Chapter 7 Same Above as Below
I have a relationship with myself. We all do, so it may seem like that is wasted words. We talk to ourselves all the time. The thing is, most people are so used to the tapes in their head, they forget that is an ongoing dialogue with self. Our inner dialogue is either questioning our assumptions, reinforcing our assumptions, distracting us from something, or bringing our attention to something.
Few of us are quiet long enough to realize there is something else. I discussed earlier that we don’t decide in real time. There is an easy proof if you like. If you touch your nose with your finger, you feel it as an instantaneous event. But you also know, the nerve impulse traveling from finger up the arm through the shoulder up the neck to the brain has a longer path than the nerve impulse from nose direct to brain. We read lips- light hits your eyes before the sound gets to your ears, and yet we don’t experience lips and sound being out of sync. If that isn’t weird enough for you, here is something else you can add to this. Most of the things you see is memory, not what you’re actually seeing. Again, this is not science fiction. This is demonstrable fact. So, for example, and again from fMRI studies, people looking at objects were shown to be using more memory parts of their brain, and less of the visual centers of the brain.
Imagine you set your keys down. You walk away and you come back and you don’t see them and spend the next hour turning the house upside for where you set your keys, only to find, after all that energy, they were exactly where you left it. If you have a kid, maybe you have had this experience. You tell them to get something. They say they can’t find it. You find the item exactly where you said it was and call them in there and demand that they acknowledge that they see what you see, and they still say “I don’t see it.” At this point, you may even get mad, “If it were a snake, you’d be bitten!” And the more irritated you get, the less likely they are to see it.
Our brains take shortcuts. You don’t see what you think you see. You don’t hear what you think you hear. You are likely to hear and see what you expect to see. Not always. You could find yourself having a good day, great clarity, everything seems joyously in sync, and suddenly an old tape rears its head and destroys your mood. That was not your present voice- that was a memory voice. Maybe it was a memory of your voice saying you don’t deserve happiness, or someone in your family gave that to you, but again- this is important- when it comes to your running dialogue, you are most likely playing old tapes than having original, new thoughts.
I am not even saying that’s a bad thing. Sometimes we need those structures to operate, to get our daily tasks accomplished. If they are intrusive or non-functional, that is problematic. What I am trying to convey is that it takes practice to be aware, to be quiet, and be present with real incoming present data. Almost everyone agrees, a panic attack is not about clear and present danger. It is a memory flash that triggered an alert- we can’t find the present danger, but we believe our brain, and that belief triggers a search find routine, and suddenly a memory has escalated into a full Defcon One scenario, and you feel like you’re having a heart attack, and if you go to the ER, they assure you- you’re hearts fine, you’re just nuts- and you get mad because you can’t deny the veracity of the signal your brain has amplified to full volume.
Sucks, eh? In the words of House MD, “everybody lies.” One of my favorite shows, too- the first three seasons were solid. But it’s actually worse than that tag line suggests. Not only does everyone lie, but we all lie to ourselves. Have you experienced telling someone something they flat out refuse to hear? People can go through incredible leaps and bounds not to listen to someone. Sometimes they will listen, and immediately dismiss it with a “but…” Everyone confronts this, not just addicts, not just religious zealots, not just scientist- even society does this. We do this in interacting with others and we also do that with ourselves. It’s not a malicious act. There is you. There is your subconscious. And there is your brain. You have heard me say it, you are not your brain- your brain is the sense organ that helps you navigate. I will go further and say, your subconscious is not you- you share a brain with this entity, and it helps you sort the artifact coming up from the brain. If the subconscious doesn’t think you can handle a truth, it gives you a lie. You can have a relationships with someone who harmed another and refuse to believe it because that wasn’t your experience. That’s one reason abuse from a parent is so insidious- even after you accept there was abuse that you didn’t witness, you’re now confronted with a very real problem of how to relate to that person. Especially if you had pleasant experiences. It messes with your head. It tears families apart. Have you ever been in a situation where time seems to slow down, if not stop? Lots of folks have experienced this, so even if you haven’t, maybe you have heard of others sharing it. What is likely happening is there is no memory reference to correlate data, and so all live feeds go direct to consciousness. Car accidents seem to happen in slow motion because you’re not thinking, you’re just aware. Confrontation with a snake will likely make you run or freeze… Sometimes it was just a stick. Watch a Youtube video of cats jumping when they see a cucumber. No, really, if nothing else, that’s funny! Even cats don’t see first with their eyes- they see with their memories- and calibrate as the information gets sorted. No, more precisely- they see with a genetic memory. Most modern day, in-door cats have never seen a snake. They still react to the cucumber as if they’re about to die. We see things, then calibrate- and then usually things return to normal.
You can learn to see, even with faulty vision. The person who taught me dope and fabric in Aircraft maintenance school reported that he used to fly the Corsair as a stunt pilot. He was a good pilot. He had zero depth perception, but he had learned to fly prior to the FAA screening out people who had problems with depth perception. He simply learned, this is what the world looks like right before you land. All visual impairments can be corrected for- even genetic ones, because we don’t see with our eyes, we see with our brains.
If you don’t think your genes are influencing your vision, then you’re failing to realize you, too, are wearing filtered sunglasses. You can’t correct your vision if you can’t acknowledge your filter bias. Genetics isn’t just male and female, but that is a filter for most people- and you ignore it at your own peril. I am not saying LGBTQ doesn’t exist- they exist, and their filters are more complex that straight heterosexual. Not because they’re broken, but because first they experience different- as measured by a norm- but then the world tries to coral them back into the “world’s” idea of normal, and so they also have reactions to reactions that most folks will never understand. Not being accepted, real or perceived- affects people! Back in the day, in Texas- you either became really good at hiding being gay, or you got the crap beat out of you. Most people became good at hiding. Whether you were good at hiding or not, not being accepted increases the likelihood of being neurotic. Genetics influencing vision also means- epigenetics needs to be elevated as a contender. There is evidence that conditions like PTSD can be passed to offspring, to children, to grandchildren- which makes you wonder about the old adage, “the sins of the father can last seven generations.” People with trauma see the world differently than those who have not experience trauma. Trauma influences the way you see. It has been demonstrated, fetuses are affected by the external environment and by the mother’s perception of the world. It changes the development of the brain. It influences the way you will see.
And all of that is you as the organism. You are not just an individual. You’re individual in a culture. In a family. One can argue the entire length of your genealogy is in itself an organism- the whole line of you a solid line of torchbearers mapping out the dark. Imagine your genetic line as a needle, and how convoluted the path to you was. Lightening never takes a straight path. The culture you live in, it too is a living breathing thing. Our brains take shortcuts. Our cultures take short cuts. Our ideologies take short cuts. It is what we do. We try to maximize benefits, and minimize cost- even though inevitably- minimizing costs means passing the debt to children and grandchildren. Capitalism is simply a lens for seeing the world. It has worked for the US for a long time. It helped get the world to where it is now. It took short cuts. Nuclear Power was a necessary thing to develop, but we have a waste problem that our great, great grandkids are likely going to have to deal with. To maximize profits for CEO and shareholders, it was decided not to stockpile masks. At the time, it was the right decision- for some. After COVID, I bet we never have a supply problem again for our frontline medical community.
The thing about our present day ideologies, those modes for seeing the world will not make sense in a world of super abundance and smart machines. If everyone has a 3D printer that can print anything they want when they want it, there will be no malls. In a world where machines are doing most the labor, humans will have to find a new industry- perhaps developing skills and talent that relate to art, math, music, or sports. Our world is changing, and the rate that it is changing will be upon us so fast that we will either accidentally fall into the right place, or we will get placed there. One of the most interesting things that I have heard multiple times in my life illustrates how we have change. I have met people who have been in prison since the 80s. They went in when rotary dial phones were a thing. They came out to digital world, and don’t know how to use a smart phone. They each described being in public, using the restroom, and crying because they couldn’t flush the urinal- and it took a son, or friend to say “Just step back.” They stepped back, the toilet flushed. It also illustrates my position that prisons are not rehabilitative, they are warehouses- they are shackles that guarantee that anyone who spends significant time incarcerated will not be able to compete, or even reasonably participate.
One way to combat your propensity for not seeing, in my opinion, is to intentionally hold conversations with yourself. If you’re doing it anyway, why not do it deliberately? Why not direct the flow of the conversation? Why not choose the subject matter? Why not modify and reframe language sets? Why not, and this is the specific trick- argue both sides of a thing. The better you can build an argument for a thing and an argument against a thing- the greater your clarity will be.
This is all in our ability to do. You may not want to, especially if you tend to be a reasonable person. Reframing things frequently means we come into conflict with the people in our usual walks. Again, most people don’t want change, they don’t want to hear about your change and what you want, and if you change your script, they have to modify theirs, by default. Changing scripts changes relationships. And if enough people are in your environment telling you the wrong thing, you will start to accept the wrong thing. That’s also a study. Volunteers grabbed randomly in a mall, placed with actors thinking they’re just playing trivia were found to agree with those in the lineup giving the wrong answers, even though they knew it was wrong.
Stockholm syndrome is a real thing. Being born into a family, into a culture- is a lot like Stockholm syndrome.
Let me iterate- (not reiterate, iterate means retell you something, so reiterate means retelling a retelling? Which is what I am doing, so maybe semantically correct)- most people don’t want to hear about your change. They don’t want to change. They’re satisfied. People are comfortable, which is okay- yay them- but people that are comfortable aren’t going to be motivated to change. And, they’re going to look at you like you’re nuts, and they will say stupid things, too, like, “Just get a job and make your life better.”
Anyone that doesn’t have a job can tell you, ‘you don’t just get a fucking job and it’s all better.’ This game is solidly rigged against people getting better. The best analogy is the game we are playing is Monopoly. At some point in the game, someone owns all the property, and no matter where you go- the penalty is steep. It’s better not to roll the dice at all. Sometimes, it’s better to go to jail, cause the next move means- you’re out. In the game of Monopoly, when you’re out, you’re out. Anyone still playing has a vested interest in keeping outed people out, even though at some point, to draw on another meme, “There can be only one.”
But our present world economic environment is also more complicated than a game analogy. We live on a continuum. We live in polarity. Polarity is inescapable, even on a round planet. We have poles. Polarity helps us navigate. The concept of good and bad is functional. I think it’s an over simplification of things, and that labeling system gets misused, but it’s definitely functional. If you need to sort something fast and dirty, good and bad can save your life. People without this basic sense of good and bad can find themselves hip deep in nasty situations before they know the half of it. Most things though are neither good nor bad, it’s just information. Information can be informative, as functional as navigational points on a compass. Diabetes is bad, in terms of preferentially you don’t want that shit, but knowing it’s a thing and that there is a correction, medication- that’s good. You, the person, are not bad because you have this thing.
There are varied levels of discernment that turn the world from black and white into a world of Technicolor. There is a multiplicity of tools that allow us to measure the world and our interaction patterns. A tape measure if pretty useful tool around the house- but not for measuring the distance between us and the moon.
There is a complaint that our society, mine, here in America, is too polarized. I have actually endorsed that idea. That doesn’t necessarily mean bad. The greater the polarization, the more likely bad is to happen. Ugly can happen fast. People will certainly not agree with me on this, but I find myself unable to vote because I don’t like either extreme. It is so extreme, that even the parties can’t promote reasonable contenders because they need the archetype that beat the opponents archetype. Voting for the lesser of two evils doesn’t make sense- evil is evil. If it’s not just a metaphor, and you accept it is actually evil- and both sides are evil, the game is over. You’re now in a Grateful Dead song, enjoy the ride.
Have you ever watched a cell divide on a microscope? Google that. I find it interesting that DNA breaks apart and rushes to opposite sides of the cell. The cell breaks in two and becomes two new cells. I wonder, if we just stop fighting the process- and let the extreme sides go to their corners, we will have two new cells in this organism and we can get back to normal operations. If you look at the right and the left, you will find that even those camps are divided into reasonable and extremes.
Most of us are in the middle. Most of us are reasonable- most of the time. Fuck, even with all the chaos going on in the world, look at how reasonable most of are. People in America have been talking about how the republic just rolled over and gave up their rights. No one did that shit. We were told this virus is pretty bad and could kill a lot of people, and asked to stay home. Most people are reasonable and said, “oh, yeah, if my staying home saves one life, family or neighbor, I am willing to do that.” That’s so fucking huge the world should applauded. Most people are reasonable and we care about our neighbors, regardless of what country they happen to be in. We are in a new world, and our leaders are still in the old world.
In this world, though- we all want labels. Some people are happy when they get a mental health diagnosis- because now they know “I am not crazy… I have depression.” We all can make ourselves crazy just trying to find our appropriate label. Again, the DSM five defines abnormalities without defining norm. The fact that there is an actual label for a things defines that thing as a normal thing. We don’t have definition for normal because there is no normal. Even people that don’t want a normative label end up having a label by trying not to have a label. The normal people, the invisible people, live quiet lives always under the radar. So, don’t be too pessimistic, nor too optimistic- find a reasonable measure and just lean into the wind and keep on keeping on.
Seriously, you can be too positive. You can be so damn positive you can’t tell when shit is shit. If you are going out of your way to eliminate all negativity, which means cutting off folks who irritate you because you find them too negative to deal with- you just created an intolerance of a thing that will drive you nuts! I am reasonably positive. I work with people who are seriously struggling- I can do that because my positivity isn’t negated by experiencing shit. Shit happens. People are happy to tell you about shit. And when they find someone who will listen, it just comes all out. Likely because no one ever listened before and they have shitload to unload. If you can’t abide shit, your positivity is an artificial construct that is the equivalent of wearing blinders and you will have a come to Jesus meeting, and your ‘happy recruits’ who also have no tolerance for negativity will cut you off fasters than a lizard can lose its tail to escape being eaten. You will either die alone, or having family at your death bed telling you to pep-talk yourself out of this one.
People who are doom and gloom are not seeing reality, either, but people who are too damn positive are likely more neurotic than the doom and gloom side. At least the doom and gloom folks have enough common sense to know things are bad. Things are bad, likely to get worse, and then you die. There’s some solid truth to that line of thinking.
It’s not all doom and gloom. There are actually some good things. I just gave you the evidence that most of us, all over the world- agreed to restraint in our activities to minimize the harm to others. Fucking huge. Why isn’t that message on the news? “People actually care- surprising poll and statistics- 90 percent of the world give a fuck.” And the degree of improvement and number of things to be optimistic about is getting better for most people. There is a segment of the population that seems to be frequently holding the short end of the stick more often than not, and that needs to be addressed, but in all domains- life is getting easier for human. And as life for humans improve, our ability to focus on others and on environment improves.
More people have a place to sleep than ever before. More people have access to reasonable food than ever in history. More people have access to water and cleanliness than ever before. And things are improving with such rapidity that we can’t even keep up with how fast it is changing. We are more likely to fall into something, than deliberately choose our path- and that’s partly due to history- we have been reactive for way too long, dependent on the few people who were proactive to point out where we need to adjust, and then waiting for a problem to arise before adjust.
Unlike the conspiracy theories about Gates suggest, he did not create a virus to take over the world. Any reasonable person could conclude that this scenario is a foregone conclusion. Lots of people have said this thing is coming, but it took it actually happening before we did something. It’s going to happen again with an asteroid. We know Earth gets hit. We know one of those hits took out 9o percent of all life on the surface. There is no one up there shooting asteroids at us deliberately to wipe us out. (Well, pretty sure no one up there wants to wipe us out. I assume if they’re up there, they’re sophisticated enough to have already done it if it needed to happen.) We have the technology now to confront asteroids and minimize or stop worst case scenario from happening. Waiting until scientist see it coming and it’s a week out, well, that’s too fucking late to respond. Space Force is actually a step in the right direction.
Did you realize Noetic Science was founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchel? He saw the Earth from the moon and realized, fuck- that’s our home. Synchronistically, it was when the world was sharing images of our home from space that the world’s first environmental protection plans and agencies came into existence. It took a change in our perspective to have clarity. It makes you wonder, is the thing about Transpersonal Therapy that makes it feel like a miracle the fact that we shatter a perceived boundary only to arrive in a very new and real place that was always there. My go to film for this was the 2001 French Film, “Amélie.” I know of no better illustration of what an epiphany looks like than that. Yay French film. Yay America for not trying to remake that film. Seriously, Le Femme Nikita was brilliant and didn’t need a remake. A good film needs to be seen in its original format, with subtitles if you have to. Exposure to other is good! It changes your world.
We do like procrastinating, don’t we? Society does. And we do. And it’s not just fear. It’s lots of little things. Sometimes it’s just because we don’t know where to even start, or it seem so overwhelming that we give it up before trying. How many people say they want to write a book but don’t? I personally did that a lot- as I have been wanting to write since I was six years old. And one day, I made a decision- I named a document and said this is it. On another day, I managed to write a page. Over time, it became chapters. Eventually, I said, done. And I shared it. You can read my stuff and argue I should not have released stuff. You’re right, in as much as there are problems with my writing, specifically with grammar. It’s not polished, it’s not perfect, it’s raw and ugly- but some of it has power, and beauty, and I have had more positive reviews than ugly.
Oh, I have had some viscous comments. I thanked them. If people realized how much intention it took to overcome my fear of rejection, my fear of not being perfect, my fear of being transparent and vulnerable- I’d be getting a fucking medal. “Thank you, Oz… I really don’t deserve this.” Oz: “You really don’t, but who fucking does?” The people who step up?
Truth, no one is perfect. Should you wait to be perfect before you try and put yourself out there? Truth, you will never be perfect. But in practice, you can get better. As bad as my writing has been, anyone who starts with my first book will find that it has indeed improved in grammar and in storytelling over time- and that is now a traceable thing. Truth- it will affect people. Some good, some bad, some positively, some negatively. I have personal evidence that my Star Trek fan fiction the first thing I wrote as affected people the most- which baffles me because I see it as the most problematic. It was my first attempt at writing. My Trek fan-fiction has over 150k downloads- which just means that there are Trek fans starved for more Trek. If I could sell fan fiction at 1 dollar a pop, I would have paid off my student loans. I have not made money on it. The personal evidence that it has been generally well accepted is that I have received letters from people that it impacted them in a significant way. The last such letter came from a US Vet, suffering PTSD- just 2 months ago. Mind you, this particular thing was written in 2004. I became a finished my Masters in 2012, started working in 2012 in mental health. (I have been working on my mental health all my life.) This person shared with me he had struggled with severe depression and PTSD to the point he experienced regular auditory and visual hallucinations, and no doctor, no family member, no fellow soldier could convince him that he wasn’t broken. Then he read about Tammas Parkin Arblaster-Garcia, Star Fleet Cadet, who had trauma, and hallucinated, and still managed to function and do the right thing more often than not. If I never get paid for writing, that was gold. Had I never shared anything, where would I be? Where would that person be? If you never put yourself out there, how can ever know how much impact you will have. There is what, 8 billion people on this planet? Do you suppose there is no one out there who wouldn’t benefit from your voice? We are more connected than ever before. Write a blog, make a youtuve channel- and let lightening do its thing.
It is my opinion, based on personal evidence, when we engage in a specific way, we improve ourselves. We cannot do otherwise. This improvement does not happen in a vacuum. You have to be vulnerably, even if it’s minimally vulnerable to realize truth. Don’t aim to change the world. Aim to change yourself. The world has to change when you change. We’re all connected. You change, we change by default.
People worry about the state of the world. I am. Right now there is a hell of a lot to be concerned about, and we seem to be at this ripe place where things could just blow up. They nearly have. It is my hope that we are sufficiently well off that we’re going to avoid destroying it all- but seriously, we’re at risk. It doesn’t help that our leaders don’t seem to see what we see, nor are they willing to engage reasonable discourse. We seem more divided than ever, with left and right so polarized that it feels like all interaction is a war. It feels like no one has the public interest in mind. Where the US was once the leader in terms of positive world influence, we’re suddenly and embarrassingly impoverished- in thought, in response, even in compassion. There are people, nations, who would benefit from taking the top dog down, at all costs. I am okay celebrating a new leader, but if this change is precipitated by the old game of king of the mountain- where replacement is based on might, or driven by bitterness- that’s usually not helpful. We need candidates that are healthy to rise in rank, and that may mean we need to tweak the system to reflect the actual change in the world. We are not where we were. We can’t afford to go backwards.
Oz, as we have known him, has been unveiled. Fuck, he’s not perfect- just like us.
In that, we still have some choices. I love “the Wizard of Oz.” I love “the Wiz.” The scene in the Wiz that clenches it for me, that this is real- was when Oz, played by Richard Pryor, is discovered to be a fraud, and he retreats into the shadow. That’s a reflection of the day it was filmed. The original version, “Ha, you caught me- Yep, I am really good man, just a really bad wizard…” and we go on with his delightful, bumbling act. Some of our leaders aren’t good people. The Epstein scandal seems to point at that.
We are moving into a world of greater clarity- greater transparency. How we will wield this power? There are some big thing, like Sex Trafficking that needs to end. There are some small things, like bribery to move merchandise. Some economic sleight of hands. In truth, aren’t all of us a collection and good and bad? Don’t we all make mistakes? Do we really want a society that ridicules and condemns a person for all time for stupid? All Nations have to contend with government abuse- all nations, the US is not exempt. It’s not helpful in ranking nations because each culture is a little different in expressing corruption. Thai is well known for officials wanting kickbacks. I have been there, multiple times, and I find I like Thai people. Out of all the places I have been, hand down my experience of Russia was the best. In 1994, I found myself in Krasnoyarsk with food poisoning- and no money, having been robbed in Germany- and it felt like the whole city rallied to make sure I was well. I am fond of Russians. I fond of Germans- so, one guy robbed me and the police laughed, poor stupid American… But at least person didn’t beat me up. And I met great people there.
I have met great people every place I have visited. Most people are good people.
Be thoughtful on how we address our future wrong doers, because we are quickly approaching a society where everything we do will be on camera. No nation is exempt from corruption, and no person is always good. We have tendencies towards being something more often than not, but not always. I suspect, the closer you are to being your core self in all areans, the more likely you are to be consistent- but there are arenas that do not want that level of transparency. We may need to explore that. There are some people acting the damn fool in multiple domains, too. Video venerates the calm, cool, collected folks. We’ve also have arrived at a place and time were ‘deep fakes’ can be impla