sharing my thoughts, feelings & prayers
I am currently reading yet another book on spirituality… "Sculptor in the Sky", by Teal Scott.. It was actually recommended to me by a fellow WP blogger. It's a compelling read. I actually plan to read it over again, once finished.
But here's the thing.
It is not exactly saying anything new to me. Nothing I haven't heard a hundred times before.
For myself, I have had to face into doubting that I had read well presentation made to me by anyone. Especially during my tenure in group work with domestic violence offenders. Most of them, truly voiced, in nearly sociopathic fashions, how everyone else was guilty for putting them in such a place and especially with an incompetent therapist. Only a few with the same court orders presented differently.
At first, that second and smaller group showed up early and chatted with me, over our horrible coffee in styrofoam cups. Too often the naysayers’ focus in conversations covertly were really denials of their own problems. Catching me off guard, the first ones of that group got away with proverbial murder. I now have forgotten whether it was a peer telling me or I just finally caught onto a truly seriously lack of insight and almost completely my own. Their fingers had, almost, never pointed back at themselves. Close to everyone of them sought to keep my attention centered on everyone else’s faults and off of their own.
Applied to my doubts, perhaps, feels a little odd but that is the point. The doubt which I am most focused on right now is that I can work. Making my case overt, my supervisor back in 1999 finally had to threaten to call the cops to have me ejected from their office. She’d told me that I had no need to raise a finger to gain disability since they had done everything beyond signing that single document that would be mailed to me later than afternoon.
What am I pointing at in all of that last paragraph? I was, like that second group I mentioned just before telling you about my supervisor threatening to call the cops on me, doing the same thing. I had been trying to turn that woman’s eyes away from all the documents she’d just shown me of hoards of serious mistakes made by me, toward my assertion that I could work. Think about it, just think about those men talking to me about everyone else’s problems while not saying a word about their own. Now, do you see some similarity shared between myself and those men?
Over the past couple of weeks, I had retaken sections of the Woodcock Johnson III test. Being a seriously cute and too damned effective a means for taking a good snap shoot of mental functions is one thing but when compared to any previous testing it takes on a serious character. Back in 2003 I was tested by a neuropsychologist which yielded grievously similar results. What has that to do then with my putting forward subtle flaws, first in how certain men in my domestic violence groups distracted me and then in how I feebly attempted to distract from my own flaws?
This time, the program I have decided to give initial traction to is suggesting that they are not just going bypass my neurological faults and flaws but to actually try and get my brain to redevelop those abilities. To some degree, I hope to potentially bypass, on my own, what has long been espoused as unchanging. So then, put simply, I am putting money where my mouth and taking the chance to revamp my neurological domain by living out what neuroplasticity means.
This past weekend, I finally got around to reading, Christof Koch’s Finding Free Will: Physics and neurobiology can help us understand whether we choose our own destiny. By the time I arrived at the last sentence not only had he introduced several works, I’d not yet caught sight of, but this short work, also, brought the likes of Roberto Assagioli and V. S. Ramachadran back to mind.
Importantly, I had not associated Edward Lorenz’s “butterfly effect” with the range and diversity of human. But, Koch behavior joined the butterfly effect, which Ray Bradbury had suggested in “A Sound of Thunder“, to the diversity of anyone’s behaviors across time and situation. Repeatedly my clients, friends and family have credited me with things, both good and bad, in their lives growing out of things I had done that were outside of my awareness in the first place. For instance, this morning the owner/barista of my favorite coffee shop gave me a gift card for a few drinks. By her report it was paid up by someone who rarely comes in but sees me there in the early morning almost every day of the week as he or she walks by to catch a light rail train.
Seemingly, Koch merges the idea of chaos into those effects reported by people having spots in their posterior parietal cortex stimulated. Bear in mind that I do know what it’s like having electrodes buried under the skull. Think about having your neurosurgeon prompt particular locations just behind your forehead into gear so that you feel the desire to move a limb without moving the limb itself. Decidedly different from having that limb moving after your neurosurgeon’s popped your top to directly touch the limbic part of your cortex causing a leg to move without a thought, of any kind, happening in your awareness. Are we not, then catching sight of physical aspects of conscious before it fully emerges?
V. S. Ramachadran’s work of merging visual perception with our sensory selves to successfully alter people’s sense of their bodies drops another hint in this issue (“Reflections on the Mind”, Scientific American: Mind, (2011) 22:3). Being able to look at the reflection of one hand replacing sight of the other, we are discovering a true ability to change perceptions of that real but unseen hand. Along with other work in this area Ramachandran is beginning to redefine a supposed security of perception and human behavior.
More than likely a few are wondering whether I was having a brain “fart” after finding Roberto Assagioli beside Ramachandran. Where, in the proverbial hell, did I find any justification for shoving the founder of Psychosynthesis in beside the other? Well, it was Roberto who introduced me to the active question of how is that we are able to coalesce the plethora of human “potentials” into that thing we call self. What I label potentials were in Roberto’s eyes those clusterings of abilities each human has.
While I was never a fan of Psychosynthesis, itself, it was though where I found the question needing my attention. Important to me was discovering Assagioli’s image of self being a tribe rather than that proverbial individual put me on a road, back in the 80′s which re-emerged in the 2000′s, with neuropsychology. I know there are many more branches to this issue, but for me this is what directly influenced my perceptions. By accepting his tribal images of each person’s clusterings of potentials I began seeing self, including my own, in fashions making it easier to try and not step on Bradbury’s butterfly.
Learning to positively accept a forgetfulness inflicted on me by surgery means only to encourage and work within the cooperation and conflicts within my tribe(s). Subtle facets of me being extracted over a decade ago had to be taken over by a smaller tribe. Trust me, as friends and family know too well all of my tribe was pissy for a few years making many of them drenched in my verbal and behavior urine and having to deal with a man who couldn’t, for those years, manage much of life. It takes time to reassign duties.
None of what I’ve said in the past couple of paragraphs matches well with what Christof Koch addressed in his article. Yet, think about what I’ve said and the second part of the article’s title. Having dealt with subtle, unless you watched my neurosurgeon extract portions of my left hemisphere, is suggestive of exactly what Koch wrote about. Regrouping a shrunken tribe of aspects of that thing called my “mind” does not violate physics nor neurobiology. For that matter, my words comfortably fit to neuropsychology in my deliberately taking hold of what I had learned and practiced in a third person sense in group and individual counseling to myself.
So then, use my personal example to undertake similar endeavors within yourselves. Keep in mind that you can take that last sentence both pointing at you and the people around you or to the tribe of neurological, psychological and psychosocial abilities nested within you.
In a longitudinal study by Bobo and colleagues the researchers looked at men aged 50 and over during a 10 year period to identify predictors of alcohol use. The researchers found that 30.7% of the men in the study were classed as moderate drinkers during the study period. The results were complex and dependent on the baseline characteristics and interacted with the number of variables including age education and self-reports of health.
Roberto Assagioli
For years now, I have refused to make awareness that mandatory pinnacle called self. After all, I see awareness as only a portion of what I am. I, also, no longer see awareness as, exclusively, in one or the other part of all it takes to make me. In keeping with Roberto Assagioli, a somewhat forgotten psychiatrist from decades past, I chose to see self, somewhat, as he did. So then, for me awareness arises out of the torrent of struggles and communions among those facets which make up this thing called self.
A quick blurb from medicalexpress.com on neuroscience made me aware, once again, of a marginal contradiction. Up front, I like the article, but even in the first sentence I found, “…not only does your brain handle such complex decisions for you, it also hides information from you about how those decisions are made…” with which I’m uncomfortable. My vexation over that part of the sentence is in the exclusion of my ‘self’ from the fullness of what unconsciousness is!
As I said above I let go of ‘awareness’ as that sole expression of my ‘self’. Rather, the I that I am shifts its’ focus of attention, without awareness. As the article suggests, it is through the restrictions of where awareness will next be focused which makes awareness. So then, isn’t what you are experiencing right now in reading my thoughts not the byproduct of what I have chosen before my own awareness joins in with you?
Before studying and practicing various parts of psychotherapy I had never given thought to how our “focus’ of attention” shifts without being overtly aware of why that direction was taken. Going even further into having a portion of that spongy stuff between my ears extracted I was forced into a, shall we say, deep refashioning of how I think of my “self”.
Imagine that small portion of me, being popped out by Tim after drilling into and then sawing out a portion of my skull. That section of my brain was more than plopped into a metaphorical trashcan. Rather, a significant unconscious portion of me was forced to do many subtle transformations. Honestly, I did change and yet I am fully recognized face to face, over the phone and by email by all those who knew me before.
My abilities to pluck things from my gargantuan tree bearing fruits of abilities and memories hanging from the branches had one of those’ branches trimmed. Its’ impact is typically subtle and at first confusing.
Excessive anxiety, coming from what Tim did, was obvious to everyone else but me. I couldn’t even see the jittering in my limbs, that incessant need to walk for some time after that extraction was a problem. For awhile, memories of how I felt and managed myself had been misplaced. Until, about a year and a half ago, I experienced no dreams. Or, perhaps, I was simply unable to recall those the next day. I wasn’t denying my problems I wasn’t for a couple of years afterwards seeing those, since those all felt natural.
Today, brief stalls in my mental gait are still experienced. The difference is now that I have come back to recognizing Assagioli’s thinking of self as a tribe and not a single thing. Having a portion of myself extricated and I am still called the self everyone had seen before, I have gained a previously unknown footing enabling me to delve deeper into my psychosocial and spiritual self.
So then, I see self as never having such things hidden from it, because awareness arises out of that necessary communion among us in creating community. It is not something I possess, but what arises out of the communion with and among others.
I’m close to completely agreeing with Bruce Nussbaum’s points in, Why is Apple Losing its Aura. 
His feeling that these machines are actively threading our attention into the community in a new fashion is perhaps on the mark.
Essentially moving our attention to what I felt in watching Apple getting pummeled by drops in sales after booting Jobs, only later to let him back in and then seeing sales eventually pick backup feels on the mark. The upswing came, I feel, with the iPhone with ever increasing integration of self with the machine. While I’m uncomfortable with the machine becoming the vehicle we tramp about our communities, I’m keeping my own readily gassed up.
It then doesn’t matter whether my favored fruit withers away or not. What I’ve been making use isn’t the only vehicle I can ride about the internet, it is simply my current favorite one.
TEDx Talk by Wendy Lampen on Asperger Syndrome and Synaesthesia
I've covered TEDx talks in previous posts. TEDx are locally organised events with the theme of technology, education and design. The videos feature talks given at TEDx conferences and are generated at a prodigious rate. This TEDx talk is by Wendy Lampen, who talks about her experience of Asperger Syndrome. Lampen also has a…
Viktor Frankl
Picking back up on a topic I caught sight of on Dover Beach, my wanting to see Dan’s body at the funeral home dynamically feed new fodder into my life’s gist. Dealing with his suicide morphed the foundations of my happiness. Before that time, I had no loss under my belt cutting so deeply.
Years before his suicide I had worked with a few people who’d attempted to end their lives. One man, whom I’d not seen before being assigned to him, had literally blown his jaw off. Fortunately, I saw him after he was moved out of surgery and onto the psych unit. Finding ways of talking with someone possessing no jaw, let alone a tongue was tasking. Setting aside my own pain in dealing with his psychological and physical trauma I worked a few days a week trying to help the man rediscover ways he already know of communicating but without a mouth.
Our efforts, for a few weeks before his being transferred, forced on us intense and mutual transference of all kinds. Wanting to help this man realize his immediate desire to stay alive while being too confident that in the next year or so he would do this again created deep conflict on its’ own. Standing by Daniel’s casket with my brother nearby in an otherwise empty room all those feelings shared with the man having no jaw and now looking my son’s body began a new stumbling dance within me.
Across those few hours of working with a man unable to wag his tongue back, I found new bedrock within. His actions, useless to him or not, unearthed a true sense of pleasure in giving of myself. Not needing to know that since he had survived this attempt he would never try again, for the moment, I enjoyed knowing him. Unknowingly, this same man set me on the road of dealing with a personal loss.
So far, that bedrock a past client unearth seems uncracked by Dan’s leaving me. Setting firmly under my pain and sorrow, being, at the same time, the foundation those feelings exist on, my happiness tips its’ hat to the man who couldn’t grunt to me.
Finally getting around to it, I watched “Can we reach the end of knowledge?” a video that Big Think had pulled over from YouTube. The video is a nice short walk through Marcelo Gleiser‘s thoughts on the supposed ability of human’s to eventually understand the whole thing. Being a succinct review of what I read a couple of years ago, I heard Marcelo Gleiser quickly share what on my iPad was right around walking over 350 pages in “A tear at the edge of creation“.
