A break during my hiatus*: Human nature in one lesson

The human psyche seems recondite. Countless ideas across time, all are parsed a thousand ways, agreed and disagreed with ’til kingdom come. People feel urged to write poems and novels that are largely incomprehensible or whose characters are terribly ignorant. For some, literary symbols are as real or important as concrete facts. Believers in one faith system debate atheists for hours and believe they’ve won. There are libraries about socialism, capitalism, anarchism, anarcho-capitalism. There is the Zen of motorcycle maintenance, slow cooking, doing, healing, writing, solitude. Rap music is trash and high art. Mindfulness – essentially, mental noticing without the interference of emotion – has won great value, like gold, in our society, when there is next to nothing in it. Philosophies – earnest thought about reality – are so abstruse and enamored of as to merit doctoral degrees and lifelong study. Adults’ playing and children’s thinking are thought deep. “Love” fills libraries.

And, we wonder “who am I?”, what our meaning and purpose should be, why we hate those we don’t know, why many people kill themselves. We don’t wonder why millions become jobs and careers that no one could love, why some people love inarticulate babies more than adolescents or adults, why wide intellectual discourse is ipso facto respected, instead of the single paragraph of logic or assumption that would be plenty sufficient.

All we need to know and understand, in order to understand this infinity of the subtle, gross, hairsplitting, compelling, certain and unknowable, is that the adult has never stopped being his or her child and that the two factors – adult and child – have fused to be a kaleidoscope not solid, liquid, gas or plasma. It’s an uneasy question mark of consciousness, body and time.

An adult’s psychological disorders first are seeds planted and cultivated in her babyhood and childhood. Frustration and tension, fear and loss – caused by outrage or silence in the home – morph into anger and alienation, broad anxiety and emptiness and depression later on. Early pain is buried under alcohol and ideas and sex and murder and false-happy defenses. Early need is answered by stalking and romance and art, material power and success. The child’s pain and need never fade. They are simply six feet under but poison and color the soil and the tree that grows above it.

We, consciously, are the trunk, branches, twigs and leaves, but our delusion is that we are the wide and full crown: our aware and expansive life. It is a construct, our idea. If we feel each leaf, we will ride it to the roots.

When I teach my client: “The problem is that your adult is not an adult, it is the alive child trying to live from his burial underground” – if he is not stunned and time-stopped, he failed to understand me.

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* “In the summer of 1937, [Ayn] Rand took a break from working on The Fountainhead to write the novelette called Anthem, a short, highly stylized tale of a future dystopia so saturated in collectivism that the word ‘I’ has disappeared from the language.” – https://www.aynrand.org/novels/anthem.