NON-FICTION: How We Feel About Each Other, Stop Tripping Dude!

There's always something to unpack =  to really deal with SOME stuff would be too too too much, too divisive, too depressing = how much lighter we always feel when we finally unwind :) = the weight that has been suppressing us.  :)  = when we realize that its not that we are flawed  :) = it's not hopeless = we just have problems with pinning down our problems = we confuse that with not having a plan = not knowing what to do.  


But we keep at it.  

Whats up with reform?
Thinking of why I feel reform is such a flat, frustratingly unambitious word...

Its because investing your time in "the system" is not any kind of investment out from your own pocket and into someone else's, its the identity, the self, that you keep believing in, thinking that's all you got, and there's nothing to be done about certain things (mostly certain powerful one-percent type things), that you know personally, or in theory.

And when those theories don't match up with what we experience, the reformist answer is to see this as an aberration of identity, just bad laws, bad politicians, bad corporations, etc.  Fixed abstractions, not concrete people we know, can understand, can talk to.  Politicians are actual people, and/or ideas we do in our head.  Laws are concrete social relations, i.e, people, insofar as they exist only in our minds, and our minds exist only in our relationships (organic and inorganic).

Insofar as they are expressions of what we want to happen with each other, and what we don't want to happen with each other, law=people.  Changing the laws, changing the people, it's all, and only, a matter of changing concrete social relations.  It's all, and only, actual relationships experienced by people, and theorized over incessantly.  It's  people dude.  :)

Reformism is a type of alienated individualism.  Its like, I can have this identity of myself as alienated through virtue, and, thus, doomed by my will for positive change.  I portray myself, to myself, as the person outside of the community, national or local, who is figuring out how to get people to do something.  Convincing, swaying, persuading.  It always comes down to who's deciding what our goals are, and how successful we are at creating cooperation.

It's always going to be right now, right now, and still, even right now...
Experience is where we are.  We don't theorize to figure it out, we theorize to describe what we feel, what we do as our brains.  It's the only reality we can confirm.  It is what you see now, and it is economics, history, law, philosophy, and it is a hanging potted plant, seen if I look to my right, through a black net screen, and window, that slightly blur the sunlight, gleaming on a single extension, a green, soft-spiked dinosaur tale.

All of this is stuff we feel in our bodies, in our infinite interrelations and interactions.  We feel it as bodies and perceive it in our head.  Our blood is moving and sometimes we feel it, our brain is moving and part of that moving is knowing and feeling.  That's what we are.  There are no memories to keep.  There's no storage for ideas, there's only some site of constant repetition of neuronal circuits, which, whatever abstractions of "willpower" we have, is us, is what we do.  We don't retrieve memories, we connect neurons to neurons.  That 'we' is what our neurons do too.  We don't store up ideas, we separate our actions, some called memories, some called honesty.    We don't unlock our unconsciousness, or suppress memories, we connect and disconnect our consciousness, our brain cells.

We feel and do Voices, Scenes, Imagination, Writing, Composing, Confessing, Charming-as part of our brain."Suppressing memories" is a form of neuronal separation.  Racism is a form of neuronal separation.  Sexism is too.  As a masculine person, I have to place my own analysis, theories, over my actual experience of women.  To make sure I know what's really up with them, I have to access what I know about their category.  If that category is not based on the continued interaction I have with actual people, I don't know who anybody really is, cuz I gotta test everyone to see how their behavior is Masculine or Feminine.  (My bros, we gotta get buff!).  

The method of "memory suppression", for example, that I used as a child, was to think of something I wanted to forget, and then preventing it from connecting to memories, and from staying in contact with my direct consciousness.  Like if I thought of some memory where I felt abandoned, rejected, or abused by someone, I would keep thinking it and then wait for it to connect with other thoughts, feelings, voices, etc, and then retrieve whatever I could from my memory, to focus on that instead, until I couldn't remember the first thing I was thinking of.  In order to deny what we are seeing when we see people, we need to focus on categories, and start seeing feminine people, black people, instead of those people as they present themselves, reveal themselves, share themselves.  And those are all these things that comprise another abstraction we treat as an external reality, a building, thing, or place, that thing we imagine as "society."

Pro-choice women, don't get knocked up or raped.  Young Black Men, don't dress yourself into an early grave.  And then there's normal people, who impregnate, rape, and kill.There is no blackness out there to throw Trayvon Martin into.  He is just a dead human, not a symbol, but an actual instance of what people do, and the violence that people do to the young.

What we do with a case like this, is to try and not to be unjust, even if we get caught up in the signs of oppression, like making the murdered person into  the aggressor, giving him half the blame.   All that's left, for those of us still alive, is how we perceive Trayvon Martin, and what we will do or not do, say or not say, to stop this shit.

There is no blackness, no evil that can be thrown over anybody to deny that they are people.  But people encourage people to try and throw that blanket of race on themselves, and on others, just as one is also, trying not to to do that.  Abusers, and bullies cover themselves with abstractions that are not to be concretized, and they want you to cover the bruises and the suffering, and the horror, with the abstractions they give you.  Anything to avoid the suffering their actions cause.

Zimmerman placed his own abstractions onto this kid, wanted him to conform to the role of suspect, potential thug, image from a ghetto movie.  Because, getting down to the level of concrete experience, (all experience is experience, ideas are experience), means facing the fact that you're afraid of seventeen your old kids, because you haven't grown up enough to feel safe around Kids.  That hurts to realize, and it hurts to think of how horrible it is to be that way.

How would you feel if you ever got to the point where you even came close to killing a seventeen year old walking down your block?

It wasn't race that killed Trayvon, and it wasn't race that made Zimmerman kill, it was the practice of Racism.  The practice of separating experience from action, of covering experience with ideas, until you forget the experience you have with other people.  The practice of Racism is the practice of focusing on abstractions, playing out scenes when they are not around.  Not trusting when they try to act all innocent, cuz we know their category, we know what they really are.  But then, that's why we need some good news.

But Zimmerman, like all of us, was trying to get safe, and trying to get free.  He did that by making some people into abstract categories, with abstract enemies, and abstract victims.  What resulted from his focus on those abstractions was concrete violence, and concrete law enforcement who wouldn't or who were stopped from arresting this guy and charging him with murder.

This led to more concrete humans stepping on concrete, in the millions to put a stop to the specific individuals who construct their concrete identities as rulers, and get us to go along with them taking billions from other people, and bombing, killing, killing, killing.  And sustaining the system of good/bad, war/peace, top/bottom, through every trick they can come up with (aka Reverse Racism aka campaign strategies, Everybody 2012!).  

This is the matter of our identities: we are constantly shaping, remaking and exchanging with each other.  We are constantly altering our bodies, including every neuron in our brain.  Even when we are alone in our rooms, typing on facebook, sick, stressing over missing class, we are still maintaining our identities, feeling the constant motion of our neurons (as thought, voices, relief, release, skin on skin) and making little interventions to choose to close off a thought, deny a feeling.

We manipulate our thoughts, but we lose contact to often with how our thoughts feel, we treat them as objects moving through space, than the feel of whichever areas in our brain are moving when we think.  We constantly decide our actions according to many systems of symbolic value, values that we imagine to be in line or out of line with our identities, or personalities, or selves  All the symbols we use to interpret each other are not who we are, but who we create.

but THE GOOD NEWS is We can begin to feel this process of real time social construction of identity.  Social identity=social reality=psychology=biology=how are you feeling right now?  What we learn from our different histories allows us to get to a point where we can start to unpack all the baggage of meaning, implication, law, sin, property, and the rest of our bullshit.

Unpacking the mess inside of us is something we've always been trying to do.  We have all these ideas to explain things, and the last thing we're willing to admit, is that it's all about safety.  We can get safe.  Every time we've failed, it hasn't been freedom and community that failed, those are just abstractions.  We've done things that had results we didn't like, so next time we act accordingly.  We are aware of the need to unpack all the ideas we have about ourselves, and to unpack all the feelings we use to construct our identities.

And, instead of worrying about reform or revolution, giving up or going on, becoming down or selling out, etc., we can begin to step out of our roles and construct our own communities where we don't have to keep seeing every man as separated by masculinity, every women as all kinds of separated, mysterious, contradictory, refusing, or compliant.

We can see people as how we experience them and separate that from the ongoing thoughts and feelings which are our reactions to each other.  We can construct each other's experiences by basing our construction of identity on our experience of each other, our experience of everything, not just our experience of fear based rules and willful passivity.

In practicing direct democracy, we begin to see our comrades and classmates, and co-workers, as the people they are, not always having to test them against the totalitarian abstractions of gender, class, race, and every other reason for dehumanizing each other.  And that brings it's own sense of security, trust, and the feeling of safety.  We empower each other to struggle, teach each other how to handle situations, how to listen, how to do things on our own, without legitimacy given from our symbolic betters.

If I can see anybody like I can see anybody else, than I don't have to hold on to abstractions about who my brothers in this struggle are, who my sisters in this struggle, what the right beliefs are, or who my friends are.  We can start getting to know each other past all these labels.  And be alone when we need to be alone, process when we need to process.

We are getting past all that baggage of history, that constant criticism, constant focus on abstractions, constant analysis rather than letting up, taking the brakes off, and breaking down the walls that close us in and keep us apart.  May Day 2012!!!!!!!!

NON-FICTION: BECOMING NON-HUMAN AND THE END OF MAN

So often visions of heaven, or technological marvels envisioned by scifi, are just extensions of existing human properties into a larger function. Like, telepathy, peace, AI, immortality, teleportation and instant matter generators.

But what doe this really do to change who we are? It just gives us greater fulfillment of our passions and desires.

An interesting question is how do we assess the choice to do away with these values or desires from a perspective that assumes them? How do we do away with love, like altering a brain's production of neurotransmitter.

An easier decision is the decision to tinker with our minds and bodies to accentuate certain values over others, like alter our aggressive behavior so that we no longer attain such a disproportionate pleasure from joint male aggression against other males. This is an easy decision insofar as it favors values we already have and just lets some values win out against others.

What if we decided to change our brains, so that they cared not about sex, not about social interaction, not about learning, not about violence, but only about something weird like maximizing the ant population. How would we then decide from that point to alter our brains back to the original state or to alter it in still other ways.


Maybe Christians should pay more attention to neuroscience and research regarding neurotransmitter behavior. That way they can get started on making the perfect christian mind, and even better,the mind of the Christian in heaven. Th could make similar minds for animals, so a lion and lamb can lay together, and carnivores never kill.

Even better would be artificial insemination and taking the lust function of the brain, replacing it with an ecstatic sens of worship.

Perspectivalism. a new word i dont like, but find useful

After being interested in Foucault for several years, because of his relation to Nietzche and anarchism, I'm finally seeing how his ideas pertain to my own interests. I've begun reading the Order of Things, which seeks to reconstitute commonly grouped together bodies of knowledge (science, econ, history) according to previously unknown, underlying epistemologies/meta-perspectives.

He seeks to examine the arbitrariness of conventional classifications such as biology&chemistry, Economics&Math. Breaking from all the obscure and reverent jargon of contemporary philosophy, we might say that what Foucault wants to do is show the genealogical grouping of sciences and humanities, thereby clarifying their actual status in history and taking away their seeming 'objective' and certain character. His conclusion is that the notion of man which philosophy and the sciences have grappled with is a recent invention, and, therefore, merely one phase that will go away some day. So that there will be an end to 'man' (or the concept as we know understand it.)

Taken out of the proud obscurantism of modern academia, we might see this endeavor as analogous to the 'deconstruction' of christian dogmas that have become commonplace over the last century. Instead of thinking of the books of the Christian bible as related by a continuous, and internally consistent theology, we find that the writers of various books had different theological views, and that the decision to include the books in the bible were made by still other individuals. Recently I read Misquoting Jesus, which shows the impossibility of stating that the modern version, the King James translation of the new testament, is a reliable account of the apostles and paul or that it is an intact revelation from god.

In reading The Order of Things, the payoff for me, is the experience of a totally different way of looking at familiar structures, undermining their seeming obviousness. It is an almost tactile sensation, like I can feel things breaking away and reshaping.

I guess this is something similar to what Foucault experienced in encountering a passage from Borges' regarding an imagined Chinese encyclopedia featuring an utterly absurd and contradictory taxonomy.

Inherent in the conception of said encyclopedia is that, in Alien China, why wouldn't we find classifications, or organizations of knowledge that seemed inconceivable and attacked our intellectual comfort, or the very solidity of our comprehension. Another example that comes to mind is Xerxes scourging of the Hellespont as reported by Herodotus (What kind of world view makes you whip the water to punish it?)

I want to note that Borges and Herodotus were exoticizing the orientals, and the actual unity of human nature is displayed in the Persians and Chinese' willingness to return the favor.

On the other hand, even the imagined alien perspectives of those savage and inscrutable orientals can serve to expand consciousness. The very conceiving of a perspective contrary to our own expands are minds, to the extent that we fully experience the 'reality' of such a perspective.

Studying logic and philosophy in my late teens and early twenties helped me to see the common patterns of theories in general. So, if I get stuck on the details of a book on science (I often do,) I can get the feel of where the writer is going and what conclusions he wants to bring me to. If i get lost in the numbers of an economic debate (I always do,) I can still get the general premises by looking at the apparently opposed arguments.

Philosophy helped me to expand my consciousness out over many general structures of human thinking, both prescriptive and analytic. After going from my default religious understanding to the broad patterns of philosophy, I was then able to fill in a lot of other gaps in between, such as what it meant to believe something, the classifications of belief I had gone through, the classifications of beliefs that I encountered, the many typical ways people argue for things, and the simple notion of knowledge structure and hierarchy.

In contrast, I have struggled with basic neuroscience for years now mostly because of my need to integrate things into systems with human meanings. Or to see parts of a system as features in a systemic process. But all the sections of the brain, different kinds of neurons, electrical gradiances, and neurotransmitters have to be memorized as mere elements of the brain, without a big scheme to place everything in, like with cars or science. The general function of these elements in the manifestation of mind (neural correlates of consciousness) have not been worked out in any complete way.

Another example contrary to the pattern of learning discussed above is my eternal battle with math. Every time I start to grasp principles, definitions, or formulas, i am undone instantly by the arithmetic.

Studying languages has been much more conducive to my need to for learning by systemic foreignness and systemic consistency. In learning Chinese, by immersion and repetition, has caused me to recall the bits of Vietnamese and Spanish that I learned in the States but never used. Also, it has helped me to start learning bits of other languages and some notions in subjects in linguistics. In regards to English, it has given me a much better perspective on word usage, dialectical variation, and slang.

I first heard this horribly awkward phrase last week in a lecture series called Great Minds of the West, 2nd edition。

The particular lecture was on Nietzsche. Nietzsche has generally been referred to as advocating perspectivism. But this guy was saying perspectivalism as in pur-spec-tie -valism. How come i read so much Nietzsche and never saw that word? Walter Kaufmann never used it that i can recall. But maybe I've forgotten. Anyways if everyone else gets past the awkwardness of the word, than I'm down too.

NONFICTION Wriggling Under Sleep and Sleep paralysis

I began composing this blog while struggling to wake up out of sleep paralysis. I forgot it was sleep paralysis, and only recognized it as this familiar state which I had visited before.

As i woke up, moaned desperately, and drifted through various illusions of wakefulness, i thought "What is this state really?"

The various false wakes had included many scenes with people i know, and seemed like they couldnt take place in the present. But maybe it would happen in the future. So, maybe this trembling, fear stricken state of in-between conscious, trying to break through the thin transparent film of sleep into wakefulness- maybe it was really the mind/body trying to break through into another time, another reality.

I am regularly struck by such thoughts. I also regularly experience 'deja vu' or visions.

The prevalent view of deja vu is that they are actually just differences in sensory intake speed, so that some sensory data bypasses the short term memory, goes straight to the long term memory and then gets fed back to you as a memory, so thus you are experiencing new data and remembering that same data.

But my visions have become more than deja vu. They are quite clearly associations that make no sense in my present context and vanish quickly, leaving only what i can conscious repeat to myself, thus inputting into my memory.

So, I cant quite explain this in terms of that deja vu model, but the discrepancy between data intake and processing being a causal factor does seem to make sense.

Because these visions seem more common when i have alot of caffeine in me, when i have an empty stomach and i start to get jumpy, or when i havent gotten any sleep.

An example of one of these visions is:

The other day i was teaching a corporate class. We were having class in the main training room. Previously, the tables at which the students sat, had been arranged in a set of four. So that at each table three to four students sat.

That day, the seats had been changed so that they were all joined side by side, like a straight 'u'. The new arrangement triggered a vision, where I was seeing this arrangement like a memory.

The trick is that this deja vu was just the catalyst, the rest of the experience was a series of associations.

One of these associations was something like 'the woman is evil' and 'i need to tell stephen'.

These two thoughts- i cannot say they are truly part of a novel experience, because they are likely to have been influenced by my state of mind at the time.

The thought of and evil woman seemed connected to the woman who was in charge of training at that company. The thought of warning stephen fits into a general pattern of worrying about him all the time.

But there was one novel thought. It was "el nunca vences" but the 'vences' was pronounced with a hard 'c'

The question I have is: Where does this come from? How can my brain produce such fascinating data?

It is not enough to say that the experience is erroneous, although this is often the main concern.
Some people just want to right this sort of phenomena off as brain mistakes. But they are not merely mistakes, they are novel and bizarre occurrences.

If my brain mistakes the name of one of my students, that is understandable and the elements of the mistake are mostly obvious.

But when my brain is suddenly seized by thoughts and feelings that seem to come from nowhere. And that provide names that dont exist, words that dont exist, I think this is important.

Whether or not my visions have any real use, they represent the conscious mind being seized in a state where utterly novel phenomena are produced.

Now that i think of it, it is rather like an inverted dream.

Whereas the bits of conscious and on-the-periphery-of-conscious data are rearranged in the subconscious during dreams,

My visions seem like subconscious data rearranged in my conscious actively experiencing mind.