Finding Time

[Taomeow]

 

I don't think 'self knowledge' is possible by asking questions of any kind, or even by 'looking inside' - self knowledge imo is only possible through relationships with other people... I think the world will start to learn that quite soon...

Have to agree here, but think carefully... which people when? are capable? of shaping? YOU? by the very way they relate to you?..

Only mom and dad, and only very very early. Why? Because the window of opportunity for forming any patterns for any relationships with anyone or anything in the world is open till you are five years old, and most of it gets imprinted by the age of six months -- 90% of all "relationship-related" connections are hardwired by then; and another 5% get hardwired between the ages of six months and five years; and only 5% constitute "software" that you are going to add on top of that between the ages of five years and the rest of your life. A hard fact of cognitive neuroscience. Other species have it even worse. If a dog doesn't lick her newborn puppies within thirty minutes of birth, they die, in one hundred percent of cases -- and no amount of licking LATER is going to change it, nor any other interventions, any other "relationships." So what happens in the earliest relationship, or fails to happen, is it. The rest will be a bunch of repeat performances by different means -- same old, different wrapper, always unconscious of the underlying early program. (Unless consciousness is restored and the condition cured.)

 

As for the rest of what you tried... I have to applaud your spirit of empirical hands-on experiment, that's the best way to go... but, sorry, you've used a rather useless technique. (You can't invent a good technique for this anymore than you can invent your liver metabolism or Chen style taijiquan -- you have to find out "how" to do it, it's not on the surface at all, otherwise way more people would be tweaking with their hangovers by ordering their livers about, and my taiji teacher would be jobless after forty years of earning qualifications for the job -- why bother if anyone can just invent it?..)

 

The "feeling why" is not "in the dantien," you are not your dantien. You are you. The "feeling why" is YOUR feeling, not your dantien's feeling, and not a bunch of "thoughts about feelings" in your head coupled with "sensations in various body parts." Feelings are not thoughts, and thoughts about feelings aren't feelings. Sensations aren't feelings either, believe it or not. Feelings are what the whole of you consciously experiences, not what this or that anatomical part of you senses nor what your head thinks about it. E.g., love is a feeling, pain is a sensation; the pain of losing love is a feeling, the pain of stubbing your toe is a sensation... got the picture? ;-) Similarly, "she doesn't love me" is a thought; while the combined total of your heart rate, blood pressure, core body temperature, metabolic rate, immune functions, hormonal output, etc., as affected directly by feeling unloved, knowing she doesn't love you, and being in pain because of that -- in their integral systemic totality constitute a "feeling." The total systemic feeling of being unloved, in this particular devastating case. So in order to start working with feelings at all, before moving on to the "why" level, it's always a good idea to find out what they are and what they aren't. I hope if you experiment with ways to determine what is and what isn't a feeling, you won't find it boring.

 

Oh, and by the way, another rule of thumb. If it's boring, it's not a feeling. ;-)

Edited June 1, 2007 by Taomeow

[Ian]

Have to agree here, but think carefully... which people when? are capable? of shaping? YOU? by the very way they relate to you?..

Only mom and dad, and only very very early. Why? Because the window of opportunity for forming any patterns for any relationships with anyone or anything in the world is open till you are five years old, and most of it gets imprinted by the age of six months -- 90% of all "relationship-related" connections are hardwired by then; and another 5% get hardwired between the ages of six months and five years; and only 5% constitute "software" that you are going to add on top of that between the ages of five years and the rest of your life. A hard fact of cognitive neuroscience. Other species have it even worse. If a dog doesn't lick her newborn puppies within thirty minutes of birth, they die, in one hundred percent of cases -- and no amount of licking LATER is going to change it, nor any other interventions, any other "relationships." So what happens in the earliest relationship, or fails to happen, is it. The rest will be a bunch of repeat performances by different means -- same old, different wrapper, always unconscious of the underlying early program. (Unless consciousness is restored and the condition cured.)

 

As for the rest of what you tried... I have to applaud your spirit of empirical hands-on experiment, that's the best way to go... but, sorry, you've used a rather useless technique. (You can't invent a good technique for this anymore than you can invent your liver metabolism or Chen style taijiquan -- you have to find out "how" to do it, it's not on the surface at all, otherwise way more people would be tweaking with their hangovers by ordering their livers about, and my taiji teacher would be jobless after forty years of earning qualifications for the job -- why bother if anyone can just invent it?..)

 

The "feeling why" is not "in the dantien," you are not your dantien. You are you. The "feeling why" is YOUR feeling, not your dantien's feeling, and not a bunch of "thoughts about feelings" in your head coupled with "sensations in various body parts." Feelings are not thoughts, and thoughts about feelings aren't feelings. Sensations aren't feelings either, believe it or not. Feelings are what the whole of you consciously experiences, not what this or that anatomical part of you senses nor what your head thinks about it. E.g., love is a feeling, pain is a sensation; the pain of losing love is a feeling, the pain of stubbing your toe is a sensation... got the picture? ;-) Similarly, "she doesn't love me" is a thought; while the combined total of your heart rate, blood pressure, core body temperature, metabolic rate, immune functions, hormonal output, etc., as affected directly by feeling unloved, knowing she doesn't love you, and being in pain because of that -- in their integral systemic totality constitute a "feeling." The total systemic feeling of being unloved, in this particular devastating case. So in order to start working with feelings at all, before moving on to the "why" level, it's always a good idea to find out what they are and what they aren't. I hope if you experiment with ways to determine what is and what isn't a feeling, you won't find it boring.

 

Oh, and by the way, another rule of thumb. If it's boring, it's not a feeling. ;-)

 

I radically disagree. More later, gotta work!!

[Taomeow]

what an interesting exchange.

 

Thank you!

 

About that torture table... Ah, metaphors. So succinct, so poetic, so often misguiding. I have great respect for BKF (is he the "Bruce" you meant?)-- so maybe you could ask him if/when you have a chance... What if getting off the torture table only results in whoever is torturing you getting you back ON the table and strapping you down? Again and again?.. And suppose you don't even see his or her face, you just end up on the torture table every time no matter what you do -- and suppose you don't even feel his or her touch, you just end up on the table without knowing how and why you end up on the table? again and again? What good is it to get off the table if "why am I on the table to begin with" remains unknown? But it gets worse. What if the torture table is not outside -- what if it's inside you? How do you get off it? Would you ask a doctor to surgically remove it or something? They can do the next best thing, you know, they can give you a pill that will keep you insensitive to the torture -- the torture will go on but for a bunch of hours every day you won't be feeling it. You won't be feeling much of anything else of course, and some people think it's a good enough price to pay for not feeling the torture table inside. No torture, no joy. Comfortably numb. But wouldn't it be better to really get off it for good, or get it removed from inside you for good? and doesn't this "how to get off it" depend on finding out "how and why did a torture table of this particular design get inside me to begin with?"

 

As for developmental history...

 

...Suppose you have a little sharp stone in your shoe. Suppose you got it in your shoe when you fell off the cliff and hit your head on a rock and got knocked out. You wake up surprisingly OK and, aside from a minor headache, feeling normal... but the trauma happens to have knocked out a piece of your consciousness out of you, it happens to have interrupted the continuity of your perception of yourself. So now you don't know that a few events and concepts are missing from your consciousness (well, how can you know that they're missing -- they are, well, missing!) You happen to not know what a "shoe" is, what a "sharp stone" is, what a "stone in the shoe hurting the foot" is. And so you take an aspirin for the headache and get going about your normal day -- limping, for some inexplicable reason. You automatically accept it as "the state of your being" that you are someone who walks like that, it's normal and natural, you don't know any other way, you walk the way you walk and you also don't know any other way to feel. It's not a great way to feel but you may call it great if you like, who's to stop you? -- you don't remember feeling any other way, and so you may assume this default state you're currently in to be not merely normal but great, perfect, enlightened -- whatever you like to think about it. You have nothing in your feeling memory to compare it to.

 

Now later in the day you meet a friend who goes, hey, you're limping, what happened? What do you mean what happened, you respond. Nothing happened. But why are you limping? What do you mean limping? I naturally walk like that, you say. It's a special enlightened walk of an enlightened sage, you say. No no no, the friend says, there's probably something in your shoe... let me see. What's a shoe? This! This thing on your foot -- is a shoe! No no no, you say, it's my natural enlightened leg, it's like that because it is the leg of a kind and compassionate man. Nonsense, the friend says, let's take the shoe off and see what's bothering you. Nothing is bothering me, you protest, but she ignores your protests, grabs your foot, unties the laces, removes it, and shakes out the sharp little stone. See, she says. That's what it was. How on earth did it get there? Why didn't you shake it out? I don't know how it got there, I don't remember... I didn't know it was there, I didn't know there was something to shake out that didn't belong, something that wasn't part of the real me... Ahh, this feels good.... Oh my god, now I really know what feeling good feels like... Gosh, I had no idea... Well, your friend says, so since the moment your got this thing in your shoe without knowing you did, every step you ever took was being determined by it , but you weren't conscious of it. You were walking the way it made you walk and you thought you were just doing it because you choose to? Silly you...

 

So, Pietro, working with "developmental history" is finding out what in your current make-up is, and has developed from the start, as "the real you," and what is, alternatively, a little stone in the shoe that you mistake for a part of the real you because you don't remember it being any other way, that really isn't. Or, in other words, it's your systemic (not in the head alone!!!) memory of yourself from the beginning of this-here life. From the moment you put the shoes on, your very first pair, and beyond. From the moment you were too young to wear shoes, from the moment you were too young to walk, from the moment you were too young to crawl... but never, at no point in the past, were you too young to feel! So if something happened that caused you to forget the feeling, to lose the feeling memory, to lose the ability to itemize your own life from the start and tell that everything that you know as you is really you and nothing but you --

if you can't remember, it means this thing that happened was a stone you had to encapsulate "outside your consciousness" so as not to feel it -- because it was hurting you and you had no other way to deal with it but to go comfortably numb in that area. And that area. And that and that and that area... So when you're older and stronger and DO have other ways to deal with things that hurt you and never went away (and they never go away until you lose the numbness, find they ARE there to begin with, and shake them out) -- that's when revisiting your developmental history, your very own way to have come to wherever you're at right now, and checking it for anything and everything that doesn't belong, might be a very good idea.

Edited June 1, 2007 by Taomeow

[lino]

Try to get it in when ever and where ever you can. Grab every opportunity. Even five minutes here, ten minutes there.

 

A great deal of focus in qigong and meditation lies in returning to the natal or prenatal CLEAN condition. You are still pretty young so it is good to start when you don't have all that much garbage accumulated.

[freeform]

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Edited December 18, 2019 by freeform

[fatherpaul]

most excellent post freeform

the basic questions ; how? and why?

 

(where, what, who and when yield much as well.)

[Taomeow]

Taomeow,

 

Thanks for mentioning childhood development - I find it fascinating and was actively interested for a while in how we develop - imprinting is certainly one the most powerfull shapers of 'me' or 'you'.

 

However when I was speaking of 'self knowledge through relationship' I meant something far more practical. Your story of the stone in the shoe fits quite well with what I meant. If i had no mirriors and a white dot on my face, only through relation with another person would I be able to recieve feedback and discover that I had a dot on my face. So I've started using relationship as a vehicle to discovering more of myself. I've learnt that the degree to which I can be present and aware with another is the degree I can be present and aware with myself. Similarly your ability to be intimate with another reflects your ability to be intimate with yourself. So relating with others can become a lesson - I notice my reaction to events, notice where and what I'm hiding from others, I really embrace awkwardness and notice how it works, and in my oppinion that is the only way to gain Self knowledge.

 

People rarely learn exclusively from themselves.

 

Going back to development - we know that our early childhood imprints 'colour' our vision of reality with certain biases. As an analogy lets pretend that our imprints work like colour filters put in front of the lense (us/awareness), and all our perceptions are coloured by the large number of colour filters we have in front of our lense. So all that we are aware of consists of mostly the filters, with a little bit of reality that gets through (although warped and coloured by the filters).

This is exactly what I found experimenting with 'why', it's useless without 'how'... As I explained before, "why" is a 'content' oriented question (any answer to it is based on content) and "how" is a process oriented question (any answer to it must include the process). It surprises me that you find 'why' usefull in any way, (especially since you have a scientific background) - Process oriented inquiery is the basis for most of the modern philosophical systems (and most of the ancient ones too) - content oriented inquiery is the bitter aftertaste of the Aristotelian philosophy that has been ingrained in the west.

 

Instrumentalism, Operationalism, Pragmatism (even Ethnomethodology and many of the other sociologically focused philosophies) all concentrate on "how" or process. Why looks at the colour of the filters and How looks at how the filters interact with light. Why is static and in the past and how is in the present and in motion.

 

How did that stone get in my shoe, and how am I going to get it out, how does it feel without the stone?

 

or

 

Why did that stone get in my shoe, and why would I get it out, why does it feel without the stone?

 

in terms of self inquiery - "how did I get this way?" or "why did I get this way?" which is more usefull?

 

I just want to understand whether "why" could be usefull, and how so.

 

 

Thanks for your thoughts, Freeform.

 

So, whether "why" can be useful, and how so?

 

The "why" I was talking about, the "feeling why," the "systemic why," is a bit like classical taoist definitions of all things systemic, nonlinear, "all things process" -- which can be described in terms of what they "do" but can't be defined in terms of what they "are" --

 

except in a roundabout way, e.g. by stating what they are "not." Just like Laozi's "non-definitions" of tao: "The tao that can be told is NOT the eternal tao... The name that can be named is NOT the eternal name..." The "feeling systemic why" is NOT a linear question that can be asked head-on. Rather, it is the roundabout outcome of an insight you emerge with upon diving deep into your developmental history. It's a "that's why" containing precise answers, not to one question but to a whole scintillating field of meanings, events, patterns, lots and lots of things you do in you life, with your life -- you emerge with a matching field of understanding "why" you do the things you do the way you do them, and it's unimpeacheable, this kind of "that's why" -- it's absolute knowledge, not relative information that can be obtained from others. You were talking about a white dot on your (generically speaking) face that only another can alert you to if you don't have a mirror? Another can see the white dot, but can't know its origin and the extent of its significance in your life. Now suppose you descend into your own lost, repressed, unconscious early memory and discover that you were smacked by your father when you were two years old and your mother applied some make-up to cover up the bruise. Suppose you have repressed the memory but have retained the unconscious pattern you learned this way: "whenever I hurt, I must cover it up." Suppose the white dot on your face NOW is something you applied yourself this morning, without knowing WHY you did -- you're just in the habit of applying some zinc ointment (e.g.) to your face from time to time. Get to the feeling memory of the original event and now you know why. Now you have your "that's why." You loathed going to work today, knowing your boss is in a bitchy mood from yesterday and will be picking on you, and that's why you have a white dot on your face. And that's why you dislike women who use make-up. And that's why you never show your feelings when you hurt. And that's why you feel angry around anyone who does -- they have the luxury you don't, they are free to show how they feel while you must wear the cover-up make-up. That's why you broke up with your wife. That's why you have tension in your shoulders which a chiropractor can't mend -- your muscles are still clenched, thrity or forty or sixty years later, from wanting with all your being to hit your father back and never being allowed to feel it, let alone do it. And so on... That's the inner "why" of the white dot on your face. How can another possibly know?...

Edited June 10, 2007 by Taomeow

[freeform]

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Edited December 18, 2019 by freeform