The Other, Part Two

Coming back from trauma can be an absurd experience. Spending 13 years, as that, the non-me I instinctively strive to deny - and bring yourself back, from that! You can't help but relate to the world in a very self-other sort of way.

My mind occupies a pole beginning from the "inner witness"of simple awareness to an awareness of an "object" consciously experienced.

I am not the object, but the watcher. Trauma makes you see that. The fact that the mind can 'dissociate' from the body, can be felt as something 'anterior' the 'posterior' of self-experience, not only elucidates the the ontological primacy of awareness, but also confirms the necessity of the object in "creating" our effected self.

Our self is an object that we can 'create' by attending to our experiences in a non-judgemental and "mindful" way. But for me at least, or the historical feelings I've had with my nerves in my stomach and obsessions in my mind, I have also come to experience the ontological necessity of the "other" in 'mooring' me to something 'out there' . What is 'out there'? Think about a moment when you're actually and truly afraid. A sharp, quick explosion of feeling will emerge from the entrails of some ruminated percept; the fear is 'meaningful', and because it is meaningful, cognitively, for me, it'll engender a process in the brain that makes the body anxious towards movement.

That's the whole purpose of the HPA axis. To get the body moving in physical action - and away from the immediate threat to one's organism. But in our hyper-cerebral day and age, and not living in tune with the needs of our physical organism, the stress response system will get 'caught up' in a self- destructive positive feedback loop, with the negative thought, leading to FEAR (in Panksepps sense) which leads to perception of anxiety in the body - the limbs, neck, shoulder, chest, but especially the stomach; which leads to deeper attentional focus upon the thing that is feared, and so on until some negative feedback can be found to save the mind of the individual from the terror.

My point is, the worst the body can do to us - and the FEAR and fear it creates in our body and mind - forces the human individual into a dualistic posture. Usually, human beings don't find themselves completely alone in their existential suffering. They have a group of familiars around them, whether family, doctors, or friends. These people give suggestions to them. Early life, and the culture we all inhabit, contains 'talismans' of power, objects which promise existential salvation and experiential relief from the pains of human life. People pass these talismanic ideas between one another by talking about them; and in communicating them, we are mutually effected, both speaker and listener by the plausibility of their power.

But suggestion and the power of suggestion can only say so much. Evangelicals, Fundamentalist Muslims and many others have their "objects" by which they swear by; and again and again, they derive power. I would say 'science' is an object of power, but it's power is largely secular - not spiritual - and so strays from questions of love and fear.

When you're crippled and overwhelmed by fear, recoiling from the thoughts, images and perceptions of body as they smolder you with their power, one's mind reaches out as impulsively as the wailing arms of the crying infant, searching for it's mother. The mother-infant relationship makes the Self-other relationship a fundamental core of who we are: the environment is 'in us' from the get go. How can the inside yet be perceived as outside?

The pressures of life, paradoxically, teach us about the nature of life. If on is happy, go lucky, and pushing away all negativity, the world becomes linear, "stable" - or somewhat so - and comfortable. The illusion of this experience works powerfully in inhibiting people from discovering deeper truths that lies outside the periphery of their experience: they must widen it if they seek deeper truths. Which means, they must, in the mystical language of chaos theory, allow a little instability into their system in order to 'expand' their perceptual horizons.

But expansion requires integration, so again, to return to the issue of the 'other' and its most sly representative: thought. Thought is something we do so impulsively that people rarely consider it's ontological significance. But it's significance is simple. For any philosopher who feels 'good' about the way he sees the world, he has implicitly accepted the position - validity, and ontological status of - the perception he is positing by 'turning to it' in the act of thinking about it. 

In their most desperate moments of fears, they 'recall' what they 'know' and calm themselves from within with the support of the thought. The thought 'moors' them and provides some solidity to their conscious experience. They feel "captains of their ship" and powerful in their ability to contain the tides.

Anyone who has tasted these horrendous experiences and who has turned inward, in love, to God, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call it, is acknowledging the deepest mystery that confronts the human condition: our embeddedness in a world where the essence works through us yet causes us to feel small and insignificant by the fact of our body and seperateness.

Life and healing comes from the inflow of that power - what can only be called a loving-kindness - into the heart and mind of the person. The viscera, before tightened and scored by anxious thoughts and feeling, is lightened by a feeling of tremendous gracefulness - peace - that paradoxically comes from a 'switching of perspective' from an act of thought. The thought sees the world and says to itself, suggestively, "relax", just 'accept', do not fight what is being felt, but just be with it. And why can we believe that we can 'just be with it'? Because we feel that love, that compassion, that lies at the core and center of human existence; built into us by the phylogeny of human evolution, and ingrained by the loving eyes of a mother.

The other is the fundamental "basis" of our capacity to feel love, to feel compassion, for ourselves, and for others. And in taking on such powerful experiences, the world becomes unified, compressed and folded inwards. Perception becomes more and more attuned, more and more secured by the eagerness of it's spiritness. With every thought upon feeling, a process already in motion becomes deepened, and the force which operates, as if, 'from without' becomes realized by virtue of it's organized 'containment' of the fear that it feels, by help, and with the support of the internalized "other".

Light

Why does reading over your own words from another time cause us to feel and see our words so differently? Perhaps, this is an influence of the imprint of trauma on my nervous system. At certain moments, my mind can "stall" under some internally generated pressure. My mind roams and tries to probe, but it doesn't get far. I feel a type of "pressure" on the sides of my head, from the dorsolateral to the temporal bone. This feeling, I know so well - total capitulation - "out of work" - morbidly withdrawn. I feel nothing and so become nothing. Just a consciousness 'watching out' upon a world I feel alien from.

And then I fight and fight to scratch my way back in. That's the instinct. We lose something, we go right back after it. The dog chasing its tail. Which, ironically, is often laughed at by us because it's so ridiculous looking. But we pretty much do the same thing - chasing after the last moment, allowing ourselves to be built up by perceptions in our day to day social interactions. We feel and then we become motivated to anticipate; and in anticipating we provoke a response, which confirms our anticipation, and we follow on in this circular way in our day to day happenings.

There really is a fundamental wisdom about mindfulness. It represents an actual recognition of an 'anterior' aspect in our object-laden thinking. The very reaching motion, the motivation to act at all, extends from a "witness pole" to a "object pole". The object pole can also be more properly associated with the self, since the collection of meaningful objects we experience generates the phenomenological feeling of selfhood.

It can be so hard. Being addicted to weed. Addicted to laziness. Addicted to certain habits of being and thinking. My sister calls me an "addictive personality". But in saying that she occludes the generating activity of a borderline mother.  But it's true. I feel a desperate neediness and desperate anxiety and tension and nervousness and hyperactivity.

My nervous system definitely is a "hyper-reactive" one. I'm sure my physiology now operates along this dynamic, which, in having irritable bowel syndrome, indicates the presence of how deeply involved the body is with the life of the mind. Our perceptions affect our body. Good feelings are "good", but they're also felt to be 'light', as in, barely noticeable, because the pleasure of the thing one is happy about puts into the periphery the effect it generates in the body.

Different body's move and synchronize in different ways. Yet I know that with a change in attitude, a focusing upon my body and relaxing into a state of slow, relaxed breathing, that I can allow myself to embrace affirming feelings of self agency. The body is truly, and absolutely, the key. The issue is connection with life - your life. Your interest in the world "out there" is what makes the world "in here".  But both support the other. The key is being willing to connect with yourself, and for yourself. 

The significance of this gesture feels to me to be at the heart of the human situation: how we deal with the otherness of life. Our place in it; the fact that we do in fact generate a 'self' that is built on a feedback between perceiving and background judgements of perception. The one feeds into the 'working models' of animal-level anticipation.

We are an other to ourselves, and so long as we feel that way to ourselves, we are likely to overlook the way our behavior affects others. Dislodged from 'within', naturally subserves disconnection from without. This fractal like quality is something that appears damn near everywhere we look.