Category: Buddhism

Narcissism is a zero-sum game

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

My guess is all overt narcissistic traits can be understood as zero-sum.

Even the narcissist’s painful inner vacuity is a minus-sum result of playing a zero-sum game of life.

This explains why narcissists often will attack even their own children. A child that displays pride or autonomy is seen as taking something away from the narcissist.

This also explains why narcissists typically are good at “impression management.” People that do not know them intimately frequently see narcissists as impressive, even admirable, people.

Narcissists manage social impressions—the impressions others have of them—because they are playing the game of zero-sum. That is how they understand life itself.

In the sense that everything is connected and all of us do “narcissistic” zero-sum behaviors sometimes, if you look closely you can see that it is precisely those behaviors that cause painful inner vacuity even in generally non-narcissistic people.

In a Buddhist sense, narcissistic thoughts and behaviors are the Second Noble Truth, the “origin of suffering.” Ceasing doing them is the Fourth Noble Truth, the “path leading to cessation of (the) suffering” they cause.

You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions — your brain creates them

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Can you look at someone’s face and know what they’re feeling? Does everyone experience happiness, sadness and anxiety the same way? What are emotions anyway? For the past 25 years, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has mapped facial expressions, scanned brains and analyzed hundreds of physiology studies to understand what emotions really are. She shares the results of her exhaustive research — and explains how we may have more control over our emotions than we think.

_________

This talk is a very good background for FIML practice, which is based on acknowledging that interpersonal emotions and interpretations are fundamentally ambiguous and must be investigated often to achieve good communication. ABN

Jordan Peterson analyzes a lot of stuff, not just Cathy Newman, and also inadvertently provides an excellent introduction to FIML practice

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

In this talk, FIML is logos. It uses word to bring order out of chaos. FIML brings  meaning and clarity to primary interpersonal relations and thus also to individual psychology. You need to want to do this, to be a hero for yourself and others. You have to want to bring meaning and order out of chaos. It’s not easy to do FIML but there is nothing else as interesting or worthwhile on the interpersonal level. I hope JP will take up FIML and introduce it to a wider audience. I do not agree with his statements about bringing out the Jungian shadow. I do agree we must discover our essence or authentic being, but this can be done without myths or shadows through FIML practice. As mentioned in other posts, FIML does not tell you how to be or what will happen to you when you practice it but it will show you, eventually, your authentic being, the essence that underlies your social persona. ABN

The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Abstract: Recent research argues that the United States is secularizing, that this religious change is consistent with the secularization thesis, and that American religion is not exceptional. But we show that rather than religion fading into irrelevance as the secularization thesis would suggest, intense religion—strong affiliation, very frequent practice, literalism, and evangelicalism—is persistent and, in fact, only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States. We also show that in comparable countries, intense religion is on the decline or already at very low levels. Therefore, the intensity of American religion is actually becoming more exceptional over time. We conclude that intense religion in the United States is persistent and exceptional in ways that do not fit the secularization thesis.

link

Arm’s length communication can be dangerous

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

By arm’s length communication I mean “our deepest levels of meaning, emotion, and intention are either implied or more often concealed from the person(s) we are speaking with.” (see: Communication at arm’s length)

When we do arm’s length communication too much, we retard both psychological and sociological growth. We harm both ourselves and others.

Arm’s length communication is often a type of “sociological communication.” That is, communication that holds cultural, sociological or historical assertions above individual psychological experience. This can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing.

It’s good when it helps us see and bad when it blinds us. Bolsheviks were blinded by sociological fantasies that led them to murder tens of millions. It is good for us to understand that today, especially as our society is being torn apart by arm’s length fallacies.

I will now present an example of this tragedy as it is playing out this morning. What happened is Trump allegedly asked an intelligence analyst of Korean extraction, “Where are you from?”

As someone who has extensive experience with East Asia and Asian-Americans, I am aware that this question drives many of them up the wall. One example:

This makes my blood boil. It must have been so awful to be standing there having her expertise invalidated and trivialized. (Source: asianamerican)

As an ordinary American, I am also aware that this question with precisely that wording was extremely normal well into the 1980s and beyond. A younger friend I discussed this with this morning said she still considers it to be a normal question.

“Where are you from?” means what is your ancestry. When most Americans ask this of each other it means what is your ethnic background, what ethnicity or mix of ethnicities do you identify with or feel close to. It does not mean I think you are a bad person or are not an American. In a nation of many immigrant groups, it is a normal thing to ask. Indeed, it is the quintessential American question. Or used to be before SJWs came along.

Information about your ancestry or ethnicity says something (arm’s length) about your psychology and some levels of your “identity.” Isn’t it ironic that a commenter on an Asian-American site would be incensed that the president asked someone about their identity and then proposed that that identity might well-serve US national interests?

Here is another comment from a South Asian that says the opposite:

Being a Chinese speaking South Asian that type of response isn’t surprising. (Source: AZNIDENTITY)

Having lived in East Asia for a long time, I am well-aware that “Where are you from?” is almost always the first question anyone asks me in that part of the world. Chinese, Japanese, Australians, Europeans, other Americans all ask it. It can become boring to answer when the query is rote arm’s length stuff coming from someone who obviously does not care, but that is nothing to be offended by.

We are in a semiotic pickle and I don’t know what to do about it either. There are many other examples of the above, most of them stemming from identity politics in one way or another.

What is happening is that arm’s length identity concepts are being idiosyncratically defined by identity groups and then the demand is made that those definitions be known and accepted by everyone else or “blood will boil.”

Tunnel vision and mental illness

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

For a period of my life someone poisoned me with drugs that affected my brain and thought processes. I don’t know what the drug was but I definitely know it happened.

That experience is the basis for the following speculation: a lot of mental illness is fundamentally characterized by tunnel vision or what I might rather call “bright room” vision.

At the time I could not see it but looking back after the poisoning stopped I can see that my brain compensated for the poison’s toxic effects by ignoring large areas of information. This was not a conscious decision. It was just what my brain did to survive.

In this sense, my brain was in a tunnel or a bright room outside of which I could see virtually nothing. I think of the tunnel as fairly bright. That part of my world was clear enough to me. What was missing was the much larger world outside of the tunnel.

If you have ever been in an underground train station with lit tunnels going to various trains (like Grand Central Station in NYC), that is a good example of this metaphor.

Now, think about people you have known who are suffering mental illness, especially those who are not aware of their plight. Do you notice that for many of them what they see is like that tunnel? It’s bright and the way is sort of clear, but the larger environment around them is highly reduced. For me, it was more like a bright room with a fair amount of stuff in it and people and things going on, but all I could see was the inside of that room and almost nothing beyond. Outside the windows everything was dark.

I was not fantasizing the room or actively deluded by it as much as confined to it, unable to be aware of what was outside it. My brain was ignoring large sections of reality to hang on to whatever I could.

Consider a long-term alcoholic, a victim of self-poisoning, whose eyes still glow. I think what people like that see is a bright room or tunnel and not much else. How else can someone who has been addicted to alcohol for fifty years still deny it? It’s because that larger awareness is not inside their bright room.

Consider a narcissist in roughly the same way. I would maintain that they really cannot see what they are doing in the wider context of all the people they are harming because they only see the bright room around them, the bright tunnel before them.

Borderline, neuroticism, and bipolar, especially in the manic stage, are much the same.

I am not saying that all mental problems have this bright room/dark world aspect but I believe many of them do.

Incidentally, all psychologists and medical professionals should always consider poison as a significantly probable etiology for all mental illness.

Can’t see the trees for the forest

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Examples of not seeing the trees for the forest are flyover assessments of sociological  regions or general assessments of human psychology.

A more detailed example of this pertaining to psychology might be the following description of Borderline Personality Disorder:

People with borderline personality disorder are unstable in several areas, including interpersonal relationships, behavior, mood, and self-image. Abrupt and extreme mood changes, stormy interpersonal relationships, an unstable and fluctuating self-image, unpredictable and self-destructive actions characterize the person with borderline personality disorder. These individuals generally have great difficulty with their own sense of identity. They often experience the world in extremes, viewing others as either “all good” or “all bad.” A person with borderline personality may form an intense personal attachment with someone only to quickly dissolve it over a perceived slight. Fears of abandonment may lead to an excessive dependency on others. Self-multilation or recurrent suicidal gestures may be used to get attention or manipulate others. Impulsive actions, chronic feelings of boredom or emptiness, and bouts of intense inappropriate anger are other traits of this disorder, which is more common among females. (Source)

I have no doubt that this general description of the “forest” of BPD is somewhat useful as a flyover take on a psychic region that seems to have its own reality within American culture. The same link concludes that “there is hope” for personality disorders if we come to “understand that they are illnesses.”

Thus, a general remedy is assigned to a general “illness”; a semiotic contortion is assigned to the category “hope.”

TBH, as a Buddhist  I must say you really should “have difficulty with your own sense of identity” because there is no such thing. Sentience in all its guises is dynamic and ever-changing.

You actually do not need a “self-image” at all. So if the one(s) you keep trying for are “unstable and fluctuating,” you are probably seeing reality more clearly than people whose “self-images” are stable and not fluctuating!

The fundamental problem with BPD and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, two of the most difficult disorders to cure, is in the trees. It is good to see the forest and know where it lies within the terrain of the sufferer’s culture, but the problem of any individual suffering from either of these disorders is always going to be in their trees.

So what are the trees? They are the actual signals received by the person, sent out by the person, and used internally by the person.

Those are the units that best describe what a sentient being is and does. If you can’t fix the trees or treat the trees, the forest will never be healthy.

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

The degree to which you are addicted to excuses is the degree to which you are under the influence of diabolical energies.

A Little Bird said this this morning. I think it is a deep statement well-worth contemplating. ABN

Next-level metacognitive control

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Experienced FIML practitioners enjoy levels of metacognitive control ordinary humans cannot even dream of.

This control comes after years of diligent FIML practice. It happens because the skills acquired through FIML combined with its metacognitive results allow practitioners to practice FIML on themselves.

FIML practice gradually removes virtually all communication error between partners. This error-removal process is ongoing because all living systems must continually remove waste and error to function optimally.

Successful FIML results in two major achievements:

  • very clear, optimally functioning cognition and metacognition
  • the skill-set needed to attain the above

When these achievements have been realized, FIML practitioners will find they are able to rather easily apply them to their own introspection, their own subjective states while alone.

Ordinary people cannot do this because they have not experienced the metacognitive states brought about by FIML nor have they acquired the skills to quickly remove error from their thoughts.

The FIML skills of quickly removing error from our thoughts cannot be acquired overnight. It must be built upon diligent practice and experience. You cannot imagine it into being.

Once these skills and experiences have become established in the mind as reliable functions, they can be applied to mental states while alone.

The other side of narcissistic sexual aggression

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Sexually aggressive, narcissistic men destroy male rivals whom they perceive as threats.

Example: potential male rivals of Matt Lauer were “killed off” by the deposed star.

Matt killed off, in their infancy, every man who could succeed him at the time that he was ready to hang it up — so there’s nobody to take his place. And now NBC is paying the price. (Source)

Narcissistic women are the same. Anyone who threatens a narcissist’s “supply” is in danger of being  destroyed.

Malignant aggression is a core feature of narcissistic behavior. It can range from career sabotage to murder, from gaslighting to poison.

It is not likely you have never dealt with a narcissist. The worst kinds are called malignant narcissists, but all narcissists exhibit aggression against rivals or former friends who have seen through their game.

Don’t be fooled by their popularity. As Lauer shows, popularity is their drug and they often are very good at “impression management” which keeps them center stage.

Religious experience as core existential metacognition

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

I submit that profound religious experience can be adequately defined as “awareness or experience of core existential metacognition.”

I make this definition in order to have a way of speaking about the fundamental importance and rough sameness of deep states of prayer, meditation, grace, awareness of God or the Buddha mind, being moved by the Holy Spirit, “practicing the presence of God,” knowing God’s will, being drawn to the Tathagata, samadhi, dhyana, satori, chan, enlightenment, and many more.

These states can and do happen “randomly” with no prior conscious input from the experiencer of them, but they most often happen to people who do some or all of the religious practices mentioned above.

These states are very powerful. They are life-changing and life-enhancing every time they occur. They are different from ordinary conscious states because they involve what might be called in the words of today “core existential metacognition.”

As such, it is difficult even impossible to maintain these states at all times. Few of us have the brainpower or divine grace to do that. We achieve these states through religious practice.

If you are Buddhist you will call them by Buddhist names. If you are Christian or some other religion, you will use other names.

I for one believe you are much better off if you engage in practices that induce “core existential metacognition” than if you don’t engage in any practices like that.

The science-induced wonder of the hard atheist is not the same.

Religious practice is fundamentally the use of disciplined methods to achieve “core existential metacognition.”

The words we use to describe this state(s) and what we are able to see within it should be more beautiful and more in keeping with whatever practice gets you there than “core existential metacognition.” But it is good to have some words to describe what is common to all of these practice and that explain in simple modern terms what people get from their religions and why they do them.