Thanks for this response, Nik.
TOK Society Member Rob Scott has done some powerful thinking/work in this domain. I recommend you check out his
TOK Society Presentation and his UTOKing with Gregg episode.
Here is another angle on this that I have been working that is highly consistent with what Nik says and with Rob’s “Fundamental Shift/Identity Shifting” work (indeed, I developed this explicit formulation via Rob’s work and credit him with
it).
When I adopt a mindful, metacognitive stance, I can now readily identify two frames on my streams of awareness. One frame is my “ego-self-persona” frame. It starts with my self-conscious narrator that is justifying what is and ought to
be. Just as modeled by the
Updated Tripartite Model, it sits much like a rider on a horse or elephant (to use Jonathan Haidt’s updated Freudian metaphor). The elephant is my experiential self, which consists of (a) my bodily feelings and desires (framed as core appetites and aversions
and experienced as sensory pleasure and pain), and (b) my heart’s appetites and aversions, which I frame as my “relational heart”. The process dimensions are mapped by the Influence Matrix, so that is my felt sense of relational value and social influence,
the three process dimensions of power, love and freedom, and the associated feelings (e.g., pride, joy, love/liking or shame, distress, contempt/disgust/hate). Finally, there is my persona, which is my public self, which is both how I imagine others see me
and the image I try to project and maintain. This is ESP (ego, self, persona) stream allows me to functionally operate in the world.
However, there is also now a completely additional line of experiential awareness that is both above and below the ESP stream. This is what Rob calls “isness itself”. The stream of awareness below refers to the base of my apperception,
which refers to my raw awareness of being-in-the-world. In this case, it is press of the chair from below, the computer screen in front, the coffee cup to the right, the ringing from my tinnitus, and so on. I started to write “my butt sitting in the chair,”
but I changed it, because this stream is evolving for me, so that I don’t even fell it as “my” butt, rather a perception in space. It is raw awareness with no memory or desire. There is also the general sense of awareness as oneness with the universe. The
universe as isness, and my experience being a fractal of that whole. The combination of awareness/isness below and above gives me a totally different position and perspective in relation to my ESP stream.
Best,
Gregg
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On Behalf Of Nicholas Lattanzio
Sent: Wednesday, October 6, 2021 7:49 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Neurologically, what is clinging?
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This is a nondual classic. The first Buddha Gautama addressed this and it's the example I have been using lately to give people an understanding of the realm of nondual first person experience.
Now if you're actually asking what is in the subject line I don't have an exact answer but it would likely have a substantial overlap with the neurological processes underlying rumination (some part of the PFC at least). However, I would
like to address the 'clinging conundrum' as I like to call it.
Clinging is the cause of all suffering (suffering does not equal pain). To cling to something is to attempt to hold on to an aspect of a present moment reality such that the aspect loses its separateness and becomes a fixed part of our
experience of the present moment as a continuous flow of time. That is impossible, of course, to keep the object of ones desire without extinguishing the desire and treating it as equivalent to the desire (having your cake and eating it too). So okay then
just stop doing that, stop clinging, stop desiring. So you go and try and you'll eventually discover this too is futile, now you're simply desiring not to desire, you've merely taken the same basic problem and turned it into a task of sorts.
So the answer then is that there's nothing you can do. So don't do something and don't not do something either. You are going to desire. So if you don't resist that desire, that feeling of necessity, then you will not suffer, because the
you that would suffer is not actually you it's the tension created when you separate yourself from your experience in a way that turns your experience into an object to manipulate. Rather you are the flow of existence itself, a wave of the stream. So just
flow with it, as an old Zen koan goes, "there is nothing I dislike."
Hope this is helpful.
Regards,
Nicholas G. Lattanzio, Psy.D.
On Wed, Oct 6, 2021, 6:30 PM Jamie D <[log in to unmask]> wrote: