Nature's unconscious urge, in the creative symbolization of existential meaning?
What is The True Nature of Our Existential Reality?
The 1960's? The beginning of a Revolution? A Rise in Mass-Consciousness, towards Realization?
The 1960's? The beginning of a Revolution? A Rise in Mass-Consciousness, towards Realization?
Born in 1951, at beginning of the second half of a 20th century. A period infamous for its carnage and loss on a truly global scale, and the birth of the nuclear age. An age which has begun the pressure for a more enlightened view of our predominately, tribal existence. For illogical and objectively irrational reasons I have held the belief since childhood that this period of human history, was in fact the prophesied Armageddon of the Christian Bible. I have always been drawn to the existential meaning of the Biblical stories and their possible interpretation on differing levels, of our daily existence. Metaphor, Myth & Meaning, fascinate me and fire my sense of curiosity like no other field of human interest. And of coarse it was a prayer to God about my deep desire for a new existential reality, which first triggered my thirty two year journey, of mental illness experience and recovery. Why has this sense of Biblical metaphor and meaning, plagued me since childhood, and been central to my experience of euphoric mania, whether on or off, psychotropic medications? And what does my experience have to do with Biblical prophecy and a public debate about mental illness and its treatment?
A public debate which is now raging in America, where there are grave concerns about an epidemic of mental illness. Arguably, America leads the world, as the dominant cultural-tribal force, and carries the Christian Bible deep within its own cultural bosom, often perceiving itself as a nation of historical destiny. Consider this passage from Wikipedia, on the history and influence of Armageddon theology-mythology;
"Influence: The idea that a final Battle of Armageddon will be fought at Tel Megiddo has had a wide influence, especially in the US. According to Donald E. Wagner, Professor of Religion and Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at North Park University, Ronald Reagan was an adherent of "Armageddon theology," and "seemed to blend his political analysis with his Armageddon theology quite naturally."
At first glance, my linking of what to many is an outdated and tribal religious history, will have no connection to the science and humane treatment of mental illness? Our current consensus reality in first world countries, is generally one of mutual exclusivity, when it comes to comparing religious metaphors with objective science. Understandable reactions will be an assumption of simplistic emotional associations, in my presentation here? Many will no doubt see a confirmation of psychotic thinking and delusion?
Yet the very premise of my argument here, is to show a fundamental mistake in our highly subjective, consensus reality, with denial as the core stimulus need in our socialized sense of self? A fundamental confusion about the primary process reality of the body and the secondary process subjective nature of the mind. Our socialized and idealized sense of self, confuses emotionally energized states of mind, with the fundamental nature of our existential reality, our body? We do this because human society's civilization process demanded a denial of our evolved nature, stimulated by a deep fear of chaos and anarchy? Our social consensus reality, based on a denial of our true nature takes two major forms, either objectification or mystification of the human condition?
And what does my experience have to do with Biblical prophecy and a public debate about mental illness? Existential Crisis? The experience of mental illness can be judged as a biological disease process, in line with our current consensus, or perceived as a profound challenge to an individual's existential reality, in what it really means to be a functioning human being? "Your out of your freaking mind!" Is often the harsh judgment of psychotic experience, while failing to acknowledge how our adult state of mind is based on a suppression of innate affect/emotion, beginning in the second year of life? We suppress our own evolved nature, for the sake of social harmony? We think and we say the word EVOLUTION, yet we fail to fully embody it, we deny its felt reality by suppressing sensation, and we fall into the trap of unconscious trauma conditioning, through our learned denial?
Is it time to face up to our Denial & The Damage Done?
As we look at our fellow human beings at the beginning of this 21st century A.D. There seems to be a deep yearning and rising desire for a return to the ancient wisdom of an embodied sense of self and an honoring of our organic nature, as truly immersed within the reality of our planets biosphere. In this chapter I hope to show you the qualitative difference in depth of self-awareness, between our everyday survival needs and our capacity to perceive our true-self. There are two distinct levels to our sense of self? Further-more I hope to open the door to a self-revelation that was always meant to be, in the natural evolution of our human consciousness? As we continue to fall into the self-realization of this Chemical Universe within? Consider;
From Object Like Self-Definition to Chemical?
"Evolving definitions
The concept of an "element" as an undivisible substance has developed through three major historical phases: Classical definitions (such as those of the ancient Greeks), chemical definitions, and atomic definitions.
Classical definitions
Ancient philosophy posited a set of classical elements to explain observed patterns in nature. These elements originally referred to earth, water, air and fire rather than the chemical elements of modern science. The term 'elements' (stoicheia) was first used by the Greek philosopher Plato in about 360 BCE, in his dialogue Timaeus, which includes a discussion of the composition of inorganic and organic bodies and is a speculative treatise on chemistry. Plato believed the elements introduced a century earlier by Empedocles were composed of small polyhedral forms: tetrahedron (fire), octahedron (air), icosahedron (water), and cube (earth).
Aristotle, c. 350 BCE, also used the term stoicheia and added a fifth element called aether, which formed the heavens. Aristotle defined an element as:
Element – one of those bodies into which other bodies can decompose, and that itself is not capable of being divided into other."
Neuropeptides: Our Chemical Elements Within?
Neuropeptides are small protein-like molecules used by neurons to communicate with each other, distinct from the larger neurotransmitters. They are neuronal signaling molecules, influence the activity of the brain in specific ways and are thus involved in particular brain functions, like analgesia, reward, food intake, learning and memory.
Neuropeptides are expressed and released by neurons, and mediate or modulate neuronal communication by acting on cell surface receptors. The human genome contains about 90 genes that encode precursors of neuropeptides. At present about 100 different peptides are known to be released by different populations of neurons in the mammalian brain. Neurons use many different chemical signals to communicate information, including neurotransmitters, peptides, cannabinoids, and even some gases, like nitric oxide.
Peptide signals play a role in information processing that is different from that of conventional neurotransmitters, and many appear to be particularly associated with specific behaviours. For example, oxytocin and vasopressin have striking and specific effects on social behaviours, including maternal behaviour and pair bonding.
All Perception is Created inside You?
From Immediate Needs to a Cosmic Self-Revelation?
From Immediate Needs to a Cosmic Self-Revelation?
“If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor” _Joseph Campbell.
From object oriented to chemical metaphors of self-awareness & interpretation?
Feel the frizz of real-life chemical sensation within?
Our Evolving Self-Definition?
From object oriented to chemical metaphors of self-awareness & interpretation?
Feel the frizz of real-life chemical sensation within?
Our Evolving Self-Definition?
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The Mental Illness Debate & The Nature of Madness?
Transcript:"This week, public television stations will rebroadcast "Minds on the Edge," a Fred Friendly seminar featuring a panel of distinguished jurists, doctors and mental health experts. Together, they address a hypothetical dilemma, in this case, the fictitious case of James, a 32-year-old schizophrenic whose mother has recently died. Frank Sesno of George Washington University is your guide.
FRANK SESNO, Elyn Saks, James, can you give us a sense of what he's experiencing?
ELYN SAKS, author, "The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness": Sure.
I think I actually have special insight, because I have experienced those things myself. I'm a person with chronic schizophrenia.
The best way to describe having a psychotic episode is like a waking nightmare, where things are crazy, bizarre, frightening, confusing. With schizophrenia, you have delusions and hallucinations and disordered thinking. Like, I was on the roof of the Yale Law School, and I was saying, "Someone's infiltrated our copies of the legal cases. We've got to case the joint. I don't believe in joints, but they do hold your body together" -- so, loosely associated words and phrases.
But, experientially, the -- the feeling is utter terror.
FRANK SESNO: And James is feeling very alone.
ELYN SAKS: He needs support. Everybody needs support. And there are resources available, community mental health centers. So, it might be useful for him to contact a social worker at a community mental health center and get some kind of support in his life.
FRANK SESNO: James is feeling very alone, as you said. And he's scared. And he's staying in his apartment. He now can't go to work. He's paralyzed.
 
| "But, experientially, the -- the feeling is utter terror." From this description of a person with chronic schizophrenia, consider Silvan Tomkins notions of "innate affect" from that decade of reaction to two world wars, the 1950's? A decade which produced much fearless thinking about the human condition, with the fervent hope that our mindless addiction to the senseless loss of territorial wars, would not be repeated? Freud would perhaps nominate this decade of fearless exploration, as an unconscious reaction-formation to so much death? So profoundly expressed in Monica McGoldrick's You Can Go Home Again: Reconnecting with Your Family as, "Loss is the Pivotal Human Experience." |
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An Existential Crisis & Innate Fear-Terror?
"The nine affects:
These are the nine affects, listed with a low/high intensity label for each affect and accompanied by its biological expression:
Positive:
Enjoyment/Joy - smiling, lips wide and out
Interest/Excitement - eyebrows down, eyes tracking, eyes looking, closer listening
Neutral:
Surprise/Startle - eyebrows up, eyes blinking
Negative:
Anger/Rage - frowning, a clenched jaw, a red face
Disgust - the lower lip raised and protruded, head forward and down
Dissmell (reaction to bad smell) - upper lip raised, head pulled back
Distress/Anguish - crying, rhythmic sobbing, arched eyebrows, mouth lowered
Fear/Terror - a frozen stare, a pale face, coldness, sweat, erect hair
Shame/Humiliation - eyes lowered, the head down and averted, blushing
Are these the innate affect/emotions which we are taught to suppress early in life, as we begin to create our socialized sense-of-self? Our Nuclear Family & Extended Group's - Consensus Reality?
"Consensus reality is an approach to answering the philosophical question "What is real?" It gives a practical answer: reality is either what exists, or what we can agree seems to exist."
Consensus Reality & NAMI's Worldview?
NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.
"What is Bipolar Disorder?
Bipolar disorder is a chronic illness with recurring episodes of mania and depression that can last from one day to months. This mental illness causes unusual and dramatic shifts in mood, energy and the ability to think clearly. Cycles of high (manic) and low (depressive) moods may follow an irregular pattern that differs from the typical ups and downs experienced by most people. The symptoms of bipolar disorder can have a negative impact on a person’s life. Damaged relationships or a decline in job or school performance are potential effects, but positive outcomes are possible.
What Does Recovery Look Like?
As people become familiar with their illness, they recognize their own unique patterns of behavior. If individuals recognize these signs and seek effective and timely care, they can often prevent relapses. But because bipolar disorder has no cure, treatment must be continuous. Individuals who live with bipolar disorder also benefit tremendously from taking responsibility for their own recovery. Once the illness is adequately managed, one must monitor potential side effects.
The notion of recovery involves a variety of perspectives. Recovery is a holistic process that includes traditional elements of physical health and aspects that extend beyond medication. Recovery from serious mental illness also includes attaining, and maintaining, physical health as another cornerstone of wellness.
The recovery journey is unique for each individual. There are several definitions of recovery; some grounded in medical and clinical values, some grounded in context of community and successful living. One of the most important principles of recovery is this: recovery is a process, not an event. The uniqueness and individual nature of recovery must be honored. While serious mental illness impacts individuals in many challenging ways, the concept that all individuals can move towards wellness is paramount.
Bipolar disorder presents a special challenge because its manic, or hypomania, stages can be seductive. People with bipolar disorder may be afraid to seek treatment because they are afraid that they will feel flat, less capable or less creative. These fears must be weighed against the benefits of getting and staying well. A person may feel good while manic but may make choices that could seriously damage relationships, finances, health, home life or job prospects.
It is very common for people living with bipolar disorder to want to discontinue their medication because of side effects or because it has been a long time since the last episode of illness. However, it should be remembered that the progress one has attained is reliant upon continuing to take medication."
Yet if NAMI's worldview of a mental illness requiring long-term use of medications is accurate, why this recent question?
Can Its New Board President Turn NAMI Around? Posted on July 19, 2012 by Jack Carney, DSW.
“The word is out!” That was Dr. Keris Myrick’s reaction when she was elected earlier this month as the new president of NAMI’s Board of Directors (personal communication). “Wow!” The reaction of many of us when we heard the news. For those of us who know Dr. Myrick, it seemed an inspired choice. For those of us that have known NAMI for many years, some of us since its founding in 1979, we wondered whether the selection of a peer/survivor as its Board president signaled a sea-change for the organization or whether it was a political move designed to restore some of its lost credibility. Perhaps, of course, it’s both.
In my estimation, this is the key challenge Dr. Myrick will be facing … to move NAMI off the biological dime and get her Board, the general membership as well as the organization’s staff to consider environmental stressors – trauma, racism, poverty – as the source of most folks’ emotional distress. My own experience working with families and NAMI members is that they reflexively fear being blamed for their children’s presumed illnesses, and reliance on environmental explanations, particularly as regards trauma, might re-open a conversation that I’m sure most hope is over. Hence the attraction of the biomedical model. All the loose ends seem to have been connected – the existence of mental illness, its cause and essential treatment and the shibboleths of wellness, rehabilitation and recovery. To challenge the biomedical model is to begin to untie those knots, to raise members’ anxiety and to invite resistance that can be expected to be fierce. I will not presume here to suggest to Dr. Myrick how she should begin to question ideas which currently comprise NAMI’s fundamental belief system. I believe that Dr. Myrick has no illusions about the difficulties she will be obliged to confront;"
Indeed there is fierce resistance to any kind of shift in our Consensus Reality!
Consider Jack's insightful statement;
"My own experience working with families and NAMI members is that they reflexively fear being blamed for their children’s presumed illnesses, and reliance on environmental explanations, particularly as regards trauma, might re-open a conversation that I’m sure most hope is over."
Back to the 1950's?
The Family Projection Process:
The family projection process describes the primary way parents transmit their emotional problems to a child. The projection process can impair the functioning of one or more children and increase their vulnerability to clinical symptoms. Children inherit many types of problems (as well as strengths) through the relationships with their parents, but the problems they inherit that most affect their lives are relationship sensitivities such as heightened needs for attention and approval, difficulty dealing with expectations, the tendency to blame oneself or others, feeling responsible for the happiness of others or that others are responsible for one’s own happiness, and acting impulsively to relieve the anxiety of the moment rather than tolerating anxiety and acting thoughtfully.
If the projection process is fairly intense, the child develops stronger relationship sensitivities than his parents. The sensitivities increase a person’s vulnerability to symptoms by fostering behaviors that escalate chronic anxiety in a relationship system.
The projection process follows three steps:
(1) the parent focuses on a child out of fear that something is wrong with the child;
(2) the parent interprets the child’s behavior as confirming the fear; and
(3) the parent treats the child as if something is really wrong with the child.
These steps of scanning, diagnosing, and treating begin early in the child’s life and continue. The parents’ fears and perceptions so shape the child’s development and behavior that he grows to embody their fears and perceptions. One reason the projection process is a self-fulfilling prophecy is that parents try to “fix” the problem they have diagnosed in the child; for example, parents perceive their child to have low self-esteem, they repeatedly try to affirm the child, and the child’s self-esteem grows dependent on their affirmation.
Parents often feel they have not given enough love, attention, or support to a child manifesting problems, but they have invested more time, energy, and worry in this child than in his siblings. The siblings less involved in the family projection process have a more mature and reality-based relationship with their parents that fosters the siblings developing into less needy, less reactive, and more goal-directed people.
Both parents participate equally in the family projection process, but in different ways. The mother is usually the primary caretaker and more prone than the father to excessive emotional involvement with one or more of the children. The father typically occupies the outside position in the parental triangle, except during periods of heightened tension in the mother-child relationship. Both parents are unsure of themselves in relationship to the child, but commonly one parent acts sure of himself or herself and the other parent goes along. The intensity of the projection process is unrelated to the amount of time parents spend with a child.”
“These steps of scanning, diagnosing, and treating begin early in the child’s life and continue.” As we create our consensus reality and as alluded to above, there is now an understandable reflexive fear about a 1950's conversation concerning the "family," which many hoped was over.
Murray Bowen’s seminal ideas on how society functions like an extended family, are as valid today as they were in the 1950?s. People confuse subjective and emotionally charged perceptions with real-life facts, we think and react to relieve emotional anxiety, more than we perceive and critique the reality before our eyes?
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Our Consensus Reality & *Unconscious* Human Attachment Needs:
Attachment certainly is the prime mover in family affairs, and indeed in human motivation, and I think we could quiet reasonably sum up emotional-mental anguish as a profound disruption of our unique dependence on attachment?
Over the past five years of closely monitoring my triggers into Bipolar type 1 mania, loss of attachment is the No1 trigger into a soaring state which seeks to address my existential reality? A reality which had become conditioned through birth trauma, to a primary expectation of negative state. Mania seeks to redress this primary and deeply unconscious expectation, in my embodied, implicit sense of my life.
In the West, we have gotten lost in the secondary processes of the mind’s “subjective” state, confusing its idealization of life, with the real thing? The body and primary process communication are the very core of our attachment needs and our living experience. Feeling SAFE, is the vital need which “opens” us up to embracing life, beyond the hard-wired, wary defense, which is our first reaction to life and anything new?
In the TV program “minds on the edge” there is a segment when a role play of a typical emotional crisis, is enacted and Pete Earley and Avel Gordly play the role of parents to a daughter in emotional crisis.
Pete’s reaction when rushing to help, is to bombard his daughter with questions, a typical male, goal oriented and “secondary process” approach? While instinctively Avel’s reaction as a mother is to hug her daughter and transmit the crucial primary process need, of secure attachment?
They are both asked about what to do, in this challenging situation and unfortunately, with good intentions, hospital and medical treatment is the seemingly obvious choice? Yet is it a choice made by a secondary process awareness, which has become “disembodied” in our crazy making, “I think therefore I am,” cultural zeitgeist?
What would I have done as the father of a daughter suffering an existential crisis of “can I cope.” Can I cope? Is the fundamental life question for all of us, and as Peter Levine points out, it is the pivotal challenge underpinning our vast variety of subjective explanations for the anxiety of the lived moment? It is not unreasonable to suggest that this is the classic historical trigger to early adulthood, onset of primary emotional disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder?
The very challenge facing the role play parents in “Minds on the Edge’s,” “What’s happening with Olivia?” A family nightmare begins when parents find out that their daughter Olivia, who has been a successful college student, has developed mental illness. (Or is having an existential crisis about her ability to cope?)
I would have approached my daughter quietly and with an open emphatic acceptance of her distress, taken her in my arms and gently rocked her, in a soothing of her heightened existential fear. I would have taken her home to familiar surroundings, where peace, quiet and appropriate proximity would be the prime concern. I would hope to enable an embodiment of my own high functional sense of “I can cope?”
Recall Murray Bowen's observations;
“The parents’ fears and perceptions so shape the child’s development and behavior that he grows to *embody* their fears and perceptions.”
Existential fear triggers a desire for “escape,” and we escape into the secondary process of subjective state, in an unconscious reaction which seeks to avoid pain in the body. Understanding this critical point about “escaping” into a disembodied state of mind, is vital in accepting that primary processes of unconscious communication, must come first in these situations of emotional crisis.
Until we accept that the body comes first and not the mind, we will continue to exacerbate the problems of emotional-mental distress, in our “mind oriented” Western cultures. What saddens me deeply about the mainstream debate on mental health, is the continuing focus on shallow “secondary process,” headline news?
Beyond the mainstream headlines, there is a wealth of solid science and therapeutic knowledge, which never makes the drama fueled and predominately negative view of emotional-mental distress. An example, is Allan N Schore’s contribution at brilliant programs like Yellow Brick?
“PARADIGM SHIFT: SECONDARY PROCESS COGNITION TO PRIMARY PROCESS COMMUNICATION:
In 1994 I suggested that nonverbal communication in both early development and the therapeutic alliance is the output of the right brain primary process communication system. Like myself, Panksepp (2008) refers to right brain primary process systems and the affective states they engender. Other neuroscientists contend, “The right hemisphere operates in a more free-associative, primary process manner, typically observed in states such as dreaming or reverie” (Grabner et al., 2007).
The relational trend in the field shifts primary process from intrapsychic cognition to intersubjective communication. In an important article on “primary process communication” Dorpat (2001) argues, “The primary and secondary process may be conceptualized as two parallel and relatively independent systems for the reception, analysis, processing, storing, and communication of information.” He asserts that affective and objectrelational information are transmitted predominantly by primary process communication, and that secondary process communication has a highly complex and powerful logical syntax but lacks adequate semantics in the field of relationships. Echoing a description of right brain attachment communications, he concludes such nonverbal communication contains “both body movements (kinesics), posture, gesture, facial expression, voice inflection, and the sequence, rhythm, and pitch of the spoken words.” Integrating this and other research and clinical studies I have argued that therapy is not the “talking” but the “communicating cure” (Schore, 2005).”
Looking to the left side of the homepage here on MadinAmerica.com, there is an endless stream of research papers which beneath the secondary processes of “interesting,” subjective mind states, are actually about the livelihood of the researchers, and not any deep desire to uncover new empirical information about the human condition?
Yet in our so-called 1st World countries, we have built a consensus reality based on this secondary process need, and we all agree to look at these research publications with a sense of “something’s happening,” when in reality there is nothing new under the sun? We have reached that point in human civilization when we really need to re-address the basics of life? Hence we are now flocking to ancient wisdom’s, like meditative mindfulness?
The double bind in “mindfulness” though, for those with trauma experience, is the possible maintenance of the unconscious need to “escape” in the hyper-vigilance of emotional distress.
In my own daily practice of releasing my habitual, trauma fueled “muscular bracing,” I seek a mind-less letting go of inner tensions, which stimulate this secondary process, we call, the mind?
Our projected ideals are often wonderful, yet they are fantasies which will not be made real, until we let go this lop-sided, consensus reality of “I think therefore I am.” The way forward, is back into the primary process reality of the body? Once such a felt/thought awareness breaks through the common denial of mind based awareness, we see ourselves in the other, and feel the common reality of one species, loosing our unconscious, fearful projections about “them,” & otherness?
I hope we can continue a shift towards answering the very valid question of “what is madness,” in forums like this one. Hopefully coming to understand that our continued focus on “them,” is simply an “acting out,” of unconsciously projected needs, rather than any fundamental critique of reality?
Consensus reality is built on a denial of just how much we actually function, unconsciously?
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Further comments on madinamerica.com about NAMI and the NPR TV program above;
"As a fellow mindfulness practitioner, I wanted to acknowledge and thank you for pointing out how challenging it can be to “sit” with emotional pain, particularly anxiety, fear, existential free fall and other states that trigger fight or flight, deeply embedded physiological experiences. In my experience, the only way out of the pain is through it, much like childbirth, and the emotional, spiritual and/or literal midwives can make all the difference for getting to the other side."
My response;
"The program “Minds on the Edge: Facing Mental Illness,” is a perfect illustration of our “I think therefore I am.” cultural zeitgeist.
In watching the show, are we watching people with a deep self-awareness, or a sense of self based on all we are taught, with its subsequent assumptions about the true nature of reality?
Are we in fact, watching reasoned reactions here, in the actual anxiety of the lived moment? Is it in fact, a common denial that WE ALL do this, which keeps us stuck in a, not so mindful, “acting out?”
Your childbirth analogy is a perfect metaphor, for where we now stand, in our journey towards a mature self-awareness?
In line with Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose and Arthur M. Young’s The Reflexive Universe: Evolution of Consciousness we are perhaps approaching the moment of our truly conscious birth?
Beyond the in-sanity of headline focused attention, much is actually happening in the background, as mass-consciousness begins to stir towards a moment of being Buddha. (awake now?) Are these times our birth pangs of realization? Not a doomsday revelation, after-all?
What gets lost in fearful judgment about psychosis, is the flip-side of the curse, in its heightened sensory awareness, for a uniquely sensitive human-animal?
Soon we will see that so-called history, in the desert tribes articulation of our existential journey, is in fact, true prophecy?
The power of psychosis, and its harvesting of blue sky, existential meaning? Watch the movie Avatar again & see the mythology of an ever present NOW, and the true depth of understanding in that eternal metaphor, of Blue?
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Is my comment above, about the panelists on the TV program "Minds on the Edge," simply a flippant remark made by an officially certified psychotic, or a coherent and justifiable observation? Particularly my comment about desert tribe prophecy and the power of psychosis, which is viewed overwhelmingly as a negative experience, in countries like America. Consider the preface in a recent book though, which is receiving wide acclaim for its critique of the medical model, of a biological illness in psychosis;
"During the past several years, I conducted a series of research studies that inquired deeply into the experiences of people who had made full and lasting recoveries from schizophrenia and other long term psychotic disorders.
As the participants revealed their stories one by one, I became increasingly astonished by what I was learning. The deep meaning within these participants’ experiences and the profound positive transformation that each of them had gone through flew completely in the face of virtually everything I had ever learned in the mainstream texts about psychosis. I dove deeper and deeper into the existing research on schizophrenia, psychosis, and recovery, trying to make sense of what I was learning. The common beliefs about psychosis and schizophrenia that are held so strongly in the West quickly began to slip away like so much sand through my fingers. I realized that what I was learning from these participants was taking me so much further than I had ever imagined possible, sending me on a journey not unlike Alice’s descent into the rabbit hole.
As I attempted to disentangle the complex and vast web of research, I found myself descending ever further into a world where the truth appeared to be much stranger than fiction, a world riddled with contradictions, paradox and hair-pulling conundrums. The journey began with the complete dismemberment of the brain disease theory of psychosis, and continued beyond the point where even the construct of “schizophrenia” itself blew away like mere dust in the wind. Ever deeper this journey took me until eventually I had no other choice but to arrive at the conclusion that the condition we generally think of as psychosis is not the result of a diseased brain after all. Rather, it is probably much more accurate to see psychosis as a desperate survival strategy brought on intentionally by one’s very own being.
It seems that all of us, and indeed all living organisms, are imbued with an unfathomable intelligence and force that strives constantly for our survival and our growth; and it appears that it is this very same organismic intelligence that intentionally initiates psychosis in a desperate attempt to survive what would otherwise be intolerable conditions. The evidence in this regard is surprisingly robust. Every participant in all three of my studies (and within many accounts of others who have gone through similar journeys) experienced the onset of psychosis after finding themselves overwhelmed by such intolerable conditions; and every participant also underwent a profoundly healing and positive transformationas a result of the full resolution of their psychotic process.
An important aspect of the renewal process is that in order for such a profound reorganization of the Self to take place, a profound disintegration must first take place, followed by a thorough reintegration (Perry, 1999). During this process of disintegration and reintegration, one’s self-image and one’s world-image tend to go through a parallel process of dying to old ways of being and being reborn into new ways of being, a process that is rarely linear, often involving a variety of disintegration and reintegration experiences in a more or less unpredictable manner. During experiences of disintegration, one may literally believe that they have physically died or are on the verge of death. They may also have the sense that their very being is on the verge of succumbing to a total annihilation that is even more profound than physical death. This is often a very terrifying stage.
During experiences of reintegration, one often has profound experiences of “rebirth and of world regeneration.” Often included within this stage are experiences of messianic affect-images, recognition of the unity of all things, and visions of a new world guided by compassion and love for all beings. Perry discovered that most of those individuals he worked with who were suffering acute psychotic episodes and who were allowed to move through them in a supportive way worked through the process to resolution in about forty days. He found that this varied somewhat (with the length of time often being indirectly proportional to the intensity of the episode), but the variance was much less than he would have expected. This time period (forty days) has fascinating implications when one considers the frequency with which this same number is used to describe the transformative periods of historical prophets (of Esdras and Jesus in the Bible, and of the world-destruction of the deluge, for example)." _Paris Williams, PhD. "A flood of tears? A time of conscious realization?"
Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis
A view from the very top of an Ivy League Tower?
Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness By Gary Greenberg.
"Every so often Al Frances says something that seems to surprise even him. Just now, for instance, in the predawn darkness of his comfortable, rambling home in Carmel, California, he has broken off his exercise routine to declare that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Then an odd, reflective look crosses his face, as if he’s taking in the strangeness of this scene: Allen Frances, lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (universally known as the DSM-IV), the guy who wrote the book on mental illness, confessing that “these concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.” For the first time in two days, the conversation comes to an awkward halt.
But he recovers quickly, and back in the living room he finishes explaining why he came out of a seemingly contented retirement to launch a bitter and protracted battle with the people, some of them friends, who are creating the next edition of the DSM. And to criticize them not just once, and not in professional mumbo jumbo that would keep the fight inside the professional family, but repeatedly and in plain English, in newspapers and magazines and blogs. And to accuse his colleagues not just of bad science but of bad faith, hubris, and blindness, of making diseases out of everyday suffering and, as a result, padding the bottom lines of drug companies. These aren’t new accusations to level at psychiatry, but Frances used to be their target, not their source. He’s hurling grenades into the bunker where he spent his entire career.
As a practicing psychotherapist myself, I can attest that this is a startling turn. But when Frances tries to explain it, he resists the kinds of reasons that mental health professionals usually give each other, the ones about character traits or personality quirks formed in childhood. He says he doesn’t want to give ammunition to his enemies, who have already shown their willingness to “shoot the messenger.” It’s not an unfounded concern. In its first official response to Frances, the APA diagnosed him with “pride of authorship” and pointed out that his royalty payments would end once the new edition was published—a fact that “should be considered when evaluating his critique and its timing.”
Frances, who claims he doesn’t care about the royalties (which amount, he says, to just 10 grand a year), also claims not to mind if the APA cites his faults. He just wishes they’d go after the right ones—the serious errors in the DSM-IV. “We made mistakes that had terrible consequences,” he says. Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, and Frances thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics—and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs.
The insurgency against the DSM-5 (the APA has decided to shed the Roman numerals) has now spread far beyond just Allen Frances. Psychiatrists at the top of their specialties, clinicians at prominent hospitals, and even some contributors to the new edition have expressed deep reservations about it. Dissidents complain that the revision process is in disarray and that the preliminary results, made public for the first time in February 2010, are filled with potential clinical and public relations nightmares. Although most of the dissenters are squeamish about making their concerns public—especially because of a surprisingly restrictive nondisclosure agreement that all insiders were required to sign—they are becoming increasingly restive, and some are beginning to agree with Frances that public pressure may be the only way to derail a train that he fears will “take psychiatry off a cliff.”
At stake in the fight between Frances and the APA is more than professional turf, more than careers and reputations, more than the $6.5 million in sales that the DSM averages each year. The book is the basis of psychiatrists’ authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research. It is as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians. Outside the profession, too, the DSM rules, serving as the authoritative text for psychologists, social workers, and other mental health workers; it is invoked by lawyers in arguing over the culpability of criminal defendants and by parents seeking school services for their children. If, as Frances warns, the new volume is an “absolute disaster,” it could cause a seismic shift in the way mental health care is practiced in this country. It could cause the APA to lose its franchise on our psychic suffering, the naming rights to our pain.
"One influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids failed to disclose
money he received from the makers of the bipolar drug Risperdal."
The authority of any doctor depends on their ability to name a patient’s suffering. For patients to accept a diagnosis, they must believe that doctors know—in the same way that physicists know about gravity or biologists about mitosis—that their disease exists and that they have it. But this kind of certainty has eluded psychiatry, and every fight over nomenclature threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the profession by revealing its dirty secret: that for all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering. This is why, as one psychiatrist wrote after the APA voted homosexuality out of the DSM, “there is a terrible sense of shame among psychiatrists, always wanting to show that our diagnoses are as good as the scientific ones used in real medicine.”
Since 1980, when the DSM-III was published, psychiatrists have tried to solve this problem by using what is called descriptive diagnosis: a checklist approach, whereby illnesses are defined wholly by the symptoms patients present. The main virtue of descriptive psychiatry is that it doesn’t rely on unprovable notions about the nature and causes of mental illness, as the Freudian theories behind all those “neuroses” had done. Two doctors who observe a patient carefully and consult the DSM‘s criteria lists usually won’t disagree on the diagnosis—something that was embarrassingly common before 1980. But descriptive psychiatry also has a major problem: Its diagnoses are nothing more than groupings of symptoms. If, during a two-week period, you have five of the nine symptoms of depression listed in the DSM, then you have “major depression,” no matter your circumstances or your own perception of your troubles. “No one should be proud that we have a descriptive system,” Frances tells me. “The fact that we do only reveals our limitations.” Instead of curing the profession’s own malady, descriptive psychiatry has just covered it up.
Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness By Gary Greenberg. Wired Magazine.
* * * * * * *
Psychosis as a Natural Process?
My Epiphany Moment in a Process of Psychosis
An epiphany moment just over a year ago, highlights the nature of my self-discovery and real recovery from a misperceived and misunderstood mental illness. I'd begun writing a blog in February 2011, some four months after returning to Thailand from that fateful trip back to Australia, the previous October. Anger, as the rebound reaction which can fuel the rise up and out of a depression, or be used as a means of avoiding a shame fueled depression, energized my writing throughout much of 2011. Hindsight's 20/20 vision would not bring this to a full realization though, until the energy of another six week long psychosis, brought about a primary process healing. Explanations of that process will follow a description of an important epiphany moment and the subsequent unfolding of its confirmation. It was during self-reflection on an angry state of mind and a life-long pattern of rumination, that my epiphany moment came to mind. The next day I wrote the blog post below.
Tuesday, 14 June 2011:
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| Bipolar Anger & Moods |
Bipolar Anger & Its Muscular Stimulation?
Anger was about Movement before the Mind Evolved?
Anger is Stimulated by Muscular Feedback Signals?
Anger is a Survival Instinct - Rage its most Intense Form?
To Control Anger - Feel the Instinct Stimulating the Mind?
Moods Muscular Actions Affected by Dissociated Mind?
Anger is Stimulated by Muscular Feedback Signals?
Anger is a Survival Instinct - Rage its most Intense Form?
To Control Anger - Feel the Instinct Stimulating the Mind?
Moods Muscular Actions Affected by Dissociated Mind?
I went for my usual walk yesterday in the early evening, thoughts swirling about people on facebook who's philosophy I disagree with. I felt a familiar tone of combative confrontation in my thinking, as scenario’s of face to face conversations filled my mind. This is an old habit of mine stemming from childhood and emotional identification with my father. Even after several kilometers and close to an hour into my walking, the same anger toned thoughts of confrontation filled my mind.
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| The Synaptic Gap |
Suddenly as I was crossing a major intersection and dodging traffic, a scene from the previous night sprang to mind. I'd been walking across a traffic bridge on the way to my girlfriends shop, when in an epiphany moment of 'mood was movement' jumped some of those synaptic gaps within my brain.
With this insight of mind my autonomic nervous system shifted my experience with a sudden muscle relaxation and a grounded feeling of perfect presence in that moment.
"Innate Anger as muscular tension, is stimulating my thoughts and mood" came into my mind now as I carried on across the intersection and again my muscular system relaxed and grounded my experience.
Muscular tensions fire the mind? - That can't be right? Can It?
"The motor act is the cradle of the mind - The capacity to anticipate and predict movement,
is the basis of what consciousness is all about" __Sir Charles Sherington
"We are exquisitely social creatures. Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others. Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling - not by thinking" _Giacomo Rizzolatti
is the basis of what consciousness is all about" __Sir Charles Sherington
"We are exquisitely social creatures. Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others. Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling - not by thinking" _Giacomo Rizzolatti
I've read the above quotations dozens of times over the last year or so and I guess they had not resonated within me, although I gave intellectual lip service to there validity. I have pasted them into many recent articles here on this blog, yet did not really feel there meaning until two nights ago. While walking across that traffic bridge, musing over how to write new perspectives from neuroscience, for whatever reason the often sighted words gelled together into a new sensation. I felt the reality of these two quotes rise up from the pit of my stomach, as if gut instinct had suddenly connected up with my brain, in a epiphany moment of "ah! I get it."
I guess I have been working towards this for many months now, with a daily routine of deep breath relaxation with facial and chest muscle relaxation helping me to let go of manic excitement, without any kind of self medication. Slowly but surely I have been letting go of the habitual dissociation of my over intellectualized head. Shifting the locus of my sense of being from too much living through the mind, towards a fuller sense of body and mind felt awareness.
The angry combative thoughts rose again today in the same circumstances, as I walked my usual circuit. I caught myself sooner this time though with a, "why do I have this angry tone to my thoughts." Feeling muscular tension I realized that I'd triggered an old habit by tensing my body to focus on writing. In habitual hyper-vigilant style I tend to distress myself in order to maintain a high level of concentration. Realizing how I'd created my state of mind through unconscious muscular tensions, the relief was equally spontaneous as I grounded in the here and now moment again.
My feet became more connected with the footpath beneath me, and my whole body became more relaxed, more rhythmic as I felt each foot fall touch the ground. This relaxed and alert feeling has only come in sporadic and occasional moments in the past, and now it came with a sense of control. I tested this notion by triggering excitement about theories and concepts, straining the muscles around my eyes and in my jaw for concentration. Sure enough what had been an unconscious pattern for decades brought me into my mind way too much, as I lost my sense of body motion. In my worst periods of mental anguish with bipolar disorder, this very same mechanism gave me those awful de-realization or de-personalization feelings which psychiatrists call symptoms of a mental illness.
The Muscular Pre-Tensions of Mental Anguish?
I know its not easy to accept this notion of muscular tensions as the real source of our mental anguish? Please try relaxing the muscles of your face, your tongue, the tensions of the jaw & around the eyes and be aware of spontaneous shifts in the depth of your breathe. As your focus turns to awareness of body sensations, the grip of dissociation should ease within the mind and as the muscular system relaxes, the minds activity will follow? This is how I manage the excitement phase of coming up and out of myself, away from habitual withdrawal, which doctors like to call mania.
* * * * * * *
August 2012:
The Body comes first, not the Mind? Its a comment I've made on and off over the past year since that moment on a Bangkok traffic bridge and my “movement was mood,” epiphany experience. A moment of relaxed self-reflection often lost in day to day unconscious stress reactions since. Yet imagine yourself as a toddler learning to walk? There was a time in your life when such an experience was brand new and practice was required to learn this primary function of our human nature. The completely upright locomotion which so set us apart from other mammalian primates. Its an ability we learn in the first years of childhood, in what the developmental experts call the practicing phase of life, the first three years. We learn so much, and promptly forget the learning, as our brain creates patterns of expectation which become our unconscious motivation, or motor-vation, as I've come to understand. The primary processes of unconscious expectation, which guide us through life. This is the main reason why fundamental change is so difficult to achieve, until we find a way of bringing the unconscious motivation into conscious awareness, and begin to dissolve old habitual patterns. Its also why traditional talk therapy is so limited for serious mental anguish, and why the mad behavior of psychosis is so misinterpreted and misunderstood by our rational mind. Let me share an explanation of primary process and how my constant reading and re-reading over the past five years has fueled a steady organic process of natural transformation, including four episodes of euphoric "state," psychosis. Reading people like Murray Bowen, Jaak Panksepp, Silvan Tomkins, Paul Ekman, Allan Schore, Stephen Porges and Peter Levine in a short list of the most important contributors to my slow, yet steady paradigm shift in self-awareness and self-definition. Examples;
“Emotions, the Higher Cerebral Processes & this Sense of Self:
Evolutionarily, the brain mechanisms for language were designed for social interactions, not for the conduct of science. Indeed, words give us a special ability to deceive each other. There are many reasons to believe that animal behavior will lie to us less than human words. This dilemma is especially acute when it comes to our hidden feelings that we normally share only through complex personal and cultural display rules."(Panksepp, 1998).
"Lie to Me," Based on the work of Paul Ekman, a disiple of Silvan Tomkins
"Ekman's work on facial expressions had its starting point in the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins. Ekman's projects included developing techniques for measuring facial muscular movement while also developing theories about emotion and deception through empirical research. Ekman showed that contrary to the belief of some anthropologists including Margaret Mead, facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, but universal across human cultures and thus biological in origin.
Expressions he found to be universal included those indicating anger, disgust, fear, shame, joy, sadness, and surprise. Findings on contempt are less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized. Ekman's first publication in 1957 discussed all of his findings on developing methods for measuring nonverbal behavior. He also wrote a famous book called "Telling Lies" in the year 1985. He was encouraged to write this book by his college friend and teacher Silvan S. Tomkins."
Consider Sylvan Tomkins ideas about affect/emotion and our sensitive skin; “The face appears to me to be the central site of affect/emotion responses and their feedback., but I have come to regard the skin, in general, and the skin of the face in particular, as of the greatest importance in producing the feel of affect/emotion. Three of the most compelling states to which the human being is vulnerable arise on the surface of the skin. Torture via skin stimulation has been used for centuries to shape and compel human beings to act against their own deepest wishes and values. Sexual seduction via skin stimulation has also prompted human beings to violate their own wishes and values. Fatigue to the point of extreme sleepiness appears to be localized in the skin surrounding the eyes.” _Sylvan Tomkins.
Back to Jaak Panksepp's understanding of our cerebral sense of self;
"In addition, it now appears that our two cerebral hemispheres have such different cognitive and emotional perspectives on the world that the linguistic approach may delude us as readily as inform us. Medical research in which the non-speaking right hemisphere has been selectively anesthetized indicates that people express very different feelings when their whole brain is operating than when just the left hemisphere is voicing its views. In short, our left hemisphere--the one that typically speaks to others--may be more adept at lying and constructing a social masquerade rather than revealing deep, intimate emotional secrets. If this is so, an indeterminate amount of information collected with questionnaires and other linguistic output devices may be tainted by social-desirability factors, making data next to useless for resolving basic issues.
Human and animal consciousness is based fundamentally on motor processes that generate self-consciousness by being closely linked to body image representations. Acceptance of such a seemingly incorrect premise--that the fundamental nature of consciousness is constructed as much from motor as from sensory processes--may help us resolve some key conceptual sticking points concerning the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is not simply a sensory-perceptual affair, a matter of mental imagery, as the contents of our mind would have us believe. It is deeply enmeshed with brain mechanisms that automatically promote various forms of action readiness. If this nontraditional view is on the right track, it may allow us to come to terms with our deepest nature in a non-dualistic way." (Panksepp, 1998)
Hmm? “It may allow us to come to terms with our deepest nature in a non-dualistic way?” It certainly is a very different view of human nature compared to our Western consensus reality of “I think therefore I am,” so absorbed within my mind that I can’t feel the nature of real presence and the power of now? Its a view from a leading scientist which gives explanation and foundation to those famous altered states of Cosmic oneness, experienced by so many with a so-called mental illness. Its also the kind of view from leading scientists which seems curiously absent from mainstream media reports about mental illness, in our consensus reality? In fact most research and concepts relating to our body's role in creating our subjective awareness, has been routinely ignored for many decades in the West. As are Eastern traditions and awareness of the body and Kundalini energy cycles. Consider;
What's the deal with 40 days, why is it such a sacred period in spiritual practices and religion?
Many spiritual texts discuss masters and saints who went through various trials and overcame challenges over a period of forty days. Even most military boot camps are six weeks long, about 42 days. Since the mind works in cycles, influenced primarily by the lunar cycle, any practice maintained over forty days uses the will and intent to break a habit of the mind. The mind is said to release 1000 thoughts with every blink of the eyes. Consciously, the human being is powerless over these subconscious chains of thought. Over a forty-day period the cycles of the mind are overcome and the subtle thought-chains of habit can be broken. A habit is a simple chain of thought patterns that have been repeated to the point where the resulting actions have become behavior.
* * * * * * *
Psychosis? Its 40 Days & 40 Nights?
The flip side of trauma experience, and the energies of its release?
How long does the experience normally last?
The acute hallucinatory phase, during which these contents go through the reordering process, usually lasts about six weeks. This, by the way, corresponds to the classical description of visionary experiences in various religious texts, such as the proverbial "forty days in the wilderness" often referred to in the Bible. Anyway, six weeks is roughly it." _Dr John Weir Perry.
"The results of these studies clearly support the conclusions drawn by a number of researchers that psychosis may actually be closely associated with the psyche’s attempt to reorganize itself (i.e., to survive, heal, and/or grow) when it finds itself in an untenable situation (Arieti, 1978; House, 2001; Laing, 1967; Mosher, 1999; Perry, 1999; Siebert, 1999). Some have suggested that by stepping outside the “box” of consensus reality (albeit often unintentionally and haphazardly), these individuals may be in a position to see more clearly the troubles within a society to which the collective tends to be blind. Similarly, it has been suggested that it may be the hidden and/or suppressed troubles of a society itself that often trigger these processes in unusually sensitive people,and that therefore such a process may be an attempt to heal not only the individual’s psyche but also the larger collective psyche (Clarke, 2001; House, 2001; Mindell, 2008; Perry, 1999)." _ Paris Williams, PhD. Is there a deeper reality expressed in euphoric states of psychosis? During 40 days & 40 nights?
U2 - "40?"
How Long? Before We Sing This New Song? Before we Feel it in Our Hearts?
Psychosis as a natural process & not a brain-disease?
A process, misinterpreted and misunderstood by our tendency to objectify or mystify, the human condition?
Trauma and Spirituality:
"In a lifetime of working with traumatized individuals, I have been struck by the intrinsic and wedded relationship between trauma and spirituality. With clients suffering from a daunting array of crippling symptoms, I have been privileged to witness profound and authentic transformations. Seemingly out of nowhere, unexpected “side effects” appeared as these individuals mastered the monstrous trauma symptoms that had haunted them-emotionally, physically and psychologically. Surprises included ecstatic joy, exquisite clarity, effortless focus and an all-embracing sense of oneness." _Peter Levine.
“The life of feeling is that primordial region of the psyche that is most sensitive to the religious encounter. Belief or reason alone does nothing to move the soul; without feeling, religious meaning becomes a vacant intellectual exercise. This is why the most exuberant spiritual moments are emotionally laden.” _Carl Jung.
"At the right time, traumatized individuals are encouraged to and supported to feel and surrender into immobility/NDE states, states of profound surrender, which liberate these primordial archetypal energies, while integrating them into consciousness. In addition to the “awe-full” states of horror and terror appear to be connected to the transformative states such as awe, presence, timelessness and ecstasy. " _Peter Levine, PhD. "In an Unspoken Voice."
Consider more wisdom from the world's most experienced voice, about our unique susceptibility to an unconscious trauma conditioning of the human nervous system;
"Human beings have been designed over millennia, through natural selection and social evolution, to live with and to move through extreme events and loss, and to process feelings of helplessness and terror, without becoming stuck or traumatized. When we experience difficult and particularly horrible sensations and feelings, our tendency, however, is to recoil and avoid them. Mentally, we split off or “dissociate” from these feelings.
Physically, our bodies tighten and brace against them. Our minds go into overdrive trying to explain and make sense of these alien and “bad” sensations. So, we are driven to vigilantly attempt to locate their ominous source in the outside world. We believe that if we feel the sensations, they will overwhelm us forever. The fear of being consumed by these “terrible” feelings leads us to convince ourselves that avoiding them will make us feel better and, ultimately, safer. (p, 180)
If we go underneath the overwhelming emotions and touch into physical sensations, something quiet profound occurs-there is a sense of flow, of “coming home.” This is a truth central to several ancient spiritual traditions, particularly certain traditions in Tibetan Buddhism. (p, 182)
My approach to healing trauma rests broadly on the premise that people are primarily instinctual in nature - that we are, at our very core, human animals. It is this relationship to our animal nature that both makes us susceptible to trauma and, at the same time, promotes a robust capacity to rebound in the aftermath of threat, safely returning to equilibrium. More generally, I believe that to truly understand our body/mind, therapists must first learn about the animal body/mind because of the manner in which our nervous systems have evolved in an ever changing and challenging environment. (p, 225)
However, there is an almost violent schism lurking in our cultural zeitgeist. Lets face it; the fight against evolution by the proponents of “creationism” and “intelligent design” is not really about professed gaps in the fossil records; its about whether or not we are basically animals. (p, 225)
In fact, the word instinct is rarely found in modern psychological literature. Rather it is purged and replaced with terms such as drives, motivations and needs. While instincts are still routinely drawn upon to explain animal behaviors, we have somehow lost sight of how many human behavior patterns (though modifiable) are primal, automatic, universal and predictable. (p, 231)" _Peter Levine, PhD. "In an Unspoken Voice."
"In the Beginning, before the Word, was Consciousness. The primal consciousness in man
is pre-mental, and has nothing to do with cognition. It is the same as in the animals. And this
pre-mental consciousness remains as long as we live the powerful root and body of our
consciousness. The mind is but the last flower, the cul-de-sac." _D. H. Lawrence.
is pre-mental, and has nothing to do with cognition. It is the same as in the animals. And this
pre-mental consciousness remains as long as we live the powerful root and body of our
consciousness. The mind is but the last flower, the cul-de-sac." _D. H. Lawrence.
* * * * * * *
Individual Subjective Experience & The Physiological Process of Psychosis?
How much of our personal history, in all we've taken in from past subjective experience, is projected onto the physical experience of psychosis? All those sensations within the body and affect/images and thoughts the process stimulates? Consider my attempt to interpret my own recent 40 days & 40 nights experience, this past June. As the heightened energy of my experience fuels an attempt at subjective interpretation, from my previous reading and learning of new knowledge?
SENSITIVITY-EXISTENTIAL ISOLATION & PSYCHOSIS:
“If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable Age of Darkness… They will see that what was considered ‘schizophrenic’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break into our all-too-closed minds.” _R.D. Laing.
“Who experiences a “schizophrenic break”? Well, there’s a lot of controversy about this! There is a constitutional element, which is often interpreted as a “genotype of pathology”, but this depends on how you see it. I see it as a genotype of sensitivity! Among adolescent siblings in a family, for example, it’s usually the most sensitive one who’s going to catch it.
So it starts with a feeling of isolation… “Yes. Now the symbolic expression of this is falling into a death – not only a death state, but also a death space – the “afterlife,” the “realm of the ancestors,” the “land of the dead,” the “spirit world.” The common experience here is for the person to look about and think that half the people around him are dead too. While in this condition, it’s very hard for one to tell if one is really alive or not.” _John Wier Perry. Consider;
“Humans have three principal defense strategies—fight, flight, and freeze. The Polyvagal Theory describes three developmental stages of a mammal’s autonomic nervous system: Immobilization, mobilization, and social communication or social engagement. Faulty neuroception might lie at the root of several psychiatric disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression, and Reactive Attachment Disorder. We are familiar with fight and flight behaviors, but know less about the defense strategy of immobilization, or freezing. This strategy, shared with early vertebrates, is often expressed in mammals as “DEATH FEIGNING.” (capitals mine) _Stephen Porges.
“Right away at the beginning, the death experience is accompanied by the feeling that you’ve gone back to the beginning of time. This involves a regression, a return to the state of infancy in one’s personal life history. But hand in hand with this is the feeling of slipping back into the world of the primordial parents, into a Garden of Eden. For example, it’s a very common experience to feel one is the child of Adam and Eve, say, at the beginning of time. This is very symbolic, obviously. It’s pretty much a representation of the psyche at the start of one’s individual career after birth.” _John Wier Perry.
Metaphorically speaking, Adam & Eve, would be the Sun & Earth, with the world taken from Adam’s rib? Can we really have any “cognitive” concept of what our nervous system is “aware” of, pre & post birth. What unconscious level of awareness is Stephen Porges “neuroception” referring to? Consider Roland Fischer’s suggestion about what we may once have “known” yet need to forget in our social/survival mode of functioning?
Space and Increasing Hyper and Hypoarousal: “Although the newborn infant’s only reality, in the beginning, is his CNS activity, he soon learns, by bumping into things, to erect a corresponding model “out there.” Ultimately, his forgetting that his CNS activity had been the only reality will be taken by society as proof of his maturity, and he will be ready to conduct his life “out there” in (container) space and (chronological) time.” _ Roland Fischer.
Are we not composed of star dust & all those chemical elements?
Is the typical “self-referential” ideation in a “psychotic break” a rationalized “hyper-sensitivity” to nature & all that lies beyond Eve’s protective atmosphere? A sensitivity which is non-verbal, non-cognitive and is a more refined integration of all five physical senses, when we fall beneath our normal nervous system orientation of “social engagement.” An overwhelmingly “unconsciously” stimulated experience, “rationalized” by the mind as “the TV is sending out hidden messages, just for me?”
Stephen Porges groundbreaking discovery of a third branch of our autonomic nervous system, shows our unconscious orienting responses are like two different operating systems, to use a computer analogy. (1) Social Engagement, an evolved nervous system responsiveness “innervated” by the feedback signals of head & facial muscles, with their vagal control over the heart. (2) Survival Orientation, an evolved nervous system responsiveness, shared with all other mammals and heightened due to our “sensitive skin,” which under hyper-vigilant threat attains a higher “resonance,” with background sensory information.
Consider Sylvan Tomkins ideas about affect/emotion and our sensitive skin; “The face appears to me to be the central site of affect/emotion responses and their feedback., but I have come to regard the skin, in general, and the skin of the face in particular, as of the greatest importance in producing the feel of affect/emotion. Three of the most compelling states to which the human being is vulnerable arise on the surface of the skin. Torture via skin stimulation has been used for centuries to shape and compel human beings to act against their own deepest wishes and values. Sexual seduction via skin stimulation has also prompted human beings to violate their own wishes and values. Fatigue to the point of extreme sleepiness appears to be localized in the skin surrounding the eyes.” _Sylvan Tomkins.
* * * * * * *
SYSTEMS THEORY is now being used to understand the complex non-linear feedback systems which integrate our human experience, particularly the early maturation of brain and nervous systems, via environmental feedback. It is becoming increasingly clear that human inter-subjectivity, is more resonant affect/emotion than left-brained linguistics and dialogue.
Consider Allan Schore’s understanding of our non-linear bio-metabolic-energy transformations, which turn matter into “meta” within the human mind; “In physics a property of resonance is sympathetic vibration, the tendency of one resonance system to enlarge & augment through matching the resonance frequency pattern of another resonance system.
In contemporary bioenergetic theory, information is conceived of as ’a special kind of energy required for the work of establishing biological order’. The processing of all forms of information by the brain, including that embedded in internal representations, occur through transformations of metabolic energy. The extraordinary power of the concept of energy transformations derives from the fact that these fundamental phenomena occur on each and every level of living systems, from the molecular to the societal.
The growing postnatal brain, the physical matrix of the emerging human mind, is supplied with a continuous supply of energy from metabolic processes. A fundamental tenant of this theory states that the assembly of complex systems occurs under conditions of thermodynamic non-equilibrium (a directed flow of energy). This energy is utilized to facilitate the cooperativity of simpler sub-system components into a hierarchically-structured complex system that expresses the emergent functions of organizing and maintaining stability.
Bioenergetic conceptualizations thus need to be implanted into the central core of psychoanalytic and psychological theory, a position they now occupy in physics, chemistry, and biology. Thermodynamics are not only the essence of biodynamic, they are also the essence of neurodynamics, and therefore of psychodynamics.” _Allan N Schore.
* * * * * * *
If the word “evolution” is to make sense on a felt level of experience, where life actually occurs, should we not consider that it is the body, its five physical senses and the motor act of orienting responses, which informs the subjective awareness of the human/animal mind? Consider;
“My belief is in the blood and flesh as being wiser than the intellect. The body-unconscious is where life bubbles up in us. It is how we know that we are alive, alive to the depths of our souls and in touch somewhere with the vivid reaches of the cosmos” _D. H. Lawrence.
“The motor act is the cradle of the mind – The capacity to anticipate and predict movement, is the basis of what consciousness is all about” _Sir Charles Sherrington.
“The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. Its as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head-mass becomes some enchanted loom, where millions of flushing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one: A shifting harmony of sub-patterns.” _Sir Charles Sherrington.
* * * * * * *
In Buddhist art, one must find the stillness within, which allows the movement and thought bubbles of cosmic inspiration to flow. Is there so much more to hallucination, delusion and psychosis than meets our “pathologizing” and fearfully judgmental eyes?
Consider two recent posts as five weeks of “psychosis” peaked with these “subjective” interpretations;
“Madness? An attachment awareness of the divine, a sense of eternity in a single moment.
Mania? I fall out of my braced muscular defense which habitually miss-regulated and thwarted my need of human attachment, and in the spontaneous shift in physiological state, sensory freedom reigns.
I’m suddenly born again to an awareness of so much, as if all five senses have come back online, after being stuck in the freeze mode of the post trauma trap. In my body, I’m suddenly so alive. The positive states of interest, excitement & joy resume their biological process and begin to reorganize my brain stem neural networks to mediate a free and full engagement with the experience of life. So enraptured by this spontaneous shift towards positive affect/emotion experience, I subjectively feed this new physiological state of being with emotive scenarios of passion, glory and wonder. I’m so overjoyed I can’t still my mind, and its role in my self-nurture during long periods of isolation, automatically continues and I overshoot the runway of my new physiological approach to the experience of life. Its natural intent, as the non-linear biological system, which is the organism known as David Bates, is miss-perceived by subjectivity, and the physiological need to BE in the here and now moment, is thwarted.
Thwarted because I confuse my minds sense of “I” with the deeper consciousness of the sensate experience of the body. The subtle sensations, sensory vibrations and arising images that resonate in an attunement/attachment connection, as that oceanic feeling of oneness, so common to the manic/mystic experience.
Attachment, Separation & Loss, is perhaps the ultimate challenge to deepening awareness, for a sentient species.”
* * * * * * *
“The ascension is not a rising to “above” it’s a Fall, just as its always been, when you seek awareness of the Universe within, & truly feel the presence of this Eternal Now. In Eastern mysticism, such experience is known as a Kundalini awakening, or in the “stillness” of the great Prince, Buddha being?
Is it time to re-address the tribal metaphors of life’s meaning, to a species understanding? In a Universe of 96% dark matter/energy. Life is “The Resurrection.” That great symbol of sacrifice we see in Christ on the Cross, as all the Light Matter Energy, sacrificed to create your life? How does the Universe become Eternal? By evolving into a form which can act upon itself, YOU & your children’s, children’s children, forever & ever, Amen! Or whatever metaphor of gratitude you use.”
Perhaps a culmination of a 32 year journey with classic manic-depression & its resolution as a felt awareness of madness, in my sensitive human animal nature, “acting out?” Or complete B.S. Although there is five years of research about my body/brain & its homeostatic feedback systems, to complement these in-sane statements. Yet, are we not, children of the light?
When we make the effort to see the bigger picture, can we understand and accept that science & spirituality are converging in this 21st century A.D. Because this is how it happens, as the Universe within, dreams itself awake? In the strange notion of an “Eternal Now” it already did, and we’re just remembering it ALL?
“The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization.
The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically, she is the mind and they are the five senses.
They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, and an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A. Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness…” _Joseph Campbell.
“I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman or child.” _Joseph Campbell.
* * * * * * *
Five years ago, when I first began to read the literature of neuroscience, I fully expected to learn how my brain was responsible for my bipolar type 1 condition. How my consistent experiences of spiritual Ecstasy in euphoric mania were stimulated by my faulty and diseased brain chemistry? I did not expect to read consistent references to my body, and its autonomic nervous system (ANS), in relation to symptoms in mental illness, and spiritual experience. Yet over and over again I read about the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of my (ANS). Unexpected, because such information is hardly ever part of mainstream reporting on research into mental illness experience and causation?
How is my nervous system responsible for my perceptions of a Cosmic Oneness?
Consider an excerpt from Roland Fischer's brilliant paper on hallucination, delusion and the role our autonomic nervous system plays in both our normal and abnormal perceptual awareness;
“During the ”I”-state of daily routine, the outside world is experienced as separate from oneself. With increasing ergotropic (sympathetic nervous system) and trophotropic (parasympathetic nervous system) arousal, however, this separateness gradually disappears, apparently because in the “Self”-state of ecstasy and samadhi, cortical and subcortical activity are indistinguishably integrated.
This unity is reflected in the experience of Oneness with everything, a Oneness with the universe that is oneself.
Space and Increasing Hyper and Hypoarousal
We call man’s symbolic interpretation of his CNS activity “perception-behavior” and regard creative, “hyperphrenic,” and ecstatic states, as well as Zazen and samadhi, as perceptual-behavioral interpretations of ergotropic and trophotropic arousal, respectively.
We may now consider some of the perceptual-behavioral changes, or transformations, that gradually develop as the level of arousal increases and decreases along each continuum. One of the most conspicuous transformations is that of “constancies”, which in the normal state of daily routine form a learned structure of primary ordering of space and time “out there.”
Although the newborn infant’s only reality, in the beginning, is his CNS activity, he soon learns, by bumping into things, to erect a corresponding model “out there.” Ultimately, his forgetting that his CNS activity had been the only reality will be taken by society as proof of his maturity, and he will be ready to conduct his life “out there” in (container) space and (chronological) time.
The adult interprets his CNS activity within this structure of similarity criteria, or “constancies,” and thus experience can be said to consist of two processes: the programmed (subcortical) CNS activity; and the symbolic or perceptual-behavioral (cortical) interpretation, or metaprograms, of the CNS activity.
It should be emphasized that the projection of our CNS activity as location in the physical dimension of space and time "out there" was learned at, and is hence bound to, the lower levels of arousal characteristic of our daily survival routines. All of this is to say that the constancy of the "I" is interfered with as one moves along the perception-hallucination continuum from the "I" of the physical world to the "Self" of the mental dimension; Analogously, the perception-meditation continuum also involves a departure from the "I" to the "Self."
The further we progress on the perception-hallucination continuum from the normal through the creative, psychotic, and, ultimately to the ecstatic state, the more complete is the transformation, or "unlearning," of the constancies of the physical dimension. Input, or outside information in general, is gradually reduced along this continuum.
Thus, Saint Teresa of Avila tells us in her autobiography that, at the peak of a mystical experience, "... the soul neither hears nor sees nor feels. While it lasts, none of the senses perceives or knows what is taking place". Space, then, which was gradually established in ever widening circles during childhood, gradually contracts with increasing arousal and ultimately disappears.
"Self": The Knower and Image-Maker; and "I": The Known and Imagined.
At the peak of trophotropic arousal, in samadhi, the meditating subject experiences nothing but his own self-referential nature, void of compelling contents. It is not difficult to see a similarity between the meditative experience of pure self-reference and St. Teresa's description of her ecstasy: in both timeless and spaceless experiences the mundane world is virtually excluded. Of course, the converge is true of the mundane state of daily routine, in which the oceanic unity with the universe, in ecstasy and samadhi, is virtually absent.
Thus, the mutual exclusiveness of the "normal" and the exalted states, both ecstasy and samadhi, allows us to postulate that man, the self-referential system, exists on two levels: as "Self" in the mental dimension of exalted states; and as "I" in the objective world, where he is able and willing to change the physical dimension "out there." In fact, the "I" and the "Self" can be postulated on purely logical grounds. See, for instance, Brown's reasoning that the universe is apparently ... constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself. But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself... but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore, false to, itself.
In our terminology, the "Self" of exalted states is that which sees and, knows, while the "I" is the interpretation, that which is seen and known in the physical space-time of the world "out there." The mutually exclusive relation between the "seer" and the "seen," or the elusiveness of the "Self" and the "I" may have its physiological basis in the mutual exclusiveness of the ergotropic (sympathetic nervous system) and trophotropic (parasympathetic nervous system)systems.
Such "I"-"Self" communication is the creative source of art, science, literature, and religion.” _Roland Fischer. A Cartography of the Ecstatic and Meditative States
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If the Ecstatic state of unity with all that exists can be explained as our evolved nervous systems (positive) perceptual capacity, what about all the (negative) expressions of psychosis? Recall our panel of experts on the NPR TV program, Minds on Edge, "The best way to describe having a psychotic episode is like a waking nightmare." Similarly my own and others description of Ecstatic states, is like being in a waking dream? Recall Silvan Tomkins original notion of innate affects;
"The nine affects:
These are the nine affects, listed with a low/high intensity label for each affect and accompanied by its biological expression:
Positive:
Enjoyment/Joy - smiling, lips wide and out
Interest/Excitement - eyebrows down, eyes tracking, eyes looking, closer listening
Neutral:
Surprise/Startle - eyebrows up, eyes blinking
Negative:
Anger/Rage - frowning, a clenched jaw, a red face
Disgust - the lower lip raised and protruded, head forward and down
Dissmell (reaction to bad smell) - upper lip raised, head pulled back
Distress/Anguish - crying, rhythmic sobbing, arched eyebrows, mouth lowered
Fear/Terror - a frozen stare, a pale face, coldness, sweat, erect hair
Shame/Humiliation - eyes lowered, the head down and averted, blushing
Are these innate affects of positive & negative state, involved in a spontaneous, and unconscious re-organization of brain-nervous system organization, during a psychotic episode? Are Tomkins innate affects the roots of human emotion and is emotion the metabolic energy source for our subjective states of mind? I certainly think so, and this shift in self-understanding has brought considerable conscious awareness and control over my manic-depressive nature.
Consider a conversation with Paul Ekman (Tomkins pupil) from The New York Times;
The 43 Facial Muscles That Reveal Even the Most Fleeting Emotions.
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| An Internal Reality We Shy Away From? |
A. For one thing, I began studying Buddhist monks in my lab. In addition, I was halfway through writing ''Emotions Revealed'' when I met him. It caused me to rewrite it. It sharpened my ideas to contrast them with Buddhist beliefs.
Crucial to how we feel is being aware of how we are feeling in the moment. The sine qua non of that is to realize that you are being emotional in the first place. The earlier you recognize an emotion, the more choice you will have in dealing with it.
In Buddhist terms, it's recognizing the spark before the flame. In Western terms, it's trying to increase the gap between impulse and saying or doing something you might regret later."
Are Tomkins innate affects, the Buddhist spark to an emotional flame which energizes the human mind, and our subjective perceptions? Are these negative and positive affects the sparks which color our perceptual images and thoughts, from the ordinary, to the bizarre? And is the photo of our internal reality beneath our skin, a reality we all shy away from, which contributes to a misperception in our self-definition, and our understanding of the human condition?
Recall from above;
“These steps of scanning, diagnosing, and treating begin early in the child’s life and continue.” As we create our consensus reality and as alluded to above, there is now an understandable fear about a 1950's conversation concerning the very building blocks of any society, the "family."
Yet Murray Bowen’s seminal ideas on how society functions just like an extended family, are as valid today as they were in the 1950?s. We do confuse subjective and emotionally charged perceptions with real-life facts, we think and react to relieve emotional anxiety, more than we perceive and critique the reality before our eyes?"
Consider, questions about the mind and how our subjective state of awareness, is actually created?
Is our consensus reality, that mind is created by the “upstairs” brain completely accurate? Or does the “first born” (touch of biblical metaphor?) brain in our gut have far more influence on the creation of these subjective states of awareness, to which we apply the creative self-interpretation, mind? Consider a typical diagnosis example:
“Steven curls up in a ball and cries uncontrollably whenever anyone enters the room” and “Steven is paranoid that others are watching him.”
If we suspend our subjective state analysis and awful tendency to categorize behavior into parts like metaphors of symptomatic diagnosis. Could we not just see the motor-vation of fear-terror in the body’s real-life communication of what is actually being experienced? The most useful phrase I took from my therapist training, was “all behavior is communication?” So when we suspend the “minds” fearful avoidance of the reality before our eyes, do we see the “felt,” yet unconscious experience of the individual.
An experience which can only be relieved at an “unconscious” level of embodied experience? We curl up in fearful avoidance of a sense of threat, of dread, (unconsciously projected as something out there) while diagnosing others stay within a dissociated mind which fearfully judges an otherness, it does not understand? Does not understand because we look with a “what should be expectation,” in interpretation of the actual reality before our eyes? “A socialized norm of expectation, in our consensus reality?” In the creative use of metaphor, we could perceive those diagnosing others, as acting just like our ancestors 50,000 years ago? Grouped together in support and protection, against a fearful sense of “nature,” out there?
Plato’s Cave & "Know Thyself," springs to mind here?
What we don’t normally perceive in the reality of the lived moment though, is our unconscious motor-vation within that personal cave, we call the body? Yet just as Jake Sully reminds us, when he falls through the canopy on a mythical moon named Pandora, “you have to trust your body, it knows what to do?”
Can we learn to stop seeing in expectation of what we “think” should be the reality before our eyes, and see what actually is, in nature’s artfully constructed “body language?”
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” _Joseph Campbell.
In truth, we avoid nature’s harsher reality like the plague whenever she demands a stress response, in the real-life reality of the lived moment? We don’t like real-life distress and we recoil from it, in the double-bind trap of nature’s instincts for survival and our socialized denial of instinctual motivation.
Watch the audience recoil reaction in this great BBC TV series, as the surface image of a beautiful face is removed to reveal the reality of evolution beneath the pleasing image?
Its an odd paradox of the human condition, that we are happy to accept our evolved nature when it saves our life, and the word instinct is fine. We are happy to accept positive sensations and feelings in consideration of the word evolution, yet quickly turn towards denial when negative sensations, feelings and "acted out" behaviors are stimulated by that same word? In our socialized consensus reality of normal and acceptable behavior though, anything abnormal is diagnosed as Illness and definitely not Instinct?
"In fact, the word instinct is rarely found in modern psychological literature. Rather it is purged and replaced with terms such as drives, motivations and needs. While instincts are still routinely drawn upon to explain animal behaviors, we have somehow lost sight of how many human behavior patterns (though modifiable) are primal, automatic, universal and predictable. (p, 231)" _Peter Levine, PhD. "In an Unspoken Voice."
Consider this explanation of our evolved nature from The Child Trauma Academy.
"Humans are Special:
Communication between one human and another is the hallmark of our species. Communication was the critical capacity required for survival during the thousands of generations of our evolution. Naked, slow, weak, and without biological armor or weapons, humans survived by living and hunting in groups. Interdependent individuals created a strong, flexible, and adaptive "whole" -- the band, the clan, the tribe.
While physically separate and self-aware, individual humans are linked by the invisible bonds of sensation, perception, and communication into larger biological units, or groups. One individual may belong to many groups -- a couple, a family, and a working group. Each group has a unique set of tasks and a set of rewards for its members. The integrity and function of the group is formed, maintained, and changed by social interaction.
The human brain developed remarkable biological apparatus dedicated specifically to social perception and communication, verbal and non-verbal. These underlying biological properties are continually at play in all human interactions -- sensing, processing, perceiving, storing, and acting on signals from other humans. All human interactions are governed by core principles of communication that are the product of neurobiological processes shaped by thousands of years of evolutionary pressures.
Through the evolutionary process, the remarkable expressive communication capacity of the face was further refined. In fact, facial expression became the most important of all social communication instruments. What else has the capacity to both reflect the internal emotional state of the individual and elicit a specific emotional and social response? The various faces we make can express the full range of human emotions.
Beware of Strangers & Anything New?
During their development, each person creates a catalogue of familiar faces and stores these as templates for familiar/safe. In these familiar faces, the infant and child learn the non-verbal language of the group as surely as they learn the verbal language. An unfamiliar face will elicit a low-level alarm response in any individual. All new faces are judged to be threatening until proven otherwise.
Two factors provoke this reaction. First, the brain's information matching process is very conservative. All novel situations and new information are judged to be threatening until proven otherwise. The second specific reason that new faces elicit a low-level alarm is that the human brain evolved in a world where, for thousands of generations, the major threats to any individual were other humans.
A new person, a new face in the typical interaction from our history meant that there were other humans around competing for the same water, fruits, game, and cave. This new person was as likely to attack as he was to decide to affiliate or cooperate. Across generations, wariness to new individuals, new groups, and new ideas was selected and built into the circuits of the human brain's alarm response."
Yet in the Western world today, it is this unconscious hard-wired wariness, which is habitually denied in our daily "I think therefore I am," social rituals of acceptable behavior. A consensus denial which causes us to unknowingly scan and diagnose in mind reading fashion, rather than recognize the unconscious language of the body.
Yet beyond the daily headline drama, I firmly believe that we have reached a crucial point in so-called history, “that ever present moment,” for which we use the metaphor “eternal.” We are emerging into a dawning realization as we begin to face the reality within, where all our perceptions are actually created? The body/brain as a holistic and creative sense-of-self, or Plato’s cave and our overwhelmingly unconscious, organismic motivations?
Step back for a moment and look at the big picture, of a Western world now financially and morally bankrupt, and in dire need of a new vision to light the way forward? Just as in the past, it will come from that ancient tribe who are born to psychosis, the kind of sensitive souls Greek mythology gave names like Cassandra to? In a dreamlike dramatization of meaning & the human condition?
“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe to match your nature with Nature.” _Joseph Campbell.
* * * * * * *
The Dream? A Container of Existential Reality?
Why do both the negative and positive experiences of psychosis feel like a waking dream or nightmare? Why is the dreaming state, considered the very crucible of Madness? Consider Jaak Panksepp’s brilliant, “Affective Neuroscience – The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions,” and a chapter entitled;
“Sleep, Arousal, and Mythmaking in the Brain:
Shakespeare proposed one possible function of sleep when he suggested that it “knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” Each day our lives cycle through the master routines of sleeping, dreaming, and waking.
Although we do not know for sure what the various sleep stages do for us, aside from alleviating tiredness, we do know about the brain mechanisms that generate these states.
All of the executive structures are quite deep in the brain, some in the lower brain stem. To the best of our knowledge, however, the most influential mechanisms for slow wave sleep (SWS) are higher in the brain than the active waking mechanisms, while the executive mechanisms for REM sleep are the lowest of the three.
Thus, we are forced to contemplate the strange possibility that the basic dream generators are more ancient in brain evolution that are the generators of our waking consciousness.
The brain goes through various “state shifts” during both waking and sleep. Surprisingly, it has been more difficult for scientists to agree on the types of discrete states of waking consciousness than on those that occur during sleep. EEG clearly discriminates three global vigilance states of the nervous system–waking, SWS, and dreaming or REM sleep.
Some people have also thought that dreaming is the crucible of madness. Many have suggested that schizophrenia reflects the release of dreaming processes into the waking state. Schizophrenics do not exhibit any more REM than normal folks, except during the evening before a “schizophrenic break,” when REM is in fact elevated. There seem to be two distinct worlds within our minds, like matter and antimatter, worlds that are often 180 degrees out of phase with each other.
The electrical activity in the brain stem during dreaming is the mirror image of waking–the ability of certain brain areas to modulate the activity of others during waking changes from excitation to inhibition during REM. In other words, areas of the brain that facilitate behaviors in waking now inhibit those same behaviors. Many believe that if we understand this topsy-turvy reversal of the ruling potentials in the brain, we will better understand the nature of everyday mental realities, as well as the nature of minds that are overcome by madness.
Perhaps what is now the REM state was the original form of waking consciousness in early brain evolution, when “emotionality” was more important than reason in the competition for resources.”
Certainly in my own experience the dream like state of a euphoric mania, enabled me to overcome a highly defensive muscular posture, and approach others openly instead of in a self-defeating all to wary of threat, attempts at social engagement. Defeated by the unconscious signals to others about my fearful inner state, and kept in this unconscious pattern by signals to my own brain-nervous system, from my habitual muscular bracing. My birth trauma conditioned postural attitude to life?
The dream state feeling of euphoric mania, acted as a container for an existential reality of innate fear-terror, which threatens to annihilate the conscious mind in any normal waking approach. Any normal conscious awareness which has not been conditioned by experience, to deal with this brutal aspect of our existential reality. In our modern world of assured survival, the ancient rituals of a young man's right of passage have been been largely forgotten. Yet teaching the young man to face the reality of a life eats life survival, and its real-life possibility of shear terror, were once a vital experience for survival. What ancient trace memories are sometimes contained within our nightly dreams and nightmares?
Why do we dream? And what is Psychosis?
"Strange psychotic symptoms explained.
Our observations of hundreds of depressed patients had confirmed that excessive worry puts huge stress on the REM sleep mechanism. This led us to hypothesise that schizophrenia develops in those particularly imaginative, highly sensitive people who become so stressed that the REM sleep discharge mechanism cannot take the strain, and so their ability to separate waking reality from the metaphorical reality of the dream world (where the metaphors themselves seem totally real), becomes impaired. When they wake up, they cannot properly switch out of the REM state and become stuck in it.
Naturally their thinking is then predominantly driven from the right hemisphere, the part of the brain most active in metaphorical pattern matching and dreaming. Many of their bodily behaviours could be expected to derive from those found in normal dreaming. In other words, the left hemisphere’s role, which is normally to analyse and organise reality in a rational way, and is predominantly in charge during wakefulness, has been usurped. The delicate working partnership of the brain’s hemispheres has shattered.
This, to our minds, provides a plausible way of explaining the wide variety of psychotic symptoms. The phenomenon of ‘word salad’ – the loosening of meaningful associations between words and phrases that results in people talking in a stream of apparent nonsense – is just what one might expect if the left hemisphere of the brain were to be out of sync with the metaphorical mind of the right hemisphere, as the latter would continue to generate associations without waiting for the left hemisphere to check them out and articulate them.
Catatonia, where patients can stand, sit or lie motionless for long periods in strange postures, oblivious to pain, is what the body also does during REM state dreaming, when the anti-gravity muscles are paralysed. Indeed, resistance to pain is often observed among schizophrenic patients and is even more marked during severe episodes. This is easily understood when we realise that, in dreaming also, cut off from all sensation, we experience no physical pain. That, too, is a REM state phenomenon (and is why hypnotised people can have major surgery painlessly without anaesthetic, as we have discussed).
Hearing voices.
Hearing voices is entirely predictable from our theory too. Talking is primarily a left hemisphere activity, whereas right hemisphere activity is mainly concerned with processing pattern matching and tagging emotions to those patterns to prompt action. We don’t talk when the right hemisphere is dominant during dreaming in REM sleep, although talking whilst in slow-wave sleep is common (but the content rarely seems to make sense to the awake mind.) However, during a psychotic episode, if the person were in the REM state awake, there would still be some logical activity and thinking taking place in the left hemisphere.
But, because the REM state is not anticipating any input from the left hemisphere, it has to interpret those thoughts metaphorically and comes up with the image of alien voices, which can seem to be commenting on the person’s every move, or haranguing them or giving ‘instructions’. (It might be expected that such thoughts would often be critical because the left hemisphere would, to some degree, still be able to analyse what was going on and ‘logically’ know that the behaviour is not normal.) This could further be interpreted metaphorically by the right hemisphere as being spied upon, or being persecuted, or that aliens are inside their head or that they are being followed everywhere by strange ‘rays’ that know everything they are doing. (Neurophysiological evidence confirms that, when schizophrenic people are hearing voices, the speech centres in the left neocortex are activated. And other researchers have observed and filmed REM activity when patients hear voices.)
The visual hallucinations or delusions associated with psychosis are also totally characteristic of the dream state, the function of which is to generate such hallucinatory realities. Neuroscientists have shown the same neuronal pathways are activated in psychotic episodes. Whilst dreaming we all believe completely in the reality of our dreams, just as the schizophrenic person believes in their reality.
Creativity and mental illness.
It has long been suggested that there is a connection between creativity and mental illness. Certainly, people prone to schizophrenia tend to come from creative families. And even if they themselves are not productively creative, then high rates of creativity are found among their siblings and other relatives.
Furthermore, creative people tend to be more sensitive to the emotional environment around them and are less robust in withstanding hostility, intolerance or criticism. Indeed, the higher the level of emotional criticism within the family context, the higher the rate of schizophrenic and depressive relapses. When people go into a psychotic REM trance due to emotional arousal any criticism may well be acting like a post-hypnotic suggestion, compounding the condition." © Copyright Joe Griffin, Ivan Tyrrell and Human Givens Publishing Ltd. 2007.
* * * * * * *
This Evolving Dream of A Cosmic Reality Within?
A CONVERSATION WITH DR. JOHN WEIR PERRY
From When The Dream Becomes Real: the inner Apocalypse in mythology, madness and the future. By Michael O’Callaghan.
"When conscious life is characterised by one-sidedness and by a false attitude, primordial healing images are activated – one might say instinctively – and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists." _Carl Gustav Jung.
"All we have learned of psychotherapy suggests that it is at the precise time when the individual feels as if his whole life is crashing down around him, that he is most likely to achieve an inner reorganisation constituting a quantum leap in his growth toward maturity. Our hope, our belief, is that it is precisely when society's future seems so beleaguered – when its problems seem almost staggering in complexity, when so many individuals seem alienated, and so many values seem to have deteriorated – that it is most likely to achieve a metamorphosis in society's growth toward maturity, toward more truly enhancing and fulfilling the human spirit than ever before. Thus we envision the possibility of an evolutionary leap to a trans-industrial society that not only has know-how, but also a deep inner knowledge of what is worth doing." _Willis Harman.
INTRODUCTION:
"True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer." _Dr. R.D. Laing.
"Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided the madness is given us by divine gift." _Plato (Phaedrus)
"If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable Age of Darkness... They will see that what was considered 'schizophrenic' was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break into our all-too-closed minds." _Dr. R.D. Laing.
The idea that the inner Apocalypse experience might be the guardian of the gate to a sustainable future has a metaphorical ring of truth which I find appealing. To explore this further, I went to California in the early 1980s to visit Dr. John Weir Perry MD, a man who was especially knowledgeable on the subject. I had first met him a few years before in Boston at the first conference of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), and was impressed by his compassion, wisdom, and humility.
John Weir Perry (1914 - 1988) was a Jungian psychiatrist who founded an experimental residential facility called Diabasis, in San Francisco, California, during the 1970s. This was designed as a comfortable home where young adults, who were experiencing the initial days of their first "acute schizophrenic break", could live in and be empowered to go through their Apocalypse on the way to greater health and happiness. The results were amazing: without any treatment by medication, electroshock or locked doors – but with opportunities for painting, dance, massage, meditation and conversation – full-blown "schizophrenics" were able to go through their ego-death and emerge on the other side, as Perry put it, "weller than well." Instead of being sent to a mental hospital and/or being expected to taking medication for the rest of their lives, these people would live at Diabasis for the first three months, spend three more months in a half-way home, and then return to the outside world, with few if any relapses of their "schizophrenia"!
This corroborated the results of R. D. Laing's famous Kingsley Hall experiment in London in the 1960's, in which only nine out of sixty-five "certified psychotics" who were tracked afterwards were re-admitted to hospitals again. Those who insist that "schizophrenia" is a disease will have to admit that it is curable! The principal differences between Kingsley Hall and Diabasis were the deliberately anarchic organisation of the former and its rather dismal location in a London slum, and the more organised approach of the latter in a more pleasant location in Berkeley on San Francisco Bay.
Dr. Perry met Carl Jung in Switzerland as a young medical student. He then became a psychiatrist. As a conscientious objector during World War II, he served for two years as a medic in the U.S. Army, attending to war victims in China. Here he was impressed by the character of the people and profoundly touched by their ancient philosophy of the Tao. He noticed the similarity between the traditional Chinese view of the universe as a self-organising system, and Jung's idea that schizophrenia is not a disease which the psychiatrist should attempt to control, but rather a spontaneous healing process which a subtle therapist might indeed facilitate through a kind of psychological shiatsu. After the war Perry returned to San Francisco, where he went into practice in 1949. The introduction to his first book The Self in Psychotic Process, published in 1952, was written by Jung himself
Perry then wrote The Far Side of Madness (about Diabasis), and The Heart of History, a trans-cultural study of mythological evolution. The book is interesting, since individuation is normally thought of in the context of a given mythology or world view. Here Perry explores the individuation process not in the context of a given world view, but within the larger macro-historical evolution of the world views themselves. He thus tracks the individuation of the deepest dimensions of the Self, as reflected in the symbolism of the metamorphosis of the world's great mythologies from the power-preoccupied cosmologies of the first city-states to the more compassionate world views which seem always to follow. Ironically, in the 1980s he found himself invited to teach psychiatry at the University of Wuhan, in China - where official dogma had it that the unconscious does not exist! His latest book, published not long after his death in October 1998, is Trials of the Visionary Mind: Spiritual Emergency and the Renewal Process.
Michael O’Callaghan: How does one define so-called schizophrenia?
John Weir Perry: Jung defined it most succinctly. He said "Schizophrenia is a condition in which the dream takes the place of reality." This means that the unconscious overwhelms the ego-consciousness, overwhelms the field of awareness with contents from the deepest unconscious, which take mythic, symbolic form. And the emotions, unless they're hidden, are quite mythic too. To a careful observer, they're quite appropriate to the situation at hand. The way "schizophrenia" unfolds is that, in a situation of personal crisis, all the psyche's energy is sucked back out of the personal, conscious area, into what we call the archetypal area. Mythic contents thus emerge from the deepest level of the psyche, in order to re-organise the Self. In so doing, the person feels himself withdrawing from the ordinary surroundings, and becomes quite isolated in this dream state.
Did Jung really see this as a healing process?
He did indeed! He believed that "schizophrenia" is a self-healing process – one in which, specifically, the pathological complexes dissolve themselves. The whole schizophrenic turmoil is really a self-organising, healing experience. It's like a molten state. Everything seems to be made of free energy, an inner free play of imagery through which the alienated psyche spontaneously re-organises itself –in such a way that the conscious ego is brought back into communication with the unconscious again.
How long does the experience normally last?
The acute hallucinatory phase, during which these contents go through the reordering process, usually lasts about six weeks. This, by the way, corresponds to the classical description of visionary experiences in various religious texts, such as the proverbial "forty days in the wilderness" often referred to in the Bible. Anyway, six weeks is roughly it.
Who experiences a "schizophrenic break"?
Well, there's a lot of controversy about this! There is a constitutional element, which is often interpreted as a "genotype of pathology", but this depends on how you see it. I see it as a genotype of sensitivity! Among adolescent siblings in a family, for example, it’s usually the most sensitive one who's going to catch it.
What does it feel like to go through a "schizophrenic break"?
The overall experience is described as falling into a kind of abyss of isolation. This comes about because there is such a discrepancy between the subjective inner world that one has been swept into, and the mundane everyday world outside. There seems to be a total gulf between these two. Of course, this is exactly what happens in our society: the individuals around such a person are bewildered and frightened. They have absolutely no trust in what is going on! So everything is set up negatively, and this gives rise to fear – on both sides.
So it starts with a feeling of isolation...
Yes. Now the symbolic expression of this is falling into a death – not only a death state, but also a death space – the "afterlife," the "realm of the ancestors," the "land of the dead," the "spirit world." The common experience here is for the person to look about and think that half the people around him are dead too. While in this condition, it's very hard for one to tell if one is really alive or not. I've been told, by people looking back on the experience, that one thing that stands out most of all, beyond the feeling of isolation, is the perception that everything that comes up is divided into opposites:
Good and Bad, God and the Devil, Us and Them, or whatever. It's confusing, it's bewildering, it causes tremendous indecision and a total arrest in motivation in which everything is cancelled by its opposite. So both these things are very distressing: the fear that you have died and dropped away from the world of the living, and the fear of conflicting powers, conflicting values and thoughts. It's a very aggravating feeling. This experience of opposites very quickly takes on a rather paranoid form.
I think this is really what the paranoid content is based on. It takes the form of experiencing the world as caught in the grip of opposing forces, whether they be political, spiritual, cultural, ideological, or even racial. In recent years I've noticed it's "those who might destroy the planet" versus "those who are ecologically minded." The prevailing idiom of the decade seems to shape the particular form in which these opposites arise. The main thing here is a great clash of forces; and this clash is usually of rather cosmic proportions, not just a local affair at all.
Right away at the beginning, the death experience is accompanied by the feeling that you've gone back to the beginning of time. This involves a regression, a return to the state of infancy in one's personal life history. But hand in hand with this is the feeling of slipping back into the world of the primordial parents, into a Garden of Eden. For example, it's a very common experience to feel one is the child of Adam and Eve, say, at the beginning of time. This is very symbolic, obviously. It's pretty much a representation of the psyche at the start of one's individual career after birth." From, A CONVERSATION WITH DR. JOHN WEIR PERRY By Michael O’Callaghan.
Recall Roland Fischer's brilliant contribution to our understanding of the nervous system;
"Although the newborn infant’s only reality, in the beginning, is his CNS activity, he soon learns, by bumping into things, to erect a corresponding model “out there.” Ultimately, his forgetting that his CNS activity had been the only reality will be taken by society as proof of his maturity, and he will be ready to conduct his life “out there” in (container) space and (chronological) time.
The adult interprets his CNS activity within this structure of similarity criteria, or “constancies,” and thus experience can be said to consist of two processes: the programmed (subcortical) CNS activity; and the symbolic or perceptual-behavioral (cortical) interpretation, or metaprograms, of the CNS activity.
It should be emphasized that the projection of our CNS activity as location in the physical dimension of space and time "out there" was learned at, and is hence bound to, the lower levels of arousal characteristic of our daily survival routines. All of this is to say that the constancy of the "I" is interfered with as one moves along the perception-hallucination continuum from the "I" of the physical world to the "Self" of the mental dimension; Analogously, the perception-meditation continuum also involves a departure from the "I" to the "Self."
The further we progress on the perception-hallucination continuum from the normal through the creative, psychotic, and, ultimately to the ecstatic state, the more complete is the transformation, or "unlearning," of the constancies of the physical dimension. Input, or outside information in general, is gradually reduced along this continuum.
Thus, Saint Teresa of Avila tells us in her autobiography that, at the peak of a mystical experience, "... the soul neither hears nor sees nor feels. While it lasts, none of the senses perceives or knows what is taking place". Space, then, which was gradually established in ever widening circles during childhood, gradually contracts with increasing arousal and ultimately disappears".
"Perhaps what is now the REM state was the original form
of waking consciousness in early brain evolution" _Jaak Panksepp.
of waking consciousness in early brain evolution" _Jaak Panksepp.
* * * * * * *
An Objective Sense of "I" & Mystical Sense of "Self"
Such "I"-"Self" communication is the creative source of
art, science, literature, and religion.” _Roland Fischer.
Roland Fischer seems to imply two distinct levels of human experience, from an instinctive "I" A sense of self dominated by our need to perceive objects in the external world. To a deeper sense of self described in mystical terms such as psyche and soul? In a previous chapter I expressed concerns about our common languages, as overwhelmingly evolved to describe objects in the external world. When trying to write about the euphoric sense of oneness I experience during psychosis, I found it impossible to describe my internal experience, in objective terms. Yet objectivity is the key assumption in our famous cognitive capacity, and as Roland Fischer points out its a key sign of adult maturity. Indeed it is this sense of objective reality, to which the psychotic is accused of losing touch? Is loosing one's mind in an ecstatic state of oneness, an observable inability to focus objectively, on the world "out there?"
Yet what are we to make of the kind of science which now tells us that our sense of objective reality, changes dramatically at a quantum level? Are there parallels between the mathematics of quantum theory, and the mystical experience of Cosmic oneness? Are science and spirituality converging now, in this 21st century A.D.
Consider this article exploring our current economic means of survival, through the lens of quantum mechanics;
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| Our cognitive world view? A Mechanical Sense of Reality? |
"As human beings, we don't just construct social realities and social systems, but we literally help construct the physical universe of which we are a part. Therefore, understanding the relationship between human beings and the quantum reality of the universe becomes paramount if we seek to truly understand and transform the social and structural systems of inequality that we have created for ourselves.
According to quantum mechanics, the subatomic level of reality exists in an undifferentiated state of dynamic flux until a conscious observer measures it (or looks at it), thus, giving that matter a particular form. In other words, an atom is spread out all over the place as a wave of potential until a conscious observer localizes it as an actual particle through that very act of observation.
So, as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, capitalism is based on the (false) assumption that an absolute "material" world actually exists "out there." Traditional criticisms of capitalism typically focus on the exploitation of labor and human bodies, as well as massive class inequalities and social injustice; however, they leave out one crucial aspect in it all: that capitalist ideology and capitalist operation mislead us about the nature of the universe (which includes the nature of ourselves since we are part of the universe, as well).
With that said, we can actually use our knowledge of quantum mechanics to transform our perceptions about the world around us, thus alleviating some of the conditions that capitalism creates for us. Even Einstein alluded to the idea that we can utilize science to "potentially change the world itself" by using "rational thinking and technology to improve the conditions in which we live." As Peter Dreier states:
"Einstein criticized capitalism's 'economic anarchy' and the 'oligarchy of private capital, the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by democratically organized political society."
If Einstein could apply his knowledge of science and the quantum reality to social injustice and systemic inequality, then there is no reason that we cannot do the same here and now.
When we look at the world through the lens of quantum mechanics, we see that the economic systems of capitalism, socialism and communism actually have more in common with each other since they all are based on material acquisition and distribution and on the assumption that our world is a fundamentally material realm. However, we can use quantum mechanics to create an entirely new way of viewing and operating inside of the world, which would require a drastic philosophical and ideological change of epic proportion. Epic change, perhaps, is a concept that we may need to start entertaining." By Michael Ortiz, Truthout, Op-Ed
A mechanical cause & effect logic? An Objectified Sense of "I"
"Which includes the nature of ourselves since we are part of the universe, as well?"
We are not Objects. We are not PART of the Universe. We are The Universe!
Our notions of God - Are Projected from a hidden reality Within?
The Parts Logic, is Cartesian Clockwork Universe, Thinking?
The True Depth of Our Reality is Unthinkable?
The Body Contains The Universe?
The Parts Logic, is Cartesian Clockwork Universe, Thinking?
The True Depth of Our Reality is Unthinkable?
The Body Contains The Universe?
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Affective sensation & our Mystified Sense of Self?
"I am positing the DU model as a tentative model of human experience at the most fundamental existential level. _Paris Williams."
If our evolved nature, the human body is a container of all reality, then how do we become conscious of such a reality within? A mystical sense of oneness, now beginning to be understood through the science of objective observation? Consider again a recently published writer espousing a new approach to the mystical tradition.
"I am positing the DU model as a tentative model of human experience at the most fundamental existential level. The DU model essentially integrates three preexisting models of human experience at the root experiential level—(a) a dialectic model that has been formulated by various existentially-oriented thinkers over the past 80 years; (b) the model of cognitive constructs that has been formulated by numerous cognitively-oriented thinkers over the past 40 years; and (c) a model of duality and unity formulated as a result of deep phenomenological inquiry within the Buddhist tradition. The integration of these three models provides us with a useful framework for describing the experience of duality and the experience of the interplay between duality and unity, experiences that are important in capturing the full range of experiences of the participants of this study. I will now discuss each of these categories of experience in turn.
Our Experience of Duality The research suggests that there are two important components of our experience of duality—one can be described as a dialectic that I will refer to as the self/other dialectic, and the other can be described using the concept of cognitive constructs. I will describe each of these in turn here.
The self/other dialectic.
The DU model posits that the existential root of our experience is comprised of a dynamic interplay between our experience of duality and our experience of unity. I refer to that component of our experience most directly related to our experience of duality as the self/other dialectic, which consists essentially of two poles set apart from each other in dialectical tension (see Figure 2). To the best of my knowledge, Rank (1936) was the first to posit this idea in his life-fear/death-fear dialectic. He defined life fear as “the fear of having to live as an isolated individual” (p. 124) and death fear as “the fear of the loss of individuality” (p. 124). In 1977, May posited a similar model, suggesting that the root of all intrapsychic conflict is “the dialectical relation of the individual and his community” (p. 228). In 1980, Yalom posited another variation of this theme, suggesting that human suffering arises from the dialectical tension between “‘Life anxiety’ [which]…is the price one pays for standing out, unshielded, from nature” and “‘Death anxiety’ [which] is the toll of fusion” (p. 142).
In 1999, Schneider presented still another variation on this theme, defining the two poles as constriction and expansion and the fears associated with these as the dread of ultimate constriction (or obliteration) and the dread of ultimate expansion (or chaos). The self/other dialectic draws extensively from the concept of the dialectic explored by these authors; however, I have found it helpful to use different terminology and expand upon it in different ways in order to best represent the data generated by this research.
From a phenomenological perspective, one way that our experience can be divided is between our experience of self and our experience of other, with other referring simply to everything that we experience apart from ourselves (i.e., other people, other beings, the world in general). We can also see this as the classic dualistic subject/object split. It is likely that most of us find that we generally have the experience of a distinct division between self and other, although it is likely that many of us have subjective experiences in which this division feels somewhat blurred—in which the distinction between self and other is not so distinct. The self/other dialectic represents our subjective experience of these two divisions with the two poles of self and other connected by the axis of rapprochement, which represents our experiential location with regard to the perpetual dynamic tension between the two poles. This dialectical tension results from the opposite forces of the two anxieties associated with the two poles. The anxiety we experience in relation to self is referred to as abandonment anxiety, and the anxiety we experience in relation to other is referred to as engulfment anxiety.
Abandonment anxiety corresponds closely to what Rank (1936) referred to as life fear— the fear of isolation and of being cut off from connection, and the corresponding desire for connection. Engulfment anxiety corresponds closely to what Rank referred to as death fear—the fear of losing our sense of self, of being engulfed by too much merger and connection, along with the corresponding desire for autonomy. The overall strength of the dialectical tension within the system is directly related to the strengths of these two opposing anxieties.
Raw unconditioned experience—the three marks of existence.
The Buddhist tradition, with its development and cultivation of mindfulness meditation, provides a particularly robust method of phenomenological inquiry into the fundamental layers of our experience. By referring to the findings of a practice contained within the Buddhist tradition, however, there is the risk that some readers may immediately discount these findings as being dogmatic or religious. If we do this, however, we make the serious mistake of discounting one of the most robust forms of phenomenological inquiry into human nature that has ever been established—mindfulness meditation. It is difficult to find an appropriate category in which to place Buddhism. On one hand, it clearly functions as a religion for many people, especially in the sense that it offers a powerful immortality project with which to fend off death anxiety, to use Becker’s (1973, 1975) language. It contains many different lineages, many of which seem to be filled with dogmatic beliefs and rituals, as we can say about any of the other major religions.
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| The Prince of Sense-Ability? |
According to the Buddhist literature, he did finally succeed in coming out of his suffering and in teaching others how to do the same (after which time his name was changed to the Buddha, meaning the awakened one).
Whether or not one believes that Gotama actually managed to succeed in this regard, he clearly succeeded in developing a very powerful method of deep and penetrating inquiry into present phenomenological experience, a method he referred to as Vipassana meditation (Hart, 1987), what is often referred to in contemporary Western society as mindfulness meditation." _Paris Williams, Doctoral Dissertation:
In my own experience of bipolar type 1's mania, as a waking dream of elation fueled euphoric ecstasy? There is a strange place beneath my usual subjective sense of self and my learned social dialogue, where a sharper waking sense of separation, glimmers, shimmers and threatens to dissolve? At its deepest level it feels like I’ve fallen within, perhaps subtle trace memories of “state,” awareness pre-birth?
On a functional level there is a new appreciation for the field of “out there” objective reality, with a re-born desire for approach and engagement, where previously wary avoidance had been my behavioral routine. Avoidance on a purely physiological level, rationalized in self-dialogue as fierce independence, although counter-dependence is a more accurate interpretation, beyond my need to soften a harsh existential reality? Being honest with myself, about myself can sometimes feel a bit brutal, and I appreciate with renewed compassion, ancient rights of passage, we modern educated super-men often consider, savage?
I guess my point here, is the subtle trap contained in our cognitive capacity and social dialogues, as an escape from the primary process reality of the body, and the harsher realities of being? I think its a most pertinent question in any exploration of “psychosis,” which I suspect can only be further elaborated by those of us who know its actual experience, on a felt level?
Yet when comes to translation into a communicative dialogue, to both myself and others, I'm very much suck in our zeitgeist (spirit of this age) of clockwork logic, particularly in this black & white, written format? How do I go beyond cause and effect thinking to embrace a paradigm shift into systemic awareness? That all at once fluid reality, in our actual experience of NOW? Furthermore when trying to interpret my own experiences of psychosis, how do I sense with certainty my need of maintaining a sense of internal security and ease, as I "rationalize" my experience? Subjectively, I'm prone to fill a physiological sense of the void, which the psychosis process seems to allow a sensate awareness of, with the subjective history of my past? Consider Paris Williams interpretation of his experience of an existential crisis;
"Glimpsing Through the Veil of Delusion — A Buddhist Perspective.
As I alluded to earlier, this (existential) crisis was precipitated by the direct experience of my “veil” of cognitive constructs. Such a veil is something that numerous spiritual teachers, philosophers, and psychologists have suggested we all create in a perfectly natural attempt to make sense of the world and to interact within it. As I became aware of this veil, what I glimpsed beneath it was both awesome and terrifying, an experience that directly led to the crisis.
When attempting to describe what I experienced beneath this veil (something I do not believe I could ever adequately put into words), I find it helpful to use the metaphor of a dynamic swirling sea of energy—a sea of constantly changing sensory experience (including light, sound, tactile sensations, even thought) in which there is no solidity anywhere. I felt out of control, at risk of being flung about by the chaotic currents, and I found myself both awestruck and terrified. I desperately wanted to grasp hold of something tangible, to find some sense of ground, but each time I allowed my intention to move towards making an attempt to grasp, I was quickly overwhelmed by intense terror." _Paris Williams. PhD.
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Does an Instinct for Approach or Avoidance, Block Exploration of a World Within,
Were All our Perceptions of Reality are Created?
Our Approach-avoidance conflict?
"Approach-avoidance conflicts can occur when one goal contains both positive and negative characteristics. For example, an individual may be nervous to fly in an airplane, but if that is the only means of transportation to visit family, the individual experiences an approach-avoidance conflict. The more motivated the individual is to achieve a goal, the greater the likelihood to approach the goal. If there are competing feelings to a goal, the stronger of the two will triumph. Individuals may experience greater motivation to achieve a positive goal as the individual gets closer to the goal (e.g., excitement in packing a suitcase for the trip). In contrast, individuals may also experience decreased motivation to reach a negative goal as the individual gets closer to that goal (e.g., anxiety at the airport terminal). As the negative goal becomes nearer, the desire to avoid a negative goal is theorized to be much stronger than the desire to achieve a positive goal.
How do we approach the unconscious reality of our evolved nature?
Recall my statement at the start of this essay: "Our social consensus reality, based on a denial of our true nature takes two major forms, either objectification or mystification of the human condition?" Is this how the subjective state of awareness, we call the mind copes with the existential nature of being? In this strange space we call the mind, we posit an "as if," version of our existential reality? A version of our sense of "I- Self" which exists in a constant potential of known & unknown awareness, which seems to be quickening towards a paradigm shift? Quickening as the underlying reality of chaos undergoes a transition phase, to a new order of stability? Are all the current manifestations of chaos in our world demanding a new sense of "I - Self," a new consensus reality? Do we need to stop assuming we need to organize the world "out there," in better way, hoping it will change our motivation? Or do we need to shift our awareness to the world within and re-organize our Self-Definition? A shift in perception defined by the sight of image and objects "out there," to a felt awareness of reflex reactions within our overwhelmingly chemical, internal world? Consider;
"Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest.” _Aldous Huxley.
Time for a Paradigm Shift?
Has There Ever Been a Paradigm Shift? by Arthur M. Young
"Thomas Kuhn gave us an interesting and provocative book in his Nature of Scientific Revolutions, in which he described science, under the stimulus of new discoveries, as making a radical change in its philosophy or basic assumptions. The idea is appealing and it did seem that there were several such shifts, beginning with the Copernican "revolution," in which, supported by the labors of Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, it was realized that the earth revolved around the sun and not the contrary.
But as I've elsewhere shown, this was rather the beginning of Western science, the emphasis on experiment and fact as the basis for theory, instead of authority.
However, it was assumed by Kuhn, and we all agreed, that Planck's discovery of the fact that light is radiated in quanta of action all of the same "size," rather than as energy, created a new paradigm. This discovery was the first clue to the true nature of light, previously thought to be waves in an ether. These waves were thought to spread out in all directions and diminish as the square of the distance. The change was revolutionary, and dispensed with the need for a medium (the ether) to carry the waves (much as sound is carried by waves in the air). It introduced quantum physics, and the quantum was found to account for other enigmas.
One especially was that, according to classical physics, the revolving electron should radiate and thus lose energy and fall into the nucleus. Bohr realized that since to radiate it had to do so in quanta, the electron could not radiate unless it changed to an orbit having different angular momentum. (The quantum is a unit of angular momentum; it can have any amount of energy, always associated with a period of time such that the energy multiplied by the time is a constant.)
This contribution of Bohr was accepted by the scientific community to apply to quantum phenomena, but it did not occur to anyone to question the classical view. This I have done recently in my short essay "Confusion in Science," where I can find no basis, theoretical or empirical, for the concept that an accelerating electron radiates energy. Apparently this concept was based on a confusion between accelerating and causing acceleration. Thus the driver of a vehicle says he "accelerates" it -- a figure of speech that is permissible because the driver does cause the acceleration to occur. But it is the engine that accelerates the car, and a scientific account should distinguish controlling acceleration by starting and stopping from acceleration itself. Acceleration is the second derivative; change of accleration is the third derivative, much as acceleration is change of velocity, and science is based on these distinctions. The scientist might say the control by the driver is a human option and outside of science, but the fact that a guided missile not only controls its acceleration but is guided to do so by the moving target makes it imperative that the third derivative be recognized.
So there is no support for the classical view of radiation, and the fact that the quantum of action made this view obsolete was ignored. Instead it was decided that the laws of classical physics and the laws of quantum physics, since they differed in these two domains, required a division of science into classical and quantum.
There was little justification for this split. Now it is true that thermodynamics -- which, since it deals with billions of molecules, each undergoing random motion, has to be predicted by probabilities, whereas each molecule is subject to exact laws -- does justify a distinction. This is not the case with radiation. All radiation, quantum and classical, originates in quanta.
But the fact that the classical view was retained shows that despite quantum physics there was no paradigm shift. This is borne out by other aspects of quantum physics.
(1) One such is that the nature of light was still not understood. The classical view that it was waves in an ether gave light some objectivity. It was the notion of something at least semi-material, and it did not occur to scientists that since the quantum of action, or photon of light, was without rest mass, without charge or other material properties, outside of time (clocks stop at the speed of light), and indifferent to space because a photon from Sirius retained the same energy it has when leaving Sirius, that the quantum had no objective existence.
The complete confirmation of the non-objectivity is that no two persons can see the same photon. Its detection on a photographic plate annihilates the photon, so there is nothing left to predict. Even in the photoelectric effect, in which a part of the photon's energy is annihilated, the part that remains is a new photon with its own complete uncertainty. But all such was ignored. Science retained its basic credo, that the world is exclusively objective. This again shows that there has been no paradigm shift.
(2) Another piece of evidence that is of special interest because it came before quantum physics was the use in relativity of an event to replace the previous notion of a point. An event occurs in time, so it includes the so-called fourth dimension. The past and the future are the same -- time is symmetrical; nothing happens. Thus the Civil War could be called an event, and relativity would so treat it. But the Civil War was also a change of state. The nation was not the same after it.
Thus relativity had to ignore history, whereas the quantum of action always produces a change of state. It can cause the atom to become an ion and lead to its forming a chemical compound; it may cause a change in the retina of the eye, producing vision. It is like a small spark which can ignite a forest fire.
Science was so impressed by relativity that it preferred to think of time as similar to space and to ignore the asymmetry implied by change of state. The paradigm shift of quantum theory was ignored. Classical science depended on forces between "billiard balls," whereas quantum physics showed that the quantum has more resemblance to a human decision or a message than to billiard balls bumping into one another.
If the reader experiences a shock that I've again introduced an anthropomorphic or human reference, I cannot withdraw it; it is part of the even larger significance of the paradigm shift that should have occurred with quantum physics.
Before leaving relativity I could also add that the measures that science can correctly say are objective, velocity and position, are set aside by relativity as not significant, emphasis being placed on acceleration, which is considered invariant and therefore important. Another invariant, recognized by Einstein, Bridgeman, and Eddington, but not made use of, is rotation -- a very important part of the paradigm shift that should have occurred, which we will get to later.
(3) I now get to the most difficult part of my thesis. The considerations I've described might be admitted by some readers, but they do not convey the magnitude and significance of the paradigm shift I think is overdue, so I will have to resort to a rather crude example.
Suppose I were to present a plate of food to a child to eat, and the child were to turn the plate upside down, spilling the contents about, and proceed to separate it into different ingredients -- to count the peas, etc. We have been given this marvelous world to experience, but science prefers to analyze it -- a worthy undertaking, but it becomes absurd if the food is not eaten. Analysis may be food for science, but this doesn't mean that the eating of the food should not be included in the theory.
So this is my main thesis. Science describes and analyzes the world, finds out the laws of its behavior, but it never occurs to theoretical science that the law of cause and effect can be applied and used for our own benefit -- communication, transportation, all machines -- using the laws of nature to increase our freedom.
This cannot be dismissed as mere application and anthropomorphic, because all life does the same. Plants control their metabolism to achieve growth and reproduction; animals learn mobility and are able to achieve short-term goals (including some long-term goals such as migration). This is not just technology; it is the basis of life." by Arthur M. Young, ©1996 Anodos Foundation.
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“The life of feeling is that primordial region of the psyche that is most sensitive to the religious encounter. Belief or reason alone does nothing to move the soul; without feeling, religious meaning becomes a vacant intellectual exercise. This is why the most exuberant spiritual moments are emotionally laden.” _Carl Jung.
Words are only metaphors, metaphors for a hidden reality within?
“If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor” _Joseph Campbell.
Still Waiting For The Great Leap Forward?
The 1950-60's? - What happened to the revolution?
Feeling The True Nature of The Light, Within?
The Body is the Door? Changing Metaphors of Existential Sensation to Chemical is The Key?
Is there a deeper reality expressed in euphoric states of psychosis? During 40 days & 40 nights?
How Long? Before We Sing This New Song? Till we Feel it in Our Hearts?
Inside Our Hearts. Are we not, Children of the Light?
Inside Our Hearts. Are we not, Children of the Light?
Spirituality is the Embodied Experience of an Individual Self?
The manifest reality of Eternal Light?
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| Science & Spirituality Are Converging Now? The Quickening Has Begun? As we FALL into Realization? |
Is it time to re-address the tribal metaphors of life’s meaning, to a species understanding? In a Universe of 96% dark matter/energy.
Life is “The Resurrection.” That great symbol of sacrifice we see in Christ on the Cross, as all the Light Matter Energy, sacrificed to create your life?
How does the Universe become Eternal? By evolving into a form which can act upon itself, YOU & your children’s, children’s children, forever & ever, Amen!
Or whatever metaphor of gratitude you use?
Are we living through a time of realization? 1 Species, 1 World, 1 Universe?
Are we beginning to realize, that the Universe is a friendly place & FEAR is only the projected shadow from "within" & not really "out there." As we emerge into a post industrial age, are science and spirituality converging, in a common recognition that all human perception is created from within? That fearful judgment of others, and an often mystified sense of a shadow within, is simply nature's instinctual urge for survival? Are we falling into a realization of the consequent nature of reality in our perception of time and human history? As science continues to show us the chemical foundation of our reactive nature, can we learn to still the mind and sense the subtle nature of a quantum reality within? Can we learn to perceive our-true-self with altered, existential metaphor?
Words are only metaphors, metaphors for a hidden reality within?
Do our "objective" metaphors explain the reality within?
JZ Knight's e-motive use of language causes many to dismiss her, in equally e-motive reaction?
“The life of feeling is that primordial region of the psyche that is most sensitive to the religious encounter. Belief or reason alone does nothing to move the soul; without feeling, religious meaning becomes a vacant intellectual exercise. This is why the most exuberant spiritual moments are emotionally laden.” _Carl Jung.
“During the ”I”-state of daily routine, the outside world is experienced as separate from oneself. With increasing ergotropic (sympathetic nervous system) and trophotropic (parasympathetic nervous system) arousal, however, this separateness gradually disappears, apparently because in the “Self”-state of ecstasy and samadhi, cortical and subcortical activity are indistinguishably integrated. (In euphoric mania, it is the metabolic energy of elation which so fires my brain, that cortical and subcortical activity are indistinguishably integrated?)
This unity is reflected in the experience of Oneness with everything,
a Oneness with the Universe that is One-Self." _Roland Fischer.
Keeping in mind the video clip above of the body/brain's unconscious and hidden reality? Please watch "falling into you," by Celine Dion and note the sensations of internal energy stimulation? Feel the struggle of a consensus reality of "I think therefore I am," as you try to keep yourself from falling within? Falling to pure energy and movement, at one with the e-motive sway of image and sound?
Fall into a Chemical, Cellular Nature, Within?
I feel my unconscious merge with yours
And I hear a voice say, "What's his is hers"
I'm falling into you
This dream could come true
And it feels so good falling into you
I was afraid to let you in here
Now I have learned love can't be made in fear
The walls begin to tumble down
And I can't even see the ground
I'm falling into you
This dream could come true
And it feels so good falling into you
Falling like a leaf, falling like a star
Finding a belief, falling where you are
Fall into Sensation Awareness & Feel The Creation of All Perception Within?
"When I began reading neuroscience, I fell in love with the vocabulary. Words such as neural oscillation, pulsation, or sinusoidal waves, like music, evoked in me a sensory resonance born of a mysteriously intangible recognition. Perplexed, I surmised that this terminology activated contact with a dimension of implicit experience where words bridge the passage of the body through the mind and the mind through the body. I became interested in exploring a rationale for these powerful, yet easily overlooked responses." Aline LaPierre, Psy.D.
The Language of Neuroception & the Bodily Self
THE BODY AS AN INSTRUMENT OF THE SELF:
Physical sensations are the very foundation of human consciousness. As the biological creatures we are, our bodies are designed to respond in an ever-changing, challenging and often dangerous world. Your knowing about the world and how you interact with it, comes from the totality of your sensations, both external and internal. Sir Charles Sherrington said, “the motor act is the cradle of the mind.” (p, 134)
When feelings of dread are held at bay, so are the feelings of joy. (p, 136)
Breathing that is rapid, shallow and/or high in the chest indicates sympathetic arousal. Breathing that is very shallow (almost imperceptible) frequently indicates immobility, shutdown and dissociation. Breathing that is full and free with a complete expiration, and a delicate pause before the next inhilation, indicates relaxation and settling into equilibrium. (p, 147)
When psychologists speak of the unconscious, it is the body that they are talking about. (p, 157)
How many of our habitual behaviors and feelings are outside of our conscious awareness or are long accepted as part of ourselves, of who we are, when in fact they are not? Rather, these behaviors are reactions to events long forgotten (or rationalized) by our minds but remembered accurately by our bodies. We can thank Freud for correctly surmising that both the imprints of horrible experiences, as well as the antidote, and latent catalyst for transformation, exist within our bodies. (p, 174)
To the nervous system, being overwhelmed by an event is really little different than being overwhelmed by similar sensations and emotions that are internally generated. (p, 177)"
Excerpts from, "In an Unspoken Voice," by Peter Levine. PhD.
********
TIME - LIGHT & THE SYMBOLIZATION OF MEANING?
An unconscious urge, in the creative symbolization of existential meaning?
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| "And in your eyes I see ribbons of color." |
MUSES: Yes, the dimensions of time.
MISHLOVE: Symbols themselves -- words, pictures -- point to the deeper structure of things, including the deeper structure of time. I gather that you are suggesting the mind is part of a nonphysical, mathematically definable reality that can interface and interact with physical reality, and in which physical reality is embedded.
MUSES: There can be some things which are physically effective which are not physical. I can give you an illustration, a very recondite one, but there is the zero-point energy of the vacuum. The vacuum is defined in quantum physics as space devoid of radiation or matter -- no energy, no matter. Yet there is an inherent energy in there which can be measured -- this is one of the great triumphs of modern physics -- and that is physically effective.
MISHLOVE: The energy of a pure vacuum.
MUSES: Yes. Yet it obviously is not a pure vacuum. The so-called savage would say to us, "The room is empty, and the wind is a magic spirit." We know it is air. So we are like the savage in saying that the vacuum is empty. There is something there.
Muses, in effect, has been echoing the ancient claim of the Primordial Tradition that there is a fundamental unity between the universal mind and the cosmos itself -- including the unfolding of time. The structure of the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm is expressed in mathematical, scientific and mythological symbols. It is the intuitive grasp of these symbols which is ultimately the goal of astrology. Such a system must always be larger and more enduring than any rational attempt to understand or contain it. If this perspective of astrology is correct, I would predict that rationalists will forever shun astrology's pseudoscientific face. And, ironically, astrology and other "superstitions" will persist because the yearning human soul never be content with rational materialism.
A Thinking Allowed interview with Dr. Charles Muses www.thinkingallowed.com hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove PhD. He is the author of an encyclopedic volume of consciousness studies, The Roots of Consciousness."
Re-Interpreting A Dream - Re-Defining a Sense of "I - Self?"
Psychosis! A Natural Process of Cellular Re-Organization? Or Brain Disease?
Objectifying labels like Bipolar Disorder or Schizophrenia are hot topics for those of us opposed to the consensus reality view of mental illness, as a verifiable fact. Like many I struggle with whether I should even mention the labels in anything I write about my own journey to understand my human condition. Yet facing reality as it is, rather than conceptualizing it within this “as if” subjective state we label the mind. One has to acknowledge that mainstream consensus reality does believe in mental illness, in this present moment, and find a way to address that fact, and how to shift this mind-filled perception?
"The left-brain style is to verbalize, to fall back on what is already known,
in order to preserve the sense of self mastery." _ Roz Carroll.
"It may be that the “mind-body split,” is in effect a right-left split, with left-brain activation overriding the right-brain assimilation and regulation of sub-cortically generated emotional states." _ Roz Carroll.
How does one write about inner sensations of bliss or oneness within an eternal now using an evolved language which overwhelming describes the external world of objects, and fails in analogy to “all at once” fluid sensation within? Our labeling psychiatrist uses the modern language of neuroscience and the revelation of our “chemical” stimulation within the body/brain/nervous system, yet still thinks and acts in an “old world,” clockwork paradigm of cause & effect logic?
This seems to be where self-interpretation breaks down, as we try to understand these birth-right experiences of the Universe within? Those internal sensations which are beneath our conscious awareness, yet the mind in its fear of loss, rushes in to fill the void with interpretation? Fills it with past subjective experience, in its constant quest of “what is it?” Christians fill the void with God, while Buddhists fill it with Atman, and Muslims with Allah?
Australian aboriginals would suggest white fella think to much, and that this is simply dream-time, bubbling up from within? Yet in our existential journey, has there been an historical need of denial, in our self-interpretations and self-definitions about the human condition?
As I wrote above, is it time to face up to our Denial & The Damage Done?
As we look at our fellow human beings at the beginning of this 21st century A.D. There seems to be a deep yearning and rising desire for a return to the ancient wisdom of an embodied sense of self and an honoring of our organic nature, as truly immersed within the reality of our planets biosphere. In this chapter I hope to show you the qualitative difference in depth of self-awareness, between our everyday survival needs and our capacity to perceive our true-self. There are two distinct levels to our sense of self? Further-more I hope to open the door to a self-revelation that was always meant to be, in the natural evolution of our human consciousness? As we continue to fall into the self-realization of this Chemical Universe within?
"All we have learned of psychotherapy suggests that it is at the precise time when the individual feels as if his whole life is crashing down around him, that he is most likely to achieve an inner reorganisation constituting a quantum leap in his growth toward maturity. Our hope, our belief, is that it is precisely when society's future seems so beleaguered – when its problems seem almost staggering in complexity, when so many individuals seem alienated, and so many values seem to have deteriorated – that it is most likely to achieve a metamorphosis in society's growth toward maturity, toward more truly enhancing and fulfilling the human spirit than ever before. Thus we envision the possibility of an evolutionary leap to a trans-industrial society that not only has know-how, but also a deep inner knowledge of what is worth doing." _Willis Harman.
"True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer." _Dr. R.D. Laing.
“I have a firm belief in this now, not only in terms of my own experience, but in knowing the experiences of other people. When you follow your bliss, and by bliss I mean the deep sense of being in it, and doing what the push is out of your own existence – it may not be fun, but it’s your bliss, and there’s bliss behind pain too.
“You follow that and doors will open where there were no doors before, where you would not have thought there’d be doors, and where there wouldn’t be a door for anybody else. There’s something about the integrity of a life. And the world moves in and helps. It really does.
“And I think the best thing I can say is to follow your bliss. If your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you’re on the wrong track. I mean, you need instruction. Know where your bliss is. And that involves coming down to a deep place in yourself.”
Joseph Campbell in The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, p. 217.
That deep place which is beneath any sense of duality, and is unthinkable? The Universe Within? A profound surrender to "is-ness," in the reality of NOW? A profound surrender to the primary process reality of the body, as the door to existential reality? With the key to further self-realization, a shift in our traditional metaphors of "I" identification with objects, as a misleading self-definition?
"The Body is the Shore on the Ocean of Being." _Sufi saying.
THIS ZEITGEIST NOW?
The spirit of this age?
Beneath our awareness of I & Other - Us vs Them?
To Know the Truth? - FEEL - The Zeitgeist Now! - Within?
"We've been lied to, we,ve lied to by every institution, what makes you think for one minute, that the religious institution is the only one that's never been touched. The religious institutions of this world, are at the bottom of the dirt. The religious institutions of this world, are put there by the same people who gave you your government and set up your international banking cartels..... the more you.... you begin to see lies evrywhere. You have to know the truth and speak the truth, and the truth will set you free!"
"DIRECTOR’S NOTE:
Zeitgeist: The Movie - Part 1: “The Greatest Story Ever Told” presents historical data relating to the astronomical/astrological origins of the Judeo-Christian theology (which can be extended to Islam as well), along with the understanding that these respective stories, beliefs & traditions are really an adaptation-extension of prior Pagan beliefs. In other words, evidence shows that these modern religions are really composites of earlier religions with their stories and symbolisms “borrowed” as the new traditions evolved. Of course, believers of theistic religions have a inherent, self-preserving interest to disagree with such a notion, for it brings their religion out of the context of the supernatural and novel - and into the context of a singular, serial intellectual evolutionof information where many religions begin to share a common symbolic and literary basis. From such a perspective, naturally, the idea that “Jesus” or “Osiris” or “Dionysus” were real, supernatural figures of a larger order metaphysic becomes a distant reality. Regardless, this section isn’t really about whether “God” exists or any such issue - it is about the firm reality that religions have been borrowing and building upon each other, while the central origin of these theologies almost always comes back to stellar and solar fascination, in part.
When we track these literary/ritual characteristics, we find that most religions of the world have been spawned from the interpretation/misinterpretation of the natural world and its dynamic phenomena. Of this phenomena, it is found that the sun, the stars and the general stellar array have been a powerful source of allegorical and hence mythological meaning since the dawn of humanity. The term to describe this is “Astrotheology".
ZEITGEIST: THE MOVIE COMPANION SOURCE GUIDE
The Truth! Perhaps the most confusing word in most systems of thought? For a slightly different take on religion and the symbolism of religious mythology, please watch Joseph Campbell's unique understanding of myth, meaning and an Eternal Now;
"Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness,
provided the madness is given us by divine gift." _Plato.
"Our hope, our belief, is that it is precisely when society's future seems so beleaguered – when its problems seem almost staggering in complexity, when so many individuals seem alienated, and so many values seem to have deteriorated – that it is most likely to achieve a metamorphosis in society's growth toward maturity, toward more truly enhancing and fulfilling the human spirit than ever before. Thus we envision the possibility of an evolutionary leap to a trans-industrial society that not only has know-how, but also a deep inner knowledge of what is worth doing." _Willis Harman.
The very premise of my argument here, is to show a fundamental mistake in our highly subjective, consensus reality, with denial as the core stimulus need in our socialized sense of self? A fundamental confusion about the primary process reality of the body and the secondary process subjective nature of the mind. Our socialized and idealized sense of self, confuses emotionally energized states of mind, with the fundamental nature of our existential reality, our body? We do this because human society's civilization process demanded a denial of our evolved nature, stimulated by a deep fear of chaos and anarchy? Our social consensus reality, based on a denial of our true nature takes two major forms, either objectification or mystification of the human condition?
What does my experience have to do with Biblical prophecy and a public debate about mental illness?
My experiences of Existential Crisis? & THIS ZEITGEIST? Zeitgeist: (the spirit of the age).
The experience of mental illness can be judged as a biological disease process, in line with our current consensus reality, or perceived as a profound challenge to an individual's existential reality, in what it really means to be a functioning human being? "Your out of your freaking mind!" Is often the harsh judgment of psychotic experience, while failing to acknowledge how our adult state of mind is based on a suppression of innate affect/emotion, beginning in the second year of life? We suppress our own evolved nature, for the sake of social harmony? We think and we say the word EVOLUTION, yet we fail to fully embody it, we deny its felt reality by suppressing conscious awareness of BODY sensation?
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| Peter Joseph, Director, Zeitgeist: The Movie. |
"Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money, the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it, the more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.
This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.
This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor ans all the horrors of a culture due to poverty, are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency." - Peter Joseph.
In his critique of our "entire system" does Peter Joseph understand how our emotional projection process works, in its projection of an autonomic system within? Do we, as individuals, and the "cellular" units of social systems, posses true insight into our own nature? Consider another famous Joseph and his unique knowledge of myth, age and the human ego;
Joseph Campbell--Myth As the Mirror for the Ego
A Fearful Shadow Within & Its Emotional Projection?
Recall the fearless thinking from the 1950's, in reaction to the carnage and loss of two world wars, in the first half of the 20th century. Fearless thinkers like Silvan Tomkins and Murray Bowen, who sought an honest exploration of human functioning, at an emotional level. Consider again Tomkins identification of nine innate affects as the root of our complex emotional intelligence. Of the nine innate affects he nominated six as negative, one neutral and two as positive. Suggesting we are hard wired to be innately wary about the environment, before we relax into positive experience. Nine innate reflex reactions which all occur beneath conscious awareness? Yet in our modern age, in our cultural zeitgeist of "I think therefore I am," we act as if unconscious motivation does not exist? How can we be sure to what extent our mind's critique of the world "out there," is orchestrated by an innately negative view? An innately wary defense of survival, as nature's positive intent to keep us alive, turned into a negative psychology of the mind? A negative psychological perception, because we don't pause to feel the spark, to the flame of our thinking?
"Crucial to how we feel is being aware of how we are feeling in the moment. The sine qua non of that is to realize that you are being emotional in the first place. The earlier you recognize an emotion, the more choice you will have in dealing with it. In Buddhist terms, it's recognizing the spark before the flame. In Western terms, it's trying to increase the gap between impulse and saying or doing something you might regret later." _Paul Ekman.
Civilizations Suppression of Innate Affect/Emotion?
"Because the free expression of innate affect is extremely contagious and because these are very powerful phenomena, all societies, in varying degrees, exercise substantial control over the free expression of the cry of affect. No societies encourage or permit each individual to cry out i.e, rage or excitement, or distress or terror wherever and whenever they wish. Very early on, strict control over affect expression is instituted and such control is exerted particularly over the voice, whether used in speech or in direct affect expression.
If all societies suppress the free vocalization of affect, what is it that is being experienced as affect? It is what I have called backed-up affect, it can be seen in children trying to suppress laughter by swallowing a snicker, or by a stiff upper lip when trying not to cry (anti affects?) or by tightening the jaw to suppress anger. In all these cases, one is holding one’s breathe as part of the technique of suppressing the vocalization of affect.
We do not know what are the biological and psychological prices of such suppression of the innate affective response. It seems at the very least that substantial psychosomatic disease might be one of the prices of such systemic suppression and transformation of the innate affective responses. Further there could be a permanent elevation of blood pressure as a consequence of suppressed rage, which would have a much longer duration than an innate momentary flash of expressed anger.
Even the least severe suppression of the vocalization of affect must result in some bleaching of the experience of affect and therefore impoverish the quality of life It must also produce some ambiguity about what affect feels like, since so much of the adult’s affective life represents at the very least, a transformation of the affective response, rather than the simpler, more direct, and briefer innate affect.
With anger the matter is further confused, because of the danger represented by this affect and enormous societal concern about the socialization of anger, what is typically seen and thought to be innate is actually backed-up. The appearance of the backed-up, the simulated, and the innate is by no means the same.
Details of the difference in socialization concern, differences in tolerance or intolerance of the several primary human affects - excitement, enjoyment, surprise, distress, contempt, shame, fear and anger - which in turn determine how positively or how negatively a human being learns to feel about themselves and about other human beings. Such learning will also determine their general posture towards the entire ideological domain.
Ideology and Affect/Emotion:
Now let me introduce the concepts of ideo-affective postures, ideological postures and ideo-affective resonance. (1) By ideo-affective postures I mean any loosely organized set of feelings and ideas about feelings. (2) By ideological postures I refer to any “highly organized” and articulate set of ideas about anything. A generally tolerant or permissive attitude would be an instance of an ideo-affective posture, whereas a progressive or democratic political position would be an example of an ideological posture. (3) By ideo-affective resonance we mean the engagement of the loosely organized beliefs and feelings by ideology, when the ideo-affective postures are sufficiently similar to the ideological posture, so that they reinforce and strengthen each other.
Ideo-affective resonance to ideology is a love affair of a loosely organized set of feelings and ideas about feelings with a highly organized and articulate set of ideas about anything. As in the case of a love affair the fit need not be perfect, so long as there is sufficient similarity between what the individual thinks and feels is desirable, to set the vibrations between the two entities into sympathetic resonance.
Modern Education & Assumptions about Cognition:
This is the most recent instance in history of favouring man’s ‘reason’ as his distinctive glory. Although Genesis equated ’knowing’ with carnal knowledge, that fateful loss of innocence that exiled him from the Garden of Eden, in both theological and secular thought reason has been glorified as the divine spark in man. This perennial idealisation of the cognitive function has prejudged its definition.
If human beings share sensory and motor equipment as well as drives and passions with other animals, and if reason is represented as both the distinctive and most valued function in man, then the cognitive aspects of the sensory and motor functions are denied by definition. Further, ‘irrationality’ is thereby also denied to be inherently cognitive.
‘Superstition’ and mysticism are prejudged to be different from cognition rather than to be special cases of knowing. In the extreme derivative of such idealisation, even science would fail to meet the criterion of true cognition, in-so-much as today’s science can be tomorrow’s superstition. In some theologies just this inference was drawn so that only God knew truly and fully.
Yet if all cognitive theorists would resonate with Socrates dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living, they would part company as soon as ‘examination’ was scrutinised more closely. Are daydreaming and thinking equally ‘cognitive’ ‘inner’ processes that had to be both objectified and operationalized”
Excerpts from “Exploring Affect,” (1995) by Sylvan Tomkins.
The Projection of Innate Affect/Emotion to Cope with Anxiety in the Lived Moment?
Societal problems from an emotional systems view:
All of the people who were, or are members of families replicate the same emotional patterns in society. Family and societal emotional forces function in a reciprocal equilibrium to each other, each influencing the other and being influenced by the other. These observations are based on the same criteria used to estimate family functioning, which is the amount of principle determined “self” in comparison to the “feeling-orientation” which strives for an immediate short term feeling solution to the anxiety of the moment.
The triangling process in a large family will help illustrate the process in society. It may begin with conflict between a parent and child. When another takes sides emotionally, he is potentially triangled. When he talks (to influence others) or he takes action based on feelings, he is actively triangled. Each person who becomes involved can involve others until a fair percentage of the group is actively taking sides. The controversy is defined on “right” and “wrong” issues, and often as victimizer and victim. In societal conflict, those who side with the “victim” are more likely to demonstrate and take activist postures. Those who “feel more responsible” for the total group will side with the parental side. They are more likely to stay silent or take action in letters to the editor, or to actively counteract the activists.
One interesting group of activists is made up of members of professional and scientific organizations who attempt to use knowledge and social status to further entangle the triangular emotional system. To summarize the process, it begins with emotional tension in a bipolar situation, it spreads by involving emotionally vulnerable others, it is fed by emotional reactiveness and response to denial and accusation and it becomes quiescent when emotional energy is exhausted.
The words used in triangular emotional exchange, based on rational thinking, are usually not heard by the other except to defend or prepare a rebuttal. The words can be heard only after the emotion is reduced. The triangle emotional system is most intense when anxiety is high. It disappears when the system is calm.
There is fair evidence that man functions at his best under adversity or when he is challenged. Until the mid 1960’s, I considered society’s slump to be functional, and perhaps a cyclical phenomena related to the depression of the 1930’s or to World War II, and that after World War II man became lazy and greedy as he luxuriated in the greatest period of material plenty and freedom from want in his existence. I was guessing he would meet another challenge and rise to the occasion. After the mid 1960’s there was more evidence of an even lower level of societal functioning. There was more feeling-oriented action and less long-term principle planning, more “rights” thinking than “responsibility” thinking. The overall pattern was closer to that of a family with a problem child, giving into emotional demands, hoping the problem would go away.
Society appears to be much more similar to a family with an intense “undifferentiated family ego mass,” than the less emotional fusion of previous periods. The members of society are fused into each other and are more emotionally dependant on each other, with less operating autonomy in the individual. Emotional events are more similar to those “within an ego fusion” than to events between relatively autonomous people.
A relatively differentiated self can live a more orderly life whether alone, or in the middle of the human pile. A poorly differentiated person is not productive alone. Powerful emotional “togetherness” forces draw him into the discomfort of fusion, with the impingement of self on self and the counter mechanisms to deal with too much closeness. Society has been gravitating into the human piles in large urban centers where the individual may become more alienated from his fellow man than before.
The main idea presented here is that society appears to be functioning on a less differentiated emotional level than in the past, that this may be related to the disappearance of land frontiers. Man has long used physical distance as a way of getting away from inner emotional pressures. It was important for him to know there was new land for him, even if he never went to it. The end of World War II was an important nodal point in a process in which the world became functionally smaller at a more rapid rate.
The concept of differentiation of self is important. At the more differentiated end of the scale is the person who can “know” with his intellect, and who can also know, or be aware of, or feel the situation with his emotional system. He has reasonable ability to keep an operational differentiation between intellect and emotions and take action on the fact of intellectual reasoning, that opposes his feelings and the truth of subjectivity. Only a small percentage of the population has this level of differentiation.
A person can have a well functioning intellect but intellect is intimately fused with his emotional system, and a relatively small part of his intellect is operationally differentiated from his emotional system. He can accurately “know” facts that are personally removed, such as mathematics and the physical sciences, but most of his intellect is under the operational control of the emotional system, and much of his total knowledge would be more accurately classified as an intellectual emotional awareness, without much differentiation between intellect and feelings.
The person at this level of differentiation does not commonly have a clearly formed notion of fact, or differences between truth and fact, or fact and feeling, or theory and philosophy, or rights and responsibility, or other critical differentiations between intellectual and emotional functioning. Personal and social philosophy are based on the truth of subjectivity and life decisions are based more on feelings and maintaining the subjective harmony.
The societal projection process:
The family projection process is as vigorous in society as it is in the family. The essential ingredients are anxiety and three people. Two people get together and enhance their functioning at the expense of a third, the “scapegoated” one. Social scientists use the word scapegoat , I prefer the term “projection process,” to indicate a reciprocal process in which the twosome can force the third into submission, or the process is more mutual, or the third can force the other two to treat him as inferior.
The biggest group of societal scapegoats are the hundreds of thousands of mental patients in institutions. People can be held there against their wishes, or stay voluntarily, or they can force society to keep them there as objects of pity. All society gains something from the benevolent posture to this segment of people. A fair percentage of people are too impaired to ever exist outside the institution where they will remain for life as permanently impaired objects of the projection process.
The conventional steps in the examination, diagnosis, hospitalization, and treatment of “mental patients” are so fixed as a part of medicine, psychiatry, and all interlocking medical, legal, and social systems that change is difficult. There are other projection processes. Society is creating more ‘patients” of people with dysfunctions whose dysfunctions are a product of the projection process. Alcoholism is a good example. At the very time alcoholism was being understood as the product of family relationships, the concept of ‘alcoholism as a disease” finally came into general acceptance.
There might be some advantage to treating it as a disease rather than a social offense, but labeling with a diagnosis invokes the ills of the societal projection process, it helps fix the problem in the patient, and it absolves the family and society of their contribution. Other categories of functional dysfunctions are in the process of being called sickness. The total trend is seen as the product of a lower level of self in society. If, and when, society pulls up to a higher level of functioning such issues will be automatically modified to fit the new level of differentation. To debate such a specific issue in society, with the amount of intense emotion in the issue, would result in non-productive polarization and further fixation of current policy and procedures.
The most vulnerable new groups for objects of the projection process are probably welfare recipients and the poor. These groups fit the best criteria for long term, anxiety relieving projection. They are vulnerable to become the pitiful objects of the benevolent, over sympathetic segment of society that improves its functioning at the expense of the pitiful. Just as the least adequate child in a family can become more impaired when he becomes an object of pity and over sympathetic help from the family, so can the lowest segment of society be chronically impaired by the very attention designed to help. No matter how good the principle behind such programs, it is essentially impossible to implement them without the built-in complications of the projection process."
Excerpts from "Family Therapy in Clinical Practice," by Murray Bowen, MD.
From the 1950's to Now, Two Age Old Human Questions: How Should I Be? How Will I Cope?
Coping with the anxiety of the lived moment?
"Beneath the monolithic label of anxiety are “camouflaged” a wealth of incomplete and indefinable somatic responses, sensations, and bodily feelings. These body experiences represent the individuals response to past experience, but also to their “genetic potential” in the form of unrealized defensive responses. Ultimately, we have only one fear, the fear of not being able to cope. Without active, available, defensive responses, we are unable to deal effectively with danger and we are, proportionately, anxious.
The psychologist Phillip G. Zimbardo has gone so far as to propose that “most mental illness represents not a cognitive impairment, but an (attempted) interpretation of discontinuous or inexplicable internal states.” Tonic immobility, murderous rage and non-directed flight are such examples.
Tonic immobility demonstrates that anxiety can be both self-perpetuating and self-defeating. Freezing is the last-ditch, cul-de-sac, bodily response where active escape is not possible. Where flight and fight escape have been (or are perceived to be) unlikely, the nervous system reorganizes to tonic immobility. Both flight-or-fight and immobility are adaptive responses. Where the flight-fight response is appropriate, freezing will be relatively maladaptive.
Biologically, immobility is a potent adaptive strategy where active escape is prevented. When, however, it becomes a preferred response pattern in general situations, it is profoundly debilitating. Immobility becomes the crippling, fixating experience of traumatic and panic anxiety.
Underlying the freezing response, however, are the flight or fight and other defense orientation preparations that are activated just prior to the onset of freezing. The “de-potentiation,” of anxiety is accomplished by precisely and sequentially restoring the latent flight or fight defensive responses that occur at the moment/s before escape is thwarted." _Peter Levine, PhD. From "Panic, Biology and Reason."
Peter Levine's description of tonic immobility as a feature of our innate response to trauma, is beyond the social norm of coarse. Yet it comes from an understanding of our triune brain and autonomic nervous system, which guides our reactions to life, on a continuum ranging from normal relaxed state and social engagement, to extreme threat response. Immobility is a primary behavioral response, in our evolved human nature, as Stephen Porges paradigm shifting discovery points out.
"Immobilization Without Fear:
Humans have three principal defense strategies—fight, flight, and freeze. We are familiar with fight and flight behaviors, but know less about the defense strategy of immobilization, or freezing. This strategy, shared with early vertebrates, is often expressed in mammals as “death feigning.” In humans, we observe a behavioral shutdown, frequently accompanied by very weak muscle tone.
The human nervous system, similar to that of other mammals, evolved not solely to survive in safe environments but also to promote survival in dangerous and life-threatening contexts. To accomplish this adaptive fl exibility, the human nervous system retained two more primitive neural circuits to regulate defensive strategies (ie, fight–fl ight and death-feigning behaviors). It is important to note that social behavior, social communication, and visceral homeostasis are incompatible with the neurophysiological states and behaviors promoted by the two neural circuits that support defense strategies. Thus, via evolution, the human nervous system retains three neural circuits, which are in a phylogenetically organized hierarchy. In this hierarchy of adaptive responses, the newest circuit is used first; if that circuit fails to provide safety, the older circuits are recruited sequentially.
In safe environments, autonomic state is adaptively regulated to dampen sympathetic activation and to protect the oxygen-dependent central nervous system, especially the cortex, from the metabolically conservative reactions of the dorsal vagal complex. However, how does the nervous system know when the environment is safe, dangerous, or life-threatening, and which neural mechanisms evaluate this risk?
Environmental components of neuroception
Neuroception represents a neural process that enables humans and other mammals to engage in social behaviors by distinguishing safe from dangerous contexts. Neuroception is proposed as a plausible mechanism mediating both the expression and the disruption of positive social behavior, emotion regulation, and visceral homeostasis. Neuroception might be triggered by feature detectors involving areas of temporal cortex that communicate with the central nucleus of the amygdala and the periaqueductal gray, since limbic reactivity is modulated by temporal cortex responses to the intention of voices, faces, and hand movements. Thus, the neuroception of familiar individuals and individuals with appropriately prosodic voices and warm, expressive faces translates into a social interaction promoting a sense of safety.
In most individuals (ie, those without a psychiatric disorder or neuropathology), the nervous system evaluates risk and matches neurophysiological state with the actual risk of the environment. When the environment is appraised as being safe, the defensive limbic structures are inhibited, enabling social engagement and calm visceral states to emerge. In contrast, some individuals experience a mismatch and the nervous system appraises the environment as being dangerous even when it is safe. This mismatch results in physiological states that support fi ght, fl ight, or freeze behaviors, but not social engagement behaviors. According to the theory, social communication can be expressed efficiently through the social engagement system only when these defensive circuits are inhibited.
Three Neural Circuits That Regulate Behavioral Reactivity:
Infants, young children, and adults need appropriate social engagement strategies in order to form positive attachments and social bonds. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, we have been developing a model that links social engagement to attachment and the formation of social bonds through the following steps:
1. Three well-defined neural circuits support social engagement behaviors, mobilization, and immobilization.
2. Independent of conscious awareness, the nervous system evaluates risk in the environment and regulates the expression of adaptive behavior to match the neuroception of an environment that is safe, dangerous, or life threatening.
3. A neuroception of safety is necessary before social engagement behaviors can occur. These behaviors are accompanied by the benefits of the physiological states associated with social support.
4. Social behaviors associated with nursing, reproduction, and the formation of strong pair bonds requires immobilization without fear.
5. Oxytocin, a neuropeptide involved in the formation of social bonds, makes immobilization without fear possible by blocking defensive freezing behaviors."
NEUROCEPTION: A Subconscious System for Detecting Threats and Safety, STEPHEN W. PORGES.
"The paradigm shift of quantum theory was ignored," suggested Arthur M Young? Why did science retain its classical cause and effect world view in the face of such a significant breakthrough? Is there a paradox to our evolving nature which has kept our focus of attention "out there," while being innately reluctant to turn our attention to our inner world? Has Stephen Porges discovery laid the foundation for a paradigm shift in self-awareness and a new self-definition?
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Are we Emerging From Shadow into Light?
Did we cross a critical threshold of rising consciousness, in 1969?
Is a steady rise in mass-education & science discovery, leaving an unconscious shadow behind?
Is a steady rise in mass-education & science discovery, leaving an unconscious shadow behind?
From Egoic "I" to Cosmic Self?
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| Are we awakening to Life's True Purpose Now? Is True Consciousness Flowering Now? |
So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I thought, it needs the opposite thought of “the other.” The conceptual “I” cannot survive without the conceptual “other.”
The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of this scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, “Why to do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.” Excerpts from “A NEW EARTH” by Eckhart Tolle.
Riding the Chemical, Cellular Wave of the Universe Within?
Beneath all thought, lies the reality of our evolved nature.
Beneath all thought, lies the reality of our evolved nature.
"I wondered, WHO is it, that's aware that I'm thinking?"
"I wondered, WHAT is it, that's aware that I'm thinking?"
"Is it The Universe Within?"
Once we open up to the flow of energy within our body, we also open up
to the energy in the universe. _Wilhelm Reich.
Once we open up to the flow of energy within our body, we also open up
to the energy in the universe. _Wilhelm Reich.
"In meaningful thinking, the mind caresses, flows joyously into, over, around, the relational matrix defined by the problem, the object. There is a merging of person and object or problem. Only the problem or object, it terms and relations, exist. And these are real in the fullest, most vivid, electric, undeniable way. It is a fair descriptive generalization to say that meaningful thinking is ontologistic in some primitive, accepting, artless, unselfconscious sense." _Sigmund Koch.
"Is our essential nature confused by the sight of objects? Close your eyes & sense the essence of your being within. Like the scent of a flower, is your essential essence of heart toned body and mind, chemical in nature?"
The Essence of a Flowering Consciousness?
Earth, 114 million years ago, one morning just after sunrise: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opens up to receive the rays of the sun. Prior to this momentous event that heralds an evolutionary transformation in the life of plants, the planet had already been covered in vegetation for millions of years. The first flower probably did not survive for long, and flowers must have remained rare and isolated phenomena, since conditions were most likely not yet favorable for a widespread flowering to occur.
One day, however, a critical threshold was reached, and suddenly there would have been an explosion of color and scent all over the planet – if a perceiving consciousness had been there to witness it. Much later, those delicate and fragrant beings we call flowers would come to play an essential part in the evolution of consciousness of another species.
Humans would increasingly be drawn to and fascinated by them. As the consciousness of human beings developed, flowers were most likely the first thing they came to value that had no utilitarian purpose for them, that is to say, was not linked in some way to survival. They provided inspiration to countless artists, poets, and mystics.
Jesus tells us to contemplate the flowers and learn from then how to live. The Buddha is said to have given a “silent sermon” once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile.
He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen.
Excerpts from “A NEW EARTH” by Eckhart Tolle.
The Spirit of This Age?
Moving through a paradigm shift?
"We are living at a unique historical moment, a time when the old divisions between matter and spirit are giving way to a new, unified vision. It is my pleasure to share with you several avenues for understanding
and participating in this exciting awakening of consciousness." _Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD.
and participating in this exciting awakening of consciousness." _Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD.
The Roots of Consciousness "The title for The Roots of Consciousness was inspired by a statement by cosmologist Arthur M. Young who cautioned against seeking only the flowers of consciousness. Although flowers provide moments of pleasure and delight, they are forgotten after they wilt and die.
The flowers of consciousness are the exquisitely intriguing foliage blooming in psychology's borderland -- telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, astral projection and other potential powers seemingly latent within us. These things may seem strange to western humanity's current ways of thinking -- or even non-existent. However, it is my intention in this book to explore the possibility that they are rooted in the essential core of our existence, in our cultural history and in our scientific knowledge. For me, the exploration of consciousness really has its origins in sparks of wonderment at my own existence which recur many times in different ways. These are the simplest experiences underlying the science of consciousness -- a newly emerging discipline which, like music, art, medicine or physical education, involves intense personal commitment as well as objective understanding. One of the profoundest speculations on the origins of consciousness occurs in a hymn from the Rig Veda, written over 3,000 years ago, in which the sages search their hearts for the personal, social and cosmic origins of being:
"Neither not being nor being was there at that time; there was no air-filled space nor was there sky which is beyond it. What enveloped all? Under whose protection? What was the unfathomable deep water?
Neither was death there, nor even immortality at that time; there was no distinguishing mark of day and night. That One breathed without wind in its own special manner. Other than It, indeed, and beyond, there did not exist anything whatsoever.
In the beginning there was darkness concealed in darkness; all this was an indistinguishable flood of water. That which, possessing life-force, was enclosed by the vacuum, the One, was born from the power of heat from its austerity.
Upon It rose up, in the beginning, desire, which was the mind's first seed. Having sought in their hearts, the wise ones discovered, through deliberation, the bond of being and non-being.
Right across was their dividing line extended. Did the below exist then, was there the above? There were the seed planters, there were the great forces of expansion. Below there was self-impulse, above active imparting.
Who knows it for certain; who can proclaim it here; namely, out of what it was born and wherefrom this creation issued? The gods appeared only later-after the creation of the world. Who knows, then, out of what it has evolved?
Wherefrom this creation has issued, whether He has made it or whether He has not -- He who is the superintendent of this world in the highest heaven--He alone knows, or, perhaps, even He does not know."
Let us examine the fundamental origins of being. There is the void, the absolute, darkness concealed in darkness, the unknown, that which is beyond. About the unknown void little can be said, although we say that this void permeates everything -- including the most solid-appearing objects. From this, according to the myth, through the power of heat was born the One. Regarding heat, the origin of the One, physics can shed some light. Heat is transmitted by particle-waves called photons in the infra-red area of the electromagnetic spectrum. All electromagnetic interactions from radio waves and light to cosmic rays are mediated by photons. This idea perhaps correlates with other creation myths, including the version in Genesis, which states that light was the first manifestation from the void. Photons are the basic quantum unit of the action of electromagnetic radiation. They have no mass and no charge. They travel through space at 186,000 miles per second with no loss in energy until they collide with other particles.
Imagine that you are a photon travelling through space at the speed of light. If you were to look at your watch, you would, according to the theory of relativity discover that time was standing still. Hence you could travel to the very edges of the known universe without aging a single day, although, to an observer on earth, it would take you three billion years to get there. Thus photons, tiny particle-waves with no mass, no charge, no time, neither matter nor anti-matter, but with a unit spin, constitute one of the basic units of action in physics.
In the seventeenth century, the principle of least action was discovered to be true of light -- and subsequently found to apply to almost all physical phenomena. This principle states that light always follows the path that gets it to its destination in the shortest possible time. Photons are also subject to Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy. This means that it is impossible to predict the destination of any given photon, and has led physicists to describe these wave-particles as "packets of uncertainty." Any given uncertainty packet is theoretically located everywhere in the universe, with the probability densities being greater for some particular space-time coordinates.
This idea of unpredictability represents a breakdown of the nineteenth century notion of a mechanical determinism governing all of nature -- including human consciousness. Now scientists are beginning to see that the process of observation itself influences the universe. Because this is problematic in the context of current theories, physicists are beginning to search for a new understanding. Photons, like all known physical phenomena, pulsate or vibrate. Planck's law states that the photon's energy is directly proportional to the frequency of its vibration. The constant of proportionality between the energy of photons and the frequency of vibration is known as Planck's Constant, or h, which is a very important unit in describing wholeness as well as indeterminacy in physics. It, like the other constants in physics, is suggestive of the Pythagorean notion that the underpinnings of the physical universe are mathematical in nature.
A photon, when it is annihilated, is able to create particles of matter and anti-matter which have both mass, charge, and time, such as electrons and positrons, or protons and anti-protons. It is tempting to suggest that these particles with their charges represent the principle of desire or attraction, which in the Vedic myth arose from the One.
Protons and electrons, of course, are attracted to each other and form the basic constituents of atoms and molecules. Electrons have a negative charge and protons, which are much heavier, have a positive charge. Positrons and anti-protons are particles of what is called anti-matter. In an atom of anti-matter, the light weight positrons orbit around a nucleus that contains negatively charged anti-protons. When particles of matter and anti-matter come into contact with each other, they are annihilated and photons are produced. Physicists suggest that particles of anti-matter move backward through time -- like a movie played backward.
As the extreme energy of the photons becomes somewhat solidified in the form of the mass of protons and electrons and their anti-matter counterparts, the amount of free energy these particles possess is accordingly reduced. Also the amount of indeterminacy, or unpredictability of these particles, while still great, is less that of the photon. According to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the product of uncertainty of the position and momentum of these particles is equal to or greater than Planck's Constant, h. In other words, the more certain you are of the position of a particle, the less certain you can be of its momentum, and vice-versa.
Of course, protons and electrons combine to form atoms which have even greater mass and less indeterminacy. There are 106 known different kinds of atoms whose identity is determined by the number of charged particles that have come together. These atoms compose the elements of the periodic table that combine chemically into molocules to form all of the substances we experience in our day-to-day living. The indeterminacy atoms and molecules exhibit is limited to the amounts of energy they can absorb and release and the times at which they release and absorb this energy, which is in the form of photons. This indeterminacy though very small is real. Consequently scientists no longer believe atoms and molocules generally behave exactly like the predictable billiard balls of nineteenth century physics.
The particles, atoms and molecules of the universe combine to form the stars and the planets and newly discovered fantastic structures in outer-space whose origins and properties are still mysterious to us. The expansion of the universe, the nature of the black holes, and the nature of quasars all imply notions of time, space and matter foreign to the rules of classical Newtonian physics that generally apply in daily life.
The small amount of uncertainty that remains in molocules may play an important role in the curious growth properties polymers display. These long molecular chains --such as rubber, cellulose and nylon -- seem to anticipate the growth of cellular life itself. Functional polymers such as proteins are the primary constituents of animal life; and the proteins actin and myosin, the primary ingredients of muscle tissue, exhibit properties of animal mobility.
Perhaps the most important molecule of all is deoxyribosenucleic acid or DNA. These complex molecules contain in their double-helix structure the information necessary for living cells to grow and function. Some scientists say these molecules contain within their structure all of the information necessary for the complete development of an organism, such as the human being. This has yet to be proven; however a single DNA molecule can store much more information than is contained in this book. When cells divide, DNA molecules also divide in two and are able to reproduce themselves. DNA molecules are able to transcribe the information they contain onto other molecules of ribonucleic acid or RNA. Certain very complex molecules of DNA or RNA combined with protein, called viruses, actually seem to be alive and can reproduce themselves when they are inside of another living organism. However these viruses are quite inert in the free state. Although science has not yet filled in all of the links in the process of evolution, one can sense a naturalness in the emergence of cellular life from a sea of complex molecules. Unicellular organisms constitute the majority of living creatures on earth.
Microscopic structures within these cells, called organelles, perform the digestive, respiratory, metabolic and reproductive functions of the organism. While the cells are said to be alive (although this is perhaps questionable in the case of the virus), the organelles themselves are not. When similar kinds of cells group together, colonies are formed -- such as fungi or algae or sponges. Several different types of cells coming together lead to the formation of different tissues within each organism. In more complex creatures, these tissues have joined further into units called organs. The most complex organisms contain not only many tissues and organs, but groups of organs may also form one or more structural organizations called organ systems.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This means the growth of any individual organism, from conception, follows the same pattern of development as the evolution of that species. Thus when you were an embryo you passed through all the stages of growth in a nine month period that led to humanity's three billion year evolution from a single-celled organism. Beyond organisms of all kinds, higher levels of life may be distinguished in the form of social groupings such as families, hives, tribes, societies, populations, species, and local communities. The sum of all living communities represents the ecological system of the planet -- which in turn interacts with the solar system, galaxy and, indeed, the known universe.
Human cultural history goes back about five thousand years; however the existence of the homo sapiens species can be traced back at least 500,000 years. Thus in some sense it can be said that humanity has evolved through qualitative changes of consciousness during the life of our species. Human beings seem to exhibit free will, a phenomenon reminiscent of the unpredictability photons and sub-atomic wave-particles display.
From the evolution of the universe we have just briefly traced, there seems to emerge patterns, pulsations, vibrations and cycles. The loss of uncertainty, the entrapment of spirit in matter as we descend from the photon to the molecule, seems to be balanced by the increased freedom, the rise of matter into spirit, as we ascent through the plant, animal and human kingdoms. The orchestration of the universe is a most complex and subtle symphony." _Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD.
"The more conscious you become, the more aware you become
of how unconscious you've been." _Patricia Sun.
The Self-Reflecting Universe Within?
"The earlier concept of a universe made up of physical particles interacting according to fixed laws is no longer tenable. It is implicit in present findings that action rather than matter is basic. . . This is good news, for it is no longer appropriate to think of the universe as a gradually subsiding agitation of billiard balls. The universe, far from being a desert of inert particles, is a theatre of increasingly complex organization, a stage for development in which man has a definite place, without any upper limit to his evolution." _Arthur M. Young, The Reflexive Universe.
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Understanding My Mental Illness Experience & My Road to Recovery
"No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may.
We ourselves must walk the path." _Buddha.
Its been thirty two years since I was diagnosed as suffering from a mental illness, in 1980. For twenty seven years I'd accepted the consensus view of a diseased brain, considering myself unlucky not to have found a medication solution to my disruptive energy cycles. Bad Karma, would be a simple and mystical view of my existential journey, "perhaps I was a murderous wretch in a previous life," now doing my penance on this great wheel of life's fate? If I'd been born in ancient Greece, I may have felt myself cursed by the Gods, with no internal inquiry necessary, for the demons of my moods, are visited upon me from without. Certainly explanations, as clarifying of my actual experience, as "its just a chemical imbalance in your brain," which my first psychiatrist confidently explained. He was pretty sure the genetic cause of mental illness was just around the corner, back then. Oh! How I wish my life had not contained this madness experience or my mind's desperate need of a solid and reliable explanation. Ignorance about my internal makeup could have been such a sweet form of bliss. Oh! How I wish I'd not had to walk daily with an over self-conscious, tyranny of self-doubts. The decades of constantly second guessing my own nature as I learned to “watch out,” for my mood triggers? Does the well meaning advise of others, understand just how torturous and self-fulfilling that constant daily self-questioning can become? Waking nearly every morning with the thought, “how’s my mood?“ It was literally like being a slave to worry and doubt, with distraction as a workaholic my usual means of self-regulation, over nearly three decades. My slavery of dependence and self-doubt, relieved by an awareness that my word-thoughts, are "as if" metaphors for a deeper reality within? An "as if" self-interpretation which is fundamentally flawed, through both an active denial of evolution and the sight of objects "out-there."
Does Science Fiction, Like Old-World Mythology, Divine Existential Meaning?
"Quiet an experience to live in fear, isn't it. That's what it is to be a slave."
A slave to our denied and unconscious motivation?
"Quiet an experience to live in fear, isn't it. That's what it is to be a slave."
A slave to our denied and unconscious motivation?
The movie Blade Runner has been voted the best science fiction movie ever made, and its exploration of the human condition is layered with metaphor and meaning from beginning to end. Rutger Hauer's immortal line "I've seen things you people would not believe," resonates deeply with my experience of psychosis. The innate anxiety of being self-consciously human begs for meaningful interpretation in each new born generation. As anxious questions about being plague each of us to one degree or another. Questions like "how should I be, how will I cope and where do I belong?" After doing my best to highlight differences between our common consensus reality, and natures reality within. How it stimulates varying levels of consciousness from surface image and subjective awareness, to increasingly subtle depths of a sense of oceanic oneness? Its time to state more simply an understanding of my thirty two year journey and my five year road to a full recovery. A road which has been a steady process of self-discovery, beneath the subjective norms of common awareness. What started as a need to understand my apparently diseased brain, led me into a deeper understanding of my dis-eased body-mind, through the daily practice of subtle sensation awareness. Education was the key factor early on as I read more detailed explanations about my brain-nervous systems hidden activity, with a “wow there’s whole different world inside me,“ beginning this five year process of self-revelation and re-interpretation. There are few experiences like altered states of mind, and seemingly crazy behavior’s which so demand a deeper examination of one’s own reality? A deeper examination than any cognitive awareness is capable of, in my humble opinion. Even though it was our amazing cognitive capacity for objective observation which educated me towards deeper insights, only a daily practice of sensation awareness beneath my chattering mind, has set me free from fear and the slavery of ignorant self-doubt. Sensate awareness has quickened my life-long fascination with myth, metaphor and meaning, making me wonder about our current age and its yearning for existential meaning and new way of being?
Five years ago I’d ran out of simple, subjective explanations and needed to explore my mental illness experience further, in an effort to understand the root cause of my madness, before I die. I was 55 years old back then, with the usual territorial striving's of a life mostly over. Four grown-up children and all the normal goals of life already achieved, and passed into personal history, albeit with this abnormal struggle along the way. Carl Jung pointed out, that the second half of life, can be a time of existential self-reflection or a continuing appeasement of consensus reality, depending on the relative dependence of individual personality? Five years ago I found myself having to confront a dependence on others, to explain my own lived experience to me, in that well worn, “doctor knows best” dependent view of life. My innate human dependence, as one of the most sensitive and individually vulnerable creatures on the planet, lay at the very heart of my madness experience. The twin forces of nature and nurture, in adaptation of those age-old questions, “how should I be and how will I cope?” In the simplest possible terms, I’ve discovered that nature has indeed equipped me with all I need to cope when being in this continuous moment we call life. Yet a commonsense understanding and its confusion and active denial about our evolved nature, thwarted a spontaneous natural healing of traumatic experience, in 1980.
Trying to funnel my experience through conscious awareness alone, led me to misinterpret a deeply unconscious intention in the re-organization of my feelings for life. My prayer to God, back in 1980 was like a “can I start again please,” plea to the very core of my being? Hence the re-birth experience, as my unconscious guide through life, my autonomic nervous system acknowledged the plea with a reset of my habitually defensive, postural attitude to life. “Can I start again please!” Reset an unconscious learning of those age-old questions, “how should I be, how will I cope and where do I belong” which had led to my maladapted counter-dependent style of coping. Born in circumstances of threat and raised in a threatening environment, I’d developed a avoidant coping style of being with myself and with others, which was counterproductive during that crucial period of early adulthood, when a wider support network of social relationships is required for a successful and satisfying adult life. Hence my classic existential crisis, when needing to develop a new way of being with myself and others, as I was suddenly faced with isolation in 1980. My "how should I be, how will I cope and where do I belong," previously restricted by an unconscious fear of life?
On a purely physiological level the unconscious intention of my autonomic nervous system, was to enable a new way of being within myself, relaxed, open yet alert and not overly biased by fear. A relaxed and open readiness for experience and the spontaneous flow of life, which in turn made me much more approachable, for a short while. Looking back now, if I'd known how to still my mind and simply accept the physiological change and new sensory awareness, my life's journey would be quiet different. Yet with only a commonsense general knowledge, there was much confusion about this re-organization of experience through such a disorganizing process? Like the classic loss of interest in daily routine, and daydreaming concern about existential issues. Fear and joy seem to tone much of the mind's sense of this process, and theme the existential thought patterns. From the joy of world peace and one's role in its evocation to the fear of dark forces and their devilish intent. The process happens unconsciously, at the hidden level of brain-nervous system activity, yet we try to interpret the experience at the cognitive level of conscious awareness. A cognition of cause and effect thinking, that struggles with the non-linear processes of such an unconscious organismic change. Especially the dreamlike nature, the mind's subjective awareness can become totally lost in. At its deepest level it feels like I fall completely within, perhaps with subtle trace memories of a “state,” awareness pre-birth? A strange place beneath any normal awareness, where a sharper waking sense of the separation of objects, glimmers, shimmers and threatens to completely dissolve? Yet who can say what form of consciousness exists prior to birth, when during the final trimester an oceanic sense of oneness, may be the personified glory of nature, in readiness for the biosphere, "out there?" Over five years I've learned not to second guess my nature, with commonsense assumptions about what should and should not be?
From a typically Western, psychological sense of being, I've shifted my self-awareness and self-definition to a physiological sense of being. Said simply, my postural attitude to life stimulates my psychological point of view. These days my conversation with myself and others, is primarily about posture-body language? A shift in self-definition which now saves me from mood swings when stress enters my life and I forget a mindful awareness of my posture. In the last year in particular, as I've reaped the rewards of time and space to devote myself to this self-revelation effort. The validity of Stephen Porges groundbreaking discovery, "The Polyvagal Theory," and his clear statement, "physiological state limits the range of behavior and psychological experience." Has enabled a paradigm shift in my understanding of my daily experience, as grounded in the primary process reality of my body, and its stimulation of secondary processes, within my mind. To let go of either excited thoughts which once led me into mania, or dark thoughts which led me into depression. I now recognize the how these states of mind are stimulated by body tensions. The mind-less feeling for muscular tensions described in previous chapters, is now the practical reality of my mental illness recovery. A five year journey, beginning in 2007 with Murray Bowen's ideas about a differentiation of self, ringing in my ears;
"The concept of differentiation of self is important. At the more differentiated end of the scale is the person who can “know” with his intellect, and who can also know, or be aware of, or feel the situation with his emotional system. He has reasonable ability to keep an operational differentiation between intellect and emotions and take action on the fact of intellectual reasoning, that opposes his feelings and the truth of subjectivity.
A person can have a well functioning intellect but intellect is intimately fused with his emotional system, and a relatively small part of his intellect is operationally differentiated from his emotional system. He can accurately “know” facts that are personally removed, such as mathematics and the physical sciences, but most of his intellect is under the operational control of the emotional system, and much of his total knowledge would be more accurately classified as an intellectual emotional awareness, without much differentiation between intellect and feelings." _Murray Bowen.
To finding a deeper sense of such functioning within my hidden brain-nervous system activity. Allan N Schore's book "Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self," started me off on this new path to inner discovery, with observations like; "Notice I say the "nervous systems" and not "the brain," because the neuronal systems that rapidly process bodily-based information at levels beneath conscious awareness are located in both the central nervous system and the autonomic nervous system." This was the revelation I stumbled upon, which so contradicted my previous commonsense understanding, of a diseased brain. In 2007 reading the language of neurobiology was like learning a foreign language, and with no teacher present to guide me, I just kept reading, hoping for some kind of functional insight. I read lots of other writer's including Stephen Porges, as some kind of intellectual awareness began to dawn. Yet only in the last two years of continuous focus, have solid shifts in self-awareness occurred. My previous stress patterns of a work-a-day existence were un-conducive to the needs of the kind of deep self-examination, which brings lasting change. Just as the wonderful Jim Carrey points out in the video clip above, enlightenment (deep self-awareness) comes and goes, and it takes patient practice to achieve lasting affects, especially after decades of the self-limiting sense of hopelessness in my diseased brain, self-definition. Our normal consensus holds enough anxiety to begin with, without the kind of crippling anxiety caused by the limits to self-discovery, inhernet in a diseeased brain view of mental anguish. Eckhart Tolle teaches that getting beyond this anxiety of anxious expectation, led him to his wonderful teachings on the insanity of our taken for granted sense of normality. A sense of normality the so-called mentally ill are so shamefully judged to have lost insight into? Yet what I've tried to show in this chapter is that our consensus of normality is based on a fundamental (escape), from existential reality of our evolved nature? Please watch Eckhart Tolle describe this constant anxiety, as an (escape) from the existential reality of being in the here and NOW.
This Dysfunctional state of Consciousness we call Normal?
"As if the next moment is more important than this moment."
"Its a form of mental illness, because in reality, the next moment does not exist."
"As if the next moment is more important than this moment."
"Its a form of mental illness, because in reality, the next moment does not exist."
My primary awareness of being in the here and now, happens unconsciously at a level of action potentials within my body. My use of the word escape, for both normal and abnormal anxiety, is to bring awareness to this primary process functioning of the body, and its hard wired responses to existential challenges. Hard wired responses which are the very root of my mental anguish experiences, and described by Peter Levine and others as the motor act foundations of our body/brain consciousness. Hard wired responses routinely denied in our socially conditioned sense of normality, as we are taught to suppress these innate responses from early childhood? Being a responsible adult in western society seems to entail the management of spontaneous behaviors by voluntary suppression (control), for sake of social harmony. Only a slow process of bringing my mind's attention awareness towards body sensation as my primary experience of being, have I found lasting and fundamental change. Just as Silvan Tomkins and his disciples used a continuum description of innate affects to show levels of intense experience, existential anxiety - anguish can be viewed along a continuum of intensity from mild (normal) to extreme (abnormal). Using such a continuum of experience point of view, my previous understanding of bipolar type 1 as a mental illness, has shifted to a view of differing levels of human experience. At intense levels of existential stress, my previously denied and hard wired nature takes voluntary control away from my mind's cognitive capacity to suppress socially unacceptable behaviors and communicates fundamental existential issues about a sense of threat and my ability to cope, at a deeper level of motor impulses. Hard wired action potentials most noticeable, primarily in involuntary behaviors or body language and confused by their energy discharge within subjective states of mind. The communication to both the subjective sense of self (mind), and to others, is essentially in motor movements towards or away from. Hence my use of the word escape as a more fundamental description of existential crisis motivation (motor-vation)in the experience of mental anguish.
Understanding this confusion about energy discharge within my mind's subjective awareness, has been a key factor in my recovery journey. Recovery from a previous judgment of bad and undesirable experience towards a perception of the elemental nature of my being, as essentially energy regulation in response to various existential challenges. Understanding my mind as a form of organismic energy regulation, takes away the need for cause and effect judgments of good or bad experience, and allows a holistic perception of my body/brain/mind. Changing my metaphors of self-awareness and therefore self-definition, from object like, this thing or that thing descriptions. Towards more fluid chemical metaphors of self-awareness, has allowed me a balance of thought and body sensation (awareness), previously dominated by a lop-sided, mind only awareness, in my self-definitions. For example, understanding shame as primarily a hard wired reflex action, mediated by chemical reactions within my body/brain-nervous systems, short circuits all the socially constructed meanings of that word (metaphor) shame. Bringing my awareness towards the internal sensation of shame as a reflex reaction, I can now accept it as a discharge of energy resources, evolved to deal with momentary instances of existential challenge. Yet in the past, my lop-sided mind only awareness compounded this momentary response to existential challenge with imaginative ways of keeping this energy discharge active. My paradigm shift as self-revelation, has become a new understanding of my mind, my thoughts, as energy discharge in line with those curious revelations of the body/brains electro-chemical activity, discovered in my first reading of Allan Schore five years ago. A paradigm shift in appreciation of my body as the door to the existential reality of being human. The key I found, is my mind's ability to observe my nature by incorporating internal sensation awareness into my understanding of what my mind is. No longer do I try to justify my mind as the emperor with no clothes, enthroned within my head.
Chapter Thirteen:>>
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