Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)
In the ken-po goku-i reference is made to the Heaven and the Earth as well as the whole Universe but it took a quote from Einstein to make another aspect of the goku-i a bit clearer.
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,” a part limited in time and space. Man experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.”
Me vs. Others, if we are unable or cannot identify with others, those resonance circuits of our brains shut off. We see others as objects, as “them” rather than “us.” We literally do not activate the very circuits we need in order to see another person. This shutting off of circuits of compassion may be one explanation for our violent history as a species.
Under threat, we may distort what we see in others, project our own fears onto their intentions, and imagine that they will harm us. We may also perceive malevolence where none exists, and then retreat to the fight-flight-freeze survival reactions of a threatened state of mind. If the threatened state creates within us a “Fight” response, than we get the object out of our way however possible.
Feeling threatened takes over our perceptions, sometimes to our benefit and other times the same brain mechanism can dramatically affect the way we behave toward others.
When we see people like us we become kinder and extend ourselves ore to care for their welfare. We see them as members of our tribe, our clan, and fellow inhabitants of our cave, and we protect them from the harm we’ve been primed subliminally to fear. The people not like us, others, are more likely to be treated with disdain, disregard and contempt - as if they are potential enemies and perpetrators of harm. We banish them more easily, create more intense punishments for any wrong doing, and judge them more harshly.
Without awareness of these issues and mechanisms of the ind that classify “us vs others,” during moments of threat, our survival is at risk. In the modern instant-information, instant-gratification, high-tech world, not having the mind-state to disengage the rapid, sub-cortically driven alarms can have dire effects.
When driven by survival, we lose any or all of the nine middle prefrontal functions, we become reactive, we revert to primitive behaviors without flexibility or compassion or empathy. We act impulsively, lost our ability to balance our emotions, and fail to exert moral reasoning. Instead of being guided by understanding and compassionate concern, even for those who threaten us, our mind-states response is to become hostile and inflexible, and to lose our moral compass.
Dissolving fixed mental perceptions created along the brain’s firing patterns and reinforced relationally within our cultural practices is not simple accomplishment. Without an internal education that teaches us to pause and reflect, we may tend to live on automatic and succumb to these cultural and cortical influences that pus us toward isolation. We need to learn how to examine the ways in which our cortical processes create the top-down influences from prior experience that cloud our vision. We need to develop enough mindful mind-states to clear us of these restrictive definitions of ourselves so that we can grow toward higher degrees of integration within our individual and collective lives.
How do we dissolve our top-down automatic processes? We need to see our own minds clearly. We need to understand and believe that physical separations and differences become less paramount as we see our actions have an impact on the interconnected network of humans without which we are just a part.
Remember, physically and genetically, our brains may not have evolved much in the last forty-thousand years - but our minds have. The minds uses the brain to create itself.
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