Organizing experience

“To experience is to organize the given.”

--D.M. Orange (quoted in Judith Blackstone’s Empathic Ground: Intersubjectivity and Nonduality in the Psychotherapeutic Process (2007))

I think a lot about the relationship and intersection between the subjective and the objective. For example, it has been noted that modern Western culture places a premium on objectivity, as far as “truth” is concerned, but that other cultures place different emphasis on subjectivity and objectivity. I read about a traditional culture that practiced a ritualized sharing of dreams, with the goal of providing guidance and knowledge for the community. Dreams, of course, are highly subjective phenomena, yet they are consulted in some cultures for guidance for the entire community.

The statement above is a succinct summary of one relationship between the subjective and the objective. A person’s subjective experience is the act of the organizing what is objectively given. This given may be perceived as belonging to the world “out there,” such as the perception of a painting, or “in here,” such as the perception of an emotion. Either way, the resulting experience is a particular method of organizing whatever is perceived. “Organizing” implies interpretation within a particular context. This context may be linguistic (organizing a particular combination of symbols, syntactically and semantically), cultural (perceiving a certain act as taboo, for example), personal, etc. 

One of the strongest forces in subjective organizing is language. We rely on language, and the particular manner of organization that our native tongue adopts has a huge influence on our own organizing. So much has been written about this, but for now I will just point out that the experience of the “I” as a subject and something in the “world” as an object is supported and exacerbated by certain languages, like English, more than others.

As psychologist Charles Tart has noted, one’s everyday state of consciousness is much more arbitrary than we would assume. It is a particular form of organization, aiming for physical survival and psychological sanity, but dictated by many assumptions (from culture, from language, from parents and friends, from the accumulation of past personal experience) about the way the world, the given, should be organized, approached, and interpreted.

There are obviously many aspects to subjective organization, but I can focus here on the dimension of rigidity/flexibility. Lao Tzu, among others, noted that the flexible branch does not break—the rigid one does. In Judith Blackstone’s Empathic Ground: Intersubjectivity and Nonduality in the Psychotherapeutic Process, it is noted that certain kinds of psychopathology are characterized by a ridigity in one’s organization of experience, often unconscious, that not only blinds the person to other, more flexible ways of organizing but leads to painful psychological symptoms—i.e. the breaking of the branch. This is central to the psychology of fixations, obsessions, neuroses, etc. The therapeutic process relies on uncovering the source and purpose of the rigidity; then the particular organizing process can be expanded into a more flexible approach to the particular experience, or alternate ways of organizing can be discovered. As I noted above, the source of the rigid response may be informed by many factors, including one’s culture, linguistic system, or religious upbringing, each of which constitutes a set of assumptions and judgments that underlie the person’s own psychological makeup. 

A basic example is a projection. If the way I am accustomed to interpreting or organizing my feelings of intense envy is by labeling them as unbecoming or even unnatural, or pretending that I don't feel them, then I will repress them and then condemn people who represent the lifestyle I envy. The "given" is the envy, though it should be understood that the presence of such feelings is not a simple matter of "appearing" in my consciousness. In fact, part of the process of re-organizing may involve, once I have accepted the envy as my own, discovering the source and purpose of the envy, the source of the "given," in order to understand how best to interpret it. Also, part of the "given-ness" of the envy may be that I perceive it as outside of me, my ego, when in fact I need to bring it inside and accept that it is my envy. I reorganize my experience of the envy by recognizing that the envy is itself an organization of other givens--namely, the emotions I feel when I see people living the lifestyle that I want.