On The Road : Sunny Wednesday edition

Went to cash my tax return check and put it on my secured visa, and just could not stop myself from coming to White Spot.

I can’t really afford it, but what the hell. Live a little. There has to be place where prudence and sensibility end and freedom begins. Where the soul flies free, and yoi trade the cold and childish pleasure of being tthe kind of who is “ttoo smart for such nonsense” for the life enriching idea that maybe, just maybe, those “sstupid” people that you feel so superior to know something you don’t.

After all, they seem pretty happy. Can’t argue with results.

It is hard for the overbearing intellect to admit that anything good can vome of going with you gut. The intellect wants to be able to understand, verify, and appove every single action. It treats anything that it does not understand and cannot verify as noise at best and pure unadulterated evil at worst.

And the world does not lack examples of instinct leading to evil. In the Western worlD,higher morality is considered to be a product of the triumph of reason over evil. And thus, we are very good at looking at an evil and finding the instinct to blame.

But this is a narrow and simplistic point of view that tars all instincts eith the same brush. Racism is an instict. But so is kindness. The desire for war is an instinct. So is the quest for peace.

Morality itself is an instinct. The intellect alone cannot provide a reason to prefer life over death, pleasure over pain, paradise over holocausT. Aol morality presupposes that it matters what happens to people and that we are all looking for the “right” thing to do.

Neither of these presuppositions is logically supportable. We care what happens to people because we, as humans, have strong communal instincts that tell us to look after one another and to, in a sense, to treat another’s fate as we would our own.

And we only seek the right thing to do because our strong communal instincts drive us figure out how to be a good person both in the eyes of our community and before our own conscience, which is also an instinct.

Once we step away from the Western model of reason oriented morality, we begin to see ourselves as more human. And that makes it easier to accept the humanity in others. The anti-instinct rationalist dynamic puts people in the untenable position of ignoring many good and helpful instincts that reach deep into our emotional well-being. Instincts that, when ignored and suppressed by the overbearing superego’s tight grip on the conscious mind, simply find other ways of expressing themselves outside of any possibility of conscious control.

Thus, they turn into compulsions, aversions, blind spots, depression, or even psychosis, and all because of the rational mind’s refusal to listen to instinct and, at least some of the time, do what it says.

Somewhere between the people who always go with their gut and the people that never do lies the land of true human happiness, where the intellect ceases to be at war with emotion and the mind functions as one.

From what I can gather, that is what a lot of Eastern mysticism is about. Their approach may not seem rational or even comprehensible to the Western mind, but by refusing to demand an impossible bifurcation of the mind by saying reason is good and instinct is bad, their practices avoid much of the convolutions and complications of the Western approach.

A house, and a mind, divided against itself cannot stand.

Once we realize and accept that both good and evil are the products of instinct and that rejecting instinct wholesale is just as wrongheaded as rejecting reason wholesale, it opens the door to a fuller and more nuanced understanding of what it means to be human and live a human life.

This is not an easy path for those of us raised in the Western school of thought. It requires us to question the deepest layers of how we see the world. Our deep investment in the reason good/ instinct bad dynamic is part of the very bedrock of our culture. Our storytelling almost always revolves, in one way or another, the triumph of our morality over a more savage and primitive one. Even the barbarian heroes of yesteryear were heroes only in the sense that they saved maidens from sacrifice by savage peoples or fought cruel barbaric tyrants in the name of freedom.

Even out anarchic heroes fight for the Western way of life.

To step away from that model and try to examine things from a greater perspective is to take a step into the black of night for us Western types. Especially those of us of an intellectual point of view who are even more alienated from the world of the id than the average citizen.

We embrace reason not simply as a means but as an end unto itself. We retreat into fortresses of thought and cut ourselves off from both the positive and the negative aspects of our deeper and more intuitive selves, and often finding ourselves living and thinking as though the conscious mind is all there is, or all that counts, anyhow.

That’s like pretending the interface is the whole machine, like thinking that all there is to your car is a steering wheel and a stick shift. And then we wonder why things stop working when we run out of gas.

Only when we remove this artificial and destructive barrier between the rational mind and the realms of emotion and instinct can we stop the war inside and become whole.

We became human without ceasing to be animals. Our deep selves know things our rational minds could never deduce. The answers to our most pressing questions about ourselves and how we can be happy lie far deeper than the light of reason can ever reach.

And the id is not a mistake.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.