Year: 2020

Quick base from the AoS method

In this article about relational allergies, we will look at it from perspective of Affairs of the State primarily focuses on getting insight on the following 5 fields:

1. Politics/moral (want/need)
2. Weather/external natural aspect (Emotional confrontation by self or other)
3. Terrain/support (time/space obstacles)
4. Leader/commander (You choose to address something)
5. Doctrine/discipline (You set way-points and follow them to the letter)

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What are relational allergies?

When living, working or simply interacting with other beings (animals or people alike), we process signals and responses from a structure deep inside our decision tree. They are initially (in case we are doing something that we have always done) on Instinctive level, but if we are still not entirely ‘fixed’ with how to handle an event, it is still being filtered sometimes by the emotional layer (this is where ‘allergies’ are noticed. Allergies are not cognitive, nor are they instinctive, though the behavior we portrait often become so, because if our brain does anything, it will see if the recurring of those allergic stimuli should be made automatic, so the brain has more time for other things.

Relational Allergies can range from simple things like someone dropping a candy wrapper on the floor, to more intrinsic structures, where the allergy is about a complex combination of both cognitive responses and instinctive/emotional behaviors. For example: If someone seems very intelligent/rational in conversation, but when there are actual moments where such person abuses such ‘observation’ of intelligence and actually behaves very irrational, this can cause a feeling of dissonance (irritation). As many people behave this way on certain moments (even intelligent rational people are still people and can sometimes feel empty or get stressed and behave irrational), it can become an unobserved response of ourselves to become slowly or even instantly irritated and behave negatively to such person.

Lets see whether you are able to find such person or event in your own life. This is ‘becoming aware’. In AoS, knowing the weather and terrain is most important. Because what we often want/need is feel better ourselves. We can’t do that if too many things influence us (or too little).

1. What do you find important as a personal quality?

(give one quality, and try to make it as concrete as possible.)

2. Why do you find this important for your own actions?

(Assess the quality and see how you rationalize that it is positive for you, others and generally the environment around you/the person having this quality)

3. And for your feelings?

(How do you feel if someone behaves with the quality in a positive way? Or how does it make you feel if a person is not behaving according to this quality?)

4. Do you feel you have this quality?

(Be concrete and honest. Do you think you have this quality and behave to it consistently, or do you think you are trying hard to have this quality?)

5. Do you recognize people around that have this quality and who does no?

(Can you name one person who you have observed behaving according to the quality  you named under the first question? Can you name someone who clearly does not? Write these names down. Remember, AoS is about you, not about others. You can’t change others. Writing down their names, makes you aware, nothing more.)

6. How does not holding the quality make you feel? (If someone pretends to have this quality but in actions later doesn’t)

(Do you remember a situation where someone normally seemed to behave according to this quality, but later at a certain point failed this? How did you feel?)

Processing reflection

Now, take the answers and write them separate as one piece of text, in the following format:

I like to be <quality from question 1>. I find it important for <scope from question 2> because <arguments from question 2>. I feel <feeling from question 3> when I notice the effects on the world around me. I sense I feel <negative feeling from question 3>. I think I <answer from question 4>. I have examples from my life, where I notice I feel <answer from question 6>.

The question now, is whether you want to improve anything here. Remember, you can’t change others. You for sure shouldn’t make yourself behave negative or different, just to accommodate something that you feel is a positive thing.

Though you have written down a clear introspect on one quality, it doesn’t mean you are right or wrong in it. However, there are three steps left to become seriously aware of the effect and validity of this need/want.

Step 2

If you have been honest in question 4, you will know how consistent you consider yourself to be. In the coming week, try to observe when this quality pops up, or should pop up and it does or doesn’t and how consistent you yourself behave towards it. If you didn’t, what was the reason? Did you think about why, or did it just happen?

When you get irritated about someone not behaving according to the quality, is this person someone you know will normally behave positive with the quality, or is it someone who normally already doesn’t?

Step 3

When you yourself notice you have not acted according to the quality, how do you rationalize this? Do you apologize to another openly, or do you conceal it and leave it at that?

Step 4

If at step 3 you have noticed you concealed it, try to openly ‘announce’ you have not done what you wanted to do.

If you have tried this even once, you will quickly notice that declaring/announcing openly how you feel and how you wanted to act, makes you feel better 1. you have shown to others that even though you missed the opportunity, you are aware (where they might not have been) and you are working on it (if you weren’t you wouldn’t be open about it).

In the previous, you have now addressed all five fields of AoS. Do you recognize them?

If you do, you can be proud of yourself. You have already made a leap in understanding yourself and social interaction.

If you fell you miss some, you can be proud of yourself, because you have already excelled in effort and are on the verge of evolving yourself to a person you want to be.

If you feel you don’t connect to the five, be proud of yourself. You are critically observing and looking at a field of knowledge you might need to research more. Or, perhaps my wording is not connecting. In that case you are welcome to contact me on it through the contact form.

Quick base from the AoS method

We will look at the cause, effect and possible solutions to rational allergies from the perspective of the Affairs of the State primarily focuses on getting insight on the following 5 fields:

1. Politics/moral (want/need)
2. Weather/external natural aspect (Emotional confrontation by self or other)
3. Terrain/support (time/space obstacles)
4. Leader/commander (You choose to address something)
5. Doctrine/discipline (You set way-points and follow them to the letter)

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What are Rational allergies?

Consider the following mention:

If there is one you should know, it is that you know nothing. ~ M. de Haan ~

Now, if you consider I said this to you, how does this make you feel? What emotion did you recognize immediately, and what rationalization popped up in your head to solve the emotional conflict?

See, even though I know why I wrote it, when I read it, and it registered,, I felt attacked. I didn’t even consider the fact that I wrote it myself, just that it talked about ‘you’, which is an indication of the person reading it. And it said that (contrasting with my logical reasoning) I knew nothing, which is generally associated with a negative quality: ignorance. I immediately had answers: The writing can not say anything about me. The writing is inconsistent with itself. You can’t know something, if you know nothing.

But is that what it says? Is that the meaning of the text? Is that the intent of the person who wrote it? (in this case me).

How can I decide which answer is right to any of the three questions? Can I deduct or induct any answer to be true in this case?

Lets pick them apart, before we continue.

Is the quote/text saying what I think it says?

What I think it says is both very relevant, and irrelevant at the same time.  It is relevant, because when I am aware that I thinkwhat it might mean, I am aware of my own processes. Being aware of yourself improves your ability to change yourself, or at the least understand yourself. This is what AoS is about. However, what I think it says is also totally irrelevant, because I can give it any meaning I want, which only has value as long as I read it, and again, if I am aware of this, the validity of this meaning is corrupted, because this meaning will be drenched in subjective historical decisions. 

What could be the actual meaning of the text?

Because the text speaks about me, but inherently we know the text can be written by anyone, about anyone, I can’t take it as a personal matter, unless it was part of a larger text where it was singularly addressing me. In such case I would know the emotional load and rational argumentation behind it. But could the text even then be true? Because I already validly rationalized that the text contained an internal conflicting connection: If you know nothing, you can’t even know the one thing. Because nothing means: no thing, none.

So, the text can’t be about me specific, nor can it be read without the internal conflicting meaning. But is there a philosophical meaning to it? How do I get to such meaning?

First off, philosophy  is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. This means in broader sense: objective deduction/induction by mind of rational causality within the world we live in. 

Now, for the text to be philosophical, we would need to break it apart, but only after we have considered a possible reasoning for the text to exist in the first place and what field of study it would involve.

I think it would be safe to say it is about the knowledge, mind and reason of an individual in general.

So, the text wants to say something about the knowledge, reasoning and mind of an individual.

Now here is the culprit of the further investigation. I wrote the text, so I know what I mean by it. This means my explanation is already tainted with foreknowledge. Be aware of this when reading the rest and validate anything I say with your own logical mind. See where my rationality fails and please let me know.

The text speaks in two pieces:

The first piece says: ‘If there is one thing you should know’

The base here is ‘teaching’. ‘should know’, says that if you don’t know yet, you would require to remember the following. If you already do, you should learn from the following. Besides this, it says: ‘one thing’, indicating it is an important thing (though this is highly subjective).

The second piece: ‘is that you know nothing’

Conflicts with the former, as it would state you would know nothing prior to this text and would have to start with knowing nothing.

That last part of conclusion is important, because is it not true that initially a human knows nothing? Don’t we all start born with no cognitive content? Instinctive, yes, emotional, yes, but cognitive no.

The second part, also means that if you should be aware that you know nothing, you (picking back to the first) should learn from this single point. Every time you think you know something, you should consider you might not actually know.

Is that the intent of the person who wrote it?

Because I wrote the text, which is a free translation of some other quote (from Socrates), I know what I wanted to convey with it (giving it this meaning). My ‘deduction’ is validated by my knowledge of the meaning at forehand, but you might consider whether you could have rationalized to the same meaning.

Conclusion

Allergies in rationale (logical inclinations), or content (information of observation) pretty much always start and end with the limitation of the context (boundaries of knowledge). This isn’t per se wrong. Often we find ourselves in a conversation where someone shows on a rational level to have no content in the matter, though having presented to be knowledgeable within the context.  This will be irritating for many different reasons depending on the times and places. Important however, is to know where the irritation comes from. Sometimes it is not the other person, but ourselves who lack the information and this can be just as irritating.

Quick base from the AoS method

Affairs of the State primarily focuses on getting insight on the following 5 fields:

1. Politics/moral (want/need)
2. Weather/external natural aspect (Emotional confrontation by self or other)
3. Terrain/support (time/space obstacles)
4. Leader/commander (You choose to address something)
5. Doctrine/discipline (You set way-points and follow them to the letter)

Definition disposition

Before we attack the anxieties, a little about where they come from.

Here is a link to the Medical News Today, about anxiety.

The link will tell you exactly what I would say. You might wonder, whether it would be even productive to go into such a diverse and complex matter. The simple answer is: Yes. Why so? Because knowing brings understanding. Understanding brings knowing. IE. You can learn a great deal from looking into it. Both about yourself and a lot of other things.

A quick resume: Anxiety is a plethora of behaviors that cause emotional and physical stress, either by impulse/stimuli from a certain situation, a certain train of thought/memoryset or an internal chemical imbalance.

Address of fear

Finding the five fields within a specific anxiety, would require first the anxiety to be ‘clearly defined’. This seems logical and simple, but of course it is not. A person responding with heightened heartrate from a view of a street doesn’t automatically falls within the borders of Agorafobia. Nor does one who feels totally drained by a group of people automatically fall within Enochlophobia. Though they are the primary targets to see if the symptoms match, so an initial treatment can be selected, it is very important to often seek beyond the ‘obvious’. If human behavior was ‘obvious’, we would have completed understanding ourselves already centuries ago.

The problem often is, that people will use old ‘medical’ steps to define newly found/understood disorders in human nature (behavioral/experience) or a human being (physical).  The DTM takes research done, based on old medical research, but then start from scratch, with rational reduction as base. The human experience is based on the interpretation of sensory input that we inherited from ancestors without the cognitive awareness of them. It is important to realize this, because it explains why human behave in certain ways and why researching how animals behave (taking that they are within the ancestral tree of humans regarding such behavior) is important for understanding ourselves.

In the above figure, you see from left to right, the evolutionary path from single cell organisms to dinosaurs and eventually humans. Though they all seem like either separate species, actually they never were. Slowly over the course of numerous generations, one turned into the other. parts of the organism changed, added, or lost functionality. Some lines went extinct. Some lines diversified. Just like your own family. Your grandma and grandpa had more than one child probably, and each of those got their own family, some with deficiencies, some with increased ‘functionality’. Those with deficiencies are often to have less possibility to survive (though in modern days we have medicine to solve many issues. And create new ones, true). Increased functionality often gets spurred by the environment, but just as likely can be an accidental genetic change.

Plato…or Plateau?

Each generation is a little different from that before. As far as we know now, before the moment of major diversity in species, there was the great Cambrian phase, where the amount of food and species were in balance and growth was possible without any environmental force to change the species. Likely when a sudden change in environment happened, the limited diversity in species was challenged and caused an explosion of species. This wasn’t like one day there was three species and the next day all three made two thousand. Just in a shorter period of time, different ‘cultures’ of microbes started to mutate to survive shortcomings in either protection from other species, food scarcity or environmental dangers.

How does this help understanding anxieties? 

First off, the chemical balance in our body, is one of the oldest systems in organic life. The cells we are made up of, are based on the singular celled lifeforms millions of years ago. These lived solely on the changes in chemical balances. Heck, the even exist because the concentrations within and around proteins caused them to fold into themselves, causing them to become more and more complex processes until they were what we call ‘life’.

It’s Chemistry

Chemical deficiencies cause erratic behavior in cells. They cause deformity and malfunctions. In systems with different combined cell types and changing/dependent concentration regulation, they cause discrepancies between parts of the system, making (again) either each other or within itself on cellular level, deform or malfunction. These malfunctions can be such that change in concentration of minerals or other pH changes, can cause the systempart to overproduce or abundantly attract fluids. This didn’t change anywhere in the evolutionary track. How do we know? Because we recognize the systems that are evolved from earlier systems, and still respond in the same way to altered stimuli or situations.

Not neurotic

Secondly, neurological importance. As our nervous system evolved from way before the mammal evolutionary diversion, the way it responds to the most basic needs, fears and changes, are important to understand. The automatic retraction of a worm is no different than the instinctive pull to fetal pose in sense of imminent and lethal danger of a mammal, even a human. Recognizing these cause and effects, can help determine on which level a person is influence by a neurological deficiency or malfunction.

Don’t get emotional

Thirdly, though not the last, it is the last we will address right now, is the emotional influence. As the DTM theory explains, we behave on three levels. Instinctive, emotional and cognitive. The fist two influences/systems mentioned above, are genetically caused instincts. We can’t really change them. The emotional one is a bit of an in between. Where the first two are in basic aimed at the internal structure of the organism, emotions are aimed at the rudimentary well being of the organism within groups. It is a differentiation that alters decisions of the organism, not based on the requirement by the chemical balance, or the neurological stimuli, but by the added value of shortterm and long term memory adaptions (learned instincts/learned behavior).

Read very carefully, emotions are (depending on the importance of the survival of the species) instinctive or learned. Often emotional behavior associated with pain or imminent death are often instinctive, as evolution has caused those who had the ‘liberty’ to experience the fear and pain and survived, over the ones that either did or did not experience it and died.

Feelings, nothing more than feelings

Emotions are, especially for a social species as humans, important in many levels of development throughout a organism’s life. For mammals, awareness of the response of parents to emotional distress of offspring causes the offspring to use such emotion to indicate requirements, until it can fend for itself. Humans, who have a totally different (artificial) native habitat, are still required to ‘teach’ their offspring to adapt to different patterns than previous primates. ‘No, you will not get food whenever you start crying. You will get food on set times, so you will grow strong, but not overweight’. In a sense, humans develop slower because of the need to first break down some of the instinctive habits, and then start teaching the offspring how to behave.  Whether this will eventually not be required anymore, is unknown (the fun part of evolution. We can predict, but not ‘know’).

Three tiers of tired

How to address an anxiety, depends heavily on what disorder is observable. See, a person can even act and be perceived as fully normal, yet be subject to several anxieties. So, even if there is nothing observable, one might want to see, if one has an anxiety.

Symptoms of anxiety can range from urges (instinctives), to feelings (emotions), to physical malfunction (chemical/neurological), to a combination. Because one can cause the other, it is imperative to be aware of what layer influence which, before addressing any symptoms.

For instance, if you feel tired at a certain moment, drained of all energy, but you are sure that it is not because of lack of rest, what should you consider?

Don’t get sad, Get even

Taking the above, the following table is a matrix you can use to fill out A. what gives you the reason why this connection could be investigated, B. what symptoms you see, or expect to see. C. What you think could be an actual action to address it.

	drained/apathic	shifted/irritated	heated/elevated
chemical
neurological
emotional/cognitive

Be very careful! This exercise is meant to give you insight, it does NOT nor ever can replace professional medical help!