Comment by Forrest Curo on 7th mo. 3, 2015 at 7:01pm

It's a complex relation between body, emotions, thoughts -- and spirit. In the model of Kabbalah, these are conceived as four distinct 'worlds' -- but clearly what happens in one relates to whatever happens in the others.

On a physical level: The same neurotransmitter that makes for anger makes for fear, or for simple excitement, depending on what context a person is experiencing when he's injected with it.

Certainly the brain's circuits will tend to fire in the mode it's accustomed to firing in -- It will even learn to act in ways that trigger any strong emotion that's become 'like an itch' -- I don't really understand how this works; but Doc Fraud described the phenomenon as 'The Return of the Repressed' -- and I've certainly observed it at work in myself & others! [Something like 'smoker's lungs,' where after a month of healing the tissues may feel a strong craving for further irritation. ]

But the prime direction of influence is not downward, but up! Real causation happens in the world of spirit; and the worlds of physicality, emotion, and thinking follow suit like shadows of what happens there.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 7th mo. 3, 2015 at 7:21pm

Wait a minute! Maybe I do understand?

A scratch reduces the itch, but when feeling returns to the site, what it's feeling is still inflammation. After a month without smoking, a person's lungs have healed enough to restore feeling -- but what they're feeling is not good; and a cigarette has become his habitual response for that.

Neurons that have become accustomed to occasional stimulation from a certain firing pattern may be exhausted by a intense series of discharges... but after some interval with nothing happening, they become more sensitive.... and less picky about what they react to? If a neuron is part of a stable sort of 'loop', such a loop would have to be self-perpetuating in some way?

Not necessarily proving how this works -- but highly suggestive: Unlike what we used to believe, people form new neurons all the time. Unless these get incorporated into some new activity (preferably some task entirely unfamiliar to the person) they die.

Comment by Mike Shell on 7th mo. 5, 2015 at 10:29am

Thanks, Forrest.

In your first comment you write:

It's a complex relation between body, emotions, thoughts -- and spirit....

On a physical level: The same neurotransmitter that makes for anger makes for fear, or for simple excitement, depending on what context a person is experiencing when he's injected with it....

But the prime direction of influence is not downward, but up! Real causation happens in the world of spirit; and the worlds of physicality, emotion, and thinking follow suit like shadows of what happens there.

This is a common way of conceptualizing the relationships between what we believe we can know directly (body, emotions, thoughts) and what we believe we cannot know directly (spirit). An alternative view is that the former and the latter are not different realms but One.

In my post I wrote:

“Ego” or “self” is essential to human engagement with the world.  The human brain’s capacity for conscious observation of experience and for imagining and choosing among possibilities gives us the potential to act independently of the consequences to ourselves.

The catch is that we usually "forget" that we are temporary bits of consciousness in a changing mortal world. We imagine a separation between these incarnated "bits" and "the spiritual." An alternative view (what Buddhism calls remembering "original self") is that these "bits" are just that; not separate entities but sparks of the One.

Blessings,
Mike

Comment by Forrest Curo on 7th mo. 5, 2015 at 10:58am

The thing is, in this one realm there's a certain correspondence in how things will work at different levels. So what happens with the brain will (normally) have a similar causative structure to what happens spiritually.

Seeing how the brain operates doesn't 'explain' the way we think -- but it does suggest the patterns and qualities we see in what we do, think, feel -- (and intuit?)

Anyway, I think we do know spirit 'directly' -- but we don't recognize that it's a separate category, not something that can be explained by the physical, emotional, or mental factors it responds to, the things we better understand the words for.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 7th mo. 5, 2015 at 11:26am

We don't recognize the spiritual things we talk about because we confuse them with the physical, mental, and emotional words we try to 'explain' them by...?

Comment by Mike Shell on 7th mo. 6, 2015 at 8:23am

This is helpful for me, Forrest:

I think we do know spirit 'directly' -- but we don't recognize that it's a separate category, not something that can be explained by the physical, emotional, or mental factors it responds to, the things we better understand the words for.

We don't recognize the spiritual things we talk about because we confuse them with the physical, mental, and emotional words we try to 'explain' them by...?

Perhaps what I am doing is simply turning the model around and looking at it from the other side.

What we usually call “the spiritual” is “everything that is,” and we experience it directly, whether or not we are conscious of it or have metaphorical names for it.

The “physical, emotional, or mental factors” are that smaller realm of phenomena which our bodies experience through our bodies’ senses and the neurochemical interactions—and which our conscious minds label as “reality,” simply because this is what we can sense with those physical organs.

Put simply, my concern is to open awareness to what we cannot sense or name yet experience in profoundly direct ways.

Blessings,
Mike

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