There’s a very specific way to brick yourself that looks like increasing awareness,
but is really just the mental/social equivalent of thinking too hard about how breathing works and suddenly realizing you’re hypoxic and might die if you don’t stop thinking and let your body *do*
“So your “love” for me is just your experience of my experience of you matching your experience of your preference for my experience of you, all of which I’ve come to grok as an ur-gestalt of sociophenomenological—“
“Yeah, I’m leaving you for Tom”
“But Tom doesn’t even meditate!”
It seems to come from an assumption that if you make explicit things that are generally implicit, this is a sign of heightened/deepened awareness
But usually, people are quite aware of these things. Just not linguistically aware of them.
And often, these things are not served or added to by being languages.
it’s not about bringing help or understanding to others. It’s about BEING SEEN bringing out new understanding.
Which is often the biggest obstacle to understanding.
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And partially cuz it’s the only book I have brought 2 copies of with me through multiple countries, cuz my first copy got too worn but I didn’t wanna lose my notes
This part is from late in the book, but captures something about the attitude.
Laing very much refused to be beaten down into submission—even while constantly looking around and calling out the dereliction of the world, he refused to sink into it
The basic jist of this book goes something like:
Sometimes the dynamics of a family force a member of that family into impossible double- triple- and quadruple-binds, where no action, no thought, no belief fits in with the prevailing dynamics and counterdynamics…
In some of these cases, it affects the family member (usually the child, who’s mind is developed within the constraints of these binds) such that they are unable to cope with, or even find a hold on, consensus reality. This is the cause of some amount of severe mental illness.
When I was going through college and talked about Laing with some psych students and profs, they bucked pretty hard whenever the ideas that family affect mental health were brought up.
I saw some post the other day about how westerners turned eastern religion into something ugly and corporate, and it was the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
If you’ve ever been to spiritual centers in Varanasi or Hanoi or Seoul or Lumbini—or read any historical travelogues from eastern pilgrimage sites, you know they needed no help figuring out that religion could be a raucous money-making racket.
This image some people have of eastern religions as these pure beautiful things that are of a higher vibration and a finer cosmic fabric... it’s utter bullshit and projection.
There’s a narrative something like
“the complicated basics of a spiritual practice are needlessly convoluted, but it’s necessary to begin there as a scaffolding for later experience/advancement”
For example—“we’re all headed for Unity, but the first step is to work with the 4 elements, 7 planets, 12 zodiacal energies, and their requisite corresponding angels, intelligences, governors, herbs, etc… then later it all falls away”
Other example—“we’re on our way to enlightenment, but you must first memorize and work with the 8 fold path, 4 noble truths, 5 Kleshas, 6 bardos, 4 marks, 9 yanas, 5 skandhas… later you’ll move past these, but they’re important to begin”
I knew a girl in Michigan who everyone around me loved and found super sexy and desirable.
She creeped me out. Something about her just seemed slimy, hollow, without any “there” there.
One day we got stuck hanging out alone when other friends left for a bit.
I decided to be a little rude and just straight up ask her some version of “what’s your center? How did you become what you’re like?”
She looked at me a minute, then told me that she’d read “The Art of Seduction” by Robert Greene when she was a teen, absorbed it, and never looked back.
lot of y’all are v optimistic about christianity and Christians
Reality check: what most of you say about your Christian faith would get you excommunicated from the majority of Christian churches. Just because you see yourself as Christian doesn’t mean they see you as one.
one of the Lutheran synods started allowing women to be pastors when I was a kid. People in my church made death threats.
There’s something fascinating here about one-way brotherhood/sisterhood.
We can see ourselves as part of a massive brotherhood, a shared heritage and community,
Even if almost no one in that brotherhood agrees that they share anything with you