“Behave!” is a declarative sentence like no other. With it, the self-sure ego dutifully imposes okayness through self-validated behaviors. Like I’m Okay, You’re Okay approaches (explored previously), it’s a wonderful sentiment, to a point.
Making timeless, ego-free context visible is the goal of OKIC’s inner compass exploration. So, to patterned and novel context, we add behavior. By the end of this essay, you will appreciate how behavior can be related to timeless dynamics, and as such that ego can be extracted from it. But since we’re also staying aware of psycho-social reorientation, ego will want to come along.
Even to the ego with its capacity to be well-behaved (or not), a fundamental question stands out as much more engaging (enraging?) than “you should…” or “I should” sentiments. How does behavior arise? What are its precursors? In other words, How is it that we are able to constantly contextualize our participation, behaving, in large part, accordingly? And is it the case that any satisfying answer would imply that the presence of a timeless context would have to as a sort of proto-ethics?
Which brings us to refer briefly to a shift required to relate to reality representationally. We must be willing to consider matters in general terms, trusting that the specifics are not lost in doing so. With that comes regular forays into what will seem at first blush to be pure abstraction.
I want to do that now regarding behavior. Like novelty and patterning, understanding behavior as grounded in timeless phenomena is critical to enlivening representational reality. Imagine three simple categories for complex interrelated precursors of behavior, familiar psycho-socially as emotions, thoughts and habits. Given the timeless context represented here as OKIC, we can precisely if generally define what emotions, thoughts and habits are. From that it is possible to examine complex behaviors and other phenomena that arise from such precursors.
From the behavior-context combination, the bodily phenomena we know as emotion, thought, and habituation extend naturally from underlying timeless, generative dynamics which get unpacked more explicitly at the end of Part 1. For now, imagining behavior-context as a layered, timeless cycle will do.
The triptych below combines a lot in a fairly simplified way. Some will be familiar, some vague, some new but related to what has just been covered.
The first cycle showing Ready-Set-Go (red arrows) captures, among other things, the centrality of paradox. Consider that humans experience time as linear (past, present, future). Yet a continual renewal of time-constrained processes is also true. This is due to the behavior-context connection by which existence is processional. Not binary like the context of a computer processor, this procession is rather a matter of sensory-perceptual re-presentation of timeless context into time-constrained immediacy conditions.
Context is true because there is always behavior as the backdrop. As such, there’s no meaningless background so long as we are willing to concede that everything, including most critically what is beyond direct detection, can be related to in terms of ready-set-go. Simplifiable, organized process present at various densities and dynamic throughout space right now.
Here’s a first example of how the timeless context of OKIC can be used to relate generally to enacted experience. There are countless books on each of the following subjects. We can define them simply, intelligibly, timelessly as follows:
- Emotions are internal functions that balance behavior and context in becoming ready. Emotions reflect, representationally, self-referencing anticipatory states with the potential to generate internal, self-referenced sense of readiness.
- Thoughts are internal functions that balance behavior and context in becoming set. Thoughts reflect, representationally, system-self anticipatory states with the potential to generate internal system-self setness.
- Habits (enaction steps) are internal functions that balance behavior and context in becoming go. Habits reflect, representationally, systematization of internal anticipatory states with the potential to generate internal go (enaction).
Further, as in the purple cycle above, define the following centering-related psycho-social phenomena simply, intelligibly, timelessly as:
- Interpretations function externally as behavior contextualizers of emotion (ready)
- Beliefs function externally as behavior contextualizers of thought (set)
- Routines function externally as behavior contextualizers of habit (go)
What the above specify is interrelated behavior conditions that emerge from the timeless processes that are enacted, subjected to time-constraintedness. Urgent matters, pressing agendas, needful others. When time constraints impinge, you emote, think, or habituate. Additionally, to effectively involve others, you interpret, believe, or establish routines. When on vacation, and really just in do-nothing mode, you are enjoying the sense of existing as the timeless enactment that it can be.
Behavior-context-time dynamic within representational reality can be tricky to grasp, being both abstract and complex. Balancing behaviors within both self and system are analogous to the well-known biological condition of homeostasis. What is unique about homeostasis is that it requires no effort, awareness, planning, or even programming (DNA-wise). It simply is the case, a sort of unintentional backdrop of relative equilibrium of internal systems in a living system. You don’t have to try to internally intend for homeostatic capacity to be true to the behaviors of self or system. Homeostasis cannot not be capacitated. To this ends, ego controls always reach a point of mootness. (Tell that to the ego’s sometimes ceaselessly impinging voice.)
I represent in later essays homeostatic self-remembering and morphic homeostatic field as representational homeostatic capacities that constitute the necessary conditions of any behavior-context that can be externally represented – using expressive forms such as languages, artistry, or mathematics.
Homeostatic Self-Remembering: all you need to know about being yourself