Author: White Whale

I know little about mirror neurons other than that they exist and that they play an important role in socialization, but I would suppose those of a narcissist would react in measurably different ways to images of themselves relative to anyone else.

It’s highly unlikely this has not been proposed before, but I think this is the first time I have proposed it.

I would add: what is a selfie but an affirmation you exist, at least in the “eyes” of a camera you can control?

Further question: do they arise from narcissism, build it, both or neither? How important a role do they play in the mental health of those who take a lot of them? Do they help, hurt, or a bit of both?

Four nights ago, I was doing some myofascial release work, and it hit me that I will never be connected to my mother in this life, and there is nothing I can do about.  She exists stranded on an island I cannot reach.  She can and will suck the life out of me, but she cannot be comforted.  All I can do is watch, from a distance.

And this thought made me deeply sad.  I’ve thought this thought, but never processed the related feelings.

Three nights ago I was dreaming I was in a flooded home, my childhood home.  I was on the second floor, but everything was drenched in water.  One of my favorite books was soaked and unrecoverable.  And in the dream I started to weep.  Everything was gone, and there was nothing I could do.  I felt the presence of my father, who died, and who I also could not reach in any way, and who was quite frequently mean to me.  He belittled me nearly every chance he got, while pretending it was a joke.  But none of the jokes were funny.

And it occurred to me that the point of therapy is reaching a point where there are enough tears for your pain.  For many of us, there is pain which cannot be cried out.  It is a deep, dull–sometimes sharp–ache for which there is seemingly no cure, and no true relief.  People like that become drunks, or addicts of some sort.  Some kill themselves.  All live reduced lives.

Two nights ago, I dreamed a kind old woman was mixing medicine for me, and saying “there is no cure without a home.”  A kind presence in my dreams is a new thing for me.  I felt very, very little kindness in my own actual home.  None, that I can recall, if I am honest, even if perfunctory and almost ritual things were done, like buying me Christmas presents.  There was little open hostility, but very little thoughtfulness.  My own mother, after all these years, does not understand me at all.  I am a thought to her, an abstraction.

Last night, I was in a public space doing something or other, contemplating that my life has lacked love, and it is such a sad thing that people live and die all the time without ever really feeling love.  They never find that person.  They never find that group.  You live and die and never really feel like you have anything figured out.  Life, if I might indulge in cliche, is unkind, very often.  I could die today, and do so without feeling like I have anything “sussed”.  I hope I don’t.  I need more time.  I still have work to do.  But many die with unfinished work.  So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut memorably put it.

I can honestly say I have done my best to face my life with courage, and with a determination to figure this thing out.

And I continue with my visions of a solution, of a church which works, of the creation of countless ersatz, but more real than real, families.  I continue with my vision of making connection easy, obvious, and nearly inevitable for nearly everyone.  I dream of new forms of “home”.  It’s not just me who is hurting.  It’s almost everyone.

I thank God for giving me a robust body, and the sense to take reasonably good care of it.  I am on a river, and there is no telling what is possible for me.  I place my faith in the rejection of self pity, perseverance, and curiosity/wondering.

I spoke within the past few weeks of dissociation being a feeling of being separated from the world of the living by a pane of glass.  I would like to extend this metaphor to assert that narcissism is a defense mechanism for the severely dissociated, one which turns that glass into a mirror, to reduce the pain of separation.  In effect, you become your own companion.  Life finds a way.

I would assert that principle, that life finds a way, would apply as well to actual psychopathy.  I would assert that psychopathy is an organism defaulting to a lower level of existence, to the reptilian brain, as a means of survival.  It only does this in the face of severe assaults, which would otherwise lead to suicide.  The violence, cruelty, and emotional lability and superficiality all act to blunt emotional pain, and thereby to keep that person alive.

Some years ago I made a study of serial killers.  They are, obviously, a popular topic, with creative serial killers being an almost sure-fire way of getting ratings on TV, and an audience in theaters.  Here is the thing: in actual fact, most of them are suicidal and most of them have to engage in some form of substance abuse to keep going.  Most of them also have organic brain damage, in areas responsible for impulse control.  I think it was Henry Lee Lucas who was thrown so hard against a wall, by his mother when he was a child, it knocked him out.

But life finds a way.  That person becomes a predator, an alpha, a user who is not used.  Patterns emerge which protect that person from killing themselves, or succumbing to depression caused by radical separation from the human race, and the possibility of peace and tranquility.

And societies can mirror these patterns at a macro-level.  When everyone feels uneasy, when everyone finds it impossible to fully relax, to fully trust the people around them, that social system develops an urgent need to find a scapegoat.  This is the root, as one glaringly obvious example, of Trump Derangement Syndrome.  It is certainly possible to dislike him personally, and disagree with his politics, while still recognizing that none of the horrific predictions made about him have come true, and that in many respects, on many fronts, he has been innovative, creative, and successful in leading this nation to prosperity and peace. 

But this necessary rage, this socially necessary rage, brought on by the depressing conformism of the Left, makes it more and more important, every year, for them to find a shared target for their personal violence.  This chronic anger is in fact an important survival mechanism, because most of these people otherwise feel impotent and disconnected.  They lack a church.  They lack a human family outside of their political engagements.  They lack a social order which will ALLOW them to deviate in any way from the defined boundaries.  This would make anyone angry, even if they don’t allow themselves to consciously admit it.  Your “friends” are always watching you, for signs of deviancy.  They are watching. They are always watching.  You–random inhabitant of Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and other places–are the subject of a totalitarian god, who lacks the slightest shred of mercy or forgiveness.  There is no coming back, once you are ejected.

And there is no coming back because the belonging is everything.  The conformity is everything.  There is no principle which would allow anyone to forgive.  All anyone can do is watch their disgraced friend drift away into the fog.

I was sitting in a small cafe in a small town in West Virginia when I posted that.  I wasn’t sure why, but I could feel the past heavy in that place particularly.  It turned out that the couple who owned the place had lost a child 5 months previously to cancer.  He was 18.

He said “I’ll guess we’ll never be the same”.  I said no, I didn’t think they would.  She said “it’s made all of us weird”.  I said there’s nothing wrong with that.

When I am feeling good, and I was feeling good then, I constantly find people sharing things like that.  I am an asshole a distressingly large percentage of the time (particularly as seen from other people’s perspectives), but I am also at times capable of genuine kindness, and gentleness.  That is all my children saw most of the time, although I was unable to keep the asshole completely out of view, and they would not hesitate to get on my case about it.

I am still not warm.  That is a growth area.  I grew up in the frost, and it left a mark.  Warmth requires, I think, a deep seated faith in people which I don’t have.  That, or perhaps a deep seated faith in myself, and my own ability to generate positive emotions in conditions of darkness.  There is more hope for me in that latter possibility, because I am unlikely to develop a faith in people any time soon.  I do think most people instinctively try to do what is right most of the time, but I also think most of them are weak and stupid a distressingly high percentage of the time, and easily manipulated into damn near anything.

As Doris Lessing commented in one of the quotes I excerpted a week or so ago, your friends of today might easily be a part of a ravenous mob tomorrow.  This is the zombie metaphor, or at least a part of it.

I am calming down, though, which is good.

There is a certain rootedness living in the past. The same would apply to “living” within ideology, one form of which, I would assert, is most forms of conventional religiosity.

We are all, I think, always seeking shelter from the wind. It both blinds us and comforts us.

This line of thinking, I suppose, roughly matches  the Existentialist ethos. Where I would differ is in supposing, based on personal experience, that a deeper peace lies hidden behind the curtain, not meaninglessness.

Everywhere I look, though, I see comforting nests. I am realizing as well that pointing out these nests/cocoons, is a form of self important cruelty. They have a vital place in most peoples lives.

I have to wonder if Christ, whoever he was, erred in bringing a sword. In the event, a powerful new cocoon was created which we call the Christian Church, within which I would include its core theological claims.

Time is not real but experience is.

CO2 is as essential for life as O2 is.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120920115739.htm

As I understand the matter, the amygdala is in the frontal cortex on both lobes.

Now, I tend to be Johnny One Note.  I get an idea in my head–here, the amygdala as the center of much emotional dysregulation–and probably exaggerate it.  This is because I am not an expert.  I can’t describe all the elements of the limbic system in detail.

Still, I recall Sebern Fisher noting that her FPO2 protocol often led to an improved sense of smell.  That’s what I think I recall, in any event.

This leads logically to an interesting proposition: psychopathy exists on a continuum.  We might measure that continuum by progressive decreases in the ability to distinguish scents.  Logically, too, psychopaths are traumatized themselves, which seems obvious.  They develop more or less alternate personalities: the glib, social self, and the amygdalic/lizard brain self.

I am tempted to say–and I nearly said this the other day before getting distracted by something or other–that we create in the outside world what we feel inside.  We create beauty when, and only when, we feel beauty.  And we may have a complex whirl of things flying around in us, and create beauty so as to feel it has a home permanently outside of our own unpredictability.  You may move on to despair, but you always have that.

Psychopaths create pain and death.

As I’ve said many times, fight/flight/shame exists on one neurophysiological level, and freeze on another.  Freezing–dissociation, clinically–is thingness.  You are no longer in your body.  You are an onlooker.  It would seem obvious that serial killers–the heros of our age–seek in the end to create thingness–dead bodies–in others, because they feel it themselves.  Ted Bundy once famously said something close to: “I want to make my victims the equivalent of potted plants.”

And as I’ve said, saying dissociation doesn’t have a feeling tone to it is a mistake.  It does. It feels like being trapped on the other side of a glass window, if you stop and really focus on it.  It is intensely unpleasant, again if you allow yourself to focus on it, which most people do not.   The way most people deal with this is through an external focus and activity.  Sadism, for example, is an obvious out.

I am an odd, exceptional (if I do say so myself) person in this regard.  I can go deeply painful places and not die, and not break down, and–I hope, although I remain vigilant–become infected by the diseases there.  I don’t know why.  I assume I was born this way.  I was a very robust baby.

In any event, I am a user of essential oils.  Logically, increasing my sense of smell might help reregulate my dysregulation (a felicitous phrase like conjunction junction).  I have perhaps described my method of tracking the phases of the moon by having fourteen essential oils on a shelf in my bathroom.  I mix one with lotion every day and rub it on my body.  I go up the list as the moon waxes, and back down as it wanes.  One of course I use twice on each end.

I recently decided though to do a full 28.  I ordered some Myrtle, Swiss Stone Pine, and Cypress recently, and am going to get more when time permits me to focus a minute.  These things make me happy.  One odd surprise is that Geranium seems to make me happy directly.  There’s something energizing in it, for me at least.

This is a salutary practice which I would recommend to anyone with the funds for it.  Many of these oils you can get in 10ml bottles for under $10.  I just mix them with unscented body lotion, which is also cheap.

And I always  know where the moon is, and what direction it’s going.  

I read Jordan Peterson, who I respect greatly, along with many others, checked himself into a clinic for rehab from tranquilizers.

I watched his appearance at Dennis Pragers conference or whatever it was, and he was teary through the whole thing.  I get that completely.  I’ve been that guy many times.

We share, I think, a sense that if you fail to truly appreciate the inherent tragedy of human life–the unredeemed suffering, the pointless suffering, the ridiculousness of it all–then you have missed a big, probably crucial aspect of the human experience.

What I would suggest, though, is that one can remain aware of all the awfulness, and all the risks, without becoming overwhelmed.  As context, in recent weeks I’ve read about lasers that can penetrate nearly anything, invisibility cloaks, micronukes (Pakistan was talking about them: I hope I didn’t give anyone any ideas), exoskeletons that can lift cars, and of course the cross channel hoverboard trip.

This, and of course aliens, global depressions, and who knows what else.

To me, life is like a giant cave.  In one part of it you have all the tragedy and hopelessness and death.  But in other places you have beauty.  In most places you have the almost inherent beauty of human beings finding reasons to believe, and to care, and to love, as well as they can, which is usually not much, but all you can give is what you have.

I kind of picture myself in a good vantage point, viewing it all.  There is a large space outside of me.  But paradoxically, when I close my eyes, there is a much, much bigger space, one where the concept of problem does not even exist, where pain does not exist, where joy is the coin of the realm, but joy of a sort we have forgotten, and rarely even sip once in a lifetime on this planet.

Here is my proposition: happiness is a learned skill.  It is not something which happens.  It is not the result of internal circumstances, nor is it the result of simply “choosing” happiness.  It is a skill.  There are techniques.

And the best single one I have found is Kum Nye.  Nobody listens to me on this, as far as I know.  I have converted no one to a long term practice, despite talking often about it.

But happiness is a sort of breathing through your whole body.  It is a letting go and allowing, and that allowing causes contentment to burst out from where it was hiding.  Painful things come out sometimes when you allow.  I know this better than anyone, I think.  But the process both sweeps away the chronic ones, and teaches you to deal in real time with the ones you cannot avoid.

I’m in a strange place.  I am changing.  I can feel it.  I am feeling torpid lately.  I just sit here.  I’m not sad, or confused.  I just don’t feel like moving.  I think this is the appearance on the outside of an internal state, a paralysis that dates back from long ago, when I felt like a thing.

I will likely have more to say on thing-ness, when I figure out how I feel about it.

For now I will hope that Mr. Peterson puts down Dostoevsky and picks up Tarthang Tulku.  Despair (and anger and violence for that matter) can seem deep because they are often hidden beneath the social surface.  People like Marty Scorcese are supposedly “deep” directors because they talk about the violence all of us feel, that is always there.

Personally, I think the deep people are the ones who see all that, feel it, understand it, then keep going.  There is peace at the bottom.