Virtue

I have been having some interesting dreams.  Many of my most useful dreams involve contemporary myths, like Harry Potter, and comic book characters.  I think in our modern world we do not value sufficiently deep symbols. The need for them is profound, and people like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Joanne Rowling, who create them, serve this need.  The “nerds” who thrive on their true fictions are precisely those who in other ages might have been priests and priestesses, the keepers of sacrificial, ritual orders.

Without getting into the details of last night, I will say that we all need to grasp that even the bad guys are us too.  I found myself in a fight last night with a force I could not defeat.  The good guys lost, and I chose death rather than submission, consciously, after thinking about it in the dream.

Then I woke up, and got to thinking about it.  What I think I chose was preferring the death of willful ignorance, to the conscious inclusion of my own defects, which include arrogance, self importance, laziness, and yes entitlement. I am what I hate.

And I look at myself, and I preach–that is the word–often about the Left as the cult of conscious resentment.  And I resent them.  I am what I hate.

Pema Chodron talks about how interacting with people can be very useful because other people will show you, in your reactions, everything you hate about yourself, what parts of your self are unprocessed, in conflict with the facts of life, in conflict with the destiny of peace, of accommodation with the realities of life, which include death, danger, loss, grief, confusion, and the need for frequent if not continual effort and work.

Isolating oneself is a means, perhaps, of learning more about oneself, but it is also an avoidance of all the “triggers” which we encounter in others which create unwanted, painful emotions.

And it feels to me that the process of “building” virtue is really a process of subtraction.  As an example, you cannot make yourself humble.  You can merely act humble, and suppress from conscious awareness all impulses arising from vanity.  You relabel them.  You see them, but make them into positives through a process of rationalization.

The process of enabling actual, useful, honest humility–and this is a worthy virtue–is that of slowly eliminating the NEED to feel superior.  Every virtue has a countervailing vice which arises from a lack of some sort.  If we are cruel, it is because we feel unloved and unlovable.  If we are covetous, it is because we are conscious of a sense of material, and thus social, inferiority.  We want the things we feel will stimulate within us the feelings we actually need.

As someone with what gets called an “addictive personality”, what I feel is that addiction is really that process by which we divert our feelings and sense of self away from all the things we feel we cannot face and process and OWN.  Almost everything in life is either addiction or truth.

Addictions are all strong feelings that overwhelm the awareness of the weak, subtle feelings.  They are the manias, the passions, the “highs” of various sorts that people seek out to trap themselves in places where what they fear cannot find them, cannot reach their consciousness.

You can be addicted to interacting with people and still feel alone.  Many people nowadays are.  “Social” media make it easy.

But you can also be addicted to “Goodness”, to “virtue”.  I am increasingly inclined to view the whole edifice of Christianity, as it has developed since shortly after Christ’s death and resurrection, as a monster which feeds the vice of vanity, the “easy out” of submission in lieu of personal growth and responsibility, and the corruption of the natural impulse towards personal empowerment into that of political and even spiritual–so it is claimed, no doubt spuriously–dominion.  I have said this before, but I don’t feel Christ would recognize anything of himself or his teaching in the modern church.