11PM, 11/23 - hi
hello brainsoup blog
i miss you
thank you for everything
hello brainsoup blog
i miss you
thank you for everything
using the enneagram as a framework:
the nine types are specific strategies for securing alignment, valuedness, and going-to-be-alright-ness
gut: "you belong here, and here belongs to you." (think anger as a response to invalidation)
heart: "you are wanted." (think sadness/shame as a response to rejection).
head: "you'll figure it out. you're gonna be alright." (think anxiety as a response to threats)
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as strategies bent towards guaranteeing certain outcomes, the types can lead to narrowness + imbalance in our personalities + habits
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growth = growing to work with your opposite energies, a more whole and comprehensive life
e.g. 8 as a warrior who can let others in, 9 as a sage who is conscious of who they are, 1 as a reformer who can fool around
2 as a giver who can take care of themselves, 3 as a keener who can accept vulnerability, 4 as a poet who can contribute to society
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the trap is that when we try to grow, we often try to grow in type-specific ways
e.g. 1s will try to grow because it's the right thing to do, it's what a good person would do; 7s will try to grow because it will give access to more positive experiences, etc.
really, though, if we see growth as our capacity to be whole and to work with opposite energies, the thing is that reality in itself will bring our opposite energies to us. reality as the complex whole that it is will bring us face to face with situations that are opposite to what our type-specific strategies are used to. independent people will face their neediness. dependent people will face abandonment. high-achievers will face disappointment. clowns will face serious moments. (source)
so really, the point is just to 1) allow reality to happen to you, 2) notice and observe how your type-specific strategies will try to protect you from unfiltered reality, and may prevent you from responding wisely to reality, and may take the form of causing you to flinch, tense up, or avoid certain aspects of reality, 3) notice and observe how other people have different responses to reality that allow them to work with different aspects of reality than you can, 4) try to grow into a more expansive relationship with reality beyond a narrow, type-specific strategy for securing access to alignment, valuedness, and going-to-be-alrightness
read more:
just watched lars and the real girl
struck me as a very human film
insofar as if some alien intelligence asked me what i thought it was like to be human, i couldn't do much better than pointing to this film
why? i think because the film holds up how scared, how burdened, how guilty, how confused, how kind, and how improvisatory we can be
i think this film also feels so human particularly because of how much empathy and attention it pays to our projections, our objects, our attachments
lars is more human because of bianca, and the film is so much more human because of how it understands this
pastoralpunk: there is something interesting about how keatings teachings of free thinking play out
sam: Free thinking but only in the Keating way?
pastoralpunk: yeah ive heard that critique but more that
pastoralpunk: neil’s free thinking leads him to shakespeare
pastoralpunk: which is among the most well established traditions
pastoralpunk: nuwanda’s free thinking leads him to womanizing and “manosphere” ideas (to use an anachronism)
pastoralpunk: knox’s free thinking leads him to heterosexual romance
pastoralpunk: like idk all of these characters end up finding legibility in like, very well-worn narrative structures
sam: Free thinking but it just leads to conservatism and conformity anyway
pastoralpunk: yeah does that make sense?
sam: Yeah
pastoralpunk: like its like how the current high agency discourse in bay area and silicon valley circles
pastoralpunk: being high agency and doing things for yourself
pastoralpunk: ends up facilitating capital accumulation lol
pastoralpunk: “Be high agency to become a more effective worker” lol
pastoralpunk: its very possible that empowering ppl only enables reproduction of mainstream norms if most ppl genuinely do just have mainstream values
sam: trvke
sam: I saw a funny quip from someone about Dead Poets Society that said that after the events of the movie, the characters went on to work at the State Department and orchestrate the Vietnam War and Watergate
pastoralpunk: yeah definitely!!
title idea: "stations of a frayed love"
touchpoints:
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” - The German Ideology
"Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate ...
"love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams" - Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
not polemic, but:
describing
what is
how it works
how it could be otherwise
how we got here
the enneagram is a model of "strategies," organized as a typology of nine patterns within human personality
summary: the enneagram points to how most ppl's personalities or experiences are lopsided and partial, and not yet "whole" or able to integrate the fullness of experience
i.e. the light of our gifts cast a shadow we avoid, reliance on our strengths also reinforce the contours of our limitations, we start with one gift and then later we get to integrate the gift of the opposite and grow into a more whole person who still has certain core strengths but is no longer defined (or trapped) by them.
1: responsible and cares about finding the right way to do things, but arrested development with forgiving ppl for being what they are + engaging with the untamed parts of reality
2: warm and attentive to the vulnerabilities + neediness of other ppl, but arrested development with their own vulnerability and neediness + sense of self apart from self-image of perfect lover and friend + dealing with feeling unimportant and unappreciated
3: high-reacher and knows how to surpass expectations, optimize for success, but arrested development with interruptions, introspection,
4:
love is:
attentive appreciation and appropriate activity
love says:
or, phrased differently:
the absence of love is: making small, devaluing, belittling, invalidating
meanwhile, love enlarges and empowers
lovelessness' "making small" can look like:
to love = to perceive the beloved's worth and treat it accordingly, as if worthy of great regard - to enlarge the beloved in commitment to its radiance
to love is to enlarge - the opposite of love is to make small, to devalue, to act as if the other is not so worthy of regard
1. to perceive the beloved's worth - leaves it ambiguous - does love find the value of the beloved or creates it? yes.
2. love is really about asking the question: what is it that i value? what do i deem worthy of regard? and how do i respond to what is valuable?
there are only two sermons:
people aren't just you and pretending to be different
people aren't tired and pretending
people aren't unhappy and pretending
some ppl find life inherently energizing and meaningful
songs that feel like a window open on a blue-pink afternoon
notes in the moral life
humans are thrown into a world in which we are always "becoming" in time
we become as we learn
we learn as we imitate
a question we cannot avoid: who are we to become like? in large part, culture = the roles and positions we are to occupy. what you learn from your cultural group is what you are going to be like, and who you are going to be like. and we learn this as infants + children through observing, imitation, modeling, mirroring others in our group
every cultural group has its own answer about which specific humans are worthy of imitation (since we can really only imitate ideals through imitating specific humans)
one inroad into christianity is to ask: who am i to become like? and the christian answer is: messiah jesus, the son of god. the specific human most worthy of imitation is jesus.
start with imitating jesus. not just as a great moral teacher whose teachings are worthy of action, but as a person whose life is worthy of imitation (including his crucifixion and his resurrection).
as paul writes in romans 8:29, god has predestined us to be conformed to the image of his son. in galatians: "until christ is formed in you." 1 john 2:6: "whoever claims to live in him must live as jesus did." other examples abound.
e.g. luke 6:40; 1 john 3:2; philippians 2:5; philippians 3:21; 1 corinthians 15:49; ephesians 4:13; 1 peter 2:21; 1 corinthians 11:1
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why imitate jesus? to become like him
because just as seeds become trees, and children become members of society, human beings become like jesus
why become like jesus? that the trajectory of his life would become ours - freedom from slavery, passing through death by the power of an indestructible life and love and coming out of the other side into a good and spacious land, flowing with milk and honey.
and that is the promise at the heart of christianity - not only that we are saved by him, but that we are saved to become like him, to do even greater things than he did, in him
this is why jesus' call is for us to follow him
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and what does it mean to imitate jesus?
it is to learn from him who is gentle and lowly in heart, to follow him in doing the desire of the heavenly father who is love, to listen to him in his commandments that to love god and to love one's neighbour are the greatest of god's instruction/teaching, to trust in him as the one who reveals god's character and will of salvation
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everything finds its place in the love of god and neighbour. things are good to the extent that they participate in loving god and loving one's neighbour. things are bad to the extent that they work against love of god and neighbour.
are megachurches good or bad? is being tough on yourself good or bad? is sex good or bad? are guns good or bad? is perfectionism good or bad? is free speech good or bad?
is hierarchy good or bad? is money good or bad? is calvinism or hypergrace good or bad? is makeup culture good or bad?
let's ask a new question: what place could this have in the love of god and neighbour?
so while we would like to draw a line between things that are good and things that are bad, the line goes through every single thing. the same "thing" or "concept" or "phenomenon" contains the possibility of both goodness and badness - can participate in creating wholeness + vividness or in wreaking destruction + death.
imagine: rather than the exclusion of things from our vision of goodness and our imagination of the kingdom, what about the redemption of things?
instead of banning swords, what if we beat them into plowshares? instead of shunning an ideology or an idea - what might it look like when placed into love?
basically, we have to think things through.
the thing is, some things are very difficult to put into love. some things have little to no place in the love of god and neighbour. this is important. there is no such thing as a loving genocide or a loving slavery.
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"There’s nothing you can’t use as a tool to obstruct, harm, defeat, and belittle yourself, from meditation to crying to hiking, and there’s basically nothing that can’t open you up, bring about healing, sink you into Life more deeply, it depends entirely on your approach/stance"
eg- if your implicit, background subconscious stance is in the neighborhood of “I need to Do This Correctly. Am I messing up? If I can just *focus* and *work* enough and *get better* at it, I can get my experience to match up with how other people’s good experiences sound…
If I can just Do The Correct Things in this framework, I’ll Achieve The Goal of having my life Feel How It Should” —that whole region of mindset (basically the sociocultural default) can turn anything into a tool you use to trap and hurt yourself.
conversely, if your background subconscious stance is something like “let’s explore this, I’d love to feel into this curious region of experience. Oooh, and other people have tried it out before and left field guides for me, let’s check how some of those work…" (link)
i am exiled from the good land
i would summarize god's character as "worthy of imitation"
god is worthy of obedience
and worthy of imitation
what god is like is always "what to be like"
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we can imagine someone worthy of obedience who is not worthy of imitation
"do as i say, not as i do"
they are wise and right enough, or powerful enough, such that it's a good idea to obey them
but someone is only worthy of imitation when it is good to be like them
god is king of kings and lord of lords, but also exemplar of exemplars
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if our final destination is to be conformed to the image of the messiah (romans 8:29), and we are instructed to be imitators of god (ephesians 5:1), to imitate people as they imitate the messiah (1 corinthians 11:1), to be complete as our heavenly father is complete (matthew 5:48), and so on, then the character of god is always such that it would be good for us to be like that
if god is angry, it must be an anger worthy of imitation.
if god hates sin, it must be a hatred worthy of imitation.
basically, i am suspicious of the idea that god's ways are not our ways to the point that god's goodness is unrecognizable to us as good - especially because we presume that there are exceptions for god that would be unacceptable for humans
of course i get where that's coming from, but we are also told to be imitators of god
so, again, what god is like is "worthy of imitation"
and there are many portraits and concepts of god which are far from good examples.
i keep coming back to improv
i think it's because improv is this game we can inhabit to embody openness
openness, spontaneity, surrender, attentiveness, and curiosity, rather than an imposed structure of control
that is what is so appealing about saying "yes and." that humour and beauty and joy and something wonderful could come from just being here enough to see what's available to play with - without pre-planning an ideal outcome or a way to get there.
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however, i've been thinking about a possible counterpart to "yes and"-ing, which is going along
that is, a kind of "yes" without an "and." this is saying yes to every first good idea, jumping onto every bit, leading to incoherence
and directionlessness eventually invites the dream of structure and hierarchy and institutionalization and optimizing.
which may be true
but i think there's something about how rather than needing to say "no," or discerning what to say no to (which is still important, don't get me wrong)
we can be mindful of how there's always multiple things to say "yes, and" to in every offer
like it's not about NOT saying "no" to an offer that seems immediately revulsive and unfunny to you
but about saying "yes" to the other interesting things going on - the other, perhaps more subtle, invitations there
(there's always interesting things going on)
the thing about yin (surrender) and yang (determination)
is that sometimes we deceive ourselves about being in yin,
and we exert as much energy trying to surrender
and lying to ourselves about what we're okay with
as it would have taken to change our circumstances
if we were not so afraid
1. self-compassion is a wide-enough home for all of you to live in.
2. self-compassion is recursive. you can have compassion on your complete inability to have compassion for yourself.
3. self-compassion is not primarily about trying to put up with yourself. it is about unlearning the reasons we feel that we need to be put up with.
love says "it matters that you're around" - and means it
love says "it's good that god made you" - and means it
"How Being 'Hard On Ourselves' Sabotages Long-Term Discipline (And What To Do Instead)
"You Can’t Simply Decide to Be a Different Person"
"the way to spend less time on this app is to prepare more interesting sources of interaction and information, and allow your focus to shift automatically" / "btw I think this is the way to get things done in general, using interest, desire, and attraction instead of discipline or self-control" - @ftlsid
a collection of links on nice guy-ism as a defense mechanism:
interesting bc this is the kind of stuff i'd be more curious about but it really does seem to contradict a lot of my foundational beliefs re: the way of jesus, eschatological/resurrection gender, etc.
gosh im confused
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update 6/25: i'm now thinking that it's really more about honesty and being a whole person - having the outside reflect the inside. being true to yourself. you can aspire to celibacy but it's another thing to project celibacy and safety wrt sexual harmlessness while wanting to fuck on the inside. what you can say is the truth.
keywords: memetics, psychofauna, social contagion, social construction
improv is a kind of forgiveness meditation
improv without forgiveness is impossible
and vice versa
surrendering to unconditional acceptance of reality
some notes on first reformed: