Relational Realities

Here's a situation:

Mom is mad at dad. She farts, dad, a cushion away, takes his hand from his side, towards his face and begins to wave his hand; mom abruptly hits dad on the arm, "why did you do that?" Dad defends himself; mom argues that he shouldn't be so close to her. Dad cant figure out why she hit him and is angry about it. Mom complains further, telling him to move.

The cushion is open. The son wants to sit there. Should he do it?

Moral situations like these are bifurcation points in how people feel about one another. If the son decides to sit next to his mother, he would have ignored a relation reality: After having been mistreat by his wife, the seat that was not allowed to him is now being tolerated for his son. The wife has 'chosen' an orientation of intention towards her husband, which can be collapsed into "I don't like you". Call it bitchy or cranky or borderline personality disorder; this is typical in modern day human beings, and the behavior persists because of a conceptual ignorance of the circular causality of it.

The son, in not taking that seat, acknowledges that his potential action carries a strong potential of inducing a shame-state in his father ("she doesn't care for me") which is instantly transformed into an anger state ("stupid effing iatch"), as the adult human being, speaker of a language, enacts the ancient animalian process of defense, so this dad sits quite, not talking, but no doubt interfacing with the affects associated with being mistreated by another human being.

Many problems in human relating ultimately stem from not acknowledging the inherent dependency that exists between us. Relational realities speak to the ways your action intimate meanings in other people. Nothing we ever do is neutral; neutrality is at most an unwatching, passively aware mind. Once a relation is developed, feeling is projected, because nothing is more genetically salient to our neurons (mirror neurons in particular) than the evaluation of a conspecific (definition: a member of one species).

Your actions, my actions, are often reflexively defensive. If the defense continues, a whole evolution of mutually enforced dissociation keeps both parties affectively aroused towards the other party. This way of thinking and speaking is entirely antithetical to logical and reasonable perception. It is not conducive towards sane conversation. The issue of affect and the degree we are aroused needs to be recognized as inherently linked to the reasonableness of a perception. Indeed, when we feel aroused to the point of stress or straining ourselves as we communicate, we are no longer communicating but enacting a need to be heard and recognized by the other: the pressures of a social interaction on human phenomenology is such that we can entirely dissociate from a higher cognitive purpose (to be scientific, reasonable) when we experience or infer (non-consciously) the presence of a dominating action in another human. These dominating actions can be a change in vocal tone or facial expression or body language; and these movements intimate intentional statements about the other i.e. you. Evaluation is instantaneous and transmission and absorption of meaning is automatic for the receiver on the other end. When we get aroused, our thinking becomes stereotyped and divisive; we see less of the subtleties in the grey that makes clear causal relations. Under stress, or when feeling too great a need, affective arousal narrows cognitive awareness, and thought, is #ty.

It is not coincidence that Republicans yell and democrats are quieter. The latter are more reflective and cognitive in their awareness of potential likely consequences, while the latter are built around the defense of ancient cultural values, many of which are patriarchal and authoritarian. Their defense of this is nothing more than a feedback loop that can and must be broken, but it can only happen in a way that avoids violence and abuse, as, again, huge affect arousals provoke dissociation in the party you're at odds with. Ergo,it is insane and pointless to speak in ways that a) bring momentary relief, but b) perpetuate long term dysfunction and misunderstanding in relationships.

Human consciousness is shaped such that in order to transcend our 'self' and find our Self, we have to de-center our perception from immediate reflexive affects (how I'm immediately affected by things) towards a cognitive explanation of what is happening i.e. the rational, causal ways that the world is acting upon we, why I feel this way, and why the other is acting as they are (this will be understood chiefly in terms of power-relations). If someone yells at you, its because they do not have the affect-regulatory habits needed to inhibit affects detrimental to social relatedness, but also the lack of a cognitive 'mindfulness' to know when, what and how relevant things are happening.

We live in an aggressive society. Aggression is based in anger. Why and how did we become this way? Simple. The mind knows what it wants to know. The recursion implies that the mind hypnotizes its own self by the statements it makes, or the reflexive evaluations it makes. These habits of mind are based in habits of neuronal prediction mechanisms, so that we relate to the world exactly as we were related to, so that our meaning is perpendicular to the minds we related with. It also doesn't require direct experience; merely being attendant to something offers cognitive food for the perceiving mind. To know social power is what the human mind seems instinctively knowledgeable about. It categorizes and generalizes. Takes from one context into a similar context. Learning is rightly understood in terms of associations constrained by context over a continuous period. So long as you live, your new experiences are 'fitted' to the dynamical landscape shaped by past experiences.

The mystery of mind and human being is that we can notice and find the relational realities, and so 'correct' reality, or what instinct alone would have predicted. We change causal processes and actually make new worlds of possibility. How can anything in the universe possess such an ability? The whole of our organism, in life, and then in possessing a consciousness, that holds reality within one frame...

We do not understand, quite yet, how wonderful we really are.

Thank you for writing this. It has been truly a pleasure to read each and every paragraph. Admittedly I have read it multiple times. I confess that I feel as if you took a day trip into MY consciousness, and wrote a diddy. All while, I sit daily not replying to good works of the English language I see on this site. This post is one I am compelled to reply to...no offense to others.
Many members have sparked wonderful thoughts and made me question,think harder, and ponder this exsistace. Yet, this post of yours spoke to me. I'd love to know where you wrote it from. Do you know what I mean by that?
I oftin am floored by what sparks original,matter of fact yet discussable ideas. And yes, it is an ultimate quest, this yearning to understand and see (not with fleshly eyes) the purpose of our being.
Round and round and round we go...this journey is spectacularly orchestrated! I do believe we ALL are a part of a beautiful dance. Such powerful energy we, as human beings, were created to house. The will of the spirit decides which pull that energy takes form, in my humble opinion. Positive/negative, light /dark, evil/goodness, call it what you may...it comes to a choice that entirely resides within your realm of consciousness.
In kindness,
kimber7y

ddrom an experience of weakness i.e. shame, in particular.

a reply to: k1mber7y

I'd love to know where you wrote it from. Do you know what I mean by that?

About 13 years worth of developmental trauma. Numerous instances of prolonged psychological attrition. Imagine not sleeping for 21 days straight; with anxiety and paranoia building up, day by day.

LOL. Life is awesome. Viktor Frankl - the great Austrian psychologist and philosopher - says perhaps life and living could best be interpreted as asking us questions, as opposed to us the world questions.

We get so caught up in the latter without recognizing the wonder of responding to the former.

I don't like to think that severe psychological trauma is a necessity to be a deep thinker, because I think empathy, imagination, and a true sense of relatedness with others can accomplish something just like that. However, when you are subject to the type of mental suffering that I endured, your choices are limited: either adapt or don't. But adapt to what?. Given that I'm suffering, stricken with a continuous background of bodily anxiety and a reflexive penchant for thinking the worst, evolution tends to bring the mind forward - if it is so fortuned by a sufficiently supportive environment - into a different state of being.

Systems theory calls such transitions "phase shifts". I evidently have gone through such a phase shift in that my mind reflexively turns to a new referent. Imagine a loop; when my mind goes toward the "hated object", it necessarily is activated by it into a state of tension. This was my reality for 13 years following the periods of trauma. Then, with continuous education in psychodynamic processes and their environmental correlates (or induction factor), and applying these new ideas to my own introspective functioning, I began to grow. But grow towards what?. Evidently, since human beings evolved out of what I call "micro-moments of recognition of an implicit self", I understand and recognize that positive affect - or love - is the basis of the iterated evolution of greater levels of consciousness in Hominids. Positive affect - or reward feelings - seems also to be the fundamental phenomenological correlate of neurogenesis/myelinogenesis/synaptogenesis in the brain. These processes represent new neuron growth, new fatty insulation of axon fibres, and more points of junction between interacting cells (synapses). In short, whatever is happening "in between" the organisms, and phenomenologically exerienced, somewhat spurs metabolic activity in the brain, leading to evolution of more processing power i.e more consciousness.

I'm on to a really, very interesting theory of the evolution of mankind which supposes some sort of primal "self" that is present in the earliest self-perpetuating biological systems. Life implies purpose since 'knowing' where food is and developing the means to acquire it is downright magical and plausibly impossible to explain without positing some centripetal organizing force. But how could such a centripetal force exist? Why should it appear in physical reality, and be mediated by logical chemical interactions? When biochemists study the functions of cells close up, they see a factory of logical relations; albeit, enormously complex relations that we understand about 1% of. To complicate matters, the new field of quantum biology strongly suggests that the most important molecular structure of the cell - the DNA ensconced within histone proteins (chromosomes) - cannot replicate itself with the sort of fidelity (1 error per 1 billion replications) it does at the scale at which it operates i.e. the nanoscale. Erwin Schroedinger was the first to point this out in his book "What is Life?".

So if quantum entanglement can be recruited to explain how it is DNA molecules replicate themselves with such high fidelity, then we are then forced to wonder: what causes these quantum entanglements to occur? And what would this force look like? It's evidently not physical, so were left with some sort of "formative" factor, perhaps something like Rupert Sheldrakes theory of formative causation. But out of what does this force appear? Ultimately, your led to some sort of idea like the "atman": each life on earth is an embodiment of the wholeness and purposiveness of the atman, and the atman 'pushes' itself through physiological processes on way to bringing about greater consciousness, greater complexity, and greater manifestation of the paradox: the whole within the divided. Humans are the furthest extension of this reality.

One last note. Shame is the ultimate force behind our dog-chasing-its-own-tail like habit of aggressing against other people. Masculinistic, chauvinistic, i.e. highly competitive cultures, foster defensiveness, fostering dissociativeness, because they offer no way for the mind to metabolize experiences of vulnerability, weakness, shame, fallibility, fragility, and mortality. To pretend that we are gods has been the source of humankinds hyper-defensive, over-determined effort to distance themselves from their vulnerability. And its incredibly ironic! As when we relate to our weaknesses in this way, we subject other people to the same standards we apply to ourselves: this means what you can't tolerate affectively within your consciousness (and which actually spurs a strong, assertive counter response) can not be tolerated in the behavior of others. If other people manifest some "sub-symbolic" behavior that speaks to something you've implicitly come to defend against, your reaction to this will be isometric to the one you've already established i.e. anger, irritation, i.e. a power-based, "your pathetic" attitude. The point is, human thought is structured around self-other predictions that, when potentiated in a super-competitive society - yields paranoia, defensiveness, projection and all sorts of other self-delusional efforts to distance oneself from an experience of weakness i.e. shame, in particular.