I love this view on disassociation, its very calming. Sometimes I think of it as being like a stone in the middle of a river, just letting all the raging opinion and emotion of the world wash over and past me. Really inert I guess.
Edit: At least it would appear inert to any other casual observer. There's usually some furious, deep brain activity going on.
Babbling, mostly:
It's odd, as time goes by and I spend increasing amounts of time in solitude, how this affects my perceptions of other people. Are people really people anymore when I no longer recognize their self-concepts as being real? Are they still subjects? Or are they "meat machines" loaded with spyware or memes? Conceptual tools to enforce hierarchy, social cohesion, and mirrored growth. But, when that growth is so haphazard when resulting from that mirror, the mirror may be haphazard itself. Accurate measurements are difficult to be found unless I want my growth to be along interpersonal lines of reality. What reality do I choose?
A realization of this means there's no reference point. No measurement. Just adjectives resulting from blissful solitude. When the attachment to my ego begins to thin, a sense of panic at losing property that's been possessed for long emerges, but that ego isn't itself's property. It's a conjuration of interpersonal reality. Return to the breath and see it further dissipate, leaving only the bliss of non-conceptualized social reality -- that is, no social reality at all.
But, then the ego returns along more abstract lines (i.e. internet forums). While this is freeing in that it allows for greater self-determination, it can subtract body language from the information that allows others to determine our self-concepts and return that information back to us. But, is body language that informs others of our self-concepts freeing or restricting in much the same way that social roles given by birth can be restricting based on traditions we didn't choose. Why tie our self-concepts to a restricting social order and why tie our self-concepts to a meat machine? As we progress, we are no longer as tied down by the social orders as we once were, and, now, we find ourselves no longer as tied down by our meat machines (bodies). Odd.
The American Dream once seemed so nice in that it allowed for greater self-determination for our self-concepts via class mobility. Now, the abstract means of the internet provides even greater self-determination. It seems that this will only increase in scope and intensity as we progress. Never before have we had such options as to who we get to chose to mirror ourselves back to us.
Those who have stake in the old social order naturally resist. Their egos have too much at stake in it, much as those who had a stake in having less class mobility before the myth of the American Dream might have opposed this emerging dream. Now, those whose self-concepts are heavily tied to their bodies oppose emerging abstract forms of socialization. It's escapism, they say. But, soon we may find that those who are engaging in escapism are those left in the dust, or, rather, their social realities entirely determine by their meat machines.
