For me the interest lies in the "construction" / "discovery" of the meta narrative; it might be these are constructs created by the human mind to provide some sort of interpretational framework but for some there might be pre existant eternal narratives, especially in the area of religion which exist independently of us, perhaps like Kantian idealism? — Edmund

I also find that kind of thing fascinating.

If you haven't already looked into Carl Jung, you might like some his ideas (on the sources of religious myths/narratives.)

In a sublime line of thought, Heidegger discovers that this "conscienceless conscience" contains a call to us —a "call to be guilty." Guilty of what? No answer. Is "authentic" living in some way a priori guilty? Is the Christian doctrine of original sin secretly returning here? In that case we would have only apparently taken leave of moralism. If, however, authentic self-being is described as being unto death, then the thought suggests itself that this "call to be guilty" produces an existential connection between one's own still-being-alive and the death of others. Life as causing-to-die. Authentically living persons are those who understand themselves as survivors, as those whom death has just passed over and who conceive
of the time it will take for a renewed, definitive encounter with death as a postponement. Heidegger's analysis, in essence, penetrates into this most extreme boundary zone of amoral reflection. That he is conscious of standing on explosive ground is revealed by his question: "Calling on others to be guilty, is that not an incitement to do evil?" Could there be an "authenticity" in which we show ourselves as the decisive doers of evil? Just as the Fascists cited Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil in order to do evil emphatically in this world? — Sloterdijk

Just wanted to share and see if anyone also saw themselves in it...

Let me joke with you a little bit and say: you tell me, because aren't you one of them? Or was your comment the emission of Virtue 2000, true to type? In other words, ain't we both foolosophers who want to say something new now and then? Even if we mostly construct ourselves from what we found in the junkyard?

Just bumped into this, and I think it describes (more or less) why I give a damn about self-consciousness and the idea of seeing one's self from the outside that then becomes more inside.

It seems that the ethos of conscious life would be the only ethos that can maintain itself in the nihilistic currents of modernity because it is basically not an ethos. It does not even fulfill the function of a substitute morality (of the kind in Utopias that posit the good in the future and help to relativize the evil on the way there). Those who really think from beyond good and evil find only one single opposition that is relevant to life; it is at the same time the only one over which we have Power stemming from our own existence without idealistic overexertions, namely, that between conscious and unconscious deed. If Sigmund Freud in a famous challenge put forward the sentence: Where it (Es) was, ego (Ich) should become, Heidegger would say: Where Anyone was, authenticity should become. Authenticity —freely interpreted—would be the state we achieve when we produce a continuum of being conscious in our existence. Only that breaks the spell of being-unconscious under which human life, especially as socialized human life, lives. The distracted consciousness of Anyone is condemned to remaining discontinuous, impulsively reactive, automatic, and unfree. Anyone is the must. As opposed to this, conscious authenticity —we provisionally accept this expression —works out a higher quality of awareness. Authenticity puts into its deeds the entire force of its decisiveness and energy. Buddhism speaks about the same thing in comparable phrases. While the Anyone ego sleeps, the existence of the authentic self awakes to itself. Those who examine themselves in a state of continual awakeness discover what is to be done for them in their situation, beyond morals. — Sloterdijk

The best way to get a thinking population like this is to train them (and especially, and in-depth, their thought-leaders - both teachers and students at universities) to make up their own minds on the basis of informed investigation, and then to give them the liberty (freedom from shutdown or harassment) to hold their own model of the world in their own head, as conjectured by themselves (whether the model is the result of a critical process or not - since that's not something we can know legislate for), and to express it to whoever cares to listen. — gurugeorge

I like the freedom so much that I distrust the training. Let there be many kinds of training. The only prohibition or restriction could be on prohibitions and restrictions. That at least the spirit of my political preferences. I do experience such preferences as a little Utopian in the sense that I think the world is going to do mostly what it is going to do. So I enjoy thinking about these things without giving them too much weight.

(Note: There are limits on speech of course: incitement, slander, defamation, imminent threat of violence, etc. - those are where harm, actual harm, not hurt feefees, issues from someone's speech, and that harm can be observed and quantified by third parties. — gurugeorge

I agree with the spirit of all this, but the devil is in the details. Those third parties probably won't remain third parties for long, since that's exactly the high ground the other two parties will seek for an advantage.

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Why is experience a matter of imposing intelligible structure on the world? Why isn't it, say, a matter of disclosing the world? — Ilyosha

Good questions. It seems to me that it's both. The world is disclosed or found always already with some structure.

The presence of being is itself arational (as here contrasted to irrational, or “error-endowed reasoning”)—the presence of being eludes the very principle of sufficient reason, and so is beyond the very purview of reason. — javra

I agree. We reason about and within this raw presence, but I don't see how we can get behind or under being to make it rational or necessary.

I can’t help but speculate that at the deepest of metaphysical levels truth is the arational itself, the being of being, — javra

I share this speculation, and I enjoyed the way you expressed it.

We often don't have a lot of time to get to know people: to ask them open-ended questions and listen. We just want the whole thing summed up quickly and easily so we can understand and move on.

Isn't it true that a sort of pre-made identities are out there and there's reason to grab one and wear it just because not having a proper tag makes it harder for people to process you? — frank

All of these are fine points, but I think you are neglecting an important situation. The philosopher or poet or comedian is only truly successful if he or she adds to or creates a narrative either for the community at large or for rebellious individuals perhaps. The anxiety of influence drives (among other things) the endless fine differentiations of and the occasional revolutions in group and individual identity. (Or such do I opine.)

So I'd say that a minority of people strongly embrace the general idea of being a culture creator, and then those in this minority wrestle with their self-consciousness in an especially intense and creative way. Non-creatives don't feel ashamed to be one more good mother or brave soldier, etc. They don't feel that being one more copy of a good thing is shameful. They are just glad to align with an ideal created by others, probably long ago. But the creative who is just one more copy thereby precisely fails to align with his or her creative ideal (to be one more copy of the artist in a higher, more complicated sense.)

I've been finding the discussion disturbing. I find myself wanting to turn away from it. I guess that means I find it stressful. — T Clark

We have entered the dragon. :fire:

If it ain't disturbing/thrilling, then it's just algebra?

For better of for worse, this is the most stressful thread I've ever participated in. A conversation about patterns of conversations. Every post is both conversation and an object to be talked about as part of the conversation....ahhhh — csalisbury

Indeed. I tend to enjoy this kind of thing, but not without a sense of danger. That's the 'saturnine' aspect mentioned above. It's sweet hellfire. For me all of this self-consciousness leads toward a 'contempt' for words that reaches for words nevertheless in order to share and flaunt itself. The friendly aspect of this sharing/secret-handshaking is the genuine desire to for a mutual recognition of this transcendence of words in another 'master.' A possible unfriendly aspect of this sharing/flaunting is a gloating over those who still think the message is the message.

And all of that babble of mine above is more spirit-meat for the ideology grinder?

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I think you and I have really different ways of looking at this. This discussion, and the metanarrative one, have been eye opening to me. — T Clark

I've had this theory for a long time, and I'm not sure if anyone has ever found it all that palatable. I see similar theories here and there in certain philosophers, but it's still never been a popular theme in my experience. It's subversive, corrosive. I'd also say liberating, but 'freedom isn't free.' For me, it's a view that evolves because or from that contempt for weakness. Fixed identities are targets not only for others but also for the self that wants to expand and consume perspectives and experience. I think of 'finite' personality as a stuffy costume that the 'god' in us wants to rip off. But this is one part of us ripping off another part of us, so it hurts. Yet it's ecstatic, too. (Love's Body gets this kind of scary-nasty-deep.)

the contempt I have sometimes felt for people, usually boys or men, acting, being weak, vulnerable, pitiful. — T Clark

I think you nailed it. I know this contempt. It's all there in the word 'pussy,' which in a crude vocabulary serves as both the primary kind of sinner and the officially sanctioned object of desire. A rough theory would be that men repress their vulnerability and find it again at a safe distance in a woman (in the heterosexual case.) He is the shell. She is the shameful but delicious goo inside.

Q: What food makes women lose interest in sex.

A: Wedding cake. — T Clark

It's funny, but I could see that being described as the food that makes men lose interest in sex. Or as a joke on the tendency for relationships to be become less thrilling (but hopefully also warmer. )

I'm not sure that having reflexively assumed roles is usually a good thing in relationships. If both people know what's going on and are OK with it, sure, but I don't think this happens as much as its converse. Games played are usually bad, or at least worse than an alternative. — fdrake

What I mean is that sometimes lovers are equal partners dealing with the business of life. At other times one lover wants to show off and be admired by the other ('I'll be the child and you be the impressed parent.') Of course the unpleasant stuff is one partner trying to parent the other oppressive. Or trying to play the child when the partner is in the mood either for adult-adult conversation or are themselves impatient to be the adored child.

In my experience, a (successful) couple gets better at reading the right moments for the right roles.

I'm sorry to pick on you, it's only that you were conveniently at the end of the thread when I came to it -nothing personal. — unenlightened

No problem. I welcome it.

Identity is division, as what I am and what I am not. And to reflect upon that is to externalise it again, creating the third as analyst/observer. — unenlightened

Yeah, this sounds right.

Hang on, I thought you were gentle inside? But no... — unenlightened

What you relate is the opposite of what you relate to; you relate being hard on the inside but perform it gently on the outside. — unenlightened

Well let's not get tangled up in context-dependent language. I choose my words with a sense of my conversation partner in mind. For you, I'd clarify things this way. I have a strong desire to love, believe, adore. I want to be the child with stars in his her eyes. I use 'her' symbolically. 'She' becomes lovingly immersed in the beautiful object, the beautiful person. For that reason, 'she' is the eternal fool, subject to manipulation and betrayal. Her unpretentious enthusiasm is maybe even the primary target of the 'mean daddy,' who envies and despises her simple trust and love. He wants her to be believing enough to not see around his edges and yet shrewd enough to appreciate why he really is #1. (This 'he' is the non-gentle 'inside' that is sublimated intellectually. )

But only another 'master' can really appreciate his artistry from the inside, and the problem here is that the other masters-for-themselves are his rivals. Friendship is the 'magical' solution. It is homo- or same-erotic. The bros are a wolf-pack (maybe just a group of bookish idealists) with a distributed identity. They can believe in and be tender toward one another, though usually not to point of sucking one another off -- since sex acts are loaded with power metaphors and irrational/dependent tendencies that would threaten the primary objective.

The group narcissism vents aggression outward to those 'fake masters' who aren't in on the group secret. This 'secret' might be some hip new theory or something more ineffable like style or sex appeal or a pure heart or manly courage or political-ideolocial purity, etc. It doesn't have to be explicit, but intellectuals are likely to exceptionally explicit, since their mastery is 'decadent'/civilized and sets itself above a might that sneers at the 'pussies' who need reasons to feel superior. I think you can see this pure inarticulate pride in economically disadvantaged young men. They know that they don't know the fancy words, but they also understand a passage of Hegel without having read it. The willingness to risk and bring death to avoid humiliation is the naked essence of mastery.

'Hardness on the outside' is just moving in the public world with a readiness for a more or less sublimated kind of war. 'Softness on the inside' is a complimentary tenderness that manifests in safe spaces like the home. Workspaces vary. Some of them are gentle or sophisticated enough so that one can be charming and warm. I do realize that many educated men (usually from different backgrounds and perhaps with different body types) are less in touch with this dominating, negative energy.

What I want to get to through this triple nature of psychology is something that has been both demonstrated and expressed in the thread, that a psychological theory is always itself analysable psychologically through a meta-theory, or through itself. The transactions of a a thread on transactional analysis are being analysed. Curiously, or not, this does not require a fourth element, but merely takes the superior position of adult/analyst/observer/ charioteer, to comment on the interactions of the participants, just as I am doing here. Personally, I don't much like Berne, his theory is just an emasculated version of Freud, with the gloss of capitalist universalism as rational, or perhaps irrational self-interest. — unenlightened

I strongly agree with the underlined part. Theories are just tools, bluffs, fragments in the whirlpool of a unstable identity. I think of this 'ironism' as a late manifestation of mastery. It absorbs the earnest theories of others without losing itself in them. By clinging to nothing but dis-identification itself, it offers a small target while simultaneously forbidding itself no weapon.

I find it very exciting - I could even call it pleasurable - when someone destroys my argument and I realise that I was thinking the wrong thing. — TimeLine

Beautiful. Yes, there is a deep kind of pain-pleasure for me in these little deaths.

Similar to the time I thought I first fell in love, it was the first time I became conscious of myself, my body and my place in the world and that overwhelmed me because at the same time I realised just how oblivious I was to a number of intellectual and sexual feelings that I never actually knew was possible. :fire: — TimeLine

I like this analogy. When I really get into a new thinker, it's like an intellectual version falling in love. And of course actually falling in love for the first time is just paradise on earth.

What I fear is not intellectual, on the contrary I try my best to make it intellectual — TimeLine

I completely relate to you on this. I try to universalize trauma, learn from it, convert disaster into opportunity. As I see it, we become big dark listeners or listenings.

I strongly believe in my values because it is important to me; sometimes my values are not aligned to others and they see that as a threat to their beliefs whereas I am just simply articulating what I believe without judgement or hostility. My fear is the "mind games" that people play with me and it hurts - both in a sad way but also in an angry way - when people use stereotypes and categories as a way to shut me down and silence me, to say that I am a woman immediately makes me incapable and the worst part about it is that it is believable, — TimeLine

I can relate here too, though I haven't had to wrestle with being dismissed as a 'silly woman.' I tend to try to talk to women as equals and sometimes bump into being an 'evil man.' And I don't mean I open up to man-hating women, but that even the women who love men (and me in particular) are sometimes put off by a critical tendency that they find too heartless and abstract. I think some men make sense of this in terms of being the 'father' who must harden his heart to face danger. (In safer neighborhood or more civilized communities, this heart-hardening doesn't look good.) And there's also the 'paternal' role of just being an emotional rock, of never losing one's cool, of being able to give a freaked-out sensitive women an 'authoritative' assurance that she is good. I do not assume that all women need or want this. For me it's just part of actually existing heterosexuality. Incidentally, I've known women to be freaked-out or angst-ridden over their feminist 'duty' (as they understand it) to be more 'like a man.' They can start to feel ashamed that they can't hold back tears at work, or that they enjoy a 'paternal' tenderness. In other words, there are messages in the culture that they understand to shame them for their 'reactionary' love of the (loving) semi-traditional man.

Intellectual development is linear as it is intimately connected to the arrow of time and as such evolutionary where we are constantly developing and improving; even memories are consistently changing since our interpretations are, but those that remain 'fixed' or stuck are really those that are delusional where their belief-system is ideological. Neo-nazis represent this madness clearly with holocaust denial. You cannot ever have an argument with such a person, it is impossible, so immovable in their position that they resort to delusional answers to resolve any inconsistencies in their beliefs. — TimeLine

I agree.

Some women are very bad, indeed they can be very manipulative to a point of turning good men into very bad men and still come off appearing to be a caring and innocent woman. They have mastered appearances but underlying that is nothing but a vicious creature tricking people to think otherwise. Sorry, both men and women are scary and violence need not only be physical. It can be psychological too. The scales are tipped when we look at the outcomes of the aggression, however, and that is largely a result of our cultural and sociological attitudes to masculinity and the fact that men are physically the stronger sex making them more capable to act out aggressively. — TimeLine

I agree. And I do know some 'evil' females who just drip (in their bad moments) with a dangerous brew of resentment and self-righteous sentimentality. If they are not as frequently violent themselves, they manipulate men into violence against other men or even against themselves. Obviously a man should not lose his cool and strike a woman. But then reality is teeming with things that should not happen.

Anyway, I wonder much of the violent potential of men is cultural and how much is biological/hormonal.

Someone can be an 'adult' at one point and a 'child' at another. — fdrake

Totally agree. Modes. I think in sexual relationships this fluidity is especially evident.

I really like what you've written. Flexible, searching, playful, serious, dedicated, honorable. Hey, wait. This is one of them metanarratives, isn't it!!!? In some ways really different from my experience of myself. You'll be someone fun to talk to. — T Clark

Thanks for the kind words. It is indeed one of those metanarratives. I'm a knight of self-consciousness in shimmering armor. I agree that we'll have some fun conversation.

Are we talking about "play" with two different meanings? Three if we include Frost:
[1} Playing games - bad
[2] Playing - good
[3] Play for mortal stakes - all there is. Authenticity, integrity, humanity.

As for #2, yes, it is play all the way down. Or turtles. Or playing turtles. "Final vocabularies," if I understand what you're saying, are play. The Tao is play. We, in our nobodiness, are playing. Good playing. I guess playing for mortal stakes, so 2 and 3 are the same. — T Clark

The kind of play that 'doesn't go all the way down' (what I had in mind) is 'ironism.' All I mean by that is that I think everyone in non-extreme states takes some things seriously. I mean that a person can have a metanarrative that emphasizes play and looseness of identity, but that they only really have this metanarrative to the degree that they take it seriously. Sometimes it hurts stay open, for example, a person who prides themselves on staying open (takes it seriously) endures that hurt.

We are born into the given- an accumulation of general processes over time. We can only work within that given and never create it whole out of cloth. Thus the demands of life are largely not ours to create, only work within. The demands of a particular economy is already there presented to us as well. The economy can only work within a particular physical reality that is also presented to us. — schopenhauer1

I agree. We are thrown into a contingency that some of us end up recognizing as contingency. Or let's say that some of us can't help but end up understanding ourselves as having been thrown into contingency and fragility. Some of us can't help but to understand ourselves as having seen through 'positive theologies' as tools that finally serve the dark human heart. Sometimes disgust with life dominates and (as I see it) finds pessimism more accurate. At other times, the 'lust of the eyes' and the 'pride of life' dominate and an irrational affirmation is possible.

One tension I find in pessimism is between its willingness to look behind theory at motive with its desire to be a 'rational' theory. The Dionysian position 'knows' that it is a noble lie or a leap of faith. It sees pessimism as another leap of faith that won't admit as much.

Again though, this has no justification other than this is a preference- a preference for seeing the same thing continue into the future. — schopenhauer1

I agree with you here. Beneath all the rationalizations, theodicies, systems...boos and hoorays.

So I would ask instead: Which metaphors work? Being condemned to fashion metaphors, which ones are worth cultivating? — csalisbury

Well said. Reminds me in a good way of what I like in Rorty's pragmatism, though in context-appropriate grimier terms --appropriate because a rosier statement will offend the nose of a pessimist.

*This isn't a very direct response to your post, though I did read it. I guess I'm steering things back to the intellectual forum situation, to a specific kind of humiliation. Also would have responded sooner, but missed your reply at first.

I have had men do it with me on a number of occasions, because I have a strong presence but I am actually very gentle inside so it was difficult for me to tolerate without getting hurt. — TimeLine

I relate to being tough on the outside and gentle on the inside. The violence for me is more or less internally sublimated in critical thought. Fixed ideas get shredded. The new part of the self is born from the death of an old part of self.

I think that you are maybe like me in having little fear of ideas as long a basic human respect is in play.

The tricky part (and I think you know all this and will agree) is that identities are intimately tied up with fixed ideas. Moreover, the language of 'private' thought is always potentially public. That means that as I brew up the death of one of my own sub-selves, I am also brewing up what others could experience as the deepest kind of poison to their currently sanity-sustaining word-sense of self. Anyway, I find myself loving a kind of fierceness of thought in myself that also scares some people away. I tend to stay loyal to that fierceness though, with occasional flashes of guilt (?) just for having personality. I think guilt of having personality is related to but different from the guilt of being a man. Men are the scary gender, the violent gender. Women are no angels, but I know the eerie possibilities of the male soul more intimately. (I do know a particular woman very well, and her meanness potential is cute by comparison. An exaggeration? A fantasy? ) I also know or just believe that personality is a city built on a sleeping volcano. Sometimes that volcano will sleep through an entire life, but one eruption is enough to change or erase everything.

It's all pretty twisted, because this 'fierceness' of thought is trying to strip away false personality in one sense (get to simple mammalian love and joyful embodiment as 'true' Christianity and Tao) and attain a kind of ('masculine') statue-like invulnerably. And also crank out memes, be a successful poet-comedian-philosopher, even if all the ideas are old. A civilized version of this is basic recognition of sharing the 'big' secret with others (that there is none, maybe, or that it's sub-intellectual) and engaging in a generous competition on the creative level (the creation and exchange of little secrets.) But (dark thought) I don't think it's automatic that one feels that another person is a full-fledged peer. We arrive at a party and look around for the people that we really like. We have our favorites, and the best one can do (?) is be gentle and minimize the 'guilt of having a personality.' I mention this because I don't want to be mistaken as more sentimental or unrealistic than I think I am.

Beautiful poem. Frost is great. And that's how I feel. Doing philosophy good conversation just feels like really living to me (the deed being truly done.)

The OP asked for an abstract book, but maybe it's good to return to the sensual, to something that recalls life's potential sexiness.

--now Mardou cut out with me, glee eyed, between sets, for quick beers, but at her insistence at the Mask instead where they were fifteen cents, but she had a few pennies herself and we went there and began earnestly talking and getting hightingled on the beer and now it was the beginning--returning to the Red Drum for sets, to hear Bird, whom I saw distinctly digging Mardou several times also myself directly into my eye looking to search if I was really the great writer I thought myself to be as if he knew my thoughts and ambitions or remembered me from other night clubs and other coasts, other Chicagos--not a challenging look but the king and founder of the bop generation at least the sound of it in digging his audience digging his eyes, the secret eyes him-watching, as he just pursed his lips and let great lungs and immortal fingers work, his eyes separate and interested and humane, the kindest jazz musician there could be while being and therefore naturally the greatest--watching Mardou and me in the infancy of our love and probably wondering why, or knowing it wouldn't last, or seeing who it was would be hurt, as now, obviously, but not quite yet, it was Mardou whose eyes were shining in my direction, though I could not have known and now do not definitely know--except the one fact, on the way home, the session over the beer in the Mask drunk we went home on the Third Street bus sadly through night and throb knock neons and when I suddenly leaned over her to shout something further (in her secret self as later confessed) her heart leapt to smell the "sweetness of my breath" (quote) and suddenly she almost loved me--- — Kerouac

from The Subterraneans.

as I drink alone
again tonight
my soul despite all the past
agony
thanks all the gods
who were not
there
for me
then


Bukowski

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/80188-i-sit-here-drunk-now-i-am-a-series-of





sometimes when everything seems at
its worst
when all conspires
and gnaws
and the hours, days, weeks
years
seem wasted –
stretched there upon my bed
in the dark
looking upward at the ceiling
i get what many will consider an
obnoxious thought:
it’s still nice to be
Bukowski

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/979919-sometimes-when-everything-seems-at-its-worst-when-all-conspires

It feels this way, indeed. But I think that after a certain point you can't really tell, so, even if only methodologically, the idea that it's play all the way down, should be abandoned — Πετροκότσυφας

Yeah, and just for clarification: I don't think it's play all the way the down. I 'believe' in something like final vocabularies. Our empathy and understanding have their limits. All play analysis can hope to do is maybe to knock down some fake limits. Or just help one develop style and charisma. Roughly speaking, I have a fantasy of the philosopher as a type of person who intentionally lives willingly and greedily in a tangled mess of ideologies and even enjoys surfing on the cognitive dissonance (endless 'foundationless' enrichment, aesthetically justified). But even here I think a fundamental faith in that fantasy has to be fixed. I have to unironically believe in being an ironist (which is also tied up for me with a notion of 'being a man' [freedom, godlessness]). So there is a foundation, but it is understood to live largely in the dark.

Well, a showcase of how NOT to play would be better, I think. I try not to play. I can't say I'm a big success, but I hope I'm not a total failure. — Πετροκότσυφας

To me the disappointing play is maybe the rule. When things get real (good play), wheels start to spin in this old heart. Working all of this out feels like an extremely deep kind of play. The play becomes conscious of itself. The play includes an attempt to unveil itself, or many such attempts. Intoxicating. I find it hard to turn it off once the wheels start spinning. I want the forum to be good, but I'm neglecting my responsibilities to write this.

I acknowledge my social experience is pretty limited to my middle class town and friends. That's one of the reasons I want this discussion. I want to test my understanding with a broader scope. Other communities, other countries. — T Clark

The background is great, and I think it matters. I grew up in a small conservative town. Working class.
Lots of stupid meanness at my school. Orphans for the local orphanage were mocked (once) by literally hundreds of people at the same time. Total mob mentality. And lots of fights. Everyone loved a fight. I was in some of them, and I wasn't always the 'innocent' party. The worst insults (the fight or lose face insults) were homophobic. At some point I started to think that this homophobia was a fundamental block or enemy of ideal male consciousness. A truly 'manly' consciousness wouldn't deny itself anything. Dare to know, etc. But I only wanted to love other men as equals , very rare and mostly theoretical sexually asymmetrical thrillseeking aside.

I feel a strong 'male' identity. On a gut level I believe in the Marlboro man, nevermind Brokeback Mountain. I'm not superstitious about body parts. These body parts were just dominant symbols for that small town culture, so I wove them in to my negative theology. And I love the idea of women sharing this kind of consciousness with me. Camille Paglia gets it, in my book.

I used to watch "Full House." Not the one that's on now, the original. I guess 25 years ago. It was the story about a widowed father, his three daughters, their uncle, and a good male friend. The opening credits showed all of them in the park; the baby and two young girls and the three men, having a picnic. Playing with each other. Laughing. It used to bring a tear to my eye to see men portrayed that way. I wish I could say it was a wonderful show, but it wasn't. It was dumb, poorly written, and poorly acted. Terrible. — T Clark

Hey, I've seen that show. I even watched one of the new seasons on Netflix. I love when stuff like that brings tears to my eyes. Oh what a sweet pleasure. (I never cry for myself. I suffer now and then in the frozen shit where Dante planted the devil, too damned mean to cry. :cry: ) But yeah that tenderness you mention is a beautiful thing. And I've had that at times, especially where drugs and music helped dissolve the usual hangups.

I can't help but think that, to a good extent, the content of this thread is a great showcase of its title. — Πετροκότσυφας

But what could be better? :smile: And I think there's some 'adult/adult' games happening, which is nice.

I must say, it feels kinda bad that I can't be genuinely trusting and ego-free and all these nice things. — Πετροκότσυφας

Can't tell if you're playing, but I'm curious.

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Some of us, like me and thee, are old enough to remember when Transactional Analysis was the latest fad to make the rounds. As old Sister Gloria put it, "It's another lingo to learn. Every few years another fad comes along and there's another whole new batch of lingo." — Bitter Crank

Indeed, another lingo to learn, another toy to unwrap. If there is freedom from being stuck in any particular lingo, I think it depends on an exposure to lots of lingos.

.

Right on. :smile:

I generally agree, but I don't know about technology 'cutting through all the noise'. (Although, that said, I'm writing this on a brand spanking new PowerBook, and by gosh I like it. :smile: ) — Wayfarer

I just mean that it cuts through all the ambiguity. It's the one thing that just about everyone 'believes in.'
Just imagine if the physicists weren't associated with working technology or falsifiable predictions (if they were useless to those who didn't find their math intrinsically fascinating.)

Constipatedly homoerotic ritual? :lol: :lol: — TimeLine

:razz:

Yeah, and the problem is just the constipation and not the homoeroticism. :halo: