This is a very important post, and maybe fundamental to the operation of our lives and our society.
You start with the introduction that in your native culture, feelings were known to be the rewards and the juice of life, and they are an essential part of living. You also note that the input of your perceptions can jog those feelings, I think you illustrate that by comparison. (Seeing something beautiful might make you feel LESS attractive.) Comparison is a devil.
You delve into the reasons for feelings (there must be one, right?) Finally it comes down to "feeling good" might be the meaning of life? Even though you can get tricked by them. "I could talk about my feelings, but could I really let them in?"
Now we are into a definition. It is that: if emotions are expressed they don't infest the inside with their rot. Put another way, feel the emotion until it dissolves. (I don't say ignore any emotion and I certainly don't say suppress it by force). Understand it and its origin, maybe. Feelings might not have a language, but please look to see if there isn't a language behind them. And of course, the feeling is steering you toward some action. What is that action? Did you choose it among options, or was that the only option available at the time?
Also ask if it really dissipates? Most strong emotions have a long history. They are recurrent, we say all they way back to "childhood trauma". So hasn't that become your favorite watering hole? Now you are going to let it run again, just to "finally have it dissolve". No it is not going to dissolve; what you are doing is re-igniting it. You can ask: why do I love this replay? What do I get out of it? There is a payback.
"Much of the social strife we’re experiencing today results today these meta-feelings". ALL OF IT. It's the stories we listen to and those that we tell and retell. Why do we listen, and why do we spin these yarns? The meaning we construct around them — what we decide is important or unimportant — it comes later.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
"What would it look like if you could dialogue with your feelings as if they were an embodied, physical presence before you? How would you interact with them, and how would it be different? What kind of questions would you ask? What kind of things would you say?
BRILLIANT OBSERVATION.
I am sure you can. Just monitor your self-talk about every occurrence, whether positive or negative. Then ask: what if that is not true? How will I ever find out? You have to try out a different story. You can be the author of your interpretations and your definitions. But only one step at a time. Just change the story a little to see what happens. There is plenty of time for this patience.
Your response, my friend, is a study in itself...and again my mind went into overchage and hence this response:
The idea is to offer a general approach for clearing the mind of harmful obstructions. It attempts to apply certain semantic values to the thinking, listening, reading, talking and writing we do in everyday life.
For instance, we all know that an engine, although in perfect repair, can overheat, lose efficiency, and stop because of internal obstructions.
Sometimes, a set of obsessions may seize multitudes of people at once so that hysteria becomes epidemic, and nations go mad. The recurrence of such disorders tempts many of us to conclude that incurable defects exist in "human nature." The quality of such an attitude needs to be hardly remarked upon.
Modern studies, notably in psychology, anthropology, and literary criticism, reveal to us the nature and origin of these obstructions in our intellectual machinery. By seeking and removing them, can we not get it to run more efficiently? We do not scold an engine for overheating any more than we reproach a man for having a headache. Are achieving anything by scolding each other for "lack of principle," "stupidity," "intellectual laziness," and all the other sins we accuse each other of?
The fault human beings have in learning anything, whether from discussion, experience, historical events, books, or teachers, does not, as a rule, arise from the underlying difficulty of the lessons to be learned. Instead, it derives from the fact that we need to grasp new notions. We have so much to learn: our inherited dogmas, superstitions, and pet intellectual cliches—all serving to nullify, distort, or caricature beyond recognition the lessons we receive.
Dear Henya Drescher, I want to be on-board with the project you outline.
"The idea is to offer a general approach for clearing the mind of harmful obstructions. It attempts to apply certain semantic values to the thinking, listening, reading, talking and writing we do in everyday life."
HOW TO PROCEED?
You suggest the engine overheats, perhaps with internal obstructions. HEAT has to be an emotional charge doesn't it. (It's the subject of this thread, about feelings that can be real but are not reliable). I also agree that the nature and origin of these obstructions is in our intellectual machinery.
But a method for seeing, seeking and removing them has not been all that clear. Is that the project then, to find this mechanism? Then you say:
✓Instead, it derives from the fact that we need to grasp new notions.
We have so much to learn:
✓Apply certain semantic values;
✓Our inherited dogmas, superstitions, and pet intellectual cliches—(to discard I guess?)
✓All serving to nullify, distort, or characterize beyond recognition the lessons we receive. (Lessons received from whom?)
Do you have any further writings on this project? Are you planning a new writing? I can cross-post it. Or you can post directly on both our sites.
I will respond tho your post today or tomorrow, But I will answer your question now. I AM writing an article on the subject. In it, the question I pose has to do with thinking. Is thinking such an independent process? Do the words we utter arise from our thoughts, or are the thoughts determined by the linguistic systems we learned?
Sorry for the delay in responding. Getting over a nasty cold.
Here are my thoughts!
Regarding free thinking, I am dismayed at all the signs of a threat to democracy. For nearly twenty years, we have witnessed a decline in global freedom. Around the world, the enemies of liberal democracy are accelerating their attacks. Authoritarian regimes have become more efficient at circumventing institutions that support fundamental liberties. And we see it in our higher learning institutions in the internal forces, distorting national politics to promote hatred, violence, and unbridled power.
The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will triumph.
There is a sobering thought: only about 20 percent now live in Free countries.
Hello Henya, I’ll go over what interests me from what you proposed:
“The idea is to offer a general approach for clearing the mind of harmful obstructions. It attempts to apply certain semantic values to the thinking, listening, reading, talking and writing we do in everyday life.” “Modern studies, notably in psychology, anthropology, and literary criticism, reveal to us the nature and origin of these obstructions in our intellectual machinery.”
These are the things I would like to discuss, and perhaps you can lead, since you already have proposed this topic. Perhaps you could write a new post, because here is kind of cramped to get into a discussion. (Or you can comment under anything on my site, and I will respond.)
Is “the threat to democracy” part of the clearing the mind discussion, or is that a separate topic? Yes, government operations can be frightful. I am not convinced that we can gain progress to right all the wrongs in the world. But I do think that we can all advance with clearing the mind of harmful obstructions.
The two links you gave are private pages. Since they are already written, maybe you can copy and paste the relevant parts? Thanks
Ah, consumer culture, which hooks us in to a particular way of feeling, which is "never enough." I took a photography course long ago, before digital cameras. The prof who worked in advertising, but was critical of it, said "advertising creates a picture of a life you would like to have, but you have to purchase it" Just buy this product.
It sounds absurd on the face of it, but ads work, otherwise companies would stop paying a ton of money to advertise. This is for all products. I ignore all ads, and now buy or consume less. Much less; only what I need. Now, that makes my life better.
I love this, Henya, thank you. A great reminder that we have all been programmed in some way and our emotions are a precious part of us to be respected and help us grow. 💛🤗💫
Hello Hanya, (In answer to your reply below.) I do see that language reveals the organization of thought into categories, and how that translates into social influence (and social interference). It is also clear how information is usually interpreted to justify our actions made through our preexisting principles. But how they got that way would be a hypothesis that might allow us to review them. Let’s go back to the foundation. And this could be one “take” on it. I am not saying that it would be possible to reverse a giant momentum in our society. But shouldn’t we know the predominant beliefs?
I will address this first, although I would also have plenty to say about democracy or not-democracy, and the spread of “misinformation” which is code-speak for forbidden thoughts.
_______________
The western heritage is from Europe and Christianity. There was a time during the birth of our stereotype of thoughts where other religions did not play a role. The Jewish were there, but in small numbers, while they may have involved more than their numbers would have indicated, they shared some foundational beliefs.
I am just considering the current “western world”. I don’t know about the Chinese, Islam, Persia, South East Asia, or other ethnic combinations. South America seems to have a collectivist ideal, maybe from Catholicism, but their results also show a high level of assassinations, which frustrate these desires.
In our “west” We might ask how did "pre-capitalist man," i.e., "natural man," turn into the philistine observed everywhere today? Before the 12th and 14th centuries, the starting point of economic activity was just the need for goods.
The liege lord, constantly risking his life protecting his lands, gets a lot of goods and immediately spends them on lavish hunts, feasts, and beautiful ladies. There's no need to save money. They'll kill him in the next war anyway, and if not in that one, then in the next one. So, the days when the lord is alive and well, he spends in pleasures. Perhaps this goes back to Rome.
The peasant has as much land as he needs to feed himself and his family and pay a tax. The artisan has the common sense not to work more than is necessary to earn a cheerful living. Such people, if they saw Rockefeller today, would consider him insane.
Greed took hold first of the Catholic clergy, then of the townspeople and finally of entire countries, but not in equal measure and in different variations. Sometimes it was carried out by plundering overseas countries, sometimes by trading, which was also risky; sometimes the way to wealth was through "despicable usury," sometimes through obtaining lucrative positions, and so on. But always the guiding stimulus of activity was an unconscious desire for enrichment, which had almost NOT BEEN OBSERVED before that time.
The capitalist spirit... might be in the mental propensities inherited from these ancestors, which we are accustomed to because these propensities are an observed trait. So, there are special "bourgeois natures," divided into "entrepreneurial" and "bourgeois. The former are daring adventurers, the founders of capitalism; the latter are dull, moderate and tidy clerks, only filling their bulk into the void left by their predecessors.
Peoples bent on capitalism are divided into two varieties: "peoples of heroes" and "peoples of merchants". To the former includes the Romans, Normans, Lombards, Saxons and Franks, and thereby the English and the French; to the latter, the Florentines, the Scots-Lowlanders and Jews, as well as the Frisians, (ethnic Netherlanders), who from the earliest epoch were considered intelligent, shrewd merchants.
The merchant peoples all have one thing in common, a high degree of mestization (ethnic mixing). In the IX-XI centuries, when there was no "capitalist spirit" in Europe, there was no active ethnic mestization. People lived in small separate ethnic groups, formed recently and preserving their own identity. The fact that these newborn ethnoses were composed of different racial components did not matter. Their stereotypes of behavior were original to them. The tasks faced by this or that ethnos was common to each of its members. Doer-ship manifested itself equally in all strata of the population, as a consequence of which social states were fluid: cowardly feudal lords died, and/or valiant villagers became either knights or free townsfolk.
In the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries there is division. From the monolithic ethnic groups, social systems are becoming more complex, enlargement into kingdoms, throwing excessive energies into crusades or into neighboring countries, the (Hundred Years' War, 1337- 1453). And in the areas of ethnic contacts, (the mixing), "merchants" appear and get rich. They get rich in the speed-up phase, and even more so in the burn-out phase of social fracture. They live at the expense of strife, enjoying the patronage of the rulers.
But gradually they gain strength and make the second transition - to the calmer phase, going forward with inertia is the most convenient for them. They like this phase so much that they invented an honorary name for it – they called it the “CIVILIZATION STATE”, in their opinion, it’s endless.
It can be recognized that human impact on the biosphere goes in two opposite directions: life-affirming and life-negating. In the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The "cooling down" of the Romano-Germanic super-ethnos is proceeding rapidly. Passionarians leave for the colonies and either perish there or return sick. Harmonious individuals work hard at home, in their fields, workshops, clerkships, university classrooms. They have no time to fight for advantages, that are mostly onerous for them. And it is here that the place vacated by the high-energy individuals is taken by the "bargainers" - Florentine moneychangers, obliging diplomats, intriguers, and adventurers.
They are alien to the local ethnic group, they are the intruders, but that is why they are extremely convenient for the Viennese. It is the beginning of six centuries of Old Nobility world financial dominion, traced from the Spanish-Crown-allied Genoese bankers, to the Dutch and then English banking system which now continues to enslave the world, and is referred to by a variety of names in the dissident sphere.
I find this as the core belief, and even repeated by those who are oppressed by it. It is one angle on it, but I think it is useful. Is this all we “know” in the west, (winner take all)?
And all of a sudden, for their benefit, Watt builds a steam engine, and all sorts of technical improvements follow. Cities enlarge, and become multi-ethnic. Man begins to live without connection to his ethnic group, sometimes only in distant contact with it. This is where the "capitalist spirit" of the European, so well described and deplored by many, comes into play.
With that little background, maybe we can begin to wonder where it is taking us? Is that where we want to go?
This is a very important post, and maybe fundamental to the operation of our lives and our society.
You start with the introduction that in your native culture, feelings were known to be the rewards and the juice of life, and they are an essential part of living. You also note that the input of your perceptions can jog those feelings, I think you illustrate that by comparison. (Seeing something beautiful might make you feel LESS attractive.) Comparison is a devil.
You delve into the reasons for feelings (there must be one, right?) Finally it comes down to "feeling good" might be the meaning of life? Even though you can get tricked by them. "I could talk about my feelings, but could I really let them in?"
Now we are into a definition. It is that: if emotions are expressed they don't infest the inside with their rot. Put another way, feel the emotion until it dissolves. (I don't say ignore any emotion and I certainly don't say suppress it by force). Understand it and its origin, maybe. Feelings might not have a language, but please look to see if there isn't a language behind them. And of course, the feeling is steering you toward some action. What is that action? Did you choose it among options, or was that the only option available at the time?
Also ask if it really dissipates? Most strong emotions have a long history. They are recurrent, we say all they way back to "childhood trauma". So hasn't that become your favorite watering hole? Now you are going to let it run again, just to "finally have it dissolve". No it is not going to dissolve; what you are doing is re-igniting it. You can ask: why do I love this replay? What do I get out of it? There is a payback.
"Much of the social strife we’re experiencing today results today these meta-feelings". ALL OF IT. It's the stories we listen to and those that we tell and retell. Why do we listen, and why do we spin these yarns? The meaning we construct around them — what we decide is important or unimportant — it comes later.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
"What would it look like if you could dialogue with your feelings as if they were an embodied, physical presence before you? How would you interact with them, and how would it be different? What kind of questions would you ask? What kind of things would you say?
BRILLIANT OBSERVATION.
I am sure you can. Just monitor your self-talk about every occurrence, whether positive or negative. Then ask: what if that is not true? How will I ever find out? You have to try out a different story. You can be the author of your interpretations and your definitions. But only one step at a time. Just change the story a little to see what happens. There is plenty of time for this patience.
.
Your response, my friend, is a study in itself...and again my mind went into overchage and hence this response:
The idea is to offer a general approach for clearing the mind of harmful obstructions. It attempts to apply certain semantic values to the thinking, listening, reading, talking and writing we do in everyday life.
For instance, we all know that an engine, although in perfect repair, can overheat, lose efficiency, and stop because of internal obstructions.
Sometimes, a set of obsessions may seize multitudes of people at once so that hysteria becomes epidemic, and nations go mad. The recurrence of such disorders tempts many of us to conclude that incurable defects exist in "human nature." The quality of such an attitude needs to be hardly remarked upon.
Modern studies, notably in psychology, anthropology, and literary criticism, reveal to us the nature and origin of these obstructions in our intellectual machinery. By seeking and removing them, can we not get it to run more efficiently? We do not scold an engine for overheating any more than we reproach a man for having a headache. Are achieving anything by scolding each other for "lack of principle," "stupidity," "intellectual laziness," and all the other sins we accuse each other of?
The fault human beings have in learning anything, whether from discussion, experience, historical events, books, or teachers, does not, as a rule, arise from the underlying difficulty of the lessons to be learned. Instead, it derives from the fact that we need to grasp new notions. We have so much to learn: our inherited dogmas, superstitions, and pet intellectual cliches—all serving to nullify, distort, or caricature beyond recognition the lessons we receive.
Dear Henya Drescher, I want to be on-board with the project you outline.
"The idea is to offer a general approach for clearing the mind of harmful obstructions. It attempts to apply certain semantic values to the thinking, listening, reading, talking and writing we do in everyday life."
HOW TO PROCEED?
You suggest the engine overheats, perhaps with internal obstructions. HEAT has to be an emotional charge doesn't it. (It's the subject of this thread, about feelings that can be real but are not reliable). I also agree that the nature and origin of these obstructions is in our intellectual machinery.
But a method for seeing, seeking and removing them has not been all that clear. Is that the project then, to find this mechanism? Then you say:
✓Instead, it derives from the fact that we need to grasp new notions.
We have so much to learn:
✓Apply certain semantic values;
✓Our inherited dogmas, superstitions, and pet intellectual cliches—(to discard I guess?)
✓All serving to nullify, distort, or characterize beyond recognition the lessons we receive. (Lessons received from whom?)
Do you have any further writings on this project? Are you planning a new writing? I can cross-post it. Or you can post directly on both our sites.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
.
I will respond tho your post today or tomorrow, But I will answer your question now. I AM writing an article on the subject. In it, the question I pose has to do with thinking. Is thinking such an independent process? Do the words we utter arise from our thoughts, or are the thoughts determined by the linguistic systems we learned?
I will look forward to it, I am sure that you are on to something.
Sorry for the delay in responding. Getting over a nasty cold.
Here are my thoughts!
Regarding free thinking, I am dismayed at all the signs of a threat to democracy. For nearly twenty years, we have witnessed a decline in global freedom. Around the world, the enemies of liberal democracy are accelerating their attacks. Authoritarian regimes have become more efficient at circumventing institutions that support fundamental liberties. And we see it in our higher learning institutions in the internal forces, distorting national politics to promote hatred, violence, and unbridled power.
The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will triumph.
There is a sobering thought: only about 20 percent now live in Free countries.
Have a wonderful weekend.
https://henya.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/71189147?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts
https://henya.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/138393176?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts
Hello Henya, I’ll go over what interests me from what you proposed:
“The idea is to offer a general approach for clearing the mind of harmful obstructions. It attempts to apply certain semantic values to the thinking, listening, reading, talking and writing we do in everyday life.” “Modern studies, notably in psychology, anthropology, and literary criticism, reveal to us the nature and origin of these obstructions in our intellectual machinery.”
These are the things I would like to discuss, and perhaps you can lead, since you already have proposed this topic. Perhaps you could write a new post, because here is kind of cramped to get into a discussion. (Or you can comment under anything on my site, and I will respond.)
Is “the threat to democracy” part of the clearing the mind discussion, or is that a separate topic? Yes, government operations can be frightful. I am not convinced that we can gain progress to right all the wrongs in the world. But I do think that we can all advance with clearing the mind of harmful obstructions.
The two links you gave are private pages. Since they are already written, maybe you can copy and paste the relevant parts? Thanks
.
Ah, consumer culture, which hooks us in to a particular way of feeling, which is "never enough." I took a photography course long ago, before digital cameras. The prof who worked in advertising, but was critical of it, said "advertising creates a picture of a life you would like to have, but you have to purchase it" Just buy this product.
It sounds absurd on the face of it, but ads work, otherwise companies would stop paying a ton of money to advertise. This is for all products. I ignore all ads, and now buy or consume less. Much less; only what I need. Now, that makes my life better.
I love this, Henya, thank you. A great reminder that we have all been programmed in some way and our emotions are a precious part of us to be respected and help us grow. 💛🤗💫
❤️❤️❤️
Hello Hanya, (In answer to your reply below.) I do see that language reveals the organization of thought into categories, and how that translates into social influence (and social interference). It is also clear how information is usually interpreted to justify our actions made through our preexisting principles. But how they got that way would be a hypothesis that might allow us to review them. Let’s go back to the foundation. And this could be one “take” on it. I am not saying that it would be possible to reverse a giant momentum in our society. But shouldn’t we know the predominant beliefs?
I will address this first, although I would also have plenty to say about democracy or not-democracy, and the spread of “misinformation” which is code-speak for forbidden thoughts.
_______________
The western heritage is from Europe and Christianity. There was a time during the birth of our stereotype of thoughts where other religions did not play a role. The Jewish were there, but in small numbers, while they may have involved more than their numbers would have indicated, they shared some foundational beliefs.
I am just considering the current “western world”. I don’t know about the Chinese, Islam, Persia, South East Asia, or other ethnic combinations. South America seems to have a collectivist ideal, maybe from Catholicism, but their results also show a high level of assassinations, which frustrate these desires.
In our “west” We might ask how did "pre-capitalist man," i.e., "natural man," turn into the philistine observed everywhere today? Before the 12th and 14th centuries, the starting point of economic activity was just the need for goods.
The liege lord, constantly risking his life protecting his lands, gets a lot of goods and immediately spends them on lavish hunts, feasts, and beautiful ladies. There's no need to save money. They'll kill him in the next war anyway, and if not in that one, then in the next one. So, the days when the lord is alive and well, he spends in pleasures. Perhaps this goes back to Rome.
The peasant has as much land as he needs to feed himself and his family and pay a tax. The artisan has the common sense not to work more than is necessary to earn a cheerful living. Such people, if they saw Rockefeller today, would consider him insane.
Greed took hold first of the Catholic clergy, then of the townspeople and finally of entire countries, but not in equal measure and in different variations. Sometimes it was carried out by plundering overseas countries, sometimes by trading, which was also risky; sometimes the way to wealth was through "despicable usury," sometimes through obtaining lucrative positions, and so on. But always the guiding stimulus of activity was an unconscious desire for enrichment, which had almost NOT BEEN OBSERVED before that time.
The capitalist spirit... might be in the mental propensities inherited from these ancestors, which we are accustomed to because these propensities are an observed trait. So, there are special "bourgeois natures," divided into "entrepreneurial" and "bourgeois. The former are daring adventurers, the founders of capitalism; the latter are dull, moderate and tidy clerks, only filling their bulk into the void left by their predecessors.
Peoples bent on capitalism are divided into two varieties: "peoples of heroes" and "peoples of merchants". To the former includes the Romans, Normans, Lombards, Saxons and Franks, and thereby the English and the French; to the latter, the Florentines, the Scots-Lowlanders and Jews, as well as the Frisians, (ethnic Netherlanders), who from the earliest epoch were considered intelligent, shrewd merchants.
The merchant peoples all have one thing in common, a high degree of mestization (ethnic mixing). In the IX-XI centuries, when there was no "capitalist spirit" in Europe, there was no active ethnic mestization. People lived in small separate ethnic groups, formed recently and preserving their own identity. The fact that these newborn ethnoses were composed of different racial components did not matter. Their stereotypes of behavior were original to them. The tasks faced by this or that ethnos was common to each of its members. Doer-ship manifested itself equally in all strata of the population, as a consequence of which social states were fluid: cowardly feudal lords died, and/or valiant villagers became either knights or free townsfolk.
In the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries there is division. From the monolithic ethnic groups, social systems are becoming more complex, enlargement into kingdoms, throwing excessive energies into crusades or into neighboring countries, the (Hundred Years' War, 1337- 1453). And in the areas of ethnic contacts, (the mixing), "merchants" appear and get rich. They get rich in the speed-up phase, and even more so in the burn-out phase of social fracture. They live at the expense of strife, enjoying the patronage of the rulers.
But gradually they gain strength and make the second transition - to the calmer phase, going forward with inertia is the most convenient for them. They like this phase so much that they invented an honorary name for it – they called it the “CIVILIZATION STATE”, in their opinion, it’s endless.
It can be recognized that human impact on the biosphere goes in two opposite directions: life-affirming and life-negating. In the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The "cooling down" of the Romano-Germanic super-ethnos is proceeding rapidly. Passionarians leave for the colonies and either perish there or return sick. Harmonious individuals work hard at home, in their fields, workshops, clerkships, university classrooms. They have no time to fight for advantages, that are mostly onerous for them. And it is here that the place vacated by the high-energy individuals is taken by the "bargainers" - Florentine moneychangers, obliging diplomats, intriguers, and adventurers.
They are alien to the local ethnic group, they are the intruders, but that is why they are extremely convenient for the Viennese. It is the beginning of six centuries of Old Nobility world financial dominion, traced from the Spanish-Crown-allied Genoese bankers, to the Dutch and then English banking system which now continues to enslave the world, and is referred to by a variety of names in the dissident sphere.
I find this as the core belief, and even repeated by those who are oppressed by it. It is one angle on it, but I think it is useful. Is this all we “know” in the west, (winner take all)?
And all of a sudden, for their benefit, Watt builds a steam engine, and all sorts of technical improvements follow. Cities enlarge, and become multi-ethnic. Man begins to live without connection to his ethnic group, sometimes only in distant contact with it. This is where the "capitalist spirit" of the European, so well described and deplored by many, comes into play.
With that little background, maybe we can begin to wonder where it is taking us? Is that where we want to go?
.