Day 16 of 100, Vol. 2

This weekend on February 4th one goal will be achieved, which will provide a great deal of joy in my life. Not just pleasure, like watching a television program or entertaining movie, but joy. I have revived my chapter of the Great Books Foundation: “The Self Preservation Society” which ironic title at first reading seems to point to self-serving rapacious activity. But a deeper reading reveals that I am referring--in a Platonic manner--to the Self with a capital S and not the self with a small s. In other words I mean to foster a monthly meeting where the Self has its place and the individuals who come to enjoy shared inquiry into an important text of Western Civilization also have a place to live out their portion of that Self through discussion. These once a month meetings will be one of the specific lodestars I have operating in my life for meaning.

I once sponsored a Great Books reading group before and enjoyed doing so. These texts provoke the deepest thoughts and grappling for those who read and discuss them. They also unlock aspirations and more often than not reveal personal folly. For those who can apprehend the opportunity they are superior to forms of group therapy in attenuating oneself, as the focus shifts from the individual to the text and then, in the compass of individual thought, to the persons themselves. That is taken away in solitude but later can be shared as culture.

I have committed to sitting on an ongoing peer to peer panel at Kaiser Permanente that focuses on the emotions; specifically anger and fear as they affect patients both in and after treatment as residual symptoms. I presented a case last week and will do so as often as possible. This panel is also becoming something of a lodestar and is a boon both professionally and personally. While my professional focus includes, among other things, an archetypal appreciation of symptoms this panel with its reductive, even repetitive, cognitive behavioral bias, serves as something like a tonic.

I changed brokers this month, which has kept my trading funds tied up for a month in bureaucratic administration. They will be available tomorrow which means commitment of actual funds towards a practical application of a financial behavioral theory I have been studying. It is through this activity, which sometime in the future I plan to turn into an investment opportunity for others, I will fulfill a personal goal towards entrepreneurship.

Using spiral dynamics one can postulate three general levels of potential mimetic cyclical forms of human behavior that have predetermined points of change (each of which can be further defined with additional layers of specificity and points of inflection). For my purpose I use the terms foundational, entrepreneurial, and theoretical. Foundational life requires effort, entrepreneurial life is delineated by leverage, and finally theoretical life through ratification. I have been living in the borderland of foundational and entrepreneurial life for some time now using those who have been theoretically ratified as my guide.

I see as I move forward that my private practice as a counselor is a personal demonstration of foundational living, My trading practice and its eventual evolution into an investment opportunity will demonstrate entrepreneurial competency. What I will do at the theoretical level which requires ratification remains unconscious. Towards uncovering that I intend to spend this year learning and applying Ira Progoff's method for an intensive journal and see what the unconscious can reveal.