Relevance Realization

Some of you may remember me gushing over just how amazing Dr. John Vervaeke is, after discovering him on the Peterson Academy last year. Needless to say, his courses on the platform are some of the most challenging stuff I've tried to grasp in my entire life, and possibly the only ones where I felt I needed to rewatch several times to actually get it. To be fair, his last course on there, The Primacy of Beauty, I attended three times before I felt like I was beginning to understand what the man was talking about.

Tools.

I have a sense of arming myself with tools (it's also what he's talking about, in a way). I find myself in a revelatory phase of my development as a person. Moments of understanding and dawning are increasingly more frequent. Little "aha" moments. Like, I'll just be sitting there and start connecting dots about things I haven't even thoughts about before, you know, like seemingly small, but incredibly intricate things like how we work, and why, and more specifically how I work.

Just now, sitting on my balcony, I found myself trailing after some random thought about emotion and relationships, a very general thought about what we need and what we reach for. Affection, but also the sense of being take care of, and how that translates.

And it became apparent, just a flash, just sitting there, why that matters and how it works on a very primordial level for us, for how our psyche is built. It also awarded me a great insight into a past relationship. Something I thought I'd looked at from all possible angles, and yet, there it was, gestalt.

This is how that worked, this is what it activated, and this is why it mattered to you.

While that story was dead and buried emotionally, it's one I return to sometimes out of survival instinct. A part of me that knows how badly I need to understand what happened there, and how that worked. You need to know which windows you've left open, where there's cracks in the foundation, and fix them, or at least keep yourself conscious about them, so that you're less vulnerable in the future.

And just this morning, this moment of keen insight, this fantastic gift from the unconscious, like a fat, bold "This is how you work. This is what happened there, and this is what you watch out for."

I took three courses over and over each of them, all discussing the nuances of relevance realization, of picking apart the way our brains work - how we foreground the wrong things, how we learn to discern salience from obnoxiousness. And for a long time, they seemed like abstract notions that while I understood them, I didn't see how they applied, or what they meant for me.

And now I do. With PA, over the past year, I've understood much about how education works, how little seeds are planted, how I'm being exposed to foreign concepts and how it might take months or even years for them to become relevant. I've been amassing tools to draw on in times of need, both culturally, but also on a deeper, more meaningful level.

I've understood it's not linear or expedient. Things become apparent in their own time. And what a gift, and what luck. The fascination that is psychology for me is that in time, you can learn to understand, you start seeing patterns, and yes, as has been abundantly pointed out by great people, the more attentive you are, the more the unconscious shows you.

I just felt like sharing. I tried to understand certain things through writing a long time. Indeed, a lot of great writing came out of it, but understanding, not so much. Or maybe I just never was detached enough before. I don't honestly know. But I'm feeling safer. And that's something.

But enough about me. It's #threetunetuesday time, as we well know, and @ablaze invites us as ever to share our finds and earworms from the last week or so.

About twelve years now. And still, I've yet to find a better lyricist or musician. There's long moments at each gig just watching him move. Transfixed. This song, while disliked at first, has really grown on me.

How much hate fits in your eyes, brother,
How much more fear can your fists carry,
Our Father, how many carats,
Have the bullets melted from your crosses?

And still, I hear it as "how much world fits in your eyes, brother".

Three years now, February sings me,
Death's odes marked in the calendar

This has also been on loop. What a gem this woman is. What a fucking attitude.

And you could have me,
If you weren't so afraid of me

While I'm wary of extremist feminism and any suggestion in our parlance that men and boys are bad, toxic or inadequate, there's some fantastic feminist art being made these days that I resonate with profoundly.

And something just to dance to. We need movement, complementary to our understanding.

And you? What are you listening to?