that I also had somewhat of a form of Stockholm syndrome about. He was my dad, the only dad I will ever have, for better or for worse, and the relationship strongly shaped me into who I am.
“We carry such things to our graves.”
I agree. This is true of any close relationship that shapes us.
From another poem in the same collection (self-portrait in a convex mirror)
"Once I let a guy blow me.
I kind of backed away from the experience.
Now years later, I think of it
Without emotion. There has been no desire to repeat,
No hang-ups either. Probably if the circumstances were right
It could happen again, but I don’t know,
I just have other things to think about"
Well i am sitting here on my porch trying to think of what to say to that. I just saw Quentin Tarantino's new movie with a friend and his friend. Its a movie brimming with Identity (cool music, violence, confident, seamless dialogue) and I walked back feeling more sure of myself and my presence, and out here with my cigarette and beer and coming home to everyone else asleep, it feels like a movie, which feels like being watched over and approved.
I also know this is a temporary feeling, since I've had the experience a few times. We all agreed the movie wasn't really good -- except my friend's friend, who had been the one to suggest we see it, seemed to be unsure about that. He and my friend were the first to say it wasn't good, or at least as good as it was supposed to be. But he - my friend's friend - had told us, over margaritas at the mexican restaurant we went to beforehand, that this was his first night out in months (married, two kids.) He convinced me to buy a ticket, even tho he knows me and my friend have a track-record (thats become a running joke) of getting bored and walking out of movies halfway through.
Earlier today I bought a book while at work about how to do self-therapy using the " internal family system"model.
During the movie I kept finding myself trying to theorize the movie and it took effort to let the thoughts fizzle out instead of pursuing them to some synoptic sum-up of What Is Really Happening In This Movie, What this Movie is Really Doing.
I have weird hives on my arms lately I've been scratching and halfway through the movie I went to the bathroom and took a piss and looked at my forearms, and got fascinated with the shape of the hives and was looking at them as I walked out, and a pretty teenager was on a bench outside and looked at me and I felt vile and strange. I had also just been looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and trying to see myself as my friend's friend saw me.
At the mexican restaurant, with my friend, before my friend's friend showed up, I was trying to speak directly, and I was trying to do that by resisting impulses to make jokes in the emotional beats I always makes jokes during. It seemed to actually be working, which felt miraculous, and I resented the friend's impending arrival and the movie.
Last night a girl who I've been hanging out with casually for a year, and who, in the past few weeks, I've begun to spend more and more time with and open up more and more to asked me via text if we could hang out that night and I said yes but in a way that signalled no and the conversation went just that way and I went home and laid in bed with a feeling of satisfaction that repulsed me but that I also allowed to lull me to sleep. The memory of this cut repeatedly into tonight.
I dreamt the night before of a woman on 'neighborhood arrest' in a beach community who called me and asked if I could borrow my roomates car to bring her somewhere.
The dream followed two different paths after that.
In one path we walked through a series of interconnected beach houses in her neighborhood, where it got progressively more crowded, until the final beach house gave out onto a beach choked with hooded figures in weird iridescent water and I said we had to turn back. I had thought we were going to an empty beach.
In the other path, I picked her up in the car and we left the neighborhood and we drove and drove and I got frustrated because there was nowhere to go to at all and I finally desperately suggested we see a movie but she didn't want to.
'What’s redacted will repeat,
and you cannot learn that you burn when you touch the heat,
so we touch the heat,
and we cut facsimiles of love and death
(just separate holes in sheets
where you cannot breathe, and you cannot see).
And I cannot now, for the life of me, believe our talk—'
All of which is a shaggy dog to: a wonderful life a as a gift of faith versus a fruit of decision. I can't imagine how you can see the fragments as they are (as one is) - as fragmented, as the wave, not as one fragment observing - without some visitation of grace. Only a fragment can decide! And in deciding, will always redact. And so repeat.
So in the meantime (yea rilke but no one has yet said it better):
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders?
And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us.
Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing.
Ah, who then can
we make use of?
Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains
some tree on a slope, that we can see
again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,
and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit
that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.
Yea exactly
I've probably mentioned this before on here, but I've thought of this for a long time as both Hal in 2001 + the hero trying to shut him down. The greatest threat to hal is his not being in control of threat-handling. Once the threat is gone, he's the threat and the threat to him becomes the people he was supposed to protect but can no longer , and so threaten him.
[so a really smart hal would make the hero identify with him....something something about how Lacan's real seems a lot like outer space around a spaceship w/ life support.]
Well it is rather like being left by one's lover, one can be liberated one can be imprisoned, one can be sad or glad, enraged, one can feel murderous towards the dead. One's relationship with the person has been complex, and it does not become simple in death; all these feelings mingle and rise up at different times.
When my father died, (I was 20) I wasn't much bothered, which is of course the most inappropriate of all. As if there is a feeling debt that ought to be paid. He was brought up a Wee Free, no toys on Sunday, Christian Miserablist, and became a Communist and then a good socialist. I guess he did well enough to live a peaceable life with wife and children through the war and pass on less trauma than he inherited.
Well you have said a lot, but I will not answer just this...
Quoting csalisbury
Let's just say that there is that possibility, and that it is not something willed or performed or achieved, but a visitation of grace, as you say, or if that is difficult, a natural phenomenon like the coalescing of drops of water, or the seeing of one scene with two eyes. Let's say there is no 'how' any more than there is an action to relaxation. One can prepare a little by doing whatever is necessary, and dropping whatever is not... make some space, get some rest, sow a little kindness...
Or if the poet insists on science, http://ift-malta.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-cybernetics-of-self-A-theory-of-alcoholism.pdf
Maybe HAL and Dave are aspects of consciousness. The fuel of consciousness is problems: unanswered questions for the mind, unredeemed sins for emotion, wounds for flesh.
Dave relies on HAL to bring these problems to his attention. It seems like Dave is in charge. He thinks is. But HAL can move Dave like a puppet.
But if HAL is taken off line, doesn't Dave become blind and deaf?
Old school traditional father son relationships were odd. My dad was omni-present but never really there. I thought he was just quirky, regimented, certain, duty bound, but maybe he had Aspergers. That makes more sense to me. I over compensate now nicely with my kids, so they can have something to dissect when I'm gone.
Miserablism - nice term. It describes my brand of childhood religion well. The Sabbath was a day you were freed of all joy.
I think of Hal as being programmatic. He has a certain cybernetic quality that, yes, seeks certain problems, certain sins, but only insofar as they are particular cases of general problems, using those problems in such a way that he replicates himself. I think Hal is in charge only as long as Dave identifies with his problems. Ive been thinkinh lately something that, transposed into this metaphor, would be: Dave does have free will, but not to choose something different. It's the free will to choose not to listen to Hal. Which leaves him deaf and blind for a moment, but only until the roar of hal quiets and he actually realizes what he called seeing and hearing were, as you said, puppet strings. There's another hearing and seeing I think
Reminds me of a Tibetan thing:
May I be free of fear
May I be free of anger
May I be free of craving and aversion.
May I be free of suffering and the root of suffering.
May you be free of fear
May you be free of anger
May you be free of craving and aversion.
May you be free of suffering and the root of suffering.
In the real, there is no distinction between me and you, so the two paragraphs sort of say the same thing. Fear is the emotion of the victim and anger is the emotion of the sinner. Together they make up a type or "general problem" that generates identities small to huge.
I think of it as briefly peeking out of my own identity and I'm nameless in a cocoon in the real.
Kind of like turning down the volume on Hal.
The frame of preparation is good. It seems to complement (no pun intended) the Bateson piece. I found myself relating very well to the cycles he describes - not just with alcohol, any number of things.
The decision to stop the cycle ends up being a key part of the cycle. It seems like each part of the cycle is experienced by a different 'I' - all these 'I's are superficially similar (they'd scan as the same person if subjected to a demographic/whats your favorite food/movie/etc quiz) but with radically different implicit values and beliefs about what is the best thing to do. The implicit bubbles under the sheen of regular talk - a good diagnostician might be able to spot early signs - until a phase change happens and the implicit become explicit in some action which climaxes and denouements into the beginning of the next stage.
But it's hard to be cognizant of that fact and keep track of this continual recurrence if you're always one of those 'I's because each I will try to rewrite the (fragmented) whole in its own terms. So even if you catch on to what's happening, you've still got a room of subselves tracking the same events yet deriving from them wildly different policy proposals. (I wonder if the power of AA springs in part from having a group of people whose cycles are out of sync and so, as a whole, naturally balances those who participate in it.)
Much of my ambivalence toward the OP springs from a mistrust that its thrust could be taken as the Noble Image the implicit relapse-ready I cloaks itself with. Even if its right, I know myself well enough to know I can't be sure what shadowparts of me are counseling me to heed to an eloquent paean to a certain way of being in order to satisfy their own ulterior motives (themselves ulterior motives of the cycle.)
I think any expression of values carries with it the potential for two contradictory ways of illustrating it, each equally powerful. The libertine is both Voltaire or a weak yellow-toothed lecher. And either frame can be as imaginatively powerful and persuasively forceful as you like. So too with the most wonderful life.
But still there's something about the post of yours I've quoted above which seems different than that.
As Bateson says the cycle will continue until a deeper nonwilled change happens. The idea of preparation seems to both admit the powerlesness of oneself to stop a cycle by force, but leaves room for a different kind of thing, an attentiveness maybe while it goes on and on, to maybe change things in little ways just enough to leave a little space for something outside to come through?
I'm so glad you're seeing somewhat what I'm trying to get at. Yes 'I' can't change/stop 'the cycle', because whenever 'I' act on 'the cycle' I'm just moving it on, or going around it some more. But 'the cycle' has that freedom ...
'Seeing without division', as the man has it.
https://www.dreamsalive.com/download/KrishnamurtiA.pdf
But if one values being inaccessible to people, then have at it.
I went to the park today (a particular park high up on a hill in Portland, where you can pick a spot to post up and look out over South Portland.) I like this park because my usual feeling of disconnection feels ok there, I think similar to the peeking out you described. I still have a weak grasp on my 'self', but I feel the pressure of needing a self less. It helps that the park is very pretty and often empty. I was there for like five hours, just sitting, sometimes reading, sometimes listening to podcasts. It was really nice, and I even got a tan.
I did want to ask : why do you say that anger is the emotion of the sinner? I struggle badly with irritability, which I guess is the expression of anger restrained (like in cartoons where someone plugs a dam with their finger and water breaks out somewhere else.) Anger is something I'm trying continually these days to understand. I was curious about what you meant by that since you said it with what struck me as an earned declarative assurance.
Indeed.
Well, I have a marked distain for modern day therapy.
Learning how to come to acceptable(different) terms with the same events is crucial to looking at the world differently. Looking at the world differently is crucial for feeling different about what you're looking at. This requires an other, and I'm left nonplussed about current methods(therapists and pills)...
It’s been 39 years in the making for me. I think I’m finally making progress there, but medication is still necessary to keep at bay the psychotic episodes and manic and depressive episodes. I’m having a good week, month, year so far.
Quoting creativesoul
Me, too.
That said, I've also had little luck with mood stabilizers but I know many people who have deeply benefitted. It seems like mental health treatment ought to be an art (with herbs and prayers and guidance and etc. tailored to the individual case) but is being progressively turned into a flowchart.
You seem to have insight, to me.
I'm glad you've experienced improvement.
I'm not nowhere near presumptious enough to think/believe that I know what your thought life consists of aside from correlations between things, and some of those things being your own state of mind. That said...
For me it took the kind of self-introspection that can only come via looking through another's eyes. If that sounds odd, I wouldn't blame the reader, but it's sooo hard to put into words.
What I finally came to realize is that I am the common denominator in my life. While there are many things that can happen to us that is beyond our control, there are also many things that can happen - and do - that is well within our influence. Having a good grasp on the way things are helps. Setting attainable goals was imperative to keeping and building positive outlook(for me - of course). I made deliberate attempts to surround myself, in the thought, belief, and words of other people that I found admirable(those who seemed to have the happy, well grounded, down to earth life that I wanted).
Thought life to be clear...
For me, I think much of it boiled down to, and still does boil down to a single guiding behavioural principle... No matter what situation I find myself in, I try to be as helpful as I can. By no means am I perfect. I can be quite the dick at times, certainly. I also make and have made my own fair share mistakes. However, in general, I try to be helpful, do things that I enjoy doing, try to make at least some of those things practical/useful for improving the quality of my life. This included willfully separating myself from vampires(soul suckers). That was very hard, and still is. However, I now have quite the different outlook on life and people than the one I adopted...
Not sure if there's anything at all helpful for you in all that, but I wish you well.
I think I know what you mean. Wherever you go, there you are. I am trying to be helpful and not harmful, but sometimes my emotions get the better of me. That’s the human condition, though. The self (pride and ego) vs. concern for the community or specific others. I agree that accepting the world as it is is key to finding peace.
Thank you for the good wishes. Same.
Of course. Helps me to make choices that increase my available choices, if that makes any sense...
That’s profound. Thank you
We can change our own shape by seeking our influences. We do not have to remain in any particular way that someone else shaped us...
Step one is believing that much...
This is not an invitation to the most wonderful life, but to the most wonderful dream. There is no contest between them, and I do not endorse and nor do I indulge in happy thoughts. This is not a thread for anyone seeking happiness or equanimity or peace, or therapeutic advice.
[quote=op]whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.[/quote]
You're on your own, kiddo, and if you're not on your own, you're not in the game. Build your bridges and walk on them or burn them, but neither a bridge-borrower nor a bridge-lender be.
Yeah, I don't know how a person could remember an experience of complete selflessness. If there was nobody there to experience anything, what's the memory of?
I think that having a strong sense of identity is a matter of identifying with dead symbols like a flag or a political brand. It makes for a certain kind of effectiveness. I'm going for an interview tomorrow and they're going to want me to tell them who I am in 10 words or less. "Why should we hire you over all the other applicants?" I'll have to pretend to be somebody. "Look, here's my label, that's who I am."
It's kind of like saying that the casket I'm in is me.
Quoting csalisbury
Imagine a scene where one person is hurting another. The two are bound together. You can't be a victim without a ______. What do you call that? The person doing the harm? Whatever it is, they're two sides of the same coin.
And there's a cycle to it. The guy whose family was slaughtered goes off to become a violent person. He makes new victims who will eventually seek their own revenge, and on and on. One act of abuse is like a pebble in a pond, spreading fear and anger out over time and space, through generations.
In that way, the victim and the person who does the harm, together they're an engine of emotion and identity. Have you ever read Great Expectations? In a way, it's the story of a guy who finds his way out of the cycle.