Pain and Sensation
I read in the NYT about the connection between pain and emotion
The author the the NYT piece, Justin Wee, writes that his back pain was healed by Dr. John Sarno’s advice in his book, Healing Back Pain: The Mind Body Connection. It was a best seller in 1991. I have not read it, but am familiar with the concept that pain is driven by emotion. I can’t now recall where I got the information that 70% of pain is usually emotional, 30% physiological, but it was central to my releasing trigger points with a minimum of pain.
Esalen bodywork was different from east coast massage therapy, which imitated a medical procedure. Esalen was combining Asian mind with western mind from the very beginning, and in San Francisco, we were learning shiatsu and Swedish styles concurrently, incorporating the knowledge of energy meridians into western modalities.
One of the points in the NYT article was that the nerves aren’t functioning to just express intensity, they can turn pain on and off. One of the convincers in hypnosis is to increase a sensation with the suggestion that if you can make it increase, you can make it diminish. Training the client to focus enough to do this was the point of the hypnosis. It dramatically increases the ability to focus the attention, and then it’s a matter of emotional quality in the attention.
The psychologist I relied on most was not Jung, or even Joseph Henderson, rather it was Dr. Maurice Nicoll, and his lectures on the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. He was combining east and west. I was impressed by how he was able to make esoteric Christianity so accessible. It has one intention, which is achieving freedom by being under the fewest possible laws. This means the laws have to have very wide parameters. Perhaps the one with the widest parameters is the golden rule. It can replace all the others, but there is another which comes first, which is that within any communication the meaning is the response, and there is no other meaning. The impression that there is other meaning is in your head, not in the communication.
When we respond to somebody because of what’s in our head, we are increasingly confined to socializing with people who have the same things in their head as we do. This is why we see conspiracy theorists gather together. They think what is in their head means something because it went viral in thir reference group.
As difficult as it is to pay attention to the responses, instead of what’s in your head, it will eliminate a great deal of emotional pain from your life.
Consider lovers having a communication. Make it complicated, so that she is a married woman and he is a married man. Just not to each other. Right away there is a social and familial context, which in this example makes it wrong to the man, a religious conservative from Saudi Arabia. The woman is from Hawaii and has turquoise nails and a toe ring. He refers to the catalogue of shalts and shalt nots drilled into him from childhood. He tries to do what he desires but he is inside an electric fence. He gets a shock when his actions, or anticipated actions, do not match the inculcated religious values.
The alternative navigation system is right brained, and occurs before there is time for this comparison to guide the decision. The woman from Hawaii is influenced by Polynesian culture. Rachel Souerbry, in “What Was Sex Like in Ancient Hawaii,” writes:
Ancient Hawaiian sexual culture was very different from that of the intruding Westerners; plural relationships were considered normal, LGBTQ identities were accepted, and expressions of sexuality were intertwined with regularly used phrases for love, joy, and happiness.”
The structures in your head, that you refer to in order to guide your behavior or attitude toward others, can be learned and understood without being primary. A Hawaiian can learn about Wahhabism or any fundamentalist creed, and a Saudi can learn about the Hawaiian culture. But if your controlling system is not nature, then it is inhibitory. It does not initiate, it inhibits natural behavior.
“Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.” (William Blake)
Control from above is a dangerous illusion
All control from above has to do with inhibition of behavior initiated from below. This above and below is what is meant by masculine and feminine. All bodies are feminine because all matter is feminine. If it has mass and location it is matter and is in the feminine realm. In this state there is eternal time, because there is no alternative to this manifestation in the moment. It’s a done deal, like a measured electron.
Masculine is without location in time. Spirit does not materialize because if it does, it’s not spirit anymore. These two states are equivalent to the material body and the Qi body. The initial response in communication is between the Qi bodies, and this registers in the material bodies, and expresses there with more or less inhibition to the natural responses. So in a religion which requires adaptation to the template the God Man imposes the key concept is intervention in a process, as is true in allopathic medicine. You intervene in a disease process. The power of the Jedi is allowing the force to be directed in concert with the originating energy. It is the same as zen archery. The key concept is that the release of the arrow and its hitting the target exist in the same moment. It is the zen moment, when there was no inhibition to disturb the unfolding moment. What throws off the zen moment has translated from the Greek as sin. It means, to miss the mark. The corrective action, or repentance, was to think with a new mind. Shift hemispheres.
In the religion which is natural, the only meanings inside a communication are the responses of those involved, and the guiding principle is, move toward pleasure and away from pain. Pleasure is of different kinds, but sexual pleasure is foundational, for all subsequent pleasure will be affected by the nature of the first inhibitions. All attraction is eros, and governed by taboos. This is the top down action of the masculine when it is in proper relationship to the feminine. It governs with reason and intelligence, recognizing that the template of life is female, and its relationship to its creator is not as a master, but as an emmisary.
