June 12, 2009
- Transactional Analysis, Freud, and the Death of the Ego -
(Quite) a while back, there was a small synchronicity here regarding Transactional Analysis, and, for a long time, TA sat in my pile of “important things to look into”. I finally got around to it recently and it got my mind going in all kinds of directions. I began with the wikipedia entry and found, as I often do, that it offered a great breakdown of the basics. At it’s core, TA is a system that analyzes our interactions with the world, in order to help us to become aware of how our unconscious assumptions about reality (called scripts) are shaping are lives. An analogous relationship would be between html code and a website as seen through a browser. You examine how things looks at the browser level, and then go back into the code if something’s not appearing as you want it to. It was developed by Eric Berne as a “Neo-Freudian” method of psychoanalysis, and as such, it has its own language and models for talking about the functioning (and dysfunctioning) of the psyche. It was TA’s basic models of interaction, known as “ego states” that really drew my attention.
The 3 ego states are as follows (from wikipedia):
- Parent (“exteropsyche”)
- Adult (“neopsyche”)
- Child (“archaeopsyche”)
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Some of TA’s language is a bit hippie-fied for my taste (it’s the origin of the term “the warm fuzzies”), but that’s just a product of the time in which this system was developed. The underlying ideas are well worth looking into, regardless of the words used to describe them, and I highly recommend exploring further if you’re interested.
But it was these three ego states that really caught my attention. I saw them as having a kind of yin/yang relationship with Freud’s id/ego/superego formations, and, while thinking about them in that context, I stumbled on a flaw in (what I think of as) some of the basic assumptions behind psychoanalysis. Now, I may not be interpreting everything entirely correctly here, but my understanding of these things did point toward some interesting conclusions. Before I get to those conclusions though, let me explain what I mean about the yin/yang relationship between TA and Freud.
On the one hand, Freud’s psychic formations (id, ego, and superego) simply are. They exist as objective parts of the psyche, functioning almost as organs within the mind, so that one could say, “oh, my id wants this, but my superego doesn’t,” just as easily as saying, “oh, my stomach’s too full, no more pie!”. They are forces that wield influence from within the self, while the self scrambles around trying to create an equilibrium of libido between their different needs. By contrast, Transactional Analysis’ ego states are ones through which the self can interact with the external world. The states are masks, forms that the self assumes in order to embody what it considers to be the best possible role in any given situation. Basically, the difference here is that TA focuses on the inter-personal nature of the self, while Freud focuses on the intra-personal nature of the self. Their concepts of “self” can be seen as inversions of each other, different sides of the same coin, the north and south face of the same mountain. Because in the end, what is being described is the “self” in it’s passive and active states.
But if both systems are examining the”self” from within a different context, can a similar parallel be found between the individual formations and ego states? That is, can each be seen as an active/passive version of some aspect of the self? It was in trying to fit these pieces fit together that the entire basis for both models fell apart for me in a really interesting way.
I’ll begin with the id/child state. In both cases, what’s described is the aspect of the self that wants, that desires, that craves instant gratification or the release of emotional energy. It’s the creative part of the self but it’s also the unpredictable part of the self. For Freud, the id “is regarded as the reservoir of the libido or ‘instinctive drive to create’“, while in TA, the child state is the source of emotions, creation, recreation, spontaneity and intimacy. In both, what we have is the part of the self that reacts to reality before conscious decision making comes into play. They come into consciousness already in motion and reach outward into the world. Freud’s id is a drive within the self, while TA’s child state is the self acting spontaneously in the world, so we do find that same internal/external dichotomy at the individual formation/state level as well. And this formation/state seems to be based mainly on creating a future state of being. Although it’s a bit counter-intuitive at first, any emotional response is something created in anticipation of some future state. I do not mean the experience of the emotion, I mean the source of the emotion. According to this understanding of the child/id as the source of the emotion, the emotion is created by that source to be experienced by the consciousness in the future. The emotion comes into being before we are aware of it’s presence. I think that this way of looking at it makes the “child” label particularly appropriate, because if children have an abundance of anything, it’s “future”. This ties in with creativity quite well too, because creativity is all about “seeing” something that hasn’t yet come into being and making it real.
The obvious retort to this is that children are always so wonderfully present, but that, I would say, is confusing the “child” label with an actual child. In fact, I think children can often be a lot more in touch with their ego/adult state than most adults are, and I disagree with TA’s notion that the child state is merely a re-creation of childhood experiences. As I hope I will be able to clarify here, I think that the id/child state might be better understood as something created during childhood, rather than as something inherent since birth.
Before we get to that though, I’d like to point to a similar pattern in the ego/adult state: that the base here is on the present moment. As TA puts it, the adult is “directed towards an objective appraisal of reality”, and for Freud, “the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.“ It is the seat of the conscious awareness, mainly because it is the part that is still in direct contact with both the circumstances of the exterior world and the drives of inner world.
And finally, in case you haven’t already figured it out, the superego/parent is the part of the self that seems most based in the past. Without the past, the parent/superego has no basis upon which to make its pronouncements. If there were no previous bad results to watch out for, on what grounds can we be scolded for our current actions? TA’s parent state is one where we “behave, feel, and think in response to an unconscious mimicking of how (our) parents (or other parental figures) acted.“ That is, it is the part of the self that has internalized the actions of the parental figure in order to please that figure. Freud pretty much agrees, saying “the super-ego retains the character of the father“, (of course, Freud’s word choice here, as with TA’s slightly hippy-fied sentimentality, is best understood as a product of its time, not as anything inherent to the argument here). Again, the inner/outer dichotomy is obvious: TA has us “mimicking actions”, while Freud has us “retaining character”.
That’s all well and good, but to me, there’s something profoundly wrong about all of this. Because really (and here’s where the bottom fell out of the bucket for me) the past of the future don’t exist experientially. As the Sensei at my zen temple has said, “we can experience a sense of the past or future, but that sense is still in the present moment”. We are always in the present, and it’s only in the present that we can have any influence on the unfolding of things. From that perspective, focusing on either the future or the past at the expense of the present is a waste of time. But then, from what we looked at above, being “in the present moment” only leaves us with the ego/adult, the “rational observer”, with the emotions and creativity of the child/id completely cut off from reality. And that, I think, points a problem inherent in psychoanalysis since Freud.
For Freud, “the id stands in direct opposition to the super-ego”, but I know that, for me, the ideal state of being is not one where the internal parts of my psyche are in direct opposition to each other. Why carry around a description of the self that has such an insolvable conflict within it? For Transactional Analysis, “learning to strengthen the Adult is a goal of TA“, yet the adult state is described as “most like a computer processing information and making predictions absent of major emotions that cloud its operation.” Is that the goal we should be striving for? A telling quote from Joseph Campbell sheds some light on the matter. It comes from his journals from his trip to Japan: “Christianity and Freud, by the way, have something in common, inasmuch as for both, man’s rational consciousness is absolutely sealed away from the unknown root of his soul.”
And I say fuck that. Why should my ideal consciousness be purely rational, and why should that rational consciousness be absolutely sealed away from the “root of my soul?” What causes someone to create a system of “mind” like that, and how might these models look if they sprang from a different understanding of the mind-in-reality? I don’t doubt that there are many analysts who make good use of the tools offered by TA (as well as those offered by Freud) to achieve excellent results with their clients, but I think a re-examination of some of the key assumptions is in order if we ever want to use these tools to their full extent. The conclusion I came to through my understanding of the id/child as future-based and superego/parent as past-based is that both these aspects are created out of the self at the precise moment when the ‘root of the soul’ is mistakenly thought to be separated from the present moment. That is, the id/child can only be seen as the source of emotions and creativity if these things are seen as not already belonging to the fully present adult/ego. Once that happens, the superego/parent is needed to balance out the time lag of the no-longer-present-source. The parental figure needs to become internalized as the superego because the inner source is no longer trusted to touch reality directly; a mediator is needed. What is being described in both systems is a fundamentally damaged understanding of what the “self” actually is, and it is being described as if this were the normal way to be. What we’re left with is a case of double vision. Take a look at this handy little visual metaphor:
To the left there is clearly part of a face. And the same is true to the right. But they both have an extremely unreal quality about them. You can see through them, as if they weren’t really there, and neither side is complete in itself. Both fade into a middle part that is clearly there. The middle part seems real and concrete, but it is a chaotic mess of features. Clearly it’s real, but what is it? No conclusions about the real face can be drawn until the blurred vision is cleared. You have to sit and stare at the part that feels real, and wait for the true face to come into focus.
So too, focusing only on the child/id, as something separate from the present moment, is to be caught in the illusory future. To focus only on the parent/superego, as something separate from the present moment, is to be caught in the past. Only when the two are seen as existing both together at the same time, naturally balanced in the present moment, can reality be fully experienced. Check out this quote from Douglas Harding (and the accompanying exercise)
This is the key to the whole thing. At some point in our childhood, we push away that root of the soul, our honest emotional involvement with the world, in favor of a more removed, rational approach. This is what all the “get in touch with your emotions” and “increase the amount of ‘play’ in your life” kinds of therapies are attempting to overcome. Even “be here now” and “be one with everything” point to the same way out. What is needed is a resurrection of that emotional source into the present moment, so that there is a flowing back and forth of energy and information between the inner and outer experiences. The sense of any barrier between the two is the “self” that needs to be gotten rid of, the gateless gate through which we must pass. We create this boundary at some point in our childhood, in response to some external circumstances that teach us that our inner drives are not to be trusted, and then we take this self-created boundary as real. We wall off our drives, instead of allowing them to interact with and learn from reality. This is not in and of itself a bad thing, but we seem to forget that we’ve done it to ourselves. We hold onto that barrier as a part of our true self, when it’s actually only a mental tool we’ve created. The true self is simply the space within which this flow of energy/information takes place between our inner and outer aspects.
This is why I said earlier that I think children are more in touch with there adult/ego self, because the true self-in-the-present moment understands that is no separation between the “root of the soul” and the rational consciousness. They are like two ends of a magnet that can never touch, but which meet quite easily in the middle.
Recently, there have been some studies pointing to a major shift in our understanding of what’s going on in a child’s mind. Conveniently enough, a few articles on these were published while I was trying to put this piece together, and they greatly contributed to my understanding of just what it was that I was trying to say:
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So then, what’s the solution to all this? Should we just let loose, do whatever we want? Let our emotions run rampant? No, of course not. On the one hand, our emotions don’t naturally run rampant. They are communications from our unconscious, and our unconscious is designed to make the best decision possible based on the information available to it. Telling ourselves that they’re unmanagable is often just a way to maintain that false boundary that we think of as an inherent part of our self. Argue for your limitations and they’re yours, as they say.
On the other hand, yes, there are people with really violent emotions and urges, but think of it this way. If you take a hose, and block the end of it, when you move your finger away there is a sudden spray of water. And if you only move your finger partially, there is a contant stream of water under pressure. What we have to learn is how to remove the blocks that create emotional pressure, but without the sudden outpouring of what was blocked. People can be damaged, perhaps permanently, by such emotional blockages, but we, as a society, would be best served by having as many people as possible making attempts to integrate these parts of themselves without the need to lash out with these blocked emotions. We have to retrain our mind and our emotions to better exist together again, because right now, they have forgotten how to. The more people who can learn to safely let the inner fountain bubble up, the less we, as a society, will have to worry about violent emotions. “What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret.”
What we have to do is learn to sit with our emotions, become aware of them as they are. Reconnect our conscioussness with the root of our soul. As a species, we had the chance to explore both extremes, the emotional and the rational, and now it’s time to head back toward the center, to level things out so to speak. It is definitely not an easy road, but the end result is one worth traveling to. And what is that result? Love. A consciously aware participation mystique. And the realization that this state has been completely available within our being all along.
Finally done, and just under the 1 month mark from beginning to completion. Hope you all enjoy it! As of this afternoon, I’m headed back up to the monastery, for a weekend of zen meditation and yoga instruction. Be back Sunday night.
Comment by Ian — June 12, 2009 @ 5:27 am
> learning to strengthen the Adult is a goal of TA
This is not how I understood it. As I was taught, the Adult is useful as a ‘safe’ place to be when dealing with strange and difficult people, as might be encountered at (for example) work. The Adult just /is/; it has no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ about it.
Parent and Child, however, are both considered to have two faces like a coin. The child is believed to be born with the state known as Free Child, in which it only knows that it /wants/ and /feels/. In an adult, the Free Child becomes the source of creativity and insight. But as a child grows up the Free Child reveals its dark side: the Adapted Child, who feels deprived and who knows how to resent. In the adult the Adapted Child is the state who agrees to the demands of his boss even though they make him angry (Compliant Child), and then later in the day goes and lets his tires down (Rebellious Child). With a knife.
The parent, similarly, has a dark and light side: Nurturing and Critical. Critical Parent is the Bad Boss, in all possible ways. At work, Free Child often hooks the Critical Parent from a boss who is expecting Adult in the transaction. Critical Parent then hooks Adapted Child from the employee and we can hear the sound of hissing air in the distance.
This brings me to what I said the other day about TA as an initiation. Book learning I guess usually hooks the Adult, sometimes the Child. Computer learning, in me at any rate, often looks like the Critical Parent. Machines are intolerant of mistakes and don’t listen. Which makes them no use at all for helpful instruction. And which makes me think that actually, instruction from a real person who can drag the student into the required States in order to demonstrate them is superior. Perhaps even necessary.
That might make no sense. Gonna go read the whole article again now… ;-D
Comment by speedbird — June 13, 2009 @ 1:29 pm
Awesome entry, Ian, really first rate stuff. Babies not being born as blank slates is something I clearly saw with my own children as well – each came out of the womb with their own unique personality, and within a month or two we could clearly see a difference in their approach to the world. For me, this relates nicely to the idea that each of us is not a unique ‘soul’ but a system of interlocking patterns which exist outside of space-time – some of those patterns are what contribute to innate understandings, instinct, and so on.
Keep up the great work!
Rob
Comment by Rob Bryanton — June 15, 2009 @ 3:36 pm
Thanks Speedbird, Rob.
Speedbird:
This is what Zen is all about. In Zen, the emphasis is on direct mind-to-mind transmission of the dharma teachings, not relying on books or sutras. Nevermind all the parts where you study the books and sutras. But the point is that those are additionals, the heart of the thing is teaching person to person, original face to original face… ;)
As for your explanation of the different states, I am glad to hear that there’s more to it than just the wiki article. My first thought is that the positive side of the child and adult states seems to be when those states are able to acknowledge the other, when there’s an understanding of them all being connected through the adult state’s awareness of the present. And the adult state, without the function of child and the parent, would become rather boring. Brings to mind Gurdjieff’s “Triamazikamno”: Holy Affirming, Holy Denying, and Holy Reconciling…
Rob:
Good to hear from you again! I have been keeping up on your site as well, just not had the time to comment. Must start doing that again. I am glad to see your studio’s doing so well. Seems like you’ve got a lot of projects going on over there.
As for “system of interlocking patterns which exist outside of space-time”, I think this is what I’m trying to point to with the “root of the soul” idea. It’s gets harder to talk about the more I try to figure it out, which makes me think I’m on the right track. I am glad to hear that you agree. There’s a lot I take away from your work on these matters, so I am happy to hear that you notice similarities as well.
If we’re all a series of interlocking patterns that exist in a higher dimension, as Rob explains, then where would those patterns go in order to improve themselves? Somewhere were there is infinite possibility for improvement I bet. But then they get there and try to finish improving themselves, because they remember being whole and complete before coming here, forgetting that the purpose of coming here was to struggle as much as possible to become even more whole and complete… And the whole “enlightenment” thing might just be our coming to terms with this as the true nature of how things work.
Comment by Ian — June 15, 2009 @ 10:02 pm
Close to the version I was taught:
http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/ta.htm
Comment by speedbird — June 16, 2009 @ 2:28 am
I begin to understand your point about Freud though (it’s not something I’ve ever really studied): replacement of the Id by the Ego does not strike me as a necessarily good thing. The Ego is more of a false ‘self’ created for various practical purposes. A kind of persona, I guess, though a sort of default plain vanilla persona.
Comment by speedbird — June 16, 2009 @ 5:04 am
Cool that about Zen, too. I think I read somewhere that all real Zen teachers have to be able to trace their ‘lineage’ back to one of the original ancient Zen masters… now I begin to understand why. Professional musicians sometimes talk about their teachers in this way too, tracing their history to some great master who worked with Mozart. I always took this as a kind of cultism, but perhaps there is a kind of truth buried within it.
Having said that, when the student is ready the teacher appears, right? :-) The road to enlightenment must be travelled, but I suspect there are many ‘chance’ encounters along the way. I’m worried now about the role of the information ‘superhighway’ in all this… ;-)
Comment by speedbird — June 16, 2009 @ 5:16 am
Huh, ‘changing minds’, didn’t notice that! (last comment for the mo, honest!) Of course, that’s a trick question; from the point of view of TA (and Argyris’ ‘Action Science’), you /can’t/ change anyone’s mind; you can only show them things to think about (Adult) and help them realise how they feel (Parent/Child)…
Comment by speedbird — June 16, 2009 @ 5:26 am
The thing with Frued is that he very much did not trust the sub/unconscious drives, and so needed an ego to “civilize” them, so to speak. My point is that this sort of thinking just drives the wedge between the two deeper, rather than doing anything to heal that rift or set up a more mutually beneficial relationship.
That’s spot on about the Zen lineage obsession (the same’s true for martial arts masters as well). Does anyone really think that there were only 82 generations between the present day and Buddha? No one who spends the time to actually think about it, that’s for sure. But that’s not the point. The point is that you have become part of a living tradition that can pass on things in that direct person-to-person fashion. That the teachings (be they zen, kung fu, or music) come from a tradition that is larger than the original person, and that is still alive. Not an entity per-se, or even an organizing principle. Just a way of doing things that works.
The internet is, I think, really a force for good, in the end. It’s basically just an amplifier, of thoughts, cultures, memes, ideas. There’s a truth buried in that old “series of tubes” joke as well, I think.
I’ve heard it said that, really, the teacher has nothing to give, and the student nothing to take. “Selling water by the riverside…”
Comment by Ian — June 16, 2009 @ 12:59 pm
Two bottles of wine on Saturday, and the worst wedding disco in recorded history, have somehow conspired to make a new link in my mind here.
It occurs to me that the TA States are somehow tied up with McLuhan’s ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media. In fact, re-reading the post, ‘Participation Mystique’ now sounds /exactly/ like what McLuhan wrote about ‘cool’ media…
Comment by speedbird — June 29, 2009 @ 4:43 am
Is there any such thing as good wedding disco? ;)
I’m not sure I’d say “cool” media = participation mystique, wouldn’t “hot” media be the closer of the two? Maybe I still don’t quite grasp the concepts well enough though.
I would say that “hot” media is more a participation mystique, because it more directly involved the awareness with the media content. That is, the connection is stronger, less resistance in the wires, and the message comes through clearly.
But is is that the boundaries in “cool” media are more permeable? That the self-awareness must become more intimate with the media/message in order to understand it fully? In that case, I can definitely see how it would be more like a participation mystique. It’s as if “hot” media, by being so focused, doesn’t allow the awareness to forget that it is there.
In the directness of its communication, it is that much harder to forget that it is separate from your own awareness?
I think the TA states, and TA in general, is very McLuhan friendly field. I both cases, one is analyzing the pure awareness and it’s ways of interacting/mediating with, the world and other people.
If you’d care to go more into how you think they’re tied together, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Comment by Ian — July 1, 2009 @ 6:14 am
Perhaps I don’t really understand participation mystique!…
As I understand McLuhan:
A cool medium demands complete involvement from those involved with it, irrespective of whether they want to be completely involved or not. McLuhan says this sort of technology is what unites people as a tribe.
A hot medium has higher definition and information content than a cool medium, but in return can exist in the background, or as an object of study without involvement in depth. This is the kind of technology that advancing civilizations tend to produce.
McLuhan proposes that a sufficiently overheated medium can suddenly ‘flip’ to become something entirely new and cool once again.
*
This DJ played all those songs that you have to know the moves to. It was terrible, there was never more than half-a-dozen people up at once, zero participation. I found myself getting quite annoyed. Give me dance-round-the-handbag music any day ;-D
It struck me that this exclusive/excluding kind of music was a ‘hot’ form of disco, and that it wasn’t a good thing. Somehow the guy couldn’t elevate it to the level of being cool to do the Macarena. I don’t fully understand what was happening, but it seemed really important.
I have this idea floating round my head that computers have been stuck in this ‘hot’ state since about 1987, and that’s why the world is crying out for a Singularity to save us. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but that’s how it’s looking from over here. It’s weird…
Comment by speedbird — July 2, 2009 @ 3:50 am
Ill respond with more later, but I just found this:
http://stumblinghorse.tumblr.com/post/133977987/it-was-an-effort-to-systematize-inner-thought
which I wanted to make a note of for later.
“viewing objects as extensions of our subjective self”
Comment by Ian — July 2, 2009 @ 6:37 am
Anyway, participation mystique is, from that definition I linked to, a situation where the boundary that separates the self and an object completely breaks down. It’s where there is no difference between “me” and “that thing over there”. Which does sound very similar to “cool” media.
Cool media, as I’m coming to understand it, is something that invades awareness, because it requires that awareness in order for the message it carries to become present. In this sense, the boundary between “self” and “other” definitely breaks down (maybe not completely, but still).
Whereas in “hot” media, the message can exist even without the awareness’s involvement.
I like the idea because it suggests that in cool, less “developed” media, awareness must be given to the media for the message to be brought into being. Whereas hot media does not require as much awareness in order to be functional.
And it also make awareness something that settles over/into media, almost like a fog. In cool media, the media doesn’t communicate until the awareness gets into it, whereas “hot” media communicates regardless of how much “fog” it has.
Computers in a “hot” state… Yeah, too much heat and it might eventually not need us at all any more, which I guess if what the Singularity is all about. We want to get back in there, but we can’t, yet. Maybe that Ubiquitous Computing stuff or Augmented Reality stuff will “cool” things down a bit…
Comment by Ian — July 2, 2009 @ 11:58 am
> no difference between “me” and “that thing over there”
McLuhan writes about Narcissus and how people often think that Narcissus fell in love with his reflection because he thought it was Narcissus. In fact, the point of the myth is that Narcissus didn’t realise that his reflection in the mirror was himself. Similarly, we don’t in general realise that technologies are extensions of ourselves, and falsely fall in love with them.
> Cool media, as I’m coming to understand it, is something that invades awareness
This is very interesting and I think you’ve hit upon something here. Had to read that a few times to take it in! But I’m not sure about ‘invades’ exactly. It’s more like a cool medium /creates/ awareness, drags the mind into an aware state, whereas a hot medium /destroys/ awareness and indeed will function without it.
> Computers in a “hot” state
I get the feeling that the ‘break boundary’ where hot flips to cool is of critical importance. It amounts to understanding, realisation, amid an increasing sea of neutral symbols. A cool medium is truly iconic and cannot be broken down into its parts without destroying it. Branding is largely an exercize in attempting to fake iconic coolness in an overheated world. Occasionally, though, true cool comes along. I’m sure there’s something we can do to help crystallise the situation, I’m just not sure what.
Comment by speedbird — July 3, 2009 @ 3:14 am
In that case, it’s almost like the difference between the two is that as the media heats up, it creates more friction, and something has to give for the two to operate smoothly (and cooly) again…
Yeah, I’m with you there…
Comment by Ian — July 3, 2009 @ 11:06 am
I think it’s like the difference between /attention/ and /involvement/. I attend to my computer all the time, but it’s rare that it /involves/ me. All current trends in machine design seem to lead away from involvement.
Comment by speedbird — July 4, 2009 @ 9:16 am
Yeah, society as a whole seems to be tending that way… But why do our attention and our involvement not equal the same thing? Seems like they don’t, but that maybe they should…
Comment by Ian — July 6, 2009 @ 9:29 pm
Indeed…
An involving technology has an element of the self-contained about it. I get out what I put in, to a degree. The opposite is exemplified by the principle of constant remote updates of my computer system. There’s nothing to get involved with, cos the rules are constantly being changed from afar. All I can do is watch and put up with it.
Comment by speedbird — July 12, 2009 @ 2:41 pm
put up with = put to sleep by
yeah, I like the curve you’re outlining here. cool and participatory -> -> -> hot and taken-care-of-for-you (wholesale). But is that something due to the media itself, or is it just the way the media has adapted to those how use it?
How do we switch from seeing the world as a hot media to seeing it as a cold media? This is what we were talking about earlier in regards to each generation needing to relearn how to do things. And the fact that as societies develop, people seem to be less willing to maintain their underpinnings, perhaps because of the difficulty getting to them. Or possibly just the perceived difficulty, but that makes little difference as far as people actually doing anything. Perhaps these things have life cycles, just like anything else. “All conditioned things pass away”. So to, therefore, must all mediated things…
Comment by Ian — July 12, 2009 @ 4:15 pm
> How do we switch from seeing the world as a hot media to seeing it as a cold media?
Maybe we just have to go out and do the seeing. See what things are (cool) not what they’re trying to look like (hot).
There’s this (twisted) idea out there that a spirit will only be accepted if it looks like something it’s not.
Comment by speedbird — July 16, 2009 @ 8:30 am
This is great.
This sounds interesting too, but I’m not sure I completely understand. Can you help to explain it a little?
Comment by Ian — July 16, 2009 @ 11:57 am
Er… yeah, I guess that was a bit cryptic. :-)
By ‘spirit’ I mean an actual technology that’s not just a creation of the advertisers, that has a Name and approximates to some sort of higher truth. A path that takes us somewhere useful, a useful way-of-seeing.
The Computer is probably one of these.
So there’s a /massive/ industry out there dedicated to making computers look like as many other things as possible. Like desktops and offices. Like musical instruments. Like brains and people. But actually a computer isn’t any of these things in itself. Where’s the drive for computers to become all they can be? Sorely lacking in my opinion. Stopped shortly after Mandelbrot took Picasso’s line for a walk in a fractional dimension. Instead there’s just creeping onionism, layers of lagging, and increasing heat.
It goes beyond that too to cars with hidden engines, which look like washing machines. In fact everything seems to look like a washing machine these days. (Use New Formula Moonie, washes brains whiter! … as the guys from Spitting Image once said) And beyond washing machines to the drive we all feel to be what we’re not. Hence ‘spirit’ as a catch-all term.
Comment by speedbird — July 17, 2009 @ 4:32 am
I gotcha. Yeah, there’s a lot of truth in what you say. The desire to be other than we are, or to define something as “like this other thing you already know about”.
Basically, it seems like it’s all just an excuse to stop thinking, to stop growing.
But we already are what we are, and we already are always growing. So it’s all a big waste of time to pretend otherwise, eh?
Comment by Ian — July 19, 2009 @ 7:41 pm
Course it could just be that ‘What Things Really Are’ is actually for the most part *Really Scary*. Cities and Jet engines and Quantum Mechanics and The Bomb and such like. Stuff which graduates to the level of having a True Name, the kind people do Magic(k) with, is generally not to be pissed about with.
I used to say quite a lot that a lot of the wonders in the world were /hiding/ from us, and that they were hiding because they were scared.
Maybe They are We, and We are hiding.
Comment by speedbird — July 20, 2009 @ 5:56 am
Maybe cause we’re scared… We understand all that stuff, but we don’ have any idea what it means yet. And we just keep plugging ahead, maybe thinking that meaning’s not important, or maybe thinking it’ll just pop up on it’s own. That’s what all these end of the world/rapturesque scenarios are. Things stop changing, and we finally have a new meaning to rest everything on… But who’s to say if meaning’s ever going to be there unless we go looking for it? It’s something we need to consciously put into our actions, otherwise it’s not there.
Comment by Ian — July 20, 2009 @ 7:09 am
Why did you write “and I say fuck that”? (not the sentiment but the language used)
Comment by Anne — February 11, 2010 @ 7:25 am
I guess because the idea that my rational consciousness is absolutely sealed away from the root of my soul makes me very angry. It seems to be a fairly accurate description of a problem I’ve been struggling with most of my life. Since I was a kid, I sort of automatically absorbed an acceptance of this, but now as an adult, I both intuit and (more or less) logically can figure out that this is NOT true. And it makes me angry that I have all this previous programming that I have to break through in order to experience something that I know to already be true.
The anger gives rise to a highly emotional buildup, something that I feel is best expressed by the phrase “fuck that”.
But of course, my apologies if the language offends anyone.
Comment by Ian — February 11, 2010 @ 10:41 am
I think our rational minds, our left brain inner dialogue, language centers, symbolic culture, ego complex, etc. was seeded by an alien, race, fallen angels…something like that.
Its like farming. Domestication. We are a food source. We weren’t a food source as primates, so they gave us some stuff to develop our consciousness in order to feed on it.
Comment by Ted — February 11, 2010 @ 11:05 am
I think that kind of idea can work on many levels. If nothing else, the left brain language center is certainly a more cosmic, heavenly, removed perspective. The sense of self as separate from reality, the ego as something in need of constant feeding (as a closed system, its subject to entropy), culture as something somehow separate from nature. On the metaphorical plane, it makes for quite a powerful catchall.
But as for taking it literally, I’d have to say its not for me. It creates too much paranoia and anxiety to keep that in my reality tunnel. ;)
My preferred way of looking at it is something that needs developing, but which ultimately we need to step away from and reintegrate that sense of ego back into the sense of connection. We are god’s way of developing “me” organs. The ego is only a wrong turn if we don’t see it as a wave that’s reached its peak on one side and is now returning to the other.
(I use ego in this comment to mean sense of a separate self, not in the Freudian sense of the ego)
Comment by Ian — February 11, 2010 @ 11:47 am
The chatter stops. Yes, errant thoughts or feelings may arise, but they are given no attention, are immediately assimilated. We don’t say “I” to them, we “eat” them. They are food. If we don’t, they eat us, and we are taken down into the person again; we slip back into the static world of history, heroes and villains.
Comment by Ian — February 11, 2010 @ 12:35 pm
Its funny that after I typed this I went to Barnes and Noble found a book about Grey Aliens by a guy named Nigel Kerner that outlines this same premise in great detail.
I had had run across a similar idea, reading up on Magick and Alchemy about fallen angels “giving us their minds”
Comment by Ted — February 11, 2010 @ 6:12 pm