April 24, 2005

• Conceptual Frameworks
  Conceptual Plateaus
  
  Conceptual Levels
  
  Conceptual Walls
  
  Reality Bubbles
  
  Reality Tunnels
  
  Reality
  

  This, from Cinnamongirl78 got my attention:

  Thanks for giving me a lot to think about.  I remember in some post or
  memoir your referring even to pain as an addictive thing/sensation,
  because it triggers those dopamine reward systems.  I thought that was
  b.s., or at the least a masochistic impulse, but now I know precisely
  what you mean.  In my short sobriety I have found myself getting easily
  angered, and realized the rush of that anger is triggering it.  The
  hardest thing for me to deal with in sobriety from alcohol is boredom,
  just sitting in my own skin and being okay with myself.  That’s where
  food, compulsive reading, Internet, even meetings come in.  I despair
  of ever getting there, but I see some people with peace of mind, not
  rushing from one thing to the next which will keep them from sitting
  with their feelings and being okay, so I realize it’s possible.  I
  don’t know how to do it, yet.

  For a moment, I couldn’t get past the passage I highlighted, partially
  because it really garbles what I have
  said about pain and dopamine.  It
  requires a tricky bit of mental gymnastics to switch things around so
  that your body secretes dopamine in place of Substance P, and that is a
  dangerous trick I don’t recommend that anyone try precisely because it
  can lead to one becoming addicted to sensations most people would call
  pain.  That in turn could lead to one injuring oneself in an
  attempt to feel good.

  The comment
  also reminded me of a lengthy exchange I once had with one of my
  mail-order
  clients, and of various concepts I’ve encountered in the writings of
  Robert Anton Wilson, E.J. Gold and Gregory Bateson.

  After I got beyond the BS part and read the whole comment, I was
  reasonably certain that although she said she knows precisely what I
  mean, she really means she has experienced something that has convinced
  her that there was more than just BS in what I was saying.  I think it’s likely that she
  still hasn’t got it, hasn’t incorporated the general idea into her
  conceptual framework.

  The specific words that gave me that impression were, “at the least a masochistic impulse.” 
  If I’m inferring correctly there, she doesn’t see the masochistic
  impulse in terms of neurochemistry.  I do see it that way. 
  In my reality, Freudian and Jungian psychology are as flawed and
  limited as Euclidean geometry.  Freud and Jung lacked any
  understanding of the electrochemistry of thought and sensation. 
  Dopamine and Substance P
  were not in their lexicons, and therefore not in their conceptual
  frameworks.  To them psycholgical processes and anomalies were all
  in the mind and the mind was separate from the body.  To me, mind
  may transcend the merely physical, but it interfaces with the body in
  clearly defined electro-chemical processes.

  The long-ago client I mentioned above had problems.  She was
  unhappy.  I understood immediately from the first reading I did
  for her where the problem lay.  Her expectations were not being
  met.  The reality in which she lived did not conform to the
  reality in her mind.  Each time I attempted to explain it to her,
  she just didn’t get it.  She said she understood everything I was
  telling her but she just “couldn’t integrate those ideas with her
  conceptual framework.”

  She had written to me because in her lexicon, “psychic” meant miracle
  worker or magician, with connotations of omniscience and
  omnipotence.  She required that I change reality to suit her
  imagination.  Essentially, she wanted me to make the fairy tales
  come true.  I told her that might be possible, but I couldn’t do
  it for her, she’d have to change her own reality.  Unfortunately,
  in her reality, she lacked the power to change her own reality.  I
  responded that what she then required was a change of paradigm, a move into a
  personal reality in which she had the power to do what she desired.

  We carried on in that manner for a while, until she gave up on
  me.  She wasn’t ready to burst out of her reality bubble. 
  She wasn’t honest enough to acknowledge that she lived in a reality
  where those fairy tales were not true, nor was she open-minded enough
  to enter a new reality where she might realize her fantasies. 
  Unwilling either to adapt to the reality around her or adopt a new one,
  she was stuck.  Ever since my experience with her, every time I
  think about paradigms, reality tunnels and conceptual walls, I’m
  reminded of her.  I wonder what reality she’s living in now.

  According to RAW, reality is what you can get away with. 
  That definition works for me.  It defines my reality as quite
  flexible and yet not infinitely so.  There are some limits but
  they aren’t too rigid or restrictive.  In Wilson’s terms, I live
  in a reality tunnel.  It’s open-ended, and as such tunnels go,
  mine is relatively broad and permeable.

  That unhappy client of mine lived in a reality bubble.  Perhaps
  she had been programmed with a meme related to “graduate” or “grownup”
  or “educated” that set a limit on her ability to collect new ideas or
  discard old ones.  In whatever way it came to be, she was hemmed
  in on all sides by impermeable conceptual walls.  The really sad
  thing about it was that her bubble contained enough internal
  contradictions such as those fairy tales she believed but could not
  realize, that she was incapable of finding contentment within it.

  Above, where I wrote about her not being, “honest enough,” or
  “open-minded enough,” and “unwilling,” I unconsciously echoed a segment
  of the “How It Works” reading from the NA meeting format. 
  Honesty, open-mindedness and willingness are offered as three examples
  of spiritual principles without which an addict has little hope of
  recovery.  I see the truth in that, and also feel that few people
  have any hope of any sort of success or fulfillment without
  incorporating those memes into their paradigms.  But that
  might be a little bit off-topic here.  (and, no, Mitch, I don’t
  hate that — I just try to keep from getting too scattered and losing
  my thread because I usually start these things with some idea in mind
  and it’s both inconvenient and uncomfortable to find myself a few
  thousand words into my story and completely off the track)

  When I try to visualize conceptual walls and conceptual levels, the
  pictures in my mind resemble the grafx in video games.  Sometimes
  in order to get past an obstacle you need to back up, go around, gain
  some experience and ramp up to a new level.  When you do go up a
  level, it feels like you’ve climbed a peak, but if you stay there the
  “peak” sensations wear off and you discover that it’s a plateau. 
  Plateaus can be comfortable places to spend time congratulating
  yourself on your attainments, resting on your laurels, running in
  circles and growing stagnant:  a nice place to visit, but I
  wouldn’t want to live there.

  Everyone has a paradigm, just as everyone has a DNA signature. 
  Much of our paradigm is universal, the result of being one of two
  genders in a bipedal species possessing bilateral symmetry, living on a
  planet spinning in relation to a central light source and orbited by a
  reflective satellite.  The tendency to see things in black and
  white follows from that as day follows night.

  Many people’s conceptual frameworks (paradigms, belief systems, AKA BS) don’t vary greatly from
  the universal basics.  A shortage of imagination, lack of
  transcendent awareness or strong fear-based programming can keep a mind
  enclosed in a tight little bubble.  You can find such bubbles in
  totalitarian societies, in fundamentalist cults, and in institutions
  with a crystalized paradigm such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Lots of things can happen to blow holes in the bubbles or just stretch
  them out of their original shape.   Some people fear and
  resist such mind-expanding experiences and other people welcome them
  and actively seek them out.  Shamanism is a technology of
  prehistoric origin that even now provides tools for selecting and accessing different realities. 
  It’s a growing and expanding kit of tools, too, as shamans go off into
  new realities and bring back new vehicles for traveling to even more
  otherworlds.

  I know I took off from that comment as if from a slingshot. 
  That’s the way my reality goes.  My mind is like a steel ball
  bearing caroming around in a bizarre non-Euclidean pinball
  machine.  I find it easier to define what my reality isn’t than to
  encompass what it is.  One thing my reality lacks is boredom.

  And that brings me back to this:

  The
  hardest thing for me to deal with in sobriety from alcohol is boredom,
  just sitting in my own skin and being okay with myself.  That’s where
  food, compulsive reading, Internet, even meetings come in.  I despair
  of ever getting there, but I see some people with peace of mind, not
  rushing from one thing to the next which will keep them from sitting
  with their feelings and being okay, so I realize it’s possible.  I
  don’t know how to do it, yet.

  Cinnamongirl78,
  several things can help in that quest.  Let it be easy. 
  Remember that what you resist persists, so don’t resist.  Face
  your fears.  Become intimate with yourself.  If you feel you
  must subscribe to the AA paradigm, then let the first three steps
  happen to you.

  Yes, I said let them happen to you.  The first three steps are not
  “worked” so much as they are accepted.  That’s what we mean when
  we say, “I didn’t quit; I surrendered.”  It can happen in the
  space
  of a single breath or heartbeat if you let it be.  Once you have
  done that, made that meme the foundation of your personal paradigm,
  then let go and let God help you in your abstinence.  The spirit
  can control the mind and the mind can control the body.

  It can take time, sometimes years of abstinence, prayer, meditation, and a healthful diet,
  before a healthy neurochemical balance is achieved.  That, and the
  self-esteem that grows out of working the rest of the twelve steps, is
  the source of that peace of mind you observe in others and desire for yourself. 

  There is, really IS,
  a quicker, easier, softer way to go, though.  The easier softer way AA’s
  founders warned against was the bullshit of tapering off, trying to quit drinking while continuing to drink, substituting
  one addiction for another, etc.  Eighty years ago, the founders
  were in the same position as Freud and Jung:  ignorant of the
  facts of neurochemistry.

  If you don’t want to suffer (Buddha said, “Pain is part of life;
  suffering is optional.”) through years of white-knuckle abstinence and the risk of relapse as you allow your body to
  gradually gain a healthy balance, then get some help from modern
  neuroscience, from something like The 101 Program.  Mental health is much easier to achieve and maintain in a healthy body.

  
  A few days of rain resulted in this puddle of water overlying the sheet of ice on the little muskeg across the road from here.

  
  Enough of the snow cover has melted that I could wade out into the
  woods through the slush without going in over my boot tops.  On
  the edge of the muskeg, I found this young birch with moose toothmarks.

  
  Here’s a broader view of the wet muskeg through the trees.

  
  Bare trees against a blue sky is the predominant view around here,
  unless you prefer to look down and see the rutted mud in the road, the
  dirty slush beside the road and the defrosting dog and moose and other
  assorted droppings everywhere.

  
  That’s our little cabin, used for storage, back among the trees. 
  This is the ugliest time of the year in one of the most beautiful parts
  of the planet, but occasionally even in breakup we have a really pretty
  day.
  

  • 11:23 pm
  • 7 Comments