The Temptations

As a young child I remember listening, with an admittedly limited comprehension but with sufficient understanding to feel a combination of respect and intrigue, to my family members as they discussed the many exploits of my grandpa, who had retired, bought himself a mobile home, and begun travelling the country apparently solely to visit as many spas as possible, which was a really just a mechanism for hooking up with as many older women as possible. I remember he married three or four times, I think, since he turned sixty.

The interesting thing to me as a child, and still today, is that my family members always seemed to exercise this special moral code in their consideration of his actions. Whereas were it anyone else they would have judged, condemned, and generally mentioned not a few religious platitudes--for whatever reason what my grandpa did was somehow admirable in their sight. He was, "making the best of his time," "filling his last days with happiness"; and so on and so forth.

For my family members, the satisfaction of their own desires was a matter of severe religious taboo; being part of a conservative religious culture as they were. As a child I was strictly indoctrinated in the religious decree of abstinence in all things, the mandate against desire. Yet apparently, given the above example, I knew even as a young child that there was a limit, even to this taboo. The onset of death, this was a spectre even more terrifying to them than the scorn of their society; and so they recognized that my grandpa had passed out of the domain within which they dwelt, into a special domain lacking their rules.

A friend of mine said to me the other day, "I don't appreciate temptation." (She was not referring to me, just to be clear.) I thought about that statement for a while. Temptation is only desire masked by the veil of social taboo. Of course, her statement was a negative, meaning "I take offense at temptation," not merely a neutrality. I however would say "I appreciate desire in all its forms," and it seems that as I grow older, I even hold a special appreciation for temptation, for it is desire that battles against our limitations, that entices us to throw aside our fears and embrace the joys of life, while we yet have time to do so.

So, I suppose I would say to those who read this, perhaps you should embrace the temptations around you, rather than fleeing them. There may be a day when you wish you had.

An Eclipse of Thought

It has been a while since I posted anything here. I have been preoccupied with the mundane lately. Work, household chores, daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, social interaction, even, to some extent, personal relationships, all can be mundane, although even the mundane can possess meaning. However, I believe the true meaning of the mundane is found not by an identification with it, as some would find themselves: defined nearly entirely by such things; but rather, a disassociation from it to the point that it can be perceived clearly as something separate from the self, this as the great philosophers, spiritual figures, and disciples of meditation have found themselves throughout history: defined not, but rather, defining. This is a very useful means of judging the measure of psychological development of another; if they are but an expression of that which they must do, then they are psychologically immature, but if whatever they do is transformed by their touch into an expression of that which they are, then they are psychologically mature. This is, of course, a very general statement, and it must be noted that there are both exceptions and different states that manifest similarly. An example of the former would be a high-functioning lunatic, whose actions can often seem at first observation to coincide with a mature psyche, when in fact the very opposite is regularly the case. An example of the latter would be an individual caught in the grips of an inspiration originated from an archetype of the collective unconscious, for the defining nature of his actions is not due to his own psychological maturity, but rather merely a result of a momentary loss of self to something that is beyond his comprehension.

All this to say that I have lately been preoccupied not merely with doing the mundane, but also with contemplating it, and contemplating that which I personally consider the antithesis of it: "an eclipse of thought."

On the Psychology of "Love"

"As a rule the motives [the young man] acts from are largely unconscious. [...] The greater the area of unconsciousness, the less is marriage a matter of free choice, as is shown subjectively in the fatal compulsion one feels so acutely when one is in love. [...] His Eros is passive like a child's; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured. He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him. [...] The imperfections of real life, with its laborious adaptations and manifold disappointments, naturally cannot compete with such a state of indescribable fulfilment. [...] [E]very beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. [...] [This] projection-making factor is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima. [...] The effect of anima [...] on the ego [...] is extremely difficult to eliminate because, in the first place, it is uncommonly strong and immediately fills the ego-personality with an unshakable feeling of rightness and righteousness. In the second place, the cause of the effect is projected and appears to lie in objects and objective situations. Both these characteristics can, I believe, be traced back to the peculiarities of the archetype. For the archetype, of course, exists a priori. This may possibly explain the often totally irrational yet undisputed and indisputable existence of certain moods [...]. Perhaps these are so notoriously difficult to influence because of the powerfully suggestive effect emanating from the archetype. Consciousness is fascinated by it, held captive, as if hypnotized. Very often the ego experiences a vague feeling of moral defeat and then behaves all the more defensively, defiantly, and self-righteously, thus setting up a vicious circle which only increases its feeling of inferiority. The bottom is then knocked out of the human relationship, for, like megalomania, a feeling of inferiority makes mutual recognition impossible, and without this there is no relationship."

-Excerpts from "Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" and "Aion: Phenomenology of the Self" by Carl Jung (edited to limit Jung's discussion to the male phenomenology, i.e. to remove discussion of female phenomenology and the animus)

Excerpt from "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell

"The second wonder to be noted in the Bodhisattva myth is its annihilation of the distinction between life and release-from-life--which is symbolized (as we have observed) in the Bodhisattva's renunciation of nirvāna. Briefly, nirvāna means "the Extinguishing of the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion." As the reader will recall: in the legend of the Temptation under the Bo Tree [...] the antagonist of the Future Buddha was Kāma-Māra, literally "Desire-Hostility," or "Love and Death," the magician of Delusion. He was a personification of the Threefold Fire and of the difficulties of the last test, a final threshold guardian to be passed by the universal hero on his supreme adventure to nirvāna.

Belief and Resolve

Belief is but an immature form of resolve, and he that believes cannot resolve but can only be resolved by that which is dictated to him. In this sense, belief is an act of escapism and a process of succumbing, for he that believes absolves himself of the responsibility necessary to attain resolve, specifically, the responsibility of engaging in the process of individuation as manifested symbolically in the monomyth.

Excerpt from "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell

"Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images. The result, of course, may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost super-human degree of self-consciousness and masterful control. [...] It cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as-yet-unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of transformation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved."

Excerpt from "The Golden Bough" by Sir James G. Frazer

"Hence Odin was called the Lord of the Gallows or the God of the Hanged, and he is represented sitting under a gallows tree. Indeed he is said to have been sacrificed to himself in the ordinary way, as we learn from the weird verses of the Havamal, in which the god describes how he acquired his divine power by learning the magic runes:

'I know that I hung on the windy tree
For nine whole nights,
Wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin,
Myself to myself.'"

Note

I have not patience for the lazy rhetorician, who supposes that his art alone is sufficient to convict me of his opinion. Else he provide an equal measure of crude fact, he may as well be crying out to me the cries of an insane man and a fool. I could even do without his art entirely, and simply be presented with the facts, for it is such things that require great effort to acquire and assemble and no argument has any true substance unless it be derived from their ore. The false diamond crafted by the wit of man is not half so precious as the gem discovered deep in the heart of the earth.

Excerpt from "Answer to Job" by Carl G. Jung

"In confinio mortis and in the evening of a long and eventful life a man will see immense vistas of time stretching out before him. Such a man no longer lives in the everyday world and in the vicissitudes of personal relationships, but in the sight of many aeons and in the movement of ideas as they pass from century to century."

Self-Psychoanalysis

Self-Psychoanalysis

Daniel Ebling

Prologue

First, it may be necessary to first peruse this post in order to understand some of the terminology I employ here.

My purpose herein is to describe an observational paradigm I employ in the analysis of my own psychic structure. This paradigm can be briefly defined as a consideration of Higher-level Conscious Ego Functions. I define a function as a psychic object that meets the following conditions:

• It is comprised of a finite set of identities.


• It is applicable to a finite scope determined by a finite set of instigating parameters.


• It is unique among other psychic contents.


• It defines a unique psychic paradigm.


• It is a psychic mechanism such that an unresolved psychic object, following exposure to the function, will emerge resolved (i.e. the finite set of identities that comprise the unresolved psychic object will be appended by an identity representing a solution to the problem they represent).

The Social Network

I feel as if I were just pounded relentlessly on the head with the clever-dialogue hammer. So Zuckerberg is intelligent enough to see through the obvious bull shit of everyone surrounding him, and enough of a brave social outcast to speak truthfully about it regardless of the consequences... well jeez. I guess that's all it takes to make a hero these days.

Self-Psychoanalysis Prologue

I'm working on putting together a post entitled "Self-Psychoanalysis," but before I do, I wanted to write up this brief prologue to cover a certain preliminary issue, namely, the manner in which my psyche contains and uses data.

Having spoken to a few other people, I have realized that this issue may not only be of interest to anyone that might read these posts, but also of interest in establishing a foundation upon which the reader can begin to construct a comprehension of why I communicate in the way I do. Many individuals have told me that I communicate oddly; many more have leveled very specific criticisms against my style of communication, saying that it is overly technical, indulgent, or even arrogant. While my motives may be a valid consideration, I shall forego such a discussion at this time to instead describe a certain psychological process that I deem not only relevant but also imperative. It must be understood that everything described herein is a consciously enforced schema, such that it is almost a natural habit, but a learned one and an intended one.

Quote Concerning Loneliness

"Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible."

-Carl G. Jung

I agree with this. I constantly feel loneliness first because the things that are important to me are things that no one else cares to even comprehend, second, because most of my "views" are things that others find inadmissible in the extreme.