Neural connections

Hi some thought and experiences generated by a friends very vivid memory and by their saying "no, I think he is describing a journey" when I struggled to describe thought/visualisation.

The experience I have - that I just touch on - as my thoughts become more visual (also auditory, tactile and whatever the fancy word is smelling - NLP, cant keep it in my head ) is actually like that in a trip, more LSD than a day at the sea. Its also like what I think is called wakeful dreaming - a state just before sleep or just before waking when my conscious mind is able to influence the very vivid thoughts that are present in my dream state. Influence... well slightly and to a greater extent than I could with practise .... too much will and I snap out of it, too little and I slip back fully into sleep.

Anyway - they said, about the image, something about where we have images within us ( I suppose others might think from without us ) that are brought together to form something so vivid and beautiful.

A perception I have from wakeful dreaming and other experiences is that we have a phenomenal supply of images. Laid down as we experience new and repeated experiences - praps linked to the creation or maintenance of neural connections.

In some way the images may form some sort of library stock - being brought together to help generate perceptions of what might be - in the future or in terms of how we think about alternatives options.

Thought - in "words" - may be a short cut to the whole image (remember, including sound, touch, smell etc.). Its easier to use this sort of short cut most of the time - it does not take as much computing time and, like words themselves, thoughts can be taken to equate to symbols. Like symbols they can be arranged in linear orders to form greater meaning and sentences.... communication. Something it took me longer than most to do as a child - I never understood the point of words when "reality", (at least) 4 dimensional, and in glorious technicolour, was so much more useful... but then I spent more time looking at trees and clouds than communication.

I wonder whether we "learn" (acquire perhaps) the tendency to replace raw image with worded thought and then become less able to access that raw information - except perhaps in dream or, perhaps, in other states of mind.

An experience of taking LSD is that it stops the filtering of information for relevance. For eg. normally we don't notice the carpet beneath our feet. With acid you see the carpet (with hallucinations too to entertain and baffle) but at the same time every thought/knowledge/etc that has ever been associated with carpet is accessed in true colour, sight, smell and sound.

I wonder (I do a fair bit of that) whether, in meditation, there is something in the way that we allow thought and experience to enter and play around in the mind that tends too to allow access to the more vivid, deeper, true (non-symbolic), store of mind.

Praps in conditions like altzimers where there is damage to the neural connections access to information stored as symbols/thoughts is restricted - as the words or thoughts fail to come the context ceases to have meaning. I think its a common experience for people to "find" a thought or memory at some other time - I wonder whether the brain continues to try to process unfinished searches for information and finds that the images that it wants for one process are still accessible attached to another memory and associates them together - sometimes the associations are very accurate and others are more bizarre.

It makes sense then to keep laying down images - to notice life in a mindful way. Praps this is the way we see/perceive new events - they make an impression, create new connections or support existing ones. If, as it seems so many of us tend to do, we do few things mindfully then praps we are not making new neural connections - we feed what we see into the existing script and do not notice anything new... like the fact that its a new day, song, smile, touch etc.

So, being, seeing, touching, mindfully - its a way of feeding our raw data, the splendid soup.

That was a long one. And, needles to say, a fairly manic one.

On identifying triggers for depressive states - its far easier to do for manic states. The examples people give some times seem too broad; as if they were not really accessing, or getting the need to, the tipping points - the little things that make all the difference.

Take care, Px

The extraordinary paranoia of nothing

Having written something, and knowing how few people read what I write, I don't know why I should feel paranoid never to receive a reaction - I wonder why that is.

Pxxxxxxxx

Nothing

Nothing never hurt me - no, only nothing ever hurt me,

The choice is to do, or to do nothing - to stop, to die.

Nothing is in the spaces in between life.

But, life appears in the nothing like bubbles carried on time and possibility.

Nothing generates life; nothing, is a fluid, a glorious soup.

Life takes life; nothing does not take life.

Nothing is where we all return, it is our whole, our make-up.