Chapter 1: Your body is Who You are

Your body is who you are. It sounds ironic. Paradoxical. A fleshy thing. Built of cells, which are made made up of proteins; which are chains of amino acids. We know that at a microscopic level that this is what we are. And beyond that, at an even subtler level, physics tells us that all of the universe is made up of atoms, which are themselves made up of smaller particles like electrons, protons and neutrons. And then theres quarks. The Higgs Boson. And probably more.

How silly this picture looks when you recognize that we exist at different scales, made up of different things. Yet in this life, this body which I live in, which means most to my existence, I take fully for granted the me’s at earlier times. My smaller me. The me at birth, for example, unconsciously introjecting the relational vibrations in the environment. Human voices, their tones, which our exquisitely sensitive physiology has evolved to become wondrously attuned to, contains a basic ‘gameplan’, a template which acts as the first ‘basin of attraction’, drawing the future self into a potential direction.

Emotions. This is all it is. A child exposed to negativity in the form of a depressed mother will invariably introject - take in the psychic effect - of what he or she is being exposed to. Such a simple thing. Yet its effects ramify through time; unless the self is fortunate enough to encounter a positive relationship offering negative feedback, If you see this self 23 years later, how astonishing it is to see a change of perspective! The baby is no different from the adult! It’s just that the baby seems so vulnerable that we make the mistake of assuming that the adult isn’t just as vulnerable.

Want to assess some of hackneyed arguments behind our apathy? Adults are ‘responsible’ for who they have become. Easy to say. Just isn’t true. Since every human being was once a baby, every human being has been ‘imprinted’ by the socio-emotional conditions of its environment. In fact, this process begins in-utero, as the same hormones which run through our veins as adults, also ran through mothers veins when we were in her belly. Cortisol means the same to a developing fetus as to an obsessively anxious adult. So were imprinted, our f*****g, god-damned physiology, whether to good or for bad, is given the physiological ‘traits’ of the mother while in-utero. Her thoughts and feelings are ‘distilled’ as hormones mediating those experiences. These hormones invade the placenta. Enter it. And help guide the molecular processes that shape specific neuronal conditions at a genetic level.

Complicated stuff, huh!? Yes. This has always been the case. The human mother has always had authority over the developing infant within her. And if you think I put the burden of blame on her? You’re wrong! The man in her life, and in fact, every person she interacts with, plays their own part in generating emotional responses in her by enacting their own troublesome dissociations.

God damn its complex! We take so much for granted. Lost. We are. To our oneness. We are relationally structured to one another. A thought in me motivated by a splitting into good and bad - unconsciously - will project, at a pure imaginal level - and will unconsciously be ‘introjected’ by the other person. This whole idea is called ‘object-relations’. Something clearly and undeniably true to anyone who pays attention to what happens within and how what happens seems to educe a direction in the other person. Crazy. I wonder if the whole idea of prognostication has to do with the probable iterations of this process into the future. And maybe reality enfolds itself at times! Pushing a future time into a present moment! Woah!

 

And then life begins. The mother gives birth and that whole experience, of course, has to be traumatic for the birthed baby. Can you imagine? A fundamental change in scenery, a movement into another reality. Light alone. Air. Its violent. There’s anxiety in the mother and those hormones, and no doubt, the subtle - but congruent - muscular vibrations, help to put the child into a similar state. Birth happens, the baby wails, the world comes into beginning, and the beginnings have already been somewhat determined by an entirely different person. And that person, if you follow the iterations, was in turn affected by others. A tangled web of causation. The roots of karma, perhaps?

I come into the world. My mother seems to hate me. Then love me. Then hate. Then love me. And if the hate happens more than the love I begin to move in that direction. What really sucks, though, is how sensitive I already am before even meeting her! I’ve been in her body. My being sucking from her being. So when I finally meet her, I’m especially sensitized to the pros and cons of being her child.

Years pass, and the dynamics of the family unit begin to shape my relationships to the world. Each person gave me an arrow, pointing me ‘this way’ or ‘that way’. My effeminate father and his own issues to being a father, which are rooted in his own father running away, left him insecure to the emasculating instincts of his wife’s mother-in-law. Baby saw it. Baby saw it again and again. And it iterates, and it evolves, into something morbid and disordered. The father is not serving his role very effectively as a masculine person in a competitive and narcissistic world. Quite an issue! Going to be a big one for this kid in the future!

His mother is an exact replica - in the most primitive ways - of her mother. Like mother like daughter. Borderline personality disorder was well honed and remains well-honed in many patriarchal societies today. And his mother fit the description. Insecure. Narcissistic. But capable of great and deep love for her children. But she flips. Constantly flipping according to the relational dynamics of the world around her.

She’s always right. That’s the first thing. You don’t disagree with her, and if you do something wrong, it’s liable to be interpreted by her as done on purpose. As a deliberate act of disrespect. And you will be punished for it - punished, because you know you did it on purpose. Unfortunately, you aren’t old enough yet to the have the pre-frontal brain power to discriminate self from mothers projections. You take it in, because the world is how you know yourself. The world in its tremendous complexity is building you, as it does everyone else, into the person you are and continue to become with each new interaction.

Gosh darn-it! Why am I talking about this? Oh yes. How annoying it can be for me to see other people, to see them from such a meta-cognitive perspective, and to be forced to accept that we, none of us, despite our deepest wants and desires, are fundamentally connected to one another. Society, is the source of self. Look at ants, bees and other group creatures. They’re unconscious to the greater movements that shape the society. They merely enact them, enact what they’re biologically evolved to know; but their knowingness is limited to immediate space, and not to our - asininely unconscious - habit of projecting our own thinking into the non-human world.

So when I’m sitting at the library, and a girl comes by me - I can look, as I usually do, taking in the whole of what I’m seeing and deciding instantaneously whether they're hot or not and whether I want to keep paying attention to them - I have to be fine with the fact that this girls mind probably couldn’t tolerate what I personally need. My fears. Of projection. Of being too f*****g analytical - a definite problem for someone with such a ‘slowed down’ perception of things - and turning it inwards on the self as he communicates, and paying especial attention to voice, which again, is the mediating fluid of emotional relation; oh f*****g damnit! Who wants to deal with that? And what if, over history, following a horrible trauma at age 13 and again at age 15 and 16, the process iterated again and again into more complex and entangled forms; a protein of death! You begin to see yourself as your unconscious identifications. That very self - that inner, embodied, en-flowing force, in movement and action with other bodies - so much of it performed unconsciously - you can actually lose that! There exists a mind-state, resulting from a particular developmental evolution, that leaves you in a ghastly state of dissociation. Dissociation. The splitting of mind from body; cosmic distance farther then the mind can imagine. And that’s precisely it! The destruction of imagination! The splitting away of possibilities from becoming realities! The emotional life is contained by these possibilities, shaped early on by the interpersonal conditions - giving life or death, growth and possibility, and all the endless iterations therefrom, or a life of pain and suffering, social isolation, shame, anxiety, suicidal thoughts; morbid fears about voice, body and self. The responsibility entailed by every thought a human being has, truly, is enormous. My gosh. It’s both awe-inspiring and horrific, depending on where you’re viewing it from.

And that’s it. In a competitive patriarchal world winners and losers are well demarcated. Losers hide and winners display themselves like Caeser before a gladiatorial contest. This is sort of what its like; how I kind of see it. I’m at the library, I see guys come in, a pack of them, each dressed more or less the same - a shared culture - and they all follow the same behavioral rules. If a librarian comes by for the umpteenth time and censures them for again not cleaning up after themselves, do they listen? Do they reflect on the legitimacy of her argument and the justification of her feelings? Or, instead, do they follow that inbuilt in-group feeling; recognizing, oops, just unconsciously, that it just ain’t cool to express understanding to another person. This is just the tradeoff capitalism gives us. It’s like heroin for a heroin user. He shoots up the smack, the heroin floods his veins, enters his brain and attaches itself to the brains natural opiate receptors; he gets a REALLY intense high; but he forgets, oh no, there’s such a thing as natural limits! So, just as with a pendulum, when you throw something so much in this direction, sure enough, it will go back back with the same velocity in the other direction. Such is what happens in a society that indulges in narcissism and economic development. It damages the social and moral awareness of it’s members; and, while were at it, it drains the natural world of resources (such as trees and mountaintops blown off for coal) and pumps Co2 into the atmosphere as an unintended consequence of taking advantage of the energy containing capacities of fossil fuels; ancient biological organisms that have become oily, carbon rich deposits in the earths crust.

Just as we ignore the f**k out of climate change, we ignore the f**k out of how our culture of narcissism - which we don’t even have the sensibility to call narcissism - creates people that are too inflated, care too little about others, and in acting so educe narcissistic defensiveness in others - or, if you’re not the affectively lucky ones - will regularly experience shame, inferiority, and other emotions, by now hardwired into your mother-f*****g physiology as particular molecular receptor and global activation patterns.

The world is a b***h when you’re not respecting it’s rules! And narcissism! How dangerous and ultimately undoing it is! If human beings don’t pay attention to others - if they don’t find every Ayn Rand book ever printed and burn it - then the very context we exist within, as an awesome, in-built poetic justice, punishes mankind by reacting to it’s inevitable self-regulation difficulties, which, as with this awesomely complex ecological situation, brings everything together in infinite feedback, feeds it forward, or pays it forward, and gives us just what we would morally deserve.

So, if you’re not the ‘squeemish’ type; someone who doesn’t really have emotions like love or compassion, or empathy and softness, for other people, than I suggest you try to get over that. I’d prefer you not ignore that your existence if fundamentally tied into mine.

Digging deep, looking in. The self is made from moment to moment. You can awaken to it by wanting it. More wanting will create a subtle shifting in perception. Iterations ensue, and before you know it - usually after its already happened - you’ve become the type of person you’ve read or heard about. Somehow, the mysterious change of existence changed you into what you thought you could never become. Like rock hardening from flowing lava, what’s “left” is the physiological conditions; the proteins along the receptor regions that fit into that awesome global pattern mentioned earlier. It Is this which is left; like gold nuggets from a flowing river. The self can be built again.