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.