| III. Deep
Loving Friendship
How
Does All
This Happen?
The movement into
living the practical Socratic wisdom of true
happiness takes place through the simultaneous activation of both
Emotional Transcendence and True Self Knowing (as elaborated in the
previous section.)
Such a profound movement within yourself can happen only through
extraordinary circumstances, usually never in the hum-drum of ordinary
life. To go so deeply in an integrated way that results in full-feeling
self-realization requires something more than the normal events and
flow of everyday life.
What Is Needed
What is needed is a way
to heighten the emotional vividness of your
experiences and deepen your feeling of them, without increasing their
emotional charge, i.e. without making the emotions themselves the
driving factor. We want to have rich, deep, full feeling in our
experiences without dramatizing them. This is because if we dramatize
our experiences so as to charge up the emotions in them we loose the
opportunity to get the subtle rich nuances of the emotions that would
lead us to emotional transcendence into ecstasy. The principle of
Dynamic Pattern Transcendence (explained in the next section, 3.
Where
It Comes From) shows us that only fine differentiation in the
process
of direct experiencing leads to experiential transcendence. Charged-up
emotions block your ability to experience the fine nuances, to make the
fine differentiations.
What To Do
With Emotions
There are about five
broad categories of ways of handling emotions:
1. Suppressing
them,
or repressing them (a deeper suppresion)
2. Acting them out,
or
catharting (dumping)
3. Sublimating them
(shunting them as is into creativity)
4. Releasing them
(direct letting go, "forgiving," etc.)
5. Felt-experiencing
of them
Only # 5,
Felt-experiencing of emotions, allows for the fine nuanced
emotional experience that is needed to bring about emotional
transcendence into ecstasy and experiential creative breakthroughs.
Each of the other stances lead away from one or another of the
necessary conditions for emotional transcendence.
Emotional
Felt-Experiencing
Felt-experiencing of
emotions means that instead of suppressing, acting
out, sublimating or letting go of emotions, you feel them in a rich,
full, deep but
subtle, nuanced way in your body. Every emotion has a much richer,
fuller, deeper character than what is immediately apparent. This rich,
deep texture is present in your body as a subtle feeling sense that you
can only experience when you fully feel the emotion but stop charging
it up by dramatizing it, and start to focus into its place and
feeling-tone in your body. When you do this kind of subtle focusing
into your bodily feeling sense, an entirely new range of feeling
qualities emerges as the underlying energy or vibration of the original
emotion.
In DEPTH Dialogue this takes place through specific guided steps of
exploration into your emotions, their nuances, and your bodily feeling
sense of their underlying qualities, and nuances of those qualities.
This process spontaneously results in dynamic pattern transcendence
into ecstasy and creative breakthroughs. This is followed by
integration of all that emerges in the exploration into expression,
flowing from the underlying feeling qualities.
The
Activating Force
This kind of deep,
integrative emotional felt-experiencing can only
happen when the conditions are right for it to happen. Most people
don't just spontaneously open up and reveal their deepest, most
intimate feelings. Most people in modern Western societies don't even
know they have these deep intimate feelings. There has to be a way of
activating the process. There has to be a way of getting something
stirring inside that would lead in a feeling way into this deep
emotional self-exploration.
In deep Socratic Dialogue - DEPTH Dialogue - this activating force is
the relationship between the partners in the dialogue. But, as above,
normal everyday experience does not have enough force and scope to
bring about the extraordinary circumstances needed for deep emotional
transcendence. Only something out of the ordinary can do this. Only a
relationship that is out of the ordinary can do this.
Deep
Loving Friendship
This will
be expanded soon. For now, here is a quick summary of the main points:
The Heart of Dialectic
1. The only force that has the power to really and truly move the soul
is the force of "being in love."
2. This force is a frenzy of passion leading to madness if it is not
accompanied by discrimination, specifically meaning discrimination of
what are true inner feelings and what are not.
3. Through a process of successive finer experiences of the true
feeling of being in love (this through Plato's "ladder of love") one
eventually arrives at the pure feeling quality of being in love (with
no object, just the pure feeling itself.) This is the "vision of pure
beauty" which transends all suffering, thereby bestowing true happiness.
4. The feeling of being in love can be synthetically produced
by
combining the feelings of desire and cherishment. This means that every
act, every session, every time DEPTH Dialogue is engaged in, even when
there is no feeling of being in love, the power of being in love can be
accessed and used - as it needs to be in order for the process to be
effective.
5. This love-power is the only force that is strong enough and
attractive enough to transcend the limited and limiting ego-self
structures and patterns. This is because the ego-self is ferociously
guarded by "disintegration anxiety" (what is the common factor in what
are called by other names but really are just this one thing -
generalized anxiety, "nervousness," PTSD, autism, sensory integration
disorder and sensory defensiveness, kundalini experience anxieties,
"schizoid" terror, etc.) This force is the feeling we all long for and
are moved by in all we do and experience, even if and when it is
suppressed or repressed. It is the only force that is more powerful
than disintegration anxiety.
6. Disintegration anxiety is not a psychological fault or pathology. It
is a dynamic impelling force pushing us to the next level of
self-organization. All stages of development have within them dynamic
tension that does this. This force is specific to the level of ego
consciousness - impelling us to want to and need to transcend beyond
ego consciousness (as we naturally do when we have the feeling of
"being in love.").
7. This impelling force will not work in us to bring transcendence if
it is not properly directed and used. This is the function and
necessity of Socratic guidance. Specifically, the love-power needs to
be evoked and activated, then it needs to be discriminated as a true
inner feeling (distinct from the frenzy of passion), and finally it
needs to be brought out into life.
8. This force is naturally evoked in the dialogue relationship. This
relationship will only work when the feeling of being love is present -
not in the sense of frenzied passion but as discriminating true inner
feeling. As this is something that is learned in and through the
process of the deep dialogue, at first only the guide has this feeling.
For the process to really work, eventually the student must have this
feeling toward the guide. In a context of psychotherapy, for instance,
this would seem dangerous and imprudent, because of "transference"
(i.e. out-of-context unconscious projection of feelings) but the
guardian of boundaries in DEPTH Dialogue is not the detached authority
stance of psychotherapy but the very strong and fine discrimination in
inner feelings that is required for "being in love" to be a true inner
feeling and not a passion. This allows for total engagement in the
dialogue and in the great intimacy of relationship that comes
from deep dialogue, while maintaining steady and secure boundaries that
are even stronger than those produced through detachment and distancing.
Update
- July 15, 2006
In the process of
discovering the
true deep essence of Socratic Dialogue I foundered on this, the very
heart of the process, for about the last two years. In the last couple
of weeks I have discovered the practical essence of the Socratic deep
loving friendship, that makes it the true inner force for the
"soul-awakening in beauty" that is the stated aim of Dialectic.
What
I found, in the process of actually doing this with people, is that
what really and truly makes deep-feeling dialogue (Socratic Dialogue)
work to birth the soul in ultimate beauty (the dynamic unique
individual Bliss Of Peace) is deep erotic friendship
and union.
In this context the
erotic element is the essential factor. Love,
desire and passion are what fuel the deep transformation that takes
place. Without these factors there is not enough power to overcome the
old patterns of the former lower state of functioning, especially in
terms of wayward and disruptive emotions.
But, the
erotic element used here is not itself a wayward or disruptive factor,
even though it can be one of the most wayward and disruptive. This is
because it is Socratic Eros.
What this means is that love, desire and passion are experienced, lived
and
expressed only through what Socrates called sophrosyne.
Sophrosyne
means being true to your inner feeling experience. It is the primary
principle of the dynamic living morality that Socrates taught - which
is quite different from the static morality of rules and laws. It means
that you don't automatically act on your feelings, emotions and
impulses but that you gain the sure habit of always checking with your
inner knowingness for whether what you are feeling at any given moment
is a true feeling. Until we gain
that habit, most of what we experience as feelings, desires and love
are not true feelings but just how we have been "programmed" to respond
- like rats in a lab experiment. But when we do have that habit we have
a sure and steady compass for all we experience, feel and do.
So,
the erotic friendship comes from Socratic Eros in
Sophrosyne. It brings all the force and power of the deepest feelings
and emotions that we have to bear on the transformational process, but
does it in a
way that is not wayward or disruptive - because the sure habit of
sophrosyne is a steady compass for what is right and true at every
single moment.
In practice, this means that the
erotic nature of the friendship does not play out as a sexual or
sensual relationship. These elements are not sublimated, in the
Freudian sense. Instead, the habit of sophrosyne constantly checks back
inside
as to the truthfulness of all feelings and impulses. The sexual and
sensual expression of Eros is simply not found to be true to the real
inner feeling. With this degree of truthfulness, there is freedom for
the full force of Eros to come through in the relationship without it
being in any way disruptive or destructive.
In the
dialogue relationship that brings about deep transformation into
soul-birth in beauty, it is not necessary that both parties have this
habit of Eros in Sophrosyne. It is only necessary that the guide has
it. The "student" is led into that by the relationship with the guide.
Soul-Birth in Beauty is actually, then, also birth into Eros in
Sophrosyne.
Erotic union - in
Sophrosyne - is what brings the little hidden spark
of Soul that is in the student into birth. The guide actually joins
with the student on the inner plane, becomes one with him there as
Soul, and from that union comes the eventual soul-birth. From there on
this has to be nurtured, and the process is carried forward in this
nurturing. It is all a process of Eros in
Sophrosyne.
True Loving
Friendship is a deep relationship of Eros in Sophrosyne. This is the
essential factor that brings about the deep experiential transformation
that is the aim of Dialectic.
(I have discovered how
to do this, and I am now doing it with people, with great success. See
my Soul-Birth
website.
Go
back to
The
Heart Of It.
Go to the next topic,
Summary:
The Full Socratic Wisdom.
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