metonymy4u

when i am faced with emotional suffering the emotion is often accompanied by a thought about something i think i don’t have. i naturally come to the conclusion that to alleviate the suffering, i need to acquire the thing that i’m thinking i don’t have. the object of problem solving then becomes this fantasized absent item (or event or relationship or whatever…). acquiring behavior is then reinforced through a negative reinforcement schedule, and suffering never really ends. the entire process is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the problem. the nature of the problem, actually, is that suffering has arisen and needs some attention. the moment of suffering itself is the problem and the solution to the suffering problem is in the moment, not in the acquiring of the fantasized item. the problem isn’t so much that i want this fantasized item, but that i fail to understand that its possession or loss has nothing whatever to do with suffering. it is truly irrelevant. this would not be such a big deal except for the fact that it distracts me from actually solving the problem at hand: what to do about suffering. the suffering is real. it demands our attention. if we allow ourselves to constantly be distracted from understanding it, how can we be surprised that we never actually figure out how to respond to it?

consider for a moment how we think about “certainty.” on the one hand we could view certainty as following from intellectual proof. following the rules of logic, we deduce that the sum of the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees, or that 2 plus 2 always equals 4 or that all bachelors are unmarried. on the other hand, following the experiences of our senses we might deny all that, saying that clever explanation of concepts does not amount to any sort of proof at all and that the only thing anyone can “know” is that a particular sensation is passing through your mind at any given time. what kant, kierkegaard and nietzsche perceived in this seemingly endless debate over “mind” and “body,” is that both sides of the dialectic presuppose some sort of hidden authority of human understanding, just waiting out there somewhere to be discovered. for rationalists it was the authority of mind, empiricists the authority of body. addiction to authority has kept us bewitched by its endless possibility like some holy grail shimmering always beyond our reach. yet how anyone can truly become the “author” of their lives has never been satisfactorily demonstrated, despite centuries of effort. will this search continue ad infinitum? will we exhaust ourselves in this sisyphean task? or blow each other to bits arguing over whose eternal truth is more true? these are the lessons of kant’s antinomies, kierkegaard’s leap to faith and nietzsche’s eulogy for god. if we continually insist on chasing an illusion, despite centuries upon centuries of ignominious failure, how on earth can we be truly surprised at our never ending frustration?

as i get older i start to learn that experiences like “feeling broken” or “wishing i had never been born,” are the end result of a chain of events that started somewhere out there, in a world not contained within my skin. and i think in space, no one can hear you sin.

one of the arbitrary patterns i often notice in the world around me is an imaginary line dividing me from some group of people. this set may be defined by adjectives like “married” or “happy” and the line dividing us often becomes the occasion for emotions like “sadness” or “grief” part of which includes the thought “i’m broken.” what i find objectionable about this pattern these days is the extent to which it interferes with the process of actually grieving what i experience as lost.

the question arises as to how often are relationships between men and women in our culture characterized by “bullying.” by “bullying” i mean a pattern of shaping another person’s behaviors based on the goals of the shaper and not the goals of the recipient of the shaping. how much active mutual shaping (cooperation) is going on and how much of it is flowing in one direction from the “active” to the “passive” participant? do we still live in a culture that rewards men for active shaping yet expects women to accomplish their goals through subterfuge, concealment, capitulation? are men expected to be the apparent goal setters and women the apparent goal followers? and in what manner is goal setting aversive and goal following negatively reinforcing? or bullying maintained by a schedule of variable reinforcement? how healthy is any of this in the end?

even a thorough systems thinker like skinner still from time to time picked up the language of cause and effect. the question here is not whether he or descartes or newton or anyone else was right to do so. the question i’m raising is the question of whether cause and effect is a useful metaphor anymore. could we contemplate another metaphor like the buddhist concept of dependent origination (emptiness) which directs attention to whole systems rather than discretely identifiable parts? how do we want to describe the system now and in the future? the description is itself a creation not a discovery, a part of the emptiness that it is looking at. and how does the system look back at its own description?