My dog, your dad, or "What a difference some letters make."

I wrote the following in response to a blogpost and resulting comments, which just somehow hit me as ripe for the picking. I was going to post this in toto in the blogger's "comments" section, but since I don't even know the gent, I decided instead to drop it here where it blends right in with all the other insights I've posted in the last several months. Enjoy. It's all for you, my dears. I'm attaching the original post, which was actually lifted from another blog.

there is good evidence that what we call the unconscious is actually "lodged," so to speak, in the nonverbal -- but also transverbal -- right brain. Every patient comes into treatment with what I call a "likely story." This explicit story is located in the left brain, the seat of language, aristotelian logic, and linear time. However, the right brain has its own story to tell, but how do you tell a story in the absence of verbal language? You do so in the form of symptoms, or quirky character traits, unexplainable likes and dislikes, unaccountable mood storms, obsessions, compulsions, or self-defeating behaviors that the left brain is powerless to stop. This is because every self-defeating behavior is ipso facto a self-fulfilling behavior for a part of the mind of which we are not consciously aware. "There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all," sang Zimmie.

Nagarjuna,

Do you suppose there's such a thing as an unconscious blending of conscious and unconscious, while being outwardly, or “consciously” aware of the blending? Sound confusing? It should, because it apparently is. Take as an example the case of the man you quote, who alleges knowledge of “enlightenment”, love, and harmony but spends his time drearily cataloguing the faults & shortsightedness of those who do not stand with him in his meticulously circumscribed, self proclaimed garden paradise.

I've spent enough time on the blog you quote, One Cosmos, to know that I've spent enough time on the blog you quote. May I have the floor?

Thanks to the marketing of the blog medium, anyone with netax® (internet access-my new word) is now afforded a daily view from anyone else's personal mountaintop. Nice idea, and the blogworld is ripe for the pickings with everything from how to fix your car to how to fix your soul, from rants about politics to praise for teachers, from heartfelt chronicles of losing dogs and losing horses to maudlin takes on parenting and house hunting. And we take in what we deem useful. I'm picking on one particular blog because, well, I want to. OC, let's call this blog since I don't want to give it any unwanted exposure, was designed to promote a book. It has sort of re-invented itself in the past several months to become a forum for the ideas of its prosaic stunt pilot author, who certainly could get a day job writing soulful music reviews for the local paper if he ever gives up blogging. He advertises himself, if I may take the liberty of forming my own opinion, as a guy who wants to facilitate our search for meaning in life. Specifically, he positions himself as a pundit re: spiritual exploration, its motivations, pitfalls, and the equipment one needs or doesn't need for the trip. I think this is an excellent idea, and he comes up with excellent ideas. Except that his is view is generally embroidered with name calling and insult, ridicule and parody. So what? What's to distinguish his blogging from all the other carping and beligerant bloggers out there, me included? His stated intent. I quote from the blogger's recent post:

As I have mentioned on many O->ksions, if I can simply redirect people back to the extraordinary richness of their own authentic spiritual traditions without being too much of a muddleman, then I will have accompliced your climb..

Buddy, I'm here to report on this "muddleman" business. While most serious truth seekers acknowledge the ability and even proclivity of a mind to follow lower, baser, misleading urges (and eventually learn the lessons contained in redirecting them), this daytripper provides a lucid, magnified view of how to tweezer and mold the worst aspects of human nature into fully formed ideas, words, sentences, paragraphs, blog entries, and finally fully confrontational personalities. I can only hope that he uses his own experiences as a jumping-off point. He alludes frequently to "his patients", but let's forget for a moment that many of us interested in spiritual development also speaks daily to others regarding spiritual pitfalls, progress, viewpoints. And our own insights are all we still, really, ever understand, if even that. He has a novel approach to moving forward: his head swivels a full 199 degrees or better in either direction, ensuring that he has at least as good a view of what's behind him as he does of what lies ahead. All good, if personal history is not to be repeated. But this guy seems to have a penchant for looking from left to right and right to left constantly, as if checking for...what, someone gaining on him? Someone trying to cut him off by coming in high on the left side? He seems to believe that spiritual pursuit is some kind of competition with others, and that as a result "others" are to be critiqued without quarter. Assuming he actually knows of what he speaks, that his recounted knowledge is actually his own, this is a guy who is intimately connected with the pitfalls of spiritual progress, with the demons that lie in wait, with the dark nights of the soul. And he has developed, to an astonishing degree, the ability to microparse his processes and lay them bare for his own examination.

What's my beef with all this? Well I think he's guilty of false advertising. After following this guy for ... long enough, I come to understand that rather than make me feel good each day for the pointer on how to avoid, oh, say, resentment when I look at my fellow industrialist filling in yet another wetland to create jobs for us and profits for the shareholders, I instead leave his blog feeling...irritated. It's the damn trolls! People keep barging in with their own ideas, and it throws him off track, and boy does he let them have it. In a blog about discussion of, oh, say, how great a job President Bush is doing, what business does someone have coming in saying that they think President Bush is wrong to head up such an arrogant administration, wrong to push legislation that does not have the backing of either the will of the people or the legislature, wrong to careen on down his path without so much as a 3471 degree look backwards just to, oh, say, keep personal history from being repeated. It is as if he believes that collecting, cataloguing, and displaying his personal demons in his own hindcrafted display case somehow exorcises them and excuses him. But he gives no evidence in his year-plus public examination of his own demons that there is any end of this process in sight save his own, which he takes pride in showing as often as possible. There is no thought process or motivation so devoid of produce that he will not crawl even lower yet, all in the name of His Truth, all to populate his garden with yet another “insight”.

As a result, his produce basket is full of strange, two-sided fruit: beautiful on the top not in spite of, but because it is not the ugliness beneath it. In his garden there is no discernment required because his personal ideas of ugliness, stupidity and poison are clearly labeled in his own recognegligible painmanship, starting right there at the gate. That his rococo roadshow outsells any potential nourishment seems to be his biggest source of pride. Here’s this, from his own masthead:

"Your Farced Rough Draft of Eternity, Circumnavelgazing the Whole Existentialada of Lumin Development with Mental Gymgnostics, Verticalisthenics, Dilettantric Yoga, Stand-up Cosmology, Extreme Seeking, Freevangelical Pundamentalism, Coonservative Slacktivism, Buddhaflaw Correcting, and Neo-Traditional Supra-Formal Orthodoxy, all in a Laughty Atmasphere of Omade Jehovial Witticisms"

That's him describing his own blog. Make your own inferences.

As I read his blog and watched his own unconscious-conscious behavior, he seems aware that his fruits and vegetables are unable to stand in the clean light of simple truth but must first be rinsed, coon-like, in a world-ugliness he constantly implies he has managed to rise above. No matter what truth or beauty tumbles out of his kompost, his own inhabited garden has guards at the gate. His Moreau-like hybrids taste so bad he is able after more than a year to personally name all those who’ve developed a stomach for it. (He cites a lean following as proof of his particular brand of truthiness.)

Since you’ve seen fit to quote his blog Nagarjuna, I have some questions for your consideration. No need to answer me directly unless you feel so moved. While they aren't exactly rhetorical, I am not in need of more answers in his regard.

Does his type of passive/aggressive behavior fall onto the side of conscious or unconscious action? Is there such a thing as "unconscious conscious" behavior? Would it be the same thing as self-deception? Is it possible for one afflicted with a severe case of unconscious-conscious, or self-deception, to develop a following? Do followers have to be similarly afflicted in order to "not see" (as opposed to simply "missing" – the former implies an act of will, however weak, whereas the latter is garden-brand ignorance – ) that they are clearly not headed toward or inhabiting any alleged peace? Wouldn't an effective way of accommodating one's affliction be to surround oneself with the similarly afflicted until the missing logic is seen not only as "normal", but preferred? Would developing an enraged, sarcastic altar-ego who purports to defend this self-proclaimed “paradise” be one way of hiding from the symptoms of the dis-ease?

Would one so afflicted necessarily align with either side of the political fence? Could this in fact be a rather widespread affliction on all sides of the spectrum, this failure to understand that where one "is" after so much hard work and life experience is not actually a destination any more than where one "was" yesterday was the stopping point? Wouldn't a natural manifestation of an ego be, when one gets tired of the struggle or simply gets "settled in" to a life as a parent or a wife/husband, professor, manager, doctor, whatever..., to liberally apply the healing balm of "arrived" to all the facets, aspects, and characteristics of one's life? I submit, after thinking about it, that this is not just an affliction, but the affliction. And this man has it to more curious degree than most, since he spends so much of his time examining the symptoms of this problem without understanding that he too is afflicted.

Some humans do recognize that physically maturing has nothing to do with the age of the soul. But many more humans assume that since all they can "sense" seems to be wrapping up nicely as they round the half-century mark, so too should their journey of spirit also be heading toward some "conclusion". It would be here that the senses, on all levels, begin to close in smug satisfaction, that the accumulated trappings of the physical world begin to function as an insulation, or more properly here, an insolentation, rather than as compass bearings. One then begins to pontificate, to firm up one's stance in order to demonstrate to self that he or she has actually "amounted" to something. Self justification. As old a pastime as humanity itself.

Yet others remember, through humility alone, that breathing has a price only if you can understand the value of the breath. That knowledge comes from the search of self. It can't be taught, but can only be realized. One breath at a time.

Nagarjuna, as a long-time reader of the blog you quote, I offer this advice for your consideration: just say gno. The blog you mentioned is sad entertainment at great eventual expense to the blogger, but it is not enlightenment nor anything close to good teaching. You were looking for truth when you found his sight. Keep looking. You have your cross to bear, he has his, I have mine. And if the twain should meet, let's not imagine someone else can do our spade work. We must still, dog gag it, find our own clean place to dig.