Fogland

What repeatedly stands in the way of our ability to succeed?

For the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to call it "the fog." The fog represents a trance state, a state of unconsciousness that feels like the mentality of a toddler or young child. It might be a feeling of fear, but more often, it's a primitive defense mechanism that has been adopted for coping with fear.

We may notice that we're in the fog when our hot buttons have been pushed and we've reacted immaturely, all the while knowing better. It might be when we don't believe a problem can be solved no matter how we slice it: the feeling of "this will never work out, never has-never will." Something along the lines of "I can't do it, I've tried everything" may come up in certain situations, repeatedly. Or, perhaps we keep pushing hard for the desired result, even though we see great damage being senselessly inflicted. Whatever it is, we can't help ourselves and something deep inside "knows better," yet we can't seem to access it when we most need it: "Oh, if I'd had my full wits about me, I'd have said..."
Somehow, we become totally frozen and can't think straight.

That's what I'm calling the fog. I invite you into a conversation I recently had with someone over their "fog" issue. I hope you can take something away from it.

"You were saying that you experienced the fog not so much in high school, as much as later in college. The fog is merely the defense tactic minus the awareness of what it's defending against, right? Of course we get better at using our fog defense over time, you probably only mastered it in college!

"It behooves you to look beyond the fog directly at the fear that underlies it. To face and survive the fear at least ONCE in your life is to be able to see it properly. After you've seen it once, you must practice surviving the fear that drove you to numbness repeatedly and with greater consciousness, if you want to master it in order to get on with what's important in your life.

"When I say at least once, I mean not just intellectually, but as a visceral experience; and not just emotionally, but cognitively too! With eyes wide open, can you experience all three at the same time, body sensation, emotional feeling, and cognitive awareness? Can you move through your fear without "fainting" i.e., without losing consciousness and later waking up, recovered from some exhaustion that tries to pass for catharsis? Can you visit your fear without falling into the fog and later thinking, "Oh I should never have reacted that way, that was NOT what I wanted to do."

"Be prepared to survive the experience of the fear that underlies the fog several times in order for it to resolve, dissipate, melt away, lose its potency. You're still running into that same fear and not experiencing it every single time you go into fogland! It's a compulsive way of running from unpleasantness.

"You can't "fix" the fear, or address it, or even feel it properly while in it, while you're in the distorted perspective of fogland. The task is to wake up to the familiarity of fogland and be willing to step out of the insanity. To do that effectively and consistently, you must listen for and truly hear the voice that put you there, the voice that drives the fear, the one that says "You're not good enough," "you're alone in this," "who do you think you are?" "this will never work..."

"You never really hear that voice when you're defending, arguing with it while still in the fog! You can only notice the voice if, for a moment, you listen to it as though it might be true. That may seem too painful, but the wonderful gift is that it genuinely CAN'T be true. So ultimately, by listening carefully and really hearing it, you win: you debunk the lie that has been running you ragged!

"When you recognize those disempowering sensations in your body, your feelings and your thoughts as being driven by the voice of superego, untruth, lie, etc., when you are properly convinced they're a lie, then you you can learn to "survive," "bear," or consciously breathe through the barricade of "false sensations" (emotions, thoughts, patterns.) These strong sensations are after all "true memories" as far as your body is concerned! These true memories were indeed experienced time and time again in your history... That's what you have to face squarely and shake out: real memories embedded in your cellular, material being: your body!"

IBP techniques can show you the true nature of your fog and the lie that repeatedly drives you into it. IBP can show you how to step out of the fog directly, effectively and consistently. It takes courage to want to experience your fog in order to learn what fears lurk beneath. It's something few are willing to try until the pain of failure has become more frightening than the prospect of exploring the nature of our illusory fears.

THE CALL OF THE FOREST

The following passage is from a book called Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body, by Reginald A. Ray. (Chapter 3, in its entirety)

"In the Buddhist past, when questions have arisen about the authenticity of institutionalized, conventionalized Buddhist organizations, politics, beliefs, and practices, practitioners have retired into the "forest" (skt, vana, aranya), the classical terms for the uninhabited jungles of India. The "forest" was regarded as a place beyond the reach of conventional culture and institutionalized Buddhism, a place where the atmosphere was open and unobstructed. The forest was understood as a tractless waste, a place for all those "others" standing outside of conventional culture, such as wild animals, gods and demons, and people beyond the pale. The latter included lunatics, criminals, the terminally ill, the most extreme outcasts, and, most important, those spiritual practitioners who literally walked away from the conventionalized religious systems of India seeking "the origin of all things."

"Within Indian culture, the forest was considered the ideal place for spiritual practice because, in the forest, there are no rules and there are no presiding authorities. The only authority is the chaos of the forest itself. the only rule is what awaits there for each practitioner, uniquely, to discover. Memories of the past and plans for the future, the psychic infrastructure of civilization, do not apply: they have no bearing and they have no footing. The forest is about something else. In the forest, there is only the ever-present possibility of events, encounters, and insights that emerge directly from reality itself, pure and unpolluted by human wants, expectations and attitudes. Uniquely in the forest, the most radical of all human journeys can take place, one which brings us into direct contact with primordial being. Generally, the greatest saints of Buddhist tradition both in India an din larger Asia were products, so to speak, of the forest; fed up with the limitations of the town-and-village culture of institutionalized Buddhism, inspired by those who had gone before, they disappeared into the forest for years, decades, or even for life."


Ray goes on to say how there is no longer any geographical, literal forest for the modern-day practitioners to retire to, and I would add that there is really no easy access to the inner, metaphorical forest either.

"Even the idea of the "forest" has become largely marginalized in modern Buddhism. Every manifestation of Buddhism, it now seems, must immediately demonstrate "social engagement" and "ethical impact. It is not [...] that these are unimportant values. But now, more and more, they have become a litmus test to determine which forms of Buddhism are acceptable and which are not. Thus, the true forest is quickly disappearing, perhaps forever, from our world.

"But there is a new wilderness, a new trackless waste, a new unknown and limitless territory, a new terrain of chaos, that calls us. It is a territory [...] that has not been, and cannot be, colonized and domesticated by human ambition and greed, that in its true extent cannot be mapped by human logic at all. This is the "forest" of the human body. The body is now, I believe, our forest, our jungle, the "outlandish" expanse in which we are invited to let go of everything we think, allow ourselves to be striped down to our most irreducible person, to die in every experiential sense possible and see what, if anything, remains.

"In this, I am speaking not of the body we think we have, the body we conceptualize as part of our "me" or my self-image. Rather, I am talking about the body that we meet when we are willing to descend into it, to surrender into its darkness and its mysteries, and to explore it with our awareness. As we shall see, this true, limitless body cannot even be entered until we are willing to leave our own thinking process behind--on the surface, so to speak. It is similar to the deep-sea diver" while floating on the surface of the sea, he knows little of what lies below, but when he descends into its depths, the limitless worlds of the ocean open to him. It was of this ever unbounded and unknown body that the great siddha Saraha spoke when he said, "There is no pace of pilgrimage as fabulous an open as this body of mine, no place more worth exploring."

Somatic psychotherapy leads you to the daunting forest, all the while remembering to help you place crumbs along the path (plenty of helpful markers) so you might find your way back, should you ever panic and feel lost.

The limits of Computational Theory of the Mind (CTM)

Moment by moment, night flickers in the imagination, in eroticism, subverting our strivings for virtue and order, giving an uncanny aura to objects and persons, revealed to us through the eyes of an artist…. Every attraction, every pattern of touch, every orgasm is shaped by psychic shadows.

Camille Paglia (1991, p. 4)

I am a somatic psychotherapist currently investigating a meta-model of human sexuality that can explain many components of irrational erotic arousal in terms of evolutionary psychology not yet fully accounted for by the computational theory of the mind (CTM). The proposed sexual model goes beyond the collective instinctual drive for the propagation of the species. It is a model where the development of consciousness is more consistently selected over human survival or personal advantage (see illustration below, regarding the stereotypical sexual coupling between the proverbial Catholic girl and the bad boy.) This hard-wired priority of consciousness development accounts for all manner of sexual attraction and perversion.

My understanding of computational theory of the mind (CTM) is of an organic feedback mechanism that acts to organize perception. My notion is that this mechanism is mediated not only by the mind but by the entire body as a computational vehicle of self-correcting apperception (not to mention a vehicle of self-healing molecular biology) and driven by chemical reinforcers such a dopamine, oxytocin, etc. to recognize and therefore respond (reorganize) to higher-level (transcendent) patterns of organization.

The new contribution of this erotic model of psychic and somatic organization is that it proposes a consciousness theory of arousal that drives evolution through a slightly modified version of the above mechanistic model (CTM). The new factor is akin to a yearning principle, that is, it's the instinctually-driven urge for humans to deeply know and manipulate physiological (somatic), material (environmental), and relational (interpersonal) as well as spiritual (transpersonal) dynamics.

The model posits the development of psychic organization primarily through a somatic gnosis of symbolic representations (chemical/emotional/relational pattern recognition on a visceral-body level) and secondarily through dream mentation (Fosshage), conceptual cognition, and eventually, through the manipulation of limiting linguistic symbols for articulating and propagating knowledge.

The model assumes a dynamic relationship between an individual’s personal reaction to symbols (that is, pre-extant organization matrices to which the individual is predisposed--environmentally, genetically, and personally--to recognize; also called archetypal patterns) and a somatic reaction that can be termed incentive salience (that which lights up reward centers in the brain) but is also recognized as instinct or desire. Ultimately, the model proposes that we are hard-wired for the development of consciousness primarily through the somatic exploration of symbols of transcendence (archetypal patterns), an optimal method for achieving developmental quantum leaps--something that the CTM model, as it now stands, cannot account for.

Steve Pinker writes (So How Does The Mind Work, 2005):

"Evolutionary psychology also helps to explain many instances of error, irrationality, and illusion—why we gamble, eat junk food, fall for visual illusions, obsess over celebrities, and fear snakes and heights more than hair dryers near bathtubs or driving without a seatbelt. The nature of the explanation is that there can be a mismatch between the ancestral environment to which our minds are evolutionarily adapted and the current environment in which we find ourselves."

The meta-theory of sexuality and arousal posits that such irrational desires (and addictions) symbolically point to unmet developmental needs. The resulting yearning, when suppressed, becomes more and more pathological. The underlying need is sought on a literal basis rather than on a higher-level analogical basis. (eg. Grasping for a breast rather than becoming conscious of insufficient nurturing in childhood or infancy –something the body well remembers and still irrationally clamors for, despite slaps in the face—rather than to seek appropriate and effective ways of bridging the as-of-yet-unconscious lacuna.)

A more elaborate illustration of this dynamic is seen in the underlying set of developmental needs expressed through the stereotypical sexual attraction between the proverbial Catholic Girl and Bad Boy. The Girl’s upbringing requires her to repress all tendencies to selfishness, self-interest, aggression, hostility, dishonesty, swearing, lying, cheating, etc… much of which the Bad Boy flaunts with impunity. This Boy, in turn, raised in a rough, gang-infested neighborhood might be risking his life if he dares exhibit tenderness, compassion, generosity, empathy, tearfulness, or any “softness” of emotion, which the good girl nonetheless proudly flaunts with the enviable result that everyone, including this Bad Boy, clamors to protect (or, perversely, attempts to squash in the hope that she can demonstrate how to survive despite her vulnerable attributes!)

Certainly when he rapes her or, optimally, only expresses carefully contrived (i.e., symbolic) roughness through his erotic aggression, he wants to pierce through her innocence to drink in her purity while infusing her with the Bad Boy qualities she lacks. Ideally he holds back sufficiently to not damage or traumatize her. Optimally, he is compelled to push their mutual limits whilst taking care to monitor her responses (to remain relational) in view of affording her a deep visceral pleasure that might embolden her to eventually try out (and validate for herself) her own latent bad-boy capacities -heretofore repressed.

He might be investigating the question of, “How might she respond when I do to her what was done to me, when I was too young/undeveloped to contain such pressure? Can I learn to be like her, or would it still be too dangerous to me?” If she feels safe in fully surrendering to what this exchange offers she might, through practice, learn to internalize his bad-boy behaviors, which have been so direly lacking within her range of responses. She can get unstuck from the good-pole of the good-bad dichotomy, which blocks her from the resolution of her developmental arrest. When the boy sheds a tear or becomes sweetly overwhelmed or deeply ashamed by his feelings, the girl might jump to cheer him and love him all the more. His wound begins to heal when he dares behave vulnerably with her, if she has modeled it for him under his "attacks" that is, if she does not take advantage or use his vulnerability against him.

These visceral lessons assist this dyad in transcending deeply buried psychologically and physically hard-wired traits. The orgasmic surrender allows the physical holding patterns that belie the embodied psychological attitudes to finally become loosed, at least for the post-coitus relaxation. If, however, such lessons are sufficiently repeated as to promote homeostatic shifts in the psychological and physical posturings of these lovers, then eventually much development and consciousness can be permanently gained. If the physical relaxation of old, chronic muscular holding patterns becomes the new norm through their "loosened" stances, then even organic illness (which could have resulted from the reduced flow of oxygen in those chronically tensed parts of the body) might be allayed in the long-term.

The girl’s and boy’s respective physiologies become excited with what their whole bearing recognizes as a potential sexual interaction that offers transcendent possibilities for resolving each of their psychological blocks. This is an archetypal pattern, not one cognitively recognized by the participants nor understood by the social environments that originally caused the psychological and behavioral suppression. Once recognized and exhaustively explored through a multitude of erotic variations, the sexual charge associated with this "Bad-Boy/Good-Girl" theme eventually dissipates. Consciousness can then be further explored within some different archetypal erotic landscape. New erotic fantasies herald the next onion layer of psychic healing/growth. An appetite to pornography is healthy if not abused addictively so as to obstruct the acquisition of consciousness.

Pinker wrote:

“Deriving new accurate beliefs from old ones in pursuit of a goal is not a bad definition of ‘intelligence’, so a principal advantage of the computational theory of mind (CTM) is that it explains how a hunk of matter (a brain or a computer can be intelligent.”

Nowhere in any logical construct, built on limited assumptions, can anyone compute a rational argument from the lover’s vantage of how and why these and more salacious erotic couplings can be psychologically healthy. On the contrary, we are aroused by whatever actually seems most unhealthy, at least from our perspective, because it brings to consciousness what was shameful and buried early in each of us. It arouses, through pattern recognition (archetypal symbols) whatever has held us back from becoming whole. Arousal always raises into consciousness that which was repressed in us during our childhood through shaming or fear. However, everything gleaned through arousal and sexual satisfaction attests to the desirability and wholesomeness of sexually perverse relationships. Admittedly, this holds true only if certain relational conditions are met and maintained: honoring the sexual partner's free will and even helping safeguard it when it is insufficiently upheld, which takes a tremendous amount of presence, insight, and respect.

The capacity for derivative thinking is perhaps not a bad definition of a certain type of intelligence, but the CTM model is as yet inadequate for describing the type of intelligence characterized by creativity. The contention of the proposed new thesis (The Psychic Function of Erotic Arousal) is that the entire body serves as an integrative mechanism that can perceive and organize new, inchoate information by mapping new perception upon itself using analogical pattern recognition to draw new conclusions about higher levels of organization. We have a whole universe of biological mechanisms within us that represent patterns through which our organism functions brilliantly, and of course unconsciously, on higher levels of organization than we can yet cognitively conceive. We are cognitively unaware of more than a tiny fraction of those patterns, although some aspect of our being certainly masters the knowledge of biological mechanisms far beyond the scope of our conscious minds.

The point is that new information rarely computes correctly within a set field of knowledge. The entire human body is part of a higher order processing mechanism than the computational model gives it (the body) credit for managing. The body's apperceptive faculties are not limited to the mind in the way the CTM understands it. The body utilizes an analogical model of pattern recognition (arousal) for gleaning a higher organizational structure about the irrational, that is, about "what the mind doesn't know we don't know," but about what the body has a veritable clue through the "universe within itself."

Pinker:

“Finally, mental life—internal representations and processes—appears to be more lawful and universal than overt behavior, which can vary with circumstances.”

In healthy sexuality the opposite is true, as illustrated in the above example. Furthermore, overt behavior in sex is usually a more muted version of an individual’s erotic fantasy, and for good reason.

Guggenbuhl-Craig observed that, “in psychoanalytic practice it happens again and again that the more differentiated, and not the weaker a person is, the more we find the so-called sexual aberrations” (2001, p. 90).

Jung’s notion of the transcendent function was to psychology the equivalent of what the quantum leap was to physics. No cognitive construct will uncover the way to new consciousness, although once a new awareness is gleaned, CTM might map an effective model that explains it. Creative intelligence is a visceral drive that expresses itself through arousal (libido, life energy, enthusiasm, joy, pleasure) that is best explored through sex, art, and only then consolidated through cognitive awareness. Let science not imagine it can forge the way to new knowledge when it so emphatically and persistently dismisses the value of the irrational and incoherent! Until this stance is changed to integrate "intuition" and "gut response," science can only confirm and articulate new ideas through hindsight postulation of imagined--not derived--models. Science can never dictate the limits of art or judge the veracity of creative expression without hindering the expansion of consciousness.