The Dr. Phil/Asshole-Ignorant Reneck approach is to advise people to "just do it". Now I do believe there is tremendous power to the idea that our minds create reality. That we are the authors of our own reality and that the thoughts we think play a paramount role in shaping our lives. So consequently it follows that if we exercise strong determination in our thoughts we can have an important effect on our lives. The problem though is when this "just do it" approach fails to account for the various complexities and nuances of the mind and how it can come to be corrupted. When a person finds themself in real trouble in their lives, whether its addiction or self destructive behavior or mental illness or whatever, I believe what is largely happening is that their mind is in conflict with itself. One part of the mind wants one thing and another a different thing and these forces become engaged in mental violence against oneself. So to simply advise someone to lift themselves up by their own boot straps is to fail to account for the complex nature of the human mind.
For Freud he believes these conflicts are the result of clashes between either the id and the ego or the ego and the superego. For Freud the id represents sort of our animal instincts towards pleasure. Things like the desire to eat food when hungry or to feel relief from pain or to have sex when aroused. The id wants these things and when we fail to choose to act on them, the id and the ego find themselves in conflict. The ego is the driver of human decision making and thus responsible for action. The ego is sort of deputized by the id according to Freud to carry out the wishes of the id through the process of identification. The ego learns through time and experience how best to achieve the goals of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain and thus allows a person to become increasingly good at them. However the ego is also influenced by the superego which represents sort of a persons moral code, which Freud believed to be inherited form one's parents and environmental authority figures. So while the id may seek sexual gratification and the ego may recognize rape as a means of achieving that gratification, the ego is restrained by that impulse by the superego which instructs the ego of the punishment that will occur if that action is taken.
So is Freud onto something here? Is internal conflict the result of the collision of these competing forces? It doesn't feel quite sufficient to me but I am not fully able to articulate why. I know from my own experience that there are forces within me that are controlling my actions which are not conscious. I do not recognize them to be mere pain/pleasure instincts but rather they feel to me to be self destructive forces. Freud might call this the death instinct, which he purposes along with the life instinct as the two main forces of human behavior. I found it fascinating that Freud found himself contemplating the same ancient time as Robert Pirsig, another author whose thoughts have impacted me deeply, in considering the earth just before life came into being on the planet. For Pirsig the context for this exercise in imagination was a recognition of the force which propelled matter in a stable inorganic state to reconstitute itself into the chaotic and instable form of life. Specifically Pirsig cited this is an example of nature violation the second law of thermodynamics which says that all energy is winding down like a clock to a stable form, or to paraphrase all life is moving towards death. Why then, Pirsig asked, would nature in such a state of stability prior to life move against itself towards a less stable form of energy? For Pirsig the answer was Dynamic Quality which is our nature.
What's interesting is Freud sees the same process and is sort of dismissive of the phenomenon of life creation and dwells instead on the difficulty life had in coming into existence in that context of death. He said that at first it took a great amount of energy to create life and that the life which was created was very short and simple organisms. Freud postulated that the energy force creating life had to keep creating it in the beginning because the force of death would act so strongly upon it. Eventually he said, life developed the ability to create itself and evolved over time into more and more complex states allowing for much greater lengths of resistance of death. What he took from this though is that we have within us that force which wants to move towards death, towards stability and inorganic matter.
Isn't it interesting that these two great thinkers firstly stumbled upon the same thought puzzle so to speak and secondly that they came away with such different conclusions. It is reminiscent of Yin and Yang, two opposing forces, creating and destroying. Maybe that's the real source of internal human conflict. Maybe what is fighting within us is the simultaneous forces of life and death. We are at once filled with the desire to live, which for me includes things like learning, growth, joy, love, transcendence, passion, helping other people, teaching, kindness and the impulse to create, and the desire to die, which for me includes things like anger, hate, numbness, the desire to hurt others, to destroy, to disrupt and confuse. Perhaps what prevents us from resolving these conflicts is a failure to recognize the reality of the death instinct. It is so contrary to life and what we are, that maybe we repress its existence in order to avoid the pain of confronting it.
That too seems incomplete...
I know that for the past decade I felt like a mind divided and to paraphrase Lincoln in the corniest way possible, a mind divided against itself cannot stand. Perhaps this is what the buddhists talk about when they speak of the great deaths. The mind wages war against itself until one side is vanquished, and then from there rebuilding can occur. I have been afraid for sometime of the destruction that might be caused by my own mental war. I feel something difficult to explain and I'm sure it sounds crazy. I feel a sense of responsibility in ensuring my unconscious self remains under control. To borrow in part from Freud I feel like it is the responsibility of my ego as the arbiter of my decisions to not allow my unconscious to become free. I feel perhaps out of nothing more than infantile narcissism that my unconscious is powerful and dark and that it is capable of massive destruction. I also believe it may be capable one day of greatness but in its present form I am afraid of it. It seems angry to me. Like a volcano bubbling beneath the earth's surface. But I feel this responsibility to guard my own unconscious not out of fear of consequences or punishment but rather out of a love for people around me. A general love of people. One of the interesting dichotomies of my personality is that I have a genuine affection for people and a desire to help people both as individuals and in the collective, but I tend to regard human behavior quite sadly. We are all so propelled by these powerful unconscious forces that it mostly seems like we have no chance to change. Like we are outgunned by a factor of a million. But I have seen great change. I have embodied great change myself. Perhaps what is needed to unify the forces of a personality is not all that different from what is needed to unify the divided people of a country, an outside force to work against. Or maybe it's even possible to unify the mind in pursuit of something wholesome and pure, I believe that has been the case with music in my life at times.
So while I am currently in the trees and consequently unable to see the forest, the plan is to keep acting as if this change is occurring and see where it takes me.
Good Times.
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