The Alchemy of Feeling

When were born into this world, our early brain stems are being regulated according to the faces, voices, and bodies of the caregivers around us. We are surrounded by an aura of feeling - a spirit - which constructs the affective ground from which we know. All thinking - all thought - is referentially constructed by this ground. It is so hidden that it is seemingly only in the Buddhist tradition that it is even recognized as a possibility. Although they too got lost in narrative.

Why couldn't Moses enter the holy land? If my reading of the narrative is correct (and I imagine it is) then Moshe - the part of ourselves that can sense in terms of the higher level of consciousness - cannot feel the effects of its beauty from the vantage point of his material existence.

Dualislm = Delusion

You have never experienced a state of consciousness that wasn't mediated by your brain, or tinged by the specific continuity of meanings that you have evolved in your life, all of which are emerging through the remarkable complexity of your neurons.

Why is Moshe excluded from the holy land? Because the consciousness he uses to know from the higher consciousness is incompatible with the meanings he formed in his youth: the trauma of the past, insomuch as it is stored in his actual physical neurological structure, constrains the degree to which he is able to experience a sense of compatibility between his social and physical existence and his spiritual existence. The two realms feel "cut apart", and hence, Moshe cannot experience the effects of the "land of milk and honey".

This shouldn't be a difficult or controversial thing to think, and in fact, it is perfectly logical with the reflexive structure we know through: since everything is based in symmetry, so long as economic and sociological asymmetry persists, there will be a corresponding internal asymmetry within each of us, creating the emergent falsity of "reality being wrong". Hence, Moses specific sin is described as occuring at the "בְּמֵי-מְרִיבַת", which can be translated as the "waters of bitterness" - or trauma.

Apparently the Hebrews were able to infer that traumatic effects remain embodied - that is, they didn't seem to fall for the delusion created by perception which says "reality is so and so" i.e. its feels wrong, and hence, must be wrong. They infered - used logic - that, "hey, if we have a brain, and we have a conscious mind, perhaps the two are one, and everything we know is stored in this container".

William James notion of the brain being a filter, then, is inevitably an incomplete idea, insomuch as this filter shapes what passes through it in terms of the history that the "filter" has lived through. Knowing and feeling, then, can be dissociated: you can know from an intellectual position that yields a piece of information; but the quality of the whole experience - how you knew will itself yield an information that will come to inform how you believe reality works.

All dualisms, all belief systems that defy the golden rule, are trafficking in delusion and hurting themselves and those they care for the further they try to pull themselves away. As Huxley wisely wrote, “The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.”

Those with a history of trauma thus can never know from up above without reminding ourselves why it feels so hard to return - to go back to a life that doesn't feel unreal and 'wrong'.

This is perhaps the deeper meaning behind science and secularism: we need to learn how to be loving people before we recognize the power of our minds, because if we have the latter without the former, we get megalomaniacal maleficence.

Moses probably was not allowed to enter the promised land because he pissed god off. After he talked to god and convinced him to forgive the people he saved from Egypt, he melted down the idle and tossed the powdered gold into water to create a toxic metal brew to sicken the people who worshiped the idle. Then the people were sickened and he sent the sons of Levi to kill all of the people he had supposedly saved. No wonder god made him wander in the wilderness for forty years. Moses seemed to have a little temper tantrum that day.


19And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. 20And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.

21And Moses said unto Aaron, What did this people unto thee, that thou hast brought so great a sin upon them? 22And Aaron said, Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief. 23For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. 24And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.

25And when Moses saw that the people were naked; (for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies 26Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the LORD'S side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. 27And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. 28And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men. 29For Moses had said, Consecrate yourselves to day to the LORD, even every man upon his son, and upon his brother; that he may bestow upon you a blessing this day.

I swear that I did not put that little smiley there, it was part of the original test. After enemies there was a : and a ) to make a

a reply to: rickymouse

Best post I've seen. (The opportunistic emoji.)

a reply to: rickymouse

Moses probably was not allowed to enter the promised land because he pissed god off. After he talked to god and convinced him to forgive the people he saved from Egypt, he melted down the idle and tossed the powdered gold into water to create a toxic metal brew to sicken the people who worshiped the idle. Then the people were sickened and he sent the sons of Levi to kill all of the people he had supposedly saved. No wonder god made him wander in the wilderness for forty years. Moses seemed to have a little temper tantrum that day.

I'm pretty sure we're dealing with a spiritual allegory that has to do with how the Hebrews interpreted the nature of the human mind.

Moshe is משה , from the root meaning "to draw out". The Shin has three sticks, and represents the thesis/anthithesis/synthesis dynamic of inference, where an 'icon' (quality) is represented by an index (a word) with a particular symbolic meaning (concept). The 'heh' is the lower mind, and the mem is the higher mind.

With this verse from Deuteronomy 32 51:

עַל אֲשֶׁר מְעַלְתֶּם בִּי, בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל,

you can pretty much understand this as meaning "because you demanded from me [to work for you] before the rest of the people." More or less, the sin of human beings is that individuals sought spiritual power for themselves without realizing that the motivations controlling them are a function of the existing asymmetry of the collective human system. "Commanding me" means, more or less, acting upon reality from that level of knowing, where reality is "made to do what you will".

After that verse, you get the "b'mei mir'vatt", or the "waters of bitterness". If you see your experience of life in terms of a "flowing substance", water is a very good symbol for experience, and bitterness is a good symbol for negative experiences.

In modern neuroscientific language, the unfolding biodynamical process within the nervous system corresponds to the internally evolving experience of the mind. Whatever happens is 'contained' within the system of physical transformations that have occurred during your life. They are not lost - but implicit within the present architecture of the body.

This all has to do with geometry and physics and how molecules reproduce geometric configurations in terms of their basic properties. Life is evolving at multiple scales from the subatomic to the atomic to the molecular, cellular, organismic, and environmental. But the relationship of relevance is clearly that between the geometries which hold the organism together and the "uncertainties" of the environment which "hides within it" the nurtirents/goods which will help the organism to reconstitute itself. This symmetry built from an asymmetry between one side (cell) and another (nurtrient) is already prefigured in the nucleus-electron relationship, and is later present in the relationship between human beings and environmental objects, with the larger symmetry being the relational 'tension' which binds us together (like proton/neutron to make the nucleus) and the 'object' in the environment which we together evolve a vocabularly for naming and 'taming'. The objects are important, but soon enough the relational property itself will be seen to be a bigger deal than the object. At this point, your own mind reflects the property of an internal symmetry between observer and observed, and a subtle asymmetry with the "other" outside you. The observer is your mind; the object is your body (all feelings are represented in the body). All mental control comes from here - from understanding the relationship - or meanings - between diferent objects, and how you can enhance the relationship between yourself, or integrate your consciousness more and more together, by taking account of the way your body represents your homeostatic situation and your threat-safety responses to the environment. At this level, the other people around you are "less" - although, to reach such a height where you can maintain a sense of coherency in relation to deliberate meanness will break this higher level process into its lower level organization - hence why coherent awareness entails leaving the world of social relationships.

The process I am describing could conceivably go further, but that's besides the point.

The words I speak entail coherent thinking, which entails that you are rightly disposed, or oriented, towards truthfulness. If you have any habits of mistreating others, your ability to be 'true' will be fundamentally altered, as truth is a psychological attunement between self and the world that begins at the moral level before it ever reaches the scientific or metaphysical. And all of this can only occur through the mediumship of care, or loving-kindness.

If you have a cliché masculinist identity, truth will forever elude you. As you think yourself to be too big to be humbled. Such a person suffers from an existential naivety about their own physiological nature. They ignore and dissociate relevant and important facts, not realizing that their 'certainty' comes from such a self-deceiving exclusion process. In order to feel good, your pulvinar (in neurofunctional terms) 'filters' out some facts, and 'amplifies' others. If you want to identify this way (tough guy, emotionless, sarcastic) you naively assume that you're not defending against a past experience that punished you for expressing normal human needs, and rewarded you for being masculinistic.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Beautifully written. You're amazing when you're in the zone.