The Absence of Love

There are two things Humans fear: death, and shame.

Just two things, and they both more or less amount to the "end" of something desired. Death is the end of life, and shame is the end of self-hood.

To be shamed is in fact to experience the normal autonomic response of the fight/flight/freeze mechanism, but here, in this world Humans live in, the shame response is 'trapped' within the confines of our consciousness - to be felt, lived, and known - and the structures that result - 'knowing myself in this particular way', are what carries out the process.

Death is the de-facto "bad" for all living things. There is no disputing this: all living things operate on the principle of avoiding death, which it does by reconstructing itself through a network of chemical reactions that form between the inside of the cell (or organism) to the environmental affordances themselves. Similarly, Human affective systems incline towards pride, which means avoiding feelings of shame.

If one can think of ones inner world as constituted by external "connections" with others as the "selection device" for how you end up behaving, then the following chart can be seen to be a more specific description of the interaction at hand:



Humans interact through prediction systems. This is a basic fact discovered by the neurosciences which more or less matches experimental studies. The brain evolved to match visual 'percepts' with cognitive 'percepts', so that the particular environmental salience (good or bad) would produce the significant feeling (good or bad) which would activate cortical narrating processes that occur through symbolic-linguistic systems.

The Self is a function of the Human forebrain:



Just as the visual cortex tracks objects to create an emergent percept of a visualizable person, so to do mirror neurons in anterior cingulate, insula. an orbito frontalal cortex pick up the relevant patterns that emanate from the other's we interact with. The "higher" pattern is the narrative-structure itself, or the "way of being you" vis-à-vis the other you are interacting with. The object and the environment in question imposes a selection-process on your approach, but also makes reflexive our responses to negative percepts.

The identificatory process - or "how I am, or the self I experience, under these conditions" i.e. say a library, makes me perceive and act this way, as opposed to another way. Simple, right? Yes. But the world we live in has produced so much fantasy that people are unable to make out reality from the things they see in the media. Dissociation and internal defense mechanisms against negative percepts, followed by a plethora of unconsciously assimilated idealized objects used to ward off negative affects and the unconscious thought/fantasies they create, works almost instantaneously in the mind, and it's not usually until after we notice ourselves having changed state for knowable reasons that we can begin to redirect our attention in a more coherent and symmetrical direction.

Ultimately, however, evolution reveals itself to be more than merely about "avoiding death". Autopoiesis, or "self-recreation", also has reproduction, and passing on a near clone of the last system so that the organism can keep itself going through 'time". But all organisms, even the earliest protists, have some "oomph" for existing that becomes more and more apparent as life progresses, from the sea, to the land, to the ferocious size of dinosaurs, to the acute sensitivity to behavioral signalling of mammals, to the play of more advanced mammals - and what play suggests, in that it takes a group for play to become complex; and play, as every animal observer can see, requires reciprocity and return. Return - or "experiencing the self being known" - in a vivacious mode, is the inducement factor for brain growth. Play - and the enlivenment that results from return, is super-subtle, and not something the animal consciously knows or recognizes: its a mere emergent property of brain-function - more a "detection" process of neurological systems than a phenomenologically active process.

Care, or in Human beings, what I call the "recognition process", is what the "identificatory need" is ultimately tuned to: Human mind-brains need to feel connected to other humans to feel coherent and enlivened. The enlivenment is the end goal; the identificatory pattern with a larger group-identity is the "key", as it were, that opens up the channels of connection.

Still, reality is much bigger and different than the world we know today. I am convinced that ancient Humans, evolving in the forests of Africa and the middle East, did not experience the environment with the sort of threat that we see today. The mind they had flowed with far less entropy, and with "entropy", or stress, comes a state of consciousness that is deficiency oriented: a state we call the "ego".

I wonder sometimes whether Teilhard De Chardin will end up being proven right about his claim that a belief that Humankinds future "lie in the stars" is the false god of our times, and that in the face of what he calls the "Omega Point", that are interest will by neessity turn inward, into our "inner-space", where something greater and more transcendent lies.

This is a scary thought to someone richly invested in todays fantasies. The human is assumed to be a byproduct of randomness, as opposed to an organism held in place by it's affects of love, awe and play - its "teleodynamism"?

This is the picture that will transform our human future. Love is not just an emotion, but an ordering principle within our body's physiology The academics who mock and make fun of those who call for "safe spaces", fail miserably to understand or appreciate how their own disaffection from the concept of a safe-space, and what it ultimately links to later on, is a function of their own neurological/self development. The claim - the wish - that the universe is different from what the evidence indicates, bespeaks of a civilization - perhaps the very describes in the bible as "babblers" - people who speak in languages and exist in ways that dissociate them from metaphysical (quantum) reality - essentially equivalent to baby's and their babbling - babbling egotists who think they can survive death or somehow trick reality, as if you and your feelings about things weren't created by realities dynamics to begin with!

To say this differently, you only feel fear because there is an absence of love in you. You only feel confusion because you don't understand your relation to the world around you. To feel love - to truly experience it in its purest sense - is to challenge the fears that prevent you from opening yourself up. This is always shame, and shame, of course, is always the "kryptonite" of the Human, compelling the formation of anger, and resentment.

And pain. A lot of people fear pain. As for death. I don't fear it. I fear for the ones I leave behind.

I disagree. Most people do not fear death, but rather in a way look forward to it and the release that it would provide.

No, the things that people fear are pain and the unknown. It is the pain associated with death that most people fear (though some truly fear death and the end it brings, these are typically atheists or others whom believe in neither an afterlife no reincarnation) rather than death itself.

The shame I can see, but is not that just another form of pain?

a reply to: Astrocyte

It sounds as if you need people that don't cause you shame - but really no one can cause you shame.
Shame happens when you feel separate and so does the need to connect to 'other people'.

When it is found that there are no things - that you are not a thing - then the kingdom shall be revealed.

Humans have fear because they are always fighting things that don't exist. They are fighting with things in time. What is there to fear right here and right now? That is unless you imagine another time and space?

Ideas in mind may say that you need people and things to be safe - but are you not safe right here and right now?

Love is here now. The space between now and 'another time' is filled with fear - but there is no 'other time' really.

The absence of 'you in time' equals love.

Fear arises because the attention is attending to what is not happening. The cure is always available - right here and right now - not in the thoughts but in the sensing - see and hear what is happening and it will lift away the stories about what is not happening.

originally posted by: JDeLattre89
I disagree. Most people do not fear death, but rather in a way look forward to it and the release that it would provide.

No, the things that people fear are pain and the unknown. It is the pain associated with death that most people fear (though some truly fear death and the end it brings, these are typically atheists or others whom believe in neither an afterlife no reincarnation) rather than death itself.

The shame I can see, but is not that just another form of pain?

This is right.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
There are two things Humans fear: death, and shame.

To say this differently, you only feel fear because there is an absence of love in you. You only feel confusion because you don't understand your relation to the world around you. To feel love - to truly experience it in its purest sense - is to challenge the fears that prevent you from opening yourself up. This is always shame, and shame, of course, is always the "kryptonite" of the Human, compelling the formation of anger, and resentment.

Human are more complicated that the simple words you use to describe them. The mind is capable of holding many contradictions. Words are often times lacking the complexity that is going on in the human mind. I think there is a lot more to it than simple abstractions. People's needs and desires are just as important as fear. Fear is not entirely the motivation behind our thoughts. Fear is a reaction. I think there's more to it than your analysis.

Nietzsche argued, quite forcefully that there was a drive even stronger than the fear of death/shame. Even stronger than Freud's sex drive:

The Will to Power

I'm in agreement with those who feel more fear of pain than death. Be it physical or emotional.
I also think Will to Power is a common drive to all humans.

Shame just seems to me like the pain of being rejected by others (or fear of experiencing that pain).

a reply to: Itisnowagain

Shame happens when you feel separate and so does the need to connect to 'other people'.

Not true. You can't pretend to be 'outside' the dynamical loop of things itsnowagain. You have a physical body with an evolutionary history that is subject to formative rules that operate between human beings. To say you don't register an affect is only to be dissociated from others. You, clearly, are a very dissociative individual, choosing a spirituality that makes you seem "disconnected" to others.

Do you laugh, do you play around? Do you have deep love and care? All of these states entail risking exposure to their opposites i.e. shame, when attempting to connect, mourning and a feeling of loss, when someone we care about "goes away" (either death or a break in the relationship).

I don't dissociate Itsnowagain. Or at least, I'm particularly good at remembering myself, at being aware of the state I'm in. Life - Being - Earth - is not bad. Things are not bad - or not unreal.

Your philosophy, in effect, is an illusion cast over your consciousness that derives from unresolved traumas. Why else suggest that "I need people to not cause me shame". Need? Yes, obviously. I'm human in that way. You, on the other hand, have just implied that you are "beyond shame" - as if the need for others to be kind to you is gone, to recognize your value is gone.

My one response to this: you are disconnected from reality, from the other, by hiding behind a philosophy that makes you devalue the other.

The only result of such an orientation is an insufficient connection to the love that underlies are human existence.

a reply to: redempsh

And then Nietzsche lost his mind and went insane.

It is nothing but stupidity and ignorance of how the universe works to act this way. Nietzsche left this world - or reality - disgraced by his own philosophical hubris. He was turned into precisely the thing he despised: a needy creature. His sister, however, being more open hearted and probably aware of the defense mechanism of Nietzsche attitudes, nevertheless loved and took care of him for the rest of his life.

This is the poetry of life, of development, and of the "ontological branching" that our life choices place us in., There is profound "rebuke", as it were, in the universes subjecting a symbol of "will to power", to such a pathetic end, and to nevertheless make his physical and affective life able to experience the pleasures of recognition, connection, and kindness - things Nietzsches conceited intelligence dissociated an devalued. In a sense, the neurological disease that ate away at his higher cognitive powers, revealed the "core" affective intelligence that lurks beneath our narrating mind, and reveals the way the brain responds to kindness, recognition of need, and the feelings that arise when another agent holds your body with a feeling of care.

a reply to: JDeLattre89

How bout this. I acknowledge your point and it makes some degree of sense, but there is a way of thinking about this that restores death and shame as the forces which generate so much confusion, uncertainty, and the suffering such states cause us.

Shame is much bigger than most people realize, and its not until a person goes through psychotherapy that they are able to construct a narrative structure that makes sense of the affects/feelings they feel. Indeed, it is almost like an ironclad law that the earlier traumatized self looks upon the idea of trauma, shame, or its general fearfulness, and fails to see its relevance to its own nature, to then be surprised at how conversation and exploration of the past and a recognition of normal human needs creates a self that then looks back upon its previous self with a sense of "how naïve".

Knowledge builds perceptual states. There' no debating that. This is why an impulse to defend yourself, or defend an idea or feeling which seems essential to your present identity, compels delusional beliefs: we need to believe, and since we only know the world in terms of the knowledge we've assimilated in our living, it is very rare that a person "knows" the value of what they don't know.

The logic of these fears is simple: Death is the cessation of life. Humans, like all animals, exists because death is something that is repeatedly spurned. The organisms is "self-recreating", so death, naturally, would emerge within te functionality of a self-aware creature as a horrifying loss of everything that is valued: being, family, skies, friends, etc. This is why fear operates within minds, and why minds feel an inchoate "confusion" or "uncertainty". The greatest uncertainty is not having a sense of your ontological standing within the space of existence. If you exist, and you do not have an explanation for that, death becomes a powerful fear-generating mechanism in the mind-brain. An explicit knowledge of death as a fear is not necessary; all forms of existential related anxieties "feed back" upon this one general fearfulness.

As for shame. Human interaction and interpersonal recognition of capacity and value is the basis of our spiritual existence. Again - something desired and loved - in this, the feelings of pride and the enlivenment that is experienced when in connection with others - produces a fear of the absence: shame. Shame is the registration of a "mismatch" between nervous systems. The minds clash; one self is negatively related to another, or both feel a negative relation.

Shame is again a powerful, subtle force that works in the shadows - compelling defensive behaviors, again, through that "confusion and uncertainty" that you mention. But these states are qualia - not specific, and therefore, do not refer to the objective social conditions which "libidinize" these self states i.e. absence of interpersonal recognition.

To reduce shame and death further: shame is the absence of what are minds want: to connect. Death, in turn, is the absence of what our organisms want: to live.

It is thus very logical to see, as clinical psychologists well recognize, that these are the two biggest problems for human beings.

a reply to: Astrocyte

That's ok. Most clinical psychos are utter fools anyways. If you don't believe me, just ask their patients.

That being said, I will acknowledge the validity of your point to an extent. But only to the extent to whereas both shame and death in this understanding are simply representational forms of pain.

Have all humans feared death?

You are reading from the "How to take advantage of the weak hearted" handbook. What Seminary school did you drop out of?

originally posted by: BigBangWasAnEcho
Have all humans feared death?

You are reading from the "How to take advantage of the weak hearted" handbook. What Seminary school did you drop out of?

Makes one wonder why suicide happens, dunnit?

Awesome thread, you should study psychology you seem to understand this stuff on such a deep level.

originally posted by: BigBangWasAnEcho
Have all humans feared death?

You are reading from the "How to take advantage of the weak hearted" handbook. What Seminary school did you drop out of?

I saw this reply yesterday and thought it was a bit harsh. But after sleeping on it, I think this reply is basically spot-on.