Arab Nights (imported) wrote: Fri Aug 24, 2012 7:39 pm
As I understand finding one's place in life, I disagree with you. But perhaps it means something different to you. Could you elaborate or explain?
It seems to me that the comment of george2u2 is relevant.
If I always know, from within, where I am (where my place is at the moment), I never need to look for it. My view that people who are seeking their place in life are dealing with some form of the psychological mechanism of displacement, and, as Harvard psychiatrist, Lance Dodes, has written, displacement is "The Heart of Addiction," Quill (HarperCollins), 2003. Displacement results from life experiences that are too important to forget and too painful to remember, such experiences are a central feature of trauma. At what may be the extreme limit of a person's seeking their place in life, because of devastating depersonalizing traumas, folks may band together and fly airplanes into tall buildings, or worse.
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janekane (imported) wrote: Fri Aug 24, 2012 4:49 am
I consistently note that people's seeking their places in life tends to become personally and socially destructive,
" is valid, in my view, only if one pays careful attention to the word, "tends." Tendencies range from vanishingly insignificant to overwhelmingly terrible.
Because of having had a distant family member who was caught up in severe addiction stemming from simply awful neglect/abuse in childhood (removed from biological parent's care at about age seven), I have significant extended family member contact with the tendency for addiction as displacement as leading to a very destructive conduct, and it is that many-year-long awareness of a person, and the person's close family members that alerted me to the hazards of abuse severe enough to result in intense depersonalization trauma and the addictive striving to find oneself while being terrified of succeeding because success in finding oneself results in remembering what is too painful to remember. Suicide and/or murder are rare, and tragic outcomes of unsuccessful efforts of finding one's place in life.
For many people, childhood traumas merely result in people being regarded as normal, alas, that may be the result of one or more forms of trauma being regarded as essential for proper childhood social development.
I worked for over twenty years in a major city pediatric hospital, where I observed many hundreds of children as they went through the usual infant-child transition (which has been called, "the terrible twos" by some folks), and, as the way in which I am autistic kept me from going through that transition, I have a lifelong experience (more than 73 years) of living successfully as a member of human society without ever coming to believe that anyone is ever truthfully at fault for anything.
Used with written permission, from the book by University of Massachusetts - Amherst psychology professor, Robert Feldman, "The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships," Twelve, Hachette Group, New York & Boston, 2009, three brief excerpts...
From page 258: "There's a dirty secret I've been trying to avoid emphasizing in this book, but its about time we faced it. All of us are liars. Yes, that means you. And yes, it means me too."
Yet Feldman also wrote, on page 73: "Parents of children with autism often report that their children are simply incapable of lying. While at first glance unrelenting honesty might be seen as a virtue, in fact it is at the heart of the social difficulties children with autism experience."
Also, on page 73, "Consider the irony of the situation. Honesty in children with autism is viewed as a manifestation of their disorder. Subsequently, autistic children who were originally unfailingly honest but have begun to show signs of lying effectively are considered to be showing improvement in their condition."
As I review my life and life experiences, I note that I have never "begun to show signs of lying effectively."
When I was seven, in second grade, in a public school in northern California, my teacher was able to get all of the boys in the class to confess to lying except me. She would criticize a boy for improper behavior, and the boy would admit fault and be forgiven, unless the 'boy" was me. (Keep in mind that I had recognized my being somewhere other than in the domain of the social definition of "boy" before kindergarten.) When the teacher would criticize me, I never understood what she regarded as my wrongdoing because she never told me what it was, and, when I asked her what I had done wrong, her usual answer was, "You know perfectly well what you did wrong, I saw you do it."
Because I was totally clueless as to what it was that my teacher deemed to be my wrongdoing, I could not confess to doing it. My incapacity to confess apparently led my teacher and the school principal to regard me as worse than virulently sociopathic, and I was regularly sent to the principal's office, where I was paddled until the principal observed a change in my overt conduct. Alas, that principal had never before paddled an autistic child until the child was driven by terror into agitated catatonia. The first day that happened, I told my parents what happened as soon as possible. They worked to extricate me from that abuse, but it took about three quarters of second grade before they were able to get enough doctors to understand that I was not doing anything actually wrong, and the doctors to persuade the school system that I was being horribly abused.
It took me about 65 years to figure out that, had I admitted to doing something wrong when I was not doing anything wrong, I would have been lying, and, in lying, would have confirmed my teacher's and principal's notions that, as in Feldman, we are all liars. However, I did not understand how to tell lies effectively when I was in second grade, and I have not come to understand how to tell lies effectively yet. For as long as I live, I expect to never learn the ways of effective lying.
The result of the abuse put upon me during the first about-three-quarters of second grade was my deciding to do everything I possibly could do to unriddle what had happened to truly good and decent people to make them utterly oblivious to the damage they were attempting to cram into me.
That decision led me to studying human biology human society as the core purpose and effort of my life, with the notion in mind that sufficient effort put into finding what turns newborn babies into child abusers as adults might unriddle the problem of human destructiveness well enough to allow people to put child abuse, war, and crime away where it is possible to learn of child abuse, war, and crime only by reading history books.
While I was in that second grade class, I recognized that my teacher and principle were doing what they were doing because they had no practical way to avoid abusing me, and recognized that was the result of their having been abused in ways that blinded them to what they were attempting to do to me. Because I recognized that they were incapable of not abusing me, I forgave them instantly, and never hated or resented them or what they were doing because it was terribly clear to me that something at least as terrible as what they were doing to me had to have happened to them during their childhoods.
My fieldwork research has informed me that it is likely that about 98 percent of western culture people (those who believe that people deserve to be punished for making mistakes?) are so severely traumatized as to be functionally psychotic regarding how procedural learning and procedural memory actually work in human brains.
While punishment of people for committing crimes remains the core of adversarial system law and jurisprudence, I find that it is impossible to demonstrate the existence of any mistake that actually was made and also demonstrate that any mistake actually made was actually avoidable through any achievable process.
Put another way, the belief that a person made a mistake which the person could have avoided making is a terribly brain damaging (or, traumatic) fairy tale, the believing of which is the essence of schizoid aspects of personality, and schizoid personality structures are what blind people to child abuse.
Life may be so simple in one aspect that only an infant can actually understand it. If a mistake is avoidable, it is necessarily avoided, therefore no actually avoidable mistake ever actually happens, and no one knows what any actually avoidable mistake is, because avoidable mistakes are always avoided and therefore, never actually exist. If a mistake actually happens, it was actually unavoidable, and the proof of this is simply that the mistake actually made was not actually avoided.
Well before I got to the age of 18 months, the age when I was supposedly able to accept the fairy tale of people actually making actually avoidable mistakes, my life experiences had allowed me to understand that the notion that people make avoidable mistakes for the making of which punishment is justice, was absolutely false. It took me over 58 years to learn enough about the lives of people who accepted the fairy tale of people making avoidable mistakes to write a bioengineering doctoral dissertation about the nature of mistakes and mental illness, successfully defend the dissertation, and start seeking ways of decently sharing what I have learned with other people without being unduly likely to trigger a flashback in someone that would result in my being murdered for my work on the nature of mistakes and human brain trauma.
Until someone has lived a life of about average length (I am past 73), there would be no reason to believe that the life I have actually lived could ever be possible, because it would have never yet happened. However, the mere fact of my life renders moot the notion of a life such as the one I have actually lived being forever impossible.
For me, during the whole of my life, I have observed that whatever happens, as it happens, is, existentially, necessary and sufficient. Therefore, I never blame anyone or anything. And I never find fault with anyone or anything. I observe that life itself is the process of existence, as the ongoing process of creative evolution that is the entire universal universe of universes.
I have never believed that, had anything which happened actually happened other than as it happened, anything would ever be better.
I find myself living in a universe in which the process of evolving creativity is absolutely perfect because whatever is observed, wherever it is observed, however it is observed, by whomever it is observed, why it is observed as it is observed, whenever it is observed, is invariably at the absolute limit of what the universal existential process of evolving creativity has been able to achieve.
There are stories, the late Joseph Campbell studied and wrote about them, his work about human myths. As I understand his work, he found that every culture had a form of creation story in which things were different in the past, and something happened, be it the opening of Pandora's "box," or suffering, or sin, or whatever else. Such myths may have an aspect in which the world was perfect (the Garden of Eden?), and people did something, or something happened, that messed up the perfect world.
From my perspective, those stories tell of a time when the conditions of the world were perfect. As a bioengineer, I find a terrible difficulty inherent to any world in which conditions are perfect. Any change in the conditions has to make the conditions imperfect. Therefore, the process of in a world of perfect conditions is absolutely imperfect, because any change from perfect conditions has to make the conditions imperfect.
The conditions of life are imperfect because the perfect process of life continues to add to itself as what may be usefully named evolving creativity at the limit, moment by moment. of what is actually achievable.
The model of existential process reality I have here presented in terse form ought to be trivially refuted if false. Given the thousands upon thousands of guilty verdicts of the law courts, demonstrating the an actually (not merely hypothetically) committed crime that was actually avoidable by accurately demonstrating the committing of the crime, and then demonstrating that the crime was actually avoided (thereby establishing as demonstrated fact that it was actually avoidable) after it had actually been demonstrated to have been actually committed (actually not avoided), will flawlessly, methinks, demolish my life work and render it utter nonsense. Absent such demonstration I find that the Anglo-American Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence in the United States of America is effectively and functionally an unconstitutional, superstitious religious establishment, which promotes and produces profoundly brain-damaging child abuse.
Demonstrate the making of a mistake (meaning that it was unintended) so that the mistake having been made is unambiguous, and then demonstrate that the mistake the making of which has been demonstrated unambiguously, and then unambiguously demonstrate that the mistake was unambiguously avoidable by demonstrating unambiguously that the mistake which was unambiguously demonstrated to have been actually made was unambiguously not made, and my work is plausibly only silly nonsense at best.
Hypotheticals are not demonstrations. Demonstrations are not hypotheticals. By "demonstration," I mean a physically tangible, unambiguous demonstration of an event that happened, and after it happened, an unambiguous demonstration that the event did not happen. In my view, accomplishing that would forever refute the so-called laws of rational thought (the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction {also named the law of contradiction}, the law of the excluded middle for dichotomies, the law of the included middle for continua, and the law of rational inference). To me, these are all corollaries of one another, and may be simply stated as, "Something that is can only be what it is, and cannot be what it isn't."
Given the existence of learning, the understanding a person has before making a mistake cannot be absolutely identical with the understanding the person has after making the mistake, or the mistake was not made.
Yes, I allow that my understanding, as herewith described, plausibly violates almost the whole of the recorded history of human beliefs.
Anyone care for a non-violent scientific revolution? Is the truthfulness of a newborn infant crying out in silence, "I am here, now."?