So desire and distress, are these things unrelated? Separate issues?
They can be related if you don’t get what you most desire.
Possibly all distress is a struggle with desire? We desire something to be a different way so we’re distressed when it’s not.
It’s argued by neuroscientists and mental health professionals that desire is separate from emotion. In their observations, emotion arises from mental states however you might be understanding or perceiving things around you or misunderstanding them. They say desire is more biological, hard wired, directly linked to biological process and physical needs, hormonal cycles, things like that.
Shall I offer my personal insight? Mental health and science professionals are enamoured of a mechanistic view of consciousness and living experience. I feel that in this, as well as most of the mainstream thinking, their view is too linear, blindly restrictive. They defeat their own purpose by insisting that things fit their aesthetic definitions. There is even evidence in their research that the seeming separate systems can and do interact, can even subvert the function of the other, but it can be helpful to establish a bedrock. In this I agree with the scientific paradigm. We experience distress because of our state of mind.
Like what systems? Oh, the network that drives our desire process versus the network that supports our perceptual assessments.
The two in our modern brains and social structure are strangely separated. We seem out of control, defeated by our own desires because our conscious understanding has not been supported in understanding the default mode of it’s own existence. We have been coerced into prioritizing an illusory representation of life experience.
We only evolved the power of the frontal lobe recently as far as the big picture of organic development goes. We are experiencing as a society a compound insult to our natural cognitive potential. The first being that the frontal lobes are capable of doping our system with a substance called dopamine just simply by functioning. As long as your so called conscious mind is humming along smoothly, you will keep getting fed a substance that will make you feel like everything is all right.
Dopamine is great. Indeed, dopamine by itself is good and necessary. If we weren’t inclined to confabulate our experiences, misinterpret just about every signal our brain gets, then there would be no problem at all.
If a neurosicentist opened your skull and started strategically stimulating various parts of your brain, you would interpret the reactions as if they were just normal parts of your experience, as if you were just remembering something, or as if you were just experiencing a natural mood shift. You would make up reasons why your experience changed the way it did, and they would lack contiguous, coherent basis in reality.
A combination of blind nature and toxic social reinforcement are doing the equivalent of this to you on a daily basis. Nature itself is not blind, but we have circumvented it to our misfortune. The other problem is because your frontal lobe has been hijacked by a roller coaster ride of cognitive stimuli, you have no time, and society provides no support, to assess the status and integrity of your own consciousness. Add on top of that the subtle persistent chain of emotional trauma, experiences that stimulate the thalamic cortex, and your ability to coordinate your brain just goes right out the window.
Now why the supposed separation between desire and emotion is nonsense (and this is supported by current neuroscience research). Pain is one of the desire forces, arguably a primary force, less subtle and abstracted, perhaps the most strong and clear force we experience. It could be said that all of our desires are ultimately a desire to avoid or relieve pain.
Pleasure uses the exact same system in the brain that pain does. Intense pain and intense pleasure make the brain react in the same way. Music frequently triggers pleasure as well as ultimately all other brain functions as well. The brain reacts to emotional pain, socially induced pain, the same way it does to physical pain to the point that they have found taking a pain reliever, like an aspirin say, actually dulls our sensitivity and reactiveness to some social distress.
So this field of pain seems to blur that supposed separation between emotion and desire despite the scientific community not having taken notice of this yet. It’s all there in their paperwork though. Self mastery is something nobody wants to do, ultimately.
Why alcohol works as well.
Yes, Tylenol relieves anxiety.
I think I heard the same thing on a science program on TV. On the science channel, or maybe ‘Through the Wormhole’, that the brain registers physical and emotional pain the same, so a pain reliever helps with emotional pain as well.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~