A new psychology, or “A Title Which Says QUICK HELP”
I’ve dabbled in a model for my vision of Torah-originated mapping of our experiences, such that it would not defy approach by strange elocution, whose tempo and logic dance and lose themselves in weaves, and would instead welcome by dazzling with meaningless colours until their audience was ready to hear what they were ready to know:
What’s the framework? Emotions. Imagine life is made up of emotions which are the spiritual forces you bring into existence. Regardless of whether you are a star athlete or waiting for dinner in an age care, you can still only compare yourself equally to others by looking at your own soul first.
- Footnote[1]
- Fear, caution. Anger. (5)
- Admiration, sympathy. (6)
- Love, happiness, bliss. (7)
- Sadness, boredom. Shame. (2/~1)
- Determimation, will power, perseverance. (10)
- Intelligence, curiosity. (8)
- Creativity, wonder. (9)
- Connectivity, openness. (3)
- Passion, zest, appetite. (4)
- Tail-end footnote[2]
If you could learn to see yourself as being the result of these pistons and cogs – even though like any story, it’s only true because it’s believed – then you could start to explore the higher spiritual short-cuts without mastering more material than what the instructions include.
Step One:
- Become more familiar with Torah psychology which believes that there are many emotions, some of which are felt like feelings (5-7), and others felt like intellectual pursuit (8-10), and others like the forces of habit (2/~1-4).
- How to do this step?
- Commit to peppering your loose time with seeds that are you thinking about any force. – Aka start using spare seconds until a few unfamiliar ideas become an elaborate blueprint you had been incapable of imagining understanding, but now do.
- Examples?
- Learning to list them. Can use any name. I wouldn’t bother with synonyms – it’s more about the idea in your mind which illustrates “passion”.
- Learning to think about any one of them. Maybe at the red light, I think about how passion/zest/appetite is a force that defines what choices are made. Or how this is seen in me. Or in others.
- Be patient. You’ve gone too far ahead of yourself when its time to revise, because sometimes we lie to ourselves and pretend to understand concepts, but can barely juggle the words.
Next part, where heaps of cool complex stuff is handed over to the pupil for experimentation
Don’t run away. This is hardcore. This is no holds barred The Matrix remastered by the Master of a Good Name himself – an impossible proposition, but one which sufficiently inspires me so as to continue…
What I need to communicate, is not just an arrangement of ideas – like saying this emotion X connects to that intellect Z – but it’s actually something much more important than memorizing symbologies. What I need to communicate is a mythology for bravery which is (a) scientific, (b) share-able between those that know it, and (c) tries to avoid restricting the reader’s future journey.
If I’m going to able to do that, I need to become freer in my story telling, and be able to trust that some readers will remember that I never claimed to have photographic proof of dragon slaying, and thus that dragons let me discuss fear in more detail than I could if I only used technical jargon.
Don’t believe me? Do you believe me, that I can explain fear more by illustration than by diagrams? I’m just curious[3].
I’m not just being cute, and I’m not just writing whatever I want just because it passes the time. At least, those aren’t the only reasons.
Here’s the map, it should apply to your life well enough to see what I mean:
[1] These are 9 forces. Each set roughly overlaps with the words I’d use to describe a kabbalistic force (aka sefira, aka numerical-lights). The numbers in the brackets are for my own records, to remind me which force I used for which list item. 1 is malchut and 10 is keter/daat. I guess I could have made sadness and shame seperate, but it’s not about memorizing the right answers. It’s just about learning to see yourself as a swissknife, and offer the world more than just pleasantry – you can invest your life with passion just like your life can be propelled by a rage for what’s right.[2] I promise you, that if just once, you asked yourself for each item, “How does this feed into my life? And I know that I don’t have been constrained by the words given, since they’re meant to inspire my own ideas.” then I promise you will be more familiar, and so too with repetitions at odd spare moments of even just a single day. And if this was “meant” for you, then a future will arrive when you will see an opportunity to revise these ideas – so you don’t have to become a 24 hr ninja training – just plant seeds and see what takes fruit.
[3] I challenge myself: Explain how creativity is used to defeat the dragon. Because creativity is like an archer which reaches for a target beyond reach, and because the dragon’s weakness is the audacity of brave archers who fire their last arrow through a window in a shingled castle. This, of course, is a simplification, but all very technical. This is a Midrash which tries to convey the role of gevura (hei) in presaging creativity (tzaddik), which was the monkey in the Nile which fell out the window when fleeing the candlelight.
Does that make sense? Not entirely, there are a few loose ends. For example, it never explained how to practically use creativity against the immobilizing force of fear. It should have explained that hope emerges from an open imagination (like Pandora’s box) → it is the archer’s hope (proven by the impossibility of proving that the hope is impossible) which reaches fear’s vulnerability (the missing scale in the dragon’s armour): fear was vulnerable to accusations of baselessness. There is nothing to be feared, mostly, but when gripped by worry we forget to pause and reflect on anxiety’s scam. And as we learn to resist fear’s hypnosis, we can take the battle to places that favour the bow-wielding knight → It is easier in calmer, less anxious moments to train our archer… walking down the road, imagining ways in which You cannot prove that everything won’t be OK, and you can’t prove that hope is wrong. The more you try, the more it works (in Chabad this refers to da’at).
Btw, for philosophers: Pascal’s wager rears its flabby scent pouch, threatening the armchair sitter with an abyss devoid of caring about caring. That is my fault, I was hurrying. Hopefully, for someone, just thinking about this problem will offer a rare path to test one’s independence. Let me guide you far enough to start:
Even if hope is not utterly insane
only proves that optimism can be sane.
Unless there was a way for studying hope’s phoenix-like life-cycle: rise, flourish, fall, gone, rise, flourish, and so forth. I myself have studied hope, by inspiring it within myself by seeing how it could exist, and then by noticing how my trust in my own hope decayed. Here’s the challenge. This is a real, actual, honest to self, challenge: What makes the hope decay?
