People will tell

People will tell

Image of painting by By Felix Nussbaum (http://www.felix-nussbaum.de) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, 'The Secret' 1939.

I am no expert in psychology, in fact, I am just getting to know my own psyche, so I guess you could say I’m in the element-ology phase, just stretching out my brain muscle, still picking up the pieces and seeing how things fit together. Sure there's some loose bolts rolling around, but I'm sure they go to something. That’s not to say I’m crazy, given the fact that there does seem to be a lot of fragmentary pieces floating around my mind at all times (words and phrases) I’ve accepted that it is because I am a writer (private poet), ergo, I guess I am crazy. Who else besides writers talk to themselves all day and not ever concern themselves with the connection between money and survival? 

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom." -Roald Dahl

Since I have begun with my brief psychotic confession, my subjective experiences have shown that if allow a person the room (space, time, blog) to confess, they will be honest and even the most critically judgmental upon themselves, getting to the heart of the matter, their own matter. After reading “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” by Carl Jung, I was surprised at the still relevant (published 1961), and striking similarity in human parable of today. In his day, Jung not only witnessed but understood at a deeper than outward behavior level the complexities of our brains and the anti-matter that is often the cause of the matter.

 "The assimilation of the fundamental insight that psychic life has two poles still remains a task for the future." -Carl Jung

Part of his technique in isolating or bringing to light the 'anti-matter', things unseen, is to listen to dreams and converse with the subconscious-which is bordering crazy, right? In this book, Jung also recounts many case stories as factual, scientific examples to support his various philosophies and summations as to the roots of the human paradox that is the mind/soul relationship. Jung, like Frued went out on a limb on the tree of knowledge and did not care if the bough broke or if society became rocked. In order to get closer to Truth it is necessary to slough off all the other stuff that's been piled on top of it. One cannot blame him for summing up certain events or cases into blanket diagnosis not of sexual derivation like Freud but favored the conception that like Kierkegaard the Truth or all knowledge is within us and it is his "job" to give birth to these revelations or understandings. While Jung strives to maintain impartiality, ignoring his own experiences as to the key to interpretation, in fact that is one thing he seems (literally on the page anyway) to try to avoid. Yet just like Freud and his many patients, we often become or create the thing we fear most. In Jung's own case it seems his empirical beliefs about the struggle between light and darkness are not to be cured, or treated, but understood and manipulated.

"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong."

Image by John Bauer, 1912 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

When my son was young and using his laptop unsupervised, pre-puberty, he made the fatal error of visiting an inappropriate website on a dare (we did not have parental controls established) and ended up giving all the computers on our home network a virus, it was an expensive error in judgement. I decided to let him punish himself, and he was wrathful, banning himself from the computer for a year and he still remembers the act more than the punishment.

No comment.

There has been much judgement being passed on the transsexual transformation of Bruce Jenner in the media, and he/she put it out there to be judged. I have no opinion or moral judgement about it, but was struck by a clip show where Diane Sawyer, an interviewer vixen, asks him if there’s anything she has forgotten to or failed to ask-he gladly reveals the most intriguing part of the story for the world and quite shockingly himself, his response was something like “Am I going to be okay?” There it is. The heart of the matter, the truth, the confession. His fear, our fear.  If Diane would have asked him, ‘is something wrong with you? Are you okay? Will you be okay? ‘-by her own instigation the answer would have been shielded by an armor of self-defense which is often translated into silence or anger.  Unfortunately, pangs of truth are like poison-tipped arrows and can travel past any moat.

I am guilty of this. My moat of self-defense is silence, yes, the silent treatment, which means that conversation I told you about in my head gets louder with no outlet, and the only way past the anger is to speak, the mouth the words, break the ice, and melt the ice crystals that have begun to form from anger in my heart.

Image courtesy of NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, 'Ice melting in Greenland', 2013.

We all have work to do on ourselves, some think this is primarily our external selves, our bodies, social status, or it is an internal work in progress, yet we are all joined by the need to ‘work’ and seek greater value in our life. As people change and grow it can seem like you no longer understand them, this is also true with yourself, you can drift apart, but if you just listen, or ask sincerely, “what would you like me to know, what should I know about you” it shows you are aware someone else’s journey is as crazy and lonely as the rest of ours.  When you let others confess whatever they want they will likely learn something about themselves. When you allow punishment to be judged by the perpetrator their penance, or self-inflicted consequence is always more severe (this requires the understanding or right versus wrong and the installation of some working moral compass). When you listen to the confessions of others you are actually teaching them about themselves.

Image By Kusakabe Kimbei [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

“People are only influenced in the direction the want to go and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wish to proceed in that direction.” -T.S. Eliot