The Elastic Band Effect

What I Believe:

If you follow my threads, the following will serve as a reminder of what I believe to be the nature of Human existence:

All things are processes. All processes throughout nature have a similar structure - self-organizing within itself according to dynamics intrinsic to the chemical ingredients which make up a cell, and the various means its evolved to regenerate its structure (feeding).

This 'formal' understanding is ESSENTIAL: formative processes occur at multiple ontological scales, for instance, at the quark-gluon, packed within the mass of a proton/neutron, packed into an atomic configuration which are themselves organized into larger atomic configurations called molecules. Molecules in turn communicate with one in another in such away as avoid entropy - perfectly reversible processes such as ATP production for muscle myosin-actin proteins occur through its coupling with inorganic phosphate production. In other words, unlike everything else around you, organisms - living beings - are islands of improbable order.

Affects are the internal registration of the body's metabolism. Metabolism recapitulates biogenesis. The food you eat, the mental processes carried out within you, and the feelings you feel with others, are entirely intertwined dynamics - with the mental-cognitive-symbolic-narrative stratum as ontologically 'above' the 'affects' stratum, giving it the formal constraints on meaing-making. Yet, as I have strenuously argued, lower levels constrain higher levels. Affects are functions of CONTEXT processes between animals. From the fact that your very feelings begun at the beginnings of brainstem development (6-7 months), your body and its affective experience has been calibrating the appropriateness of energetic relations to its environment - based, as always, on what the environment affords or deprives the emerging systems sensory modalities.

Traumas occur as a function of recognition dynamics, which occurs as a function of an affective expectancy that follows any self-initiated communicative desire. A positive receptivity 'excites' the perceiving mind into a more cognitively creative enactment - but since it is interested in the story its telling, it doesn't pay much attention to the energetic-root of its enlivened identity. Traumas are defined as affective states which overwhelm the psychological systems ability to maintain an internal I-You relationship, and so, have the capacity to narrativize an understanding. Very intelligent and self-aware people can do much to help themselves, yet the sort of mental clarity needed to transcend torturous abuse from an Other is, as they, godly. For most most, if not all of us, the social world of today is "inside our genes" - dictating the epigenetic mechanisms that underlie the coordinative dynamics that generate our particular sort of personality.

Beginners Mind

Such a thing exists - and is real - and definitely has a mysterious relationship to the heart and soul of the Humans existence.

A beginners mind is a childlike openness and receptivity to what the 'other' tells you. The Other can be nature - it can another person, or it can be your body. In a very essential sense, we are surrounded by three essential "others": body, others, and the world itself.

The body is the core of who we are - and it is, as I've written before, actually the basic meaning of Adam and Eve - etymologically, symbolically, etc. This was and is the meaning, and probably has a real history in our planets past, albeit, as interpreted through the mythological consciousness of ancient Humanity.

Adam and Eve. Intelligence - or your observing self, and Eve - Chava - "living being" - your body, the living presence that actually directs your attention. Adam must know Eve if he is to act coherently, yet Eve - the body, is "taken up" by the whims of her brainstem/amygdular processes. Eve succumsbs to the Serpent through a faulty attentiveness - no Adam present - and "eats the apple"... Eating, as the symbolism suggests, is an "internalization". So eating is acting. Acting in a way that creates effects is "eating the apple", and knowing the tree of "good and evil", has effects for the observing consciousness, which observes itself in a different situation than before. The wisdom of knowing what was good for you - an ecological consciousness - was forgotten by the obnoxious pridefulness created by acting without reference to the emergent effects of your completed actions - As Cain says 'My punishment is greater than I can bear. Cain - the same word in Hebrew for "to acquire". An archetypal psychological dynamic is being described as it relates to the personality motivated to acquire physical things i.e. the agriculturalist, brought his "gift" to the Lord of Being, and experienced it as insufficient.

Do not read into this a 'story' - even though it is told as one. It describes your mind - what happens, as a causal-law, when you live with reference to being acquisitive. The capitalist - the libertarian, who sees "conquering" etc, as the best way to live, is delusioned - fully under the grip of the motivational referent of the desire for more power. And a basic effect of that orientation is an inability to regulate back to a state of balance. This is all a systems analysis of psychological processes - whether or not it is understood this way by kabbalists, qabbalists, etc, is a function of their slowness to recognize the significance of the systems-theory revolution - i.e. the "era of emergence" (as opposed to the "era of reductionism") occurring in the various sciences/humanities.

The Elastic Band

24. So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life. [S]

This phrase in the Hebrew is full of additional meaning. For instance, "east of Eden" can be read as "from eternity, where there is pleasure". This is no different from the meaning meant by taoists. Without a mindful connection to your body's dynamics, you are "east of eden" - living in a sub-form of Human experience that precedes the realization of Human community in the generation of a higher level of awareness - the "8th phase shift" - where the individual conscious mind connects and attunes to other conscious minds - taking in the wholeness of the complexity of their beings, and through this deepened connection, generate, like the quark-gluons the incredible mass of the proton, a world consciousness - a "noosphere" - which builds us more deeply into natures reality - where we, Human beings, quite literally, experience the depth of our oneness with being.

So what is the elastic band effect? It is reserved for those people who insist on a dualistic metaphysics that includes a "demiurge" that is somehow opposed to your being. You must understand this for the traumatologically-generated fantasy that it is. Humans are fantasy-based creatures i.e. we need to make coherent our experiences, which we do by exploring the affects we feel with reference to the meaning our culture offers us. New ideas are typically considered to be ones own personal "eureka" - a sign of brilliance - rather than an alchemical interaction between self and other, self and body, and the artistic weaving into awareness of the implicit into the explicit.

a reply to: Astrocyte

From a person that had difficulty following your thread let alone understanding the connections, I have my own simple understanding of 'the rubber band' effect'' which may or may not relate to your thread.

In my life I have noticed people, including myself, who have come from extreme situations, and have sung too far in the opposite direction in an attempt to correct the perceived problem. Could go on but won't. Otherwise I have no clue what the intent of the post was. Call me ignorant.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Not quite sure what your point is but all I can say is if you are attempting to "explain" how it is you "think" then you have a disjointed method of getting your point across. You open with stating what you believe to be the nature of human existence. "Nature" means something that is naturally occurring. "Human existence" as naturally occurring? What do you mean by this? Humans are an organism part of a massive eco-system that is Earth.

You misconstrue multiple topics and have taken much of what other published authors have stated and modified it to your disjointed process of I don't really know what your point is.

You have the concept of the "beginners mind" completely wrong. What exactly is your context for the use of the phrase "the elastic band effect"? None of what you have written am I familiar with regards to this phrase. I know it as something entirely different than what you are attempting to insinuate.

Then you move into political ideological concepts which in themselves can be infinitely dissected with different meanings. Seriously, I'm just being candid but you are sending a boat load of very contradictory and confusing signals with this post. My reading comprehension is excellent but I have to admit I have no clue what your point is.

Just because a person "believes" something doesn't lend any credence to their argument. Any argument or strongly held belief must be supported with evidence as to why that person feels the way they do. Either by physical evidence that can be verified, validated, and is generally accepted as "common truth" and not originating from "just because I feel this way" type of argument.

Much of what you write comes off as being unnecessarily wordy. Contrived. Also some of what you write about is circumstantiald evidence so when you start making wordy statements that are inferred I am the type of reader who immediately discounts what I am reading because of the very fact it is inferred which means it is not validated as fact. Ironic, huh?

(S)he means that there is a higher state of consciousness (a noosphere which emerged in/from an era of emergence) that connects us all, but we are reduced to a lower state of consciousness (during an era of reductionism) by given into our emotions (pride and selfishness).

In short: If you think selfishly, you will be blinded to the fact that life is of one mind.

Edit: In other words, he thinks that God/heaven/Eden/noosphere is an emergent property of the collective mind - that our fall was "not really us being kicked out of Eden" but is us (individually or collectively) entering into a lower state of consciousness (a lower state in/of the noosphere) that we have reduced ourselves to by thinking selfishly.

In his search he has come to realize that the things of God are true and undeniable and so what you're seeing is his attempt to deny God whilst retaining the things that are undeniable.

a reply to: Bleeeeep

Some of the broader brush strokes of his post I understood but my point remains that he does a horrible job of conveying that messaging by being unnecessarily wordy and long winded.

To your point, however, if his post is about letting go of the ego which feeds from the brain which derives its input from physical world experiences then he is a contradiction in action as he seeks to be understood on an Internet message forum.

He is feeding his ego by the very explanation he has set forth in a very, very disjointed manner.