Recording: Birth, DNA, Disability

This session grew out of our discussion on the 11st of Nov, when we discussed the body and its boundaries.

In Bernardo’s idealism, individual consciousness is a localized excitation in a field of subjectivity; a dissociated alter of universal consciousness. So we took questions about how this dissociation begins, develops, decays and dies. It was also the chance for people to share their personal experiences with pregnancy, birth and how society responds to genetic variation. 

Thanks Amy Lemon for assisting, Deborah Chen for her reflections that I share below, and underneath are Rita Conde’s timestamps and the recording. 

As we returned to contemplating when life begins and ends, Bernardo cautioned against trying to pin down any process too cleanly. Despite our desire for clear boundaries, no process in nature is binary, and dissociation is not a surgical divide. 

Instead, birth is a deeply archetypal process, one starkly coupled with death. When both of these occur in our lives in close proximity, it is multiple archetypal processes in motion at the same time, liable to cause what looks like a breakdown, but likely with its own internal logic.

When mind becomes matter

When we adopt new ideas and beliefs, we may wonder if those changes in our minds affect our bodies. This may not happen at first, but over time ideas sink deeper and deeper into our psyches. Eventually they may affect our physical states; however, we should guard against thinking that we can hack the system and think our way to good health. There are complex processes at work, and while our deeply held convictions play a role, we are by no means in complete control of our health.

Society's response to genetic variation

Because our culture values people as economic tools, any genetic variation that impairs productivity is a disability. In contrast, in some indigenous cultures schizophrenia might confer high social status thanks to access to the spirit world. In Nordic culture a blind person was considered a seer. How we view genetic variation is culture bound. Many conditions with limiting factors are paired with special gifts, such as the known link between savant syndrome and autism.

Even the stars will die

As no process in nature is flawless, sometimes dissociation is partial, as in cranial conjoined twins, who sometimes can understand each other’s thoughts and feelings. Every natural process comes to an end. Stars fade. Human beings decay and die. The end of the body is not the death of consciousness, merely are remerging with Mind at Large. As the dissociative boundaries crumble, the small eddy that was once you returns to the ocean of all that is.

TIMESTAMPS

00:01:20 - Today's topics
00:03:30 - The intimate relationship between birth and death
00:07:25 - The primacy of lived experience over philosophical conceptualization
00:09:21 - Birth and death as the two major archetypal human events
00:10:02 - Conventions of social behaviour
00:13:00 - Catastrophic archetypal events occurring simultaneously
00:14:40 - All things move towards their end
00:16:45 - Ideas sinking below the egoic layer
00:18:00 - Rupert Spira’s personal advice to Bernardo
00:19:40 - What it felt like to believe that death is the end of consciousness
00:21:45 - Human beings were not evolved to live until 90 years old
00:23:10 - Not everything in the body is caused by mental attitudes
00:23:45 - Change as the primal constant of nature
00:24:50 - A personal account of childbirth
00:28:35 - What happens to our alter when we give birth
00:32:40 - Humans are born prematurely 
00:37:37 - DNA and the transition from inanimate to animate matter
00:39:50 - Birth as the arising of new dissociated “whirlpools” of consciousness
00:44:14 - What are genes?
00:49:44 - Possible relations between consciousness and the collapse of the wavefunction
01:03:58 - How society treats people with mental disabilities
01:06:53 - The principle that every negative also carries a positive
01:09:47 - Focusing on the advantages granted by our limitations or conditions
01:10:55 - A definition of intelligence
01:16:16 - Bernardo’s personal account of a difficult moment in his life
01:21:00 - Reframing problems: a lack is usually balanced by an excess
01:29:55 - Fertilization and the first moment of dissociation: are sperm and egg alters?
01:32:56 - When does life begin, and asking whether a virus is alive
01:35:50 - We don’t need hermetically sealed boundaries 
01:37:50 - No process in nature is perfect or flawless
01:39:50 - The Western path versus the Eastern path
01:43:20 - Reality is a very promiscuous thing
01:44:04 - Cranial conjoined twins and the question of their boundary
01:47:40 - Physical decay as a gradual dissolving of dissociative boundaries
01:50:20 - Even stars die
01:53:35 - Decay should not be viewed as unnatural

Recording