What's More Important?

Growth

As a person with a deep interest in how a sperm and an egg transform to become a full grown human being in adulthood, I find myself asking, 'what causes the system to grow as it does'? The biologist Rupert Sheldrake, influenced by esoteric ideas, has posited something called a 'morphic resonance', which emphasizes what so much of mainstream biology likes to ignore: that the organism seems to be correlated with, or identical with, a superimposing image, or 'gestalt', which entrains and coordinates all the dynamical processes in spacetime; that said, the idea doesn't properly take account of the elements which make the body work, or acknowledge the role of symmetry in its variously complex patterns at multiple scales, to 'bring about' the emergent property.

My instinct is to draw a correspondence between vacuoles and the universe, because I see circles, or spheres, or a torus, as representing the essential dynamic of existence. The universe, as many cosmologists believe, is in the shape of a torus. Similarly, the Ernst Strungmann forum, a neuroscience conference which publishes book with MIT press, has a calligraphy-style circle as its insignia.

In a basic sense, action and perception are the two poles of this way of thinking. Perception precedes action, because every evolving cell, animal, and mind, is referencing objects before it ever has a cognizing mind equipped with interests and beliefs 'about self'.

Symmetries

Every brain-mind self-organizes with reference to other human beings. This is important to remember, because it means everything: the context you evolve through absolutely shapes you. There is no room for anything else. Indeed, it is on this account that human evolution, which has been pushed back to as far as 200,000 years ago, produced states and affairs that were necessarily very varied. Did a garden of Eden exist? Were humans in the beginning, at this long epoch, living in a worldly utopia? Surprisingly, yes - this state probably existed. However, this state was dependent on the vagaries of the environment; the forests and the dynamics of life, entrained the functioning of the early human, leading to inferential processes, or inference chains, that constantly captured a beauty and wonder that seems best represented by the movie Avatar. Consciousness in such a world was likely very other focused; the world and its properties were likely related to abstractly as metaphorical representations of self-experience. Whether or not this was a 'complete' truth - that is, really entailed the cooperation of the world outside them in a way that meant the world was a 1 to 1 representation of the human life-world, is impossible to know - as a hypothesis, science will eventually get to the matter of determining it. But to really believe it, as a complete and all-containing truth, seems very naive.

Nevertheless, when the world enraptures us - when were made to marvel and feel awe in front of it - something in us and something in the world we extract and make meaningful, "clicks". Magic is the completion of the circle: it is the circle, hidden, noting something meaningful on the other end.

Now when it comes to birth, you need a mother, yes? If you didn't receive that thermoregulation, touch, and other cross-modal interactions, your brain would not have grown to progress to where it needed to be to experience the world in the way you experience it. So what does that imply?

In the beginning, for every human being, is the mother and its infant. It is ia beautiful relationship, and Christianity, in emphasizing this archetypal relation, certainly deserves credit for paying good to attention to the value of that early imprinting process.

In my mind, the actual lived relationship of the early life constitutes the beginning of every mind. At birth, the dynamics of the self-organizing human 'expects' a mother: the archetypal other, the nurturer, is expected to be present. If she isn't, and if development ensues without her regulating support, a life of serious trauma and harm and suffering will likely emerge from this situation. This is the most basic expected Other; it is the most basic, fundamental archetype that organizes the rest of every human beings life span.

The good news is, bad thoughts and bad feelings and horrible perceptions are emergent properties of the life-experiences you've had. This means that whatever it is you think is relative; it is dependent on past interactions, past meanings, past needs, past ideations.

To get past this level entails work. The easy way out is always suicide: it is easy for the self who does it, but for the attachments he made with the world - for the people whose brains hold him or her as an attachment object, his suicide will produce so much suffering for those others who experience their absence.

Hence, the 'work' of changing your brain-mind from one place (say, a nihilistic place) to another, is to have compassion for yourself and for what you've gone through; it is only by recognizing and emphasizing your ignorance - you're not knowing what you were actually doing to yourself, as well as the quantitative input of like-minded others on conditioning your brain-mind into a sense of truthfulness - more or less means that there is legitimate space for forgiving yourself, because we are, in the end, determined by the conditions of our embodiment and embeddedment in the physical world.

Helping the Self

Some people imagine that there is a SELF that is beyond good and evil, or beyond right and wrong, or self and other.

Scientific - i.e. objective and empirical and parsimonious investigation - evidence shows that this is a wish. The self, in reality, is composed of self AND other; it is the matrix of interactions every individual takes that makes them who they are. The effects of actions - the symmetry dynamics of self and other equivalence - generate affects like guilt and shame when they're exploitative, or pleasure and goodness when they're supportive.

Does this not indicate that the latter is more relevant than the former?

Empedocles is said to have said that the universe is made of love and strife. These categories don't really exist as essential opposites, but are emergent properties of human relations. Strife, or what Emepedocles imagined to be the "opposite" of love, is actually dependent on feelings of deficiency, such as shame and guilt. Yet since these 'primary affects' are negative, in the sense of being "receptive" from an environmental input, anger, or rage, or strife, is positive: it is something the organism does to protect itself.

Frustration, irritability, and anger, then, are just products of a brain-mind that is being weighed down by a lot of suppressed awareness of shame, guilt, and feelings of weakness. The anger response is the conscious reaction to the unconscious or implicit 'input' of a feeling of 'worthlessness'.

My brain is no more free of trauma than most people in this world of ours. I speak the way I do because I want people to realize that mindfulness can go a long way to reducing the suffering we feel, and best of all, we can ignore all that metaphysical speculative BS and allow ourselves the freedom of 'being in our bodies'.

So whats more important? Believing your stronger than the most primal archetype? Beyond the need for the Other? Is one better than two? Doesn't it take two to do th tango?

Morphic resonance: the Tits are the boobs' cream.

You love knowledge too much. The apple. Wisdom, I don't care what you call it
There is a line between true wisdom and true knowledge.
You are still on your path

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Have you ever wonder how they knew about this? How they could see at such scale?