cars on the highway: fear

go a few miles and watch the lightning. getting closer you hear the thunder. the compressions. then at 75 miles per hour you hit the first sheet of ran. maybe there was a brief run where you see it coming in advance, but basically you can hit the rain and turn around.

or you can keep on going.

are you invested in where you're headed?

Heaven is waiting
Heaven has stood outside your door
We had all the plans but i don't know what it was for
Everybody said you spent it well
I guess you did what you had to
All the little lies that people tell
They said the same things about you

This post has been queued for two months, may as well get it out:

closure is such an odd word. its used to refer to resolution, or it is intended to connote the same thing. it seems more literally linked to shutting off, putting barriers up.

i was distracted. my heart ran away with my sight. i felt patronized and used and toyed with. i felt like some guilty, creepy vine; trying to push itself into the face of brick, and mortar. i went somewhere and was told to get the hell out. but there a happy bunker trying to dig out and build itself around me too. hard and cold, and i tried, too hard, to force it away. i was petrified of numbness.

Maybe I am just fucking insane but people can have the power to heal other people. When two people have the power to heal each other, they not only have to be in a place where they can reach out to give of themselves in that way, but they need to overcome the fear of being healed. Sicknesses, ailments, and hurt allow for a common strength; they teach us to cope with loss and the threat of loss.

There is a real fear to combat when you see that you can reach in and heal someone, and they realize that you can and that you know it. There is a trust issue right off the bat, for both people. You can choose to reach out, to heal or be healed, but it will inevitably lead to discomfort. The fear of being bullied, of wasting one's effort, and of being exploited for being open come to the surface quickly.

To be healed is to throw off all the shackles that have held you up for all this time; those same ones that have grown so far into and under your skin you will miss them. It may have been a cast iron neck iron; still, it kept you from crumbling down to your ankles.

To heal is to invest your heart in a person. It is to open yourself to all the things they can push into you and cleanse to toxins with your own. You need to be willing to let someone reach deep inside you, and you need to be willing to bring the poison into your body.

There are bound to be things that feel a lot like disappointment. They are knots that need to be untied. It is detrimental to have low expectations for the person you reach out to heal; it is detrimental to underbid how far you can be healed. It is a synergy and if either party is not wholly open to the range of possibilities, then there will be an imbalance. If you are not wholly open, you might hold back, or worse, freak out if you are successful.

Likewise, you have to give yourself to the other person. If one person is afraid, you can't let them be afraid, or relish in their fear of you. It is a power trip to have someone be afraid of you. You can't be afraid of the other person or you will never open up to them.

Healing can also be too precipitously endeavored. We can rush in, foolhardy, with our toolkits and torsos spread open. The conceit of humanity is not precluded. We cannot believe that we know the steps to healing in advance as there is no choreography; only a slow, languid dance that meanders through the body rather than hitting marks on a floor.

Like trying too hard to close wounds, we can push too hard to heal others. Moving at the pace they can move, opening up at a pace we can flow, this is part of that dance. Speaking and having one's say is less important than listening. Setting boundaries is good, but knowing behavior is better.

The balance of control and flow and its abuse can make us ugly to each other. I can go in and order myself, work through my issues and resolve them. But this is not healing, this is a step between survival and healing I would liken to nourishing. The healing takes place after because it requires us to open back up and become vulnerable again once the pain has settled and been digested. Recognizing the equilibrium and disequilibrium healing will bring to that foundation is what allows us to move forward in healing.

I need to go deeper and be healed. There are many people who make sufficient partners. There are few people who can reach in and heal you. It is one thing to believe you can save a person. This involves a level of judgment; more importantly, it involves a level of investment that does not reach down into the person who thinks they can do the saving.

Healing is not a rational endeavor. It is dark, and messy, and wet, and alternately hot and cold. It is hands on, and it is an exchange of selves and a transfusion of blood; and an opening/loosening/shattering of the ego. There is no specific goal as in some end-point, no mode of transformation. Healing is a way of opening oneself up by communicating with another.

It's Good to Be Dangerous

I am dangerous again today, all of a sudden.

Today is a good day for rioting and screaming.

That begs the question, "Is there a day that isn't?" 

Do you riot in your mind about things? Do you get so bitter or angry you push your feelings out on others? Do you fear your feelings, and hide them all bundled up inside?

The dilemma I run up against is a noetic one; should I just feel without knowing, or know what I feel by feeling too much?

Feelings seem to me like hypotheses, tentative approximatimations that are meant to condition and guide how we behave in future situations. It feels good to feel feelings though. My preference is to pantomime feelings a lot of the time. I don't mean this like some confession of insincerity; what I mean is, I like to deliberately exaggerate how I feel (if talking it through, by being explicit about the hyperbolic content). Then wind myself up so that when I wind back down I can trace the resonating features.

I had some bitter stuff to walk through yesterday. Once I walked through it, I found out why it seemed like it was bitter. I had been shocked, surprised; there was a funny taste in my mouth. Funny how surprise can be conflated with bitterness. No sense letting yourself think your ego has been bruised, when you can say flippantly, 'Quelle Surprise!' Also, when you think your ego has been bruised, then it's the other person's fault for doing ill, and your fault for not having your guard up. When you are pliant enough to realize you were merely surprised, no one is at fault, circumstances were simply not what you had read them to be. The latter approach is, to me, much more objective and less constrictive.

In other words, don't waste time feeling too much for the benefit of yourself or others. Can you think of an emotionally fueled argument that, ultimately, wasn't some disingenuous aggrandizement of one issue when in reality you were arguing about another one? Learn to let go of feelings and how you feel; emotions are illusory. Fight the right fights, but if you are direct those don't need to be emotional.

"What can we communicate that won't just turn to dust?" -Little Scream

rough draft: Unexpect Everything, Reject Pattern

This is a rough draft of a thesis I have been working through. Criticism Welcome.

-------------------------------------------------------

Our brains are wired for pattern recognition. It helps us recognize danger, perceive and precognate threats; whether referring to the rustle of leaves or the walking down a dark alley.

Our brains are wired to protect the organism, the organism is centrally operated by the ego. It is an amazing thing our ability to recognize pattern. An interesting article about Jung cited the following:

 “The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe,” Jung writes. “Considered from the standpoint of realism, the symbol is not of course an external truth, but it is psychologically true, for it was and is the bridge to all that is best in humanity.”

The myth and its correlates, ritual, sign and symbol, speak to an internal dialog between the external world and the coping of the ego with this world. The egoic ligatures show us the tensions between worlds. Beginning simply with the sign, we see a direct relationship arising between two things. More deeply the symbol pushes past the directly representational to the patterns we perceive arising around us from communing with objects' and situations' greater traces of egoic resonance.

• Myth and symbol are the literal and physical manifestation of our egoic projections; expect and project.

These ligatures of the ego keep it suspended in happy harmony in the world, safe and secure in its expectations, projections, and ultimately by providing an interpretive framework for assessing consequence. As the ego is happy suspended thus, so is the organism safe and the cycle resonates with itself and reinforces itself in a spiral of self-righteous confirmation bias.

There is oblivion in me, and as such here is a project that steers us away from the happy organism and unseats the ego from its structures.

Reject Pattern:

There is a world of healing to be found in the massaging of the ligatures. Relaxing the coarse language the ego is convinced it needs is the endeavor of mindfulness and complete experience. There is a phrase common in other disciplines, "Economy of the Body." It is to do with property rights over one's body, but it goees further and in many not-agreed-upon directions.

Sex trade and slave labor is bad, right, but what about when we consider this beyond just the corporeal body? Referring initially to how talking points shape not only political debate on stage but at home between loved ones, and rhetorical gestures become aped across kitchen tables at family gatherings it is straight-forward to realize how we can be intellectually driven to submission.

Likewise, we are prone to the same issues in aesthetic and emotional and spiritual spheres. Transhumanism makes an interesting debate for persons interested in the economy of the body. Push past the biases inherent in each trite discussion on 'at what point do humans stop being humans and become cyborgs?' Ask instead, 'what happens if I am cured of my pathologies; will I be me if I am no longer disabled?' Perhaps more interesting worries and anxieties rise to the surface, and you are threatening the ego with that line of thought.

• Every time you deliberately threaten the ego you can teach it to hold tighter to its ligatures or to relax them. 

By seeking patterns you are exercising your brain's programming; it is a circuit designed for crunching these things. By seeing past the patterns you are opening yourself to more complete experience. Complete experience is not what got the ego or the organism where it is today; if it were it would  be active in every person (though I won't get into the capacity for it).

By not seeing past the patterns, by relying on them, the ego holds more fortuitously to its throne. Ritual is a fantastic example of the choice to live a lifeless or vital experience. Our minds are happy to have an ordained place and time for ritual. The arbitrariness of dates is reasonably well-suited to the lack of external significance.

New Tag: Obnoxious Lectures

I am a pathologically pedagogical one.

Perhaps it is fueled by spending so much time in philosophy classes and religious studies seminars. Anyway, I have a new tag you can filter out; "Obnoxious Lectures." I'm not giving them their own category, not yet anyway; as of right now they just fit a flavor of Prison Break Survival. If they do get out of hand though I will probably have to 'make' them.

Competing thoughts on friends; Avett Brothers v. Basia Bulat

Two interesting stanzas stand as a kind of point and counterpoint on the role of friends;

I wanna have pride like my mother has,
And not like the kind in the bible that turns you bad.
And I wanna have friends that I can trust,
that love me for the man I’ve become and not the man that I was.

avett brothers, "perfect space" 2009

--------------------------------

I don't mind if it rains
You can leave your friends where you found them
For your soul is still a mountain
And you can tell them not to worry if it rains.

basia bulat, "if it rains" 2010

The former speaks of someone who wants friends he can trust, without having to trust them or himself. The latter speaks of someone who sees loss ahead, and worries about leaving something behind; who is worried if love can be grown out, and who is worried about not asking for more.

It's an interesting juxtaposition. On the one hand you have someone who wants to leave his friends behind (or is believing he already has done so), but wants to be able to trust that they will still be there for him. It speaks of a lack of confidence in himself and the relationships he has cultivated, and the choices he expects himself to make or, more accurately, the disappointment he fears.

On the latter, she's not afraid of bad consequences, or bad choices and mistakes, but acknowledges that it's her own responsibility ("If it's easier just to run, I'm as hurried as everyone...") which gives her a certain confidence in the face of loss.

It seems the pride the Avetts seek can only be found in learning to trust themselves. The key to unlocking the language in the avett lyric, "I wanna have pride," can be found in the inferred lyric from the latter, "I have no shame." The distinction between the pride his mother had and the pride in the bible is palpable, but illusory. She held her self above the slings and arrows of the world, his mother would prioritize protecting this sense of self whether it was from an affront by a friend or god. Hubris is just a specialized ego survival method.

It seems there are those of us more guarded than others, as well as those of us who are idiots. I find myself incapable of empathizing precisely with "rejection" as some kind of real thing. I have been rejected, and my mind reels at each instance, but it is never something I have taken to heart or personally. Lately, the tempest that ensues is more savory than the expectations of a positive result. While I can sympathize with it, disappointment is not the same. Perhaps I never felt the fiercely competitive crush of sibling rivalry, but I just don't have the wiring necessary within to identify with that emotional construct from without.

• I refer to "rejection" as an emotional construct because it is not an actual emotion; normally spoken as 'felt rejected' 

It seems closest to a composition of bruised pride (from structures being broken between values held) and disappointment. In the avett lyric, he is foreseeing, perhaps seeding, rejection. in the bulat lyric, her shamelessness knows no rejection. It knows hurt and disappointment, but not the pridefulness that engenders the emotions bundled in rejection.

Even in divorce, there needn't be any real sense of rejection; loss and disappointment sure. I won't say I have overcome fear of rejection, but practically speaking it is more an aversion bordering on phobia if anything. In reality, fear of loss is more accurate, and a greater threat in decision making.

• Pride is a sign of a guarded heart. It has structures and protocols and priorities it needs to assess in order to be satisfied. When one's sense of pride is in balance then the structures and protocols are being followed by others; well-ordered pride has priorities that indicate how to spend resources. When pride recognizes an affront, it restricts those resources it would otherwise invest; e.g. devotion or commitment. The degree of guardedness a person bears will influence the severity of that restriction. i.e. The more guarded one's pride, the more skittish the investment.
• Shamelessness is stupid; dumb and uninformed. A shameless person has priorities based on needs; they may or may not be in touch with those needs and will accordingly appear feckless based on how out of touch they are. There are no structures and protocols to observe for the shameless. Nothing is an affront, little or nothing informs investments; i.e. devotion and commitment are given freely. 
• A guarded heart treats emotional investment as a finite resource; a shameless one sees them as infinite, and is not worried about market forces, but will cease to gravitate toward an investment it finds unsatisfying to its needs.

There is no exhaustion of resources for the shameless heart. All things (friendships, relationships) are open-ended and can be picked up at will, at least in their solipsistic view of the world. Correspondingly, they can be abandoned when a shameless heart is no longer attached or becomes motivated by some other sense beyond self-interest. At root, there is no driving self-interest for the shameless; no investment can become too sour when that is the case. For the heart of pride, all too frequently, when an investment sours, the supposedly finite resources become an even more precious commodity, and the heart repeals the chips it laid down. Pride's protocols are not observed, its structures are broken; this results in quickly dissolved friendships, relationships. In reply to pride's precipitousness, for the shameless, it is more problematic, complicated, and subject to "wasted time" criticisms from hindsight.

The shameless, when confronted, don't have a structure or protocol or even direct priorities to refer to. The first guiding emotion, then, is typically fear. Fear of loss, not rejection. Disappointment, and its extension rejection, is a different matter than loss. Loss deals with want and need, disappointment deals with expectation and need. In the face of loss, a shameless heart will try coping by wanting to sell off their investment, double-down, or hold steady. Selling off is used when fear commands the decision, doubling down is commanded by desperation.

• The holding steady is the equilibrium position for the shameless. However, it is as difficult as holding steady is for the person with a prideful heart. Threat of disappointment is the destabilizer for the prideful heart from its position of equilibrium. Threat of loss places the shameless in disequilibrium. In either, the easy out for either is giving in to dissolving an investment, or by selling off / doubling down. Although both are digested well by the prideful and shameless systems (they distance us from pain by skewing perspective), neither return us to equilibrium, or any other state of being able to see clearly.

Holding steady requires of both the prideful and the shameless a willingness to confront their anxiety over either loss or disappointment. Pride and shamelessness revolve around prioritizing needs. Pride prioritizes based on guards; shamelessness makes it up as it goes along. Pride seeks to protect finite resources; shamelessness seeks to devalue or overvalue an infinite one. The survival mind cultivated in either case is a way of buffering against the consequences of a committment.

• When pride lets go its fear of shame, it can begin to assess what is really at hand rather than making relative qualifications based on preconditioned structures.
• When the shameless lets go its fear of desolation, it can begin to value appropriately rather than blindly seeking to deflate or inflate a commitment.

If someone wishes for pride, they already have it; they are voicing their fear of shame (the 'why' a friend wouldn't love the man he'd become). If someone expresses abandon (i.e. leaving friends behind), they see it as a freedom from themself; they don't likely ever abandon anything, they can't, they can only redefine. In any crisis of commitment where all hands haven't been placed on the table, don't lay the chips down. Both those who are proud of heart and those who are shameless wish to capitalize on their investments. In light of that, the perception of ups and downs in the market are often taken too personally.

Don't let initial reactions shape final words.