Whitecoast, I've been watching what amounts to a display of your inner landscape and I have to say that I am concerned. I think I already mentioned that what struck me most forcibly was your apparent inability to perceive "the crux of the matter" and there have been a number of mentions of "selection and substitution." These effects appear to play out over and over again and yet I think - feel? hope? - that you are sincere about really wanting to "go somewhere" with your personal development. I'm stymied for how to help you get over this barrier; because barrier it surely is. But I'm not sure it is a fear barrier such as Gurdjieff describes; you know, sitting between two stools.
I went back to Ponerology searching for clues. Here's what I found:
Lobaczewski wrote:
During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection, introspection, knowledge of others, and an understanding of life’s complicated laws. Is it worth pondering the properties of human nature and man’s flawed personality, whether one’s own or someone else’s? Can we understand the creative meaning of suffering we have not undergone ourselves, instead of taking the easy way out and blaming the victim?
You are a product of such "good times" as are so many who were born in the generation after my own. I got a taste of it too being a teenager in the 60s.
L writes:
Perception of the truth about the real environment, especially an understanding of the human personality and its values, ceases to be a virtue during the so-called “happy” times; thoughtful doubters are decried as meddlers who cannot leave well enough alone. This leads to an impoverishment of psychological knowledge, the capacity of differentiating the properties of human nature and personality, and the ability to mold minds creatively. The cult of power thus supplants those mental values so essential for maintaining law and order by peaceful means.
During “good” times, the search for truth becomes uncomfortable because it reveals inconvenient factors. It is better to think about easier and more pleasant things. Unconscious elimination of data which are or appear to be inexpedient gradually turns to habit, then becomes a custom accepted by society at large. Any thought process based on such truncated information cannot possibly give rise to correct conclusions; it further leads to subconscious substitution of inconvenient premises by more convenient ones, thereby approaching the boundaries of phenomena which should be viewed as psychopathological.
Such contented periods, which are often rooted in some injustice to other people or nations, start to strangle the capacity for individual and societal consciousness; subconscious factors take over a decisive role in life. Such a society, already infected by the hysteroidal state, considers any perception of uncomfortable truth to be a sign of “ill-breeding”. J. G. Herder’s iceberg is drowned in a sea of falsified unconsciousness; only the tip of the iceberg is visible above the waves of life. ... In such times, the capacity for logical and disciplined thought, born of necessity during difficult times, begins to fade. When communities lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism, the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale, whether individual or macrosocial, until they revert to “bad” times.
We already know that every society contains a certain percentage of people carrying psychological deviations caused by various inherited or acquired factors which produce anomalies in perception, thought, and character. Many such people attempt to impart meaning to their deviant lives by means of social hyperactivity. They create their own myths and ideologies of overcompensation and have the tendency to egotistically insinuate to others their own deviant perceptions and the resulting goals and ideas.
In the European languages, “Austrian talk” has become the common descriptive term for paralogistic discourse. Many people using this term nowadays are unaware of its origin. Within the context of maximum hysterical intensity in Europe at the time, the authentic article represented a typical product of conversive thinking: subconscious selection and substitution of data lead to chronic avoidance of the crux of the matter.
Information selection and substitution: Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible: including those generally described as conversive, such as subconscious blocking out of conclusions, the selection, and, also, substitution of seemingly uncomfortable premises.
We speak of blocking out conclusions if the inferential process was proper in principle and has almost arrived at a conclusion and final comprehension within the act of internal projection, but becomes stymied by a preceding directive from the subconscious, which considered it inexpedient or disturbing. ...A conclusion thus rejected remains in our subconscious and in a more unconscious way causes the next blocking and selection of this kind. This can be totally harmful, progressively enslaving a person to his own subconscious, and is often accompanied by a feeling of tension and bitterness.
We speak of selection of premises whenever the feedback goes deeper into the resulting reasoning and from its database thus deletes and represses into the subconscious just that piece of information which was responsible for arriving at the uncomfortable conclusion. Our subconscious then permits further logical reasoning, except that the outcome will be erroneous in direct proportion to the actual significance of the repressed data. An ever-greater number of such repressed information is collected in our subconscious memory. Finally, a kind of habit seems to take over: similar material is treated the same way even if reasoning would have reached an outcome quite advantageous to the person.
The most complex process of this type is substitution of premises thus eliminated by other data, ensuring an ostensibly more comfortable conclusion. Our associative ability rapidly elaborates a new item to replace the removed one, but it is one leading to a comfortable conclusion. This operation takes the most time, and it is unlikely to be exclusively subconscious. Such substitutions are often effected collectively, in certain groups of people, through the use of verbal communication. That is why they best qualify for the moralizing epithet “hypocrisy” than either of the above-mentioned processes.
The above examples of conversive phenomena do not exhaust a problem richly illustrated in psychoanalytical works. Our subconscious may carry the roots of human genius within, but its operation is not perfect; sometimes it is reminiscent of a blind computer, especially whenever we allow it to be cluttered with anxiously rejected material. This explains why conscious monitoring, even at the price of courageously accepting disintegrative states, is likewise necessary to our nature, not to mention our individual and social good.
....
Grey-haired Europeans living in the U.S. today are struck by the similarity between these phenomena and the ones dominating Europe at the times of their youth. The emotionalism dominating individual, collective and political life, as well as the subconscious selection and substitution of data in reasoning, are impoverishing the development of a psychological world view and leading to individual and national egotism. The mania for taking offense at the drop of a hat provokes constant retaliation, taking advantage of hyper-irritability and hypo-criticality on the part of others.
America’s psychological recession drags in its wake an impaired socio-professional adaptation of this country’s people, leading to a waste of human talent and an involution of societal structure.
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Now, the above is the background description of the times and the general problem of the influences you have been subjected to all your life; you were born into it. A fish hatched in a dirty river doesn't know any different; he CAN'T know any different. But a human being is different from a fish; as Stove describes it, humans ARE different.
But now we come to one of the particular problems that this present cycle presents us: drug induced characteropathies. Lobaczewski again:
During the last few decades, medicine has begun using a series of drugs with serious side effects: they attack the nervous system, leaving permanent damage behind. These generally discreet handicaps sometimes give rise to personality changes which are often very harmful socially.
The cytostatic drugs used in treating neoplastic diseases often attack the phylogenetically oldest brain tissue, the primary carrier of our instinctive substratum and basic feelings. Persons treated with such drugs progressively tend to lose their emotional color and their ability to intuit a psychological situation. They retain their intellectual functions but ...
Results similar to the above in the psychological picture may be caused by endogenous toxins or viruses. When, on occasion, the mumps proceeds with a brain reaction, it leaves in its wake a discrete pallor or dullness of feelings and a slight decrease in mental efficiency. Similar phenomena are witnessed after a difficult bout with diphtheria. Finally, polio attacks the brain, more often the higher part of the anterior horns, which was affected by the process. People with leg paresis rarely manifest these effects, but those with paresis of the neck and/or shoulders must count themselves lucky if they do not. In addition to affective pallor, persons manifesting these effects usually evidence an inability to comprehend the crux of a matter and naiveté.
Character anomalies developing as a result of brain-tissue damage behave like insidious ponerogenic factors.... traumatizing our psyches, impoverishing and deforming our thoughts and feelings, and limiting individuals’ and societies’ ability to use common sense and recognize a psychological or moral situation.
Brain tissue is very limited in its regenerative ability. If it is damaged and the change subsequently heals, a process of rehabilitation takes place thanks to which the neighboring healthy tissue takes over the function of the damaged portion. This substitution is never quite perfect; thus some deficits in skill and proper psychological processes can be detected in even cases of very small damage by using the appropriate tests. Specialists are aware of the variegated causes for the origin of such damage, including trauma and infections.
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Now, I've included the part of PP where Lobaczewski discusses brain damage due to drugs of various kinds and pathogens, for a specific reason. I'm aware that you have done some experimentation and I am wondering if this has had something to do with your apparent inability to let go of the false personality, the egoic self-image you have created, which is so clearly on display here. Lobaczewski discusses what to do for people who have this selection and substitution problem, this inability to see or get to the "crux of the matter" as follows:
In any method or technique of analytical psychotherapy, or autonomous psychotherapy, as T. Szasz called it, the guiding operational motivation is exposing to the light of consciousness whatever material has been suppressed by means of subconscious selection of data, or given up in the face of intellectual problems. This is accompanied by a disillusionment of substitutions and rationalizations, whose creation is usually in proportion to the amount of repressed material.
In many cases, it turns out that the material fearfully eliminated from the field of consciousness, and frequently substituted by ostensibly more comfortable associations, would never have had such dangerous results if we had initially mustered the courage to perceive it consciously. We would then have been in the position to find an independent and often creative way out of the situation.
In some cases, however, especially when dealing with phenomena which are hard to understand within the categories of our natural world view, leading the patient out of his problems demands furnishing him crucial objective data, usually from the areas of biology, psychology, and psychopathology, and indicating specific dependencies which he was unable to comprehend before.
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So, as I said, I AM concerned about this situation and I hope you can take all of the above onboard.
This has been a great thread so far. Sorry if I'm coming across as a bit manic now, but really, this is a huge, HUGE relief.
