Gabriel Raam
Essays
(c) All rights are reserved to the author and the publisher.
Contents
Introduction by Professor Shlomo Giora Shoham[1].
Part one: The approach
Preface: Observation from afar
Prolog: the mysterious life
Part two: The gate of knowledge
Preface to the gate of knowledge
The mysterious life of reality
To dream life
The important things
The antithesis as a friend
To be natural in the spirit level
Adjustment to life. (”Let it be”)
The princess of sweet fantasies
Self-deception
Romanticism
On spiritual mediocrity
The price of compromise
From historical perspective
3 Educational essaes:
1. The established education
2. The dominant education
3. The authentic (organic) education
3 social definitions:
1. The social animal and individuality:
1. The sick society
2. 8 social definitions
The one and only choice
Work and learning (or the pure learning)
The great power of the status quo
The pure value of the postmodern art
The priest and the prophet
To be up, to be down
From a dead past to an alive present
On riot, calamity and going wild
Vive Le Bourgeoisie
The art of prose and poetry – the truth in a lie
Interpersonal communication series:
Games people play
On the magnetic dynamic in communication
The circular nature of the authentic communication
The hidden worlds in interpersonal communication
Relations of body and soul:
The human in the dimensions of: body, space and time
Out body – a resonance bell
The body language of the soul
The existential change
On late response
The guide for tracking the soul in the foreign land of existence
The real nature of difficulties and hardship
On total questions
Part three: the gate of the soul
Preface to the soul’s gate
In the spirit kingdom
Transudation
The dove-man
Spirit and matter
Me and God
Peace
In praise of the cry
The art of living
On real wisdom
The distress of the ember
Something is missing
Amphibians
And what is between
The way of the warrior
In praise of warriorship
The bottom line
The secret of out brother the lonely ranger
The void
On inner conflict
To dream reality – an eulogy
“Sad Lisa”
The art of finishing
The selling of the soul
What are they talking about?
From shock to shock
Part four: The existence gate
Preface to the existence gate
The transience of human existence
Life is passing – A
Life is passing – B
All passes
Life aren’t but a train
Life as a drive
Life and the missed opportunities
About the unbearable quivering of the soup bubble
Drunken youth
Determined old age
Life as a corridor
In praise of philosophy
The void a death ambassador
Madam History
The death
Here is laying our bodies
We who are about to die
Out and away
Some presence
The end of the road
The fantasy life of reality
People are singing
The three levels of time
The illusions and ups and downs, of age and time
The human and the issue of free time
To live life
Our life
The turning of a man into a wolf
Shell shock
Towards war
Let there be sadness
On worry and anxiety
Death and the meaning of life
Sayings
Bibliography
Introduction
It is an honor and a pleasure to open this important, interesting and deep composition of Gabriel Raam. This is a spiritual development biography of a thinker and feeler. Gabriel is presenting first to us the abyss gaping between the group, the other, the oppressive collective and the established systems and between the sensitivity, depth and pain of the individual that gets broken on the forceful walls of the establishment – is what is the essence of his suffering. This struggle could end in the despair of the individual, laying at the bottom of the achievement pyramid, when the Sisyphus stone is crashing him until his helplessness.
The hope gushing out of Gabriel’s important composition stems from the possible dialectic between the individual and the daily routine and the powerfulness of the systems which surround us.
The individual, in his desperate endeavor for authenticity, could experience a revelation of grace and turn it into a creative experience. As long as we are not anchoring on abstract goals, which recedes from us as a Fata Morgana, but are aspiring for authenticity in every moment of our existence, we can get out of the strangling grasp of the absurd. Gabriel shows us the possibility for the possibility of the existence of the authentic man even whiten the filth of the stonefly effect of the collective others.
The essays of Gabriel come together to a life teaching, that anyone who adopts it could find in it an escape route which is unique and special for him and for him only – from the corrupt forcefulness of the establishment. From this respect Gabriel’s wisdom is like the manna in the desert; each one finds in it flavors which are fit for his uniqueness.
Professor Shlomo Giora Shoham. Tel Aviv University.
First part: The approach
Preface: views from afar
“Give me but a firm spot on which to stand, and I shall move the earth.”
― Archimedes. The Works of Archimedes.
This firm spot would have allowed us a different, wide and realer look of reality. A look that is not possible as long as we are sunk in reality, involved and being part of it.
We are prevented physically from going out of the borders of our reality, but we have got the ability ‘to visit’ someplace without being in it physically, an ability to reach the Archimedes-firm spot which is located out of our reality.
With the power of thought, which is limitless, we can ‘visit’ our past districts, ‘to travel’ to far places, or place ourselves in in a view-point outside of ourselves, from which we can have a view of our self. The thought as an ambassador of the spirit – is the most experienced, efficient and unlimited tourist that we have, it doesn’t need visas, passenger permit, or flying tickets – only freedom.
On the book:
The book is made from essays, which are divided into three gates, and every gate constitutes a central position approach.
About two thirds of the book are viewpoints, trying to examine issues in our life from afar. The heart of the matter could only be seen from afar. Too often we get lost to and in, ourselves, being too close, too attached, too identified with what is happening to us. Without this firm external spot, we are likened to a spider that gets entangled in his own webs.
The position of the spot from which we view our life, determines the size of the cage in which our life is taking place in.
The beliefs positions and conditionings, we chose for ourselves, could be the bars (of this cage) or a launching platform aimed at a greater, bigger, and wider – reality. For the only cage is the way we see our life; from being lost in it, or from being far away.
The subjects of the essays are many and varied, and they deal in the different aspects of human life: communication, old age, education, history, learning and working, youth, wisdom, time, death, and the like.
All the essays are interwoven, and together they constitute a kind of drawing, which is the world view of the author, and this world-view constitutes together a map, or an arrow, of a spiritual world-view.
What is spirituality which is the spirit of the book?
A person being fired at night, can assume what is the source of the shooting just by its source and where the flash of light came from. So is the case about spirituality; all that could be said about her is the clues, that give a faint view of its direction.
Thich Nhat Hanh said: “A finger pointing at the moon is not
the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon”.
In the same way, the essays here are a finger pointing towards spirituality, or the domain of high consciousness.
The book is made from essays, collected into three gates; the first two – knowledge and the soul are an attempt to look at our life from spiritual perspective.
In order to discover in them the sparks of holiness that got spread and swallowed by the kelipot[2], (in Kabala).
The third gate, is looking at life from life itself, as the naked existence is by itself.
The 3bgates of the book are:
- The knowledge gate: This is a position looking at our life through thinking and the mind, coming to lighten sides of our life by various philosophical approaches. The affinity of this gate is of research and learning.
- The soul’s gate: this another observation point, looking at our life through the heart and the inner life. The iffinity of the gate is poetic.
- The exisitential gate: this gate is located on the bottom line of our life and not from the high towers and hopes.
The view is existential, relating to the three lower stairs of human existence: Anxiety by: Kierkegaard. Martin Heidegger: Average Everydayness. And the Absurd, by: Abler Kami. To wrestle with them and suck out of them – meaning. The affinity here is existential.
Prolog: the mysterious life
An Axiom: to relate to something as a matter of fact, means, not to relate to him at all.
Hearing doesn’t internalize the content of what is being said, it mainly gets the tone of voice (whisper or shout). Looking doesn’t internalize the inner dimension of things, just takes a snapshot of the outside of things.
Only through listening and observation it is possible to internalize the content and the inner dimension of impressions from the world. In a similar way, in order to live it is not enough to exist, there is a need for intensification of the experience of inner perception.
Usually, we just look, we don’t observe. We hear but we don’t listen, we are alive and not alive.
So, we are looking for an explosion of experience, than we might feel, for a while, that we are alive.
When I was about 7 years old, I traveled with my father to Haifa harbor, to welcome my mother returning from overseas. In the evening before I ate, for the first time in a restaurant, and for the first time we entered our room in a hotel. From our window I saw the sea (also for the first time), something was rising in my throat, I turned to my father and asked him: “Daddy, are we having fun right now”?
In all of us lives this child and even at 40 the child could look through the adult eyes, looking for the magic that happens in the passing moment. As we remember it; the first kiss, the first time we saw a movie, and so on.
Would the magic happen in the next going out to a restaurant? In the next hug? In the next trip abroad? In entering a new apartment? In a romantic affair out of the marriage, in next morning?
At a certain stage in our life – the memory about the possibility of a life which is not taken for granted- gets foggy and our conviction that this possibility actually exists – gets weaker. The dull blurred hue of here and now becomes fixed and overshadows the initial magical experiences.
Experiences which are powerful, clear and exposing – are perceived now as threatening or scary, and our habits also distances us further from the magical experience. We just hear, just look, just to exist. And here we abandoned the 7 years old child in Haifa harbor, which is in all of us.
My claim in this book is, that life did not move away from us, it is us that moved away, and so we have to look for them under etiquettes and the routine dust, for real life is hidden from sight, looking at us, secretly, in silence in mystery.
*
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
― Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies
Part two: The gate of knowledge
Preface to the gate of knowledge
All the progress obtained by our cerebral effort consists in the ascertaining of material facts by ridiculously imperfect instruments, which make up in a certain degree however for the inefficiency of our organs. Every twenty years some unhappy enquirer, who generally dies in the attempt, discovers that the atmosphere contains a gas hitherto unknown, that an imponderable, inexplicable, unqualifiable force can be obtained by rubbing a piece of wax on cloth; that among the innumerable unknown stars, there is one that has not yet been noticed in the immediate vicinity of another which has … Well, what about it? Our diseases are due to microbes? Very well. But where do those microbes come from? And what about their diseases? And the suns, whence do they come? We know nothing, we understand nothing, we can do nothing, we guess nothing. We are shut up, imprisoned in ourselves…
GUY DE MAUPASSANT: NOTEBOOK, APRIL 7, l888
Reading those lines of Maupassat’ I remember what Gurdjieff had to say about human beings[3], and indeed their great achievements – sky scrapers, airplanes, satellites, autonomic cars, G.P.S. T.V. brain surgery, heart and lungs transplants, and more… – are achieved by sleeping people, and if all this was achieved by sleeping man, what achievements could be reached – if all this huge investments, were done by wakened human beings?
The mysterious life of reality
Part A
The commercials industry presents figures, pictures, sights and happenings – in such a way, that gives them a kind of artificial magic, false romanticize, idyllic relationship. Through the advertisement filter- an airport becomes a lively place, where people come and go to their magical life and destiny. In this commercials even a supermarket may seem to be a colorful heaven, to see all this tempting staff, and just to reach out for it and it is yours.
In this world, where an artificial glitter is surrounding all, nothing is itself, but his image in the eyes of his imagination (every product is a one way ticket towards happiness).
But not only in commercials, had all this begun in our mind, in the private commercials that we concoct from the raw materials of the daily routine. A concoct of a different reality, mysterious, magical, sending a provoking finger towards the ends of our longing, hoping, daydreaming. There we weave chapters of life in our emotional imagination the following: breakfast in bed, a good looking woman or man, a flourishing garden, city lights in the rain, music of Bach while traveling in a car, picture of the sky scrapers, a shelf full of books in a bookstore, a freshly squeezed orange juice at dawn in the country and so on.
All this is appearing for a moment in our imagination and plants a hop to implication of it sometime, somehow.
Usually, there is a huge gap between our ‘now life’ and what this pictures plant in our mind. A gap in which there is a longing.
What is this imagined reality? What is this Fata Morgana? And what creates them?
Part B
Life is not like this, it is what it is. Sky scrapers are tall building in a busy city. The other, without fantasies is just another human being. A breakfast in bed is the same meal, just horizontal… things around us has got their own being, which has got no relation to the hallucinatory way through which we see life.
The conditioning way in which we see life is a result of the raping of reality by non-actualized cravings and desires that are cruise as ghosts at the edges of our consciousness.
In order to absorb the real inner reality of things – there is a need to silence the subjective and dominant voices, and instead, to listen to the inner being of things.
Only in this way we can absorb the real, unconditioned magic; they as they are themselves. Truth inhabits the inner being of what there is, with no connection to our personal perceptions and conditioning. We can dance around the Golden Calf of our subjectivity, or allow our consciousness to magnetize itself around what is real, for itself and by itself.
In the end, how come we were convinced that our non actualized life can be the central axis of the world around it. Only the purest levels of reality itself can and should be such axis, an axis that our consciousness could turn around it and suck from it its mystery.
*
The world is incomprehensible. We won’t ever understand it; we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.
Carlos Castaneda
To dream life
An axiom: we don’t live life – we dream our version of it.
People get lost in life; dreaming about the past, the future, but are rarely present in the ‘here and now’. The daydreaming are a fantasy about a better realty.
The orange juice (from the previous essay) – in the eyes of the daydreamer, is a symbol for youth, freshness, health, correct lif – but is a fantasy.
When person thinks of a glass of orange juice (or anything else) – he is thinking about the fantasy representation of the orange juice glass. When a woman thinks about a man, she doesn’t think of someone suffering from hemorrhoids, or an unfaithful partner, she thinks of course on the fantasy. In fact a human being is a collection of fantasies, that reality act for them as a trigger.
To a person dreaming reality – there is no reality, only, or mainly, dreams that come and go according to his associative approach to reality itself.
A woman who is going out for a date – doesn’t meet him at all, she meets the fantasies that the man arises in her. And the same with a man dating a woman, and then they both get married… only to meet later the real reality of the partner – for they both thought that they met reality.
To wake up (in this context) is to see another as he is, and to be captivated by the potential in him, his inner being; to know that he has got fears, anxieties, ambitions and weaknesses, and to be fascinated by him being him.
To be enchanted by reality or to be enchanted by fantasy – are totally two different things. Daydreaming are subjective and are not connected to reality.
We got lost in the compensating fantasies that we invented in order to supply an alternative reality, imaginary, better than the real reality. In other words – to live in hallucinations about a reality we will never met as it is and most likely – we would never meet.
To wake up from the dream about life, meaning to become free from the subjective-conditioning chains and to be at all times in the: ‘here, now, with you and me’, in the reality as it is, which has got nothing to do with us. Without filters, without colorful lenses, or enlarging or minimizing lenses. When we were kids we still had the ability to experience something with all our senses, (colures, sounds, textures, smells, and feelings) – they took us to a trip into the being of that which we were dealing with at the time.
If it is a cup of tea – then you experience the smell, the color, it presence. You get lost in it’ it is your reality now, it is the whole world. (Like in a trip of L.S.D. or Mescaline).
As for the person who dreams his life, nothing is enough by itself, so we jump from one thing to another, from experience to an experience, from subject to subject and from item to item – in search of the greatest, most existing fantasy. And as we are being swept towards the sweet fantasy, we pass thorough life without really living them.
The real reason why we choose a particular way through which we see the world and our life – is to find a way that will cause us as little as possible emotional dissonance[4], pain and frustration. We believe that we see life in this specific way, because this is the way things are, but the truth is that we choose the view that will cause us as little emotional dissonance as possible.
*
We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.
Chuang Tzu
The important things
The really important things – are always important’ or at least how they are supposed to be. The real important things cannot be important sometime, only when it is comfortable for us, when it fits to us.
In the beginning we swear on the importance of certain things. With time and as the years pass, something is depleting the importance we gave to things. What ever happened to the things that were so important to us once? What happens to them while the teeth of time is being munched at it? Well’ mostly, it is being pushed to the corners (so that it will not disturb), this repressions are usually followed by expressions such as: “It just didn’t work out”, “I didn’t have any time”‘ “it happened only by coincidence”, “it is only technical problem”, “it won’t happen again”, “I tried very hard, but…”, “next time…” and so on.
Sometimes we put the blame on other people: “you simply don’t understand me”, “life is not just black or white”, “you accept too much”, and “you don’t see it right”. This expressions serve very well the defense mechanisms of the pushing aside things we once believed were important. It could be a diet, work outs, clarifying conversation, a book you promised to yourself that you must read, the time you promised you will arrive, the task you promised to execute, what you promised you will never do. And mainly; the meaning you promised yourself that you will discover when you have the time. But at the end, what becomes eventually are the little daily hills of routine: how to get along, how to overcome a temporary difficulty, how to compile few more crumps of happiness and success (each one into his little pot). And in the meanwhile, under the routine little importance – the real neglected importances – gather and accumulate. And they are: the tears that were not shed, the deeds that were unexecuted, the needed conversations, love affaires that did not come to be and the emotions we did not allow ourselves to feel. We would never admit, of course, that those neglected importances might never come to be and in the meanwhile we acquire expertise in delaying technics: “I am not ready for this yet”, “it is not the right time yet”, “it’s never too late”, “one needs to wait for the right opportunity”. And from delay to delay – time runs and you are 60 and your life is full with banal trivia. And the real importance? It escaped us somehow…
But what was important once – is always important. Like the great creative works in the areas of art, music, prose, poetry or philosophy which do not lose from their importance with the passage of time, so it should be about the important values in our life.
The real importances actually, never left us, it is us who moved away from it into current, alternating, superficial importunacies of the celebrating moment. What is important is to return to the original importances, like a return into childhood home, to an adolescent love. To wake up to the again, to remind ourselves again and again, what is the core.
Time doesn’t do well to the original importances, it gets deserted, eventually in favor of the fashionable, the current, the passing: but only the real original importances are what gives to the pseudo importances the core importances that escaped us so far.
*
The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‘renouncing’ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ in the usual meaning of the words.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The antithesis as a friend
The idea of inoculation is amazing idea, according to it the way to combat with an enemy is to enter a Trojan horse into the threatened kingdom… The inoculation is weakened form of the virus, which is entered into the body in order to evoke the immune system into action. Behind this phenomenon there is an explanation in two levels; the first level is coming from the holistic and bioenergetics[5] – fields. The second level (the level above) is the consciousness level.
The holistic approach claims that the immune system must get a kind of ‘shock’ that will provoke it into action against an intruder. Rudolf Steiner, a philosopher and a mystic discovered Iscador, for cancer patients, it is an extract of European mistletoe (Viscum album)[6]. This medicine evokes the ‘soldiers’ of the immune system, which are the T cells, for them the Iscador effect is like an attack, and after they win the weakened version of the virus, they have got in their hand ‘the cod’ of the enemy and they are ready for war.
In the world there is a basic polarity, to everything its opposite:
The day has the night.
The winter has the summer.
Sleep has got wakefulness.
The sperm has the ovum.
The heat got the cold.
The positive has got the negative.
Man has got woman.
Life has got death.
Light has got darkness.
Failure has got success.
Rest has got activity.
The Ying has got the Yang.
In the process of fertilization, the sperm in united with its opposite; the ovum and so life is being created.
In the process of working on the atom bomb, an opposite process (to the fertilizing process) took place; scientists split the atom and so, separated between the two poles; the proton and the electron) and one pole attacked the other and a great explosion happened. In other words, Synergy’ or the unification of opposites, is a constructive process that leads to growth and life, whereas, dichotomy and separation between the poles is a distractive process, that leads to conflict and an explosion.
Divorce is the most typical example; the couple is split, and usually with split – explosions happens, they attack each other very often.
Rest and activity
In a distractive and dichotomic way of life – rest and activity ‘live’ separately, one comes on the account of the other, the one grows on the account of the other, and one attacks the other.
It begins usually when the activity side starts to be too dominant and then at the height of its power, the person falls into the ‘hands of the enemy’: exhaustion. And from it there is a leap into the opposite pole: ambition, competitiveness. And so on. The longer it goes on, so does the dichotomy grows, and the more it grows – so does grow the power of each side and his demand to be the only ‘boss’.
In a way of life which is synergetic and constructive – rest and activity are together, living one within the other. Like the symbol of Ying and Yang, when the center of one us living within the opposite pole.
In the heart of every activity rest should live and in the heart of every rest activity was supposed to be. Then, the person is acting from peace and relaxation, when rest is the inner soul of the activity. If a person would barricade himself in the activity pole (when he will separate between the poles) – he would tend to be: angry, tense, aggressive and competitive. And if he would barricade in the rest pole – he would have a tendency towards: melancholy, depressed, lacking confidence and initiative, surrender easily and is escaping from difficulty and a combat.
The correct rest does not reside outside activity and a correct activity does reside outside rest. They reside one within the other, like a sperm within the ovum, the eye of the storm within the storm, the neutron within the proton, like the soul within the body.
Sleep and wakefulness
When we are asleep, in the heart of our sleep floats the wakefulness (dream, processes in the mysterious subconscious). When we are awake. In the heart of our wakefulness sleep was supposed to reside: inner peace, the depth and clarity of the quite lake of our inner life. Therefore we should wake up quietly and slowly, not at once; gradually, so that some of the night can infiltrate into the potential day, before it will be conquered by the armies of: competitiveness, effort and pressure. And if we succeeded to ‘inculcate’ the day by the antithesis of the night – our day will be blessed, soft, quite as the bottom of a deep ocean, it will be tuned inside, to the intuition and inner voice.
Woman and man
I men women relationship we find today the same dichotomy as between rest and activity. It is a dichotomy that is expressed in a growing hostility between the two genders; men attack women forcefully, and women are expressing objection by protest (feminism) and the getting together in study and support groups.
But within the man, femininity was supposed to reside, the same as that within the woman – masculinity was supposed to reside. The famous psychologist: Carl Jung related to two terms: Animus and Anima[7], Jung claimed that in every masculinity – Animus, there is femininity – Anima and the other way around. But the situation today is that each gender is fortressed in what is different from the partner. This leads to misunderstandings and power struggles.
Strong and weak
Everyone aspires to be strong, everyone runs away from weakness and its typical signs, as it is an epidemic; weakness is being conceived as an invitation for maltreatment, as being a looser. People believe that to be strong means to renounce weakness and weak people, and to expel it out of bounds, and be based in control. But this is not the case, the ability to be strong for real stems out of becoming friends with what is perceived as weakness, but in truth, it is sensitivity. The strong for real admits weakness, allows himself to feel anxiety, and then, after he met himself in his weakness – he is ready to cope.
There is nothing stronger than the antithesis[8].
Temptation and abstinence
Those who abstain are running away from temptation like from wild fire, closing themselves in an isolated convent, Yeshiva or a mosque. But the thicker and taller would be the walls, so would the temptations (get stronger); and the more they would isolate themselves, so would the dark power will intensify outside the thick walls. Only making friends with temptations (in the emotions and thoughts), only living with it all the time – could block the external, flesh and blood – temptations. Because the power of the antithesis is great when it is outside the walls, especially when it meets the thesis through its weaknesses.
The solution is in the have one within the other (like the Animus and Anima and the Ying and Yang); the activity should host rest, the day should host the night, masculinity should host femininity, forcefulness should host weakness, peace should host war, life should host death, the thesis should host the antithesis and what there is should host what is not…
Through weakness we should open our gates and call loudly to the enemy’ to the opposite, the problematic, to the unknown, to the other, the outsider – to come into our home inside; let it come and enter into the thesis; let it come with its power’ let it come and be.
***
“To get everything you want is not a good thing. Disease makes health seem sweet. Hunger leads to the appreciation of being full-fed. Tiredness creates the enjoyment of resting”
― Heraclitus
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
To be natural in the spirit level
We, citizen of the western world in 2020 are used to coin phrases such as: “but it is not natural” or “I want to live in a natural way” or “this product is made only with natural ingredients” and so on. It seems the naturalness and being natural are conceived by us as a positive value. But is it really?
What do we mean by talking about the naturalness and the un naturalness of things? Does it mean that being natural is to behave and act within the area of what you already know and familiar with? If the answer is yes, then this approach is a sure recipe to stagnation and degeneration. But if it means that being natural means to do a conscious effort to return to an original and basic way of conduct – then the meaning is opposite (to the conventional believe).
Indeed, our way of life leads us (in many areas) either towards growth or decay. If we would allow the muscles to act ‘naturally’ (according to the first version), meaning: effortless, in our regular rang of activity – we would lead our bodily systems to a general decline and degeneration. However, putting a physical challenge to the muscles and bringing them to super-effort in a range which is beyond what is required from them in our daily routine (which could be conceived, from the ‘point of view’ of the muscles – as un natural) – would lead us to the way of growth and strengthening.
The first (and common) way is conceiving the concept of naturalness in a low level. The second way is conceiving it in a higher level. There is also a third way and it is of course the highest of all.
The first, physical level:
The level relates to the plans of the physical, material and the fixed – all which have reached a final stage of evolution, such as the skeleton, the bones and tendons. Natural on this level is to allow it to happen, to preserve the existing state. To be natural on this level is meaning not to hurt, not distort the Skelton and bones structure by adopting a wrong posture and gait.
The second physical level:
This is the level of the tissues, muscles, blood and fat (everything between the bones and the skin). Here, being natural means coping with the load of difficulty, with resistance. Being natural on this level means challenge and conformation with the difficulty, and the greater is the difficulty – so does the muscles become stronger, the fat decreases and the level of vitality in the blood – intensified.
The third, soul and spiritual level:
This is the hidden level. Being natural in this level is relating and coping with what did not happen yet, a meeting with what is missing. In the spirit level we relate to areas in which we have not been yet; examining values, ideas and understanding – we don’t have yet. To be natural in the level of the spirit is to ask (all the time): what is missing? What could happen but did not happen yet? How to act in a way we did not act before? How to think about what we did not think before?
So, the conventional understanding of being natural – is good for what has already ‘arrived’ in the human, all which has actualized its full potential, and it is, fully, as he was supposed to be; fully functional, like the heart, lungs, kidneys etc. But it is not good as far as what is still in a raw, potential state – is concerned. Everything that has not been fixed yet (reached its ultimate, final state) can either deteriorate or grow.
There is an essential difference between our body parts which are below the neck and those which are above it. The head is the most potential organ in our body, which far away from full actualization. (One example is that we use 90% of the left hemisphere and only 10% of the right hemisphere, and this is why 90% of people are right handed…). The brain is a pioneer, living in the seam between the seen and tangible and material worlds, and the unseen worlds of the spirit; trying to find its way in the spiritual darkness.
So, to natural on this level means to be all the time, dissatisfied, embraced, lost, more like a tracker that his senses are directed towards the ranges which are beyond what is seen and known.
It is natural for the mind and the spirit to relate to the unknown and to be enchanted by it, and therefore, to grow towards it, like the plant which is not growing towards what is familiar and know to it; the earth, but growing towards the unknown, where it hasn’t been yet (the sky).
Therefore, to be natural in the spirit level is to object to the comfortability that comes with the habit, to reject to the obvious, to object to dogmatic, conventional answers, that their object is to block any open ended question and to relieve any wonder, and instead, to insist on a mind that acknowledges what is undefined, the unknown, that which wasn’t charted yet; to get acquainted to the hidden – to what we don’t know yet.
And this is a definite sign of a person natural in the spirit level; he is based and anchored in what he doesn’t know, and let it guide what he knows.
Adjustment to life (”Let it be”)
In the adjustment to life (like in acquiring various skills) there are stages. In the first stages the task is greater than the experience and the training and the person is motivated by ambition and aspiration. For example; a baby trying to walk, or learning to drive, later on he starts to ‘forget himself’ and then the wonder happens: suddenly the walk or the drive are as happening by themselves, instinctively, at this progressive stage the difficulty and the effort of awareness are making room for the dynamic flow.
And so it is in the way we live our life; somewhere, during it was supposed to come the dynamic flow stage; not to make an effort – to walk or drive, we do the first move and the rest is happening without us being involved; not to be the operator and activator of our life but being activated and operated.
A person who succeeded in adjusting to life is nor striving to be the playwright of his life but the pen and paper upon which his would play of life happen. The person who managed to adjust to life is careful not to be the pusher of his life, for if he does, he would block his ability to be and of his life to happen.
The person that have adjusted to life knows that by himself he is weak and helpless, just like an electric wire which is not connected to an electrical outlet is not effective. Thus he is trying to wait for the moment when he will be moved, to the moment in which something (and not himself) will activate him. The danger for him is that each entering into a state of stress could transfer the center of gravity from the dynamic level to the self-effort (of the person trying to push himself). When a person is in a state of stress – his power gets weaker, it is as though an electrical equipment is being disconnected from the outlet and is working only on batteries.
An instrument has no choice, human has. The temptation to react to a stress by surrender to it – exists always. Mostly there is anxiety that stems out of uncertainty, that the worst would happen, and so we go back to push ourselves (batteries). Therefore one should object to self-pushing and self-activation and to be elevated above the anxiety that nothing would move. The world is full of people who suffer from high blood pressure, heart disease, a broken disc in the back – because they insist on forcing themselves to make as effort and this effort is breaking their back and damaging their heart. The heart and the back were not supposed to bare this violent effort which are motivated by hysterical will and performance anxiety – but to carry the lighter load, a load which is moved by the gentle forces of nature and life.
For the one who wishes to reach the higher levels of life and existence – he should be careful not rape, rape of the present moment, rape of the other and mainly, rape of our inner life.
We should allow the moment, the other and our inner life – appropriate space and the time in which they could happen. If and when we reach the level where all this could happen – the dynamic would also happen; dynamic in the affinity between us and another, us and the present moment, us and our inner being. It will be like an arrow that was shot from the bow’s strings – not because of the mind’s intention, the heart’s wish and the power of the hand, but exactly because the mind gave up its intention, the heart gave its wish and the hand loosened its grip on the string[9] – then we succeeded to relax our obsessive control of everything, and then, instead of life collapsing – it takes off. The arrow have reached the target. It is not the effort that sent it straight into the center of the target, but its total absence.
The princess of sweet fantasies
We see quiet few people during our life, most of them could look to us as regular, daily, grey and even quiet ‘square’, but all are hiding within them an intimate secret; the first love. For all it is an internal experience, painful, wonderful (or both) – till an elevation. In every person, even the most flat and practical there is an underground layer, vulnerable and longing. Everyone deep in him is a lost soul, a child crying for warmth and love.
It could be indeed find expression in the sign and the pain (often) the first love (actualized or not) left in him. But the first love a symptom and a voice to for the desperate cry that the cruel teeth of time did not manage to ‘eat’ it altogether.
By itself, this vulnerability and longing – remains (despite the passage of time) pure and initial, looking from the eyes of the 80 years of age and above, untouched by the teeth of time. For the covers of the aging body are lying, for the reality of this passage of time is not acceptable in the realms of the heart and soul.
The easy available answer to this desperate living longing are the stories in Television and movies. To the cinema house entering: A tired orthopedic doctor, a successful barber of woman, a querulous head of a house committee, a busy secretary to CEO, a hard working truck driver, a greengrocer with an expensive store and a housewife with hemorrhoids. All are coming from their difficult or another mechanical day, in order to be savedtemporarily from their difficulties and desolations, to release and set free their soul bird[10] and to get lost again in the endless fields of love and longing. To be melted forever.
When they watch the movie, they are actually watching the Hollywoodian actualization of their longing of their panful and longing soul. It is unbelievable how a boy or a girl in the heart of all of us to swallow the sweet legends on the screen, while identifying with the heroes … and continue to dream.
Because in our hearts we did not give up on the sweet fantasy price/princess. She/he refused to die, wants to live, sleeping in the cold alienated daily routine, waking up from time to time, to the kiss from the imagined price/princess from the screen Romanic tales.
Self-deception
One of the most frequent ‘arts’ one should have in life, is the art concealment. From a young age we learned (and get ‘trained’) to put on a disguise, mainly in order not to hurt and be hurt. Then we adopt small ways of beatifying that increase the more our social interactions get perfected. To this beautifying ways there are nice names: “to know how to behave”, “to adjust yourself”, “not to step on another’s toes”, “using tact”, “to behave in a civilized manner”. Of course we wouldn’t call this idioms in the blunt name: deceit. It is considered as an ability to get along with people. We are used not to call this as manipulations, but as having good manners and an attitude of civilized person.
The English and the Germans brought the art of concealment to a level of sophistication and even, perfection. Especially good at it are English people from what is called: upper class, but the principle of: ‘behaving in a civilized manner’ – is quiet widespread in other cultures as well. In the influence of the dominant western cultural of the 21th century, instead of trying to lower the alienation wall in order to reach the other – it deals in hiding and covering of: disgust, antagonism, competition and dominance – and is cultivating: conformity, political attitude, cognitive dissonance, Groupthink[11], and generally, to talk and behave, like everyone else (and not like oneself).
The present culture is dealing in the indoctrination of the next generationand it teachesthat the world we live in (not like ‘the dark’ Middle Ages, God forbid…)is an advancedworld, for it seems that science is on the brink of solving most problems of humanity, dangerous diseases (with the exception the Corona virus), prolonging the short day (by the invention of electricity), communication is easier (emails, what’s up, Zoom, skype etc.), filling empty times (by: smartphones, television etc.).
This are fantasies about our so called: advancement of humanity.
Various religious beliefs join the dream industry, by promising improved fantasies: reincarnation, the second coming (of Christ). Also the advertising industry in which we are made to believe that with this drink or this yogurt, with this facial cream, this book – our life will be so much better…
Of course it is a deception, because no improvement of the conditions of the ‘prison’ –could cover the fact that the soul of man is in a trap situation in which she experiences very difficult issues: alienation, estrangement, loneliness, meaningless life, competition, power struggle, stress, burn out, disintegration of the family cell, increasing violence (in murder of wives, in schools and hospitals), governmental corruption and more. When people are trying to deceive others (by wearing a mask, and the sending of subliminal messages[12], while using a collectively accepted language), without taking responsibility on this subliminal signals.
But not about social violence I wish to write here, but on a kind of slippery and cunning deception which is difficult to trace and abolish, and I mean: self-deception. In our attempts to deceive ourselves it is not so easy, for the person knows, somewhere deep in him that he is deceiving himself, so here it is more complex and cunning. It is much more sophisticated and elaborate then the social deception (being civilized). There is nothing more sophisticated then auto-suggestion[13]. The ability to deceive oneself and to believe in it, is an ‘art’ that without it – it is difficult to get along in our world.
Where this elaborate ‘art’ does comes to expression in the life of the individual? Well, first of all it is important for us to believe that our life is in a process of improvement (as people are used to say about themselves, always: “I am optimistic”. We indeed believe that: we know more, we live longer, and our psychological problems have professional help and more. And that tomorrow will be much better then yesterday. No one will take away from us the privilege of telling ourselves the stories we want to believe in.
We are telling ourselves that life did not happen to us yet, that this situation is temporary, that the next trip abroad, the next baby, the next meeting, next year, next day – would cause our life to happen, like Pinocchio, we are growing dinkies’ ears[14] and still do not let go from the way of thinking that: it is our right to consume life, there are shares in life and out share would also be gratified.
But reality is different; it teaches us that what is – is, not our subjective ‘is’ but the real ‘what is’; meaning that we have basically one obligation/duty in life, and it is to struggle in order to be fit to actualize our human and personal, destiny, and this is a truth difficult to bare.
Romanticism
The motivational force of romanticism as an approach to life – is very powerful. Therefore it is important to look at it closely, to know it to understand its characteristics, on its dangers and of the elusive ways through which it enters into our life.
The romantic concept comes to expression in idyllic pictures that out brain manufactures on life and reality; pictures that do not reflect reality as it is, but trying to place it in a better, nicer – position. More than that; reality itself seems as a lie through the eyes of the ideal, and in its place appears another picture of reality, the romantic one. I want to point out the psychology which is behind the romantic conception and the dangers embodied in it and to challenge it.
The romantic approach claims that there is a section in life which is a better portion then the existing one and therefore: “if we only do the right thing (find a partner, have a child, win in the lottery, advance in career, plant grass, finish my studies, etc.) if I would only do that or that – my life would be good and pleasant”.
The romantic conception believes that it is good to wait and there is what to wait for, there is hope that life would happen for us, according to the idyllic picture that was created by our brain.
All of us experience such moments; almost everyone is sensitive to a combination of elements, that when they get together, they awaken in us this longed for – romanticism.
This romantic feeling could be seeing the rainbow, seeing a sunset, a corn field moving with the wind, a Cantata of Bach, a meal with a loved one to the candles light and so on. In reality, the sun indeed was set and in the radio a Cantata of Bach was played – but on the romantic feeling that they might cause – our mind is responsible. And it alone creates this state in which our emotions are playing in the romantic scene. They, cause us to believe that now, this is real life and it was worthwhile to arrive at this moment.
The truth of the matter is that this is not life. The difficulties and struggle are not as we imagen them, as shells that if we manage to peel them, we would find the sweet, soft fruit of life. No way.
Romantic approach is an intoxicating drug (manufactured by our brain), that conditions us to believe that there, few steps ahead, in the place we did not reach yet, we believe that there the magic is constant and permanent, there is real life for us.
But the truth of the matter is that life is what it is; functional, and their beauty and charm are mainly in our subjective perception. Between the being of life and the imagined drama and the telenovela that we create around them – there is no connection. We should restrain our romantic approach to life (and their ‘relatives’: sentimentality and nostalgia) – and get drafted to the struggle.
The romantic approach claims that the ‘now’ is an intermediate stage – on the way towards a reality of happiness. And it is not like this, there is no stage of happiness, a person must be obliged to the absence of perfect happiness and be committed to the finding of the way towards self-actualization. He should be awake, sober, planted deeply in the ‘here and now’; a soldier of life, so is the anti-romantic approach.
And back to the romantic approach; it claims that life is a bid supermarket, in which we are the consumers and we deserve the best that life can offer (‘so said to me – Mom’…). The anti-romantic approach sees life more as a battle field and us as soldiers in it. Life is not a playground, nor is it a school, a person should be anchored in the journey, in the struggle.
If we can remove from our life the veil of romanticism, our ‘here and now’ life will become a powerful experience, when each moment is charged with the vitality and power of the very essence of being alive.
The world moves and doesn’t stop, life continues to happen, whether we are with them or not (and it does not matter if we feel the center of the world and that we deserve everything and that life will supply for us the rainbow in the cloud, or that we take upon ourselves the responsibility for our existence and are going out to meet life, as it is (with no connection to us individually).
We do have the choice (as impossible as it may seem) to continue to sleep our life as sweet dream or wake up to the world as it is.
On spiritual mediocrity
Part one:
Violence (especially towards the weak, in families, schools and hospitals), superficiality, emptiness, alienation, the race after status, money and pleasures – reached in our time (after the middle of 2020) a new climax. From the examination of the various approaches of the educational system and the great religions – we find approaches, such in the Western Christian traditions, that relates to the 7 deadly sins[15], which is divided into 3 categories;
- Lustful appetite (gluttony, fornication, and avarice)
- irascibility (wrath)
- Mind corruption (vainglory, sorrow, pride, and discouragement).
It is believed (in the Western Christian traditions) ,– that the way to deal with it are the seven virtues which are identified as: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility. Practicing them is said to protect one against temptation from the seven deadly sins.
Generally there are two polarized and radical approaches towards the deteriorated state of humanity – One is the way of the fanatic religious believer, the hermit that eradicates the root of any bad quality he has. The other is the way of the civilized average citizen that behaves externally as though he doesn’t have any dark side, he pays his taxes on time and keeps a decent approved life, but bury his cravings, lust and sexual desires – dep inside.
Henrik Ibsen, towards the end of his play: peer Gynt[16] described peer meeting with the Button Molder (the angel of death) with his ladle, he comes to fetch peer.
“The Button-Molder: Your grave is dug already, your coffin bespoke. The worms in your body will live at their ease. But I have orders, without delay. On Master behalf to fetch in your soul.
Peer: It can’t be like this, without any warning…
The Button-Molder: It’s an old tradition at burials and births. To appoint in secret the day of the feast. With no warning at all to the quest of honor”.
He then explains that those who has done something distinctive, either good or bad, will go either to hell or to heaven, and the vast majority – the average lot will be melted in the ladle, in order to make out from them new Buttons.
The average ‘normal’ people deny their ‘shadows’ from one hand but on the other – they don’t accomplish anything special, thus remain average.
It is easier to take one of the two extremes; repression of the dark side, or eradicating it.
An example could be found in the approaches of people to foods; the fanatics are either vegan or anorectic (like the Hermit), and the other way is of the average eaters, they eat, mostly, junk food.
The two extremes belong to the fanatic way, the average way of eating is the second way. But there is a third way; acquiring new and correct habits of eating; managing your eating habits in a moderate way, this is the neutral way, which offers indeed a coping with cravings, but in a controlled callowness, meaning : instead of ignoring the craving (by repression), from one hand, or ‘castrating’ it, from the other.
The mature, neutral way, acknowledges the craving, examine it, and becomes friends with it, for it is an important ingredient in keeping the selfhood and the authenticity of a person.
The repressing bourgeois, and the extreme castrator – are motivated by a fear from the cravings, while those who are coping with the cravings in a neutral way – is motivated by a friendly inquisition approach.
The approach, or idea, that in order to be spiritual or religious, one has to abstain from cravings – could lead to the loss of the connection with his selfhood, and by that, to become a spiritual or religious astronaut. The connection with one’s being and selfhood is passing through the body. “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman–a rope over an abyss.”
Friedrich Nietzsche. Any disturbance of this balance between an animal and an angel (towards up or down) will create an unhealthy extreme; a violation towards up, will damage authenticity, a violation towards down – will damage spirituality.
The mature, neutral golden path – directs the person to make friends with the cravings, a friendliness that would lead to the acquiring of the ability to moderate the craving, the preserve it within the right proportions, which is much more difficult than repressing from one hand, or abstention, from the other hand.
Part two:
One of the questions about how to deal with the deadly sins is not how to do it, but from where from where would a person draw the power and motivation to cope with this cravings and lusts? The real problem is that often people lack this power and motivation to cope at all with the access weight? (a force that would allow the adoption of correct eating habits?
The solution for this is a deeper understanding of this third way, the golden path, this way offers real coping. The cliché says that in order to cope – you need power, I say that in order for a person to have power – he needs to cope.
The way to spirituality is passing through coping with the basic questions of existence. The friction with this basic questions supplies energy, with which it is possible to cope with the cravings, energy that gives the power to cope with mission of what is called in Kabala as: Tikkun HaMiddot, From a Kabbalistic point of view, this “refinement of character” called Tikkun HaMiddot (in Hebrew) is very much part and parcel of the Divine purpose in creation. Even small improvements are vastly appreciated by God.
It is like the friction of a match in a matchbox, the friction creates heat and the heat creates a spark. The spark draws to itself the flam, and with the flam it is possible to fix and upgrade one’s low characteristics (Tikun Hamidot in Hebrew).
A man cannot improve anything in him, without the fire of motivation. Real fire can only be created only by coping with basic questions: death, the existential void, life’s lack of meaning, alienation, getting old and loneliness. Without coping with this basic question there would be no inner pressure created. We should ask ourselves this basic questions, and by not having a readymade answers, the friction would build the inner pressure.
In fact we draw power from the frustration, from the desperation, a person who is content, often he is empty spirituality, for being average is often corresponds with being flat. The more a person would ’embrace’ the existential frustration – the more he would be charged with spiritual pressure that, in turn, would charge him with the motivation to do something about his existence.
The existential approach is the only one that leads to having power and motivation, an example are people who coped, and are coping, with terminal disease, mourning and lose had and suddenly began to create.
Perhaps most commonly, for artists, poets, writers, musicians and journalists, terminal illness can provide one last opportunity for creativity[17].
Faced with terminal cancer, renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, if possible, more prolifically than before.
Research shows what artists suffering from terminal illness have told us for centuries – creative self-expression is core to their recovery sense of self.
Creativity may give voice to our experiences and provide some resilience as we face disintegration. It may also provide agency (an ability to act independently and make our own choices), and a sense of normality.
A paradox: the limitation of timespan can lead to creative freedom, and the admission about the approaching death can lead a person to a kind of revival. The admission about the temporary state of matter, can give birth to the force that comes from the spirit.
The coping with terminal illness and the forthcoming of death – can charge the person with the force that will allow him to elevate about the level of the living-dead. Awakening will come by coping with one’s antithesis[18]. A real mending of impediments can only come after coping with spiritual void, and this is done by rubbing with difficult and confusing existential questions, because only after that can we relate to the mending of impediments or barriers. Personal barriers are obstructions put in place by individuals that negatively affect their achievement in specific areas or their lives in general. For example, some people have personalbarriers that hamper their ability to communicate. Such barriers include poor listening skills, limited vocabulary, misinterpretations based on prior experiences, inattention to feedback and narrow thinking.
Only after coping with difficult existential questions and the spiritual charge that might follows can we begin to talk about fixing impediments. Only the coping with the existential absurd[19] and the being toward death[20] – can bring about the thirst for spiritual meaning, that without it life is a terrible desert.
The price of compromise
We are required often to compromise and do concessions[21]; to restrain and ‘swallow’; from the man in charge at work, from the complaining neighbor, form short tempered bank official, and from our family members. We give up and compromise on less then what we deserve.
And so, our life seem apparently to be simpler and pleasant. Slowly we learn to treat this small compromises as a necessary tax we have to pay in our relationship with others, in order to be able to sleep quietly… and during time the compromise becomes a way of life and becomes a kind of our second nature.
The road to the compromise passes through various gates, and the greatest two are: the gate of guilt and the gate of inferiority feelings. This gates has got a long corridor called: apology and excuse, both are making us satisfied with less then what we deserve. This is done with various justified and logical reasons, like: The wish not to appear petty, the aspiration ‘to be ok’, considering the time schedule of others, the wish to eliminate from conformation and the like.
Relationships are never really equal. Almost in any relationship there is the one who leans more towards concessions (he retreats too quickly, and expresses very seldom disagreement or objection), and there is the side that would give up less. It is like two cars driving next to each other in a road that is getting more and narrower. One car would remain on the road, while the other will have to be pushed to the margins. The division between who gives up and who doesn’t is never coincidental, as it might seem. The driver who won’t give up would stay on the road, while the one who is leaning towards giving up- will be pushed to the margins.
Relationships are based on variety of hidden messages, through them one side learns that the other is more determined, with a better chance of winning, less considerate, hungrier for success, or more dangerous. The registration of this subliminal signals is what moves the weaker to give up, restrain and be content to stay on the margins.
Any relationship, be it the most loving, beautiful and Nobel, will be tested always by the degree of freedom it allow both sides to get experienced in both roles; the strong and the week, alternately. The strength of every relationship will be tested at the moment when the one who compromised so far will refuse to continue with his role so far and will try to demand for himself what he deserves, not less.
Our society is based on competition and forcefulness – is proud in its shop window of preaching of values such as patience, consideration and other compromising approaches. But this ‘values’ should be adopted by the strong, but the ones who adopt it eventually- are the weak…
The weak, who are usually highly sensitive persons[22] – are the ones who eventually give up, restrain, reseeding from any confrontation, they are quick to fulfill the expectations of others, and take upon themselves tasks that were influenced by others.
More difficult is the position of the one who compromised for years and decided that ‘no more’. Poor is the one that made others get used to him being weak and suddenly he dared to get out of his role. Then all friendliness and intimacy- disappear, and instead of them a rhinoceros of the strong is out to destroy everything. But sometimes it is enough for the strong to send a hint, and the one who sated to step out of his passive role – to return to his role so far.
If they say to the weak: “you are not ok”, even if he is totally ok, never the less, he will examine himself, and even might admit to his failure, while the dominant one will deny everything, even if he is totally out of line.
What makes us: restrain, to swallow, to dwarf oneself, ‘to be nice, not to confront – is the fear from abandonment[23], rejection, loneliness, social isolation and the stigma. As long as the sword of fear (from what might happen) is above out head – we are destined to be weak in our relations with others.
The possibility of passing from the position of compromising for less – to the position of the one that stands on his own – involves two obstacles, the one is recognizing your own worth, to feel that ‘I deserve’, without guilt feelings or feelings of inferiority. The other is moving from ‘being nice’ – into being not so nice sometimes. This passage entails overcoming the fear of not being acceptable.
And so, being in the double lock of wanting to belong and the fear of rejection – we continue to be content with less, to turn a blind eye, not to complain, not to confront, to lower one’s profile[24]. We tell ourselves that in this way we will be surrounded by friends, protected and safe in our relationships.
But our trampled rights, our lost respect and our silenced principles – are crying out from the internal prison in a cry of protest.
From historical perspective
Often we are mistaken about evaluation and the correct judgment of a happening or someone. We find it difficult to evaluate its real value. At this point will come to us the historical perspective. For she alone is the only loyal judge of the nature and being of happenings and personalities. This perspective needs time for its formation and crystallization. The people who lived in the generation of Bach, did not perceive him as creative genius, one of a kind, contrary to him there those who were very important, but a generation passed and no one remembers them. Only when the cheers of the public dies down and world fame passes away – what is left is the nucleus, that fickle effects of time did not affect its nature, what is left is: truth: crystalized and undisputable. Time needs to pass for inner structure (with fixed and steady values) to be exposed. Popularity comes and goes, but truth remains (being hidden by the temporary and fashionable), neutral, royal, and glowing, whether we know about it or whether we don’t.
The passage of time is only doing justice to Shakespeare plays, but who remembers the most prominent politician of his time?
And despite the justice being done by the historical perspective, it is hard and uncompromising. Therefore, people who live their lives from a historical perspective are considered in their generation to be: fanatics, full of rage, non-communicative, swimming against the stream just for the fun of it. Mostly they are not being understood, they don’t fit to the existing structures, but in the end all is registered in historical bookkeeping…
All that a person has to ask himself in order to be able to evaluate correctly a figure or a work of art is to ask himself what importance or validity would this works have in a few hundred years, and the subjective fog will disappear, and like the Genie from the bottle – she will stand in front of him: awesome and majestic: the historical perspective.
Education: 3 essays on
1. The established education
The subject of education is in dispute; how to educate? When and for how long? Whom to educate? And in what methods?
Education is almost a synonym to design, for in his early years the child is still unshaped, therefore any intervention is his growth is to do with education.
Education almost always means well, the results (as was written) are quiet in contravention.
The education of the child is taking place mainly in two places: one is kindergarten and school, the other is within the family.
There are two levels of education: formal and informal[25] (hidden). Education at school intends to be objective, factual, rational and informative, but in fact, it is fashioning an image of the pupil that will be in accordance with a society which is: consumptive, materialistic, commercial, industrious, technological and competitive (all this is passed informally, undercover).
Education within the family frame was supposed to give emotional support, moral values, emotional security, but apparently (and through informal means) they inherent to them their insecurity and fears about the possibility, then when he grows up he will not be able to integrate within the existing way of things.
The formal education is but a fig leaf covering inborn individualistic traits.
The informal means (which are the one that really influence the child’s orientation towards life) is using guilt feelings, if the kid doesn’t want to learn then he gets directed to him undercover messages that cause him to feel guilty. In order to decrease his guilt he finds the way to conform. The guilt feelings also cause him to become obedient, running to answer the establishment informal demands, in order, again, to calm down his guilt feelings. After internalizing the informal establishment demands he feels less the stigma: “I am not ok”, and instead to feel at last: “I am ok[26]“.
And when the mechanism of: “I am not ok” is being activated in the pupil he will not interfere with accepted establishment criteria, such as: to gain your own interests (called: negotiation), calculation of gain and loss (called: commerce), the prospering of Capitalism (called: economic growth). In the end, in most cases, the undercover messages will erase the endemic individualistic traits of thinking for oneself.
Society has its needs, and the school is training, undercover, the pupil to be fit for those needs, when he grows up. Therefore the emphasis is on practical, technical traits, rather than humanistic one. This process is called by: Proffersor Shlomo Giora Shoham: “the decline of the spirit”. And if the kid will not adjust, then in his adulthood he could become a marginal person, an outsider and rejected, which will cause in him a big: “I am not ok”.
Real education should impose less structures for being one of the many, and instead to awaken in him the urge for self-fulfillment.
*
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
2. The dominant education
In the reciprocal maintenance between the teacher and his student and between a parent and his child – it seems that education, in its present state is more for the teacher and the parent – then the need of the pupil-child.
Teachers don’t teach according to the need of the pupil to: search, to ask difficult questions, to find out – but according to the teacher’s need to gratify the establishment that qualified him.
Noe about education at home: each child has got his own wishes and wants from his life, but the parent sees in the kid his own reflection and extension. He sees the kid as a second chance for him, a kind of companion for what he did not achieve in his own life.
And then the child has to carry on his back foreign expectations, a load from the previous generation. This overload strangles his cry for self-actualization, and he becomes (in most cases) to be a tool for his parent self-actualization and not an autonomy for himself.
Together with this expectations from the child, there is also fear, fear of the possibility that the child might be spoiling their immaculate image and future.
If he does fulfill their expectation, it will be no more than a fig leaf covering his parent’s shortfalls.
Maybe what the child needs is wonder in the deserts of life, so they could listen, through the spiritual void to their inner voice from the burning bush of their spirit. An inner voice crying for meaningful and authentic life. A voice that will navigate them to the promised land (of their self-actualization).
But this cries are not for total freedom, but are for the right not to get stuffed with readymade answers, but of freedom to look for, to ask the right questions:
- Where am I heading?
- Why am I alive?
- What to do with my life?
- What now?
- What is the main axis of my life?
- What is the meaning of my life?
- What am I living for?
- What is my goal in life?
- How was my life so far?
- Am I satisfied with my life?
- What am I hoping for?
- How far away am I from where I want to be?
*
“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
Victor Hugo
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
Mark Twain
. The authentic, organic – education3
The original term: education, is close to concepts such as: initiation and to initiate. This is a process of training that was in ancient Egypt and in the Indian and African tribes, in which the elders of the tribe prepared the young person to be ready for the real thing: life itself.
Is that what is being done at school?
The answer is no! Education in our days is directed towards the imposing of norms. It is a conformist education being used as an executing arm of the dominant consensus.
The story we tell ourselves on education is that without it we would remain backward, in a raw state and primitive. Really? No, a person would grow only if will actualize his original potential. And for that to happen he needs to grow into a free and non-dominant world, lacking orders and dogmas, a world with a creative freedom, a world that would allow a growing space to what is deep within him.
The education of today qualifies a person to get along with existing society. It is an education that presents to the child an arbitrary systems of regulations and commands, to whom he has to obey and of areas of knowledge which he has to learn and study.
It is like a young wine plant that aspires to grow freely into the space around and above it, but has to adjust itself to the particular restrictions being imposed by the winegrower (by wire and pruning) the twigs are being tied to pillars, on which the wine would climb and get a hold on, during the next year.
And which one is the successful wine? It is the one that managed to adjust itself to the restrictions of the winegrower.
So it is in education; it ties and ‘prunes’ the pupil in order to adjust and fit him to a social reality. And this is to guarantee that there would be no one that will try to shake the existing order.
But in the child there are already all the necessary codes for growth, so there is no need for limiting intervention from the outside. The intervention will not change the child’s being and essence, but it would limit and disfigure the way and form of its growth.
With-it, it is not possible without guidness, for complete freedom might lead to complete anarchy, therefore the child needs directing.
And here we arrive at the ‘organic education’, the one which takes care about actualization his personal potential (contrary to the common social education).
The ‘organic education’ is supposed to restrain the ego, so it won’t go wild, will not interfere with the child’s growing potential. The urges and cravings of the child are like a bottomless pit, as was described in William Golding’s: “lord of the flies”‘[27]: In a place in which the boundaries to the ego’s urges are absent – the Pandora box is wide open, and the dark ghosts are rushing out.
But, there is a great difference between putting boundaries and repression of those limitless ego urges. The repression preserves them by hiding them deep within (where they would intensify). Whereas putting boundaries will confine the borders of its territory (to minimize their space of activity). But how is this being done? Well, by training (which is very different essentially from conditioning and social conformity). This traing is described in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry “the little prince”[28] in the conversation between the fox and the little prince, where the fox praises training as a tool in building a friendship:
“It was then that the fox appeared.
“Good morning,” said the fox.
“Good morning,” the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw nothing.
“I am right here,” the voice said, “under the apple tree.”
“Who are you?” asked the little prince, and added, “You are very pretty to look at.”
“I am a fox,” the fox said.
“Come and play with me,” proposed the little prince. “I am so unhappy.”
“I cannot play with you,” the fox said. “I am not tamed.”
“Ah! Please excuse me,” said the little prince.
But, after some thought, he added:
“What does that mean–‘tame’?”
“You do not live here,” said the fox. “What is it that you are looking for?”
“I am looking for men,” said the little prince. “What does that mean–‘tame’?”
“Men,” said the fox. “They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?”
“No,” said the little prince. “I am looking for friends. What does that mean–‘tame’?”
“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.”
“‘To establish ties’?”
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . .”
“I am beginning to understand,” said the little prince. “There is a flower . . . I think that she has tamed me . . .”
…”My life is very monotonous,” the fox said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat . . .”
The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.
“Please–tame me!” he said.
“I want to, very much,” the little prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”
“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me . . .”
“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.
“You must be very patient,” replied the fox. “First you will sit down at a little distance from me–like that–in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day . . .”
The next day the little prince came back.
“It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox. “If, for example, you come at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you . . . One must observe the proper rites . . .”
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near–
“Ah,” said the fox, “I shall cry.”
“It is your own fault,” said the little prince. “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you . . .”
“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.
“But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince.
“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.
“Then it has done you no good at all!”
“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.” And then he added:
“Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret.”
The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.
“You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”
…And he went back to meet the fox.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
“It is the time I have wasted for my rose–” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.
“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . .”
“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember”.
Yes, to train, like training a dog, ‘organic education’ should bring the child to the highest level in which he can actualize his potential.
כן. לאמן. כפי שמאמנים כלב, כך החינוך האורגני צריך להביא את הילד אל הרמה הגבוהה ביותר שם יוכל ליישם את הפוטנציאל שלו.
*
3 essyes on society:
- The social animal and individuality
Often we hear relations to the human as a ‘social animal’[29], this terminology is not exact from two reasons: first, the human is not an animal and second: he wasn’t meant to be completely social, at his roots.
It is more fitting to exchange the word: animal with a word that has got in it a greater possibility for consciousness, for example the word: entity. And to exchange the word: social with a word that relates to the individual and autonomic dimension of the human, and not only to the collective herd like – dimension. And so to exchange it with word: ‘individual’. And from a combination of both, we get: ‘individual ‘entity’
The huge gap between the: ‘social animal’ and ‘individual entity’ – is a steep slope, when at its bottom is the ‘animal’ and at the top: ‘entity’. The way up, from the bottom to the top, is actuality opposite to the flow of the historical current, which flows downwards, towards seeing the human from the mechanistic-material point of view, as a political, national and economic citizen.
The social roles and professions we fulfil, are in fact an antithesis to all which is unique, special and authentic in a person. The 21st century is full with communication technologies (Facebook, Instagram, what sup, emails, Zoom and smartphones) – this makes the world to become a global village; where all are wearing and investing in their social masks, but there is almost no knowing or connection to their inner-life, or the inner life of another mask wearer.
This is an extrovert, showoff, flat (one dimensional), that creates human models which are: lacking uniqueness and authenticity. Here the rule is: ‘everyone is like everybody’, we all are trapped in a collective predation line that manufactures ‘social animals’, carrying the flags of: consumption, productivity, urbanization, industrialization, efficiency, biocracy, Capitalism, competitiveness and social comparison (‘I measure myself according to others, they might have been ahead of me in the rat race[30]).
The approach to human life is technical, mechanistic and materialistic.
The spiritual dimension leave in the exile of established religions, galleries, museums. The humanistic studies are not considered, for the ambitious and the hard working – are occupying the technical studies[31] departments.
A person who is considered to become successful will not go to study philosophy. But what about psychology? Isn’t it a part of humanistic studies? Well, no, it tries very hard to be scientific, on the expense of real penetration into the psychic and the unknown in the client.
There is a deep gap between the common conception of the world through what is exposed and measurable, and rarest conception of the approach to the life through what is hidden, unknown and undercover.
And despite the flourishing of new age groups and Gurus, actually, many of them carry and use even more powerful means to address the participants as a ‘social animal’ and the collective rules are not less strict then what is practiced in general society.
And so, the ‘individual entity’ is shrinks from day to day, from year to year.
*
Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
2. The sick society
The term ‘Social Deviance‘[32] intended generally to describe the attitude of individuals deviating from the consensus- Norma. But there is an opposite phenomenon that also could be could: ‘Social Deviance‘.
In the first case the individual is deviating from social reference in the opposite case society deviates from the human reference.
The second phenomenon attacks small groups and sects, as much as whole nations, such as the German nation in Second World War, but mostly, it could poison a society that looks and behaves as sane but has deviated- from corrected human codes.
How such society does behave? How do we know that it got sick? Here are such possible symptoms: the existence of informal norms of the laws (taxes, smuggling, white color felonies, traffic violations, violence in the family etc.), the intensifying of depression, tensions, anxieties, burnout[33] , aggression, alienation, avoidance from the humanistic aspect in relationships. Intensification of the mechanical, technical relation to statistics, numbers, and facts, and not to personal uniqness and inner truth. Increasing the gap between rich and poor, strong and weak, crushing of the weak, sensitive and the venerable, the mutual attack between rival parties in politics, the breakdown of the family unite, instead of heart to heart dialogue – and meaningless chatter. All in all it could be divided into 7 Extentened sections:
1. Segregation of the Sacred: A sick society no longer understands anything as sacred. There is nothing considered Holy. It is held accountable to nothing and no one because because those things that are sacred are segregated to “private” and “personal” areas of life. Morality in pubic life is self-determined, often by those in power and legitimized by might, not rights.
2. Legitimization of lovelessness: A sick society legitimizes the careless and inhumane treatment of others. The recent applause of the audience at a poltical debate where one of the politicians suggested that a sick person be allowed to die rather than have the government pay for health insurance shows the legitimization of being loveless. A sick society does not care for neighbor, but objectifies and blames the neighbor for being in need.
3. Normalization of Nasty: (Phrase taken from a sermon series of Pastor Jeff Harrold in Ann Arbor MI). A sick society legitimizes and normalizes immoral practices. Practices that should cause shame and embarassment are now considered normal. The lewdness and crudeness of what constitutes as entertainment should shock us, but instead numbs us to the cruelty and perversity that is real and all around us. We have no idea of modesty and no convictions of decency. Our children have seen over 1000 pages of pornography by the time they are 16. Nasty is the new normal.
4. Violence as a Vice: Violence is the preferred manner of activity in a sick society. It is the way of solving problems. It objectifies its enemies and wipes out the problem by annihilating its opposition. This is seen in our penchant to go to war, the incredible amounts of violence in our streets, and the bullying violence on our playgrounds. Peace is considered naive and unrealistic, so we amp up our violence as a response to violence. It’s like thinking we can cure our bacterial infection by fighting it with another infection.
5. Competition as a Core Characteristic: A sick society continually understands itself at odds with itself. It sees a zero-sum game, where some elements must win and other must lose. Competition is cherished, while cooperation is shunned and seen as weak. Political philosophies are framed based upon who wins and losses, but rarely in terms of win-win.
6. Refusal of racism as continued reality: A sick society not only refuses to understand its own history of systematically exploiting others who are racially and culturally different, but often expresses the same racism in different ways. These ways are often systemic barriers that keep minorities from having the same opportunities for economic, educational, civic, and relational success. It’s not a coincidence that African-Americans, as an example, are over represented in poverty, incarcerations, chronic disease, under-education, unemployment, etc. Our society refuses to see that we have developed systems that many are benefiting from, yet create barriers for others.
7. Success is not civic: A sick society does not understand that it prospers when the entire society prospers. Success in a sick society is based upon individual achievements and accumulation of wealth, as opposed to the flourishing of the entire community. We allow CEO’s to make over 250 times what the average worker receives (by the way, it was only 17 times greater in 1950) in times of incredible unemployment. A sick society cannot make the connection that its overall health involves the entirety of its body.
In this situation the society must take care that its deviation will not be discovered, so it adopts the deviation as a norm, and it does it by a mechanism called conformity[34] or groupthink[35]
The more deviant a society is – the more it increases and intensifies its control by the agents of groupthink and conformity. In their power to cause someone to believe that a short line is in fact long (the experiment of Solomon Asch on conformity[36]), that the naked king is in fact fully dressed, and that the Nazis is only a local phenomenon (this was disputed by the movie: ‘the wave”). The greater is the deviation of a society the more elaborate become conformity and groupthink.
In order to impose conformity there are three (secret) agents: ignorance, fear and competition.
- Ignorance: actually it is governed by those who are considered to be educated, but their informal role is to keep the general public in their ignorance by distribution and making accessible – knowledge which is common and fit for all. And what’s more’ – its availability and easiness of reach – are downgrading its value and importance. It is knowledge which is hardly relevant to the existential and personal issues of the life of the individual (and the possibility of its actualization), but it is highly relevant to a superficial and mechanical (not dynamic and casual) society; this wide spread knowledge is connected to any knowledge which falls within the realm of the known, the exposed and the measurable, rather than issues which is to do with the actual existential aspect of one’s existence – which are usually deep in the unknown.
The available knowledge is easy to reach. Instead of making it difficult for those who long for knowledge and wisdom. But the available knowledge is tempting, mainly in two ways:
One in the conventional and formal way of a degree or a diploma (that its rewards is acceptance and advancement in the crier ladder). The other is the informal way of courses and popular ‘how to’ books, for the general public. (That its reward is the self-conviction about becoming learned and better equipped to deal with life).
And as the greatest enemy of an air of sexual tension is availability and the cancelation of mystery – so it is with knowledge, we know so much that we know nothing, the easy to reach, common knowledge is ‘hiding’ the rare and real knowledge.
Schools are advancing ignorance, because they don’t teach you to think for yourself, to analyze a raw text, to understand meaning through metaphors and analogies, to deduce one thing from another.
What they do teach is to swallow large quantities of useless knowledge for knowing how to live), this is a fig leaf on basic ignorance about life, and mostly about how absurd they are… and so we learn; to disguise the basic lack of knowing about the real meaning of life by flooding it with answers no one is asking for.
- Fear: Everyone is afraid from everyone, and mainly afraid rom failure, afraid from being hurt, from rejection, from not being loved, afraid from abandonment, from emptiness and from loneliness.
Fear is only one pole in the bipolar swing, when one pole is the pole of security: a diploma, a title, permanency, your own house, family, ordered times and routine. We run around between the pole of fear and the pole of security, and the greater is the fear (being inflames by societies’ messengers) – so does the pole of security becomes scared, it is a pole of a fortress wall of bourgeoisie[37] mentality that exists between the individual and his freedom to cope with the unexpected.
- Competition: the sick society intensifies and emphasizes competition, the race after: popularity, crier, property, status and success, success and more success (the one who fails, like a singer with unsuccessful last albums, will be thrown to the sides and forgotten).
Competition crowns the winners and despise the losers.
Between this three agents (ignorance, fear and competition) – there is a cyclical interaction: The competition is governed by fear and fear is controlled be by ignorance (in the fashion of: ‘what would happen if someone will pass me over and will be above me? And therefore, what do I have to do, or do more in order for that not to happen?’
Ignorance is at the base of it all, in that that the normal human being has no idea about real life and reality – that exists beyond the official life picture, it is the one which dictates banal clichés which are frequent on everyone’s tongue.
We never has more: food, drinks, culture, entertainment, lodging, secure work place and generally, many possibilities to be contentment in his share, and still the competition gets more wild and extreme.
We never had more popular science books, courses, workshops, and free knowledge in the internet, open universities – and still ignorance intensified.
We never had better social conditions, more psychological and social work – help – and still under the general make believe there are: fears, ignorance and competition.
To finalize:
If the illness came from society and polluted the individual, then the cure should come from the individual and filter into society, for example:
- To be always in tuned with your inner voice.
- To try to know at any given time, who you are, what is your mental state? Where are you heading to? What do you want from your life?
- To walk on the path of inner work which is based by majority on self-knowing and the full acceptance of our weaknesses
- To love the struggle and fight, as a way of life.
- To breathe deeply from what is higher than you.
*
It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Conformity to a sick society is to be sick.
I contend that most emotional distress is best understood as a rational response to sick societies.
I could never trust anyone who’s well-adjusted to a sick society.
- 7 social definitions
- Civilization
Civilization is a phenomena happening on the face of society, it is a refinement of the outer layer of social behavior and its improvement by polishing and beautifying the shop window of the accepted behavior on the account of a neglect of the inner, personal – layers.
- Culture
Contrary to the shining Aura that surrounds the word: culture, it is in fact an external and collective replacement that comes on the account of individual creativity deepening, authenticity and dialogue, in the life of the individual.
- Society
The collective coming together of individuals that has got no common permanent center of gravity, and they get together in order that the noise of togetherness will cover and overshadow the loneliness and emptiness inside them.
- Conformity
The way in which the individual is straightening a line with a dogma or social convention, because of fear from public opinion.
- A citizen
The one that has civil rights for fulfilling his duties o the state of an organization that organization his life and the life of others.
- Territorial dominance
It is the power drunk individual that contributed to society (or organization) in doing that he becomes useful and effective for them, and in return the organization gives him power and governing space on others who are left behind in the rat race[38].
- The public
A monster that its opinion and judgment are determining the fate of the individual, whereas its values and principles are in continuous inflation. The public is faceless and lacking unfitness, but is divided to many heads, all arguing with each other on what could be perceived as ideological differences and a different world views, but in fact, they are only a thin cover through which the territorial dominance is ruling, meaning that one head wants to overcome the other heads and thus to be the only leading head.
The one and only choice
From time to time, life puts a dilemma in front of us, there are few options and we should choose one of them (the one which seems to us to be the best). The act of choice is problematic (would it be a successful choice? Could I have known ahead if a choice would be good?) And unaffordable on most of us, and most likely that we would like to eliminate from it.
Erich Fromm in his book: “Escape from freedom[39]” is dealing with this issue of the freedom to choose, in it he claims that human history was influenced wrongly, more by eliminating from making a choice rather than by making the wrong choice. The freedom to choose, according to Fromm, puts a too heavy load of responsibility on the individual. Fromm also explains the rise of Hitler and the Nazism in that that the Germans hated so much the need to evaluate and decide democratically – that they preferred Hitler on the facing the need to choose.
So are we, in our little lives, run away from the freedom to choose, and leave the choice to circumstance, to happenings and forces more powerful than us.
And then we are forced, blackmailed – to take a certain route, do a certain action – not from a free choice but from an external constraint. And so, people don’t choose to study this profession this or another, merry this person or another or with another – it is mostly a result of circumstance.
The difficulty to choose is motivated by fear. And in order to understand it we must see that the human is not free in the first place.
But who is free? For in our daily life we are already ‘drafted’, biased, polarized, and leaning to one side or another, weak or strong, fearful or daring, rational or emotional, extrovertist or introvert, conservative or liberal. Al of us are already cataloged and carry tags we put on ourselves or that we allow others to put on us. All of us are already framed and locked in different departments (in which we either locked ourselves or allowed others to lock us). And when the time comes to choose, an unbiased, objective and free- we are already without freedom, being under the influence and limitation of the polarity that rules our life; an polarity to a ‘child‘, or a ‘parent’ whereas only the ‘adult’ is the only one that can only choose. This three terminologies are taken from the field of transactional analysis of D”R Eric Berne[40]
On the real choice to be made from the adult neutral vector (which resides in the level above) – which is the only one which can choose, a choice which is not a surrender to the tyranny of that which is not balanced in us.
The polarization towards one pole is always ruled by infantile emotions, whereas that in order to choose there is a need to come from the neutral vector (which is the one which is the ‘adult’ in us). When we chose in politics, does it come from the non-choice of the ‘child, or the nonchoice of the ‘pedant’ or the choice of the ‘adult’? Well there is no free choice, for the choice comes mostly from the two infantile-emotional vectors and not from the sanity and neutral balance.
In voting time what tilts the scales to the right or to the left is the emotional load majority of the population. And so, the one non-choosing pole is fighting the other non-choosing pole, and both are convinced in the rightfulness of the free choice they did not actually made. Every pole is claiming that the other’s lack of free choice is worse than his lack of free choice.
So it is in human relations; the pole of rationality is blaming the emotional pole and the other way around. But only the synergy between them is the one which allows a true choice.
On work and learning (or the pure learning)
The pianist Arthur Rubinstein said: “I never learned in order to play in a concert: I played in a concert and from that I learnt”. Usually the situation is reversed: we learn in order to work, and the study are the introduction leading to the core. And indeed it seems true and sensible. An old Chinese proverb says:
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. The bread will sustain life. The flower will give you a reason to live.
But is it really like that? Does the bread exist for the Lili? Or could it be a situation where the Lili exists for the bread??
In other words: does a person finishes his work day so he can relax and then read, learn and gather knowledge and wisdom? Or, maybe, in our society, success in acquiring knowledge – is the necessary selective condition for what kind of work and what degree of hierarchy within that work place – would a person reach. So, in this case, the Lili (the knowledge) is there for the bread (better position in the labor market).
The question is: what is the central value that this society gives to learning and to the acquisition of wisdom? Is it (as was written just now), a value of a door keeper, a secretary? That their job is to be an elaborate filter that weeds out students who are dysfunctional to the institutions. Or is the study and learning has a value for itself and by itself? And that work was supposed to allow after hours where he can learn and gather wisdom in peace?
The concept of learning which a spiritual concept at its base is, got contorted completely in the materialistic-technological society of our days. Instead of taking care to have bread in order to have Lili, the society turns the Lili into a filter in order to match that achievement of students in their studies – to the ladder of jobs available in labor market.
Society throws send in our eyes, there is no proportions between the amount of study a person has to invest and how much from it will he actually use in his work. It does seem that so many years of learning would better qualify a person for his work, whatever it might be, but in fact it is like what Rubinstein said: most learning is done on the job. The reason for so many years of learning is the social factor, being that competition in the labor field is so great, the need for a greater filtration was born, and this turned the learning to be a filtering tool.
We are were never flooded by so my knowledge, but maybe it could be said that ignorance was never greater…
With it, of course things are not so black and white, for in order to operate a computer – one has to learn, and in order to drive one has to learn. But I did not refer to this kind of learning called: a motoric learning that its purpose is to aquiver control and efficiency. I refer to a learning for the purpose of understanding inner processes, meaning and the reasons of things. This learning is called pure learning, learning for the sake of wisdom, wisdom or the sake of truth.
The only way of learning in the old day was the way of the apprentice; the young person was ‘thrown into the water, and ‘learn to swim’ under the guldens of expert field man. The idea of unrelated, general and massive learning material – isn’t organic and is not true, there is no training for a job except experience.
Pure learning is not a training for function and it shouldn’t be, it should be the highlight, a pure celebration of the mind, trying penetrate to a core meaning and expose a truth.
The average age of a person finishing his studies and is out to the labor market is above 25.
Meaning could not ne attainted before experience. Experience without prior learning would cause a yearning to know what to do and how to do it better, without this hunger – the food (the knowledge) if given before the hunger, will only make the body heavy, but will not go to nourish yearning muscles.
Learning without mental maturity and life experience – is sterile. Learning is supposed to be a reward, given to those grappling with life issues and gather much meaningless experience. And not a meaningless burden on experience less youngsters, they yearn for experience but instead learn about unrelated and no relevant – knowledge.
The problem with too much pre experience learning is that it blocks is us the love of asking fresh questions, and the curiosity of the wish to know. They kill the fire of the wish for pure learning.
*
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
Albert Einstein
I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
Albert Einstein
The only source of knowledge is experience.
Albert Einstein
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
Albert Einstein
The great power of the status quo
The terms: ‘change’, ‘progress’, ‘growth’, ‘improvement’ and more – are used frequently to describe goals and positive targets, in personal, social, educational and political fields. The greatest enemy that stumbles this good intentions is what could be viewed as an innocent and even neutral concept: the status quo.
The status quo is the existing consolation, static and unchanging. Status quo is a preserving gravitational power – that everything returns eventually back to him, unable to disconnect from its ties.
The status quo is in fact the hidden being, hiding behind and within the many efforts and the plans for change and development. It is amazing to estimate the amount of resources, of the emotions, of energies. The arguments, the conflicts that are investments, apparently, in order to change the situation, but in fact is strengthening the status quo.
The advancement soldiers are being defeated by the forces of the status quo, and the indentations for change and improvement are being swallowed by it again and again.
On the surface celebrates the technological advancement, the development in science, medicine, etc. – All give the impression as though everything is advancing in a dynamic breathless movement forward, towards the future… but behind all the noise and the activity of: congresses, seminars, political coalitions – all says the same; nothing moves, nothing happens, and everything stands still.
But the worst is yet to come, not only that the outward advancement is a cover for a status quo, but the stagnation (the status quo) itself is a cover, a cover for processes of regression and degeneration which are taking place behind the status quo.
In other words, even if we admit that nothing is changing essentially, we still did not touch the more bitter truth, fore behind the static state of things – slowly things are crumbling…
Every apparent status quo, is in fact a sign for a decadence.
Here, on this hard earth, nothing is achieved easily, and for every small result we need to put in much sweat.
Here, on this difficult earth, every spark of energy is surrounded by much matter, and in order to rescue dynamic sparks of achievements, there a need to ‘move aside’ many ‘mountains’ of matter.
Deterioration and regression are not reached by any effort, in order to deteriorate, there is no need to work hard particularly, all one needs to do is to decrease the degree of effort invested, and allow the matter to swallow the spark. And again, in order to regress there is no need to go back, only to stop.
-In order to destroy – it is enough only to regress.
-In order to regress – it is enough to stop.
So, how does one advances? How does one get rescued from the grip of the status-quo and becoming to reach growth and results which could not be disputed.
What can ignite the rocket’s engines and send it outside the gravitational pull of the status quo?
What can pull us out of the status quo?
We are trying to push our life with our own power, our own will, our own efforts, this is not enough, and we need an outside force.
Certain people did amazing things in their time: wrote great books, conquered half the world, created world religions etc. where does this great power come from?
Moving oneself with one’s own effort and willpower is limited, it working by the power of the emotions, and the ego, but all these are like butteries, with limited electrical power, they could bring one up till the gravitational pull of the habit and the mechanical way of living, no more, and from there on in a repetitive loop, a status quo. And in order to to be released from the gravitational pull of the status quo we need to connect to an unending source of power, a kind of electrical current, an external source.
But it is not my intention here to offer an answer as to what is this external source of power. I wish to remain with the question, Socrates taught by questions that that instead of leading to answers, they led to more questions. Questions could be more important than the answer, because it is an option, whereas an answer is the closing of an option. A too early answer, too ready, or too obvious – stope process instead of progressing them. But it seems that we have fear from questions, the unknown symbolizes for us danger (‘Skeletons in the Cabot’).
We have answers almost for anything, but not enough questions. We don’t let what we don’t understand – to be, we are not hungry enough to know, to understand.
The power come from the question, just like real power comes from hunger not from food.
To wonder all the time about the great enigma of existence.
And maybe this wondering, together with the longing to know – will connect us to the generator, to the power to get out of the mechanic al zone and into a new filed, a new dimension.
*
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
~ Ecclesiastes 1:9
1:9-10; New International Version
The priest and the prophet
The bustling consumer of modern culture and art does not rest for a moment, he is getting updated, renewed. He is having savvy, reading the prose that just now came out of the printer, watching the newest modern dance works, visiting new art exhibitions, knows about new movies, quoting from modern poetry collections and more. And if he managed to be updated well and bring convincing proofs for it in casual talks, the ‘reward’ will not be late to arrive: he is in; recognized as succeeding to touch the current representation of truth. And he is doing all this from real conviction that what is important is in the innovations and new material in the various art fields, as they are expressed in the new critic or story in the newspaper or the internet about what is fresh and current – all this gives the feeling that in all this fields and their new works, exists the last expressions about the discovery of truth.
But this hope, this fragile faith that claims that the truth about human existence is in a process of revelation and exposure – is actually the modern art’s version for the idea of the appearance of the Messiah… (or The Second Coming (sometimes called the Second Advent or the Parousia) is Christian, Islamic, Baháʼí and Messianic Jewish belief regarding the return of Jesus after his ascension to heaven about two thousand years ago. The idea is based on messianic prophecies and is part of most Christian eschatologist). In both approaches: the religious and the art one is the belief that till now we lived in comparative darkness, but the light is on its way at last (no need to wait for the Messiah), what you need to be doing , is to be updated with the newest art works, therefore be anticipating for the last novel of a well-considered writer as to not to miss being the first to discover it. For, again, we are convinced, that till now, all were experiments, and in fact all generation were lost in great darkness, but only now the next ballet company from Stuttgart would bring it forth it their new work.
The pioneering forces of the areas; prose and philosophy are at the front lines of discovery and translation of their discoveries into new artistic form. This is how we understand the word: Modern; Modern is right. Modern is an updating of what was and now it does not fit anymore to the truth that wants to be burn now.
But now, modern is not enough anymore, it needs to be post-modern, no less…
But now come the time, in this essay, for what I call as: a reversal point. Maybe what we think is the truth about what exists in modern and post-modern works might, in fact, only intensifying the fog and the uncertainty?? For maybe the future only has in store for us more confusion, more uncertainty, more frustration, despair and anxiety than ever before? Instead of what we would like to believe, that it carries the new fresh winds of upgrading and growth.
For maybe the truth is that all this race towards innovation and modernistic plays, dance performances, new novels etc. – only thickness the fog and intensifies the uncertainty?
Maybe the future has in store more confusion more uncertainty, frustration. Desperation, and terror greater than before? Maybe humanity is marching into darkness and away from light?
For we never lived in such false culture, concerning it values, and at the same time, so pretentious about glorifying art and artists as bringing forth progress and progression.
Truth does not have to be invented or created in an art form, it is here all the time. Covered by conventional current, accepted collectively – truth. It is more like a fragile archeological relic that should be uncovered under the many layers of out of date cultural art works.
Whatever happened to red riding hood?
Human history testifies that any change of direction that influence the course of history – originated mostly in a great inspiration, understanding, enlighten, that happens in an inspired individual. From this inspiration-discovery, a great evolvement and development is happening, as it pass from the inventor, the prophet or thinker – into the public: Moses and the Judaism, Nelson Mandela and South Africa, Marx and communism, Herzl and Zionism, Muhamad and Islam, Jesus and Christianity, Buddha and Buddhism and others.
There was a Jewish thinker called: Ahad Ha’am[41] from his essay:
“Priest and Prophet” (1893). Here are some quotes:
- There are … two ways of doing service in the cause of an idea; and the difference between them is that which in ancient days distinguished the Priest from the Prophet.
- p. 130
- The Prophet is essentially a one-sided man. A certain moral idea fills his whole being, masters his every feeling and sensation, and engrosses his whole attention. He can only see the world through the mirror of his idea; he desires nothing, strives for nothing, except to make every phase of the life around him an embodiment of that idea in its perfect form. His whole life is spent in fighting for this ideal with all his strength; for its sake he lays waste his powers, unsparing of himself, regardless of the conditions of life and the demands of the general harmony. His gaze is fixed always on what ought to be in accordance with his own convictions; never on what can be consistently with the general condition of things outside himself.
- p. 130
- The Prophet is thus a primal force. His action affects the character of the general harmony, while he him self does not become a part of that harmony, but remains always a man apart, a narrow-minded extremist, zealous for his own ideal, and intolerant of every other. And since he cannot have all that he would, he is in a perpetual state of anger and grief; he remains all his life “a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth.” [Jeremiah 15:10] Not only this: the other members of society, those many-sided dwarfs, creatures of the general harmony, cry out after him, “The Prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad” [Hosea 9:7]; and they look with lofty contempt on his narrowness and extremeness.
- pp. 130-131
- The Priest … appears on the scene at a time when Prophecy has already succeeded in hewing out a path for its Idea; when that Idea has already had a certain effect on the trend of society, and has brought about a New Harmony or balance between the different forces at work. The Priest also fosters the Idea, and desires to perpetuate it; but he is not of the race of giants. He has not the strength to fight continually against necessity and actuality; his tendency is rather to bow to the one and come to terms with the other. Instead of clinging to the narrowness of the Prophet, and demanding of reality what it cannot give, he broadens his outlook, and takes a wider view of the relation between his Idea and the facts of life. Not what ought to be, but what can be, is what he seeks. His watchword is not the Idea, the whole Idea, and nothing but the Idea; he accepts the complex “harmony” which has resulted from the conflict of that Idea with other forces. His battle is no longer a battle against actuality, but a battle in the name of actuality against its enemies.
- pp. 131-132
So, after the prophets comes the continuing generation of the priests, who are made of: rabies, lecturers, teachers, educators, commissars, historians, academics, authors, interpreters and intellectuals – who cannot, in their life and way of thinking, are worthy of the vision. And then, not only there is regression from the original idea, but actually a reversal and an antithesis. For the next generations are betraying the original idea while apparently serving it. And so, they allow exactly the very same things that the establisher and originator of the idea, was objecting to, with all his might.
Indeed, this is the place that the antithesis (of the original vision) likes to live in, within the thesis, protected and hidden by the original idea that became to be only the cover.
The thesis (the original idea) resides in the antithesis (the priests), through the eyes of the priests it looks outside, priests who are roaring the massage of the prophet, who is the thinker of the original idea. But the voice is the hoarse voice of the priest. (There is nowhere the devil would like to reside in than in a monastery).
To be up, to be down
Like in the excellent British T.V. series: “Upstairs downstairs” – so it is in our life; there is the down floor and the floor above.
Like in the pyramid of needs of Abraham Maslow: below there the basic physiological needs, physical security and love- this is the maintenance floor, the two upper floors are to do with esteem needs and self-actualization.
Also in our life we have a similar pyramid; up is the master’s floor, or the head of staff, and downstairs we have the soldiers or the servants. Or in other words; up is the brain, down is the maintenance system.
The passage, in human life, from the lower floor to the upper one, the master’s floor – is never easy or automatic, to the needs in the maintenance floor there is a powerful demand, and the funny thing is that the more you satisfy their demand the more it’s demand will intensify.
In order to shift the center gravity from the lower department to the higher one there is one condition: to put a barrier to the unending dominance and demand of this lower department, to say: “till here”, otherwise the demand and dominance will only increase.
To us it seems that if we only respond to the next demand – we can, at last, be free for the upper floor (self-actualization), but it is not like that, for most of us it is difficult to rise above the lower floor, and we find ourselves running around trying to fulfil their needs which are like a bottomless pit, and if it will not get restrictions put upon it will expand like a cancerous growth.
From the point of view of the lower floor, the higher floor is conceived as non-relevant, as luxury: “what is the importance of finding a meaning to my life when my career at work is halted?”
So, how do we deal with our slavery to the lower department and the blockage from reaching the higher ones? When we are trying to compensate by escapism. But freedom is not is actually is reached by the opposite, by restraining the inhabitants of the lower floor; putting boundaries to them.
The inhabitants of the lower floor should be trained, so we could move to the higher floor, to free the creature living in it from the dominance of the lower floor, so that he can dedicate himself to self-actualization, and to his wish to give meaning to his life.
Without training, restraining and putting boundaries to wild emotions, such as: being hurt, taking things personally, putting the egi in the center, and shortly – the higher parts, like clear consciousness – will not function.
A beautiful piece about training as a positive approach (in friendship, we find in the story: “The little prince[42]” in the dialogue between the little prince and the fox:
It was then that the fox appeared.
“Good morning,” said the fox.
“Good morning,” the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw nothing.
“I am right here,” the voice said, “under the apple tree.”
“Who are you?” asked the little prince, and added, “You are very pretty to look at.”
“I am a fox,” the fox said.
“Come and play with me,” proposed the little prince. “I am so unhappy.”
“I cannot play with you,” the fox said. “I am not tamed.”
“Ah! Please excuse me,” said the little prince.
But, after some thought, he added:
“What does that mean–‘tame’?”
“You do not live here,” said the fox. “What is it that you are looking for?”
“I am looking for men,” said the little prince. “What does that mean–‘tame’?”
“Men,” said the fox. “They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?”
“No,” said the little prince. “I am looking for friends. What does that mean–‘tame’?”
“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.”
“‘To establish ties’?”
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . .”
“I am beginning to understand,” said the little prince. “There is a flower . . . I think that she has tamed me . . .”
“It is possible,” said the fox. “On the Earth one sees all sorts of things.”
“Oh, but this is not on the Earth!” said the little prince.
The fox seemed perplexed, and very curious.
“On another planet?”
“Yes.”
“Are there hunters on that planet?”
“No.”
“Ah, that is interesting! Are there chickens?”
“No.”
“Nothing is perfect,” sighed the fox.
But he came back to his idea.
“My life is very monotonous,” the fox said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat . . .”
The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.
“Please–tame me!” he said.
“I want to, very much,” the little prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”
“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me . . .”
“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.
“You must be very patient,” replied the fox. “First you will sit down at a little distance from me–like that–in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day . . .”
The next day the little prince came back.
“It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox. “If, for example, you come at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you . . . One must observe the proper rites . . .”
“What is a rite?” asked the little prince.
“Those also are actions too often neglected,” said the fox. “They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all.”
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near–
“Ah,” said the fox, “I shall cry.”
“It is your own fault,” said the little prince. “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you . . .”
“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.
“But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince.
“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.
“Then it has done you no good at all!”
“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.” And then he added:
“Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret.”
The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.
“You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”
And the roses were very much embarassed.
“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you–the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.
And he went back to meet the fox.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
“It is the time I have wasted for my rose–” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.
“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . .”
“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
From a dead past to an alive present
Part one:
A nation or a religion, like an organic body are born, becoming shaped up and grow, but also grow old, and sometimes cease to live, all together.
The fact that they have died does not mean that they also had to disappear; for they can also still exist as functioning carcasses. Of course it is only the outer layer, for the living spirit and the inner dynamic movement forward – is already absent. At this stage, the nation or the established religion, begin to sanctify past – events, personas, dates, and scriptures – that would influence and make a mark in the present and the future.
A nation in this stage I in fact in its ossification stage, it is trying to reconstruct, by ritual patterns, what was once a living force, in living people, standing in front of living God. The formula for the reconstruction, became the main thing, and instead of increasing the spirit of search, wonderment and curiosity – they freeze and repress it further.
The written rules, lineage ways of goings on, repeating of the old ways – are kind of coffins for any personal growth, because they sanctify and preserve the results of activities of past forces, for the living force could not be preserved.
Concentrating on answers from the past (any past) will not revive the forces, only in confusion, allowing oneself to get and be, lost, becoming friends with questions – this are the tools for connecting with fresh living forces. Search means to be prepared to meet with the unknown, in order to integrate it into one’s present life.
I a person want to be alive with what is going on now, he must be prepared to give up readymade answers and cope with the angst of uncertainty: with the difficulty to determine what is right to do and what is not? What would be the next step? And when a person is trying to find his way in the uncertain darkness of his existence, what is greater than the temptation to reach back towards the artificial light of the dogmas, rules, conventions and norms, that are handed to him from the past, and light the road, but is it the right road for him now?
On riot, calamity and going wild
Part one:
Everything is yearning, in the end, to go wild, to break apart, to fall apart, to return to chaos: the apple of the shelf in the shop, like the pages of a book, like mirage, like the dress we wear, like our friendship connections. The order, methods and organization that we put in our life with much effort are pushing to go back to lesser order. Whether it is junk eating sexual hallucinations or difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. To let it happen without boundaries, to return to chaos. All which got together – done so only temporarily. In 2000 years’ time – what would remain whole under the archeologist’s brush?
Somehow we ménage to hold on to some sort of order, in our private and social life, great forces are pushing and pressing, to bring all to original chaos, which is always there under the thin and fragile organization cover.
Part two:
War happen suddenly, at once, as could be seen by the shock of all, it could breakout any minute. The rickety piece is doing it by the loose power of agreements and contractors. Great forces are pressing so loosely that eventually things will fall down like in a domino rally.
So it is in wars between nations and a fight between lovers; suddenly, because of a marginal thing – the chaotic forces burst out to break out that which was whole and in one piece, so far.
Part three:
The order in nature is internal and calamity and disorder could come only from the outside, from human being, that disconnected himself from nature.
But order in human society (and in human creature of society) is external, meaning, not burn like in nature, but political, national, military, educational etc. (enquired). Therefore disorder could only erupt from the unknown, from the subconscious. So it was in the two world worlds, and so it is in our individual and transactional catastrophes, threatening us from within any day, any hour, any minute.
Vive Le Bourgeoisie
There are many ways to live a life; through crime, through madness, through career, through academic study, through love, through family, through fun and games and sports, through the arts and more. All the ways are leading to one of two main roads; most ways are leading to the main road of materialism (in its wide term) and only few leading to the main road of spirituality (in its wide term).
In the followers of the ‘spiritual side’ we find: religious believers, philosophy students, and searchers after truth, eccentrics, dreamers, visionaries, creative artists and carriers of the spark. In the followers of the ‘materialistic side’ are we can find: practical people, lawyers, businessman, contractors, engineers, politicians, merchants, salesman, computer programmers etc.
Followers of the ‘spiritual road’ refuse to become bourgeois, to be part of the ‘materialistic, established, road’, this road is conceived by them as hollow and full of information instead of meaning. An in the same way that the bourgeois are downgrading the followers of the other way, so do the followers’ of the ‘spiritual road’ to downgrade bourgeois, the followers of the materialistic road. And exactly from deep conviction from the importance of the wide meaning of having spiritual life, I am going to defend few words of defense on the … bourgeois…
The humanistic-spiritual camp, claim that if the bourgeois get a house with the price of his spiritual life, then it wasn’t worth it. I wish to present it different; I prefer a bourgeois that got a house on a dreamer about reality, and this is because the bourgeois, at least succeeded to get out of a raw-infantile state and did something. The best dream about exalted state, cannot be of the same value to the smallest achievement in the area of materialism, because dream is still a dream.
The fortress of the dreamer is the conviction that dreams could be actualized, whereas the bourgeois’ reality is a dead end.
But in a second thought, maybe it is better to have the material achievements of the bourgeois? For maybe the hope of the humanist-dreamer that always there will be the next day, next month, and next year – is a powerful trap. This life was supposed to circle around actualization of potential. And everyone has some freedom whether to actualize, or not to actualize, himself, the best choice is of course – actualization, even if it is only the actualization of the material side. The bourgeois did something, got rescued from the raw state of life as a potential, and this could not be taken away from him, it could be a shame that this is all that he actualize from his potential, but he cannot be judged, definitely not by a person who did not achieve anything in his life because who was too busy dreaming about some sort of spirituality.
The difference between a person who got achievements in the material field and a person dreaming about a field of spirituality, is like the difference between a tuber of a simple plant that has grown a stem, leaves and a flower, and a tuber of a white lily that is only dreaming its beat full blossomless.
The jealous spiritual (again, in the wideset term) approach, sees justification for existence only if a person actualizes himself in his higher chambers. But the problem with those who ‘aspire for spirituality’ is, that their spiritual intention is a fig leaf, leaving them as naked as they were from any stand point, because at the end, they were left with no coping with anything real.
Coping in practice is as important as potential spirituality.
With it, coping which gets material asset, is never preferable on coping which gets a spiritual asset. To be a human being means: to actualize that which is hidden within you as a promise. Existence is first demanding from us: “do something with me” and only then, asks: “what are you doing with me”?
Many of the people who are on some sort of a spiritual path are escaping from taking responsibility on their life- don’t do, and therefore, from this respect, the Bourgeoisie knows what it means to work extra hours to close an overdraft, he knows self-discipline, cleavage to goal, pride on achievements that were got by much hard work. Whereas, the spiritual dreamer knows, maybe, to quote beautiful sentences, and to describe higher worlds, but he is enslaved to romanticism. The dread of the one on any sort of spiritual quest – is a kind of compensation for him not having a life…
It is comparatively easy to seat with likeminded spiritually inclined people and to criticize the establishment and the materialistic society. But intention could not judge achievements. For achievement is an achievement.
There should be a difference made between the apprentice and the master, the materialistically inclined is a master in buying a car of a house and it is not something to be taken easily.
In order to reach something in life, a person should give up his nativity and romanticism.
כדי להשיג משהו בחיים, על האדם לוותר על התמימות והרומנטיקה. פקעת של חבצלת אינה יכולה להטיח ביקורת בצמח של אפונה ולומר שהוא טיפש או מכוער; עליה להוכיח תחילה שהיא משהו, ואחר-כך לדבר. הפסאודו-רוחניים הטוענים שכל אידיוט יכול להגיע למשהו בעולמות החומריים אינם יודעים מה הם שחים. קודם-כל עליהם לעמוד על רגליהם (הרוחניות, או לפחות על רגליהם החומריות).
הבורגנים אינם אשמים שהם חיים בתרבות מורעלת. הם משתדלים להיות ראויים למעט שהם יודעים על החיים. אין הם בוחרים בבורגנות בצורה של “מה את מעדיף בורגנות או רוחניות?” הם משלמים מס על ההתדרדרות ההיסטורית ההולכת ונמשכת של המין האנושי, התדרדרות מן הרוחניות אל החומריות, התדרדרות שבה הוקרב הניצוץ האנושי למען הצלחה בקנה-מידה חברתי. הבורגני אומלל, יש לו קרעים נוראים בנפשו, היות שההצלחה החומרית אינה מחפה על חוסר צמיחה פנימית; וכנגד זה, להישגים שלו אין טעם (ובתוך תוכו הוא יודע זאת היטב). בשלב כלשהו הוא מגלה מאחורי הישגיו את נפשו העירומה ועולם שאין בו עם מי לדבר, והוא מרגיש זעקה פנימית. הכאב שזעקה זו מסיבה לו מניעה אותו לנסות לנתק את דרכי התקשורת שלו עם פנימו ולאפוף את עצמו ברעשים חיצוניים, שימנעו אותו מלשמוע את זעקת של “ליסה העצובה” שלו, הבוקעת אליו מבפנים.
אך תמיד, כשהמאמץ נחלש – הזעקה נשמעת. וזו, למרבה הפרדוקס, זעקת הריקנות הגורמת לו לחזור אל הבלי היומיום מתוך מאמץ רב יותר, בניסיון מוגבר להשתיק את זעקתה הנוראה של הריקנות הבאה מבפנים. למרות המלכודת הנוראה שהבורגני נתון בה – הרוחניות או הנפשיות אינן ערך. ההתמודדות לקראת הגשמה עצמית היא ערך. רוחניות היא איפה – מטרת-על.
[1] טירוף, סטייה ויצירה, סדרת אוניברסיטה משודרתשלמה גיורא שוהם., בהוצאת משרד הביטחון –, 2002
[2] The Zohar distinguishes among four kelipot, three of which are entirely evil. The fourth, kelipat noga, is the shell which actually envelops the spark of holiness. It thus has direct contact with holiness and is not entirely evil. The other three kelipot surround kelipat noga and are therefore further removed from holiness.
[3] Let us take some event in the life of humanity. For instance, war. There is a war going on at the present moment. What does it signify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people. They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up. Everything that takes place is owing to this sleep.
[4] Abraham, R. (1998). Emotional dissonance in organizations: Antecedents, consequences, and moderators. Genetic, Social and General Psychology Monographs, 124, 229-246.
[5] The study of the transformation of energy in living organisms.
A system of alternative psychotherapy based on the belief that emotional healing can be aided through resolution of bodily tension.
[6] Iscador treatment can achieve a clinically relevant prolongation of survival time of cancer patients and appears to stimulate self-regulation.
[7] Anima is psychiatrist Carl Jung’s term for the feminine part of a man’s personality. Animus, is the masculine part of a woman’s personality. … Men are nurtured and raised to suppress their feminine side to a degree, while women are nurtured and raised to suppress their masculine side to a degree
[8] A person or thing that is the direct opposite of someone or something else.
“love is the antithesis of selfishness”
[9] Herrigel, Eugen (January 26, 1999). Zen in the Art of Archery (Later Printing ed.). Vintage Books..
[10] “The Soul Bird 10th Anniversary Edition”. Constable & Robinson. Retrieved 26 March 2010.By: Michal Snunit.
[11] Groupthink is a phenomenon that occurs when a group of individuals reaches a consensus without critical reasoning or evaluation of the consequences or alternatives. Groupthink is based on a common desire not to upset the balance of a group of people. This desire creates a dynamic within a group whereby creativity and individuality tend to be stifled in order to avoid conflict.
[12] This may involve the use of split second flashes of text, hidden images, or subtle cues that affect the people at a level below conscious awareness.
[13] It is a form of self-induced suggestion in which individuals guide their own thoughts, feelings, or behavior.
[14] In The Adventures of Pinocchio, Pinocchio grows donkey ears after riding the roller coaster. In Geppetto, the roller coaster is again the cause of Pinocchio’s transformation and the puppet does fully take on donkey form.
[15] Schumacher, Meinolf [de] (2005): “Catalogues of Demons as Catalogues of Vices in Medieval German Literature: ‘Des Teufels Netz’ and the Alexander Romance by Ulrich von Etzenbach.” In In the Garden of Evil: The Vices and Culture in the Middle Ages. Edited by Richard Newhauser, pp. 277–290. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
[16] Peer Gynt: a dramatic poem, published by Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1936. Color illustrations by Arthur Rackham. via Internet Archive.
[17]T HE VIOLET HOUR. Great Writers at the End. By Katie Roiphe. Illustrated. 306 pp. The Dial Press.
[18]A difference or opposition between two things, it is a figure of speech in which an opposition or contrast of ideas is expressed by parallelism of words that are the opposites of, or strongly contrasted with, each other, such as “hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all sins”.
[19] The idea of the absurd is a common theme in many existentialist works, particularly in Camus. Absurdity is the notion of contrast between two things. … It’s easy to highlight the absurdity of the human quest for purpose. It’s common to assume that everything must have a purpose, a higher reason for existence.
[20] For human beings, time comes to an end with our death. … This is what Heidegger famously calls “being–towards–death“. If our being is finite, then an authentic human life can only be found by confronting finitude and trying to make a meaning out of the fact of our death.
[21] If you make a concession to someone, you agree to let them do or have something, especially in order to end an argument or conflict. We made too many concessions and we got too little in return.
[22] According to Dr. Aron’s definition, the highly sensitive person (HSP) has a sensitive nervous system, is aware of subtleties in his/her surroundings, and is more easily overwhelmed when in a highly stimulating environment.
[23] Emotional abandonment is a subjective emotional state in which people feel undesired, left behind, insecure, or discarded. People experiencing emotional abandonment may feel at a loss, cut off from a crucial source of sustenance that has been withdrawn, either suddenly, or through a process of erosion.(Wikipedia).
[24] keep a low profile. Stay out of public notice, avoid attracting attention to oneself. For example, Until his appointment becomes official, Ted is keeping a low profile. This expression alludes to profile in the sense of “a visible contour,” a usage dating from the 1600s.
[25] Fordham, P. E. (1993) ‘Informal, non-formal and formal education programmes’ in YMCA George Williams College ICE301 Lifelong Learning Unit 2, London: YMCA George Williams College.
[26] Harris, Thomas. I’m OK, You’re OK. Harper 2004.
[27] In Lord of the Flies, British schoolboys are stranded on a tropical island. In an attempt to recreate the culture they left behind, they elect Ralph to lead, with the intellectual Piggy as counselor. But Jack wants to lead, too, and one-by-one, he lures the boys from civility and reason to the savage survivalism of primeval hunters. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding gives us a glimpse of the savagery that underlies even the most civilized human beings.
[28] The Little Prince (English) Paperback – 15. 5. 2000 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Author), Richard Howard (Translator).
[29] The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement is a non-fiction book by American journalist David Brooks
[30] A way of life in which people are caught up in a fiercely competitive struggle for wealth or power.
“they quit the rat race in order to live a simple life”
[31] ‘Technical studies’ is a broad term that describes the more practical aspects of hands-on fields such as engineering and computer science. Technical courses are generally more practical and vocational (career-oriented) than their theory-oriented academic counterparts.
[32] Douglas, J. D., and F. C. Waksler. 1982. The Sociology of Deviance: An Introduction. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
[33] People who are struggling to cope with workplace stress may place themselves at high risk of burnout. Burnout can leave people feeling exhausted, empty, and unable to cope with the demands of life. Burnout may be accompanied by a variety of mental and physical health symptoms as well. If left unaddressed, burnout can make it difficult for an individual to function well in their daily life.
[34] Behavior in accordance with socially accepted conventions or standards.
“loyalty to one’s party need not imply unquestioning conformity”
[35] Groupthink is a term first used in 1972 by social psychologist Irving L. Janis that refers to a psychological phenomenon in which people strive for consensus within a group. In many cases, people will set aside their own personal beliefs or adopt the opinion of the rest of the group.
[36] The Asch Experiment, by Solomon Asch, was a famous experiment designed to test how peer pressure to conform would influence the judgment and individuality of a test subject.
[37] The middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes.
[38] A rat race is an endless, self-defeating, or pointless pursuit. The phrase equates humans to rats attempting to earn a reward such as cheese, in vain. It may also refer to a competitive struggle to get ahead financially or routinely. (Wikipedia)..
[39] If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism. This is the central idea of Escape from Freedom
From Eric Berne, Transactional analysis in psychotherapy (1961) and Games people play (1964). A more recent book—Ian Stewart, Vann Joines, TA today: a new introduction to transactional analysis (1987)—is also recommended.
[41] had Ha-‘Am: Selected Essays (English) Paperback –2003. Ahad Ha-Am (Author), Asher Zvi Ginzberg (Editor), Leon Simon (Translator)
[42] (27 August 2020). The Little Prince. Translated by Morpurgo, Michael. London: Vintage Children’s Classics.
