Hugo Chavez and Caring Empathy.

Caring Empathy is a biological mandate.

It's an expression of optimum biological health in a human being.

As such it predates any concepts of 'spirit', or 'ideology' or 'morality' as it exists within the womb, in every womb, just waiting for the correct NURTURING environment for it's fullest expression. This is what Science tells us.

In truth it is also one of the best long term thrivival strategies of all, for it enables co-operation, working WITH natural processes and our habitat. It is also the primary mode of human living for the majority of human beings over the past 250,000 years and before.

However if the child does not receive that nurturing, the adult he or she becomes will build a societal structure lacking in caring empathy, which will generate a cycle of breaking with the nurturant modality of human living.

Which is where we are today. We CAN break that cycle, and we CAN return to our basic biological mandate, without 'going back to caves' or even 'living in mud huts'.

It's a question of choice, of accurate information and ultimately of resistance to abusive power conditioning.

The choice is ours.

Hugo Chavez (RIP) clearley cared about the poorest people in Venuzuela, and understood their lives. He had to deal with a very, very difficult situation, he saw the pointlessness of violence (as in overthrowing by violence) by his own personal experience and worked for many years to build a base amongst the poorest people. By helping them to help themselves.

Unlike western politicians who have built a base amongst the very richest and the indebted middle classes (those with a mortgage).

Voting % amongst the poor have been falling year on year, all over Europe and the USA for that reason - that is a meaningful vote of no confidence. It is not apathy.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

THRIVIVAL or mere Survival?

THRIVIVAL : A word I have created, and have been using for many years to describe the biological reality I have observed.

Survival as a word implies struggle, threat, risk and imminent potential of death.

Narrators of Nature Documentaries repeatedly use this term, not as scientists, but as a cultural meme. They claim to be scientific in their use of the word survival. The claim is false.

Natural communities THRIVE. The hunter hunts for but a little of their time. The hunted are hunted but for a little of their time. They do not spend the bulk of their time in aggression (hunter) or fear (hunted). Both are thriving most of the time. Natural communities THRIVE, and often in very large numbers... and their behaviour nurtures the world around them, way beyond their own species. This is both obvious and scientifically understood.

THRIVIVAL is thus defined as the state of existence, sets of behaviours and conditions  that nurtures more life for all life.

However, those who exert force or Power to control people are concerned with the use of force and control most of the time, for they know that as soon as they relax, those who are being controlled will break for freedom, in diverse emergent creative ways, urged on by their own biological calling towards optimal health. Power fears this calling.

Furthermore, those who use Power are in competition with others who would also use Power and Force to take over the position of Power. And so for them, they ARE concerned with Survival as a primary objective. They feel the threat is ever present, even when it is not. (most of the time the threat is non-existent: most 'ordinary people' have no desire to kill, murder, abuse those who have abused them, they mostly want the abusers just to stop and go away - that would be enough for most people, because we are biologically mandated towards empathic self organisation at the grass roots).

And the Power addicted always project their internalised view onto the world around them. The cultural projections of narrators speak to the conditioning which the narrator/writer has submitted to, internalised or assumed as normal, more than it describes the realities of nature.

Top predators, or those creatures who have are rarely hunted by others, who reside at the tops of food chains, tend to ensure the health of the communities they get their food from. Industrial Society has stepped out of this paradigm. And this disrupts the nurturant cycles of biology.

It is well past time to disestablish the 'Survival' meme, and to move towards THRIVIVAL.

And what a lovely journey, a fine destination that is.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Wonder, no wonder...

Here's a few recent thoughts uncluttered with world affairs and ongoing resistance and recovery...

Honesty is Science. When Scientific data is wilfully mis-interpreted, it ceases to be Science. You can quote me on that.

Here is Charity debunked, gracefully yet with such gorgeous vehemence!

          "True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar; it comes to see that an     edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
           -- Martin Luther King Jr.

What an elegant use of words, nothing wasted, each word full of meaning, of maturity and empathy.

I think of the amount of work, care, commitment, 'sacrifice' and energy the 'average' Mum and or single Mum's life; all that they do, to nurture, to stick with and submit to the reality of the child, to consistently assist a healthy child to grow up into a healthy human being, to pursue his or her own life in turn.  That ain't charity!
 

I often think on the un-natural poverty of Societal support for this most vital of human activities, this work of love, and of the willingness of some ideologists to isolate and identify 'single mums' as a 'problem', all too ready to dehumanise them by stereotyping certain lone parents as 'benefit scroungers'.

I think about the willingness of others, ideologists and propagandists and religious zealots, to assume to INSTRUCT Mums, quite often to go against the Mothers own deepest instincts and feelings...

These are not nice thoughts. The experience of those at the receiving end is many, many times worse. It's more than thoughts. It's lives.

The Bureaucratic fig leaf of 'parental leave' .. what a dull phrase that is in our lexicon. Such a small amount of time, given as a concession to the economy. How meagre! How cruelly efficient!

I was watching Kangaroo Dundee. A very busy man.

Yes, this man has become a 'Mum', albeit of adopted abandoned Kangaroos...  fluffy animals makes us coo. 

Men CAN mother.... when we really WANT to.

Benefits Addicted Mums make us scowl. Check the comments section when ever the Guardian ' Comment is Free' column starts a thread on this subject in response to some Government Minister pronouncing on the next 'plan' to deal with the 'problem'.

Yes, the public - actually, the wolf that calls itself the media, pretending to represent the public 'opinion' - will happily let the Government scowl at the Mum. As if it were ALL her 'fault'. Transferring the problem.

 
LOOK AT WHAT IT TAKES. TAKE IT IN. BE HONEST. 

THAT'S a work load. Huge amounts of all kinds of energy required. For a LONG time!

Especially during infancy. The slow segregation of Mother and Father into discrete 'roles' as full-time caretakers and breadwinners, separated from their extended  family and their community looks more and more like a culturally induced avoidance strategy. Conditioned slacking.

Irrespective of what primates may or may not do, our biology functions at it's best, in context, when the load is shared by a community of people who probably love each other to one degree or another. Oxytocin is a molecular expression of that reality.

Historically, - read the literature, don't take my word for it - Kings (and most Queens) never seemed to like the messy WORK of parenting.

We Industrialised Peoples live like Kings, in relative terms, with our gadgets, resources we use, land we use .... relative to biology, anthropology, culture.

It is that work, care, commitment and energy that is the core of a healthy functioning human community, it does take a village to care for a child, indeed all the children of the community, at optimum biological state. A village in a natural setting, naturally.

Until Motherhood/Fatherhood and community parenting are at the very core of this Society, informing it's long term decision making processes and behaviours, it will remain selfish in it's core psychology. And unsustainable.

And it doesn't have to be that way. 

We have brains.....

"The idea that the brain can change it's own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron.

The neuro-plastic revolution has implications for, among other things, our understanding of how love, sex, grief, relationships, learning, addiction, culture, technology, and psychotherapies change our brains.

All of the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences, in so far as they deal with human nature, are affected, as are all forms of training. All of these disciplines will have to come to terms with the fact of the self-changing brain and with the realisation that the architecture of the brain differs from one person to the next and that it changes in the course of individual lives.

While the human brain has apparently underestimated itself, neuro-plasticity isn't all good news; it renders our brains not only more resourceful by also more vulnerable to outside influences."

 
Norman Doidge "The Brain that changes itself"

We as people all have this capability, it is innate. And each of us needs an appropriate environment and experience for it's healthiest expression. We continually change and grow. Self healing. Solving problems. Then we die.

And what is innate in us, as individuals, must also be innate in a healthy functioning human community. Our optimum biological state. Where individuals live and die, and the community is sustainable over many millennia. Kinda state I'd love to live in.

How we get there is a very interesting journey.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Is/was George Osborne Bush The Third Evil?

I was asked this question.

"Is George Bush Evil?"

Not really. And this does not let him off the hook. Not a bit of it.

I think there's enough evidence to suggest that Institutions, which are rigidly hierarchical, and violent, and are populated by people, whose actions according to the Instituition's rules, using powers accrued to the Institution, have an adverse affect on many other people, then all those people become to some degree Institutionalised, or conditioned, more or less 'adapted' to a sick society.

And that this can lead to individual. group and mass culturally accepted adverse behavioural issues, related to fear, power and control, which become 'normalised' in the eyes of those growing up into it. What his or her parents, siblings and extended family and community do, how they behave, is the model the child observes, which the biology has mandated as fundamentally empathic in nature.. It's common sense.

Due to historical influences beyond our parents ability to avoid, we were born where we were born. No plan.

And in that situation this could happen to anyone.

Where we are born in this life is an accident of birth.

Fate, not that I subscribe to the idea, could not be so cruel to so many, for so long.

Our long gatherer-hunting-gardener history goes back 1.5 millions years minimum, probably way longer back in time... we don't really know.

As it happens, that history stands as a testimony to Homo Empathicus as a biologically sound organism.

Biologically speaking, not one of us was, at birth, expecting this Society - based on our biology, as in what our biology tells us we ought to be expecting for optimal health. Which is nature's way, after all.

Yet in a traumatising environment, and I see the Dominant Civilisation as a traumatising situation, one that is set in course and maintained by Power and Influence, where are the tools to prevent this cycle from being repeated? ..... for the benefit of all concerned?

It's not rocket science.

Judgements as to 'evil' I find to be self limiting. For me the criteria is 'does this action nourish the world in which it occurs?' Nature says 'does this work, in the present and in the future?' It's that kind of criteria ......

Without mitigating the human emotional realities of the trauma, this thought helps me to find for myself a balance. I understand the shock, rage, horror, revulsion .. the healthy feelings of a sensitive human being facing such adverse behaviour and outcomes. It hurts. It sears the psyche. Pain IS physical.

And yet I sense too that under the very personal as well as the Legal Institutional desire to punish, there is grief.

The ubiquitous urge for revenge, the hyper outrage, the almost religious judge-mentalism of peer pressure, where group identity is hardened, and which is fundamental to political strategy, all of these repeated patterns creates a protective skin, neural pathways habituated to that state, the need to control certain feelings (which contain key information which that person needs) masks amongst other things, a deep grief, loss, scars and fears ... and the urge to push it all away has to be strong, such is the pain of the grief. 

Making myths concrete serves to maintain this control.

That's not to say that the use of violence is not Institutionalised in Hierarchical Societies like ours in a quite conscious and intentional manner. Which is quite an 'evil' action to undertake....

It's all quite sad.

Especially with so much testimony to the natural intelligence and beauty of human birth, infancy and early development, so we KNOW what the natural happiness bench-mark is.

All the more reason, as a conscious adult, a mature human being to engage in looking for practical pathways through this life (a gift of nature) and through observing the lives of others, finding those actions and behaviours and other material realities that nurture that empathic nature our biology mandates.

That's a long game.With regard to people who engage in extremes of abuse through which they harm other people, children, communities, etc... there are aspects of the range of learned manipulative behaviours which are well developed in such harming people, as survival tools are generally, and in the case of abusive people, manipulation is the key tool to maintain control and mask the outcomes of the behaviour, with an inner coldness, outer charm/warmth and many more subtle characteristics. 

ALL these qualities are so at odds with the human biological mandate - homo empathicus - as to be biologically dysfunctional. What baby is born, with this in mind? None!

And the results when harming people like that organise, or build a structure, that structure will reflect their psychology, and if it is institutionalised, it makes the illusion that psychology as being the 'best' psychology more 'concrete', set in stone, so to speak.

Some folk call it '"The way it is.'" and they sigh. It does seem immense. Of course it does. It is.

The larger the organisation, empire the more people whose lives are affected in ways that disrupt the natural development of the natural human biological mandate - homo empathicus - . The more real it's self created myths, the wars they fight for peace, the stronger it's grip on the psyche of those who have no choice but to try to live through it.

The myths aren't real, of course. The myths are lies, and so the 'proof' is manufactured, war is intentional, business like and the cycles of violence continue. Institutionalised. Institutionalising all who come under it's sway.

Institutionalisation is a process that is, in and of itself, dehumanising. It's the de-humani-fication of interpersonal relationships, where everything is a matter of 'form'. Not so much formalities, as life limited by objectification, the key ingredient in Corporate Ideology.

An object is a 'thing', which can be manipulated, as cheaply as possible, so as to generate an outcome that profits the manipulator's boss. His or her owner. An object can also be discarded, Expendable. Fodder. 

Statistics and registers  can be used to turn people into 'things', separate objects, which are then manipulated and used by different factions to make spurious, and often opposing generalisations about how best to organise 'things', (without reference to the pathways the 'things' themselves might self organise, naturally .....). 

And whenever a faction is in Power, they impose their psychology on the people.

It's insane!

It can be VERY cruel and harmful.

Until someone says "Does it really have to be this way?"

And tries to answer it, through diligent yet not too onerous study, honesty and with an open mind and heart, and a healthy respect for scepticism.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Nurturant Biology

 'Natural Humans Beings' is one thing. Adapted to Oxytocin. Peace.

'Conditioned/traumatised Human Beings' is another thing. Adapted to Cortisol. Stress.

Each will give up a different emergent Societal Modality.

Or a spectrum of Societal Modes,

Egalitarian, Empathic towards ever more Hierarchially Violent.

Natural Humans Beings is one thing. Adapted to Oxytocin. Mother Child bonding.

Conditioned/traumatised Human Beings is another thing. Adapted to Cortisol. Stress. Indoctrination, War.

Nature undoubtedly tends towards resolution of problems. Oxytocin. Dopamine. Serotonin.

It's in our nature. It takes time.

The wounds are deep, and everywhere.

I TRUST the innate biology of myself, of all of us,
 
it has immense wisdom, bio-logic.
 
The natural self healing, the natural flow towards maturity and nurturing .....

is in everything alive! Or is alive in everything ....

...and

rather than instructions or explicit directions, 

I have found that supportive discourse does help the individual 

to make his or her own pathway, 

using their own inner resources 

and receiving those they may find on the path,

through meeting brothers, sisters, one's recognised family of life

... and seeing all paths connected,

as each path is itself interwoven with all life,

thus there is plenty enough for all to thrive.

And we ARE in it together.









Kindest regards

Corneilius