Bliss, Disquiet, Enlightenment, and False Satoris
You can read a prettier version of this on Medium. Please ‘Clap’ if you do.

You can read a prettier version of this on Medium. Please ‘Clap’ if you do.
You can read a prettier version of this on Medium. Please ‘Clap’ if you do.
We’re going to need a bigger boat.
We are hard-wired for deep empathy with our ‘brothers and sisters’…even brothers and sisters well outside narrow family connections.
We are hard-wired to hate and even kill anyone we feel threatens us and our people. Empathy freezes. Antipathy switches on.
The same neurotransmitter, oxytocin, is likely central to both reactions.
[[This is an experiment. Generally I write and edit and write and edit and edit some more and then publish. I’m working on this in public; parts will probably only be comprehensible to me while that’s happening..]]
I’ve been sporadically preoccupied with the big Why Bother questions since high school: What’s worth doing? Why bother to act? What justifies itself in the face of the imminent heat death of the universe. (Well, maybe not always the latter.)
This has lead through the decades to a slow motion analysis of the meaning of meaning.
My initial thoughts were shaped by three books I found in the paperback rack in my father’s drug store when I was a high school freshman: Alan Watt’s Psychotherapy East and West, RD Laing’s Politics of Experience, and Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
It should be obvious from what follows which one of the three had the biggest influence.
I will still argue that Jung is inappropriately dismissed as unscientific. His basic mechanism of the Self, particularly as elaborated by his collaborator Erich Neumann, is an auto-regulatory system, an explicitly compensatory mechanism, that kicks in when the personality becomes lopsided and fore-grounds and integrates needed but excluded and/or under-developed aspects of the person.
With that introduction. Here goes….
Life is not a matter of holding good cards but of playing a poor hand well. – Robert Lewis Stevenson
Paragraph form: Meaning is a human activity. We act as if it is a discovery and, although it presents itself as found, it is built not found. Meaning is fundamentally a social construct and, if all goes smoothly, it provides reasonably stress free guidance to the individual. If that fails, the individual is forced back upon whatever resources they have or can discover.
Outline form: Starting Set: Meaning.
Paragraph form: Apparently clashing values are a problem only if they lead to contradictory impulses to action. There are often schisms through our belief systems. Some derive from personal biography, some from our culture, some from the nature of our species or any embodied being in a context of forward moving time and physical space. It is only when we find ourselves actively on both sides of a schism, that we are challenged. It is only then that we are given the opportunity to seek/forge deeper meaning. There is, of course, no guarantee that our solutions will be totally successful.
Outline form: Contradiction:
(to follow – Extrinsic (tribal): [[under construction]])
My own tale of a life disrupted and rebuilt and the roots of my fascination with meaning, myth and story are told on my story-trading site, OutInUnder:
My Life in Stories: Intro to the ‘Story of Stories’ Conversation
Useable (share, remix, etc.) but with attribution