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.
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