Dragons?? What do you mean, Dragons?
Dragons?? What do you mean, Dragons?
Why the Dragons are real as rocks and trees.
Some of my friends started wondering lately: What trip did he get on that he keeps talking about dragons?
So here more background on what I mean by the Dragons and why I write mystically sounding sentences like:
“The Dragons are here to give us strength.”
And:
“The essence of Dragonstrength is love.”
I could add that the Dragons are as old as humanity itself. And that they’re the most powerful beings that ever existed on planet Earth.
This still might sound slightly mystical though.
What can be said for certain is that the Dragons exist in all of us, even though many of us got out of touch with them.
But this again might not sound very precise or practically useful. So, here the plain, rationalist definition:
The Dragons are humanity’s accumulated, collective emotional heritage.
Ah… ok… that sounds a bit more down to Earth. But what does it mean exactly? And how exactly is it practically useful?
Much of it comes down to our early childhood brain imprints.
One thing that most neuroscientists and psychologists can agree on is that our emotional experiences in our early childhood leave deeply enshrined traces in our brain (and the rest of our nervous system). And these deep rooted synaptic configurations have significant influence throughout our whole life, on our thoughts, our actions, and - in particular - our reactions.
At first sight, this might sound pretty trivial. But these imprints in our brains have much deeper effects on our reality than at least I was aware of for a long time.
For someone who grew up in a family of psychotherapists and who studied philosophy with a focus on theories of consciousness, I’ve been pretty late in fully appreciating the importance of these emotional imprints that we all get in our early childhood.
Rather, I thought, my mindset and my worldviews where shaped by my philosophical reflections, my conscious choices, and, of course, my highly rational deliberations, based on scientific evidence and rigorous methodological standards.
But since I started looking at it in more detail, I am absolutely mind-blown by discovering how much influence these emotional imprints actually have. And above that, by understanding more and more about the implications this has for our efforts to make this world a better place.
Our parents are in our brains.
The people who affect our emotional experiences in our early childhood the most usually are our parents (or whoever took the parental role for us). In that sense, they, i.e. all inputs we got from them, are deeply enshrined into our neural structures.
By the very same logic, our parents’ own brains and thus their actions and reactions have been deeply influenced by their own respective parents or caretakers.
This means that we too are indirectly influenced by the emotional imprints of our grandparents, whose actions and emotional reactions were in turn influenced by the brains and thus actions and reactions of their own parents. It is easy to see how this pattern has been going on for generations and generations and generations.
Quite a colorful mix.
Now add to this the fact that our later emotional experiences, too, can leave deep imprints in our brains. That includes our experiences in our later childhood and youth, and even some of our deeper or more persistent experiences as a grownup.
And consider that the various people who play a role in creating these experiences all are influenced themselves by their own generation-chains of childhood imprints and later emotional experiences.
Through this immensely complex mess of mutual emotional imprints across and within generations, we all get our own personalized bag of imprinted brain patterns, carved with traces of influence from the emotional experiences of the very first human beings onward (and possibly from our ancestor species, too).
Now these age-old, omnipresent emotional imprints in all of our brains, in their collective accumulation across generations and within generations, are the Dragons.
And, to close the circle of this enormous global drama and actually make a practically relevant point: We can choose to face the Dragons.
And if we do, we can become their friends.
Of course, if you want this is just another metaphor. A more worldly way of putting it is to say that we can learn to understand the underlying emotional imprints in our brains by observing our mental and behavioral reactions. And in a next step, we can start playing proactively with the “emotional energy” they generate in us.
On the one hand we can train ourselves in reacting less strongly, which actually implies intentionally reshaping these brain imprints to some extend. But we can do even more. If we become friends with the Dragons, that means, if we learn how to actually use our own brain imprints for the purpose that we can discover in ourselves by stopping to fight or flee from our deeper emotional inputs, we can develop Dragonstrength.
Ok, this is Dragontalk again. So what does it mean in worldly terms?
It means, quite simply, that if we sincerely face our deepest emotional patterns, we can disentangle and unchain our capacity to love. And, by embracing this love, we can create a happy existence for ourselves and others. In fact, it means nothing less than that we can change the world and re-calibrate all relevant parameters of the universe.
So the Dragons actually have no spiritual meaning. Or do they?
Let my ego throw in another piece of personal background here: For a long time I considered myself rather extremely rational. I’ve been interested in things like the philosophy of mathematics and reductionist theories of consciousness. I never thought myself religious in any form and liked to say that if you stop questioning your beliefs, you can be certain that they are wrong.
Nevertheless, I do believe that the Dragons do have a spiritual aspect to them. If spiritual means postulating the existence of something outside of reductionist explanations of the universe that at least in theory can be modeled in conceptual languages like physics and mathematics, then the Dragons are indeed spiritual beings.
The core of this spiritual aspect lies in the observation that the essence of the Dragons is love. And that experiencing this love is the most fundamental of all human experiences. Whatever concepts, scientific theories, and methods we may use to make sense of and influence the world around us, this experience of love comes before. That means, there’s nothing we can think, understand, or conceive, without being influenced by our capacity to love.
Even physics and mathematics are conceptual languages that are developed by beings that are subject to this fundamental capacity, and they are therefore inherently constrained in explaining it. No human language could, we can only learn to observe this love in ourselves and then approximate a common understanding with others by finding ways to communicate about it. Non-verbal, non-conceptual ways might be much more effective for at least some aspects of this.
In fact, this implies that understanding itself is a feeling, meaning that there is no final conceptual “truth” outside our emotional states and that the only thing we can do to refine our understanding of emotional states is working on becoming more sincere. But this is not the topic of this text.
There is no way around the Dragons.
What is relevant here is the implication that we cannot ‘disproof’ our fundamental capacity to love through conceptual constructs.
We can try to analyze what happens in our nervous systems when we consciously feel this love and develop all kinds of theories about it. But we cannot explain this fundamental experience away. We can blur it and bury it under all kind of stories and self-talk. But beneath it all our love is still there, leaving its imprint on everything that is going on in our minds. It is the most fundamental aspect of our existence.
All other feelings and emotional states are rooted in this love. If we feel fear, it ultimately means we fear for something you love. If we are sad or angry, we are sad or angry about what happened to something we love. We can dwell and rage in any other feeling for as long as we like, but below it all, and open to see for everyone who finds the courage to look with sincere eyes, there is this basic love.
If this is the case, where does this come from?
As Rutger Bregman pointed out in Humankind: A Hopeful History, our species developed by evolutionary selection for our friendliness. I would add that from a phenomenological perspective, this friendliness comes down to the mentioned basic capacity to love.
This explains why we are so good at cooperating. As homo sapiens sapiens, we do not just have an incredible capacity to adapt and to develop and communicate conceptual understandings. The deceicive reason why we became the species that enthroned itself on top of all others, extinguishing other species by the thousands every year, imprisoning them in zoos, aquariums, and terrariums, exploiting them in industrial scale farms, and analyzing and manipulating their biological properties in laboratories, is our capacity to cooperate. It is this capacity that made us become the super-dominant, if not super-destructive species that we are. And this capacity roots in our capacity to love.
Wait a minute, we extinguish other species, start wars, and devastate whole landscapes out of love?
Yes. The apparent contradiction quickly vanishes, if we look at how far out of touch with ourselves most of us are. And not just us, our ancestors have been out of touch with themselves already, imprinting their injured emotional heritage on us. We are all deeply sick, and we continue to transmit our inherited sickness on every new generation.
This is not about blaming anyone. This is about sincerely acknowledging this reality that we all share.
And now it is up to us to find ways to get back in touch with our fundamental capacity to love and actually become what we evolutionary developed to be through millions of years. That is, a friendly, loving species that lives in respect and harmony with our surroundings, each of us grounded on a base of peacefulness, gratefulness, and happiness, because we sincerely feel, express, and live the love that is inside of us all.
These are the real “hard facts”.
This might sound like cheesy hippie-talk. But in my view, it is simply stating the brute facts, after removing all fairy-tale self-talk of ‘intelligence’ and ‘toughness’ and ‘self-confidence’ that we keep telling ourselves in our strive to hide from the Dragons. In mundane terms, it means stating the facts after removing the narratives we develop to cover up the effects of the emotional imprints in our nervous systems from our early childhood and beyond, and the accompanying bottomless insecurity of our existence.
So yes, in my view we are all helpless little babies born into a world that really needs some healing. And in response we are all clinging to some stories and beliefs that give us some fake sense of certainty. I think there is nothing wrong with admitting that, because if we become more sincere and learn to access our love, we can be happy and strong.
If we do not do that, if we keep trying to ground our strength in something external, like our achievements, or status, or power, or technologies, or the material stuff that we accumulate, or the dream of control through rational understanding, then we end up developing Plasticstrength and will always be subject to a chronic feeling of emptiness and uncertainty, no matter how much we try to ignore it.
If instead we sincerely face our collectively accumulated emotional heritage, and if we support each other in embracing the inevitable vulnerability that comes with it, then we can thrive as a happy species in harmony with our natural environment on planet Earth.
Agreed, there are still some steps to go, but the capacity is there within us all, and the path is there before us as soon as we find the courage to work on our sincerity.
And so yes, it is time to face the Dragons.
This is the last of my four Dragonstories. It was my goal with it to make more clear what I mean by the metaphor of the Dragons. I think it could be useful to read the second and third one again after reading this, since they are short and condensed summaries of what I mean by ‘facing the Dragons’.
You may also enjoy reading the more personal first one about Dragonstrength. Or join other humans who want to become Dragonfriends.
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