Go to:

http://seriouslyfolks.bloggagratis.se/

or http://dhagglund.wordpress.com/

 if you want to see my new blogs. I warn you before you click that these are purely holistic psychology blogs, and the reading will require some concentrated effort even if you only read the latest installment.

I more or less finished this Education blog some time ago, except as I find it needing a second draft (which is a bit tedious and could take forever, and considering the visitor statistic, how much responsibility is implied really?). If you want to find the substance of this old blog it is at the beginning, after the preliminaries, back in June.

The conscious is called that because it is consciously observable, and the subconscious is called that because it is not consciously observable. At one time even our species had a mind that operated without any aspect of the operation becoming observable. When we are asleep that mind resumes its work. Imagine a dream where you had to observe the process of conceiving and constructing the dream. It would lose that thing the actors call "suspension of disbelief". In other words the fact the process was observable would mean you couldn't really dream.

So let's say that you once found God, but you found God with the mind as it was before you adopted a conscious (which would imply that all animals have found God; that it has nothing to do with being human, or even that being human is what makes us uniquely unlikely to find God). Then your conscious would not be the mind that found God. As soon as you adopted a conscious you would not have found God, or to put it another way, you would be conscious of not having found God. This is where religion comes in. You found God, then you lost God because having found God is not in the conscious, and now religion is going to help your conscious to find God. It's a racket!

The conscious can not ever become aware of what the subconscious is aware of, because the subconscious has the true-to-life or universal version while the conscious is composed completely of uniquely human versions. If we make anything that is in the conscious into a true-to-life version it ceases to be conscious. This is the basis of meditation. Make everything in your conscious true-to-life or universal and your conscious is empty; it vanishes.

Gullibility is an opiate. The one who tries to correct it will seem more cruel than kind this side of time's horizon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some thousands of years ago a nearly four billion year old process of evolution was interrupted in our species (and a few select other species we favored as pets and cattle) when we decided that the process of defying nature could be made more interesting than continuing to evolve. A means was invented for extending the range of our species, and improving upon this means, and thus extending our range perpetually, became a new star to follow, a new God perhaps. This precipitated a radical change in the mind, and especially in the human mind. On the one hand we had the mind as it was evolving, devoted utterly to evolution, which is to harmonizing with a growing and evolving diversity of living forms, and on the other we had the mental compartment, if we may call it that, which we would devote to what man could do for man if he established some order or regimen of allocating tasks which tasks taken together would produce a society with some potential for survival or coexistence with nature and with other societies.

In theory this was a practical development. Man seemed to himself an intelligent animal either way. He was an intelligent natural animal when he was living in nature, and he became an intelligent "person" when he devoted himself to human society. But has anyone ever questioned this theory seriously? Are there not some holes in it? Is it really possible to be intelligent in two ways: by behaving as if nature and its evolution is everything, "God's Plan" so to speak, and also in behaving as if nature and its evolution must make way for man and his "evolution". No doubt all of us have heard, from some people with respectable degrees from respectable schools, that man has been evolving since he abandoned nature; that leaving nature precipitated some extraordinary evolution in our species, while other people with equally respectable degrees from equally respectable schools have said that both man and nature have stopped evolving since man abandoned nature for a life as a rogue mammal, and that nature will resume evolving if man allows it to, releases it from bondage, while man is, as far as nature is concerned, an extinct ape and will never again evolve; that man is a mammal that can not be restored to nature, which is also true of the humble cow. In some species the pilot light of instinct has gone out, according to these less optimistic theorists (who have been taking into account the relatively recent discovery of "Eden Man", people who, while being exactly like us physically, have less in common with our ways of living than wild chimpanzees. The dictionary gives us: Homo sapiens 1. the species of bipedal primates to which modern humans belong, characterized by a brain capacity averaging 1400 cc (85 cubic in.) and by dependence upon language and the creation and utilization of complex tools. --while the chimps are more inclined to use language and tools than Eden Man, even though Eden Man does have this brain capacity. In short, remaining in the exact niche where evolution placed man to begin with, which is where he doesn't need or use clothes, shelters, words or tools of any kind did not keep his brain from growing big. The conscious has not made the brain grow. A big brain has more to do with how sensitive your skin is and how much of it is exposed than with how intelligent you are.).

Are there two perspectives: One where nature is looking at man's activities in disgust and another where man is looking at nature's activities with contempt. And if there are these two, is one of them intelligent, or are they both intelligent? And if one is intelligent, which one is it? (Certainly we don't believe that nature watches man's activities with approval! "Hurray! I'm extinct! Wonderful! Man is making my lungs bleed!") This is a question regarding the division of the human mind. The conscious precipitates the effect that the natural intelligence becomes subconscious. The new perspective precipitates the effect that the old comes into disuse. Contradictory perspectives do not coexist within the conscious ken.

How does a creature of nature get along? He applies an intelligence, but what is this intelligence; what is its medium? The conscious, which is man's way of getting along in human society, applies knowledge, experience and words. The adult conscious actually immerses him in a sea of words for all his waking hours. We can not seriously expect that the natural creature has anything akin to words in its processes, and so its processes are not sluggish. That is simple enough to understand. It needs words to slow the processes down, words that are being acted out, spoken for effect rather than because they are true or cogent. What is harder to understand is what knowledge and experience do to processes. If there is no knowledge and experience, is the subconscious process remotely related or similar to the conscious process? Knowledge and experience are introverted effects. We must collect them and refer to them, which means we must distract ourselves from the present to find out what we need to do, like a person who must look something up on a website or in a reference book. Without knowledge and experience there is no distraction from the present, and this is what is unimaginable to the conscious process, a mind that processes without distracting one from the present.

How can the present and the processing not conflict with each other? It may appear that there must be both and that the one must distract and detract from the observation of the other. But look at a recent science, a science in its infancy, 'body language'. There are two ways to deal with body language. One way, the conscious way, is to remember what each known posture of the body means, which means the observer must look at the posture and then refer what he observes to his memory, and the other is where there is an instantaneous perception of what the posture means so that observing the posture is not interrupted for even an instant while the observation is being processed. Looking at this rationally, the observed person is making a posture without trying to, and so the observer should be understanding its meaning without trying to. After all, the person doing the observing is also making body language all the time, and he is not conscious of it. Apparently it is the conscious that is the distraction. Get rid of that and everything is working smoothly...

...except for one thing: the subconscious is extremely critical of man's activities.

Is this clear? I am making body language all the time and so are you. Does this mean we both know how to make it but neither of us know how to read it? Or is reading it just as natural and unconsciously done as making it? Why this new science then, if we are already reading it subconsciously? Why does it belong in the conscious, as well as in the subconscious? Next we will be posturing consciously as well, which will defeat the whole purpose, like a veracity testing machine that lies.

What we are sure of is that body language, when it is not studied for effect, is being truthful. I say I love my mother but my body language testifies that I abhor her. It is true that I abhor her. We can rely on it. When we die we are reincarnated in hell, which is in our mother's care. Being afraid to die is being afraid of mothers, which is quite rational. So what we have to determine is if it is possible to have an intelligence that lies, or if it is a prerequisite of intelligence that it is truthful in the very best sense, a sense of not even being naïve.

Is it possible to make the conscious truthful? This is where knowledge and experience come in. Is knowledge true? Is experience true? Can we suspect all knowledge? Can we suspect all experience? Can the phenomenon of input itself be false, so that if it requires us to look inward, into memory, into the past, into the idea, then it is false? Consider astronomy, for example. If I distrust what I was taught about religion, this does not mean I necessarily distrust what I was taught about astronomy. I put religion down as superstition, and astronomy as science. But they are both input. So where is the lie of astronomy? It is simple. There is a cosmos above us. It gave us an evolving sense of its presence for nearly four billion years. Astronomy disregards this sense, and gives us a new cosmos, a cosmos that is appropriate to study as if it never made any better sense to us than it does to the scientists who are assembling the puzzle of cosmic parts and generating the new ideas from these structures as if nature were oblivious to the cosmos and science is the chore of generously enlightening the only species that can be enlightened.

Conscious is something dead giving us the dead version of everything else.

If only man can make sense of the cosmos then only man deserves to live on, and any other planet in the cosmos that does not have man on it deserves to be plundered to death. Science is destroying the bond between man and nature, as if man's evolution were some sort of primordial larval stage. Like Adam from the Old Testament (Judeo-Christian scriptures), science gives us a nature that is scarcely worthy to be sacrificed on an altar. This again has to do with what is instantaneously perceived. If we instantaneously perceive that nature is profound and inspired we can not make ourselves conscious of it, and if what is profound and inspired about ourselves is what nature evolved us to be rather than what man has conditioned us to be we can not make ourselves conscious of it. Conscious can not regard life in an unconditioned perspective. Conscious is purely an invention of our authorities. We are tailor made to serve older generations, like dogs made to herd sheep.

How is experience like knowledge? If you see me and I am making a face that seems nonchalant, what do you see as far as what lodges in your conscious or memory? You see a man who is nonchalant. But why am I consciously making you see me as nonchalant? It is because I am actually quite perturbed! I have reasoned out that to show you how perturbed I am would place me at a disadvantage. So now your experience tells you that I was not perturbed. This is a gullible conclusion. And your power to get past this is subconscious. You can not make your conscious less gullible. You can not accumulate less gullible input. Like body language, you can only do it truthfully from your subconscious, which is from evolution, from being a wild animal. The truth is told or expressed only subconsciously, and it is heard or seen, perceived in short, only subconsciously. Why is this animal gift subconscious? Because we are no use to authority if we are still functioning on all cylinders. We are not exactly cattle, because our ingenuity is our greatest gift, and we will not apply that unless we believe we are serving ourselves.

There is a great celebrity in the music branch. An idol. All the budding teens adore him, except those few who have spent some time with him. The ones who know him too intimately hate him, grew disgusted with him. Why? Because he is a monster, of course. And they made him a monster. They took an ordinary brat and made a monster of him. How much would it be worth to love someone and find that no matter how intimately you knew him and no matter for how long, your love would only grow? Only the subconscious has this gift. Only the subconscious knows who this is and why it is this way; why it has to be just those, and not the ones in the spotlight.

The old adage is that familiarity inevitably breeds contempt. And what is the opposite of familiarity? Besides novelty! Since novelty relies too heavily on naivety. It is evolution. No one is ever the same. Not only are they consistently good; they are always better. The best any person, cat or dog could ever be is consistent. Not so the wild creatures.

And why just the wild creatures? Because one law applies. Diversity challenges the social intelligence. If we are the same we do not provide the gift of challenge. Harmony and order are actually opposites. Same things can develop order, while only diversity can develop harmony. We love things because they refuse to become more like us; they insist on becoming less like us. Love exists because it is never the same. It is always challenged. When people love each other it is because, together, they love the other species.

Conditioning takes time. We have to meet authority. We have to imprint upon authority. We have to be instructed in how to serve. So there is a time in life when we are less conditioned, almost unconditioned. And how does one agree with an unconditioned person, a baby? It is as simple as this: love the other species. It is what babies do. A baby may hate that it is hungry for too long, or thirsty, or itchy or generally uncomfortable, but what it hates more than anything is that it hears, in ways we can not be conscious of, an invitation to encounter other species, or perhaps the cosmos, and its feet will not move it. Mother is the baby's feet! Like being cut in half, the lower half having died in the process.

The conscious has no real past. It is something that exists through authority's trickery. There is a real past. We begin whole and diminish. The real past is to recover the whole through penetrating the trickery. The trickery can not penetrate itself. Look at modern psychology. It is all about how the conscious will come to understand the unconscious and the subconscious. The fact is the subconscious is an ocean of perception. Putting drops of pseudo-understanding into a bucket is futile when there is already an ocean of perception waiting for a small upgrade.

I find that writing Knols ("units of knowledge") more practical at the moment. Blogs are more for people who follow them. New readers are disinclined to go back to the beginning. So you might consider this:

http://knol.google.com/k/dennis-hgglund/meditation-from-a-to-z/3cyz8h78xgrjf/7#

my next installment, and follow links from there ("also wrote"). 

To preserve the old version I am moving the revision or second draft process of this blog to a new blog, which you'll find here:

http://ucanbserious.bloggagratis.se/

No inserted pictures this time, I think.

I don't promise this revising will happen quickly, or even at all. I'm just feeling my way forward, doing what I like to do whether or not anyone likes to do it with me.

How evolved is life on Earth? This is a question regarding the depth of evolution, and it must be fairly obvious to anyone who asks the question earnestly that an evolved awareness is aware of the exact depth of life's evolution. The awareness is evolved enough that it is perfectly aware of how evolved life is. There is no divergence where life is evolved to a degree while the awareness is evolved to a lesser degree.

But man has contracted an aspect of mind (which is of awareness) called "conscious", and this distinguishes itself by not being aware of how evolved life on Earth is, and as it predominates it drives our original awareness, that which is aware of the depth to which all life on Earth has evolved, into "subconscious", which is where the original mind acts upon its awareness (instinct) without conscious approval or recognition.

Everything that conscious relies upon must be termed "illusion", because it is not deep enough to be real. For example, if a man makes a pleasant face we say he is happy. This is not true. This is a man who wants to make us believe he is happy from some concealed motive. That he is happy is illusion, and he consciously creates this illusion, which means he is preying on the shallowness of our conscious.

To evolve means to add depth to social reality, and yet man has done the exact opposite when he created his own conscious. The world changed at the hands of man, and man climbed aboard this change and looked back at the unchanged world and decided it lacks depth, which it does not in a realistic perspective. Rather it is the change man has wrought that lacks depth. To call man's efforts deep is mere salesmanship.

Creativity, then, is when we do something that has new depth, a depth man can not expect of man or of himself. This depth can not come from the conscious. It only happens when the original mind has been completed, which is when everything man has delegated to conscious is deepened until it is no longer divided from the original depth of the mind.

Why are things in the conscious? Because they are not as deep as reality, not as deep as the mind. The mind is deep and rejects what is not deep enough to be real, and if we resist this rejection we must find another way to keep this shallow input: conscious. So finding the real depth of these things will deliver them from the conscious, which will release the subconscious from its tether as a tame or domesticated mind.

Why do the hormonal chemistries of individuals and species differ? As a general rule it must be for the same reason their bodies differ: they do different things, pursue different livelihoods. All sparrows living in a certain environment behave and eat more or less the same, finding what they need the same way, and so with all foxes, so within species there is generally a minor difference in chemistries. Sparrows and foxes need radically different chemistries, while sparrows and sparrows do not.

Man has a very special spectrum of activities, because man is a species unto itself. This is like when the world suffered and extinction level event, and a few species had to serve as the basis for re-diversification. The world has not evolved for billions of years in order to find itself reduced to one species. As soon as a species divides itself off to become the only species in some environment it begins to diversify, initially and most obviously into prey and predator, which means into ordinary people and sociopaths. You may think most sociopaths are institutionalized, but in fact they are more often quite successful people; and highly respected, not because they do good things, but because the things they do are said to be good. With success comes the right to a custom-made image.

Consider a politician, for example. How does a peace loving person become a politician? He can't. He must always ask himself if he is the right person for the job, because if there is a better suited person it is worse than mass-murder to take the job. And has any politician in the world's history ever asked himself if there is anyone more suitable? It requires an extremely cavalier attitude towards the suffering of the masses to present oneself as a candidate or accept an appointment to political office, and no one has devised a politic which precludes this predation even if several interesting books have been written on the subject, and a few interesting experiments have been performed.

With this preface we are hoping to establish that people's feelings differ because people's actions differ. Then, when we introduce the phenomenon "contempt" we can discover what the actions of contempt are.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If one allows contempt to possess oneself, which means if one allows oneself to indulge in certain actions (which we will quickly get to), its study becomes oversimplified. Contempt can not be a discovery when we have it only as our own feeling. So, can contempt be ones own exclusively in a relationship? In other words, if you meet me and just me on a path, and you have contempt for me, does it make any difference to your ability to feel this contempt for me if I don't feel contempt for you at the same time? Or is contempt, or any other feeling, always a cue that you are missing this feeling in the other because you allow it to possess you, which means you are missing the others antisocial resources or resourcefulness?

Why do we allow a feeling to possess us? Let us say that you see me and I am a deep mystery. If I am a deep mystery, then how do you know how to feel about me? Is it just a habit? I'm a slender mature man. Is that enough to trigger a feeling? Are we in some simple kind of competition, and not responsible for finding out the depths of each other? If we are sane, then we understand that even though we are both people, homo sapiens, we are deep mysteries to each other, and it behooves us both to be finding out about each other, rather than reacting with some conditioned social mechanism triggering itself by simple recognizable differences. We need to approach the new as if it were new! (And if we do so we will find that each of us is always new, that we have started something moving.)

Contempt comes from home. At some point in our development we become objects of desire to the parental generation. Those parents who don't overtly court us would do so if they could get away with it easily enough. A heterosexual father and his son, for example, are competing for the same thing, someones heterosexual daughter. But the father is married, most often, and can't admit to this competition. But he tells himself he is the obvious choice for the girl; the son is pathetic for his immaturity, his lack of a good job, etc. She deserves better than his son; she deserves himself. And it becomes important that the son remain pathetic in all the measures the father approves of in himself. In other words, he sabotages the son's chances. Sabotage is the message of contempt when we feel it as other, which is when we feel it without our own glands producing the chemistry.

And if the father is homosexual he has contempt for his son's interest in both girls and boys. He still has to sabotage the son's chances to find himself secure. This is why success, which requires some sort of sponsorship, is often founded on incest, which pedophiles call "children maturing rapidly".

And if the boy's mother is heterosexual she develops contempt, which is a plan to sabotage his chances, when she realizes that he finds girls his own age more attractive than her. And if she is homosexual he has become competition for the girls. So if he is living with both parents when he enters into the arena of romance he has both of their contempt, regardless of gender preference, which is often a conspiracy to sabotage his chances. War is a good way to get rid of unwelcome sons. It is for this reason it is very hard to slow down or dampen any international conflict. The world is full of unwelcome teenage sons, and parents seeking ways to dispose of them.

The situation is secret, of course. Subconscious as far as the conscious observer is concerned. So the son assumes the role of the unintentionally failed development. He won't be going to the school he was accepted in or whatever, and he won't be dating a nice healthy girl from a good neighborhood. He'll be desperate, subservient, humble and perhaps promiscuous because every girl he meets wants his body but not his prospects. This is a son who doesn't know his destiny is a product of sabotage, which is a product of contempt. His mother claims to love him, his father claims to be confused about how all his best laid schemes to subvention his rise up the social ladder fell through. The parents generate a torrent of lies to cover up their mischief. This torrent is the usual source of the fiction in books and on the television.

Now this son is in the position of the herbivore who doesn't know the tiger is silently hiding in the grass downwind. He assumes the contempt he feels is his own contempt (thus he assumes that sabotage is his own device, his own inspiration), whereby it possesses his body and is played through his glands so that he has no way to find that alien contempt which is his family's, and the real nature of his fall from grace.

This susceptibility to the feeling as his own is also an action he indulges in. He can't have only the feeling of contempt as his own. There is always the action inspired by any feeling, or the feeling inspired by the action, whichever end one wants to approach the matter from, since there is neither cause nor effect. Recall how we said in the preface that we have chemistry because we have different actions. Contempt is virtually a new predatory species, a mutation in the child who was not that way, and had no such problems as mom and dad actively trying to sabotage his chances.

The action among boys in the upper grades of schooling is usually lies. There are honest boys who have some fair amount of charm to the gender they are inclined to court, and to sabotage these boys chances requires only that someone lies about himself. The honest boys are known to have done the usual trivial things: homework, maybe sports, television, videogames, etc. But the liars are known to have done all those things that only exist in fiction. They have walked on mars, been on secret missions for Her Majesty, solved murders, killed terrorists, and so on. The pose wins the contest.

And girls play an equally deep game using makeup and high heels and other fashion tricks. Glamor, it's called. Glamor works better than good genes and healthy routine. A girl who is not slim enough for her stature looks slim enough if she seems taller, while a girl who is slim enough in the first place has no option but to accept that she has been reduced to a mere equal of the chunky girl. And the chunky girl is prepared to give in to the boys' fantasies, which she signals with her fashion, and by painting herself to appear more vivacious than the healthier girls. She competes at full throttle. She makes sure she is on every boy's mind, pushing out the better girls.

Fictions gives us all a circle of the good people, the ones we have to save, or who have to save themselves, from the few bad people around. It is difficult to want to discover the real nature of acquaintances. They are mysterious and new, and yet it is easier just to agree to accept them as well meaning, which is how they portray themselves to us. When we say we want to discover someone who is new and mysterious we mean someone wonderful, not someone awful, not a vulgarian. There is already too much that we need a vacation from in life; we are disinclined to add more to it. But as we discover others as they truly are we also discover how to live very seriously, which is gratifying. And the reason all this predation exists is that it has gone undiscovered, so it is all our own fault. Subconsciously, as the police psychologists are so fond of saying, everyone longs to be caught.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hate is a closely related feeling. Most hate we encounter is feigned, affected, and so found consciously, not by feeling as other. If you really hate you are actually trying to rape, torture and kill. It is hard to hate very much without first making yourself very sick physically, and it is hard to hate when you are very sick unless you have some tonic or balm for the symptoms. Heroin is sometimes called monster, because it completely liberates a person from what he has done to himself, so that he sees very clearly how he could rape, torture and kill. Performance enhancement is not only about cheating at sports.

We say "done to himself", but of course there are predators. If the obese person hates the hate did not originate there. For example, people have sold him more food than they should have, and the wrong food, and then other people have sold him treatment and pharmaceuticals. Someone who wantonly participates in making a person obese and in preying on the obesity is also hateful.

http://knol.google.com/k/dennis-hgglund/psychology-of-creative-intelligence/2n5c5345q1u7a/2#

In case you're wondering what I've been up to since I last blogged.

The ultimate farce of education is when it produces psychologists. A psychologist by education's measure is at best a normal person. This means he has been elevated from a normal person who needs therapy to a normal person who can't admit that normal people are perpetually self-diminishing, always senile compared with their younger days. He vindicates authority, like some Pope of Normalcy.

Two kinds of people exist in normal society: those who have suffered severe damage due to experience, and those who have little or no experience; old and young. Authority is a vice indulged in by those who are damaged, as they inflict the damage on new generations.

Authority is an insistence that becoming damaged is wisdom; that the adults damaged themselves intentionally. There is no authority of being rational, because being rational will not spread by insisting, or by demanding respect, cooperation, obedience, friendliness, etc. There are no rational second fiddles. Humanity under present circumstances is something each one must become equally expert at, and which each undamaged person can readily achieve because his humanity is intact, lacking only the latest chapter or upgrade.

The reader of this blog may discover something by looking only at the current entries, but this blog is intended to be a course of study beginning in June '08, and may seem obscure or even mythical taken out of order. You go to previous months by clicking the left arrow under the current month's calender on the right. If you are looking for my political comments the link is in the list below that. If you are a regular reader you can search for rev. to see what I have changed (revised) since you read it.

***************************