Ew.
I don’t get migraine headaches but I get migraine auras. Some people describe them as a pretty light show but they are much weirder than that. It’s impossible to create an exact image of what it’s like but these two pictures show some of the effect. The view through the windshield shows the jagged scintillating rainbow effect. It isn’t static, it flows and changes size. The other picture, the one of the guy, shows a bit of the creepy empty blind spot that accompanies the first effect. My effect is always to the right side of my visual field.
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Here is the creepy part. The blind spot isn’t an obstructed blind spot…it’s a place where nothing exists. It makes visual gibberish out of the things it passes over. This is Oliver Sacks type material. Perhaps a quarter of my visual field isn’t just unworkable, it’s a negative which makes things not exist as my eyes change position.
Watching a movie, that actor has only half a face…convincingly. He walks away in a universe where people get along with half a body and one leg. At times, even knowing what’s happening it is scary…because it’s as if not only sight but long-established neurological common sense has vanished or been proved wrong.
Another example. I scan words on a page and it isn’t that the right half of the page is gone, the second half of each word is gone! The other half flickers in and out of existence. I try to transcribe the words and I know that each one is really longer but it’s very hard to remember how the second half of the word can exist. As I type, half of the word seems like the correct amount and adding to it seems peculiar.
Not just my eyes but part of my brain is tuned in to empty static. I find it distressing and I lay low and wait it out. It has happened when driving and I don’t trust my processing enough to keep going. I pull over and wait it out.
I have one right now, it inspired me to try to explain it. I’m not at all sure how effective my proofreading is, but I’m going to publish and come back later without the aura to see how well it worked.
1. Self Asserting
Like the articles on Tension Force and the balance of Progressive to Conservative, this is about the population pattern spread of personality types that defines the way a group behaves. Although it might seem like I’m simply being pro-self-transcendence, this isn’t a moralistic issue and there are unexpected outcomes. And while it clearly overlaps a teensy bit on the subject of right and left-wing politics it only has a solid connection to that out at the edges where the saints and sociopaths hang out. It’s hard to talk about this without paying the most attention to the extremes but the wide middle of this spectrum is in “normal” range. A healthy happy person probably has a good balance, but there’s more than one kind of happy you can be.
There are satisfactions that come from looking out for number 1 and the kind of people who make a point of only looking out for number 1 assume that these are the real and even ultimate satisfactions. Coincidentally, Donald Trump is an exaggerated archetype of this point of view. There are obviously rewards for self-assertion but self-transcendence on behalf of something you love can be a full time high, filling you with renewed energy. Only in people who are cartoonishly on one side of this spectrum or the other are these traits expressed as absolutes. Trump is cartoonishly self-asserting in the manner of a spoiled child. But self-assertion is more than short term self-indulgence, it also powers your serious goals and ambitions. It’s the oomph of aspiration. Gandhi and M.L.K. would have gotten nowhere without it. Any poor, hardworking kid who made something of themselves, has used this power. Actually Gandhi and MLK were well supplied with both impulses, it doesn’t HAVE to be just one or the other.
Here we start to encounter those unexpected outcomes. In fact, consider this: Have more of the horrors and tragedies of the human race come through self-asserting behavior or self-transcending behavior? Self-transcending can be beautiful and saintly but it also drove the selfless nazi and it drives the true believer ISIL volunteer. Extreme self-assertion might rob banks or investors. But for true horror and cruelty, self-transcendence is the big winner. Selfishness doesn’t generate armies of minions. There is no genocide without people who give up everything to kill whoever the great plan points to. Giving yourself wholly to a powerful cause is a transcendent experience and also, in the abstract, an amoral one. In MLK it was moral, but only because of the framework of that transcendence. Passionately pursuing a personal goal is also amoral. The internal values of the goal determine the good or ill.
The strongly self-asserting are often callously disinterested in what happens to anyone they don’t personally know and love. Dick Cheney for example only began giving a damn about gay and lesbian rights because his daughter came out. If she hadn’t, he never would have seen any point in supporting that position, after all, what was in it for him? Strong self asserters aren’t necessarily aggressive or intense but the bottom line important question for them is “How does this affect me?”
Freud & Jung relaxing with friends at a Turkish sauna during a psychoanalysts’ retreat , circa 1907
This graphic reads upward from the bottom. Remember that Emergence works like this: “More is different”. What causes the emergent thing? Critical mass. The famous tipping point. That each of the steps here did happen is almost self evident. But science backs me up that far. Calling them revolutions is sort arbitrary and brings some unwanted imagination baggage along. A revolution returns to its starting point. Since each of these developments is emergent and leads to the next one it might be more appropriate to call them Evolutions and imagine a spiral rather than parallel circles. The time taken for each level is also way smaller than the previous level so our spiral should have a wide bottom and thin as it rises.
Every one of these steps produced the next through arrival at its own critical mass. At that point, each was in effect, a solid platform for the next one to grow on. This little graphic shows unequivocally the growing complexity of whatever this system is that we are a part of.
Entropy is the dirge-like background music that we are always reminded is the true story about the universe. Everything is cooling off and falling apart and randomizing (certainly in my personal life, anyway).
But the people who tell the story about entropy and the people being told are each creations of anti-entropy. Syntropy.
Syntropy is “the tendency towards energy concentration, order, organization and life”
Maybe entropy is the 9 to 5 job of the Universe – but syntopy is the beloved hobby it hurries home to putter around with.
It’s obvious why women and men both have mixed feelings about make up.
Selfie stick in 1934 with actual stick
And a rather sweet mirror selfie from 1900
Also 1900
