Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.
Joined Dec 2022
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!
Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Küsse gab sie uns und Reben,
Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben
und der Cherub steht vor Gott.
The reference at the heart of all of this is impossibly obscure. It's impression on your will is crooked and self-mocking. But in all of it there is enough looseness, enough play between the elements that there is the possibility that it is all redeemed by this experience of beauty. You cannot say that this beauty is what the roaches felt, or even what your human neighbors feel, and you cannot say how the cereal makes it possible. But the possibility is undeniable, and it stirs in you a theme:
The more you find yourself contemplating the aesthetic the more it becomes a source of profound inner clarity, deeper even that what you can even articulate in private words.
Beauty. Beauty itself. Beauty in its endless resplendent array of senses. Beauty from the senses but beyond the senses. Beauty that seems somehow beyond the whole world, even though it's only glimpsed in such things as the groin of a tree or an unexceptional historical tea set. Here too beauty is rescuing the world.
The doubts that you hold about pheromones also rupture into your mind at terrible times. Your boss tells you to "follow your nose" in an important meeting and you can't recover after that. Or more accurately you insist on trying to recover but do it in a method that is so pained and self-aware that the episode becomes a major entry in your collection of memories that inspire self-loathing.
And yet even in the midst of all of this there is one aspect that hovers over everything else, like dawn.
You can't give up, or at least you find yourself doubting whether little choices betray you.
One day you hesitate before pouring boiling water on some ants. You cannot convince yourself that you know why you do this: hesitate, then torture. You do not know what this means, but you feel strongly that if you had forgotten about the Christmas Ghost as well as you thought you would have, you would have been certain in either killing the bugs or sparing them.
But the roaches died when the archipelago was contacted by European missionaries. This at least opens up to research, and you get several solid theories about what specifically killed the roaches and how their sense of pheromones might have been physiologically felt, at least.
So now you've got the aesthetics of the pheromones, the way that a qualitative dimension might have felt to a distantly extinct animal population, and you feel like the whole thing turns absurd again.
You try to give up.
You tell yourself that it was a hallucination but the visit is dimly, distantly, but unmistakably captured through the window by a neighbor's doorbell cam.
You don't remember the breakfast cereal, and it has no Wikipedia page, but then you spend so much time trying to remember it that you can no longer say with certainly whether you partially remember it or whether you've fooled yourself.
And then there's the roaches. Wikipedia says that they once inhabited a certain Pacific archipelago.
The Ghost of Christmas Gray-Orange morality appears in the corner of your room with a version of you that is visibly confused. It explains that this is what your life would look like if in terms of specific pheromonal aesthetics, appreciable only to small subspecies of roaches, if your mom had let you have a certain breakfast cereal during your youth. The pair disappear into thin air.
@enkiv2 Then you can think about the similarities between paying your taxes and going to the arcade as a kid. Maybe you discover that in both situations you had a rush of confusion leading to a frustrated spite about being ripped off. If you feel like you've found "an answer" or some insight about the handle, you pay attention to your clenched jaw again and reflect on that answer. The feeling of successful validation is usually a relaxing breath and an innate sense of clearing / unblocking.
@enkiv2 It might be that this imagery seems like a distraction, like it's basically irrelevant to the feeling you're trying to focus on. In that case you need to ask yourself the question again and await another handle from the unconscious body-mind. But let's say that the jaw clench and the arcade memory seem to intensify or focus each other in some way, and that when you think about the arcade memory you're able to intensify the jaw-clenching anger. This proves that you have a handle.
@enkiv2 Then you try to hold onto whatever ache or tension that you feel with the anger. Let's say your neck is tight and your jaw is clenched. Then with a relaxed and introspective frame of mind you can ask yourself, "What's so jaw-clenchy about my taxes?" And if you hold that question and pay attention to your imagination for a minute, you might get a flash of some strange memory, like playing at an arcade as a kid. Then you validate the arcade memory by comparing it to the jaw clench.
@enkiv2 So let's say hypothetically that you know that *doing your taxes* is one of those areas where you can sense that something is a bit /off/ and you probably should do some "feeling your feelings" stuff. You know at some level that you're mad and upset about *doing your taxes,* but you don't know how exactly you're supposed to be "feeling your feelings" other than getting mad about taxes again.
In this scenario, you'd need to catch yourself feeling the anger inside your body at some point.
@enkiv2 Then you validate the handle by observing the body-feeling again and seeing if it's semi-coupled with the handle. Partial hits count, though you may need to "go fish" and search for different handles until one is suitably well validated by your body-feeling.
Sometimes this validation is sufficient to achieve the "body shift" or yum-like feeling to signal the end. Other times you need to actually do some introspection using the handle. Your introspection should be validated by body-shift
@enkiv2 In the second stage you basically use an relaxed and introspective state of mind to observe the body-feeling, see if you can voluntarily exacerbate it by a small margin, and then propose the following question to yourself: "What is so X about Y?" In this phrase, X should be the body-feeling and Y should be the explicit situation as you understand it.
Your subconscious should provide an image, word, memory, etc. in your imagination. This is your "handle."
@enkiv2 It's probably unfair of me to boil down the Gendlin approach, so check out the actual documentation on this for independent verification.
The "focusing" method basically moves in two stages: in the first stage you notice some body-feeling. It's best to think about a body-feeling as something that could appear in your awareness primarily as emotion, or primarily as a bodily ache or tension, but in the Gendlin line of thinking both are fundamentally connected.
@enkiv2 I'm probably brainrotten due to Gendlin's *Focusing*, but I totally buy into the view that the therapeutic benefits from "feeling your feelings" are derived from a simple process for interfacing with your body-mind using subconsciously-provided symbols, imagery, or "handles." There's a definite and distinctive release your body-mind can achieve at the end of the steps.
No need for mysterious Buddhist metaphysics in my humble opinion.
There's a Chinese flood narrative, too FWIW.
Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ
boosted
You can do many things on computer.
Don't.
I use every opportunity to say "fingerspitzengefuhl."
Now I want to admit that I could be wrong about the internal coalitional politics of people fighting climate change. It may be that "bleeding hearts" are less influential than I believe. And it may be that the "mere climate" faction is going to lead the charge. I hope they do. But I sincerely doubt it.
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.
Joined Dec 2022
