People, Language and Thought - Perspectives from Feldenkrais

 Fragrances often have tones. These are differentiated on the basis of how long they persist after the fragrance has been used. 

People's personalities are like fragrances. We wear these different masks which are archetypes of behaviours. Like onions with infinite layers. Depending on the social group or the situation we are immersed in, our personality changes. Yet there is still a semblance of going towards the core. 

As we become more sensitive to this process, we can see that at our core we are like children, bundles of joy. This plethora of masks is nothing but a collection of defense mechanisms to life's circumstances. 

In essence, it is possible to game the system once one realises this; there are certain masks that society loves. I have been reading Feldenkrais recently, and in his language it is possible to put in the reps mechanically to develop a certain mask but those mechanical and fearful reps do not arise from a place of sensitivity and love. 

Language is a modality of thought. But it is just one of them. Our body is a whole integrated process. Language is the isolated process of our analytical brain. Our whole society is structured around language in many ways; not only in the natural language sense, but also in the way we imagine life itself, a sort of grand turing machine. This is a fundamental reason why our structures of thought currently struggle with complexity. 

In studying statistical mechanics, complexity science or any reasonably large network, we realise that language and the modalities of thought it promotes struggle to handle emergent phenomena. When the number of interactions in the different subsystems "assemblages" become too much to handle, it is simply not sensitive or subtle enough, and lends itself to "coarse graining" or truncative approximations to comprehend. However, nonlinearities in interactions in a subsystem lead to problems with this program. That is not to say that language is not an extremely important part of our life. However, its tendency to isolate and fracture itself is perhaps also the line on which society is going; It lends itself to being fractured yet wanting for love, which is exactly what happens to almost all children and adults in our society. 

Somewhere along the way, we all lose our sense of being integrated with the whole; Our defense mechanisms kick in and we perform mechanical action to improve parts of ourselves that we think will help us obtain whatever our conception of "love" is (which is again limited by our perception). That is perhaps the most common thread in the human condition right now. In writing this, I realise there are other reactions to that initial "fall" to use christian language. There is also a widespread loneliness, hopelessness, nihilism. But that first "fall" is in essence something that is common to the human condition. And documented everywhere from chrsitianity to heidegger. 

In terms of neuroscience this could be formulated in a bayesian setting with predictive processing e.g. In trying to maximize an objective function from a limited perspective, we invariably cause fragmentation. This is what a lot of "mental illnesses" are in my opinion. Ways of functioning of one's system of thought that have maladaptive axioms at their base. 

Changing one's axioms for our system for thought fundamentally is a difficult task. No matter how many blog posts you read like this, a purely linguistic argument will never open you up to the possibility that your system of thought is limited. Or perhaps it will through things such as Godel's Incompleteness theorem. The more one remains purely within the modality of thought, the more their finitude confronts them. We just have societal objectives as miniquests to maximize and when you're done maximizing or you fail out of the rollercoaster you finally need to deal with the emptiness it has left in its wake. 

Experiential knowledge is much better at making us confront our finitude. This is why there is renewed academic interest in psychedelics; we realise that the creativity and space for wonder that they open up are something our lives should be filled with anyways and not something we need to microdose ourselves to feel. Meditation or devotion to any physical activity also allow this and these are where I have personally begun to see this open up. Though there is no reason these activities should be priveleged, I would assume sincere devotion to anything can bestow such understanding upon us. 

Writing and narrowing down my field of focus to try and perfectly articulate the movement of my thought is also something that has helped me to learn how limited it is. It is a tool, and a sharp and amazing one at that, but how I open myself up to the world and experience would be very limited if it was only through this perspective. Looking into people's eyes, observing the changes in their body, observing our own bodies, breaths. The field for our sensitivity to expand into is limitless. That is the sheer joy of being here. 

Being afraid to lose yourself in Samsara is a lack of faith. In a Hegelian sense, it is not that you love truth or god if you fear that engaging in the world will make you lose your faith but rather that you fear the lack of your own faith. 

Namaste.