How Your Senses Have Been Colonized
Story State Action Diary 2
Hello, all. Blessings in this time of brutality and addiction.
Yesterday I hosted a special workshop, part of my new series on my Story, State, Action model. It was all about using the eyes, sight, vision and working with image. I chose this because of a few reasons.
the spring season is governed by the Liver and the spirit of the liver is known as the hun. This spirit rises up and goes journeying, it is in some ways the who, what & how of our dreaming capacity. The liver along with the gallbladder govern the sense of vision.
A significant portion of brain matter is dedicated to visual processing. This processing includes prediction and referencing, which are dreams themselves — hallucinatory models that the brain/body uses to alert of us potential danger in our immediate environment. This is also why doomscrolling and social media are so addictive: they are exploiting and further colonizing this major part of our survival apparatus.
Without the ability to use the eyes and seeing properly, one will be stuck in hijack mode, reacting to subconscious threats based on weak, faulty or misused visual sensing. Our post-modern urban environments also play a large part as to why and how people get stuck in the F modes like Flight, Fight and Freeze, etc.
I will pause there, because I’m already touching on many of the ideas I want to address in this diary entry.
So, let’s start with the short Intro I wrote for the workshop and expand it. The block quote indents are my expanded thoughts.
INTRO
Society has become a war for and against our minds, our attention, our senses.
The constant bombardment of noise, distraction, stimulus, panic, hyperbole, propaganda, bad ideas and delusion are not merely innocuous agents that can be easily cleared. Constantly being subjected to bad ideas requires one to spend energy to filter them, sort them, pick them apart, decide if they are friend or foe, etc.
This qi could be spent in better ways, but as herd animals, we overfeed ourselves on this communication-information precisely because we need each other to survive and we do not know what is good or bad for us, and we are afraid that if we do not know, we will die.
(This means that we dedicate an enormous amount of energy to visual and auditory communication, because we are “stuck” with each other, NEED each other, and thus have to continually decide if someone is behaving in a friendly or dangerous way. I.e. “Is this person helping or hurting my chances at survival?”)
The oppressors and marketers are counting on us being too exhausted to rebel, too exhausted to say no, and too exhausted to discern our natural appetites.
One of the keys to understanding our natural appetite is a kind of educated curation, a curation of vocabulary, a vocabulary of the "palate".
This is beyond important. I just dropped a lot of terms and will drop more soon, but recognize vocabulary, appetite, palate.
This is not just about the food we ingest with our mouths, but about the information we ingest with our senses. We must educate our appetites; we must educate our qi.
Learning vocabulary is how we make sentences, how we communicate ideas and needs. Without this crucial education, we cannot ask for what we actually need, and we cannot find it. If we don’t have the proper education, we can’t formulate coherent questions — we won’t know HOW to think, much less what to think. This is the goal of fascism: To undermine our capacity to learn HOW to think and ASK QUESTIONS.
Where does this educated curation begin? I contend that it begins at the very places and functions by which we are being attacked: our senses. This requires us to decolonize our senses.
To re-learn how to sense.
Welcome to one of my major thesis arguments that I discovered over ten years ago when doing a lot of dance, acting and somatic training. The thing hardly anyone was or is talking about. This invisibilisation of our primary way to engage with reality (aka our senses) IS a fundamental function of colonization. The site of colonization is not just the land and bodies to labor on that land, but the very sensory actions of said bodies. We are trained from a very early age on how to sense correctly (& who pray tell decides that correctness?) and by omission, how NOT to sense, and then this process is erased as if it never happened.
So, we go decades, maybe our whole lives for some of us, operating our bodies with an invisible manual that has been revised, rewritten and redacted by oppressors.
The only real upside to this grotesque violence is that the problem & the solution arise together. That is nondual animist-indigenous wisdom that speaks to us, through us, from a “place” that can never be colonized.
Are we up to the task of discerning that un-colonizable communication?
This is where education, a real animist education rooted in the somato-sensory relationship of bodies & land (which includes things like food, water, breathing, sleeping, etc) comes into play. The interface between the body and nature is the senses, so in order to re-educate and un-learn our enslavement training, we must engage and relate directly with the senses first and foremost.
AWW, U GOT ANIMISM IN MY NEUROSCIENCE, or, Why we are taught that white ideas are the only ideas worth repeating.
The irascible issues with fascism, colonization, and oppressor behavior come down to a mal-adaptation of creativity called addiction. Make no mistake, as this is my other big thesis statement: Addiction & Creativity are 2 sides of the same coin.
It is very hard to see something you don’t want to see (because it’s scary or painful), much less if you don’t have the vocabulary by which to name it.
And so, over many generations, the original human ontology and epistemological basis was scapegoated and genocided. This is Animism, or we could say, animistic relational sciences.
Going into all the gory details as to how humanity ended up in this self-inflicted torture chamber would be books upon books of data, so I will just do a little improv bit here and say that we are wired for fear and really want shit to be easy and if we have to maybe murder heaps of kids to feel a bit more comfy then some people are gonna run with that idea and keep on running with it.
This is also why I will never miss a chance to say that western, white psychotherapy, psychiatry and medicine in general is a fucking scam. It fails many more people than it helps, and it is protected by a cabal of sociopaths and addicts who have letters after their name and houses on stolen land.
I didn’t make any progress on my path of healing until I went and learned animism, nonduality and indigenous thought models. Even all my somatic and creative training needed to be integrated, and western models of “attachment theory” and “maslow’s hierarchy of needs that he stole from native people and rewrote for europeans” did not really help me integrate.
It confused me more, because it was colonizer bullshit. If you have a great meal, but sprinkle it with arsenic, that meal is now poisonous no matter how nourishing it could have been. I had to do years of work, study and practice to decolonize the very models and systems FIRST. The tools I was told were the best tools, were colonized.
And those colonizer tools are still being used and lauded as the best and only way to “heal”, all while making white people and abusive men richer and richer and richer.
All the systems of oppression, including a colonized education and healthcare system, feed addiction patterns and a “hoarding syndrome” based on a heightened perception of threat. None of us are exempt. The virus must be managed because the virus is how the economy works, how environments are built and how we are locked into false trust models of transactionality.
Neuroscience is only as good as the DECOLONIZED MIND that wields it.
This (and the rare gems of teachers I met along the path) is what eventually led me to the story state action model. It has taken me twenty years outside of any formal academy or institution.
The problems we face as a people will never be dealt with using the Master’s tools.
The problems we face as a people will never be dealt with if we cannot manage our intense feelings of Pain, Fear & Hunger/Desire.
The problems we face as a people will never be dealt with if we keep telling Wrong Story.
The problems we face as a people will never be dealt with if our sense are colonized.
Housekeeping
Thanks for reading. If you’ve made it this far, I would love to ask a few things.
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Introduction to the model: The Story, State, Action Model
Story, State, Action Diary series
Diary 01: Dying on that hill, Falling on that sword
Diary 02: How Your Senses Have Been Colonized
Diary 03: How to Become Normal Human*
Diary 04: Normal Human = Sublime
Diary 05: Normal is not Normalized, Normalized is not Normal.
Diary 06: Chaos, Our True Home.