compassion

The last thing I thought I would be doing so quickly was typing away on this thing, but there are so many questions to be asked! Hopefully the phrase "ask and you shall receive" has some significance in the way that I hope putting questions out there into the universe begs for an eventual societal answer.

Maybe the only relevance to size in this philosophical thinking is in the way that beauty pageant contestants always wish for world peace. That contestant is stuck in a specific observer position. This seems to prevent the individual from even being able to grasp the concept that her societal position as a contestant may depend on her existence in a construct where world peace cannot yet exist.

You know how these things work, text lays around for 250 years before somebody picks it up and thinks it's kinda neat. Today I thought long and hard about several previous posts, and I came to the conclusion that I needed to take a break in talking about obesity for just a minute go back to school for an education in a relatively simple concept that has seemingly gone unnoticed for decades by now, maybe for centuries, maybe for millennium.

Maybe, just maybe, there is a grand experiment going on to figure out how long it takes for a sentient intelligence to arise from the primordial slime and become enlightened to just the right degree. If we are failing to fulfill the requirements of such an experiment, I could fear that the results if said experiment had an expiration date. I really start to hope that if a certain civilization actually had a glimpse of some very important info, that we would try to figure out what they knew and why they were so insistent about a certain date, I think it's 12.21.12.

Ok, start out with compassion and end up with mathematical thinking, totally obliterating the path that I wanted to take! I can't pass up the chance though to reflect on how wiki says two interpretations put the date at either the 21st or the 23rd. If two possibilities were extrapolated from the same data, maybe a misinterpretation caused a failure of translation where it should be from the 21st to the 23rd. After all, according to the equation given, the smallest unit of measurement listed is 20 days to make a uinal. I can't find any representation at this time for a unit of measurement for 3 days in the long count or the Haab' version of mayan chronological technology.

I do find a period of five days or "nameless days" at the end of a Haab's 18 uinals (20 days) known as Wayeb'. It is possible that a similar small period exists in between the 13th and 14th "baktun" that is similar to wayeb. Oh great, now I'm speaking freaking Mayan! Or is it Olmec? Rest assured, the world can't "end" on one date if a span of time is necessary for the transition from the end of one baktun to the beginning of the next! :) In other words, just a long, long, long, long, long, long new year.

While people love the drama, tragedy, and potential chaos involved with any end of the world fantasy, it's less entertaining for the movie industry to provide a theory that the date is more involved with entering the messianic age. Doesn't that feel so much better? I don't think it would sell as many movie tickets though! :)

I saw a phenomenon within this whole Mayan intellectual expedition that repeats over and over a common thread. This one civilization practiced bloodletting. Many other civilizations had similar techniques of establishing rituals to enforce a sociopolitical position and, when enacted, was important to the perceived well-being of a given society or settlement according to wiki.

I've often considered any attempt at religion by a human being or civilization in any time period was simply a manifestation of an instinct to serve. This instinct shows up way too many times within recorded history to be simply coincidence. I have started to imagine that maybe a possibility exists where we are born with one set of instincts merely to survive, but we were given intelligence to figure something out.

Connecting the construct of intelligence to purpose and then combining that with the need to figure something out and the instinct to serve provides a rather crude formula to explain how religion was man's attempt to find a way to grow the part of the brain responsible for compassion and therefore enlightenment. Simple instinct would get us breathing when we "come out", but something deep within the cerebellum has provided us with some kind of desire to build on the compassion center of the human brain itself. The instinct to serve would be a brilliant "trick" to a non-enlightened brain to provide some reason to expand our consciousness even further and therefore get even smarter, and therefore become more enlightened. It's a way to tell an intelligent, sentient race to think and evolve beyond where you are at now, as a race, on the whole.

When thinking backwards, it's easy to observe that religion is a phenomenon that exists, therefore it must have a very deep and significant purpose. When looking back through the portal of history, so many groups attempted to get it right, so therefore there is something to get. After all, we're here! We try and try to explain some purpose, some meaning to it all. Maybe it's that instinct to serve something greater that makes us aware of what great things we could achieve, or what great prize there is at the end of the path to enlightenment.

I asked google a few questions and thought, wouldn't it be great for us to finally figure out this quantum thing so Dr. Steven Hawking could finally provide theory that eventually provides us with the synaptic external network link so we could google mentally! Would that be false enlightenment, or would that be a pathway to eventual enlightenment? Chicken vs. egg again! Wow, synaptic google brought to you by Quantum Devices. Wow, by saying that does it mean it could someday happen? Why not? :)

While even brushing against the phenomenon of quantum, I could not help but also notice how the Feynman diagram almost looks like my philosophical statement that everything is connected and at the same time has two sides. I have to do much more studying to apply some of my contemplation to quantum and also apply quantum to my contemplation! :) I do want to openly express a sentiment of good luck to CERN and Fermilab on finding or not finding the higgs boson though! It's amazing that existence vs non-existence has a parallel to some of my previous arguments and further expresses the duality in which we even exist as the observer, and therefore the duality that also exists in all things connected by the very reality in which we exist!

Considering compassion (getting back on track), I realize the relevance of our ability to acquire it as a race, and how it must start with the individual in order the be eventually acquired by the human race as a whole. I asked wiki if compassion is learned or innate, and both the question and the answer ended up being grounded in multiple observer's mutual desire for us to experience compassion as a race. There was an observation that compassion can exist as a result of some emotional trauma and an ability to identify with how it felt to be the victim of circumstance where a lack of compassion had a negative impact.

I wanted to see if people believe that compassion is part of instinct or something we learn throughout our life. The answer provided didn't really answer my curiosity, but it did illustrate that once an individual is exposed to some kind of abusive behavior, they are given the choice to inflict this behavior on another individual, or they can use that experience to relate to others in a similar circumstance, and that may inspire the compassionate individual to provide help. It's at the root of charity, which is a phenomenon that exists because of need. There I end up back at the struggle to exist providing a reason for existing, and either helping others to exist, or working to terminate their existence. That seems really two sided, but the deeper I try to get at any conflict, the more often two distinct sides are revealed.

In even linking to the Good Samaritan parable, I further read “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.’ And, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Interestingly enough, even in the Gospel of Luke there is yet another hint at the possibility that each of us is another "version" of the observer coming from a finite yet diverse set of possible circumstances. The "golden rule" provides this same sentiment, and I'm sure so does many other concepts already thoroughly introduced into our current knowledge.

It would seem obvious to an intelligent individual that by imposing suffering on another individual, you are contributing hate to society instead of love, and therefore nothing but negative energy could come back to the individual who is so brave to dare fate and break the rules. This golden rule philosophy would be the foundation to any potential Utopian society.

If the beauty pageant contestant really wants "world peace", why would one ever put someone down for their sexual preference? Whenever I bring up sexual preference rights though, it always inevitably comes back to size preference instead of gender preference. It's ironic how some people can argue for one sexual preference and demonize another. Dammit I wasn't going to go there in this post! :)

I found more pondering on the issue of compassion being learned or innate, which I'm guessing is a nice word for "instinct". In this question answer session, it is proposed that "The experience of injustice is important in the development of compassion." The answer in this case actually goes into the additional phenomenon of power struggle and the two sided phenomenon of the bully and the one bullied. This answer still matches up to the other in the way that it illustrates how experience combined with upbringing forms the unique compassion equation within each of us uniquely.

I had a theory about how instinct is the mind-source connection, the thing that starts up the respiratory system when we come out and it is therefore time to exist. If we can relate the metaphorical heart simply being part of the human brain, then our instinct drives us to independently create a heart-source connection over the course of our existence.

I've postulated earlier about how our invention of religion was an attempt to push the compassion center of the brain beyond what it was thousands of years ago, and continue pushing it beyond what it is now. Maybe my only evidence that our race is so obviously not fully mentally evolved is in the lack of compassion the average human will be inclined to show to another human, or "fellow observer".

Maybe the same observer can be brought into a singular reality multiple times if the source has domain over time and space and can place multiple versions of the same observer within the same reality! Compassion would be a test to see how bad we would treat each other even though we could potentially, theoretically, be each other. Wow that's kind of deep, haven't tried to google it but somebody probably wrote something to this affect long, long ago already! :) When I look up golden rule itself it is amazing to see how this is one of many common threads among all religions.

At one point I have considered how I was so compelled to start blogging just after the 41st b-day. I contemplated how maybe there is a hormonal, physical component to enlightenment process that can only occur upon a certain type of maturity. This brought about yet another paleolithic theory about the venus figurines and the way in which so many people have already proposed a pre-historic matriarch theory.

When I simply wondered about how my own hormonal changes might have influenced my thinking, I contemplated something. Since women are prone to possible hormonal fluctuations on a regular cycle, could it be possible that women were provided glimpses of hormonally produced enlightenment at a time when the human brain was still so "fresh"? Could this be another tiny part of the puzzle in trying to figure out details from an age before language or recorded history? I had to ask someone if this mere theory could be perceived as "sexist", but I have no negative intent when even contemplating such an exotic and temporally distant reality. Some people have studied this a lot more than I have at this point and dispute the existence of a matriarchy at all. At this point I have to plan on even trying to read the whole article that I just linked to!

I have had a friend inform me that it's much more likely that any potential matriarch could be explained by the way in which only females can give birth, so they are recognized by paleolithic man as "magical" in that respect. Paleolithic man had a much more sex based religion though because by practicing the ritual of sex, they actually made more of us! What is more magic than that? I've often wondered about the way in which sex is kind of demonized by our current society, more evidence in a sub-conscious fear of over-population.

This fear of over population provided yet another profound realization. There was a line in the blog I linked to, "Hunger is not the result of 'too many mouths' to feed. Global food production has consistently outpaced population growth. People go hungry because they do not have the land on which to grow food or the money with which to buy it." Well, maybe if you replace too many mouths to feed with too many obese people, you can begin to confront the issue of fear of obesity.

While going over population issues, I ran across the philosophy of Malthusianism. You can imagine my surprise when I read that this concept emerged around the time of the industrial revolution! Wow, I have already written before about the critical role the industrial revolution has played in the eventual growth of our collective waistlines. Imagine my surprise when I found a connection between this philosophy and the events going on at the same time.

One article I found about compassion finally crossed over into the use of a specific part of the brain that is responsible for emotion, and therefore connected to the feelings of empathy that can be translated into compassion.

When I discovered the wonders of the insular cortex, I could barely contain myself! I look down at the 2500 word count and I have a thought.

I must begin to craft the skill of writing one singular blog entry that gets to the point and then moves on to the next amazing, fascinating, why didn't they think of this moment. Fantasies of winning the nobel peace prize for solving obesity flow though my mind in an amazingly fantastical OMG moment, only to be quickly dissolved by the realization that I'm some poor southern uneducated hillbilly redneck that just happened to learn to type before the internet and is guilty of creating amazingly long run on sentences and blog posts!

roflmao :)

I really could have stayed on the point, written about this whole compassion thing and how it reinforces what George Harrison wrote when he said love could save the world. By spouting some kind of "love everybody" philosophy repeatedly I just come across as a boring humanitarian hippy. If I politely explain the way in which things I see have a profound emotional impact on me, I might prompt some kind of real attempt at changing what I perceive as a negatively imbalanced status quo.

When suggesting solving such big problems, sometimes you have to imagine the way in which solving a bigger problem might make the first problem seem easy. Simultaneously, one must also see how attempting to solve a perceived smaller problem could either help or exacerbate the bigger original problem, or cause new problems to appear spontaneously that are directly attributed to solving the first problem.

I hope that by eventually tripping over some real, physiology connections I can eventually bring some kind of positive into the equation just by sharing my perceptions and making people with high levels of education ask themselves why not? more often. I wrote the whole blog post about why not just to re-invent the wheel because more skilled and experienced people than I have been all up into this.

I didn't bother to google the concept of reverse problem solving, so I was s.o.l. even while writing such a big blog post on the very subject. I wasn't writing so much about concept as I was exploring that very self-realized concept as I was talking about something I observed, in the context of an old Beatles song. What's that about? I'm a new blogger give me a freakin break! :)

That other article has a link to this personal success blog, amazing how personal success can also translate into societal success, and the more people who are enlightened the better off we all really are.

Ok, when I started to study neurology all the sudden, I looked up obesity and insular cortex, but it looks like a lot of the studies are about what obesity does to the brain. This post is already ginormous, so I can only point out that I am looking for a study that looks to the brain as a cause instead of only looking at obesity as something messing up the brain. I would easily argue that the industrial revolution did not directly cause more of us to be fat, but it may have contributed to making more wrong choices that made us fat. In other words, we don't choose to be fat, but we make bad choices that make us fat.

I found an article titled "Binge eating is associated with right orbitofrontal-insular-striatal atrophy in frontotemporal dementia". I think that this was meant to cover people who were already institutionalized, but this was kind of fascinating in my bigger thought. You know, I thought that if I google "neurological cause of obesity" I would not be bombarded with all the things that obesity is allegedly doing to the brain. I only started to poke around the brain myself because I really do have a sneaking suspicion that while they study how our fat body hurts the brain, they may be overlooking the ways in which the brain contributes to our fat bodies.

Then, I find this article called "Obesity Surgery May Cause Neurological Problems". I was like whooooaaaa because I started to look for what neurologists have done in the area of obeseology but I ended up finding out something kind of sinister that I had not made myself educated to already. One would think that less food digested means less calories, but it's really sad to imagine that without proper follow up care, some people who have the surgery will end up with peripheral neuropathy, or PN if they let themselves fall victim to freaking malnutrition!

I was looking into any studies that attempted to use MRI technology to check out a large number of morbidly obese people's insular cortex. Imagine my surprise when I read the line "Research upon conversation links it to the capacity for long and complex spoken sentences." OMG LOL I happened upon another interesting phenomenon, "that reversible inactivation of the insula disrupts amphetamine conditioned place preference, an animal model of cue-induced drug craving"

Wow, the paradox is astounding that I read earlier, "The insula also reads body states like hunger and craving and helps push people into reaching for the next sandwich, cigarette or line of cocaine." A number of functional brain imaging studies have shown that the insular cortex is activated when drug abusers are exposed to environmental cues that trigger cravings. This has been shown for a variety of drugs of abuse, including cocaine, alcohol, opiates and nicotine. Despite these findings, the insula has been ignored within the drug addiciton literature, perhaps because it is not known to be a direct target of the mesotelencephalic dopamine system which is central to current dopamine reward theories of addiction."

Wow, obviously the "diet industry" hasn't had as much interest in examining the potential insular cortex connection either. I can also safely assume now that Dr. Drew didn't want to address the paradox of removing an addition without taking away the addictive substance for a very very very very very good reason! :) That guy's no neurologist, or obeseologist for that matter. :)

While I started to write about compassion, is it an irony that a little digging brought me to the insular cortex, which brought me to such a complex theory? I wonder if I was supposed to think that deeply about it at all! :) I wonder about how much grant money I could get if I did happen to already be a neurologist and I already knew about all the studies that do not exist because I checked out the book of five rings and it told me to see what I cannot see by seeing what I can see. I was concerned that the gastric bypass might cause some atrophy in some part of the insular cortex, but I obviously had no idea of what I was getting into. I mean, this really is brain surgery, geez! I was wrong because it's not about atrophy as much as it is about proper operation. I don't want people to think that damaging or attempting to remove part of the insular cortex is a good idea or anything damn!

There are too many other functions wrapped up in that thing to mess with it until you know what your doing, and apparently from the age of the research I'm finding, they don't know much! There really is an incredible, awesome balance at work. To see that addiction and compassion are potentially coming from the same general area of the brain is fascinating. I can imagine the first attempt to mess with the cortex to fix obesity and then causing someone to suddenly become a sociopath out of nowhere. There is such a delicate balance in the way our very genetic structure has interlocking pieces that mesh into one another. You cannot simply remove one thing without risking something else. I read this article and realized the power behind what I said before. When I said that size is not a flaw, it's an instruction to provide variation to promote diversity, I had not yet even read this article!

Ok, over 3800 and it's been way too long, I have to sign out for now, but I will no doubt be looking around more to see if there is a neurologist in the room where all of these professional experts are gathering in an attempt to eradicate a problem that may be a symptom. I said something about going back to school and I sure wasn't kidding! I was all ready to "wrap it up" and then I could not resist something I found while studying neurology! It is such a trip that mirror neurons could actually explain why we love to watch porn! That's a good note to end on, and now I'm about to break the 4k word count as it is!