I just came across a quote by Gordon Wheeler (a gestalt and Clinical Psych) in a presentation I’m watching, (I’m currently studying Gestalt Psychotherapy).

Having been obsessed with animist and ecosystemic senses of self since I was 17 or so, the theory is a little dry for me, but it can still reap insight and value, if you bring your ‘lived, sensed experience’ with you.

Wheeler was talking about Gestalt related models of the brain/consciousness from a century ago, and how much of a formative role those models played in leading to current brain models and neurobiology today, it felt like an apt quote:

“When the environment is too changeable, and ‘the field’** is overwhelming to us, we cannot cope with it all…

We have a built in tendency, which we see through all human ‘pre-history’, a built in [neurological] response, for too much complexity, and that default is: ‘I divide the field’ into ‘us and them'”

— Gordon Wheeler

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me, observing us all on here occasionally, that these ‘media ecologies’ we’ve co-created, commodified and (digital twin) imaged ourselves with… All its consequential ‘viral’ memetics, inter-dependencies, and resultant identitarian, bifurcated ‘brandings’ and tribal allegiances, in many ways… are basically too much for our brains.

This might indirectly explain why so many fixate on what they believe is ‘the problem’, at the expense of actioning and uniting around solutions, and others, might fixate on solutions (band-aids) at the expense of far wider systemic problems. We can only tolerate so much chaos in our meaning making.

Asserting our own boundaries can quite possibly be conflated or complicated with asserting polarised or aggressive coping strategies.

Especially when you perceive yourself as siding with the ‘superior’ or ‘winning’ team, for self / social preservation purposes.

I’d suggest that each ideological camp has its own nuance and value of truth, a vector, or line of flight, through a vast incomprehensible fabric of chaos and order…

These vectors are rarely anywhere close to the whole picture of complexity that it’s proponents usually claim. Scientific, political, ideological and even ecological.

Unless synthetic computerisation completely outruns us, I imagine we’re going through another ‘software’ reorganisation of our brains in the coming decades / centuries to cope (and no doubt adaptively merge) with this complexity.

After which perhaps, for another short evolutionary interlude, we are indeed ‘coping’ once again…

Until then we’ll simply continue to divide, polarise and simplify for our own ‘sanity’, and the allegiances we base that sanity on.

Ironically, simplifying and polarising often only serves to increase relational and environ-mental complexity, perceptions of threat and danger.

To crudely and briefly tie this back into my own ‘BioEnergetic Release’ work.

I’ve endlessly witnessed much bioelectric and neuromuscular reshaping and trauma charge release occur, when people take a small risk, and surrender their usually polarised (neuromuscular) attitudes and ideologies, into simply ‘not knowing’…

This gives the body-mind space ‘to feel’ (effortlessly organise), as opposed ‘to know’ (expensively rigidify).

(PsychoPhysiologically) posturing yourself ideologically (as necessary as that is occasionally) has ‘complicated’ costs and consequences in ‘the field’*.

The presence and awareness (love) we bring to others is ‘dramatically’ weakened and watered down by the posturing.

**a person’s behaviour can’t be viewed in isolation from the situation they are in. The ‘field’ in field theory refers to the organism/environment field; that is, the total situation of a person (organism) in a context (environment).