So What?

Okay, you decide what next? I leave you readers to comment which of the subjects I’ve mentioned should be the next post. Something will come along anyway maybe an inspired idea of your own – let me know in the comments.

Write up on a couple of expressive biases I’ve mentioned?

Should I write the next post on how I believe culture to be an expressive body?

Expand on the idea of habits forming habitats?

Outline how I think we can prepare the ground for peak flow?

Do you have any related questions you want to discuss here?

I’ve been thinking about terminology, what I call my metaphor, and I think it most resembles a metaphor of the ‘psychic environment’ . Dynamic things of meaning present through events, time, and dimensions we exist in. I also figured I’ve been calling myself a poet without evidence. Here are a couple of poems from my collection.

Quarks and Larks in Apple Trees is an old poem that I used to perform in London venues as part of my short slot on stage. Depending on the night a poet might get 3-5 minutes…or shorter if you get booed off. I wrote the Haiku this year and if you don’t mind me saying I find the title particularly inventive.

Far From Shore

Thoughts trickle to a stream of dreams

Flowing to the river of life

Now here we are oceans apart

Larks & Quarks in Apple Trees

Take a look at science get into minds like Einstein,
To me it’s frightening this blindness that we live by,
See we can take raw energy and apply our theories randomly,
We could build an end to humanity yet discover no sense of identity,
The realms of possibility, like black holes in the space of reality as time collides along the boundary of our journey.
If we can will such things to being, can they bring us closer to meaning and what’s beyond an answer to any question?
Do my ideas seem alien?
As I look around surprised is the blue sky just bent light and behaviour merely flights of fancy?
Who determines e=mc? Squared or to the power of two shared this doesn’t do enough for me and you.
Spared the unbearable truth our awareness takes us through beyond the infinite and absolute. A blend of presence and absence, movement without resistance, Sensuous harmony and a symmetry in minds reflections,
A collective essence!
Overwhelming waves of experience can brush with the lightest touch past your world of existence and animate the difference between what is and what isn’t.

You can let me know what kind of poetry you enjoy or post a comment with your own poetry…just let some words flow! I hope your own flows are a peaceful fun ride until next time curious friends.

An Enduring Instinct

Hi, I hope you have made it through the previous posts about expressive instincts. Here we are at the last and this final instinct, I think, has the capacity of regulating our instinctive expression. Tolerance allows us to cope and carry on through, knowing the end is close. As tolerance snaps acceptance, anxiety and charm, recoil in the denial of time and effort.

Tolerance can be like a fuel gauge, an alert to the problems of running low then empty. Something tested with challenges and activities we take on. Tolerances can be finely balanced strains that hold things together or let things unravel and unwind from your experience. The instinct certainly influences our mood and attitude and is reflected in our dislikes.

With charm anxiety and acceptance they grow negative in abundance or a deficit tolerance is different; seemingly having a positive charge and a negative charge that is switched on instantly when the right conditions appear. Intolerance can be an outburst in an otherwise calm atmosphere that quickly settles again as though nothing happened.

Core expressive instincts

A sense of tolerance is mindful appreciation of your day or a time span to manage. I’ve ordered the expressive instincts because I do consider tolerance to be the way Instincts are self-regulating. Intolerance can be turned inward toward ourselves as we find something distasteful about our own behaviour and communication. Overlapping instincts may inspire noticeable expressions of patience, empathy, grace or elegance. Blends of these instincts may allow us a broad range of emotional moods and attitudes.

These instincts are woven deeply into our experience, the infinitely varied experience a person could have in a lifetime. This complexity requires a simpler mechanism than words and contracts to determine our impulses. Pressures, tensions and frictions we’re asked to absorb, to take on and carry through phases of experience seems to be what our instincts transmit and translate from expression. We aren’t always able to absorb the stress forces and people need time processing the meaning of things. We can also learn what our commitment truly means when we fall short or fail to live up to our word.

I start a new job next week. So I will try and stay posting regularly but things might get a bit intermittent in the beginning, as always dear reader thanks for taking time to bring meaning to my words. Keep following to find out more about creative expression!

Quirky strangeness.

Hi thanks for visiting mind science and creativity! I hope you find the ideas interesting and have some ideas worth sharing in a comment. If you aren’t familiar with what they’ve written Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung provide an archetypal description of the psyche, different descriptions based on experiences shared with them. This ecocentric view is an architectural description of the psyche working through experience.

I’ve watched groups and individuals doing specific things for around thirty years and I’ve read at least a hundred authors with something more to say about human experience. Modern technology allows any of us to watch and listen to philosophers, entertainers and gurus from around the world presenting ideas in our own homes.

The more ecoeccentric your perspective the more acceptance you can find in the world. These ideas are projections and predictions as we currently don’t have technology to examine the instincts scientifically, so there’s no real evidence except the sense things make. I truly think of them as metaphors, stepping stones between us but I’m just a poet and thinker tinkering with ideas. Okay so now it is a bit of an exotic topic!

You will have to feel your way around this next instinct and try and relate it to your own charm. Because charm is the third instinct in the Core4. Charm could be a sense of humour, warm friendliness, manners and politeness and ease with things, a genial attitude. It could be honesty, trustworthiness, helpfulness or all of those. Charm is an instinct we develop alongside cultural awareness and relationship and life learning, it’s one that matures well.

Charms can also be physical. A ready smile, intelligent eyes or a quirky style. Anyone with a little knowledge of quantum mechanics will recognise charm as one of the quarks discovered by Murray Gell-Mann who is another one of my scientific heroes. I searched around for a suitable term before settling on charm, previously I called it capacity, room for more than essentials and flexibility to adapt and add to what you’re doing. Think of Eckhart Tolle’s ideas of spaciousness.

All the instincts I’m describing are capacities that shrink and expand with experience and we can always add a development goal of increasing or decreasing the capacity. You may feel you always say yes and accept too much and learning to accept less demands can still be done with charm if we are conscious of practicing both capacious charm and reduced acceptance.

Charm is what lies behind charisma and radiates from a presence that catches the attention of a room upon entry. Charm relates in some way to; optimism, hope, belief and even faith and obviously some quirks in our patterns of thought. The term charm works very well to describe this instinct as not everyone carries the same things around with them.

It can seem like phases of time are charmed because not every moment or event is like that – where we are zinging and in or near peak-flow. Certain situations can disposes us of our special powers that would make the challenge we face so easy.

Next post is the last in the expressive instincts. Sure, we probably have many more but this core4 enable recognition, interaction and success at being grounded and present in what anyone is doing. I will follow on with a description of some expressive biases we can pick up without noticing. I will also attempt to describe an architectural sense of the peak-flow state, a sense of instinctively creating it.

Caring Instincts

Welcome you meaning seekers and internet wanderers. You can catch up with the previous posts relating to expression if you’ve landed on this post. Here we go with instinct number two on the self expression charts.

Once we accept the presence of anything, even ourselves, many varied associations and associated experiences can be fixed to that entity. Many of those associations will excite an anxiety impulse. Worry we aren’t able, don’t have control over things. A belief that we can’t trust in stuff. We all have different ranges of anxiety, different worries, cares and concerns we carry through phases of experience.

Some cares and concerns won’t be beneficial, especially long term habits relating to your past self. Some cares are worth carrying and holding onto if they smooth out experience and make your life easier to manage. Worth having if your cares make the world a nicer place! Anxiety is bound to our problem solving capacities but it can be attached to events beyond our control and problems we can’t really solve. Experiences we visualised going wrong, deep self doubts or doubts and suspicions about others.

Anxiety is certainly in the leading wave of self expression, perhaps a pilot wave as we step into new experiences, plotting features to avoid or tick off. Anxiety can’t be a sustained wave of self expression because it is a weak flame; as our expressions relate more and more to problems in our own environment, rather than the fire inside ourselves.

Anxiety is a neutral instinct causing us to think and feel our way more acutely through experience. When we respond to anxiety we make a positive difference to what we are doing. It can grow negative, as with any instinct, when we react to anxiety without consideration.

Caring about thoughts of care, worry and anxiety helps us consciously influence anxiety patterns as we seek an understanding from the thought and a sense of positive intent. All the expressive patterns seem open to the right kind of conscious influence; reflective effort and attentiveness.

I’m going to tag some ideas about survival instincts here. Just take a moment to think of a non-survival instinct… All instincts are survival instincts so it seems banal speaking of a ‘survival instinct’ when it is expressiveness that takes us away from danger. I have our Instincts mapped differently; we have instincts for information – what we look to absorb and take in from events. Then the expressive instincts that move thoughts and ideas through to action and growth.

I hope you’re enjoying what you read and hopefully find this is good food for thought. If you want to let me know your thoughts and ideas comment below. Follow my blog if you want to keep up to date with thoughts like these. Thank you always for reading and you curiousity about this thing we call life.

Creative Self Expression

Welcome you searching hearts, yearning minds and inquisitive characters. You will find writing on this blog for personal therapy and the pleasure of connecting people, ideas, styles and cultures.

Recapping from the previous post I explained that behaviour patterns are embedded in expressive cycles. Why does that distinction matter? Every behaviour pattern is bound to some aspect of an expressive cycle; if your mood is low or you are angry your behaviour fits the mood. If you think of the cycle of a washing machine this is a good analogy for expressive cycles which end similarly in the drain and spin programme. Cycles must be complete to wash feelings from experience.

The notes you read are aspects of my thirty year path of recovery that has spanned quite a bit of experience. I won’t bore you with the details but I have used up my time on earth being easily led ending up with some issues to deal with. No great drama I always think because drama is relative and there are much worse histories than my own.

I was down the shops earlier getting moody about people clogging up the aisles. I checked my negativity and realised that these people weren’t slowing me down or getting in my way, I wasn’t caring enough. By blaming them I didn’t have to address my critical thoughts and negative feelings.

Thinking about expression, even looking out into the world to interact with anything we must first accept it to be the thing brought to life through our senses, we must accept our senses are attuned and accept our self being present. This forms an instinct for acceptance, a sense of agreement or mixed feelings of resistance and accepted. We are complex creatures and can handle a little resistance mixed in.

Terms, the words we accept at the start of a relationship, may need renegotiating to reflect how much more bought in or out we have grown. Some people believe their way ahead or their recent past is made from sacrifice. That X has cost Y. In reality, if the only path forward means options are limited then choices lead to concessions; a fee for progress.

The word sacrifice also assumes something is forever gone, dedicated to some higher power. That is rarely seen in life, things seem to come around again. The definitions we accept are all worthy of reflection to ease unnecessary burdens and strains of a reality shaped by ideas.

Instinctive acceptance encourages compassion and inclusion admits difficulties, wrongs, allow self expression and differences. In negative forms, it denies all the above or has resistance for these and other life dynamics.

We have acceptance for things but resistance to stuff that goes with it and we have the capacities to juggle the diverse impulses. We aren’t conflicted, we just have different values we decided to follow, strengthening conditioning towards one impulse over another and maturing.

I recently learnt, through a dear friend, there is a conscious effort of acceptance we call admittance. More than accepting the flow of things admittance brings things closer to our hearts and to our lives. In human relations it is a complexity of acceptance. Acceptance you and I are alone in this world and acceptance that we can both be conscious of briefly suspending our natural solitude. A truthful expression of the human need for connection.

Admittance can mean entering a deeper phase of a relationship as shame and hurt are faced and not avoided. We admit to mistakes to express true feelings and honest problems to work through together.

Next post I will attempt to describe the very next instinct to emerge from self expression and our creative efforts. Thanks again you beautiful readers and writers who inspire me to improve and stick to this path of writing, reflecting and connecting through inspiration.

Animating meaning takes expression

Welcome, these posts are growing long so I’ll cut straight to the point as we consider some ideas about expression. Modern sources are much richer than Psychologists who didn’t get vocalists with their music unless the were Opera lovers. Culture is another expressive body that grows through us but that’s a subject for another post!

The first confusion to stumble across is what makes expressions different to behaviours. An action or behaviour pattern is like a particle of effort. The collapse of a wave to water droplets as it reaches the shore. Expression is the wave action that brings water to the shore and sweeps it up again. Expressions are the activities people bring into and away from experience.

The scales of expression I want you to bring to mind are the efforts of thinking, feeling, vocalising and doing things. It seems controversial to say stress connects them all, too simple. Just check if most of your thoughts and worries revolve around pressures, tensions and frictions…

Other people too must be translating the pressures, tensions and frictions as part of an unpacking of communication they translate. A resemblance of the many strains wrapped into what we say.

It is not only the pressures, tensions and frictions that factor in your experience but our first wails in the world were environmental responses. We will begin to describe differences between creative and stress expressions but the definition is a superficial sense of pressures tensions and frictions we enjoy and ones we struggle with. Hey, some people enjoy struggling and the bliss of doing nothing drives some folk crazy.

Being different we all have unique sensitivities, boundaries and thresholds and we pick out different characteristics from the information we’re faced with. Forces of habit and the habitats that inspire is another post that I’ll share in the future, if you my dear reader enjoy what you’re reading!

The scale of expression I mentioned earlier is just our focus for self-development. Awareness of expression can be realised in miniature; as words contort our mouths and we control the way the air comes out. It goes on in larger scales when hopes are formed and eroded as time passes and spirits deflate.

The key feature for creative expression is recognising that releasing pressure, letting go of a habit or demand that adds nothing to life at this moment in time; checking if all the strains of tension and friction are worth holding on to. Any small shift makes your environment a little more creative.

That is the essence of creative expression; using our own expressiveness to reduce stresses and create more creativity. The next post will begin a tour into self-expression and the key instincts we use to navigate the planet.

I can see expression being five more posts so keep following to find more updates. Thanks for being focused on your growth because it helps everyone, not just your community but the light of humanity! Keep shining true to your brightness.

Like-Minded Theories

Greetings my curious readers, I’m grateful being able to share more thoughts with you today. I doubt they are as enlightening as the sun blazing through the tattered remains of Winter here in the UK.

I don’t really want to share the esoteric way I transformed the gender of my imaginative mind because just imagining it should work. The deeper methods I applied hark back to Jung’s archetypes and how a person can express their truest nature. To fully unlock the minds potential a marriage between the Shadow and Anima/Animus must happen. The two archetypes must have some relations for growth and development that form the basis of relationships and roots of our personalities. This brings us to the third party, the unwed Anima/Animus.

In my own mythology this archetype dies a death and everyone lives happy ever after, that’s the symbolic fairytale of self-mastery…it isn’t the only destiny. For me, being a hetro-male, it is easy but it could be exquisitely complicated matters of heart. My life-love, who wears the imprint of my imaginative mind, excites and guides my imagination could well be loved by my Animus, he could love both of us…he could love just himself and be hidden away, for fear we become similar.

Most of the archetypes and forms found in the work of Freud and Jung have been married within the thought-scheme of my metaphor of the psyche. I get the impression that our conscious attention, Ego, sketches out some aspects of Anima/Animus, only fragments which we often piece together badly. I have recently begun thinking of the traumatic learning process associated with our identity and connections in the world.
That’s a bit of substance around a structural sense of mind and the archetypes buried in our impulses, dreams and imagination. A journey anyone must go through to reach an understanding of their mind and meaning.

I have tried disentangling the way these mental constructs influence our thoughts. A basic idea began forming around language patterns of confidence and doubt; Ego resonating a sense of certainty, confidence, correctness or the rightness of a thing. Contrasted with the Shadow, thrilled by self-doubt, uncertainty and hesitancy. Communication is exquisitely complicated arrangement so I abandoned efforts to align theory with process.

This blog holds my thoughts and reflections about the mechanics, described by the great minds of the past, of our animate existence. I plan to change topic tomorrow but please do continue the discussion in the comments if you want to hear more of this thought stream about Freud and Jung. Thanks for visiting, if we both find the time worthwhile then words have made a little magic today

Fusion with Freud and Jung

I have been spiritual since childhood and been mindful of living right after some early missteps and false starts. My passions for psychology and identity, concepts of Freud and Jung stirred me to write a modern perspective. I was around thirty-five when I began developing my own designs of the mind. I thought it would a) improve my mental health. b) Make sense of and fit with other people’s ideas and the subject at heart. Over the next twenty years I played around setting up small experiments and monitored my own mental wellbeing improving.

Whether you are male or female, we all have images/ideals of a man and woman we carry in our heads…whether others are asked to measure up to it or that we refine our ideals from experiences with people doesn’t matter here. That male female presence relates some way to Freud’s concepts of Father / Mother and to Jung’s Animus / Anima

Jung’s anima cannot escape the associations to a Mother figure, earth-mother and the mystical union of femininity. Just as Freud’s Mother-entity is eternally bound to the collective unconscious mother-sense carried from our distant ancestors to this very evening…or whatever future date you’re reading from!

I prefer to talk of metaphors than models. Freud or Jung are not here to direct us precisely so you have your metaphors and I carry mine around in the hope of finding matches or productive clashes. If things need such names I would like to think it a map as the mind seems like a navigational device…and similarly to satnav it can give bad directions.

My map of the psyche just has attention and imagination. I must have been nearly ten years in before a beautiful idea struck me; in seeking wisdom and information I was missing half of the available data. I couldn’t look on the world as a woman would, or see events from a feminine perspective. In a shot I decided my imaginative mind was about to get a sex change so I could access the full spectrum of information. A small price for the gain. I figured that if I had an imagination that couldn’t imagine itself as a woman it was a pretty poor imagination! More about these changes and the way they relate to the great minds in Psychology next time. Thanks for stopping by and being in my thoughts

Bonds of Freud and Jung

I don’t expect to post here every day as I do have a density of ideas that take some arranging and as I’m not directly sharing the unpublished book in snippets here it’s a gathering of things worth sharing on the day. I plan to use this space to go into the background, of me and the books conception. The motivations and drives propelling my purpose.

Where “Ecocentricity” is the handbook of my modern theory of mind here is where people can find the notes, stray thoughts and edits that didn’t make the pages. Imagine yourself in a workshop tinkering with ideas. You might ask why I ever thought to develop a theory of mind, I often have! I began working with people and groups, teams in the early nineties and found the material…clunky, disjointed, disconnected and confusing. If all the great thinkers and theorists are correct, concepts of Freud, Jung, Wundt, Adler, then our minds are crammed, filled to the brim with spectres of thought….I’m assuming those names are familiar to readers, and a few others who’ve had something to say about what goes on in our heads! To the recent insights of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemann who seem to have uncovered many biases people can gather through experience.

Even since Jung parted ways from Freud studies have gone disparate directions to look into many aspects of mind and to pin down details of behaviour. Jung needed to create separation from Freud and his model of the psyche so that his own ideas could flourish and grow unfettered from established and emerging concepts. I see many similarities and believe that both models can be reconciled with few loose ends. Again, one can use imagination to entertain their ideas in a space of collaboration, wherein the world sees difference. Our view is stripped of much detail about the functional self to try and grasp a sense of the formative processes that create a sense of life; happiness, sadness, moods of doubt and optimism, attitude and being.

Freud, as one of the founders of analytical psychology, developed his model in the same analytical style. Some call it reductionist but I like to think it is architectural. Meaningful when you are seeking the foundations of trauma. Jung then developed a spiritual model with ephemeral aspects such as spirit, soul and meaning. Jung found meaning in emotions where Freud saw dysfunction.

Tomorrow I’ll go into more detail about how I see their models of the psyche being married. Thanks for reading and hope I can hold your interest with the next post. Pop a comment below if you have questions or suggestions.

A creative revival

Ok now you’re back in the room!
I’ve found myself with a little time to revive this old news. I have been busy moving many of my ideas forward and I hope to get a book published. The themes of the narrative are:

Metaphor.

The stress mechanism of meaning transmission.

The senses and how they are all variations of touch (I bet it’s the first time you’ve heard that) and ideas around the architecture of the nervous system.

Two biases: Emphasis bias and Perspective bias.

Meaning and sensation.

Effort and expression.

Presence and a presence of mind.

Capacities of emotion and awareness.

I want to make the complex concepts of human relations simple and straightforward to understand and use some creativity to fit the many splendoured ideas together. Drop a comment below if you’re inspired to connect!