Mike is cooking bok choy and I am drinking black V-drinks — an energy drink. I find that I am learning to rely upon less and less stability in my environment as life moves on, with me getting … well, older in this process. I used to value firmness — firm friendships, firm ideas, fortressed and well protected personal environments. Still do. But I am learning to expect less generally, and to get by with what I have acquired already. What matters most is a healthy body — all else follows.
Tonight, Mike and I will retreat behind our “Iron Curtain” as the frenzied mob celebrates New Year. Hushed and quiet, we will consume the electricity of each other’s company. This had better be good……..
This next year, I have made a resolution just to be myself, let the cards fall where they may. I will develop resources of patience, and capacity for quiet observation. Life will go on — despite ideological violence which may be inflicted on me.
Thank living for that!
Monthly Archives: December 2005
Your Prayers Make The Real Gods Angry: What I heard about Iraq in 2005
To Kaunda
Sorry if I’m being hard to understand. I’m still trying to put together some pieces of the puzzle regarding cultural conditioning, in a way that makes some sense.
>I rather assume that all people have a personal unconscious.
Yes, I think so too… But I’m more interested in constructing a map of the cultural unconscious, not the personal unconscious….
>Part of the utility of consciousness results from assorted habits of thought that guide attention and behavior. Consciousness is efficient and useful, because it limits the impression of a multitude of sensory data which are nonetheless dutifully stored or “remembered.”
Right. I suspect that in the cultural sense, our consciousness is the result of adopting certain codes or ideologies or mythological frameworks, which are selected because they resonate very well with our cultural unconscious – that is with the memories that we have, including the ways that these have been ideologically framed by our parents and elders – such ideological framing having left an emotional impression upon us, causing us to find certain social and environmental patterns more appealing than others, due to the deep level of the memory traces they have left on our personalities.
Now, this seems like a ‘circular definition’ of how the conscious works on the unconscious and the unconscious works on the conscious, as if in tandem — However, I don’t think that this is so. If you take a fresh water fish out of its natural environment and put it into salt water, it will shrivel up. Similarly, if you take a salt water fish and put it in fresh water, it will puff up until the point that it might explode. So, this is the way that I see the cultural unconscious working within us. It is a hidden regulator, which adjusts us to the environments that we are dwelling in as children. Like fish swimming through water currents, we perceive our environments as being “the norm”. We don’t know that we are living in very particularised environments, with very special features. We universalise, and think that all fish swim in the same kinds of ocean currents… That is, until we discover fresh water fish – or indeed, we enter upon fresh water. And when we enter upon fresh water, we find that our cultural metabolisms are quite unconsciously adjusting us to an environment which to all intents and purposes no longer exists for us. Thus we discover how much of the way we are has been regulated not by rational choices – as we might like to assume – but by unconscious processes, relating to our earlier conditioning.
>Clearly I’m not saying this very precisely.
>What’s so interesting, as if changing channels on radio or TV is to realise that personal consciousness–the habits of thought–are quite variable. Indeed, that the way people think is quite plastic.
I think that this plasticity can be understood as part and parcel of a kind of multiplicity of conditioning processes. The postmoderns are very familiar with this sort of an adjustment, although I would be inclined to argue that to be able to absorb multiplicity in this way is very much a part of an Urban post-industrial consciousness. This is not to say that pre-postmodern civilisation is totally unable to reflect a multiplicity, or that it is somehow inherently more “rational”. Not at all. One reflects what one has been exposed to – and what’s more, I’m inclined to think of the nature of the mind as being made up somehow of something like lots of little crystals, which are structurally separate micro-processing units, but which can come together to make a whole. This whole is made up of irrational, emotional parts, which gives the appearance of being rational, when many of the parts are combined together in a coherent schema (say, in the form of a mythology or ideology).
>It also seems to me the case that there are certain habits of thought collectively shared by people who roughly share the same place in time. Cultural biases–again being very inprecise.
Yes. Certain environments will support certain mythic structures better than others.
>I was very intriqued by your hypothesis that the environment imprints itself on people at a very young age.
>I think something like that happens. Just as I assume that our pattern of development: baby–child–adult imprints on us a way of ordering the world around us.
>That’s why, although terribly out of fashion, I think Piaget’s “genetic epistemology” (I think that’s what he called it) makes a sort of sense in viewing the history of human ideas.
>One of the modern versions of Roget’s edited by Robert Chapman significally recast earlier editions in a way that seems familiar to Piaget’s genetic epistemology. Chapman writes:
>”At this distance from his historical milieu, Roget’s scheme no longer seems simple and natural. It reflects a Platonic view of the cosmos, combined with Aristotlean marshalling of concepts…”
>”However respectable this cosmos and its deployment may be philosophically, it does not coincide with the way most people now apprehend the universe…I chose what I call a ‘developmental-existential’ scheme…The notion has been to make the arrangement analogous with the development of the human individual..”
I don’t know how much the development of the individual human psyche, from childhood to adulthood reflects the development of the human race itself. (I’m not sure that this is what you or Roget are saying……….). I do think that there is a certain analogy with the development of the human psyche and the growth of …let’s say, a grapevine. A young vine can be trained to grow in certain directions, say, along a broad-based frame. However, after a certain point of becoming firm and hard, there is no longer the same possibility in shaping the vine. Only its new shoots can still be shaped in that fashion. Similarly human beings, once they have received the main quantity of their conditioning.
>I’m not sure what the origin of Chapman’s “the way most people now apprehend the universe” is. On one hand the book is intended for Americans and to lesser extent other English speakers worldwide. So “most people” is probably intended to mean “most Americans.” But on the other hand, I suspect that this modernity extends much more widely. I’m not sure it’s really a product of Western culture and values, but not sure really what sort of change it marks. Only I will say that the edition of Roget’s is easy for me to use.
I’m trying to see to what degree we can understand Modernity as coinciding with Industrialism. I think that would be a nice, neat way of looking at things………
>My brother was murdered. My parents were both from New England and moved south during my father’s career. So my brother lived in a very Southern state. Trying to come to grips with “the reasons” for his murder–he was killed by neighborhood teens playing out some gangsta drama–I tired to imagine the mindset that led to his murder.
I’m sorry to hear about your brother. I think that delving into the mind-sets of those who cause us problems can be very fruitful – also very hard to do. Such a process of investigation into various (in some ways more minor) distressing events in my life has led me to the conclusion that despite the assumption or appearance that we are all motivated by some clear and relatively graspable ideology or myth-structure, this is rarely the case for most people. It seems to me that most people are not motivated by a rational ideological structure, but rather by the imprints they’ve received from various experiences they have had. Perhaps it could be a sense of trauma from being hit as a child, or some experiences which linked violence with a temporary sense of gaining respect and freedom – perhaps being the source of an ideology of “honour”… But the basic aspects of our personality appear to come from micro-programming like I’ve attempted to describe – and not directly, at least, from a salient idea that is already in the community. (That is because the “ideology” – the germ – always has to find an already emotionally receptive psyche – the “host”. Parents and authorities can do very much to make sure that the individual’s subjectivity is ready to receive a certain ideological message — but ultimately other factors or accidents of life can intervene in this process of ideological preparation or indoctrination…….). In any case, the true origin of any “mindset” is hidden in the person’s cultural unconscious.
>Such titles as “Devil’s Spawn” and books about youthful sociopathy didn’t resonate. However a notion of “a culture of honor” did. At first I was highly skeptical, but rather solid sociological data as well as narratives of individual biography seemed rather convincing.
I don’t know a great deal specifically about research into this “culture of honour”……..
>Voting patterns here follow a Red state/Blue state divide. There are real cultural factors at play. Factors which I suspect are derived from a priori categories rather more “mythic” than the categories you suggest.
You might be right – but I suspect that these values have been inculcated at a pre-mythical level, into each child, prior to the point that the child actually adopts the myth in question. There is also the aspect of cognitive dissonance which can help to sway a child towards adopting certain myths. For example if a father is always absent and yet proclaims his undying love for a child then such a child might well grow up rationalising a certain emptiness or appearance of ascetic hardship as “love”. This felt need to so rationalise might predispose the child to adopting one particular ideological stance rather than another.
>LOL, dear unsane, I’m afraid that what you’re trying to tell me is going right over my head, and further afraid that my replies miss the mark by a mile. In any case, I appreciate your engagement of me and with very important ideas. I especially enjoy how grounded in your personal experience your wider insights are.
Sorry for going over your head. I do that often, and with most people. I think it is because I am trying to forge ideas which are truly original. On the other hand, I could just be deluding myself….
Hopefully not, though – as I have had experiences which cry out for a better explanation than I have seen in the journal articles I’ve read so far.
adventure and the guilt of being two.
For the longest time I was driven by a need to have adventures. I was inert, obedient to the cultural structures that were trying so hard to form me. I hoped — and simply assumed — that adventures would come to me. They didn’t. After many years of waiting, I changed my attitude to adventures. I found my footing in this culture and decided that the worst risk I could take was in continuing to sit still. I sat still because I was out of touch with my “double” — my deeper level self. In other words, I was emotionally repressed but didn’t know it yet.
My life was draining away. I could feel it. Every Christmas, every birthday, another year had passed — and still, I had not had my rite of passage, no ultimate adventure.
Now, everything has changed. I look upon my past self as an entirely different identity.
Reply to Kaunda — where it can be easily seen!
As I have said earlier, I think that there is a tendency in western culture to overlook one’s personal experiences, and not to build them into the fabric of one’s systems of meaning. That is because western individuals are defined A PRIORI by certain categories: their gender, their age, racial identity, whether or not they are married of have children, and, above all, they are defined by their jobs. So, from this, there tends to grow the assumption — a potentially false one in my view — that by knowing something of a person’s demographic, you can also make a pretty strong claim to knowing the person themselves. Now: This is potentially very wrong — EXCEPT that so many westerners actually adopt these ideas AS IF they were truth itself — thus making this way of approaching life a very common facet of western experience, indeed.
Hence there derives a general superficiality from this. Nobody bothers to speak to anybody in any real depth, nor to ask them “their story”. Everybody just assumes that they know each other’s stories, just by looking at their surface appearance and making a snap judgment about it.
Perhaps it is the case that such westerners do not actually have a personal Unconscious.They have, instead, a sense of being contained, within a realm of law and order, much like a bunch of crayfish are contained in a large metallic crib on the deck of a ship. They know the gentle lulling back and forth, upon the ocean, as they are transported to their final destiny. They dare not ask for more.
But reference to personal experience is reserved for the one who dares to break out of this mould. To tell a story about oneself, one has to first be able to take oneself seriously. To tell a story about one’s tribe, one has to first be able to take it seriously, also.
Western education, however, tends to quash any inclination to take either oneself or one’s origins seriously. This tendency is censured as “immodest”. Perhaps this is the reason why western society appears to tribal outsiders to lack a real soul?
we’re off!
Well not right away. In several weeks………………….
To be honest, this seems like it could be my sort of place!
Just the facts ma’am….
In 1839, missionary John Williams attempted to impose western ways and
Christianity on the Ni Vanuatu and was clubbed to death and eaten.
Christianity on the Ni Vanuatu and was clubbed to death and eaten.
International cuisine features strongly with French, Polynesian,
Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, English and Japanese to choose from, as well as
local specialties like coconut crabs, wild pigeons and flying fox cooked island
style in ground ovens.
asshead: eat your sadza!
UNSANE AND SAFE: The Cultural Unconscious.
UNSANE AND SAFE: The Cultural Unconscious.
We can never really know what cultural influences have really shaped us until we move into quite a different culture altogether, and find that our most basic assumptions about human decency and cultural intelligiblity are challenged.
That experience is like being in a choir where you are the only one who is out of tune, and yet you must sing, and still you don’t even know the refrain. You know a different refrain, but that one is not understood, and is considered with suspicion. Only then, does one begin to understand the fact that one has underground streams that one longs for.
And only then does one understand that one’s longing — one’s emotional reality, as such — is hidden from view. What is on the surface — a certain appearance of bungling and confusion within the cross-cultural context — is then very different from the firm emotional structures which lie below.
The Cultural Unconscious.
Which are the experiences defining you? Many of them will be unconscious.
Those who are brought up in a consistent culture with consistent environmental features, will tend to find that so long as they stay put, their inner worlds containing various emotional triggers based on past experiences, map their outer worlds (that which is publically discussed with openness and ease) fairly closely. They have developed inbuilt receptors to handle the common cultural messages that take place within the culture into which they were born. Others, born and bred elsewhere, will have a different cultural unconscious — due to the impact on them of a different range of experiences, some of which are made salient to their consciousness by the local use language, employed in culturally specific ways.
According to some developmental psychologists, self awareness probably comes about with the ability to employ language as a tool. I’m not sure to what degree this is so, myself. I am inclined to think that emotional awarenesses of self and its needs precedes language and are not erased by either having certain language tools for conceptualising these needs, or not having them. However, language gives social validity to various things which we are feeling, and overlooks (and so devalues in our consciousness) other things which we are feeling. Language, in other words, gives focus to our overdetermined awarenesses, and by so doing it allows us to create a social self about which we feel some solidness and reliability.
Consciousness and language both tend to be quite limiting on overall perceptual capabilities — that is, in themselves. They tend to filter and stream sensory data and awareness down certain pre-established channels, predictably. However, beneath the surface of these predictable mountain streams of consciousness, lie underground chasms — lakes and rivers — which are chains of memories … experiences which have been repressed. These are aspects of ourselves which do not find avenues for common expression within a particular culture. These aspects may have developed within a totally different culture from the one which one is now in. They can also be memories of experiences which have been acquired through a non-uniform or incomplete cultural conditioning.
Language can, at times, give focus to these generally unacknowledged aspects — yet it will have to form “a culture” through recognition and applause of previously repressed behavioural traits — in order to succeed in changing anything with regard to the internal and external landscapes of the psyche.
It is behaviour which creates new memories, which differ from conventional experiences.
It is language which consolidates the new behaviour in consciousness and creates a moat or river passage for it.
Australian homogeneity
This guy has it spot on, for some reason [click to read more]:
Australia has had to define itself against others. But the tendency has been that instead of defining itself, and realising itself as a continually changing society, it has nostalgically yearned for stasis, drawing on a large number of myths which, while uniting segments of its population, retards its overall ability to absorb newness and deal adequately with others.
The born and bred ones never want to take a risk on any, but their own sweet asses !
cross cultural, you divide
I have just been engaged in reading some psychological cross-cultural studies.Most of them attempt to draw a distinction between “Western” culture and Asiatic culture. They generally succeed in proving evidence of differences through the use of formal psychological questionnaires or similar approaches of an empirical nature.
Some interesting points I found are that American males tend to overgeneralise their concepts of how much power they have as individuals, whereas Asian people will tend to see their amount of power and identity as being determined by their relationships. The type of acculturation which most American male infants receive towards aggression, but prohibiting social withdrawal, is unlike that received by American women. Japanese women are taught to be modest and accommodating, whereas Japanese men are taught to be intellectually competitive and sharp.
I wonder what can be said for myself? I’m weirder, because I span two cultures. I’m not particularly western, although, because of my features and my manner of speaking (somewhat British upper-crust, but occasionally mistaken for various European concoctions of speech), I look and sound generically “Western”.
This belies the internal anguish: I cannot resort to my African simplicity, an almost Asiatic simplicity, where I do not assert myself, but allow my context, that is my environment, to speak for me. Whereas I would prefer to allow the mood of whatever-environment-I’m-in to dictate where I go next, who I speak to, I’m compelled to show a different side to me when I’m within a western context: indeed, I must invent that “self” which will make sense.
My body, mind and spirit tends to recall an African holism, when I’m at my most relaxed. That is when I tend to perceive an environment with people in it as the real object of my interest. After a while, I fail to see the people at all–it is just an environment with a particular mood, a particular gush and dynamic which causes it to flow. I forget that the people in it still perceive themselves as western individuals with their own internally-base decision making faculties, operating 100 per cent independently from that environment which they are in.
I forget; and when I do, I am in danger of offending them. They want to be seen as narrow individuals …. And I am forgetting to see them this way.
I understand the underlying reasons which relate to their needs…. their cultural conditioning. Yet all the same, such narrowness is a curtailment of my religiosity and sense of communal connectivity. I am deprived of peak experience, when dealing with very narrowly contained people. I start to find them exceptionally odd and contrived. This awareness of individual self-limitation gives rise to a feeling of emotional constriction … disappointment and a feeling of a lost potential of humanity appear to block my doorway. A cultural chasm opens up, perhaps once more.
I remember when I was first a migrant; I would look at all the boys and girls and actually see nothing, experiencing very little. What seemed oddest was a total lack of connectivity, not only between themselves, but in a sense of being divorced from, disrelated to the immediate environment. Aesthetically and sexually I was not aroused. (No, not at all by the young boys and their antics — and the females, the young women, looked like ghouls to me, back then.) Beauty and eroticism were both burnt up for me then — destroyed in the fires of the historical past.
It seemed like work-a-day oppression had pervaded every part of life eventually. Even the so-called “natural environment” was tainted by it. The sunrise, even, had no redeeming factor nor drama, even though I’d got up at 5 am, just to see it loom, over a nearby bushland reserved area.
Everything had become self-contained and narrow, one thing failing to pervade into another, refusing to flow into another, denying its spirit to another.
Last night, I dreamt that someone gave me a cornucopia with sea food and assorted mystery items in it. One of the objects was a large grey octopus. I couldn’t look at this, because it had very obvious eyes on it — black pupils in whiteness. I placed the cornucopia into the crook of a very tall tree, which needed a ladder to reach. I left it, and went to the temple, to do martial arts. Some monkeys or apes were driving me there.
| Geesh! | You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility.
What is Your World View? (updated) |
Christmas cheer.
Christmas comes but once a year– and, during that time, we poor pagans have to suffer. . .
Behold, the Diety-worshippers grimace into the camera, while the weary pagan emits her desperate sigh…….
“It won’t be long now … ’til their Lord comes & takes them away,” she reflects.
“For they are surely on the Earth, but they are not “of this Earth”. Another home awaits them in the sky!!!
So, you don’t think you have a philosophy…
Still, you already have one…
Only, the one you have has been inculcated and entrenched by the range of your experiences to date, including your own ego defence against experiences which you consider hard to register … hard to make anything out of. Maybe it is just that your brain is too small to do this job, yet. Maybe, in a way, you choose not to assimilate all your experiences into your conscious mind as being somehow meaningful. You think your bread is buttered on the other side — the side of refusing to recognise meaning in whatsoever you cannot understand.
Oh well, poor you, poor sucker!
You have a philosphy — and it is an expedient philosophy.
You have a philosophy, indeed, and you are already and waiting to impose it upon others, perhaps on poor, unsuspecting passers-by, who must suffer because of your entrenched idea that your philosophy is simply “common sense”.
Your Prayers Make The Real Gods Angry: Hell Now Icy Cold claims crazy-ass German pope.
asshead
mynewhorse
We all gamble
Even the adoption of a very stultifying and non-dynamic view of the world involves a moment by moment gamble in so far as it involves and even reinforces perspectives of good and evil — and what is gambling but the inclination to delve into postulating factors of good and evil, in order to produce the best outcome for oneself? Adoption of a static perspective on the world is an attempt to shield oneself from evil, such as one understands it, and to take shelter in what is assumed to be “the good”. Yet, however worthy such a goal of self-preservation through Manichean (black and white) thinking might seem to be, an adoption of metaphysical ideals of good and evil nonetheless remains a biological gamble. There are no absolutes in lived experience, only ideas of them. Those who adopt a very stable worldview, either consciously or unconsciously, take the material risk that their worldviews will not be disrupted by those approaching living from a different angle. Maybe the main difference in perspectives between those whose worldview is Manichean and those who adopt a more dynamic view of living, is that the Manicheans are at best unconscious gamblers.
PS– the link above gives a more comprehensive meaning for the term Manichean than simply black and white. I am attacking the absolutism of black and white thinking. I think perspectives on good and evil are very alterable depending on who one is and what one has experienced and is capable of thinking about!
Life-gambling
We are all gamblers. The lioness gambles with the getting of on getting food, whilst not being stabbled, hoofed, stomped, and so on, by the prey it has approached. Dead lionnesses are not uncommon.
One gambles most crudely and least effectively when one doesn’t know one’s own environment, inside and out.
Most effective life-gambling is done by those who have had a conditioned understanding of their own environment — bestowed in part by parents, but also acquired through direct experiences, light play, as well as harsh trial and error.
Well-intentioned advice which is based on knowledge acquired in one geographic, social and political environment is not suited to an environment which varies from the one in which this knowledge was acquired. To the degree that the environments differ, such advice is likely to be misleading, rather than helpful: destructive rather than life-enhancing.
Each must learn to live effectivly within their own, concrete and social environments. Those who have elders who bestow correct environmental knowledge have the best head start.
Wisdom is environmental.
Pleasure
Aware of the pleasures, every minute of life is a pleasure. Death is definitively anti-pleasure.
Up against Mike last night for pleasure, touching skin to skin, I realised how weird it must be, in terms of what is considered average, to still have an erotic attraction for your partner after 5 years. Newspaper articles insinuate that The Honeymoon Period lasts a few months (and then dies). Folk wisdom indirectly invokes a sensation of displeasure by constructing men and women as fundamentally on different train tracks in life, having a different psychology, a different way of coping and (here is the brain crack) ultimately, different desires. Folk wisdom leaches the libido of desire making it anemic, finally leaving it dusty.
Desire automatically arrives through a deliberate minimalisation of consciousness.
Remove the baroque appendages and flowery expectations from your psyche and you will be left with your libido and its instincts plainly speaking to you telling you the means to achieve its aims.
Living, breathing is achievement of desire, and pleasure.
Up against Mike last night for pleasure, touching skin to skin, I realised how weird it must be, in terms of what is considered average, to still have an erotic attraction for your partner after 5 years. Newspaper articles insinuate that The Honeymoon Period lasts a few months (and then dies). Folk wisdom indirectly invokes a sensation of displeasure by constructing men and women as fundamentally on different train tracks in life, having a different psychology, a different way of coping and (here is the brain crack) ultimately, different desires. Folk wisdom leaches the libido of desire making it anemic, finally leaving it dusty.
Desire automatically arrives through a deliberate minimalisation of consciousness.
Remove the baroque appendages and flowery expectations from your psyche and you will be left with your libido and its instincts plainly speaking to you telling you the means to achieve its aims.
Living, breathing is achievement of desire, and pleasure.
New Tack
I’m switching from intellectual activity to a purer martial arts focus. I find that very little anybody has to say these days is new (with the exception of Roughness, and a few good links listed on my blog).
I find that I desire the New — new experiences, new feelings, new exposures to reality. Where are these to be found? I find that most people are the eternal recurrence of the Plebeian and the mediocre. They promote only themselves — more of the same.
Where is the daring to advance … ? Where is the delight in the search for novelty?
It’s here: I’m going to be reworking my own autobiography — and I want to work my theories of somatic conditioning into it.
To those who feel inclined to help, I would most certainly revel in any advice.
HAPPY THANKYOU.
http://tinyurl.com/7qpbx
statanic static
Van Nguyen flies around the walls of my room, with energetic frustration (and not lacking in petulance) because he has realised that he resigned himself to die too soon.An evening day-dream.
In my dream last night, I went to the beautician, Lucy Liu, who agreed to manicure my nails, even though her partner in business engaged in quite some dramatic and petulant martial arts defiance, before refusing to attend to me, her booked-in client. A positive affirmation of female developmental prospects and liberation?
Watermelon Rant
doctoral thesis
I want to say that we replicate the patterns common experiences bestowed upon us by our environments, in our bodies. These patterns are memory traces, and are coloured as it were, by either red or blue — which is to say, by positivity of negativity, primarily.Such internalised patterns of the psyche can and do link up to form other larger patterns, or landscapes within our psyche (both conscious and unconscious parts). The linking of such psychological patterns as a matter of course, is promoted by ideologies.
Some ideologies (ways of codifying to ourselves the good and bad whilst also elucidating to ourselves our own memory patterns) are very compelling to us, subjectively, as they reinforce a greater number of our internalised patterns, causing them to reverberate within consciousness. Such reverberation is confirming. Confirmation of what one thinks one knows is always pleasurable, and rings forth a sense of security with regard to the predictability of one’s world. Ideology does that work of making one feel IN CONTROL of one’s environment. There may be no more pleasurable feeling in some ways than receiving confirmation of one’s being in control through a corroborating feed-back loop (confirming one’s subjective sense of one’s environment’s predictability).
On the other hand, failure to receive reinforcement of one’s internalised patterns has a contrasting effect, of making one feel insecure about one’s environment, which then takes on an uncertain and unpredictable quality. One feels disempowered to control it. One cannot register its patterns from previous memory traces to learn which of the patterns or effects that one perceives are beneficial or disastrous. If one cannot read the patterns of a new or altered environment, and if the patterns which one has internalised are not corroborated by the reverberation of similar effects which generate from one’s environment, then one starts to feel … unwell.We are creatures of our environments, forever imprinted by them, at a deep subconscious level.
We can learn about new environments and how to navigate the sorts of positive and negative patterns they tend to generate, but we can never entirely lose the effect of having being sculpted by our previous environments.
UPDATE 2011: My actual thesis suggested that shamanism is a way to be “born anew” to a rather large degree.
globally heating the teacup
If I make no mistake, the weather is a tad tempestuous today in Perth. It’s 3.58 pm. The weather-mood is rather like that which I used to experience in sub-tropical Harare
It seems as if a storm’s a-brewing! Said storm will probably not arrive though, late in December (Perth’s hot and dry season — once said to be a “Mediterranean climate” — now we are not so sure!) Yet the moistness in the air, the almost sultry gusts of wind, are like that of Zimbabwe at this time of year.
