We're non-physicists, and we vote*

Why would something – like the original substance of the Big Bang – explode into an essentially infinite quantity of perfectly identical insanely small particles, such as electrons, or quarks, or superstrings? This doesn’t seem logical or possible. If someone blows up a building or a boulder, are the resulting fragments all identical, whether small, tiny, or sub-sub-sub-microscopic? What could make this happen? The only cause I can conceive is not an explosion, but the most powerful pulverizing force. That is, the universe would have come not out of an explosion, but out of a crushing or an implosion. That doesn’t seem to make any sense either, but how else would there come to be nothing but infinitesimality?

I think we also have to assume that the result of this bang explosion or pulverizing implosion is the creation of the ultimate, irreducible elements of nature itself – those quarks and strings. But that, of course, sounds absurd, as it seems necessary to our brains that one would start with that ultimate particle, not create it by the application of some internal (explosive) or external (pulverizing) force upon something bigger.

So what could have granulated the material of the cosmos to a cosmos of radical particles? God’s angry fist? And what would His smashable clay have been? God Himself? Was He a self-mutilator? And why can’t our minds wrap around something as absurdly basic as What had to be in the beginning, even if “the beginning” is thought of as an eternal regress? Is it the smallest possible unit, or not the smallest possible unit? I think it’s very sad that we can’t even get that, can’t even settle that question.

Let’s assume that this conundrum is an accurate (but not necessarily the only accurate) appraisal of the situation. Standing on that, we’d then have to accept that human logic is ultimately invalid, or that human sight is so blind as to create an invalid logic. What we see and think may have nothing true to say about the real universe. Is this analogous to the validity of Newton’s insights, which apply to the pre-relativistic, pre-quantum world? Our blindness is in beautiful mathematical and testable sync with the opaque world we blindly perceive. Maybe our ultimate hope for the future of our race has to be to become something other than what we are.

For now, I’m voting for the Big Smash.

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* Other amateurish thoughts about the universe and creation -- https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/07/my-philosophy-changes-my-psychology.html, https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/03/slapdash-profundity-1-only-smart-way.html, https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/04/mungo-psychology-part-one.html.

A rough-hewn working-through of the Narcissistic state (part 2)

I have to invoke my purest-oxygen feelings of Narcissism to try to understand this flaw. In my later adult life, knowledge and grief-cathartic feeling have dimmed the narcissism’s incandescent purity. But it’s still there in a small kernel that won’t die, and that’s what I have to study.

I begin by declaring it, then undermining it.

I know more than anyone else about psychology, human nature. It is my inner engine and depth of knowing that is the apex unreachable by others, not as much the particular facts or amount of knowledge. Someone else might discover a new observation or principle that I hadn’t conceived. But that is only because I haven’t yet, in my busyness, gotten around to that point. In fact, someone’s discovery couldn’t be anything that contradicts my own insights, because I have already grasped the essence that contains all future learnings.*

So what is it that I have to know, or be, to have the narcissist identity?

I see that I must have – always present, always part of every thought and experience – a felt image of myself as unique and wise and separate from humanity. I cannot simply feel something – excitement at seeing a comet cross the night sky, sadness after an argument with my wife, benevolence at helping a client, love when petting my dog** – without at least a minimum accompanying presence of grandiose self-awareness. Healthy children don’t need ego in every stimulus-response moment. Narcissists do. I’m sure this is because we did not have ego, identity, in the early formative years, but rather life-and-death emotional pain. I must say “I am” in every moment now, or else the child returns – “I am nothing.”

But why the need for perfection, difference (separateness), superior, best, unique? Why is the narcissist’s life-identity so shaped and colored? Why isn’t it sufficient for the ego-less man to say “I am a person”? Why is inferiority defeated by superiority, ego non-existence defeated by deepest existence?

And most enigmatic – Why do I know, in my sternum, that I am the best, and know, in my mind, I am not the best – both equally strong and certain, both always present, matter and antimatter coexisting in relative harmony?

This is very difficult to figure out. Maybe a better approach-question is: What is the narcissist’s feeling? “Perfection” and “superiority” are not feelings. What is the narcissist’s actual experience?

For me, if I allow a feeling of being ignorant, I feel there is no person that exists – there is no actor.

The narcissist has become an idea, because feeling itself brings him back to the underground conflagration, the disintegration of his child’s ego-identity. He does not feel human: In his growing adolescence – set adrift from the umbrella of parental dependency in which he has a borrowed identity – he observes other humans and, in the most evanescent spark that is quashed instantly, senses he is not them – he is a failure.

There is now no choice: The idea he becomes must be non-human: He must be different, possibly perfect, possibly superior. I say “possibly” because I do not know if all sociopaths feel superior or perfect, and the sociopath’s childhood is very similar to the narcissist’s.

What may seem like self-esteem and glory is really an identity outside of humanity.

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* The part-destruction of my narcissism has left me aware that I might be blind not only to some recondite truths in my own field, but may be completely blind to simple daily insights that most average, more mature people know.

** Post-narcissistic me has selfless love for puppy and wife, and sometimes selfless benevolence for clients.

Open letter to Narcissists* (part 1)

“If I cared to study physics, I know that I would see clear of the morass of silly theories about ‘spooky action,’ strings, and ‘a universe from nothing.’ I already know that these physicists are self-indulgent nincompoops, actually mistaking their flawed and “uncertainty” perceptions for the reality that they poorly perceive.

“If I weren’t turned off by the fact that the heart of a novel is an artificial arc and plot and that its characters must be false adults instead of the children they really are, I would write one of the greatest stories in the literature. Every reader would stop, stunned to be so found, so undermined. I wouldn’t be surprised if this planet, struck by the power of new truth, tripped into a different evolutionary orbit.

“My mind may seem normal. I use common words. But I have – or rather, I am – the capacity for deepest, timeless understanding. I don’t have every insight, of course, but the ones I care about and the ones that matter. It occurs to me there’s likely to be only one most perfect thing in this world of bigoted, shallow, blind and ego-filled people and the chaos of matter and the dumb mystery of the cosmos (the joke’s on you, universe: You can never, in your total mystery, tell your greatest secret to anyone!). That is the perfection of my mind, my sight. Like God, I grasp all, and rightly, because I Am. But God is bored – quite a flaw – and I am not. I feel good.”

Narcissists – There is something in our childhood that strips us of humanness and leads us to grow a substitute. It is the way we get value, otherwise described as the way we exist. There is only one natural way of being human, and many created and consolation ways. One of these is the Narcissistic self.

Either a child feels secure pride in himself when his parents made him both separate (they cultivated his separateness) and loved, or their neediness took him away from himself. They may make him a part of them: their ideas, their rightness, their approval and disapproval, their control. If their neediness is a very weak kind (where the parent-child dependency is reversed), with no center of power that pulls him in, he will recede to his lonesome, may self-soothe with tension-releasers and rituals: Tics and obsessive-compulsive behaviors become his substitute Self. Without them, he’ll feel he cannot exist, does not exist.

Narcissism, one form of the damaged self, may be planted when praise replaces love. That was my scenario. This was a family without warmth and love, but I was praised for my piano playing, which was unremarkable. Inside this praise was poison: My anxiety and immaturity were unacknowledged, so I was in essence complimented for being invisible, for not being myself. It was my parents’ own need to see me incorrectly (to protect their emotional balance) that they were adulating. But invisibility is depressogenic. Depression is the loss of the child’s real self. Praise – the reflection between two mirrors – replaced it.

If you look back to your own childhood, take with you a flashlight that can see love. I believe it will cast its beam and not see that. You may have been elevated above reality, like me, and never touched with care. Or the atmosphere – possibly what our new president lived – was predatory and ego-heavy, with the leitmotif to feel one way about winners and losers, not to be a boy with his own feelings and sights. Like me, you may see that you did not actually grow with the other children – you over-grew them or under-grew them. And you may realize that, come age fifteen or so, Narcissism saved you from a state that none of us wants to think about: the failure to escape a failed childhood.

Narcissism saved us, though that’s not the reason we love it. It is, sadly, its own reason, its own love. It is self-trapped, imperiously and angrily so, because no one saw us, only themselves.

There is a way to question, to deeply deflate this disorder. Its greatest tool is to want to, as perverse as that sounds. To want to just be, not be perfect. To want to just feel, not feel ego; to feel the world, not the self. To risk non-being, for the sake of merely being part of the world, a regular person. This is all quite possible. I’ve tried it. I recommend it.

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* I intend to address the question of why a Narcissist needs to be not only excellent or one of the best, but the one best, in the next post.
 

Hold everyone's hand

I just saw a television commercial hawking human goodness and loving-kindness. It was a big hospital system’s public service sales pitch. An infant stands up, seeming to want out of her crib. Dad redeposits her prone. She comes back to the rail but this time he climbs into the crib and they fall asleep together. We see many of these warmth lessons – Olympics brother- and sisterhood, pets forlorn or rescued, young teen advising his mom: “No kissing on the first date,” children holding hands, standing together, old folks thrilled with their caregivers.

These commercials, Scrooge-ishly, annoy me. It’s not just because they are artificial sweeteners – people are more layered than these moments. It’s not just that I don’t like the U.S. economy telling us what’s good. It’s that I don’t like society telling me anything. I don’t like society assuming we’re all connected.

I am, I suppose, insular in a way.

Does anyone else feel nagged by this fallacy? I already have enough of being forced into the same leaky PT boat by disturbed Captain Trump. My good is my own treasure. It’s not generic. It doesn’t send waves of golden meaning into other people’s lives. Not only is it quiet: It is unknown to others.

Whose self-medication is this? Who decided we’re all one? Maybe this honey in the air doesn’t actually turn people’s lives, but I think there is an implicit – very subliminal, a real collective unconscious – feeling or assumption in people’s brains that we’re all in this together. And that idea or feeling must take over true individuality. It prevents our knowing that while we can talk to others, our words end up not truly blending into the alien soil of their lives. Their lives are their own. After the cradle, just before the grave.

Yes, there are still times in my life when I’ve wanted that bond with another, where one exists yet fuses with the other. There are times in my therapies when I’ve offered to be a client’s home, her eternal parent to go to. I may get a few calls over the months post-termination. But then it stops: Everyone wants to be freer than that, despite their need and their loneliness.