How the Self SHOULD Work

I emphasize the "should" because all of us are structured by stories that make us think reality is exactly as the stories say.

Why is this? Why are stories so powerful? If I hadn't lived such a painful life, the story would be just as real to me as it probably is for most people - the vast, vast horde who live life without a shred of understanding of how they exist within it.

But to break apart and "pull yourself back together"? Even the idea of "pulling yourself" back together sounds pretentious to me. My mom, my dad, my sister, my brother, my family. Love put me together. That is, the "Me" (2nd person) I (1st person) thought I was, was not real, and had to die.

Was it painful? And does it even end? Yes and no, both answers I'd imagine the undeveloped person wouldn't want to hear; and yet, paradoxically enough, I am blessedly happy - with an unfathomable capacity to regulate myself and also regulate those I interact with. How can a person not be astonished by such a power, when years of torment are "explained" by a feeling of reality that comes straight from the heart?

Mike number 1

I don't think revealing my name is much of a problem, given there are probably hundreds of thousands of people with this name, maybe millions. I know for a fact there exist other people with my exact name - first, middle, and last. And I marvel at how he and I both experience our name as "ours", and find it equally weird to look at another person who has "our name".

I was a brat as a kid. This "brattiness", if left in its simplistic state, is a dangerous phenomenon. Every brat is made a brat by a past relational interaction. The mindbrain is fundamentally sensitive to intentionality. Mother senses Bobby is intended to direct her attention; he is adopting a state to "get something". But mother, strangely enough, interprets a normal dyadic interaction between baby and mother as an act of manipulation. Trauma does this to the human mind. It shapes its interpretations according to the experiences of the past. A child's natural proclivity - nevermind this being a natural proclivity in all animals - to adopt a state conducive to achieving its own good is interpreted in about as insecure a way as can be imagined. The body presents a feeling ("what is he doing?"), her eyes squint, and she reacts with irritation. She experiences the 'manipulation' of a profoundly undeveloped being as if it were a fully-grown adult. It is the unconscious imposition of one context into another, extremely inappropriate context. How often does this happen? Everyday, in everyway, almost all the time.

Mike # 2

Mike number 1 never died. He has a boisterous energy about him that I still completely own as "mine". But he took things too far. He stole; he cheated; he was selfish, greedy, whiney, resentful, and above all, idealistic and dissociative.

At age 21, I got into the habit of "car-hopping", where you move from one car to another, checking to see if they're open, and if so, ransacking it for whatever goods you can find - ideally money, but also phones, weed (especially!), and whatever gadgets I could find. I also encouraged my younger brother to do this with me.

Night after night after night, I'd do my "shopping" across the town. Sometimes I'd get caught, and the rush of running away (I'm extremely quick/fast/athletic from basketball compared to most people) would make me feel simultaneously big ("I'm so athletic; I can't be caught!") and small ("you're pathetic; what you're doing is wrong").

That very summer, I was walking in the night with my brother a bit away from our house. We were smoking, and I was high. I had a history of unresolved trauma that was sitting in my unconscious, and then suddenly, everything seemed unreal. The world around me lost its substance; my brother lost his substance; my being, walking, moving, felt profoundly unreal.

Having a history of paranoia, I immediately interpreted this experience as harkening the onset of a psychotic breakdown. I began to fear that I'd hear voices; every second that I was aware, I was personally dreading the voices. This fear of insanity came from my mom's own nervous breakdown. Just 7 or 8 years from that time period, my mind was once again tormenting me with paranoia - a paranoia that was, paradoxically, perhaps coherently maintaining an "egoic" defense. By stating my fear to myself - as well as my brother - I was "nipping the bud" from forming in an unconscious way.

I came home that night absolutely flooded in anxiety. With egoic consciousness of what one fears comes anxiety. These two processes are inextricably entwined. Fear is a very subtle prelude to the subsequent anxiety: my experiences from this horrible trauma have shown me quite well how much the body can torment the mind.

In order to be conscious, I had to defend against my fears. I had to hold off the voices, know that I feared them. I did this, but with every agitated reflection, I depleted my body of yet a bit more cortisol - a massive, gargantuan molecule - which breaks down fats to release glucose for energy. My fear was eating my body. My body was feeding my fears.

This tormenting nightmare went on for not one day, but 21 days exactly. As the days progressed, I watched as my coherency faded, my mind becoming more cloody, more 'flighty', more intense. Electrical pulses were occuring in my head: I was being electrocuted within my mind by my own body! I saw flashes as they occurred, and each one felt like a trauma.

If not for antipsychotics - for the powerful tranquilizing effects that it had - my mind would not have lasted, and the nightmare would have persisted. God bless antipsychotics!

Mike Number 3

The level of fear and anxiety and depression during those 3 weeks of hell is just too grueling to think of, yet I recall it all the time, because I feel it taught me a very important lesson about reality.

That lesson wasn't immediately learned, of course, but it did lead me on the road towards that discovery, through the gateway 'drug' of Judaism.

Somehow, I think Judaism, in its own time, and Catholicism, in the middle ages, played similar roles in constructing 'counter-philosophies' to the "heresies" of their days. The world of the ancient middle east was extremely religious, withe everything about "what is" being ascribed to a god or force independent of the actual processes that existed between themselves and others.

There was, in other words, what philosophers call "hypostatic abstraction", of taking what is an emergent phenomenon, an epiphenomenon of distributed dynamics, as being 'sufficient in itself', without reference to the lower levels it builds from.

Judaism brought me into a profound world of thinking that till this day I am profoundly appreciative of. Yet, there is an "orthodoxy" that is absurdly literal and absurdly extreme which I find in every major religion - Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. This quality of getting "lost" in the symbolizations of things in terms of 'divinity', and away from the very processes which make us, allows delusion to grow.

Mike number 3 was religious, but still broken. Kabbalah didn't give him the understanding that he actually needed; and conversion to Judaism seemed - and was - too extreme a change to make. What mattered, it seemed, was understanding my history. My actual lived experience. If my views of things...

and feelings of what’s real, derive from the type of mother I had, the type of father I had – in other words, in the good or bad luck of the draw that the Universe subjected me to – then what mattered that I attune my mind to those realities.

Mike number 4

This Mike, perhaps the present one now writing, believes science is the most respectful way of going about knowledge. Why? Because Mike number 4 doesn't need to prove anything. There is a truth from Mike number 3 - the religious one - which translated God into the existence of the Universe and Nature. Mike number 3 also learned something important from Judaism: the person that I am is also natural, and also me. My history is me as much as I, as the Universe become aware of itself, am the Universe.

Mike number 4 learned that trauma creates the false perception of dichotomies where none exist. It creates the issue of having a "small window of tolerance". Apparently "opposite" realities - the timeless and eternal, and the temporal and the spatial, are felt as desperately "incompatible". This drives people into intramundane gnosticism, which makes the situation even more dysfunctional, and in the end, as we are all now learning, it will mean the end of our species, civilization, and perhaps we might destroy the planets life as well.

When I talk like this about myself, as Mike number 4, or speaking of myself in third person, I find it sort of amusing. I like that I feel ok with being "the Universe", and being a human. I like the paradox, and like that I am being scientific - and truthful - about it.

These are simple truths. The most simple truth is the truth of love, which ultimately confirms the truth of the unity of self-with-world. If this is true, then knowledge of relative matters SHOULD be subjected to scientific inquiry - experiment, etc. If anyone needs to assert something without having a reasonable basis to do so, then one should infer that this person is unaware of his unreasonable neediness, and unaware of the shamefulness of pretending to not be needy when at the unconscious, motivational level, there is clearly a feeling of deficiency and
'wrongness' which this action is supposed to make 'right'.

What are some of the things which people do to get away from the truth that love communicates? They begin to abstract love from an embodied expressed action, into a series of manipulative, evil actions, which have as their end point a supposed "loving" end. Such 'end-justifies-the-means' mentalities pervert the facts of processual dynamics. This is nothing more than an elaborate justification to maintain the present trajectory - a trajectory which will no doubt punish the actor in ways that will ultimately prove the truism "not worth it".

Every generation of humanity has marched forward through cliches and stories, and as science grows, the tolerance for cliches grows less and less. Stupidity becomes a problem - an irritant - and something that needs to be competently dealt with. This attitude is present throughout the logic of climate change, yet it falls on the deaf ears of postmodernists and fascists who think they know the way the universe works, when they know nothing, and want to continue to know nothing, because knowingthe truth, for them, hurts.

Yet it hurts. I suffered, and so did Jesus, and so will every human being who lives until the world is made right again.

There is a mixture of good and evil in todays world; with perhaps more good on the logic of the left than the right, yet, there is a goodness in the rights religiosity that is absent in the lefts hedonism. We have to work with what we have, no doubt, but we also need to realize that resolving our problems requires that we use our reason. And the reason we possess is fundamentally conditioned by bodily reactions. Hence, without an understanding of the way mind and body intertwine to produce meanings, I cannot see how this world will be fixed.

I like the last paragraph. It is good philosophy.

Is the mike outlay thing about a transition of consciousness or something?

a reply to: Astrocyte

This is simple. When you do #ty things, you feel #ty about it. When you focus on being kind and productive, you feel good. It’s not complicated. It’s a scientific fact.

a reply to: rickymouse


more or less..

I meant to change the title to something less pretentious sounding.

originally posted by: rickymouse
I like the last paragraph. It is good philosophy.

It does though, kind of, remind me of the original basis of the Protestant Reformation: Finding the middle way; The Protestant work ethic etc. Which is not a criticism of Astrocyte's perspective, or yours for that matter, and I certainly think that we can learn from the past where good ideas go wrong. "New" religions have a tendency to challenge the status quo and to gain popularity in doing so from those who sense hypocrisy, or the do as I say but not as I do example, and then sink into complacency when they feel their demands have been met, not understanding that change is an on-going and dynamically process which requires maintenance and adaptations to ensure that the rot doesn't set in, and you become that which you set out hating.

I know that the OP was not about religion per se, but still, it sort of was.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
I meant to change the title to something less pretentious sounding.

"Can" or "could" may have sounded a little less dictatorial.

Interesting as always though.

according to how the explanation for Mike 4 ends and how the struggle of Mike 2 explained, what percentage of Mike 2's sufferings still a part of daily life for you?