Body is a social network.

Back in the late 90s, as part of my doctoral training at SUNY Buffalo, I did a psycho-oncology practicum at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute and was later briefly employed in their pain clinic as a clinical research assistant.

Naturally, in those days cancer was very much on my mind (as well as the interplay of pain and time perception).  It was back in those days that I finally dropped the hyphen of distinction from the notorious mind-body dichotomy: it became starkly self-evident to me that both words (body and mind) refer to one and the same system.

It was also around that very time that I harvested my first crop of conclusions from my readings of Eastern philosophies and one of these conclusions was the following: anything that is alive is also conscious.

Facebook, Twitter, email, chat, texting, social media, blogging.  What is this constant compulsion to share?  Must be the fear of remaining un-witnessed.

When “the body is but the foam of a wave” (as Dhammapada teaches), the mouth has nothing to do but to foam with words.

It’s always been like that.  What’s a haiku but a medieval tweet?!  Mind watches its own passing and mourns itself with verbal sentimentality.  Community through communication.

Pass your time in centrifugal peace, fellow eddy-in-a-stream.  Un-wind outward!  No swimming up this stream of consciousness.   No hoarding of water.

This constant communication-compulsion to rejoin the stream of “what is” is what makes this communal life-stream flow in the first place.  Pour out!

No One Makes Mistakes On Purpose (Sabotage Notwithstanding)

The phrase “to make a mistake” implies purposive, conscious, planned action.  That’s utterly inaccurate: there are no intentional mistakes, no one consciously sets out to fail.

When we fail on purpose, when we make a mistake by design, we are actually succeeding with some kind of covert plan.  Therefore, even an act of conscious sabotage isn’t a mistake (to you) even if takes the form of a mistake (to others).

Bottom-line: No one makes mistakes because no one ever makes a mistake on purpose (sabotage notwithstanding). 

Spin within a Spin within a Spin

A year – astronomically – is a spin of a celestial object around a center of gravity.  In our – Earthly – case, a year is, of course, a spin around the Sun.

As we yearn for stability and balance in our lives, we are zipping around the Sun at an orbital speed of 30 kilometers per second (that’s 108,000 kilometers per hour) – and not down some well-paved straight line, but on a perpetual curve, without any chance of ever getting off this mind-boggling ride!

Ponder this as well: a straight line is but a geometrical abstraction.  We live in the world of tremendous centripetal/ego-centric forces and inevitable curvatures. 

Know all and you will pardon all.

Thomas A’Kempis

This is a follow-up to my previous post Rediscovering Your Motivational Innocence.  As I see it, when you dig down to the motivational depths of all behavior, there is only one core motive: pursuit of wellbeing – we all move away from pain towards pleasure.  It is my firm belief that all conscious existence is lined up along this motivational vector.  The rest is just variations on the theme.  How we go about pursuing our well-being is pre-determined by the intricate interplay of nature and nurture. 

Some of us do a better job than others – that is when we compare people to people.  But any such comparison is a comparison of apples and oranges.  After all, as I have noted before, similarity isn’t sameness and everyone is unique.  The difference between how any two people go about pursuing their wellbeing has to do with the differences between their histories. 

We are all doing the best we can no matter how much our best pales in comparison with personal and social ideals.  Your core motive is always the pursuit of wellbeing.  Your effort is always the best that it can be at any given moment in time.  Motivationally innocent and perfectly imperfect, you have nothing to blame yourself for. This isn’t some neurolaw argument that “my brain + my past made me do it.”  No.  You are not hiding behind your history.  You are simply taking your psychological determinism into account in an attempt to accept reality as it is. 

ps:

I realize that you might bristle at this idea.  I wouldn’t be surprised if you did.  We’ve been culturally conditioned to judge.  So, we aren’t particularly keen on forgiveness.  But let’s be clear: I am not proposing a legal reform or a new code of ethics (after all, the goals of law and psychology aren’t necessarily aligned), just a a path of wellbeing.

Resources:

360 of Compassion  and Self-Acceptance  and Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda, Buddha 

Know all and you will pardon all.

Thomas A’Kempis

Guilt and/or shame leads to rumination and dwelling on the causes of what happened.  At a glance, this seems to be a potentially useful information-processing habit.  The problem, however, is that this post-mistake analysis is biased and the conclusion is typically foregone.

You have already decided that a) if you “made” the mistake, then, of course, it was your fault, and b) that the reason why you “made” the mistake is because you are flawed.  Let’s work on reversing this process in order to rediscover your motivational innocence and to learn to give yourself the benefit of the doubt.