Developing Through the Field

The above photo more or less describes the trajectory of evolutionary dynamics. It reveals the essence of the process; but also conceals the dense yet knowable logic within the biophysical system, itself embedded in an environment which it has evolved in a "structural determinism" with, so that whatever happens out there comes 'in here', at various degrees of permeability.

Everything in actuality is perfectly expressed, and therefore, absolutely nothing lies outside the causal loops which merge the human being with other human beings, which is to say: everything you've ever felt or thought derives from a probabilistic outcome of how your brain connected to a particular environments objects. Your thinking arises from this, like a spirit above the waters (literal waters) of your physical body (of which 98% of which is made up of hydrogen bonds derived from liquid water).

Reality is unified, always, and therefore the things which we have longed believed can have very simple, entirely natural biosemiotic origins.

If you step into the realm of cause and effect, you can discover what reality truly is:





We need to pay attention to the absolute importance of early life, with a particular emphasis on the first 2 years of development which deal with the affective-relational patterns of the interactions we engage in.

What sort of interactions are important to an infant, or a 1 year old, or a 2 year old? I'll use my self for an example, hoping, perhaps, that you can discover explanation for some of your own problems, and how those problems were seeded early on in the first 2 years.



The first major "loop" in the fractality of human development occurs in the first 2 years, where brain development absorbs the biosemiotics rhythms of self-other affective interactions. Here begins the 'feel' that reality takes on, which is really just a matter of threat, and how much the environment threatens the organism. If no threat, then of course, the human being is as natural as everything else, and so flows with the flows of all the things around it, completely unified, because of course, it is only feasible to experience reality without a sense of threat if the first 2 years of your life occurred in such a way, and in such an environment, that your sense of self and sense of other became unified, and linked, so that a single feeling - love - drew you in your cognitive relations; nothing else, and therefore, there existed no concern or fear about realities troublesome 'wrongness'. If there's wrongness, it's in us; and reflects our history. If you look deeper, you will find nothing but natures effortless simplicity for an explanation for you feel the way you feel.

We could say that self-knowledge is essential to a realistic capacity to know reality at all. if you do not know yourself, your personality is more or less an expression of what traumatic experiences and environmental relational affordances for growth have created. You are, in other words, the 'secretion' of the brains inherent fractal, symmetry seeking, dynamic, translating 'how you feel with others' (always this ecological gestalt as the determinant) into ways, and waves, of being, in which you imagine in certain ways, and perform in certain ways, all because the snuggly looking, cute baby on the outside, was really, on the inside, a profoundly ordered and self-ordering assemblage of 86 billion neurons responding to relational cues in the parent and other peoples fact and voices that enlivened or disenlivened, or had a 'relaxing', or conversely, anxiety inducing, effect on the mind-brains self-ordering process.



Early on, the fracticality of the brain mind establishes a series of patterns that are completely integrated with all the bodies other systems: and indeed, since the bodies rhythms are evolutionarily older than the mind, or even affective emotions, affects and mind are 'entrained' to the dynamics of the homeostatically self-organizing dynamics of the biophysics of energy-in-motion.

I'll use my self for an example of how meaning transforms itself into problematic 'untruths' - and therefore, decorrelated states - in a developing mind. Hopefully, this example and its basis in a developmental timeline will give any interested readers an explanation for their particular sense of self and identity.

Now, relationality goes far back, and each trauma in any persons history reaches back even further, so I can only begin with the immediacy of my birth, and the process which determined a particular condition of it: that is, a C-section birth, which is now understood to be an early insult to the developing system, as the mother's becteriome, present in the vagina, coats the newborn infant with the relevant external bacteria which its system will need to know if it is to develop coherently. So why a C-section? At 8 years old, my mother was raped by a family member, and as Freud once said, most neuroses (particularly in females) derive from early life sexual traumas.

Because rape induces anxiety, the females nervous system becomes "fixated" on the elements which are activated during the traumatizing act itself: the vagina. Therefore, in giving birth to my sister, my mother's nervous system, naturally fearful of the birth process, preferentially activated the muscles around the cervix which need to be relaxed - via oxytocin - but were instead being 'vigilantly guarded' i.e. via norepinephrine - because of the relational fact that she was once raped by her elder cousin. It was like a clamp, and she was told she wouldn't dilate enough to give a natural birth.

Because of this fact, my birth was suboptimal, and therefore, my developing body - and its immune system in particular - had to do a lot of catching up. This too, of course, only works if you have a soft, kind and soothing environment. You don't want unexpected arousals; you want high-level certainty, because your system is still working on developing itself, and therefore deprives consciousness of what it needs to 'feel' good. Feeling bad, of course, is experienced as a burden to human beings in capitalist western societies. Mother's are no good at it; dads even worse. And to boot, false explanations exist for its occurrence, so that a genuine "delusional scaffold" allows humans to systematically traumatize their children into the adults currently controlling our societies.

In any case, at 1 years of age, my mothers grandmother died, and a few month later, her father suffered a major stroke: all anxiety inducing events which made my mother 'borderline' in her ways of thinking and being. That is, she would flip out; be physically aggressive and verbally abusive to those around her; and her children as well. These behaviors, of course, are perfectly "natural" for her. You need an environment for change to occur, and she didn't have the environment that was needed to avoid traumatizing me.

At 18 months, I had a major asthma attack, which essentially reflects the way my immune system, already vulnerable, began attacking my lungs, because the anxiety and over all chaos of my environment was dysregulating my body; and so, inducing 'systems errors' such as what occurs when one develops asthma.

Now, with asthma, I am in the hospital, about to receive another trauma, this one more seemingly small, and in line with the idea that a "butterfly in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas": I have a tube stuffed down my 18 month throat, made necessary by helping me to breath; but nevertheless, from the perspective of developing infant, whose sense awareness of its own self - its own body - is just forming, the object being put in me generated a natural anxiety reaction, whereby the general anxiety response became particularly centered on the presence of a tube that was widening my throat, and to which my own anxiety response - centered in the throat - was to 'clench' the muscles and so prevent the object from entering.

All animals respond this way because its an evolved response to having a foreign object go into a vitally important orifice - the mouth-gut connection. But now, with two weeks in the hospital, and subject to feeling states that are, I imagine, overwhelming (I of course am inferring my awareness at the time; I have no possibility for recall here). But nevertheless, lets fast forward to age 13.

At 13, my mother was going through a major depression (again related to her own traumas) which began a year earlier, with a deeply worsened borderline personality, whereby mountains would be made of every molehill, and normal relations were impossible. All this 'incoherence' hit a threshold; my system became systematically depressed; and in a depressed state, all the fears - the embodied structures of the midbrain (so subject to early life dynamics) became revealed. All those times I was picked on for my height came back; and I was afraid; or leery, to have to fend for myself: I was tired; and evidently, made enormously phobic, anxious, and nervous, to socialize.

Simultaneously to this situation, a kid from a very different early life social context entered our school; so different, tall, a year younger, but threatening; with nose rings, ear rings, a 12 year old, with bleached blonde. Definitely a scary object to a person in my situation. 4 foot 5 at 13, and he, at 12, was about 5'8. An animal researcher could have read the situation from body language alone; the scared human, abandoned (emotionally) by its mother, and the other predatorial human, dead to the idea of needing other people; angry, and recognizing that they are typically the social 'alpha' in the situations they're in.

I invited his response with my body language; and he responded in turn - however cruel, sociopathic, and cause and effect related to his own experience and hatred of his own weakness, he and I were destined to meet and affect one another in this way. It's just how nature works.

I can't quite remember when I first felt this, but in moments of intense anxiety, I would feel a 'lump' in my throat, as if the muscles in my throat were 'stressing', as if trying to close. Of course, as a kid, I couldn't explain this; it was simply an embodied cue that my mind responded to, so that when I was feeling weak and scared i.e. anxious, the voice I heard when I tried to speak sound terrified, weak, and anxious. The initial physiological meaning associated with intubation transformed into a fear of expressing a social self that looked weak.

I never felt this way, pathologically at least, until that grade 8, 13 year old year. It was precisely the combination of abusive interactions around my height, and general 'social weakness', and the complete absence of a compensating support outside the school context i.e. a complete absence of any human interactions, since my sister was gone with her friends, my brother was out with my mother, and my day busy with his business, so that, in effect, a big 'absence' in the outside world, where something there was expected and needed, wasn't there; and in not being there, my system, always sustaining itself through real interactions - whether food or socializing - was 'dying'.

Puberty is a time of further hormonal imbalance, but this was mostly induced by a powerful negligence from my - understandably preoccupied parents - and an unusually sadistic chance interaction with a kid whose way-of-being was to squash and destroy any sight of 'pathetic'ness' in his environment. He was antisocial; yes. but, like so many sociopaths, his complete lack of self-reflection made him socially relaxed, and thus, desirable.

At 16, another set of traumas set me off, and this time it put me down for a good few years, The voice things transformed into a complete obsession. Fear of socializing became a hyper-cognitively developed fixation befitting an adult; yet the content, the quality, and dynamics, followed the pathways of previous patterns, from age 13, to the originating trauma as a baby, whose throat was artificially whitened to aid breathing, but whose anxious brain could not help but enact a defensive response: to close.

Closing to challenge a tube that was stuffed down my throat to help me breathe, became closing to block my breathing for speech. The meaning transformed, but only because of what came first, what came after, and how each major disruption entailed a particular set of ingredients - environmental situations - for the event to unfurl.

a reply to: Astrocyte

thank you heaps for your own example of how meaning transforms itself in a developing mind.

i did find some explanations for my own sens of how i feel and act but not after a lengthy revisist into my young life and observations of the effects. i certainly had some "aha, that's why....". it's not even the first time i embarked on such ventures. there is always something new something more to detect from every new level gained.

a reply to: Astrocyte
It sounds to me that the throat has been throttled - you knew it was not safe to speak in the environment you grew - you were fearful so the body contracts. Has the body been petrified (turned to stone - stiff) as well? Did you experience difficulty in getting food down when you were a child? Maybe eating has always been an issue?

I had singing lessons which really helped to get my voice back and did a lot of courses.
Do you think that the reason you write opening posts but do not enter into discussion has anything to do with this throat thing? I don't know....maybe you want to reply but cannot get the words out.