posted on Dec, 11 2018 @ 11:28 AM
"You are the Universe".
A huge claim - and for a little child, an overwhelming thought.
"You are the Eternal".
Am I? How can that be?..an unconscious process seems to say.
Am I an individual, or am I a process? Am I filled with the metaphors that precede me? Or is this speeding-train of a concept - "You are the
Eternal" - occurring in some sort of "tabula rasa" way?
PTSD
I have come to see it necessary to speak of "post-traumatic stress disorder" rather than trauma, as some people relate to the latter concept as if
it didn't carry with it forces that complicate - and infect - how subsequent perceptions are made.
Humans are always to one degree or another carrying the information that comes from the "way others experience you." Natural selection is such that
the states that I embody in certain situations are selected by the meanings that the cue's my attentional mind interacts with carry; we are always,
in other words, being anticipated by our own unconscious affective processes. Previous meanings are "held in the body". The other person, in fact,
is "held in the body" - and constitutes the counterpoint in the dynamic with the 'point' of our observing consciousness.
If a kid is viciously bullied long enough by other kids, what sort of symptoms will he experience when he contemplates "going out"? Will the movies
carry with it the connotation that it carries for non-bullied kids? Or will any and every environment that 'is social' come to be experienced by him
as dreadful? Is the dreadfulness a truthful representation of how other people are like? Or is dreadfulness an emergent property of how his brain was
affected by the pain and terror he endured at the hands of other people?
Can such a dreadfulness ever be overcome - or, do traumas affect the organization of the brain - and leave it in an organization which forever (or so
long as that brainmind exists) 'tinges' social contexts with a quality that remains under some degree of control by the environment? In my opinion,
while 'ritual' and powerful experience can provide some degree of healing, that persons brain will - so long as they exist - be exquisitely
sensitive to the specific traumas that they endured, and moreso, their ability to regulate themselves will always be subject to dissipative forces
operating from within them - as their metabolic and homeostasis processes - and without them, in the form of recognition dynamics, or the way and
manner other human agencies 'orient' to you i.e. the motivational processes they are experiencing as they experience you as an object.
Since we're all controlled by symmetry dynamics within the matter - atoms, molecules, cells, organs, organisms - that organize our perceptual and
cognitive states, there's a certain degree of skepticism that seems mandated when we recognize and understand the perceptual effect that past
experiences have had on us, and continue to have on us, by virture of the fact that our consciousness is not merely a developing process, but a
process that is continuously carrying the meanings that have shaped its particular material structure in the past - which means, those meanings will
reflexively 'pop out' of us under times of durress, and if we identify with the meanings they produce, and don't recognize how those meanings were
constructed in us, we are non-consciously enacting a dynamic which, if we were acting with any sensibility, we would reduce the importance and
relevance of in our minds.
The Power of the Mind
If you can understand your mind as constructed by metaphors, what are the most basic metaphors we can think of? First, how does cognitive science
defines metaphors? In metaphor theory, metaphors are understood to be 'structures' with a point-counterpoint dynamic (I always frame this idea in
terms of this dynamic) which can be carried from one domain of interaction into another domain of interaction. So, the structure of the relationship
between caregiver and baby is the origin of what we mean by "self-other" interactions. This dynamic is metaphorically - or structurally - contiguous
with the way the baby comes to regulate its feeling body, because its body is a reflexive representation of how the environment "takes care of it".
Self-Other is structurally the same as Observing (mind) - Object Observed (body). There is a structural connection between the two processes, and so,
the material within the latter is 'metaphorically' representing qualities from the former.
What if we lived in a severely psychologically damaged society? How would the concept "you are the Eternal" be experienced if you were raised in an
abusive context? If the caregiver isn't safe, how can you feel like you have control over your body? And if the body isn't safe, how could you ever
feel like you could accept the nature of reality - of how the organism is connected to the world?
If the structure of metaphorical continuity were ignored and never understood, every one of your thoughts "about reality" would be read-through the
traumatic structuring of earlier experiences, and every thought, because it is taken to be a "truthful representation" of the object described,
would convince you - because you are always seeking to defend your existing identity structures and always wanting to project their truthfulness into
the world - would replay the "stories" that you have learned in your development - stories that conceal and hide away the dialectical nature of the
construction - the relationality of how the 'ideal' world you believe to be the true ideal (say, Plato's ideal society) is itself a construction of
preceding interactions based in abuse and terror, and which leave you with the 'emergent property' that such experiences produce: an image of the
world that seems horrendous.
A common behavior of traumatized minds is "either/or" perceptions. This is such a subtle process that notice how easy it is for someone to produce
in you a contrarian position merely because your need to be heard (experience symmetry in response from the other), when not experienced, produces in
you an exaggerated orientation to the position of the other. In fact, after you calm down you may find yourself thinking "he was right, he was being
more logical" - and hence, while you were talking to him, you weren't doing a very good job recognizing how your affective response was being
organized by how he - the other - was responding in a way that wasn't very conducive to the state of being that you were in. Hence - alot of energy
on one side (yours, lets say) leads to a polarized relation as the other expriences you in a way that was dissonant with your needs.
We often go into the world with 'expectations', and, very often, people manage this difficulty by becoming polarized yet again. Take for instance
the cliche "don't have any expectations". Isn't that an overreach? That is, an exaggerated and hyperemotional response? Polarizations in the human
mind typically take the form of "gross generalizations", where we take a response to something which stresses us in a stereotypical way (a way
we've often heard others speak from) and, instead of being more precise and accurate, such as "modulate your expectations with certain types of
people", or even more precisely, with "people who are operating under certain circumstances and thus prone to receive me in a predictable way", we
jump too far, and in doing that...