IS: Rejection
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Consider an alcoholic who gives up drinking. They go teetotaler for years, unwinding their psychological and biological dependency. At some point, they are able to partake in light social drinking without backsliding into addiction. This is the form of "subjugation, rejection, reclamation." It's not a good or bad form, just something I want to describe and see together here.
Substitute "desire" (at a basic level, like pull-towards or impulse) for the word "alcohol" and that's what prompted this topic today. As children we are subject to the power of our desires, fused with them and controlled by them. As adults, we have desires, but we are not ruled by them, and we decide when-and-whether to fulfill or deny them. Modern professionalism exemplifies a control of our impulses. But then, wise elders are often known to re-enter a stance that is playful, irreverent, almost child-like. What is happening there, and when we talk about "reconnecting" with our desires?
The process of growing/developing generally goes from "is a" to "has a" with everything we "grow out of." We can sometimes perhaps just do that directly and smoothly. Yet, often we navigate by overshoot. We feel so subjugated by our being-stuck-inside the thing that we reject the thing vehemently and entirely, until still later we soften toward that thing we rejected, and are able to integrate it back into our life in a useful synthesis.
Rejection isn't "bad" of course, but perhaps it's even helpful or necessary. (Adult developmentalists and cultural evolutionists would probably both agree.) I think that the stronger the former view was, the more of a "kick" we tend to need in order to "push off" and get enough distance from it. The weight and momentum to free ourselves from subjugation to a too-small subjection, it carries the pendulum-swing of rejection out to a place that eventually feels like "too far." But we need enough distance to realize that on the backswing we don't RETVRN — after we've grown, there is no going "back". Our bigger self can't fit in the old shell of a smaller hermit crab. But we can close the distance to that thing, pick it up, put it in our pocket, and pull it out when it serves.
We reject the primacy of our desires in order to escape our subjugation to them, AND THEN we reject the machinery of internal repression that is disconnecting us from our desires, AND THEN we reconfigure and reclaim the goodness and rightness and value in our desires, and the goodness and rightness in our ability to hold our desires in right relationship to bigger values, and the goodness and rightness of trusting our biggest self to hold the balance that uses the strengths of both.
Perhaps the degree of overshoot/rejection lessens, after this form/pattern is itself known to our awareness? It does seem like a complexification on top of the "subject to object" transition, one that theoretically isn't necessary. Or perhaps it is necessary in the perspective-taking evolution, but the suffering is optional. Most suffering is.
The growth mantra of Intentional Society, "awareness, acceptance, integrity", contrasts clearly the "acceptance" with the "rejection" I've spoken of above. We can accept instead of reject, and also we can accept the rejection — or even accept our rejection of accepting the rejection! There's always an outer layer of okayness, of turning-towards, that can hold any number of layers of turning-away.
🙏
Cheers,
James