As is becoming common for me; in the midst of crisis, a flower blooms.

I've been surfing wikipedia alot lately.  My latest topic du jour?  Brain chemistry and neurotransmitters.  Bitchen stuff.  I'm so glad that I love Ken Wilber's work, or I'd never come out the other side of this kind of study with my faith in free choice intact.  The brain is amazing - humans are amazing - any animals at all are amazing - consciousness is amazing.  It's a miracle.  It just freaking is.  Jesus!

But tonight I fell down the rabbit-hole called "meta-cognition".  And while I was down there, I met "self-awareness" who is related to "self-consciousness" (check out the picture and caption for that page! Look familiar?) and introduced me to someone named "flow" who gave me the magic pill called "overlearning" (which I'm under the influence of right now).  Now that I've taken that pill, I can never go back to being ignorant about what happened to me as a child in school.  My kingdom for a learning institution who will reward me for over-learning instead of punishing me.  Bloody 40 years of ripping intelligence wasted!

I have to laugh at the incredible lack of self-reflection that wikipedia shows by having only a small "stub" of a page on over-learning.  How ironic!  Only over-learners contribute to wikipedia.  Wikipedia may be the largest collection of over-learning in the world.  LOL

!!!!

My method of over-learning is not repetition or rote, but rather meta-learning.  I double up my topics.  Here's an example of something that happened to me several years ago when I tried to take a bonehead math class at my local junior college.  The class is meant to function as both a refresher for those who have been away from school for a while and also as a way of determining where to correctly place people in the higher level classes.  I was the former.  So, I picked up math concepts that I had somehow dropped years ago as a result of non-use.  I got all the way to multiplying and dividing fractions, but then encountered a problem.  The teacher, up to that point, had been teaching us not only how things work, but why.  And I liked this.  This is how I learn.  It is one of the ways I double up or meta-learn things.  So I was doin' great up to that point.  But one day he introduced a "short-cut" and told us not to ask why it works, just trust that it does and keep going. 

I literally couldn't go on.  After phoning the resource center and asking for tutoring help to find out why this worked but being told that I'm not allowed to learn that and - he didn't know anyway - it took me about two weeks to figure it out on my own.  I bravely came back to class and told the teacher that I had stayed home until I had figured it out and that I knew that I was hopelessly behind now and couldn't finish the class.  He stopped the class and had me explain it on the board for everyone.  Because of the self-consciousness factor, I couldn't do it very well, but I think he saw that I figured it out.  He was genuinely innerested in how I was thinking.  He was a real teacher.  Sadly, his Alzheimer's is deteriorating now and he's retired.  He still remembers me and sees me around town and is very kind.  Bless Kirby.

I've talked to my daughter about this too, and she understands what I'm talking about.  She is able to go on even though her need for instant gratification is frustrated.  She can hold out until it reveals itself later.  I asked her how things like short-cuts are discovered in the first place if people can't understand how they work until they advance in math much farther out.  She says, only geniuses can retain it all enough to progress while understanding why, and then they find the short-cut and they teach that to the less advanced students.  But when she understands the why's of math, it is so electrifying to her that she is in love with mathematics and wants to pursue it as far as she can.  She is turned on by it as much as I am, but she can delay the gratification.  I literally stayed up until the wee hours writing and processing why fractions can be multiplied and divided and such, unable to rest until I had tasted it's blood in my mouth. 

I never graduated from High School.  And I am so glad right now that I didn't "get my GED" or "take the proficiency exam".  I knew that I was holding out for a reason.  The whole system is terribly flawed and unable to accommodate my kind of learning. 

My teachers were terribly confused by me.  And my Mother too.  I got so bogged down in 2nd grade, that they held me back, thinking I was slow.  But in 4th grade, they could see that I had absorbed way, way more than the other students and then thought I was too advanced, so they pushed me ahead.  Both of those moves were terribly traumatizing for me socially and emotionally.  Horrible.  I never mastered my "times tables" though they drilled me and drilled me for a year.  I couldn't find the "why" and therefore couldn't retain it. 

Rote doesn't work for me, but meta does. 

I'm seeing the connection right now between this and sex.  I've noticed that men do this thing.  Typically.  They overlap layers of meta-woman so that the sexual experience is more extreme.  There are many ways to do this.  Mirrors, cameras with multiple angles, watching other people fucking, watching women fuck themselves, watching women fuck each other, extreme make-up, enlarged breasts, shaved genitalia, extreme taboo-busting scenarios and positions - and more.  All this doubles up the external experience of sex so that it is more intense for them.  As a woman, all this seems silly and unnecessary.  The quantity of sex is not in the externals, but in the internals.  It is the infinite possibilities of adoration, pleasure, giving and receiving, spiritual and emotional gratification and transcendence which intensifies sex - and I'm not talking about commitment or marriage or any of that.  That's another external - just time-related instead of space-related.  I think Ken Wilber would call those an Atman Project.  Men are very confused by me sometimes - I want the internals, not the commitment.  Common, popular teaching about dating and sex constantly confuses these and makes it really difficult to be understood.  So men experience the impulse to intensify sex using meta on the externals.  Women do so on the internals - typically.  Very inneresting.

But wait!  There's more!

I am seeing now that self-awareness is a developmental issue that effects abso-freakin'-lutely everything!  People are more apt to Project their own unresolved emotional issues onto others when they are unable to reach a certain level of self-awareness where the solution becomes self-evident.  Until they reach that level, they see others as being the cause of strife and difficulty in their lives and their language and conversation is filled with crude objectification of others.  For my entire life, I have struggled with being blamed in this way by people who just can't see their own reflection.  It's a developmental limitation. 

In AA there is a section in the Big Book called, "How it Works" which begins like this:

"Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.  Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.  There are such unfortunates.  They are not at fault.  They seem to have been born this way.  They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty.  Their chances are less than average.  There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest."

This section in the Big Book is describing exactly this.  I was raised by someone who had grown up with active alcoholism and all the fear and confusion that that includes but had no ability to find resolution for her emotional turmoil other than projecting it outward onto others.  Me.  As I grew up, I found myself attracting others like her to me because I was used to dealing with it.  I didn't really know there were people out there who could resolve problems by way of self-reflection until it was too late and my relational patterns had been laid down. 

Learning how to be, in the early years, is learned and taught by modeling only.  She could not relate in a non-blaming way, so I grew up overcompensating for the excess blame that was coming onto me all the time.  I had no way of knowing that there was another way to live.  Then later, when I found out there was another way to live, I had no way of knowing what this gap was about.  Without understanding, the only interpretations available to me seemed to be the typical, regressive lack of intelligence, sanity or integrity.  When no other options are yet available, those seem to be the only choices. 

I married a man who showed self-awareness when I met him, and while we were dating.  But as soon as we married, there was an event that triggered him and he instantly regressed to a state of non-self-awareness.  And he never returned.  I had no warning about this.  I felt tricked.  I was pregnant with the child of a man who was just like my Mother - blaming and projecting - and I was back in that state of chronic overcompensation.  It was horrible. 

It is quite possible that this can happen to me again.  Very soon. 

So it seems that the state of pre-self-awareness is a developmental level that is still fairly common - and therefore cannot be considered a "developmental disability" even tho it keeps people at a chronic level of disability when it comes to solving certain relational problems.  People like that tend to keep objectifying others and perpetuating the dualities and barriers between people.  They cannot even see the value in integration or merging intentions with people who are "not like them".  I've seen this in the Emergent Conversation in Christianity.  I've seen it in online communities where people fixate on collecting information in an attempt to find the resolution point for a problem, but never get to that place where they can see generation of both the problem and the solution in themselves regardless of information. 

So, I'm thinking that it will become increasingly important to literally teach people how to become self-aware.  And there is alot of New Age and pseudo-spiritual thought that is actually counter-productive in this endeavor.  It can be mistaken for "information".  And the danger in "teaching" it is that it can be looked at as information to be gathered and collected.  Therefore, there needs to be some empirical study done on this with verifiable methods of determining levels of self-awareness.  That way, people who do not score high can safely be barred from decisive higher epistemological conversations.  I know that's elitist, but the alternative is tyranny of the mediocre - and that's becoming increasingly unpleasant, not to mention deadly.  This will become very important work in fields like Law, Psychology, Education, Science, Medicine, Theology and all sorts of other things.  I'm sorry if that's bad news to some, but this problem of the those seeing through a glass darkly blaming those who are inwardly lit has gone on long enough.  It has to stop. 

---oOo---

My boss took me aside to talk to me today and see how I was doin'.  I don't have a normal job, so this is not filled with the tyical fear and loathing.  I actually get paid to care about people and be cared about.  It's freakishly great, tho confusing.  We talked for over an hour.  He is somewhat self-aware so it's possible to resolve conflict with him.  However, I work with someone who is not, and I can see now that we will not be able to resolve our conflicts.  She seems to be constitutionally incapable of the kind of rigorous honesty that makes the solutions obvious.  When we're around each other, we trigger one another terribly and spiral down.  So, I've decided to keep my distance.  This is the first time I've been able to keep from regressing to the "stupid-crazy-or-evil" interpretation.  Especially with a woman.  Women trigger me really bad when they do not self-reflect.  They get quarantined off to the Bad Place pronto. 

So, one of the things I want to do is develop a method of teaching self-awareness and then testing for it.  I want to do this as part of my job.  I don't know if I can.  But I want to. 

---oOo---

And about my eyes...

I knew I painted them like that for a reason.  I am trying to get people to be self-aware.  Those who can't do self-aware often feel provoked by my eyes and simply feel self-conscious.  Then the projections start flyin'.  It's inevitable.  Sometimes they are good projections, like with my friend Al.  But sometimes they're not, like with my boss who feels fear. 

This raises all sorts of questions about "The Evil Eye" and the folk remedies for it.  Wearing jewelry and textile prints which contain eye motifs have long been used to draw away the acursed gaze of someone who obviously has evil intent toward you.  The power of that evil intent is determined by just how deeply split off you are from your own Shadowed impulse.  If you can successfully objectify the impulse, the evil has little power.  But if you are plagued by a "besetting sin" or temptation, and that eye fixes you and you feel like they see your impulse to sin, the power of that evil intent is overwhelming and they make you do bad things.  The ability to repress is what makes civilization work.  People who have issues with being looked at prolly have difficulty repressing.  Those who are ready to stop repressing can look others in the eye and it's okay.  People who work in the field of lie-detection know that we believe that the eyes are the windows of the soul and that people can see inside of us when they we look directly into our eyes, so our eye movement determines our comfort level with what we imagine is being seen. 

All this goes on and on.  It's all connected and endlessly fascinating ...  because I'm meta-learning.  When I feel satisfied that I really have integrated all this with what I already know, then I can let go of it with my short term recall and my long term recall will hang onto it.  Then my short term can concentrate on more important things.  More pressing things... 

...such as my Mother asking my permission today to talk to my Shrink about what her role in my illness and recovery is.