Fearfulness and Love

Fearfulness and Love are the two sides of reality.

You could say the former condition has its roots in the concept of separation, identity, constraint, and competition.

The latter condition is the basis of self organization, or the tendency of things to cohere and cooperate. Life is based on this principle.

Life is tricky. It can express two sides, and two sides, furthermore, which pounce or enlighten us with meaning. The powers released by such meaning is astonishing, giving meaning to Plato's allegory of the cave. The meaning of the sign's we see enlighten us; we can feel awe and peace, or, conversely, we can feel the exact opposite.

Competition could be traced to entropy, inasmuch as creatures compete because there is insufficient resources for everyone. Death is a feature of all living things - a feature of living in a semi-closed system (the Earth), which means life implies death, order implies chaos, and more basically, everything exists because it exists along a continuum that can be summarized as "good or bad|.

Studying nature and reality i.e., science, affords true knowledge about reality, while at the same time patterning your mind to ask logical questions about reality. Logic is a process that may, perhaps, have an endpoint, as Charles Sander Peirce believed.

What prompts a scientific approach to reality? Well, curiosity, of course, but I'd say a bigger motivation in todays world is social-esteem, i.e. I would feel this way if I had more knowledge. Knowledge, as Bacon understood, is power - and the most basic and unconscious form of power knowledge affords is the feeling of "being smart". Narcissism, or selfishness, is always there in the human first-person perspective. On the other hand, that we need the Other means that we aren't complete without the Other's responsivity. Again - complementarity. We are neither selfish nor selfless, but both. That is the way of existence.

So why have I written this thread? As always, I have the "elite" in mind, particularly in todays world, where today's latest headline portends an awful, awful future, I found myself thinking things that brought about the cascade of anxiety thoughts - feelings which unfurled with such rapidity, that I found myself unable to prevent the release of a biological process that, once it get's started, doesn't stop without something to counter its influence.

Cortisol, norepinephrine, adrenaline and dynorphin are all involved in the anxiety and fear process, with the first and the third acting within the body, while the second and the fourth operate in the brain. Cortisol and adrenalie are both very large molecules designed to break down fats and elicit an energetic bodily response which serves as a fight/flight response to environmental threats. In humans, this process becomes an inward dynamic, so that thoughts become 'things' which can trigger a behavioral response that seems out of place vis-à-vis the nature of the problem. In a certain sense, Gould's 'spandrel' could be 'exapted' and repurposed for an existential function. Since the body mounts an excited response when the mind perceives things that scare it, the mind and the body can be put into a sort of tension and conflict - with the latter containing a sort of 'knowledge' that, if it is incompatible with a mental belief, will prompt anxiety, and with it, confusion of all types.

So again, we may conceive the body and the mind as involved in a complementarity, with the body "commenting" through the feelings produced against the mind's beliefs.

It's a strange thing though. A true interpretation, such as the one I gave myself, seemed to relax me. I thought "you haven't eaten much; you've had 5 coffees, no water, its hot as hell, and your stoned." For some reason, my body responded well to this, and an endorphin release occurred, finally, when I acknowledged to myself "I seem to be exhausting my bodily systems; too much coffee/weed has been objectively associated with cortisol fatigue - which is paradoxically needed to operate as negative feedback for the brain to end the stress-response cycle". That seemed like a coherent formulation, and so, my body secreted some endorphins, which produced a feeling of profound ease, and also, relaxed my diaphragmatic and intestinal muscles to help me swallow down some food.

Compassion

I can only wonder what sort of fears, anxieties and pressures bewilder other minds, and how, because fear/anxiety is so depleting for the Human being, that we turn to perspectives on reality that help us feel better.

I know and understand this emotion/feeling state better than most people, which is why I consider it my most important internal referent for thinking, in particular, about the elites.

I hate the idea of anybody thinking themselves as particularly special i.e. distinctive, relative to other people, and yet the world that has been created for humans does just this it enlivens us so that we need it to make our mental life coherent. Beliefs are things - mental ontological objects, which exist not because we "freely chose them", but because they help us deal with reality. We only think that which is consistent with our "attractors" i.e. those beliefs which bring about a state of affective/bodily coherence for us, because, ultimately, we experience reality through our body, not in spite of it.

Yet there are people who believe just this: that mind is objectively "above" and "prior" to body. I can't help but think this to be an example of that above principle: a belief that someone turns to because it makes sense of what has happened to them, and what they themselves have done because of it. Beliefs are indeed "sacred", at least within the minds of the people who hold them, which is why, if knowledge be considered, there is no more truthful way of relating to another person than to consider those conditions which made them feel/think they needed this belief, even though, in fact, they are unaware of these truths, simply because those truths are intolerably perturbing to the persons affective system, which has internalized different feelings, different values, and so different beliefs systems are required to justify the pragmatic facts of their embodied existence.

At moments of intense anxiety, I can understand Jim Carrey, Eckhart Tolle, and others, who, meaning to be good and kind in their heart, throw away the semiotic dimension of reality because thinking becomes oppressive, and to think - or for Krishnamurti, to consider the psychological self (time) is painful, and so the problem becomes, for him, and for others, the problem of time.

I understand these people, their feelings, their suffering, and their needs, merely by knowing my own. I know how painful reality can be; and so I can understand very well the escapist fantasies that people cultivate to help themselves.

What does all this mean? We can hate meaning, deny its existence, but that just seems to bury the problem in a "shadow" realm, which, nevertheless, maintains its complete control over us. Ignorance is bliss may become our go-to solution, but this just seems to compound the problems of being, as the things we do generate effects that feedback on our emotional life, with our body, always, serving as the anchor which comments on our being.

In the end, I am caught in a 'catch 22'. Knowledge means I know, which means, in effect, I am constrained by what I know. Science is knowledge. The body, too, only knows what is necessary to know - and so, what is generative to the organism.

Fear and Love stand at opposite ends to one another - the two pillars of reality, you could say.

Thinking and feeling are complementary processes, with thinking largely there for contemplation and constraint on behavior, but for the most part, feeling and being is the goal which the organism comes to recognize as required for wellbeing.

Fear is always related to self-absorption, and love is always allocentric i.e. focused on the other.

Even more importantly, perception is always a reaction - the same thing as when chemicals react to produce a "third" state, so too is every perception an emergent property of what preceded it.

We see the world from the present, which is the hub of all knowing.

For me, time can be a friend, as when I tell myself "this state will pass, as it always does".

a reply to: Astrocyte

Fearfulness and Love are the two sides of reality.

Fear and Love stand at opposite ends to one another - the two pillars of reality, you could say.

Which is it? These two statements seem to be contradicting themselves.

I would say if there is no fear then there is love.

The time between when you actually are and another time is fear. When there is no time appearing - no thought of any other time - this is love.

What is there to fear right now if there are no thoughts appearing?