Meaning and Dissociation

People are afraid of meaning. They are like vampires, and meaningfulness is like the sunlight vampires run from.

How could this have happened to us? Anyone who studies complex adaptive systems must understand that this constitutes a state of the system, and so, a state of being that can be changed. The human mind which flees from meaning into the arms of fantasy is putting all their eggs in one basket - and a very ugly and rickety one at that.

What is needed for change - and what makes change so hard? The truth is, I've spent my life searching for a cure for a problem. I went to the East, then the West, and found the excessive dogmatism of both to be problematic to my healing.

Instead, I took something of profound value from the east, which is being cultivated by neuroscientists, philosophers, physicians, and psychologists in the west - mindfulness.

It seems apt that it would be the Buddhists, living up where they live above the clouds, who would provide 21st century human civilization with a psychological perspective that seems almost magical in its efficacy: just watch yourself, non-judgementally, just watch but to do not identify with what you observe. Just watch, see, and notice the significance of the relations.

Is it an inherent pacificism, or rather, a profound self-regulation of the Tibetan Buddhist society, that mindfulness was able to induce this effect in westerners? What needs to be kept in mind is that the suggestion that one can think non-judgementally about ones experience is itself the inducing mechanism in the process for the one being told this, implying what relational psychologists and infant psychologists know quite well: humans induce effects in one another, for good or for bad.

People could make better use of one another then they currently do, but the fog of behavior stands in the way of us connecting. This is it - isn't it? Many libertarians love liberty because some of the things they like would be regarded by the majority as problematic, no? Some people are nihiists, and it shouldn't be surprising since Nietzsche is a pretty well known name, and the stuff he preached wasn't particularly nice to others.

The problem is the belief in individualism, but at a deeper level, its a problem between the physiological semiotic dynamics of a human beings self-organization, and the world he lives in and interacts with.

The mind is addicted to an entitlement to do. Liberty - and no responsibility. The narrative structure that structures the flow of awareness moves within the feeling-meaning categories of depreciation and disconnection - wryness, sarcasm, horniness, manliness, aggressiveness. The feelings that are felt and the meanings that are made dominate perception-action categories, and the observer which exists as an existential "other" to its experience secretly colludes with its bodies addictions to do what it does without concern for the consequences of others.

Each stage of development seems to be encased in a dense shell of disconnection, where the thing that is hated and despised is the "experience of weakness" - all those features associated and related to aspects of self-experience, shame in particular, and all those objects in the external world which "map" that weakness - females especially, but also short people, fat people, black people, ugly people, and any person who can appear in any way to possess any weakness in their physical appearance or their spoken voice. Weakness is hated and despised because the sight of it triggers the mirror neuron system to simulate the affects non-consciously, which is then interpreted within awareness as a feeling of disgust i.e. as a response to what is known/felt about that feeling.

To think a person isn't a Russian doll housing the individual they were at each preceding stage all the way back to their birth, is a fiction. We are all prisoners of our early life (first two years especially) experiences - which shaped brain-development, and so constrained-what-could-be-thought by our organism. Because the brain is a semiotic structure created by interactions between cells that engage in their own point-counterpoint symmetry/broken symmetry relations, the human mind can be corrected by engaging with the contents of its own past - which can only be resurrected and brought to the fore through conversation with a responsive and caring other i.e. a person who will help you through their positive/recognizing facial, vocal and bodily response (which may negative at times i.e. coherent with reference to the details of a negative story, for instance).

I don't know how "deep" the meaningfulness of reality goes, but it is beyond question that cells in complex organisms are semiotically correlated entities which are simultaneously "themselves" and us, in the creation of our physical being.

It has been said that the trauma of killing is worse than the trauma of being a victim: that the dissociation of the victim may be less than the dissociation of the perpetrator, who has a brain which structures-out-of-awareness the violent asymmetry of his actions against others.

The logic is simple: the brain is a dialogical structure, and so, inherently dyadic. It maps not just any other - but Human beings: their faces, their voices, their eye gaze. Indeed, even the white sclera of our eyes evolved so that another mind may better discern the intention of the other's eyes. Isn't that in itself a strange biodynamical causality i.e. does it not implicate the existence of a structure that is intrinsically larger than the I? Of course it does: we are dyadic beings, self-other, you-me, are the superposition of a semiotic swirl that affords observer awareness from the centripetal 'core' of a self's ontological connection with an Other. Literally, our capacity to be "above" ourselves may exist in the ontological space between us - not in us, but in the lived environment itself. Yes, we have a brain; but the brain itself embodied an invisible semiotic web that reaches out into the physical environment itself.

I've also found that when victims are willing to forgive their attackers, the attacker often finds himself overwhelmed - so overwhelmed that they either experience an intense expression of affect, or they close down so quickly because their mind will not allow them to give expression to great affect in a public space i.e. feels shame.

Shame, indeed, is the issue. This affect is like one of those barbed arrows, so that when it hits you, its really, really painful to take it out. Its the affect that makes sensible the rage people feel. It both underlies entitlement dynamics (to be or act a certain way) and motivates the hatred of people who are perceived to be "inferior". Its strange; true strength is really having the ability to psychologically tolerate a difficult affect and process it in a constructive manner. But from the vantage point of the nihilist, strength simply means identifying with and enforcing what is felt, as if what is felt wasn't the creation of the environment and a continuously accidental effect of affordances/chances from the environment.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I've been watching this music video. I think it fits this thread.

Sometimes when it is impossible to sympathize with people, because of not being in their shoes ever, we can at least empathize to a certain extent by simile. "Going through that is like this which I have gone through or am not able to change."

a reply to: Astrocyte

'The state of being can be changed'.
Can it? Whatever is right now............. IS. This is being what it IS. It is too late to change what is being.
Being IS whatever IS.

All is changing constantly, quite naturally......... however, no one can change being - no one has to.

a reply to: Itisnowagain

You're just hiding from your history itsnowagain.

The very fact that you do not relate to events in the world as things which produce effects speaks to a deep mental/neurological issue of "non-responsivity".

If you never notice bad things - if all of humanity got in the habit of doing that - the ENTIRE PLANET AND ALL ITS SPECIES ARE IN MORTAL DANGER, as some of us cannot let go of their philosophical egotism to see the fundamental and important difference between being and non-being.

You can't see the difference, because your pathology is based in believing it doesn't exist or matter. You are afraid of valuing life because you're own life was devalued by an other - at some point - and you're solution was one that doesn't admit the Other into reality.

For instance, I love life - I want life to continue to grow and evolve - but you don't give a lick; death, life - no difference to you. All the species which live, play, grow, I'm sure, jump and play because this is the only world and context that can happen in. There is nothing else, and no basis for believing there is anything else; indeed, even talk of "non-being" is speculative - because it is always occurring from the vantage point of a body with an embodied semiotic history: there is always "translation" of experience through a brain - and if the brain is hurt, or holds memories of being hurt and have never recalled or processed that hurt - the content or belief that comes through such a brain is necessarily going to be subpar.

Not all Buddhists believe this way. The Dalai Lama is a champion of psychological change - and rationality as well.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
a reply to: Itisnowagain

The very fact that you do not relate to events in the world as things which produce effects speaks to a deep mental/neurological issue of "non-responsivity".

Everything is happening. How is that denying that events produce effects? All is happening together - there is no thing (including you) separate.

If you never notice bad things - if all of humanity got in the habit of doing that - the ENTIRE PLANET AND ALL ITS SPECIES ARE IN MORTAL DANGER, as some of us cannot let go of their philosophical egotism to see the fundamental and important difference between being and non-being.

A 'bad thing' is something which you do not like - but it does not mean it is 'bad' for another.
Please explain what you mean by 'non-being'.

It seems that you feel that life is dangerous - whereas life is just life - it's just happening - no problem!
Life is only dangerous to the one who fears death.