Bud said:
[quote author=Briseis]
I'm trying to understand the MECHANISM beneath this blindness, as you call it, Bud. Is it self-preservation of some sort? Very ill-informed self-preservation, if it is. And what "self" is being preserved, hello?
You are much more eloquent than I. I don't know if I can explain the mechanism as I understand it, or even use the language well enough to point to it, but it helps me to think of my wider context and of myself in terms of emergent phenomena.
We are born into a matrix where most every word and behavior we're exposed to carries within it the experience of generation after generation of men, women, families, tribes, and nations, including their insights, value judgements, ignorance, and spiritual beliefs. The influence of the mob of those who've gone before and those who stand around us now can be mind-boggling.
As newborns, toddlers and young children, our brains, neuronal paths and connections are totally plastique and totally shape-able. In fact, Dr. Gabor Mate points out how we are all born pre-mature and require 2 or 3 more years for the environmental input and various feedback loops to mold us into something appropriate to operate and survive in the environment we find ourselves in. Since we are fed and provided with almost everything we need to start out with, our perceptual faculties could even be called unrecognized extensions of a collective brain.[/quote]
Perhaps our prematurity (relative to similar creatures, like the apes) creates a special vulnerability to the "matrix" as you describe in the previous paragraph. "Soul building", then, is crossing a threshold from automatic acceptance of the "matrix" into awareness of it, and then awareness of it's limitations? Just a side thought . . .
Unless we have this vulnerability, language and culture as we know it would not be possible. Like Dad throwing us in the lake to teach us how to swim.
Most of us probably recall all those childhood imperatives to "think about what you're doing!", which effectively means "talk to yourself" - give yourself the instructions internally that you're currently being given externally. This becomes one of the features of consciousness - narratization, the analogic simulation of actual behavior which can make mimics out of us. Once we learn the language and the narratization activity well enough, we can make ourselves believe anything we can justify.
Unless . . . we don't. I think this is where "we" are, those of us engaged in a particular sort of self-examination, that is.
To what "end" does a person engage in self-examination? What subtle siren song, as it were, encourages self-examination in the first place? In my personal experience, this "siren song" has been . . . unremitting nagging :P that there is MORE. More of? Not a clue. Just "more". Triggers are everywhere.
I've gotten myself into trouble, especially when I was very young, when I thought I found someone else experiencing this same "nagging MORE" I did. Too often, fellow "nagging MORE" were egotists, and about as often, I participated in the nagging MORE for self-serving reasons, too.
And speaking of justification (buffers), in the midst of all this, consider the pain that is inflicted on us by various people for various reasons as punishment. Pain is a necessary condition of punishment (otherwise why would anyone bother to inflict it?), however, it is not sufficient. In addition to pain, what is necessary is the victim's consent that it is justified.
It seems like, for those who survive the transition from the terribly frustrating time of childhood double-binds into "going along to get along", they've justified the conventional view of reality and no longer experience all and everything as totally stupid, ridiculous and harmful to life. "It's just the way it is". We deny the reality we are actually experiencing and then "forget" (deny) that we are denying the reality.
So, this becomes the narrator's view of life, enforced by threat of re-experiencing the original pain of accurate perception (though from mostly a child's knowledge level) and the threat of realizing the depth of our denial of what we've done (from a more adult knowledge level).
It was indeed SO painful that I gave up actively seeking MORE, not easily. Each time I thought I found MORE, I was rapidly, and painfully shown that ONCE AGAIN, I was barking up the wrong tree. I didn't yet know that what I was looking for was not in the trees, or the people. I still believed that this MORE had something to do with my ego, me myself becoming "special" I guess, which effectively blinded me even more.
So about ten years ago, I stopped looking. I chalked it up to having an overly philosophical and unrealistic temperament, and being slow on the uptake. No one else (practically) was "looking", and those that were, were no more successful than I had been. This coincided with the death of my dearest girlfriend from breast cancer, and caring for her in that last year no doubt colored my disillusionment. After she died, I spent about a year in a state of mind that I don't remember real well. Like I'd let go of one trapeze and accepted there wasn't another one coming :D . Sounds more dramatic than it felt.
But this nagging MORE was not about to let go of ME. In my refusal to "take responsibility" for it, or my life, I met a beautiful man at work who HAD IT. He was actually a psychopath (garden variety and "failed", but anyway), and ten years later, he's long gone, along with a LOT of money and innocence (good riddance for the latter).
The MORE I was searching for was NOT what I wanted to find. Anyone else relate LOLOL?? The "original pain of accurage perception", and staring into the depths of my denial put me out of operation for about a year. I couldn't work, and lived on what little money was left after I got rid of the ex-husband. My professional experience would name my condition that year as "major depression". My more imaginative self would call it The Abyss, or the Dark Night.
The mechanism, then, as I see it, is one of constantly overlaying our perceptions with our assumptions, beliefs, rationalizations and justifications in order to prevent withdrawal from what we've become used to.
The "mechanism" continues, I just disgust myself more regularly by noticing it
Misusing our cognitive feedback loops in order to reframe our moment-by-moment experience is another of my favored perspectives. Sort of like a paraprosdokian, only nothing funny about it at the time.
If you can self-observe, read the following (assuming you haven't already) and notice what happens in your mind when the more familiar initial "meaning" changes. The instantaneous re-arranging of meaning is noticeable when it's funny, but not so much when not (due to the action of buffers, OSIT).
[quote author=somewhere on the forum]
A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax
1) I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.
2) Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
3) I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.
4) Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.
5) The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on the list.
6) Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
7) If I agreed with you we'd both be wrong.
8) We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.
[/quote]
[/quote]
I didn't know there was a name for those LOL!!
Thanks Bud, I got some new thoughts and insights from your response.
But you DID upgrade, didn't you? ;D
