The Democratic Party: A Snake Eating It's Own Tail.

[tekisui]

Excerpts From

Intuition and the
Intimacy of Instinct and Consciousness
by: Mike Arons

Here I present a symbol. I will use it in my attempt to understand and convey an understanding of intuition. This snake, eating its own tail, is an Eastern symbol of wholeness and unity.

Wholeness? The poor creature is eating itself away. Unity? If ever there was a house divided against itself is not this snake its symbol? Have the Eastern sages simply blown one? Or are they sager than our own first encounters with this image may indicate?

Let’s see. Taken in itself it is a circle. The circle is a geometrical symbol of unity and wholeness. But unity and wholeness imply, nay, implicate their opposites: disunity and separation. This snake symbol takes that into account. Here are the opposite ends of the snake, head and tail joined. But weren’t they joined anyway? After all, this - head and tail - is the same snake. So the disunity, not yet recognized by it as it creates it, develops when the snake tries to join with its tail in this self-destructive way. The snake in its innocence had taken opposite to mean alien or other, or appetizing.

I propose that this symbol says that the snake, like us, had to learn of this primordial unity of apparent opposites the hard way. It, like us, has to pass from innocence to reflection to consciousness and do this through the process of experiencing its limitations - which realization opens up new possibilities for altered action or new visions concerning its relationship to itself and the universe.

Follow the hungry snake on its eating path, inch by joyously painful inch. Let us start with the snake seeing some tantalizing food ahead which it grabs in its mouth. In its innocence (of an activity of which it is anything but innocent in the legal sense) it sees its tail as an other than itself - i.e., as a prey. That is, a satisfying prospect, an opportunity to be grabbed up. But one can imagine that as the snake starts eating away, it begins to have mixed feelings centered in both satisfaction and pain. If this is a particularly dumb snake - like contemporary humans with our environment - it may eat itself to the back of its own head before, if ever, being brought to the threshold of a disconcerting realization.

On its eating path the snake may be beset by doubts, unarticulated questions, vacillations and, who knows, perhaps a type of serpentine neurosis. This conflictual experience calls for resolution by or towards an understanding of what is happening. Perhaps even without benefit of therapy it arrives at a realization.

(snip)

The problem solving may lead to the snake’s attempt to back out of the jam it has got itself into, learn how to adapt to a not-perfect situation or, if and when the insight goes deeply enough, enjoy to a fuller, mystical recognition that there is no ultimate escape from that condition - only a new and perhaps fascinating way of looking at it via less dense consciousness of this inescapable condition. We could then speak of an enlightened, unified, or whole snake. At which point the symbol disintegrates into the real snake who is head and tail, one and the same reality, and it can straighten or coil up, as snakes do, and go about it’s business of catching and eating something else -which has a more appropriate part to play out in that realty - like a mouse. The symbol is gone. The snake is now what it Is. The mouse, too. But that is okay.

The symbol - the snake’s life from innocence to reflection to consciousness - has already done its work, and what it has revealed allows the snake to be itself fully. This consciousness opens a second innocence of a universe now viewed differently. The lived symbol has informed the snake - and us as participant observers - in and through its (our) particular unhappy circumstance of the greater reality of which it (we) is a part. It is implicated - by its nature, its biology, its instincts - in an orgy of eating and being eaten. The desire and fear engendered in this struggle are what prevented the snake from recognizing these implications. What makes this snake different from other still primordially innocent snakes is that it understands this implication and, therefore, now identifies with the whole process, contributing fully to it in its particular way.

All of life, Alan Watts once mused, is a mutual eating society. Or, if you like to see things in a more positive light, all of life is a mutual nurturing society. In any event, animal life is pain and pleasure and terminates in animal death. Consciousness not only recognizes the original unity of the opposites of head and tail (heads and tails joined from the inside and being mutually contradictory seen from without) but, as well, the unity of the opposites of pleasure and pain and their source in ignorance. Simultaneously, such consciousness of that which was previously unconscious recognizes that pleasure and pain were the very creations of that ignorance or, put negatively, of actions based on the failure to realize that what is Is.

http://www.westga.edu/~psydept/arons-intuition.html

I hope that as the Democratic Party eats it's own tail, we will realize what Unity is, and be strengthened by it. And, devour the mouse that is the Republican Party.

[tekisui]

1. Kick for Unity and Strength!

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. The Democratic Party is faced with evil

The snake is busy eating its own tail, only to be eaten by the vulture. The GOP are evil, corrupt and laced with the type of people who would make your hair stand on end and you wouldn't like to meet on a dark night.

[tekisui]

3. Once the Democratic Party truly realizes this, we will be unstoppable.

We just gotta realize what we're doing, and aim our sights on the real enemy.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

4. EXACTLY!!!!!

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5. It is time to eat the mice, John Dubya McSame, and the goppers.

[BenDavid]

6. I say, blame obama, he's the one that wanted to "unite us" and

one question I would like to obama if he somehow survives by next Friday night.

Are you going to heal America the way you healed the Democratic party?