Jim's Mailings

The Mind

I have a little book called “The Silly Mind” written by two fellows from our church, Dave Lima and Don Sobel, which was published in 1975, but which appears to be out of print. In one section the subject of worthlessness was addressed.
>>>94 THE SILLY MIND
INFLATED WORTHLESSNESS
Earlier, when we were peeling the absurdity, the example of peeling came to the core absurdity, "I'm a worthless human being." This is often an underlying absurdity of a person with intense negative feelings and counter-productive behaviors. A client who drew brilliantly in pencil harbored such an absurdity. She was asked to come to the next session with her best drawing that reflected an exaggeration of worthlessness, as if inflated to the ultimate.
She came to the session with a folder that housed her drawing. She said she had worked hard to produce this, including many preliminary drawings. She then reached into the folder and produced a blank sheet of paper. She explained: "I produced lots of other sketches, but when I examined them closely, I could find something of worth in each one of them. The only picture of ultimate worthlessness is nothingness." She was asked, "What does the blank sheet symbolize?" To which she responded, "At first I thought it might be nothingness in the sense of death, but that wasn't it. The nothingness means it doesn't exist, there is no such thing as worthlessness.
That isn't so, of course. The person who feels worthless is entitled to that absurdity, and to him or her that worthlessness has meaning. But when you blow-up worthlessness, stretch it out to its ultimate dimension, whoosh! it disappears. Inflating it renders it smaller and smaller. This is the magic of absurdity thinking. We can do with our absurdity what we will, challenge it, laugh at it...even such a paradoxical trick as puffing it up and puffing it up until its gone."<<<<<<
You will note that the word absurdity, introduced earlier, dominates the discussion, and later in the book is used to address a whole series of Mental Disorders, which are listed in the paragraph below: >>>BELIEFS ASSOCIATED WITH DEPRESSION, COMPULSIONS, ADDICTIONS, ANXIETY, ANGER, STRESS AND OTHER DISCOMFORTS --- I.E.Depression
The key concepts here are LOSS and/or UNWORTHINESS.
As you have probably noticed with all the problems of a less flexible mind that we have discussed so far in this chapter, there is a common thread. The central focus is myself and my relationship to myself. Anxiety is expecting the worst for myself. Compulsive behaviors are to protect myself. Posttraumatic stress is repetitions trauma of myself. Addictions are a seeking of comfort for myself. Anger comes from a threat to the central importance of myself. The keys here are demandingness and condemnation."<<<<<<
Dave and Don are now associated with an agency “Recovery Resources” which seeks to treat victims of addiction such as alcohol, which has more or less replaced the twelve step program of AA, which in the past has served this class of people, but this new paradigm has been giving promising results or cures
I recall reading “A Farewell To Arms” as a part of my “Modern Lit.” course back in 1948 at the Univ. of Iowa. About the same time my mother joined the Book of the Month Club, and I discovered a book “The Mature Mind” by Harry Overstreet. It was printed in 1949. I can’t recall a thing about this volume, but I was impressed by the author who had assembled an orderly structure for examining the potential of the human potential, which I was also studying in a class on psychology. I later found out that Harry taught psychology as well as philosophy at CCNY, and that he and his wife Bonaro had achieved great success with the publication of this latest book. In the 50’s the Era of McCarthyism dawned and died, and in the process succeeded in tagging Harry with the Communist Label, which was used to taint most of the more creative, and intellectually stimulating, people college kids looked up to. Somehow, Hemingway, who wrote “A Farewell To Arms” escaped Senator McCarthy’s smear campaign.
After graduating, I chose to indulge myself in the Great Books program, and adult education series of books, organized by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler & associated with the University of Chicago. I was able to continue along this line for nearly twenty years, and toward my goal of a “mature mind.” Thanks to the Book of the Month Club, I had at my disposal 12 volumes of “The Story of Civilization” by Will & Ariel Durant. Seriously, I don’t think the unwashed could make it through Socrates, Plato and Aristotle without knowing the historical context, like is presented in Story. I also think that I was greatly assisted by my training in symbolic logic, created by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, which was taught by Prof. Gustav Bergman as “Logic,” in another of my college courses. It has seemed to me that this type of academic training would have become essential for those who later discovered the principles upon which today’s Modern Computer Science rests. I do not have a copy of “The Mature Mind” handy, but I did find a little book “Let Me Think” which Harry Overstreet had earlier (1939) published. I present the final chapter of that volume below:

>>>>CHAPTER XII ACHIEVING MENTAL MASTERY
"THERE are few things upon which human beings have widely agreed. One of the few is this: A Jack-of-all-trades who is master of none is a pretty sad specimen. He does not fit into the human picture in any way. He is the rolling stone that gathers no moss.
It is the destiny of each individual to begin life without any ability to do any particular thing well. The child kicks and squirms and slashes about. He cannot walk, cannot talk, cannot reach and grasp. He is a small bundle of nerves and muscles, all set to go places but not able yet to go.
The life process is one of mastering, one after another, certain abilities and the knowledge that is necessary in making them useful. The child learns to reach and actually grasp the object he aims at; learns to creep, then to walk, then to climb stairs; learns to change the meaningless sounds he makes into meaningful words; learns to wash his face, dress himself, feed himself. He learns to go to school; learns two plus two equals four, and c-a-t spells "cat"; learns that Columbus discovered America, and that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. He learns to run with his gang and to fall in love; learns what a nickel will buy, and buys it; learns to want more nickels and to spend them.
It is a long road from the squirming infant, helpless in everything, to the mature human being, able to run his own life and join with others in the running of their joint life. It is a road that every normal individual travels between the time he comes into the world and the time he goes out of it.
Some, however, are shunted off the road, even in infancy. They are born with defective minds and cannot quite make the grade. All their life they remain infants, unable to master their muscles, to make articulate speech, to do the things that others of their age are able to do. As imbeciles and idiots, they go through the years, but the years do nothing to them. They die without having lived.
Others get shunted off a little later. They learn to do what children can do, but are unable to do more. Their minds are fixed at the child stage. As morons, they go through the years, but the years never carry them into full maturity. They die, having lived only a little.
These subnormal individuals are the most pathetic defeats of life. Some defect in their heredity pushes them off the road the rest of us travel. We hurry by, toward one satisfaction after another. They struggle painfully along, but life continually crowds them off into the ditch.
Others move along the road of childhood and into youth. They learn the muscular skills and how to talk and read and write; they play games and go to parties; they recite from the textbooks; they graduate from high school, sometimes from college. They seem all set to reach full maturity, but something halts them. There comes a time when they have to achieve life's characteristic mastery—the mastery of a vocation. They have, in short, to learn to do something so well that through it they can be of use in the human enterprise of surviving.
They come to a place where the roads spread out in many directions: "Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief." They have to choose. Having chosen, they must go ahead on that particular road and not turn back. This, apparently, is the life necessity: Find a work to do and stick to the doing of it.
These unfortunates choose, but are forever turning back. Going a short distance on one road, they are certain they have made a mistake. They turn back, or they cut across fields. They get lost. They hit another road and try that. It turns out to be the wrong road. They cut across more fields, get lost again. And so on, many times, while the years pass and they get nowhere.
These Jacks-of-all-trades are usually neither imbeciles nor morons. They are the indecisive, the unable-to-make-up-their-minds. Something in their heredity, or in the conditions of their existence, has failed to give them the power to choose and to stick. They suffer what Masefield has called "the long defeat of doing nothing well." It is not a sharp, sudden defeat —one can recover from that—but a long-drawn-out defeat, of having nothing we can look back on with pride, and nothing we can look forward to with hope.
People flounder where they have no real mastery. For two things are essential to life—pride and hope. Where there is no pride, the individual is battered by the superiorities of those around him. He has no foothold in himself; nothing to give back for what he gets. He has no sense of worth, no sense that others need him and that he can be of use. Without a pride in something that one can do, the individual sinks to a zero.
Hope, too, is essential to life. For the human being can never completely lose himself in the present. The days and the weeks ahead are forever peering in. Hope is the belief that the days and the weeks to come will have something in them to make them welcome. But where the individual has nothing to look backward to with pride, there is little chance that he will have anything to look forward to with hope.
Pride and hope are made up of our masteries. We can be proud of our handsome face—for a time. But if our handsome face hides a brain that is useless it is a pride that does not last long. We can be proud of our well formed body. But if our body is not able to do anything or make anything that people around us admire, the pride turns into humiliation. We are then just "no good."
Life is a form of energy; and if we cannot energize we get, after a while, the feeling that we are only partly alive.
Life, also, is a kind of contract with other people. We know well enough that we cannot possibly go it alone. We come into the world through the help of our parents. We remain in the world through the help of the innumerable acts and interests and products of our fellow men. If we enjoy life we must at least do something in return for what others have done for us.
This, no doubt, is one reason why men and women go to pieces when by some accident of the business system they are out of work for a long time. They are removed from sharing in the joint human enterprise. They are unable to do their bit. They see the eyes of the others regarding them, pityingly perhaps, but also scornfully. They shrink out of sight, avoid human contacts. Even though they are not to blame, even though in their hearts they know they want to do their part but are prevented by forces beyond their control, they harbor a deep shame. They are failures, bumming their way, taking but not giving.
The most basic pride is the pride of being useful. To be laid on the shelf is almost the same as being laid away in a coffin.
There is something vigorously sound about this feeling that in order to have self-respect we have to fit actively into the human enterprise. It shows how social we naturally are. Our energies must be woven in with the energies of our fellows. We have to make our contribution, even though it may be so small that no one gives it even a passing thought. Small though it be, however, there is a glaring difference between making it and not making any at all. No one may notice the small contribution, but when our hands are idle the whole world seems to turn reproaching eyes upon us.
Also, there is something steadying about the ability to marshal our energies and concentrate them upon a piece of work. We then turn our attention away from ourselves, lose ourselves in what we are doing. This is the healthy human way. The opposite is the sick, neurotic way. When we are forever fussing about our health or worrying about our emotions, we are on the road that lands us in the doctor's office. The healthy human way is to turn the attention away from ourselves, to get absorbed in something we can do, something that can take its place in the world, stand on its own feet, and be respected by our fellows. There is a psychological wisdom in the saying: He that loses his life shall find it. He that loses himself in a piece of work that is worth doing finds the kind of life that is wholesomely human.
The mind, therefore, has to go through the process of tightening up its powers. This is what learning means. Learning takes work. There is no such thing as being spoon-fed into knowledge. We spoon-feed infants; but as humans grow older we expect them to feed their own minds as well as their own mouths.
This means the discipline of effort. The mind has to sweat. It cannot sit lazily under a knowledge-tree and let the fruit drop into its lap.
That has always been man's dream of paradise, to do nothing and be happy in doing it. It is a dream, however, the wise among us have long since learned to surrender. When we are not wise, and grow particularly bitter about our need of working, we put the blame on Adam and Eve. They lost the family fortune. If they had only behaved, we might all today be living effortlessly in an earthly paradise. When we are particularly hopeful, we look into the future. We make an investment that will guarantee us an old age of complete and blissful doing nothing, or, barring that, we do the best we can to win the right to an eternal idleness in heaven.
There is doubtless a hidden wisdom in the old folk tale of Adam and Eve. It is a wisdom so hidden that it is usually missed. Our forefathers, it will be remembered, ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Before that, they were ignorant. They simply did not know what life was like, and were blissful in their ignorance.
But having eaten of the tree of knowledge, they now were wise. Being wise, they could no longer live in the flabby state of idle ease. They had to get busy, for getting busy is the real way of life. And so, as the story tells us, they went forth to work by the sweat of their faces. They became man and woman.
It is only in our silly times of ignorance that we call work a curse. Worklessness, we now know, is the real curse, the inability to marshal our forces to a purpose, to bend our backs or our minds to a job that needs to be done. Work is the making of the man. A playboy is no man—even though he be fifty. He is merely a hapless human parasite or, perhaps better, an ungrown-up piece of human protoplasm. The genuine human being is one who has learned the happiness that lies in making effort and triumphing through effort.
If work is a curse, it is man, not God that has made it so by changing it from a triumphant organizing of our strength for a purpose into a drudgery that has neither purpose nor triumph. A new story of man's loss of paradise might be written. There would be no angel of God with a flaming sword driving man out of the garden, but a composite figure of the whole system of our economic inhumanity. This composite figure would be the human devil standing at the gates of life, driving defenseless man into the hell of purposeless and unhappy drudgery. And the story would not end with man's meek submission to his self-inflicted fate. It would have a further chapter in which man would rouse himself, return to the gates of life, drive out the devil of his own creation, and recover his right to work as the vigorous spirit of man needs to work.
So life that is healthy has to undergo its discipline. It has to labor to learn. It has to find the thing that it can do so well that it can be proud in the doing. It cannot spread over everything. It cannot, grasshopper-wise, go jumping from one thing to another, never finishing, never bringing anything to a point of triumphant accomplishment.
In the great shuffle of transmitted characteristics, traits, abilities, aptitudes, the man who fixes on something definite in life that he must do, at the expense of everything else, if necessary, has presumably got something that, for him, should be recognized as the Inner Fire. For him, that is the Gleam, the Vision and the Word! He'd better follow it. The greatest adventure he'll ever have on this side is following where it leads.1
1E. A. Robinson, quoted by Hermann Hagedorn, in Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Biography, page vii (Macmillan).
The happiest life is that in which our work is not only mastered but loved. Work that is drudgery is no proper discipline for the spirit of man. It is man made a slave by other men's desires. But in work that is a beloved mastery there are both discipline and love. We then are willing to sweat in the doing of what we deeply want to do. We undergo discipline because we know that without it we shall be merely flabby wish-thinkers. To succeed, we have to gird up the muscles of our mind and go to it with vigor and persistence.
We have our lives to live. In the long history of the race we have learned a little about how to live them. We know that to close our minds to what is around us is to live lives that are meager. We know that to do nothing to change the world around is to miss most of the adventure of living. We have both to accept our world and want to change it, to take it in and to take it in hand.
We know also that there is no stopping this side the grave if we wish to keep mentally and emotionally alive. We have to set goals for ourselves but never reach a final goal.
We know, too, that the world around us has fascinating puzzles that we can try to solve. We can enjoy discovering how the wheels go around. But we know, also, that it presents endless opportunity to us to select what we please and create for ourselves our moments of beauty.
We know that human life has developed a rare quality of mutuality—of giving help and receiving it. And we know that we are at our best when we both give and receive.
We know that life is not all cakes and ale, that we have to be equipped to fight the things, and forces, and people, that endanger what is good in life. We know that at best our minds are not equipped as we should like them to be. We have to be honest enough to check their inaccuracies and presumptions, and to make them in truth the instruments of truth.
We know that we imprint on our world what we ourselves are. We make the world in our own image. It is not unreasonable, then, that we should seek to keep mentally alive, and alive with special vigor, in some field in which we contribute to the ongoing human enterprise.
We have our lives to live. Through all the ages men and women have been trying to discover how to live them. They have passed on to us some of their wisdom. We are not wholly ignorant of what should make life the way life should be. Nor are we by any means helpless in our effort to shape our lives according to that knowledge." © 1939 The Macmillan Co. – The People’s Library<<<<<<<<
I have contrasted the intelligent mind with the diseased, but remember the mind can be also affected by external causes, be they an internal physical disability or by another individual or circumstance. I like to think the Master Mind has power over the written word or over the Media in general, to keep from going off the deep end. One of my reliances has been science education like the course I took in Historical Geology. It was a perfect follow-on to my teen age reading of “Limitations of Science” by J.B.N. Sullivan. Education stresses the unknown chance that man will achieve “better things for better living – through Chemistry” but is strangely silent on what cannot be accomplished. Historical Geology tells of the great victories of Evolution, but stresses its mistakes as well. School also needs more reality checks like those offered by Prof. Sullivan. I became aware of the limitations of educational efforts again in my Modern Lit. class, by reading James Joyce “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
These matters have helped me reason through the fallacies of Intelligent Design. Just today, the Ohio Board of Education, consisting of supposedly 17 well-educated prominent citizens, have, by a 9-8 vote decided to continue the lesson plan adopted last year which stresses criticisms of Evolution using Intelligent Design techniques. It would be well to send these folks to the prep schools in Ireland, where they could advance learning, instead of well established, ‘Settled’ American Educational Principles. I would like to see some of these folks take a course in Historical Geology, so they could find their proper ecological niche.
Just today, the following column appeared in the Plain Dealer, which overviews today’s intellectual climate.
>>>>> J.Co's sizzling tell-all: 'A Million Little Lies'
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Joanna Connors
Plain Dealer Columnist
"We received disturbing news this week at Domestic Bliss HQ.
We weren't sure whether to share it with you or not. But then we thought: It's going to come out anyway, so we might as well do what is right and make ourselves look bad before someone else has the chance.
So, here it is: This will be our last column. The Smoking Gun is on to us.
You probably heard about The Smoking Gun early this week. It is the Web site that reported that writer James Frey's memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," really belongs in the fiction section of the bookstore. It seems that police and court documents The Smoking Gun dug up, as well as interviews with police and prosecutors, show that Frey was not exactly the dangerous, crack-addled, wild-man criminal he claimed to be.
Actually, at Dennison University, he joined a fraternity where - breaking news here - the brothers did a little drinking and drug-ingesting. When he was caught driving under the influence, he cooperated with the cops, posed for a preppy mug shot and went off to an expensive rehab center.
Let me just say that I have always adored The Smoking Gun. Without them, I would never have been able to keep up with the mug shots of the rich and famous. And I would never have known the situation of my poor, dear friend Liza Minnelli. Each time her ex-husband filed new court documents alleging Liza had chased him around their apartment, beating him up whenever she caught him, or gotten drunk on Thanksgiving, The Smoking Gun posted them.
But now, it seems, The Smoking Gun boys are suggesting that I take a walk in Liza's Jimmy Choos. And I must say, it is not as much fun when the Choo is on the other foot.
So. Before The Smoking Gun exposes me, I have decided to expose myself.
For as long as I have written this column, I have - let's follow Frey's lead and use the word "embellished," shall we? I have embellished certain details of my life and my international concern, Domestic Bliss Global Domination Inc.
Of course, I have every right to do this. When you write a column, everyone knows it is your interpretation of your life, right?
Besides, the genres known in publishing as "column" and "newspaper" and "nonfiction" hardly suggest that every single little thing you write is the truth. Where would the New York Times be if that were the case?
As some of our highest politicians keep reminding us: The facts are overrated. But you deserve them, so here they are.
1. My name is not J.Co. Also, I am not from the block. I am from the suburbs.
2. It is true, however, that I am, in fact, fabulous.
3. Domestic Bliss Global Domination Inc. is currently under investigation by the Agriculture Department for fraudulent statements concerning meals proclaimed to be "homemade" but actually purchased at Trader Joe's.
4. Domestic Bliss Global Domination Inc. is also under investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for harboring three aliens. They are undocumented Canadian citizens, all of whom believe Canadian hockey is better than American hockey.
5. My friends "Vickie" and "Jean" do not exist. In point of fact, I do not have any friends. Vickie and Jean are imaginary. Sometimes their voices wake me up and tell me to do things, bad things, such as go to estate sales and open houses.
6. I did not graduate from the University of Minnesota. I admit I was just trying to trade on its prestige. I actually have my undergraduate degree from the Sorbonne, my graduate degree from the London School of Economics and a law degree from Hogwarts Academy.
7. I do not have a son named "Dan" or a daughter named "Zoe," at least not anymore. They went to court and were given legal emancipation. In the ruling, the judge noted the "lifelong shame they have to bear, resulting from their former mother writing about them almost every single week."
8. "Bill Smith" is, in fact, his real name.
9. I love Christmas.
10. Finally: Yes, I'm pregnant. Brad's publicist will release a statement later today.
So, my friends. So long. Farewell. Auf Wiedersehen. Goodbye. Parting is such sweet sorrow."
Actually, that's not true either. Parting isn't sweet at all. It's been fun.
To reach this Plain Dealer columnist:
jconnors@plaind.com, 216-999-4307 © 2006 The Plain Dealer
© 2006 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.<<<<<<

Ahhh! books, and James Frey is one of the latest to pry our minds, but he is the one with the Silly Mind to undergo rehabilitation, probably using drugs – if his problem were depression. If we only had a list of the Great Unwritten Books to guide us through. How many books are the products of the Silly Minds. One of my books of current interest was published in 1975 by the same Random House that published ‘Pieces.’ Only Frey used Doubleday. This book “Power of Mind” was written by Adam Smith, AKA George J. W. Goodman, who also wrote “The Money Game” some 10 years earlier. I suppose he made enough money in the Stock Market to assume a gentleman of leisure role in writing the earlier book, then with the book credits had enough to explore the mind in all the modes of dissipation that the Flower Children had created. His obsession is almost devoid of Overstreet and the conventional wisdom I have tried to peddle here. Frey has been accused of distorting truth to fashion his book to startle the book trade into buying it. I doubt if A. Smith’s book does that, or that he made much money doing it. On the dust cover is written “Adam Smith has tried everything, knows everything and everybody, and has read everything…And you kno w that the world is the way he tells you it is.” – by Eric Berne, founder of tr ansactional analysis and author of “Games People Play.” (from the NYTimes Book Review). Somehow I liked “I’m OK, You’re OK” by Thomas Harris, M.D. better.

posted by James E. Opfell @ 8:30 PM