Philosophic Emotion & Enlightenment

[Zhuge_Liang]

I did not want to post this in the general Ethos, Mores, et Monastica forum because I was worried it would be spammed by religious nuts.

This isn't a topic about a philosophic concept as such but rather the emotions surrounding 'enlightenment'.

Many years ago I was involved in a late night philosophic discussion with my brother in a hotel on a remote island on the far side of the world. We had been talking about many issues which I will not go into now, when an event happened. Although I cannot remember exactly what conclusion we reached because of the fear that I felt afterwards we were talking roughly about the concept of time, perception and life. Then after discussing something, which, neither of us could remember after the event, I had a terrifying sensation which vaguely felt as though somebody or something with mal-intent was immediately behind me with their head over my left shoulder. I turned around startled and felt completely helpless and insignificant. It was without a doubt the worst and most vivid sensation I have ever felt in my life. What makes this scenario even more strange is that I turned back to my brother expecting him to ask what was wrong only to find him asking "did you feel that" in a scared tone. We had both felt the same thing at exactly the same time.

This happened almost a decade ago however has come to surface again lately because I only just discovered that my mother had a similar sensation when discussing similar issues when she was the same age. She then told me that her mother, my grandmother, had also had a similar sensation when she was a young woman. The difference between the experiences was that they felt overwhelming reassurance and a "hand on the shoulder", whereas I felt fear and abandonment.

This is probably a good point to add that I am an atheist, though I wasn't at the time. Even still I did not relate this to a spiritual experience at the time despite it feeling at though a demon was standing (so close I could almost feel the breath on my neck) behind me. This is the only time I have experienced such a thing.

I post this hear because I think what happened, even just for a moment (in my case anyway) was the realisation of a concept which was overwhelming for my young mind I was scared out of my wits. It didn't feel like a typical "that makes sense" as though I had just read a theory out of a book and understood it, this was a seismic shift in my thought process. Has anybody else had a similar experience?

[Ummon]

The realization of a concept which is overwhelming and the contact with an entity possessing evil intent, are one and the same thing, seen through different perspectives. It is very unlikely that a serious discussion can occur concerning this issue here, but you may want to check this.

http://www.answers.com/topic/bizarre-object

http://human-nature.com/free-associa...ver/chap4.html

Poincaré writes:

If a new result is to have any value, it must unite elements long since known, but till then scattered and seemingly foreign to each other, and suddenly introduce order where the appearance of disorder reigned. Then it enables us to see at a glance each of these elements in the place it occupies in the whole. Not only is the new fact valuable on its own account, but it alone gives a value to the old facts it unites. Our mind is as frail as our senses are; it would lose itself in the complexity of the world if that complexity were not harmonious; like the short-sighted, it would see only the details and would be obliged to forget each of these details before examining the next, because it would be incapable of taking in the whole. The only facts worthy of our attention are those which introduce order into this complexity and so make it accessible to us.11.

Bion takes this to be a model of all creativity - the way in which seemingly disparate, chaotic elements accumulate around a 'selected fact'; a process which gives new meaning to both the chaotic elements and the fact selected. For Bion, this 'selected fact' is the name of an emotional experience.

Bion also introduced the importance of what he called 'catastrophic change'. Any new thought is felt by the psyche as potentially disruptive and shattering. The ability to tolerate this upheaval will result in growth, but it is a painful process that is dependent on the individual's capacity to withstand fragmentation, anxiety and doubt; Bion compares it to Keats's 'Negative Capability'.12. The sense of catastrophe seems to start when the infant first screams and Bion thought the intuition of it was probably older than life itself; a memory of the explosive force that created the universe, carried within the molecules of our bodies.

Bion's theory of thinking and creativity marks a big step forward in psychoanalytic theory. For not only does it provide psychoanalysis with its first account of thoughts (the 'contained'), and the thinking apparatus created to think them (the 'container'), and their relationship to the thinker, it also radically re-orientates psychoanalytic theory into the mainstream of western epistemology. Bion moves away from Freud's mechanistic biological reductionism into a philosophical sphere, invoking the pre-determinism of Kant and Plato. He supplemented Freud's instinct theory with Plato's theory of inherent forms ,pure thoughts (what Bion called 'thoughts without a thinker') and Kant's a priori assumptions (things-in-themselves).

His theory of thinking is based on the conjecture that pure thoughts exist long before there is a mind to think them. According to his theory, they are evoked from passivity into disruptive energies by the sense organ of consciousness as the latter is stimulated by the events in the external and/or internal world. A mind is needed to think these thoughts.13.

According to Bion (following Freud), the thinking apparatus evolves in response to the pressure of thoughts. This begins when the infant projects his uncontainable fear, discomfort and anxiety into the mother, who acts as a container for the child's fears. The mother is able to receive these projections and modify them so that the infant can introject the fear but in a 'detoxified' form.

Bion introduces the terms: 'alpha function', 'alpha elements' and 'beta elements' to designate certain aspects of this process. Alpha function refers to the ability to create meaning out of raw, unprocessed sensory data which he called 'beta elements'. The mother's 'reverie' is her alpha function, and represents the ability to modify her child's tensions and anxieties. The mother and the child form a 'thinking couple' which is the prototype of the thinking process that continues developing throughout life.14.

According to Bion, the alpha function works on the unprocessed beta elements and transforms them into alpha elements in a way similar to a chemical transformation - indeed, Bion compares it to the digestive process, thinking being 'alimentary'. The 'beta elements' (which are fit only for projection and splitting) are so modified that they become absorbable and quite literally, food for thought. The alpha element represents the link between our innate preconceptions (intuitions) and raw experience of the external world. They form the building-blocks of thought upon which more complex systems can be built.

Ultimately, Bion saw the psychotic experience as the result of a failure by the mother to contain her infant's fear of dying. Perhaps the mother was psychotic herself or depressed and unable to contain and modify her child's fears. In this situation, all the infant's anxiety is projected into the mother and instead of being contained and modified by her, the fears are returned to the child but now in a heightened form. The establishment of the alpha function is impeded and thinking seriously impaired.

Bion's concept of the container-contained relation was to have significance not only for Kleinian thinking but for psychoanalytic theory generally. It added the possibility of the psyche's adaptability and re-established the importance of external reality which had been lacking in Kleinian psychology. Like the work of Winnicott, Bion focused on the importance of the individual's relationship to his environment and the importance of the mother's adaptability to respond intuitively to her infant's needs.

Bion suggests that such geometric concepts as lines, points and space 'derived originally not from a realisation of three-dimensional space but from the realisations of emotional life'. They are also 'returnable to the realm from which they emerged (cf. Fuller's analysis of Rothko's backward journey into the limitless expanse of space in his paintings, to be explored in chapter seven, section 1 below). He believed that the geometer's conception of space derives from the experience of 'the place where something was' and so it can be returned to make sense of psychic experiences such as the feeling of 'depression' which is says Bion 'the place where a breast or other lost object was', or that space is where 'depression or some other emotion used to be' (1970, p. 10).

Bion argues that despite our association of them in everyday expressions, there is an essential difference between the geometer's space and that characteristic of mental images. In the latter, an infinite number of lines may pass through any one point (multi-dimensionality) but if one attempts to represent such a visual image by points and lines on paper, then there would be only a finite amount of lines. Bion says that this 'limiting quality' inheres in all representations of three-dimensional space that approximate to the points, lines and space of the geometer. Such limitation however, does not inhere in mental space until the attempt is made to represent it in verbal thought. Bion postulates mental space as a thing-in-itself that is essentially unknowable, but that can be represented by non-discursive thoughts, including phantasies, dreams, memories (alpha elements) but not unmodified sense-data, or 'beta elements' which are not 'thinkable' but are subject to violent splitting and projection - 'bizarre objects' ( p.11).

He says that 'thoughts may be classified with the realisations of all objects approximating to the representation of three-dimensional space'. He refers to a certain kind of person who cannot tolerate the degree of frustration and limitation involved in this transition from mental space (pre-verbal) to thoughts - whether through the process of verbalisation or spatial realisation. Bion believes that such people lack the capacity to help them map a realisation of their mental space just like the geometer who had to 'await the invention of Cartesian co-ordinates before he could elaborate algebraic geometry' (p. 11). Such an individual is in a state analogous to 'having pain without suffering it';15. 'not understanding planetary movement because the differential calculus has not been invented'; 'not being conscious of a mental phenomenon because it has been repressed'. In all these situations, the problems require thought for their solution; in all of them, thought is restrictive and can be directly experienced as such as soon as an intuition demands representation for private communication. Since thought liberates the intuition there is a conflict between the impulse to leave the intuition unexpressed and the impulse to express it, even though the expression will not be able to capture the full quality of the initial experience. The restrictive element of representation (verbal, pictorial, mathematical) therefore obstructs its transformation.

According to Bion (1970) the creative, adaptive individual is one who has 'negative capability' (Keats), or, in Winnicott's terms, to be able to hold the paradox without resolving it through a 'flight to split-off intellectual functioning' (1971, p. xii)). Bion believes that such persons who cannot tolerate the restriction that such transformations impose are not fully capable of thought, and instead they find substitutes. In such cases the process of projecting parts of the self (which Klein termed 'projective identification') takes place in a mental space which has no visual images to fulfil the functions of a co-ordinate system; there is 'no conception of containers into which projection and introjection could take place and the mental representation of space is felt as an immensity so great that it cannot be represented at all' (op. cit., p. 12).

As a sidenote: religion is not nuttiness, it is a form of thought. Just as you experienced.

[s/laughter]

I have experienced this type of situation before. I have felt the presence of 'demons' and also my sister has a similar story from a strange night in Phnom Pen (sic) Cambodia. She was up late at night talking with a friend about the horrors of the country (Khmer Rouge), and the general 'strange' feeling that lay over the land... She and her friend both saw dark figures come out of the shadows and surround their beds.. They both felt an overwhelming fear, and they freaked out, closed their eyes, and screamed for a sleeping friend to turn on the light.

A long time ago, I was interested in Astral Projection.. One night in my sleep, I had a 'dream' where I was standing outside my room. But I was conscious of myself being asleep, and that I was outside my body, but NOT dreaming, actually in the physical space just outside my room... I thought, 'okay, I'm having an 'out of body' experience.. I decided to see if I could control it, and I started to move down the hallway.

Immediately, I FELT some "Thing" some awful, awful "Thing", coming up towards me from down stairs, from the room in my house that always gave you that 'itchy' feeling when you walked by at night... There was a pitch-black bathroom in there with mirrors that faced each other.

So.. the most awful horror I have ever experienced came over me, and I rushed back to my body and immediately I awoke. I awoke TERRIFIED. I could FEEL something behind me, just behind my bed... I hugged the covers over me and I lay there sweating and trembling... What I felt was that the "Thing", whatever it was, had been trying to 'steal' my body while I was outside of it.

It was the same thing you experienced... The feeling of a dark force, a 'demon', and it was without a doubt a unique kind of horror, something I have never experienced before or since...

I (also my sister) am not a follower of any religion, however, I DO believe that the Universe is full of things we cannot even begin to comprehend. I also think that 'consciousness' is something much more common than most people think.. Believing that there are 'demons', or entities that exist around is in dimensions unknown, for me doesn't have to lead towards a religion, it just leads towards a universe with more complex forms of 'consciousness' than we can currently comprehend or imagine.

Scientists today tell us there is a world of 'anti-matter' whatever that is. They also tell us that it looks like the universe is made up of over 70% Dark Matter, whatever THAT is.. and, they ALSO tell us that there are dimensions in the universe that we cannot see or comprehend..

In my opinion, there is a lot of room in today's best science for 'Angels and Demons'..

[Amorphos]

I know this feeling though in a different context, instead of a demon I felt a space/room as being completely evil. I have long been involved with people who practice ancient magics and with this event they were showing me how the mind can be brought to a place which reflects its state.

When moving between realms we always enter ‘the void’ [an empty space], I expect there are similar notions in ancient Chinese religions maybe even tao, I don’t know. Anyway there is a colleague talking to you as you enter the void and according to the direction you move in [or float as the case may be] takes the form of different emotional state. Down equals all things in the mind which seam ‘evil’, then up is the opposite, right is the future and left the past and their associations.

Back to the point though, when entering a trance state the mind can be brought to the same places experience in the void, in this case my colleague brought me to a place of absolute fear and evil simply by whispering incoherent sounds in a certain way with hints of terms containing evil connotations. the blackened room became incomprehensibly black [not like the emptiness of the void], and I felt all sorts of sensations though not as distinct as to think there was a devil in the room but more that there were evil forces.

The reasoning behind all of this, is to understand that the mind can encapsulate itself completely in a subjective and created environment. The black room does not really exist obviously, and the spirits/forces emanate from ones own mind even though they appear as coming from an external source.

that’s one theory lols, the other is that such evil exists outside of the mind and that we are simply connecting to it rather than manifesting it. However, considering that the mind can manifest people and places and indeed our everyday visual reality is a manifestation of our minds not of physical light etc etc, one can imagine that the mind can produce anything that would seam real to us in every sense the same as the reality we normally percieve!

edit

Having said all of that, noting that your ancestors had a similar experience, I would think its an ancestral spirit trying to contact you where ‘x’ [whatever it is] had a positive effect on your ancestors [who may have believed in such thing to some degree] but a negative experience on you. I would suggest that the ‘x’ is neither good nor bad but comes across differently in the subjective mind of the beholder.

Note that as we can manifest such effect in our minds, other people can too! …and in each others minds.
For me this kind of stuff goes on all the time on a more subtle level.


Hope that helps Zhuge!