On the Space Between Appearances & Reality, Time & History, Subject & Object

The following mess is what results if I disable the filter and just let it rip, without thinking about whether it makes any sense to the reader.

I'm going to start with a quote from Thomistic Psychology, which provoked the whole fiasco:

Subject and object must in some manner be related if we are not to lose our grip on reality. Related they certainly are.... But separated, too, they must be, if existence in the intentional order is different from existence in the real order.

On the one hand, everything is what it is. On the other, nothing is what it appears to be. There is reality; and there are appearances. However, we only ever experience the former in terms of the latter. Animals too only have contact with appearances, except they don't know it. Nor do they not know it. Rather, they only know what they know, in a closed neuro-instinctual loop.

How did human beings ever exit this loop? Some people insist we never did. If that's the case, how do they communicate the idea to us?

In any event, it seems -- no, it is the case -- that there is a kind of breach or crack in the cosmos, and that this crack is everything. We can't deny it without reverting to animality, but nor can we ever fill it without exiting humanness from the other end. Supposing we manage to escape, we don't become better than human, rather, like a human only worse. This is, for example, what ideologues do, i.e., imagine a world unfit for humans.

Now, this crack in the cosmic egg is both spatial and temporal. This latter is what we call "history," and here again, it's not something we can ever stop, or from which we can ever disembark. Except when we can, in which case we are also plunged into a world in which everything is what it is -- the world alluded to in paragraph one, prior to the real world where nothing is what it appears to be.

That real human world is full of irony, not to mention humor, ambiguity, and play. Which is why ideologues are never funny, and why late night comedy has become so unfunny. You can't be an ideologue and a comedian at the same time. In North Korea you can't make fun of Kim Jong Un, nor in Iran ridicule the mullahs.

You might think things are different here in the U.S., since our late night ideologues constantly ridicule the president and his supporters. But they aren't permitted to laugh at or even point out the absurdity of figures such as Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Joe Biden, Jerry Nadler, Al Gore, etc.

Back to history. There is the historical stream into which we are born, and our own personal/developmental history situated within it: wheels within wheels. Let's call the first (H), the second (h). Now, one of the most fascinating things about (H) is how easily it can be distorted by (h) due to emotional, cognitive, and spiritual pathologies of various kinds.

I was reminded of this when bashing out the previous post, with reference to a book called The Matrix of the Mind, which I read back in grad school in 1987 or so. It made a big impression on me at the time, but I wonder how it squares with my current, more traditional approach to things? Can it be translated to my current language?

Recall from the previous post that the defense mechanisms of splitting and projection are rooted in an imaginary distancing of the self from a feared or despised intrapsychic object or feeling state. Ogden writes that "splitting creates a state of mind in which there is no 'in between.' A plane has two faces and two faces only; an observer can never see both sides at once."

So, in this polarized state of mind, it is as if half the world disappears; or, as if we were to look at the moon and forget it has a dark side we can't see. Again, it is reduced to the world of mere Is, as we withdraw from the second world in which we understand that nothing is what it appears to be.

Example. Let's say you have a patient with borderline personality disorder -- or a coworker, spouse, or other relative. "When a borderline patient feels angry and disappointed by the therapist, he feels that he has now discovered the truth.... History is completely rewritten.... There is an assault on the emotional history of the object relationship. The present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, non reflective present."

This especially happens when the mind is overcome by primitive hatred. I'll spare you the tedium, but I could cite hundreds of examples of how Trump Derangement causes its victim to distort past and future by projecting the explosive hatred forward and back.

Okay, one example: Ms. Ocrazio says the U.S. is a brutal, barbarian society for the vast majority of working-class Americans. How did she find herself in this parallel universe? Clearly, she didn't think her way there. So, what was the mode of travel? Easy: uncontainable rage exploding out from the moment into the past and future -- like a frustrated three year old who suddenly hates his parents, now and forever.

They say history was discovered by the Jews, and I think I know why. It's because they formed an ongoing relationship with the one transcendent God, whether or not they were frustrated, angry, disappointed, etc. Of course, the OT documents the struggle to maintain the relationship instead of running to another god at the first sign of trouble. In short, in order to enter history, humans had to stop splitting off their various emotional states and projecting them into imaginary gods for comfort and safety.

The same process occurs, by the way, in Christianity. Think of the day after the Crucifixion. How does one reconcile the idea that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that Jesus is the messiah, when the messiah has just endured a brutal death at the hands of the state? It would be very easy to split, both literally and figuratively, as did the two figures the resurrected Jesus encounters on the road to Emmaus.

Among other things, they must have been discussing What That Was All About -- how they had been taken in by the excitement surrounding this charismatic figure, only to have all hope dashed. But Jesus proceeds to give a discourse on all the various scriptures concerning himself, and then,

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.

At that point, the travelers heal the split, and this integration allows them to return not just to history, but to a deeper time that touches on the meaning and vector of (H) itself. Again, their momentary grief and despair are integrated into a much higher unity -- a reflection of how the ancient Jews, beginning with Abraham, did the same thing (for example, reconciling the demanded sacrifice of Isaac with a loving deity; it would have been easy to simply flee such a request and run away from God).