When you go deep enough into a profound and vexing subject, you always find that the truth is… not the opposite, but orthogonal. You were thinking in two dimensions, and the answer is in the third. Which means there are many truths that are inaccessible to us. We are three dimensional creatures, and they are innywise and outywise.
Yesterday I was very happy. Yet that very happiness caused me to slacken my work ethic, creating a problem. Is happiness also dysfunctional, I wondered? I reflected on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If”. I reflected on Roissy’s description of the men women love in high school – chronically dissatisfied, often critical. My mind turned to the famous alphas of film – Bond, Eastwood. A seldom smiling, never giddy bunch. I was not like them.
I turned to the engineering aspects of the problem of psychological happiness. To not be happy – that is easy. I can shut down my emotions at will; the trick was reawakening them. Obviously this is not what is meant by the equanimity praised by Stoics and Kipling. Mere amputation is too easy. They don’t actually mean what they’re saying; or else, they are talking to an audience without my freakish biopsych profile.
So, what do they really mean? Not annihilation of joy and happiness, but resistance to it. But one cannot resist simply for the sake of resisting; that is inauthentic and arbitrary, thus difficult to calibrate. What is the secret rule that permits them to pull this off correctly?
My mind turned to Shark Tank. Robert Herjavic is always saying, “Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness.” Always pulling offers when he feels slighted. Always over the top goofball softie antics for kids, pets and cool toys. An ingenopath. Frequently mocked for it by Mark Cuban. Big puppy-dog Neanderthal eyes. Yet he is tough, a centa-millionaire. What is he doing wrong? Why?
I realized that pain management wasn’t my problem: happiness management was. I’d always thought my koans were a concrete psychological basement, to keep me from going through the floor. But a house also needs a roof. Every time things went right, I abandoned koans and floated on air. I only relied on them when a dissonance wave hit. Therein lay my error.
Furthermore, using the koan structure would give me a congruent way to limit the happiness/joy emotional range without amputating it. It would be processed, modulated, but not eliminated.
I tried it on. Just shifted the tri-symbol structure from hands to chest, held it there. And suddenly I was passing shit tests, getting attraction and compliments, with ease. Yet I didn’t blow myself out by becoming overly excited, or crash after getting nailed in ingenopathic flight by the next negative social input.
With koanic soul, I thought I’d just been building a foundation, a launching pad. Actually, it’s a house. A permanent emotional prism.
And why did I misunderstand the purpose for so long? Biological predetermination!
When an ingenopath interacts with tribemates in a happy vibe, there are no limits to expression. Participation is fully mutual and trusting. There is no guardedness.
Since I have the Neanderthal face, that is my preferred mode. But when I became old enough to immerse in toxic modernity, I found this mode constantly and traumatically rebuffed. Other biopsych types think nothing of slinging barbs of actual malice while in this mode, which to an ingenopath is bewildering. To sapiens it is merely part of the large-group shallow-shifting-alliance modus operandi. To an ingenopath it is like getting divorced in the middle of your surprise birthday party: What did I do???
I’m convinced this is part of the reason I became a stone-faced stoic at puberty. I’d been rebuffed in happiness mode a couple of times, and decided to eliminate it entirely to avoid the unpleasantry. This was my first attempt to adapt to toxic modernity.
All this time, I’ve unconsciously been trying to find a way to be unguardedly happy – ingenopathic happy – around others. Because that’s what I’m biologically predisposed to regard as real belongingness, real happiness. But guess what? IT DOESN’T EXIST.
It existed once for pure TT’s. Extended family small tribe, cracking horribly perverse jokes without a worry in the world that any real malice was in the air. Maybe there’s an occasional pocket of that still surviving. Or maybe it’s all Redbans getting amogged by Rogans. But for MT’s like myself, with a satiric edge to all the humor – that couldn’t exist and never existed. Slight but sincerely held differences in ideology would boil over into malice.
What I was chasing wasn’t a paradox. It was an oxymoron… emphasis moron.
Thus the koans are a permanent second skin, or rather chest plate. A Harkonnen heart plug, permitting life amidst a psychopathic and poisonous environment. The koans’ pain processing function is secondary; their primary function is to inhibit the ingenopathic flight of joyful trust that creates the initial vulnerability.
Like a heart plug, the koans filter, rather than block. They modulate emotional current from DC to AC, making it compatible with national wall-socket standards. They are a soul reduction and an environmental suit. But at least for this MT, they feel right.
I wonder if TT’s would ever be motivated to put on such a thing. Perhaps they will prefer to separate and go Atreides instead.
I can live with the heart plug. I can shiv with the Harkonnens. But beneath the contacts, I’ve still got blue eyes.