From Alpha to Omega

So let's say, for the sake of argument (and the current state of culture - a function of history) that the alpha of our human experience is trauma, and the omega is what you have to do to survive the mental breakdown that traumatic affects release in you.

The classic symbol for trauma is the flood, which requires some form of rest - Noah, in Hebrew, Noach, which means rest. How do you find rest when you are being flooded from within? Is it not - the feeling of being overwhelmed by affect - not akin to drowning? The system that is being overwhelmed is the vagal nerve complex - as the vagus nerve regulates the heart's sinoatrial node, and hence, how you could in reality "scare someone to death" via overwhelming their vagus-sinoatrial nerve complex.

But to return to my story. Being flooded from within is the experience that results from the breakdown of the autonomic nervous systems fundamentally oppositional structure: the HPA axis (cortisol, adrenaline) and the neurochemistry associated with it - dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin - is "opposed" by the dorsal vagal complex, supported by the periaqueductal grays dynorphin, enkephalin, and other endorphins. One system activates feeling and motion in the brain-mind-body, whereas the other one relaxes. These are the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

So drowning is what losing the control of the other system feels like. Sympathetic explodes into activity, and the parasympathetic, ever-so important, and yet misunderstood by most people. Between these two systems lies the special mammalian evolution of the ventral vagus complex, which includes the nucleus ambiguus (ambiguous nucleus - strange name) and its connections with the orbitofrontal cortex. When the parasympathetic fails, because of some fail-safe occurring a bit higher up in the solitary nucleus (also a brainstem site), the PAG lets out its "zoning out" hormones, and the person fades away, no longer real, once a self, and no longer a self.

But if keeping the self, and enjoying life, and relaxing into existence, into the present with others, is something you want to do (that's what I would prefer) then you cannot let yourself be consumed by feeling, and thus lose your ego. In order to keep your ego, however, you have to appreciate my usage of this word to mean "consciousness of self and its intentions". Not ego, as in, 'selfish', but ego, in contrast to that unconscious dimension of ourselves which is more like an "image", from which a light refracts off into a singular, linear form, shaped for the sequential time-based mode of language.

In order to keep this, you must follow the Biblical directive, since it genuinely describes the archetypal dynamic of our biosemiotic form. Thus, if you seek to exist, to "stay above the water", you must prepare for the world around you. In relation to your sense of the priority of Being - the Being of the Universe which precedes you and shaped your form - you submit to building yourself an ark for existence - of building yourself a word (another meaning for this word in Heb. is "word", as well as "nature"); you submit because you see an obvious problem in being insane; in opposing the flow and so creating entropy - suffering - which carries with it a falsely appealing 'excess' which wrongully takes up our faith - because it can only hurt us in the end.

Whatever the ancient "Hebrews" were about, its hard to know them through the generations of needy humans that evolved their own specific agendas vis-a-vis the body of this text. All I can know and say for certain is this: these humans understood the nature of our condition, and in being good humans, deposited these meanings to guide subsequent generations, albeit, in a form, which, from todays perspective, seems needlessly and even gratuitously metaphorical, and lacking the a value that a more descriptive, literal language of understanding, such as the scientific perspective, being more mature and precise in its truth claims, can circumnavigate via our linear understandings that the natural works through regular and repeating laws, and indeed, contains a basic form around the number three. The most abstract way of thinking of conceiving this Threeness was pronounced by Hegel, but Hegel's own dissociative disorder prevented him from recognizing its proper functioning in a form that directly reflects our own embodied evolution in the world, as constituted by enaction of intentions which are constrained beforehand by the safety-threat considerations of a reflexive attention - of what matters, and is made to matter, as a matter of survival. The genes of past evolutionary successes precede us - and I don't mean the cliché hunter-gather situations that most anthropologists focus on, but on the fact that the evolution of human life has always bee the evolution of the human minds relation to other human minds, and how they come to understand one another vis-à-vis the third of the ecological context - the historical and climatological circumstance. The teaching mechanisms are trauma and stabilities, with stabilities being carried as tradition, and trauma transforming traditions by forcing a movement into a more sophisticated adjacent possible.

What is love - the omega, but that love? If were going to be completely honest with ourselves, disease, suffering, and delusion, arise from the way love becomes shaped - with the symmetries become reworked through a lower level, more entropic idolatry. Values which aren't really that valuable shoot to the fore, and all on the false premise, through the trauma-seeing eyes, that love is evil, that love seeks to swallow us up, and that my identity and my fighting is all that matters.

But is it rational? If Omega is love, and you return to love either way, what do you think you're journey back through the minefields of reconstruction i.e. life review, is going to show you, but the disentanglement of meaning construction that made you value such valueless things? If the idol isn't real - isn't truthful, isn't a reflection of reality, how can anyone think - besides from the perspective of being a deluded primate that dissociates its zoological status as an animal - as a reacting, feeling, creature, contextualized by cues, and motivated in our relations, ineluctably, by a brain that has been shaped by historical experience?

How can anyone come to reify a process-based reality, and essentialize their self as if their self, this ego they so prize, which paradoxically they defend in a way that will ultimately come to hurt them so much more, becuase they hurt others and will have to know that from the perspective of love, Other's are a part of the Self, and hence, integrated into the identity structure of a person living through love?

Is idealism what happens when a person looks at a brain and see's a mere lump - a singular, and not a plural? If the deep structure could be seen, and the neurons counted (86 billion) and supporting glia, mapped out (85 billion) - and the entire system be represented on a computer screen, would it then not become more obvious this brain of ours is both singular and plural, and that, furthermore, it is dialectically and symmetrically a sub-system in a larger two-person system, of a self-and-other configuration which constitutes the real unit of human reality? Is tihs not why our mind occurs in an observer-object form? And is this observer not an emergent property of love?

Hmmm interesting

I think what you have said is a good indication why I see buddhism as a failure
Buddhism is a very self absorbing belief where Christianity and Judaism are both very communal and individual identities.
Proverbs teaches people to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice

"the alpha of our human experience is trauma, and the omega is what you have to do to survive the mental breakdown"
And to survive is to seek help in the form of compassion and empathy from people who have experienced the same or similar

Yes it would indicate others are part of self, community, our capacity to love, empathy, compassion ...

Good post

Haha. Thanks for illustrating why this place is such a joke. Can you please take like 200 more paragraphs to tell us what is happening?

-Omega

a reply to: Astrocyte

I'd like to take a moment and answer a few of your questions.
I don't know. Absolutely not. Maybe. I don't know. Huh? Sure, why not. Yes. Yes. Could you rephrase this last question? I mean, are you asking if the observer is not or is?

a reply to: MissSmartypants

a reply to: Phage

Very nice. Always liked "Blinded By The Light".

a reply to: MissSmartypants

I always like Manfred.

The name itself is so cool.

a reply to: Astrocyte

What you said is all fine and dandy, an interesting read even...
Yet to me the Alpha and Omega,says...
Before you were, I am...
After you are no longer... I am...
I am forever...

a reply to: 5StarOracle

I am he as you are we

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: 5StarOracle

I am he as you are we

You are the walrus. Koo Koo Ka Joo.

a reply to: MissSmartypants

Nah... I’m the spaceman...
Didn’t you know?

a reply to: 5StarOracle

Eggman

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: 5StarOracle

Eggman

Right you are. My bad.

Better Or Bitter Or Border... Those Three Are Pretty!

a reply to: Raggedyman

You do know that Buddhism is NOT a religion™ but a philosophy? Unlike Judaism™ and Chris†ianity™ and Abraham's other seed Islam™.. Next You will type that Taoism is also a religion™...

It appears You found a religion™ then used "confirmation bias" to bolster that position?? Did the RuleBook™ also instruct You to go to Church™? Don't You find that similar to commercials w/the pitchman soliciting Your business?

www.youtube.com...

a reply to: JimNasium

Ha ha ha haaa

Homework, deny ignorance
To deny ignorance you need to study
Try searching on Google " the religion of Buddhism" then get back to me with your valued opinion
Now imagine a donut dripping with sarcasm

Oh look, missed a YouTube link, that obviously means you are right
You will be reincarnated a unicorn farting fairy floss and burping candy pop corn or maybe a cockatoo or three
Laughable

Ouroburos...the beginning of the end, and the end of the beginning.

"Are you sure you want to overwrite this save file before turning the system off. Any unsaved data will be lost once it does. Would you like to continue?"

a reply to: Raggedyman

This is not an opinion, though, and yes, Buddhism's historical deification of the self is fundamentally problematic: positing God by calling it "Buddha" and then claiming its just the self sort of ignores the Yin/Yang complementarity at the root of the self.

If I find myself positing an entity on the other end which can help me, I think that more or less gives away the secret: God is, simply because we're built to adapt to stresses that force us - if we don't want to die - to adapt to an even higher level of being and existence.

People who try to wiggle out of this logic are more or less engaging in a defensive process with themselves. It's oxymoronic: defending an I that is relationally constructed to support this self in such a way as to bring harm to other selves - on a very suspicious rationale that says "oh, reality is really better this way, with evil to complement love"...which should be added ,"from my perspective, at least."

Yes, your perspective is a function of your ecology. The relationships and affordances that made you were simply superior than that which made others; but does that then mean that we should adopt an ethos that excludes those who suffer and are taken advantaged of to simply accept a perspective which, from their perspective, seems cruel and gratuitous and unjustified and mean-spirited? Isn't there something intrinsic to the asymmetry of the social and economic system that created that attitude? And isn't it hyper-religious, and fanatical, and severely unbalanced, to think that you are somehow special? Isn't that the sort of motivated reasoning that a scared and threatened animal would perform?

What could be logically deduced to befall an animal that lives and behaves - at the mental level - in this way? Hell?

And will Humans follow the logic of Cain - or the cliché of Cain - and simply follow a hewn pathway and "resent YHVH", as if personifying nature in this way is really useful when your body is off-kilter with the environment, and, the only way to fix that is to fix all those elements which are making you experience reality in this way?

The thing about people who imagine a non-relational universe and like to believe there is some 'essential self' standing a part, unaffected, and forever free from the harms that befall "weak people", is that they ignore the most vital, and empirical of facts: THEY ARE ANIMALS. You function like the duck, the goose, the gopher and the shrew. We can be lions, but we can also be gazelles; the world "out there" is hierarchically implicit within the world within us; and hence, a common metaphor structures both them and us, but NOT, as we anthropocentric humans like to think, FOR US, as if their existence had no phenomenological quality, or creativity, or individual uniqueness, that didn't make their existence justified as well (although not, of course, complete equals: we do after all experience reality more deeply, and therefore, with greater joy and also greater suffering).

Dismissing the facts of what you are - letting a stupid fantasy-narrative control your awareness, and not your own implicit relational knowing of the world around you - is an act of "magic" that is more a function of human ignorance as to what its doing to itself - both the perpetrators and the victims - than to any human fiction that the actors posit to make themselves feel powerful, and so avoid the powerlessness/depression/anxiety that comes with being wrong.

We really do underestimate how much depression and anxiety threaten us; we are consciously aware of it as much as we could be afraid of a lion. Just because it is a state of self-experience doesn't make it any less a causative object on self-organization. We react with fear; we suppress, and then come to dissociate; and the narrative pulls our minds along its pathways aiming to restore "coherency" in the animal-minded human. Unless we emphasize our fearfulness of depleting and disempowering emotions, we will always instinctively identify with our reflexes - with the self-serving rationalizations which soothe us with feelings of being "a knower", when we are certainly not knowing truthfully, but reacting with fearfulness, yet again, and staying and preferring fearfulness to the knowledge of reality - to what you're actually doing, and why you're doing it.

Why does this happen - especially to the antinomian type? Because they are caught up in a metaphysical reasoning dynamic with an imaginary self-posited figure which, if they thought about it more deeply, they would come to realize to be unproductive in its relation with them, and hence, it would make much more sense to break things down into smaller more digestible pieces. If you work slowly, and on empirical reality as it is - on relationships with others, and how the qualities of those dynamics affect the structuring of the feelings that arise in people, and the words and meanings that they find myself formulating, then you will understand and accept your animalness, as well as your ability to take control of what you need to do to correct the problem.

Talking about yourself in the singular as in a "war" with God, is, as is quite apparent to any self-aware and educated human being, a profound delusion borne by severe mental illness (manic-depression, feelings of grandeur, with symptoms of sadomasochism).