Tag: Psychology

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Placebo vs Nocebo

placebonocebo

Placebo —-vs—- Nocebo
It looks like:
Positive imagination/expectation —-vs—- Negative imagination/expectation

Positive and negative imagination tend to spiral.
* When you life has been going well with better and better things, positive imagination spirals.
* And when your life has loss after loss, negative imagination starts to spiral.

It seems, life is like an indifferent movie, that keeps playing, and you sit in the theater seat and watch it unfold.
* If great things happen, you start to see positive future visions (+ve imagination).
* If bad things happen in the movie, you start to dread the future scenes (-ve imagination).
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Desire is what makes the potential for pleasure possible.

Desire = Potential for Pleasure.
No Desire = No pleasure.
Attachment to pleasure = Attachment to desire.
Attachment to pleasure = Attachment to denying oneself -> by projecting a part/possibility of yourself out on someone or something.
Every desire gives your power away.
Greater the desire = Greater is the power given away.
So ironically, your capacity for pleasure is totally related to your capacity to deny oneself and project outward.

The desiring process is as follows:
First divide/compartmentalize/multiplitize yourself -> then deny yourself of some divided parts and project them into the world -> play complex games to seek for those divided parts (in such a way that you will never get it completely and you can keep playing).
So that inconsistent getting and losing of the desired, keeps you hooked and playing the game round and round.
Greater the inconsistency and the sharper the reward = Greater is the addiction and enslavement (that is why the more addictive drugs have the greatest and shortest possible highs with the greatest drops).
If you want greatest pleasure, then you will seek the most unattainable and impossible.
Because then you can enjoy the greatest possibility for pleasure at the time of reunion.

It is a game of hide and seek.
Game rules: Separate yourself into many fragments, and ask all the fragments to hide into the world, and then play the game of hide and seek in the world to RE-MEMBER yourself back.
Every reunion brings great pleasure.
The soul splits itself into a million fragments(like a big bang event) and then takes on a hero fragment/avatar who searches and unites himself with all the other fragments.
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All identity is relational

The self-other is like a single magnet with its 2 poles arising together.
In our outer life:
* The self is implicit and the other is explicit.
* The self is the background and the other is the foreground.
And this seeing can be reversed too, as is done during deep introspection and contemplation.
* The other can be made the background, and the self can be made the foreground.
* Similarly the other can be made implicit and the self can be made explicit.
So the picture is the same in both cases, but depending on where you focus, the other pole get blurred out. 

The image below shows the 2 possibilities of focus:
fgbg

So the self-other arise together mutually and interdependently.
* So whenever there is a self, there is an other.
* And whenever there is an other, there is surely a self.

The sun-signs zodiac literature classifies the signs into 3 kinds of identity natures:
* Cardinal = Identities that have a firm foundation and keep expanding (Rajasic) = mind dominant = positive charge (in the magnetic field) = Symbolizes a Volcano = Conscious mind = Dynamic, Action-oriented, Initiating.
* Fixed = Identities that are fixed (Tamasic) = body dominant = neutral charge = Symbolizes a Mountain = Unconscious mind = Stable, Determined, Unyielding.
* Mutable = Identities that are constantly changing (Sattvic) = soul dominant = negative charge = Symbolizes a New Born baby = Superconscious mind = Subtle, Transformative, Reflective.
There is a lot of deep literature on this subject, I have really said very little above.
But this will help me to speak about certain other points.

You can either change yourself to fit more and more into the world or change the world to fit more and more into your self-conception.
* The cardinal identity type will only associate with things people places concepts etc., that expand its own identity structure. And it will avoid all the negative forces.
* The fixed identity type will try to change the other and the whole world to validate its own attachment to a fixed way of perceiving itself.
So the fixed type is in a way against both positive and negative forces because it wants to maintain the same perception.
* The mutable type will keep adapting and changing/shape-shifting itself into different roles and identities in the world like an explorer. It changes itself to explore the different dimensions of the world, rather than change the world per se.
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Charter of principles for relationships

PRINCIPLES:
***************
Make: “Compulsion” -> “Choice”
Realize: Your compulsions are your unconscious choices.
Become: “Conscious” of “Expectations”
Understand that: “Unsaid Expectations” are the root cause of ruin in all relationships.
{ Work towards: “Communicating expectations” to others, and “RESOLVING” conflicts.
Insist on: Reaching an Agreement. }
Remember to: “Do what you are doing willingly, and don’t do anything that you are not willing to do.”
Remember: All anger is from expectation (said or unsaid).
Replace: “Expectation” with “Truth”
Do things: “Willingly” without “Expectation”
Remember: If you do things willingly from your own desire, it maximizes your intrinsic happiness. The happiness from relationships is only the icing on the cake of your own intrinsic happiness. The icing cannot substitute for the cake, nor will it compensate much for a bitter tasting cake.
The goal is: “Unity in diversity”, not “Unity of sameness”
Focus on: Making “systems” for everyone, that also “maximize” the “freedom of individuals.”
Let: Each person freely and naturally give to others, what they themselves naturally value, without expectation.
Orient your: Life around your values.
Focus on: Discovering your values, and then orient and shape your life around them.
Do not: avoid conflict. Use each conflict to clarify/illuminate/communicate expectations and arrive at a mutual understanding and agreement/validation.
The goal is: Harmonic existence, with maximum freedom (which allows and gives space for the growth and flowering of the individual).
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The unspeakable torture possible from the mother

This is to speak about a case where the mother clings to the infant stage of the child’s growth, and actively and violently opposes its development and independence beyond that stage, so as to keep getting great narcissistic supplies from the child of “adoration/respect/desirability/admiration/grandiosity/greatness/praise” and enjoy a god like feeling of power and omnipotence in comparison to the child.

Remember, all power is relative.
So the power differential between the infant and the mother is the greatest possible difference.
The mother can get instantly addicted to THIS level of narcissistic supply from the child, and this will esp. happen if the mother did not have any life of her own and had a dependent personality before the event of child birth.
Once deeply addicted to this care-giving and protecting role, the mother may actively oppose the child’s independence, be hostile to the developing child beyond the age of 2 itself.
The mother can actively reinforce the dependence again and again ad infinitum, conveying that “you need me, you cannot live without me” in a million ways said and unsaid.
Such a mother focuses the child only on itself, and the child sacrifices its own self-awareness to please the mother developing codependence.
Really after all the origins of codependence is the narcissistic parent who purposely enforces dependence in subliminal, indirect, and direct ways, and actively opposes the child’s developing separation and independence, so that they can have an endless source of narcissistic supply and meaning from the child.
Often they also cleverly hide it by programming the child to believe, it was its own choice to be that way, and that it can’t help it.
They may even keep telling the neighbors and friends things like “my child needs me for everything, they are such a burden, I keep telling them to do things by themselves, but they keep coming back to me, what can I do?!”
This is just the narcissists game.
This is a microcosmic version of the game of training a slave to believe that he is actually not a slave, but is choosing from his free will.
It all starts at this level.

Just like doctors who save patients are considered to be doing a divine profession higher in value and weight than most other professions, mothers are given this kind of deification and supreme value too.
So a mother can exploit this for a long time, by actively working to keep the child dependent on her and opposing the child’s development/independence in every crooked, unspeakable mystical way possible.
I can elaborate on all those psychic techniques but that may detract from the main points I want to convey in this post.

This can be experienced as extreme suffocation, stifling, and pain, for the child.
But since it is programmed to idolize the mother, it can never imagine going against the mother.
So it condemns itself, and thinks it is the real problem, and the god-like omnipotent mother is always right.
It thinks if it is pained by the mother, it is because, it is defective and needs to be fixed.
And later in life this may slide to depression if it loses all hope after trying out everything and failing.
In truth, this whole thing was really engineered and transmitted from the mother herself.
In the progression of this myth, from this child’s point of view, total powerlessness and despair and depression is an EXPECTED stage that has to be passed.

The mother’s relationship has to keep evolving as the child evolves/grows/matures/separates/independent-izes itself.
So for different people this happens at different times, depending upon the stage of development the mother herself is in.
If the mother herself identifies with being a helpless infant, then she resonates with the child only at that stage, and the child cannot grow beyond that, because it directly faces the threat of losing resonance with the mother.
So the child is then forced to stay infantile even in its later years.
It may be successful in society, but internally its egoic climate is still at the level of the infant only.
So the child may find himself/herself as helpless, powerless, at the mercy of circumstances, unable to establish any identity, and constantly wandering aimlessly.
It may find itself as hyper-sensitive, easily hynotizable and living in a dream-like feeling all the time, and many other such feelings.
It becomes like a Bonsai(miniature) tree, that has grown but not been allowed to grow at the same time.
Often, the child may feel this as a global feeling of being trapped in an incredibly oppressive world, and may become apathetic and depressed from the impossible struggle it would take to change anything in its favor.
Really, this projection of such a tyrannical world, has its roots in the tyrannical mother herself, because it was the mother who was tyrannical in the sense of opposing the child’s independence, and that is later felt by the child as a tyrannical world view itself.

What I speak about here is of unspeakable depth.
Things far less deep, are spoken about so much in society, as so called deep issues.
Real power is always invisible, and the power that is visible is always much lower.
For example here, the mother-child bond is done in secrecy, in the darkness, in great trust.
Nobody ever questions it, and you are shamed even if remotely begin to investigate.
This is a giant taboo in society, because any questioning of it breaks its supremely sanctified and sacred status.
My point is, great wonders and horrors can happen at this stage, at intensities even beyond the most powerful psychedelics.

There has always been extensive talk in society about abusive husbands etc.
Imagine a hyper-possessive husband who keeps his wife like his possession and pet, and pleases her when he wants, beats her up when he wants.
Basically keeps her like his trophy wife, seals her from the outer world, prevents her from having any life outside of him, and controls her like a pleasure-giving slave.
Does this horrify you?
Now, this example I gave above is a weak analogue of the mother-infant situation I describe.
Think about it: What is power? Isn’t all what we call power, a relative concept?
The relativity comes from the power difference.
What is the difference of power between this man and woman living as husband and wife?
And compare that to the difference between a mother (say aged 25+) and an infant(age 0-2)?
The mother for the infant is like an omnipotent god-like being and giant.
But you know what, society will speak endlessly about male violence against women etc.
And this mother-infant dyad, is shrouded, kept under wraps and wraps, sanctified, deified, and any torture that you faced here gets buried as YOUR shame, unspeakable shame of phenomenal intensity.

My point here is not to entirely blame the mother.
The mother herself maybe unconscious of her real power, and how much she affects the infant (the other developing being).
I might have pushed some buttons in this article, but this is in the interest of really looking into this territory of deep psyche experience.
Even if you are a woman, you were also brought up by your mother, so this is not gender-specific.
The purpose of this article, is to illuminate this realm, and to awaken people to it so that they can heal themselves and gain their own insights about their own deep psyche.
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Sanity is relative

The concept of sanity is relative.
Relative to the:
1. Level of vision
2. Level of perception
4. Level of consciousness (LOC concept from David Hawkins)
5. Number/breadth/height of perspectives you can see
6. The dynamic range of perspectives you can hold at a time
7. The extent of your spatial vision
8. The extent of your temporal vision both forward (future) and backward (past)
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Reflections on my life experience now

wave

I am not able to understand anything totally.
All my ‘intellectual grasps’ are like views from high points of different waves arising in the ocean.
What is the ocean itself?
The more I inquire I see that I am not perception at all.
I am deep sleep itself, the cessation, the void, the unmanifest, from which manifest-conscious arises like a wave and passes back.

This is a time in my life where the ocean does not have any 1 continuous wave, but rather has 100s of waves arising and passing.
Each time, my “perception” arises out of the wave, as a relationship between the wave and the ocean, and then returns to the ocean in deep sleep again.
The ocean is the true fount of my creativity, it creates waves of creative-impulse/inspiration that rise up as manifest-consciousness and after that return to the unmanifest.
The wave is a new creative thought/form/relationship/connection/theme/frame/theory/idea/insight.

It seems like perception and separation are connected because perception is always a relationship.
No relationship = ONE = Union = No perception = A void.

I see a continuous BIPOLAR state in me:
Wildly and quickly oscillating, waxing-waning, coming-going, rising-falling, empowering-disempowering, bright-dark, energetic-dull, free-afflicted.
This strong cycling of dualities makes visible the emptiness and non-essence of all of it.
I am neither depressed nor happy, neither free nor afflicted, neither interested nor bored.
Each is a state of consciousness, a state of the wave’s relationship to the ocean.
When the ocean emits the wave = it creates the positive emotion from the wave’s point of view.
When the ocean pulls back the wave = it create the negative emotion from the wave’s point of view.

Essentially, it is the attachment to the ‘States of consciousness (SOCs)’ that is being tested.
The attachment results in [pleasure+fear] in the rise cycle, and [pain+longing] in the fall cycle.
I realize that my desire is for the WAVE itself and its point of view vs. flatlining into the ocean.
The waves/cycles have also been intense and narrow for me, which causes a mild psychosis like feeling.
The intense creative activity of mine is showing that I am operating very close to ocean.
That is why there is the constant alternation between the ‘end of me’ and the ‘me arising each time differently from a new inspiration’.
I have not had any continuous long-range inspiration at this stage of life nor in this life in general.

We move away from god/unmanifest in an inbreath – wave rising.
We move towards god/unmanifest in an outbreath – wave falling.
My life experience now is more like a series of short-waves, flutter breaths (rapid extremely shallow in-out breaths).
It is like like living 1000s of lives in one life, in very rapid cycles.

I realize my attachments are much more abstract than I thought.
I cling to the peaks of the cycle, and try to increase its dynamic range, i.e. I try to make the lights brighter, and the darks darker.
Each arising wave is like an upsurge of inspiration that separates me from the ocean and allows separation/perception/consciousness/relationship, which is what I desire.
This is my WILL to be, my WILL to exist, my WILL to rise and live as a wave.
So I then try to hold on to these inspirations as far as possible.
This is why there is this continuous clinging present.

It is like living a new character in a new movie everyday, and each time you continuously cling to the movie, because you do not want it to end.
It is like struggling to be born, because various desires push our a wave of birth/inspiration, but they only last a day at most and return to the ocean.
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Your conceptual mind functions holographically

Let us understand a few basics about holograms that would apply here:
1. Holograms are as the name suggests, always whole.
2. Every part of the hologram contains the whole.
3. The additional elements of the hologram only add ‘detail’, but the inherent same wholeness is carried by all the parts.
4. For example if you cut a hologram into half, then both the halfs that would result from would contain the same whole albeit in less detail.

From what I’ve read, our entire brain works like a hologram.
Even if you take away half of the brain, the wholeness of consciousness stays, only the details are lost.
So this validates another concept that resonates with me that the brain and body are only FOCUSING instruments of the potentials of consciousness.
Something like a channeling or focusing instrument.
Like putting a slide in front of the projector light that projects the image on the slide.
The ‘slide image’ is like our body and brain.
Suppose the ‘slide image’ gets smudged, then the projector light will still shine through the slide, but it would create a really hazy and blurry image.
The source of consciousness is like the projector light, and it shines through the body and projects our experiences.
Like how electricity is everywhere, but our device channels it in a certain way to produce a certain output, similarly, our body focuses the light of consciousness in a certain way, much like a prism or diamond diffracts white light entering it.

I read somewhere that in certain kinds of autism, the person cannot form abstract concepts at all.
For instance, he cannot comprehend the full concept of what a dog is.
That part of the brain does not capture the “Conceptual Image” of dog.
So when you say dog, he can recall 10s of particular images of different dogs, but he cannot understand ‘dog’ as an abstract concept.
This means that, that part of his brain is unable to FOCUS the “abstract conceptual image” of a dog.
So what this example conveyed to me was that, our conceptual mind is a certain abstract structure in our brain that focuses and sees the ‘abstract concepts’ in the particulars. The recognition of the ‘dog concept’ when looking at the particular/literal dog.
This conceptual imaging part of our brain, works holographically, and brings into focus these abstract conceptual images.
Only once these are perceived in the first place by this part, can memories be stored and recalled.
Once the GENERIC concept is captured, all specific/particular knowledge and details learned/gained thereafter only add to the detail of the concept image, but not to the intrinsic qualia/wholeness of what was perceived (just like the hologram).

That is why in spiritual circles, the concept of awakening and initiation abounds.
Because the part of you that sees the forest in the trees has to be awakened, in a far larger context than your day to day conceptual mind.
Moving from literals to the daily conceptual mind itself is in itself a huge evolutionary jump and an awakening.
The awakening of the symbolic/metaphysical/archetypal/mythological/theological/soul level of mind is another jump of evolution.
Only after this is awakened can such symbols, motifs, themes, and super abstract ideas even be cognized/perceived/recognized.
And it is only after they are perceived first, can they be stored(memory), named, and spoken about.

The spectrum is basically from:
Literal —literal mind—-daily conceptual mind—-symbolic metaphysical mind— Abstract
Like to see a picture you need to stand far enough back for your vision-frame to contain it.
If you are too close you only see pixels and you cannot see the ‘picture’.
So there are different vertical heights of vision possible.
A person at a very high height of perception is called a visionary.
Similarly a person at a very low height of perception is a very literal focused person.

Seeing the forest in the trees, and seeing a picture in the pixels, happens not by the same part of the mind that perceived the trees or pixels, but by a dimensionally higher qualitatively different part of the mind.
Concepts reside in the 5th dimension, in the plato’s world of eternal forms.
So it is all RECOGNITION.
You only recognize the higher form with the cue of the literal form.
All lower forms are only representational cues that point and thereby connect you to the higher forms.
The literal objects we see are shadows of the higher dimensional concepts in the 5D plato’s world of forms.
They are only a representational cue or aid of the higher dimensional perception.
For instance, how does a child learn language?
Isn’t it all words pointing to words?
All words are empty by themselves and they only point to the child’s direct experiences/perceptions/recognitions.
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Core beliefs and the 4 responses

Core beliefs:
# Is the world real and am I unreal? = Fawn response
# Am I real? and is the world unreal? = Fight response
# Are both me and the world unreal? and only something beyond is real? = Freeze response
# Are the world and me real, everything beyond that is unreal ? = Flight response
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Madness is a distorted mirror

Madness is a distorted mirror.
For someone with a concrete identity, who is clearly identified with a specific structure of human experience and possibility, the mad person does not affect them much.
Because they do not identify with them at all.
We are not affected by things and people we do not identify with.
They see the mad person as totally separate from them.
However, for someone who is highly open, fluid, with vast vision and empathy, who recognizes in himself the potentials of the entire collective human consciousness itself, this witnessing of madness will hurt/pain a lot.
Because, here the deep visionary and empath can recognize himself in the mad person too.
It is like seeing a funky mirror at an amusement park, that distorts your face making your nose super large, eyes and chin super small etc.
For the person with a concrete identity, he just looks at it and flatly denies having anything to do with that reflection, he just says “this is not me”.
But for the deep visionary, it is trickier, because he is not identified with any fixed concrete identity as such, and sees himself with all possibilities of the collective consciousness.
So, when he sees the distorted mirror in the amusement park, he knows that, that is his face, a distorted version version of his original face.
The difference between the concrete person and the visionary is that, the concrete person believes the mad person is totally separate and has nothing to do with him, while the deep empath visionary can see the mad person IS HIM, in a greatly distorted form.
We are not affected by the things in which we cannot see ourselves in.
That is the root of empathy, is it not?
When your identity is sufficiently subtle, you see yourself in and as everyone and everything.

When you are young, you are mirrored in your mother’s and father’s image of you, which becomes your social identity (relational identity, ego).
If they mirror you in a seriously chaotic inconsistent mirror, then that becomes your “social identity/relational identity/ego”.
You are then never sure of your security, desirability, lovability, value etc.
Because the parent’s mad fluctuations keeps changing you from an angel to a devil randomly.
So then you start living in fear/anxiety all the time because you never know what wrong you have done, what punishment you are going to get, what expectation is going to be shoved on you etc.
They then keep you walking on eggshells all the time.
In order to adapt to those mad expectation projections on you from the parents, you have to keeping shaping yourself too accordingly.
So the end-result is, even your structure will mirror the mad parents.
The interesting thing to note here is that, madness at this intra-family level is only related to “inconsistency”.
A consistent interaction pattern no matter what it is, within the family, will be coherence and sanity. It may be totally mad with respect to the outside world however.
That is why the tyrant is a particular adaptation to madness, where he creates some arbitrary pattern and then stays ultra consistent in his investment to that, forcing others to abide by the same too, punishing them whenever they don’t.
A second adaptation to tolerate madness would be, to completely sacrifice yourself to the other and always changing yourself to match and harmonize with the changing random moods of the mad person.
The third adaptation I can think of is to completely isolate yourself, so that the self-other “painful difficult dynamic” can be totally avoided.
These 3 types of adaptation are essentially the: fight, fawn, flight responses.
If nothing works, and you are stuck in a inescapable situation, then the freeze response happens, where you lose consciousness of the entire self-other dynamic and float away in some out of body dissociated state.
At the societal level, the macrocosm mirrors the microcosm, that is:
The 4 categories of fight/fawn/flight/freeze form:
tyrants/followers/outcasts/hermits

The insight I get is: “People see me as they are, not as I am”.
But then it is also true that: “What I know as myself is only the internalized reflections from others”.
Because one cannot know oneself any more than a candle flame can burn itself.
So this is part of the “self-other” interdependent matrix.
Disharmony/Distortion/Projection = madness —vs— Harmony/Clarity/Independence = Sanity
Madness is always relative.
It is the discordant note in the symphony.
If you were born in a mad family, then the structures that you form mirror that circumstance and outcast/separate you too.
The same can be said about the parents themselves.
Maybe they themselves were the effect of mad circumstances.
So in this way, madness propagates itself in the genetic chain.

The way I deal with madness is, I work to transcend it.
By understanding the higher laws/dharma/truths beyond the madness, I work from that footing on fixing the madness in me and others.