I haven't been feeling well. My body was off. Got a cold, and of course with the cold comes concomitant changes in phenomenology. A slight increase towards the negative, as if the force of feeling negative in the body infuses itself into conscious processes, dictating their direction.
But I've gotten over my cold. So what else is it? I missed school. I skipped school. I made a rather reckless and immature decision to stay home and smoke weed with my brother rather than go to school, watch a documentary, and then take notes of the class conversation. And that's it. I skipped an opportunity to take important and useful study notes. I broke a promise to myself; a meaning which I struggle to keep contact with. I'm almost afraid to go forward in describing it without losing awareness of the arbitrariness of it. I both feel intense guilt, and a desire to chide myself, to say something to myself, that will help me see what I need to see and understand. So much fear all the time. And weakness, and perception of self in terms of weakness, associated with your voice and the flow of your experience.
How do people not see how obvious it is? Because it isn't relevant to them. They do not have periodic eruptions, borne from a history of daily submersion in the dynamics of shame, anxiety and obsessiveness. I do. So I see things in me. I feel in me this utter dysfunction; a concatenation of speech, perception of speech, a deep visceral feeling of shamefulness, a stress in the voice, a void in the self, a fracture at my core, a being struggling with its beingness. How could I get out? How do I get out? A fearlessness. Like the Tao Master 100 eyes in the TV show Marco Polo says, I do not cling to life. And that's it? Isn't it? Why should that be it?Isn't that cynical?Or unappreciative sounding?
No. Life's ways teach us how to exist. Complex dynamical systems, as we are, when dysfunctional at one level - in my case, in affect, self-perception, an audial sensation of dysfunction, must strive, and search, and find; but what do they find? That feeling. Call it grace, compassion, love, acceptance, forgiveness, openness, tolerance, forbearance. There's a Jet stream like quality to it. It is important. A stream that the mind senses exists, in the stream and flow of thought and the various moral and ethical ways of thinking, perceiving, and orienting to an object. The stream presents perceptions that build-up into complex perceptions of a self-environment coherence, but the coherence always strikes a nice balance between the equal aims of vying selves. It's in the sincerity of sensing, exerting to sense, and trying to afford to the other what you feel to be a fundamental need in yourself. But can you feel the needs? Can you say, if I asked you, what your needs are? I'm sure sure some of you would say "yes", and name their needs; some, legitimate, others ridiculous. But the problem is, the most relevant needs when it comes to human health and wellbeing is structurally built into our biology and cultural behavior. Omissions are deadly powerful. They are bad because what we don't think of, indeed, may be something that our brain is deliberately directing attention away from. If you actually watch and listen, honestly, you can hear within yourself, in your body, a certain affective reaction. Affects are complex things; not simple and certainly not isolated from one another. They ultimately cohere around a basic need, hardwired into our brain and appearing within us as a basic unconscious want. This is the bear minimum. What we need, at every moment, is a way to make sense of ourselves, to ourselves, in terms how the other responds to us. It just so happens that other people can have a powerful hypnotic effect on the human mind-brain. Humans becomes entrained and enchanted by a particularly feeling in a particular situation, because it is meaningfully familiar to them. But it is also performing a function within its mind-brain: you exist like this because you need to exist like this to get along and thrive with others.
Our selves are amorphous structures that change from moment to moment, from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, and a changing external context. In my room, in this quiet bed, and with the reverberating tones of the Tao Master 100 Eyes, tingling in the background, I sense in me an effort to just bring peace to myself, calm to myself. I feel a certain strength, from an unconscious identification of myself with his manners, to no shy. I do not need this background, yet its there, exerting a certain expressive force on the way my thoughts emerge, with images and sensations projected in between of it's source.
So what now? It's late. Go to bed. Accept the feelings. You've talked about them. But you're also very stoned, and no doubt a large, if not the main-cause of this change, is due to the dissociative and affect blunting power of weed. You feel a frozeness in your chest and an obsessive fixation on "whats wrong". How do I fix this? In my interacting with my brother, I give expression to this experience. This is to say, my bodily experience is projected into my need for recognition, for re-connection with the other, with my brother, for validation, for confirmation, that I exist and that I matter and am cared for. What a strong, incredible impulse! THIS, this is the need that underlies not just me, but all humans, and it's a need that seems to underlie the processes that sustain group homeostasis, with a "shared intentionality", or the pleasure of agreeing on the same thing, magnifying one another's sense of positive influence on the other. To see yourself as a FUNCTION of this 'higher dynamic' is a profoundly sensible notion. It's phenomenologically true - at least to any psychotherapist who truly understands what their patients feel, and also what they themselves feel. Shame, and it's discomforts, and the resonance that forms between two brains synchronizing emotional information in terms of expressive affects in face, eye, voice and body. The body communicates intent, and when we "know" it as an inchoate percept, we un-know it before we ever have a chance to recognize it's formative power. The shame 'inhabits' your system as a powerful attractor. And it's meaning structure is such that our minds incline away from it and towards a positive structure that is its polar opposite. It could be thought of as an adaption made by your brain-mind to make coherent a particular existential self-world relationship pertinent to the present context. As contexts shift, the brain-mind shifts its way of doing business, so that every thought structure has a particular homeostatic "coherency" that maintains whole organism coherency. Of course, the thought-structure, if truly coherent - complex, yet integrated - will be thoroughly social, open, and accepting of changing circumstances.
Is this just "unconscious cerebration"? No. At least I don't think it is. I think that idea is sort of chutzpah, and frankly irrelevant to the remarkable meaning of being a conscious expression of a unity of common need. That we unconsciously seek confirmation of self from one another speaks to the intensity of our interdependence. Faces, voices, - visual input, audial input, in neuroscience talk - change the structure of our attention to attune in a new way, to bring about a particular effect in self-experience.
Notice I always speak with an underlying dualism. Mind and it's object. Mindfully probing self, demarcating always the act of perception from the thing perceived. The former is the real thing, the thing looking for the thing. You can talk about brains all you like, and emphasize evolutionary processes: this, as can be seen, is a pride of focus for me. But in the end of the day, I see s causally active mind - morally, and empathically aware in the way we mean by "love" and "awe" and "compassion" - sometimes coming through, but more often than not being coordinated by the affective factors shared with primates and other mammals. Competition. Defensiveness. The felt need to express strength and defend against ideas that conflict with the idea of strength. Strength, power; the exisential qualia intrinsic in phenomenal states of pride conduce to feedback loops that build narratives consistent with past meaning-structures. Shame is an enemy to this mind, and yet its not acknowledged as such. Our present, modern day society talks about morality in abstract terms, but fails to generalize it to the real world. The mind is fractured. It is a dynamical system that somehow maintains a 'general identity' (in mentally normal people) yet maintains enough looseness to create internal incoherence between "self stated views", such as the self-belief that one is fair, kind, and nice, and those times when one is pressed by his social relationships to act in ways that are unfair, unkind, and mean-spirited. Each situation is unique; and in some situations, shame is the enemy - by which I mean:awkward experiences; being left out; saying something that might get a certain type of feedback. Semantics and style are serving the same goal; and the coherency operates by "keeping away" negative affective reactions.
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