I had an interesting conversation with a friend who visited yesterday, where she was talking about how she visualized herself after realizing how so much of her identity, was not hers at all. She essentially spoke of being a puppet, with strings attached to her limbs that would pull her this way and that, making her feel like she was moving and in control, but not actually guiding herself. Once she saw the strings, the illusion was broken and then the real trouble started, because at that point, she no longer knew who she was, sans the strings.
This visual connected with me and a lot of the things that I have discovered throughout my own life, as I realized quite early on how much of my own behavior was conditioned. The patterns I played were just simple response to stimulus, not a true reaction from within, including the emotional reactions. It is a difficult thing to describe and most will reject the proposition, because the ramifications are too immense, as it means losing oneself completely.
However, over the last almost two years from when I had a stroke, I have had to much more actively handle these things, as my own brain no longer automates these patterns, so I have to build them. For example, just after the stroke, I would essentially sit on the couch and stare until my wife would say something like "Our daughter needs lunch" and that would trigger me to ask, something like "What should I give her?" In time however, new patterns formed actively so that I am able to do all of what I need, without having to carry all of the baggage that comes along with it.
This is also a negative, because it means that while I build everything consciously, our unconscious has far more resources available that it inserts into our personal patterns to flesh them out. This means that when I actively build a new routine, it is missing a lot of the richness it would otherwise, as it doesn't benefit much from past experience like it used to. While this means that negative patterns aren't included, a lot of positive patterns garnered from years of experience are also omitted. Because of this, there is a lot of trial and error, but it ends up (if active) being better perhaps, once enough iterations have evolved.
This also makes my moods and reactions more volatile, as they aren't benefiting from the experiences of the past as heavily that had taught me more self-control over emotions. In time, I believe that I will handle them even better than I did, because I will be able to go forward without having all the weeds of the past filling my bags.
But, it is exhausting to go through this and it is a constant activation, meaning that my attention always has to be on, otherwise nothing happens. Essentially, if I don't actively engage my brain, I will just sit here blank, unmoving, thoughtless, except for whatever my brain is able to take in in the moment. I close my eyes and all that comes to mind is the scene I was looking when my eyes were open a moment before. I don't have to image that though, but if I don't then it is just a black room, with nothing in it, nothing emerging, unless I actively build something in that space.
The only way I have been able to describe the feeling of active building is by getting people to do a simple exercise and self-reflection. I give them a math problem, where I ask them something like "divide 147 by 3.6". Most people don't even try unless I urge them and as they go through the process, I ask them if they can feel their brain working. That is me all the time, but I am not solving math problems, I am just getting through a normal day, whether it be making a pot of coffee or delivering a training session - there is very little automatic pilot at any stage of the process.
The automatic pilot is like having a calculator in the mind that is taking inputs and running the equations in the background that will then be converted into a response or reaction to stimulus. Push that same work to the conscious mind and everything not only slows down, but there are going to be "human" errors of misunderstanding and omission, especially in the places where we don't have conscious awareness by default.
For example, we are programmed to register micro-expressions and actions in the unconscious mind that will elicit a response from our body, mind and emotions. However, when we have to actively look for these things, we are going to miss all the ones that we don't even know to look for consciously.
By the way, this is also one of the reasons I am so against children overusing technology and screens, as there are patterns of behavior in ourselves and others that are likely fundamental to learn, but are only learned through direct interaction. The screens will omit this from experience and people will not have the skills to develop a broad unconscious pool of resources to be able to negotiate life effectively. This is another post entirely and I would suspect that there are a few scientists out there working on exactly what the ramifications might be, but as someone who is essentially experiencing some of this now as an adult due to the stroke, I assume the future consequences are going to be dire.
Our patterns of behavior make and break us and if we don't have patterns that are suitable to our environment, we are going to continually fail. It is like dressing in winter gear in the summer, or wearing a bikini on a trek in sub-zero temperatures. Yet, we don't actively work at improving our suitability for what we have to face in the world, nor are we encouraged. If anything, we are actively encouraged and incentivized to not improve in these areas and instead taught to accept our flaws as something we should embrace, or blame others for - rather than take the responsibility that our patterns, regardless of whether we created them or not, are ours, as are the results they lead to.
As much as people want to improve their outcomes, few of us are actually forced into making new patters and instead, we build our identities around what we know, which is what we have always done. We are born into families and cultures that dictate how we view the world and our reactions to experience, thinking that this is what makes us who we are, without ever really having to explore if this is indeed the truth - at least the truth from the subjective form of human experience.
They say that life is a dance, that there is rhythm and flows that guide us and perhaps this is true. But, most of us feel that we are sitting at the piano playing the music that becomes our lives, yet if those strings are being pulled, we are not the player, we are the piano being played, making the sounds we are expected to make, based on the key strokes of another.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]