some thoughts on meme theory

Gemeni

          Dawkins invented the word memes to refer to gene-like memories. They ultimately survive by a mind communicating them to other minds. Hitting a nail with a hammer is a meme; it works, we feel it is useful, we repeat it. There are billions of such memes alive in each of our heads.

          I have heard this meme-theory criticized as a psuedo-scientific metaphor; but since it refers to mental activity, and we don’t know exactly what ideas are, it must necessarily be a metaphor for now, in the sense that we can’t look at it under a microscope. And so is all psychology.

          A meme, then, is merely an idea. By christening ideas as “memes” he wishes to show they’re reproductive qualities. It is a fresh outlook. But ultimately, the meme “memes” itseslf must die. We already have a name for it, and it is “idea.”

          Human ideas are the progeny of man. Focus, purpose, activity. Focus must be a need of the group; purpose is an interpretation of that need, and activity a planned movement from that purpose. All of these are recognized, communicated, and allowed by ideas.

          “Necessity is the mother of invention,” the saying goes. The depths of this saying are yet to be plumbed. Indeed, the mind, when it emanates its needs or is inspired by external obstacles, invents. Inventing is what needs do.

          But creativity requires large excesses of mental energy. The innovators of mankind are always men flowing with vitality, or charged with pain. Nothing emenates like a denied need, nothing inspires like a tough world. Since creativity requires much energy, most of us invent by adapting the old. By calling Christianity “an inspiring set of stories that, though not literally true, are useful for helping us relate to God,” we save ourselves the effort of inventing a new religious outlook. We are able to address the need of honesty regarding the past, and yet face the future with our comfortable traditions at hand.

          Ideas evolve by constant revision of what went before. The needs of myths and religions addressed issues that matter nothing to pious persons nowadays. What Moses or Paul were really up to  matters little to the devout Jew and Christian. How we can pretend the words are as relevant today as they were then?—this is the imaginitive projects of the rabbis and pastors.

          This is like how the eyeball evolved. It was not an eyeball at first, possibly not a “seeing thing” at all. But as every generation of organisms had to interpret it through his lust for life, those who used it best spread it further, until it became the negation of its inception: a new thing, a seeing thing.

          In the same way, marriage, funerals, confessions, jail-houses are ancient born, and utterly different now than at their beginning. Our need for group solidarity often demands that we patronize old traditions. So we give them a modern spin. The US government changes year by year. The constitution is interpreted beyond itself.

          The greatest changes happen at the circumference. Cults, innovaters, inventors, are always eccentrics, weirdos, those kicked out of the wedding, forsaken by God, despised by men. Of course. They are the saints of tomorrow. No great man is timely. This Nietzsche knew more then anybody. He was able to recognize himself despite an entire world that disagreed with him. Every world religion began as a cult—often a cult too ridiculous to be shouted down, ignored because it appeared harmless. The early Mormons had much more difficulty than the early Christians.

          New ideas require incubation. The greater the idea, the more it must incubate. A new idea always begins as a lie, and if it were presented too soon, would be cut down and killed immediately. An innovator knows how to keep quiet. Or if he must talk, he talks over people—he disdains them too much to care what they say. He has an ear for echoes, and takes every good word. But his invention, his new idea, his new policy, it must always be gestated in silence. Thus us Creators eat weird diets, keep weird friends, stay up all hours of the night, and ultimately despise anybody who demands an ounce of our strength away from our goal.

          Which is to say, that Aristotle was right: there are two types in this world: nobles and slaves. In a Democracy, do not think we have forgotten this. Racial slavery looked bad in front of our enlightened Europeans. Well then, we have outgrown it. Are we any less a nation of slaves? But of course: people still work their lives away. Only now you have willing slaves.

          Forty hours of my attention to something I care nothing for is slavery. I don’t care the wages. If you pay more, I spend my money on not working. Freedom is freedom to create. A full time job is slavery, and antithetical to my spirit.

          But many of us work more than forty hours a week. Many of us work demanding jobs in factories, in industry, even in customer service. These people look at it as natural, dignified, and duty. As is right. That is what the slaves have to believe. Is work noble? That is the wrong word—they are not noble. The rich? Not them, they work hard too, but are business smart; they are born to control.

          The rich in this world are not the inventors of ideas and their memetic charm, but those who are clever at exploiting those who do, whose with a business sense, with the canniness for legal bindings. On the other hand, I find around me in the brightest eyes, in the sharpest students, highschool graduates and PhDs alike (and they are often equally educated in life, if not in techinical traditions), is that we are surrounded by repeaters. Man the ape! Man who does not understand his experiences, but presumes them and adapts them wholesale, so that, he may be a business man, he may be a scholar, he may be any worker of praiseworthy skill, but he has created none of it. He is a master of adapting it, and applying it directly to making a living.

          Impressive, these people; I myself am a slow learner, gasping with breath to keep up with the class. How do they do it? They do not even need rote: the ideas stick right in their heads, like grapes to a vine. I think mankind could survive indefinitely under the control of such men.

          But they are not plus men. They are not creators. They are the majority, they get the vote, but they will never know the sheer joy of creative ecstasy.

          This is the world of fear, the world of power, the world of work. This is a glorious world, a needed world, a good world, and a world us artists take no part in. We do not force or enforce. We do not tell others what to do. We freely create. We are the third class. It is our arrogance to mock at the others, because, after all, we are the Gods. The memes of the many are the ideas from us. What is mere meme in their minds (repeating without addition), is created from our very soul (original without borrow). We are the giants of the world. The sun shines only for us, though it sheds light on you too. We are like vines who enjoy the first of the sun. The universe blossomed wide so that we may exist, though she kisses also you.

          All peoples that make themselves distinct under a name also size to fit certain ideas for themselves. They grow into thsse memes. These complex masks fit over them like a skin, and in the meantime, they start reproducing in accordance with them.

          In the same way, every people grows alongside its mask.

          The human cell never helps the human organisms by sacrificing itself for the organims. The cell selfishly insists on doing what is in its own best interest. This is why the cell allows the organism to flourish. In the same way, the idea creators are the selfish creators of the world.

          In a holistic view, mankind is a symbioses. There is Man, and there is Culture. Culture, as the meme metaphor makes clear, is one great ecosystem. And mankind is the symbiant one who lives within the culture. As a culture culturates, it grows deeper, wider, shallower, thicker. To live in the modern world takes a certain sort of person; to survive, to flourish in the modern world—and this necessarily means above all modern culture—this naturally selects who the new mankind will be. The atom bomb may have killed a couple cities, but it has killed off many more people than that, by mere implication. Who makes money, who reproduces, who avoids suicide, all these are indirectly related to the atom bomb, the cell phone, the writings of Hemingway, the American economy this year, etc. Culture kills off many of us, as surely as it allows others of us.

          For ideas influence all our choices: what risks to take, whom would be a fit husband or wife, how to balance family and employment, how to handle illness, where to live, how to raise our children, how to handle their health, whether to let a kid come to term, whether to adopt out or adopt in, what religion or secular worldview to cherish, and to punish others, pay taxes, charge taxes, fire and hire, have children and raise them, according to these ideologies. We are partially conditioned by the logosphere, by all the ideas we take in from the world.

          This is not to say that it allows the best of us, or that it kills off the weakest. As we all know, modern medicine allows bad genes to proliferate. The eugenecists and social darwinists scare us because in principle they are right: our long term happiness is not to enable the sickest human beings, that our heart-warming charities are bringing in more suffering then they are curing, that, in short, we are selling our sells to get into heaven.

          Perhaps this cannot be escaped. Men do not want to really help the world, they want to seem to the others they love and seek admiration from, to have helped the world. Who every accused a missionary of ever doing real good? Who ever considered a charity a real blessing of humanity? These are always forms of therapy for the charities themselves, and those who support them. People commit acts of charity in order to assuage their own guilt, their own evasions from themselves. And in this, they have served their purpose. The means justify the ends.

          Lamarkianism survives in meme theory. For while the deeds of a man do not pass into his genes, they do pass into his children, their children, and their children, by conscious, unconscious, mental, and physical encoding, if not more directly in the choice of partner and nature of child-rearing philosophy.

          Life evolves by three factors: genes, memes, and will. From birth we are educated, which determines how our instincts will express themselves. Identical twins in unidentical families may be very different. Will itself, the conscious choice of the person, by which I mean the aspect that is not from education nor genes, acts as the interpreter of both instinct and culture, and thus the creator of both.

          Ideas themselves can convince us not to reproduce, or to reproduce chaste or suicidal children. Our culture of ideas—and a meme is merely another name for an idea—determine where we move, what we do for a living, how we have sex, when we have sex, how we raise our children.

          In this way, both genes and memes are alive: they reproduce, they grow, they develop. A will however, cannot be said to be “alive” per se, but merely active and conscious. It cannot reproduce itself. A will is a differentiation of energy grown from a system of information (brain). It is initially created by the genes, but is genetic. There is no heridity of will.

          With memes, we have again the return of Lamarckianism. Lamarck believed that habits and actions changed our heriditary material. Indeed, he was right, in our choices and actions, we will influence—

our choice in sexual partner

our children’s attitudes, beliefs, personality, and character, and therefore

our children’s choice in sexual partner

and also the group we choose to live among, and subtley

how the entire group reproduces

Therefore, our choices can be encoded into memes, which themselves are a selecting force for what genes flourish and which do not.

          Culture is an ecosystem that grows along with us, a part of which we take in and join to ourselves. A meme is a bit of culture, a bit ofencoding of will, that can be communicated. Will itself can be communicated and implanted, but since it is not our will, we call it habit, or influence. A strong will, or generations of will, can be communicated into a person or people as a sort of second will.

          What is difficult for the father is easy for the son. Buddha’s could be beaten in his own game by his astute students, who can go further, faster, deeper, but always as disciples, not with the glorious experience of having created the original.

          Thus we have three: genes, memes, and will.

 

 

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Perfection Is Easy

www.msu.edu/~junedan

 

Postmodernism is democratic mediocrity in self-glorification.

Postmodern Mediocrity

          Derrida is merely one of many: it is stupid to speak of him as if Derrida were something of a man when he is merely one of many, has no life or being outside of the texts he attacks. He is a university scholar, a level down from Lacan in originality, among equals with Zizek, Delueze, all these second-hand, third-hand pan handlers. Read them a little at a time. For they are not primary. As university scholars, they do not think about ideas, they interpret texts. They do not experience the works of genius, nor do they work genius, but they kill the books they touch and turn them into “texts” and like a stray suitor snuck into Penelopes sewing room, destroys the completed tapestry she gave to to Odysseus, and wrends it to threads, as if this reduced Odysseus to a mere suitor, and gave him a chance to steal a few threads and wad them into tricky knots. Such ones as these are theologians of the Western Canon, not that they study the Bible or God, but like a theologian, they misinterpret literature to make it say whatever they can possibly make it say, being incapable of saying anything with authority themselves. Half man, second-hand men. Do not waste your time on them.

 

 

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Perfection Is Easy

www.msu.edu/~junedan

 

the nobility of truth

 

Nobility

                Ultimately, the greatness of a man lies exclusively on his courage, and courage is the attitude the man has towards his truth. Insofar as a man puts truth and honesty above all virtues, including love, he is a noble man, a great man, and he alone is worthy of immortality and achieves it. Truth stands for his unique and direct experience of the world, and courage his willingness to live by this view despite the imposition of other views upon him. Courage also is his willingness to sacrifice anything and everything that interferes with his ultimate goal: the greatest man will sacrifice wife, child, society, God, even his own mortal life for the sake of his truth. For his truth is not something he loves or hates, but stands for his I, his eyes, the very basis of his being, the one highest need above all else, his personal experience of the world and the all.

            In Genesis, Abraham tests himself by killing his son, so as to be true to his religious vision. So every man catches glimpses, if not the actual utter proof, for himself, “What is my greatest Truth against which everything else is mere secondary, distraction, and cast-away?” Tragedy, emergency, crisis, and terror will teach you this lesson, insofar as you will not admit it to yourself. This is the narrowing of the soul. The widening of the soul is the same movement, to put great distances between ideas in your heart, to make certain wrong thoughts impossible to think. Also, to see all things in the vertical axis, what is of more power to us, what is less, what is true, what is merely agreeable? Pleasure is our enemy insofar as it asks the smallest damper on truth.

            A woman lives and dies for love, her body is made for love, her breasts and hips made for love. A man lives and dies for truth, gives his truth as a child to the woman, who above all and always is a fighter for truth, primarily, and secondarily, for the application of truth to men, and this is called culture, and higher culture. Love is never sufficient for a man. It is part, but love is not all. It is neither center nor ultimate necessity. Love for the sake of truth. But not truth for the sake of love.

 

Emerson quote on beauty

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Can I quote to you what makes my heart leap with joy today?

 

Em:

 

Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks fabled that Venus was born of the foam of the sea. Nothing interests us which is stark or bounded, but only what streams with life, what is in act or endeavor to reach somewhat beyond. The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye, is, that an order and method has been communicated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature, — a long nose, a sharp chin, a hump-back, — is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a more excellent symmetry. The interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry, and to watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the charm of running water, sea-waves, the flight of birds, and the locomotion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, to recover continually in changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but by gradual and curving movements. I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. This fact suggests the reason of all mistakes and offence in our own modes. It is necessary in music, when you strike a discord, to let down the ear by an intermediate note or two to the accord again: and many a good experiment, born of good sense, and destined to succeed, fails, only because it is offensively sudden. I suppose, the Parisian milliner who dresses the world from her onsmustfurnishimperious boudoir will know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind, and make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the just gradations. I need not say, how wide the same law ranges; and how much it can be hoped to effect. All that is a little harshly claimed by progressive parties, may easily come to be conceded without question, if this rule be observed. Thus the circumstances may be easily imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most naturally in the world, if only it come by degrees. To this streaming or flowing belongs the beauty that all circular movement has; as, the circulation of waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical motion of planets, the annual wave of vegetation, the action and reaction of Nature: and, if we follow it out, this demand in our thought for an ever-onward action, is the argument for the immortality.

 

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/e/emerson/ralph_waldo/e53c/part8.html

 

Always and ever he sings to me.

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the logosphere

Logosphere

          The logosphere can be conceptualized as the sphere around earth that contains all meanings, all meanings crystallized into ideas, and all languages and their flow that trigger these meanings to be felt and worked on.

          The language you use daily was not invented by Webster, nor the English, but all of humankind. Every word has been tested out, used in different contexts, grown, and sharpened. Every idea has been tried millions of ways, fitted and perfected by the greatest geniuses, beauitified and poetrified by the amplest poets. Language itself is mankinds greatest creation to date, an achieveent that grows along with us daily and at all times.

          The swirling of these meanings in our collective conscious is like the rainbow skin of a soapbubble, or the passionate rumblings in the veil of Jupiter. It is a flux, and it contains pieces that are forever constant.

          A genius or a great author steps above the chaos and the deep, and draws all his power from it when he speaks oracular truths, seemingly from his own essence alone, but really not only from his essence, but much of it from the Zeitgeist, of the animus munde, of the Oversoul, the rhythm of all meanings. We each ever and always participate in this, in all our doings.

Reading Religiously

Reading Diet

                How does one read religiously? Not like a Protestant. The Christian, by reading his Bible every day, exhausts the book much quicker than it should be. Some books you must set down, perhaps for years, and let the germs of the book grow up independently within you, so that they are your own, so that your life is a Bible, and then, when you come back to the Gospels, you will read these books as if you had written them, with wisdom and measure rather than praise and ignorance. Do you not yet see that “praising” is an act of ignorance?

            I have long since ceased and ever will to read the New Testament, and even the Torah is very far from my heart. The Bible, like the writings of C. S. Lewis and Ayn Rand are authors who I much enjoyed reading very much until something in me snapped, and I had come to experience things more profound than these authors had spoken of. When I read any of them, I feel disgust.

            Yet new and interesting insights into the Bible dawn on me every day, without the obligatory Bible obsessing. Because I do not conclude in advance that it will teach me all wisdom, I do in fact gain more wisdom from it than my Christian friends. To conclude in advance is to preclude advancement.

            The books I read religiously are ever Emerson, Whitman, William James, and Nietzsche; and the rest of my literary diet – of which I am an utter glutton, and first to sing of the virtue of gluttony! – is like an angry ocean, and my storm clouds toss this ship left and right. But the citrus of Emerson and Whitman are never far, nor the map of James and the compass of Nietzsche.

            Ideas build up over time, and books grow. The general opinion of a book changes the way you read, it no matter how objective you wish to be. Every word of the Bible, whether translated or not, means something to us that it could never have meant to the author or his audience. The explications, hermeneutics, interpretations, and billions upon billions of misinterpretations – even if explicitly rejected – have changed the very meaning and perceived intent of every atom of that book. And that is merely the most immediate example. In fact, all books are that way. You will never in any life time be able to read Plato as if you were Aristotle. Cannot be done. Not that you even have an inkling: you are forever kicked out of the family cave, all you have is your modern sun, but not the original fire of Plato’s promethean intent. What you have is richer and also weaker. You understand more, you understand less. Let us therefore forever lambast and outrage the audacity of those who claim to be returning to the “fundamentals of the primitive church.” That would be pure bullshit.

Personas and Internalizations

This is an old essay I just touched up. It is the basis for the other one I sent out about the Engines of habit. Some engines become images or personas. Rereading this I realize what a dry writer I can sometimes be. I should develop this more.

 

Personas and Internalizations

            The mind uses images of a person in order to see that person. Just as our summer in 5^th grade can be remembered as one entity all at once, so too do we remember our friend all at once. There is the image of him. It is a complex image, containing his full history, our full history of dialogue with him, our full history of thinking on him. How do we use this image?

            The image is a sort of plug by which we can communicate to our friend. We plug the image into him, and thus we can talk to him as a familiar. But when he is absent, we can coddle and interact with the image itself, and this is what all religious people do with their “God,” or “Buddha,” or “Kristna.” Unlike completely abstracted ideas, which are simpler, these complex personality abstactions are too sophisticated to understand, and thus require animation by plugging into the real person. Or, with those who have a “God” image, they plug into scriptures, and especially into a religious group.

            Such an image plug allows us to know a person; it brings forth millions of unconscious expectations by which we can evaluate the person’s present state.

            The image plug plugs into our sensations of the other. Yes, but the other end of the image plug does not plug into our “self,” but it plugs into our self-persona. For every image—for every person we know, and indeed, every type of person we know—we have a certain mask we wear. This is not a mask that obscures, for there is no face. In fact, it is our face, but not our only face. The self is a complex ocean, which only becomes visible and solid when spoken. The self is omniscient, but speech is semiscient. We say much less than we know.

            Thus, to continue with the electronics metaphor, the self is a sort of electricity which requires four connectors to touch the other person: our image persona, our image plug, his image plug, his image persona. Through these four intermediaries, which are, in fact, four types of language, we draw in and out a new source of energy: intimacy.

            Therefore, we do not dialogue merely between our image of the person and the image self-persona it plugs into, but we also dialogue with our friend’s image of us. We must constantly correct how he sees us, the criticism and innacuracies he project unto us. Not that we must think of this constantly, for most of communication is without analysis. Most talk is “mindless”; intimacy may require little intelligence.

            Thus, she plugs into me, and I plug into her, but not at the same point. I plug my image of her into her mask for me, and she plugs her image of me into my mask for her; a chiasmus.

Do we play a different part for everybody we know? The metaphor here is that we are the same person, and we wear a different persona depending on our company. The person underneath, is he really the same underneath every persona? A personality is essentially a verbal contruction. It is a series of language engines evoked for a given situation. There is also a persona-for ourselves. When we are alone, we are in contact with yet another persona, who is not more nor less "real" than when we are with a mate, with our parents, etc. All of them are constructed. We might enjoy being this one more than that one.The Self of a person, however, is the needcenter beneath mind, persona, habits, history.

A persona, a personality, is a connected set of language engines.

The part of us that talks is a persona. Even when we are alone, we are alone with our personafor ourself. The person we see in the mirror is a mask we wear in front of ourselves. Below that, deep below, are the invisible needs.

            The persona requires reorientation, engaging its external correlate.

            We internalize our tools. We internalize our world. We are what we do. And we take in our full world, and make a world-image in ourselves by which to interpret the world external. In all our experience, we have within us the wide experience of the all.

            But man is most hypnotized by his own instruments. Consider the computer. Lately, we have whole branches of psychology based on the metaphor that “the mind is a computer.” Cognitive psychology is based on this. Much of our intuitions are based on this. Lately, certain scienitific scholars like to talk of the universe being made out of information. It is called the “information model of the Universe.” This is so appealing because we love to play with our computers, and it is fun to take the next step and say, “and its all a computer.” Like Shakespeare and his “all the world’s a stage,” or anybody in any profession saying, “not only my job, but also the world.”

            We internalize our world, we internalize our job, we internalize our society, but not by analysis. We swallow them whole, but only after many attempts. One never learns the world by analysis. Analysis is an after the fact intellectualization of learning, is philosophizing, is violencing the world. Analysis, indeed, is the way to destroy and learn the secrets. Analysis is the birthright of the ruling class, the masters, only they shed work and philosophize.

            The world as a whole is internalized, is a “persona” requiring constant input. Personas require input from the external—the persona is the interface between the self and the external. We cannot internalize another self. What we internalize is always really a part of ourself. Thus, fantasy will never fully suffice unless it is mixed with externality. We can only see what is already within us, we can only find what is already within us.

            Men internalize their environments, in the persona whole. Especially, a man becomes his tools. They extend him, and he intends them. Man invented the computer, now man is a computer—ask any pyschologist. Man invented the internet. Now mankind is www.

            Within us we have the incommunicable I, the personafor, and the imageof. But of the I we also have the face of I, or the personafor ourself. This is our self image, necessarily an interpretation of the self. Between this I and the personafor, we need nodes of connection, the parts of our friend where they share a virtue that we also have. Where these contact, a flow of esteem goes either into their image, or from their image into our I, and creates a tension of difference.

            This “esteem” is in fact differentiated Crea (will-fuel), to continue the metaphor. That such a dynamic exists between us and the image of our intimates gives us an unconscious attitude toward the friend. When we connect our imageof them into their personafor us, these differences of esteem are communicted as honor, envy, distrust, appreciation etc. Rarely do we realize the full intricate set of energies behind each atom of speech.

            The esteem itself is only partially differentiated. It is energy to be used for me or her in our relationship. But it is further differentiated/ interpreated according to my habits of affect, love, fear, etc.

            Our conscious speaks to his conscious, our unconscious speaks to his unconscious, and rarely are we able to speak consciously to his unconscious.

            The glue of a friendship is allowed by an exchange of esteems and values. We call this “mutual regard,” and insofar as this regard is differentiated into affection, “love.”

            There are in fact four sources of crea in a friendship: inness, esteem, value, will.

            Inness is to create the image in itself. This image becomes a source of energy, both to be sent out to the person, and also to be put into ourselves. Friendship invigorates. It is by inness, and especially by connection with the outer friend that we internalize a mood from the other. Live with a wife, and you will both feel depressed at the same time, enthusiastic at the same time, because of the intimacy of connection.

            All other people are experienced directly, as if we were them. All thinking of others is sympathy, compassion, etc, at least for a conscious second, and finally unconsciously much longer, where the consious awareness of them is replaced by a reaction to them. That reaction is fed by the initial and persistent identification we first made.

            Whenever we read a story, we identify with every character, we are each character. We feel all that is felt. Only we are conscious of little of it.

            For it is impossible to see without feeling. If a I feel wretched with the wretch, my highest kindness is to repress that wretchedness, and build upon it the next step, the triumphant attitude that defeats the wretchedness.

            For to see is first to idenitfy with, and then immediately progress beyond.

            All relationships are sex and violence, that is, crea, which is both a tearing apart of the other, and a creative identification with the other. Mostly unconscious. We struggle constantly. Casual talk is much deeper than the weather.

            We feel as he feels for the smallest conscious moment, and then use this as a source of our attitude towards him. To consciously identify with him or her for a long time might give us a more powerful interpretation, or it might not.  One cannot understand nor misunderstand another with internalizing him, being him, feeling his world through direct experience.

            To pity him would be a revenge against him. We must identify stronger than that.

            A marriage doesn’t start until the fifth year of intercourse. Only through this continual mutual creation are the two in sync, and prepared to creatively shape an Us. There is no human way to be married before this.

            The same for a Great book. The world’s greatest treasures are her books. To internalize the conceptual persona of a book, the narrator of a narrative or of a nonfiction treatise, requires marriage intimacy. It requires sex and disputes. Shy from these and you will never have it.

            Emotions are contagious because we identify with those we see. Those with the most persistent moods affect the most people. This is why mentally ill people ought to be treated.

            Esteem is a factory of crea. Once we have placed a token of esteem, that token produces a usable quantity, which revitalizes us during the absense from our friend.

            We esteem ourselves, we esteem others, and we also thus esteem his esteem, and can gain more esteem from his appreciation.

            Insofar as a node of esteem is greatly different, we may either intimate, or disconnect. If we intimate, then we must honor and respect him.

            Of will there are three types: violence, charisma, nobility. Either we follow a will by being forced to, and thus by fear, or by charisma, in which we wish to please the enforcer, and thus by rhetoric, or by nobility, in which we wish to honor the idea of the noble, and thus be a wish to identify with him.

            Will produces crea by focus. We charge an idea with power by focusing on it. A weak will needs external sources for reinforcement in order to act, and cannot self-discipline. Such a will does well to find a noble cause external to itself to reinforce and enforce itself.

            In every situation between me and other, there is a contrast of wills, and this contrast is known immediately and unconsciously by body language. Self-discipline, by the way, is the best gift a parent can give. With it you can do anything.

            Many people are weak willed, and need to belong to a group, community, work-place in order to borrow the will power of the leaders and the collective.

            A value is something we create in the world, and exchange for something else in the world. Money and goods are valuables we exchange. Many relationships focus on this aspect the most.

            These are sources of willpower, crea. Esteem is the belief in the value of an object, a sense of importance. It derives from an interpretation of the needs. Values , will, and innerness all are in fact syphons of need, are the differentiation and cultivation of need power.

            When the Other is an Idol (God, Karma, Nirvana, etc.) it may still be a powerhouse despite its static nature. We put our own factories into the image. Since we don’t value ourselves, this external esteem allows us to thank God for the bread that we broke our own back to earn. This sort of hypnotism is necessary for those who feel unable to valorize himself.

            Personas are sewing machines. Critiques are the mouths that eat them up.

            What is in the heart is too near, to painful, to delicate, to be touched directly. And so most people do not internalize, do not directly pierce their own heart. They unconsciously project their heart unto the world, the world being more plastic than the mind and heart, and they actualize themselves externally, they fight their shadow in the person of a boss or a neighbor, they love their inner child in the form of a wounded animal, and also use other indirect ways to “know thyself.”

            Those lacking in will but not in obedience prefer to externalize their will. A man who grumbles and yet follows his boss, his father, his wife, has a weak will, and unconsciously he recognizes this, and so he makes other people into his will. He makes an external system to substitute his will. In this way, all our possessions, all our friends and family, are literally part of our I, and without them, with the loss of any of them, the I himself is cut, is broken, is changed.

            As much as we oppose our enemies and our challenges, we in fact love them, love to suffer them, and make them happen again, the same problems keep happening over and over, inescapably, and we don’t know that we are happy.

            From the rich soil of our memories we may assume two things: personalities and systems, or ideas and concepts. A personality is a dynamic conceptual system fronting the creative needs. When we assume a personality, we take in an organic whole from the person in our world, and make an image. This internalized persona is taken in, internalized, intimized. Thus image is a system of memories, expectations, problems, questions, and the direct connection to our multivalent feelings towards the person. This image becomes our eyes when we meet the other person in the real world. We understand her through her image, and are thus surprised when she contradicts it.

            This explains why teenage boys, for instance, believe they have found the Goddess in their silly classmates, and adulate them with the most hyperbolic phrases. They have in fact used their girlfriend merely as the starting point for a grand portrait. Thus when they become disillusioned, they can snap to cruelty very quickly.

            We can say that we love others through an image we have of them. And in the absense of the other—death or dumping—we continue to love the image. It may lack the spontanaity of a living personality, but its life within us still marks itself as alien and other.

            Questions of “superegos,” the spirit of a generation, a chuch, a group, a family, a nation, etc. are in fact internalizations of personalities as an extra pair of eyes to see through. (A man is like a fly, ever looking at the world with hundreds of eyes, some borrowed, some home grown.)

            Dante’s image of Beatrice is nearly complete fiction, based on a quick internalization, yet the woman grew and transfigured. Her image grew autonoous.

            Thus people feel guilty before “God,” by which they presumably mean Yahweh the war God; or perhaps they ponder the violent words of Christ. They are able to “meet Jesus,” to “invite him into their heart,” just the way any fictional character is let into your heart: the assumption is designed to assume patterns into personalities. For this reason, we feel other people to be Gestalts, though we experience them only as fragments.

            The image becomes an internalized persona to conduit energy from the world, a way of seeing, a way of seeing her and a way of addressing her. We have two eyes on her. We have the full her experience, what she is as a whole, and we have the “how do I feel towards her now” experience. This is akin to the two eyes of focus, one on the All, the other on the Specific.

            “Those abstract ideas make sense,” you say, and you speak no contradiction. Focusing too is a sensation, the effort of focus and the free of release are sensations, and the building blocks of experience.

            A representative must contain all whom he represents. Their personas must be comprehended.

            How difficult to be angry with nonpersons, mere things. If I stub my toe, I do not really growl at the rock for tripping me up, but at the imagined audience, who always view me, from somewhere in my head, and jeer at such mistakes.