If your head is often boiling with ideas, associations, memories, signs and signals from people and the world around you and you love it but maybe it’s driving you crazy… and you have a partner who is similar or at least understanding, then you will love FIML and become good at it if you try.
Tag: psychology
Buddhism and KOBK: Kill-or-be-killed
Buddhism holds that the human realm is ineluctably characterized by delusion. That means the human realm, NOT individual humans.
KOBK is a deep feature of the human mind, at both societal and individual levels. At the societal level (more than a small group), KOBK cannot be eliminated. This is so because large groups always communicate on levels that do not represent the fullness of human subjective experience; and this causes serious mistakes to arise and accrue, leading to clashes, violence, war. From a Buddhist point of view, this might be thought of as the basis for the delusion that always binds human life until at an individual level, it is seen through and completely understood causing enlightenment or freedom from all delusion and the cessation of rebirth in the human realm.
In Buddhism, a full understanding of suffering, dukkha, the First Noble Truth yields complete enlightenment instantly.
Before we attain that stage of existence, Buddhism counsels us to behave compassionately toward all other sentient beings while keeping our spiritual eye on ultimate wisdom, total liberation from the dukkha of the human realm.
Buddhism does not reject new ideas. KOBK is a game-theory explanation of one reason the human realm has always been characterized by delusion and suffering. This analysis of KOBK should not in any way encourage any intelligent person to consciously engage in KOBK behaviors (except in some kinds of self-defense). If KOBK is fully understood, it should help us as individuals and friends to better access the ultimate reality of the Buddha Mind, the Tathagata, Logos, God.
In Buddhism we did not “originally sin.” We are originally good but we are living in a pretty rough place. If we understand that many people with enormous earthly power feel forced to engage in KOBK, we will better understand this realm.
further reading: How to understand the deep strategy of earthly political power: KOBK
Instinct as felt resonance with Logos/Tathagata
You can see this in many ways. Instinct, intention, karma, where you are, what is happening, what is prompting your mind, what you remember, care about, are mindful of… ABN
The Fear Pandemic
The evolutionary advantage of playing victim
Scholars from the Immorality Lab at the University of British Columbia created a victim-signaling scale that measures how frequently people tell others of the disadvantages, challenges, and misfortunes they suffer. Those who scored higher on this victim-signaling scale were found to be more likely to virtue-signal—to outwardly display signs of virtuous moral character—while simultaneously placing less importance on their own moral identity. In other words, victim signalers were more interested in looking morally good but less interested in being morally good than those who less frequently signal their victimhood.
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You could expand this to include the groupiness of the hard left. Playing victim requires an audience. Also requires an ideology that forces others to pay up. ABN
Archdiocese of LA nixes religious exemption for vax
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has said it is not providing religious exemption letters to individuals who object to receiving a vaccination against the coronavirus. If all this stuff wasn’t controlled by the same command structure, some power structure somewhere would have our back, even if just by chance. This is what you see when a coordinated intelligence operation spends decades identifying positions of power and influence and targeting them for control.
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We are seeing the same phenomenon in the medical profession where the vast majority of doctors and nurses are going along with pseudoscience dictates from agencies, governors, medical boards, and hospitals to not allow effective therapeutics for early covid or even when people have gone to the hospital. I do understand that doctors risk losing their licenses, but is there really no way they can speak up? Weakness and fear from all our important institutions while Fauci strides forward, always wrong, never questioned. He is a psyop media cartoon playing grampa to the gullible. ABN
Mass psychology and the corona crisis.
This video can improve our understanding of where the totalitarian covid rules are coming from, why they are accepted thoughtlessly by so many, and how we can communicate effectively with those who believe and/or follow those rules unquestioningly. Desmet explains that a prior state of “free-floating anxiety” is a necessary precursor for the kind of “totalitarian hypnosis” we are now seeing all around us. In his view, only about 20-30% of any population will not be susceptible to the totalitarian mindset. ABN
Flight crews resist, airlines relent
Only a fool, idiot, or demon would require others to take a dangerous, failed vaccine. ABN
Schizoid Personalities
The person whose character is essentially schizoid is subject to widespread misunderstanding, based on the common misconception that schizoid dynamics are always suggestive of grave primitivity. Because the incontrovertibly psychotic diagnosis of schizophrenia fits people at the disturbed end of the schizoid continuum, and because the behavior of schizoid people can be unconventional, eccentric, or even bizarre, nonschizoid others tend to pathologize those with schizoid dynamics—whether or not they are competent and autonomous, with significant areas of ego strength. In fact, schizoid people run the gamut from the hospitalized catatonic patient to the creative genius. (link to original; scroll to Chapter 9, Schizoid Personalities)
This is one of the best essays on psychology I have seen in a long time. Highly recommended. I bet the whole book is good, but all I have read so far is this chapter. ABN
first posted AUGUST 31, 2020
On Freudianism and the assertion of interpersonal meaning
Freudianism is an extreme example of the assertion of meaning where there is none, or very little.
It is extreme for two reasons: 1) because it is scientifically groundless and 2) because so many people believed it.
Communism, many religious beliefs and practices, fads, styles, ethnic myths, many “historical” misinterpretations, and much more are examples of false meanings that are asserted and believed by large numbers of people.
You could say that pretty much all human culture is a similar stew of strongly asserted falsehoods mixed with some facts.
Freud was an interesting writer and his ideas were and are worth considering, but they should have remained minor points in the history of psychology and never become “meanings” that influenced the entire Western world.
In this respect, Freudianism is an excellent sociological or macro example of what individuals do psychologically, on micro and meso levels with themselves and others.
Humans are extremely prone to append or assert meaning where it does not belong either because there is no “meaning” in that context or because the “meaning” being asserted is incorrect.
Freudianism shows how powerfully and massively wrong we often get meaning and how wrong our analyses of human thought, emotion, and behavior can be.
At the macro level of trends like Freudianism, we can and should have asked for evidence.
At the micro and meso levels of human psychological understanding we can and should ask for evidence or confirmation from the person or persons about whom we are asserting psychological meaning.
If you do this frequently with a trusted partner, you will begin to see that many of the “meanings” you append to that partner and to yourself are false.
False macro meanings like Freudianism can be corrected through science. At the micro or meso levels of the individual, wrong meanings can only be corrected through a practice like FIML.
In the future we may be better able to understand micro and meso levels of interpersonal meaning through the use of brain scans, but even brain scans need interpretation and will be difficult to use during real-time, interpersonal interactions.
See Micro, meso, and macro levels of human understanding for more on what is meant by these levels.
first posted DECEMBER 3, 2015
A signal-based model of psychology: part four
In the first three parts of A signal based model of psychology, we discussed micro, meso, and macro levels of human understanding and how paying attention to these levels can make human signaling easier to comprehend.
In this post I want to discuss how human signaling is normally managed and, knowing this, how we can better understand how it affects us.
In truth, there are countless possible interpretations for every moment of every day if we choose to notice them. In the material world of doing familiar things in familiar surroundings, we handle the abundance of possible interpretations by simply ignoring most of them. We put our minds on autopilot and do our tasks by accessing rote procedures and memories.
In social situations, though the stakes may be higher psychologically, we do much the same. Rather than wonder about the vast majority of communicative exchanges with others, we generally put our minds in social autopilot mode and interpret what we are hearing and perceiving according to fairly simple rules we have already established.
Continue reading “A signal-based model of psychology: part four”Psychology and mental illness
The essay The Myth of Mental Illness by Paul Lutus hits hard. I agree with Lutus that there is a great deal of deceit and self-deceit in psychology and a grotesque paucity of physical evidence, but it’s not just psychologists who are to blame—many school teachers are involved in the support or even initiation of dubious psychiatric diagnoses while general practitioners are responsible for the majority of psychiatric prescriptions.
I still believe there is a valuable role to be played by psychologists, if only because they have spent more time with troubled individuals than most of us. That said, readers can make up their own minds about Lutus’s essay, which I recommend.
What I want to do in this post is point out the ways that FIML practice does not have the sorts of problems Lutus describes. FIML is not (yet) supported by large studies because not enough people have done it and we don’t have the money to conduct the studies. Nonetheless, FIML practice is based on real data agreed upon by both partners and in this respect is evidence-based, though the kind of evidence used in FIML practice is not the same kind that is used in large studies of many people. (Please see A Theory of FIML for a rough idea of how FIML can be understood from a scientific point of view, and how it could be falsified.)
In my view, FIML is a growing tip of science. It is an idea coupled with a practice or technique. It works with real data that is objective in that both partners must agree on it. It is based primarily on words just spoken, thus limiting distracting generalizations and ambiguity. It allows for and relies upon comprehensive mutual understanding of what partners are actually saying. Normally, both FIML partners will experience a sense of relief after a FIML session because both have achieved a fuller, shared understanding of whatever was in question. Normally, both partners will also be capable of describing the event in question in ways that are essentially the same. Ultimately, partners will realize that many of their FIML discussions have been arising from on-going mistaken interpretations that they had always believed were true. Partners will also come to understand that simply using language to communicate—indeed, to communicate in any way at all—will lead eventually to serious misunderstandings and emotional suffering if their communication is never analyzed in a way similar to FIML practice. And all of the above will help partners understand how neuroses (mistaken interpretations) are formed and how they perdure. And this will gradually free them from neurosis and, it is hoped, most of what we now call “mental illness.”
Today, FIML is mostly an idea. That’s how science progresses. New ideas are explored, improved upon, or discarded. Though FIML has worked very well for me and my partner, I will happily discard the idea of it working for others if it can be shown to be ineffective.
On this site, we have frequently tied FIML practice to Buddhist practice because: 1) several core Buddhist ideas and practices greatly support FIML practice; 2) Buddhism is fundamentally a truth-seeking enterprise, somewhat like modern science but with greater emphasis on the experiences of the individual; and 3) we believe that in many ways FIML practice leads to the same liberative ends as Buddhist practice–freedom from delusion, unnecessary ambiguity, false ideas, emotional suffering.
first posted FEBRUARY 25, 2012
UPDATE 7/16/21: We are still doing FIML and still strongly believe it is a powerful catalyst to positive transformation, both spiritual and psychological. ABN
White House Occupant Delivers Angry Speech in Philadelphia Demanding All Resources Must Activate to Defend His Legitimacy
The speech Joe Biden delivered Tuesday in Philadelphia was not the rant of a righteous or confident man. [READ IT HERE] Instead the speech was a bitter, angry and divisive plea for help from those extreme leftists who supported his installation.
The need for control is a reaction to fear. That fear was what Biden displayed above all other attributes. A fear that more American people will begin to see the false construct of his installation. A fear that those who perpetrated the fraud of his election will be exposed because the scale of their manipulation is far too great to continue hiding.
continue reading…
Narcissistic power trip
A core part of narcissism is the narcissistic power trip.
A narcissistic power trip is “the power to define other(s) and act on that definition.”
It is narcissistic because the narcissist defines others based on self-centered criteria and acts on that definition either with excessive cruelty or callous disregard. Or excessive “kindness,” rewarding the defined person based on their “supplying” the narcissist with what they want (praise, adulation, attention, etc.).
An important foundation of social and psychological understanding is knowing that pretty much all human behaviors exist on a spectrum that encompasses all people and all societies everywhere.
For example, using the definition of narcissism above, we should be able to say that all people and all societies define others. A narcissist is characterized by the degree to which they do this.
A glaring example of this is the NKVD Bolshevik officer who daily interrogated people who had been arrested for “offenses against the state.” This officer would demanded a signed confession from his victim after which they often would personally shoot the victim in the back of their head.
This process could have lasted a few minutes, several hours, or even many days. It always involved psychological torture and frequently involved physical torture.
It is narcissistic sociologically because the real reason for it was to terrorize the population while removing potential enemies. It is narcissistic psychologically for the individual Bolshevik officer because that officer knew the sociological reasons for what they were doing. There is no doubt in my mind that a great many of those officers derived narcissistic pleasure from the power they held over their victims. In those days it was said you were drafted into the Red Army but you had to volunteer to join the secret police.
A minor example of a narcissistic power trip comes from someone I know. He is alcoholic and as with so many alcoholics also exhibits narcissistic traits. What happened was he asked a woman out on a date and she refused, so he slit her tires. Most people when rejected feel bad, maybe they will cuss out the person in their own mind, but only a narcissist will act vengefully on their definition of the other.
It is very important to recognize that narcissism is defined by the person going too far, by their being on a power trip. Just imagine psychologically torturing a frightened prisoner, knowing that you are going to kill them with your own hand once you have played with them long enough to satisfy your narcissistic rage. That really happened many times and not just in the Soviet Union. It was a defining feature of communism almost everywhere it was practiced.
Complex system are defined as systems with a lot of factors any one of which, no matter how small, can affect the entire system. Our minds are complex systems.
In this respect, notice that FIML practice focuses especially on small details to prevent partners from forming false impressions of each other or the world around them.
By removing false impressions or interpretations from our minds, we avoid many problems, not least of which is the narcissistic power trip.
American Buddhist Net 