Month: May 2018

In my current Kum Nye practice session, I am to end with a 10-15 minute meditation on love.  I am not comfortable thinking about love, but I did it anyway.

And it occurred to me some of the different things that happen under the name “love”.  There is the person who sweeps in and takes over, who makes your bed, and ties your shoes, and packs your lunch and tells you where to go.  This is “cloning of the self”.  It is an aggression, committed by someone who wants to see more of themselves in the world.  It has nothing to do with you at all.

Then there is the person who just wants to leave their scent everywhere, who affects a benign presence, and more or less “blesses” you.

There is the desperate need to get, from romantic love, what one did not get as a child.  Both people demand of the other everything they have, while giving only their need.  Sex can tie this together for a time, but not forever.  It spins apart in various ways, although sometimes someone–usually the woman–can keep it together by giving much more than she gets, over a long period of time.  The man, in this scenario, remains a child, with a lover/mother.

And it does occur to me that how a mother separates from a child, particularly a boy, is of vital psychodynamic importance.  There has to be a union when the child is young, and a specific separation at an appropriate age.  As I have said, I do believe in the Oedipal Complex, but I think Freud got it backwards: I think the children imbibe the unhealthy attachment of their mother, who is often using their child as an object to get the love they do not get from the father.

What I feel is that real love, true love, is a taking away of affect, not an addition.  What I feel, what I see in my waking dreams, is all of us living in water, connected, naked to one another.  We all live in bubbles which can be made opaque, which can be made larger and smaller.  Love is not adding or taking anything away.

I am not sure what I mean by this.  I am speaking aloud.  Perhaps I will see more in time.

It is really a remarkable thing, coming into life with post traumatic stress.  The worst that can happen, has already happened, and then used as a baseline.  People like me are in some respects strangers, at least among those who have not suffered such stress. 

But it is hard–impossible, really–to know for sure how many people are affected by Developmental Trauma Disorder.  It is a new diagnosis.  It appears in many ways.  It is perhaps like an inflammation of the soul.  It is perhaps the true genesis of all evil.

I was reading an article by Stephen Pinker (I saw his picture for the first time, and was struck by his dandyish hair style, and presumably underlying sense of affectation), and it occurred to me that, while Reason is vitally important for all human undertakings, that he is asking the wrong question.

The question is not what is rational, but how do we become fully rational human beings.  He, himself, is clearly not a rational human being.  He rejects the science of the afterlife, of psi, of everything non-physical, but extremely empirical and hence scientific on his own terms.

I am tempted to postulate that people who “live in their heads”, who overemphasize reason and rationality, might be presumed to suffer as a group from developmental trauma.  They were not loved enough at some point. They don’t REALLY understand love.

Reason is a natural outgrowth of emotional health.  If you are trying to get from A to B, then reason is the best way to do it.  Since you are emotionally healthy, you will reliably choose the best path. 

But reason tells us NOTHING about what to value, and about when protecting our own emotional health might require detours and rerouting on otherwise straight lines.  It is rational to protect one’s emotional well being, but if one is insensible of what that might mean, then this aspect of rationality is lost.

And in the same sense that Robespierre trod a straight line from the Revolution equaling human well being, to the destruction of all possible opponents of the Revolution also equaling human well being, I think it quite appropriate to fear, in the abstract, all people who would fetishize both “science” and “reason”.

If one assumes perfect rationality is possible, then there is no logical reason it cannot be canonized in a single authority with supreme power.  It is made supremely powerful because it is supremely rational, and because by definition what it considers an abomination must be wrong.  If it follows the methods of “science”, then it is infallible, just as we are told, in many ways, that the IPCC is infallible, and the “science is settled”.  Those spouting this view lack the political clout to create their tribunal, thus far, but the principle is there already, and the social support for it is there as well, among many, who already clamor for the heads of dissenters.

In reality, of course, a singular authority represents a perceptual choke point, which kills many possible ideas.  This is the reason “science”, properly understood, can NEVER be understood as anything other than ALL the opinions represented by people who follow the method.  If it is uniform, it can be ASSUMED to be dead.  Where there is only one opinion, it can only mean the others have been killed, figuratively or literally.

As I have pointed out before, Newton’s Laws of Motion, which are as canonical as a body of ideas describing physical reality can be, were shown to be incomplete and wrong in some cases.  This is why we now use General Relativity which, itself, may one day be superseded.  As a final answer for the nature of reality, it is clearly wrong, as it cannot incorporate the discoveries of Quantum Physics.

A better tomorrow will necessarily, structurally, need to begin with comprehensive, deep, emotional health and well being.  It will necessarily begin with people learning about, getting in touch with, and learning to meet their true emotional needs.

This is the only logical approach.

So I listened to Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit” and had many ideas.  I will share those I can remember intelligibly here.  Those I can’t remember intelligibly will trickle back to wherever ideas which have been thought and then unthought go.  They are likely still there somewhere.  I may yet find them again, but presumably they will have changed clothes by then.

Basic idea: Humans have space in our behavioral memory allotted to what amount to programmable instincts.  We are like birds in that we can feel the need to nest or mate, but unlike birds in that the precise nature of our instincts can be made to adapt, in real time, to current circumstances.  We call these programmable instincts “habits”.

A culture is the sum total of the habits of a given group of people who have bonded together to some greater or lesser extent.  How such habits form is a formally complex process which is not replicable, but which is comprehensible, as a series of responses which are more and less effective to the problems of human life as they relate to confusion about the nature of life and the world, the concrete problems of physical survival, and the social problems of how to make group decisions and how to concentrate or distribute power to either optimize happiness on one pole, or safety–or perceived safety–on the other.

This means that who we “are” within a cultural context is a set of habits we did not invent, do not understand, do not execute consciously for the most part, and which confine us in important ways, while also allowing us to belong to a protective social order and to meet our needs for community and interpersonal connection.

I propose that for habits we can substitute “dharmas”.  Now, I am a bit fuzzy on the Buddhist use of the word, but it is clearly applicable to Hindu notions of place and duty.  As I understand the Buddhist use of the word, they include a roughly Hindu notion, but also use it to refer to what exists, the bits and things floating around, understood abstractly.  Here is one selection:

Mahayana texts sometimes use the word dharma to mean something like “manifestation of reality.” A literal translation of the Heart Sutra contains the line “Oh, Sariputra, all dharmas [are] emptiness” (iha Sariputra Sarva Dharma sunyata).
Very basically, this is saying that all phenomena (dharmas) are empty (sunyata) of self-essence.
You see this usage also in the Lotus Sutra; for example, this is from Chapter 1 (Kubo and Yuyama translation):
I see bodhisattvasWho have perceived the essential characterOf all dharmas to be without duality,Just like empty space.Here, “all dharmas” means something like “all phenomena.”

To be without form is to be without habits.  Physiologically, psychologically, this is very, very hard.

Duhigg talks about habits as constituted by a trigger, a behavior, and a reward.  They are conditioned responses, in other words.

Here is the thing: the trigger is most often a feeling of some sort.  A feeling flashes before your inner eyes–perhaps so fast you don’t even feel it any more–and you find yourself doing something which seems logical, but you don’t know why.  Having done it, you feel better.  Not doing it elicits all sorts of bad feelings, notably craving.

Craving–the Buddhist Tanha–is the word Duhigg uses, and it first occurs in the case of monkeys who were more or less addicted to blackberry juice.  Once they got the jones, all they wanted to do was get more juice.  Their brains were rewired.

One can easily look at the Buddhist spiritual path, particularly, as oriented around nothing more or less than superior mental health.  Logically, if we can learn to avoid constant cravings, if we can learn to deal well with uncertainty and change, then we will be happier all around.

Within Kum Nye, the whole point of the thing is to feel what you are feeling, to find what is hidden, to find what slithers around in the darkness, or in the periphery of your vision, or which moves so fast you think you are imagining things.  All of these things lead, ultimately, to habits which have cravings associated with them, and following unfreedom and behavioral compulsion.  If you stop to feel, you automatically stop the looped behavior. If you give that feeling freedom to breathe, it can go anywhere it wants, which makes you more authentic and more intuitive.

Returning to this conception of culture, Duhigg offers what to me was a good analogy (although of course I am extending it much farther than he did).  Researchers watching mice learn a maze noted that the first time they walk it, they are hypervigilent.  They proceed slowly, sniff everything, look at everything, pause often, and generally expend a lot of energy.  After they have completed the maze a few times, they go faster.  Eventually they run immediately to where the cheese is.

Living within a culture is like this.  It takes a bit to become acculturated, but once you have, many things, many behaviors, happen automatically.  You celebrate the 4th of July by grilling out.  You celebrate Christmas with a Christmas tree and gifts.  The details both vary by culture and define that culture.

With learned/conditioned behaviors, you get dopamine reinforcement, which is something Duhigg did not know about, or chose not to discuss.  Dopamine is an inherent reward for a given behavior.  It is the completion hormone (is it a hormone?  Neurotransmitter?  I’m not sure), at least as I understand it.

Living within a culture is living within known bounds is living within a maze you understand and know how to get rewards out of.  Culture is in some respects a dopamine dominated system, and an organized method for getting behavioral reinforcement.

That comprises most of my notes.  Some of the ideas I had don’t fit neatly here, and I don’t feel like making a follow up post.

But there are some very interesting ideas here.  I do believe in the afterlife.  I do believe we go on.  But it is also possible, I feel, to dumb Buddhism down to a concrete method for developing mental health here, now, before we go anywhere at all, and one which works even if you are a materialistic fundamentalist.