The Cellular Dance of Love -v.2 from in1tero on Vimeo.
Damasio has found that social emotions such as admiration or compassion, which result from a focus on the behaviour of others, tend to activate the posteromedial cortices, another set of brain regions also thought to be important in constructing our sense of self.
The upshot is the social me. I had never thought of admiration as an emotion, but, of course, it belongs with the hierarchy, pecking order stuff. So, on the one hand, as I admire you, I'm lifting you up and setting myself down in comparison. That's why comparisons are odious. On the other hand, as I admire you I'm recognising at least a potential in myself to be admirable. And my experience is that, as I feel love and kindness and compassion and respect for others, I get softer and wider and wetter and more available to receive the thwock of the other. And so, this seems to relate to that thing about friendship: the more I do for you or give you, the more I will like you because (in my simple world) it's clear that I wouldn't do a lot for you unless you were a lovely person. And, as I've just proved to myself that you're a lovely person, then I should do more for you. And so the wide spiral of generosity or charity or love begins. "I think it is only through years of 'training' their unique brains through fantasy play in childhood that modern humans were able to create fantastical symbolical artworks like the Chauvet bison-woman. The shorter Neanderthal childhood, combined with their lack of complex fantasy play influenced the adults they became and the artefacts they left behind." Something here combines with the stuff about infantilisation caused by us being born earlier and earlier to let our fat brains get out without slaying our mothers at birth, but resulting in our never emotionally maturing 'fully'. That leads to love-making, for example, having its quality of fingers and thumbs baby exploration rather than mallard rape (if we're lucky). But baby love is at odds with strong sexual desire. Whereas, maybe, fantasy play is more in line with the emergence of fetishes and mallard stuff. "Our whole attitude towards our personality has to change. The shift of perspective has to be made permanent. One thing that can help is to see the complete mechanicalness of our associations... the very nature of our personality is to be an automaton. That is why it comes under all kinds of influences that are unnatural and absurd for it to come under. Its opinions, attitudes, interests and so on, can be changed without its even noticing."
... "Fulasnitamnian is the right way to be living... The other way is where one lives by external shocks, particularly by the causes that have arisen in the past. In the way of itoklanoz we are living in the action of our past lives: the bobbin-kandlenosts, the wound-up springs that keep us moving, simply go on until they are exhausted and then leave nothing behind... The itoklanoz way of living is the way of a marionette with a lot of threads attached to different parts, each of which are producing reactions and behavior manifestations." J G Bennett - The Way to be Free "We exist in a peculiar way that has the successiveness of past, present and future and also the peculiar property of location. We say we cannot be in two places at once - today and yesterday or today and tomorrow. All that is true for our physical body... but it is not true apart from bodies...
There is also an undetermined and uncommitted world where nothing is fixed... The whole world is connected. From one way of looking at it, 'every part of the world is in the same state as every other... When this way of looking operates in us we become aware of another time and another place as being here and now." ... Time is not of the essence. The difference between the essence and the personality is that the personality has no possibility of existing at all except as a temporal process." J G Bennett - The Way to be Free "It is not that one person cannot satisfy all our needs, but that with each person we create a new set of needs. Each new person shows us that there is something else to want. Seduction, the happy invention of need."
Adam Phillips (via Jo Mitchell) Moving by the beech trees at the top of Stonebarrow I pressed my cheek against the trunk of one of them.
I felt again the frisson of connection - not so strong as with another human being, but still palpable. I realised that I wanted to touch the trunk, to feel my face against its flank - for the sensual pleasure of it and also somehow for the tree. But I had no sense of being able to help or serve or look after the tree. So there was some sense of service without and expectation of getting back approval or love. When and how is it that we - some of us - come to expect to understand everything?
Infants and children don't understand everything they hear and read, and don't particularly mind. They don't expect to understand. Some people never expect to understand. Others do. For those who do, everything changes. It's hard to go on reading the book, watching the film, joining in the conversation when something's not understood. Not understanding becomes a disruption. Rewind please. Say again. Deciding that we should understand everything has taken us in a certain direction. Useful, except when it prioritises chopstick-in-the-mouth rationalism over lived experience. Perhaps a week a year when we let go of trying to understand everything would be handy. Kristina says that the chrysalis turns to soup before it emerges as a butterfly, rather than just growing wings.
Turning to soup seems to encapsulate the maddening process of losing one's identity and being drawn back into the great oneness - crossing the erotic edge or falling off the erotic tightrope. |
Author: AndrewArchives
April 2014
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