readoldthings | Daily Reflection 3.10.21

Though the Enemy be stronger in numbers, we may prevent him from fighting. Scheme so as to discover his plans and the likelihood of their success. Rouse him, and learn the principle of his activity or inactivity. Force him to reveal himself, so as to find out his vulnerable spots. /

Carefully compare the opposing army with your own, so that you may know where strength is superabundant and where it is deficient.

Today, Sun Tzu's talking about something we've heard quite a bit of-- the need for knowledge. We need to know our enemy, and we need to compare his strength with our own. As always, our primary battle is with the Enemy Within, that is, the sum total of our own passions, bad habits, thought-chains and addictions that keep us from accomplishing our goals. This is the Enemy that we need to know, and his the strengths to understand.

So far, so familiar; we've said the same thing many times since beginning this series. Today I'd like to talk a bit about how I use these ideas to understand and overcome some of my own internal enemies.

Careful examination of my life reveals the following:

I really like being out of power.

That doesn't sound very good, does it?

It's true, though. Something about my mind is very comfortable when it's part of a small and despised minority, struggling against an overwhelming power. When I was a child, my favorite movie was Star Wars (the original one; I was born in 1983) and my favorite book was Lord of the Rings. In Star Wars, of course, a tiny band of rebels struggles against the all-powerful Galactic Empire; in The Lord of the Rings, a tiny band of heroes struggles against the might of the Dark Lord Sauron. Did my fascination with these stories cause my mental disposition, or is it a mere reflection of it? Who knows. Either way, the result is the same. My favorite place to be is in the heroic band of rebels struggling against the empire, and if I should happen to find myself on the imperial side, I will move Heaven and Earth to get back to the rebellion.

I've watched myself repeat this pattern over and over again. I grew up in a rural, very conservative area that is basically run by the Catholic Church. And so by the time I was 18, I was a radical leftist and a pagan. Eventually I moved to California, where everyone I knew was a Democrat and a Buddhist or New Ager or "spiritual but not religious" essential oil yogini. At that point, right on schedule, my political views began to shift hard toward Conservatism, and Catholicism became far more appealing.

These days I live in a more or less red area, but it's easy to maintain my conservative views because of the deranged Woke Left hegemony currently running the country. Once the backlash against Wokesterism propels a new generation of Far Right leaders to power in politics, academia and entertainment-- I expect this to happen by 2030 at the latest-- I guarantee I'll start sounding more and more like the Boomer '60s radicals I currently abhor.

I know this about myself, and I don't regard it as an especially good quality. It does seem to be a fairly fixed condition, though.

So what do I do about it?

I have a number of different approaches. I was going to write about three of them, but my daughter interrupted me as I began the third paragraph after this one and I honestly have no idea what I was going to tell you; maybe it will come back tomorrow. In the meantime, here are two:

First, when it comes to my beliefs and views, I try to figure out which ones are actually mine, and which ones are reactions against the enthusiasms of the day. The way to do this is to figure out what endures from one of my personal incarnations to the next. A surprising number do. For example, on a religious level, the changing of the seasons is very meaningful to me; there is something about the awakening of life in the Springtime, its climax in Summer, maturity in Autumn and death in the Winter that moves me like very little else does. Religiously, then, I need a cycle of seasonal celebrations. Modern paganism, the Druid Revival, and traditional Roman Catholicism can all meet that need. I love the natural world and need to interact with it spiritually, and it doesn't particularly matter whether the spirit of a forest is called its god or its guardian angel On a personal level, I like making as much of my own stuff at home as I can. I bake bread, brew beer, make medicine, grow herbs, and do most of my cooking from scratch. This is true of me whether I'm justifying it by way of anarchism (Liberate the means of production!) or Conservatism (Burkean "little platoons" and subsidiarity!); therefore it needs no justification. Yesterday I brewed an herbal beer inspired by Stephen Buhner's Sacred and Herbal Healing Beer; it uses molasses as its sugar and is flavored with fir needles from our Christmas tree. It will be excellent regardless of its justification.

Second, I try to give myself outlets that aren't harmful. At one time, I expressed my love for being in a secret rebel band by living an anarchist lifestyle in an actual secret rebel band. The result was that I didn't have any money, I was frequently in danger, and I was angry all the time. It turns out, though, that I can meet a lot of the same needs that I met through anarchism by simply taking in fictional stories about rebels, bandits, and people facing overwhelming odds. Reading Mario Puzzo's The Godfather puts one in much the same mental frame as spending hours on radical message boards. Even better, I can put some effort into figuring out what I want to be, and use the opposition of some large body to push me in that direction. I am attempting to do this with my spiritual life above all else.

Think about your own recurring life patterns. How can you use them to push yourself in the direction you want to go, rather than being pushed by them in directions you don't want to go?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

methylethyl

The most immediately wonderful and helpful thing I got from my formal Orthodox catechesis, was the idea that *I am not the sum of my thoughts* and that it is possible, through prayer, study, and discernment, to tell the difference between the thoughts that are actually mine (surprisingly few, really), and the interlopers, and start spotting some of the more harmful ones while they're still incoming, and just stand back and let them fly on by.

From:

readoldthings

I had no idea that that mature an understanding of the mind was part of Orthodoxy. Can you point me to some sources that discuss it?

From:

methylethyl

I wish I could! The problem is that most of those little gems come up in a counseling/pedagogy sort of context. I don't know of a comprehensive guidebook, I just had a good catechist. Orthodoxy was born into a Greek world: they had the Greek understanding of the mind as a jumping-off point, so it's not all that surprising. Poking around... you can find interesting bits and pieces by looking up "orthodox christian" plus "nous" or "dianoia" or "noetic". "Paisius on thoughts" is always a fun (and infuriating to modern sensibilities) romp. He says things like:

"Today I observe that even with great matters, when someone asks, before he has even had the time to complete his question, we interrupt him and answer him. This shows that not only do we not seek enlightenment from the Grace of God, but we do not even judge with the reason God gave us. On the contrary, whatever our thoughts suggest to us, immediately, without hesitation, we trust it and consent to it, often with disastrous results.

"Almost all of us view thoughts as being something simple and natural, and that is why we naively trust them. However, we should neither trust them nor accept them.

"Thoughts are like airplanes flying in the air. If you ignore them, there is no problem. If you pay attention to them, you create an airport inside your head and permit them to land!"

From:

readoldthings

That's helpful, thank you. I'm not actually unfamiliar with Orthodox philosophy-- I just hadn't encountered that specific way of talking about thoughts and the thinking mind in Orthodox literature (or if I have I've forgotten it).

FWIW, I spent a bit of time studying Orthodox theology a few years back. Mainly through articles and podcasts on Ancientfaith.com, but I also have a few books, including Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Michael Pomazansky. More than anything else, it prepared me to study Plato and his successors, because it introduced me to the concept of the nous! Eventually I realized that I had misunderstood a great deal of both Western Christian philosophy, and of Neoplatonic literature, because I didn't realize that nous was originally translated into Latin as intellectus, and that the convention was to render both nous and intellectus as "intellect" for a very long time. Later, of course, the English "intellect" came to mean the same thing as the Latin "ratio," or reasoning mind, which is (I'm fairly sure) Greek "dianoia"-- a very different concept from "nous" as understood both in Christian and Platonic writings.

From:

methylethyl

Wonderful! I'm not a big student of the ancient philosophers or anything like that, but I find the distinction helpful in regular day-to-day life :) I think that we westerners are often really stuck in the idea that what we perceive is 100% sensory input + reasoning about it.

But if we think about it even a *little* bit, we know this isn't true. Sometimes, you *know* in your heart something about this person you just met and have no information about: that this person is nice, or that this person is dangerous, or that this person is someone to stay away from. Then you work your way backward from the "answer" to come up with a chain of logic that "leads" to that answer. But we do it backward from the way we say we do it, you know?

IMO, that's the nous showing through in a little flash, before we jump on it and suffocate it with a thick blanket of reasoning.

Encountering the nous/dianoia concept finally gave me a framework for understanding that experience (and not feeling guilty about it!). You have senses and reason, which are indirect means of perception, and you have nous, which perceives directly. They can't operate at the same time: it's one or the other. A lot of Orthodox discipline seems to be oriented around clearing the gunk out of the eyes of your neglected nous, and re-acquainting yourself with it: It's how you perceive God.

From:

readoldthings

You have senses and reason, which are indirect means of perception, and you have nous, which perceives directly.

This is one of the best way to understand this distinction that I've ever seen; I plan on borrowing it. Thank you.

From:

methylethyl

Yes! It is *so* different from the way we're raised to think of things, but so, so useful. And also, clearly, an old idea that I'm just regurgitating, so I can't remotely take credit for it.

In stories about blessed elders and clairvoyant saints, it is a common theme that they often... people go to visit them, and their lives and thoughts and very souls are an open book to these holy men and women. This is because they've learned to see with the nous! Without the distraction of words and sensory data. Seeing soul-to-soul without any filters. I can't imagine that would be an easy thing to do all the time, which explains why these people are almost universally monastics, hermits, or holy fools. Regular social interactions *depend* on everybody being able to hide aspects of themselves.

I *think* that one of the functions of regular confession is that it gets us used to the idea of *not* hiding those aspects of ourselves that we are ashamed of. This seems like it'd help us to be able to handle the sort of truth the nous has access to. It seems like (and this is just me, not any religious authority) if just regular people, with no preparation, suddenly went "pop!" and had the eyes of their nous opened wide... it would not be the sort of thing you could function with in normal life. It'd make you bonkers, like being on a permanent shroom trip.

From:

readoldthings

That's a great explanation for Confession, and I plan on borrowing it as well.

For what it's worth, the first time I went to Confession-- as a 7 year old Catholic-- I left the confessional feeling as though I were floating in a field of golden light.

Then I went to school the next day and bragged to all my friends about how I didn't have any sins anymore.