It’s occurred to me that in order to learn from painful experiences, you kind of have to stick around and endure them.

At least, to learn properly from them. Learn with your full human capacities of both logic and intuition (and emotion and all the rest).

If, instead, you compulsively flee the situation mentally, you only learn on the deep emotional and irrational level an animal learns.

A way based on aversions and fetishizations over which the rational mind has, at best, highly limited control, and at worst no control at all.

In fact, if the system has degraded far enough, the best the rational mind can hope for is to make up bullshit rationalizations for why these irrational fears and attractions are, in fact, totally logical and reasonable.

The results of this can be quite pathetic.

Oh no, my lifelong hatred of all vegetables, including starches like potatoes and wheat, is completely rational and based on my… um… deep skepticism about the standards of nutritional science and suspicious about the power of Big Vegetable propaganda!

Yeah, talk that talk. You’re obviously full of crap.

Possibly literally, given how little fiber you must get.

I, at least, know all my neuroses and anxiety are completely irrational and not based on reality at all.

I have always been as honest with myself as I can be.

I am too honest with myself to claim to always be honest with myself.

Besides, I know I’m delusional. They are emotional delusions based on distorted interpretations of reality as opposed to grander delusions based on rampant psychosis, but they are no less irrational for it.

I might not think I’m George Washington, but I feel like everyone hates me, and that is just as untrue.

Many find me downright lovable, in fact.

It helps to be cute.

So at least I don’t fool myself over such things. That gives me a be advantage over some people. I don’t pretend that I am totally rational.

I’m too rational to do that.

But that does put me in the unenviable place of knowing I am crazy and not being able to do anything about it.

Or at least, the knowledge of being crazy not meaning you then stop being crazy.

In a more rational schema, you realize you are wrong about something and change your mind about that thing in order to now be right about it.

But there is a reason that’s an unpopular option. It totally ignores issues of emotional and cognitive stability. Every piece of information in our minds is just one part of an incredibly complicated house of cards and we are false rationalist fools if we imagine that it is easy to just snatch one card out of the pyramid and replace it.

Think of that next time you are tempted to think someone should just change their minds because they are so clearly, obviously, and demonstrably wrong.

Trust me…it ain’t that easy.

So um…. yeah. I guess what I am trying to say is that I feel like I have not truly learned from my painful experiences because I fled them mentally instead.

Pain can be the best teacher if you let it.

But you kind of have to experience it first.

Maybe I will manage to talk more about this in the second half.

More after the break,

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Gotta burn to learn, part deux

Thing is, there’s more than one kind of knowledge.

Nerds like me absolutely nail it when it comes to the sort of knowledge they test for and reward in the school system. I’ll call it formal knowledge for ease of communication rather than get bogged down in terms like symbolic knowledge, academic learning, an that kind of thing.

And in our little nerd universes, we like to pretend that is the only kind of knowledge that exists, or if pressed, the only kind that matters or counts.

But that is a shiny but superficial kind of knowing compared to the kind of knowledge one gets via experience.

Otherwise known as “actually doing stuff”.

And the thing about this experiential knowledge is that it is non-transferrable. The sorts of deep emotional connections that comprise it cannot be written down or explained because it is not your brain that learned it, it was your soul.

Or your psyche, or your deep self, or whatever else you want to call it.

Point is, you learn it with the totality of your being and not just that fancy interface with all the tricks we call the rational mind.

Compared to the deep mind, the conscious, rational mind might as well be a cheap calculator with a three color display.

And two of those colors are black! *canned laughter*

So far from being the totality of your personal universe, even in a genius like myself the rational mind is merely the emcee of the show that is the full, deep human mind.

The big IQ just makes my rational mind a lot more likely to put on airs and front like it is the big powerful poobah around here.

Guess what : it ain’t. It’s corrupt, self-destructive, unreliable, and a compulsive liar. Part of my road to recovery has been the realization that I absolutely cannot trust this big bad brain of mind and that my only hope to escape its delusions and judgements is to tap in to the raw, irrational power of my long suppressed id.

I really should get to know it better. I’m still calling it Mister Id.

Aaaa horse is a horse is a horse, of course…

I’m still on that road. It’s a long and bumpy one. Learning to trust my gut is going to take a long long time because I still have not killed the voice in my head that insists that going with your gut is nonsense because what the fuck does your gut know?

Going with your gut is for people without brains. Like Dubya.

And I know that is wrong. But I haven’t found my way to what is right yet. I am still fumbling around in the dark looking for a light switch that I know isn’t there.

I need to develop new senses.

I need to learn to see with something other than my eyes.

I need to learn to feel my way around.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,