I may make a series of posts on this. As my understanding–standing under would mean what I see overhead, I suppose, what covers me and defines me–evolves, what I see are endless seeming tugs that we call opposites, that we have to balance to live well.
Imagine two force vectors going in opposite directions. Balance would look like the one going to the right curving upwards, and then back. The one going to the left curves downwards and then back, both of them following the universal principle of balance, which embeds their opposite within them, and brings them back.
You get the Yin and Yang symbol, and one energized in continual motion. Imagine that symbol not as static, but as continually spinning within approximate bounds, and spinning now a bit to the left, now right, now up, now down, now forward, now back. And conceptually it should be three dimensionally. I can’t see that in my mind. Perhaps the third dimension is Time, although that is normally the 4th.
I am speaking out loud, saying words whose inner reality I cannot fully see.
But this is a Bidirectionality, too, isn’t it? Sometimes you see something then say it; sometimes you say something then see it. Both are needed. Perhaps a proper balance is MOSTLY seeing then saying, but you still need the other represented on the scale.
Hegel and then Marx spoke of Dialectics, of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. Practically, Marxists at least think of Synthesis as the victory of Thesis over its Nemesis.
That makes this a destructive, unbalanced mode of thought. It seeks the opposite of a dynamic balance, and in terms of FEELING this is perhaps why the static, unchanging hellhole becomes the reality. Look at Cuba. It’s like a Time Bomb hit and froze it in 1962. Time passes, obviously, but little evolves. Fear has transfigured the land, and turned a spontaneous, largely happy people into quiet people, frightened people, submissive people, who eat their beans and rice if they can get it, and while away their days with little to do, to hope for, or to live for.
I woke this morning thinking of the Bidirectionality that one should always pursue the path of courage and duty, however one conceives this. The balancing consideration is that we all have limits.
Myself, I would have thought I would be farther along emotionally by now, but then I get in my feelings to what I felt as an infant, and it becomes obvious to me it is a fucking miracle that I am alive physically at all, and an even larger miracle that I am emotionally alive, that I did not disappear fully into a fully neurotic intellectualism; that I did not become completely cold, mean, detached, and to what I will call an English extent, ruthless while appearing kind. That is a common malady there, I think. They are a cold people, and as I have said before, that is why they took over so much of the world.
But I think I will make more posts on these things. It’s of course not a new discovery–the Yin/Yang goes back at least to the 1960’s, right?–but as I have said often, sometimes putting new words on things–repainting them–allows me to see subtle contours of a larger reality that were previously invisible to me.
And here is another one: sometimes what we are “seeing” we are projecting. There is a Bidirectionality between what is going out, and what is coming in.
I suppose the balance, the ideal, is projecting out possibilities, and allowing in what is actually there.
The opposite, then, is projecting out a delusional reality, of seeing only what you want to see, which is not there; and denying the existence of everything that does not match your desires.
That is more or less exactly what most Leftists do. To call it a mental illness is to ignore how much choice there is, or at least could be, in all this. They are habits of perception, chosen continually.
Habit and freedom is another Bidirectionality, or Habit and Spontaneity. I don’t think any of us could function without habits, but at the same time if we are fully defined by habits we are functionally ants. As I have said before, habits are functionally acquired instincts.
That will do for now. My little brain has been busy, but I just haven’t been feeling like writing.