Narcotic of Narcissism

I was reading about feminists:

Huffington Post
Young Feminists Do Get It. So Why Does Hillary Think We Don't?
02/08/2016 05:06 pm ET | Updated 5 days ago
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/caroline-tehrani/young-feminists-do-get-it_b_9190308.html

... Gloria Steinem has already apologized for her gaffe on Bill Maher's show Friday for saying women get "more activist as they grow older. And when you're younger, you think: 'Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie." It was a foolish thing to say, and Steinem -- so often a figure women look to for leadership -- did herself an injustice. It's precisely because of contributions Steinem (among others) made to the women's rights movement that women like me today can exercise choice independent from men. Yet her words, despite her apology, have caused younger feminist thinkers to seriously question her understanding of their struggle today...

I found it interesting for two reasons, which is a good deal of interest, for I wish my posts could be found to have at least one reason of interest, not to mention two of the best of that species.

First, it well delineates the ongoing process that started back more than 50 years ago of politicizing everything. The entire business of "raising consciousness" might very well be characterized as "politicizing consciousness".
I am not engaging in any sort of critique; I am observing.

Second, it struck me mightily how the wonders of consciousness are supremely self-centered and narcissistic.
The ultimate human self-centeredness involves the winds and climates of consciousness, whether we be standing on a hilltop, feeling the ideal wind blow at us, or whether we are running from the rainstorms of depression, or whether we are stretching out to dry ourselves in the sun, or whether we cast aside our history of conscience past and turn our faces Ishmael-like to the sea, and forget the landlubber encumbrances and set all sails to wind and adevnture...

We delight in the jousts of neurons. It amuses us. It hypnotizes us.
We see it intimately when we watch a good movie or read a great story; we are enchanted and the story becomes a gem of our consciousness and our consciousness becomes the story and we forget we are isolate and individual, but are one with a vibrating quanta universe....


We love our own history. We think our own problems are the most insoluble and our solutions to those problems the most ingenious.
The roots of Narcissism and Obsession lie within us.
Narcissism is the spring of Curiosity of Novelties and Obsession is a ritualized Boredom of Repetitions

We have to take a deep breath and relax. We have to realize there are other conscious entities who themselves are experiencing as validly as we are and as we did...

Even Ballet is chaos.
The dance performed for 200 years changes if we focus intently enough to see the changes of the dancers, the changes of the choreography, the chances of the live performance.

We do not need Wagner redivivus to tell us how to run Bayreuth.
One of the recurring elements in certain dystopian stories of the future has been the heavy hand of ritual and tradition weighing upon a serf-like population...
an ultimate narcissism of the dead past, gazing unendingly at its sagging reflection.

 Consciousness of Ritualistic Boredom

Our very intimate construction: our very minds and consciousness point out the way to divine Play, and abhor the vacuum of boredom and lack of originality.
And it is our own natal originalities that we fall and nourish first.
But we need make room for the children of others.

Ms. Steinem, take a breath, relax, and look at your grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

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Metaphors We Live By

Look up the pdf of Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson in Google, download it, read it, and think over and over how it applies to our fantasies of governance and guns.
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The Place of Superstition in Consciousness

I was saving some information on ancient cursing tablets from the late Roman Empire, and I saved them into a folder titled "Religious". I did this since the engravings upon the tablets were inscriptions and pictures of a diety, conjectured to be the Greek Hecate.

However, it seems that terming something connected to Religion as religious merely because it contains a picture of a god is odd. It seems to be a lot like calling profanity a part of Religion, because it often contains a form of a name of a deity, even such oddities as Selma Bouvier's expostulation of "Jeeezum Crow!"

Or, similarly, is my nonsense humming while I shower actually Music? Or is it merely a repetition of a repetition of what was once Music perceived?

And is my prayer to win the lottery actually Religion? Why should a prayer be ipso facto religious?
And why should sermons by a clergyman inciting anger and hatred be accepted as part of religion? Or why the congregation's attitude of respectful listening?

I no longer see any such connection. Such behaviors are aberrations which employ religious imagery and religious emotion and feeling to create a psychological artefact.
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Ritual

I have been talking about structured and patterned behavior, such as Sports and Dance. I think these all can be subsumed under a heading of "Ritual". Ritual would cover a wide range of phenomena, but they would have in common their structure of bodies moving in patterns.
Sports is more chaotic than Dance; the probability of the sequence of movements in Dance is fairly rigid, whereas Sports is very much random at times.
Religious ritual is highly rigid, but it depends on its outcomes: if its outcomes are perfectly predictable, it is not much more than Sunday morning service.

Recognition

Veranda of Consciousness

I have just finished perusing some 10 blogs, 10 new ones, that is, ones that I have not seen before. I like to see what's going on. They were all jejune, adolescent, self-centered, and full of their own importance; in short, a mirror of my self...and all humanity. There is something about conscious entities that just screams Narcissism. I have read things that speak of the development of the human psyche, which state that at some point in man's evolution, the sense of "self" came into being, perhaps when they began depicting themselves in the cave paintings of Lascaux, for example. However, it seems clear to me that conscious entities have a sense of "self" from day 1. That is the meaning of being conscious: it implies a sense of "self" - even though that notion may not be put into communication. That is to say, my sense of self may not be put into words, or paintings, or music, but it simmers deep within in the mutes codes that are not communicated to other conscious entities.