Pair A Docks: 2015

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

The Five Stages of Therapeutic Recovery

Denial / Pre-Contemplation. The patient does not know, cannot see, or refuses (usually out of irrational fear) to observe to notice to recognize his or her actual thoughts, emotions, sensations or behaviors. (Stuck in recognized but rationalized, or un-recognized, defense mechanisms.)
Contemplation / Consideration. The patient becomes willing and open to at least looking at and thinking about his or her actual thoughts, emotions, sensations or behaviors. (Still largely snagged by defense mechanisms, but at least observing to notice to possibly recognize them.)
Identification / Acceptance. The patient has looked at and thought about his or her actual thoughts, emotions, sensations or behaviors long enough to at least temporarily recognize, acknowledge, accept and own them. (Some defense mechanisms are seen, heard and/or felt... and temporarily transcended. But "bargaining" and "half-measuring" are still possible.)
Commitment / Action. The patient has become motivated enough to engage in the action of detachment and distancing from his or her actual thoughts, emotions, sensations or behaviors in favor of continuing direct observation, noticing and recognition, as well as acknowledgment, acceptance and ownership of what he or she thinks, feels, says and does. (Automatic appreciation and understanding of the purpose -- as well as the price -- of dysfunctional defense mechanisms, as well as the discharge of emotions that had previously locked those defense mechanisms in place, can be achieved in this stage. Reframing and transcendence of the gestalt are possible.)
Relapse Prevention / Maintenance. The patient has worked with the skills of observing to notice to recognize to acknowledge to accept to own to appreciate to understand his or her thoughts, feelings and behaviors long enough that he or she can now pick up those tools whenever his or her thoughts, feelings and behaviors are recognized, acknowledged, accepted, owned, appreciated and understood to be taking them back into their misery, depression, anxiety, mania or anger. (And the patient can use the tools of self-awareness or mindfulness to spot, process and overcome his or her defense mechanisms with a high degree of functional probability of reaching transcendence.)

It is (according to the guys who put the first version this list together about 30 years ago) only possible to be of help to those who are at at least the second stage. And they can only get to that stage if their suffering and remaining accurate sense of what is is sufficient to shake them up enough to observe to notice to recognize to acknowledge to accept to own that they need to contemplate and consider.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Jiddu Krishnamurti on Loneliness vs. Being Alone

Paraphrasing pretty tightly his comments in Seattle on 6 August 1950:

What is important is not to conquer, overcome or distract oneself from loneliness, but to understand loneliness by facing it and looking at it directly. In relationship we use others to cover up loneliness; most of what we do is a distraction and attempt to escape. But if we are to understand something, we must give our full attention to it.

How can we give our full attention to something if we are running away from it? How can we give our full attention to loneliness if we are afraid of it, if we are running away from it through some distraction such as work, what we call relationship that actually is not, through religious practice, through entertainment, through politics and power-seeking, through drink?

Many people laugh at loneliness and say, "That is only for the bourgeois; be occupied with something and forget it." But emptiness cannot be forgotten, it cannot be put aside. One must see that without understanding, loneliness in every form of action is a distraction, an escape, a process of self-isolation which only creates more conflict and misery.

If we go more deeply into it, the problem arises of whether what we call loneliness is an actuality or merely a word... a word that covers something that may or may not be what we think it is; what we have been taught to believe it is by our parents, our families, our teachers, our culture, the so-called authorities. Is not loneliness really just a combination of thought and emotion, a result of thinking? And moreover, a kind of thinking so common throughout our environment that we do not see it?

So the very giving of a name to that state may be the cause of the fear which prevents us from looking at it more closely.

Surely there is a difference between loneliness -- an idea and a corresponding set of emotions -- and merely being alone, as "by oneself without others nearby." Aloneness is neither loneliness nor isolation. Loneliness is the experience of ideas and emotions about being alone.

Aloneness is a state in which all influence has completely ceased, both the influence from outside and the inner influence of thinking and memory. Only when the mind is in that state of aloneness can it know the incorruptible. But to come to that, we must understand loneliness, the process of isolation, which is the activity of one's unobserved and unconsidered beliefs.

Alone is just alone. It is our ideas about being alone that make us lonely.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

I's & Eye's: Three States of Cognitive Consciousness (with new material 06-16)

For the sake of therapeutic use in the framework of the mindfulness-based cognitive psychotherapies (MBCTs), I began in 2012 to develop the notion that there are three basic states of perception combined with representative, lingual thought as well as (mostly visual and aural) processing. Three states of consciousness, or more accurately of perceptual and cognitive operation.

I will discuss them in an approximate -- but inherently inaccurate -- nosology of "lowest," most common or basic state that most everyone uses daily, to the "highest," least common, and most "evolved" state that one becomes able to use when one has sufficient experience using the Vipassana-style, mindfulness meditations common to both Tibetan Buddhism and the mindfulness-based cognitive psychotherapies like DBT, ACT, MBBT, MBSR and 10 StEP.

I will also reduce the three states to brief notations that can be easily recalled by those who evolve sufficiently to be able to observe to notice to recognize to acknowledge to accept to own to appreciate to understand their empirical and cognitive operations.

The three notations are:

1) I-Eye (which may also be inconized with the letter I, a mathematical minus sign, and the shape of an eyeball, which is exactly what the word "eye" is meant to represent: vision, or more broadly, perception);

2) Eye>I (which may be iconized with the eyeball, and the right-pointing arrow indicating directional flow from the eyeball -- or pure perception -- to the I, self, or ego); and

3) I+Eye (which is similarly iconized).

Discussion:

1) I-Eye is the state of being locked out of conscious perception of what is and in mental appraisal of what is perceived according to some combination of conscious and (for most of us, unconscious) belief. This is the state of complete "egotism" and refutation of sensory, empirical perception in favor of verbal explanation, evaluation, interpretation, assessment, or analysis or and/or attribution of meaning to perceived events... without further resort to empirical observation, noticing, recognition or acknowledgement.

In practice, this state rarely exists in the "normal" human mind. While most people do perceive and process phenomena largely in the I-Eye state of consciousness, they will utilize Eye>I and I+Eye on a regular basis. More so if they are scientists, medical professionals, professional athletes, race drivers or attorneys who have to utilize the Eye>I and I+Eye to function adequately in their occupations.

But in the neurotic human mind it is the polarity toward which mental operations gravitate, owing to a powerful, largely unconscious need to explain phenomena according to beliefs, ideas, ideals, assumptions, convictions, codes, rules, requirements, dogma and other internalized mental constructs... so as to prevent having to experience ostensibly "intolerable" affective sensations and/or emotions.

And in the psychotic human mind, I-Eye describes the "learned helpless" and/or paranoid-delusional ideation of an appraisal system stuck "inside" a box of its own design and construction, without resort to observation of what is actually so in the world, either "out there" or in the person's internal, corporeal, body space. If one is wholly dominated by the I-Eye state of consciousness, there is no accurate sense of external or internal reality; there are only ideas about it.

2) Eye>I is the diametrically opposite state (vs. I-Eye) of being wholly locked into complete empirical observation of ongoing, current phenomena with no "contamination" or "corruption" by any beliefs, ideas, ideals, assumptions, convictions, codes, rules, requirements, dogma and other internalized mental constructs stored in verbal or sensory memory. It is pure perception.

It is also, as the Sufis, Taoists, Buddhists, Hindus and other "high Brahmans" like to say, "timeless" or "out of time" because the perception is locked into the current moment as a series of ongoing current moments experienced and then immediately discarded so that perception of the next moment is not distorted, contaminated, adulterated, corrupted or otherwise effected in any manner.

In actual practice, full-time Eye>I operation is itself an ideal. It is nearly impossible, though some Buddhist meditators claim to be able to do so, reaching a state called "nirvana," which is experienced as "total bliss" as the result of complete detachment from earthly or material concerns.

3) I+Eye is the state of attempting to retain what is experienced in the Eye>I state as "memory," or "lessons," or "experience." In theory, one might be able to retain such experience "100% perfectly," but in actual practice, the very operation of nervous system will begin to adulterate, contaminate or corrupt the memory-stored lesson or experience immediately, and ever more so as time marches on.

Proof of this is often demonstrated by having a dozen or more people stand in a circle. One is told an unfamiliar ten-word phrase and asked to whisper it to the next person. By the time it reaches the starting point, it will invariably be different from the original phrase or sentence.

This is called "perceptual degredation via representation" (or, as McGilchrist calls it, "re-present-ation"), and it cannot be overcome in any manner we yet know of by those who are not skilled Vipassana- or Zen-style meditators.

Now, in actual practice, none of these three states actually exists over any period of time beyond a fraction of a second, and two of them not at all... ever. I-Eye and I+Eye exist only as metaphorical concepts for the sake of conceptual explanation. And even Eye>I exists only momentarily. It cannot be ongoing at the neuro-anatomical, neuro-physiological or neuro-chemical levels. But I-Eye and I+Eye exist conceptually as polarities one can utilize to convey the notion of absolute cognitive dysfunction vs. absolute cognitive functionality, even though neither actually exists.

In fact what exists over any length of time is a fluid activity I have called "hijacking" of the

a) post-perception cognition (in the I+Eye) or even the
b) pure perception (in the Eye>I) by pure, belief-based explanation.

This is symbolized thus:

a) I-Eye ^ I+Eye or
b) I-Eye ^ Eye>I+Eye.

(The caret sign "^" is used here to indicate that I-Eye "takes over" or "runs off with" the perception and adulterates it on the way to (ostensibly) pure recollection. (Very small children may not do this, but as soon as they start to have memories of past events -- let alone hear words and attach meanings to them -- their minds begin to hijack, run off and adulterate.)

Not truly "knowing" how non-lingual animals "think," we don't know what happens or does not happen in this regard, but we can at least afford to presume that they have sufficient memory and associative capacities to be able to confound their experiences... especially under stress.

But that leads conveniently to the next point. And it is this:

Under stress, all three states of cognitive consciousness will become degraded: Eye>I will see, hear or feel things that actually did not occur... or... fail to see, hear or feel things that did occur. I-Eye will mis-interpret, mis-evaluate, mis-assess, mis-judge, etc. And I+Eye will store ostensible "pseudo-memories" of observed events that never be entirely accurate. In fact those memories will be far more fragmented and less accurate under stress than they are even under normal conditions of I-Eye hijacking and contamination.

There is in fact such a thing as false memory syndrome (FMS), and it tends to occur in people who have post-traumatic stress disorder. This is the result of having been overloaded with unmanageable levels of sensory stimulation and/or inability to tolerate what was perceived owing to the effects of their internalized beliefs, ideas, ideals, assumptions, convictions, codes, rules, requirements, dogma and other internalized mental constructs upon their explanation, evaluation, interpretation, assessment, or analysis or and/or attribution of meaning of those events.

But even when the stress-impacted memories are not truly "concocted" (as in FMS), they will be fragmented into components usually defined by specific sensory input channels, e.g.: vision, hearing, smell, taste and somato-sensory "gut feeling," as well as bits and pieces of recalled heat, chill, pressure, pain, etc.

This, by the way, appears to be precisely what occurs in the minds of schizophrenics during childhood and adolescence owing to genetically and/or epigentically pre-disposed over-sensitivity along the afferent neural tracks leading from their sense organs to their emotion regulation centers. In that "limbic" emotion-processing area, the actual (or perceived) hyper-stimulation coming to the brain through the insula runs into the programmed instructions in the amygdala relative to what is threatening vs. what is not. Once that occurs, two very signifcant things occur:

1) the hypothalamus gets a jolt from the amygdala that is too much for it to handle, it slams on the pituitary gland, and the pituitary whacks on the adrenal cortices to set off the fight or flight syndrome in the autonomic nervous system (ANS); and

2) the hippocampus becomes too saturated with input on too many "channels" to be able to feed the neural energy upwards in a properly codified manner to the memory banks in the neocortex.

Thus...

1) the ANS is sent into severe sympathetic pitch; and

2) the brain will not have any organized, cohesive, ,multi-track, sense-making memory of what happened. (The brain will know, however, that something happened and have powerful but only partially connected emotions about it.)

In most people, that series of jolts will be quickly overridden by relatively functional operations of the neo-cortical Eye>I, I+Eye and even the I-Eye, if it is "well programmed" to deal with that particular stressful event. In the schizophrenic, however, the I-Eye is so adulterated, contaminated and corrupted with previously "dumped" and still disorganized misinformation that it will hijack the I+Eye and even the Eye>I operations governed mostly by the neo-cortex above and beside our eyeballs.

And when that occurs, sense-making from the senses -- plus conceptual input stored relatively in the I+Eye (for "better") or I-Eye (for "worse") -- will be disrupted and manifested as hallucinations, delusions and "strange" explanations rooted in a highly corrupted I-Eye set-up.

But even in most people -- and certainly in the majority of us who are at least minimally "neurotic" owning to unprocessed, stressful life events -- I-Eye hijacking will take place, causing "conflicts" between various, embedded I-Eye mis-conceptions, as well as I-Eye conceptions vs. I+Eye "experience" and even with Eye>I perceptions as they occur.

We see this daily in those who are mildly obsessive-compulsive when they continue to smoke, drink, drug, gamble, eat, over exercise, under-exercise, chase "bad ass" men (or women), walk out on relatively functional partners, hang in there in wretched marriages, self-harm, etc., etc., etc.

I have found that those who adopt these simple conceptual labels for their cognitive states in company with use of the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing (see http://pairadocks.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-10-steps-of-emotion-processing.html) are able to move very quickly through DBT distress tolerance into emotion regulation, as well as CBT thought questioning and revision.

- - - - - - - - -

Further discussion added 05-05-16 upon reading the following in Batchelor, S.: Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening, New York: Riverhead / Penguin, 1997. "The denial of self [in formalistic, procedural meditation] challenges only the notion of a static self independent of body and mind... This notion of a static self is the primary obstruction to the realization of our unique potential as an individual human being. By dissolving this fiction through a centered vision of the tranciency [sic], ambiguity and contingency of experience, we are freed to create ourself [sic] anew."

Since this is (to me, anyway) a very significant sentence with respect to the understanding mindfulness and its upshots, it seems useful to explore / observe > notice / perceive > recognize / identify > acknowledge > accept > own > digest what is about it.

I-Eye and I-Eye^I+Eye are clearly "static selves." I+Eye (and even I-Eye^I+Eye) may "evolve" over time, but even I+Eye is time-bound. It became what it is at a point in time that is forever in the past at the "port of entry" or "receiving dock" of that moment of dis-cover-y. But it is henceforth and forever caught at the memory of that dis-cover-y. I-Eye can only store conclusions made at an increasingly distant moment in the past. It's ability to reason on the basis of those empirical observations is enhanced, but the results of its reasoning are not the functional equivalent of further observation and dis-cover-y.

Eye>I+Eye may be an edified or conceptually informed retainer of what was observed, thus being relatively or comparatively more plastic and amenable to change, but Eye>I by itself is pure observation, embodies complete and everlasting flux, as well as impermanence. There is "ego" in I-Eye and I+Eye. There is no ego whatsoever in Eye>I. It has no "stake" or "dog in the fight." Eye>I neither holds nor retains any memory or conclusion thereabout.

Eye>I+Eye is quite literally Krishnamurti's "observer as the observed" and vice-versa, because it retains or "holds" objects after the event or action of its subjectivity. Eye>I, however, holds no objects. It is nothing but subjectivity. It only exists phenomenologically. It has no sense of itself because there is no retained or held self to objectify. It is merely empirical awareness or unobstructed consciousness without any connection to previous experience. It exists outside of time.

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I clipped the list at the half-way point for the sake of trimming the file to fit this blog's parameters; I will consider assembling & providing the remainder to a professional requestor.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

The Path to Peace: Separating Conditioned Belief from the Direct Experience of Reality

A correspondent wrote: You seem to suggest something like a neutral way of experiencing the world (that "what is").

I answered:

I'll jump on this particular interpretation because it opens to door to the old belief-vs.-reality issue you seem to be dealing with in your disquisition here better than the others.

I am coming from the fundamental p.o.v. of the mid-century cognitivists like Broadbent, Chomsky, Hayakawa, Korsybski, Neisser, as well as -- further back, the arguments of Berkeley, Locke and Kant; and even further back, the positions taken by Lao Tsu and Siddartha Gautama -- that most people do not see reality or "what is."

What they see is their appraisal / evaluation / interpretation / assessment / judgment / attribution of meaning according to their (mostly) unconscious -- and introjected -- beliefs, ideas, ideals, assumptions, presumptions, convictions, rules, regulations, principles, codes and requirements.

If one can acquire the means and methods to look, listen and tactily "sense" what is occurring in the continual stream of passing, momentarily present moments, one will observe one's own cognitive conditioning (as described above) attempting to "explain" or "make sense" of the as yet uncontaminated reality... and contaminate / corrupt the pure sensory perceptions into "codified," "belief- and requirement-fitting appraisals.

And depending upon the relative accuracy -- or inaccuracy -- of these more deeply embedded cognitive constructs of belief, idea, ideal, etc., the resulting appraisals, evaluations, interpretations, etc. will be closer to truly -- but never actually -- representative and accurate... or (at the other end of the spectrum) grossly mis-representative and relatively in-accurate. (Sz-ish "paranoid delusions," aural hallucinations and visual projections appear to be extreme manifestations of these cognitive distortions.)

Even if visual, aural and tactile images are embedded in memory -- as opposed to mere verbal/lingual, or mathematical, symbols -- they are subject to environmental influence (e.g.: neurochemical, later input, stress) that distort the sensory memories and resulting appraisals, evaluations, interpretations, etc. thereof. The words are never the thing itself, and after some time -- beginning immediately after the original perception actually -- neither are the memories.

What the vipassana-style mindfulness meditations used by the the various MBCTs like MBSR, DBT, ACT, MBBT and 10 StEP do is attempt to jump the institution of cognitive conditioning and the construct of appraisal according to belief by allowing the practitioner to have repeated experiences of momentary direct perception that are uncontaminated by conditioned belief, idea, ideal, instruction, assumption, presumption, principle, code, etc.

Having such experiences, the practitioner begins to actually see, hear and interoceptively sense how his cognitive mechanisms mislead him or her into mis-appraisal, mis-evaluation, mis-interpretation, etc. of reality. If one continues to practice the meditations, they will come to experience that so doing provides them with direct, "trans-verbal" experiences of what is that produce immediate grasp of what to do about the circumstances they have more directly perceived.

What I have described is the essence of Tibetan, as well as Japanese Zen Buddhist "action-taking."

Another corespondent then wrote:

You seem to be saying that by being fully aware of your self by default you are aware of your limitations.

I answered:

What I am saying is that one can acquire (or more accurately, RE-acquire) one's self-awareness using the methods in the mindfulness-based cognitive therapies that are built on the Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist meditation practices.

Though decidedly NOT on many of the southern Asian point-of-focus / distractive meditations like those in Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation. Those meditations will "relax" the ANS and bring it back into sympathetic vs. parasympathetic balance for a while, but they will not produce observant self- or environmental awareness or transcendence of unwanted stimulii.

If you are curious as to where I picked all this up, you can start with Daniel Goleman's, Charles Tart's and Arthur Deikman's books in the 1980s. As well as Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Jean Klein, Jiddu Krishnamurti, S. N. Goenka and Chogyam Trungpa further back. And Stephen Batchelor, Stephen Hayes, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Marsha Linehan, Tara Brach and Pema Chodron more recently.

A correspondent wrote back:

It's much easier though when the mind isn't always looking for that next thought.

I responded:

Which is the product of doing the Vipassana-style mindfulness meditations on a regular basis for a while. I don't do them that regularly anymore. As Krishnamurti and his pupils Joel Kramer, Alan Watts and Charles Tart all reported -- and as I have experienced for several years now -- up-out-of-the-box mindfulness becomes conditioned, habituated and normalized over time.

A mantra that may be useful to help one get to "neutral experiencing"

http://pairadocks.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-10-steps-of-emotion-processing.html

http://pairadocks.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-10-steps-for-recovery-from.html

http://pairadocks.blogspot.com/2016/08/on-meditation.html

And very much worth reading with respect to insight meditation to see what the likes of Deikman, Klein, Tolle, Krishnamurti, Goleman, Trungpa, Batchelor, Levine, Kramer, Siegel, Watts, Maharshi, and Goenka himself have to say:

http://pairadocks.blogspot.com/2016/08/on-meditation.html

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