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Happiness Is A Side Effect Of Meaning | Proudly Made in the USA

Happiness is a Side Effect of Meaning | Proudly Made in the USA

Happiness is a Side Effect of Meaning | Proudly Made in the USA

It's a beautiful day to be alive here at the peak of recorded human history

GO FORTH AND BE MIGHTY!

Lyrics

One of the very great things that C.G. Jung contributed to mankind's understanding
Was the concept of the shadow
That everybody has a shadow
And that the main task of the psychotherapist is to do what he called, “to integrate the evil”
To as it were, put the devil in us in its proper function
'Cause you see it's always the devil
The unacknowledged one
The outcast, the scapegoat
The bastard, the bad guy, you see the black sheep of the family
It's always from that point
Which we could call the fly in the ointment, you see
That generation comes
In other words, the same way as in the drama
To have the play it's necessary to introduce a villain
It's necessary to introduce a certain element of trouble
So, in the whole scheme of life, there has to be the shadow

[Chorus]
The shadow
The bastard, the bad guy, the black sheep of the family
The shadow
Integrate the evil
Integrate the evil
The shadow
The bastard, the bad guy, the black sheep of the family
The shadow
Everybody has a shadow
Because without the shadow there can't be the substance

So, this is why
There is a very strange association between
Crime and all naughty things and holiness
You see holiness is way beyond being good
Good people aren't necessarily holy people
A holy person is one who's whole
Who has as it were reconciled his opposites
And so there's always something slightly scary about holy people
And other people react to them in very strange ways
They can't make up their minds whether they're saints or devils
So holy people have throughout history
Always created a great deal of trouble
Along with their creative results
Take Jesus for example
The trouble that Jesus created is absolutely incalculable
Think of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the… heaven only knows
What's gone on in the name of Jesus
Freud is a big troublemaker, as well as a great healer, you see it all goes together

[Chorus]
The shadow
The bastard, the bad guy, the black sheep of the family
The shadow
Integrate the evil
Integrate the evil
The shadow
The bastard, the bad guy, the black sheep of the family
The shadow
Everybody has a shadow
Because without the shadow there can't be the substance

So, the holy person is scary
Because he is like the earthquakes, or better still he's like the ocean
See, the ocean on a lovely sunny day you can say, "Oh isn't that gorgeous?
And you can go into it, and relax, and float around
But boy when the storm comes, does that thing get mad, terrifying
So, there is in us the ocean, you see?
And Jung felt that the whole point was to bring the two together
By a kind of fantastic honesty
To penetrate one's own motivations to the depths
[Chorus]
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other

Now when you go deeply into the nature of selfishness
What do you discover?
You say I love myself, I seek my own advantage
Now what is the self that I love?
What do I want?
And that becomes an increasingly ever deepening puzzle
Now I've often referred to this when you say to somebody else
I love you, it's always rather disconcerting to the person to whom you say that
If you imply that you love them with a pure disinterested and holy love
They automatically suspect it as being a little bit phony
But if you say “I love you so much I could eat you”
That's an expression, it’s a way of saying to a person you attract me so much that I can't help it
I'm absolutely bowled over by you
I'm gone
And people like that
Then they feel they're really being loved
That it's absolutely genuine
But now, I love you so much I could eat you
Now what the devil do I want?
I certainly don't want to eat the girl in the sense of literally devouring her
Because then she'd disappear
Hmmmm
But I love myself
And what is me, in what way do I know me?
When it suddenly occurs to me that I know me only in terms of you
See when I think of anything that I know and I like
Then it's always something that can be viewed as other than me
I can never get to look at me, real me
It's always behind, it's always hidden
And I really don't know it well enough to know whether I love it or not
Maybe I don't, maybe it's an appalling mess
But certainly the things I do love, and that I want from a selfish point of view
When I really think about them they're all something else
That's in a way outside me

[Chorus]
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other

Now, we saw that there is a reciprocity
A total mutual interdependence between what we call the self and what we call the other
That's the warp and the woof
And so if you're perfectly honest about loving yourself
And you don't pull any punches, you don't pretend that you're anything other than exactly what you are
You suddenly come to discover that the self you love if you really go into it
Is the universe
You suddenly come to discover that the self you love if you really go into it
Is the universe
You don't like all of it
You're selective about it as we saw in the beginning
Perception is selection
But on the whole

[Chorus]
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other

Because it's only in terms of what is other that you have a self at all
So, this is a view of the world
As a system of mutual exploitation
And of maximal selfishness
Now it's a very profitable view to explore
Everybody should do in their lifetime sometime (sometime)
Two things, one is to consider death

[Chorus]
Consider death
To observe the skulls and skeletons
Consider death (Consider death)
And to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up
Never

That is a very gloomy thing for contemplation
But it's like manure, just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on
So the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death
Is very highly generative with creative life
You get wonderful things out of that
And the other thing to contemplate is to follow the possibility of the idea that you are totally selfish
That you don't have a good thing to be said for you at all
You are a complete, utter rascal
You are a complete, utter rascal
Now, the Christians have avoided this
Because although they say, in their Episcopalian form of confession
That “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep and we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts” too much, you know?
“We have offended against they holy laws. We have left undone those things we ought to have done, and done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.”
But, it ought to be different
And we're gonna do our best to amend with the help of God's grace
That is a real con act
If you equate health with genuine love and perfect unselfishness
Then in that sense there is no health in us when we look at ourselves from this point of view

[Chorus]
Consider death
To observe the skulls and skeletons
Consider death (Consider death)
And to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up
Never

[Chorus]
Consider death
To observe the skulls and skeletons
Consider death (Consider death)
And to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up
Never
Now, this is a very strange thing you see, that it is partly true
That the universe so far as its biological aspect is concerned
Is this weird system that lives by everybody eating everybody else
Only what we do to maintain what is called order and civilization
Is that various species make agreement that they won't eat each other
They'll cooperate and so be an enormous gang which can beat down the others
So the human being is the most successful, so far, of this gangster arrangement
We are the most predatory monsters on Earth
And we have cooperated to assault the fish, and the vegetables, and the chickens, and the cows, and everything you see?
Only we do it by not letting our left hand know what our right hand doeth. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, unless gentlemen happen to be prone to going hunting as a sport
They don't see their food killed
They don't see the slaughterhouse
And so what you get in the butcher, in the market is steak, you know?
It’s a thing in its own right, it has nothing to do with a cow
Steak is a thing shaped thus and so, it looks as if it might be like a banana or something like that, you know and nobody worries
And when a fish is served up, it does indeed look like a fish, but it's not the squigley and squirmy fish that comes out on the end of a fisherman's line
You know, when you really fish you realize that the fish doesn't like it very much

[Chorus]
In this gangster arrangement
We are the most predatory monsters on Earth
So, let me repeat, so, so let me repeat
In this gangster arrangement
In this gangster arrangement
We are the most predatory monsters on Earth
So, let me repeat, so, so let me repeat
In this gangster arrangement

There is that absolutely extraordinary side of things
That is really terrifying, and so let me repeat (so, so let me repeat)
The illustration I used of the cross in the net
Where one side of it is scissors, that cut and eat, teeth that chew
And get this thing in and the opening side of it is like James Joyce's Ulysses
The girl who says “yes” and I said “yes, yes, yes,”
She wants to be absolutely ravaged by her man, you see?
So, it’s open, open, open
But now comes the if we take the dark view of things, the horrible view, excuse me if I go into some rather grizzly details, but have you ever heard of a vagina dentata?
That is the idea that in the sexual organ of the woman, there are teeth
And a lot of men have this fantasy, and so are rendered impotent
They don't make love
Because they feel that the price of this blessed experience
This creative experience, loving experience, he's going to get cut
You're going to get emasculated
You're going to lose your precious member

[Chorus]
In this gangster arrangement
We are the most predatory monsters on Earth
So, let me repeat, so, so let me repeat
In this gangster arrangement
In this gangster arrangement
We are the most predatory monsters on Earth
So, let me repeat, so, so let me repeat
In this gangster arrangement

This is a very ancient fantasy, it appears throughout all known history
Because this is simply the woman's come on
Where she attracts but she's out really to get you
She is basically a spider mother you see
Who is selfish, and doesn't really love you
Not really, but says she does
And of course there are on the other side all the tricks of the men, which we can go without mentioning
The web is a trap
Like the spider's web is a trap for flies
Also, the lovely embroideries are worn by women as traps for men from a certain point of view

From a certain point of view
And I want to consider the web as something playful
You see there are so many ways of looking at it
And you will find that all these ways are right, but what we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
Of the view
From a certain point of view

The web is a trap
Like the spider's web is a trap for flies
Also, the lovely embroideries are worn by women as traps for men from a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
And I want to consider the web as something playful
You see there are so many ways of looking at it
And you will find that all these ways are right, but what we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
Of the view
From a certain point of view

[Chorus]
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view

There are people for example who can see the web as a trap, and get stuck with that
There are people to whom existence is simply hateful
They see it as nothing but a ghastly mistake
The Lord really erred when he created this world
Because he arranged it in such a way that everything lives by eating something else
And what I'm doing is I'm describing a certain point of view
(From a certain point of view)
I'm not exactly philosophizing, I'm describing a point of view
You can look at life in such a way that the whole thing is this ghastly mistake
For example, there's no such thing as genuine kindness or love
Everybody is really pretending that they are loving other people in order to get some advantage from it
And indeed there's a point of view which occurs in certain forms of paranoia
Where people who don't seem to be real they are mechanisms, and you can think that out quite intensely with a good deal of intelligence
After all if you start from a good old Darwinian or Freudian basis
And see that man is a material machine, and that the consciousness of man is simply a very evolved and complicated form of chemistry
Well then these awful mechanical things, these Frankenstein's that everybody is, they come around and they say
"Well I'm alive, I'm a human being, I have a heart. I love, I hate, I have problems, I feel."
And you feel like saying
"Come off it, you're just a monster. And you put on the civilized act because really you're just a set of teeth on the end of a tube."

[Chorus]
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view

And you've got a ganglion behind those teeth
Which you call your brain and your so alleged mind
And this thing is really basically there for two purposes
One to be cunning enough to get something to eat to put down the tube
And the other, you know what, Mr. Freud libido
And everything else you see can be construed as an elaborate subtle way of pretending that that's not really what you want to do, but you do
But you put on a great show
Now some people according to this view get mixed up, they are so repressed
That what they really want to do is to eat and to screw, they get involved in higher things that are the masks for these activities
And think that that's the real purpose of life
And then they become what's called neurotic
[Laugh]
Because they get involved in being pure camouflage
That's what’s called escaping from the facts
Not looking at life, not looking at reality correctly

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