Thoughting

Attention! David Brooks* is the archetype of the person who believes he lives primarily and essentially on the ground of ideas, of thought; who believes that knowledge and life lessons are what actually motivate us, rather than our history-planted inner feelings and sensations. Such a sad, ignorant delusion! Picture yourself in the “good drowning” of the beginning and romancing phase of a relationship. There is often a combination of inebriation and delusion, where your true inner self is washed away by a golden wave and you find yourself living and sending out the energy of your unreal, hoped-for, fantasy best. You become powerful and moving, happy, deep, funny, leap-walk against gravity as on the moon, with winsome peremptory energy. You are no longer – right then – aware of your more in-the-dirt baseline of irritability or depression, your childhood drag, and won’t be until after the commitment phase. The world is wonderful, she (or he) is your manna. It may have occurred to you, most fleetingly, that you had long been starved, because now you are filled: All your needs from birth to now are met.

By the light of Le Brooks, will you, in that place, be superimposing Jane Austen’s antiquated polished percep­tiveness upon the face and charac­ter of your new partner? Considering pro’s and con’s of desirability from English 101? Let us for God’s sake hope not. You would be a ventriloquist’s dummy, a program, a severed head. Pathetic, deplorable, brainwashed intellectuals!

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* “The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life. If you didn’t study Jane Austen while you were here, you probably lack the capacity to think clearly about making a marriage decision. If you didn’t read George Eliot, then you missed a master class on how to judge people’s character. If you didn’t read Nietzsche, you are probably unprepared to handle the complexities of atheism—and if you didn’t read Augustine and Kierkegaard, you’re probably unprepared to handle the complexities of faith.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/commencement-address-too-honest-have-been-delivered-person/611572/.

I have a big problem with thinking. There is just so much wrong with it. Clients with no good ideas – chronic worrisome, poisoned thoughts with no value but to enervate. Grotesque reductionism of complex feelings and needs: “I have a right to know everything and control my daughter’s life: I’m her mother.” The pseudo-reality of ideas, always ipso facto seeming to have a veneer of legitimacy, yet they’re the convoluted metamorphic stuff, debris and mountains, first thrown up from our underground magma – the body’s historical feeling. If you really want to know Self, shut down your thinking and feel the surge and the sludge beneath. You won’t find prejudice – racial or gender hatred; or simple labels like depression or anger or Borderline. You won’t find your philosophical mission statement or religious obduracy. You won’t find intellectualized disregard of your daughter’s personhood – the raison d’être of one client’s mother’s blog. You won’t find the “guilt” so many people claim from their childhood roots, because the feeling knows you did nothing wrong, that “guilt” was your parents’ cruel words and your accepting them because you needed love, because a six-year-old – if she has a chance at all – can’t reject her parents.

What you will find is heavy, foundational feeling states from childhood, and if you have a drill and a microscope, even deeper ones from a toddler’s or infant’s life. You will find adolescent or adult fusion-feelings – lighter but more dramatic – evolved from the earlier ones, because you’re not a different person from your child.

I’ll admit that it’s old age and ripened neurosis that have made me so weary of the constant diarrhea flow of thoughts that people spout day to day, year to year, generation to generation. All this helium! Regal political flatulence. Religious reframing of murder. Eight-hundred-page novels about people who would need therapy to know themselves. The world of popcorn heads floats away into the timeless sky, forever. And all the “racing” thoughts that circle in the head, infesting anxious or cognitive people.

Watching a client, I sometimes see his thinking itself as the problem: long-winded soliloquies full of “I guess” or “I’m probably” or “maybe it’s” or “I keep getting suspended because I’m impulsive because I’m ADHD” – utterly meaningless fudge, a floating Disney World. I want to – and sometimes do – say “Stop! Stop generating these thoughts.  Find your body.” People live on the wordy top floor of their tower.  Well below them is their ground, and below that the basement, then the dungeon. They may sense that where they stand or run is not the ground, but thought is the only flashlight they wield to look beneath them.

So what that we can’t – or shouldn’t – reach the bottom, the chains lying at our foundation? Living in the clouds is poison, too. My feeling is the deeper we go, the more gravity of ourselves we feel. We re-own our substance, remember and reclaim our utter unique. I wonder how many people remember that person.