It is not only my iMac memory which needs a clean up...

It is not only my iMac memory which needs a clean up...

The book writing neurosurgeon and Art’s well formulated and defined Reflection (Is There Really a Heaven?), of what is happening at various levels in the brain when we at some early stage have been subjected to unbearable pain gave me a lot of reasons to think through and reorganize my memories of a long life in the shadow of pain, anxiety, religion, neurology, psychology and neuroses.

I have earlier in life, during an uncertain imminent threat of neurologic interventions due to my epileptic stigma, tried to convince me / “believe” that surgeons belonged to the group of professionals where accuracy and precision in "hand and mind” dominates. This belief has suffered a blow. Belief often fills an unbearable emptiness, which remains when  knowledge is lacking. 

In the case of the fairy tale writing surgeon, he choose, due to lack of knowledge, to interpret his absurd experiences from his period of illness in religious terms and uses with disguised restriction his professional background / prestige to sell his book to a religiously drug dependent society with the help of a well known (not scientific!) magazine. 

The advantage that my faith in the surgeons got a scratch is that it happens with the help of an insider who reveals what is below the surface even in surgeons...

Jan Johnsson

Near death without hallucinations.

Janov's Reflections  Is There Really a Heaven? 

(Click to access!)

My comments:

Near death without hallucinations.

Your reflection over the hallucinating neurosurgeon, I read with a mixture of great satisfaction but even greater concern. Your crystal clear and pertinent comments about how the different levels of the brain actually work during the surgeon’s “brain death”, and your disclosure of his absurd induced hallucinations of American cultural symbols was a great pleasure to read. I feel big concern that the major part of our Western society is so repressed / naive as to swallow such nonsense, which is basically a mockery of both the modern biogenetic evolution and the > 6 billion global citizens who do not fantasize (have near death-experiences) about young, blue-eyed beauties as their religious cheerleaders.

I first  read your Reflections and the NEWS-article of the neurosurgeon, then copied them and read them again before I fell asleep. After a few hours, I woke up with my head full of thoughts about my 40-year maturity and rehabilitation process. Among other things, I felt the satisfaction of having experienced the effects, in several development stages, to have been epileptic. My epilepsy stood for 20 years as the door to death, and it was thus a significant near-death threat until I through my first primal, which developed out of a potential grand mal seizure, experienced my birth trauma, which was a horrifying struggle for life and death.

During the 20 years when I was ignorant of my birth trauma, my brain / I avoided religious hallucinations as an alternative to numb the pain. However, I often had flashbacks (spontaneous “primals”) to sensations of traumatic character that I had repressed followed by a big relief. A very important event, from a religious point of view, occurred before I was 7 years old, with other words long before I developed epilepsy. During emotional discomfort (I remember it almost like an epileptic aura) I decided not to believe in, or allow me to be influenced by my mother’s religious drivel full of bible quotes. This very early intuitive experience of my mothers godly fantasies, which were like a drug / protection against some kind of repressed pain was important for my search for an earthy explanation of my epilepsy. (By the way, my mothers religiosity changed and loosened considerably after a few strokes between 75/80 years of age. After that she was despite an impaired physical mobility safer and more secure in her opinions.)

Since the epileptic and religious experiences of my life had passed revue early this morning, I felt tense and laid back and felt an internal pressure / pain come up. It was a wordless re-experience of my birth trauma (which probably will return in a more readily perceived form until the original amount repressed birth pain has emptied out). It takes a few hours of wordless pain, tightness, tingling, feeling of anesthesia and suffocation while inimitable bodily movements to and from taking place. The emotions experienced at the beginning, and during much of the process take place in a very small body and at its end the little body fills out my adult body, and the process ends, with a feeling of being more developed and free.

Simple, comfortable and close to life.

Jan Johnsson

PS

It would have been interesting to listen to Dostoevsky’s opinion about our neurosurgeon’s religious hallucinations. I suppose he would have filed it under the label “time shall be no more” as the one with the epileptic Muhammad, who during his epileptic moment “had time during the same second to survey all the dwellings of Allah”...

Replies

Arthur JanovOctober 27, 2012 11:50 AM
Jan: most interesting as always. art

Richard AtkinOctober 28, 2012 3:30 PM
i've been reading about seizures. they can happen in many different parts of the brain. if the burst of electrical 'noise' is happening in only one side of the brain, the person may or may not lose consciousness. but if it happens in both sides - in other words, if the noise spreads across the corpus callosum (the thick bundle of 'wires' that act as a switchboard between the two hemispheres) the result is always unconsciousness.

it seems that the corpus callosum is a critical contributor to consciousness in that it must be functioning smoothly (without any 'noise') in order for it to maintain consciousness. If one side of the brain is completely removed, consciousness is maintained simply because there are no messages passing through the corpus callosum from one side to the other. in this sense, it is operating smoothly. but of course it would not be 100% full consciousness. full consciousness cannot be achieved until ALL brain-parts are contributing towards the overall sensation.

there are many parts of the brain that can be removed as a complete piece so as to avoid any resulting noise. of course it would be better to smooth out a small area of noise rather than remove a huge lobe. how do we do that?

a false belief is similar to a mild seizure; it is a relatively small group of deviated connections. the electrical current must violate all of the surrounding connections which are encouraging the belief to form part of a seamless network. i think it is possible that much of the false belief is truthful - meaning much of it's connections are well integrated and seamless in the right hemisphere and the corpus callosum, but perhaps there is an abrupt deviation in the left hemisphere which needs to be constantly 'maintained' to stop it from being electrochemically integrated with it's surrounding connections. Art describes it as a truthful force coming from the right and lower centers (the parts that develop earlier than the intellect). indeed, from an anatomical point of view, it is likely to be a strong, fast current (not deviated) which is trying to close the circuit at the terminal end.

the brain really is a computer full of closed circuits. the axons are 'wires' that bridge from neuron to neuron, just like a circuit board. those wires are covered with 'plastic insulation' (the fatty myelin sheath) to prevent interference from nearby wires. and the corpus callosum is packed full of wires that span the distance between the two 'computers'.

when a wire on a circuit board is routed incorrectly, it can heat up or fry other parts of the circuit board. can prolonged confusion cause damage to neurons? yes. perhaps regulated unconsciousness (sleep) can give deviated connections a chance to 'cool off'. perhaps this is why epileptics go to sleep immediately after they have had a big seizure.




My comment:
More on close to life.


I have felt and written about my kind of pain / seizures. I have made friends with them over the last 40 years. I am not qualified to discuss epilepsy in technical terms with you; I can only tell you how / why they appeared and how they symbolically changed my life, first when my pain turned into seizures and then when my seizures turned into primals and I eventually, miraculously was cured.


It was a trauma that started when my mother deliberately caused that I was not allowed to have an easy birth. In accordance with her religious belief, she had decided literally to make sure that I was born with pain. This was a process that took 48 hours beyond what was necessary. My mother was physically and mentally strong and endured, which meant that my / our trauma was extremely exhausting. Without having been able to gain insight into the physician's assessment (medical records at the hospital were missing when I asked for them!),  I was turned around late in the process and pulled out ass first, which in turn meant that I was exposed for severe strangulation experiences with the umbilical cord around the neck.


During primals I have, countless times, experienced the wordless pain I experienced, the assault of my head, arms, legs and body. The disastrous feeling and pain were the first times unbearable. The numbing sensation of pain that went on for a few hours meant that large amounts (several dl!) of mucus poured up of my lungs and stomach and through my mouth, nose and eyes.


When the process was most striking, I became dry in the mouth, my tongue turned inwards and fell down in my throat (impossible to imitate) and my body was bent backward in a bow while performing convulsive twitching. My senses were strained to their utmost, and instead of a grand mal seizure, my organism performed an indescribably dramatic attempt to get oxygen that ended in an intense baby cry (deeply from my guts) and I was finally completely relaxed and free and the primal ended.


My breathing has during my primals normally three modes; hyperventilation (automatic breathing controlled by 1st line impulses) at maximum capacity, hyperventilation in an energy-saving mode and a third mode, which meant that I was not breathing at all, which led to a feeling that I give up and am painfully strangled. On and off during the birth process, I feel/felt  anaesthetized, which is probably a result of the doctor / midwife inserting various types of anesthetics, stimulants to get my mother relaxed and speed up the process.


The described birth primal, I have experienced several times since 1980. For every primal  the magnitude of the trauma gradually has subsided due to the repressed pain has decreased, I now understand what it is about and the whole process has become part of a positive curative symphony.


I lived with the immense pressure of my birth trauma for 40 years without understanding that my epilepsy was my symbolic birth trauma. I got Carbamazepine / Tegretol against my epilepsy, which did not prevent that I developed a hyperactive lifestyle. Eventually, I could understand that I developed a life pattern which meant I imitated the birth process in my desperate eagerness symbolically "to be born". Every time I got stuck, in schools, marriages and professions,  I changed radically due to feelings of not being able to breathe or endure (suicidal feelings / seizures of all kinds could then easily develop). I changed so I could start my symbolic struggle; a new place, a new job, a new wife, a new country, a new culture and a new language ....


My seizures could be grand mal, petit mal, hallucinations, etc., and I have enough of experience to fill the majority of the neurologic, standardized, categorization definitions, which I only see as a curiosity because all is about pain from my birth trauma, and no one, NO ONE! neurologist has during 50 years asked me WHY I have epilepsy, while they have been pouring technical definitions over me to fill my ignorance which I now understand that I had in common with the neurologists.


But now I know! Thanks to my curly shrink Arthur Janov!


Jan Johnsson


PS. I was not one of those epileptics who needed sleep after a seizure.


More comments:


Dear Raindog,


I agree with you. Who cares what people believe, and if it quells their pain, fine! But when they start marketing their belief as a "latter day" truth, using their professional, scientific and prestigious Harvard background to catapult their nonsense, then they have spent my compassion...


Jan Johnsson

Wanted! A capacity for imagination!

               Wanted!

                   A capacity for imagination!

On several occasions I have pointed out how my life, gradually, has evolved / changed since I met Art Janov and began to to test and understand how he combined the evolution and the Primal Principals. Since I "luckily" was a psychological ignorant it had to be Arts, as a shrink, unorthodox imagination / vision to grasp my traumatic context / epilepsy, that appealed to my intuition, and that laid the foundation for the search, during decades, for my "hidden demons" / epilepsy.

That way, I eventually connected an entire ensemble of experiences; psychological, neurological, biogenetic and linguistic skills. Along with Arts guidance, Primal Therapy, Rolfing, career counseling, nutrition and physical training this increased my ability to connect "soul mates" between the emotional and the intellectual parts of my brain and my body. I slowly began to realize that what matters is not things, and terms but relations, movements and transformations. The fact that I, along with my "research of my destiny," had succeeded, for 30 years, to support myself as an international change consultant was an important ingredient in the interrelated factors that gave my life at least 20 years additional extension. My trip could, on many occasions, have easily derailed. I had numerous opportunities to go under. My deep set positive imprints, however, kept me on track.

I have for some months read a number of essays, articles and books about the ongoing revolution in genetics and molecular biology. If I had not had my own experience of Primal Therapy and Evolution in Reverse, I'm sure my curiosity would have been a search for precise explanatory mechanisms and codes, which had lead me, along a path of least resistance, toward a reduction of understanding. However an excellent guidance of Steven L. Talbott in his essays in The New Atlantis, have helped me to use my imagination to grasp the context in more Meaningful terms. These are my conclusions after my introduction into genetics and molecular biology:

The epigenetic revolution is working its way into an ever wider audience. From what is being written the conclusion might be that we are gaining new complex understanding how to treat the living organisms as a machine to be tampered. However, the lesson we eventually can draw from the work in modern molecular genetics is that life does not progressively shrink into a code or a module as we investigate its very small dimensions. “Biologists find life staring back at them from their chromatograms, electron micro graphs and gene expression profiles. Things do not become simpler, less organic, less animate.”

The information task deep down is essentially the same as the one higher up. Our understanding becomes easily constricted as we move downward, because the contextual scope and qualitative richness of the survey is utterly narrowed. A capacity for imagination is always required for grasping / envisioning a context in meaningful terms. At the contextual level the basic data are not things, but rather relations, movements, and transformations.

“To see the context is to see a dance not merely the bodies of the individual dancers.”

Jan Johnsson