Reflection on higher learning, intellectuals and God

An essay on true freedom

Here I am writing whatever comes to mind at the end of November not necessarily having any sense of direction about what I want or can do next. My only hope as I am writing this is to hopefully stumble across a new idea that will spark the fire and the motivation I am looking for so that I can focus the majority of my attention to one task or the tasks that I find the most important. I am looking for a major goal to wrestle against. And thus far I haven’t been able to find it. Thus far I am working towards things that take time. But at the same time I feel like I have so much time that goes to waste. I feel like I must be doing something greater than myself but I don’t know what that is. I’ve had visions of writing a novel or at least writing a big project that would justify my down time. Something that would justify my interest in Psychology. Something that would permit myself to grow and challenge myself. I’ve never truly understood how some people, including myself, would have the ability to remain patient until they finish what they are told to do so that they can move on to the next chapter.

 As I am writing this, I am caught up in the feeling of desperation, and I don’t think it is necessarily a bad feeling or thing. I think it is what gives me the strength and fire to want to write. I want to understand myself and write freely. It gives me the incentive to at least sit down and write freely and choose freedom instead of being all caught up in my mind. That is a place where no one in their right mind would like to be. I assume people, including myself, are at their best when they are present in the moment and are engaged with whatever they are doing. People are at their best when they are not wasting the vast amount of their energy but in doing. Or at least it is 50/50. 50% of their energy goes into thinking and 50% is just doing. I think this is the approach of the free-thinker and artist. Nothing is really right or wrong until it has been written or made and then examined. I think for people like me it is very important to be given the opportunity to freely create, to not be held back by too much self criticism and too much self-doubt. Although I don’t have anything to my name yet I do have the most important thing. And that is to give myself permission to fail and as I may fail, I get to explore. This is turning every rock I come across upside down.

 This is a rebellion against the present moment. Because the present moment is too predictable and too static. It is not descriptive in its nature. I already know everything that I need to know about the present moment which is why I am caught up in routines. And the reason why I would like to rebel against the present moment is to stir up some controversy in my own life, just so that things could be different. I think life or society in general would like people to follow a predictable structure , it would like people to follow a certain set of beliefs, which is why many people feel static in their everyday lives, including myself. The only reason why I find myself in the present predicament today is because I chose to escape. I chose to rebel against reality. I have been a Barber for as long as I can remember. And I never truly appreciated the familiarity I had with the trade. Everyday was the same and it brought the same. And so my path was to challenge myself by doing something remarkably different. And thus far I’ve been headed in that direction. But with putting myself in new and different situations, I also need to make sure I keep pushing the ball forward so that it continues to roll down the hill. No one will push that ball down for me. It depends on me if that ball will continue to be pushed down. And failure for that ball to be pushed down really means being static and no more learning takes place. 

The baseline level for the intellectuals of our society is for all of them to think the same and do the same as the rest. I challenge this position by saying that the true intellect must continue evolving and finding ways to challenge himself or herself. And I think our universities and other places do a horrible job at doing this. Everything that I have learned thus far I have partially learned. What I mean by this is that I’ve been given plenty of information and I’ve been told to recite it or memorize it. I haven’t been told to think critically about it or to reflect upon it. And this stance pretty much reflects the modern American school system. There is no evolution of thought taking place which is why everything feels so static, including the personal lives of people. People are essentially told to follow a set of rules and this is why they become robots. And if they dare to think outside the box then they are punished for it. And this is why I’ve felt like an outsider through my higher learning experience beginning at the college level. And it was evident for me that all of the psychoanalysts that I had read and the other theorists of the humanities had questioned reality and had put themselves forward in their theories. They are rebels who also felt the necessity to question their own existence and even question the nature of God.

 What thinker can truly call themselves a thinker and not wrestle with the questions I just mentioned? And thus far God is out of the scope of what an American education can present to the student. At least in higher learning education he is completely missing. If the student wishes to find out about God, they would have to do so in their spare time. There is  a fear that exists among intellectuals about bringing up the idea of God. And if I had to take a guess, this is causing some despair amongst a lot of us, including myself. If we think about why we choose to learn, eventually we arrive at the fact that we chose to do so for selfish reasons and only because we desire to do so. But there is nothing beyond ourselves that justifies this pursuit. And you might ask; why should there be a reason beyond the self, and I would say that because God has been central to Western civilization for thousands of years and to dispense with the idea of God is to avoid the elephant in the room even though many intellectuals pretend it was never there in the first place. Why do we hold the belief that we are too knowledgeable to dispense with the idea of God even more so than our ancestors. Is it because we are modern they are not? What has modernity brough us that is so good? 

We still have many challenges that we are fighting against and there appears to be no solution to them such as the fact that some people believe today that it is ok for them to take their own life because life for them is not worth living. These people don’t even consider the idea that God gave them life, that their life is a gift coming from God, that their own life isn’t their life, but something beyond themselves and it leads them to not fear God in that aspect. Human vs human leads to human solutions. What does it mean to be human? We’ve built great buildings, great architecture, created some amazing art, have developed the sciences which have aided human lives, and have saved lives as a consequence. But humans have also developed the atomic bombs. What makes one choice better than the other if there is no arbiter of right and wrong or good and evil? We lack so much in our modern education that I think it is not possible for a psychologist to sit in front of a patient and truly understand what he has in front of him. The human being is so complex and is so rich in history that by taking away God from him as we try to figure out who he is and why he is the way he is, we set ourselves up for failure. We do this perhaps to make our own lives easier but in the end this ends up backfiring the psychologist. He ends up making judgments which are not remotely right. He is better off saying that he doesn’t know. That will for sure not solve anything but also not create more trouble, misdiagnosis and confusion. So what is a human being?

 First of all, he is in his or her nature isolated from God. Society wants him to remain isolated so that he or she can become a creature who is socialized, indoctrinated and a person of his or her times. But if they do become this, they lose all of their history and only live in the present moment, up to the whims and dictates of modern society. This has been said by Jung before, that modern man does not necessarily understand where he came from or where he is headed which creates for him plenty of confusion. It is so easy to lose our way, or the way. And this also begs another question? What is the right way for a man or woman to choose in their lives and why does it matter? These questions are also not addressed as part of higher education. And I think the term “higher education” is misleading because it really doesn’t get any higher than the self and perhaps the interests of different institutions. Are we talking about money here or prestige? I also don’t think that by the end of a graduate program, let’s say in counseling or psychology, that the professional knows himself. I speak for myself and truly tell you that I know myself less as a consequence of going through a graduate program. And if I continue to write I do it to challenge my own assumptions and beliefs. 

I think graduate programs of this nature run on the assumption that the more theories and ideas are provided the better. And this is not necessarily true. More theories are a good thing but this alone does not make it more true. I think what it is missing is the why. Why does it matter? It lacks depth and philosophy. In order for any theorist to claim that they have found a way, they should be able to back it up by saying that it is not only true for themselves, but for others as well and then make a good defense as to why it matters, or what is at stake. It is not useful for me to say, “I once forgave a person and I felt better as a consequence, try it!”. In the first place, this is a personal account, that lacks depth, that is not justified, that lacks an explanation, a why. It would not be in another's best interest to do as I wrote or said. It would take away from them autonomy and responsibility. I would then become an authority figure for that person which wouldn’t be in my best interest to become so. As best as I can understand theories and make sense of them enough for me to make the following claim about them, I would say the following; Theories are only good, insofar as they allowed the theorist to work through the ideas and challenges they were facing. If they allowed the theorist to make it to the other side, more clear on their assumptions then it was a success. On the other hand, theories aren’t supposed to be memorized and then be repeated as if they were Gospels. Theories are man made by people who had their struggles and were trying to solve a problem. But it was their own problem and they probably got their own unique solution. It is then not anybody else’s solution, nor the psychologist. I think the best theorists within the field of psychology essentially tell their readers to find their own way and don’t be followers of them. I think people are supposed to find their own way and not become slaves to any of the theories, whether it is philosophic, economic, or humanitarian. If the person chooses to tell a story about them then good. That is something that can be done. But if the person chooses to apply it as a solution it is a very tragic mistake.