Originally Posted by
volwest
It is a fact brought on by neurobiologists that there is no specific spot in the brain for "good" or "bad", for those notions or values depend on cultures and time.
The plasticity of the mind is so that what is good for us can be bad for someone else, and what is bad for us in a certain situation is no longer bad in an other. Everything being based on survival and the memories of what is unpleasant.
The mind does not remember much or not at all of what is good, or what brings on pleasure.
But it knows about reward, and some neurons are constantly on duty to make sure it happens.
In fact we remember very well what a punishment is. Punishment is discomfort. When a being, a rat or a man in training accomplishes an action, which results in pain, they will try to learn a different action to avoid this pain, and even more if there is a reward at the end. Circus animals are educated this way...the hard way, and then the reward way.
What beings look for at all time is the end of the tension(s) which creates pain, and "growing up", or learning, is the discovery of ways which bring us to this release and which end a certain suffering. This learning process is even more reinforced by rewards, meaning the presence of a certain habit, which will set in place the rewarded behavior.
We only look for a tension when we know the possibility to end the said tension. The orgasm is cloned on this model.
In other words, we do not like being tense, unless we know the way to relax.
If we put in place a little experiment...and we twist our arm in a new position which creates after a while a tension, a certain pain or discomfort...it will not be long before we start looking for the way to lower the level of energy which we cannot channel. If the unpleasant position is maintained because we cannot change it, it will become a new position and will be forgotten.
The body can sometimes get use to very unpleasant positions and make do with it...those positions become "normal"...(giraffe women)
It is the same for everything, ideas and thoughts. To accept an idea from someone is unpleasant for it creates a friction with our daily thoughts. We do not listen to music that make us tense, but rather a music which offers us the possibility to bring back our energy level closer to "zero". It is the same for all organisms, from Man to crystal...
The balance is obtained when the level of energy is endlessly brought back to the lowest level.
"...To the concept of negation, corresponds very well the fact that in psychoanalyses, we do not find "no" coming from the unconscious, and that the re-cognition of this unconscious by the self is always expressed by a negative form. The proof is the reaction from the patient when he says: I did not think that...I never thought of that."
Freud
We can therefore understand that everything we do, say or think is in most cases a negation of what bothers us, a refusal of what hurts us, a release in rapport with what pains us.
Where are our affirmations in this endless negation? Where is our power of decision in this automatic search of what makes us suffer, in the automatic search of what brings us a certain reward, or in general, what comforts us and binds us to the image we have of ourselves ?
This affirmation of ourselves, this auto-contemplation, as solid as a rock and as unshakable as DNA is not a voluntary decision, it is not an affirmation of a choice or of a preference...this affirmation is the result of the negation of everything else.
I decide to go see a movie. Is it a free willed based decision? Or is it the negation of many other possibilities, which we do not accept, or even don't think about, that are hidden and that does not appear in our attention but can appear in therapy or in a profound reflection on the essential reasons for our behavior...
All of our ambitions, all of our hopes, all of our intentions are free willed? Or are they what remains in our imagination or in our habits, or simply the obligation to respect the direction that our society invites us to endorse in order to be socially accepted?
Our actions are the negation of what we cannot do, our thoughts are the negation of what we cannot think, our words are the negation of what we must silence. We perceive what we have learned to perceive, we feel what we must feel by negation of what we must not or cannot feel to be human, to be part of humanity.
We are what we did not allow ourselves to be, by obligation, by ignorance, or by intellectual dependence, by lack of freedom of comprehension.
Our mind builds itself, and therefore builds our relationship to the world on, and by negation.
We are conditioned by the negation of everything that is not us.
The repressed is our true nature; we are the negation of our repression, the denial of our true nature.
But we believe we are a gigantic will, an affirmation, a coherent intention...when we are nothing else but "no".
So?
" To be or not to be" that is the question indeed.
And an answer can arise...if we are negation, if we cannot affirm our being but by the refusal of what we are not...Being is first "not being", to no longer BE.
Being is not ex-isting.
Being is in-sisting.
In fact, if we want to be conscious we must diminish the energy that we dispense towards life, or that life takes from our bank without asking. We have to admit to ourselves that we have never been free to decide anything, and that we have always carried a decision or a will which was "the negation of", more than an " acceptation affirming that". We have never been free because our life, through its sweet tooth for energy has prevented us from being more conscious, or in rapport with sensation, with pure perception.
Tensions nourish our consciousness, and the resolution of tensions makes us fall into the trap of rewards.
"I cannot take a human life" is a negation.
The sensation of guilt recalls the maintaining in the minds of individuals of a feeling of belonging to a group.
This guilt will arise when the individual feels that he no longer conforms to the laws of the group to which he wants to belong to, through the needs of defining himself and claim his part of happiness.
The feeling of guilt is an attachment to our minds by ways of adopting an idea, an opinion that we must defend.
The size of the group will be in direct relation to the size of guilt...more people, more guilt to deal with.
When we look at animals, we can observe that they all have traditions, they belong to groups, and they transmit those traditions and feelings of belonging to each others with this mechanism that binds them to follow the rules and laws put in place which are an other way to regulate fear within the group.
Laws and rules arise during the association of similar individuals to regulate power struggles and the distribution of tasks in order to ensure the survival of the group and each individual belonging to the said group. Laws regulate the tensions of the group as a whole but also reduce tensions within individuals.
When laws and rules appear within a group, the individual sees a promise of security, and therefore a better chance to reproduce himself. The representation of his own reproduction and the transmission of himself and of the informations that concerns him and the group to which he belongs to are enlarged to become the representation that the group has of itself.
The individual has no longer an individual based fear but a fear stemming from his own mind which will ironically increase by the simple fact of belonging to a group.
Beyond the sensation of security that units the group, the group itself will become an "individual" with fears of it's own and the need to regulate it's own tensions and reproduction of itself in order to find infinite "life" and therefore will try to assimilate other groups...etc.
Fear amplifies therefore, from cells to tissue, tissue to organs, organs to organisms, organisms to social groups, social groups to nations...
Long enough Sarge ?
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Soc. 101.
Here's mine.
Lately I've been spending my spare time trying to teach Owl-girl 'self-defense" but have gotten tired of gettin' my butt kicked! SM has wandered in with some younger wolves, Wild Goth (WG), and Survivorman (SMII) Sm has put them to work setting up booby-traps & big snares as well as digging pits with pugi stakes in the bottom. (Hmmm, note to self, get SM to have a nice long talk with VW as soon as possible!) I've saved every tin-can we've used for food. When I opened them I left the lids partially attached. The small stream nearby, (probably runs off into the lake) has about a million stones so I've dumped a few into each can and had SM help me string them across the trails on all the ways into our camp using 550 cord. Good chance anybody tries sneakin' up on us they'll give away their position! Well, gotta go and make more coffee, FVR, Trax, WE, & VW have been really hittin' it...I suspect FVR has dumped some Seagram's Crown Royal into it...
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