I Hate That I Hate

I hate that I hate.

Rightly does Buddhist psychology deserve its status in understanding the core dilemma

“When hit with discomfort, the conventional reaction is to whine and regret, kick oneself, take it hard. So we feel two afflictions: 1) the inevitable, physical feelings [a first arrow the world blasts us with] and 2) the additional, mental reactions [the second arrow we shoot into ourself]. We may fail to note any relief or escape from uncomfortable feelings [the first arrow] other than to distract ourselves with sensual pleasure. So we cling to diversions, rather than observing what is actually present, the arising and passing of feelings.”

The Buddha's meanderings read a bit clunky in todays system's terms, but the point is a crucial phenomenological one: we do not choose what we feel; feeling accosts us by the chance interactions on the outside which activate and trigger dynamical processes operating within us on the inside.

Symmetry controls reality and that's just the way it is. It will outlive my existence in same way that I know it is responsible for my existence/. Kudos to the readers of this thread: your mind "bounces" back and forth in terms of a symmetry dialectic that moves between values (being) and fear of losing that which is valued (thinking, fretting, worrying). The Biosemiotic movement in the biological sciences is growing too quickly vis-à-vis the developments in systems biology that in ten or twenty years time we will be talking about the very realistic possibility that our planet is a living, meaningful process, and that we evolved as the 'center-piece' of its ontological meaning-making.

It is sad that Semiotics has taken so damn long to develop: from the Portuguese Thomian theologian John Poinsont, to C.S Peirce who studied the latters writings, to Alfred North Whitehead, who discovered so much in common with Peirce, to Jacob Von Uexkull, who brought forth the centralizing theme of the functional circle, better conceptualized as a tripartite system of perception-affect-action.

But now, in the 21st century, there are dozens of biosemiotic philosophers who range from Pericean objective idealism (I include myself in this group) to a thermodynamic materialism (Marcello Barbieri, Dorion Sagan), but the more important point is that the epistemology and ontology of the sciences is changing towards relationality - and the only way this can be stopped - a lunatic idea - is to destroy society itself, as Peirce said:

“Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.”
― Charles Sanders Peirce

The solidity of the scientific edifice being created powers the mind with a belief that is awesome to experience. Knowing that you are knowing better than others i.e. more truly, is both privileging, and frustrating, because the positions of others, being based on such rickety grounds and deriving from nothing more than the egotistical need to defend what the self produces, is something the other cannot help but do.

This means I hate because I value what I know, and so experience the epistemological inferiority of other views (a gestalt percept) in a way that can be described within the Buddhas parable as a "first arrow", which derives from the simple fact that beliefs are things - mental things which work to dissipate the affective energy of our meaning realities. When I feel something, my brain-mind is enacting a relational ontology whereby unconscious objects within you (or as your brain) mutually intimate themselves often in an ice-berg like way: the expressed action, which is based upon a semiotic transformation that is far deeper/more complex than the mind which expresses it.

We still live in a world where people don't get it: Your brain is PLASTIC. Genetic determinism is a MYTH. Knowing this, and accepting the remarkable alchemical like nature of reality - that transformation exists, but exists in an astonishingly treacherous terrain which requires a profound willingness to engage - as Peirce says, to learn requires the desire to learn, and some of us do not desire to learn or understand how it is the forces within and around us shape the whole process to begin with.

As a spiritual person who experiences little leeway to "cheat" himself without his body putting up a fight, there are some truths which are too true for me to turn my back on, no matter how easy others do it, to dissociate, from perspective, is not a skill, but a spiritual malady.

I hate that I hate, though. While the part that cares to know the world truthfully puts up a fight against the intellectualist gnostics who don't read modern science or philosophy and so imagine they know the world truthfully, the part of me that hates knows quite well how damaging this emotion is to the dialectical engagement with the other. The other, another human being, functions just as I do. What I feel constitutes the basis of an object-relation, and as brain science shows, mirror neurons are doing just this: mapping self-other relation processes in the other, as if the self-were performing that process.

My commitment to truth means I am committed to you. The Other person, experienced by me as an "other", is not, in actual reality, actually an other to me. While that fiction is arguably necessary for the time being, the road ahead seems very much directed to linking the varieties of mental experience that a human can have, and a corresponding "semiosphere" with various ontological valences vis-à-vis one another.

Again, I hate to say it, because like others, I am a "fan" of the metaphysical picture painted by popular culture. Yet, I think, Steven Spielberg and company are naïve about the "alien" and its relation to the psychodynamics of self-formation. Teilhard De Chardin thought the space-fantasizing of his era was a hyperbolic fantasy related to the excitement to developing so many technologies and experiencing our technical prowess as a species.

Chardin read the gnostic/luciferian/prometheanism rightly, and saw it as it really is: a sad fantasy. Of course, this does not invalidate space-travel, as indeed we have sent robots into space and onto other planets. Nor, of course, does this invalidate the possibility of life on other planets.

The real issue is semiosis vs. materialism. If we are to make sense of things, only a monistic framework will work. No strings can lie loose. Indeed, our very mental experience of being needs to be tied into the functionality of all that exists if a true-monism is to be appreciated.

In that sense, I somewhat agree with Deepak Chopra's "Human Universe". But how different mine is from his! Instead of mind being anterior to the physical world, it arises as a function of the body's relation with other body-minds and a natural ecosystem which intimates its meaningfulness

Stuart Kauffmans ontological sensibility, of a truly emergent and creative universe, may, indeed, be frighteningly out of touch with the community college epistemology that generates popular culture.

Really? It pisses me off that you hate hating. Just hate me for being mad and deal with it.

originally posted by: Astrocyte

to dissociate, from perspective, is not a skill, but a spiritual malady.

This rang very true to me. Hard to explain why I find this to be true. But I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine about reality perception, and he boiled existence down to perspective (as in, there is nothing but your own perspective). After he made his point we didn´t really continue the conversation, but I could not help feeling that his/this line of thinking is a trap. His/This concept can push you spiritually forward compared to the average Joe, but when you say perspective is the final stop in understanding reality, you have reached spiritual stagnation, and you are totally blinded to even deeper understanding.

Or is the bottom of the rabbit hole really not that far down?

I don't know...

Great posts by the way, I like you.

a reply to: Astrocyte


Debatable in relation to this matter is that are animals capable of hate?

Animals do compete for territory, reproductive advantages and so on.

But in relation to these issues are they capable of hate?

Rage perhaps.....

When it comes to looking into ancient comprehension of mankind's capacity to relate to mysticism?

There should be a warning label about hate.

Nice thread.