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Tag: thought
Repost: A theory of FIML
Note: I don’t care for the term “personality” if it is taken too seriously. Used as a rough indicator of how people see themselves, it works well-enough in this essay, I hope. ABN
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FIML is both a practice and a theory. The practice is roughly described here and in other posts on this website.
The theory states (also roughly) that successful practice of FIML will:
- Greatly improve communication between participating partners
- Greatly reduce or eliminate mistaken interpretations (neuroses) between partners
- Give partners insights into the dynamic structures of their personalities
- Lead to much greater appreciation of the dynamic linguistic/communicative nature of the personality
These results are achieved because:
- FIML practice is based on real data agreed upon by both partners
- FIML practice stops neurotic responses before they get out of control
- FIML practice allows both partners to understand each other’s neuroses while eliminating them
- FIML practice establishes a shared objective standard between partners
- This standard can be checked, confirmed, changed, or upgraded as often as is needed
FIML practice will also:
- Show partners how their personalities function while alone and together
- Lead to a much greater appreciation of how mistaken interpretations that occur at discreet times can and often do lead to (or reveal) ongoing mistaken interpretations (neuroses)
FIML practice eliminates neuroses because it shows individuals, through real data, that their (neurotic) interpretation(s) of their partner are mistaken. This reduction of neurosis between partners probably will be generalizable to other situations and people, thus resulting a less neurotic individual overall.
Neurosis is defined here to mean a mistaken interpretation or an ongoing mistaken interpretation.
The theory of FIML can be falsified or shown to be wrong by having a reasonably large number of suitable people learn FIML practice, do it and fail to gain the aforementioned results.
FIML practice will not be suitable for everyone. It requires that partners have a strong interest in each other; a strong sense of caring for each other; an interest in language and communication; the ability to see themselves objectively; the ability to view their use of language objectively; fairly good self-control; enough time to do the practice regularly.
Conversation
One topic my partner and I go back and forth on is conversation.
We both wonder—though I do more than her—why so much conversation among adults is so limited.
My extended family, for example, is so limited in what we can say to each other that we resemble people at the beach who never do anything more than sit in the sun and occasionally toss beach balls to each other. If you push even just a little on any topic, you will be met with silence. If you try to move deeper into almost anything, people perceive the effort as threatening, or so it seems. And it has been like this for decades. My extended family is highly restrictive with respect to speaking and listening and nothing seems to ever change that. They are “nice” people but they do nothing to help each other think, reason, or explore the world of the mind. I wish I could say that I have been a saint with them all my life, but I haven’t. I do realize that for years I contributed to the problem by breaking too many “rules” and appearing threatening (I assume) to them.
And if you look beyond my family, the same is true with almost any group. Buddhists get stuck on pretending to be compassionate or empathic. Christians have to watch what issues forth from the mouth, or whatever that quote is. Both systems of thought demand keeping your lips together, if not always your legs. I wish Buddhism would augment the bad speech thing with a bad listening thing.
Group communication is so dependent on shared semiotics that if you do anything to push at those limits, you will be expelled from the group. How many readers have been to an academic conference? One that is large enough to roughly represent the fullness of whatever the latest consensus is but also small enough that you can view the sycophancy? They often function as nothing more than group-bonding and fealty-display sessions.
One of the causes for the stultifying limitations on conversation or discussion within groups is people simply do not know how to go beyond established limits without appearing challenging, aggressive, or destructive. This happens one-on-one within groups and not just in group sessions. Most all of us have been deeply trained to fear being different, saying something that might be taken wrong, that might reflect badly on us and not be forgotten. The training is so deep the fear permeates even families and small temples.
FIML can fix this if enough people do it, but even without FIML, I hope more people will think about this. The person who is trying to say something different or more or extra should be seen, much more often, as someone who is sharing a gift, not issuing a threat.
My extended family is filled with smart, caring people and I love them all, but dang do they suck at saying almost anything about anything.
True crime
I just read a couple of true crime books.
The thing that struck me about both of them is how the idiotics (idiosyncratic semiotics) of both main characters (who were found guilty) were profoundly depraved.
Each of these characters (and I will assume their guilty verdicts were correct, though of course it is always possible they were not) had built up a huge story in their mind about who they were and who the person they eventually killed was and why it was right to kill them and how to do it.
Their stories were composed of semiotic units, semiotic bundles, bundles of meaning and belief that they clung to with such passion, one of them at least seems to continue to believe her story even today, many years later.
One way you can tell their stories were entirely depraved is they planned their crimes very badly. Their backup stories were often self-contradictory and filled with easily discoverable lies.
The stories in their heads about who they were, not surprisingly, were similarly filled with error and delusion. Also unsurprisingly, these stories were largely believed by loyal friends and family members.
Their stories of anger or concealed greed and why their emotions were justified were also mostly believed by these same sets of people. Friends like each other because they either are alike or strive to be.
In one of the books, some of the people surrounding the killer believed he was innocent even in the face of strong evidence against him.
In the other book, many loyal friends continued to believe the killer’s stories about why she had been right to do it even after it was obvious she had been lying about many important matters.
This is, sadly or happily, pretty normal. We stick by people and praise ourselves for being loyal. A basic thing people do all the time is generate, transmit, and receive meaning. Complex meanings (including the stories of murderers) can get woven into friends’ brains/minds in ways that make them hard to untangle.
True crime stories when seen as examples of extremely deluded human behavior can show us much about how we all function. We all make stories and present ourselves in different contexts; nothing wrong with that. Until it becomes depraved. With people like the ones I just read about, the stories are horrible, cruel, selfish, deluded, insane
It is good to be aware of what our stories are and what our intentions for telling them are. It is also good to review our feelings towards our friends and those who are close to us. Are we right about what we think and feel about them? Are our stories about them right? Have we ever asked them about that?
Most people misunderstand everything
Why?
Because language is necessarily often ambiguous.
So?
The ambiguities are rarely fixed.
So?
Unfixed ambiguities lead to errors in interpretation. The errors accumulate and snowball. All people have been raised in environments like that and continue to live in them.
This causes pain because our minds are capable of communicating unambiguously, but we don’t know how.
We are semiotic animals, beings that live in semiotic jungles.
Our pain and error-ridden communication makes us mean, simple, greedy, stupid, violent, selfish, crazy.
Communication errors, misinterpretations, cause ghosts to form in the mind. We need to imagine a role for ourselves and others, but since we experience so many errors, our imaginings are fundamentally wrong. They are like ghosts in our minds.
We are as ghosts speaking and listening to each other.
Identity versus ego
In this post, I will describe some of the main differences between “identity” and “ego” as we use these terms on this site. One of these days, I will make a glossary of all the terms we use.
- Identity is the internal signaling system.
- Ego is fiction that overlays identity.
- Identity is clear, practical, ethically sound.
- Ego is theatrical, defensive and offensive, designed to communicate with other egos and to further ulterior motives.
- We need an ego in social situations only because that is how everyone is.
- People communicate through the fictions of their social groups because that is all they know.
- You won’t get far with nothing but an identity in a world full of egos.
- But you will get closer to the truth about yourself and others.
- Two identities can create their own group without ego fictions.
- The fictions of the ego are tautological or self-referential.
- It is very hard for most people to see the difference between ego and identity as defined above.
- The reason is ego is the major way they have learned to communicate with others.
- You show me your ego and I’ll show you mine.
- Ego is a story, a fiction.
- Groups of egos will always have self-referential stories or fictions that identify them.
- Groups of motorcyclists, groups of Christians or Buddhists—all ego groups have stories, signs, and symbols that identify them.
- These stories, signs, and symbols are always false, never completely true, always serve the purpose of upholding the group and the egos in it.
- People without egos or ego groups can communicate just fine, though it will always be hard for people with egos to understand them.
The ego is the “deluded self” or the “small self” of Buddhism. I suppose the “identity,” if it is very pure, is the enlightened mind, the Buddha mind, the Tathagata.
FIML practice greatly helps the identity see the difference between identity and ego. It does this by showing the identity how the ego interprets what it hears and frames what it says.
The ego is like a ghost in the mind, or a collection of ghosts, that distorts reality for its own purposes. It is hard to see by yourself where it starts and where it ends. With the help of a caring partner, the line between ego and identity will become much clearer.
We “need” an ego only because it is the main way that people communicate. We do not need or want an ego when we communicate with our FIML partners. If more people did FIML, there would be less need for egos.
3 Mules
“The space needed by The Mules to travel this country freely in all four directions on the landscape is being taken over by the suburban model of automobile usage, exclusively, and leaving no space for alternative venues of moving and living. In our travels, we carry that awareness and bring it to others.”
Semiotics and psychology
A semiotic analysis of a person’s “internal and external signalling” often can be more conducive to understanding than a “psychological” analysis.
From a semiotic point of view, it is not at all necessary that even a very significant adult behavior will have started with a significant trauma or any other sort of strong influence.
The smallest thing can constitute the start of a “semiotic slope” that, once begun, will tend to persist.
For example, your mom may not have understood that as a three-year-old it was normal for you to prefer the company of your father. Her misunderstanding may then have led to her withdrawing from you very slightly, and this snowballed between the two of you. When, years later, you wanted a closer relation with your mom and were not able to get it, it may have seemed to you that the cause was some trauma in her relation with her mother. But the actual start of the whole thing began with nothing more than your mom never having learned the simple fact that toddlers often prefer one parent over the other for a period of time.
What happened was she misunderstood the semiotics of toddler behavior and many things followed from that. There was no trauma, no ideal state not attained due to some seriously bad thing having happened to her.
Another way to put this is most people do not remember very much before the age of five or so. But didn’t a lot of formative things happen back then? Some probably were traumatic, and we do tend to remember those experiences more clearly than others, but much of what started our paths of development also began with very simple, often accidental, interpretations or misinterpretations of what was said or done to us or around us.
In a semiotic analysis, we recognize that a good deal of what we think/feel/believe began with a small thing, a random or accidental interpretation that got us going in some direction that we likely today see as a major component of our “personality.”
Semiotics can be defined as “the science of communicable meaning (including internal communication).”
Once your mom began to interpret, even very slightly, your toddler behavior as “meaning” that you did not love her as much as your father, many things followed for all of you. But there was no trauma, no glaring formative event, no Freudian ghost from her past coming to haunt your life. Rather, she simply made a mistake due to her ignorance of toddler behavior.
Ironically, the fact that many of us still today tend to understand much of human “psychology” as being determined by unconscious Freudianesque forces is a good example of how a “semiotic slope” once begun tends to continue. Freud started us down a “semiotic slope” that still shapes much of our world today.
The persistence of what is simply a wrong interpretation in an individual can be compared to what happens in cultures. Something begins, then it snowballs, then it becomes a tradition or an established idea. The semiotic network that is culture is hard to change once it is established. Something very similar is also true for individuals.
I am not claiming that emotional traumas do not happen and that they do not affect people. I am claiming that what we are is often due to small accidents as much as large traumas. And that people who are “resilient” after having suffered significant traumas may be so because their semiotic development led them to view the “meaning” of their trauma in a more “resilient,” or useful, way.
Signaling as a basis for understanding introversion and extroversion
Basing our understanding of human “psychology” on signaling and signaling systems—essentially seeing people as complex signaling systems—can make many aspects of being human clearer.
For example, rather than analyze “introversion” versus “extroversion,” we can use terms that work better with the signaling model—introspection versus extrospection.
Extrospection is a made up word. In this context it means someone who looks (spec, specere) outwardly for the establishment, maintenance, and validation of their identity.
In the signaling model, identity can be defined as “the (somewhat) complex nexuses of meaning/signaling that ’embodies’ our comprehension of the semiotics of our cultures and experiences.”
An extrovert is normally seen as someone who likes people and wants to spend time with them, as opposed to an introvert who prefers spending time alone.
There is probably some value in this distinction. But all introverts know that we also like people and want to spend time with them; the problem is spending time with strongly “extroverted” types is not fully satisfying.
Similarly, extroverts are generally not as satisfied with the company of introverts as they are with other extroverts.
It may be hard to see why this is until we use the terms “introspection” and “extrospection.”
A person whose identity depends heavily on the opinions of others—one who favors extrospection—will tend to spend more time with other people than alone. They will be good at getting along with other people of their type because “extrospectors” value the mutual validation they offer each other.
To a person whose identity depends heavily on introspection, the “extrospector” may be fun to be around for a while, but will probably become tiring because the “introspector” does not want the same sort of validation required by the “extrospector.”
In terms of signaling, the introspector relies on internal signaling while the extrospector relies on external signaling. The introspector can and does enjoy other people, but they are far more likely to be satisfied with other people who share their tendency for internal signaling.
The signaling systems of introspectors with introspectors and extrospectors with extrospectors mirror each other much better than when the two types are mixed.
Extrospectors tend to form groups and have a much easier time finding each other than introspectors do. This is why extrospectors control so much of what happens in the world.
Moreover, extrospectors also tend to base their opinions of themselves and each other on external, measurable things—property, money, status symbols. To the introspector, these things are not as valuable to their identity as depth of analysis, depth of internal signals, depth of communication.
Extrospectors are great and we need them. But if you are not one, it might be good to realize that it is not people per se that you want to avoid, but rather the tedium of extrospectional values, aims, and beliefs.
Find another introspector with compatible interests and there is a good chance you will become highly “extroverted” toward each other.
UPDATE 02/02/21: Since introspection produces an identity that is grounded more on internal signals, self-generated or discovered signals, introspectors tend to be more different from each other than extrospectors within the same culture.
Edward Snowden’s Dad, Lon Fires Back At Obama: My Son Has Sacrificed More Than The US President
Do you realize how ambiguous you are when you speak?
And how bad you are at interpreting what others say to you?
If not, you are living in a very muddled world that is probably “anchored” to nothing more than your “feelings,” your “identity,” or some form of extrinsic “belief” or “faith” in your nation, group, religion, career.
Either you are a sort of slave to a public semiotic (religion, ethnicity, career, etc.) or you are a sort of slave to your muddled interior—your volatile emotional sense of “who” you “are.”
The only way I know of to fully comprehend how badly you speak and listen is to do FIML practice.
You may understand in the abstract how wrong and ambiguous speech and listening frequently are, but if you don’t do FIML you won’t be able to see with any specificity how wrong you are and where and why. If your understanding is only general or abstract, it will function as just another level of ambiguity, another source of mistakes.
Mildly sorry for being so blunt, but it’s true. Only FIML, or something very similar, can give you and your partner real-time access to objectively agreed upon communication mistakes being made between you. And there is no general or abstract substitute for that.
Even a single mistake can have massive consequences. But we all make dozens of mistakes every day.
Saṃvega
The oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it’s normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. Source.
Malignant narcissism and identity
Malignant narcissism is an extreme form of narcissism characterized by aggression against people who threaten the narcissist’s narcissistic supply.
A malignant narcissist sees the other person as the threat, not just what they say or do.
This makes sense in that a narcissist has at some level concluded that they as a person are the standard for all things; thus, other people are blamed and attacked far out of proportion to whatever the narcissist believes they have done.
In Christian terms, the malignant narcissist blames the sinner not the sin and thus attacks the sinner, even when the sin may be as mild as a withheld compliment or a deserved rebuke.
I think all narcissists behave in a manner similar to this, though the ordinary type, which is very common in this world, is less aggressive than the malignant type.
Since narcissism is so common, one can say that in some ways narcissists have good reason to be suspicious of others and take revenge on them. There really is a good chance that they are dealing with another narcissist, who will do the same to them if they get the chance.
In a previous post, I wrote about the vortex or tautology of identity, the tautology of basing our identity on a semiotic matrix that, by its very nature, always refers back to the same “identity.” A malignant narcissist is an extreme example of this problem.
The semiotics of malignant narcissism are such that the narcissist sees his or her identity as being the person they really are. Seeing themselves in this way, narcissists apply a similar logic to others—at their core they are people who must be opposed or attacked for even the slightest perceived offense.
A group example of extreme malignant narcissism might be North Korea. If an NK citizen makes a single mistake—even a slight verbal mistake—they run the risk of being executed and also having three generations of their family sent to prison for life. The reasoning is that the original offender is a very bad person, which can be known from what they said. And since they are very bad, they must have influenced every person in their family who is younger than them and been influenced by every person in their family who is older than them.
If that isn’t hell on earth, I don’t know what is.
It is my belief that most groups, even very cute and nice ones, tend toward narcissism and many of them tend toward and become malignantly narcissistic. This happens because groups form and maintain themselves on the basis of shared semiotics, which necessarily are formulaic or simplistic.
We can see malignant narcissism in many religious, political, nationalist, or ethnic groups. The clearest sign is a disproportionate response to criticism—banishment, murder, violence, loss of employment, etc.—but narcissistic groups can also be clever and hide these responses or delay them long enough that the connection to the “offense” is hard to see.
Just as narcissistic groups cannot bear criticism, even self-criticism from within, so individual narcissists are bad at introspection. For either one, to honestly view and assess the core value (me!) is to destroy the false identity. For either one (group or individual) this would be a wonderful thing for them and others, but it is hard to do because their semiotic matrix is a tautology and they cannot admit this, or usually even see it.
Identity as a vortex or tautology
Our identities are fundamentally made up of semiotic matrices. That is to say, in part, that our identities have meaning; they mean something to us.
Often they mean a great deal to us and from them we derive the semiotics of motivation, intention, life-plans, many of our central interests, and so on.
Identities have strong emotional components, to be sure, but our emotions are ambiguous or diffuse if they are not positioned on a semiotic matrix and focused or defined by that matrix.
Identity is usually tautological in that its components, interests, and associations tend always to lead back to a few central elements. Often these elements have been inculcated in us by training. Some, we learn on our own. These elements are our values and beliefs, and also how these values and beliefs are understood and pursued.
The semiotics of identity must mean something to the person identifying with them. In this sense, they are almost always tautological. I do what I do because that is how I learned how to do it, think it, feel it, perceive it.
Most people are more adept at moving the parts of language around than they are at moving semiotic elements around. When semiotics are unconscious, they act like a vortex pulling perception, emotion, and understanding always toward the center of the identity. I think this is another way to say, in the Buddhist sense, that the self is empty; that it has no “own being.”
We can pursue an understanding of an empty self through Buddhist thought and practice, but we will get better results more quickly if we add a practice that deals directly with the semiotics of our identities.
Since there is no book you can go to to look up how your unique semiotics of identity works, you have to see for yourself how it works. You can do much of this on your own, but eventually you will need a partner because there is no way you will be able to get an objective perspective on yourself acting alone.
FIML practice is the only way I know of to fully see into and through the semiotics of your “identity.” Beneath identity there is a sort of artesian well of pure, undefined consciousness. FIML helps us experience that well while keeping us from rushing back into the tautological matrix of identity or static self-definition and clinging to it.
FIML is able to do this because FIML is process. FIML itself has no definition, only a procedure. It is not a tautology because it has no semiotic boundaries.
Semiotics, FIML, and identity
After you have a done a good deal of FIML, you will start to see semiotics as things, similar to words or memories.
FIML facilitates this process by forcing us to pay close attention to the ways we use semiotics and the ways they affect us.
Our identities, such that they are, are based on our closeness to or need for semiotics that define us, assure us, make us feel at home, tell us who we are.
Our use of semiotics in that way is very common but it is hard to grasp if we have no other basis for our identity, which few of us do.
FIML practice provides a different basis for identity than “extrinsic” semiotics, the conscious and unconscious semiotics of culture, upbringing, media, advertising, schooling, what we may think others think.
FIML partners, by constantly paying attention to the play of interpersonal semiotics, gradually will shift the bases of their identities from largely static extrinsic signs to dynamic intrinsic, or interpersonal, processes. This is what makes semiotics start looking like things rather than abstract elements of linguistic analysis.
Semiotics are things as much as words are. They differ in that there is no dictionary of them; we have to see them for ourselves and understand how they have been formed and why they affect us as they do.
Once partners do this through FIML practice, they will eventually notice that their habitual extrinsic semiotics will start to slough off, to fall away from them. This happens very naturally as a rich dynamic realm of largely error-free communication develops between them.
The falling away of habitual extrinsic semiotics that had been used to define or maintain the identity is accompanied by delightful feelings of freedom and lightness, independence and assuredness that one’s being is better served by the intimate communication of FIML than the inculcated beliefs and values of the past.
American Buddhist Net 