Identity Solstice 2022

I have known that we are not who or what we “think” we are for decades. The mental images and the feelings they induce, and identify with, are no more our essence that a sticky label on a slice of gum. And yet, believing them often crushes us.

Themes: 
identity

Language, Consciousness, and Identity

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Preface: Human development is model-dependent. Of near-unlimited possibility, only those capacities that are modeled in the environment will open and develop. No model, no capacity; summarizing Joseph Chilton Pearce on the ‘Model Imperative.’ Joe often shared that a lack of modeling can cause a complete capacity to disappear in one generation, with the new generation not missing or even being aware of what has been lost. This sets the stage for what we describe below as ‘The Missing Mind’ and the way symbolic-metaphoric language, science, and technology empower and blind.

The overwhelming power of the neocortex to create mental images shapes human consciousness. Language is a defining force. The form, structure, and pervasive use of language pre-defines and organizes what we perceive, including how we perceive ourselves, and this, of course, implies how we relate to everything.

Physicist David Bohm described how matter dissolves seamlessly into energy. There are no sharp edges that define a ‘thing’ from something else. Edges that define are more a statement of the observer’s point of view than the ultimate nature of what is being observed. The structure of the human eye, for example, persistence of vision and other qualities, ‘represent’ the swirling movement of energies, two-parts hydrogen plus one part oxygen, as a stream. There is no stream as an independent ‘thing.’ What we experience as an independent thing, a stream, is a representation, an appearance. The movement of various energies ‘appears’ to be independent and solid. That ‘thingness’ disappears at finer resolutions.

Themes: 
consciousness
identity
mindfulness

Wiggling Free

Optimal experience is an end in itself… it is a self-contained activity, one that is not done with the expectation of some future benefit, the doing itself is the reward.

When experience is intrinsically rewarding, life is justified in the present, instead of being held hostage to a hypothetical future gain… The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers.

Themes: 
identity

Self As Self-Defense

One’s relationship with another is based on memory. Would you accept that? On the various images, pictures, conclusions I have drawn about you and you have drawn about me. The various images that I have about you - wife, husband, girl or boy or friend and so on, there is always image making. This is simple, this is normal, this actually goes on. When one is married, or lives with a girl or a boy, every incident, every word, every action creates an image. No? Are we clear on this point? Don’t agree with me please, I am not trying to persuade you to anything. But actually you can see it for yourself. A word is registered, if it is pleasant you purr. It is nice. If it is unpleasant, you will immediately shrink from it and that creates an image. The pleasure creates an image; the shrinking, the withdrawal creates an image. So, our actual relationship with each other is based on various subtle forms of pictures, images and conclusions.

Themes: 
identity

Walking through millions of years of image-making evolution

Jul. ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.
Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare

Themes: 
identity

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