Architectonics of the Self

If the sky were to suddenly open up... there would be no law... there would be no rule. There would only be you and your memories... the choices you've made and the people you've touched. The life that has been carved out from your subconscious is the only evidence by which you will be judged... by which you must judge yourself. Because when this world ends, there will only be you and him... and no one else.
— Donnie Darko (2001)

Who am I? There are always many ways to be answering this question. Every moment in life I am this or that, such and such, that's me, that's not me, this is mine, and this is not. Everywhere I go the sense of self follows my footsteps closely and generates the I-ness and the me-ness and the mine-ness of my being-in-the-world. The sense of identity can be very concrete for some people and it can be quite fleeting for others, but even when that which I am identified with changes rapidly there is always an intimate self-sense present to the sacrament of life, however big or small, strong or fluid, convenient or unconvincing, conscious or unconscious, personal or depersonalized and so on. It can be very dynamic, flaky even, and yet it undeniably exists.

The overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness looking from the outside can be called personality (in a somewhat narrow meaning of this term); the overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness objectively looking inside can be called self-system. The total kaleidoscope of fluctuating identities and self-perspectives I would call architectonics of the self, and it is a penetrating look into the mystery of the architectonics of the self that could bring forth a first glimpse for a satisfying answer to the question of self-identity. This is even more evident if one encounters the complexity dilemma of simple, however experientially grounded, answer "there is no I" being as much unsatisfactory as defining the self-sense in a reductionistic static way as something concrete—indeed, as some thing at all.

When one attempts to speak of the architectonics of the self, it is absolutely crucial, in my opinion, to mention the name of Vasily Vasilyevich Nalimov (1910-1997), a truly unsung hero of our time. In his numerous works, published in Russian, English, and German, Nalimov was tackling different issues all related to the basic question of science, existence, personality, and consciousness. A member of a Moscow mystical anarchist circle back in 1920s, ex-prisoner of Stalin's concentration camps, the last and lonely knight of the Eastern wing of Templars; a renowned mainstream mathematician and a physicists who worked in the laboratory of A. Kolmogorov; an influential transpersonal philosopher, a gnostic, and a truth-seeker, he shined throughout his life with profound intelligence, adamant will, and a commitment to knowledge, honesty, and freedom. In 1970s and 1980s, many years before Soviet people were able to learn about the West and its recent cultural trends, he was writing about such transpersonal authors as C. Castaneda, S. Grof, Ch. Tart, and K. Wilber; in a thoroughly fundamentalistic-atheistic society he was openly asking the questions of meaning, life, God,  the universe, and the Ultimate Reality—something that had long been forbidden in the USSR and, probably, is still unprecedented in the Post-Soviet countries. (For more information on Nalimov see, e.g., Wikipedia article, Eugene Garfield's web page, and Thompson, 1993.)

In his book The Spontaneity of Consciousness (Спонтанность сознания [Spontannost' soznaniya], 1st Russian ed., 1989/2nd Russian ed., 2007), Nalimov attempted to draw what he called  architectonics of personality or self. Now, in the Russian language the word personality (личность [lichnost']) has many meanings; and it can be translated to English basically both as a personality and as Self (in its broadest sense). Most certainly, Nalimov's probabilistic vision of language would require taking into account the total variability of the word's semantics.

Nalimov writes the following about the intention of the book in question:

In this work we want to focus on the problem of architectonics of the Self with the hope that this way the nature of the Self will appear before us as an ultimately accessible manifestation of reality—the manifestation in which reality discloses itself through ourselves. First of all, we will consider the Self to be a carrier of meanings, thus exploring its linguistic (semantic) nature.

We fully recognize that any attempt to build such a model of the Self includes not only and mainly knowing but rather not-knowing. The deeper and clearer we are drawing an image of the Self, the clearer the patterns of that which we do not know appear. Not-knowing is always richer than our knowing. Not-knowing—the not-knowing contours of which we can delineate—provokes us, makes us seek, makes us look at the World and our own being with wonder. In this wonder life becomes full of meaning. That which modern psychiatrists tend to call existential emptiness disappears.

Before we continue I should note that it is always very hard to describe views of a thinker of such high altitude and magnitude as V. Nalimov in a short essay. He was a strong proponent of postformal thinking (which he called a probabilistic vision); he was a founding father of the field of scientometrics; he developed a probabilistic view of language that includes both discrete and continual aspects; he tried to create a postformal panoramic view of the universe and consciousness so as to find meaning in the fact that there is something rather than nothing. In his writings he was dialoguing through books with Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Buddha, Christ, St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Popper (with Sir Karl Popper he actually exchanged correspondence), early Ken Wilber, and so on. In an oppressive state of the Soviet Union he was a liberated thinker, a free soul whose transtemporal and transspatial flight couldn't be held by physical or social restrictions and boundaries.

In my opinion, the best of his approach that we can take may not be the concrete ideas themselves but the span and the depths of the questions and problems he inquires into. In The Spontaneity of Consciousness he quotes Maeterlinck: "The greatness of a human being is measured according to the greatness of mysteries that perplex him or that make him surrender." (I didn't find the quotation as it is translated in English, so I translated it from Russian; the phrase in original Maeterlinck's language and the way it is translated to English can differ significantly.)

When contemplating such complex subject as what the actual meaning and structure of the Self is, I believe, it is absolutely crucial to adopt the most panoramic and integral vision one can, otherwise the attempts of knowing would be childish and reductionistic. In the spirit of this approach facing reality means facing its ultimate mystery and pure silent not-knowing which is the ultimate knowledge itself. Immanuel Kant said: "Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." Gazing at the stars and contemplating the depth within can bring nothing else but the state of profound awe and not-knowing, not-knowing that is self-liberating. I resonate a lot with this stance of Nalimov and most mystics, the perspective that sees and feels the universe as a constant unfolding of the Mystery.

The first Mystery that we encounter is the mystery of our own existence. Most people in the world go on in their lives ritualistically thinking and perpetuating the thought that what they think is what they are. In fact, as long as they continue ritualistically doing whatever they are doing without asking this profound question of who am I and what does it all mean in some ways they don't even exist. By saying that they don't even exist of course I don't say that they are zombies without consciousness, what I am saying is that they are not fully aware of their existence. Most of our adult lives we are running away from the very fact that we are here, from the fact that there is the starry sky above us and the moral law within us, we are numbing ourselves to our being. We constantly dissolve ourselves in our personalized me on, which is Greek for non-being, by habitually pursuing the games we learned to play and telling each others limited stories we learned to narrate.

The most obvious example of this running from one's own authenticity can be encountered in a therapist office (and actually in any occasion where there is an opportunity for a field of intersubjective resonance to arise). Sigmund Freud was one of the first to show that we are not what we rationally think of ourselves or even how we feel about ourselves, that there is much more in our personalities, in our selves hidden beneath the iceberg of that which we are used to be aware of. Further advancements in the science of therapy and healing demonstrated that most of our lives we live according to a matrix of experience that has been forming during the early and not-so-early years of our lives. In fact, our life is grounded in the illusory feeling of knowing, in a feeling that we know what our life is about with all its upsides and downsides. We think that this—whatever this that happens to be entering our conscious awareness—is what life is about. We constantly run in circles in the self-built corridors of our "known life" and recreate on multiple levels the limited story that we learned about ourselves and the world; and there is no space for not-knowing in this story. The basic mystery of existence is something that shatters our house made of cards and brings terror to our life because in our selves we are used to identify with a limited range of possibilities and experiential realities.

And then suddenly it strikes us that we are getting divorced three times in a row, that we keep losing friends and alienating people, that our beloved children don't want to talk to us, that we have cancer, that we are going to die today—and then, at the moments like this, we look into the face in front of us with awe and not-knowing-ness: who is this person in front of me, whom I have always thought I have known? At whom does this face look? Who am I, really?

Something else can happen that will disclose this basic gap between our conscious self and the overall self, between the relationships that we picture in our minds and actual totality of processes happening around us, involving us as participants and transforming us constantly, every minute, every second, every moment of Kosmic existence. A policeman takes a gun and kills ten innocent people in a supermarket; a schoolboy does the same at school. Anomaly arises in our minds; something tells us that we are not seeing a crucial aspect of reality and it is killing us or makes us anxious and we desperately want to wake up. As we are gradually waking up we look in astonishment at the unconscious processes, scripts, stories, and scenarios we were so used to follow, the patterns that constantly recreate and magnify suffering in us and others. The emerging sense of amazement and wonder brings us closer to the determination to become truly liberated, truly conscious, truly wise so as to participate fully in the festival of life and co-creation.

Every human being has a profound depth hidden in his or her consciousness and self. An old homeless person taking care of her pushchair with bandboxes and empty bottles that for months has been her last resort. An imprisoned oligarch who declined to leave the country because of his pride and dignity. A president who looks sicker and sicker with every year he is in power. A young university teacher who keeps wondering about her life while living in a dry academic environment. A psychiatrist who suffers more than some of his patients. A schoolboy who passionately fell in love with the Goddess for the first time. A detective who ruins his career because he can't stand corruption anymore...

The architectonics of the Self that I am talking about includes not only what we think of ourselves in our minds. We ourselves are a mystery. We are what we eat, we are what we talk, we are what we think, we are what we see, we are how we move, we are what we feel, we are the scripts we play, we are the light we shine, we are the darkness we emit, we are everything that happens in this particular manifestation of our individual being-in-the-world. Our self includes everything, from the birth to the death; it goes through time and space; it weaves together aspects of  Kosmic being and experience like wind gathers together clouds in the sky. We are the Witness and the Witnessed in its many ways of manifestation and interconnectedness.

The ground for conscious being

It is both fascinating and frightening how lost we can be in the world of apparitions due to subtle contractions and attachments of our psyche—the phenomena of which we tend to be unaware. We get used to a limited perspective on ourselves and on others; we develop some basic agreements with the world during the process of growth and interaction with the other, we co-create the worldspace where we live that includes our thoughts, things that we say, things how we say, our memories, visions, sensations, body movements, chronic energy fixations, and the totality of it all is our self which we present to the loved ones and the hated ones and the world at large.

It is dramatic that our self, as it constantly grows towards more maturity and embrace and experience and becoming more aware of itself by including more and more entities into its space of being-in-the-world, at earlier stages can learn and adapt to the world, construct the basic sets of its elements in a way that in the future would become self-evident as self-contractions and subtle attachments that hinder liberation and hide essential qualities of one's own human being, of one's own profound truth under limited adaptive masks or personae of which we are not aware for initially and genealogically these masks were developed in order to comply with the requirements and agreements that the other and the environment told us, showed us in the days when we were just starting to make first steps towards self-consciousness and conscious liberation. And these masks of which we are not yet aware, the shadow patterns of our co-existence contaminate our whole life and communion with the ones we love and prevent us from being fully and self-recognizably who we are, radiant blissful fluctuations of the Spirit's meaningful, passionate, unlimited unfolding, the unfolding that is personally embodied in the Soul, the ego, and the bodymind.

The Spirit is always present in our life as the very fact that we are aware. In fact it is the space of awareness, of consciousness that is aware of us and all our life right now. In this space the wisdom and compassion grow and stabilize as structures, as fractals, as flowers. Giving space to yourself the way you fully and deeply are in your true embodied nature means grounding yourself in awareness and putting everything that exists in life into this ground, washing with its liberating rain the basics presets of your tetra-constructed¹ being and knowledge of the world and how to engage with it. In the space of awareness the spontaneity occurs that breaks ice of the old and allows novelty to emerge, and the novelty brings new excitements and flow of life and the conscious awareness always liberates them from attachment, for the attachment per se is something of which we can become conscious in the space of awareness.

The names of attachments, fixations and repressions are Legion. They hide everywhere in your private and public worldspace and they cause you to develop a false concept of the self, a false self. You get used to move in a certain way and not the other; and you unconsciously consider these movements to be the boundaries that divide the territory of your self from the foreign land of not-self, the unknowing land that brings anxiety by its very existence. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in movements. You get used to have certain sensations and feelings in the body; and you may not even be aware of the fact that these are only sensations and feelings that emerged in the process of growth; and you just take them for granted. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you feel your body. You get used to have certain thoughts and preconceived ideas in your mind; and these ideas are always more limited than the mystery of the world and your self. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you think about yourself and existence.

You get used to hearing a limited spectrum of sounds, seeing limited things, enjoying limited moves, experiencing limited emotions, playing limited roles, having a limited diapason of dreams, and living a limited range of possibilities of life. And all of it in the totality of who you are you present as a total message of your existence to others. And others respond, both consciously and unconsciously, to this message as a whole with their being. Of course, you are responding to their message as well.

If I am so attached to these things that I don't even let them into my awareness so as to let go of them, how not to get lost in this vortex of apparitions and how to finally arise above the process of recreating the suffering, the suffering that is constantly shared with others? If there is nothing in my self that I can ground myself in, for it all is essentially a fleeting and constructed experience, what is the way to freedom? How can I free myself to being fully embodied and yet unattached? The ultimate way is to ground yourself in something that has no content and yet is always already present, in a presence that constitutes the basic undeniable dimension of the being-in-the-world that is closer to you than your self.

That which is always already present and yet has no content is the silent awareness, the very framework of attention, the very space of consciousness in which everything you are reading right now as you are sitting in a certain posture, feeling certain sensations and thinking ideas and making various micro- and macro-movements is arising moment to moment. This awareness is your best fucking friend forever. Ground yourself in awareness and allow yourself making new moves, approaching people in new ways, playing new roles, having a fresh taste of feelings in the body, no matter how silly you think those are, for these very thoughts of silliness are just temporary clouds in the sky of your awareness that come and go, come and go like flowing waves in the ocean cradled by the wind which is the Spirit whispering.

Ground yourself and help your beloved to ground themselves in awareness and then look into their eyes and make funny faces, scream and cry and move and liberate and dance together and give the full space to feelings in the body and suffering in the life for this is the path to healing and redemption and underneath suffering you can find profound happiness if you actually follow this advice, this practical injunction. Constantly remind yourself and others of this translucent awareness and the power of the present moment and the glory of all-pervading silence by being a living example.

The quietude is the Spirit smiling to you.

¹ Tetra-construction is the term that points to biological, psychological, cultural, and social factors of development and evolution. See, e.g., Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 2006.

Dialectics of sawubona

In the previous blog I occasionally mentioned a reference to the word sawubona and its meaning. Here is the video I linked to.

Sawubona, a Zulu greeting that means "we see you," is the essence of mutual resonance in the intersubjective domain of being-in-the-world. And while Orland Bishop in this video (somewhat romantically) explains sawubona as something that we had lost at some point in the history, I believe the imagination and visionary capacities he describes are potentials of our future unfolding which are yet to be established.  Established through a collectively interlocked network of individual practices.

The nature of mutual seeing and recognizing each other in the gesture of sawubona is dialectical. I recognize you as the embodied, impersonated, incarnated soulful Spirit manifested in this very occasion of the recognition, with all its multiple dimensions of intersubjective communion, which brings my own self into resonating with yours… and into the glory shared.

We grok each other in a multilevel occasion, and for this grokking to happen in a complete way (according to tomorrow's standards) my self and your self have to be transcendental; they really ought to unfold dialectical reason—and then further modes of consciousness—with a mature ego being a catalyzing structure for the union of mutuality.

In order for this mutuality to emerge we indeed have got to ask ourselves the question: "How do I have to be, as a human being, for you to be free?" If I attempt to restrict you, in this restriction I am limiting my own self because I focus my intentionality and will at narrowing the opening of the miracle called We—the opening that is inherent to our being and to emergence and deepening of our self-awareness.

And now, when I ask myself this question, I ought to find out what your structure of consciousness is like. You are a sentient being who inherited free will; you can be free, however, only within the limits of your mind. When you are not free, when I breach the boundaries which are not yet to be breached, it is simply not fun anymore. Now, of course, it goes both ways. Think about me being a partner in dialogue, too: what do my wave-like patterns of consciousness behave like? And what are some of the corpuscular freeze frames of my mind? How can you help me help you help us?

Interiors of consciousness are engaging exteriors

Even though this blog is presumably devoted to explorations of interiors of consciousness, at some point the so-called "interiors" start to include pretty much everything, for the phenomena in the exterior world start to touch something deep inside you. It happens when your self-identity transcends an exclusionary identification with a more limited perspective on yourself and the world and goes beyond into the worldcentric and even Kosmocentric kingdom of perspectives.

You spontaneously begin to discover universals that are shared among all human beings of any race, ethnicity, creed, sex, faith, and so on. You begin to realize that all sentient beings share the same basic taste of duḥkha—or uneasiness, disquietness, anxiety, soreness—which is the Buddhist term for the basic sliding condition of one's unknowingness about one's own exclusive preconscious attachments to certain subjects-and-objects interrelations in the overall stream of phenomena that flows through all domains of the experiential matrix. All experiences and all perspectives are impermanent in that they actually seem to be vibrating and dynamically changing currents of dialoging aspects of the Kosmos. And even the most stable ones, such as certain physical laws of the universe, are considered by such brilliant folks as Charles Peirce to be more or less stabilized habits evolved through aeons of cosmic evolution:

For Peirce, the entire universe and everything in it is an evolutionary product. Indeed, he conceived that even the most firmly entrenched of nature's habits (for example, even those habits typically called “natural laws”) have themselves evolved, and accordingly can and should be subjects of philosophical an scientific inquiry. One can sensibly seek, in Peirce's view, evolutionary explanations of the existence of particular natural laws. For Peirce, then, the entire phaneron (the world of appearances), as well as all the ongoing processes of its interpretation through mental significations, has evolved and is evolving. ("Charles Sanders Pierce" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

If you are unaware of the sliding nature of the phaneron (as we naturally are more or less most of the time), then you tend to attach yourself to this or that experiential leaf that is being carried by the seemingly chaotic current in the ever-pervading ocean of global awareness. You are preconsciously attaching yourself to the plenitude of your adaptive personae, to your constructions about your own identity, to your intuitions about what it is like to be your own self, to your current state (or dynamic systems of states) of embeddedness with this or that whirlpool in the great matrix (mātṝkās); and when this or that aspect, or perspective, on reality transmutates, with you being unable to consciously follow its transformation by transforming yourself, you experience dying and suffering and soreness and pain and grievance—and you might even become attached to this newly-formed state of condition once again, indefinitely.

But when you become increasingly aware of the sliding nature of the world of appearances, you cannot help but start experiencing profound compassion and care for each and every aspect of it, for each one of them is so aesthetically perfect, so ethically tender (cf. the meaning of sawubona), so structurally unstable that even a slightest glance at a phenomenon makes it move beyond itself into the next stage of transformation. Compassion is the foundational artistic tool with which the superconscious artist constantly paints new panoramic snapshots of being. It helps to preserve, to cherish, to nourish, and to prepare for further stages of transformation.

That's the thoughts that emerged during my acquaintance with the recent story of Aleksey Dymovskiy, a detective officer of Russian militia, who has single-handedly attempted to voice (to cry out loud, actually) his concern regarding corruption and catastrophic condition in one of the local law enforcement units of the Department of Internal Affairs by courageously posting two videos on YouTube in which he stated that he just "had enough" of local corruption, fabricated cases, and working in an extremely stressful environment without holidays, without being paid, and without any health care. (See also a Times Online article.)

Even though Dymovskiy spoke about the state of art in the local unit, it is no secret to anyone who lives in Russia that precisely the same points apply to virtually all the departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and militia (militsiya) in general. In St. Petersburg alone there has recently been numerous cases when militsiya members (of very high ranks) were caught at doing serious crimes (involved robbery and serial murders, not to mention the common practice of bribery that is widespread everywhere and became a cultural norm long ago). For instance, last year there was the notorious case of "black realtors" when some high-rank members of local militsiya were involved in murdering dozens of lonely people so as to sell their apartments (real estate prices in the major Russian cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow are extremely high—dozens and in many cases even hundreds times higher than the average income of an average Russian). In another case a criminal investigation department was found guilty of creating a widespread system of drug trafficking and distribution (which seems to be a common practice in Russia; the pandemic is systemic). Their name is Legion, for they are many.

Sadly enough, long time ago law enforcement system became the most feared seat of uncontrolled criminal pathology in the post-Soviet societies. Every day thousands of people all over Russia get abused, beaten, and killed in the streets by local patrolling militsiya whose vertical center of gravity seems to generally revolve around the opportunistic stage in ego development theory; red (power-driven) stage in Spiral Dynamics/Clare Graves's theory of values development; and preconventional stage of Kohlberg's moral development. In the psyche of a common Russian, any communication with militsiya is fulfilled with the fear for potential massive abuse. And all of it is just one, if all-pervasive, aspect of the ongoing sociocultural catastrophe in the Russian Federation and some other post-Soviet states.

On freedom of speech and modern Russian history

If you read today's news in Russia, you would find out that today, October 30, is officially the Day commemorating the victims of political repression. Sixty years ago, had I written about the things I write (and about to write) today, I would have probably been imprisoned and killed. Thirty years ago I would have probably "only" been talking to KGB and having trouble in my everyday life. Awareness of that fact sends chills of self-reflection down my spine. 

I remember how on my freshman year in university (2005) I protested against being taught the Lenin's theory of reflection as a foundational worldview in our general psychology class. At the time I was naively into constructivist epistemology and thought that naïve materialism was too ancient to be seriously taught as a basic foundation for general psychology. For me it was like, "Come on, I went through so much trouble and self-sacrifice to get the scholarship; and now what I get is studying Lenin? You gotta be kidding. No, it seems you're not. You're absolutely serious. Oh. My. God." (And that's when my total disillusionment with the Russian academia began. Given the fact that I had almost no illusions regarding the Russian academia, it wasn't coming down to earth, it felt more like coming down six feet under earth altogether.)

I found the imposed ideology to be quite outdated and was sincerely struck by the cruel reality that almost twenty years after the Soviet Union collapsed many of the faculty members still (successfully) tried to teach psychology the way it was taught in the communism-dominated past. That time I just had a "serious talk" with a teacher who strongly advised me against undermining the dominating paradigm as I would get into a big trouble at my exams. I didn't take that too seriously, but still decided not to stir up a hornets' nest and let it go. The point here is: in the early 1980s, I would have probably provoked something bad to happen to me in terms of academic career for such remarks.

Given the cruel history of the totalitarian regime in this country (which itself is grounded in the history of Czarist Russia), no wonder that, historically, Russians have so much trouble of directly and honestly assessing and addressing the problems of the way we currently live. For many decades, survival has depended on one's capacity to doublethink. Truthful self-reflection was a dangerous trait that may have triggered serious anxiety. Through generations this became an unselfconscious cultural norm; and some complex sociocultural defense mechanisms emerged over the centuries to perpetuate the cultural morphic field of this frequency.

Now it pervades the society as a hidden factor; and not many people are actually aware of how this cultural background works in themselves. Most attempts to take a different perspective on life trigger vicious self-defense as the center of developmental gravity in the population seemingly tends to self-defensive and conformist selves (in terms of Susann Cook-Greuter's ego development theory). Instant gratification under the condition of stressful chaotically-changing environment is the dominating mode of discourse in Russian business and politics; and there seems to be no space for complex systems solutions in the Russian mind. Collective reflexology at its best.

Pandorum as a real pathology

Spoiler alert: The reader is advised to watch Pandorum (2009) prior to reading this psychological interpretation of the movie.

Pandorum is a fictional psychopathological syndrome induced by prolonged space travel. Its symptoms include severe paranoia, vivid hallucinations, and homicidal tendencies. The onset of pandorum can be triggered by psychological trauma under stress conditions of space flight.

In the movie, one of the characters experiences acute pandorum when receiving the shocking news that the Earth has been destroyed. He kills other crew members and single-handedly takes charge of the giant spaceship that has been launched to colonize an Earth-like planet locating far from the Solar system. He decides to play God and wakes up thousands of colonists from their hyper-sleep and locks them away into the darkness of the spaceship. When the spaceship finally reaches the destination planet, he prevents colonization of the land by not initiating an ejection of the last hyper-sleep cameras with colonists aboard onto the planetary surface. He is stuck with himself; and he chooses to continue the pathological self-play, even if that means destruction of the last remnants of mankind. He has fostered creation of a dark pleromatic world inside the spaceship; and he makes the choice to reign in Hell, for this artificially-created hell provides comfortable boundaries to his personality. The boundaries that, as he hopes, are never to be breached.

Even though it is a work of fiction, it might be the case that cinematically-described pandorum accurately reflects the psychological reality of one commonly-shared developmental pathology. Psychological development runs as a series of disidentifications from old ways of being and subsequent identifications with new ones. When the old world is lost and the new world isn't found yet, the sense of disorientation arises. "I have lost everything; and in the world of nothingness I may do whatever I want," and that's when the self falls prey to the infinite loop of pandorum. I bound myself to playing a very limited game. I do my best to prevent the change of that condition, for the status quo lets me stay in the trap of the self-contracted ego. This is the trap I'm adapted to, while the perspective of an unknown world is uneasy. Here, in the self-created hell I feel powerful; "I am a spider and this is my web, the web that I weave."

And once the pathological condition is set—once the web is finally woven—the self is going to defend it at all costs. Salvation is so near; and yet I'm so afraid to let go that I use all my powers to enforce the current disposition, both consciously and unconsciously. Instead of using my potential to explore the land of the new, I focus my energies on sticking to the present condition. There's nothing more important than my current zone of comfort; nothing else matters. In order to defend itself, the pathological condition creates its own immune system. The fixation occurs. I'm getting lost in myself; and others bring danger. ("Wherever there is other, there is fear," as the Upanishads put it.) The pandorum's box is open, all evils are unleashed. Pathology's perpetuated, development's deceased.