My personal framework for how we individual humans become the way we do and how to alter that to become freer if we wish

I am going to expand on my own personal framework for how we individual humans become the way we do and how to alter that to become freer if we wish.  I doubt this expansion will be very persuasive, but it could help someone understand where I am coming from if they were interested. 

It all starts with what I call our experiencing and integrating mind (EIM).  When we are first born and cannot even differentiate ourselves from anything beyond ourselves, we are pure EIM.   We first learn that we are in ways separate from everything else as we intuitively learn that some things we do make our caregivers happy, sad, mad, etc, as well as intuitively learn that we have felt needs, which are sometimes at odds with our caregiver’s.  

In order to fit into our environment and best get our felt needs met our EIM develops emotions to guide us.  These emotions are solidified and backed up by what I call visceral beliefs, which are our EIMs interpretation and integration of what we are, how the world operates, and how we fit into our world.  Next, our EIM develops learned behaviors (LBs), which are its strategy (based upon its visceral beliefs and its unique tendencies and strengths and weakness as a human) for how best to act to get our felt needs met in the environment we find ourselves. 

Before proceeding I’d like to note that all of this will vary enormously from person to person, because we have a number of things that can vary greatly from person to person, as well as each person’s experience of the world obviously varies a lot.  Each person’s felt needs vary, especially in their relative strengths, and this is getting way ahead of myself but they also vary greatly at different times in the same person’s life.  A person’s natural tendencies from the outset vary greatly, such as to be timid or bold, and as previously mentioned a person’s natural strengths and weakness vary greatly.  When you compound all of these variances hardly anything can be prescribed as blanket statements for what is best for all people. 

At the same time, I’d suggest that having the framework to help think through things and come up with helpful solutions for individuals is very useful.  Otherwise we tend to become overwhelmed and poorly choose corrective actions and suggestions.  Additionally, I’d suggest we all have an intuitive understanding of something like the above framework, which we use to try to guide our own children, at least if we have the time and are willing to expend the effort and enter the unknowable enough to really contemplate what is best for a particular adored child of ours. 

Moving on, when we get to the age of reason, our EIM, which is what is doing the thinking and reasoning, mostly use reasoning to provide support for our emotions, visceral beliefs, learned behaviors, and the thinking and reasoning itself.  This thinking and reasoning has a large amount of variance from person to person as far as if it is a strength or weakness for them and in how much they tend to try to use it independently of whether it is a strength or weakness. 

Cobbled all together the above is what I refer to broadly as our unconsciously constructed framework (UCF) guided by our individually repetitive emotions and thinking/reasoning and manifested primarily as learned behaviors/default strategies for interacting with the world and ourselves.  This has all been constructed by our EIM to successfully operate in something like autopilot most of the time and not require the constant presence of our EIM.  This is because our EIM knows we are hopelessly inseparable from everything else and thus vulnerable to everything else, which is overwhelming for us to consider and others will often act as maliciously as needed to prevent us from making them consider it. 

As we fall in line with our surroundings these emotions and thinking/reasoning become blocks from experiencing reality as it is (with us all being hopelessly inseparable) and substitute our group’s story of what reality is.  If we are part of a group that operates similarly and compassionately enough or find such a group we often eke out a fairly satisfying existence.  However, if our own UCF cannot find and align with something larger than ourselves, we have some variety and intensity of angst and in today’s society that is labelled mental illness. 

The above framework for how we operate has come primarily from reflecting upon my own struggles that seemed like they would never dissipate.  However, they also try to encompass the things I have learned from consistent relationships with a few trusted mentors 20 to 50 years older than me, various types of therapy, what I believe to be 100-200 of the most remarkable stories of transformation in the transformed own words, as well as a lot of trying to help others and trying to grow up quickly enough to be useful to my kids and be a decent husband. 

It took me a very long time to become something like decently adjusted to life.  I did not really have friends growing up because people generally made me very uncomfortable.  The last few years of undergraduate college were somewhat of an exception because I drank heavily and took on a partying persona that was fairly easy and enjoyable for me.  But the drinking often got out of hand and even when it did not I drank heavily every day.  When my own angst was too much for the alcohol to get rid of for long at all I decided I needed to stop, but I could not get through the torment of a single day unaided and started taking lots of drugs for a short period of time.  Next came a decade of a lot of desperate searching anywhere and everywhere for a way to live without chemical numbing because my ability to earn a good living and continue to be married and even out of jail was undeniably at stake after getting caught and monitored closely but with a narrow path of freedom left open and encouraged.  This probably looked mostly successful from the outside, but not from the inside or to those nearest to me, feeling tormented and inevitably sharing that torment with others in various ways, mostly consistently and intensely with my wife. 

After about a decade of very often felt like futile searching without much relief from the torment no matter what I explored and tried, over the course of a year or so I realized that things were coalescing from all the different things I had tried into something that allowed me to feel peace and a sense of well-being more often than not and even quite a bit of non-chemically induced euphoria or feeling really good.  I was now generally able to choose a life for myself that was fair to others, useful in the big scheme of things, and let me be and feel like a decent husband, father, and friend.  In other words I was fairly well adjusted to life or I like to term it reconciled to life, and I have been able to maintain this for many years with it slowly getting even better over time. 

Now I still have struggles and am 50 pounds or more overweight and my eating is often still a mess.  However, from what I can tell, after starting out with 30 plus years of being much less happy and more poorly adjusted to life than most, I have gone to being much happier than most while being a pretty good husband, father, employee, and friend.  I have gone from feeling violated with any physical contact with my wife (even though she never treated me poorly), to having a very fulfilling and comfortable physical intimacy.  I have gone from not having any close friends (other than relatives) to having a lot and really enjoying them.  I have gone from being a real burden to my son, as I could not help but share my torment with him no matter how hard I tried (and I did try my hardest and knowing I could not added greatly to the torment) to mostly being a good guide, support, and companion. Fortunately, my daughter arrived late enough to miss most of my torment. 

I do not share all of these things to say my ideas are definitely right or better than someone else.  I do share them though because I like to know where and how someone’s ideas formed.  It seems to help me intuitively grasp what might be applicable and helpful to my own life and why. 

Having laid out the framework and a little of where it came from, I can turn to the exciting part, which is the countless ways I or others can use it to find freedom, wholeness, and connection that we all most crave.  The essence of that is always spending time with our experiencing and integrating mind (EIM) and allowing it to teach us how to create and engage in a life true to it, which is what we identify with as being our deepest self.  Simply spending time here is remarkable and learning to live from it is even better. 

The first and most important thing to remember is that our EIM created our perception of everything to begin with and created the blocks to itself to protect itself from a hostile (to it) world.  As such using those feelings and thoughts as bread crumbs to guide us back to where and why they formed, is one way.  (Bread crumbs metaphor compliments of Joshua Lawson when I was explaining some of my theories to him.)

Prayer, if praying for ways to have the strength and courage to act in the interest of this part of us that knows we are all connected and thus in the interests of the whole or marginalized as opposed to for our own safety or self-interests. 

Likewise taking actions to further the interests of the whole or marginalized as opposed to for our own safety or self-interests. 

Enjoying arts, including music and dance, which are generally meant to conjure up a recollection of our connectness.

Reflecting upon things important to us and why.  Spending time with the part of us that knows we are connected to things beyond us. 

Sharing more than superficially with trusted others.

Meditating to get beyond our thoughts and feelings to their source internally and beyond.

Reading sacred texts, which are sacred because they talk and point towards this source within and beyond and discuss the pitfalls and triumphs of finding it and living from it. 

Experiencing and Integrating Mind (EIM)

Comment to a FB friends comment to "Never let you head overthrow your heart."

I'd say the reverse is almost as true. We really cannot be whole with ourselves or anything else if we are not willing to do the work to sift through issues until our heart and head find agreement. The heart might need to slightly lead the way, but unless each treats the other as an indispensable and revered partner we are bound to be hiding or suppressing a big part of reality.

I personally go back and forth between believing my heart must take a slight lead or dominant role and thinking they ought to be equal revered partners of each other and then oddly I normally decide there is no actual difference between the two approaches. If both are treating the other as completely revered/trusted partners they will listen to the other until a consensus if found and that will be the nearest thing to truth for that situation and moment in time.

At this point another friend asked, "Perhaps the more significant question: Who is this “I” you speak of who goes back and forth between your head and your heart?"  To which I replied:

This probably will not make any sense to anyone else, but I view this “I” as my Experiencing and Integrating Mind (EIM) from which my thinking (head) and emotions/feelings (heart) originate. My thinking and emotions are the result of this deepest and oldest self (EIM) experiencing and trying to integrate itself into the world it experiences. 

Oddly, in order to fit into its surroundings and world that it intuitively knows it is hopelessly an inseparable part of our EIM has to adopt the collective paradigms of our clan and culture, which are mostly unconsciously agreed upon illusions. It starts to do this from a very young age with emotions, well before we develop any reliable thinking or reasoning, as we figure out what leads to feeling secure or scared and otherwise good or bad in our family/preschool/etc environment. Later we are taught how to reason and view things from our culture and clan’s perspective. Sometimes our emotions and/or reasoning do rebel against part or all of our culture’s perspective/paradigms but we are still stuck in them if we are fighting for or against them.

Ironically, as our original, oldest and deepest self (EIM) is experiencing and integrating ourselves into our world it is tragically writing itself mostly out of the script/picture. (I’m not a big fan of true self and false self lingo because if we are operating out of what is meant by our false self then that is what we are and what our reality is at that moment. At the same time the traditional meaning of the concepts of true self and false self might be helpful, compared to my own mumbo jumbo, if anyone is actually trying to understand what I am saying.) Basically what I am saying is our true self (EIM) creates our false self/ego in order to fit into the world we find ourselves.

It does this because this EIM/true self/image of God within each of us is the part of us that knows we are unavoidably a part of our surroundings and everything else. Being a part of something inescapably means we are vulnerable to the fate of that which we are a part. We intuitively, through our emotions bolstered by our reasoning, realize the last thing we want to be is vulnerable. As such, we hide and deny our true self in order to try to fit into our world safely. In the process, generally without realizing it, we try to make ourselves less vulnerable at the expense of others by shifting our inherent burden, which is the creation and living out of our false self. And since most of the world operates out of this paradigm any vulnerability/weakness exposed is generally a target to receive another’s burden, reinforcing the need to hide and deny our true self with its known vulnerability.

We generally do not try it unless we are out of options to hide and deny it, but everyone’s greatest yearning is to get to be with their own true self and experience the world through it. Since our true self has created our false self by developing emotions and thinking to try to fit into our world, the path back to our original/true self is to evaluate/contemplate these emotions and thoughts/concepts from their source within, our deepest/original/true self. And this process of contemplation/evaluation always consists of a gentle interplay between the heart (emotions) and head (reasoning) until they align into an epiphany of sorts from their common source within for at least that moment when that source or true/deepest/oldest/original self is experiencing and present/whole with its surroundings. This is of course commonly described as letting go, because it is the head helping the heart or the heart helping the head to let go of the block to our true self.

If we go yet deeper we actually find this “I” or true/deepest/original self vanishes into union with everything else (including the past and future) to the extent we are successful in letting go of our false self/ways of the flesh/ego/shell/emotional and mental blocks. To whatever extent we are successful in this letting go process at any given moment we will discover we have removed what keeps us separate or lost or broken (off) from complete union/communion. This is what Jesus was alluding to when he would talk about he and the Father being one and only doing his Father’s will, and is how Jesus was in this sense fully human and fully divine, after relinquishing all of his false self/ways of the flesh/ego/shell/emotional and mental blocks. It is also what the Buddha was alluding to when he said “Actions do exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not.” 

To the extent we are not using our emotional and mental faculties to protect ourselves and seek advantages for ourselves and our group we will be united with God (The Entirety). And we will feel united, which is bliss. We will still have this creating part of us within, but we will know it is a small indistinguishable part of The Creator, and we will accurately recognize this as our Source.

Please do not think I am implying I spend much of my time being very successful in this letting go process. Unconsciously adopting the opposite as the wise approach I started out as someone almost entirely and exclusively committed to emotional and mental blocks with their commonly resulting behaviors, including the frivolous pleasure seeking and worldly success since meaningful enjoyment only comes from some variety of union. Through this approach becoming repeatedly untenable and an enormous amount of luck/good fortune/grace, including great people wanting to be helpful and viable paths to a better way, I have stumbled into some mystical adventures that at times bring great clarity, when I successfully surrender to the letting go process. When considering the tremendous amount of grace I have received and how guarded I still am most of the time though my life is nothing to even consider bragging about.

Is humanity doomed

The thing that gives me some hope for humanities future is that we are geared more than anything else to survive and create the best living conditions possible. 

Generally in human history, often with some lag time, we have done what would or has achieved this goal best. When we were hunter and gatherer type people this skewed towards looking out for the tribe ahead of the individual because we had not yet conquered the earth and most could not survive well for even brief periods without the tribe. With the industrial revolution, innovation, and conquering the earth it swung towards emphasizing personal responsibility and rewards.

Now that we have conquered the earth and are wearing out/depleting the earth, not to mention found ways to quickly be able to obliterate ourselves, we are going to have to again shift towards a more collective approach to survive and create the best living conditions possible.

In a lot of ways WW1 and WW2 were probably the start of realizing this. And some changes were made in the aftermath as you have often mentioned. If you look at some of FDRs ideas of what would be needed to form a better society that did not require so much big and small conflict, there was also this understanding politically, at least from some. However, as the new great power in the world it was still in the US’s short term (say 50 years or less) interest to use that power primarily for its own prosperity rather than a global prosperity that might be more stable.

A similar dynamic was occurring at the individual level in the US. For those individuals who had a moderate amount of comfort and prosperity, they were more likely to keep that and increase it a little in the short term (here maybe 5-10 years) by focusing mostly on their own self interests, especially if they could mask that under ideologies and jargon that made it seem best for the whole of society.

However, as mentioned to start, we are quickly approaching a time when surviving and having an improving way of life is simply not going to be possible without a radical change in the way we view things and operate. Up to this point in time someone trying to prematurely start this better way of life has been marginalized in various ways. Soon though it will be the only way to do what we are most geared towards doing, and thus we might actually do it on a large scale.

Social responsibility or personal responsibility

I agree with all your observations on personal responsibility, such as:
1 -People don't like to admit their own failings,
2 - We've been led to believe that personal responsibility is what determines one's lot in life, w/o learning that personal responsibility only goes so far in a universe filled w/ events that one has no control over,
3 - We also fail to take into account that no one is independent. We ALL depend on the actions and accomplishments of others,
4 - People would rather insist that they were right, instead of actually BEING right, but being right also means that you have to be able to accept when you’re not. 
5- People insist that they're right when they're not because they haven't experienced enough success in their lives to be comfortable w/ accepting their failures also.

I would note though that while we have been led to believe and in some ways bought into personal responsibility being what determines one’s lot in life, we must not have bought into it too much if 1, 4, and 5 are accurate observations. It seems to be something we say we believe, vote like we believe, but apply more to others than ourselves. 

I only gave a partial answer previously when we were discussing personal and social responsibility, as I was being a little cantankerous insisting upon both with only partially explaining what I meant. I’ll see if I can do a little better job now, although only briefly (hopefully).

It seems to me people error mainly in thinking one precludes the other when in actuality complete personal responsibility and complete social responsibility are needed for an ideal community. 

It is our community’s social responsibility to tell us we must be productive or useful (in some way) member of that community and give us the opportunity (with as many options as possible) to actually do that. This includes giving us opportunities to admit and to the best of our ability make up for our mistakes or failures. However, as we all intuitively know there is no use in giving people unlimited chances until they seem to have understood, acknowledge, and done what they could to correct/make up for their mistakes. It would be irresponsible for the person and community to allow a member to continually extract resources from mistakes without demonstrating they have learned from past ones. 

Our personal responsibility is to be a useful or productive member of the community, to admit and make up for our mistakes to the best of our ability, and to learn/mature in the process to become more useful in our own direct contributions, our mentoring of other community members, and our administration of the community. 

I’d also suggest something like this is already practiced by a good portion of the privileged, amongst themselves. Of course a community should be considered the whole of a town or city at the very least and probably all of humanity or all of earth inhabitants.


After a friend asks me what I mean by "probably all of humanity."

I had done a better job than I often do with brevity and you aren’t going to let me get away with it? 

In that last sentence I was trying to very briefly define the scope of the community that owes this social responsibility to the individual in that community/society and that the individual owes the personal responsibility. Having further defined it like this taking it past all humans is problematic. 

We of course have a ton of different layers of communities within this largest community. For me examples would include my marriage, immediate family, extended family, friends, workplace, profession, neighborhood, my kid’s friend’s and families, school district, city, state, nation, etc. There would be nuances to each, but I think the basic dynamics I shared would apply to each, as well as how each of those layers or smaller communities would owe something akin to the personal responsibility to one another and the larger communities that encompass them.

Common Ground

FB comment on a friend's post asking if there is common ground between the far right and far left on the political spectrum. 

The common ground is buried so deep that few find it. A lot more are going to need to find it if we are going to survive as a human race without a nanny state or catastrophe that makes us mostly start over. I’ll again start with observations from recent discussions. We humans are social/connected creatures. Whether we can see it and admit it or not we are connected to each other and to our surroundings, which are connected to everything else. When we are born we cannot even distinguish that we are separate from our surroundings and caregivers. Soon we learn that things we do seem to make those around us happy, mad, sad, etc, and that our felt needs/desires are sometimes at odds with our caregiver’s. This is how we first learn that we are also in ways separate from everything else. In order to try to fit in and prosper we develop what I’ll call unconsciously constructed frameworks (UCF) for the way the world works and how we fit into it. This primarily forms with what I call visceral beliefs guiding our emotions very early in life, well before we develop any reliable thinking or reasoning, as we figure out what leads to feeling secure or scared and otherwise good or bad in our family/preschool/etc environment. Later we are taught how to reason and view things from our family’s/groups’s/culture’s perspective. Most of the time we are taught and naturally want to use our reasoning to justify and fortify our UCF, rather than to challenge it. This mostly static UCF of emotions and thinking/reasoning to support it are blocks to experiencing life as it actually is at any given moment. I should step back to try to explain why that is. The fact that we are hopelessly inseparable and dependant upon things beyond ourselves is obvious when we are very little, but no less true when we get older. We cannot tolerate the vulnerability that is an escapable part of being a part of things beyond us though, and adopting some variety of our group’s UCF with our own nuances is how we attempt to get around that. As long as we choose an acceptable role within the group’s UCF and do an adequate job of fulfilling that role, our group lets us fairly successfully avoid feeling the vulnerability of actual reality. Anthony De Mello does a great job of discussing this at length and how this is the illusion we live within. And how these emotions and thinking/reasoning/concepts are the attachments (blocks) we will have to let go of or give up if we are to awaken to Life. Alan Watts also discuses it as the illusion we must break free of, but he more often refers to it as seeing through the game of life. Humans have always operated primarily on this basis of substituting a shared religion/story/philosophy/collective UCF for actual reality. However, that has gotten much harder to do recently. Until recently different groups with different religions did not have much contact with each other in their daily lives, and it was thus easier to have everyone in the group operating from a fairly consistent perspective and get those who did not in line or do away with them. With the melting pot of the US and globalization though this has now become impossible without an authoritarian and overly invasive regime demanding and enforcing a collective UCF. Unfortunately, instead of recognizing this and moving towards reality by recognizing, admitting and letting go of our blocks/attachments/illusions, many are pushing harder and harder for their version of masking it. The common ground is that everyone is trying to avoid the vulnerability inherent in being a part of everything else. The far left’s approach is to get rid of vulnerability by making the world safer and easier than reality allows. The far rights approach is to act like they are not vulnerable and sufficiently rebuke anyone who displays vulnerability. This vulnerability inherent in Life is hard to come to grips with by itself and that becomes almost impossible when almost everyone is trying to avoid it and are inclined to try to suppress anything that makes them feel it. After a friend's comment If we were to briefly entertain my obnoxious psychobabble about us forming unconsciously constructed frameworks (UCFs) to try to best get our felt needs (including safety) met in the situations we find ourselves, and this takes the form of adopting ourgroup’s/culture’s paradigm(s) in order to avoid the felt vulnerability of realizing we are all part of the same thing and dependent upon one another, and this is guided by our emotions and adopted group’s reasonings, which are blocks/barriers to experiencing reality as it actually is, it might make sense for people to choose the neatly dressed confident clones to represent them. The fact that these people have made themselves into these neatly dressed clones is the proof they are the most committed to the paradigm and thus the least likely to push people past the felt safety of their barriers/blocks and experience the vulnerability of being a part of everything else.

Shame

Comment on friend's FB asking where does shame come from, it is ever beneficial and do some experience more of it than others or have more problems from it even with similar experiences.

We humans are social/connected creatures. Whether we can see it and admit it or not we are connected to each other and to our surroundings, which are connected to everything else.

When we are born we cannot even distinguish that we are separate from our surroundings and caregivers. Soon we learn that things we do seem to make those around us happy, mad, sad, etc, and that our felt needs/desires are sometimes at odds with our caregiver’s. This is how we first learn that we are also in ways separate from everything else.

Operating successfully shame is what teaches us (along with our caregivers) how to get our felt needs met in ways that are pleasing and beneficial to our surroundings because shame is the feeling we get when our felt needs are at odds with our surroundings.

Unfortunately, as parents and society we rarely have the time or patience or it seems wisdom or desire to model and teach our young how to get their felt needs met in ways that are pleasing and beneficial to others. In fact we often demonize/shame the felt needs in order to get our young (or really those of all ages) to do what we want them to do or to shield or disguise our own. Or with slightly better motives we might be teaching them to hide/suppress/deny their felt needs/vulnerabilities so that others cannot hurt or manipulate them as easily.

Tragically, this means that someone trying to get their felt needs met in ways that are pleasing and beneficial to others are often exploited and deeply hurt, and thus most learn well to keep them buried. At this point if we go back to my definition of shame – the feeling we get when our felt needs are at odds with others – we see how understandable it is to get paralyzed by this shame as something hopelessly defective within us that has these felt needs that keeps us at odds with our surroundings.

If we cannot live from these primordial felt needs, which are all related to being a connected and valuable/useful part of things beyond ourselves, we are cut off from the part of us that connects to things beyond us, and we have to find some way to numb that pain or distract ourselves from that pain/disconnection/emptiness, which typically seems to reinforce the defectiveness since we are rejecting this part of ourselves and often doing things we are less than proud of trying to suppress/hide/reject it.

One of the countless ways to try to numb and/or distract ourselves from this pain of being isolated from ourselves and everything else is adopting a religion that seems to validate our experience of being hopelessly defective due to our felt needs, which promises some solution either now or in an afterlife. As long as we are using the religion to try to get around doing the often excruciating, but just as rewarding, work of learning how to satisfy our inherent felt needs in ways beneficial to others, we will remain isolated and empty. At the same time, if we realize that in countless ways (one for each of us) we can get our felt needs met in ways beneficial to others, we will realize that was what all the great spiritual teachers have always been sharing and demonstrating.

Before moving on I want to clarify that it is not just because of our often subtlely hostile environment that we hide our felt needs/vulnerabilities. Unless we are taught and shown how to get our felt needs met in ways that are pleasing and beneficial to others, we will naturally try the easiest and safest ways to satisfy them without nearly enough regard for whether that is useful or even fair to others.

It probably goes without saying but most of the felt needs part of the above is biological/nature and most of the learning how to get them met in beneficial ways for others, as well as having them shunned and demonized is primarily environmental/nurture.

The environmental obviously varies from person to person as they experience the world, but I’d guess the felt needs vary almost as much in their flavor and intensity from person to person. Beyond that some people are inherently much more sensitive to feeling hurt or threatened. Further variation between people occurs in how people are willing and able to sort through things to come to some resolution and new path forward. Some are much more susceptible to getting stuck in thoughts or feelings and forever being crippled by them.

Edit

Consciousness - Comment on an article

A friend posted the following article on FB and solicited thoughts. 

https://www.sciencealert.com/research-finds-it-might-not-be-consciousness-that-drives-the-human-mind

From my own perspective I do not think they are really saying anything new, but I think, like almost everyone with any big idea that everything is supposed to fit within or be explained by, they take it too far. I think they are observing from their own professional paradigm what is the proper understanding of “it is all Grace” in Christianity, or the crux of Taoism, or really any religion or philosophy has its concept for it. Freud and Jung, of course called it the unconscious, and said it was almost completely in control of things. I think what they are saying is mostly correct, but they take it too far. The best example of this is, “The personal narrative exists in parallel with our personal awareness, but the latter has no influence over the former.” At the absolute least personal awareness should be viewed as they view free will and personal responsibility later in the article, as something used by the “non-conscious” as part of a personal narrative. So at the absolute least, this personal awareness would have a function, which they deny when they compare it to a rainbow that has no function at all. When considering the possibilities of what is the least in function and meaning to ascribe to this personal awareness/consciousness they are discussing, I’d go further and say that the least is that even this personal awareness/consciousness is a tool used by the non-conscious to refine or hone the personal narrative and itself, the non-conscious. This is actually much more than the absolute least I mention above because, even while conceding it is under the dominion and thus only used by the non-conscious for its own ends, it modifies and refines that non-conscious. The personal awareness of the non-conscious ultimately being in control of even it and using it as needed and desired to bring about it’s own objectives, still changes that non-conscious and its personal narrative and thus how we feel, think, and act, or in other words relate to ourselves and the world we find ourselves. While initially introducing it as the least that can accurately be ascribed to personal awareness, I believe it to also be the accurate function and meaning to give it. And in those broad brushes I like to use, I’d say getting to that is the middle way and function of all religion and philosophy. Getting there changes everything and makes this personal awareness a great influence on the non-conscious, even as it stays under the ultimate dominion of the non-conscious. I continue after a friend asks why we do not use our reasoning to be more rational.   I’ll start with an observation from another recent discussion. We humans are social/connected creatures. Whether we can see it and admit it or not we are connected to each other and to our surroundings, which are connected to everything else.  When we are born we cannot even distinguish that we are separate from our surroundings and caregivers. Soon we learn that things we do seem to make those around us happy, mad, sad, etc, and that our felt needs/desires are sometimes at odds with our caregiver’s. This is how we first learn that we are also in ways separate from everything else. In order to find our place in this world we develop what I’ll call unconsciously constructed frameworks (UCF) for the way the world works and how we fit into it. This primarily forms with what I call visceral beliefs guiding our emotions very early in life, well before we develop any reliable thinking or reasoning, as we figure out what leads to feeling secure or scared and otherwise good or bad in our family/preschool/etc environment. Later we are taught how to reason and view things from our family’s/groups’s/culture’s perspective. Most of the time we are taught and naturally want to use our reasoning to justify and fortify our UCF, rather than to challenge it. I’ll note here though that the elite educate their children in exclusive boarding schools that do require constant reassessment and modification of their UCFs, which is what I think we’d agree is desirable. These boarding schools also demand civility and thinking of things from a collective and big picture perspective, even while they allow/demand the students to formulate their own perspective and regularly defend and modify it. Those classes less than the elite probably never demanded this regular reassessment, defending and modifying, but they used to always demand a collective perspective – benefiting the family/group/culture. Starting with the boomers as parents we seemed to even lose a lot of that. Unknowingly this meant that our primordial felt needs, which all have to do with being a connected and valuable part of things beyond us, could not hoped to be satisfied. I do not know if the elite were wise enough to do this on purpose, but it turned us into consumers looking for anything and everything to futilely try to satisfy, suppress, deny, avoid, etc, and distract ourselves from these felt needs that cannot be met without being a connected and valuable part of something beyond us. This consumerism also includes looking for and trying to adopt new ideologies for the problem and solution, and we generally get stuck fighting over which pure ideology is best or to implement our own preferred ideology, which keeps us blinded to the only fundamental truth there is, that we are all hopelessly inseparable. This results in the elite generally being pragmatists, while everyone else is at each other’s throats and fighting over ideologies, which are not allowed to be questioned or when they are questioned a new rigid ideology is adopted. Worse yet, we rarely even try to actually apply these rigid ideologies to our own lives. Instead we seem to be operating under the false assumption we need to successfully get our ideology implemented for all and then it will be easy or we will naturally follow it. Simplified the solution seems to me to be to find/demand a community that allows/encourages this regular reassessment of our UCF by expecting its members to accept and try to rectify the natural consequences of their errant actions while celebrating doing that, and where that community also teaches and celebrates satisfying our felt needs in ways pleasing and beneficial to one another. However, I do not think this can actually be a formalized community because the rules and hierarchy of any formalized community will prevent the continual maturing of its leadership and members. I believe it will have to be an informal community of individuals maturing as they reassess their UCFs, learn how to meet their felt needs in ways beneficial for others, and then patiently and generously demand, coax, encourage, etc, those they choose to be in relationships with to do the same. If we as a human race are going to survive without a catastrophe and learn and better way, that is my guess for how it will probably have to occur. We are of course running out of time, but that is generally what it takes for an individual or a society to actual reassess at a deep enough level to create a new and better way.

Mental Illness

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke Good stuff there.  If I had one wish, unfortunately I’d probably use it on something selfish, but a top contender would be that those struggling with mental health issues (including substance abuse problems) would realize that the root of their issue is that they have intuitively sensed answers they could not live for various reasons. Probably the two main reasons being they did not have a framework to put the answers into and whatever their community and surroundings were are not ready for that answer. And it definitely turns into a balancing act, finding a framework to put the answers into in order to live them without being paralyzed unless or until we find that framework or unfairly demanding we get to live what we think is our (or the) answer in a way that prevents others from equally being on the same type of journey. Another facet of this is that labeling anyone discontent with the status quo enough that they are having a hard time fitting themselves into it as mentally ill is a brilliant way to silence or at least marginalize our modern day prophets before they can get a head of steam and be dangerous to those in power benefiting from the status quo.

Sovereignty

The Father is the Entirety (including eternity in both directions). Jesus is The Way to the Father or being one with the Entirety. The Holy (whol-ing) Spirit is our innate guide to The Way to be one with the Father, which includes eternal life since we are joining the eternal Father. 

Viewed in this way it is accurate or legitimate to say God is sovereign over all because He is All. However, people (and their theologies) intuitively realize that becoming a part of it all means we are vulnerable to that which we are a part, which is of course completely overwhelming. As such, our theologies (personal and institutional) try to give God an intervening sovereignty that is not accurate or defensible when soberly examined.

In other words in exchange for trying to meet God in our weakness/vulnerability/neediness (the only place He can be found), we try to give Him the attributes required to make that seem possibly safe or wise. In reality when doing this we are limiting our experience of Him, which is the only way to actually know any of Him. This can normally be easily seen by how we subtly or overtly want favor/perks or a preferred status from surrendering/accepting/embracing God. The only perk possible from knowing God is becoming one with Everything (Him). This is indescribably wonderful, but does not include any intervening or alterations to our material world. However, it does change how we feel, think and then act and how those we interact with feel, think and then act, which has the potential to change everything.

And it is all Grace because all we are offering or can ever offer to receive this union and eternal life is our surrender to our individual weakness/neediness/vulnerability and thus need for it. Now to the extent we actually do this and join the Father and his ways, we will truly be a part of something all powerful and all good and we will know this and feel this. Unfortunately, we will still probably confuse how that came about and try to sustain in or re-discover it without the personal weakness/neediness/vulnerability.

Edit

Is Morality Relative?

I think you may be incorrect, maybe because you are assuming we are each (as individuals or groups) separate from everything else. Even if morality is completely relative, if we realize we are all part of the same thing and hopelessly connected to everything else I think we would want the morality of Jesus or the core of any great religion. I am not necessarily saying that all morality is relative, but I am saying the problem is not viewing it as relative. The problem is not seeing our connection to everything else and being willing to set up our society accordingly and then act accordingly. Wouldn’t we then mostly set up our society and want to act based upon treating others as we would like to be treated because that is how we would like to be treated and the world we would like to live in. After requiring everyone (and everything) to be treated with dignity and value there would be some negotiated tradeoffs, such as, between freedom and security, between the rewards for hard/dangerous/undesirable work on other behalf of others and treating everyone equally, etc. Now if we did not realize we were each connected to everything else and we thought morality was relative and we were in a position to be able to do so we would likely act as you suggest. ... It is interesting isn’t it? Those who seemed to honestly believe that admitting morality is relative (or arbitrary) would lead to chaos and all sorts of repugnant things actually do so because (without knowing it) they demand this arbitrariness or relative standard of morality for themselves by defining their God and his morality, often including lots of favorable exceptions or reprieves for themselves, the in-crowd. ... Right, saying morality is not arbitrary, especially when emphasizing a personal relationship and guidance, is actually the way to have it be arbitrary for the individual. Very convenient. ... But I guess I think you are right in that formulating and refusing to compromise from some ideologically pure way (rhetoric against arbitrariness) is what has kept people from actually coming together to realize their commonality and find good (arbitrarily agreed upon) solutions, even if those solutions are not perfect because none are. ... Being a part of things greater than ourself including the incredibly large and complex universe does lead to wonder/awe, which leads to our benevolent thoughts, feelings, and actions. It also leads to realizing (or trying to deny) we are a vulnerable part of things beyond us, which leads to all of our objectionable thoughts, feelings, and actions. ...

Fears, Resentments, and Conceptions

I’ve enjoyed pondering this since the only place to do that is in the awe and mystery, which is a great place to hang out. 

Getting to that awe and mystery happens to the extent I allow myself to simply be a part of it all. Part of that is getting past my fears and resentments, which for legitimate and illegitimate reasons say it is not safe or wise to be a part of it all, starting with my immediate surroundings.

These fears and resentments are of course what Christianity tries to get us to let go of with its focus on faith and forgiveness, as well as among what Buddhism would label attachments and also pinpoint as barriers to knowing (from experiencing) union with everything else. Until I can get past the fears and resentments, at least for periods of time, I will be trying to figure out ways to be safe and not experience more of the hurts that led to the fears and resentments and uncertainty that leads to fear, which together generate the worldly power structures that cause unnecessary suffering and keep us focused on having an advantageous position in the power structure rather than focusing on being a benevolent part of our surroundings.

To get past our fears and resentments most of us need safe times, ideally with safe people, to discover and explore what they actually are, and then also the courage/faith to act benevolently in spite of them and often in direct contradiction of them.

Buddhism correctly adds all conceptions, such as what we are, the world and its parts are, and God is, as attachments that keep us from this awe and mystery. Christianity does the same by telling us not to judge. Avoiding these types of attachments is important because as long as we are attached to our conceptions of things we will forever be trying to fit our experience of the world into these conceptions with resulting judgments. The practical effect of this is we will miss out on actually experiencing our world (and the awe and mystery involved) while we try to fit it into our (normally adopted) conceptions of how it is supposed to be.

I am not advocating forever avoiding having conceptions/judgments of how things are or ought to be. I am suggesting we need to find ways to suspend them to allow a deeper reality to consistently mold these conceptions/judgments, which is what I think Aristotle meant when he said, “educating the mind without the heart is no education at all.”

...

I worry I might have given the wrong impression when I said we need the courage/faith to act benevolently in spite of our fears and resentments and often in direct contradiction of them. Before we have found much of the awe we are generally acting blindly and part of this can wisely be guided by acting benevolently in the opposite direction of our resentments and fears. However, this is not a long term solution because it will leave us miserable, which we will eventually (even if inadvertently) share with others. The only long term solution is to prioritize finding, spending time with, and being guided by the awe.

Knowing the awe will be what is left when we let go of our attachments (fears, resentments, conceptions) and allow ourselves to be simply a part of it all, as it is and guided by this awe, that is the faith that heals and moves proverbial mountains.

Beyond the fact that being guided by acting against our fears and resentments will make/keep us miserable, which we will inevitably share with others, doing so will keep us enslaved to them - fighting them in ourselves and everyone else. This is actually a foundational pillar for our objectionable worldly ways and resulting power structures. As such those beholden to those power structures must keep us focused on and guided by our fears and resentments in order to maintain them. They also must try to crush those who would try to free/save themselves and others. It is precisely the opposite of the love Jesus describes or the ways of the Spirit Paul discusses, which is actually finding and being guided by the awe underneath and before the fears, resentments, and resulting conceptions/judgments.

Being Ordinary

Most suffering is only felt as suffering because we are trying to avoid being simply a part of it all, and experiencing the vulnerability of that. We demand more than that, which causes our separateness, brokenness (from everything else), incompleteness. When we really accept our place as a run of the mill part of everything else, we realize the things we once felt as suffering are actually the bonds to everything else and feel like connectedness, wholeness, oneness, and being saved even when objectively negative things occur.

In an odd sort of way the suffering from demanding our own way is our and God's friend because it is often the suffering that ends up making us surrender to just being an ordinary part of it all.

Entirety

Could it be that God is a part of each part of it all and we are really supposed to honor it all, moment to moment? Wouldn’t that be what love actually looked like and as beautiful as any other conception, as well as consistent with all the different ways Jesus described his path to becoming one with the Father?  Wouldn’t it actually be a lot more beautiful (like a God of Love) than a God that wanted us to seek him in ways that created divisions and strife?

Community

I’ll start off saying that it takes tremendous bravery/courage/faith (whatever term you prefer) to continue to seek authentic relationships after being hurt by manipulative ones, whether that is within a formal church setting or not. In other words it takes great faith to continue to pursue Jesus’ path to the Father (aka wholeness with oneself and everything else, which is the crux of the Sermon on the Mount) inside a church or outside. Our defensiveness and lashing out at others comes from the parts of ourselves we have not yet been successful reconciling to this path.

That being said, I am not sure everyone here that seems to think they are so at odds are actually in disagreement nearly as much as they think. There are many churches that (often seem way too diluted to many) are a great place to meet unpretentious fairly safe people who are genuinely caring and want a wholesome type of friendship/community. And many of those churches have leaders who are sufficiently humble or just like the comfort of sermonizing and not digging to deep into their flocks personal lives, that those wholesome friendships can and do develop that are fulfilling and life supporting.

Generally the problems arise when the leaders or flock (both are just as guilty) make some idealized conception of the church (and rules for how things ought to be done to bring about that idealized conception) the focus because invariably they are each trying to create a safe environment so they do not have to hide parts of themselves – become whole with themselves and everything else. Without realizing it they are trying to figure out a way to make actual faith unnecessary by joining or creating a group that is ultra safe, and tragically instead create a group that rejects most of themselves, each other, and life/reality.

So these fairly safe and unpretentious people we desperately need in order to help support us on our journey of becoming whole with all parts of ourselves and everything else (aka Jesus’s path to the Father) can be found within traditional churches and without, although they are fairly rare both places because they have to being doing the same thing and having some success at it or they will be stuck in wordly ways of rejecting the deeper vulnerable parts of themselves and everybody else.

Fitting in

I can relate (to not feeling like I fit in) but I was probably much more extreme, and of course I am not saying any of this necessarily applies to you. I really did not have friends K-12. For example I went home for lunch every day K-12 to avoid the pain of being obviously alone. Actually being alone was not that bad, just somewhat lonely rather than very painfully alone when in a group. When I was 16yo though I would drive 80 miles many, if not most, weekends to hang out with cousins 4-6 years older. Before that it was mainly just a younger brother and dogs that I could connect with.

The first couple years of undergrad I lived with one of those cousins and hung out with his friends and developed a hard drinking entertaining people persona and carried that with me to another undergrad and for the first time kind of had my own friends who mostly seemed to enjoy me except when I went way too far, which was not uncommon. Basically, I think I am saying I developed a persona/role/ego that was capable of without too much discomfort hanging out in groups, about a decade or two after most. While this ego/role/persona is something we ideally overcome to a big extent to allow authentic wholeness internally and at the same time with everything else, it was a huge step for me to finally develop a workable form of it.

Unfortunately, I have found that all groups demand everyone assume a role, even if that role is to rebel in various ways against that group. They also have something like stereotypes about themselves and their members you are not supposed to buck too much. In this way the group can have predictability so members feel secure if they follow their role, and this security is traditionally one of the main reasons people want to be in a group. So today, I am OK assuming a variety of roles in a variety of groups, but experience much of it as a façade, and I do not have much desire to spend much of my time like that. Fortunately, most of the time today I seem to be able to connect at a deeper level (than the façade) with almost anyone when one on one (or in very small groups dedicated to moving past the façade), and that is how I choose to spend most of my free time, when I can find anyone interested. 

Brief FB comment

Yes, most believe what they need to based upon their experiences/"life education" and make scripture support that.  Realizing this can be a great beginning for the freedom you mention, not to mention much closer alignment with the actual message from the author of the scripture who is writing from at least a glimpse of of that freedom.

Free will

One of the most interesting aspects of this Susan Blackmore talk (to me) is that she seems to think that if we gave up on the idea that we have free will that we would end up acting much more meek and poor in spirit as Jesus suggested we should or with much less attachment to things, including ideas and concepts, as the Buddha suggested we should. She does not explicitly go to this, but if you view it from a philosophical perspective I think it is where she is headed. And as counterintuitive as that seems (to a red blooded American) I think she might be on to something.

I personally think we have a tiny amount of free will, probably about 0.1-1% of what we have generally been taught we have, and even at those times it is primarily a choice to embrace or reject/fight reality. Even that amount of free will though when exercised changes everything downstream from it and used over a lifetime changes plenty. Most will not even entertain the notion of us having much less free will than we have been taught we have because they think that would mean we should not punish others for their actions (and they really should forgive others).

In a way it does mean we should not punish people for their actions but it does not mean we should not impose consequences for their actions. The consequences would just be much better tailored to actually changing their behavior to make them a safe and responsible person to have in society rather than punishing them, and if consequences could not make them safe for society they might still need to have some sort of humane sequestering.

At this point we should be honest and admit wherever we draw lines between safety and liberty the line is arbitrary and favors one or the other. And we should always error on the side of liberty because only the side of liberty leads individually and collectively to progress and a sense of well-being.