“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
— attributed to Albert Einstein
Love
On the face of it, love is an immature emotion but there are various kinds, so I must be more specific. There are different things to love and ways to love, and some are more enlightened than others. A person can love from different aspects of their being, and each of us expresses these aspects to different degrees.
There’s physical love which is generally thought to mean sex but really means having a physical connection. Physical love develops a sense of peace and trust based on being physically present and mutually supporting. If you live with someone and rely on them and they are suddenly removed, there is a fracturing of a physical bond.
Intellectual love, which doesn’t sound compelling, is a real thing. It means more than just being agreeable. It can mean supportive, enduring, and reliable. If you’re an intellectual person and you strive to create a world that makes sense, then being in partnership with someone who understands you and supports your understanding creates an important bond. It’s fair to call this love because breaking this bond will cause heartbreak.
But it’s emotional love that we think of first because this is the most common, dependent, deceived, attractive, rewarding, and frequently denied form of love. And it is all of these things not because it’s the most difficult, but because it’s generated by one person’s fantasies. And while there is nothing wrong with fantasy, as it’s a necessary part of creative thinking, it serves a temporary function.
Hate
Hate is also an immature feeling. By hate I don’t mean simply an adversarial attitude, I mean a mental obsession. A specific, negative projection about a person, place, or thing. And it’s not the negativity that’s immature—there may be good reasons to be negative—it’s hate’s obsessive and unexamined nature that makes it immature.
Hate can also be physical, intellectual, or emotional, but these are not simple opposites to love. You may hate being in pain, and that’s a real hate. The simple presence of certain people may cause you anguish. The longer you remain in the presence of these people, even if nothing is said or done, the more anguish you’ll feel. At some point, your hatred will grade into anger.
I’m not sure about intellectual hatred but it seems possible, it’s just not something I can easily identify. It would be an overwhelming, intellectual negativity that clouds your thinking. It would not be emotional.
My attitude toward people who endorse slavery is something like intellectual hatred. It’s an antipathy that’s cold and calculating but not passionate. Manipulative people who lie to achieve their ends trigger similar feelings. Donald Trump elicits intellectual hatred and this seems to be his intention. But when the feeling becomes passionate, it becomes emotional hatred.
Emotional hatred is what we’re familiar with. This is the red hot feeling of being personally, physically threatened. Politicians incite intellectual hatred because it always spills over into emotional hatred, and it’s emotional hatred that turns people into puppets.
Whoever controls your emotional hatred controls you, and if no one controls your hatred, then the hatred itself controls you. Your hatred can be directed to motivate you to war, or your hatred can motivate you to violence. It’s interesting that despite being one of our strongest motivators, hatred accomplishes nothing more than creating distance. You’d think there would be easier ways to accomplish this.
Projection
Projection is simply applying an attitude as a way of description. It’s a way to illustrate what you feel, but it’s not a property of the situation. This means that what you project only endures as long as you continue to project it. It is not something you’ve recognized as part of a relationship, it’s how you’ve decided to connect the dots. The dots may be real, but the way you connect them probably is not.
We disparage projection as false and pretentious, but we should appreciate its positive role. There is a reason that we project our love and hatred on situations. It begins a process of development. But rather than learning how to use projection as part of a process, we’re taught to consider these projections as accurate.
We believe our first impressions or the first impressions offered by authorities. What could be a good starting point, and one that's an essential step in creative thinking, becomes an undeveloped end point. As a result, we learn to be stupid.
Why Do We Do This?
You have to imagine something before you can build an understanding, and once you have an understanding, you can start to take steps to strengthen it. Just as you trace an image on a blank canvas before you begin painting, so also you project your ideas on a situation before you begin thinking. What you project becomes an opportunity that you can invest in.
But an idea is not a realization. An image of a sculpture is far from the finished work. Clearly, you need the image before you begin. Without a basic image you’ll build in the wrong place, or you’ll start by putting a roof on the ground. Projection is necessary, it’s something one should learn to do in childhood through play. It’s something that must be refined.
What We Miss
Having an idea does not tell you how to put it into practice. Taking prescribed actions doesn’t tell you why you’re doing them. There is a step between conception and conviction that’s missing when we educate people poorly.
Telling people what to think without fostering the growth of their bodies, minds, or emotions is a central failing of “modern” culture. By modern, I mean the money economy in which people work only to accumulate security.
If you never learn how to take the love you project and create the relationship you imagine, then you end up with hollow, unsustainable relationships. If you never learn how to take the hate you project to fix the bad situations you imagine, then you squander your energies destroying environments that are necessary for long-term survival.
Unrefined love is an undiscerning acceptance which fosters all sorts of unhealthy behaviors. Unrefined hatred is an undiscerning rejection which, like a forest fire, burns everything. We find both of these in the natural world, but they are part of larger processes.
Nectar and forest fires have their place but they are parts of processes that require discernment and endurance. Membranes and boundaries protect resources. Thorns and toxins keep exploiters away.
We must be similarly discerning with our destruction. We must inflate and examine our projections to see our ideas more accurately. Just as a movie projects a 2-dimensional image that we expand to three or more dimensions, we need to learn to do this with our imperfect projections.
How to Do Better
There are many pieces between initial ideas and completed constructions. These are the pieces that connect our imaginations with our practical skills. We send people to school in an attempt to teach this to them. Schooling succeeds to a small degree, but fails to a large degree. We learn how to hold a job, but we don’t learn how to foster love or channel hate. We don’t learn how to learn.
“Education is what people do to you. Learning is what you do to yourself.”
—Joichi Ito, entrepreneur
The result is what we see in the “modern” world: failed marriages, broken families, global poverty, and endless war. All of these are failures in realizing human ideas. Not “ideals,” as those are the goals; “ideas,” as those are the means.
Most people don’t recognize that these laudable processes—relationship, family, community, and culture—begin failing as soon as we move beyond our immature conceptions of them. We project these conceptions on the world and invest our 2-dimensional understanding. No one is teaching us to do better.
A successful marriage takes more than two people consenting to an illusion. A successful nation requires more than one person declaring himself dictator. You cannot react to failure by becoming depressed. Failure offers both losses and lessons and must be seen as a new starting point. In each of these cases what’s lacking is skill. How does one get it?
It’s hard to develop an aptitude that was supposed to develop when you were young. People who were traumatized or abused as children were denied an important part of their development. Many normal people get angry and reactive when obstructed, rather than becoming curious and resilient.
Young people approach problems with body, mind, and emotion at a time when they have support to play, explore, fail, and experiment. Real world problems require a complex combination of skills that cannot be broken down into book-learning form. This applies to academic subjects but applies even more to relationships, families, and cultures. These are full spectrum problems.
Once we’re adults, we no longer have that support, and we cannot engage in that kind of learning. As adults, our time is limited and there is little opportunity for full spectrum learning. We’re taught instructions without learning skills. The result is the collapse of relationships, families, nations, and cultures.
One solution is clear: discard what you know and start over. This sounds silly, but this is what learning always entails. Forget what you love or hate and relearn these things. To do this you must find the time and resources.
This is a prescription for re-schooling, and that makes sense for intellectual learning, but what about physical and emotional learning? The school version of physical education was always a joke, and emotional education never existed. The intellectual part is the least important because it’s the easiest. It’s the other skills we lack.
My work as a counselor involves helping people develop emotional skills. I can say at least this much: don’t let your time be taken from you and wasted in emotionally unrewarding ways. Don’t let negative people and attitudes control you. Build on healthy foundations. I will try to be more specific later.
Speak to me love, hate, and projections by scheduling a free call:
https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/schedule15
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