Ceremony, simple or complex depending on whatever suits you best, is not the only way to establish binding. One can focus inward, and through meditation alter the influence of others. It can’t be erased, but it’s general impact, it’s character and thus it’s individuality can be negated.

What about meditation can’t be erased? Ah, the persons memory can’t be erased, but just as with ceremonial binding, it’s presence and behaviour in your mind can be dictated by you.

“Playing it down” to others or just not giving attention to something will lessen the other persons influence? Yes, that can be an effective social strategy though not always effective. Your mind is unwilling to cut off any portion of itself. As much as bad memories might hurt, your mind will hold onto them like it’s life depended on it. This is how everyone’s mind works, even mine. In fact, mine is even worse than normal. Because of how my central nervous system and thus brain works, everything registers in an overblown manner. Everything is an “OMG!” moment, so a huge amount of strange, silly and even meaningless detail is included in any memory I have. – OMG bacon! That person just sneezed! What did she say again! – My nervous system is over sensitive.

In order to cope, I learned long ago to work with those associations in such a way that they conform to my own states of mind. Instead of disrupting my concentration say, they reinforce it. This is perhaps why they say autistics have such “obsessive” concentration, instinctive coping. I suspect anyone can actually do this. I could go back and drag out every social slight, emotional hurt and personal shame I have ever experienced, but this would of course serve no purpose.

What they are finding in neuro-scientific research is that neurotypical individuals have a tendency to get stuck in loops. Autistics behave that way physically, but regular people do it mentally. An autistic will develop a daily ritual that they strongly feel must be adhered to, because if it’s not they can’t figure out what do do with themselves or how to behave. This is why I ask my wife so often about her perceptions and expectations. That, and I am just genuinely interested as well, but my point is, normal people internalize that. They seem to be able to deal with whatever comes their way because they are perceiving or processing a portion of it, whatever “makes sense” to them, and they reflexively see the rest as nonsense.

Scientists even say this is necessary. I suppose it must be, and by comparison to me most other people are very efficient in getting things done, but that bites you in the butt as well. You don’t have control of your getting things done behaviour. Your mind tries to fix things that happened to you and linger in your memory, and thus you can have a very hard time letting your attention move off of an old memory. Is this fair to say? For me that never happens. What I lack in control of the outside world, I have control of my memories.

You have a process that occurs in your brain and it’s natural. It’s commonly called forgetting. Can you deliberately do it?

I don’t think any normal person can. I can. You don’t actually forget things, nor do I, but when the mind wants to, it can put things in a sort of suspension. It does so by generalizing.

Let’s say someone insults me. Well, I have been insulted countless times before. I will consciously reflect on the new insult for a little while, take in all the details, sort of itemize it. The reason I do this is because almost always an insult contains nothing new and more often than not nothing meaningful. You do this with your senses normally. As neurotypical individuals, you don’t even notice you are doing it. It’s why you don’t think you remember what colour shirt the person in front of you at the McDonald’s was wearing. Why don’t you do it with your memories or thoughts?

It’s ‘personal’? I guess that might be how you perceive it, and might be the source of some of my own social shortcomings, but it’s really not. Your memories and thoughts are no different than your senses. What is personal is your emotional reaction to them, your instincts as you ruminate over whatever is stuck in your head. To cope with that I put the thoughts out of my focus of attention, or I consciously assimilate them.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~