Object relations in animal exploitation part 1

I am going to use parts of the following essay as it relates to animal exploitation and my recent posts regarding the self-other:

http://www.psych-culture.com/docs/rk-zizek.html


According to Slavoj Zizek, the fundamental level of ideology is that of an "(unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality”. Norman O. Brown's writings on culture and fantasy in Life against Death: the Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) allow us to expand upon Zizek's theory of ideology. Freud believed that anything arising from within that seeks to become conscious must try to "transform itself into external perceptions."


The unconscious battle for existence/survival between the societal self and the authentic self is played out through projected/constructed ‘realities’ – containers and coliseums that we and animal others appear to operate in.


Repressed impulses must first "find real objects in the external world and attach themselves to real objects before their nature can become manifest to the subject."


Animals become scapegoats - containers of envy, guilt, and inevitably anger…. introjected into the self at an early age (by adults)and then projected out into the world, to be *reacted to* by the self. It is an attachment by way of early dependency/identity survival needs.


Traditionally, psychoanalysis studies and treats individuals within the clinical situation. Brown proposes another method for studying and treating the subject based on looking outward to observe how desires, conflicts and fantasies are projected into cultural objects. Ideologies from this perspective constitute "containers" for shared fantasies; cognitive structures that allow members of society to project their fantasies into reality.


Parents/adults pass on the societal ideologies (of animal exploitation) into the children much like a drug being introduced into the womb. The self, with structural ties to the original foundation of *Being* reacts to this toxin with a protective layer in order to keep its own life-supporting (post-birth) gestation going. The societal self, defensively constructed, is *born*. This is the first true splitting within the self that formulates the 'other' of which the conflict is projected onto the outside world.


How may we account for the structure and shape of particular ideologies, and the passion with which they are embraced? Whereas Lacanian theorists view the mind as a product of the symbolic order, Brown seeks to explain the nature and shape of the symbolic order itself. Brown states that culture represents a set of "projections of the repressed unconscious. Culture exists in order to allow human beings to "project the infantile complexes into concrete reality, where they can be seen and mastered."

There is a symbiotic relationship where one (mind) does not seem to precede the other(society). The self is ‘by its nature’ propagated by social relations, yet has an underlying infrastructure *prior* to cultural fertilization. This “I” infrastructure is socially wired for the parent-child (secondary) gestation, but also has roots in the ‘Being/nothing/becoming’ foundation (originating from the Big Bang), which also organizes its faculties to live in the world. This foundation is part of the ‘infantile complexes’ and becomes part of the battle for existence (apart from cultural impositions), to be ‘seen and mastered’. Animals become stand-ins in this battle.

The concept of transference grows out of the clinical situation. According to psychoanalyst Herman Nunberg, "Transference is a projection." The patient's inner and unconscious relations with his first libidinal objects, Nunberg says, are externalized. The patient displaces emotions belonging to an unconscious representation of a repressed object to a "mental representation of an object in the external world."

As in recent posts, born out of fear of annihilation, the societal self confines the authentic self(and its ties to animals in terms of unconditional love), and goes on to *match* the cultural self, as indoctrinated by the parents and supported by the rest of outer society (itself a collective projection of this secondary gestational battle).The societal self *dominates* and retains/fixates on a sense of self/oneness that mirrors the first libidinal ties: sexuality –as- orality. Ingesting *as and equal* to existence, this is mastery via consumerism. Animals and Nature representing (dominance and securing the ‘breast’ as the way for the “I” to be in the world).

I will continue to utlize this essay in part 2, but right now will do a bit of summarizing/unifying/forshadowing :

The consumerist (oral fixation) of the infant relation with the parent is projected out onto the world in the form of consumer ideology (with devastating effects upon nature). This ideology, constructed materially and socially, is transferred back into generations of infants (via parents) which in turn get stuck the the oral consumer level of development (thus mirroring/completing the circuit).
Attempts to individuate from the dependency of the ideologically -constructed 'parental' mass producing culture occurs by way of 'local', 'organic', 'sustainable' 'hunting' etc. Yet these efforts retain the parental/societal ideology of 'others' as exploitable resources/parts (thus continuing the unresolved inner conflict). The pseudo-oneness and separateness experienced in the 'outside world' belies the false individuation, and is part of the fantasy structured around defending against experiencing the earliest fear issues of loss. in my view, I am not ready to commit to the view that society is merely a product or effect of the mind based on inner mechanisms and dynamics encountered through others. Nor an i ready to say that the mind is only a collective construct/imprinting of the surrounding culture. The mind is not a machine driven by material impulses seeking their own pleasure of gratification. It seeks relatedness as an end in itself. Psychoanalytic structures serve as a functioning 'tool' of Being, not the culmination of Being itself. It serves as a vehicle for the "I" of self to evolve - at times alongside nonhuman others. It can be a tool to expand upon a current situation's creative possibilities embedded from the original Big Bang. The procreation possibilities of human beings who grasp their finitude in it's fullest immediacy will counter the fears of annihilation :(the death object is the mirror-yet misguided 'opposite' of finitude's object) and end the deaths of innocent nonhuman beings whom these fear/envies are acted upon in pathological ways. The death/destruction must be grasped as attempts towards life affirmation, however counter they are to this end (in actuality). More constructive ways to meet these life forces must be forged.(More on this later.) If all of this seems rather human-centric, the goal is to separate our needs and get them met without exploiting others. At the current rate, the world is becoming more diseased from our pathologies, and we need to find our foundation with the original Being -from-Nothing again for the benefit of all.

The Hunt for the True Self.

The title of this post is meant to be viewed in both ways. The 'true' self is in the hunt to find and actualize itself in the world, while the false self looks to kill any chance of that happening.
Below are some descriptions from someone who hunts. This first one sounds very much like a description I gave a few posts back about getting ‘lost/disorientated’ . It gives a picture of the ‘bridge’ that I will try and build between :
1-internal (psychological) structures of the mind.
2- How the mind is inter-dependent with a larger (mirroring) structure.
3- How this relationship can be looked at psychoanalytically for purposes of seeing the barriers to authentic self development.
4- How the original ‘big-bang’ relationship between being and nothing reverberates through this.
5- How the societal mind-container has contributed to obscuring the original foundational relationship (and its creative possibilities).
6- How nonhuman animals have been incorporated into the ‘repression’ or split between humans and their ontological, cosmological foundation/possibilities.
I will try and cover some of Freud’s ‘Death Instinct’ as it pertains to an attempt by the mind to approximate the role of finitude in creativity and participation with the ‘big bang’ potentiality for this planet. (All of these notes are subject to subsequent refining).
Let’s get started with the hunter’s account,(slightly re-worded to avoid 'copyright'infringement). It does not itself pertain immediately to that ‘sport’, but just his personal contact :

.When I got my driver’s license I would travel to state property and make an effort to get lost on purpose – one time I got so lost that a pheasant had to point me in the right direction. When he flushed out from the brush my eyes instinctively followed and I saw the sun’s reflection off the windshield of my car.”.

My interpretation:

• Getting his drivers license (growing teen, separating oneself from parent in terms of identity, and using car as a ‘vehicle’ to create distance and self-propel).Also, the 'vehicle' is often a symbol of mode, a means to bring forth something.
• “Getting lost on purpose”, while seemingly a contradiction, became the vehicle of the authentic self inside to usurp the grip of the habituated ways of being grounded in the world (fostered in part by parental/societal upbringing).
• This disorientation gave way to a recognizable, *new orientation* on a more fundamental, ‘natural’ ground and relationship.
• This new ground provided a sense of timeless union much like we might imagine animals occupying. It felt like a placement within ‘Big Nature’, standing before a great power as well as a shared affinity with it. Being a part of the bigness prevented one from feeling like an insignificant drop in the larger ocean.
• The pheasant’s gesture, while able to be interpreted as an anthropomorphic projection, served to represent the large power’s ability to provide (the right) direction and reassurance that one would find his way.
• The bird guided his gaze (instinctively) to the sun, which represents life, warmth, and light. That it was a ‘reflection’ frames the encounter as a mirroring of oneself and the heavenly light, the ‘windshield’ being the eyes to the soul.
• The encounter is a lived metaphor for a phase of development between parent (Big Nature) and child, where the union of (little)self and (big)other is an ideal, nurturing oneness, yet given to the process of individuation and direction.

The second part:

“...I don’t know any hunter that doesn’t thrill at being successful – after all we are predators and being successful means survival. Of course it’s named hunting because you aren’t always successful. If I knew before hand that every hunt would result in a big buck I probably wouldn’t do it at all – which is hard to even imagine for me. I’ve been deer hunting since I was 16. Now this past year I finally took a mature buck in the rut, the dominant buck on the property. It took me 18 years to do that and it was worth every second that I waited. ”




Children at a certain stage of development see their father in idealized, infallible, invincible terms. The child’s sense of self and self-esteem at that time is also very tied into the parent. So the idea that the child maintains is – “You (father) are perfect and a part of me”.
At some point the child wishes to supersede the father and be one with the mother (bio-mother and ‘mother-nature’).The power of the Oedipal impulses begin to guide the percieved reality to find a symbol for the father. It is found in the male animal, the buck, and as animal also contains the hidden authentic self. The fantasy competition ensues. The father is internalized as the superego, providing direction, guidance, and conscience. Yet
to choose peace with the animals (and thus your authentic self) threatens to create a conflict between his family loyalties self and his true self, (still waiting since childhood). So his child self puts on an empathy numbing animal mask and plays a (in-the-wild-) predator with real (not wild) guns. Taking that buck’s life was all about power. He was a stand-in for his father’s position. He ‘honored’ him, and then he superseded him, to take his ‘rightful’ position as top (human) buck. That the hunter chose to kill the buck in it's rut is especially Oedipal, as 'the rut' is the height of sexuality/ conquest for the male deer. To kill this 'father' and join with the mother(self-in-nature)in a dominating context is the ultimate culmination of Eros and Thanatos.




He ‘takes out’ the projected symbol of the father –as conscience, as competitor, as a threat to the idealized internal representation that acts as a container of the authentic self. This container prevents the self from having contact with the original B.B. foundation.
The act of killing may also be a version of the death instinct, acted upon an externalized representation of the authentic self (buck) in an attempt to form a union with Nature,yet this 'Nature' is unconsciously born/projected from within. This ‘return union” with the original serene nothingness is what Freud was getting at. It may be experienced as re-birth, as societal-child reunites with mother in the original, oral awareness of “I” as coming from mother. However, this ‘death as oneness union’ is no more than an act to ‘bury the dead’ down deeper into repression. The ‘dead’ in this case is the authentic self, now further encased/removed from the contact boundary of the *original* B.B. foundation.
This oral awareness as conscious “I”, is to be ‘one’ with nature and to be in the world ( maintain an identity). It must continue to ingest the projected symbols of it’s ties. It must ‘eat the competition’(innocence,authentic self symbols) to maintain contact,loyalty and internal (repressive) integrity. As he said: "Being successful means survival"

I think that it is too easy/clandestine to enmesh our behavior/psyche with some bio-fused oneness, calling upon similarities with *all animals* as a means to rationalize one's *motives* to eat them. It’s the same with the ‘everything dies’ fusion of ourselves within some bigger, eternal whole. It’s largely a “oneness’ comfort blanket we use to protect our species from feeling alone with our finitude in this universe. But it’s time to detach from the cosmological teat and evolve/differentiate ourselves to reach our potential. In doing so we will also be freeing the earth and its other earthlings from our (infantile) oral fixation, seeing/them it as a separate whole and not just ‘parts’ that we latch onto. The world becomes partialized into the breast, and it’s exploited inhabitants the nipple, all so that we can experience a uniform security. We miss our opportunities to fuse with the world and procreate true evolvement of Being.

A cage for the soul (with a nice view)

"Food For The Soul"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23kristof.html?_r=2&th&emc=th


Excerpt:


“I think I figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture. It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all.
More fundamentally, it has no soul.
One of my childhood memories is of placing a chicken egg in a goose nest when I was about 10 (my young scientist phase). That mother goose was thrilled when her eggs hatched, and maternal love is such that she never seemed to notice that one of her babies was a neckless midget.
As for the chick, she never doubted her goosiness. At night, our chickens would roost high up in the barn, while the geese would sleep on the floor, with their heads tucked under their wings. This chick slept with the goslings, and she tried mightily to stretch her neck under her wing. No doubt she had a permanent crick in her neck.
Then the fateful day came when the mother goose took her brood to the water for the first time. She jumped in, and the goslings leaped in after her. The chick stood on the bank, aghast.
For the next few days, mother and daughter tried to reason it out, each deeply upset by the other’s intransigence. After several days of barnyard trauma, the chick underwent an identity crisis, nature triumphed over nurture, and she redefined herself as a hen.
She moved across the barn to hang out with the chickens. At first she still slept goose-like, and visited her “mother” and fellow goslings each day, but within two months she no longer even acknowledged her stepmother and stepsiblings and behaved just like other chickens.
Recollections like that make me wistful for a healthy rural America composed of diverse family farms, which also offer decent and varied lives for the animals themselves In contrast, a modern industrialized operation is a different world..."

In regards to the Goose and chicken story:

Kristof recognized that maternal love (soul) superseded the difference between one type of sentient life and another. We should identify with that. Our treatment of others that don't *look* like us should involve unconditional love. Not the 'pseudo-love' that small farmers use in the service of clearing (albeit masking)their conscience and 'separating' themselves from factory farm motives, intentions and bottom line relations with animals.

We view animals as food because we are looking out for our 'own', the same 'maternal' drive seen in the goose. We also try to establish our identities (and associations with nurturing) with *Larger Nature* (symbolized with the goose). Thus we try to follow/fit in with Larger Nature by going into the 'water'- (taking lives for food as part of Nature).

Like the chicken, we *should* be having an identity crisis. We don't really belong in the water with Big Nature. We can learn to see the water's edge, not plunge in, find our own way, and redefine ourselves like the chicken did. We can 'move away from the barn' and eventually no longer associate with our 'step-sibling' sentient others. That is true sustenance of the maternal soul- seeing others unconditionally, letting them be themselves and having their own lives. We can find our and our loved one's physical food elsewhere.

I’ve been working with children and adolescents with 'difficult lives' for some time. When they were given wonderful homes, foster parents, teachers, and 'stuff', they still fought it much of the time. I learned that kids, no matter what their upbringing was like, will maintain loyalty to the parents (and thus their past). Being treated well by others raises a terrible conflict - of loyalty, of dread that one's own parents didn't care enough about them to give them a good life. Kids often wonder if it is their own fault. In order to avoid living in this terrible conflict, they *make* the wonderful others out to be monsters, justifying terrible treatment. This restores some kind of inner balance.
Sometimes it is a just a matter that kids (like a lot of us) were raised a certain way and didn’t know any differently. I think that kids raised on animal farms have it that much harder. To see things as they really are is difficult, depressing, but hopefully releasing in the end.

Kristof may need to preserve the integrity of his roots: parents, his experiences, and ultimately his own sense of self, by maintaining the relationship with animals that he 'grew up' with.
He refuses to see himself/his childhood in those animals- confined, manipulated, indoctrinated, and most importantly *defined* by others (parents)who were seen at the time as a power greater than himself-just as we see animal others. The animals he knew growing up gave him all the *signs*...an alternative vision of courage, fortitude, and honesty. He just doesn't want to know it, to see the whole, and struggles with the ideas/emotions that would free himself (from the exploited/victim role) through giving freedom to animals.



Kristof has been searching for his soul that got separated from him at the childhood farm. His defenses keep him off target however. He seeks soul in the small, family farm itself. But farms don’t kill animals, people do. He want to see that the problem lies in the way animals are treated, not the way they are related to as beings in their own right. He deflects the problem to animals, not to the problem of his own self/soul. His soul was lost when his innocence, along the animal’s innocence, was taken by others who were supposed to look out for his heart. Not betray it.
He built a mind cage around himself and his heart for self preservation. Factory farms however *magnify* the foundational conflict in his relationship with animals, and his mind cage is too small to contain this. He is trying to fabricate a bigger mind cage (internalized welfarism, like any welfarism, is based on instinctual drives to seek an immediate end to suffering- in this case his own).


He is afraid to free himself from the mind cage, as it makes him, his past, and his loyal memories secure from unacceptable thoughts, such as betrayal. Thus he cannot see that animals (i.e. ‘self) should be freed. The animals, as a result continue to be betrayed in the service of human need. Kristof want to continue to belong, be accepted, and be seen as a beautiful person- to match the shell that he has created around his self.

Using animals as a self-protective measure..

People utilize all types of animal biology, personal animal experiences,'contacts' with nature to rationalize their continuation of animal exploitation. They blur the boundaries between self and other, which refers to one of the earliest states of fusion in the parent-child relationship. In later self development, this blurring/loss of self containership is experienced as anxiety-provoking regression.

The societal self is fixated on securing 'self' consistency and 'self' nurturing by feeding/ingesting/reabsorbing the *external representations* of the child's 'survival of the self' relationship with their parents. The animal is both mirror and abyss for the child's grounding in the world. Child and animal are 'one', farmed and preyed upon by society.

The authentic self inside however can peer through this guilt-muting facade at times and contribute to the 'uneasiness' of the humans-can-eat-animals 'alliance'.

First up is a defense that someone used, that it was Ok for vegans to 'eat clams' because they have no central nervous system. In absence of *pain* , there should be no moral qualms.

My response:

The clam




'Suffering' is not the only criteria a vegan may follow in terms of making choices..

Plants may not suffer but that does not mean that we have the right to exploit all of them, as their existence may be important to other beings that depend on them (i.e. rainforests). This is also true of animals such as clams that make up the aquaculture community. They have their place, are autonomous, and have developed animal characteristics. 'Pain' is not the only category for determining their worth and right to be left alone.
Some people have a NEED to believe that clams and 'lower' animals exist in a category that ALLOWS us to exploit them GUILT-FREE. It is this escape from experiencing their own pain which is most at stake. It is not that they physically require the intake of clam flesh(for B12). They have made themselves believe that they do to mask the fact that NOT FEELING (within themselves)is permissible on some level. They have, in essence, created within themselves a 'pearl' that has been built around an irritant: That tiny grain of truth. They actually on some level identify with the clam: Alive but incapable of feeling pain & suffering. In consuming the shellfish, they are actually going through a ritual of self re-absorption ("you (clam) are free of painful feelings and thus are a part of me"). Scientific 'evidence' is selectively enlisted to remove all moral threat/pressure to the self. Then it becomes not a matter of choosing to consume flesh, but a 'scientific necessity'.
However if it was an indisputable fact of science that vegans cannot obtain *active* B12 outside of animal sources, then the scientific community (by its very nature) would unanimously concur. But, it hasn’t. Research continues.







Some people don’t do well with absolutes, scientific or moral. That’s part of the reason people have trouble with veganism. It represents an ideal in peace and respect. People dislike ideals because trying to live up to them in the past(or to please others) has resulted in them experiencing pain and resentment. People may need to face their own fears about the unscientific, unreliable aspects of our existence, our choices, an sometimes the emptiness that can be the human condition. Then…make peace with the clams.

Object relations and animals as objects

I will be getting to some fundamental 'development of self' theoretical underpinnings shortly. For now I want to jump ahead with some applications to animal-human exploitation relations- the psychological origins. In another post I will talk more about the breach or split from cosmological authentic self in regards to its foundation. That might be better served in as a prequil to this:


* What is happening here (and everywhere)is the theme of adults “using vulnerable children to further their agenda”. Indeed it is one of the central issues in the raising of the indocrinated societal self (which normalizes exploiting animals).

* It resonates deeply within so many of us. As children, our natural empathy, which includes animals, is initially fostered by parents(storybooks, stuffed animals) and experienced directly via ‘pets’.

* But when children start to put the pieces together, they see animals broken apart as ‘food’ etc. as well as loved, and this creates a chasm within.

* It also creates (an unacceptable) comprehension of adult betrayal (trust VS mistrust)as they uncover the agenda of adult’s egocentric values transmission.

* What ensues is a terrible loyalty conflict within that gets acted out on others, the innocence of animals.

* What follows is that well meaning (but internally misguided) parents transmit ideologies about nonhuman beings that cause upheaval in the child’s mind and relationship with their caregivers.

* The child’s sense of self is still in symbiosis with the adult, so rejecting them would be like casting their own selves out. They need their parents love for their own physical and psychological survival.

* Children need to contain the conflict from consciousness. They isolate the authentic self and corral it with inner defense mechanisms. These defenses imprison the authentic self and prevent it from being in contact with the authentic outside world (like overprotective parents-apprehensive and controlling). Then the child substitutes and maintain an idealized version of themselves and parents.

* In a quest for loyalty to idealized parents (tied to the instinct for self-survival), the child upholds the parent/societal view of animals and distorts and rejects any outside others that would induce critical thinking, emotion, and re-engagement of natural empathy. These same dynamics are often seen when abused youth reject loving foster parents (animals are the stand-in for foster parents here).

* Instead of being able to separate their sense of self from the parent naturally, the betrayal conflict involving animals (intuitively known to the child as one with nature as the child *should be* with parents at that state of development) has breached the natural course prematurely.

* Children remain at an oral state of development in this regard, seeking mental/emotional cohesion between self and parent by ingesting the idealized parts. They do not see others beyond this parent/self boundary as (separate and whole), just as parts that can be used to satisfy.

* Ingesting animals in *parts* satisfies a sense of consistency, as they are symbolically ‘ingesting’ the earliest form of ideal parental nurturance in (as parts-the breast). This is the only sense of personal cohesion they know to remain psychologically alive in the world.

* Experiencing oneness with Nature *and* taking it in (by eating animals) serves to symbolically reproduce and maintain the safe, parent-child relationship : feeling/being part of something bigger and being a part of the larger society.

* This survival-induced façade of the societal self must continue to hold empathy at bay and see animals’ unconditional love , freedom, and oneness with Nature as threatening its 'dominance'( internal dominance of the real self).




* Many people report experiencing a ‘re-birth’ when they put together the animal exploitation that they have been ‘part’ of and evolve towards veganism. This psychological rebirth is the authentic self being freed, to come into the world and live life free, and seeing/letting other beings live their lives as separate beings.

A Road Less Travelled

A great deal of what we go through in life is interplay between change and constants. It is also about the structures that hold contexts and situations together while we ascertain what factors appear to change and be constant.

I’m sure you have been driving in a car and suddenly wake up from a daydream. Your body/mind has been on autopilot, keeping your driving reactions in line each step of the way. Suddenly you do not really know where you are in the journey, even if you have made it hundreds of times before. The road and land do not look immediately recognizable. As you get re-orientated the familiarity returns and you are grounded once more in time and place.
When this happened to me I decided to not rush to orient myself. I decided to ‘just be’ and let my surroundings just be as well. I suspended my destination-intentionality and my *personal control* to allow the moment - the land, the road, to fill the experience.
This sort of depersonalization of the experience allowed me to just be on some road, in some area, somewhere in the state, somewhere in the world. This is my version of a phenomenological reduction. You remove/reduce the imposed habitual way of knowing/using an orientation. The temporal, personally-built up familiarity of one’s individual life relationship with this road/land is removed, and one is able to experience “what is left over” what remains present. This dis/re-orientation has an effect not only on the perception of the surroundings, but on the person’s sense of self as well. I can put my sense of (social/life history-self) ‘on hold’ as well as the socially situated locale I am driving in. One could almost ‘exchange seats’ with any self driving anywhere.
Another version of this de/re-orientation can be achieved by approaching the destination from a different road or direction. The goal is to remove the habituated orientation, the sedimentation of repetition in how we know something.
As I approached the town I lived in(for a short while), the unfamiliar pathway I took ‘freed’ the village to present itself as something apart from me and more standing (once again) as ‘in itself’. In this new orientation situation my own sense of self was more centered/seated. I decided to try and carry this re-orientation perspective further into my familiar associations. It worked for awhile. My apartment interior stood alone and apart. My saw my fiancé as a person in the world with her own life. I knew all of this beforehand but this is the lived experience of that knowledge. After a sort time she was asking me questions or making requests that required me to return/relate in the established, familiar way. What is important however is to not lose what sight was gained and work to bring it back into the fold of experience.

Many times when we are in new surroundings we look for the familiarity in them. If we move to a new city we slowly wear a path of recognition into our surroundings. It is difficult to experience a room (the same way we did when we first entered it) after a hundred entries. In this case we begin with the familiar and induce the breaking of habitual knowing. We then re-orientate to a new, grounded familiarity (based on a universal, anywhere-in-the-world centering) that is sometimes accompanied by an ‘out of regular time’ sensation.

The out of time orientation can also be used in the following way: Hopefully one has some childhood memories of lying in their bed, of being in their bedroom. Where the bed was in the room and such.

There should be no distractions and no noises unless they are of the same kind that you experienced from your room as a child. You should try and recreate the experience of yourself as a child, lying in your bed in the same location/position in the room. Now you should lie down in your own bed at night and close your eyes. Next you should try and experience the moment as if you are a child again, that your history is not part of the moment. You just want to be. You should feel the same location in the room as your childhood bed. You should experience that the activities outside of your room are your ones from back then. With all of this it should become easier to conjure up a sense of your finitude, mixed with an almost timeless feel.

If you still have the opportunity to revisit your childhood home and sleep in your old bedroom, one can try for the same experience.

No matter where you have to perform this experience, what it is for you is your own approximation and closing in on your own historical Big Bang. Your mind is firmly seated in the experience of your self as being, but not *exclusively* located particularly anywhere, in any particular time or history. You can *see* your life experiences suspended before you, but ‘you’ are not seated in any ‘container’ of them. The finitude of your life places this experience of the world (and your ‘self” in it )as simply being. It is then that the nothing (because your origin of self does not spring from any context anchored in the past or present or future in this experience) becomes the ‘black hole’ that pushes out the ‘all that is’ of the experience, of world, of you. The realness and depth of the nothing is experienced in the vividness of the simple being-in-the-world. It is here that the full comprehension of your being alive against the eternity of nothingness becomes known, as strong as the first origin/moment a human being was created in form. What also stands out against this backdrop of nothing/finitude are other beings living life (related and unrelated to you). It is everything lit up in the strongest light of ‘being alive’ that is possible, and equally important are the relationships and bonds of love between people and between other beings.

This is being in touch with the big bang of your life,understood now through finitude-the knowing that your self will not be . Finitude belongs to the individual’s life, for the ‘nothing’ must have temporal and individualized embodied context in which to bring forth Being’s ‘all that can be’ in that existing moment. The fully realized being of that moment is also ‘for the individual’ to utilize , who is inspired and thankful for the opportunity to be so alive and to make sure that other living beings can continue to exist as close to their contact boundary with Being as possible.

While continuing to draw on finitude, the next entry will begin to focus on the Being/becoming of self in the world through an ‘other’- the object anchor of the self. This will also begin to tie in the ‘other’ in animal form and where/how things go astray for us, them, nature, and the future.

I will not be, therefore you are.

For human beings, the comprehension of death involves understanding that the self and the container which embodies it will cease to function in the world. The comprehension of finitude involves understanding that all elements and processes are bound up in limits. Both of these concepts involve a graspable content or object. The comprehension of nothingness does not involve an object (of nothingness) before one’s consciousness. One cannot *see* nothingness, yet we know that it’s nonexistence ‘exists’ by virtue of ‘Being’, originating in the Big Bang. Human beings carry within them the grasp of nothingness by virtue of its expression through finitude. Finitude is an ‘open-ended’ way of knowing. It is beyond being confined to understanding/seeing material death of embodied life.
The grasp of our finitude acts as an apriori (pre-experience) synthesizer between Nothing and Being and as such acts as the conduit or catalyst of ‘becoming’. What follows is then grounded, anchored, revealed, and contributory to an experienced ‘field’ (previously described in my entries about rooms, containers, and pre-existing foundational ground initiated by the Big Bang).

To further illustrate the ‘presence’ and bringing forth of Nothing into the foundational and co-created Being of the present moment, consider this: We may ascertain that a light exists, not because we can see it’s source, but because we can see the objects it lights up.
So it is with the illuminating quality of the Nothing, as it brings forth all that is its opposite: Being. Being is *only limited* in its presence, it’s depth, and it’s expression in the world by the depth of the grasp of human beings who bring the contact boundary of finitude to each encounter.

* The problem, stated in its early form here, is that human beings equate finitude with death, the end/negation of life and development. They mirror(and attempt to ground) themselves, their ‘existential condition, their will to live ,their control of life/death against this ‘knowledge’.

* They attempt to separate themselves (life) from the other (death) by distinguishing themselves (human) from other(animal).

• The animal /other dies ( a misappropriation of the finitude/nothingness)so that we may experience the ‘opposite’ : life.

• It is actually the negative/backwards/mirror opposite of life/existence. Our seeking Being from incorporating Nothing via death of the other is actually negating. It is heading in the direction of Nothing coming (the unbecoming) from Being. This 'Being' is understood only in relation to death, rather than finitude.

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Human beings should equate finitude with life, the beginning, becoming, and affirmation of each dimension of existing.

Human beings have taken Freud’s misguided grasp of finitude, known as the death drive (Thanatos), and brought that into the world (resulting in the material unbecoming of the world). Instead they should be bringing the finitude/nothingness drive into the world of living, resulting in maximum existence.

If one can frame an experience (the immediate perception of the situation at hand) through one’s finitude, it will bring into play the remnants (left behind) of the Big Bang. What will then occur is that the ‘objects’ within that purview (internal and external) will be illuminated/defined by the original ground. The object will be experienced as existing in its original moment of coming into being. Not only this, but it will be experienced in relation with its universal (meta-temporal) ‘form’. When studying Plato I wondered why there would be a ‘form’ for a desk, if a desk was a construct of human beings, themselves considered imperfect. For me it is because Being is in everything, including the human mind, and contains parts/structures of the original Big Bang. Thus a relationship, a recognition, can occur between mind and the universal aspect of an object. Thus, the grasp of the foundational ground will also include the observing person within it, as if being understood from a location outside of both. (like the observing self that used a 3-way mirror to see the ‘outside’ body placed in the ‘outside’ world.).

Language descriptions will not convey the intensity or characteristics of this foundational experience of the object. Describing the ‘blueness’ of the blue, the ‘dog essence’ of the dog before me will not make another’s sense/thought experience any different. What it can do for me is to perhaps change the way I relate to the dog, appreciate the being before me, and inspire me to make decisions that ‘really matter’.

This last sentiment is something often reserved for people who have had a brush with death or are near their own end.. Somehow it is believed that these specific circumstances can give rise to a ‘deep’ consciousness of life and meaning, as well as decisions about love, honesty , openness, and being non-judgmental. I think that while it is true that this often happens, death does not have to the exclusive domain of this level of consciousness. Why should one have to wait until a death encounter to harness the power of finitude and use it as a way to the world? One thing is for sure, no matter how you get 'there', what people come to see as important are the relationships that they have and the presence of love. This in the end is what we are striving to infuse in the world with enough influence to change the course of events.

As it were, it is time to get back to the ‘world’ and perform some more mental activities that will further the becoming (re) union of the present, the important, and the timeless.