Busy Humans, Working Towards Paradise...

Sometimes I have the funny thought: "am I the most self-aware person on Earth?". Its funny to me because I know it's a narcissistic thought, and sharing it with others - something I'm driven to do - is ultimately about making known why those thoughts even pop up in the first place. It's not only because I believe my work seems to legitimately unite the hard sciences and the soft sciences (humanities), and so provides a detailed 'guide' to the nuanced phenomenology, psychology and the subtle interpersonal lattice-work of social forces that organize, constellate, and canalize the flow of feeling, thinking and narrative-making with the Other's we interact with. It's mostly because I am a partial product of this world - driven by a narcissistic ego-need to have others recognize my value as a thinker - the complexity and erudition that underlies my theories - in other words, to seek as others seek, because I am creature of the larger system - just as you are. My enlivenment - health and wellbeing - is fundamentally dependent on the interpersonal signs my biology has to process when I encounter Other's in my living. My "interpretation" of the signs, at the nitty-gritty affective-procedural level - in my muscles stomach, and chest, is beyond my control. This is the proverbial "first arrow" of Buddhist thought - the fact of immediate "embeddedness" in a world, and so continuity with it, that makes instinct and reflex an inevitable part of living.

You Cannot Control What You Feel: The Aleister Crowley fantasy of "do what thou wilt" is a sand-castle built on no sound understanding of the natural world. A threshold will be reached - as it always is - where your cognitive mind - itself an emergent function of social processing begins to interact with the dissociated/disavowed products of experience - those 'first arrows' which need to be suppressed, denied, and ignored, because the actor/agent has such a faint, dysregulated relation to the facts which matter: indeed, as Philip Bromberg, a well respected relational psychologist states,

[I]“Dissociation narrows ones range of perception so as to setup non-conflictual categories of self-experience” [/I]

This is logical and very consistent with dynamical systems theory. Just like the cell, our mind has "receptors", or self-states, which we unconsciously assume in order to "metabolize", or psychoemotionally process, the needs we can't help but feel within any prospective Human-Human interaction. These self-states just like the gene-protein receptor networks within cells, are partially dissociated from one another: separate systems occurring in the same system, each operant at different times in relation to the 'signs' being offered by the environment. For example, a gene which has protein receptors for glucose, will switch to lactose protein-receptors when glucose is no longer available and only lactose is. This switch is a highly choreographed molecular chain-reaction where molecular messages from the environment (absence of glucose, interaction with lactose) triggers a cascade of events where epigenetic regulation of glucose genes are turned off via methylation (for instance), and genes corresponding to lactose metabolism are turned on, which leads to the propagation of protein-receptors that process lactose, which "out-compete" the glucose receptors.

All of this is cause and effect through a chain of networks that are partially dissociated from one another. Glucose and Lactose protein-receptors on the membrane of a cell is a function of glucose and lactose in the environment. Correspondingly, self-states, which are "ways of being you" that deal with some specific social culture, are 'activated' by being in that particular environment. The valuation of Others - how they feel - 'impresses' itself upon your unconscious via your brain, which enacts a self-state that will best handle (according to your brains unconscious predictions) the present environmental interaction.

There is an 'utter' continuity here. Utter, because we have been living for so long without an inkling of the continuity that exists between ourselves and the matter we are made of. My body is not "other", and yet there are cults - "left hand paths" as they are called - which operate via that unbelievable fantasy of "changing nature", as if its laws weren't responsible for everything that exists: as if the wish to change nature, or Human nature, wasn't essentially identical to suicide and non-existence.

Devaluing the body also is simultaneously devaluing the Other. Notice that I capitalize "Other" - because it is more real, in reality, than my name "Michael". The people who fantasize about an arbitrary reality by which Humans with their arbitrary fantasizing arbitrarily imagine a world which follows "no laws" are Humans have lost all contact with their bodies - and so are literally theorizing in an imaginary vacuum. $hitty thinking comes from dissociated minds - who fail to recognize that the body and Other Humans - never mind nature and all "otherness", is essential to my being, to my health, vitality and sense of wellbeing. To be dissociated from this is to lose control of yourself, and indeed, to subject yourself to a different 'ontological paradigm', at least with regards to what sort of dynamics rule Human affectivity - motivation: what sort of "idols" Humans worship, in other words.

The Hebrew Bible is Probably True

Truth is truth. Yes, today, people still think that religion or science are different endeavors, when they are clearly not: nothing which happens in Human minds is dissociated from physical dynamics within matter. No. Symmetry making and breaking in the brain is deeply connected to symmetry making and breaking in interpersonal relationships. The mind we experience, in turn, materializes these many different relationships we have, Indeed - since the Neolithic, we have been living in a widening world of relationships - and very different ones, too, which creates incompatibility, dissonance, and so, a sense of threat - a deepening of egotism, etc.

You don't need aliens to explain Human egotism. You need a changing social world, an environment which entices and compels the Human (male) into a sense of ownership and domination. It was the devaluation of nature - the conquering of her and "domesticating" of her, which entangled females, other humans (usually strangers), and the body itself, into a relationship of estrangement.

This is the message of the first 4 chapters of Genesis. It's remarkable - and yet, what does this mean, that this book may be true, other than that the nature of reality is not foreign to us - that it is intuitively accessible and not necessarily dependent on scientific ways of knowing.

The tale is primitive, but it is fundamentally RELATIONAL. 6 days "God" creates the world. Is this God, or is it us - the busy laborers, working like ants in moving about our lives while at the same time creating and developing a technical orientation to reality that "opens us up", materially, technologically, and finally, epistemologically and ontologically. Quantum physics sure seems like the result of "great work" - of Human laborers in the "realm of Elohim" (powers, or laws of nature, in the Hebrew language)...

And then the 7th day, the name YHVH appears, which reminds me so deeply of Erich Fromm and his book, "To Have, or to Be?", which explores the very different natures of the elitist value-system (I will not debase Germans or any other people who like to associate "hardness" and fitness with Germans, etc. All Humans are the same - only the powerful become demented by their power) and the Human-value system.

Do you really think it is a coincidence that Donald Trumps nightmarish presidency is unrelated to the perennial existence of an elitist religion that is deeply impressed by the "facts" of occultism? I often mention this - because many people think paranormal techniques of "divining the future" are unreal, when clearly the probabilistic and circular nature of quantum and macroscopic physics means future realities are highly probabilistically suggested within the present. A vantage point as "high" as the traumatized mind, awakened to the facts of relational reality - such as the newly freed Hebrews of Egypt possessed, seems to encapsulate the entire journey of Human beings - which from some far off "Adam", sees Humans "toiling" towards an endpoint - a point which confuses and offends the egotistical mind, but when one gets a sense of what that might mean, does not offend or scare, but enlivens and excites - as a journey with an amazingly interesting trajectory - revealing to many the fundamentally spiritual nature of the Human being - a discerner of the deepest existential truths of being - and a reality which is wide and large, which encompasses us still yet, harboring beings just like us, yielding a universe that is simultaneously metaphysical as it is physical - lawful, as it is enigmatic in its extent.

a reply to: Astrocyte

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a reply to: Astrocyte

Thank you for this piece and sharing your thoughts.

It's almost a dualistic theme: [Individual Self] [Existential Wholeness] , which seems a correlation with: [Decay] [Thrive] , and [Death] [Life]

I feel it's best to be the best Individual Self that we can be, while mindfully acknowledging the existential wholeness/oneness. (Opinion).