It is of course a commonplace that we forget most of our dreams. Most people, in my understanding, have three periods of REM sleep a night, and most of us are doing well if we can remember one dream.
The last two nights I have been having dreams sort of “on the other side” of this giant block standing in the way of my awareness I have just become aware of. This itself constitutes an expansion of awareness.
And to the point of this post’s title, I last night had a dream of a contentious but non-violent assembly, in which all the parts sought to negotiate a modus vivendi, a peace.
So often we have dreams of people chasing us, of falling, of a gap between what we want and what we get; between comfort and experienced reality. We fear. We fight.
But is the logical end of psychological growth, of psychological integration not more or less the development of harmony among our various “parts”, between our shadow and our normally acknowledged self? Is the logical end not a sort of unity, which can become a unity of purpose–a true unity, not one in which some major but unrecognized “self” dug deep in our unconscious is constantly creating friction and conflict?
And it occurred to me that there is a homology between the negotiations, the mutual recognitions and acceptances, necessary for individual harmony, and that of the democratic process which–when unmolested by radicals refusing to join into the social fold, the social field–ends with a deeper peace than would have been possible in a situation of coercion.
Democracy, self rule, negotiations between people who differ in values in lifestyles, true Liberalism: these are tools for social growth. To the extent we can grant the existence of something called “Society”, it is built in this way, and destroyed by the authoritarianism of the Socialists, who, having failed to individuate, having failed to achieve any degree of personal psychological integration, see in the realm of abstraction–of intellectual violence to reality–the only possible solution to their mental problems, and who thus make the primary reality something which does not even exist, the Society.
Buddha famously posited Anatta, or Anatman, which is that the self does not exist. This is self evidently true, if we want to think of the self as a unitary, unevolving, block. But with individuals you at least have a singular body, and a singular mind, even if it changes. With regard to society you don’t even have this. It is an utter fiction.
We might say that growth is decreasing the number of selves by increasing the overall complexity of the Self, the underlying informational richness.
Likewise, social growth that matters is increasing diversity of behavior–which is something Socialists actually detest, even if they gladly accept social deviance because it acts as an acid which helps to dissolve remaining non-ironic cultural traditions.
When it is said that Leftism is a mental disorder, it truly is. It represents an emotional inability to handle complexity, a lack of capacity to integrate primitive emotions like anger and fear, and a following behavioral rigidity tied closely to the process of rejecting reality by interacting only with reified lies.
Do you think when he looks out of the window of his eyes that Obama sees actual people? Of course not. That is how he can joke about murdering them.