Visible within the window of the Magic 8 ball of daily infinity - the word defensive. My own defensiveness and that of everyone else. I know my defensiveness is at the root of so much of my mood in relation to the world, clamped down clammed up. When I go to the store and the clerk sells me something at a price that is shameful, I can feel the defensiveness and how it abuses the soul, cutting it off from me and all of creation. The expectations of a broken system fracture humanity.
To my amazement, the war of religions continues - each one being defensive about treating something subjective as if it were objective and needing to prove the other wrong. Heads rolling. Recently someone complained about people who find their spiritual communion in nature instead of in churches, as if Christ himself hadn't done so for 40 days. Someone else I know is sarcastic about Jesus as if he never saw through fundamentalist distortions. Such an offensive is natural for one who makes the claim that spiritual communion can only happen within the 4 walls of a specific church or temple and disenfranchises all other spiritual claims. How often this happens, even now, with people believing that they alone have the true spiritual key. Many have the need for the spiritual support of a community and others may need to be alone so as to absorb reality for itself instead of the promoted representations always created within groups.
We also at times run into the war of therapeutic alliances, cognitive behavioral therapists against analysts, depth therapists, humanists and others, all claiming to have the best way. The equivalent to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle came in the form of a study that showed that all approaches helped equally. Certainly there's a lot going on in the sentience of a therapeutic interchange besides the prescribed techniques associated with a specific discipline.
If we could stop trying to justify our subjective views and choices to realize that we are all subjective all the time we'd be kinder and more humble I think. It doesn't mean we have to stop believing what we believe, it simply means we allow others their specific views. Subjective is how we are supposed to be, because it is our birthright to seek different expressions of experience. There are many right answers. We don't have to justify what we need and what we are attracted to.
The intensity behind conflicts driven by defensiveness seem to go back to early life when we felt that we couldn't have what we needed without betraying or disappointing ones we loved and depended on. As if one were ever wrong for wanting...more food, more love, more of a sense of specialness, more of a sense of importance, more safety, more empowerment. What is that part of us that wants to be right about things that have no right answer? The part that wants to be beyond criticism, the part that was perhaps violated by negation, dismissal and abuse.
We've only ever been lovely fools happy for no reason or injured fools pretending to be righteous. Only you know what makes sense to you, what you need and it's up to you to be honest and surrender up all the taints seeping in through hairline fractures caused when you were resented for needing what you needed, for being who you are, for seeing things how you see them, for having your own agency or perhaps for having made the mistakes you needed to make. There are only fools in this world, fools building hadron colliders so as to taste their own blood instead of living their own human lives. This is one ancvery expensive flavor of folly.
Another way to look at it is that every human being needs some kind of anchor from moment to moment - anchors take the form of food, rituals, obsessions, practices, goals. If those 4 walls are your personal anchor go there but don't make claim that others should as well. They are walking their own path anchoring by the directives of their own inborn elegance and wisdom which will take them towards a different expression of experience, perhaps through thickets of what appear to you as mistakes and misfortunes. When anchors aren't grasped so tightly we naturally understand a more vast array of meanings.
Grimm 23
The Mouse, The Bird and The Sausage explores the way in which delicate systemic balances can be undone by peering analytical eyes that cause a fracture of confidence, that rush in to tell someone how it is and what they ought to do. It illustrates Blake's innocence to experience progression, and hopes to leave us with the benefit of the informed innocence, in which we know we are fools, know that any other answer is more or less fraught. Knowing that things remain equal (ly foolish), we are able to revel in the particular psychic structure that leaves life tasty and savory.