Disease of the heart split off from wholeness

What Causes Heart disease? - a series of posts by Dr Malcolm Kendrick

#1
My reflections began with response to the not unfounded idea that stress causes oxidative inflammation and disease).


Does not the term 'stress' here needs qualifying? - because the sympathetic activation of the nervous system (within healthy function) is accompanied or balanced by the parasympathetic response. They work as one thing, (e.g; stress initiates production of nitric oxide as well as suppressing it). Persistent or chronic stress (via a range of vectors) results in deficiency and/or toxicity and thus a persistent state of inflammation. This leads to dysfunction that then triggers 'backup' or re-routing systems of fulfilling function, that in time becomes adapted as an attempted 'homoeostasis' within 'stressed' (inner and outer) environmental conditions.

The psychic-emotional or 'inner' conditioning' is implicit because our response to any event is the determiner of the meaning we take from it - and thus determines any consequent reaction. Unresolved and unreleased 'conflict' of fight/flight response can and does filter our experience of everything - including attempts to escape stress by inappropriate means that themselves become an inability or refusal to address it directly - such as addictions to masking diversion. In other words much of this runs unconsciously beneath subconscious habits of reaction and belief that find support and reinforcement as social mores and behaviours or indeed regulated medical practice.

But in biological terms; action is a stressor - but also a functional AND meaningful fulfilment of being. If 'functional meaning' is limited or reduced to serve a stress-inducing sense of asserted self-will - rather than aligned and felt meaning - then muscle function is seen to fulfil its purpose as 'work done' toward attaining a goal - but set against some sense of opposition and depletion, and thus as an effort requiring or demanding sacrifice.

But if the term 'functional' is expanded to embrace a felt freedom in wholeness of being - then the embodiment of the true of you knows itself in the act of such movement of being; an act that is aligned or unconflicted with who you feel and know yourself being. In this appreciation 'work done' serves or embodies the meaning of giving and receiving, of a natural sense of belonging - rather than compliance and sufferance under transactional demands of a sense of isolation and limitation or defence.

Dissonance of unsupported isolation and limitation calls for defence, and maps out threat - as an overlaying or filtered awareness of being, re-routing energies and priorities as an autonomic survival reflex, until the conflict is resolved and relaxation re-opens functional presence of re-integration and regeneration.

But if such dissonance persists as unresolved self-conflict, the relaxation, reconnection is effectively blocked by being indefinitely delayed by a mind set in restless or compulsive engagement of attention against genuine relaxation. This survival reflex runs as a masked and masking conditioning - as a subjective sense of managing its 'self or life problem' in terms of maintaining psychic-distantiation and a sense of private or personal defence and control relative a fragmented or 'chaotic; sense of compulsion to "DO something!" in ongoing reinforcement of a narrative identity as the re-enactment of the patterns of its own 'conflict resolution' mask or personality construct.

'Trouble abroad diverts from trouble at home' - and in a sense our 'world' operates a displacement  and diversion from core issues of 'escaped' or 'lidded over' self-conflict. We don't just 'see' what is truly here - but through the filter of our (psychic-emotional) mind-filtering - and suffer it as real while the filtering operates unchallenged as purposes no longer called for or needed.

This surface personality is in a sense, extremely fragile - and thus heavily defended against literally impossible odds - because 'reality control' is impossible (and unnecessary) no matter how charged up the attempt to put such a Humpty together again - however or whoever is flagged up as the scapegoat or bogeyman. Indeed a closed-minded defence against healing perspective is the result of exclusive investment in such a narrative identity that at root, polarizes against a feared, hated, 'enemy' or 'evil'. And it is such deeply conflicted aversion and denial that sets the 'foundation' for a relative sense of self-righteous 'escape' from perceived and believed guilt and fear of profound self conflict.

Any triggering event to the breaking of such 'reality' to the uncovering of otherwise concealed (unconsciously denied) conflict may be experienced as an extreme 'attack' of overwhelmingly traumatic experience. But also to an awakening to the More of what life is - than what we thought and accepted true.


Is our life experience a balanced rhythmic flowing exchange in which psychic-emotional consciousness reflects both a feedback mechanism to our defined object environment - AND a vector through which self-aware recognition automatically aligns the field of its own definitions?

A state of persistent conflict/inflammation, invoking 'backup' strategies of more complex and less efficient systems of fulfiling function (survival) - has a psychic-emotional corollary of 'consciousness' ... as we more or less consensually imagine, define, accept, and operate from as if true. It is hardly a 'blank slate' - but rather a dissociated personality adaptation overlaid upon its original nature. Conflict avoidance becomes parasympathetic dominant and passive-aggressively withdrawn from relations. Conflict expression becomes the blind arrogance of self-righteous assertion upon others - and overrides communication and relationship. The embrace of seemingly polarized conflict is the true nature of being that gives us identity of alignment in unifying and reintegrating purpose. I hold that we have it backwards - putting consciousness as the 'effect' - and yet as we define consciousness it IS an effect. The power to define thus is however the power innate to consciousness - even when running as if unconscious to a sense of life lived independently within its terms.

# 2

Stress also activates nitric oxide production/release as well as limiting it. While generally agreeing with your sketch as a work in progress, I am aware that we mythologize our experience of world and body, or rather, we interpret the world mythically. Perhaps A.I may learn to think as a wholeness instead of trying to put Humpty together again in impossibly complex linear conceptual mappings of variable responding at once to each other?

So I sense Life embodies a communication of balanced functionality that our good v bad 'narrative identity' can only distort. And so I see the good v bad narrative identity as a symptom/reinforcement of a persistently maintained imbalance aka 'define and control mentality' or psychic-emotional defence - as a result of a perceived and believed loss of wholeness of being - and adaptations of persisting under such conditions. This 'development' runs its prodigal course as a dissociation in fragmentation that eventually results in desire for and reintegration within wholeness of being - which is directly Felt Life - rather than emotionally reactive or suppressive mentality operating upon it. The blocks to feeling being - including substitutions  for true presence lived - are both biologically conditioned and psychically reinforced. Does the blood beat the heart? Does environment determine the particulars we see as 'agents' - ie bugs, virii, bacterium, fungi? Is 'environment' merely or exclusively physical or is 'psychic' a pervasive field of informing-information to a tangible expression/experience? Indeed is our consciousness actually the biogenome?
Without it we would have no life in the body - and mitochondria is the intracellular powering of vitally organised bio-electrical and kinetic energy. Why exclude the informational energetic of consciousness?

The consciousness of the personality construct is in many ways a reversal of Consciousness; a cause defined and trapped in its own effect. I see that prematurely opening 'identity in persona' (presumed consciousness) into Consciousness could result in heart failure or psychosis. But I also see that clinging on to outgrown beliefs as a personal sense of 'power' also necessitates 'breakdown' of such a focus or structure in Consciousness.

#3

I cant escape the feeling that the attempt to find the 'cause' in a complex network of symptoms or effects is inadvertently hiding or protecting the cause from exposure by investing in search somewhere else than the realm of Cause.

That is to say - I hold that psychic-emotional conception, filters and distorts a pervasive field of energetic informational communication - (that may facilitate communication breakdown) - relative to its alignment or dissonance in relation to core function.

'Self-inhibiting consciousness' may also be assigned as subjective consciousness can seem to suppress life and seem to step outside it. We can embrace this as its own process of development and discovery, through which consciousness of self and world change as a result of adopting or releasing limiting belief. "It's life Jim, but not as we think we know it".

While science has worked like a demon to exclude consciousness - excepting as some sort of afterthought (an image we are rapidly embodying in robotic compliance to our own beliefs) - it is of course an expression of it. (A self-defeating dead end unless something stirs awake!).

If the yin/yang of sympathetic/parasympathetic function is the key of wholeness or health - then attending to the realignment to wholeness undoes the conditions associating with a state of dysfunctional imbalance. I sense that 'attacking' or suppressing symptoms often works a magic of seeming to work until the result of being further 'attacked' reasserts itself - perhaps in new forms. Don't just do something! Stand there! And react not without pausing what we think we know, enough to be genuinely curious to know.

I sense an aversion to 'simple answers' is when these are assigned support narrative assumptions already aligned with invested or conditioned identity. However that seemingly simple narrative identity investment is an extremely complex psychic-emotional complex with only a 'front end' that seems self-evident as 'the world'.

Not perhaps the kind of conversation that fits a 'medical model' - but that is the nature of the narrative control; it filters to rule-out (as psychological defence) - so as to rule over a subjective experience, and yet becomes subject to its own thoughts believed true. A useful tool, consciously held, or a forgotten consciousness in conditioned reaction.

 I don't see a necessary war between purpose (aligning spirit) and desire (matter to you). But if what matters to us is framed in such a way as to defeat purpose, then complexity confounds the desire as persistent un-fulfilment of core function/nature. Narrative control is a strain and a burden of impossible 'responsibility' because it is the effect of self conflict, seeking causes outside - and be-living them AS testimony to being 'right' or validated over or upon a sense of wrong, projected away.