Neural Nets... or Wagon Ruts?

At a workshop of Jerry Ruhl's recently, I learned about what brain researchers and scientists call "neural networks." (Since anything worth talking about alludes to the internet, you say "neural nets.")

Basically, neural nets exist because brains are very busy. And since they're so very busy, they take shortcuts to get from one place to another whenever they can.

So if you've done something, or felt something, or thought something, or heard something one time, you're very liable to experience it in exactly the same way the next time it comes up. Because you already have a pattern -- or a neural network -- for it in your brain.

And the more times you go over that thought or feeling, the deeper that neural network will get. There are places in Eastern Oregon where you can still see wagon ruts made by settlers back in the 1800s. That is what happens in the brain when we go over and over something. Think Rush Limbaugh. Think anyone who says the same type of thing over and over, with as much emotion as possible, whether it applies to the situation they're in or not. By that time, is it a neural net, or a wagon rut?

While this phenomenon is not exactly new -- Carl Jung first started talking about it almost 100 years ago, but he called them "complexes": sets of emotions attached to a fragment of your history, which are charged with feeling and energy, and are autonomous, which means they come up on their own -- it is getting more terrifying all the time.

Terrifying because we live in a world with thousands of highly effective ways to communicate, but a world where people do not tend to think about what they're saying. A world where most just say whatever pops into their heads first, or whatever they've heard someone else saying, with no reflection whatsoever. A world where many people actually make their living saying whatever pops into their heads first, to as many people as possible, and as hatefully as they can. (Sorry to pick on you here again, Rush. But you do make a juicy target.)

Folks, this is not good. As we all know, as we've been told repeatedly by every sage who ever walked the earth, minds need calming, not inflaming. Unless we're at the saint or Buddha stage, a good 80% of "whatever pops into our heads first" is going to be feeling-toned, overly emotional bullshit, capable of doing great damage to others. Not wisdom, not information, just complex. Knee-jerk, reactionary, monkey-mind babble.

Which we now pass around to one another faster than the world's worst virus.

Truly terrifying.

from The Red Book, on our current political climate

"The spirit of this time considers itself extremely clever, like every such spirit of the time...

The clever person mocks wisdom...
he uses the pointed, poisonous weapon...
But the mockery falls on the mocker...
and he suffocates on his own scorn.

We cannot save ourselves from the cleverness of the spirit of this time through increasing our cleverness, but through accepting what our cleverness hates most."

--The Red Book, CG Jung, Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, p. 237



Massive amounts of contempt for others will not get us anywhere.

To progress, we have to accept the Beauty in others as well as the Beast in ourselves.

I'm interested in the human shadow, but this is ridiculous.

There is SO much shadow, so much blaming, so much accusing others of doing what one is actually doing oneself, so much newspeak, doublethink, and flat out BULLSHIT in politics right now, I don't even know where to start. I don't even want to get into it. How --and when-- did the American flag become a symbol for hatred and bigotry and name-calling, for obstructionism rather than leadership?

Hhhmm... Howard Zinn might have said 'from the very beginning, my dear...'



I can think of a good bumper sticker, though:

Not Self-Destructive Enough To Vote Republican

MUST we have more "The Book of Eli"s ?

Parts of David Denby's review in the January 18th New Yorker are too good not to repeat.




...I'm beginning to wonder if filmmakers aren't using the world's end as a trope to license a neo-primitivist ethos. When people must scavenge just to survive, any kind of violence is justified. ...

"The Book of Eli"combines the maximum in hollow piety with remorseless vilolence. It's a true American commercial product, overflowing with barbarous acts and improving bromides.

Uh huh.

What do we see when we look within?

Increasing the Light at the Winter Solstice

The Winter Solstice.

A time humans have been celebrating for thousands and thousands of years. The time of year when nights get their darkest and their longest. The time when things look and feel their bleakest.

You can call it Christmas, you can call it Hanukkah, you can call it Kwanzaa, you can call it the remnants of a pagan festival if you want to. But whatever you call it, the darkest days of the year bring out the human need to give, share, sing, gather, and generally light up the darkness in any way we can.

And there is a lot of darkness today. No doubt about it. We're in the midst of big changes -- religious, social, political, in consciousness -- and human beings tend to take change pretty hard. We don't tend to "go gentle into that good night," we tend to fear the worst and fall apart. We tend to go kicking and screaming into that good night, fiercely defending turf we don't need, can't use, and could have started sharing ages ago.

The only way to increase the amount of light we've got is to take some responsibility for the amount of darkness we produce.

To try to become aware of when we're merely projecting our own fears and inadequacies onto others. To try to figure out how much of the evil we see out in the world is actually coming from within our own hearts, our own actions, and our own attitudes.

The amount of human darkness increasingly exponentially around the world isn't coming from "them" -- it's coming from "us."

A good thing to ponder during the Winter Solstice.

The Pot Calls the Kettle Black

Why do we hear so much ranting and raving over the airways? Why is it so easy for us to get all hot and bothered by what someone else is doing? How come we just can't get off of certain subjects?

It's pretty simply, really. We dwell on what others are doing so we don't have time to think about what we're doing ourselves.

It's called projection, in psychological terms, and it happens all the time. It starts with denial, and ends in blame. We take some part of ourselves we don't like--or are ashamed of, or don't want to think about, or can't bring ourselves to deal with--and project it out onto another person, where we can see it. Imagine a movie projector. You would be the projector whirring in that little room up in the back of the theater, and the other person would be the big screen down in front. You're creating the image, the image is actually coming from you, but the other person is the only place where you can see the image. Thus we can develop a rich and satisfying hatred for the other person while remaining steadfastly in love with ourselves and not having to change a thing personally. "I don't have a bad temper. What are you talking about, you asshole? You have a terrible temper!!"

This cycle, denial--projection--blame, is a basic psychological mechanism. It's a description of what went on at your dinner table last night. It's a description of what we each do all day long every day unless we're making a sincere effort not to do so, and probably a good 78.87% of the time even then.

There's no getting around the fact that humans are now using their intelligence to project whatever they don't like about themselves onto other people, rather than using their intelligence to correct whatever it is about themselves they don't like. Shoot--we're taught to project whatever we don't like about ourselves onto others. Children hear their parents and teachers and leaders do it every day. Hang out in any schoolyard, anywhere in the world, for one whole recess period, and count how many times one kid blames another kid for what he or she just did.

Where do they learn that?