It is ironic that I read States of Mind while I wasn’t in a very good state of mind. An illness went through the house which was either flu or COVID and one of the symptoms for me was considerable brain fog. I found myself having to reread paragraphs three or four times and with the more challenging authors I had trouble comprehending their meaning.
I was looking forward to this edition but brain fog aside I was left disappointed. I had hoped for articles on meditation, transcendence, elevated consciousness, subjects in that sort of vein. Instead I got medical, philosophical and emotional.
Therefore, I have less highlights than usual for this edition.
“Enlightenment,” said the monk, “always comes after the road of thinking is blocked.”
I’ve had my ups and downs with my Zazen meditation practice. It has mostly been non-existent over the past two years after a very good two year run. What I’ve learned and what draws me back is the elevated clarity, the calmness and sense of well being obtained when normally my mind is a chaotic cacophony of uninvited thoughts. Growing up Catholic, prayer is used for these same results. However, instead of asking a ‘higher power’ for all these things, I’ve found that Zazen, meditation, and practicing the absence of thought to be much more rewarding and effective.
Instead of a supplication to the divine of “please give me this,” which could be considered a grasp of the mind, meditation teaches enlightenment comes from not only stopping the constant grasping of the mind but stop ‘trying’ completely when in meditation, and let the storm of thoughts simply disperse on their own. Isn’t this inherently more peaceful and serene? One grasps, requests, begs, for external help, while in meditation you’re helping yourself. We already have the “Buddha nature;” it is not something apart. Christianity mostly teaches God is something apart – until pressed and then it becomes: God is in you. So you’re not God; he is in you and a part of you, but still somewhat separate – yet not really, as it is all just a mystery.
Nah, I’ll go with we all have Buddha nature, we’re all part of the divine, of the universe and if I can calm my mind enough I’ll remember, or be enlightened to a small fragment of whatever has been placed behind that unseen veil. I also understand that there are supplications in Buddhism, sutras, mantras and so on and contemplative traditions in Christianity but that would require a novel and this post is just my highlights and some thoughts.
History is not what happened two hundred or two thousand years ago. It is a story about what happened two hundred or two thousand years ago. The stories change, as do the sight lines available to the tellers of the tales.
Contemplating this really exposes the limitations of what we think we know. Even interactions that I’ve been a participant in are only seen through my own lens, my own mind and isn’t that inherently limiting? In fact, I could experience the same event differently depending on my state of mind.
I also highlighted this due to what is happening in the USA. The current administration is erasing the unpleasant parts of our history such as the genocide of the Native Americans and slavery. All because it might make some white people feel uncomfortable. Ignoring a wound is the worst way to heal it. It will sit, fester and cause continual problems until addressed.
Therefore, it is my view that we as a country face those dark days of our history head on, atone for them and only then can we begin to truly heal and move on. Currently, the Trump administration is not only changing the story but trying to erase some of it completely which never works. It is the way of the universe that the truth will always surface although it may take a very long time. Epstein files anyone?
A historian is the sort of man who should be fearless, incorruptible, free, a friend of free expression and the truth, intent, as the comic poet says, on calling a fig a fig and a trough a trough, giving nothing to hatred or to friendship, sparing no one, showing neither pity nor shame nor obsequiousness, an impartial judge, well-disposed to all men up to the point of not giving one side more than its due, in his books a stranger and a man without a country, independent, subject to no sovereign, not reckoning what this or that man will think, but stating the facts.
Well, this used to be the way of the news as well. I’ll always remember Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather giving us simply the facts, the straight story of what happened without opinion or commentary. The ‘news’ has now become entertainment with more opinion than fact. I assume that the history books, or more recently, AI historical analysis will eventually become more political and opinion based rather than just the facts. It won’t be because fact based historical AI bots don’t exist, it will be that people choose historical AI bots that align with their own bias. Instead of the truth, such as Native Americans being violently dispossessed of their lands, it will be defense against heathen savages attacking peaceful, Christian settlers.
The ‘truth’ is going to become a very rare commodity in the age of AI and the vast amount of slop it will produce throughout the entire internet.
But it is the mania that really interests the doctors, that must be stamped out. Depression is your own problem; get out of it however you can. Wait out the months, a year maybe, till it goes away. Only you must not commit suicide – that is absolutely forbidden. Your life does not belong to you but to the doctors, the relatives, the state: the social circle. Show any symptoms of suicide, and they’ll pick you up like a thief.
I highlighted this to explore how much of your life is really your own and to consider differences in culture. We do not allow for suicide in the USA. Should it even be considered the state can take you away and lock you up as society considers this to be the most irrational action one could take. Contrast this with Japan where sometimes suicide is the most honorable thing you can do given certain circumstances.
In the USA our culture is shaped by Christianity where suicide is absolutely forbidden. I believe that most who restrain the suicidal do so out of an honest belief they are doing the right thing? How could they not? Suicide is the end, and how could anyone not want to live? Well, there are certain circumstances where living is such a hell that death would be preferable. Where is the line drawn and who gets to make those decisions? It would have been better for many who had died by suicide to have lived. They didn’t get through the darkness and there was light at the end they never go to see. There are others who have caused so much havoc, so much pain, that it would have been better had they died.
I guess this can be summed up with this question. If you had the opportunity to kill Hitler as a youth, would you do it? You’re killing a hitherto innocent but prevent the suffering and death of millions. I’m going to say that in the Christian tradition you couldn’t kill Hitler based on the commandment “Thou shall not kill.” This is a philosophical exercise only, the USA – a self proclaimed Christian nation, does plenty of killing. Why doesn’t it let euthanasia be an option? Bit of a ramble there, just stream of consciousness on some very heavy topics.
“I suppose the body to be just a statue or a machine made of earth,” he wrote in the early 1630s, in his ‘Treatise on Man,’ one of two scientific works he chose not to publish after learning of Galileo’s conviction for heresy in 1633.
This is about Descartes exploring the relationship between mind and body, the “I think therefore I am” philosophy. I’ve highlighted it just as an example of the severity should you have gone against Church teaching in the past. I highlight these because the Church does not like change, and only recently – within the past 100 years or so – has cautiously opened up to science. It is interesting to see mind-bending mental gymnastics of trying to reconcile traditional Christian teaching with recent developments in science. It doesn’t work and the story keeps changing as new scientific developments are made.
This third and “most irritating insult flung at human megalomania’ was, in Freud’s famous phrase, that the self is “not even master in his own home” but instead ruled by unconscious desires and forces.
I would agree with this. My mental state determines what kind of day I will have. Is it that these “unconscious desires and forces” drive my mental state? I would say that, along with brain chemistry that they absolutely do. Put simply, why do things that used to excite me in my youth no longer do? The natural joy and excitement of youth is mostly non-existent here at 48. Thus we try to get it back with exercise, alcohol, social media, caffeine, nicotine, trying new things etc. In my youth I could just wake up and be extremely excited for the day. That never happens now. I could win the mega-millions lottery now and would be less excited than I was at 10 with just a summer trip to the Grandview pool.
The introvert’s need to find hidden meanings behind the actions of others – which drove Schmid crazy during his correspondence wtih Jung – undergirds the entire project of Psychological Types, of course: Jung is doing what introverts do.
I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about the innate characteristics of different types of people. People are different and I left it at that. Each person is an entire universe of hopes, dreams, fears, anxieties, opinions and desires. But for most, even those closest to us we’ll remain at a very superficial level of interaction and relationship. How much do I really even know about the inner thoughts of my own wife? I am absolutely certain she knows less than 10% of mine. And how much should we know? Knowing more is not inherently ‘better,’ and could in-fact be worse! How deep could you go, should you go in a relationship with someone? I don’t know. What I do know is that like everything in the universe, and like life itself, relationships eventually disintegrate and fade away over time.
“that people are virtually incapable of understanding and accepting any point of view other than their own… Every man is so imprisoned in his type that he is simply incapable of fully understanding another standpoint.”
Yes, this is incredibly difficult to do, especially when the other opinion is completely stupid. It is a worthwhile exercise to try to understand them and how they came to think that way.
Take the illogical backlash against vaccines we’re currently experiencing and in a time when a very serious disease – COVID – has killed hundreds of thousands! It makes no sense at all! It is interesting to dive into their mindset and really understand their influences, their history, their overall mindset as to why they think they do.
Perhaps it would be easier to just make the exercise more absurd. There could be a plague of rats and perhaps half of of the population were adamant about their right to lick those rats. They catch them, put them on a stick and derive pleasure from licking that filthy fur because it is their God given right, their freedom and they really don’t like another group of people telling them it is probably a very bad idea.
Is it really much different? Along comes COVID that is pretty deadly but has only killed family members of a few acquaintances, and only one person who I actually met once. This amounts up to hundreds of thousands of countrymen but I’m not seeing people drop dead right in front of me. Yes, the hospitals are overwhelmed with people struggling to breathe but I don’t go to hospitals, so for me, those deaths don’t even exist except for an article in the newspaper.
Along comes the government telling us we should get the vaccine or at least mask up. I can almost understand a reluctance to put this new serum in our bodies just on blind faith as the primary aim of the overall medical/pharmaceutical/insurance establishment has become profit over people. But what I cannot understand is the common courtesy of simply wearing a mask to try and protect others. That is a very easy thing to do, but our society isn’t about the common good is it? That’s what will be derided as “socialist,” or “communist,” not that the majority of those who blithely toss those accusations can define them let alone articulate the differences between them.
It becomes so absurd, so selfish and so incomprehensible that I cannot rule out the possibility of a movement in the future where a good part of the population demands the right to lick rats. They’re already taking horse de-wormer as a cure for whatever ails them no? Wasn’t a cure for COVID to put bleach and/or sunshine up the arse? So you see, my rat-licking example isn’t so outlandish at all! I’ve even surprised myself remembering real examples from the past and by golly rat licking as a cure all wouldn’t surprise me at all should it come as a suggestion as a cure all from Robert Kennedy! What a crazy world we’re in.
Anyway, to return to the point, it is still very interesting as a mental exercise to try and really comprehend why some think the way they do. It is not easy and a skill very few have ever attempted.
Although I had very few highlights in this edition of Lapham’s Quarterly it appears I’m very opinionated, more opinionated and feisty than I’ve been in quite some time! So, I’ll leave it at that.
