There Is No I In Us And We... An Explanation
This is an involved philosophical article of great importance not just to myself but probably to everyone on the planet. Read it, and you'll understand. Don't read it, and you'll run into this eventually, but it may catch you by surprise.
That is my shortest poem ever. I wrote it in 2002(?) while working in the west end of Toronto.
That could be taken to mean any number of things but when I wrote it, I intended it to represent the sacrifice of one's own concept of self when compared to their partner when in love. It was purely meant in that context.
Let's face it. When you're truly in love, you generally tend to put your partner first and instead, two people together become something else entirely different.
That poem however became something much more significant in my life, and one of the aspects that is driving a good portion of the plot development for my book, A Lady's Prerogative III: Singlularity. In fact, elements of this plot will connect both A Lady's Prerogative III: Singularity and The Butterfly Dragon III: The Two Dragons.
I run into this concept everywhere, and it makes up a significant portion of my Jungian existential experience in life (in terms of his theory of Syncrhonicity and its relationship to psychology and meaningful coincidence).
There are the times when it is just malicious people who operate in groups, attempting to dissect or even destroy my person or psyche as a form of gas lighting. Using the fuel of specific moments from my life and output into society in order to manipulate my attitude. Replace the me and my in that statement with you and your, and you have something that happens to a great many people. Something for which I wish there wasn't the comfort of not being alone.
This is like the entropic noise of any information field. Any paradigm to which your attention is drawn that seems to contain meaningful and contextual information as if in coincidence in relation to your own life and perhaps some hidden symbolic meaning associated with your own experiences and memories. So this social clutter that happens is just like the static you hear when tuning an AM radio receiver (does anyone use those anymore?).
Every once in a while, amidst that noise, you'll pick out things that have contextual meaning to you and your life.
Now once again, we get into another aspect of our consciousness and perception that we could call observation selection effect as theorized by philosopher and Nick Bostrom in his work on Anthropic Principle.
Where the cars in the other lanes on either side of your own vehicle always seem to be moving faster than your own. This is an observation selection effect, where because the visible field of view to the periphery of your vision is far greater than that of what's in front of you. Not only that, but its parabolically curved hence anything moving through it will appear to be moving faster than it actually is. That's because of the curvature or the lenses of your eyes, and the duration of time it takes to cross that greater periphery than the center of your vision. These two facts create an illusion of perception.
Where it relates to existential experience, these effects are the same when it concerns what seems to be meaningful coincidence and the context of our memories. We see random situations and impose meaning upon them, because our perception and cognition is so efficient at filtering things that mean nothing to us, against our previous experiences in the form of memories.
We have memories of experiences that act as filters to what we perceive so that when we see something that is closely related to a memory, it seems to jump out at us from the noise of random events in society. That too is a form of noise, because here, we're looking for perception and experiences that break the rules of randomness (meaning having an equal chance of being noticed by us as not being noticed by us).
Then there are people with whom we have a bond of some unspoken or unmet familiarity, though we don't know specifically who they are. We only know that they exist and that we share some form of similarity in terms of interest and struggle in life. They might speak to us in ways that emerge through the noise of random social events in life, by use of their own ingenuity to emerge as a meaningful coincidence. We don't know the sender, and they don't know us, yet we know that the other exists. Perhaps something similar to the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Even that in the context of meaningful experience, though valuable and certainly inspiring at times, is still noise to that which I'm referring here.
Finally, there are the experiences that defy either any form of express communication and any occurrence of anything that could be analyzed as arising from Anthropic Principle that jump out at us from the cacophony around us and have express meaning, though meaning that would be nearly impossible to describe without others regarding that explanation as being evidence of lunacy or delusion on your part.
These are the gems of synchronicity for which Jung searched, especially towards the latter part of his life, for which evidence can be found in one of his last books: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Google, Amazon). My personal favourite of Jung's works.
My point for bringing this up is that for those of us blessed and cursed (I say that as an Atheist that leans towards Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism) with the need to delve deep into existential experience in search of meaning, in today's world, there's a lot of (purposeful?) noise for anyone involved in that search that might not be so much coincidental as we're led to believe.
Now consider the whole idea of being in love with your partner. Not just the first stages of any relationship, which are undoubtedly in any such experience fueled by pleasure and the accompanying hormones as you form a bond through intimacy, but after enough time and familiarity has elapsed where your intimacy actually links the two of you together. Like a sort of biomagnetic WIFI of the human body.
Before you write this off as nonsense, consider this: our body has one of the most elaborate naturally occurring communications systems produced by nature. In fact, so far it is the most elaborate according to our knowledge: Our nervous system.
That nervous system of ours is basically an electrochemical communications network, meaning that electricity is the main medium through which information in the body is encoded and expressed throughout the nervous system. This information is essential to the functioning of our body, for it governs all aspects of that functioning including our hormone production, kinematic motion, the functioning and timing of our vital organs, our perception and the recall of memories through our brain. All of those aspects of the functioning of our body rely upon our nervous system.
Consider that electricity flowing through a conductor produces a magnetic field, and a magnetic field passing through a conductor produces an electric current. So this electrically encoded information flying around in our nervous system is constantly producing a magnetic field that contains all of that information. That magnetic field is very weak, but exists nonetheless.
That magnetic field, when we're close to someone is strong enough to pass into their body, where it once again becomes an electrical current. That current contains all of the same information as that which was in our nervous system, and given the fact that our nervous system exceeds in distinguishing information from a signal, in this case, the biologically encoded signal that originated from our body and travelled through the air to hit their body and become a similar signal and information channel contained in the resulting current.
As a result, over time we literally become connected to our intimate lover, especially if we're dedicated to just one lover, because familiarity in this case breeds connection (much more so than contempt, fortunately). So essentially, two lovers become connected to one another over time and as a result, they become as one in terms of their ability to share information between them. Two distinct people that share a common connection whereby what could only be described as psychic experience, information is shared between the two without any communications technology other than the human body. We'd call this lover's intuition.
That's what I was speaking of when I wrote the poem: There is no I in Us or We.
Consider that we live in a world that is more and more aware of this phenomenon and some have been aware of this for a long time. Consider that there are those who'd try to create a similar connection between people, that doesn't involve just two people, but a large group of people. Where those who were involved in such a connection could be said to be a collective, whereby every member of that group is similarly psychically connected by the same phenomenon that is easily explained by the scientific method. For there sorts of connections, intimacy is not involved, though extreme emotion, such as hate often is.
This is where we start to get into the scary part of things, because this phenomenon and its growth really has many connotations as a result. For instance, what if a group of people started creating such a collective and figured out techniques to create these connections between people through the walls of our living spaces within our communities?
Science has barely reached the point where it can prove this phenomenon, but that is just around the corner with the next generation of technology such as sensitive devices used to detect minute magnetic fields (SQUIDS). So though this effect hasn't been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, it is more or less widely accepted albeit rarely spoken of.
Consider the issues involved and you'll arrive at many of the same issues that we have with the internet today, because the internet itself is a metaphor for the challenges of facing this new reality where people without technology can become interconnected via their own nervous system and biomagnetic field.
The difference is that nobody can force you to connect to the internet. If you choose not to use the internet or be a part of it, you're free to do so and nobody will come along and force your arm on that. You'll likely find life difficult by comparison with someone connected to the internet, but certainly far from impossible. Right now as it stands, there are means for those without internet to benefit from it as if they had it. These means include through their banking institutions and their phone and television providers, without actually requiring an active internet connection. That will only increase as we progress into the future.
So we live in a society where one has the ability to maintain their independence from the internet if they so choose. Nobody would force them to do it, though I can't see any reasons why someone wouldn't choose to have an internet connection, because regardless of the privacy issues and risks, we're still afforded a semblance of boundary between our personal physical life, and our online life. For some people, they almost become two distinctly separate identities, while most others seek to have them be one and the same.
Something similar between the concept of a biomagnetic collective and the internet would be the ability to maintain anonymity. In a biomagnetic collective, everyone connected would essentially be sharing a similar mind space, somewhat like an internet forum, though one where everyone's thoughts would amass like numerous jumbled threads of discussion absent of form. Nobody would really know where or from whom a thought originated, hence we'd all be mostly guaranteed anonymity from our own thoughts much like through the use of aliases, we're able to take part in a discussion group and express our opinion without others necessarily knowing who we are in person. There are some people who prefer anonymity and others who don't require it and both certainly for their own reasons.
Now lets take the case of a biomagnetic collective. A large group of people connected to one another in a similar way that two lovers might be become connected over time and consensually so, though in the case of a biomagnetic collective, there probably wasn't any kind of intimacy involved. More likely, extreme emotions that would create powerful biomagnetic hormone based information within a person's biomagnetic field, strong enough to maintain that information over a distance. Something that would likely be required for a connection between bodies to be possible. So such activity would involve extreme hormone driven emotions such as hate and anger and likely would seek to provoke those to whom others are trying to connect to react with emotions of the same extremity. After all, you need two sides to have a connection and if one of those sides is unwilling, then provocation is the best bet of those trying to force such a connection. I'll get to the part about consent later. For now, we'll deal with issues where it is invasive.
With someone on the internet, they can finish up and go to bed and spend romantic time with their partner without any details of what goes on in their bedroom finding their way onto the internet, assuming that they don't have any cameras, hidden or otherwise in the bedroom with them relaying their intimacy to the online world. Sure, others might imagine what any two people do in their bedroom, but there's no specific record or information about what they specifically did hence protecting their intimate privacy. So the internet affords couples, especially those who stay away from any sexual content online a boundary of privacy that is only violated by someone using a camera or recorder of some form with or without the consent of the couple. Odds are that sort of thing won't happen and is very, very rare.
With a biomagnetic collective, consider that all of your senses are a part of the collective experience. What you see, feel, hear, taste, smell and think all become part of the collective experience. That means that all of your senses become potentially a risk for the invasion of your own privacy and that of your romantic partner. In a biomagnetic collective, depending upon how strongly this biomagnetic connection between you and others is reinforced, all of your experiences are available to all others part of the same biomagnetic collective. That means every single one of your personal secrets can, and likely will become known by everyone part of the same collective group. However, because you can't see yourself every moment of every day unless you have mirrors everywhere, nobody will know that it is you specifically as the source of your own senses and thoughts. They will however be able to experience what you see, almost as if your eyes were a camera for them. So they'd see your own partner as you saw her or him, depending upon the case, meaning that your partner's privacy is violated more so than yours and upon recognizing your partner, they'd be able to figure out who you are, though I'd personally take the violation of my partner's privacy as the greater violation.
Not being able to choose for yourself whether you're connected or not and the fact that if you are connected to a biomagnetic collective, that you have no option for turning it off means that your privacy and the privacy of everyone else around you is violated similarly, though you have the benefit of nobody knowing who you are unless of course you look in a mirror. So the issue of privacy is a big one when it comes to biomagnetic collectives.
As it currently stands, so is consent, because biomagnetic collectives generally don't obey the laws. They violate the privacy of others when and where they decide to do so, and without permission from anyone.
Now take your romantic partner, and go back to the beginning of your romantic relationship and assume that instead of calling it a relationship or romance, you call it a biomagnetic connection (very technical and certainly unromantic, but bear with me). You and your potential partner understand that engaging in a relationship will result in such a biomagnetic connection and that's part of the risk of becoming intimate with someone. Now you or your partner decides that you'd rather not become intimate but remain acquaintances or friends instead. That doesn't tickle your fancy or your partner's as the case may be and you or they decide to take matters into their own hands against yours' or their consent and they go about having an intimate time without permission and as a result, a connection is formed between you and them.
Now in the case of a biomagnetic collective that forces itself upon a solitary person to create such a connection, there is no defense for the victim. A bunch of people make that decision and forcibly attempt to connect to their victim. There's no crime, and if the victim reports such a thing, they're written off as being mentally ill, schizophrenic or some other stigmatic label to explain their reaction to such violation of their person and privacy. Keeping in mind that there's no physical contact between those attempting to connect to a person against their will, technically there's no crime or the crime is a crime of emotional and psychological torment along the lines of stalking.
In the first case, if you or your potential partner make the move without consent to become intimately connected, it would be called rape. Even if there was no contact between you and them, and you or they instead chose to stalk the other, and subject them to emotional aggravation in the hopes to trigger reactions that would indicate that the two of you are connected, it would be considered a crime. Whether there is physical contact or not, there are means for victims of such a crime to seek legal reparations and justice. With a biomagnetic collective as it stands, when they violate someone emotionally and aggressively and especially specifically for the purposes of connecting non-consensually with their target, there are no such means for justice. Like gang rapists getting away with a rape. Currently our understanding of this phenomenon and the technology to research it are around the corner which means that law hasn't yet arrived at the philosophical issues surrounding this aspect of our humanity.
This is a social phenomenon that occurs all the time and some of the biomagnetic collectives that conduct it even believe that they can control the people they connect to. Overpower the consciousness of the person whose body it is and replace it with their own collective consciousness. I'd actually beg to differ that they cannot, but such people that attempt this make it into a very disruptive social competition. A sort of game they play socially. Different collectives compete against each other, all trying to have the most bias in favour from the victim they're attempting to manipulate in this way and in achieving this goal regard themselves to be controlling their target.
Here's where it gets very complicated if it isn't already, and this isn't just about myself in the context of this sort of thing. There are people out there who enjoy fantasy related to control. Like mind control, hypnosis, where it involves role play with their partner. So there are people out there that enjoy thinking about it, but that would never take action or attempt to control other people by the means I've described or any other means. For them, its just a romantic role play fantasy and for the most part, it remains a thought and at most, consensual role play.
For the people that really attempt to biomagnetically connect to other people, there is no consent. They just do it in large groups upon whomever they choose, or they'll attempt to trick their victim into violating their privacy in order to justify violating their victim's. Sort of like weaponizing the golden rule to become: do unto others so that they do unto you in such a way that you gain the justification to do the same or similar thing back to them.
The real difference between people who fantasize about something like that, and the people that actually form groups and attempt to do it for real is a distinction between those who respect and maintain the boundary between fantasy and reality. Between thought and action. That recognize that just because you think something isn't the grounds to go out and to do it. There are grounds for limiting one's actions, but not their thoughts, because to do so would be to control what they are allowed to and not allowed to think. That would be like muffling the potential of human creativity, whereas the filter should be against action, not thought. There is no polarity reversing either fantasy or reality or thought and action, for what kind of people would do such a thing? There is a definite distinction between fantasy and reality and thought and action as much so as there is a distinction between cause and effect. Let's hope that for each of these pairs that the one never become confused for the other. Perhaps some of the few cases where fantasy should become reality is for the terminally ill, such as children with a terminal illness who wish to visit a theme park once in their life or go on an adventure they'd never likely have been able to do so. Obviously where there is no harm or violation of theirs' or someone else's rights and person.
One last thing I'd like to reveal about this is the fact that when a collective has access to everything about your person and existential experience, they have the ability to eradicate you as existing in this world. Everything that you experience through your senses not to mention that everything you think becomes part of their collective and as an individual, you in the midst of this can literally be denied of your own existence because the people who do this sort of thing compete for the credit of those things. Much like every aspect of your being becomes the ante on a poker table, with everyone else on the same poker table trying to take that pot away as theirs. Without a distinction and boundary between you and others in this degree, there is no longer an I in Us or We.
In a sense, you could say that this is the reflection of that poem I wrote years ago. The dark side of the true context that I meant, because I meant that when you're in love, that other person becomes more important than you.
Amazing how a group of people took that and turned it into such a horrendous antithesis of love. In a way, I'm flattered to know which side of that fence I'm on.
So which side are you?
Would you deny someone else of their own existence?
When you decide, consider this aspect of our future in this world because this might be that hurdle that all other intelligent alien civilizations out there in the universe struggle to overcome and if we can overcome, maybe we'll start seeing those other alien civilizations.
Oh and in case you don't think that its necessary to wear a mask or that blue means that whatever others say means the opposite context of what they express...
Get Vaccinated And Get Better So That We Can All Get Back To Work, Business Or Whatever It Is That Is Required Of Us Within Our Lives
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I'm 6 feet tall and have red, yellow green eyes and live in 200 Sherbourne Street in apt 701 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
Atheist leaning towards Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.
https://www.twitter.com/MediaShhhh
My love interest is Asian by the way...
Last but not least, Mike that works or worked for Heyworth House is not Bryce Maxwell...
