Nature of self

Isn't it amazing how hard it is for we humans to appreciate this holistic perspective? I am reading a book by Marianne Wolf called Proust and the Squid, and it's about the birth of reading and writing. She argues that the creation of symbolic language changed our brains. I was wondering if this might be what was being called left-brain in that old metaphor that wasn't so accurate. Then I thought about Jill Bolte Taylor and her experience of having her left brain completely shut down for a while. I wonder if over-reliance upon reading and writing perhaps alienated us from the holistic perspective, which is, ideally, a total brain phenomenon in which right and left are both active and balanced. After all, we need to tell others about our experiences and to share them in a way that others can have those experiences.




I have been writing about the Lakota perspective on this inner and outer stuff, and have been struggling to understand the Lakota concept of nagi, which is as close to "self" as Lakota comes. Nagi is every being who has ever influenced us (human, ancestral, natural, spirit) along with every story that they have ever told that has affected us. Also, apparently Lakota is low on words for I, me, my and high on words for you, our, us. I suspect a lot of our thinking about boundaries is an artifact of learning how to read and write and that the work of the next 100 years will be to discover how to balance our brains to perceive both wholes and details. We have to balance the brain changes achieved by symbolic language and its utilization with total being experience and what that has to teach us.



So here's my idea: your thinking negative thoughts about yourself is someone else thinking negative thoughts about you because "you" don't exist except in relationship and "you" are a bunch of internalized voices that you have heard anyway. The idea is that the brain makes a social map of your outer world and each node in that social map is a voice that you can hear saying something that you heard once upon a time and of course modified potentially each time you activate that node and hear that voice. So there's no you. There's only stories that include you.



When do "you" become the co-creator of "you." I suspect when we begin to wonder about the desirability of the voice we are hearing and begin to wonder if we can strengthen or weaken it. As we explore how to do that (especially including other people) we become co-creators of "us". That means that potentially a person who never reacted to their inner voices or wondered about them could actually have zero agency in the world, could actually not create any aspect of "them". I suspect that's rare because people are naturally curious and we wonder why we are saying what we are saying to ourselves. See how difficult this concept is to express in English. I wish I knew more Lakota.



An elder told me that every story has a spirit and every story once told is there forever. Telling counter-stories weaken bad stories and that's what he said he did.

Professionalism

How do we teach students how to help other people? We currently have created such a hierarchical system which serves those (apparently) on top of the hierarachy. I am currently teaching what is called "professionalization group" which aims to teach students how to act like professionals. Yes, the model for professionalism is so distancing, so aloof, so alienating compared to traditional healers. What about the practice of generosity, humility, appreciation, and connection to the earth that characterize healers. What if these attributes are what help others to heal? The separation of professionals from their clients by the symbols of power (white coat, desk, etc.) can be powerful placeboes if they stimulate the faith, belief, and trust of the client, but, ultimately, I think they lose out to the power of a genuine, humble, more equal relationships, which doesn't mean that the healer doesn't know more about healing than the person coming to him. It just means that outside the healing encounter, they are equal. I read an ethnographer saying that healers told him that their medicine wasn't as powerful as it used to be because fewer people believe. Frank Fools Crow was an amazing healer and he exemplified all the attributes of healers, including humor and being a bit rascally at times.

Ursula in Coyote Healing and how do people become sick?

Ursula raises the larger question of how does physical illness come about. I think illness emerges as either a consequence or an epiphenomenon of the embodied enactment of stories. All thoughts have physiological consequences just as I mentioned for imagination. Medical students who watch horror movies show decreases in immune function just as medical students who wtach comedies show increases in immune function. We can't explain the mechanism by which that happens, but we know that it does. So, your emotional experience, which is a direct result of your perception of the world, which arises from the stories you hold about the world and enact in the world, affects your physiology. The story of guilt and self-blame and self-loathing is probably a bummer for the average white blood cell who's more interesting in responding vigorously to happiness and joy. Our emotions, however, arise from our position in a social world and the stories in which we grow up. It's the flip side of the competition story. For every winnter, there are 100 (or more) losers. What's it like to be the winner or the loser? I think Taleb (in the Black Swan) and Gladwell (in Outliers) both make the excellent point that after you put in your 10,000 hours to become an expert (Doidge uses that number also), it's largely luck and social capital, not talent or genius. Yet, the more we believe the individual genius story, and the more we're not the big winner, the more we beat ourselves up. The more we beat ourselves up, the more beaten down we feel. Up, down. Up , down. It weighs heavy on a body, and is probably in service to capitalism because the more down we feel, the more stuff we buy and services we consume.

My new blog

I am starting a new blog because my old one was linked to an old email account and now that I'm ready to start seriously blogging, I thought I'd just start fresh.