On the Importance of Little Things and Thought Patterns.

On the Importance of Little Things and Thought Patterns.

 

It is pretty much agreed upon today by members of both the scientific community and the philosophical community that there is no “outside world” which could be described as, as Philip K Dick put it, “exist[ing] when [we] cease to believe in it.” Heisenberg’s allegations that, observing the process, we change it can now be applied not only to physics with some degree of what the modern man can call Certainty, but to the psyche of the individual as well. It is generally agreed by a school of thought known as Correlationism that there is nothing in the world as we perceive it that does not depend upon our thoughts, and so the New Age way of thinking which seems to suggest that our thinking can alter the Universe seems more pardonably optimistic (if it is, in fact, optimistic) and even less far-fetched. Each human being seems to be at the center (or somewhere) of his or her OWN, Personal Universe. Multiverse Theory may be just a modern way of making reference to the experience of another individual’s mystery, for in the wake of Rationalism and all dogmas that predated it we lost a sense of the Other Human as being truly an alien organism, if not an entirely different planet or World of experience. Yet all of the different Paths seem to be converging now on one truth: That each of us is a unique Universe, by any definition of the Universe that we can make with any serious consideration free from dogma or laziness, and that each interaction with another person is shared not within one Cosmos but between two dramatically different ones.

 

Given this awareness, the existentialist assertion of Individual Responsibility becomes increasingly apparent. If What I Think determines not only how I see the World but also how it (by any philosophically sensible definition of World) is, then I have to be especially careful in what thought I entertain. After all, if Multiverse Theory is not only true but applicable to interpersonal relations, my thoughts will in turn affect the entire Universe of which ever Other person I come into contact with.

 

Given this, the naive notion that one should be more wary of the “Outside world” than the sanctity of one’s own thoughts holds no further merit. To make the argument that one is too victimized, either by socioeconomic conditions or personal tragedy, to “spend time thinking (or meditating) about something”, becomes a blind withdrawal from responsibility. This can be understood theoretically without even any need to pay attention to the psychosomatic effects of things like poetry and moods.

 

Given all of this, Little Things become exceedingly important. Where our fairly medieval conventional approach to psychology would always describe Attention to Minute Detail as a neurosis, it is not always so. In fact, to make that dogmatic blanket-statement dooms the patient who may suffer from something like, for instance, a Negative Anima.

 

The functioning of the Negative Anima in men tends to make them attribute excessive and pointless attention to detail which escalates into an Obsession. The way that many men deal with this is by constructing a very patriarchal ego that tries to repress the Negative Anima by condemning all attention to detail as neurotic. This is what the psychologists oftentimes mistakenly reinforce.

 

Yet it is precisely this dogmatic attitude that, whilst keeping the negative Anima “in”, metaphorically speaking, keeps any chance of salvation Out. The way to cure a Negative Anima is to redirect its energy to a Constructive Anima. In this instance, attention to detail becomes not a compulsion but a delight, and sanity (as it is defined as Cognitive Peace) is restored. Yet the very distinction between compulsion and delight would be exactly the kind of minute distinction that the patriarchal guardian ego would reject.

 

The basic presupposition of the dogmatic modern psychologists is that one can cure an excessive attention to detail by drawing the individual’s attention to the “Bigger Picture” and the “Future”. Yet both of these promises are philosophically and spiritually ridiculous. To claim that certain things or thoughts (and remember that things and thoughts may in fact be the same thing, as Alan Watts points out when he explains that the words “think” and “thing” share a root) are “more important” than others is incredibly dogmatic and lacking in constructive seriousness because they represent a regression to what philosophers call Dogmatic Metaphysics. To attribute anything close to an “absolute” value to a certain object of consciousness or state of subjectivity (the two of which appear to be the same to the correlationist philosopher) is to presuppose that there is a metaphysical dimension wherein “Things are definitely and Absolutely important”.

 

Zen teaches us to overcome this neurosis by drawing our attention again to little things. This is also the art of many forms of poetry and many other forms of Art. It is also what is done in the process of reintegrating the Constructive Anima that I have hitherto described.

 

If one defines Sanity by what appears Important, one runs a tremendous risk of a break with the Unconscious. If, for instance, I define Sanity as “what gives me a sense of success”, then I cease to feel myself to be sane when I inexplicably fail to feel successful. Suppose that I am a mathematician. This I have attributed importance to (my occupation) and have thus learned to derive a sense of Success from the proper execution of a mathematical problem.

 

Suppose that one day I awake and find that I can no longer calculate, WITH CERTAINTY, the space of time between two events.

Suppose that I saw an old friend that I had not seen in four years. I see her once in 2013, The second-to-last time that I had seen her was around the same time of year in 2009.

 

FORMALLY, I have not seen her in four years. Yet, all of a sudden, I begin to question whether or not this is true. This is because, inexplicably at first, I can no longer feel the sense of SUCCESS that I have conditioned myself to feel at the proper execution of a mathematical problem.

 

Having identified my ego as that of a mathematician, I am naturally very insulted. I begin to repeatedly do all kinds of figurative mental gymnastics to prove to myself that 2013 minus 2009 equals 4. I scour my mind for any lapse in sequence. This is difficult, of course, for I am essentially constructing a house from mud in a swamp and then trying to enter it while it is all ready in a process of decay.

 

I begin to think: I must be going mad. How can I not make this simple calculation? How can I, a mathematician, fail to do the arithmetic that a five-year-old child could do? And then I should begin to wonder if, in fact, a five-year-old child could complete such a simple task of arithmetic. And I would begin to obsess over that.

 

What I may find is that, because any calculation requires time, time is working against me in this instance. If I cannot complete the calculation automatically because there is no Pavlovian sense of success to indicate that I have been successful, I have to resort to a process which may have several steps:

 

1.       The envisioning of the number “2013”

2.       The equation of this number with the second event.

3.       The envisioning of the number “2009”.

4.       The equation of this number with the first event.

5.        

a.       The counting of all of the integers between 2009 and 2013. AND

b.      The addition of “1” to this sum of these integers.

OR

6.       The subtraction of 2013 from 2009 (somewhat of an automatic process).

7.       And finally, the attribution of this numerical sum (four) to the length of time between event one and event two.

The problems here are exceedingly subtle. In the first place, each step of this process is an event in and of itself. The time it takes for me to go from step 1 to step 7 may occupy several seconds. During that time, I may all ready have forgotten what the first step was. This may easily happen in a situation wherein this sequence of thoughts is only one of perhaps an infinite multitude of possible paths to arrive at “four”. The awareness of these paths, coupled with a basic sense of humility, should suggest that I have no way of knowing by the arrival at step 7 which path I had taken. I may have accidentally repeated a step or skipped a step, but I would not know, because memories are fallible.

 

The predicament could be described by Zen Buddhists as a situation of your innermost mind playing a trick on your rational mind. It can be described more “innocently” in this koan: I last saw my friend in 2013. The second-to-last time that I saw her, it was 2009. Yet, in between, four years have not passed. How is that so?

 

If our mathematician contemplated this long enough, he should come to a sudden realization that in Zen is called satori: Time is an illusion. Your feelings towards your friend have not changed over the course of this time, and so all calculations are unimportant. Because they are unimportant, they are meaningless. Because they are meaningless and abstract, they are not Real.

 

In this case, for all intents and purposes, 2013 – 2009 does NOT = 4.

 

The Unconscious, as the seat of the Buddha mind, knows this, of course. It is for this reason that, when we are faced with the impending annihilation of a set of conscious values, one of the earliest symptoms is the withdrawal of our conventional, conditioned responses to things and thoughts.

 

In the absence of a sense of Success on the part of the mathematician, he or she is left with an empty vessel: A Consciousness of things that have no meaning. In such a situation wherein a proper calculation is of equal merit to a miscalculation, all sense of a “proper” calculation dissolves. Anything goes, and yet nothing goes.

 

Clinging excessively to a dogmatic idea of Sanity may therefore be, in fact, the perpetuation of a neurosis. Definitionally, a neurotic is one who does not know that she is neurotic. Yet it is possible to know that one is neurotic if one knows that one is neurotic but misattributes the cause of the neurosis to certain faculties. In this instance, the neurotic tries so hard “not to be crazy” that she in turn behaves in a neurotic manner. If we are to accept the popular definition of insanity as the repetition of the same action with the expectation of different results, she would match our description perfectly. She would insist on ignoring the will of the Unconscious and repeatedly exercising Will to repeat the same thought experiment in an infinite number of its possible variations. Her calculations would never yield anything REAL, by any definition, because the sense of Success that had hitherto defined Reality and therefore Sanity for her has been withdrawn, lying outside of her conscious control and in the domain of the Unconscious.

The only way that such a neurotic may come to health by her own choice would be to accept “insanity” as she had defined it. By renouncing a dogmatic view of thought and the World, as well as the relation of one to the other, she has freed herself from an excessive dependency upon one way of thinking and therefore one form of Universe.

 

Dm.A.A.