The Complementarity of Nature

The title of this thread is very broad, but generally true. The word "mysticism" within the culture of academia is largely associated with "gullible", "unsophisticated", "lacking self-awareness", "wishful", "idealistic", and other like terms.

My Own History

I think it's quite normal to take to magic and mysticism when you reach early adulthood. There's a "coolness" about it, and that coolness, in terms of systems theory, would be called an 'attractor'. This is the place for questions:

Why are Humans attracted to the state of "coolness"? What does coolness represent, or serve, functionally speaking?

In terms of the science of coordinative dynamics (based in the philosophy of "complementary pairs") the interest - or my own interest - in Kabbalah, Qabalah, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Free-Masonry, Theosophy, Thelema, and the like, was a function of my desire for

a) strength and b) coolness.

Nothing my brain-mind did could be abstracted from my social-context, which was always there serving its role as ontological-referent for my brain-minds particular wiring. Like other brain-minds (most, if not all) I entered a world full of traumatizing narcissists who traumatize others in order to regulate their affective-state: sort of like a ritual (we, just like all animals, are ritualistic creatures - consider your thinking, feeling, and obsessions in light of the rhythmic dancing of many animal species: the mind "buzzes" just like the bees) the other triggers an affect, or feeling state. This part of the process tends to be instantaneous - but if the nature of the trigger is negative, the first part might be phenomenologically occluded by the adaptive response.



The above chart shows how complementary logic works.

If you live in a society which valorizes competition (i.e. the whole world), then translated into organismic functioning (how your brain-mind works), success against others, or succeeding against others, would yield a state of pride. Pride would thus be the 'attractor', but it would be wrong to think that this pride state is pure.

Pride is the natural attractor for every Human beings brain-mind, and so there is nothing more venomous within Human-Human interaction than an interaction which deprives another person of a feeling of pride (this is basically systemically structured into Human phenomenology today - mostly overlooked because people 'move' and 'think' so fast i.e. attracted by 'carrots' and pressured by sticks). But pride - itself as a state - depends upon correlation, sychrony, or at a psycho-social level of articulation, having the experience of "being recognized as a Self". When people talk to one another, this is NOT A NEUTRAL situation, but an energy-shaping dynamic with the power to increase or decrease the amount of energy the parties feel. Working together - being friendly - we maximize vitality, energy, and thus, an experience of pride ("I can do"), which comes with states like happiness, joy, etc. Everything is functionally more complex when people are good to one another - more flexible, more adaptive, more perceptive.

But this is most certainly not the world we inhabit. The world we inhabit is rigidly structured by fear dynamics - primarily a fear of shame (so interesting that genesis 2 finishes off with "there was no shame" -- as if this were the critical control parameter.)

As the chart above shows, in any competitive situation, shame is lurking as an unconscious referent within the brain-mind as the repulsing dynamic which helps generate the specific form of the pride "attractor". See how repulsion and attraction operate together inside of us to produce a single state? We are born from a paradox - a circle of opposing relations!

Anatomically, all these areas are linked: the amygdala actually IS singularly focused on detection of threat in ALL organisms. Threat - as well as the advantage it inclines the organism to seek (the 'instrumental avoidance', in behaviorist lingo) is obviously the first and most important stoppage in neural processing, and indeed, activity in the amygdala has been shown to regulate response times, which implies that the amydala regulates the activity of our 'embodiment' i.e. how we actually feel - initially - is the prerogative of the amygdala. Of course - how we feel correlates with how fast or slow we respond, and thus, how we experience ourselves in our living.

This speed factor is regulated in turn by the striatum - roughly the area around number 2 in the chart. The amygdala signals to the nuclues accumbens (ventral striatum) and the caudate-nucleus (dorsal striatum), which in turn regulate how we organize our bodies and the way and manner we organize our expressions. Reflexivity is generally associated with this brain structure: it allows us to act in fast and coordinated ways.

The middle picture of the tensor diffusion imaging shows how the brain is made up of "threads" of individual fibers which interconnect in various ways - but clearly, they process different things, which is why they move in different directions.

To return the story and my own early fascination with mysticism and ultimately - power, I was fortunate enough to be disabused of my relationship to this world by a psychological breakdown that thankfully, left enough of me to put myself back together in a more coherently organized and robust way.

Thresholds

Non-linear thinking is all about thresholds. It doesn't assume simple, reducible explanations for how one things affects another thing - something Isaac Newtons physics and Rene descartes philosophizing made worse in Human beings.

Everyone has their affect threshold. There is not a single human being alive who is invulnerable to being dysregulated by negative interactions. Negative interactions are "meaning-vehicles" which activate something within your brains-dynamics, kick-starting a process you're not allowed to oppose - only respond to.

In any case, very structure has its weak-spots, and that includes Human beings.

Suffering provides a PERSPECTIVE - an Important one - which reminds you of your intrinsic fragility.

People who scoff or experience annoyance at speech such as the above, cannot seem to imagine themselves abstracted from their present circumstances. They think who they are at that moment is 'abstract' from their context - as if the context didn't operate to mollify or aggravate feelings - i.e., acting as a 'switch'.

I call this "epistemological naivety" - which means, not knowing what there is to be felt or known phenomenologically. Elites - entitled Humans - have the most immature denial of this reality, believing, first, that they will never encounter different conditions in their living - or, if they do encounter different conditions, they are "strong enough" to overcome them.

These two conditions pertain to this world and reality, but what of the next one? I, for one, think that complementarity as a principle deals with life~death, beginning~ending, as well as "first person"~"multi-person", at different levels and ways in the process of living.

How? It's not yet understood, and, in preferring a monistic thoery, I assume some sort of relationship between anti-matter/dark-matter and the physical world. But in death, you are still in a certain sense "still here".

How did you even become what you were in your living,

But through the ontological entanglements with other people i.e. those very people who were needed to stimulate you into experiencing yourself in a certain way?

Such "thirdness" implies a place where self~other are united in a deeper sense, such as in a "collective memory" of the flow-of ones recent existence and the forms its passed through - the symmetries and broken symmetries of relation that shaped who into who you were.

Just imagine how much joy, pleasure and peace there is?! Such a place is the "source" of the pride, pleasure, happiness and peace we come to feel as Human beings. It is the ontological referent, the "transcendent self", which orients us in the ways of our dynamics.

Shame

And shame. I for one find it plausible that my future "hell" will be related to those instances where I acted in mindlessly selfish ways with little reference to the way I activated others. I acted as if I wasn't ontologically coupled with them - that the two of us in interacting formed a larger "we" - a dyad, with me on one end and you on the other.

Could shame be related to perceiving or knowing the other's state - which we contributed to in whatever way that we did? Is this nothing but the "recalibration" of the mind-stream, before it reeneters the conditions of existence? Plausibly.

....and yet the pulse of matter on Earth continues on Earth, seemingly without reference to the Human being and is many travails.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I'm pretty stunned by your last two threads. I mean you always write quality I just thought of you as pure materialist.
Keep'em coming

Dude?

Something I think, that might help you.

People with strong sex drives and tendencies towards violence crash into websites all the time. They throw out a round of garbage, picking up folks and figging off. It's not a mind brain, or a complicated picture, and I highly doubt they are "elite." Before you've figured it all out they move on leaving you holding the handbag. I'd suggest that your mind brain is leaving you to wonder why things keep tagging along, and it leads you on all these wild and wonderful adventures that might have concluded in your abuse what you perceive to be your abuse or neglect or whatever. You're trying to figure yourself out on the net. You blink on and off like a beacon, hoping and waiting while seeing glimmering patterns in the distance but alas. It's an a**hole. And it isn't really worth it. I mean it dude.

a reply to: mericks74

Just as an aside, some have little patience, including me. It's not worth losing your cool, launching your # or tangling everything up into a political scheme just to make things make sense.

the worst part is that there isn't a "third party" for this thread. Reading a monolithic piece is insightful. Seeing a discussion on it is illuminating.

Thanks for sharing....i agree, keep 'em coming.

a reply to: Peeple

Being is too real to be merely "epiphenomenal".

But at the same time, it is intricated in the dynamics of physical matter - symmetry and symmetry breaking, entropy and resisting its effects, etc.

We have to recast our emotions in these dynamical terms, while at the same time maintaining their conventional meanings for us. People often polarize one another into either/or positions, where they nestle into their 'basin of attraction' i.e. association with a culture and belief they share with others. Conservatives vs. liberals, or even in more conventional ways, overly defining themselves with beliefs - words, symbol formations - which function as ontological constraints on the structuring of their feeling.

We need to see the circularity here: feelings - which precede us - structure our beliefs - which then enforce the structuring of the feeling. Since every person begins as a baby, without a coherent narrative - understanding, correlative representation of the historical phenomena which structured the form and nature of the feelings you feel about yourself - there will always be a mismatch - an entropic "slippage" - in that the higher order cognitive dynamic (i.e. beliefs about self, world, and how to be) is out of step with the body's general flux and movement.

Telling yourself stories about how the world works when the world doesn't work that way, from my perspective, is ultimately self-destructive. Ideally, you can create the best life for yourself within a coherent epistemological and ontological framework; furthermore, it might set us on course towards another phase transition where life offers up its next mystery.

I am not a materialist. My cup-of-tea is truth, and truth is, reality is complicated. Reality has a material and a mental side, and you can't experience the grandeur of it without opening yourself completely up to shaping how you thought you knew the world, but now know the world with greater precision.

It's amazing that mystics - Jewish, Hindu, Easterner - all achieved that profound phase shift where reality becomes mental - and the space and matter around the mystic, subject to the mystics whim.

Isn't that wonderful? And yet, if another Human comes into contact with them, they will be dysregulated by their energy field. Their ignorance of their own self-states - of the way their own affectivity in perception structures the way and manner they are motivated to act - is like encountering a man who has wolves behind him, following him, although he doesn't recognize them as dangerous, but as friends. The mystic - or person who sees clearly - sees the wolves and sees that they are indeed dangerous: there's no negotiating with nature: you cannot disrespect the role of the "other" - that other half, God, or what-ever you imagine is responsible for all this structuring, you cannot put yourself in opposition to the Tao - the natural way - the path of the Tzaddik.

I'm profoundly interested in the first two chapters of Genesis, so much so that I find myself wondering - and as analytical and skeptical as I am, I am still so interested here, like the very mystics I sometimes complain about - the book honestly reads - in the Hebrew (and to appreciate the philosophy of this language is another profound subject in itself) - like the dynamics of reality translated into the language of Human beings - not merely Human beings as 'neutral agents' - but AS human beings, as thee very awareness they experience and the body's they inhabit. Shame, then, is a scientific reality as much as it is a Human emotion. It's nothing but culture - and its inherent asymmetry between elites and non-elites - that has generated such false understandings of Human nature - insisting on an antagonistic paradigm - a paradigm, itself generated by traumatological dynamics, which frustratingly enough, is eager to reproduce itself - just as a virus is built to manipulate the dynamics of living creatures, there is a truth to the hypnotic allure that captures the awareness of people who want to manipulate, hurt, punish, etc. Sitting in the background are their own reasons for feeling this way; all their own hurt - all those facts about themselves, which they ignore and shamelessly pretend to be irrelevant to their hateful motivations to destroy all goodness.

But then again, how are you to change if your environment never offers you the "affordance" for change? Yuo need a 'holding environment'. When a Human is hurt, it is not much different from a baby. Baby's need to be held - and in being cute, its easy to hold them. Children too - still cute enough - their faces show it - so we still hold them.

But adults like to pretend that such emotionality doesn't dynamically constrain their feeling dynamics just as much - or still importantly - as within children. There's this retarded pretense: simply look at the ancient Egyptian, Babylonians, Persians. Is it at all surprising, really, that todays agitators are largely the Western/Roman world, and the Islamic/Persian world? Do you think the retarded mystery cults with their simplistic philosophies and deranged convictions emerge in a vacuum? Or does a Human culture built around terror, torture, war, and mayhem, not necessarily produce those genetic 'champions'? I joke about genetic - as it is entirely based on system processes i.e. luck. Luck and positive feedback is what made some people nobles and others commoners. And those nobles - being normal humans prone to greed - ignobly went to the darkest and meanest extremes to maintain their control - to which they sincerely believed themselves entitled to experience.

There is a profound error in any way of thinking that reduces others to objects for your own gain. They are not ontological objects. They are never - and despite being used by you in such a way - actually existing as that. They are real, and so are you. You and they are ontologically locked: quantumly entangled, in physics terms.

To be Human is to be a macroscopic object with profound molecular and electromagnetic complexity - to be a system, in effect - that spontaneously self-organizes to synchronize and resonant with other humans.

Going against that core intrinsic dynamic is a possibility inherent within the Human condition. Consciousness allows suffering. Suffering, if left untended - i.e. without mourning - can create bitterness, dissociation, and defense idealizations that, the more idealistic they become (polarized in the positive direction) the more hatred and repulsion they feel towards the polar opposite of those ideals i.e. Jews, democrats, liberals, progressives, etc.

Who hasn't seen this dynamic operate in themselves or in a child whose acting up?

originally posted by: Astrocyte

...But adults like to pretend that such emotionality doesn't dynamically constrain their feeling dynamics just as much - or still importantly - as within children. There's this retarded pretense: simply look at the ancient Egyptian, Babylonians, Persians. Is it at all surprising, really, that todays agitators are largely the Western/Roman world, and the Islamic/Persian world? Do you think the retarded mystery cults with their simplistic philosophies and deranged convictions emerge in a vacuum? Or does a Human culture built around terror, torture, war, and mayhem, not necessarily produce those genetic 'champions'? I joke about genetic - as it is entirely based on system processes i.e. luck. Luck and positive feedback is what made some people nobles and others commoners. And those nobles - being normal humans prone to greed - ignobly went to the darkest and meanest extremes to maintain their control - to which they sincerely believed themselves entitled to experience.
...
To be human is to be a macroscopic object with profound molecular and electromagnetic complexity - to be a system, in effect - that spontaneously self-organizes to synchronize and resonant with other humans.
...

I agree with pretty much all you said, except this bit. Adults should have learned to control their feelings. That's for a large part what eastern mysticism from buddhism to tao, yoga, chi... is about. You meditate your ankles hurt like crazy but you control yourself. And don't blame it on the ancients, their mystery cult was everything but retarded.
Did you know the ancient Egyptian never did prayers like "oh gawd help me!" until the very end of their realms days when the seapeople raided the Mediterraneans? That's where the problem lies in modern Christian islamic etc believers, it's all they do.
The ancients had faith in their own powers, their own magic, it sure seems superficial to us, outright silly maybe, but at least they believed they can handle their own problems.

It's build from fear. All hate is.
And genes play a huge role. I bet you know about the mice inheriting learned behaviour from their parents? That. The original sin is to be scared, because you pass it on like a curse.

Also humans don't only adjust to other humans, so I would have preferred you say "to their environment", I get that you meant it as in communication but many people are a lot happier interacting with plants and animals than with humans.

Dude do you watch movies or get out or anything like that? You don't produce proof, and half of what you say is contradicting itself. More like you're toying on the net. You string words together to form a response trail, and then contradict yourself in the very next paragraph almost like you're toying with people. I find it highly immature..

You just want things to fit your narrative of dueling opposites. Like with this. Maybe you will pay no mind to me at all and then in another paragraph say something against "dual opposites." Yeah. Well. Thanks but no thanks. You don't seem to be listening to what anyone has to say beyond changing the narrative based off people here and how what they say has to somehow tie into your harmonization theme, like all others here are striving to offer you sympatico. I'd dare say it's not a theme at all and you have some possessive need to interact and think others are working to do the same by your terms, just off a belief that we all want to harmonize and strive and whatever else along the strains of whatever you put here. You don't even take the others into consideration. If you've made up your mind that it is about you talking to yourself and pretending to be a genius why even bother?? Everything someone says yiu use as some kind proof people are just here to specifically fit into the narrative of eventually merging with you and it doesnt even matter because apparently, theyre not people. But I'm done, mainly. Off to something new I say.