Analyzing Behavior

So my mom is sitting down across from me, and were eating, and talking. I ask her if vovo (portuguese for grandmother) is coming over on New Years. She says no. She says tia (my aunt) is coming over, but not my grandmother. Originally, I am thinking about my grandmothers situation: if she isn't going to my aunts - the same tia - this year, than where is she going? But eventually, along my arguing, I switch over, unconsciously, into the wish for her to come so I can collect my christmas money....to buy more books. In any case, I press the point and ask my mom where Vovo is going. She says she's not coming. I ask her again, but with greater force, bass and pitch "How is Vovo not coming!??" And now, my mother is acting out. "Why does it matter to you? Tia doesn't want to sleep with her; she snores. And besides she doesn't want to come". She makes passing comments about me to my brother. There's an obvious rancor in it. A way to "get back at me" for irritating her.

She's irritated because she feels guilty. Her mother wont have anyone to be with on New Years - and knowing that her daughters are celebrating New Years together, with her not merely "not there", but deliberately uninvited - and it seems designed to hurt her. Yet, there's truth to my mothers resentment. She is the child of a woman who manipulated her, lied to her, enslaved (taking her wages to pay off the house, from 12 years on) her, and turned her head to the physical abuse and sexual abuse inflicted on her by her father and cousins.

That's a lot of stuff. That my mother has been so committed to her mother for this length of time is important. One wonders how she can "grow", as a person, when her mind is periodically subjected to the relational field that makes up her and her mom - as well as the emotions that underlie her borderline personality disorder.

Nevertheless, it was amusing to me how she had unconsciously 'transferred' her emotion and feeling from the interaction dealing with her decision not to invite vovo to new years, to the subsequent conversations we had about other subjects. The hostility was prodigious. She was speaking in a manner and pace that indicated profound autonomic arousal; her thoughts were darting in particularly spiteful directions, aiming for the 'weak spot' in the detested object (me).

Playing with this state - or at least attempting to - I come towards my mother and discuss what I'm perceiving. The process that we've been involved in, and which me and my sister have both contributed to creating, has led to a point where she can at least sit, and somewhat listen to me, while maintaining a bantering persona. I say to her "you're angry because I made you feel guilty about not inviting Vovo". And she listens, and begins to talk about her reasons for not inviting her. However much I disagree with this approach, for her, in her situation, it is probably necessary, albeit, it pains me knowing that my grandmother will experience this; however, the woman continues to manipulate and engage in spiteful behaviors. So what else can be expected of people like my mother, uncle or aunt?

I am not like this, because fortunately I have enough conceptual knowledge and an existential, or philosophical depth to my experience, that I can deal with the abuse/stupidity of my mother by "transforming" it into an opportunity for compassion - that is, understanding that her brain-mind has been conditioned by countless rounds of perception-action cycles. Since my mom has nothing comparable to my self-awareness and ability to sense the minutiae of experience, my relationship with her can be one of two things: constructive or destructive. I decided long ago that I had it within me to feel compassion for my mother, and to learn to tolerate and process my feelings when she falls into a negative self-state. Thankfully, for whatever good there exists in the world, I have indeed become proficient at regulating my emotions when my mother says stupid things, simply because I know that I am working with a very subtle glitch in the human condition: dissociation and idealization. Because I know how these processes work - and which I watch unfolding countless times in my self and others - how can I honestly hold a grudge against a person who has mindlessly - quite literally - done something that has caused me or others harm? To reprove of course is a necessity. To do what needs to be done, to help build up their capacity for correct awareness, should also be sought. But a punishing attitude, it seems to me, is fundamentally destructive and is done more because we are social primates who love the thought of revenge - and the restoration of social status that it implies - than for the reasons of righteousness that we tell ourselves.

Thougthts on Defensive processes

We can exist in multiple ways vis a vis a particular piece of information, but ultimately we can speak of two ways of organizing the self.

These two ways are (an idea borrowed from the psychologist Alan Fogel) the "subjective emotional present" and the "conceptual self-awareness". These two represent two ways that are way-of-being-in-the-world can be. They are different because they feel different, and indeed, cognitive neuroscience has described these two states as "reflective" and "reflexive", and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called it 'system 1' and 'system 2'.

Fogels description is closer to phenomenology. By emphasizing "subjective", he points out that the phenomenology itself is highly tied to personal feelings, needs, and motivations. In this state, we automatically give expression to our unconscious meanings - or relational histories - and what we are doing in this instant to achieve this need.

Subjective emotional present is feeling-neutral; it is a concept about a class of experiences as they unfold temporally, and psychologically. Negative feelings like shame, fear, depression, anxiety, hatred or jealousy can fall into this class as fluidly as positive feelings like joy, compassion, play, excitement, curiosity, and awe.

Conceptual self-awareness on the other hand is a function of the evolution of the dorsolateral sections of the brain. Extending from the hippocampus, conceptual self-awareness is largely a memory and consciousness process. It is what gives consciousness its power to select and inhibit. Selection and inhibition seem like simplistic things, and indeed, somehow the complexity of our feeling of 'free will' is ultimately reducible to our ability to choose and focus our awareness, or inhibit - at an embodied level (which means the brain stem/vagus nerve) - a particular physiological reaction to a mental percept that aroused a fear. Emotion that spills into the body as a result of a particularly negative percept happens because the mind has not noticed itself engaging in an unconscious, compulsive reflexive process. Self-criticism often happens in these moments; and its our habit of existing with and in these processes, and not extracting ourselves to allow ourselves to perceive ourselves as we act, that creates so much suffering in life.

But it isn't easy to know - and it's a colossal error to think that everyone is equally good at moral psychology. To know the processes and habits of your own mind requires an actual conscious effort, carried continuously, sincerely, and earnestly, over many years. This process is to be understood in the context of neural darwinism, which means that the more frequent the connections between neurons, the more established, efficient, and complex their interactions become. Information flow in the brain is ultimately reducible to synaptogenesis, neurogenesis and myleingenesis: processes that are subject to the selective pressures of a self-aware mind. Because of this, those who have spent their lives, or spend most of their time, reflecting on moral issues with reference to psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary anthropology, and who have also spent much time examining their own experience, have a certain clarity and sophistication in their moral analysis that isn't naturally mirrored by those who spend their time doing other things. To sum this idea up: we are what we do. Our minds mold towards how we relate to the world, which means, our subjective emotional reflexive actions have an automaticity that derives from what we do, whom we do it with, and the moral meaning of what we do. In keeping with a focus on morality - because humans are embodied, reflexive social animals, the needs of our personal self - which is registered at the level of affect - enter our attention as we think about things that serve what we "need", that is, with what we feel. The ultimate result of this principle is that the self, or conscious mind - called the ego, or 'working memory', or the "theater of the mind" - unconsciously "confabulates" a justification for a feeling, as the feeling, being a 'somatic marker' of bodily homeostatic processes, impels consciousness into 'interpreting' what it experiences, and to align cognitions with feelings.

There are certain truths about human nature that aren't readily accepted by academics today, but which I and many others see as fundamental to the human species. These principles are dissociation and idealization. If the mind always inclines to "justify" its experiences, this means that the natural bias of the mind is to 'see the beat', or 'feel the best', that is, to idealize by favoring a positive interpretation on things. A natural corollary of this reality is that consciousness ignores certain things. Indeed, the word "ignore" is problematic as it implies that the content - or perception - has somehow "dropped outside the mind". That if we simply say something about our experience, that means that what we say is true. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Consciousness is not the gatekeeper to perception. Things get in and imply themselves simply by having been noted by unconscious cognitive processes in our brain. The amygdala, on the other hand, is a good candidate for sentinel and gatekeeper of the human mind. As an all around "relevance detector", it takes stock of "threats" - that is, meanings with the environment - as well as noting "opportunities" for positive feedback. The amygdala is there to navigate the complexities of living in a highly nuanced social-environment, but to still carry out its evolutionary function of "guiding the organism with reference to threat and wellbeing"

The amygdala therefore is the cause of dissociation, as well as the 'avoidance' strategy of idealization. The amygdala, in coding the affective valence of each interaction, eventually carves out a personality with a particular propensity for certain reactions - or expectations and anticipations - as a way to predict the world around it. Thus, negative affective responses to a particular facial cue, vocal tone, or gesture, will become associated with a compensatory behavior that was itself 'found', or 'picked up' during some other previous interaction. Positive and negative become 'polarized' in the brain, with the negative 'cues' linked with 'instrumental avoidant' strategies of getting away from the negative affect. Idealization and dissociation are psychological terms for what the amygdala is doing as it 'marks' the external world - and subjective perception - with the affects that are genetically programmed into the typical behavior of the organism.

At which point this begins is arguable, to say the least. Many evolutionary biologists believe that an organism is 'imprinted' in embryo and as a fetus by the level of circulating cortisol in the blood stream, a certain percentage of which passes into the placenta and plays an 'informing' role in the development of the brain. So, even from the get-go, genes are being "acted upon' by the environment of the mothers body, which in turn is 'acted upon' by the mothers own reflexive mental behaviors, as well as the way others in her immediate social world relate with her (which activates her reflexive defensive processes).

A Definition Of Projection

So I'm sitting in the shower, and to stave off paranoia (smoking a juju - my bad habit) I start thinking about what I was reading earlier in Christopher Bollas' new book "When The Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia"; the cover alone attracted my attention; then I read the name (popular psychoanalyst), the topic, and thought "oooooh, interesting". But the honest truth is, any human being who has a history of traumatic affect dyrsegulation - and the concomitant perceptual disturbances in consciousness, are likely going to be afraid of the most dreaded of cultural images: psychosis, hearing voices, hallucinations, being restrained in a straight jacket. The images alone scream 'horror'.

The paranoia probably began at 17 when I watched A beautiful Mind in m English class. Some context will add to the scenario: I had for the 3rd time experienced a nervous breakdown, defined as a complete retreat from social relations, a persistent negative affective state, chronic paranoia, and the cyclical emergence of panic and anxiety. However, my anxieties were largely "contained" by the social context. Everything about the social world was my area of concern; my inability to function normally within it, an experience of continuous "toxic shame".

Toxic shame is the only appropriate word for the person who has suffered severe relational trauma, such as happens to people who are chronically bullied by a parent, sibling, or peers. The experience is itself a testament to what the "negative" of a human experience can be like. Take away the social relationships, habits, and ways of being that social relations entails - such as embodied response, high affect, and a sense of deep subjectivty - and you are left with a vacuum. In the negative, the presence of other people evoke a state in you that basically corresponds to a past experience. The shame of a past shaming, and the contextual factors that incited it. Contextual factor: other people; activation of shame, fear and anxiety.

Years later, I've learned hat the shame was not so much the problem as the human habit to defend against emotions as if they were external objects. Thoughts, perceptions, on the inside, or facial expressions, body movements, prosody, a word, a topic, a sight, sound, smell, taste or touch, is
neurologically linked to a vagal-brain stem-amygdala "gate". Everyone has a 'cue' outside their core awareness that activates them because it activated them in the past. The traumatized person has a whole network of such cues, some of which are linked to the originating trauma-memory (or cognit), and others are iterations that emerge in being a being immersed in a culture that possesses plenty of commercial material that can activate a hyper-aroused autonomic nervous system. These secondary 'traumas', inasmuch as they create new experiences within the individual, makes every human story completely unique. The feelings people have about their perceptions is fundamentally a function of the state that the autonomic nervous system is in.

So, on to projection - the title of this post, and a subject I have temporally forgotten about. In the shower, I was replaying some of the ideas Bollas was presenting about the schizophrenics way of affect-regulation (what it may be ultimately reduced to). He gave some interesting examples of the contents, or aspects of a persons being, being 'projected' outside the organization of the self, into the world it interacts with. What interests me, is how this could happen? Why is there this assumption that projection exists? Certainly, it does exist, but we do not explore the concept further when we think about evolutionary anthropological implications. The mind evolved in an external social context. Projection exists, which means, essentially, that the human mind can 'trick itself' into believing that a that a thing felt in them (defended against out of hate/fear, oftentimes referring back to an experience of shame) is actually in the other. How can such confusion arise? Or is it not confusion, but an evolutionary adaptation? Obviously, its an adaptation, but psychologically, it speaks to an underlying dynamic 'tension' between the identity of the self and the identity of the other. Self and other are simultaneously in consonance and dissonance with each other, in empathic attunement, and sharing of positive affective states; and conflict, competition, a position of threat-defense, and an attitude of domination towards the other.

The schizophrenic, desperate to get away from the experience of his own self, that is, from the process of reflecting and 'owning' the experience one is having, discovers odd ways of creating separation from the observer self and the percepts, thoughts, feelings and ways of being of the suffering, traumatized self. The effort, of course, is made under dire conditions. Already having suffered a psycho-perceptual breach, that is, the eruption of right-hemispheric dissociated affect (with their own emotional meaning) into the left hemispheric brocas area, creating both auditory hallucinations and a breakdown in perceptual awareness, particularly in the self's ability to keep track of a developing context, as is necessary in writing or observing a developing scene, situation, or phenomena.

This horrific breakdown in perception will typically generate a profound fear and anxiety response. The intiial experience of fear feels like a lightning bolt within the mind; imaginatively, even, one could locate it at the temporal lobes, right at the amygdala. Then, an instant later (though felt as simultaneous, due to the time difference between perceptual consciousness and  biological events) the heart drops, indicating that the HPA axis has taken control and the vagus nerve hyper-stimulated the viscera - with stomach anxiety, chest anxiety - affects which drive consciousness into agony.

Consciousness flees from this - from these horrifyingly debilitating feelings and the perceptions, beliefs, and fears they produce in the mind. But when time passes, and affective states soften, and the individual is woken up by genetic social urges to engage and connect, if not with the "human world", than at least the object-world (a more primitive way of organizing) the self, or the brain, finds a way of dealing with the world "out there", by making corresponding shifts "in here". When connection is forged - interest activated - a polarity seems to ensue. The processes of the self and the meanings conveyed by the interacted-with world, organize a way of relating that builds itself from recent "relational" models. The recent past builds from past avoidance strategies, but now with a schizophrenic makeup, processes more easily ignored or dissociated before, are "projected" involuntarily - it seems - into the conscious mind. I think Bollas would agree that this as a breakdown in the selfs ability to experience effectance - or the capacity to effect something. The 'eruption' of an unconscious thought, fully verbalized, into conscious experience, speaks to a breach between the usual ways of processing unconscious thoughts. In a 'normal' unconscious thought (which I can only speak from my own experience) the self perceives something that is not-verbalized, but nevertheless contains meaning. Because we are such a verbally-focused, and superficially motivated society, people usually treat these experiences as "not anything". That they occur, only a self-aware person can aver. But without being able to talk about it and locate it to a particular context and set of conditions, the mind is likely to overlook it and 'return' to whatever their brain usually does.

Projection, then, speaks to a way of dealing with feelings by 'placing' the meaning of something outside the self; in the other, as is common in all humans, or, in the case of the psychotic person, into objects that have somehow become 'linked'. Bollas argues (and I think he is largely right about) that this projective process has different stages to it, with metaphorical projections being "earlier", and more linear (able to be understood and picked up on by a therapist) followed by projections that are tacitly connected, perhaps metonymically, and finally to connections that have become almost random in their nature,

Presumably, because everything which happens has an efficient cause, and is contingently related to events and things around it, these transformations have a "logical" history, no doubt. But it is very interesting to me the way the schizophrenic uses the world around it to order it own self processes. Things which are usually 'organized within', in processes that are basic to organism functioning, are offloaded, as Bollas even writes, in an almost artful manner.

Ultimately, it gets you thinking about how interesting the connections between the organism and the world can be.

The Fun of Photoshop

So how did the human mind become as we know it today? This diagram explains the main processes.

 

The Paradox At The heart Of Healing

In reading "Understanding and Healing Emotional Trauma" by Daniel Sief, I was led to an interesting thought, provoked by the clinician J Bruce Lloyd. Lloyd says we need to "go into our pain", which, of course, is a common theme in psychodynamic theories of psychological healing. But Daniela Sief then mentions the viewpoint of the anthropologist Ralph Neese, who points out that evolution 'created' pain to signal to the central consciousness that something is wrong with the organism i.e. as a means to provoke the organism to do something to get away from the pain. 

INDEED! A paradox at the heart of our condition indeed. What is psychopathology other than the failed effort to get away from ones psychological pain? Instrumental avoidance, earlier a motor strategy enacted by an organism to get away from a noxious influence, has somehow got 'inside us', with the external environment, earlier monitored by the amygdala, becoming mirrored by an internal environment of known properties. 

Because we've evolved this thing called consciousness, the world, is no longer simply external. Now, the contents that arise within our perception and which we consciously reflect upon become an aspect of our "environment". The amygdala monitors and responds to percepts as if they were things "out there", in the external environment. Thoughts and feelings (what I've called "percepts") are now things to be avoided in an instrumental way. Echoing Bromberg, the functioning of the mind parallels the immune system of the body: whereas bodily integrity is the primary concern of the immune system, psychological health, or, in short, affect stability, or sanity, is the prerogative of the unconscious self-system of the mind-brain.

Neese, and perhaps Lloyd as well, see a contradiction here. But I see the evidence of a profound evolutionary process, hidden within ourselves. Lloyd says that we "go against our biology" when we go into our pain. However, I do not think this is the right way to understand the facts.

Since the human mind is itself a relic of our having evolved around one another, and thus evolving faces and nerve connections (such as the ventral nerve complex) that mediate a conscious connection of the body, it should be understood (but is hardly ever mentioned!) that the human "subject-object"  polarity within our consciousness is a stand-in for our experience of relatedness to other humans. Thus, when a person 'goes into their experience', they aren't contradicting any biological rules or laws, but in fact are leveraging the very same processes that gave rise to our unique form of consciousness!

When I create distance between my subjective awareness and my immediate experience, I am embodying within myself the dichotomy of "self" and "other". I turn my experience into an "object" of thought. I, then, embody a perspective to my experience that is 'detached', insomuch as it utilizes compassion, and the power that this feeling and experience can unleash, to 'calm' the dysregulated affective state in question.

To recognize and appreciate this process first requires that one recognize that the self is not any sense singular or essential. What is singular is awareness. What is experienced is multiple, dimensional, and perspectival. We thus have within ourselves "selves" that become activated within different contexts. Contexts can be external or internal. Conditions such as how much sleep we got, the food we eat, caffeine intake (a problem for me!) are factors that affect our biology. External environments associated with a particular trauma (large social environments, for me) stimulate and prompt certain memory-affective processes in the brain.

An additional way to think of this, to add a greater layer of complexity, is in terms of homeostasis. When we do not take care of our bodies (sleep, eating healthy, going to the washroom when the body tells you!) we compromise our capacity to respond in sensitive environments. This is because, as the work of Antonio Damasio has made very clear, the body has a 'hierarchy' of priorities. The body, insomuch as it is as "other" to our perceiving consciousness, demands respect and care from us. When we do not get the rest or  nourishment we need, the higher levels of the brain (dorsolateral complexes) receive less blood flow. Subjectively, we experience this as a reduced capacity to regulate our affective states - as well as a "drowsiness", or dissociation, from the world around us.

Since evolution has progressed, the higher levels accreted upon lower levels do not themselves arrogate any primacy in our functioning.The brainstem determines where blood-flow goes when energy resources our low. And the body, as a rule, is given number one priority. What else does the work of Stephen Porges - and the sheer existence of PTSD - suggest, other than that when affect rises too high, the lower brain 'shuts' down the higher brain. It even releases endogenous opiods to keep the worry-mongering mind 'stunned', so that the business of keeping the body alive can be carried forward.

Finally, that we can even exist within ourselves this way - be the compassionate eye, or gaze, towards our own experience, is truly a metaphysical wonder! (at least to me!). We embody within ourselves the context of our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. The cynics who decry "humans are selfish", fail to appreciate the relational neediness at the core of our selfishness! Were selfish for recognition, for being needed. We need to be recognized, because it was through such recognition, that these amazing brains, these knowing and self-knowing vehicles of consciousness, even emerged!

Books and Life

Lately I've been reading a lot book about consciousness.

First, it was Joaquin Fusters "The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity", which, besides the very interesting concept of perception-action cycles between the environment and the organism, and a way of thinking about the brain that involves hierarchical feedbacks between different regions, his underlying mission - to convince his reader that consciousness is 'just' an epiphenomenon of physical organic matter to be too implausible to take seriously. At Amazon, I gave him 2 stars out of 5 - seems harsh right now (perhaps would of gave him a 3) but I trust my earlier perception, inasmuch as reading his words, and his cavalier way of presenting epiphenomenalism, got deeply under my skin.


Now I'm reading two books coming from 2 different perspectives. If Joaquin Fuster represents a conservative view (the mind as a non-causal epiphenomenon of organized matter), Christof Koch represents a moderate view, and Marjorie Hines Woollacott, a liberal view.

Fuster wont even allow consciousness any causative role, even though Roger Sperry's emergent interactionism makes it very clear that conscious, existential qualia guide neurnal processes - i.e. as the 'meanings', 'memories', and 'gestalts' of experiences. Fuster's view is an impossible one. Ugly, reprehensible, and sickening. It obviously strikes a negative chord in the human mind, because, well, the nature of human existence - the consciousness of our consciousness - itself generates the affects and forces that inspire concerted reactions to the world. The mind which demotes consciousness to an 'epiphenomenon', who sees all the psychodynamic complexity, representation, and meanings about self "not significant", or at least, not significant enough to change their orientation towards the world, one really can't help but wonder

Jokes aside, the issue must come down to developmental differences in life experiences. The rule probably is: 'what happens earlier has a large effect', although it isn't iron clad. Point is, I can not understand the person who wants to degrade life and the meanings that emerge within it to the dustbin. How can one inspire oneself, and be in the world, and live with others in a meaningfully alive way, if one harbors a suspicion that none of it ultimately 'means' anything beyond the luke-warm 'requirement' to be moral because epiphenomenal matter likes it.

Reflection upon the self, and the paradoxical 'gestalt', of knowing your own awareness, and being in awe of it is an emotional experience that speaks to me, and tells me: "this could not be unless consciousness amazes itself", that is, has causative influence in neuronal organization.

Next was the much more enjoyable

Christof Koch is a tall lanky German-American biologist, scientist, physicist, who believes that consciousness exists in all of matter, and in a certain organization, automatically becomes sentient. Koch, I must admit, does make clear the logical implications of "what" the world looks like when you want to explain how reality unfolds. The underlying assumption is: "mathematics is fundamental", and reflects ways of organization in the world. Koch therefore wonders (at one of his more extreme moments) that maybe one day the internet - itself a thousand times more powerful than the brain, could become sentient.

One part of me thinks "you're fucking insane". Something in me doesn't like the idea - doesn't like the degradation of the human mind, human self, and human meanings, to some arbitrary show of engineered "minds" - with no other proof to a 'mind' than the claim that the robot in question has been designed to organize vast amounts of information (though nowhere near a human brain).

I'm skeptical that silicon can ever match the complexity of carbon, so, unless we mimic the universe, it seems likely that silicon will never be a useful source material for creating complex sentient life-forms.

All in all, Kochs views are interesting; his theorizing and beliefs about the possibility seem far-fetched, inasmuch as the biochemist Nick Lane believes silicon to be a less efficient element for complex systems than carbon. I think I'll trust the biochemist.

Finally,

This book arouses different emotions in me. Her passion for her subject and her belief in an underlying meaning touches me. However, I don't think she is very rigorous in her argument, and, the psychoanalytical part in me can't help but wonder whether she promotes a simplistic spirituality, or what can almost be a fetishistic and naive commitment to views that inculcate narcissism and self-importance.

I am not at all saying that Marjorie is any kind of person, but some of her arguments, examples, and theories, really have little empirical justification. With 'bottom-up' approaches, we work not merely from biophysics, but also from academic psychology - that is, the steven pinker type, experimental approach that seeks to explain things in more 'parsimonious' ways.

I think this approach makes sense because humans have a very nasty habit of deceiving themselves. I feel Woollacotts approach contradicts important ideas about human evolution - such as our situatedness, sensitivity to immediate social context, and proclivity to unwittingly enact defenses, for example, by insisting on a certain view because one is 'in the throes' of an affective experience, partially dissociated, that prevents one from changing course in ones thought or speech. Experience is fundamentally psychodynamically organized, as different "meanings" interact to bring consciousness into a comfortable affective state. This means that a human organisms fundamental concern is "affect regulation", i.e. controlling feeling, which also entails having your mind pushed 'this' way and 'that' way by meanings that promise a certain response (in the other) or the 'self'.

I am basically saying that Marjories picture is overly certain-of-itself. Ontological statements can really screw up human thinking and acting by 'stereotyping' our thought to focus on the world in presumptuous ways, which of course dissociates potentially important information. Emotions, then, are 'rudders', that guide our cognitive awareness towards particular 'cognits', to borrow a term from Fuster.

I am very open to the idea of panpsychism. I am also open to the possibility of Psi, as if it exists, it indeed shows that there is a level of consciousness, ontologically unique to human experience, that allows consciousness to "skip" the space in between two objects. I like the idea, but I do not think Marjorie presented the idea in any meaningful mechanistic way. She assumed what must logically be assumed (that a 'mind' surrounds the mind within physical matter) and even drew a nifty diagram, with a big consciousness that swallows up a little consciousness. But this doesn't make any connections with known physical laws, thus, requires a lot of assumptions (i.e defying occams razor).

I am not saying she is wrong, but I do think it's presentation was simplistic, and so might offend people who are more interested in usable information, rather than "baseless theorizing".

From my own perspective, I think "strange attractors" have something to do with it. I think when two people connect on a deeply empathic level, and therefore share a similar empathic affect, that the "consciousness" which exists within them might 'supervene' upon the matter within and between them, leading to an 'entrainment' of sorts that, perhaps through quantum entanglement, allows the communication of awareness, mind, and selfhood, from one body to another.

Love, and consciousness, seem somehow very similar. If the Universe is diffuse consciousness, and the organic matter which arises within it, instantiations of an organized and directed being, then in social creatures, and later in humans, we find an organization that gives unique expression to an affect, and meaning, that speaks "goodness" and "peace". These two concepts entail human experience - as well as the paradoxical relationship between trauma, fear, and anxiety, and the pleasures of joy, peace, and wellbeing. That is, having suffered as I had, I found myself more easily motivated to find the "deeper meaning" in reality. Reality thus provides a 'way out', when the suffering being searches, explores, and begins to acquire meanings that almost 'draw' it toward some predestined purpose.

Could the universe have a purpose? Could ones suffering, have a purpose, that finds its place within the universes purpose? My life could have gone in many different directions, yet I was built with a basic need "to survive", and to survive, I came, almost inevitably, to the reality of compassion. This emotion at the center, it seems to be, and emanates, a power that draws the human heart towards it.

Magic In The Moment

I depend on some sort of magic in the moment. In every situation, every disequilibration, requires an almost cosmic sensing into how to set things aright.

But the window of opportunity can feel so narrow. I sense so many different selves, the "me's" who exist when I find myself acting in the moment. Contextual conditions - the stresses I feel impinging on me, as a force of a particular situation - speak to neurons in my head that 'make' me do things; I feel "captive" to my body, to the last thing, to the last physiological effect, leaving my 'watching' mind, gasping for expression.

I pop up from time to time. I, or this higher force in me, gives me the experience of being a sort of "father" to myself. But from where does this identification derives its force? It is literally surreal. Existentially speaking, I've "switched", or find myself "switching", by tenderly, and calmly nursing my experience back to a state of equilibrium.

The moment of experiencing equilibrium, of finding, like Goldilocks, a state that is 'just right'. What is this attractor that draws my mind towards it? How can one explain such a phenomena - me, my mind, my being - as being 'brought upwards' by a mental attitude, towards ones own identity, that somehow permits a shift, a movement in bodily affect, and with it, disturbing perceptions recede, consciousness finds itself, as itself, as this embodiment, as it were, of what Buddhism would call 'buddha consciousness'. I make no claims of being such a consciousness, but I do feel 'carried' by a "strange attractor", which I am connecting with, and indeed, coming to identify more with.

How else can a mind be lifted out of it's torpor? How else can I calm the stormy seas of my subcortical brain - the tsunami of dorsal vagal activity, numbing, and dissociation from objective reality? The human being is such a creature which has evolved the preconditions - an essential sociality - that serve as a background to the experience of being "one with the universe". My sense of oneness - deriving from my sense of twoness, of the other - allows me to 'find' my own "higher nature".

The metaphor of a "higher nature" derives from this feeling of sensing into. Who's sensing? Answer: My self with the need to sense. And where are you sensing into? Answer: the self I know I can be.
What allows this transformation, other than a fundamental connection between consciousness, love, and the universe? The organism which experiences this, from the inside, as a subjective being, with a history of meanings, cannot help but consider it's personal narrative as fundamental to the transformation process. Whatever "neural harmony" is found, seems to be the result of a non-material process that acts upon the dynamical states of neurons; and the transformations in the brain are themselves constructions from the energy created in the psychological meaning-making experience.

The relationship is necessarily bi-directional, and, paradoxical. If nature shows us anything, it's that weird, seemingly opposite things seem to 'hold' together, and in their 'holding' together, help to sustain one another. At a basic level, mitochondria need a cell nucleus, and the cell nucleus needs the mitochondria. Cells of tissues, once 'finding' that homeostasis, need one another, as well as their relationships with other tissues, in order to make an organ. In the mind, the 'object' of thought is inextricably tied with an observer. And vice-versa. This reality is itself a consequence of our evolution in large social groups. The "other" within us, is a 'stand-in', for the other humans we relate with. Mutual dependencies sustain the world. Our minds - and all that occurs within it - owes its existence to the presence of other people. So what, given the generative potential of this pro-social organization, can we make of misanthropism, other then condemn the social system - and those in a position to most influence it's direction - of complete thoughtlessness?

Maybe the world pulls all of us along a path until were forced to wake up and face reality. The "reality principle, so ingenuously termed by Freud, is something every mind will one day have to recognize. The need to escape reality, to escape negative feelings, is something so known, yet eagerly dissociated. The larger consequences bequeathed by this inability to 'know clearly' leads to feedbacks in culture that sustain themselves by sustaining individual - yet common - difficulties with feelings, like shame, anxiety, depression, or any state that might represent the self as 'weak' and 'vulnerable'. Money hungry CEO's , however powerful they may seem, necessarily have 'unreflected upon' issues stemming from early life circumstances, such as the modelling of behaviors, and the way the mind becomes biased to self-organize in reference to the 'meaning' of the action: is it good, or bad? Humans are animals subject to non-consciousness meanings that control their behavior. Much of this non-conscious, dissociative meaning comes from shame and pride. We fight along this 'continuum' of feeling as we build our personalities. Everything about our taste, interests, and pleasures, derive their orientation from an earlier experience that represented an 'image', or 'position', such as this, as desirable to the organism's (your) well-being. Each decision was biased by the nature of the communicative display - gaze, facial expressions, prosody, movement - and the 'content' that was communicated, is very often a 'husk' relative to the emotional meanings in the face and voice.

Shame and pride are 'useful reductions' in that they serve the larger group selection goal of 'shared intentionality'. You cannot get people agreeing or wanting to agree, without a carrot called pride, and a stick called shame. Within and between these psychodynamically related states, lies a spectrum of human emotions listed by major emotion theorists (Ekman, Ledoux, Davidson etc), but for some reason, perhaps culturally and socially influenced, shame and pride have not been seen as the 'master' emotions, the north and south pole, as it were, of the human personality.

Pride is the state that is sought, in the sense that social interactions exhibit actions and behaviors that elicit certain effects on others. It is the "other focus", the 'view from nowhere', or the 3rd person awareness of some deeply human perspective, which impresses itself into the perceiving mind. Eventually, the mind will respond to a situation with a response suitable to the nature of the communicative action. A smile will be released, in the "implicit relational knowing" (BCPSG) that a smile will elicit a good response. Prediction becomes the focus, but the prediction is mostly concerned with what will be 'good' for the organism, and pride, a state which "protects" the mind within, is incessant and inveterate in it's idealizing.

Shame, on the other hand, is feared by the organism. The state itself spurs idealizing - searching - for a "knowledge" housed within, that will give it a way out of its present feeling. Idealizing battles with Dissociation. The shame experienced, expunged, purged from awareness, with the scratching mind striving for a better image of itself.

Shame is a moment of dissolution, a breaking down, a 'cutting' within the mind that keeps certain objects interdicted from conscious knowing. It is a scar on the psyche - a teacher of values, of norms - but can also be used to the point of destruction, where the organism itself becomes defined by it's shamefulness, and so it's existence becomes a hectic and frenzied effort to find pride, find a goodness about itself.

But it can't find itself because it's body now houses the shame. The muscles in the throat, stressing during speech, reflect back to the self an image of brokenness, of weakness. Body and mind, small and vulnerable.

Just as pride becomes conditioned into the body's homeostatic process, so does shame; and so, the presence of mental illness, all mental illness, owes its etiology to the grating force of dissociation on mental functioning. In psychosis, the left hemisphere has lost the power to regulate it's experience, and so the experiencing consciousness suffers as it enacts frantic, worried, and confused behavior. Schizophrenia is the breakdown of the left brain, similarly, because of a long history of dissociated shame and hurt. The human heart, terrified of shame, and envious of pride, throws itself into dissociation by instinct. To forget, and not recall; and to be inclined to think something else, is very human. But it's also entirely animal-like.

Letters From My Mind

I am currently finding it hard to see myself, feel myself, and be myself. I am dissociated. Existing in a "fuzz", with a bodily feeling, in the stomach region, of a general "lack". If it could speak, it would say "something is wrong". I'll say it, because I'm "it": something is wrong.

I don't want to exaggerate or catastrophize, but I do need to speak. to myself, to me, to Michael. I am both me and this suffering me. A tired, forlorn, lonely, man of 30; still living at home with his parents. Going to school, but still not completely opening himself up to others. He speaks to the teacher - I speak to the teacher - and "we" come away feeling good and bad.

Today, things just felt wrong. From the morning, to taking Maggy for a pee, to the walk, to the wait, to the skies above me and the two people sitting at the Go station, looking like drug users, smokers, people who speak loud and bluntly. The bus ride, boring. The book I'm reading, interesting, though depressing. With the way that the day feels, I'd rather not be fighting with the nature of consciousness - is it causative, or isn't it? - and running down a million rebuttals for how consciousness, at least my consciousness, is causative, and constantly interfaces with the contents which trouble me, which I must localize, isolate, and work with in a conscious way. For me, the intrusion of a negative shame response from the facial expression of the short, muscular Arab guy as he looked at me after I laughed at the professors goofiness, requires an instantaneous response - but it is not reflexive; but carefully crafted, it is sensed into. My day has been one long run on in an intellectual realm between me and Joaquin Fusters view of consciousness as merely 'epiphenomenal', and not causative, as it is phenomenologically experienced to be.

In the above situation, how could I effected that organization without the searching of a needing mind? I am that mind. And it is me, and my mindful deliberation, both in the body, in the inhibition of a terrifying emotion which has historically crippled me, and my post-hoc verbal reflection that contextualizes the nature of the experience. Fuster says all this can be done 'without consciousness', in that consciousness is merely 'epiphenomenal'. To me, this is balderdash, as it takes me, and my history, interfacing with a particularly fearful existential reality, and "holding myself", as it were, as I endure the experience, and bring myself back to a state of homeostasis. These processes are fundamentally mental. Meanings, not "cognits". Cognits, as explained by Fuster, are a poor candidate term for what I experience in these sorts of moments. It is the gestalt; the totality of "me" moving, connecting, sensing. Fuster seeks to do away with the "problem" of the observer, acting, agentic ego. But the witness is the inevitable "whole" that is my observing consciousness from moment to moment. I find myself, know myself, through this thing called consciousness. It is in my reflecting, and "collecting" in my reflecting, the sense that I grow bigger, stronger, in knowing myself, which necessitates a realer impression of what consciousness is and isn't. Fuster's view, as well as Churchlands, seems superficial, and a tad arrogant. But the arrogance, itself, inasmuch as it serves as a defense against a long unrecognized neediness, leaves the mind only "half" reflecting. Fuster does something like this. He reads deep, philosophical stuff, but he talks scantly of how his own experience in socialist Spain promoted a dread and discomfort with "oppression", which is the input and impact of the other. Fuster talks about territoriality as if it were the first principle of animal behavior, as opposed to being an "add on" to a later, more primitive distinction. The truth is, threat and safety determine the experience of a humans sense of "territoriality", and so their feeling of "liberty" i.e their freedom to act.

I have much problem with the libertarian disregard, and almost a callousness, an unwanted widening of the circle, a fear of the other, a need to impose limits and enunciate order. I know this feeling because I lived within it. I had my conservative, orthodox views, and regurgitated, cliched phrases. I now recognize that I spoke these ways because of an underlying, dissociated anger - at the other - at the people who've bullied me, who took such mindless satisfaction in hurting another person. This was me! ME! MYSELF! MY ONE OPPORTUNITY AT LIFE! How could such a powerful, super-order narrative arc, not influence the direction of my political views? It's inevitable, because the brain, indeed, is a closed system. And the emotions that battle within it have to be resolved, not by the brain, or the "cortex" (according to Fuster), but by the person who struggles to integrate the meanings - the gestalts - that are approached, not by the physical neurons, but by the mysterious force that brings it all together, into life, and into meaningful engagement with reality.

The years will likely be difficult. Future Michael: don't have fear. Trust. Breathe. Know. Metabolize your emotion constructively, mindfully. Seek and find healthy relationships, find friends, do not seek more than you feel ready for; but understand the necessity of disturbing your comfort level. You can only move forward by tolerating and absorbing - processing - the negative. Breathe. Have love. Cultivate, this mysterious, wondrous thing called compassion.

Shaping Human Evolution

I have a dream. In this dream, human beings have come to better understand how they evolved to behave as they presently do. Something like this charges my fantasies, as it promises to give mankind a more accurate understanding of his current "being in the world" - the way he thinks, feels, imagines, and resolves the various realities he come to experience in his life.

Necessarily, such an enterprise would need a logical timetable. A plausible 'picture' of such a time table is a) "long time", referring to the force of evolutionary biological forces on his present constitution; b) "middle time", referring to the force of historical cultural circumstances on the organization of the brain and mind, and c) "short time", referring to the historical contingencies of development.

Development can in turn be spliced up into: a) Intrauterine circumstances (mother's stress, diet, which in turn is "scaffolded" by her immediate relationships, social background, culture, history, etc); b) Early life experience (0-2 years); c) Childhood (2-11); d) Adolescence (12-18); e) Young Adulthood (19-30).

This developmental picture is enormously ecological, as we can see biological evolution as the "widest circle", with cultural history encompassing the intrauterine circumstances of the mothers pregnancy, and the events of the child's early life.

Now, I will stop to answer an obvious question: from what basis do I argue that man is "acted" upon by the environment? The answer can come in the form of neuropsychology. The amygdala is a deep-brain region that specifically responds to environmental stimuli that is either "good" or "bad" for the organism. It is thus regarded nowadays as a general purpose "relevance" detector, with 'defense' as it's strategic core, and 'instrumentality' (doing things that are advantageous) as a later adaptation. The amygdala becomes activated at .10 milliseconds when shown a mean-face, but consciousness doesn't recognize it until .500 milliseconds. Consciousness is thus 'fed' an image, or perception, that will frame it's form of thought and affective valence. In this way, the vast majority of human behavior is constructed from what Joaquin Fuster calls "action-perception" cycles. Thought, Affect, and Action, become "connected", by the immediate form or "gestalt" of a situation. Through something called a "vitality form" (Daniel Stern 2011), mirror neurons pick up the 'gestalt', organized from the 'bottom' up in motor programs. In the situation, certain 'engrams' will be 'called up' and the individual will find himself enacting a particular cultural, historical, and personal behavior that 'suits' this particular interpersonal interaction.

To go a little further into the etiology of this process, in every human beings life, 'defensive' actions, or stimuli that trigger activity in amygdular neurons, increase in activity and specificity as environmental interactions 'shape' the neurons in this 'primary' nucleic brain center. But what are the parameters in any interaction? What are the primary internalized forces that act upon the organism, causing it to act 'this' or the other way? Michael Tomasellos theory of "shared-intentionality" provides the obvious "setting" that internalized affective process are biased to meet towards. Nervous systems must be wired in such a way that information on other faces, moving body's, and the sound of a voice, may give primary direction to how the organize should 'inform' consciousness. A 'still-face', for example, would trigger neurons in a baby (and later, an adults) brain to stimulate physiological reactions of fear and anxiety; as adults, these feelings are "supervened", as it were, by the instrumental avoidances organized, again by instinct, as the organism learns how to "dissociate" negative affective, psychological, and behavior material, and unconsciously "idealize" positive states, themselves picked up by non-conscious valence-gestalt sensing systems, which can infer and internalize (make available for action systems) behaviors seen in others that result in certain kinds of feedback (positive feedback).

Feedback seems to be what the social brain is organized to care about. Negative emotions, resulting from negative communicative displays (primary = facial/vocal, secondary = meaning content;this does not mean meaning content doesn't amplify the effects in non-verbal communicative displays) generate 'compensatory' activity - this being the locus of what we've historically called "psychoanlysis". Neurology, or the logic of the neuronal systems in our brain, is providing a biological framework for unconscious psychodynamic processes that 'organize meaning' to be biased towards the "positive" in any situation (this process is non-stop, always changing, always adapting, so it becomes increasingly complex as the person ages) and to dissociate, or "inhibit" processes in the amygdala that otherwise generate certain subcortical "anxiety" affects.

A simple way of thinking about human sociality is with reference to what Colwyn Treverthan calls the "Pride-Shame" continuum. Pride and shame would be the two logical poles that would make Tomasellos theory of "shared-intentionality" phenomenologically feasible. People need to be guided to "share positive states" with one another, and to avoid states that were opposite, that is, states where our intentional - or affective - interests were different and incompatible. Between cognitive and affective processes, it is clear that the affective is the more primary, organizing vector, on top of which beliefs later sit. As the self grows, beliefs itself becomes a force upon the affects in the body, leading to stronger feedback loops as time goes forward (i.e as the cortex grows and develops, and myelination continues).

Human beings can use all this knowledge - of our vulnerability to shame experiences (or experiences of negative feedback) and a tendency to fall deeply into a "shame attractor" when a parent uses shame too often in discipline, as well as a tendency towards narcissistic action, when others in our world model for children the behavior of ignoring others, in pursuit of their own interests. Much can theoretically done with this knowledge to help individuals develop the regulatory knowledge as well as the neurological hardware of greater executive consciousness, developed by mindfulness i.e the conscious reflection on the minds own activity. Meta-cognition is not a given - human beings have evolved to be reflexive and automatic. Ones capacity to think clearly, and more objectively, is fundamentally related to the ability to recognize the influence of a past "engram" on present experience, and to have the imaginative resources, and a nuanced sense of bodily affect, to move attentional awareness in another direction.

With all the problems in this world, and with all the things humans do in the face of injustice, it could not be anymore important than to increase the awareness - change the brains, and with that, the minds - of more and more people, so that mindfulness will not be felt as some weird new-age belief, but as a veritable neurological technology - something we can use to increase our attentional awareness of ourselves, of our behaviors, so that we can 'attune' our minds to the way that evolution organized us: to be aware of our tendency to respond negatively to negative communicative displays; to recognize our susceptibility to 'shame' states i.e. from more subtle 'awkward' feelings to full-blown humiliation, and to protect ourselves from such states with 'over-determined', manic defenses; to realize, also, that we are prone to have poor recall of past events, and thus learn to speak with more humility about what we recall about a situation. Most of all, human beings need to be realistic about their fundamental emotionality. The brain is built to adapt - and to adapt, in a creature such as us, is inextricably tied to emotional connections with others, and thus, to emotional feedback, a sense of connectedness, and a sense of belonging.

To make a better world, all we really need to do, from the perspective of neuroscience, is to train the brains of tomorrow to tolerate negative feelings, learn from negative feelings, and grow as a person - and as a mind - in the pursuit of 3 things which will likely dominate human behavior in our species future: cultivating relationships, studying the natural world, and technological innovation.

Writings For today

I'm feeling it pretty strongly right now. I'm feeling this intense shamefulness.

I feel like my brother is causing it to me. I feel bullied. I feel unresponded to.

I sense in him this repetitive, wind up gizmo, working from some stereotypical foundation, taking hold in his mental stream, and leaving me to relate with what Louis Cozolino calls 'reflexive social language' - ways of being that my brother has obviously developed to relate with the people he interacts with. The "ways of being" are stereotyped in that they are accomplished in a relatively hypnotic trance-like state, whereby the 'personality' is constructed moment to moment in accord with some underlying pattern of activity.

In doing this, he loses sight of the meaning that his behavioral cues can induce in others. When I speak and I get a blank faced response, I feel exactly like the baby's described in the still-face paradigm. I feel helpless, and reactive, and needing, and I myself come to react with the same neediness that was programmed into me by my early life relations.

My implicit relational memory is riddled with negative expectations. Riddled, shaped as it is, and feeling inside as it does, because the face I interacted with was an unstable one. However much love was in her, in other parts of her existed dissociated shame, and thus an anger, aggressiveness, irritability, all made manifest in grimaces, disgust faces, and intense shifts in movement.

I can only infer from my present experience what my early life may have been like. My mother as I know her now is dissociative. Although not officially diagnosed, she is obviously a member of that category known as 'borderline personality disorder'. Intense sensitivity to any language that may intimate vulnerability (shame or anxiety states) is regulated by 'externalizing', i.e. getting upset, angry, irritable, or even bully another person. A person this "split", that is, unable to 'reconnect" at those moments when she gets aroused, is somehow present in me - as this "core shame" feeling. It's not anything other than a feeling which inhibits and suppresses ventral vagal activity. Perhaps, I wonder, that this wouldn't be such a problem for me if I didn't smoke so much weed - when I have ample experience providing me knowledge of how routinely harmful this practice is to myself.

It's tiring, and frightening. To feel this weak, and pathetic. The other day, yesterday, I felt strong. I was resilient in the face of multiple arguments with multiple people. I was handling myself very well, maintaining focus and affective attachment to the object of my interest. Today, I am experiencing the opposite of that. Not in the beginning - it started off well - but it has since fallen low when I started smoking weed. It was originally related to Charlie Sheen and his HIV and how depressing this subject matter - he and the kind of person he is - was to me; and as I smoked, I fell deeper into a depressive state, leading to a sudden "invitation" to hyper-focus on Jordans responses to me. Feeling this way, my place of focus was externalized as the "facial reaction". Enough emotional input was offloaded for this attentional tast. No big deal? Horrible. I'm lodged in a shitty state with seemingly no way out.

But how can I keep doing this? Have I not fallen low enough? Do I still think I can go as I'm going - knowing my current level of accomplishment, and still smoke weed? Can I afford those "1 times out of 5" where things go wrong, and I feel totally dysregulated, dysfunctional, and alone? This is a horrible addiction that is made all the more horrible by it's subtly. Is it that bad? It's "just" weed after all. But it's a drug. It's in the opioid family, with endorphins and oxytocin. Cannabinoids like THC narrow attentional focus by "diffusing" sensory feelings. We can move from thought to thought with a rapidity and narrow focus that can morph into the popular symptom of paranoia. Depending on the feeling state interacting with the general cannabinoid effect, a person can be creative, relaxed, and open, or severely obsessive, paranoid, and delusional.

I need to write to metabolize these feelings. This writing is for me, although I know others can read it - its for the makeup, the place it provides me. The sense of safety for me to write and access my words.

Sometimes, I too need to cry. I don't cry - I stand by others as they cry, but I've had trouble doing it, something that may be related to the "blunting" effects of SSRI's (and SNRI's), or maybe to my lack of affective interactions with others to provide the emotional 'grist' for a later cry. But right now, I do feel like crying. I feel unsafe. I feel exposed - weak, short, shameful, ugly. The only thing I can't say about myself - because saying it is so unquestionably untrue to me - is that I'm dumb. I have a feeling and sense of my self, deriving from my passion for reading, learning, growing, understanding, and connecting with an underlying meaning, that I am an intelligent mind who understands himself - despite failing in restraining myself, my mind is open to what it sees. No doubt this "skill" derives from my long traumatic history, supercharging, as it were, my brains norepinephrine systems, and the associated vigilance (self and other).

Life seems destined towards something. Trauma results in enhanced transcription in norepinephrine neurons. Increased receptor proteins between these cells leads to a greater awareness of the environment: both the external environment, and after dozens of rounds of complex mental simulations, the internal environment of ones thinking, feeling, and imagining. Norepinephrine now powers self-reflection systems. The increased awareness of self - of ones internal environment - provides a "stepping stone" onto the path to enlightenment. Essentially, enlightenment is what's left when one collapses, when ones body becomes formed to suffer - either with a sense of social annihilation, or the existential annihilation that comes with death, life forces a new organization upon the self-reflective organism, powered by the norepinephrine systems that were upregulated by traumatic experience. To survive, for us, now means to survive our own awareness of suffering. To somehow find a new organization, or way of perceiving, that allows a new, higher, more stable organization than the chaos of anxiety, shame, depression and dissociation. I can see, truly, that there is something incredibly powerful about compassion. The emotion can be directed outwards, as well as inwards. Inwards! The serotonin, oxytocin, endorphin, dopamine concoction that produces these incredible sensations stabilize negative states. They are an energy - a reality of a deeper connectivity - that is able to "rebind" what has been broken, neurally, and psychologically (which are yet somehow the same). You need to submerge yourself within it, to find the courage to move yourself - be yourself - for all to see.

Thoughts, And Cleaning Mental Space

My mind flashes from performance – or want to perform – or to nevertheless hear oneself performing, and to feel that jittery urge, that baseless perception: somethings wrong. You don’t sound right. You sound off. You sound….what is the word? What is the word that matches with this idea? Disconnected? Worse???????        Utterly shameful object. Utterly pathetic, weak, morbid, distorted, experienced...as.....I am unknown to myself. I'm in constant tension with my being, with my sense of identity...............At these moments. 

I am here to pour my heart out, to let myself breathe....it out. The toxic shame. The morbid thoughts, feelings, and sensations that collide inside of me, leaving me weak, enervated, crestfallen. 

I know what I am... Or I think I do. My instinct pulls me outwards, towards it, towards some sign, out there, implied by my persistence, by my humanly, animal need to survive. But to what? What does my mind seek after? That feeling. A goodness in the world, whose presence appears in these types of feelings. Explosion of love - only something which can be called love - saturates my being, enlivening my heart - and telling my mind, "this is you". From where I am - right now - the moment contains that special "organization" - of you sensing YOU. You find it, like the compass finds the north. The mind "senses into" at such moments. It finds that higher organization that will help stabilize it's present chaos. From the chaos, the swirling mess that is me, shoots out a torpedo of intention, catching that feeling, and from that feeling, knowing how to guide yourself back to safety, back to sanity, back to the self. 

It is utterly horrifying how real such perceptions can be. I remind myself, "I didn't get much sleep", "I keep drinking extra-large coffees",  "I had 5 green teas", "and your currently stoned" <-- lot of careless things for a person with a trauma history to be doing. But I do it. I find myself following a pre-written script: "this is what you do when you wake up" i.e. coffee, "this stuff is stimulating, plus its healthy" = green tea. Delusions pop into my mind, and because they're impelled by feelings, I do what the body typically impels the brain to do: perform action that will alleviate the need. 

How can we claim "free will", knowing what we do about ourselves? If free will could be quantified, the vast majority of our behavior would be under the heading: "determined by environment/body, via memory and homeostasis interactions". Once in awhile, depending sometimes on contextual factors (being girded by others) or a fortuitous circumstance, or from the practice of mindfulness, we can really relate to ourselves in a softer, gentler, more modulated, and thus, deliberate fashion. We settle the feelings inside of us, and we recognize, respond, and ultimately trust the "other". We move into our body's, and respond from it. The sound which comes out - the sound that is you, which you know, and which you know carries all your vulnerabilities, out there, to be heard, to be interpreted and digested by other minds. An image of me, of myself, enters them; and the self they see, if the wrong one, gets embedded in their memories. A basin of attraction. 

We exist in a whirl pool of activity; what we don't usually reflect upon, is, that we are that activity. We are that whirlpool getting swept round and round, in circles, connecting stereotyped environments, with stereotyped reactions, in, out, in, out, like a coin put into a jukebox, and the movements of the machine putting a record to be heard, certain buttons play certain songs. 

What's frightening is that it's not a metaphor: the dynamics are precisely as deterministic as being "pushed" by a trigger and the brain enacting a response. Our freedom from this reality is an impossibility. A contradiction in terms. Yet, when I find myself embedded in this construct of my unconscious making, I am inspired by a feeling, by an experience, by some ineffable 'witness', that allows me to guide my mind back towards equanimity. 

This still says nothing about the reality of consciousness. The simple capacity to "will" seems to be an energy generator, diverter, causing the energy that "constructs" it's "self", to be deliberately focused by this thing we call consciousness. Willing, I can enhance neural activity in different areas of consciousness. Neurofeedback from an fMRI could allow someone to consciously activate any area of the brain with greater frequency, once it detects the phenomenological correlates. How can this be? Where can this be happening in the brain? The general, most interesting fact about this thought experiment is that our focused consciousness can deliberately change neural activity. Joaquin Fuster, the cognitive scientist, thinks this entire process is automated by non-stop action-perception feedback loops, with my mind recycling the past as it creates the present, governed by biophysical laws determined by the speed and nature of chemical reactions. We, "us" on the inside, are just "going for the ride", as it were. 

But that really doesn't help explain the obvious duality of consciousness and matter. There is a physical "thing", called the brain, and the neurons and glia which make it up; and there is me, my mind, my perceptual experience of reality. Two things, existing, at the same time. Reality, at least as it appears ontologically (as two different "substances") is manifestly dual. 

But mainstream philosophers and scientists are biased to perceive things in materialists terms; as physical principles following basic biological and physical laws. I find this perspective enlightening, but short-sighted. No other creature can operate it's mind from within - can take such conscious, executive action within its own mind, and thus upon it's own physical matter - as human beings can. Humans, or the "whole" of the human self, in being able to organize, serialize, yet find some important qualia in the structure of it's organization,  seem to, as it were, "close the circle" of the paradoxical, circular, feedback processes that characterize the dynamics of physical and phenomenological reality. The minds power to excite itself, in simply 'knowing" it's own states, and realizing a particular organization within itself, seems to realize consciousness at it's most refined, acting upon the physicality of stereotypical matter. The major point is: this 'consciousness' "finds" itself, and acts for itself, from a position of knowing, awareness, and, at its most powerful, compassion.

The compassion, or love, can't help but convince a traumatized person of how beautiful, tearfully, powerfully meaningful, existence is. To be enlightened, seems to mean, to know the reality of our embeddedness. But to have suffered greatly - and I think I have suffered greatly - adds an intensity and paradoxical joy, in losing aspects, interests, and behaviors, that characterized an earlier self. These "shedded" properties fall away as a consequence of the present organization. Love melts them away, keeps them apart, as the meanings in the interactions contradict one another.

It is precisely the sensation of being cared for by a mother. The world, earth, but more generally, the "totality" of the created universe, is my mother. It created me, built me from the stardust of a creative explosion. Chemicals reacted one suitably spaced planets. One planet, Earth, generated complex patterns, leading to an "evolution" of patterns that became full-blown biology. And many, many revolutions around the sun would occur before a species evolved that possessed "consciousness" of itself as an agent - as an existing being. Suffering. Joy. Play. Mourning. Shame and Pride. We get the full circle of things. We get the right and the left, or the yin and the yang.

And yet, paradoxically, when we go through our own suffering - made possible by having this thing called "memory", which we can consciously explore with this thing called "will', we somehow create an experience of acceptance, which allows the release of powerful, pent up feelings. All made possible by "memory" and feeling.