On the Importance of the Primal Frame of Reference

There is a recent survey of coffee consumption (Read Rebecca Coffey—no joke, in Discover Magazine, April 2013 http://discovermagazine.com/2013/april/22-20-things-you-didnt-know-about-coffee#.Up9ZBmRdXHE ). There were many conclusions including heavy consumption and smaller breasts in women. But another caught my eye: university students who drank three cups daily were three times more likely to hear voices and have out-of-body experiences. Now why is that? It is pretty much the same with long- term usage of marijuana. Both approaches speed up internal pressure on the neo-cortex. Coffee agitates against the neocortical repressive function, which then has to manufacture booga booga notions to cope with the additional input—out-of-body feelings. This is almost literal in the sense that one has been driven beyond one’s repressive capacity….out of one’s body. “I am no longer the usual me.” It should read, “out of brain” experience because that is in a sense what is happening.

Long term marijuana use works a little differently, like a functional lobotomy over time. Bit by bit the gates are weakened, the lower forces are liberated and again force the neo-cortex to manufacture paranoid ideas. The real feeling—death is approach due to loss of oxygen at birth, “becomes someone wants to kill me”. Bizarre notions are not capricious; they derive from real experience, real imprints that are filtered through the gating system. It is the weakening of the defense/gating system that permits breakthrough of feeling which then impels and compels the cortex to go into action manufacturing booga booga.

It is not the coffee that does it; it is the activating ingredient caffeine that soups up brain activity. As usual, it compels the last evolutionary defense, ideas, into action. So one can activate the brain inordinately or diminish the gating system to achieve the same result. Notice, it is when feeling are artificially thrust into action that the cortex enters the fray and tries to capture and bind those feelings with ideas.

Here we get a picture of psychosis; the same processes are at work but the internal thrust is not artificial. It is internal; something causes hurt and pain, some feeling that is too much to feel to accept and integrate, so the cortex begins its job of protection and survival. It is in charge of repression, of holding back those feelings so that we are not overwhelmed and lose our bearings. It is essential that we don’t lose our cognitive skills so that we no longer can navigate through life to protect ourselves. It has all to do with survival; that was always the function of defenses. They just became more sophisticated as we evolved. And the last defense is cognitive. The cognitive therapists, however, forgot the other two key brain systems and focused only on cognitive functions; in this way they cannot possibly understand what defense systems are about and how they evolved. In short, they cannot see that they are survival functions, not to be analyzed to death but to be liberated so we can live.