Openings

I hear a slam outside the window, and I know already what it is; those blasted kids, stoners, all of them, tapping on the window, and slamming it, inevitably, to get the attention of the teenagers on the other side. "Yo", he mouths. "yo" being the thing kids born within a certain time period in human history (I'll guess between 1975 and the present day) say to one another when they feel a sort of chumminess, which hides the program inside of them designed by evolutionary time to make the organism act for this reason. I don't deny that the experience can often be a good one. To just speak to another person, whilst feeling good, that is what life's sort of all about, isn't it?

If depression, anxiety, shame, fear, paranoia and pain - I think the basic affective categories on the negative side of things - make life appear this or that way, what sort of ways do we mean? There's an infinite variety of negative states of mind and I think I have a strong case in claiming I've experienced some very painful ones. I know others have fared worst than I, and in that little fact theres something worth feeling thankful about; but all that matters, ultimately, is that our suffering can become meaningful to us. We have to do it, paradoxically, the most noble experience a human can have is built by a simple raw evolutionary logic: adapt in whatever possible way to survive. And that's what I think when I reflect on the two stoners outside tapping, then punching the window to get the attention of their friends inside: they're doing what will help them survive. "Yo" is just a little example of that. Not bad, just necessary to connect more fully with the other person. Our brain, or mind, impels us towards the full existential feeling of aliveness; the 'content' may be nothing more than an illusory semantic vehicle to convey the feeling across the space that divides us.

And a they come in, they make more noise, and I know a few of them as they pass me are having thoughts unique to their life history. I'm always a little aware of them when they come by, although I've become exponentially better at regulating my feeling  - and so my reality -  when I feel the trauma coming on. The difference between the two states cannot be described as 'night and day' because I feel there is absolutely no 'bridge' between the two experiences; or rather, if the bridge exists, it exists beyond the poles of both experiences; a simple mindful knowing of the what is happening within - as mind, or body - the twofold nature of human mental organization: observer and the objects of his observation.

This time, as they pass, I mentally relax myself, a 'doing' that confuses even me - the doer - and puzzles me ad infitum to capture the paradox of an ephemeral and elusive mind directing the molecular biological activities of my brain, presumably via manipulation of electo-magnetic fields, lets say.

So the kids pass me, and I keep my my body and mind relaxed; I feel calm, and my exact facial expressions, as opposed to being in the foreground in an anxiously aroused mind, simply follow in the way of the emotions being felt, emotions which arise, largely, by my unconscious cognitive narrative - a type of thinking which can feel wordless but nevertheless conceptualizes reality in it's happenings. Or, maybe, I'm just so involved in the action of thinking that I simply don't attune to the reality of my words being the vehicle of my mental reveries. Which ever the case, I can say that it's my "self" which organizes the activity of emotions and biochemistry at the moment of acting, and not anything else.

Yet, what is a self? Perhaps, the saying 'you don't know what you got till its gone' is truer than we think; perhaps true knowledge entails the necessity of both poles in understanding; that understanding, instead of being any acquisitive knowledge, is a process that emerges from experiencing the opposing qualities of our percepts. A thoroughly interactional product. Anywho, the experience of 'not having a self' is a qualitatively different experience of reality from having a self. And as glib as this may sound, its basically the difference between feeling happy, excited, and interested, from feeling depressed, numb, fearful and anxious.

Each of these 15 year olds walking in front and beside me is a walking testimony to their history. I can almost imagine a seemingly infinite train of past selves following our present self at each moment, trailing behind us like a beaded rosary, informing our present self with it's vagaries of knowledge. Who else can anyone be but what the moment of conception brings into greater and greater determination with every day of the future beings ontogenesis; early development and the complexities of cell division, structural inheritances, and more florid differentiations between genes, proteins and cells. And all the time, the mothers mind remains the 'focalizing' organ over the fetuses evolution; providing tiny increments by the foods she decides to eat, the sleep she decides to get, the stress she decides to live with. The "decides" being the implied doer in all of our actions; the potential self awareness that can assign itself duties towards its infants future life. But, awareness of such a thing, who really knows it in all of its complexity, biologically, interpersonally, intrapsychically, socially and culturally? When you exist in a web of feedbacks like we do (and all of reality, really) then it isn't actually fair, at any level, to condemn another person in any sort of final and ultimate way. Even Adolf Hitler - a man whom I despise  - suffered the trauma of losing a brother at 11 years old; then the sudden death of his father at 14; the death of his mother at 18; clearly, all events which primed his mind towards dissociating, and eventually hating with all his being, his "shameful" human need for connection, family, and love. In a sense, seeing Hitler like this, it is totally logical that he acted as he did. Via the instinctive categorizing proclivities of the human brain, emotional associations (made unconsciously), send out signals to certain realities: woman: sexy, something to be possessed; homosexuals: disgusting, castrated men who seek to be penetrated like woman; and Jews, sneaky, effeminate and castrated little crooks who despoil everything with their overly feminine civility and "laws".  Then throw into the mix the sociological conditions of late Wiemar Germany, the birth of national socialism - the insanity that was Adolph Hitler essentially rode the wave of something already quite insane - and you get the mythological portrait of Adolph Hitler as the antichrist (as is so often presented by fundamentalist Christians). Somebody deemed unequivocally evil and rotten to his core. Yet what would he have become if his brother hadn't died? Would that have influenced his fathers death; his mothers death? Do you think all that death promotes health; or illness? As we know stress so often does.

I feel balanced by the knowledge of what every person is: a trail of selves that moves through the present. Which is felt and communicated with in the present. But how great a loss it is to not know this? Its huge. Its unfathomable. Just watch a war movie and witness the barbarity of what human beings have historically done to each other. And for what? For lack of a better word, ignorance of the source of their feelings to act; or more generally, a lack of a mental organization of their mental experience. And this, as I've learned, is a complex ability that is slowly picked up, accelerated if you have the time and ambition to develop it, but also something that is easily counteracted by a world which mocks and derides that most essential of emotions: empathy.

Whenever I don't feel it, or if I turn away from the reality that impinges on me in a negative way, I ask myself: do you want to feel this way right now? I know it may seem like you don't have any choice; but you do. And in seeing yourself do it, overtime, you become more affected by the proof of your past success at doing it. The observation affects the observer, and new levels in this video game like process become available to be thought and dealt with. It's the pain which promotes the development; its whatever presents itself as a problem to feeling compassion, joy and well being which spurs human mental evolution.

And so I detach, feel good, and enjoy myself in the presence of other selves, as I sit on my big comfy blue sofas at the local library. And I fee calm enough to countenance the presence of another mind which could possibly be judging me, and, with the traumatized guy existing latent as a possibility, I am instinctively inclined to frenetically search my environment for threat - for eyes which judge - and I cannot tell you how many years I lived, day after day, with the oppressive awareness of other faces, other minds, judging and hating me for simply existing. Can self-hatred be so complete? Apparently yes. Unless speech becomes a monolithic difficulty for you, unless any activation of the social mind engenders visceral anxiety, you cannot claim to know what the total absence of a self creates. We hear about 'anxiety' and 'panic; attacks, but what about shame attacks? A simple association between a seen reality and an emotional reality from my past; and the present is eviscerated, lost, while the past, like groundhog day, repeats its dynamics again and again and again. Too much; too much is what I always felt! The shame seeps in, slithers in, forcing my mind to withdraw from all emotionality; from feeling; a basic rule of thumb: do not do anything that will alert others to your existence.  How can I get over this, for years, I always pondered? What will it take? The presence of the question was enough to keep me on the right track; but it took me many different places and trained me in many different ways to become the person I feel myself to be at this moment in time.

When the self transforms as many times as it has for me, I find any conversation about the 'genetic' basis of any personality trait, say conservative or liberal, to be total nonsense, and completely ignorant of the particularities of feedback between culture - and our enacted behaviors - and developmental biology. The "simpletons (as they may appear) who pride themselves with knowledge of genetic and computational things, miss the big picture between mind and society, and forget what is intuitively apparent: were all affected by the things we do; how we eat, the coffee or pills we take, the smiles we make or the frowns we perceive, the thoughts we think as we give off a certain look, and the corresponding process seen in others as we introject their look and begin thinking about our own inadequacies. Or, defenses? Do you defend against shame, can you see how that happens? I see it. I see how I don't like conceding to other people and how I have an evolved bias to be 'territorial'; but what is that feeling I'm trying to get away from? It's shame. I can see it in me because I've developed a complex lingua franca of my mental world, which means that without some sort of vocabulary, the subtleties of self experience will not be readily apparent. Naming, or symbolizing, is a necessary ingredient in evolving consciousness.

I think overall we defend against negative emotions, and the various mental acrobatics we perform in our various life activities are little more than events 'acted out' upon the hidden realm of feelings in the body and the unformulated experiences of the mind. A conversation with another person has content, but the unconscious mind organizes itself to work together with the other person; that is, so long as if you've had the fortune of having another person initiate you into a feeling of human community. We really fail to appreciate how interdependent we all our; even in relating with another person, I have to to respond; I have to adjust my inner organization to adapt in some way to the to the world outside me. Even in decrying dependency, you demonstrate dependency by enacting the need to decry it. So long as you’re in communication, you are forced into responsibility for how the interaction will go. If the illusion (and delusion) of self-sufficiency appeals to you, that creates problems for the larger system; for another human self, vulnerable to imitation and, just like you, built to dissociate from negative affect, being a dick will promote being a dick in others. Inhospitality will generate cynicism. An within the general void of cynicism, the menace of criticality and ‘splitting’ things into good and bad, usually with you and your actions on the side of ‘good’, or, in another pathologized mind, it can be others as ‘good’ and me as ‘bad’, as it had (and has) existed in my mind for so long.

Are we simply a glorified ape? Or, does this spectacular ability to represent to ourselves all that is happening " and granting us the choice to promote that which is good " make us ontologically different from all other creatures? However you want to define evolution or the nature of existence, the way you conceive the issue says a lot about your own unconscious organization of the world. To even utter the word ‘hatred’, such as in the sentence, “I hate idiotic Christians who deny evolution”, or “I hate arrogant scientists who think they can explain Gods creation”, throws the mind a state of disorientation; enlarging the favored idea and diminishing the hated one; leading to a basic lack of clarity in what’s being perceived and a loss of critical knowledge such as how past conditions make the present as it currently is.

Biologists, scientists, philosophers. Nobody escapes the system completely. Indeed, it is only by acknowledging the system that you can work with it, instead of against it. This is the crux of this book. My system is my mind; and the story of how my mind became the way it became can only be explained by detailing the history of my existence from the various points in time that matter; my parents whose own trajectories shaped and formed probabilities of development. To my in-utero period; to early life relationships. Really, it’s about the relationships which came together to form ‘me’. The ‘me’, I experience myself today as being, a person, more alive to his selfhood, yet paradoxically accessing his power of self-healing from a place beyond himself; from here, there is no differentiation, just a mirroring process, where I play “me” and you play “you”, but we are dependent by virtue of our commonality; the existential meaningfulness of our subjectivity " whatever ‘beliefs’ that come with it, is the same, the strain is the same; and it only through compassion, through reflection on the total situation, that the worlds come together again.