Consciousness, Transcendence & Integration

[leskey]

Shangri-La as depicted in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow


Leskey, I have seen the movie, Sky Captain..., and remember Angelina Jolie with a patch over one eye playing a tough cookie. The Island they depicted was strange and far from Shangri-La. Though, it was beautiful, as in this picture.

I believe Huxley wrote the novel "Island" to show that a future can be good for mankind. It is nearly the opposite of the darker Brave New World. Though, in the end, Huxley couldn't restrain writing about the horrors of man, and through corruption and military force, the Island was invaded and changed forever. Huxley couldn't write a happy ending for such a place as Pala.

Yes, I thought you'd be a science fiction/fantasy fan. Good thing too, there's a lot of it here at ToE Quest.

You never know the rest of the world might just club each other to death (also a bit like ToE Quest lately) and the remote 'Pala' will be left to become the role model for a new beginning...with every race represented here it's already a little ark at the end of the world.

Sadly though, I'm in the throws of preparing for a move back to Australia...maybe to return to my 'Pala' in the not too distant future...

[timeparticle]

Yes, I thought you'd be a science fiction/fantasy fan. Good thing too, there's a lot of it here at ToE Quest.

You never know the rest of the world might just club each other to death (also a bit like ToE Quest lately) and the remote 'Pala' will be left to become the role model for a new beginning...with every race represented here it's already a little ark at the end of the world.

Sadly though, I'm in the throws of preparing for a move back to Australia...maybe to return to my 'Pala' in the not too distant future...

If Australia is "Down Under", then is New Zealand "Down Under and Away"?

[timeparticle]

Yes, I thought you'd be a science fiction/fantasy fan. Good thing too, there's a lot of it here at ToE Quest.

You never know the rest of the world might just club each other to death (also a bit like ToE Quest lately) and the remote 'Pala' will be left to become the role model for a new beginning...with every race represented here it's already a little ark at the end of the world.

Sadly though, I'm in the throws of preparing for a move back to Australia...maybe to return to my 'Pala' in the not too distant future...

Crazy Cat Comics

1015 Aviation Blvd., Suite C, Manhattan Beach, California


Hours: MON-TUE 12:00AM-6:00PM, WED-FRI 11:00PM-7:00PM, SAT 11:00PM-6:00PM, SUN 11:00PM-5:00PM

This is the sign over my comic book store I owned with 2 partners, years ago. We sold it. I read enough comics, sci-fi, and fantasy stories to last a lifetime. I started when I was very young, and still continue today.

[Mikal]

UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL SUICIDE
It was December, 2000 that cultural suicide became a part of my life experience. It met my ignorance like a tornado meets the shore and leaves a path of devastation in its tracks. The loss was heavy because it was a young life and the pain tore through me with such force, I felt a sensation like a current, run up my spine and I was knocked instantly into a depth of shock so strong, that I was only allowed to process small bits of what I would eventually need to accept over time.

Cultural suicide itself is tremendously confusing and deeply painful whether it takes away the old, the mid-young or the young. This is so because we by habit build boundaries around death that keep us safe from truly feeling our losses. We define death and loss by “it’s a fatal disease, the person will die or we say the person is old and the end of their life is inevitable or we say it was an accident we could not control.” With cultural suicide we cannot erect boundaries, it makes no sense to us so the pain pierces deeply and for the first time in life we understand what loss truly is because we have to feel it at depths of grief we normally do not experience.

Emile Durkheim in the 1800s said, “Suicide in the young is so rare, it is not worthy a study.”
Durkheim also stated, “However, sudden spurts in the suicide rates of certain groups or total societies are "abnormal" and point to some perturbations not previously present. Hence. "abnormally" high rates in specific groups or social categories, or in total societies, can be taken as an index of disintegrating forces at work in a social structure.” Adolescents are a social group.

Disintegrating forces at work in a social structure represent accelerating forces of change that will effect the next generation needing to be pulled into the collective society and as the KGB Manifesto on communism states, “change at work in societies’ structures takes roughly twenty years to form, shape and become normalized.”
This acceleration began back in the 1960s progressing slowly, and gaining in momentum until fully formed and ready to trap the generation of kids born in the mid to late 1970s to early 1980s. The specific cultural changes relevant to cultural suicide which became a part of our loss are listed below :
(1) By 1982 caesarian birth had become normalized. Considerations that it may be important to come into life through normal birth were lost in the thrust to medicalize the entire birth process. This interference into normal physiological processes involving birth is suspected as being linked to the recent elevation of young cultural suicides.
(2) By 1982 the trust index that existed between the family and society had collapsed. The family now was labeled as “dysfunctional” and was the object of study and examination in the higher echelons of colleges and universities.
(3) By 1982 the Educational System had changed its mandate from teaching and learning to Behaviorism. The trust index between education and family had collapsed.
(4) By 1984 The Young Offenders Act was initiated and the label young offender was created. We would become societies’, inclined to imprison our young.
(5) By 1982 the Therapuetic Movement had thrust mental health as mental illness to the forefront and focus of society, it was normalized to drug school children with Ritalen from the growing viewpoint that 3 out of every 4 children were mentally ill and children were the possibility of future social problems.
(6) By 1982, shared past values and traditions in society were collapsing so there was no unifying aspects to include in the socialization process for a new generation of young people.
The above list is pertinent to Durkheim’s study:
“Characteristic ways of bringing about social cohesion
Degree of integration into society
People who are well integrated into a group are cushioned to a significant extent from the impact of frustrations and tragedies that afflict the human lot; hence, they are less likely to resort to extreme behavior such as suicide.

Integration—interraction with one another.
Value integration—shared values and beliefs

Social cohesion protects against existential crisis.”
Integration into society and its degrees—its weaknesses or strength determines the level of suicide in a particular group. Integration is the role of the collective society pre-existing before its unborn members and are those who will draw its new members into itself.
Social structures are the patterns of social relations that bind people together and help to shape their lives. Social solidarity is an aspect of social structure that anchors people to the social world. It follows that the lower the level of social solidarity in a group, the more a group member will be inclined to take his or her own life if he or she is in deep distress.

TYPES OF SUICIDE
Suicide is the end result of relationship to society
Egoistic or Individualistic—detachment from society
Anomic—normitive regulations surrounding individual are relaxed failing to guide human propensities.
Altruistic—overly strong regulation of individual
Ritualistic—strong attunement to the demands of a society
Fatalistic—Derives from excessive regulation, where future is pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline.

From a deep examination of our own loss and six years of study into Adolescent suicide it is strongly my opinion that the demise of our social base greatly complicated the striving of a new generation to belong and be accepted into society, that complication becoming so extreme could thereby hold the possibility to create in and of itself the type of suicide Durkheim termed rare and named Fatalistic Suicide.

To be continued

[leskey]

If Australia is "Down Under", then is New Zealand "Down Under and Away"?

In my beautiful balloon, it is...lol! Well, at least NZ is 1300 miles closer to the US.

[timeparticle]

UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL SUICIDE
It was December, 2000 that cultural suicide became a part of my life experience. It met my ignorance like a tornado meets the shore and leaves a path of devastation in its tracks. The loss was heavy because it was a young life and the pain tore through me with such force, I felt a sensation like a current, run up my spine and I was knocked instantly into a depth of shock so strong, that I was only allowed to process small bits of what I would eventually need to accept over time.

Cultural suicide itself is tremendously confusing and deeply painful whether it takes away the old, the mid-young or the young. This is so because we by habit build boundaries around death that keep us safe from truly feeling our losses. We define death and loss by “it’s a fatal disease, the person will die or we say the person is old and the end of their life is inevitable or we say it was an accident we could not control.” With cultural suicide we cannot erect boundaries, it makes no sense to us so the pain pierces deeply and for the first time in life we understand what loss truly is because we have to feel it at depths of grief we normally do not experience.

Emile Durkheim in the 1800s said, “Suicide in the young is so rare, it is not worthy a study.”
Durkheim also stated, “However, sudden spurts in the suicide rates of certain groups or total societies are "abnormal" and point to some perturbations not previously present. Hence. "abnormally" high rates in specific groups or social categories, or in total societies, can be taken as an index of disintegrating forces at work in a social structure.” Adolescents are a social group.

Disintegrating forces at work in a social structure represent accelerating forces of change that will effect the next generation needing to be pulled into the collective society and as the KGB Manifesto on communism states, “change at work in societies’ structures takes roughly twenty years to form, shape and become normalized.”
This acceleration began back in the 1960s progressing slowly, and gaining in momentum until fully formed and ready to trap the generation of kids born in the mid to late 1970s to early 1980s. The specific cultural changes relevant to cultural suicide which became a part of our loss are listed below :
(1) By 1982 caesarian birth had become normalized. Considerations that it may be important to come into life through normal birth were lost in the thrust to medicalize the entire birth process. This interference into normal physiological processes involving birth is suspected as being linked to the recent elevation of young cultural suicides.
(2) By 1982 the trust index that existed between the family and society had collapsed. The family now was labeled as “dysfunctional” and was the object of study and examination in the higher echelons of colleges and universities.
(3) By 1982 the Educational System had changed its mandate from teaching and learning to Behaviorism. The trust index between education and family had collapsed.
(4) By 1984 The Young Offenders Act was initiated and the label young offender was created. We would become societies’, inclined to imprison our young.
(5) By 1982 the Therapuetic Movement had thrust mental health as mental illness to the forefront and focus of society, it was normalized to drug school children with Ritalen from the growing viewpoint that 3 out of every 4 children were mentally ill and children were the possibility of future social problems.
(6) By 1982, shared past values and traditions in society were collapsing so there was no unifying aspects to include in the socialization process for a new generation of young people.
The above list is pertinent to Durkheim’s study:
“Characteristic ways of bringing about social cohesion
Degree of integration into society
People who are well integrated into a group are cushioned to a significant extent from the impact of frustrations and tragedies that afflict the human lot; hence, they are less likely to resort to extreme behavior such as suicide.

Integration—interraction with one another.
Value integration—shared values and beliefs

Social cohesion protects against existential crisis.”
Integration into society and its degrees—its weaknesses or strength determines the level of suicide in a particular group. Integration is the role of the collective society pre-existing before its unborn members and are those who will draw its new members into itself.
Social structures are the patterns of social relations that bind people together and help to shape their lives. Social solidarity is an aspect of social structure that anchors people to the social world. It follows that the lower the level of social solidarity in a group, the more a group member will be inclined to take his or her own life if he or she is in deep distress.

TYPES OF SUICIDE
Suicide is the end result of relationship to society
Egoistic or Individualistic—detachment from society
Anomic—normitive regulations surrounding individual are relaxed failing to guide human propensities.
Altruistic—overly strong regulation of individual
Ritualistic—strong attunement to the demands of a society
Fatalistic—Derives from excessive regulation, where future is pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline.

From a deep examination of our own loss and six years of study into Adolescent suicide it is strongly my opinion that the demise of our social base greatly complicated the striving of a new generation to belong and be accepted into society, that complication becoming so extreme could thereby hold the possibility to create in and of itself the type of suicide Durkheim termed rare and named Fatalistic Suicide.

To be continued

It sounds like they are trying to "dummy up" the kids in school. It also sounds like the novel "1984", by Orwell... The "Party" controls the people.

The Party controls every source of information, managing and rewriting the content of all newspapers and histories for its own ends. The Party does not allow individuals to keep records of their past, such as photographs or documents. As a result, memories become fuzzy and unreliable, and citizens become perfectly willing to believe whatever the Party tells them. By controlling the present, the Party is able to manipulate the past. And in controlling the past, the Party can justify all of its actions in the present.

[Mikal]

The determining cause of a social fact (suicide) should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of an individual consciousness. (Durkheim)

As Durkheim pointed out it is everything that precedes a young suicide which becomes the determining cause.

In all reality excluding endless relationships a young boy of eighteen has really only experienced two environments in life; the first environment family and the second environment the educational and learning experience, the former termed traditional and being shorter and the latter being Institutional society and a longer more varied experience.

FAMILY
Family begins with birth. With the young life I am examining here, birth began by caesarian. In a study carried out by M.D Thomas Verny it was noted that in caesarian birth the infant is robbed of very important physical information that later becomes human bonding and psychological, sensory and feeling/sensual information that is important to later conceptualizations concerning space and knowledge of body proportions. “He does not seem to know where he begins or ends physically.” Verny stated also, “how we are born may even influence how we die.
Taking Verny’s statement that the birth process is harder (struggle) on the infant because the infant is no longer immersed in a water world, it may simply be the first experience of self-preservation which may stir the root of what we call human self-preservation.

(The Secret Life of the Unborn Child)

Does birth order in a family hold any significance? D. W. Winnicott noted in a study, because siblings draw out powerful emotional feelings, the only child misses out on experiencing the ambivalence and polarity of feelings—to be able to experience powerful negative feelings and know that they do not destroy relationships. As Winnicott suggests, “to survive psychically, we need a sibling as a primary agent of beginning socialization.” The only child has a higher need to be challenged to competiveness, to attach to friendship, lacks experiences in life transitions, has difficulty in developing autonomy and has a higher need for achievement and status in life. (The Child, the Family and the Outside World)

At this point it is clear that we see a young child with higher needs which can only be met and satisfied outside the dynamics of the family where the main process of socialization and development of the social self are to occur. So this is a case of typically higher integration needs in comparison to others.

Durkheim stated that the state of society and the shock of circumstance can make a person a ready prey to suicide.
Engaging with this thought and using Durkheim’s structure of thought revealing the over-throw of beliefs and what leads to being weakened by preliminary controversy and public opinion I began to structure just how the disposition for suicide may begin in the young.

Family begins the development of self-concept and self-belief (ego) or faith in self. As Jung noted, when the child begins school, the phase of building up the ego and adaptation to the outer world begins. There can be shocks to the developing personality and disturbances to the development of consciousness as it naturally unfolds. If their experience with love and sharing their nature does not contain immediate and satisfying meaning the child can become concerned about the deeper meanings of life. (Man and His Symbols)

Contrary to the existing negative world-view of the family which is very much enforced on the collective societal mind by and through the power of Corporate Media which sells and prospers from bad news—families unconditionally love their children and share quite emotionally powerful bonds and favorable hopes for their children. This young child being born to older mature parents well stabilized in their marriage and professions had more love and respect than one child could ever hope for.

Can you undo that early love, where you “over-throw” the beginning developing structure of self-concept and belief in self? As Jung stated, “the child is in the phase of building up the beginning ego.” So to over-throw this developing structure would have to entail chronic interference with information contrary to the child’s beginning belief in self and nature.
As Durkheim noted “it takes to create an empty inner vacuum, through the circumstance of assertions and passing crisis not occasionally but chronically that drives continual reaffirming of autonomy and the rising of conflicting impulses for new opinions to replace ones no longer existing.” This is how the disposition to fatalistic suicide began to structure itself in the nature of a young boy. Without this knowledge we are helpless to stop this ongoing process.

To be continued

[Mikal]

“The physical and social context….exploration…touching objects….interaction of body and self….a child builds his structure of world knowledge.”
(Allan Schore—Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development)

So let’s do a synopsis of this young boy. He is now six and ready to go to school. His history is marked by his young feats—he crawled early, walked early and was a busy, busy child. He could read and print by four and by five was tackling the art of writing.
For being young he was handsome, charismatic and engaging—gave him a bubbly sparkly personality, cheerful and full of laughter.
His young crossroads and history were little scars crisscrossed into his growing body. He had two distinct characteristics that defined him—he was inquisitive and took risks to learn.
However he was not good with his body—what challenged him usually attacked him—be it climb a tree, fall out of a tree; climb a cliff, fall off the cliff, ride his bike and crash. One calamitous venture cut his head open—rushed to hospital, sits patiently while being stitched—then a hundred questions over-whelm the Doc. What are these things? Will they grow into my head? What are they made of? Where did you get them from??
His other characteristic—he seemed to have a finely tuned skill to listen—one day while rushing in play, he crushed his gramps newly planted bush. Gramps is now surveying the bush, the young boy backtracks to explain and say sorry—gramps explains patiently—you hurt the bush! Then a hundred questions over-whelm gramps. Hurt!! Is it alive? Why doesn’t it get up and run around like me? Can it cry? If I say sorry will it hear me? Can we stop its hurting??

He came across to others as a fine mix of rebel, innocent mischief, niceness, a subtle touch of timid shyness and about the best friend any kid could ever hope to find or have. He was about to begin his educational journey.

To be continued

[Mikal]

SCHOOL, EDUCATION AND THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE


"I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change what’s rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, though it does not "educate"; that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.
(– John Gatto Schoolteacher—New York State Teacher of the Year.)


I don’t know why for sure, but upon graduation we leave school behind us—and the way it was when we were there, rather becomes a frozen memory and we never think it has changed.

In 1921, Carl Jung wrote a letter to Sigmund Freud and in it explained that due to their differences in views concerning the human psyche that they would part ways. Psychology/Psychiatry and Analytical Psychoanalysis split in two. Jung leading the vein of thought called Holistic Psychology and Freud leading the vein of thought that would become Behaviorism.

Psychologist B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) had been studying salivating dogs and through his study he would go on to publish his Theory of Learning Operant Conditioning—his main hypotheses was that learning is a function of change in overt behavior; basically stimulus-response. The main principles in his study were the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and forms of behavior, and the other principle, response is reinforced, punished or eventually extinguished.

This theory would become engagingly attractive to Behavioral Psychologists and when our past base of society as family based was dispelled it was then replaced with the Therapeutic flavor. Behaviorism would get into the educational system. Behaviorism being a theory became a tool of knowledge spreading in universities and colleges and then a tool of use in the schools as the new Mandate for teaching and learning.

The new learning environment the young boy was going to begin in was nothing like the environment that I learned in, in the 1960s.
This was an environment laden down with new theory ideology, new behavioral techniques, class aids who would observe, examine and assess behavior, there were new labels to define kids who did not learn on the same level, the same way or at the same pace, there were new forms of punishment for any mishaps in ongoing behavior, teachers were instructed to get innovative with punishment and every student’s negative behavior was recorded in office logs, for infection and influence to all teacher-aids coming in from heavily inter-connected agencies now entwining themselves into the educational environment.

Really Cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor of Rutgers University says it best in his professional critique of Operant Learning, “Skinner’s behaviorism really was, and really was intended to be, a radical departure from commonsense ways of thinking about the mental (in learning).”

Another opinion!
"School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned."

(John Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year)


Why did school change?

“"By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers - backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling: teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, et al. - has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.

(John Taylor Gatto– Schoolteacher—New York State Teacher of the Year.)




So imagine a young child who’s adventurous, explorative, inquisitive, and talkative and sometimes a bit of a rebel with a young and passionate spirit—and with hidden needs nobody knew about— is now entering this kind of learning environment….


To be continued…

[Mikal]

NO TIME FOR NUTURING—THE WORK OF SHAME

“Identification with the body is late-forming in a child. Shaming breaks into this natural process resulting in a pre-mature awareness that results in a split between self and body—an inner rejection of body…
(Allan N. Schore—Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development)

Society can develop an over-rigid environment—it can bruise the natural instincts of the young who burn with idealism, generous missionary zeal and active devotion waiting to develop.—Durkheim

Ideas and feelings as social currents in the social milieu can enter an individual and invite him to destroy himself.—Durkheim

“The psychic life of a child is a problem of magnitude to educators—but when normal a child has no problems of its own. It is only the adult human being who can have doubts about himself and be at variance with himself. –Carl Jung

So the boy entered school!

There is scant written information concerning kindergarten but just enough and an ending result which clearly reveal that it was more than likely the starting point where the boys beginning self-concept would have begun to unravel. Jung called this “shocks to the developing personality and unfolding consciousness” and any deep examination of Durkheim’s work reveals that assertions strong enough to create crisis and happening on a chronic level could be the forming of a new self from the fabric of negative assumptions.

You have to be immersed in the system to see the entire philosophy of the “time-out chair” or the “desk of isolation”—little moments of shame and humiliation that this highly interracting little boy would not have fully comprehended.
This had to be the first time the boy heard the idea he was bad and strange enough kids don’t tell because the feeling that comes with it, is uncomfortable—but heard enough and kids just like the boy did, will go home and with solemn face cupped in both hands, will ask, “do you and dad still like me?”
Kindergarten ended with a bang. A small progress report stating, “your child has been assessed as hyperactive and to continue on into Grade 1 may require an outside professional Behavior Assessment to determine if Ritalen is needed to stabilize your childs present behavior.”

If a sentence could ever betray the presence of Behaviorism—this would be it! It is especially suggestive that the boy was watched and observed which is the way of Behaviorism and its disseminators.

Durkheim’s statement that society can develop an over-rigid environment—begs for a greater grasp of the main foundational thought which gave rise to Skinner’s learning theory.

Skinner is the only major figure in the history of behaviorism to offer a socio-political worldview based on his commitment to behaviorism. Skinner constructed a theory as well as a narrative picture in Walden Two of what an ideal human society would be like if designed on behaviorist principles. Skinner’s social world view illustrates both his aversion to human free will, to dualism and he deliberately rejects that people creatively make their own environments. (1)

Skinner protested that “it is in the nature of an experimental analysis of human behavior that it should strip away the functions previously assigned to autonomous man and transfer them one by one to the controlling environment.” (2)
( l-2—Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The summer break after kindergarten the boy’s grandma remembered as the time the boy began to change….

To be continued…