Domestication is how we relate. We condition one another. We, essentially, colonize one another with our memetic projections and entrain one another into this or that frequency of thought. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It's how we've evolved, socially. It's the mammalian thing to do. Maybe it's the only way for an organism to engage with its environment. One could argue that it's the alive thing to do. As conscious mammals, though, it can become really complex--rife with feedback loops that amplify endlessly until they are broken by conscious force or environmental intervention. The more entrenched they become, the harder to break.
No one can really blame us, little mammals that we are, for having evolved to this point by means of fixed action patterns that slowly give way to conscious behavior. It could scarcely have been otherwise. Blame is really beside the point. In fact, using concepts like blame to understand these subtle, multifactoral energetic dynamics is like trying to reduce the emergent complexity back down to the familiar, easily categorizable fixed action patterns we're leaving behind. It's futile and it's a bad faith endeavor.
Awareness is a heavy gift. Once you recognize a truth, feigning ignorance is a betrayal of Self. Self betrayal opens you to betrayal by Other (which is really just more Self). A hull breach forms in your energetic structure and you start taking on brackish water and, soon enough, "foreign" invaders. You find yourself in a fractal broken-mirror battle of epic proportions wherein factions of your being fight to the death for sovreignty against the invasive thought forms. The more invested you become in the fight, the harder it is to recognize that you're shadow boxing. You only recognize (and are triggered by) the foreign invaders because your system has encountered them before. Your energetic immune system has them tagged and is ready to engage. You've invited them with your recognition.
I guess, the best we can do, aside from cultivating good emotional regulation, is to strive for mutuality in our exchanges, with the foreknowledge that tendrils of expectation and projection will inevitably extend from Self and Other and form a new, third thing. Good hygiene would have us ask ourselves at every given moment, "Is this something I want to bring into this reality? Is the system I'm being inducted into at this moment (or already supporting by my complicity or active engagement) one that I want to see persist in my reality and one I want to participate in and, potentially, be bound to? Am I living/doing/creating what I love?"
#SN-in-Libra
