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.