The Power of Care

Right now, Human beings are still deluded about the nature of their brain-minds and the nature of their Being.

I made an earlier post where others thought the point was that "we don't exist". That is certainly not my point.

We live in body's and exist as individuals, yet, think for a second what allowed are brains to evolve to their present size.

Neurons evolved myelin connections around 300 million years ago to scurry away from the "monstrous" dinosaurs. The result was speed, but also a lot of metabolic output, leading to quick heat loss. The solution was for the animals with this evolutionary innovation to stay with one another. To huddle together to share one another's lost warmth. The warmth and energy between them was shared.

This situation ultimately leads to the emergence of care, yet what is this feeling? The Dalai Lama says 'Compassion is my religion'. All World religions have said compassion is the essence of living with Others in life. Yet, the earlier post mentioned led to a long conversation about the "absence of being".

There is a profound energy that can move through the Human to share the deepest of mysteries. And yes, at the very end, the Jesuit-Paleontologist Teilhard De Chardin's Omega-Point may entail a "involution" into the Other. But really, nothing? Do you think you're nothing even though you think and use computers? You are choice incarnated: a central center of attention, awareness and focus that lives within a feeling body to which it constantly refers to for it's thinking.

There is a mystery in being that may be beyond our present brain-minds to comprehend - or at least, we may be too-at-odds with one another, experiencing one another as "competitors", leading to a reflexive constituted affective referent that our egos eagerly surrenders to - as a function of the fears of suffering we have and a desire for well being.

Being is beautiful, it is relaxed, and peaceful. Right now, at this point in our history, we need to cultivate care for one-another so that we can see that care creates consciousness, it feeds us feelings of strength, liveliness and well being. You exist, I exist, but we exist more deeply than either of us.

This reality, often called "trans-personal", can be terrifying but its the truth. The response to it is not to withdraw and renounce living, as tempting as that can be, but to return to the World, to Others, and to cultivate real-meaning in our relations. Do not let yourself experience these relations as "unreal", because this is precisely the feelings of this word and the way its patterned every brain-mind upon entering it. There are games and fun and play - powerful, enlivening emotions to be experienced, known and cherished with Others. There is just only one rule: do not shame others. Shaming others leads to the violent feedback loop in the community between shame and pride, which ultimately leads to the deranged reality we live within today - where people literally believe that they are singular, individuated, and somehow, existing in some "random" way.

The absurdity of believing that the 10 octillion or so atoms making up our body are organized by random "trial and error", is one of the confusions capitalism creates. Rest assured, we are divine beings, nurtured into existence by care, against a symbolic backdrop of an evolutionary process on a planet that expresses an integrated ecology - a life - with the Human being symbolically "holding" in its structure the history of the past.

There is such a soothing power in care that the pharmaceutical companies - with their talk of biology, neurotransmitters, etc - delusionally deny. But for the person who has overcome within themselves the noxious presence of shame, care is a divine gift that lets you know that the Universe, or God, at root, is Good. Trusting in this and not fleeing into the quietude of oblivion, but believing that, although we take part in the infinite we not the infinite ourselves, inasmuch as we cannot know what happens beneath planks scale or know what the future holds.

So we need to cultivate collective selfishness... I thought that's what was already going on?

Maybe we would do better to quit with all these notions of care, and good ... can't we trade out this delusion for a practical understanding of collective necessity and desire?

a reply to: pl3bscheese

Sorry, neuroscience and psychology doesn't support the view you feel the need to share.

Try being a baby, as you once were, without another body, face and voice enlivening your brain into existence. Do you understand that you, right now, literally owe your being to those interpersonal interactions and the effect it has on the self-organization of your brain?

It's seem like you a) want consciousness, but with b) the responsibility it entails.

The planet literally cannot tolerate an objectifying consciousness, as we see with climate change.

I'm sorry that the picture I describe is so painful, annoying and angering for you. The notion of "collective selfishness" is a true absurdity, as it entails nothing more than enjoying the presence of Others and vice-versa.

Are you aware that people give away their internal reality when they make comments like the one you just made? In the age of neuroscience, its no longer possible to play games and pretend that you are somehow above the Human condition.

As a psychologist, my natural question to you would be: why do you feel that way? What is in you i.e. what have you experienced such that you (or the thing which enlivens and animates you) cannot tolerate the peacefulness of being cared for and in turn caring and nurturing Others?

Who would have thought that brain-science would ineluctably lead to a new-spirituality based upon the simple, undeniable reality that negative expereinces with Others are neurotoxic while positive experiences are neurogenic.

Are you afraid you'll lose yourself? What if, at root, you are nothing more than the extension of the cosmic ray that gave you being to begin with? Furthermore, since, the emotions of Fun, Care, and Awe, are emergent (depend on the presence of Others to give expression to their qualia in phenomenology) in a purely secular scientific sense, youre insistence on a non-relational and non-ecological way of describing yourself, again, is delusional.

That is, it isn't true. Truth means something. It means that youre "holding reality" in a properly correlated and HONEST way, and not dissociatively.

Truly, I understand and sympathize with the feelings you describe, but you have to overcome them. Whether we like it or not - and if we get caught up in not-liking it, were taking "our" opinions wayyyyyyy toooooo seriously - that is how Nature works. Nature pushes everything this way, towards paths of least resistance to relax the stresses moving through the system.

Fun, finally (a feeling vitality I suspect you very much love) is beautiful and of cosmic significance. But you can't play or have fun (experience the phenomenology of fun) at other peoples expense, which is what I think your feelings desire.

As someone who went through a major trauma and as a system researcher (in science), the suffering of change is nothing more than enduring a process that occurs in all coherently organized systems. If something is in you - it can be purged. It's just the purging hurts - it takes time - before the mind-spirit-body reach a new organized attractor.

a reply to: Astrocyte

You're an incredibly confused individual, and I really don't care to pick it all apart right now.

Good luck with that!

a reply to: pl3bscheese

Ahhh. I'm confused. Ok.

Break it down. Lets have a rational conversation using reason. However, to be reasonable, you need to understand how your mind-brain works - and as a neuroscienist-psychologist - that's my expertise, not yours. Although I'm sure you think you're "illuminated". So sad how important an objective understanding of the brain-mind is to get a sense of how it works! You know why? There's this demonic illusion called "dissociation" which operates by pulling our phenomenology (consciousness) towards paths of least resistance - just like all physical and biological systems, our consciousness is based on probability, and probability inclines us towards enlivenment and away from disenlivenment.

Even worse, trauma and low-level affect regulation (OFC development) can really create the profound and horrifying delusion of think you know what you're talking about and how the World works. I fear there are hundreds of thousands of humans on are Earth today, insanely confident in their views, who have been horrifyingly (and I say this with compassion! Delusion is powerful!) led to views that skirt the most encompassing of processes: how matter in the universe self-organizes towards paths of least resistance. The entirety of our cosmos works this way, yet some people think they can change that - using - and this is the funny part - "reason" i.e. the brain-mind they are constantly thinking and being biased by in their relations with Others.

Do you know how frighteningly powerful dissociation is? What we DO literally CREATES what we experience. If you do evil, for instance, your brain-mind will generate affects that negatively evaluate what you don't want to here: you, like all creature, seek coherency. It just so happens that the coherency your body seeks has led you (and many others) toward a profound delusion about the reality, necessity and absolute nature of care-awe in the exsistence of the Human.

In a sense, the phenomenology of our minds follows the "paths of least resistance" established by what we feel we need. So, for instance, lets say you've been a horrible, horrible person your whole life, as a function of having grown around narcissistic psychopaths. Simply because the brain-mind self-organizes around the encounters we have with Others, correlation (kindness, care) or de-correlation, will, in fact, make and shape the ecology of your consciousness.

The ego is a profound gift. We get to feel and experience ourselves as individuals, centers of consciousness and being. However, for many people, this gift is experienced as a horror - but they don't realize that this is the cosmic illusion - the biggest illusion of all: your feelings are nothing more than an ecology of relations.

But, again, people with "demons" in them cannot hear this because their body's get anxious - the "demons" in them fight off the contradictive (lets say, clockwise) force of care and awe. How horrible.

How horrible that some people think they know more than what can be established by empirical scientific study of organisms (check out Harold Morowitz "The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the 4th Geosphere; Brian Goodwin's "Signs of Life: How complexity pervades Nature"; Mae-Wan Ho "The Rainbow and the Worm: the physics of Organisms"; Stuart Kauffman's, Investigations)

I am almost wonder if all of Human mental life can be reduced to simply a) positive of experiences of Self with Other, and b) negative experiences of self with Other.

It makes much sense to think this way. Are you going to think about something that caused you intense suffering? Unlikely. Rather, your brain-mind will move to a path of least resistance i.e. something else, something positive and, something received from the Others we grow around.

a reply to: Astrocyte
Tell me, astrocyte. How does the brain think a thought? It's not very often I get to talk to such a learned person.

a reply to: Aristotelian1

The brain probably doesn't think the thought. The Thinking of the conscious mind is a profound, profound mystery.

My guess is, Ervin Laszlo is probably right: our "thinking" capacity derives from some higher reality, the "quantum void" (the higher waters) which acts upon the coherent organization of the body (the lower waters).

Modern day science is showing how water possesses a 4th state called the "liquid crystaline" state, and it is this which Mae-Wan Ho argued underlies the coherent organization of fields and autocatalytic loops in the conduction of the biodynamical functioning of the organism.

Water, then, is truly a magnificent mystery.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
a reply to: Aristotelian1

The brain probably doesn't think the thought. The Thinking of the conscious mind is a profound, profound mystery.

My guess is, Ervin Laszlo is probably right: our "thinking" capacity derives from some higher reality, the "quantum void" (the higher waters) which acts upon the coherent organization of the body (the lower waters).

Modern day science is showing how water possesses a 4th state called the "liquid crystaline" state, and it is this which Mae-Wan Ho argued underlies the coherent organization of fields and autocatalytic loops in the conduction of the biodynamical functioning of the organism.

Water, then, is truly a magnificent mystery.

Very interesting! Have you ever heard of Dianetics? It seems to me that subject would be of great interest to you, given your field of expertise.

a reply to: Aristotelian1

Dianetics? As in scientology? As in the demon worshiping L Ron Hubbard?

Hubbard was operating upon knowledge from the mysticisms (i.e. Qabalah with a Q, hermitism, gnosticism, etc).

That the metaphysics of mystical traditions had the overall right picture (probably ultimately derived from the Hebrew Kabbalah of the Torah) is indisputable, but the science - the actual evidence of H20 (MaYiM in Hebrew) and its mysterious way of organizing molecular positioning within the organism (to put this mammoth idea into proportion: we are made out of roughly 10 octillion atoms i.e. 1 with 28 zeros behind it) is just beginning to be unraveled.

It makes one basic claim certain: we aren't ever going to extend our lives through any external means. The Human organism is just too complex (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms) for gene therapy to be anything more than a pipe dream, this being the main conclusion of Siddharta Mukherjee in his book "The Gene" (2016).

I say this just to wake certain people up (like ray kurzweil) who naively and wishfully believe that the Organism can be extended through external means, or even worse, through some computer simulation (showing a complete lack of knowledge of the electomagnetic nature of biological self-organization, imagining that the precise spatiotemporal organization of atoms of living creatures could be paralleled by silicon!).

originally posted by: Astrocyte
a reply to: Aristotelian1

Dianetics? As in scientology? As in the demon worshiping L Ron Hubbard?

Hubbard was operating upon knowledge from the mysticisms (i.e. Qabalah with a Q, hermitism, gnosticism, etc).

That the metaphysics of mystical traditions had the overall right picture (probably ultimately derived from the Hebrew Kabbalah of the Torah) is indisputable, but the science - the actual evidence of H20 (MaYiM in Hebrew) and its mysterious way of organizing molecular positioning within the organism (to put this mammoth idea into proportion: we are made out of roughly 10 octillion atoms i.e. 1 with 28 zeros behind it) is just beginning to be unraveled.

It makes one basic claim certain: we aren't ever going to extend our lives through any external means. The Human organism is just too complex (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms) for gene therapy to be anything more than a pipe dream, this being the main conclusion of Siddharta Mukherjee in his book "The Gene" (2016).

I say this just to wake certain people up (like ray kurzweil) who naively and wishfully believe that the Organism can be extended through external means, or even worse, through some computer simulation (showing a complete lack of knowledge of the electomagnetic nature of biological self-organization, imagining that the precise spatiotemporal organization of atoms of living creatures could be paralleled by silicon!).

Just out of curiosity, who told you he worshipped demons?

There are some interesting concepts in this thread about things I never thought to think about.

Thanks for that.

a reply to: Aristotelian1

Do I need someone to tell me that? Can I not infer?

It's so interesting to reflect and think about the metaphysics of our reality. You know the TV magician criss angel? Ever seen him walk up the luxor hotel, as if, "by magic"? This little stunt, as you may know, is mediated by "demons" - or forms deriving from the quantum vacuum that possess an ontological reality of their own, existing just like viruses do, at the expense of some entropy reducing process i.e. living beings.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Excellent post, Astrocyte. Very detailed and I agree with your premise. It sounds as though the knowledge that you poured into this thread stems from experience. That's usually the best kind of knowledge, imo.

As far as it is related to the topic being discussed, how exactly do you view the nature of demons (i.e. the 5 w's)? I'm mostly asking because you mentioned demons, but I'm also curious as to what others think about the subject outside of the box of religion.

a reply to: noceteipsum

Demons are entropy processes - that is, they are basically the same as viruses: they exist by finding a "niche" within a living process, and continuously acting upon that process to maintain its existence. The construction of a "personality", for instance, may be riddled with demons i.e. processes that poorly represent external reality, and hence, do not provide coherency to the well being of the Human. In short, demons are fundamentally related to ethical action in relation to Others. They're presence in our personalities (very few people alive today can claim to be free of demons: but it is also these very people who give expression to the immense wonder of the in-forming power of human consciousness) makes them difficult to see, as the very "ego" we protect oftentimes entails the protection of forms unrelated to the essential Self.

It's only because demons are feeling relations that we assume they aren't real, but they're real, lying hidden, "floating" through the quantum vacuum, moving within the biodynamical organization of the Organisms functioning, stealing energy for itself, and in some cases, for Human beings who want power.

The 5 ws?

Who? There's no who. Satan, Baalzebub, etc, these are mere metaphors for what we do. Humans are the actors, and demons nothing more than feeling relations that self-organize upon the system that reproduced its structuring processes (just watch T.V and see how completely filled our culture is with demons, seemingly deliberately i.e. to confuse, dissociate and delude)

What? Its some sort of energy form, likely of the type Lazslo describes as the "plenum" moving through the quantum vacuum.

When? This is a hard one to answer. In one sense, they exist when we act. But in another sense, "they exist" at a completely different time-scale.

Where? Inside matter. Beneath planks scale.

How? Through our brain-minds. When matter passes a certain threshold, consciousness "wakes up" to itself existing, and everything it thinks about what it feels constitutes a brand new cause upon the self-organization of the biodynamism of the organism.

If you understand the significance of the concept of constraint (in thermodynamically organized systems), it can be seen that demons act as constraints upon the interpretation of cues, and so, work through a reflexive phenomenology. If you just act - no thinking, theres a good chance a demon will become expressed and potentiated within your bioynamical functioning.

This of course isn't good, as I'm one of those believers in heaven/hell, with the latter and the former being states related to that which was fundamentally neurogenic i.e. constructive, and that which was fundamentally deleterious to the Organism.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
a reply to: Aristotelian1

Do I need someone to tell me that? Can I not infer?

It's so interesting to reflect and think about the metaphysics of our reality. You know the TV magician criss angel? Ever seen him walk up the luxor hotel, as if, "by magic"? This little stunt, as you may know, is mediated by "demons" - or forms deriving from the quantum vacuum that possess an ontological reality of their own, existing just like viruses do, at the expense of some entropy reducing process i.e. living beings.

I'm assuming you're being fecisous about Chris Angel. Mr.Hubbard factually speaking, did not believe in demons; much less worship them. From what could you even infer that?

a reply to: Aristotelian1

Perhaps I was exaggerating. In any case, scientology doesn't have the greatest reputation.

a reply to: Astrocyte
That depends on who you ask.

Profound

I'm saving this. This is one of those writings you need to come back to a few times I think.

a reply to: Aristotelian1

You know, simply going to Hubbards wikipedia page leads you to an area on Jack Parsons, Thelema and sex-magick.

Is it so hard to believe that Hubbard was a manipulative self-serving occultist?

originally posted by: Astrocyte
a reply to: Aristotelian1

You know, simply going to Hubbards wikipedia page leads you to an area on Jack Parsons, Thelema and sex-magick.

Is it so hard to believe that Hubbard was a manipulative self-serving occultist?

If you think there is a shred of validity to Wikipedia I have a bridge to sell you.