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Thoughts, Perhaps too Confusing, About Confusion
By: Dr. Bradley Olson
My mentor, David Miller, wrote a paper, At the Edges of the Round Table, in which he shares an anecdote about his first visit to the Eranos conferences in Switzerland. In the story, he turns to his neighbor after the end of a lecture and asks if there would be a Q&A afterwards. She responds:
"You see…the presenters are invited to speak at the very edge of their disciplines. If they manage this edge, they are in no better position than the audience to answer questions. It would be premature. On the other hand,” she concluded decisively, “if they do not manage to speak at the edge, then they are not worth questioning in the first place!"
But doesn’t this sound more like a confusing lack of clarity or understanding? After all, any kind of knowledge inherently purports to know something, doesn’t it? Proficiency should be able to answer questions, should be accountable, and should offer direction. Expertise should know.
Is it fair to say that nearly the entire theo-philosophical tradition of the West is based on what one may know? Perhaps that may be overstating the case, but certainly traditional theology suggests we can know the mind of God; conventional science suggests that we can unmistakably know the natural world. Is it fair to say that the positivistic orientation of the Western World finds confusion to be an undesirable state of affairs, and a situation to be avoided? I think it is. But it is precisely there, within the experience of confusion and chaos seething beneath the surface of accepted rational, linear thought, that one encounters the essential opportunity that confusion offers us: when one is confused one sees things that would be otherwise overlooked or missed when one thinks one understands a given situation.
Jacques Derrida suggests that confusion and perplexity are hidden,"a priori" elements of any text, roiling around barely contained, threatening the reader under the apparently straightforward and logically unified text: “What comes to pass in a sacred text is the event of a pas de sens, a step of meaning/no meaning […] Pas de sens: this does not signify poverty of meaning but no meaning that would be itself, meaning beyond any ‘literality.’ And right there is the sacred ” (italics are mine). When Derrida suggests that meaning beyond any literality is made, meaning itself becomes a superfluity–meaning may be found everywhere, exactly the fate of language in the Babel myth wherein one tongue becomes many and is, ever after, irreducible and incomprehensible. There can be found no literal meaning, no one-thing or set-of-things that through their knowing may impart the experience of meaning, but rather an exponentially proliferating set of non-literal meanings arise, meanings which may be sensed or intuited, but probably not articulated.
One may, I hope, begin to catch the faint scent of paradox in the air around this argument and it sets up a situation that is as if true homelessness and confusion will only be inflicted on those who do not desire it, as if learning to love one’s perplexity is the only way ever to be free of it. Homelessness creates a multiplicity of homes–if one is not wedded to a particular image of home, confusion creates order (because without confusion order is meaningless), and in the many there is much more of a capacity for relationship than exists in the One. The presence of apparent paradox is an important factor to keep in mind, for in the acceptance of it, one may discover an enhanced consciousness that provides one with some understanding of the mystery of life, the mystery we all would like to solve, the end of our confusion. In the writing of Frederich Nietzsche, truth is illusory, perhaps even impossible because, he writes, life itself has a primary aim of creating illusions in order to "organize a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible."
Paradoxically, he also insists that it is necessary to pursue the idea of truth, and that such a pursuit isn’t futile. In fact, such activity leads one to authoritative grounding: "Each perspective exposes some limitations of others," and are therefore less influenced by any single perspective. Remember, Nietzsche believes that perspectives are illusory–that is to say, false–representing only the "merely apparent" character of our perspectives, so that if one can make one’s beliefs more independent from one’s perspectives, the resultant beliefs will be truer or "less apparent."
Nietzsche urges us to accept, even to love, every aspect of our lives: the whole thing, every experience, every phenomenon, however good, bad, or confusing. One’s ability to love one’s own fate is what Nietzsche calls the "holy yes." Such an affirmation of one’s life inspires a reconceptualization of one’s history and leads to the development of a substantially different narrative of events, which is told to the self and ultimately valorizes the past. Catastrophic, painful, frightening, and traumatic aspects of one’s past may be redeemed by being re-told and re-experienced within a complete narrative one can embrace and value. If one can accept, even love, the whole story, then the “meaning” of its individual parts are transformed as well.
Such redemption requires honest self-reflection; one cannot simply choose to believe a convenient lie or substitute a comforting fantasy for an authentic "saving illusion." Living in an unactionable fantasy is a psychologically dangerous situation in which only pretense and pretending dominate the activity of psyche and fails to honestly redeem one’s actions or life. Effective redemption requires imagining at the edges of oneself and the courage to see oneself honestly, and still more courage to invoke the "holy yes." If we can follow this remedy, we then become the "poets of our life," and if the art is successful, we don’t need to pretend our lives are beautiful, the art has already made them so.
This is the beauty of Nietzsche’s directive: saying yes to every aspect of one’s life allows the multiplicity (aka: our thematic of possibilities and confusion) to interact with itself, thus creating a state of chaos, and out of that chaos, cosmos (literally meaning “good order”) is born. Healing, the anodyne to our confusion, then emerges organically without artifice or force. The healing energy does not arise from outside oneself; rather, a continual healing unwinds before us as trajectory; it is a movement, which is lived into and claimed as one’s right, as something one has, in some manner, willed. Healing in this way necessarily changes one’s self talk and the way one regards oneself without the risk of narcissistic inflation, and it is precisely this change in self-perception that invites the redemptive moment and allows one to act in harmony with "the better angels of our nature," finding the clarity we need while in the midst of bewildering possibilities.
Dr. Bradley Olson is a Jungian psychologist in private practice and co-owner of Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona. He is also a frequent lecturer and writer whose topics intersect with mythology, psychology, spirituality, and culture. To contact him about this article, e-mail Dr. Olson at mythopoesisme@aol.com or visit mwhealingarts.com.
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