Sorting Out the Truly Mysterious from the Merely Anomalous

[Image: “Deep Puzzle,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

This week, whiskey river offered me one quotation which especially intrigued me — sending me on an extended read of the source material:

Can you explain why it is that there are, at last count, sixteen schools of psychotherapy with sixteen theories of the personality and its disorders and that patients treated in one school seem to do as well or as badly as patients treated in any other—while there is only one generally accepted theory of the cause and cure of pneumococcal pneumonia and only one generally accepted theory of the orbits of the planets and the gravitational attraction of our galaxy and the galaxy M31 in Andromeda? (Hint: If you answer that the human psyche is more complicated than the pneumococcus and the human white-cell response or the galaxies or Einstein’s general theory of relativity, keep in mind that the burden of proof is on you. Or if you answer that the study of the human psyche is in its infancy, remember then this infancy has lasted 2,500 years and, unlike physics, we don’t seem to know much more about the psyche than Plato did.)

(Walker Percy [source])

That Percy quotation, as it happens, follows a brief discussion of the mystery of astrology — the mystery that, and why, astrology is so easily attended to, by so many, on a daily basis. Before and after it all, in the original source, I found these passages (among others):

Imagine that you are reading a book about the Cosmos. You find it so interesting that you go out and buy a telescope. One fine clear moonless night you set up your telescope and focus on the brightest star in the sky. It is a planet, not a star, with a reddish spot and several moons. Excited, you look up the planets in your book about the Cosmos. You read a description of the planets. You read a sentence about a large yellowish planet with a red spot and several moons. You recognize both the description and the picture. Clearly, you have been looking at Jupiter.

You have no difficulty at all in saying that it is Jupiter, not Mars or Saturn, even though the object you are looking at is something you have never seen before and is hundreds of millions of miles distant.

…

You have seen yourself a thousand times in the mirror, face to face. No sight is more familiar. Yet why is it that the first time you see yourself in a clothier’s triple mirror—from the side, so to speak—it comes as a shock? Or the first time you saw yourself in a home movie: were you embarrassed? What about the first time you heard your recorded voice—did you recognize it? Clearly, you should, since you’ve been hearing it all your life.

Why is it that, when you are shown a group photograph in which you are present, you always (and probably covertly) seek yourself out? To see what you look like? Don’t you know what you look like?

Has this ever happened to you? You are walking along a street of stores. There are other people walking. You catch a glimpse in a store window of a reflection of a person. For a second or so you do not recognize the person. He, she, seems a total stranger. Then you realize it is your own reflection. Then in a kind of transformation, the reflection does in fact become your familiar self.

One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second’s glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.

The question is: Why is it that in your entire lifetime you will never be able to size yourself up as you can size up somebody else—or size up Saturn—in a ten-second look?

Why is it that the look of another person looking at you is different from everything else in the Cosmos? That is to say, looking at lions or tigers or Saturn or the Ring Nebula or at an owl or at another person from the side is one thing, but finding yourself looking into the eyes of another person looking at you is something else. And why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

(Walker Percy [source: ibid.])

Finally, from among some other things I read this week which addressed the inherent weirdness of being human:

It’s OK to be in this body… it seems to me the basic experience of being human is pleasant. One’s body is basically happy to be here. Of course, there can be all kinds of difficulties, illness, and injury and all other kinds of things that get in the way of that. As I get older, and certainly through the year of having COVID, I’ve plenty of pretty strong and ongoing unpleasantness going on in bodily life. And yet still, it’s sort of like one’s soul is happy to be alive. We were made to be alive, at least for a decade or few. Underneath our neuroses and all our pushing and pulling, most deeply, we’re glad to be here. Connecting to that—in fact, just the retreat I gave last week, the first day or two of the instructions, I talked about pleasure more than I might usually, just connecting to the pleasure of relaxation, the pleasure of the fact that you’re able to breathe. People really remarked on it, during the retreat, how much of a resource it was. Whatever else is going on, you can actually, as you settle down to meditation before your legs start to hurt and everything else, just to find some way you can connect with a sense that it’s good to be here, some sense you’re glad to be here, some way in which your belly is glad to relax or your your breath is pleasurable to come in and out. It’s a really helpful resource, especially as people end up making meditation into this kind of chore or this thing they’re supposed to do that’s good for them rather than this moment, I get to sit down in myself.

(Martin Aylward [source])