Uninspired, Lazy, Carnal & The Death Wish

The self cannot be forced to grow from the outside - or at least not usually, and particularly not in an individualist context where people can't help but reflexively enact the meanings constituted in their day to day relations.

The nature of evolution of the organism in space and time means that the organism is subject to the space of its lived territory and the time it takes to get from point A to point B. All of these details - semiotic facts - are intrinsic constraints written within the molecular dynamics of the organisms nervous system; its movements are tactical and strategic; nothing is done which does not have something necessitating its emergence: some antecedent fact which 'canalizes' towards a particular effect. All of reality is a fractal - connected; but each 'thing' speaks its own qualia to the "thing" it becomes connected to. The interpretant organism, the fly, sees the human hand very differently from the dog, who sees the hand largely as a semiotic pointing device. Each 'thing' contains its own meanings - but the meanings do not depart from the actual 'thing' and the qualia it radiates.

The cognitive mind 'rolls forward' from the effects built up from early life experience so that by three years of age, the general affective 'outline' of the individual personality is more or less set; the 'primitive', or most basic part of the affective self, derives from here. Yet learning to realize the unrealized parts of your self, later on, is a genuine potential, but one which depends upon the force of love. But what is love? It's a feeling and its a concept symbolized by the linguistic sign we've created - "love". "Kindness" "benevolence", "altruism", denote different meanings by being used in particular contexts; but they all contain the same general meaning. This term speaks to an experience, but the experience can be regarded as 'unreal' if it was never embodied in your contextual early life experience, and therefore, is something which the self has implicitly recognized it has lacked in its experience, something which becomes "magnified" when it (love) is demonstrated in the actions and meanings of other human interactions.

Growing up in the absence of something that is genuinely good - love - is intolerable, and so human cultures subject to 'competition' have already formed a response against the "supposed value of love". It is scarcely possible to conceive a loveless society without material and social inequality, and so we must accept that the dystopian concepts we have are purely a function of the "civilizational process"- a process which has a "life of its own", insomuch as its powers are spread out through the objects of the lived-environment and the people who are invested in perpetuating its murderous power. Competing, Fighting the Other, Infighting so that the mind divided continues to divide, turning friends into foes, unable to maintain relationships because others have not shown them what it means. All these harsh realities constitute the body, brain and being of the Mafioso criminal type; but they are also implicit in the cultures of the business world, entertainment industry, banking, the military, government. The bluff, the pretention, the genuine threat, all serve to keep the façade alive; power yields dividends, or it doesn't, and the person experiences the consequences of the gambit. Cynicism and skepticism, addictions to short term gains - sex, food, gambling, drugs; the person trusting in the moment gives in to something he would otherwise want to avoid: a downward spiral, spiritually and physically, the processes of the brain weaken the processes of the body, and a decadence and ugliness appears bit by bit, until the will to live, that fetishized belief in ones own 'superiority', darkens into a self-pitying nihilism, leaving the self little to think or feel about, stunning it into a baseless inanimate torpor.

What keeps the reeling self caught up in its reeling? The gods they worship, implicitly or explicitly (the occultist, or pagan, takes it a step deeper) are merely they values they enact in their day to day living. The values - the feelings - are akin to the gluon's power between two quarks; that is, the gluon exists only by virtue of the presence of two quarks, and so the same applies with the spiritual powers which express the qualia and evaluations which operate within human-human or human-organism interactions. Human perception is mediated by "spirits"; they are the third implicit element which flows from the interaction between one point - the observing mind - and the dynamical object which the spirit emerges from. The human and the object is the ideal thing; whereas the qualia which radiates outward from the real interaction is the Real.

And so, the native American legend about the two wolves, and the ancient Near East obsession with angels and demons, describes something important and unusual about the human mind: the property of "knowing" creates new objects, so that knowing A, lets say, knowing the meaning of another persons pain, means that the observing self (lets call it 1) and the object it interfaces with (2), form a higher level meaning structure (3), which now operates in awareness as an ontological force - a fact of what the self knows, and so an object able to create an angel or its opposite - a demon.

In this way, that is, in relation to how we "represent reality" - demons and angels are created. The particular relevance of these mythological terms derives from the experiential facts of how we live for our feelings - which simultaneously represent values, insomuch as our feelings occur in situations, and the feelings we enact in situations can either be justified and reasonable, or unjustified and so unreasonable. Good and Evil are terms we use to define and circumscribe the different ways we connect with reality; truthfully or falsely; we either honor one another, which is to honor truth, or we violate one another's intrinsic rights as a Self, and in effect "steal" from ones own future, by taking something we want; whether it be something physical, like an object; or spiritual, like the humiliation of someone who wronged you.

In Buddhist cultures, we know that the individual self can be coaxed into attaining highly complex spiritual states of awareness, simply by structuring the objects of the context and timing experiences so that the mind develops in a predictable way. From one state to another state, the Buddhist mind is brought from one dynamical object to another, so that a surprisingly benevolent culture is formed which emphasizes positive experience.

A person committed to nihilism is a person with a death wish. But how, or what, is the death wish, but an endpoint, a counterpoint, which arises from a mind which misrepresented the world so much and with such a frequency that they are now 'beholden' to the only logical endpoint, and the process which brings them downwardly closer to that dynamical ending?

In anycase, its important to keep track of what actions do to us, vis-à-vis feelings. Are feelings subsequent to actions, or prior to? Both. By virtue of physics, symmetry forms a basic criteria for the formation of meaning; by virtue of genes, every human comes into the world with a pre-set condition for meeting the species-specific values needed for proper development; without the proper stimuli at the right times, error creeps in, and error, over time, becomes committed to...

...the phenotypical 'errors' associated with each stage of development.

Canalization means you are subject to biases, which refer to the stereotyping effect of past experiences on present experiences, leading to a 'decoupling' of the cognitive mind from the perceived environment. This decoupling starts early, but gains major force when people begin to believe ludicrous things about reality.

Developmental Psychology is something I've tried to maintain as a constant cognitive subroutine of perception int he back of my mind for a good decade now, but Developmental Philosophy now that's another level.

a reply to: Astrocyte

But where does that ''proper stimuli at the right times, error creeps in, and error, over time, becomes committed to...'' come from.
It seems this 'error' is and has been always with us from the conditioning of survival. Though these ''errors' compound over the ages and the conditions for ''proper development'' seem agelessly squelched, how is it that these preset conditions for meeting the species-specific values might ever develop in such a way that they outweigh the counter productive practices seemingly inherent in the struggle for survival?

a reply to: Astrocyte

Is neurolinguistic barbital better than nihilism? I cannot say, but I really like the the two wolf thing.

a reply to: Astrocyte
Somehow, I get the feeling that If you could express yourself poetically,
the ideas you expound upon in your posts would be easier to understand .
I feel like I'm in a classroom lecture ( with my bladder full)
whenever I try to read your posts. I just want to go!

C'mon and give me your "Sermon on the Mount", your magnum opus.
I feel that you have it . I am expecting great things..............

Growing up in the absence of something that is genuinely good - love - is intolerable, and so human cultures subject to 'competition' have already formed a response against the "supposed value of love". It is scarcely possible to conceive a loveless society without material and social inequality, and so we must accept that the dystopian concepts we have are purely a function of the "civilizational process"- a process which has a "life of its own", insomuch as its powers are spread out through the objects of the lived-environment and the people who are invested in perpetuating its murderous power. Competing, Fighting the Other, Infighting so that the mind divided continues to divide, turning friends into foes, unable to maintain relationships because others have not shown them what it means. All these harsh realities constitute the body, brain and being of the Mafioso criminal type; but they are also implicit in the cultures of the business world, entertainment industry, banking, the military, government. The bluff, the pretention, the genuine threat, all serve to keep the façade alive; power yields dividends, or it doesn't, and the person experiences the consequences of the gambit. Cynicism and skepticism, addictions to short term gains - sex, food, gambling, drugs; the person trusting in the moment gives in to something he would otherwise want to avoid: a downward spiral, spiritually and physically, the processes of the brain weaken the processes of the body, and a decadence and ugliness appears bit by bit, until the will to live, that fetishized belief in ones own 'superiority', darkens into a self-pitying nihilism, leaving the self little to think or feel about, stunning it into a baseless inanimate torpor.

My 200 proof condensate of the above quote would be :
Ambition is rarely a benevolent force.

"Intoxicate" us with thy truths . Please? Hmmm? Do you really enjoy writing like that?

a self-pitying nihilism, leaving the self little to think or feel about, stunning it into a baseless inanimate torpor.

That's a little better. I get the idea, but I don't get an "image "
(which would make it doubly powerful).

Try something like:
Blackboards smashing students' faces into submissive futures.

originally posted by: yughii
a reply to: Astrocyte

Is neurolinguistic barbital better than nihilism?

Answer: yes it is. Sorry for questioning your approach. Its just not for everyone you know.

I'm aware that neurolinguistic barbital doesn't technically mean anything. Yet I meant something by it.

a reply to: RavenSpeaks

Is it just me or are you not super funny and right on point?