Positive Dissociation?

This brings to mind story telling in the tradition of Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I think that such stories would qualify as "potentially transformative or therapeutically hypnotic". Listening to stories lets the subconscious of the listener generate images instead of images being directly beamed into the psyche as is done through TV and movies.
 
They had a way of "making up" an actor to visually display certain ideologies that was fascinating.
The Walton's and Star Trek had some really good hair and make up artists.

For instance a Walton would do a scene of some righteousness or another and the next shot would be a profile with a lovely little cross combed so subtly into the actors "hair do" that hardly anyone ever noticed it, but it must have taken a real artist to put it there.
A scene with Captain Kirk in a fist fight with some evil doer would end with the captain torn and bruised but with a dusty cross upon his cheek!



Responding to my own post, and since this kinda ties in with the original post, I put it here.

Considering that several Fraternities (spin off`s of the Freemason`s etc), started up in the late 1800`s and early 1900`s and consisted of mainly "theater" and the actors guild type of folks, maybe it isn`t so surprising after all!
Here`s what I find interesting now though.

It seems that the local Welfare Department and the "Fraternal Order of Eagles", are now working together and forcing some folks who have had to go on welfare to work at least 30 hours a week ( free volunteer service ) for this Fraternal Order of Eagles, who are some spin off of the Phoenix Masons, or so it seems.

I don`t know what kind of "service" these people will be forced to perform for their welfare check, but I do think this is an interesting development!

Why not have people volunteer at the Senior Center, the schools, or the hospital?

Whats up with this "Fraternal Order of the Eagles" and the Welfare Department?

Anyone else find that curious?
 
Recently I discovered a good website to improve one's english-vocabulary, for free (Basic-Language: German).

For interested: _www.vokabel.org

Now I am learning almost every day and I recognized some progress. It animates me to participate...
 
Laura said:
So, if you think about dissociating in this way, what kinds of movies,
shows, games, fantasies, reading material, etc, would you consider
positive?
New Super Mario Brothers Wii game. Don't ask me why but it is tremendously calming and energizing at the same time. Since I've been playing it I am more self-confident and courageous when under attack or stress! I have even dreamed about it. I has some awesome music that plays in my head a lot too.
 
Hi everyone,
I'm a 'beginner' truthseeker (& Starseed) as well as musician/composer/songwriter/artist from Indonesia.

I've just discovered this thread thanks to someone's mention about this thread, from my original thread "where does human's IMAGINATION really come from?" (here's the link: http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,33199.0.html ).

Perhaps as a musician/artist myself, I often have very vivid imaginations, and often even very 'other-worldly' Imaginations, that not a lot of 'common/ordinary/normal' people around me everyday usually have.. for example, Imaginations that are NOT possible in this so-called "real-world / Reality" like those magic, dragons, wizards etc in Harry Potter's world/universe, or Chronicle of Narnia, or even very imaginative sci-fi such as TRON, etc etc.

My question, as similar with my original thread in the link above is:
Where does human's IMAGINATION really come from?..

Has Laura (& Cassiopeans) and/or any Gnostic/esoteric texts ever really discussed and touched upon these "other-worldly" Imaginations & its puzzle/mystery, especially WHERE did they really come from?..
I am very utmost curious, and have even been 'haunted' by this question, as because I don't think even SCIENCE nowadays could answer where all these Imaginations really come from...!

Because, my logic keep saying that: if GOD is All-There-Is, then surely, God should be MORE than our mere human's Imagination,....right?

Please let me know some good & detailed source of information about this "other-worldly Imagination" thing!
thank you~
 
dinkot said:
I've just discovered this thread thanks to someone's mention about this thread, from my original thread "where does human's IMAGINATION really come from?" (here's the link: http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,33199.0.html ).

You have been directed to this thread, but have you actually read it? From the rest of your post, which has been repeated enough times that it seems like spam, it seems that you have not read this thread. This thread has nothing to do with imagination. If you had read this thread, you would have seen that.
 
According to my experience in improve you can find a lot of programs getting triggered in a safe environment, where you can look at them and laugh at them...or even just let them play out as part of the scene and see where they lead you without necessarily getting completely caught up in them. Thanks for sharing...
 
Hi Alicelewis, I see that you just joined, so I want to welcome you to the Forum.

We suggest that new forum members introduce themselves in the Newbies section. Nothing personal, just a little bit about yourself and how you found the forum. If you are unsure of what to write, take a look at how others on the board have done it. :)
 
There is an article on SOTT that talks about how positive dissociation in a form of a movie coupled with discussion can help preserve a marriage.

http://www.sott.net/article/273074-The-benefits-of-positive-dissociation-and-sharing-Divorce-rate-cut-in-half-for-couples-who-discussed-relationship-movies


https://youtu.be/4SULfxYwzcg
 
Writing. Philosophy, if I even do that, though I like it in the sense of thinking about the nature of world. Drawing. I sometimes play vid games or read comics. I never thought about it, but transformers' comics is just a good damn analogy to certain parts of the building of pathocracy. If I play vid games I'd do it for the sake of finding moral dilemmas or something like that. Martial arts, box, weight lifting.

And reading the wave, hehe, I know is not that dissociating. But sometimes I just read it for the archetypical and mythological descriptions Laura gives, and for just for the sake of reading about the cosmos.

meditation changes you lol
 
There's a passage in Collingwood's Principles of Art (see posts here and here) that I think is relevant here. He's discussing amusement as distinct from art (art being the expression of emotion, whereas amusement seeks to evoke enjoyable emotions for their own sake, e.g. fear, sex, adventure, adventure, etc.):

§ 5. Amusement in the Modern World

We have already seen that amusement implies a bifurca-
tion of experience into a ‘real’ part and a ‘make-believe’ part,
and that the make-believe part is called amusement in so
far as the emotions aroused in it are also discharged in it and
are not allowed to overflow into the affairs of ‘real’ life.

{Make-believe is essentially fantasy, "depicting a state of things in which their desires are satisfied" and which are a reflection of a corrupted consciousness (see second link above). E.g., earlier, Collinwood writes:
"Sexual desire is highly adaptable to
these purposes; easily titillated, and easily put off with make-
believe objects
. Hence the kind of amusement art which at
its crudest and most brutal is called pornography is very
common and very popular. Not only the representation of
nudity which reappeared in European painting and sculpture
at the Renaissance, when art as magic was replaced by art
as amusement, but the novel, or story based on a sexual
motive, which dates from the same period, is essentially an
appeal to the sexual emotions of the audience, not in order
to stimulate these emotions for actual commerce between
the sexes, but in order to provide them with make-believe
objects and thus divert them from their practical goal in the
interests of amusement.
The extent to which this make-
believe sexuality has affected modern life can hardly be
believed until the fact has been tested by appeal to the
circulating libraries, with their flood of love-stories
; the
cinema, where it is said to be a principle accepted by almost
every manager that no film can succeed without a love-
interest; and above all the magazine and newspaper, where
cover-designs, news-items, fiction, and advertisement are
steeped in materials of the same kind: erotic stories, pictures
of pretty girls variously dressed and undressed, or (for the
female reader) of attractive young men: pornography
homoeopathically administered in doses too small to shock
the desire for respectability, but quite large enough to
produce the intended effect."

He was writing in the 30s. Just imagine what he'd have to say today!}

This bifurcation is no doubt as ancient as man himself; but
in a healthy society it is so slight as to be negligible. Danger
sets in when by discharging their emotions upon make-
believe situations people come to think of emotion as some-
thing that can be excited and enjoyed for its own sake, without
any necessity to pay for it in practical consequences.
Amuse-
ment is not the same thing as enjoyment; it is enjoyment which
is had without paying for it. Or rather, without paying for it
in cash. It is put down in the bill and has to be paid for later
on. For example, I get a certain amount of fun out of writing
this book. But I pay for it as I get it, in wretched drudgery
when the book goes badly, in seeing the long summer days
vanish one by one past my window unused, in knowing that
there will be proofs to correct and index to make, and at the
end black looks from the people whose toes I am treading on.
If I knock off and lie in the garden for a day and read Dorothy
Sayers, I get fun out of that too; but there is nothing to pay.
There is only a bill run up, which is handed in next day when
I get back to my book with that Monday-morning feeling.
Of course, there may be no Monday-morning feeling: I may
get back to the book feeling fresh and energetic, with my
staleness gone. In that base my day off turned out to be not
amusement but recreation. The difference between them
consists in the debit or credit effect they produce on the
emotional energy available for practical life.


Amusement becomes a danger to practical life when the
debt it imposes on these stores of energy is too great to be
paid off in the ordinary course of living
. When this reaches
a point of crisis, practical life, or ‘real’ life, becomes emotion-
ally bankrupt
; a state of things which we describe by speaking
of its intolerable dullness or calling it a drudgery. A moral
disease has set in, whose symptoms are a constant craving
for amusement and an inability to take any interest in the
affairs of ordinary life
, the necessary work of livelihood and
social routine. A person in whom the disease has become
chronic is a person with a more or less settled conviction that
amusement is the only thing that makes life worth living
.
A society in which the disease is endemic is one in which
most people feel some such conviction most of the time.


{Again, this seems only to have gotten worse. Just think of the hours per day many spend playing videogames, or watching television...}

A moral (or in modern jargon a psychological) disease
may or may not be fatal to the person suffering from it; he
may be driven to suicide, as the only release from taedium
vitae, or he may try to escape it by going in for crime or
revolution or some other exciting business, or he may take
to drink or drugs, or simply allow himself to be engulfed in
a slough of dullness, a dumbly accepted life in which nothing
interesting ever happens, tolerable only when he does not
think how intolerable it is
. But moral diseases have this
peculiarity, that they may be fatal to a society in which they
are endemic without being fatal to any of its members. A
society consists in the common way of life which its members
practise; if they become so bored with this way of life that
they begin to practise a different one, the old society is dead
even if no one noticed its death.


This is perhaps not the only disease from which societies
may die, but it is certainly one of them. It is certainly, for
example, the disease from which Greco-Roman society died.
Societies may die a violent death, like the Inca and Aztec
societies which the Spaniards destroyed with gunpowder in
the sixteenth century; and it is sometimes thought by people
who have been reading historical thrillers that the Roman
Empire died in the same way, at the hands of barbarian
invaders. That theory is amusing but untrue. It died of
disease, not of violence, and the disease was a long-growing
and deep-seated conviction that its own way of life was not
worth preserving.

The same disease is notoriously endemic among ourselves.
Among its symptoms are the unprecedented growth of the
amusement trade, to meet what has become an insatiable
craving; an almost universal agreement that the kinds of
work on which the existence of a civilization like ours most
obviously depends (notably the work of industrial operatives
and the clerical staff in business of every kind, and even that
of the agricultural labourers and other food-winners who
are the prime agents in the maintenance of every civilization
hitherto existing) is an intolerable drudgery; the discovery
that what makes this intolerable is not the pinch of poverty
or bad housing or disease but the nature of the work itself
in the conditions our civilization has created; the demand
arising out of this discovery, and universally accepted as
reasonable, for an increased provision of leisure, which
means opportunity for amusement, and of amusements to
fill it; the use of alcohol, tobacco, and many other drugs, not
for ritual purposes, but to deaden the nerves and distract the
mind from the tedious and irritating concerns of ordinary
life
; the almost universal confession that boredom, or lack of
interest in life, is felt as a constant or constantly recurring
state of mind; the feverish attempts to dispel this boredom
either by more amusement or by dangerous or criminal
occupations; and finally (to cut the catalogue short) the
discovery, familiar mutatis mutandis to every bankrupt in the
last stages of his progress, that customary remedies have lost
their bite and that the dose must be increased.

These symptoms are enough to alarm any one who thinks
about the future of the world in which he is living; enough
to alarm even those whose thought for the future goes no
farther than their own lifetime. They suggest that our
civilization has been caught in a vortex, somehow connected
with its attitude towards amusement, and that some disaster
is impending which, unless we prefer to shut our eyes to it
and perish, if we are to perish, in the dark, it concerns
us to understand.

I found it interesting that Collingwood suggests that the way of telling the difference between amusement and recreation "consists in the debit or credit effect they produce on the emotional energy available for practical life." It reminded me of Peterson's inner experience of telling lies: they make you weak. Basically, diversions can serve their purpose, but only if they don't take you away from your responsibilities - and as long as they are recognized for what they are.

As Laura wrote in the original post of this thread:
Laura said:
Pathological dissociation serve no other purpose than to engulf us in a
fantasy world as an escape from real life and dealing with our issues.
Sure, it may restore our hope or "good feeling" momentarily, but when it
is over, we have no new thoughts about what to do next, how to do it,
how to bring our dissociative fantasy back with us into real-world
practical issues. We have stolen energy from somebody else's fantasy
instead of finding the wellspring of our own creativity.

In Collingwood's terms, we have simply discharged or earthed certain emotions in a make-believe fantasy for the sake of having those enjoyable emotions. We don't profit from it.

Laura said:
Our time spent in dissociation should enrich our lives, give us ideas
about how to reshape our lives, change our programs, create new patterns
of behavior
, and so on. They should not be an escape that is only
temporary, and when we emerge from it we are still trapped in our old
feelings that we are helpless and unlovable.

Collingwood would probably classify such things as 'magic', which he defines as producing emotions for a practical purpose in real life. Included under that category would be things like propaganda and advertisements, but also folk tales, myths, rituals (including secular ones). About this, he writes:

Collingwood said:
...magic is a thing which every community must have;
and in a civilization that is rotten with amusement, the more
magic we produce the better
. If we were talking about the
moral regeneration of our world, I should urge the deliberate
creation of a system of magic, using as its vehicles such
things as the theatre and the profession of letters, as one
indispensable kind of means to that end.
 
It seems to me that the significance of dissociating depends entirely on
what happens during that time - on the content - and, most importantly,
WHY it is being done.

So, if you think about dissociating in this way, what kinds of movies,
shows, games, fantasies, reading material, etc, would you consider
positive?

I remember watching TV during the holidays, and a show would come on and the fact that - not just your family was sharing this experience - but many others who were tuned to the same channel. And it was special in that regard. Not just in respect to the occasion, but that it was shared, and so it was less about programming and more about being channeled into a positive affair and knowing that at the same time others were with you - not just your family - on an occasion that is special and if even it be imagined, our feelings were one - or were in a state of coalescence.

And so with video games and tv, events can have that shared feeling as all involved are sharing it albeit through electronic medium.

I remember when vcrs became commonplace. It was nice to watch movies at your leisure, but it was still more special when you were part of a large audience, because it was a shared experience. And you could talk about it the next day at school or work, ect.

So, through broadcasting and electronic media, there is a positive side in that we share experience, and if the occasion is positive, then the type of dissociating is not too important.

You know how positive news is lighthearted and negative news is concise and explicit? That's how it is with positive things - it's not about what you think, but how you feel. And with negative things, it is about what you think.
 
I have a couple of t.v. show recommendations that I’ve been enjoying recently.

On the drama side: the first, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be available on any streaming services at the moment, but when I was a kid, Quantum Leap was one of my favourite shows and I was lucky enough to get the DVD box set for Xmas. If you want to go to the trouble, it’s worth the effort.

For those who haven’t seen it or heard of it, it’s about a scientist who discovers a way to time travel, except when he ‘leaps’ through time in each episode, he goes into a different person’s body and life.

The main thing about the show is how there is a ‘reason’ that the protagonist has entered into the body of each person, and it’s to ‘right a wrong’. Often this is in the vein of saving someone’s life, or a relationship, or preventing someone from making a terrible mistake.

The thing that stands out to me more than it ever did before was the overtly religious theme of the show. The whole foundation of the protagonist’s adventure is that it is God who is determining the people he ‘leaps’ into, and at least once in every episode, he has a look up to the sky and asks God why he’s in this situation, or asks for help etc. As a side note, I find it interesting that the existence of God for me as a child was such a normal part of how I saw the world that the fact that God factored into the show didn’t stand out to me. But I cannot imagine a t.v. show being made these days that deals with the idea in such a natural and ‘given’ way, so to speak.

The show covers the full range of emotions and as serious as it can often be, the mood is always uplifted by the protagonist’s companion, another scientist from the future who is able to appear in holographic form to help and provide information and moral support. This character’s chief feature is his obsession with the opposite sex, which is done in a very funny way. Again, an attitude portrayed in the show that you couldn’t get away with in today’s woke t.v. programming.

For all it’s good points, I have to admit that for every three or four episodes, there’s always a stinker, where either the plot, the writing, the dialogue or the acting are really terrible, or cheesy, or members here might cringe at certain free will or causal violations. But on the whole, I’d thoroughly recommend it to everyone.

The other show is totally different and easily available to anyone who has YouTube. It’s an American panel game show that began in the mid-fifties called What’s My Line?

The show is a relic, an artefact of a bygone era when t.v. culture was very different, and men were gentlemen, women were ladies, etiquette was alive and well, wit and elocution were prized, and sexuality was often there for all to see beneath the veneer of it all.

It’s lighthearted fun of the healthiest sort, where a normal, everyday person appears in front of a panel of four well known media personalities who then have to ask questions in order to figure out what the person does for a living. And then later in the show, the panel are blindfolded and a more famous person is brought out and they have to guess their identity via the same questioning process.

Again, I fully recommend it for some uplifting, lighthearted fun, and for the cultural significance it holds.
 
Quantum Leap was one of my favourite shows and I was lucky enough to get the DVD box set for Xmas. If you want to go to the trouble, it’s worth the effort.

For those who haven’t seen it or heard of it, it’s about a scientist who discovers a way to time travel, except when he ‘leaps’ through time in each episode, he goes into a different person’s body and life.

Seconded, that was a great show! It used to be on after school on BBC2 as I recall, always interesting in how the stories would unfold. I particularly enjoyed Sam's rapport with Al, the hologram guide he has, really funny!:lol: It didn't shy away from deep topics too, although the central morality of the show was pretty simple, downhome decency. I think I'll pick the DVD of this show, thanks for the reminder!
 
On reading Laura’s original post of some 12+ years ago i thoughtfully substituted the word “dissociation“ for the word “entertainment“ and then pondered the origins of such in times gone by. Tribal communities no doubt depicted their lives by way of artwork, song, dance and some sort of “plant” concoction, all in the name of entertainment or dissociation, however whether or not all was positive is a matter of conjecture, but certainly was an important construct in the development of a diversity of cultures.

Today we KNOW movies, music, artwork, gaming etc. can easily be politically hijacked, so the “unaware“ are easily hypnotised. For those awake to it, it can be a ”positive” form of debate and teaching aid.
 
Back
Top Bottom