Experiment in Introspection

I did a little time of sitting before God quietly to think through some dilemmas.

Here's what I found.  It's kind of abstract, but I'm trying to describe how I thought through the disconnected ideas, to try in prayer to hear what God might be saying.  This is a lot like what happens when you try to hear a prophetic word, after which you have to match it with scripture.  But when you're in the moment of listening, it's like following a dream.  Prayer, meditation and scripture study all go back and forth.  Scientific thought and philosophy is like this sometimes too.

I tried to start out with asking what has been going on with music in my life.  In the time of prayer and quietness, I saw connections.  One thing leads to another.  There's a natural branching of ideas led to friendships and human connections.  As I quieted myself and just tried to trust God to lead me to make connections, I saw these things.  There would be a dense network that centered on related, repeating patters, with peers, intimate relations, comics, schoolwork and reading, playing guitar and other music, having an aesthetic appreciation of music of different kinds, and trying out different projects, trying to do different things, pursuant to taking various initiatives.

I was expecting to find moments of shame that have locked me in or kept me down, but nothing of shame came to the surface.  Quite unexpectedly to me.

What did emerge, on reflection, is that the primary feature of all the positive emotional aspects of life experiences is the exercise of my will to bring something about.  Good things would happen in the trail of taking initiative, even very small good things in the course of life, as well as very large cumulative projects taking years and much support from other people.






I'm reminded of the parable of the Talents.  The master gives the servant a supply of talents, and says in so many words, I'm trusting you with these--go out there and see what you can do with them!  Try this, try that, try the other thing.  Just launch out in good faith, you'll see what works, there's no shame in trying thing.  You're smart, you'll figure it out.  Just, go do something.

The emergent observation, the apparent result of this experiment in quietness, is that it doesn't really matter what the subject is (repeating: whether it is developing peer relationships, or intimate relationships, or involvement with comics at any level, involvement with music at any level, or the execution of projects at any level); but that what decisively does matter is the exercise of my will to make something happen.  And the clarity and unmixed attention and effort that I bring to the purpose to which I am attending, whatever that purpose might be; that clarity, attention and effect will yield (one may expect, even plan on) success in life, and happiness in life, and success at my purpose.  I will accomplish the thing that I'm trying to do, one might expect, and there will be a lot of satisfaction and happiness both for me and people attached to me.

I was trying to get the experience of "quietness before God" down into words while I still remembered.  So if it's a difficult to understand, that makes sense.  If you're interested, I'll discuss these things in a personal conversation, if you ask.  Thanks so much.

Love, Truth, Beauty they will be there at the station

Love, Truth, Beauty they will be there at the station


But for the time being all I can see is slogging uphill and solving other people's problems.

Jesus is faithful.

https://youtu.be/iimvaenpa4w

Young Love True Love Filled With True Emotion, or not.

Note to the reader: To fully appreciate the argument and enjoy the page, follow the links and watch the videos.

Here's a fine fix.
Start out with suspicion of erotic pleasure being the same as sin, an a priori nay-saying toward touching and feeling.  Here's to you, Journey.

But ... but... Song of Songs.  I mean, Really.

I don't think the whole truth about the ins and outs of falling in love has been told more truly than by Meatloaf.  Doubly blessed, barely seventeen and barely dressed.  Well, it's not Shakespeare. But Shakespeare doesn't get much airtime these days.

Then there is the whole truth about that One Special Moment.  The Senior Prom, we danced till three, and then you gave your heart to me.

The other side: Skip ahead just far enough to see hard times in the rearview mirror.  Thank you, Orleans. https://youtu.be/XrPnBkjdaFM

Then there's the problem with anxious/avoidant lovers.

The Bob (Dylan) and his amorous exploits, early in life.

Bob also wrote a testimony to the fact that it doesn't get better simply because you get older--(voiced by the Lonesome Cowboy Himself, Willie Nelson).What Was It You Wanted?  

Do you need anything?  What problem can I fix for you?  Tell me what you want!



Being "anxious/avoidant" in personality sets one up to believe that there's no such thing as emotional, sexual love--in the way of deep and intimate reciprocity that secure/autonomous folk experience.

Here is something about anxious/avoidant personalities and anxious/ambivalent (aka anxious/resistant) personalities.  [As always, Wikipedia is a usually fine starting point for further research, not a place to stop.]

The Bible spends, oh, maybe zero amount of time and energy trying to straighten out the anxious/avoidant lovers in our midst--may be a tiny amount in a circuitous fashion.  It spends tons of time and energy on restraining the Meatloaf crowd.  And much time celebrating the Orleans perspective from their video above.

Makes me think that in the Bible's perspective, anxious/avoidant love is not really that big a deal, since we die by the time we're forty, which is long enough to live to do the right thing by "decision not emotion," have progeny, and pass on to our eternal reward.  (Thank you anyway, but no thanks-- Self-growth.com--but there are a lot of born-again sites with the same approach.)

Except for the complication that love is the be-all and end-all for Christians.

But now we live longer and need to find something.  We need love.

You want Decision Not Emotion?  I'll give you some damn decision not emotion.  






































Page one of the Relationship Agreement is taken from the free, multi-page template at Sample Templates.com.  https://www.sampletemplates.com/business-templates/relationship-agreement-template.html

Actually, I suspect this latter approach could work well for the rare obsessively organized and industrious, and introverted couple, where both parties love each other and express that love, accountant-like, in spreadsheets.  



Apologies for not illustrating this blog with Shakespeare and classic references and illustrations.  I just reached out my metaphorical hand and used what was at arm's length.  Sigh, Romeo and Juliet, Leaves of Grass, and 16th Century Italian Poets.  Thank you for all your good work.  Maybe next time.

The sandcastle, as with so much that is constructed with forethought and intention, gets washed away -- like so many tears in the rain.  Couldn't help myself with that one.  Did you know that Rutger Hauer completely ad libbed those lines in the original Blade Runner?

Roger Silverberg

Grow into your art.

Here's a fine commencement speech given at the New England School of Photography in June 2004.

I found it on the online pages of fotocommunity.com by Arno Rafael Minkkinen.

http://www.fotocommunity.com/info/Helsinki_Bus_Station_Theory

And a follow up.
https://cindyricksgers.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/timeout-for-art-stay-on-the-bus/

Here's the nub, the point, the gist, the heart, the essence:
Find your focus as an artist.  Do it for awhile.  Then you find that people will compare you with others, and you'll be tempted to go back and do something else, tempted to get off the bus.  But if you stay the course, you'll find that your own distinctive features, your "voice" as it were, will emerge, and even those early works will be valued.  But getting off will interrupt your growth.

"If God knows already, why pray?" so they ask. Let's talk about it.

https://www.academia.edu/19688951/The_Causality_of_Petitionary_Prayer

In this article, Stephen L. Brock enlists the aid of C.S. Lewis, Peter Geach, and St. Thomas Aquinas to think through the matter.











To the beginner and the faithful, it is enough to remember Jesus' words, "You have not because you ask not."  Done.  And James's words that you ask but don't receive because you ask amiss.







But in general understanding is an aid to our prayers, and so thinking through this matter with the aid of Brock, Lewis, Geach and Thomas is conceivably a good thing.




Amen.

A prelude: Having a common mind: distributed consciousness

Here's the general idea, the details of which I will need to return in order to spell out the argument adequately.

The Chinese Language Room thought experiment has been a strong argument against distributed consciousness.  On the pro side, there is the fact that our left brain and right brain seem to be separate loci of consciousness but when united have a sense of a unified consciousness.

The idea is this.  The contributing parts will believe that it is Itself that is conscious of the awareness that is held by the whole.

In the Chinese Room, were it to happen, the clerk running the file cards would be aware that he understands that "this output" really means the thing it's supposed to mean, even though he doesn't have the first hand knowledge of each of the other parts.

When your team wins, it is you who win.

When a small town in rural Uzbekistan, say, was part of the USSR, the people there were able to say that it was part of one of the world's great historical and present day Super Powers, political movers and shakers.  But now it's just a little town in an overlooked little country.

When a man or woman are single, unattached but flirting and moving toward marriage, they have their whole lives held individually in their minds individually.  But when they marry, if it works, they will go through the long and arduous and painful process of letting go of the substance of what represented their individual aspirations and relationships--forsaking all others, say--for better or worse--and counting as one's individual success and failure the success or failure of the whole marriage and all the parts thereof.  When they marry, they have their history or "self-consciousness" surgically excised, so to speak; and it will be a long time before they are able to replace the old with the new--if it ever actually happens.

A little toe has no real consciousness, but should you stub the toe, the toe will, in a sense, cry out in pain.  The whole unified consciousness of the self will attribute the awareness of the toe--the pain--as an awareness of the whole.

No man is an island.

Should the SETI project find something, it will be all the SETI parts who rejoice.

Go Team!  Be True to Your School.  Stand By Your Man.  We are Family.  Jeremiah went into exile along with the rest of Israel under judgment.  When Roe v Wade or the Dred Scott decision was instituted, we all in the United States were aware that we were part of the country that had abortion of our unborn children at will and the legally enforced slavery of our fellow man.  It is and was not possible to claim that one has the moral high ground and that these horrific things were not part of oneself.  Abortion and slave hold were something that one is doing, being a part of the whole.  The only way to escape that awareness would be to somehow! detach oneself from the whole, by leaving, or by an intellectual emotional withdrawal which can only be partial at best.  And when one prays, one can never say, "those people out there who hold slaves" or "those people out there who put to death their living children," because it is the action of oneself as part of the unified system.

This is why divorce and civil war and amputations and exile and solitary confinement are so horrendous.  It's not a technical matter, it's an attack on the unified consciousness.