Ampersand Gazette #10 — Susan Corso

“Then came word of Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter and the possibility that the app could become even more of a cesspool. That was enough for me. I decided to put Twitter in my Facebook category: to stop producing original content for it and only use it for announcements of content I was producing elsewhere.

“It’s my way of pulling back. And I like it. I still record my thoughts, but what would have been tweets are now notes, notes that I can think through more thoroughly, notes that may become a column or a book or a comment on television.

“This feels better to me, more settled, more considered. I no longer feel so strongly the tug of addiction that social media generates. I am slowly returning to me, the person, and away from the persona.”

from an Opinion essay by Charles M. Blow called “My Twitter Pullback Is About More Than Elon Musk” in The New York Times
May 2, 2022

I’ve been on the Libra fence on social media since it began. There was just something in my way about endorsing it whole hog. It’s taken years, quite literally, for me to parse out why. Then I read Charles Blow’s usual zingy prose, and he nailed it in one sentence.

Any guesses?

“I am slowly returning to me, the person, and away from the persona.”

And there it was, right in the pages of The New York Times, in black and white, clear as day. I watched all kinds of friends, clients, acquaintances, and even celebrities curate their life experience on social media. Long before the computer engineers who created it admitted to their intense study of addiction, it felt like addiction to me.

Much of my “argument” about social media was what got left out of the images, 140-character gotchas, memes was the stuff of real life. The highs are swell, yes, but there are lows, and a curated life doesn’t allow for any faltering, any insecurity, any exploration, any failure either.

Life is richer than social media lets it be. Persons are far richer than personae, too.

P.S. Right after I read this piece, Instagram, whereon I was starting to get a generous following of my chakra teachings, totally disappeared my posts. I tried to figure out why. Nothin’ doin’. I’m taking a break from it, and deciding whether or not to continue.

Being disappeared for no discernible reason is quite uncomfortable. And there’s no one to ask about it or fix it. Hmmm. We object when persons disappear, don’t we?

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“One night, I was cooking dinner, and he [my four-year-old Rex] asked, “Is God real?”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think that for real God is pretend and for pretend God is real,” Rex announced.

“I was stunned. That’s a big thought for a 4-year-old. It’s a big thought for a 40-year-old. I asked Rex to explain what he meant.

“God isn’t real,” he said. “But when we pretend, he is.”

“Philosophers have a name for this sort of view. They call it ‘fictionalism.’ Suppose I say, ‘Dumbledore teaches at Hogwarts.’ If that was a claim about this world, it would be false. Hogwarts doesn’t exist here, and neither does Dumbledore, so he can hardly teach there. But they do exist in a different world—the fictional world that Harry Potter lives in. The sentence ‘Dumbledore teaches at Hogwarts’ is true in that fiction.…

“I am a fictionalist about God.…

“Still, I pretend. And I don’t plan to stop. Because pretending makes the world a better place.…

“Pretending makes the world more magical and meaningful.”

from a Guest Essay by Scott Hershovitz for Opinion “How to Pray to a God You Don’t Believe In” in The New York Times
May 2, 2022

I loved this story. And the four-year-old’s answer. It reminded me of another pearl out of the mouth of a babe. A college professor of anthropology asked her four-year-old one night if fairy tales were true, also, it happens, whilst preparing dinner.

The four-year-old, who was carefully tearing salad leaves into small pieces, stopped her work and said to her mother, “Of course. Fairy tales are stories that aren’t true on the outside, but that are true on the inside.”

Someone once asked Carl Jung whether he believed in God. Mr. Jung said, “No, I believe God.”

Here’s the thing. Pretend or not. True or not. Real or not. I’m a happier person when I believe there is a Cosmic Order to our world. I’m also a happier person thinking, despite J. K. Rowling’s dreadful social missteps of late, that Dumbledore is teaching at Hogwarts. And that there really are unicorns, and that the fairies my daddy promised four-year-old me really were living behind the sofa.

God has made enough of a showing in my life that I, like Jung, believe Her. That’s good enough for me.

And it doesn’t matter whether you do or not. I’ll say that again. It doesn’t matter whether you do or not.

It’s totally, completely, forever up to you whether you want to wrangle with the God Idea. Do it. Don’t do it. I don’t think it matters to Her either.

What matters is: does a belief in God foster more life in your life? Excellent.

&

Right after I read the essay above, of course this arrived in my email inbox. I can’t make this stuff up!

The Universe

3:25 AM (4 hours ago)

to me

Here's what I ask folks, Susan, who aspire to being fabulously wealthy:

"Couldn't you just pretend you're a multi-multi-millionaire?

"You know, right after you're done pretending you're not?"

O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-u-h…

The Universe

Susan, it's all pretend.”

from Mike Dooley’s “Notes from the Universe” ©www.tut.com
May 2, 2022

This is what imagination is for, Beloved. Changing things you want to change. How is it that we so easily forget that? Or discount it? Or ignore it?

Great, let’s pretend, for the next two whole weeks, that we are multimillionaires, and see what happens, shall we?

I double-dare you.

&

“As a psychologist, I often teach clients in my clinical practice the difference between pain and suffering. Pain on its own can be difficult. But it’s only when you don’t accept it that it turns into suffering.”

from an article in The New York Times by Jenny Taitz
“Radical Acceptance Can Keep Emotional Pain From Turning Into Suffering”
May 3, 2022

Suffering is definitely one of the big questions of the spiritual life, isn’t it? Why do we suffer? It’s the entire theme of the Book of Job—why do good people suffer?

I liked Jenny Taitz’s take on it—that pain hurts, yes, and that suffering, you might say, is optional. Suffering, she maintains, comes from resisting pain instead of attending to it. Read that again. I said attending to it. Ms. Taitz says accepting. Most of the spiritual people I know would have a problem with that.

So, it depends upon what she means by accepting, and of course, I can’t ask her. I suspect, though, that what she means is attending to the pain, acknowledging the pain, listening to the pain, learning from the pain, really, facing the pain.

I’ve always thought it was no mistake that the word pain has a homophone—a word that sounds like it, but is spelled differently. Try this on: pane. The word for a piece of glass in a window.

Pain is a pane on some aspect of your life, Beloved. It’s there as a messenger.

I wrote a lot more about this in God’s Dictionary, the new version of which can be found here.

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“A major lesson I took from those law students was to avoid a tempting, all-too-common misimpression: that if people have views different from yours, then the reason is either that they lack certain information or are simply bad people—that they’re either naifs or knaves.”…

“But so often, the real issue in these situations is less ignorance or ill will than differing priorities.”

John McWhorter
from an Opinion Essay “I’m Pro-Choice. But I don’t Think Pro-Lifers Are Bad People” in The New York Times
May 7, 2022

Naifs or knaves. What a great phrase. And what a trap of an assumption. I’ve done it myself. Haven’t you? Dang.

John McWhorter, one of my favorite language experts these days, makes a wise distinction. He calls them priorities. Everyone has them. Sometimes, we don’t even know we think of something as a priority until it’s challenged.

The thing is, there’s another word we use synonymously with priorities that makes them sound and seem a whole lot more sinister: agendas.

Isn’t that what an agenda is? A priority that’s been written down.

I’m sure you can imagine how I feel about the potential toppling of Roe. How could I not? But when I think about priorities and not agendas, the experience of those who want what I don’t becomes a whole lot more personal and a whole lot less manipulative.

And maybe something to be curious about instead of instantly going into the suffering by resisting the pain I think I’m perceiving.

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“Every morning, Noom gives me little quizzes about nutrition and water intake and caloric density, and whenever I guess right, it says corny words like “Noomalicious!” and then rewards me for my achievements with NoomCoins that move a piece on a game board as if I were a child playing Candy Land.

“I am a middle-aged man with a mortgage and teenage children and a beard. I have arthritis in my ankles. Please excuse me for a moment while I schedule my next colonoscopy. Do I really need to spend a large part of every day being treated like a preschooler with a sticker chart?

“Well, humiliatingly, yes, I do. I seem to need this very badly. Because the psychological hardware that governs my in-the-moment relationship to food is apparently 5 years old. In fact, this might be why Noom worked for me—not despite its annoying cutesy tone but because of it. That candy-colored, cartoonish frequency allowed it to reach the tiny child in me, the tiny chubby child who first struggled with his weight.”

Sam Anderson
From a New York Times Magazine feature “I’ve Always Struggled With My Weight. Losing It Didn’t Mean Winning.”
May 11, 2022

Husky. Chubby. She has such a pretty face—it’s too bad. The garbage I was handed over food, eating, and body image could sink Atlantis, so I read these sorts of weight-loss success stories holding a huge grain of salt.

This one delighted me. Sam Anderson is insightful, self-deprecating in the best way, and hilarious to boot. The sentence that got me is above.

“Because the psychological hardware that governs my in-the-moment relationship with food is apparently 5 years old.” Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I wonder if mine is even that old?

Certainly, I can feel as deprived as a five-year-old when she’s sent to bed without dessert. Even this morning, we discovered that mayonnaise—one of my go-to favorites—is causing me lately to feel crummy. I could have suffered over it, but my husband made it sound like a valuable piece of information. That’s all. Not deprivation. Not punishment. Not anything but information.

I checked in with my own chakra system to make sure he was right, and he is. My digestion is a wreck this morning. This is why chakra work is so helpful. Instant answers, within you, at the sole cost of asking and listening for them.

This was an Ampersand moment for me. A discovery that information doesn’t have to deprive me unless I let it. In fact, this one piece of information was a both/and. Sure, I’ll have a tuna melt every once in a while. Sure, there will be mayonnaise. Sure, I’m forewarned.

May I invite you to learn about your own chakras by investigating my new workbooks on Amazon? Here they are. And here’s how to choose where to start.

Seeking to be more alive? Start with Energy Integrity Red Root Chakra.
Seeking to be more passionate? Start with Energy Integrity Orange Sacral Chakra.
Seeking to be more powerful? Start with Energy Integrity Yellow Solar Chakra.
Seeking to be more loving? Start with Energy Integrity Green Heart Chakra.
Seeking to be more creative? Start with Energy Integrity Turquoise Throat Chakra.
Seeking to be more intuitive? Start with Energy Integrity Indigo Brow Chakra.
Seeking to be more abundant? Start with Energy Integrity Violet Crown Chakra.
Seeking to be more compassionate? Start with Energy Integrity Rose Thymus Chakra.

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In book news …

I’ve finished the edits for Jezebel Rising, and have a cover design. Revealed here just today. We’re reading it aloud to catch any odd edits we missed, and then will be sending out copies to beta readers. If you’d like to be on that team, email me using the contact page on susancorso.com please.

I’m also starting to promote the chakra workbooks by beginning to book a podguesting tour. If you happen to know about podcast hosts who’d like to learn about the human energy system for their audience, by all means, let me know about them, and I’ll reach out.

Until next time, as always, be ampersand, Beloved,

S.