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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity


 

I invented the term
"pathological harmonizing"
to describe my thinking
as a fundamentalist

 


 

return to the main-page article on "Clear-Thinking"

 

it's a perfect fit

My children and I share a private joke with the line, "It's a perfect fit!" At times when something doesn't quite go together, for example, finding room for something in a box or a suitcase, with a bit of well-placed scrunching, we now declare, "It's a perfect fit!"

This imperial procedure toward semblance of well-ordered life is easily transferred to the mental domain. For a long time, it was standard fare in terms of how I made sense of the world.

In my research-travels, especially as a young man, whenever I'd come across an inconvenient fact, one in contradiction to my "one true doctrines" of my "one true church," with a bit of strategic mental-scrunching, by forcing together antithetical ideas, I could proudly declare, "It's a perfect fit!"

Later, however, I would finally come to perceive both the dishonesty in such procedure and that:

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." (Anais Nin)

Mental scrunching of concepts is pathological harmonizing: it's the games people play in their heads to maintain private paradigms about life and the world.

 

 

Albert Einstein: “Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”

  

 

Editor's last word:

Einstein saw through to the essence of the "games that people play" -- it's an attempt to create "peace and security," a refuge against the terrors of living in this world.