We come back to this concept of homeostasis. Yes you can trigger chemical events in your brain that lead to profound experiences upon taking something like a tab of acid, but in the end your own material reality is affected in part by the inputs from the environment you reside in - most importantly the social inputs from other people. You can maintain a certain tenuous sense of peace upon self-revelation and self-knowledge, but such a sense of peace has to be constantly maintained and buttressed against influential social and environmental forces from external sources.
To cite a crude example, if you are a dick, you can have endless compassion for the prick in you, but you will still be treated like a prick by others if you manifest that behavior, which will pull you temporarily into a position of social instability until you can manage to stabilize yourself again. Neuroscience has found our brains to be these vast ecosystems of competing tribes and alliances of neural networks. We have a "perception of insults" network that becomes inflamed and strengthened upon its activation, riling up our emotions even against the wishes of our executive networks. We also have an "exchange logic" network that kicks in when we have to pay rent or buy food and procure wages for that purpose, which upon inflammation orders our social interactions in ways that are no longer useful in a world where some have much less to exchange than others.
The nice thing about this is that we can consciously choose the type of person that we want to be, or even the types of societies that we want to work towards having. The choice itself might be determined on a cosmic level, but we still have the experience of making the choice. We can choose to exercise a given neural network by feeding it, and many of these networks interface with others to produce complex and often unforeseen results. For example, if you choose to meditate with regularity, you are diverting energy away from certain executive networks that may be having a negative effect, feeding emotional networks that may be giving you anxiety or feelings of guilt or worthlessness. In doing so you are also thinking slightly different and diverting your attention to different things, which can lead to greater changes in the way your brain functions.
What I am driving at is that I myself had certain revelations that were very useful, but to take advantage of these revelations in a practical matter, that is, act on the revelations in physical space as opposed to simply thinking about them, one needs a bit more than mere inner light.
Well, inner light itself manifests not only from a sudden turn of attention to realities within us that have always existed, but the actual external influences that make such a turn of attention possible in the first place. When one fails to be absorbed into the conventional external reality, in this case capitalist society, one has no choice but to turn inward and towards those instructional bodies of knowledge produced by others who have turned inward themselves.
So I found compassion for myself as this nervous nutcase obsessed with and fixated on certain ideas. It doesn't change the fact that I still act pretty strange many times and this produces effects in those around me and sometimes I worry about those effects. I still possess a broken self. I am resolved to improve myself as far as possible within the environment I find around me in order to harmonize with others, however one can only pursue this path so far. There comes a point when one's external environment becomes so contradictory to one's character (one is unlikely to be pleasant and sociable while dangling over a lava pit) that it becomes necessary either to transplant oneself into another environment altogether, or seek to change the existing environment in a radical way.
Broken selves like these exist in variations throughout our social totality. The pathologies that arise from my own self correlate to the functions of my character in social space; the breaks occurred along the very seams that make up my person, so to speak. Others will develop pathologies in accordance with their own characters, such as unnecessary aggression, excessive neediness, emotional distance, debilitating cynicism, etc.
So what's producing these broken selves? And are these selves really broken? I'm not so sure. The whole concept of brokenness is a slippery one and seems to relate to utility. For example, a broken gear is only broken in the sense that it no longer possesses the bodily integrity to function within a greater machine. The actual matter is still all there, just not situated in the specific way that it makes a specific system work.
Life has a way of producing bounded systems that function on repetition to sustain themselves. The moving parts do their work in repetitive movements again and again, even while the actual molecules within the moving parts vibrate away and the parts undergo a long process of decay.
It brings to mind Freud's studies of the interactions of the pleasure principle (Eros) and the death drive (Thanatos) in trying to understand human psychology and human civilization. With the pleasure principle, life progresses by seeking pleasure and avoiding displeasure, and with the death drive, life seeks to restore itself to a past state through repetition of past events, arcing ever gradually toward an inanimate state. This is a fascinating concept but I think its incomplete.
There's this binary directional quality implied in the concepts: Eros is the principle of life, ever-changing and striving towards pleasure and vitality, while Thanatos is the principle of death, a tendency that moves in the direction of Absolute Zero towards increasing loss of energy, calcification and crystallization. But there's more to this dynamic than all that.
If pleasure is the experience of the generation of life itself, it seems that in order to experience such pleasures in the first place, life has to organize itself into an organized system that then begins to decay as soon as it is formed. This takes a repetition of the constituent elements which temporarily freezes organized matter into a living system that experiences. So the drive towards death is a necessary prerequisite for the striving of life itself and the experience of pleasure. And on top of that, the striving towards pleasure of each constituent of a living system tends towards greater entropy and resulting death. These binary concepts are only opposing each other as distinct concepts in our minds; they are really two sides of the same coin.
So here we are, each of our selves stuck within a society that desires a previous state of organized matter that is no longer possible due to the changing constitution of its constituents. Those of us who are broken are broken insofar as we no longer function correctly when plugged into the totality that is the decaying body of capitalist civilization. Revolution in this case would be to re-realize a society that is capable of absorbing each of us as our characters exist now. Our tasks as individuals is to become what we are, as Nietzsche loved to say, and to become what we are, it is necessary to engage in forming a framework that allows that to happen in temporal material space. It is necessary to engage ourselves in the twin task of coming to terms with our true characters and forming an alternate society that reflects that reality, which will then begin its process of decay all over again. A tall order to be sure.
So now to bring this train wreck back to the matter of my confusion, my acid trip, my revelation of my broken self, and the resulting process of coming to terms with these realities. Many of the social pathologies and the resulting mental illnesses that arise from such pathologies are generated by what I find to be the following dynamic: one finds oneself to exist in a tension with greater society due to the contradictions between one's changing self and a society in stasis, so one sanctions one's new self via guilt and anti-social behavior in accordance with old ideals of what an individual should be and relate to society, which results in social conflicts and dissonance. Healing consists of not only coming to terms with the real self and generating new honest values to live by, but having that real self loved and appreciated by a genuine community bound by those forces of Eros (love), preferably in accordance with these new values. If such a community exists, excellent. If not, one must be created. In my case, merely talking to friends about these experiences and receiving their understanding was enough to loosen the knot greatly. But more must be done.
So that is that. All this to try to come to terms with a bundle of personal hangups!
