Imagining the Impossible: Good or Bad?

Some people have a radical way of seeing things. The radicalism shatters them on the inside into oppositional states. Imagine two magnets with identical charges. Two states - or states of self experience - but there is something that keeps them "apart" from one another.

Its an intuitively obvious concept.



And this:



The brain arises like intertwining vines, emanating outward from embryogenesis into a entangled structure with distinct fiber paths carrying out specific functions within the organism becoming. Diffusion Tensor Imaging has enabled us to think about our brains as a self-organizing system of neurons, glia, and endothelial cells which perform their configurations for the "reactive face" - or the person and self - the emergent property, of the self organizing dynamic. Still, it looks a bit like other organic structures

or



The Human nervous system, 'extracted' from its body, would like this:



A long tail part, with branches and vines extending out spatially into important centers - feeding and being fed by the cells around it with which they communicate. The neural mass that gathers again in the middle - the spinal chord - to go upwards towards the "cap" of the mass superstructure, where information is consolidated and expresses as a living, feeling, planning, knowing -- flowing -- consciousness of the external world.

Imagination - Good and Bad.

How insane would it be if this consciousness began thinking it could arbitrarily create and change other people and the world within which they live?

What I've described and showed in images above is a rule-based causality - hence the emergent coherence of the structures - similar between a mushroom and a human nervous system - where repeating causal rules on the flow of semsiosis (information) generates self-similar fractal patterns. It is physics that this even happens - and so it needs to be understood that the very construction and matter of our bodies is fundamentally constrained by the rules which generate the structure-function.

Said differently, a Human can't actually be a goat, and a goat can't ever be a Human. The external forms of animals intimate the inner form of their experience of living. If it looks dull to be a goat - you're right, it is. Perception and Action are fundamentally integrated opposites which mutually influence one another in the construction of our sense of self. We are 1) taking, symbolizing beings, who only can communicate with one another because 2) we interpenetrate one another's at a basic systems level. Humans are a super-system of forms: this world is the "downside", whereas the next world - may be related to dark matter - would be the flip side of every interaction you have ever had - on any person you've ever affected. You and that person constitute a complementary pair. In that particular moment of interaction, you can be said to be 'existentially entangled'. You're life - your living, is you and your perspective as a Human person or Self. But reality is larger than you: you emerge from a larger Self-Other structure, and so this world is your perspective, whereas the 'other' is the other perspective.

Get the drift?

If this makes sense to you - as it does for me, then every interaction is fundamentally meaningful to our existence, inasmuch as everything we do will have some consequence whether we like it or not. Now, you can just accept this - live life with moderate self-control and deal with the after shocks when they come - or be a monk and seek perfection in your living - or try to be good, but to maximize fun times, pleasure, kindness, compassion, sex, etc. The first is a typical secular way of being. The second is a path chosen by some people - seems excessive to me (existence exists for a reason i.e. its awesome). The third is my cup of tea and seems to be the most popular one.

Yet a 4th exists - of the Donald Trump, "4th Reich" kind, of complete unreality - lunacy - that has some sort of secretive conviction in some philosophy that somehow preserves something about reality and existing because why else would they act this way? It's a mystery - clearly, the global elite are a group of nihilists or naive spiritualists - and power is what it is: it is a massive concentration of psychological energy into a persons skull. Money - the means to do things - is very very seductive, very very enticing, and so entails - for some people of a high intelligence - the regulation of awareness and feelings so that "what I feel right now" isn't idolized - i.e. to not let myself become naively super-involved in the feeling and the impression it creates in me. This state - a pride state - increases along the lines of fractal dynamics - a feedback loop between consciousness (perception) and the effect (affect!) created by the feeling of pride. When consciousness views and experiences itself in a positive way - a state of pride - we invest within ourselves an energy and potential for growth and development. Pride is fundamental to the evolution of Human affectivity - yet it was intrinsically linked to interpersonal recognition processes. There's no denying that we evolved in tribes. It is fundamental that tribal contexts are fundamentally different from today's contexts - yet seldom a psychologist of philosopher has recognized the significance of this difference.

Is this because we insulate ourselves from the effects of normal living? Yes. We - the children of the west - have evolved in a social reality which inculcates megalomania in its inhabitants. From the right - with libertarian people like Alex Jones, or Fox news, and even some spiritual movements which operate from a naive idealism which thinks "anything is possible", without considering the system conditions we operate through - and the constraints they impose on what were allowed to believe.

For instance, evil cannot be something you do. If evil means, acting against others, hurting them, knowingly hurting them and taking pleasure in their suffering - then in the body's language, its as if a normally and naturally clockwise system has suddenly got the idea to change itself and make itself counter-clockwise. Okay. Interessssstttttting. I imagine the Pharoahs of Egypt thought something like this.

Is that not true - btw? Isn't their something fundamentally eerie about Egyptian religion? A lot of people are still very naive about the organism-world connection, but a desert people will not normally produce a nice philosophy. Think about the examples we have of desert people, and think of the harshness - the "dustiness" - like sand paper is what their "human touch" feels like. Desert living is hard, and so it hardens the feelings of people. Some people speak so highly of the ancient Egyptians even though it is well known that they were a slave based society. That they were imperialists - and the product - of war, fighting, and bullying.

Good hearted people get sucked into bad things - and as Philip Lombardo rightly says, we all have the ability to turn evil - to see evil and understand its enticements - and so be able to empathize with people who have been sucked in, but are too dissociative to change.

For the most part, all of this is harsh. Reality is harsh - and this may be because we are radically one being -

One being - senselessly hurting itself - and for what reason? Because each part thinks their "I" is more real the the "We" that every Human in fact emerges from.

Think about that. Your mind is patterned not just in any sort of "developmental" way - but ontologically, existentially, phenomenologically, and psychodynamically - you are made into who you are by the people who interacted with you. The emotions - the self-states they felt - DIRECTED AT YOU!!!! How exciting that is! Only people dissociated to think without reference to the beauty of child behavior - of their honesty in response and the the sincerity of their needs - can fail to recognize that everyone feels the need to be needed - and this has an ONTOLOGICAL i.e. METAPHYSICAL reason and basis: this is how reality is formulated. We unfold within a fundamentally relational system - hence "non-locality" and "superposition" phenomena.

We live in a 'fallen' state, but getting back entails actually being moral and fair with others. It means not getting carried away by your sense of strength - and so regulating your self with the power of consciousness, instead of stealing its effects through other means. Mistreating other people even seems to have a "transitive" effect: the power you steal from them in the interaction is "absorbed" into you - into your neural structure and self-organizing dynamism. Most of the time the difference in Human interactions is of varying degrees of symmetry and asymmetry in power distribution. But bullying in school - or an environment - in which a certain sociopathic confidence is felt by the bullier, and the bullied manifests an experience of shame, we may call this profoundly "symmetrical" behavior - even though there is an obvious "power asymmetry". So what is the symmetry? The original unity of Self and Other (or, conversely, the "emergent unity" of self with other selves) is here separated into its worse possible extreme: intense suffering on one end, and a pleasure in doing violence on the other end.

This is easier to imagine when you think about it topologically. Imagine an overhead view of two nervous systems, hanging 'outside' their self. We would find in the flowing of each nervous system opposite behaviors - one absolutely CERTAIN (like a positive charge, or a coherent organization) in the sociopathic bully, and an opposite state of indeterminacy - often termed "depersonalization", "or derealization" - apt, but perhaps also ontologically so. The self on one end feels more REAL and ALIVE to itself, while the self on the other end is feeling DEAD on the inside - frozen like a little animal, afraid,



in a timeless realm - indeed, does time not slow down and seem to disappear as a force when we retract into ourselves? I mean those stares we can get into; or the 'fog' someone says they can be in. Time, then, is as Camelo Castillo puts it

“Time is change in the structural relations of matter-energy systems.” – Camelo Castillo, Origin of Mind: A History of Systems; pg. 19, 2011; Allardice Creek Press A good definition of time

I would also add speed of transformation, as when were happy and enlivened by one another, we feel a speeding up of time - and yet we also feel a "hyper-realization" of identity and self, so its worth it - very much so. It is exactly what evolution is aiming for through us: to maximize freedom from entropy - or what Humans call stress and suffering.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I like goats peculiar creatures they are

a reply to: Astrocyte

I'm narrow-minded, being an UFO abductee, my frequency of thoughts usually swim around the topic of UFOs and ETIs. Your writings are too much for my aging brain to encompass and frequently outside of my prime interest areas, but I'm satisfied that you have a brilliant mind. What I would like to see and learn from you is an extensive discourse on how a massive intelligence that has had many earth generations to mature into the grandest of all sages would manage the earth's people if it were to arrive.

Of course, I have my own views on the matter and frequently (excessively?) express them on ATS. What I find on ATS is a dearth of such materials when to my mind, a self-analysis and re-examination of our place in the galaxy should be going at ram speed at this time. Basically, I'm suggest you to help us over the hump of acknowledging to ourselves that we are at best a Third World world. Of course, you can take the tack that we are the supreme life force in the Universe, either way, I would like to see your handiwork on the topic.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Symmetry and asymmetry = convergent and divergent spirits (will).

flow of semiosis = spirit/will moving through a body

There is a spiritual body (information/form to will); there is truth to the Spirit.

We are not interpreting "forces" as will - we are interpreting will as will - it is will - all the way down to the most fundamental level - it is Spirit.

Only people dissociated to think without reference to the beauty of child behavior - of their honesty in response and the the sincerity of their needs - can fail to recognize that everyone feels the need to be needed - and this has an ONTOLOGICAL i.e. METAPHYSICAL reason and basis: this is how reality is formulated. We unfold within a fundamentally relational system - hence "non-locality" and "superposition" phenomena.

I think what you're referring to is how the Spirit is Holy. You should think of holy, sacred, or solemn as being of the highest regard and the source of what we long for: the presence of selfless love (agape) - the kind of love felt when you give yourself to someone completely or they give themselves to you completely (as we do when we make a holy bond or a sacred connection or as when parents give selflessly to their children). It's the all in all we long for. By imagining that we've done good we feel a sense of self-agape - we think of ourselves as holy and feel the selfless love by being in our own presence. A child does not long for pride or attention - a child longs for the selfless love of their parents. We want agape - to be in the presence of God.

Relating to Egypt, the Sphinx has a supposed interesting history behind it.

Paraphrased from The Biology of Transcendence

According to the archaeological studies of Schwaller de Lubicz reported by John Anthony West in his book Serpent in the Sky, it was carved many millennia before the first Egyptian civilization. Until damaged, the Sphinx was a composite creation that symbolized the three major periods of evolution on this earth and, for close to twenty thousand years, embodied in stone our own evolution.

The body of a lion, human female breasts, and a male head adorned with a great reptile rising out of it – a unity of reptilian, old mammalian, and new mammalian, the human experience in stone. The reptilian foundation on which human life is built is lifted into ever-greater orders of functioning. Again and again the higher incorporates the lower into its service, changing the nature of the lower into that of the higher, until that which was lowest is lifted to the highest, wherein we have risen and gone beyond all limitation and constraint: the resurrected human.

In the Hindu tradition the hooded cobra represents the Kundalini Shakti, or universal creative energy from which life springs, and is a mediator between Shiva, the supreme god, and mortal man. Shakti’s movement up through the great cycles of evolution culminates in human life. In this tradition the crown of our head is the seventh chakra. Chakra comes from the Sanskrit word for “wheel”; these areas of the body are considered whirling wheels of energy and may have some relation to neural centers. When the serpent power breaks through the bounds of the skull, and thus of mind or thought, it brings enlightenment, the highest state of life. In the version presented by the Sphinx, the great Shakti then curls over and rests her hooded head right in the center of the forehead at the ridge of the brow.

With the ancient Kabbalah as guide, Hoffman spent some twenty years studying Genesis in the original Hebraic Alphabet, which, she contends, throws new light on our literary and religious heritage. One observation from Hoffman is particularly pertinent to our needs here: Eve preceded Adam, of course, and she was the one granted by the Serpent not a curse, but instead the boon of conscious awakening. Awakened to her true nature, Eve, in turn, awakened Adam as best she could. To understand the full implication of this we need to recall that monolithic myth in stone, the Sphinx, and its towering triumph of the great serpent arising from the crown of the human skull.

Who else can soothe the savage beast and lift him up but she?

“In sum, the struggle for our future is . . . the struggle between those who cling to patterns of domination and those working for a more equitable partnership world.”