A Dog Named Sye

Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks

I named him Sye … and I figure he's that part of the human psyche … that resists all attempts to classify … label … and define his person in some way. He is that which is the source of our passions … enthusiasm … and our curiosity about the world. He brings a certain color to life … and chances are we can't do without him … but the question on everybody's lips must be ' How do you manage Sye?'

In the course of human civilization we have come very close to understanding him … but at each age … we get too close … and he slips the net … and wanders off … into a new scheme of life … and we are left scrambling to find out what it is. The Christian practice of working towards being born again … brings us to the personality of the child in our minds … entirely peace loving … and wondering about the possibilities of life. And he makes contact with Sye for a while … but only to realize later that Sye will not be tied down with moral conduct.

The Indic experience of the search for knowledge accomplishes something similar in the personality of the child … but its rather more in terms of the grandpa … doing the baby sitter bit with Sye … but not for long. He senses grandpa's play of love and affection … gets enmeshed in it for a while … and then throws grandpa to the wolves of intelligentsia … and leaves him to grapple with what's true about our lives.

What is therefore Sye? I think I've got him figured as the unborn personality of the mind of creation. He is the sum total of the qualities … that defines our need for form … passion … and reason … and he is the mold from which each new generation of babies are born … with the accumulated knowledge of the past … and the ability to deal with the developments of the future. Ultimately we encounter him in the self conscious reflections of the skin tissue in the human experience.

As we may well surmise … Sye is a friend … but he can also be an awesome enemy. There's a curious story about his beginnings in the human … revealed intimately in the psyche … about the oneness of the human experience … and how we converted that from an experience of perceived mind to that of the passions. It reflects itself today in the way … we cultivate a sense of mind in ourselves founded on reason … and realize its competitive opposite … as the passions … with an equal claim to intelligence … as compared to mind.

In a social context … the passions manage our daily activities … but at an individual level … it is mind that recapitulates … and supervises its experience of itself. When the passions manage … they do so with the mind as a satellite of its function … and expects such affirmations of its sense of true love from the mind. And when the mind is in an active state … it views the body as an extension of itself … and expects such compliance from the body … to undertake all physical activity consistent with the inclinations of mind.

In some ways … Sye is sympathetic to the way … our mind and passion … work with each other. On occasion he faces considerable …. criticism and anger at the hands of either of our faculties. In a clash between mind and passion … it takes place in Sye … as the host and ground … on which we undertake our work of understanding and growth … of the human experience. However on each of these occasions we realize that … we have to learn more … and Sye takes into account our physical limitations … for not being able to accomplish more.

In the course of time … Sye splits our experience into different colors of races … and then sometime in the future … is expected to cultivate a homogeneous being … with a fair refinement of the qualities … for a greater integration of our personality. No doubt we have been doing just that over the ages … and find in our development … a greater consciousness of the self and the need for social order. Extrapolated into the future … its possible to see where Sye is leading us to.

Hence in our well being of the state of our mind … we would expect that we are coming to a greater acceptance of the commonwealth of our qualities … in a defined sense of equality … and held in that way to be self evident. What would we call such an object that stores and makes active a fair representation of all our qualities? We'll need a word … how about Synthesis? That would be Sye in the boat of passions … and man's penchant for cultivating a thesis about his views.

To an active thinking mind … our experience of Sye today … is inevitably in the nature of the psychic. Perhaps that has got to do more with the way we bring an isolated sense of facts and reason … in the traditional manner of zealots … who figure they are climbing up the ladder of civilization … and leaving their primitive natures behind. This would not be accurate. The Indic psychic understanding that brought worship to the phallus … can today be viewed simply as the eros impulses in man. But why would a man of learning avoid having to say that in public communication? Does our academic traditions reveal its own bias of being exclusively right?

In much the same way … we can today make references to prophets … as men who were imbued with the psychic understanding of the god experience … and convert that into a reasoned understanding of the same. The loss of Sye's psychic qualities to uphold the traditional beliefs … creates an alternative for us to understand the phenomenon … and does not imply a loss of faith. Sye must think that is possible … if we can work to get him out of the dog house.