For myself, I take my awareness of my existence as an act of the ignorance of blind faith, and therefore have no place in my life for any religious dogma or doctrine.
Nonetheless:
At whatever peril may arise from my being as truthful with words as my being autistic may permit:
I am also an existentialist, being so for the simple reason that I find that existence, whatever it is, has always been what I have observed as though it, including its apparently being observable, is, ultimately, all that I have ever yet observed.
As I am able to observe, my life agglomeration of observations includes some personally/subjectively-irrefutable observations that contravene reality as apparently defined by some subcultural forms of social consensus.
My understanding of the existence of existence is grounded in the limit of my grasp of applied theoretical biology, as of the work of Walter M. Elsasser, Robert Rosen, Francisco Varela, A. H. Louie, and many more people whose life effort has been directed toward making some sort of usefully functional model of "ultimate reality."
I have intended to persuade anyone to believe or understand as I do; I have indefatigably endeavored to deny to other people any way of defining me in terms of their lives to a comparable extent as I decline to define other people in terms of my life.
In do doing, I have found it necessary unriddle what I find may most usefully be deemed "child abuse" in terms of traumatic neurological injury to persons as a function of social/cultural socialization traditions. The approach I have taken is based upon biological pattern recognition methodologies (my doctoral advisor's area of special expertise) as applied to forms of brain scan observations indicative of physical brain damage in response to traumatic experiences. This work is, as I learned during the Fall Conference of the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, MA, last weekend, is apparently at the "cutting edge" of trauma research.
The existential philosophy upon which I have based and developed my research into the biology of trauma is an aspect of process philosophy (Whitehead, Hartshorne, and others).
http://www.iep.utm.edu/processp/
Put as simply as I have yet been able to state my sense of understanding of ultimate process reality in English-language words, the Process of Ultimate Reality is, "Whatever happens, as it happens, is necessary and sufficient."
In my process-philosophy view, for a reasonably accurate observation to occur, there must be an interaction between an observer and an observed, and the observer, as well as the observed, as well as the process of observation, all need to be reasonably accurate. However, I find that the notion of reasonable accuracy is itself vulnerable to inaccuracy of reason, as may be understood in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This notion has consistently invited me into the realm of the philosophical issue of self-reference regarding nested sets that are inextricably, mutually, self-referential.
During the night of March 13-14, 1960, I stayed up to help time lunar occultations at the Goodsell Observatory at Carleton College, during the March, 1960 lunar total eclipse. Came the next morning, somewhat short on sleep, I went to my classes, went to lunch with my fellow scullions at the Margaret Evans Hall dining room, and, after lunch, went to my physical education swimming class in the swimming pool in the basement of Sayles-Hill Gymnasium. I had been practicing underwater swimming, with a buddy system well in place and under the supervision of a Red Cross Water Safety Instructor. Perhaps I took one breath too many to avoid what happened, however, shortly after I pushed off from the shallow end of the pool, I blacked out, and my body settled, unconscious, to the bottom of the pool. No one noticed my having "gone missing" for the duration of the class, which lasted about half an hour after I blacked out. At the end of the class, the other students and Instructor left the pool area, and the last person to leave, a person who was not actually blind, but who was "legally blind," later told me that, after he turned of the lights and walked through the door to the pool, he was turned around without conscious will, and observed that something about the pool did not "look right." He called out in alarm, and others came, and pulled my body out of the pool and notified the college physician, whose offices were in the Sayles-Hill building. One student ran to my room and notified one of my roommates of my "drowning." That student was a biology major who had worked the prior summer in a hospital, and who had become acquainted with the color of the cyanosis of death. He hurried to the pool area, and, when he got there, he noticed that I was of the color of the cyanosis of death. I had not been breathing for more than 35 minutes, and had been in warm enough water that the near-freezing-water death-avoiding reflex ought not to have been available to me. The college physician, all else having failed, finally decided to inject a large bolus of epinephrine directly into my heart muscles. The effect, according to my roommate, was my starting to stir, cough up a little water and lunch from my stomach, and resume breathing.
The people who had pulled my body from the pool had, as I understand, at the physician's direction, placed me on a metal table from a room near the pool, and, when I began to breathe, I also began to stir, and I understand that the college physician directed people present to hold me so my body would not fall off the table. Yet unconscious, and evidently in a partial coma, as I stirred, and people held me so my body would not fall off the table, my body went into a form of hypnotic-strength reaction to being held down. The campus policeman had arrived, he weighed about 300 pounds, and was asked to hold my ankles. According to my roommate, I lifted the campus policeman off the floor by raising my legs while being held down elsewhere by other people. After something like fifteen minutes of such hypnotic-strength reaction to being held, someone decided to get some wrestling mats from an adjacent room and the people holding me put me there, where I thrashed around like a cat dying from having been run over by a car for about ten minutes, and then became physically calm, and was taken by ambulance to a medical facility where an electroencephalogram did not reveal any trace of anoxia-caused brain damage. No evidence of any trace of anoxya-caused brain damage has ever appeared following my not breathing for over 35 minutes, most of which time was spent in warm water. I was in a coma until early in the morning of March 15, 1960. When I finally woke up, around mid-morning of March 15, 1960, my muscles had been so "worn out" that I could not initially even raise my arms at the elbows off the mattress of the hospital bed upon which my body was lying.
As I woke up, I had a sense of a memory of having been through an event somewhat of the sort that has been named "a near-death experience." However what I remember of what I remember is not like the reports of "other near-death" experiences of which I had read. There was no "tunnel." And there was no encounter with "God" or "Saints" or supposedly dead people. What there was, for I wrote about it soon thereafter, is what remains with me now, a memory of being in the immediate presence of "all the power there will ever be." By, "all the power there will ever be, " I mean whatever made existence itself, including whatever made any and every "gods" or "God" that may exist, and that may have created tangible existence.
As I remember, not in words, but only in pure meaning, I described the whole of my life as an autistic person in terms of the abuse I had experienced while surrounded by human society, and inquired, not in words, of "all the power there will ever be," as to whether it was a time when I might be free of a life of such difficulty. The reply from "all the power there will ever be," was, not in words, "There is more that you may do." To which my reply, not in words, was, "All right." It was then that, so I understand, the legally-blind person was turned around without his willing to so turn, and he noticed something not right about the appearance of the swimming pool, even though the pool was dark because he had turned off the lights in the pool area.
In 1972, my dad died from cancer. By 1984, my bioengineering studies had resolutely informed me that I was a member of a "cancer family" in which treatment of cancer had never been able to stop death from terminal cancer soon after the presence of cancer had been detected. So, based on my grasp of bioengineering, cancer risk, and effective cancer-prevention, I arranged for my bilateral orchiectomy early in the summer of 1986. Came the next week, and my brother, who had been asymptomatic as I was arranging to get my orchiectomy, was found to have the form of terminal cancer I sought to prevent.
With my brother's imminent cancer death as more evidence of risk, I finally got the effective attention of a proper gastroenterologist, who found that I did have a form of polyposis cancer gene, and who, soon thereafter, did my colectomy. Morphine, given for post-surgical pain not only helped with that pain, but also reduced the remembered pain of my being repeatedly paddled until I shattered into agitated catatonic states while I was in second grade at Marshall School, in Eureka, California.
Because I understood very well by then that such remembered pain reduction may lead to violently destructive psychotic breaks, I successfully acquired voluntary psychiatric inpatient status because I could not imagine any better way to keep my body and the bodies of other people adequately safe while I worked through the meaning of what led me to ask of "all the power there will ever be" whether March 13, 1960 was a time when I might be free of a life of such difficulty as mine.
In 1973, as a member of AAAS, I received my copy of Rosenhan's "On Being Sane in Insane Places."
http://www.walnet.org/llf/ROSENHAN-BEINGSANE.PDF
When morphine took me into a morphine-induced iatrogenic psychosis, in 1986, I recognized that my iatrogenic psychosis might allow my doing a variation of Rosenhan's pseudopatient study as a real patient. And that is what I did.
By Thanksgiving, 1987, I had been taking prescribed psychotropic medications for most of a year, and they had notably increased my iatrogenic psychosis. On Thanksgiving eve, November 16, 1987, I had progressed from "one-on one" to "fifteens" in the fifth floor unit of Charter-Barclay Hospital, in Chicago. "One-on-one"? A private-duty nurse was assigned to be within three feet of me at all times, no matter what. And "fifteens" was a "step up" from being "QRed in full leathers." "QRed in full leathers"? In a psychiatric hospital "Quiet Room," secured with restraints (usually made by the Humane Restraint Company, then of Madison, Wisconsin) from ankles and wrists to the corners of the bed in the Quiet Room.
The simple truth, as best I can tell it, is that I apparently did the full iatrogenic psychotropic trip about as far as it can be taken without its killing the person taking it.
About 10:00 PM, on Thanksgiving eve, 1987, I went to bed in the corridor of the fifth floor unit of Charter-Barclay Hospital, as was necessary when on fifteens. In a few minutes, I fell asleep, only to waken about five minutes later, having experienced a fragment of a dream. It came to me that I would wisely remember the dream fragment, so I parked it in "permanent memory," and again fell asleep for about five minutes, and awoke with another dream fragment which I also parked in permanent memory, This pattern of falling asleep, having a dream fragment, parking it in permanent memory, and falling asleep again lasted until about 4:00 AM on Thanksgiving morning. With each dream fragment, I found myself experiencing vastly deeper and more profound depression. When, for the last time I fell asleep that way, I had never imagined the experience of such utterly infinite terror of depression being at all possible. However, the next time I woke up, after another five minutes or so, I was neither depressed nor at all manic; I was rather flawlessly euthymic, as the dream was complete and I understood it.
What can I put in words about that November 26-27, 1987 dream, as I remember it? It was as though I as able to "see" the whole universe of universes from the outside, from before "the beginning" until "after the end," and, in that dream, there is no possible path from now to any actual end; the totality of all universes is a creatively evolving singularity within which time does not actually exist other than as an aspect of the observability of the process(es) of existence itself. Within that dream were the "original" ideas that became the core of my doctoral bioengineering thesis and dissertation.
Within that Thanksgiving, 1987, dream was that, were I willing to test the reality of the content of that dream without any faltering of personal effort, it would lead to my properly earning a doctorate in bioengineering with an existential model of neurological injury and its healing that would clearly and verifiably show humanity the way to the forever-after end of the epoch of human destructiveness within which humanity is presently effectively embedded.
How do I understand my life? Perhaps I may be a "Strong Thief."
From the Olga Marx translation of Martin Buber, "Tales of the Hasidim," Schocken Books, New York, 1947, 1975, 1991, page 104, used with written permission:
The Strong Thief
The maggid of Mezritch said:
"Every lock has its key which is fitted to it and opens it. But there are strong thieves who know how to open without keys. They break the lock. So every mystery in the world can be unriddled by the particular kind of meditation fitted to it. But God loves the strong thief who breaks the lock open: I mean the man who breaks his heart for God."
To me, as an aspect of human biology, "God" is a name for, and perhaps merely a name for, the existential "Reason Why," such that, if there is no Reason Why, then the Reason Why is the reason why there is no Reason Why.
Unriddle that, and, for all I can yet understand, you may find the key to understanding the remedy for human destructiveness within your grasp.
For the Reason Way, all things possible are possible in their appropriately necessary and sufficient way.
I recall a story, one I remember as of the Baha'i Faith, wherein, on the dawn of a new day, among people living on a mountain, there will be one person who sees the first ray of light seen on that new day; neither that person nor ray of light is more nor less special than any other person or ray of light. Consider that the mountain may be nearly spherical and named, in English, "Earth," and the light in question is the practicable existential understanding of the neurological injury of the trauma of traditional shame-based child socialization; that is, the infant-child transition that is so traumatic and so brain-damaging as to apparently render a plausible majority of adults incapable of accurately remembering their life prior to said transition.
I have included the following in prior Internet postings, and include it here for completeness:
From Robert C. Scaer, M.D., P.C., “The Trauma Spectrum,” W.W. Norton, New York - London, 2005, page 58, used with written permission from W.W. Norton:
Trauma As Imprisonment of the Mind
In Chapter 1, I defined the mind as “a perceptual experience, generated by a complex set of synapses, neurons, and neurochemical states, determined by genes, instincts, and experience, that is capable of developing and directing novel behavior.” In the brain of the trauma victim, the synapses, neurons, and neurochemicals have been substantially altered by the effects of a unique life experience. Not surprisingly, the perceptual experience that constitutes the mind has been equally altered. This alteration more than anything else is a corruption of procedural memory, that part of our intrinsic memory that is most involved in acquisition of survival skills. We depend on learned cues in our environment to distinguish positive versus negative survival-based information. If we have not learned to distinguish between these types of cues, we lose our edge in the survival game. In trauma, cues to an event that is over and done with are stored in procedural memory as if the event had never been completed.
Trauma thus represents a time-based corruption of learning. The brain in trauma has lost its ability to distinguish past from present, and as a result it cannot adapt to the future. This confusion of time further immobilizes the trauma victim, who still remains immobilized by a thwarted freeze discharge. Procedural memory is bombarded by environmental and internal cues that represent old, unresolved threat. Declarative memory is assaulted by intrusive thoughts, memories, and dreams that repetitively warn the person of potential danger. Furthermore, the constant activation of brain circuitry related to threat alters and suppresses structure and function in the verbal and thinking brain. Trauma indeed is a state of imprisonment.
The above two paragraphs from "The Trauma Spectrum" as about as concise a description of the lock I broke, and I broke it because I find that the maggid of Mezritch was mistaken; one lock was made before the first key was invented. The lock of trauma as a state of imprisonment of the mind was made without the making of any key fitted to it that could ever open it.
The only way I was able to find to make a key fitted to the lock of the mind of trauma was to break the lock in myself, for myself and others, so as to understand the lock mechanism well enough to make a key not only fitted to it, but that opens it, and that anyone can safely use when ready to use it.
The key is:
Whatever happens, as it happens, is necessary and sufficient.
And I made that key through carefully exploring the realm of existential religious process thought no less than through exploring the realm of applied theoretical biology.
People have successfully used that key. One such person, a mental health professional, is described in my bioengineering dissertation. This person had been under cost-unlimited psychiatric care for about twenty years, when the person came to me, having heard of my work "through the grapevine." The person asked me to explain my work, and told me of being married to another mental health professional. The couple and I agreed to meet the next day for about 90 minutes. We met, and, at the end of the 90 minutes, they asked to meet with me for another 90 minutes the next day. We so met. At the end of the second 90 minutes the mental health professional who had been working one month out of three for about 20 years (one month of work, one month sliding into a depression that only electro-convulsive therapy had ever seemed to resolve, electro-convulsive therapy, a month of recovery from said therapy, and a month of working, and the next slide into depression), said to me that the method was understood and would work.
That mental health professional had a scheduled psychiatrist session the next day, at which it had been planned to make the arrangements for the next electro-convulsive therapy event. At that session, the mental health professional told the psychiatrist that further electro-convulsive therapy would not be necessary, because the problem that had required it had been solved. That mental health professional has never again needed electro-convulsive therapy and has never since taken a day off from work because of mental illness.
That mental health professional is not the only person who has successfully used the key to unlock traumatic imprisonment of the mind.
Until after I had about a week to process the events of the Fall Conference of the Erikson Instutute of the Austen Riggs Center to my satisfaction, I was not ready to give the key out to the whole world for everyone to learn of its fitness to the traumatic imprisonment of their minds. Now, I am satisfied that the key is ready, and that people are becoming ready to use it as each person deems appropriate.
How do I know that the key works? It is as though it was given to me to test well before I was born, I have tested it in every way I have been able to imagine for more than 73 years; I have observed that it has safely unlocked every trauma-locked-imprisoned mind that has ever actually put it to use for real.
