Reflections: Weblog Commentary

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I have been meaning to launch this blog post for some days now, but I’ve kept putting it off because I couldn’t decide how to frame it. Rather than continue not to get the words online that I wanted to share, therefore, I’m just going to go ahead and post them unframed and let them stand (or fall) for themselves.
This material consists of a comment made by Ron King, a valued sometime visitor to this blog, followed by several comments made by me, elsewhere. I asked Ron’s permission to share this comment because it will be made available to my Facebook friends, as well as to readers of this blog. Ron made the comment in response to this post. I will edit Ron’s comment only to the extent that his very first sentence has been moved to the end of the comment. I do this in order that it may segué into the rest of the material, all of which consists of comments I made on a couple of different strings, to a couple of different people, following posts on one of my favorite blogs, Vox Nova. These I will simply clean up to stand alone, if any such polishing is necessary. I will offer them without comment, while inviting comment on them here. Without further ado, Ron King:

The problem for introverts is the early emotional conditioning of fear and rage due to the pain of being aware of not being validated by the primary caretakers and then the educational system. Consequently, the introvert is constantly under the intrusion of forces trying to make her/him into something she/he is not. This will cause a further retreat into self along with an ever increasing suffering.

Once the introvert has an awareness that being created in this way has a distinct spiritual purpose of exploring the dynamics of human suffering and the loss of love as the cause of suffering, then introverts can begin healing the false identity that has formed in reaction to a world that does not know how to love.

Loneliness begins to fade when the introvert begins to educate others about what it means to be an introvert. They can begin to teach extroverts what it means to be more sensitive. Every introvert I have known in my life has a passionate desire to be free to express their truth. The freedom is to be found internally and not externally. It is to be found face to face with extroverts, regardless of what they may say or do.

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Jesus is an introvert.

Vox Nova: excerpt 1

Another commenter said of Jesus,

“…if he were conversant in Greek philosophy to any extent why did he not lay things out ever in a similar style.”

I replied,

Jesus perhaps did just that, when speaking to learned Pharisees; or, perhaps, to learned Romans. It is unfortunate that in the Gospels we are usually only given the punch-lines of his dialogues with his intellectual opposition. But, in most of what we are given, he is preaching to peasants and fishermen and shopkeepers, etc. There is nothing to be gained by speaking over the heads of one’s audience.

Any time I am arguing with a Catholic and I quote a Bible verse in support of my central thesis, and that Catholic then visibly pales, frantically starts making the sign of the cross and backs away from me screaming “Sola scriptura! Sola scriptura!” I am reminded that this once had some validity. Pre-Gutenberg, people didn’t own Bibles. Most people weren’t literate. What they knew about the Bible had to be spoon-fed to them by clerics. The priests don’t want to relinquish that power, so they preach still today against the “proof-text,” as though the text shouldn’t be a source of proof. I have to either spit on the floor, or chuckle. Hopefully, I usually choose the latter course of action. Luther, to his credit, not only translated the Bible into German, but preached that people had a duty to read it, and to interpret its meaning (with a little help from above), each according to his special spiritual need at any given time. This is not to use the Book as an oracle, but rather to use it as a learning tool; as a workbook for the student of the spiritual connection between heaven and earth.

To sum up: Jesus knew what he was doing.


Vox Nova: excerpt 2

I don’t know what “go to heaven” means, because I can’t conceive of heaven as a place. I can only understand heaven as a state of being. The upshot of that would be that only saints would “go to heaven.” One would need to be in a state of being compatible with heaven, i.e. “heavenly.” And by “saint” I don’t mean what the Church routinely means. What the Church means, in most cases, is something like “Employee of Decade” or “Distinguished Professor” or “Father of the Year.” So, what happens to the rest of us, I don’t know. That sad alternative may be what’s happening to us now. Being Christ-like does not mean being a really big fan of Jesus. It doesn’t mean liking Jesus, it means imitating Him.

Vox Nova: excerpt 3

I’m not so interested in the theories such as that Jesus went to India during “the lost years,” or that Jesus was the iniate of a Greek mystery cult, etc. I think it enough to speculate that Jesus was very probably literate; that he grew up in a Hellenistic milieu; and that he may very well have had some acquaintance with, and instruction in, both Greek (Platonic) and Roman (Stoic) ideas and used some of those, tailored to the levels of sophistication of his audiences, in his teaching.

I also think it very telling that Jesus was apparently not a Jewish nationalist. Reading the New Testament, one would get the idea that Jesus and his followers were wandering about in tranquil, almost sleepy countryside. In fact, of course, the area was crawling with insurgents and a constant thorn in the side of Rome. Jesus seems to have been totally aloof from all of this, which makes him somewhat less than ultra-Jewish in his thinking.

Moreover, if he had been nothing more than an unusually witty freelancing Jewish rabbi, I doubt that we would be talking about him today.

Finally, Socrates had Plato, and Jesus had Saul of Tarsus: the rest is history.

Vox Nova: excerpt 4

The difference, of course, is that Socrates and Jesus had visionary interpreters of real genius, both of whom offered a set of ideas too grand to ever be exhausted by subsequent speculation, or completely co-opted by "the world," and which, therefore, endlessly spark the imaginations of intelligent and creative persons who come in contact with them.


This is to take nothing away from the mediation of Socrates or Jesus. In both cases, their teachings were worthy of such interpreters. I assume that this was a necessary condition for the production of those interpretative bodies of thought.


I see the institutions--the Church, the Academy--to be like globs of semen; millions of sperm sent forth to produce one fertilized egg; millions of the "faithful" assembled to produce one true saint. And only the saint transcends.

Vox Nova: excerpt 5

The very last thing that a saint would want to be, I should think, is innovative or original. A saint is simple. There is nothing novel in the truth. The saint is proof that the truth can be received from its source and that life can be lived in accordance to it–not merely read about and acquired by rote for recitation on command. Man would get redemptive brownie points for the latter only if Kafka is G-d and the path to “heaven” really does lead one through the corridors and the various official stages and offices of some vast bureaucracy, beginning in the kindergarten of the parochial school and ending before the throne of judgment.
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Your comments are welcome.
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Reflections: Only the Lonely Know

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The edition of Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life that I borrowed from the library includes a rather long prefatory introduction entitled “Unamuno Re-Read” by Salvador de Madariaga. This piece is definitely not hagiographic. It seems to be quite objective in its assessment of Unamuno’s beliefs, works, character, and personality. Of the latter, Madariaga has this to say:


The chief paradox of Unamuno’s life…may well be that this apostle of life, this eloquent advocate of irrationality and experience versus reason and intellectualism, lived mostly in the mind, gathered but little outward experience, and often mistook his thoughts on life for life itself.

I photocopied two pages of this introduction and brought them home. I did this because, for good or ill, I was recognizing myself in what I was reading.

Madariaga goes on to say:

His life was all within. His experience was inner experience. Not for him those excursions to foreign lands, those adventures in the realms of danger, passion, the strange, the unfamiliar, the irregular, the shocking, the crags, peaks, and abysses which surround, fascinate, attract, and repel other men, and out of which they form their thoughts fed with the sap of reality. Unamuno spoke and wrote about life far more than most, but he lived far less than most.

*sigh* It gets worse:

Could it be that this formidable man, the uncompromising stand, the proud uplifted head, the glaring eye, and the stubborn mouth, could it be that this challenger was deep down a shy man? Yes. It could be. In fact he was. The forbidding mask hid untold shyness and even tenderness within. His search for retreat, solitude, the quiet of the countryside, the reflective and inward looking contemplation, possibly even that negation of outer life and that wish to unamunize it… He will roam in the vast spaces of his inner self, whose dangers he knows well and he can face, rather than risk adventures in that outer reality he does not actually know and he prefers to deny. …In Unamuno’s works, details of time and place are seldom given. Everything happens in people’s minds rather than in their fields, backyards, rooms, or kitchens.

What Madariaga has done here is take his critical scalpel to the psychic anatomy of an extreme introvert. In the process of chopping up Unamuno, he has cut me to the quick. If you’ve ever wondered why nobody seems to be able to get it on with me for long, now you know: people grow resistant to being dakinized.

Yes, now you know…
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Reflections: The Insider, Part 2

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So I climbed the stairs, up out of my basement study, and went to the big wall of bookshelves in the family room, pulling volumes by and about Carl G. Jung— four, five, six, seven… All of this to fulfill the intention expressed at the close of my previous post, to write on the subject of the Introvert vs. the World, as expressed in Jung’s theory of psychological types. But then I had a change of heart.

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For one thing, I’ve already got so much reading lined up that I don’t want to undertake the review of Jung that the post I had contemplated putting together would entail.
For another thing, I just want to cut this short and move on to other interests.

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What I am going to do, therefore, is first quote the paragraph on introversion from the Wikipedia article, “Extraversion and Introversion”. This is as good—and accurate—a general description of the type as any I found in a quick survey of the Jung books in my possession, and it covers all of the salient points that I had planned to discuss.

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Next, I will put forth a little rant of my own devise on the nature of introversion. This is kind of poetic sketch, which says what I believe without laboring to heap up a mountain of words to support any of it: like it or lump it.

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Finally, instead of directly quoting Jung himself, I will provide you with a really neat quote from Heinrich Heine’s Deutschland, which Jung used to preface his introduction to his own work, Psychological Types, or The Psychology of Individuation. This paragraph just blows me away. One could write on the ideas condensed within it for a lifetime. So, here goes. First, Wikipedia:
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Introversion
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Introversion is "the state of or tendency toward being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one's own mental life". Introverts tend to be more reserved and less outspoken in large groups. They often take pleasure in solitary activities such as reading, writing, drawing, and using computers. The archetypal artist, writer, sculptor, composer, and inventer are all highly introverted. An introvert is likely to enjoy time spent alone and find less reward in time spent with large groups of people, though they tend to enjoy interactions with close friends. They prefer to concentrate on a single activity at a time and like to observe situations before they participate. Introverts are easily overwhelmed by too much stimulation from social gatherings and engagement. They are more analytical before speaking.
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Introversion is not the same as shyness. Introverts choose solitary over social activities by preference, whereas shy people avoid social encounters out of fear.

And now, Rodak’s rant:
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Extroverts make life on earth possible. Introverts make that life worth living.

Extroverts make things work: they organize; they build the hives and drive the drones to their tasks. Without extroverts, ours would be a world of solitary men, scavenging in virgin forests for roots, berries, and psychotropic herbs.

Those things which the introverts contribute to the lives of men are not susceptible, however, to such animal imagery. Bees and ants don’t compose music, recite poetry, or have visions of another world. While both hives and factories have their managers; while both ants and men have their soldiers; while both bees and men have their cooks, their nannies and their hod carriers, only men engender artists, philosophers, and visionaries. There are no prophets in the animal kingdom. And, although one must never discount the value of friendship, even the best of good dogs is only a friend, not a saint.

Finally, as promised, Heine, as quoted in Psychological Types:

Introduction

Plato and Aristotle! These are not merely two systems: they are also types of two distinct human natures, which from time immemorial, under every sort of cloak, stand more or less inimically opposed. But pre-eminently the whole medieval period was riven by this conflict, persisting even to the present day; moreover, this battle is the most essential content of the history of the Christian Church. Though under different names, always and essentially it is of Plato and Aristotle that we speak. Enthusiastic, mystical, Platonic natures reveal Christian ideas and their corresponding symbols from the bottomless depths of their souls. Practical, ordering Aristotelian natures build up from these ideas and symbols a solid system, a dogma and a cult. The Church eventually embraces both natures—one of them sheltering among the clergy, while the other finds refuge in monasticism; yet both incessantly at feud. ~ H. Heine, Deutschland

Thus endeth the thoughts of this introvert on the introversion that is both his gift and the cross he was given to bear through life.

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Reflections: The Insider, Part 1

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Perhaps some reader with an eye for detail has noticed that I’ve again changed my profile portrait. And maybe that person, being keenly attuned to such minute changes, has also noted that my self-description as “Rodak” has gone from “faceless clerk” to “introverted clerk.”

“Faceless” hasn’t really been accurate since I scrapped the portrait of haiku master, Bashō, for a series of self-portraits. So, in search of a new adjective to modify “clerk,” I settled on “introverted.” This choice of a modifier was dictated by the coming together of two items, each of which was recently uncovered in one of my fits of boxing backwards.

The first of these items, to take them in chronological order, according to when they were discovered and catalogued for my personal archive, is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. The second is the drawing of a dream image about which I’ve posted below. These two items are linked by my interest in the work of Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, as mentioned in the post linked. Myers-Briggs is based on Jung’s theory of psychological types.

My Myers-Briggs classification is: INTJ. This indicates that my basic personality type is Introvert. This I had determined years ago, through my readings of Jung. The “N” indicates that I am iNtuitive (as opposed to “sensing). The “T” means that I am a Thinking type (as opposed to a “feeling” type). The “J” is for Judging (as opposed to “perceiving”).

The Myers-Briggs thing is usually deployed by creatures such as human resources managers as a device to find out why employee-X has become a problem to the organization by acting out his personal quirks and foibles. Myers-Briggs characterizes the INTJ individual thusly:

“Usually have original minds and great drive for their own ideas and purposes. In fields that appeal to them, they have a fine power to organize a job and carry it through with or without help. Skeptical, critical, independent, determined, sometimes stubborn. Must learn to yield less important points to win the most important.”

Right. And who gives a shit about all that? I’m not interested in knowing just how my particular cog best fits into the machine.

The Myers-Briggs list of introvert traits is a bit more interesting:

Introverts…
...like quiet for concentration
...have trouble remembering names and faces [I do fine with faces; names, not so much]
...can work on one project for a long time without interruption
...are interested in the ideas behind the job
...dislike telephone interruptions
...think before they act, sometimes without acting
...work alone contentedly
...may prefer communications to be in writing
...may prefer to learn by reading rather than talking or experiencing

Yikes. Most of that is spot-on, w/r/t your humble host. All of this, however, is still job/organization-oriented. I am not so very much interested in defining myself as an employee. So, forget Myers-Briggs. In a subsequent post, I’ll go straight to Jung, who has some things which interest me to say about introverts and their problematic and trying relationship to the world.