(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Gurdjieff taught himself to seek crisis consciously, as a means of shaking himself awake. He wrote:
"I had to forgo any limits, emotional, perceptual or knowable, that I had formed in myself, or had accidentally been formed in me by previous experience. I quickly recognized that any objective shock to the system could be used, provided it were safe enough to stop short - in some cases just exactly short - of total disruption of the life force in the body."
Gurdjieff's method included keeping his students in a perpetual state of alertness in order to solidify and "grow" the higher organs of perception. Only in this way can we achieve objective states of consciousness.
[Comment - Perhaps, higher organs of perception do not have to be grown. Maybe, such faculties already are in us and merely need to be purified, calibrated, activated, and given barakah in the form of whatever tajalli or unveiling Divinity wishes.
In any event, what “organs” is Gurdjieff referring to? How does being “in a perpetual state of alertness” solidify and grow them?
What kind of a perpetual state of alertness is he talking about and how does one achieve this state of alertness prior to growing the requisite organ of perception? This seems to presuppose what one needs to develop.
What constitutes “objective states of consciousness”? Objective according to what criteria or standards?
Spiritual development is not like storming the Bastille. While struggle is neccessary, one does not progress except by Divine leave.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) But, what is this Predator's mind, exactly? It is the way our brains and nervous systems are set up - as delineated by our DNA - which includes certain early periods of Imprinting, which establishes our circuitry and thinking processes at an age and under conditions over which we have no control.
One of the main aspects of socio-cultural programming is what is called "imprinting." Human beings are born with certain basic behavior patterns built in their DNA. Just as a flower will follow a certain series of steps from the emergence of the seedling to the stage of producing a flower, human beings also develop certain characteristics only at certain times in their growth process. These sequences are something over which we have no control.
[Comment - While, undoubtedly, DNA shapes, orients and colors a great deal of the context our of which human development arises, DNA is not God. Moreover, our relationship with Divinity is mediated primarily through the soul and not just genetics.
Consequently, human beings have a lot more degrees of freedom - both spiritually speaking as well as biologically - with respect to the potential for behavior than do other animals. For example, the specificity of stimuli which triggers imprinting tends to be far more diffuse in human beings than for other species.
In addition, the window of opportunity within which whatever imprinting human beings are susceptible to occurs is far broader than is the case for other animals. Furthermore, the plasticity of this process of being able, within certain limits, to rewire what may have been missed earlier is far greater in human beings than in other species. Moreover, the linguistic, cognitive and spiritual capabilities of human beings do not necessarily get established through a process of imprinting, except in limited ways and, in addition, all of these faculties are capable of modulating if not transcending many aspects of whatever imprinting does take place.
Finally, there is not a lot of demonstrative proof that human beings are subject to a great deal of imprinting which is of an indelible kind. Acculturation is not the same thing as imprinting and the process of acculturation is capable - to varying degrees - of being countered under the right set of circumstances.
Attitude formation and opinions do tend to be resistant to change, but not entirely. Furthermore, the individual tends to be the one who forms her or his own attitudes on the basis of a person's own hermeneutic of experience rather than simply ingesting ready made attitudes from the surroundings. Oviously, people do pick up attitudes from their surroundings, but this is based on modeling, operant conditioning, and other forms of learning rather than on any strict, narrow form of imprinting.
Human beings may be vulnerable to certain kinds of programming, but being vulnerable is not necessarily synonymous with the inevitability of such programming. There also is considerable question as to just how permanent such programming actually is.
Behaviors can be conditioned, but this is not necessarily the same thing as programming. Laura and company may be over-simplifying the complexities of human capabilities and making things seem a lot more controlled than may be the case - a lot depends on the individual and the circumstances in which one grows up.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Konrad Lorenz illustrated this principle with his famous ducks. Ducks (and humans) are "programmed" at a certain time in their lives to "accept a mother" figure. If the proper mother figure is not there at that moment of "imprinting," whoever or whatever IS there will be the "mother image" in the mind of the duck. That is to say, when the appropriate (or inappropriate) object of need is presented to the duck at the correct time in its development, the object is labeled "mother" somewhere in the brain, and this label is next to impossible to erase.
[Comment - Ducks and humans are neither programmed in the same way, nor with the same sort of rigidity or specificity. There are a great deal more degrees of freedom for the role of 'mothering one' in humans than in ducks - brothers, sisters, uncles, grandparents, fathers, and even close friends can all serve as a mothering surrogate in ways that does not take place with ducks.
To be sure, there are phenomena such as stranger anxiety or separation anxiety which are exhibited in some children. However, in most cases, this is just a passing phase rather than an indicator that some form of indelible imprinting has taken place, as is occurs with ducks.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Experiments were conducted with ducks which demonstrated that there is a critical age in hours at which a duckling is most responsive to "obtaining and labeling" a mother.
[Comment - Although there is a bonding process between mother and infant which seems to occur with many humans shortly after birth, this is not just a matter of what happens with the infant but with the mother as well. For some mothers, this bonding never occurs, and it is the mother who feels distant from the child rather than the other way around. Furthemore, whatever the nature of this bonding process - and it appears to be more complex than just imprinting in the ethological sense of Lorenz - the critical period seems to be more extended than is the case with ducks - being a matter of days, sometimes, rather than hours.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Similar studies were done with monkeys. These studies demonstrated that if a monkey has not received motherly stimulation before he is a certain number of weeks old, he will grow up to be cold, aloof, and unfriendly to his own offspring. The curious thing about the monkey experiments were that the sense of touch was more important than the feeding. A fuzzy surrogate with no milk was preferred over a wire surrogate with milk. This demonstrates a high level need for touching and caressing. It also suggests the "mode" of this imprint - sensory. Kinesthetic.
[Comment - Actually, the Harlow monkey studies were not really the same kind of study as performed by Lorenz, Tinbergen (Herring Gulls), and others. The latter individuals spoke in terms of specific triggering mechanisms, particular behavioral patterns that would arise as a result of such triggering cues, and narrow critical periods within which the relationship between cue and behavior would be set.
Harry Harlow, on the other hand, described a set of conditions in which young monkeys would demonstrate a marked preference for tactile stimulation (the terry cloth wrapped surrogate mother) over food without tactile stimulation (the wire mesh surrogate mother). In addition, Harlow did not establish a specificity between environment cues and particular behaviors as the aforementioned etholgists did, but, rather, demonstrated that those monkeys who did not receive a certain amount of tactile stimulation (and the source of the fuzziness might vary across a wide array of fabrics and skin textures) tended to exhibit greater irritability, anti-social behavior, sexual dysfunctioning, and withdrawn behavior than did monkeys who were not deprived of such tactile stimulation.
In other words, people such as Lorenz and Tinbergen, provided both observational and experimental evidence indicating the reality of an imprinting mechanism in certain species of beings. This imprinting mechanism seemed to involve a form of specific learning which was tied to specific environmental cues within a critical period of time which was species specific - although such learning - whatever the precise character of the critical period might be - tended to take place very early after birth (sometimes hours, sometimes days, and sometimes weeks).
Harlow, however, did not show that imprinting, per se, was taking place with the surrogate mother experiments. Rather, he and his associates were demonstrating that if there were an absence of certain kinds of stimulation, then, other aspects of development - especially, the quality of sociability - often were adversely affected.
However, while there were a general range of possible outcomes which might ensue from such deprivation, there was none of the specificity (either in the form of cues or learned behavior) which marked the ethological studies. In fact, the Harlow studies was more about what was not learned than what was learned - and imprinting is about the specific character of what is learned and the cues which are necessary for such such learning to take place.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Evidence that there is a critical period for the "mother imprint" in the higher animals was emphasized in the monkey experiments. In one instance, the experimenter was not prepared for the arrival of a new baby monkey and had to create a makeshift "surrogate mother" using a ball for the head. This was provided to the baby, while the experimenter worked on a better model with a face. But, it was too late. The baby monkey had already bonded to the faceless mother and turned the face of the new model around so that it was blank. A mother with a face was simply not acceptable because the imprint had already been made.
[Comment - Bonding is not necessarily the same thing as imprinting. Bonding is about establishing a zone, source, base, or relationship of security and being 'at home' in the world, whereas imprinting gives expression to a specific kind of learning that ties together stimulus and behavior.
Clearly, the monkey in the experiement described by Laura could visually differentiate between the original faceless mother and the subsequent model. If this were not so, then, the monkey is not likely to have turned the new model around so that a blank face (somewhat akin to the initial ball-head 'mother', but wanting surroundings with which one feels are familiar, secure, and recognizable is not necessarily the same thing as the process of imprinting.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Joseph Chilton Pearce writes:
"Occasionally we hear of people found chained in attics and such places from infancy. Their world view is either scanty or different for they are always feeble minded at best. In 1951 a child was found in an Irish chicken-house, having somehow survived there with the chickens, since infancy. The ten-year old's long hair was matted with filth; he ate at the chicken trough; roosted with the flock; his fingernails had grown, fittingly, to semicircular claws; he made chicken-like noises, not surprisingly; he had no speech and showed no promise of learning any in the time he survived his rescue."
"Forty years ago there was interest in two feral children found in India. They had apparently been raised by wolves. They were taken from an actual wolf den along with some cubs, the older wolves scattering or being killed. One of the children, Kamala they called her, survived for nine years. Only with difficulty was she taught table manners and such niceties as walking on the hind legs. Nevertheless she exhibited a growing awareness of the reward system of her new group, and displayed a strong drive toward such orientation. As with the chicken-child, however, she had missed the formative period of human infant development, and there was no easy or complete going back to retrace the steps. Kamala had formed according to the pattern eliciting response around her during her mirroring [imprinting] period. For her first two years of captivity - or rescue - she howled faithfully at ten, twelve, and three at night, as all Indian wolves do. She would also, in spite of precautions, manage to get at the chickens, rip them apart alive and eat them raw. Only when the new social reward system grew strong enough to outweigh the earlier rewards did she abandon her early training." [The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, 1971]
[Comment - What happens under extreme conditions (such as with feral children) is one thing. However, there is considerable difference of opinion about how deprived, abusive, or extreme a situation must be before the foregoing kinds of learning deficit show up or before some form of debilitating pathology occurs (e.g., dissociative identity disorders).
Furthermore, even thought the situation being escribed by Pearce was extreme, nevertheless, there were some degrees of freedom which were possible through the use of behavior modification. The presence of a potential for malleability suggest that whatever imprinting may have taken place (and, as was the case with Harlow's monkeys, the learning involved here may not be a function of imprinting), such learning was not as totally set as initially thought.
Finally, the foregoing material on feral children does not necessarily show the phenomena of imprinting. Although learning of some kind appears to be involved, such learning may be more a matter of reinforcement contingencies under extreme conditions, together with learning through observing modeling behavior, plus the effects which may ensue when the human need to belong or have a sene of identity and meaning in one’s life is either thwarted or pushed in a non-human direction as a result of extreme conditions.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) We are all Kamala. We are all divine children raised by wolves.
But how can this be?
We are all programmed. Our programs are written in the circuits of our brains by those around us in our formative years, just as their programs were written during their formative years, and so on back into the mists of time. Each generation just adding a few more lines of code.
[Comment - This programming - to the extent one can call it programming - is not as total, dominant and irreversible as Laura is trying to say it is. There is overwhelming evidence from everyday life that most human beings are capable of changing directions, goals, values, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, life-styles even when we are acculturated in certain ways or are embedded in certain systems of operant conditioning.
Human beings are capable of awakening in any number of ways - emotionally, cognitively, socially, politically, economically, ethically, philosophically, and spiritually. This is the case because human potential is built - in terms of its primordial nature or fitra - to resonate with a vast array of possibilities that fall outside of our immediate social, cultural and physical milieu.
From the mystical perspective, the primary program is Divine, not man-made or alien-made. God has given us the capacity to transcend almost any kind of programming provided we are willing to struggle and are helped with the right sort of guidance, support, and barakah or Grace.
If we did not have such potential, then, Laura could never have awoken to whatever extent she did. We are bequeathed with a potential for both STO (service to others) as well as STS (service to self) behavior and understanding. The destiny of an individual is written according to the way individual choices, Divine help, and problematic forces interact at the locus of manifestation known as the human heart.
Furthermore, if each generation can add a few more lines of code to the wiring which goes on in the brain, then, obviously programs - to whatever extent they exist - are re-writable and not just read only. How the lines of code which are added interact with the coding which already exists is an interesting area to explore - in fact, we all do such exploration every day of our lives as we seek to individuate in the midst of a social framework that tends to be resistant to such individuation.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) It is our ideas that shape our children. We provide what we may consider to be the ideal environment for the child, but our own programming determines what we may consider to be the "proper environment." Once we have provided the environment, we then want our children to like it, to approve of it, to agree with us that it is "right." And our ideas come from our culture. And our culture is created by... what? A Control System?
[Comment - The ideas of our parents may shape us to some extent, but children are notorious for rebelling against parental values, beliefs, ideas, and so on. Furthermore, shaping is not necessarily the same thing as programming or imprinting.
Even when we are shaped by the values and beliefs of our parents, the ideas and attitudes of children are often not carbon copies of parental teaching/modeling/programming but, instead, are a modulated, complex mixture of the child’s own hermeneutic of parental ideas in the context of the child’s individual experience - within the family as well within the larger world. Laura’s model of development is far, far too simplistic.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) There is considerable evidence that "agreement" is also "in the genes." There seems to be a genetic drive toward communion with others, for speech and preferences and disposition. As newly born human beings, it seems we come into the world with intent to be in agreement with others. But the details of how we go about being "agreeable" is related to the imprints we receive at the various stages of childhood development.
[Comment - What evidence concerning this issue of there being 'agreement in the genes' is she referring to? How does she know that such 'agreement' is genetic rather than social, or some combination of the two, and, if so, what is the profile of this combination?
What, precisely, is the relationship between genetic predisposition for this dimension of agreeableness and the process of imprinting? Just what are the dynamics of imprinting in human beings? What are its parameters?
What is the genetic coding for this dimension of agreeableness? What about the obvious evidence there are also a great many dimensions within the human being which are oriented toward rebellion, individuation, fractiousness, disagreement, and argumentation?]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Everyone carries in their genes, it seems, deep archetypes that are very much like a database program just waiting for someone to input data. The thing is, this database is only open to input for a limited period of time, and whatever data is entered during that time determines how all other data will be evaluated forever after. It will produce over and over again the same response to any set of stimuli that have one or more items that have been organized by the database. Anything that is not found in the database is "discarded." If the database is not utilized and no data is entered during the period of "readiness," or imprinting, that possibility goes dormant and diminishes.
[Comment - How do the genes carry these archetypes? How are these archetypes genetically coded for?
Why attribute such phenomena to genes, per se? Why not envision a more dynamic, interactive process of genetic parameters engaging experience in the context of other dimensions of the human being such as spirituality, intelligence, consciousness, creativity ... which - to date - have not plausibly been shown by anyone to be reducible to either genetics or even material phenomena?
What evidence is that the database to which Laura is referring is only open to input for a limited period of time? And what evidence is there to indicate that whatever is entered in to these alleged data bases early on will completely dominate whatever comes later ... color, yes; orient, yes; shape, yes; modulate, yes; but where is the proof that whatever is first in will completely dominate or control whatever evaluations comes later? And, while there may be some aspects of understanding, belief, attitudes, and personality that do lend themselves to habitual behavior, there is nothing which indicates that all behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and aspects of personality are so rigidly controlled.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) The higher thinking functions, laid over the deep level archetype database, can be viewed as a kind of software that is linked to the database, and must constantly check with it in order to operate. You could think of it as a word processing program with a fixed dictionary and set of templates, and you can only write in it according to the templates, and you can only use the words that are in the already fixed dictionary. Since our brains are genetically designed to accept imprint conditioning on its circuits at certain crucial points in neurological development, these critical periods are known as times of Imprint Vulnerability. The imprint establishes the limits or parameters within which all subsequent conditioning and learning will occur. Each successive imprint further complicates the matter, especially if some of these programs are not compatible with others.
Different schools of thought describe these circuits as "stages of development."
[Comment - One can view the higher thinking functions as almost anything one wants but this doesn’t make one's view correct or true. The claim that the higher thinking functions are laid over the deep level archetype database is a theory but little more than that - there is little to demonstrate that such a theory accurately reflects the truth concerning cognitive functioning, consciousness, understanding, or spiritual insight.
What evidence is there that higher functioning only operates if it can constantly check with the database of archetypes? What evidence is there that there is a fixed dictionary and where, exactly, in the brain is this dictionary located, and how did it get there and how did the templates form, and what is the character of the templates?
Although there is SOME indication that there are certain areas which have a degree of imprinting associated with them (e.g., language and vision), where is the evidence that such is the case across every aspect and level of neurological functioning. Moreover, even if this were the case, where is the proof that consciousness, understanding, insight, critical thought, creativity, and spirituality are totally dependent on, and functions of, neurology or that one can only write in the higher functioning word processing program according to such templates?
What is the precise nature of the alleged linkage between the higher functioning software and the supposedly underlying template data base? Which theory of stage development is one going to use - Sigmund Freud? Adler? Rank? Jung? Anna Freud? Sullivan? Erickson? Horney? Piaget? Montissori? Maslow? Kelly? White? Kohlberg?]
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