Association was explored and described by Pavlov. You may have heard that when a dog salivates, a Pavlovian psychologist gets an undeniable urge to ring a bell - but the lesson of association goes much, much deeper. Read on at your own risk. Hold on to the bakkie, boet. Bloemfontein is going bye bye… So the experiment went like this - feed the dog and ring a bell. Do it a lot. Later, when you ring the bell, the dog salivates. Conclusion: The dog's mind-body system responds to the associated stimulus as if it were the real thing. That has pretty far reaching implications for our mind's operation in relation to reality. It can be problematic, sub-optimal to automatically respond to something as if it is something else! Just because they have become associated. Arbitrarily associated. It doesn't stop there though. Pavlov continued the experiment - ring the bell and flash a light. Repeat a lot. Then just flash the light and the dog salivates. You can do this again and again. Seven times or so. With just a dog's mind! Isn't this getting weird? So the dog responds to the thing associated with the thing that it associated with the real thing - responds as if it really was the real thing. To get personal, if you were raised and educated anything like "normally" in the modern culture (and it's unlikely you'd be an internet user, reading English if you weren't) then you've been through a system of mind training by association, and it's made you, like it made me, quite clever. Look at how much of "conversation" between people consists of each waiting to say what he has associated with what the other has just said. We are really expert at association - much better at it than dogs. Want the veils of Maya cast aside? Want The Truth? Authentic experience? Want to see the Divine expressed in Creation? It's hidden under the associations. An example: Little Jane plays with her yoni. She's enjoying a natural pleasure of the body, completely innocently experiencing what is at that moment. Her mama notices, and, being a really modern mama, she doesn't scold, beat or tantrum. She just firmly and clearly suggests to Little Jane that this is NOT OK to do here, in the lounge. Maybe by herself, in her bedroom, but not here. Mommy is tense. Little Jane already has associations with Mommy being tense, Mommy speaking to her in a different pitch and cadence of voice. If you track them, the associations - the layers removed, what they are associated with is TROUBLE. A threat to survival. At the bottom line, a grumpy mother doesn't yield milk. Nappies don't get changed as gently, or as often, Bad things. So, with no conscious effort or awareness of what she's doing, Little Jane has now started to associate that pleasure she was feeling with TROUBLE. It won't have to happen much more before Jane will have an unpleasant, worried feeling whenever she feels turned on. Jane, like her mother would find the idea of a glimpse of the divine being available in sex quite unsettling. The chances of her being able to be grateful for all of existence and her participation in it becomes remote. We have been blessed with bodies that can experience pleasure and pain. These are useful to our physical survival, and are very involved with natural learning. That's the experimental way children learn. Guided by pleasure and pain in their encountering the real. Not being conditioned by reward and punishment. In our culture it's not unusual to find people who associate pain with reward, punishment with pleasure. There's really no logic to associations, just the fact of them having become associated is enough for the mind. Consider how effectively punishment is associated with pain. Consider the things you associate with punishment. In some cultures, dishonour is considered more unbearable than any physical pain, and is a valid and honourable motivation to suicide. In some, a woman's love has been associated with her willingness to burn on her husband's funeral pyre. In others, a man can grow up believing that women are delicate creatures of high value that you can own (marry or employ/support) or rent (cash, or dinner and a line) for sexual services if you've got the money. In those cultures, a woman can grow up associating sex with pain, ugliness, shame and survival. Association runs very deep indeed. For example, what we can see depends on it. There's a story of Charles Darwin's arrival at an island where, strangely, the local population, in plain sight, ignored them and their ship completely. When they launched a boat - a small rowing boat - the islanders seemed to notice them for the first time, and greeted them enthusiastically, asking where they'd come from. It took a long while before they were able to see the ship, far bigger than any water craft they knew of. So much bigger, and so different to their design that their minds couldn't make any worthwhile associations, and therefore ignored it. This is startling - surely the image focused on the retina in an islander's eye is the same as in the sailor's eye! Yes, but an image on the retina is not what we see. The mind must first make sense of the eye's input, filter "nonsense" out, fill in areas of ucertainty, and then render the full multi-D experience that we have. The Islanders' minds didn't create an object "ship", and render it appropriately because they didn't have the symbol "ship" or any other association for the impossible thing which occupied some sea in their field of view. It made more sense to their minds to render the sea without bothering about the strange visual anomaly. An experiment which clearly shows the mind's "ability" to not bother
with the unexpected, with something not associated with the current
task. Would you believe people could just "miss" noticing someone walking
through a basket ball game wearing a gorilla suit? Some experiences are joyful, others painful. Inappropriate associations mean that mostly we experience a feeling in our bodies (e.g. a clenching in the gut) which is produced by an association with an association with… all related in the mind, not at all related in reality to the current experience available in the moment. Meditation is the practice of seeing and living through to the other side of this mess.
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