(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) The first peptide to be synthetically replicated was oxytocin. Oxytocin is released from the pituitary gland during childbirth and binds to receptors in the uterus where it causes the contractions that expel the baby. It was later learned that oxytocin is not only released during labor, but that it is also responsible for the uterine contractions of the female orgasm. It also binds to receptors in the brain producing "thinking changes" that we refer to as "maternal behavior." Oxytocin is an eight-amino-acid peptide. It is the active ingredient of the Pituitary gland.
[Comment - Which came first, the impulse toward mothering behavior or the presence of oxytocin? Is the production of oxytocin the result of how a mother expects to behave based on culture, role, and so on, and, as such, is set in motion by a phenomenological orientation that may pre-date biological activity?
What specific 'thinking changes' does oxytocin bring about, or is it like, say, endorphins, something that affects mood rather than generating specific emotions - a mood which combines with emotions of, say, compassion and love for a specific child to help facilitate mothering behavior? Would the presence of oxytocin in non-mothers or in males lead to mothering behavior of a specific kind, or would it just make them more receptive to the cultural idea that mothering behavior is appropriate or expected or part of a role?]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) There is clear scientific experimental evidence that the facial expressions for anger, fear, sadness, enjoyment, and disgust are identical whether an Eskimo or an Italian is being studied. Facial expressions that register other emotions such as surprise, contempt, shame/guilt are likely also pancultural. This suggests that emotions have inborn genetic mechanisms for their expression.
[Comment - While one might agree "that emotions have inborn genetic mechanisms for their expression", this is not the same thing as saying that genetics are responsible for emotional experience. One might still tenably argue that emotions first arise in non-biological ways and that this is, then, translated into processes which are capable of being expressed through genetic-based wiring. The expression of emotions follows upon, or is subsequent to, the hermeneutics of emotion, and it is the latter which directs and selects the former modalities of expression.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Getting back to our opiate receptors and the limbic system: it has been shown that core limbic brain structures such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and limbic cortex, believed to be involved in emotional behavior, contain 85 to 95 percent of the various neuropeptide receptors. Wilder Penfield, working in the 1920s, experimented during open-brain surgeries undertaken to control severe epilepsy. He found that when he electrically stimulated the limbic cortex over the amygdala (the two almond-shaped structures on either side of the forebrain, about an inch or so into your brain from your earlobes), he could elicit a whole gamut of emotional displays. His patients gave powerful reactions of grief, anger, joy and more as they relived old memories! Their bodies would shake with rage or laughter, they would weep copious tears, and their blood pressure and temperature would fluctuate appropriately in accordance with whatever was being "experienced."
[Comment - The foregoing doesn't prove that emotions are caused by biology. All it shows is that the re-invoking of memories is capable of generating the original phenomenology in which emotional experiences were encoded in a biological template.
Furthermore, we still have no idea how memories are possible or how they are generated or how they are stored. In any event, the encoding of the original experience is what makes the biological memory template possible, and this encoding process may well involve non-biological components - namely, the initial experience of emotion which became encoded in, or reflected by, a material/biological context.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) NIMH researcher Paul MacLean popularized the idea that the limbic system was the "seat of the emotions." His triune brain theory held that there are three layers to the human brain, as we have already discussed in psychological terms of imprinting. MacLean proposed that these three layers represent different stages of humanity's evolution. The brain-stem, or 1st circuit, is called the reptilian brain (isn't THAT interesting?) This is the seat of autonomic functions, including the "fight or flight" response. It is here that "safety" of the organism is monitored and, if certain threats are perceived, it will trigger an automatic cascade of responses designed to preserve life of the organism.
The limbic system, or 2nd circuit, encircles the top of the brainstem and is, as we have already discussed, the seat of the emotions. The cerebral cortex, or 3rd circuit, the forebrain, is the seat of reason. But it can also manifest emotions!
[Comment - Saying that certain aspects of the brain - for example, the limbic system - are correlated with emotion or that there is interaction between ligand-receptor activity and the phenomenology of emotions is one thing. Saying that the limbic system is the seat of emotions is quite another.
The latter idea reduces emotions, consciousness, and so on, to purely biological functions, whereas the former leaves open the possibility that biology alone is not sufficient to account for the phenomenology of emotional experience. There are many, many lacunae permeating the etiological details of how emotions come into being or how the limbic system becomes notified that this or that emotion is a called-for response to what is transpiring in consciousness and one's hermeneutic of the events in awareness.
Modern psychology or brain science cannot even provide a plausible account for how we are able to have awareness. Nor can psychology explain - in purely biological terms - how awareness of events leads to an interpretation of those events which arouses a certain, specific emotional respons.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) The frontal cortex, theoretically the most newly evolved, the most HUMAN, of the brain structures must "forge" pathways" between itself and the rest of the brain to enable humans to learn to control their emotions and act unselfishly.
[Comment - Just what are the specific dynamics inherent in this process of 'forging' pathways? How are such pathways forged?
Modern science doesn't have a clue. Nor can modern science tell us what logic is or how it arose or what makes intelligence possible or how - biologically speaking - we generate hermeneutical structures and paradigms. Nor, can modern science account for how - biologically speaking - ethical systems are generated through which we seek to control emotions or act unselfishly.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) William James theorized that emotions originate in the body and are then perceived in the head, where we "invent" a story to explain them. Writing in 1884, he concluded that the source of emotions is purely visceral, originating in the body and is not cognitive, and that there is very likely no brain center for emotions. He thought that we perceive events and have bodily feelings, and after the perception, which joggles our memories and imagination, we label our physical sensations as one or the other emotion. He believed that there is simply perception and bodily response based on memory of other events that relate to the "present" experience. He thought that their immediate sensory and motor reactions that occur in response to the perception, such as a pounding heart, a tight stomach, tension and perspiration, ARE emotions.
Walter Cannon posited that they originate in the head and trickle down to the body. Writing in Wisdom of the Body, he explained the workings of the sympathetic autonomic nervous system. A single nerve called the vagus (wandering) nerve exits the back of the brain through a hole in the bottom of the skull called the foramen magnum. There, it splits to run down the bundles of nerve cells, or ganglia, along either side of the spinal cord to send branches to many organs, including the pupils of the eye, the salivary glands, the heart, the bronchi of the lungs, the stomach, the intestines, the bladder, the sex organs, and the adrenal glands.
When Cannon stimulated the vagus through electrodes implanted in the hypothalamus in the bottom of the brain just above the pituitary gland, he demonstrated physiological changes in all these organs consistent with what would be needed by the body in an emergency. Cannon was able to measure how much time it took from the moment the hypothalamus got the jolt to the moment the bodily changes in blood flow, digestion, and heartbeat began to occur as a result. The conclusion was that these changes were too slow to be the cause of emotions rather than the effect. Not only that, but animals whose vagal nerve had been cut, and presumable were incapable of sympathetic visceral bodily changes, still seemed to behave just as emotionally when placed in a threatening situation.
It took over a hundred years to realize that both James AND Cannon were correct.
[Comment - Actually, neither James (emotions start in the body and, then, are explained or interpreted or rationalized in the head) nor Cannon (emotions start in the head and, then, trickle down to the body) are necessarily correct - at least there combined account is not necessarily the whole of the story. More specifically, Cannon cannot explain - in physical terms - how emotions start in the head, and James cannot explain how emotions start in the body.
One might have some sort of case for the importance of the general issue of arousal in relation to the experience of emotion. However, even here here there usually needs to be some sort of hermeneutic present which leads to the state of arousal since such states do not usually happen on their own independent of external or phenomenological events.
Furthermore, the idea of the flight-fight complex in the nervous system has to be activated. The flight-fight complext is activated only when someone interprets a situation as being of one kind or the other, and even, then, the sort of response may be a modulated form of fight or flight that is mediated by hermeneutic considerations (e.g., defensive strategies) which are not easily tied to the body, and for which there is not any explanation for how the head is able to come up with such interpretive scenarios.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Biofeedback is demonstrative of this fact because it is a technique that can enable a person to gain conscious control over physiological processes previously thought to be autonomic and not susceptible to volitional modification.
Elmer Green, a pioneer of biofeedback stated: "Every change in the physiological state is accompanied by an appropriate change in the mental emotional state, conscious or unconscious, and conversely, every change in the mental emotional state, conscious or unconscious, is accompanied by an appropriate change in the physiological state."
[Comment - The process of gaining control over a physiological state is set in a context of both phenomenological awareness as well as hermeneutical activity with respect to: desires, goals, purposes, methodology, intentions, understanding of language, and conceptual systems. Biofeedback is a system that presupposes an organized system of thought, awareness, understanding, and methodology which shows the person how to employ the techniques of biofeedback and for what sort of things those techniques can be used. The process begins with changes in the mental, conscious, emotional facets of phenomenology - namely a hermeneutical process - and none of these changes can be adequately explained through a purely biological framework.
As such, it is only correct to say that "every change in the mental emotional state, conscious or unconscious" is accompanied by a corresponding change in the physiological state (and vice versa) after one has been taught the system of biofeedback and one engages the methodology - a teaching and learning that cannot, yet (and, perhaps, never) be reduced to purely biological considerations. Moreover, once again, the fact that correlations exist says nothing about causality or the dynamics of such causality.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) There is a tiny cluster of cell bodies in the hindbrain called the locus coeruleus. It projects its norepinephrine-containing nerve endings into the forebrain, and it seems that all the norepinephrine in the forebrain comes from this one source. It was discovered that what is known as the pleasure center - the area that, when electrically stimulated, will cause rats and humans to ignore the need for food and sleep in a frenzy of pleasure - is contained within this locus coeruleus.
It seems that, unbeknownst to the earlier researchers, the electrical stimulus for pleasure had worked by causing the release of norepinephrine from the nerve endings along the pathway. Amphetamines and cocaine also work by amplifying this same "pleasure pathway" by blocking the re-uptake of the body's own norepinephrine, and thereby increasing the ligand binding to the norepinephrine receptors.
The problem with this idea was that, if peptides and their receptors were only communicating across synapses, the should be only very tiny distances apart. But, the evidence indicated that many of the receptors that were responding were located too far away to be part of specific synaptic gaps. The conclusion was that the greatest source of control of information in the brain - that which determines its "state" - is the specificity of the receptors and their ability to bind with only one kind of ligand.
In other words, it seems that less than 2 percent of neuronal communication actually occurs at the synapse. It was seen that the way in which peptides circulate through the body, finding their targets all over the place, makes the brain's communication system itself more like an endocrine system. As Dr. Pert baldly states it: "The brain is like a bag of hormones!"
[Comment - What kicks this system into gear? What regulates the system? What are the relationships of consciousness, reasoning, memory, and emotions to this system? How does the former affect the latter, and how does the latter affect the former?
How are different configurations of receptors distributed around the body co-ordinated with one another? What is responsible for this co-ordination?]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) One very interesting discovery made by Rita Valentino of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the nucleus of Barrington in the hindbrain, formerly believed to control just the emptying of the bladder, has axons continuing the neuropeptide DRF that extend through the vagus nerve all the way to the most distant part of the large intestine, the anus. It has been proven that the sensation of colonic distention, or the feeling of needing to empty the bowels, as well as genital arousal is carried back to the nucleus of Barrington. From there, there is a short neuronal pathway that connects to the locus coeruleus, the norepinephrine source of the "pleasure pathway" which is also loaded with opiate receptors! Once again, Dr. Pert says it plainly:
"The pleasure pathway hooks up to the control area of these bathroom functions, which is located in the front of the brain. Goodness, is it any wonder... that toilet training is loaded with emotional stuff! Or that people get into some unusual sexual practices involving bathroom behaviors!"
[Comment - That these functions can become entangled with one another should not come as any surprise. However, the issue which needs to be explained is how - in biological terms - many, if not most, people are able to keep the two separate and what this means in terms of the kinds of hermeneutical learning, differentiation, and conscious will that are necessary to accomplish this?]
(Coming From Pert) "The body is the unconscious mind! Repressed traumas caused by overwhelming emotion can be stored in a body part, thereafter affecting our ability to feel that part or even move it. The new work suggests there are almost infinite pathways for the conscious mind to access - and modify - the unconscious mind and the body...[Pert, 1997]
[Comment - And vice versa. Nevertheless, whatever the truth of this may be, reducing that which is referred to as the 'unconscious mind' to being a function of or expression of only body activity has not, yet, been scientifically demonstrated.
Undoubtedly, certain kinds of trauma and memory can be stored in the body via the receptor systems which exist in different parts of the body. Yet, as has been pointed out elsewhere in these Comments, trauma is a very subjective phenomenon and not all pain is experienced or interpreted as being traumatic.
As a result, not all pain is translated into localized memories which become repositories of trauma. This subjective dimension of trauma means that the storing of localized memories is not automatic but must be processed through some sort of hermeneutical activity which assigns meaning to and evaluates certain facets of the phenomenology of experience. All of this opens up the possibility that repressed traumas are not entirely a function of biology but also involve encoding of hermeneutical stances concerning such experience.
Moreover, it may be that what we call the unconscious is actually more conscious than our so-called conscious experience. The unconscious seems to be more in touch with what is going on in our lives than does the so-called conscious realm.
What we call consciousness may actually be a bifurcated or compartmentalized aspect of what began as a unified consciousness but which, over time, and through conscious choices we begin to attend to only a limited aspect of phenomenology and this is the part with which we most identify - for a whole host of hermeneutical reasons involving likes, dislikes, beliefs, values, personality, education, consensual validation, and so on. The rest of consciousness recedes into the mists of inattention vis-a-vis what we call normal consciousness, even though the former knows all about the latter, while the latter, through selective inattention which has become habitual and entrenched, becomes oblivious to the former.
Localized, stored memories are remembered at the time they become laid down. But, with the passage of time, our 'normal' consciousness has forgotten, although the traumatized memory is shaping and coloring the structural character of our 'normal' conscious activities at the horizons of 'normal' awareness via the localized stored memories of pain and trauma - even if the specific etiology of the trauma has been consciously 'forgotten'.
As such, the body can color, shape and orient consciousness, but this is not necessarily the unconscious in action. Rather, consciousness has been re-framed and does not recognize the localized memory for what it is - an remnant of past trauma. To a large extent, the so-called conscious mind is unconscious of, or toward, such traumas, rather than that such traumas are part of something called the unconscious.
There is much in consciousness on all levels which is pressing in on the horizons of what we call 'normal' consciousness and to which our life of 'normal awareness' has been reduced. However, in effect, it is the so-called 'normal consciousness' which is unconscious, not the rest of our consciousness which is quite active and busy with shaping, coloring, orienting, and directing a great deal of what goes on in the unconscious consciousness of sleeping wakefulness.
How can we be asleep and awake at the same time? The foregoing reversal of roles indicates that what we call normal, waking consciousness is, in point of fact, fast asleep when it comes to the rest of consciousness which is aware of the former even as the former has forgotten about or is selectively inattentive to the many clues in our everyday life that something more is going on within us than our 'normal waking consciousness' supposes.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Virtually every location where information from any of the five senses enters the nervous system, there are high concentrations of neuropeptide receptors. They are called "nodal points." The already mentioned nucleus of Barrington is a nodal point and, depending on what neuropeptide is occupying its receptors, feelings related to sexual arousal or bathroom functions can be switched or modified, made unconscious, or made a priority. Thus, emotions and bodily sensations are intricately intertwined in such a way that each can alter the other - usually at the level of unconsciousness. It can also emerge to consciousness spontaneously, or be deliberately brought to consciousness.
All sensory data coming into the body goes through a "filtering" process that may or may not reach the frontal lobes. It is in the frontal lobes that the sensory input enters our consciousness. The efficiency of the filtering process, which chooses what stimuli we pay attention to at any given moment, is determined by the quantity and quality of the receptors at these nodal points. The quantity and quality of these receptors is determined by many things, one of the most important being your experiences.
[Comment - What determines whether, or not, such sensory data will reach the frontal lobes? Obviously, something, somewhere is aware of the data, in some sense, or no 'decision' would be forthcoming about whether the data should be filtered or passed on to some other part of the brain for further processing.
What runs the filtering process? What is the nature of the decision making process which determines what will be attended to and what will not be attended to?
Are these conscious choices or unconscious choices, and if the latter, then, exactly what does it mean to make an unconscious choice? Again, the idea that 'normal waking consciousness' is the only form of active consciousness seems problematic.
What our normal consciousness attends to, and what the rest of our consciousness attends to are often a function of interests, likes, dislikes, fears, anxieties, beliefs and values. The latter two, especially, (namely, beliefs and values) can have a huge impact on what we permit ourselves to 'see' and what is relegated to the sidelines - at least as far as 'normal waking consciousness' is concerned. Yet, within us is the awareness of what normal waking consciousness has chosen not to see or deal with.]
(From Candace Pert) In other words, biochemical changes wrought at the receptor level is the molecular basis of memory. When a receptor is flooded with a ligand, it changes the cell membrane in such a way that the probability of an electrical impulse traveling across the membrane where the receptor resides is facilitated or inhibited, thereafter affecting the choice of neuronal circuitry that will be used. This principle is important not only for understanding how memories are stored in the brain, but that they are also stored in a psychosomatic network extending into the body itself! It is also the underlying principle of imprinting. Just like a printed circuit is embedded in a computer chip, so are our brains AND bodies programmed by chemistry and electricity. The decision about what becomes a thought, rising to consciousness, and what remains an "automatic circuit" pattern is buried in the body and mediated by the receptors. And memories are stored with their respective emotional content. The emotion can bring up the memory, and conversely, a single "cue" element of the memory can bring on the emotion - even if the memory itself never becomes conscious!
What this means, in the clearest of terms is this: many memory processes are emotion-driven and unconscious; but, they can sometimes be made conscious.
[Comment - Neither Pert nor anyone else has shown or proven that the "biochemical changes wrought at the receptor level is the molecular basis of memory". We do not know how memories are formed, and we do not know where they are located, and we do not know how the retrieval system works - although there are a variety of theories about such processes might work.
Furthermore, the claim that: "When a receptor is flooded with a ligand, it changes the cell membrane in such a way that the probability of an electrical impulse traveling across the membrane where the receptor resides is facilitated or inhibited" is problematic because there is no guarantee that the presence of ligand will, in fact, lead to an electrical impulse traveling across the membrane since there are many other neurotransmitter messages received by a neuron which may dampen, or negate, or modulate the action of a given ligand and affect whether, or not, the presence of a given population of ligands will give rise to an electrical impulse. In addition, the relationship between any given neuronal electrical impulse and alterations in conscious awareness, emotions, mood, thinking, and behavior is a lot foggier than Laura is indicating and, consequently, the precise character of the way such neuronal activity 'affects' "the choice of neuronal circuitry that will be used" is not really known.
Furthermore, the claim that "the decision about what becomes a thought, rising to consciousness, and what remains an "automatic circuit" pattern is buried in the body and mediated by the receptors" does not really say much at all because the whole structural character of the dynamics of this 'mediated' process is not really understood. All that is known is there is a relationship between ligand-receptor activity, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an understanding that this activity can shape and color, to varying degrees, the contents of consciousness.
However, what has not been proven is that emotions are a function of such activity. Nor has it been shown that ligand-receptor activity - either individually or collectively - is capable of generating consciousness, thought, or intelligence. Anyone who makes such a claim is overstepping what the available data has demonstrated.
While one might be willing to agree that an emotional content can be encoded in a memory, this acknowledgment does not require one to subscribe to the idea that memory is a function of ligand-receptor activity. In fact, what may be encoded is the 'IDEA' that a certain emotion was present, while in other instances, the encoding of a particular configuration of ligand-receptor activity may lend a quality of intensity to the memory, but, once again, the presence of such a intensity signature does not mean that ligand-receptor activity caused the emotion.
Conceivably, when current events trigger a pathological response or an emotional response which seems to be at odds, in some way, with the reality of the situation, people may re-experience the intensity of the ligand-receptor activity associated with an encoded, emotional, memory that has been hermeneutically labeled as traumatic or threatening dissociation of some kind. However, since the rest of the traumatic memory associated with that stored ligand-receptor configuration is not experienced as intensely, one may have difficulty understanding why the emotion is being re-experienced because the rest of the details surrounding the traumatic event may be vague, or suppressed, or denied, or selectively attended to.
Another possibility is that the ligand-receptor configuration that is associated with the earlier traumatic event may not actually be stored in memory. Rather, what may be encoded in memory is a hermeneutical orientation that would automatically re-invoke a certain kind of ligand-receptor configuration activity in the present when appropriately triggered.
Finally, the dynamics of imprinting that Laura would like to advance is not any clearer after her foregoing discussion than it was before that discussion. While ligand-receptor activity may be associated in various ways with the phenomenon of trauma-imprinting, the issue of what constitutes a trauma, together with the severity of the pathology which may arise in conjunction with such trauma, are a function of individual, subjective hermeneutical activity that assigns meaning and significance to an event or series of linked events. Moreover, no one has, yet, demonstrated that the essence of such hermeneutical activity is reducible to ligand-receptor activity even though we can agree that such activity does shape and color and orient such hermeneutical processing to varying degrees, depending on the individual, the nature of the event, and the character of the circumstances in which the event takes place.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) Donald Overton of Temple University documented a widespread phenomenon in animals which was later shown to be equally true in human beings: A rat that learns a maze or receives a shock while under the influence of a drug - which you now know is merely a synthetic ligand - will remember how to solve the maze or avoid the shock most efficiently if it is re-tested under the influence of the same drug. Dr. Pert elaborates:
"When we consider emotions as chemical ligands - that is to say, peptides - we can better understand the phenomenon known as dissociated states of learning, or state-dependent recall. Just as a drug facilitates recall of an earlier learning experience under the influence of that same drug for the rat, so the emotion-carrying peptide ligand facilitates memory in human beings. The emotion is the equivalent of the drug, both being ligands that bind to receptors in the body. ...Just as drugs can affect what we remember, neuropeptides can act as internal ligands to shape our memories as we are forming them, and put us back in the same frame of mind when we need to retrieve them. This is learning."
"...Emotional states or moods are produced by the various neuropeptide ligands, and what we experience as an emotion or a feeling is also a mechanism for activating a particular neuronal circuit - simultaneously throughout the brain and body - which generates a behavior involving the whole creature..."[Pert, 1997]
[Comment - Pert's foregoing analysis may be incorrect. The chemical ligand is not necessarily the emotion but rather a facilitator for an intense mood that is receptive to the rise of a sense of dissociation. The encoded, traumatic - that is, emotion-laden - memory triggers the release of a certain ligand-receptor configuration which, in turn, facilitates the onset of a mood that is susceptible to be interpreted as the on-set of dissociation - which becomes paired with the memory of the trauma, and, therefore, the triggered traumatic memory threatens dissociation via the ligand-receptor mood facilitator. In other words, the ligand-receptor activity is triggered by a traumatic, emotional memory, and the former activity induces a state or mood (such as depression) that renders a person vulnerable to the experience of dissociation.
Ligand-receptor activity is mood-oriented. That activity does not generate behavior, per se, but helps establish a charged context (positive or negative, euphoric/pleasant or depressed/blue) which has been triggered by prior hermeneutical activity of an individual that has resulted in something being experienced and remembered as emotionally traumatic. The mood which is generated itself becomes both backdrop to, as well as a subject for, hermeneutical analysis and to which the individual will respond with emotion that may give rise to some kind of behavior.
The idea of traumatic pathways that becomes established as circuitry that can be triggered under the right circumstances is quite plausible. What is less plausible is the explanation which Laura gave earlier with her neo-Freudian approach to imprinting, as well as the explanation that Pert is putting forth with respect to the dynamics of the way in which trauma circuitry can be triggered again and again.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) More frightening than that is the fact that higher level negative beings can most definitely control our emotions by controlling our chemistry as we have already described. This means that they can cause us to feel love or hate or aversion or attraction based on their agenda, not our own.
[Comment - Controlling our chemistry is more likely to affect our moods than our emotions. I don't think that the 4th density STS beings can make us feel love or hate or aversion or attraction, but they can place pressure on us by controlling our moods which could then be a means of inducing us (through the way constant pressure wears us out and exhausts us, making us more vulnerable to certain suggestions, or by constantly confronting us with the possibility that we are sinking into dissociation) to be susceptible to the idea of re-arranging our hermeneutical structuring of experience.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) The superior colliculus in the midbrain, another nodal point, controls the muscles that direct the eyeball, and controls which images are permitted to fall on the retina! This means that an emotional center of the brain literally controls what we SEE!
[Comment - While the activity of the superior colliculus may filter what reaches our so-called 'normal, waking consciousness', this very process of filtering indicates there is hermeneutical activity taking place at this level with respect to the meaning, significance, and value the data which has been received. This means there is a realm of consciousness within us which does SEE even as such data is filtered out or kept away from the restricted viewing of normal, waking consciousness - which, in truth, is more unconscious than conscious ... more asleep than awake.]
(From Candace Pert) For example, when the tall European ships first approached the early Native Americans, it was such an "impossible" vision in their reality that their highly filtered perceptions couldn't register what was happening, and they literally failed to "see" the ships. Similarly, the cuckolded husband may fail to see what everyone else sees because his emotional belief in his wife's faithfulness is so strong that his eyeballs are directed to look away from the incriminating behavior obvious to everyone else. [Pert, 1997]
[Comment - The normal waking consciousness of the native people failed to 'see' the ships, but the ships did register with them. It has been reported that not only did some of the Native elders report being able to 'see' the vessels if they glanced at the ships out of the corner of their eyes, rather than straight on, but, as well, in time, they eventually came to see the ships which, previously, had not been present to their normal, waking consciousness, even as it was present to other facets of consciousness.]
(From Laura Knight-Jadczyk) I have recently witnessed a great deal of this type of activity in various people reading these pages who simply read what they are programmed to read, and NOT what is really being said. One of the chief clues of STS control is that a person "twists" what they read.
[Comment - This control and programming may be self-inflicted through the machinations of the nafs. Iblis and other STS agents merely exploit the vulnerabilities which such self-programming creates.
The bad news is that we do suffer as a result of the problematic programs we lay down which control certain aspects of our engagement of reality. The good news is that since we are the ones who have shot ourselves in the foot, so to speak, we also have the capacity to struggle to reverse much of the self-generated programming that has gone on earlier in life.
The circuits need not be as permanent or so all-encompassing as Laura sometimes appears to indicate. However, one does need expert assistance to be able to struggle toward counter-acting the effects of such circuitry.]
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