Civilization and Its Discontents (introduction)

It is impossible… to judge widely of people who value the wrong things because many seem successful, but are little valued, while there is often short connection between thoughts, actions, wishes. One of these… may write a book on or miss the source of religious sentiments arising out of subjective reality and still be called on one’s own religious and free from illusory belief. The views expressed… it is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings or physiological signs can be easily determinate; psychology occupies a liminal space and is the original source of religious feelings’ flood. I have nothing… original to state; except that the self which considers boundaries between conception and reality as absolute in every case is, of course, that of its psychopathy. Further reflection tells… us that an ego’s feelings expressed in personality develop over time in response to perception of one’s body, outside sources like family, pain, wanting of pleasure when enjoyably stimulus is removed; sometimes these extend so deep and long that they can/not distinguish between the inner and outside world of itself—as a defense. In this way,… a detached self narrows the full world of experience to ideological and emotional counterparts. But have we… some serious difficulties in trying to fix boundaries and the problem of certainty can be insurmountable in any specific instance… This brings us… a great deal of problematization in human consciousness and memory, which is obscured a relation in the act of forgetting as recollection unrealized. Now let us… dispense with example to show that even objective observation is a series of substitution for appearance or position of views reflecting on each other. There is clearly… a limit to this line of, logic, leads to absurdities which temporality and phsyical dimension can, must or ought to pin down in historical sequence (still can’t picture it). There is one… aspect of comparisons assumed proper; this is questionable as their basis. We bow to… the logic that other analogies are more or less appropriate, but never touch relations of identity (even for one’s self—since the ego develops over time [cf. Empedocles, Heraclitus; Zeno]) Perhaps… we ought to content ourselves…that even in the mind some of what is old…whether in the normal course of things or as an exception…but we know nothing about it is rather the rule than the exception for the past to be preserved in mental life. Thus we are… willing to acknolwedge a type of religious feeling is widespread, even related to an early emotion, which is the source of religious experience. To me the claim… can only be a source of energy arising out of a need in the human condition, from childhood on, sustained by terror at the inscrutable intentions of the Divine, a need for authoritative male’s protection giving rise to oceans of meaning overwhelm the infantile totality of the ’self’ as reality—derived from a mere baby’s dependency and that which precedes it. I can imagine… this feeling of pre-conscious totality as the sociological source of religion.

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