I have been thinking about people’s ability to, in a strictly mental sense, create what they need in order to compensate for a lack of an expected stimulus a lot lately.

Sorry that’s such a complicated sentence. It’s the best I could do.

The example I talked about yesterday was the way a blind person’s other four senses heighten in response to the lack of visual input. Whether born blind or blinded, the human brain will compensate for the lack of expected stimulus because it has to. The human mind simply cannot accept a lack of expected stimulus.

This is easiest to see in sensory deprivation experiments. When the stimulus level is that catastrophically low, the mind’s react to this stimulus starvation is to generate vivid hallucinations which can include all five sense. That is how powerful the mind’s need for stimulation can get, and shows that the human mind can, in certain situations, generate the stimulus it lacks.

That’s easy to see with sensory stimuli. But I think it works for emotional stimuli as well. I think that in a healthy mind, when a necessary emotional stimulus is absent, the mind creates a version of that stimulation, a sort of placeholder image version of it, until the real thing can be found.

This pale imitation cannot compete with the real thing. It is merely a ghost, a shadow of the real thing. It merely acts as the minimum stimulation level to prevent catastrophic emotional collapse.

The unhealthy mind, by comparison, cannot do this, and it is a strict rationalist sense of only believing that which is “real” that prevents it. When the mind is rendered incapable of fooling itself even a little, it becomes extremely vulnerable to the breakdowns and malfunctions (and even delusions) of a stimulation-starved mind.

Thus, a rigid rationalism with no room for belief for its own sake actually sabotages the ability of the mind to cope.

This psychological self-righting mechanism, in most healthy people, takes the form of religion. A belief in an all-powerful loving God allows the individual to generate the feelings of love, acceptance, belonging, and so on in order to continue to function and keep going even if life fails to provide those stimuli itself.

However, everyone’s emotional gaps are different, and if religion comes into existence in order to fill those gaps, religion must different from person to person too. We cannot all have the exact same God. One key cannot fit all locks.

For those of us without religion, or at least without religious belief, the outlook for psychological health is bleaker. We cannot generate our own cure the way someone with some kind of all-encompassing belief system can. Our gaps, left to themselves, would remain unfilled, and so another solution must be found.

Thus, we turn to the wide range of alternatives offered by modern society. None of them have the panacea effect of religious belief, so they are usually high maintenance solutions that do not so much solve the problem as mask it.

They distract, they sedate, they suppress, and they substitute, but they can never do the job for long.

For a lot of people, career is their religion and ambition is their interface with it. You can fill those gaps in your emotional inputs with the hope that the next promotion, the next big deal, or the next fiscal year will be just the thing for them.

And even if the last string of successes failed to do it, the need is so strong that it is easy to convince ourselves that is is the next whatever that will do it.

Otherwise…. what’s the fucking point?

Really, this need to fill the voids within us drives all our modern addictions. In our daily spiritual crisis, stripped of the ability to imagine our way healthy, we follow the destructive path of decadence : we try to fulfill our emotional needs via hopelessly indirect and short term solutions like food, drugs, ambition, acquisition, or even rage.

As modern spirituality/psychology teaches, this search for external solutions to our lack of all the complex emotional stimuli we need is ultimately futile. No solution outside ourselves can ever become permanent. It will always be doomed to eventual failure. The only possible permanent solutions have to come from within. Somehow, in this rational age, you have to give yourself permission to fill these gaps in order to function.

This is how the refusal to allow or accept any belief that is not externally verifiable leaves people psychologically vulnerable to anything from depression to addiction to being victimized by those who seem to offer easy solutions. Under that system, there is no way for the mind to compensate for lack of love, friendship, social acceptance, or whatever.

We starve inside because we refuse to generate our own sustenance. Better to starve than to eat illusory food?

I used to think so, but now I am not so sure.

The problem, of course, is that there is no path back from the rationalist route. I cannot see a way for a rationalist mind to consciously accept that which is not “real”, regardless of how dire the emotional need might be. Before this rigid rationalism sets in, the mind might still have the necessary “wiggle room” to at least fool itself a little in the background, letting the conscious mind continue to think it is perfectly rational while the rest of the mind keeps things balanced with the kind of unobtrusive delusions that are easy to conceal and rarely face scrutiny from the outside world.

But if the rigid rationalism sets in and the conscious mind insists on stripping out everything inside itself that is not “true”, then this vital coping mechanism will be destroyed and the only way to cope is to find the necessary inputs in their genuine form, accepting no substitutes.

And how do you get there when you are starving inside?

So go right ahead and love yourself, without condition and without proof. Only this will provide the permission to fill one’s emotional needs oneself. Not entirely… you will still want all those needs met by the world as well.

But it will let you get by until you do.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.