Concretely, children who do not receive secure love, who to do not feel secure attachment, never really establish a firm sense of who they are vis-a-vis “the world”. Figuring out how to do this is the task. The essence of the promise of neurofeedback is giving adult children a retroactive secure, adequately nourishing childhood.
And I might add a post I nearly made a few days ago, after getting drunk Saturday night. I woke up feeling strongly that my purpose in life is understanding the nature of evil, and HOW TO HEAL IT.
As I see it, there are two big metaphysical problems which can and should be dealt with by science, which would in a sane world be the focus of most of our resources (rather than better coffee pots, and faster cars): the nature and cure of evil, and the nature of life after death (is there any, and if so what is its nature). Meaning formation–what to do–follows logically from ones understanding of these two.
I am not meant to be a part of the “Life after death” team in this lifetime, although I hope some more smart people within the scientific establishment take it up much more robustly than has yet been done. Currently there are already some excellent contributions by people like Eben Alexander and the Windbridge Institute .
But really the lack of funding is tied to the problem of evil. It is tied to spiritual constriction, lack of imagination, excessive hubris, and the loss of faith, really, in life itself, within the materialistic paradigm which is–for all I can see–completely indefensible empirically and scientifically.
I’m on Team Evil. My job is to experience first hand all the things which make people mean, angry, dishonest, scheming and nasty. I know why people kick dogs. I know what it is like to feel continual rage and fear, and to bury them in denial, and even in benign rhetoric, such that the evil becomes rationalized as good. I am quite capable of writing soaring verse about love, then being nasty to the store clerk.
And I’m getting a strong sense of deja vu. Maybe I’ve written all this before. Be that as it may, my job is to figure out how to turn dog kicking into authentic love, and figure out a SYSTEM that people can copy and emulate. That is my job, here.
And my work continues. I’m not an innocent man yet, by any means. I have many miles to go. But that is my purpose. That is my identity: chosen or assigned, I don’t know and don’t care.
And what I just wrote was authentic. That was not dissociative. On the contrary.