10/11/12

I am fascinated by the different qualities attention or awareness can adopt. My awareness can be limp, as when I am tired, lacking the needed energy to be able to focus on one thing with conviction, palpably falling short of any task for which I want to summon it. Or it can pool, which happens in a kind of lazy contemplation, like when I choose to gaze, to rest my attention upon, a bush or a butterfly or something. The object is usually something in nature, because art, created by humans, usually requires more of my consciousness, and can thus induce a deeper, more nuanced kind of contemplation. Instead of pooling, when I experience good art, my awareness is much more engaged, and more is demanded of it than in the facile interaction (if I can even call it an interaction) with the plant. Of course, different kinds of art induce different qualities of contemplation. With a painting as its object, my awareness does not just pool, it dives--not just into the painting itself, but deeper into the present moment. It feels as if the right now is enriched, becomes fuller; my perception of the room's texture changes. For a moment, I am reminded, emphatically, that the world and my experience of it is not just flat, mundane, and repetitive. It feels as if I were hanging out on the surface of the ocean, being lulled into the lazy assumption that this is all there is, and the painting brought me down just a few inches, below the surface, and I can already see hints that there is so much more going on.

In conversation, there is a distinct pleasure in observing the awarenesses of several people, let's say two, and the ways in which they may interact. In some conversations, one person may lead, set the tempo, and the other may follow, happily or not, in a supporting role. In others, the two awarenesses seem to be unsuccessfully trying to locate each other in a maze. And the barriers in that maze may be the result of cultural differences, emotional history, or they may simply be erected out or nervousness or insecurity. Some conversations, such as those between close friends who haven't seen each other in a good while, begin immediately with the two awarenesses seamlessly merging, each being expanded and colored by the other. There is a shared space between the two that can only be inhabited fully when the two are together, like a room that requires two different keys to open, and there is a joy at the opportunity to enter this space again. Perhaps more exciting is the process of creating this shared space, whether by lovers or best friends or even colleagues.

In meditation, depending on the kind, awareness can bore, like a prisoner escaping from his cell, it can tighten, it can hover, it can feed back upon itself. By this last one I mean the process of sitting in meditation and focusing one's awareness on being aware of its own awareness. Who is aware? What is aware of who is asking the question, "Who is aware?" How far back do you go? Or is there something already back there? Is there even a back?

Unchanging

This morning in meditation, I thought briefly about the unchanging. Although there are many different styles and methods of meditation, the meditator often aims at some form of stillness--not necessarily in the emotional sense of placidity or calm, but in the sense of unwavering presence. This may take the form of visual concentration (e.g. staring at a candle flame), or mental concentration (e.g. counting breaths), or holding one's attention taut yet open (as in Zen's "just sitting"). As I bring myself to the mat or chair every morning, I marvel at how difficult it is to be unchanging, still, and immovable, even for fifteen minutes. But this difficulty is a clear sign that the training I am undergoing is valuable.

Little Gidding

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

--last stanza of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (published 1943)

Planting

This summer has been a time of planting seeds. I spent much of the winter and the spring searching for a more convicting and clear sense of purpose--gradually learning to place my finger over the hose to produce a stronger stream, so to speak. I spent a lot of time feeling idle, lazy, and dull. But reading Alan Watts during that period helped me to trust the idleness, the sensations of looseness in my soul.

As spring was moving into summer, I was granted a glimpse of something truer and brighter, and I began to cultivate the motivation this brief vision inspired. It became clear that a higher degree of self-discipline and steady cultivation than I had previously set for myself was now required. So I recommitted myself to daily Zen meditation. I returned to practicing hatha yoga several times a week. I am also now in weekly speech therapy, challenging myself in relation to one of my most fundamental facts: my stutter. I have been writing in a longer, more academic form and cultivating my affinity for synthesizing the many perspectives I encounter in my reading. Finally, as I briefly discuss here, this movement of my soul has been mirrored in my own personal, tactile aesthetics--not only have my clothing tastes been changing, I have just recently adopted a hairstyle (dreadlocks) that require cultivation and patience for them to reach satisfying fruition.

Now, my focus is on sustaining and caring for these fragile seeds I have planted.

Spaciousness

One of the values of practicing hatha yoga, for me, is a deeper and richer understanding of the truism that the body and the mind are one. Since encountering this view a few years ago, I have held it to be intuitively true, but it has been through conscious practice of this particular form of body work that I have been able to flesh out my understanding.

One aspect that I pay much attention to is the experience of spaciousness. I was talking with a friend the other night about a theme that I return to constantly--the recognition of an external apprehension, especially one that evokes strong emotions within me, as an internal reality. I often think of this in terms of architecture, prompted by readings such as Alain de Botton's Architecture of Happiness, Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, and St. Teresa's Interior Castle. The example I used with my friend was the emotions I feel in a spacious, cavernous room, especially with very high ceilings. There is a distinct sense of freedom; a feeling that suddenly more time has been bestowed upon me; my mind feels more calm, capable, and secure. When I notice this connection between the space I am in and how mind and my soul feels, I try to contact, even momentarily, the "space" within me that corresponds, like Teresa journeying through the mansions of her soul. 

This process is not easy, and I believe it requires patience, focus, and commitment to find the internal equivalents of what is more easily apprehended outside of oneself. But what I am finding with working with my body is that this process can be conducted both through the mind and the body, for they are, I am assuming, two sides of the same coin, the total organism (though I am not ignoring the significant and necessary differences between these two sides--e.g. the ability of the mind, rather than the body, to take the perspective of someone else but myself). Of course, there are many body practices, each with their different aims, but something that I really connect with in hatha yoga is a focus on the very spaciousness I have described. I don't know very much about the technical intricacies of yoga, but it seems to me that one of the purposes of the poses is specifically stretching different areas of the body in order to create more space, slowly extending the walls, as it were, of the bodymind. And the more I practice, the more I appreciate the openness I experience in both my body and mind after a session.

I value this openness for several reasons, but one in particular is connected with another theme I have been pondering lately--tension, conflict, ambiguity, and ambivalence. In trying to get more in touch with how much of these sensations I constantly live with, I have realized that in order to learn from my ambivalences and internal conflicts, they need space to exist within me. If my bodymind feels cramped or constricted, it is more difficult for me to give the two sides of the conflict their proper due, or to accept their interdependence. For example, in my speech therapy I challenge myself to approach situations where I am afraid to speak, like on the telephone. There are two strong forces at play--the fear of embarrassment and the drive to conquer this fear, to challenge myself, to expand my capabilities. I notice that if I am feeling cramped or constricted, it is much more difficult to honor these two forces, and I feel the tension, which is in some ways necessary, much more acutely. But if I breathe deeper, open my body more, and introduce more spaciousness to mind via my body, I find that I am more capable of being aware of the tension, acknowledging and honoring its value, while also feeling stronger and more confident in my decisions. Another way to look at it is that the more closed and constricted my bodymind feels, the more easily I contract around the tension, especially the fear--my awareness becomes myopic, I cannot feel that I am anything else but this uncomfortable and disturbing fear. 

It is one my fundamental convictions that everything can be a teacher. In the example I am discussing, a more subtle element of the tension is my deep desire to treat fear as a teacher--in other words, to not be afraid of fear. Both David Deida and Alan Watts (especially in his Meaning of Happiness) talk about this a lot, and it has really helped me: in order to effect this attitude towards fear, one of respect and honor, even humility, rather than more fear, fleeing from this deep and fundamental emotion, space is useful. It is as if, in the presence of fear, there needs to be room for both teacher (the fear) and student (the part of me that wants to honor the fear). If there is not enough room, only one will be able to stay--and that is almost always the fear itself. 

Mirrors

I did a post over at my other blog.

"What the lover sees himself as wanting is his beloved. In this he is not mistaken, of course; the point concerns only why he loves her. That question the lover himself does not ask: immersed completely in the universe of love, its object is self-evidently its final cause. But if our object is to understand, the question 'why' obtrudes. The beloved attracts because she configurates the precise aperture through which being [the Infinite] can pour through to her lover in largest portions. Or change the image. Among innumerable pieces of quartz that lie strewn about the floor of a quarry it may chance that one alone bends the sun's rays at the exact angle that sends them toward my eyes. Doing so makes the quartz gleam. Yet it is the sun's light I see; were cloud to intervene, the quartz would turn to slag. So it goes: every emptiness we feel is 'being' eclipsed, all restlessness a flailing for the being that we need, all joy the evidence of being found."

--Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition (1976)

That image with the quartz really gets me, especially the idea of bending light at the right angle (also the image of the aperture). It seems that what determines the precise "angle" which is necessary for a person to perceive the Infinite in the most powerful and arresting manner is the result of, really, one's entire history--culturally, historically, emotionally, psychologically, one's language, personal experiences, family, body, karma, anything. Everything affecting everything else to allow one to perceive through this particular piece of quartz the shining bliss of the Divine.

Integration

"The task of all our knowing is to enable us to incarnate all that we tend only to believe is outside and independent of us."

--Bubba Free John

The logic of anger

I've been thinking more about Solomon's notion of the logic of the individual emotions (from The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion, 1977). It clears up so much confusion I have had about various emotions for years, because it has shown me that the way I am accustomed to thinking, in my ordinary, calm state of consciousness, does not always follow the logic of the individual emotions. Understanding the logic of anger, for example, which is built upon assumptions and goals inherent in the emotion itself, helps me get to the bottom of anger, and helps me to better express it and learn from it.

By approaching an emotion like anger as something with its own inherent logical framework, I can no longer view it as simply "irrational" or otherwise misguided. Anger has a voice, and it wants to be heard.

As psychologist Charles Tart aptly points out, a "logic" is essentially arbitrary, in that it proceeds upon certain assumptions and carries them to their conclusions. Of course, certain logical systems are more conducive to physical and psychological survival, which is why we need to rely on them. But there is more to life than survival, and there are other logical systems, each with their unique sets of assumptions and conclusions. Christian theology is a logical system, as is the emotion of anger.

According to Solomon, anger's logic is very similar to the proceedings of a courtroom--the one angered is the judge, jury, and plaintiff, the person one is angry at is the defendant, and the verdict is undeniable guilt. Anger is tied up with issues of justice and fairness (excluding the different emotion of self-directed anger)--it is inherently intersubjective (involving other people). One's decision as to whether the guilty party is indeed guilty can only come from reflection upon the anger. Anger, in its essence, declares the other party completely responsible for the injustice or unfairness or insult or offense felt by the angered party, no questions asked.

A clear indicator of that the logic of anger is different in certain ways than one's logic when one is calm or content, is that one's thoughts proceed differently. If I observe my thoughts when I am quite angry, I will notice that the stream is different--I may be gathering evidence for the case (thinking of other things that person has done that has angered me, insulting them in my head, using words like "always" and "never"), I may be having an imaginary confrontation with the person in my head, I may be obsessively defending myself (because in anger I am the judge, jury, and plaintiff, it is crucial that I appear infallible, at least in this particular situation).

One value of anger lies in its motive to act (as with many emotions). I can reason about a social problem, with my "calm" logic, but if that reasoning is accompanied by anger, by the conviction of injustice, I am much more likely to act on the situation. Recognizing this helps me to give anger the respect it is due, and to learn to listen to it, but also to criticize its motives and assumptions in a given situation.

Limitations

"There is much talk today of expanding the scientific method to make it applicable to broader, more humane considerations. By directing this method to new problems, the scientific enterprise can indeed, within limits, be expanded, but not the scientific method itself. For it is precisely from the narrowness of that method that its power derives, so that to urge its expansion is like recommending that a dentist's drill be broadened so it can churn a bit of butter on the side."

--Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition (1976)

I think about this idea a lot--the power and necessity of limitations, boundaries. I see much of human growth and maturation as a discovering of and coming to terms with limits. The body has its limits, the ego has its limits, and it seems that everyone's limits are different. Part of the discovery is realizing that what was once perceived as a limit--for example, in the body's capabilities--can be expanded beyond one's previous conceptions. The same applies to the ego, the personality, and its capabilities. Part of the coming to terms, however, is recognizing the importance of limits, as Smith discusses above with regard to the scientific method. He suggests that science as a method for obtaining knowledge is limited, and thus should not be applied indiscriminately to all fields of knowledge. But the power of the method is inseparable from its limitations, and I believe this principle applies to many areas of human experience. Furthermore, just as the dentist does not try to accomplish everything with one tool whose capabilities are diffuse but instead works with a range of powerful and limited tools.

Still here

I'm still here. I have just been working on a long essay on sexuality for the past couple of weeks, so most of my thoughts have been diverted to that. But I hope to develop the ability to pursue that longer piece alongside other trains of thought, and return to posting here. So, I'm still here.

Telos

"It is an intellectual catastrophe that the concept of telos has been scrubbed from modern psychology; philosophers from Artistotle to Hegel have found the universe impossible to comprehend without telos. If the universe is truly interpenetrating and interdependent in all aspects, then not only does the past shape the present, the future also shapes the present, just as an electric current will not leave one terminal until the distant terminal is grounded."

Ken Wilber, "Odyssey: A Personal Inquiry into Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology" (1982)

Acceptance and resignation

"It is of capital importance to understand this distinction between acceptation and resignation. To accept, really to accept a situation, is to think and feel with the whole of one's being that, even if one had the faculty of modifying it, one would not do it, and would have no reason to do it."

--Hubert Benoit, The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought (1955)

I came across this passage in Benoit's book (which has been slow, rich reading for me) last week, and it has stuck with me. It reminded me Nietzsche's concept of eternal return (or eternal recurrence), which, to me, is one of the most striking thoughts (or thought experiments, if you prefer) I have encountered. It illustrates so well the value of philosophy for living one's life better.

To start, here is a succinct formulation of the concept of eternal return--aphorism 341 from The Gay Science (1882), translated by Walter Kaufman:

“The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

It is arresting. One may choose to ignore the thought experiment, but if one chooses to engage with it, an immediate reappraisal of one's life seems inevitable, if only for a minute or two. What if you had to live your entire life over, into everlasting time, every single moment the same? Would this prospect cause you anguish, or has there been a moment in your life, just one moment, that would make the whole thing worth living again and again and again? And not just worth living again, but that you would want, as Nietzsche emphasizes, nothing more than to do this living over and over.

It is interesting to add in a nuance that Benoit mentions--the idea of being able to choose this fate ("even if one had the faculty of modifying it"). In other words, if you were given a choice to change any aspect of your life as a whole, would you?

I imagine that some people would immediately answer yes, and some would immediately answer no. But others would probably take a moment to think, and perhaps arrive at the answer: the only thing I would change is my desire to change anything. In other words, I would venture to say that most people, from children to adults, have aspects of the life that they have lived thus far, that they would like to change. And I would go further to say that most people would not change many other aspects of their life thus far. In other words, there lies an ambivalence within the person as to the prospect of complete acceptance (as Benoit says, "with the whole of one's being"). Nietzsche's concept confronts this ambivalence directly by removing the prospect of choice. In other words, he does not acknowledge of the possibility of being able to modify one's life situation. His question is not, as I phrased it above, "if you were given a choice to change any aspect of your life as a whole, would you?" This option is taken off the table, and the questioned person is left with the starkness of the demon's statement: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more."

What then? For Nietszche asks us if we will accept, or, better, embrace, the demon's pronouncement, or gnash our teeth in despair. This further step of embracing is important--it is reflected in the reply, "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." For embracing goes beyond acceptance. It implies, as in the physical act of embracing, a whole-bodied experience (again, Benoit's "whole-being"). When I embrace someone fully, no part of me is holding back. 

Further food for thought: earlier in The Gay Science, Nietzsche offers a preliminary response to his own thought experiment (he would later explore the theme in greater detail in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885):

For the new year.— I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year—what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer. (aphorism 276)

Adonaïs

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.-Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!-Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

--from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonaïs" (1821)

Aggression and property

I suppose that Buddha, with his own penetrating insight into the necessary relationship between attachment, fear, and hatred, could probably have put it all very simply. For according to Buddha, hatred and aggression arise wherever there is attachment (clinging and grasping), for one mobilizes to defend one's attachments. Aggression, in this sense, is property defense. Even in the animal world, aggression almost always occurs as a simple defense of territorial property. But man alone of all the animals has a property in his person, and thus a new form of aggression: man alone will lash out blindly to defend his egoic immortality status and "save face" (save the mask). Each attachment, each property, whether internal as self or external as possessions, acts as a stick point or lesion in choiceless awareness that will fester with the stench of hostility. This lesion, this person/property defense . . . can fuel both oppression and repression, for one aggresses internally and externally to protect the person/property. 

--Ken Wilber, Up From Eden (1980)

I've obviously been reading a lot of Wilber lately. In fact I am in my second big wave of reading him (the first was a year ago, when I read six or seven of his books). This time around has been just as fruitful as the last, and I am more capable of seeing the deep logic in his incredibly complex theoretical system. As I have said elsewhere, philosophy is at its best when it helps one to live better, and Wilber's writings do just that for me. The above quote resonates with my experience lately, in which I have been trying to pay more attention to the moments and occasions when I feel aggression. The notion of "property defense" helps me to interpret many of these instances of aggression, because I am forced to ask myself just what it is I am defending, and why. This process also points up the value of aggression, for in evaluating what I am defending and why I am defending it, I sometimes come to the conclusion that both the defense and the aggression are useful in the specific case. As I have discussed elsewhere, aggression, like anger, is a strong motivator for change, and is thus something to be listened to, rather than suppressed blindly or acted on blindly.

Also illuminating is the recognition that aggression reflect both internal and external property. This internal property is the self. Again, there is a time and place to defend one's self, but I am trying to be more aware of which aspects of my self I seek to defend most passionately, and why.

Ambivalence and the shadow

Ambivalence is as inevitable in behavior as in belief. Every way of being and acting has antithetical alternatives, and to be conscious of one is to be conscious of the other. The inherent logic of English (and other Indo-European languages) promotes this by providing logical opposites: a word such as kind is meaningless without the antithetical concept, unkind. In order to think of himself [form a self-image] as kind, a person must be aware of what he would do if he were unkind. Indeed, he expresses his kindness as much by abstaining from cruel acts as by performing kind ones. He is necessarily aware of his capacity to be either kind or cruel, but he does not necessarily permit himself to be aware of his desire to be both.

--Snell and Gail Putney, The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society (1964)

The concept of the shadow, first termed by Jung but having its roots in several aspects of psychoanalytic theory from Freud et al., relies on the ambivalence described above. It is a complex topic, but basically: an impulse, desire, experience, etc. that is deemed undesirable or otherwise unacceptable is alienated or repressed, cut off from conscious awareness, but does not disappear--instead, it makes its presence known in various ways, most notably through the process of projection (which can be described as perceiving one's shadow in the mirrors, as it were, of other people).

Ambivalence lies at the heart of one's relationship with the shadow. It is aptly named--we can never escape our physical shadow, but we can ignore it and keep it from view.

In the field of ego psychology, it has been found that individuals who have confronted and integrated their shadow in a thorough manner emerge with a high "toleration for ambiguity" (to use Jane Loevinger's phrase). This ambiguity (or ambivalence) has been present since the early years of the person, but it can now be approached with a greater sensitivity to the interdependence and polarity (as Putney and Putney describe above) of all thoughts, actions, desires, etc. It requires a willingness to accept seemingly contradictory desires (e.g. the desire to be both kind and cruel, even to the same person), instead of ignoring or repressing one or the other, which was the way the ego dealt with such contradictions in the earlier stages of its development. This is another important aspect of the shadow: for the most part, everyone has some un-integrated shadow material because of the nature of ego development. As Freud pointed out, the ego begins its life in the early years of childhood as a weak and feeble entity, and thus does not have the strength and means to manage and organize all of the impulses and desires of the self (in his system, mainly deriving from the id), so it is forced to split off various aspects of the overall self in order to conduct its business with the outside world.

The superego also contributes to this splitting (note: in psychology, "splitting" has multiple meanings, so I am not using it here in any precise sense), by emphasizing certain desirable aspects of the personality, other aspects are deemed undesirable and are easy to ignore or dissociate from the overall personality. But the superego, as much as the young child would like to believe about its parents, is not the final authority, and its pronouncements are often too simplistic (e.g. "anger/aggression is bad") and can end up stifling the ego's development. So, the ego, once it has developed to a certain stage, can return to the projected, alienated, repressed aspects of the overall self, and confront the ambiguity and ambivalence that at first seemed so confusing, but turns out to be much closer to the nature of the world. Again, as I described here, a more accurate map is created for the territory.

The pioneer

Referring to Freud, from Harry Guntrip's Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy, and the Self (1971):

It is not the function of the pioneer to say the last word but to say the first word. That is the most difficult step. All the pioneer has to begin with is a problem, which has always been there, but hitherto no one has looked at that phenomenon in this particular way. The pioneer suddenly asks a new kind of question. Once the all-important start has been made along some new line of investigation, those who come after have only to faithfully follow up every possible line of inquiry it suggests. Some of these will be false trails, others will lead somewhere, but all have to be explored.

Working with constructions

When one discovers or realizes that some aspect of their life is constructed, not given, there can be a feeling similar to the child’s when he finds out that there is no Santa Claus--disenchantment. For example, reading Denis de Rougement’s Love in the Western World was illuminating for me because it demonstrated how constructed our culture’s views of romantic love are, by revealing the history behind it, but also somewhat disenchanting in revealing how constructed certain aspects of the experience of romantic love are. When one considers the many other manifestations of romantic/sexual love in other cultures and other time periods, it becomes more and more difficult to consider one’s own system necessarily the “natural" way to proceed in matters of romantic love. Instead, one is able to reevaluate one’s assumptions about romantic love (for our assumptions contribute to our constructions), see through the mythology that we have adopted, and approach the particular relationship with new eyes. Mythology is useful--it can provide meaning for individuals and societies, as Joseph Campbell tirelessly emphasized--but it has its limitations, especially when it is taken as literal truth.


For when you notice something that has been constructed, you are free to leave it as it is, or to restructure it. And this is possible with emotional habits, prejudices, belief systems, neuroses, even entire states of consciousness. 


Step back. When you realize you are wearing glasses, you can choose to put them on or take them off, at will. And you can take them off and admire them, for the complexity and intricacy of the particular structure. They become just another object, and cease to be the (unconscious) subject.


We are responsible for the structures in our subjective worlds, even though many of them were created in our pre-rational years and influenced by forces outside of our control, like our parents and cultures. But at a certain point of maturity we must accept responsibility for who we are, the lenses we see through, and the structures we may be unaware of, but that may be stifling our life and hurting other people.

Returning to the experience of “falling in love”: this experience has been built up for several hundred years (its origins are placed around the 12th century) in Western culture. But one of its crucial elements is the hide-and-seek we play ourselves in order to allow this experience in our lives. Although we may not want to admit it, we make ourselves fall in love—not simply in the moment (for it is part and parcel of the mythology that it happens in a moment, although it may be led up to: “I think I’m falling in love with you”) but as a result of a series of assumptions and decisions we have made long before that moment. The young girl reads, watches, listens to stories culled from the mythology we have created: the princess and her Prince Charming; romantic comedies and novels. Even some boys, usually later, take an interest in the mythology and begin placing the structures in place, “setting up” for the experience. What are these structures? Specific images of ideal lovers form, fantasies are created, expectations are formed.

But the hide-and-seek is that we don’t notice ourselves making these subtle choices and distinctions over the years, so that we enable ourselves to perceive the process, if it happens, as “falling.” We hide from ourselves so that we can find something we have wanted for a long time. There is nothing inherently problematic with this, as this hide-and-seek process manifests at self at many different levels of life (and according to Hindu tradition is the very nature of the universe), but it can be useful to become aware of the process.

NOTE (6/27/12): Although I do still see value in de Rougement's pointing out the sociocultural construction of one particular form of Romantic love, upon further thinking I would like to also acknowledge the deeper, cross-cultural aspects of romantic love which seem to be more universal in the history of human beings. While there are certain "surface" features of the European traditions of romantic love that are unique and socially constructed, there are other aspects to this fundamental human relationship that cannot be accounted for in terms of social constructionism.

Digestion, pt. 4

Metabolism--One of the central tasks of the self is to "digest" or "metabolize" the experiences presented to it at each rung of development. "The basic assumption of developmental theory is that experience must become 'metabolized' to form structure." Object relations theorists, such as Guntrip, speak of pathology as "failed metabolism"--the self fails to digest and assimilate significant past experiences, and these remain lodged, like a bit of undigested meat, in the self-system, generating psychological indigestion (pathology). The basic structures of consciousness, in fact, can be conceived as levels of food--physical food, emotional food, mental food, spiritual food. . . . These levels of food, as we will see, are really levels of object relations, and how the self handles these "food-objects" ("self-objects") is a central factor in psychopathology.

--Ken Wilber, Transformations of Consciousness (1986, co-authored by Jack Engler and Daniel Brown)

Alienation

Alan Watts once said, "knowledge of self is knowledge of other, and knowledge of other is knowledge of self." Since I came across these words, I have held them to be true, on some level. In working with my shadow recently, I have come to a deeper understanding of this statement.

One method (described in Integral Life Practice, reprinted here) that I use to work with the shadow is by recognizing people and characteristics of people that I come across every day that irk me, annoy me, anger me--affect me in a negatively emotional way. The principle is that other people are mirrors for the self. And by recognizing that the things I don't like in other people are simply reflections of things I don't like in myself, I begin to see a certain truth of Watts' statement. Parts of my self that I have alienated, cut off, repressed, ignored, do not disappear, but instead make their presence known in the mirror of other people. The process of reclaiming these parts of the shadow is painful initially, but it leads to a greater, more total, more integrated sense of self. And, somewhat paradoxically, it leads, at least in my experience, to a greater feeling of unity with other people.

Putney and Putney (in The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society (1964)) comment:

To become autonomous, it is necessary to move beyond hatred. Yet, when a person first senses that what he despises in others is a mirrored image of latent potential in himself, he is fearful. It seems that if he looked closely he would discover that he was the antithesis of all that he hoped to be. A hitherto unconcealed aspect of the self does loom large at the moment of recognition, but once it becomes familiar it slips into place in the totality of the self. Only the man who can honestly admit that "nothing human is alien to me" is capable of self-acceptance.

It is the last sentence of that paragraph, with the quote from Terence, that really links up to what I'm saying. When I notice something in someone else that I don't like, I am pushing that part of them away, under the impression that I don't possess that quality, but they do. It can be something as trivial as a woman at the cobbler who, in my eyes, was being obnoxiously nitpicky and holding up the line. I lead myself to believe that the nitpickiness I notice is clearly something she possesses, not me. But in this appraisal of things, I am alienating not only her, but the part of myself that is nitpicky. So when Terence says, "nothing human is alien to me," his words can be interpreted as referring to a state of affairs where any sense of alienation I feel from other other people is a direct result of alienating the parts of those people that I recognize in myself (whether it is nitpickiness or the desire to murder). And when I take the qualities that annoy me about other people and recognize them in myself, I simultaneously feel less alienated from the person and less alienated from myself.

Mapping the territory of the ego

"Mapping" is another of my big topics. There is a strong explorer/cartographer spirit inside me, and I especially delight in examining philosophical and psychological maps and systems. Economist E.F. Schumacher has much to say about this in his Guide for the Perplexed (here is an excerpt), and Ken Wilber has dedicated much of his intellectual work to creating some of the best theoretical maps I have come across.

I'd like to talk about maps in the context of "psychological space"--namely, the ego. As psychologists since Freud have determined, the formation of the ego in childhood and adolescence rests upon the formation of an accurate self-image. Its accuracy, as elsewhere in life, lies in its adherence to the data; the data in this case is the behavior, emotions, desires, thoughts, etc. of the self, of the ego. The self-image is formed to match what is experienced by the self, whether this experiential data comes from the opinions of a parent ("You are a good boy"), a peer ("You are fun to be around"), society (e.g. taboos), etc. The individual's emotions and actions contribute to the self-image as well--if I experience myself feeling the safe in the arms of this person, part of my self-image becomes a particular emotional attachment to my mother.

This is a process of mapping the territory--the map is the self-image and the territory is the experience (which is largely comprised of the individual's relationship with its environment) of the self. Again, accuracy is important; from the basic level of being able to perceive that this painful sensation of touching the stove is painful because my body is sensing it (the image of the body becomes part of the self-image) to the more complex level of sensing a desire to be around other people and interpreting that as my wanting to make friends (my sociability also becomes part of my self-image). Sensations and desires, along with more complex forms of behavior, are the territory, and they have to be represented and acknowledged on the map in order to create an accurate, healthy self-image.

Now the second part of this story is that the map, the self-image, must be acceptable to the self. This is the source of much pathology and neurosis, and it is something I am working with intensively right now. Snell and Gail Putney, in their Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society (1964) comment:

As he [the developing individual] internalizes the norms he learns from others, he applies them to himself and wonders if he is acceptable. As he acquires models to pattern his developing self, he accepts standards against which he measures his self-image. It is not so much that he learns to appraise an existing self-image; it would be more accurate to say that his self-image and his evaluation of that image are acquired together [the creation of the map occurs simultaneously with the evaluation and judgment of the map]. The very idea of being merges with the appraisal of modes of being; the process of self-evaluation is simultaneous with the process of self-discovery. Man needs not only an accurate self-image, but also one that he can accept.

 Because the territory we are speaking of is one's own self, not an "objective" space like a forest or a set of philosophical ideas, the map is wrapped up the self's sense of self-esteem and dignity, which provides much of the criteria for the acceptability of the self-image. The difficulties that arise between the dual desires of accuracy, which seems simple enough, and acceptability, which is more complex, account for many common neuroses, fixations, etc. And one common manifestation of this is the sacrificing of accuracy for the sake of acceptability:

. . . he may fall into the ineffectual but common attempt to make the self-image acceptable by rendering it inaccurate. This is a basic misdirection, involved in a fundamental--but normal--neurotic pattern. Through a process of self-deceit, the individual may pretend that those aspects of the self of which he disapproves do not exist. The difficulty is that such a deception, precisely because it is self-deception, inevitably fails. It is because he does perceive in himself elements of which he profoundly disapproves that he seeks to hide these things. . . . Fulfillment does not result if he attempts to sacrifice accuracy for acceptability.

In other words, pretending that there is not a dangerous cliff a couple of miles away, and neglecting to represent this cliff on the map one is drawing, does not remove the cliff from the landscape. It is an inaccuracy that is more harmful than helpful. And, again, when the territory becomes one's own self, this inaccuracy, this self-deception, is harmful. There is a dissonance between the territory and the map: I register a desire to kill someone who has enraged me (territory), but I (or my superego, if we want to divide things like that) disapprove of this desire, so I refuse to acknowledge it on my map--I refuse to integrate this impulse into my self-image, into my ego. But it is there, just like the cliff was there, and I am only deceiving myself by pretending that it's not.

I'm not going to discuss projection here, but that is usually the next step in this kind of process: I refuse to acknowledge and accept the desire in myself, so I project it and perceive it as outside of me, in my environment. I perceive others as being hostile towards me, instead of accepting that the hostility is my own.

Putney and Putney provide a good example of a healthy way of creating an accurate and acceptable self-image: "He can deal with this conflict [between accuracy and acceptability] by attempting to make his conception of acceptability one which stresses choice between elements in the self (e.g., "I am capable of being a bully, but I choose not to be"), then acting so as to minimize aspects of the self of which he disapproves."

There is a fascinating relationship between thought/desire and action at work here. Freud realized that the id, the source of much of what becomes unacceptable in the later formation of the self-image/ego, cannot differentiate between image and action. The id uses images as representations of its particular desires or impulses--when the id registers hunger, it conjures the image of food. This is the source of processes like wish-fulfillment, where the id's desire is frustrated (there is no food available) and tries to satisfy its desire simply by conjuring the image (of food). Freud linked this process to the dreams and daydreams, where one's thoughts/images and actions are the same (i.e. I can conjure an image of food in a dream, and it magically appears).

The ego, on the other hand, develops by recognizing that the image and the real thing are not the same, and that it needs to go and find food instead of just thinking of food in order to satisfy its hunger. There is a distinction created between image (which does not need to take into account the outside environment) and action (which needs to negotiate with the environment). And this is just what Putney and Putney refer to above: in creating an accurate and acceptable self-image, the ego acknowledges that although it feels something that it (or the superego) disapproves of, it chooses not to act upon that feeling. Instead of assuming, as the id does, that the feeling and the action are the same (incidentally, the superego also assumes they are the same, which is why one can feel guilty for just thinking something morally reprehensible), the ego separates the two, and is thus able to acknowledge both the disapproved feeling and the approved choice to not act on it.

Digestion, pt. 3

From our present vantage point it now appears that what Freud was trying to accomplish during the thirty years between 1890 and 1920, when the unconscious mind reigned as the sovereign concept in his psychological system, was to discover those determining forces in personality that are not directly known to the observer. Just as physics and chemistry make known that which is unknown about the nature of matter by means of experiment and demonstration, so the task of psychology for Freud was to seek out those factors in personality of which we are ignorant. This seems to be the meaning of Freud's statement that "our scientific work in psychology will consist in translating unconscious processes into conscious ones, and thus filling in the gaps in conscious perceptions." Freud is merely acknowledging the well-known fact that the goal of all the sciences is to substitute knowledge for ignorance. For example, man is not directly aware of the process of digestion as it takes place, but the science of physiology can tell him what happens during digestion. This knowledge does not enable him to perceive (be directly aware of) his own digestive processes as they are occurring; nevertheless he knows (understands) what is taking place. In a similar manner, one is not aware of unconscious mental processes, but psychology can teach him about what is going on below the level of awareness.

--Calvin S. Hall, A Primer of Freudian Psychology (1954)

Closing the gap between reason and emotion

All passions have the same end—personal dignity and self-esteem. But each passion, though tied by its own logic to all the others, tends to become obsessed with its own objects and outlook. Each follows what it takes to be an optimal strategy; but from a more inclusive view it is evident these individual strategies conflict and interfere with each other. These are strategies that are virtually always disastrous (like running backward in football). It is the business of rationality to eliminate or modify them, to organize the passions in a co-ordinated effort, joining them together toward a common goal (which means, however, that some of them will have to spend most of their time on the bench). Moreover, it is possible that even a co-ordinated strategy will be less than optimal, even disastrous. Thus, I shall argue that rationality is the search of the passions for optimal strategy for achieving self-esteem. What is called wisdom is the attainment of this optimal strategy, the “harmony of the soul” that was so celebrated by the Greeks, harnessed from the enthusiasm and chaos so encouraged by the Romantics. It is what Aristotle called eudaimonia, “living well,” surely not devoid of passion, but not devoid of reason either. Indeed, it is only when this insidious distinction begins to disintegrate that the ideal of “self-esteem,” “wisdom,” and classical “harmony of the soul” will begin to make any sense for us.

---Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion (1977)

Term(inal)s

The principle is that all dualities and opposites are not disjoined but polar; they do not encounter and confront one another from afar; they exfoliate from a common center. Ordinary thinking conceals polarity and relativity because it employs terms, the terminals or ends, the poles, neglecting what lies between them. The difference of front and back, to be and not to be, hides their unity and mutuality.

--Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology (1962)

As usual, Alan Watts points out something in my everyday experience of language and logical thinking that I never noticed and which reveals to me the limitations of my usual way of experiencing the world--namely, the hidden meaning of "term." Much has been said about language's role in filtering and structuring Reality, and I will probably return to this topic.

Watts recognizes that our usual experience of language, for the sake of clarity and efficiency, ordinarily concerns itself with opposites (good and evil, life and death) and distinctions, and that it follows the structure of our logic--the law of the excluded middle. But, going back to an image I introduced here, this is a matter of observing the branches (a symbol of the diversity of life) but forgetting their source, the trunk.

But it goes even further than that--the terms not only share a source (good and evil both stem from the "trunk" of morality), but they are interdependent. Watts hammered in this point throughout his entire career--you cannot see a figure without its background, so it is more accurate to say that you are seeing a figure-background instead of simply a figure. You didn't just buy something--a buy-sell, a transaction, just occurred. And you can only recognize yourself because of everything else that is not-you. But just as you are not seeing a figure, but a figure-background, you are experiencing yourself as a you-not you.

There is also the notion of "spectrum." I won't elaborate here, but suffice it to say that a particular language's terms sometimes fail to capture aspects of experience that lie along the spectrum between such terms, in the cracks, as it were, of the ranges of experience language is capable of capturing.

Living truth

Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static, but when you see that truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to--then you will also see that this living thing is what you actually are--your anger, your brutality, your violence, your despair, the agony and sorrow you live in. In the understanding of all of this is the truth, and you can understand it only if you know to look at those things in your life.

--Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known (1969)

For the past few years, I have been aware of Jiddu Krishnamurti, but I never felt that it was time to dive into his works. It seems that it is finally time, so I am proceeding slowly and gladly. He is challenging and refreshing, and requires time to really flesh out what he is saying. What strikes me most about him is how little he refers to traditional religious or philosophical systems, sages, or saints, and the importance he places on one's own individual approach to truth.

The above passage reminded me of the viewpoint offered by the "new physics" in the first decades of the twentieth century. The traditional scientific attitude of an objective subject observing, objectively, processes in nature, gave way to the discovery that, at deeper levels of physics, the foundation of objective truth in our culture, what is being observed is affected by the observer (summarized in mathematical terms as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). Ken Wilber summarizes (from The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977)):

The quantum revolution was so cataclysmic because it attacked not one or two conclusions of classical physics but its very cornerstone, the foundation upon which the whole edifice was erected, and that was the subject-object dualism. That which was Real was supposed to be that which could be objectively observed and measured, yet these "ultimate realities" could not themselves be totally observed or measured under any circumstances, and that is, to say the least, a sloppy form of Reality. . . . As Sullivan put it, "We cannot observe the course of nature without disturbing it" . . . It was abundantly clear to these physicists that objective measurement and verification could no longer be the mark of absolute reality, because the measured object could never be completely separated from the measuring subject--the measured and the measurer, the verified and the verifier, at this level, are one and the same.

 The assumption that underlay the Cartesian and Newtonian scientific models, that objective nature was waiting to be analyzed, discovered, and "figured out" by human subjects is akin to the assumption Krishnamurti is exposing above, that truth is somehow stable or static, and is able to be discovered or sought, as if it were separate from the one discovering and the one seeking.

"The Worm's Waking"

This is how a human being can change:
there's a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.
Suddenly. He wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he's no longer
a worm.
He's the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn't need
to devour.

--Rumi

Emancipatory writing

I am re-reading Ken Wilber's One Taste, a "philosophical journal," he kept during the year of 1997. The format of the book, I realized as I began reading, is very similar to the format of this blog, especially in the content, which Wilber describes as "ideas that orbit the sun of the perennial philosophy (or the common core of the world's great wisdom traditions)."

One topic he discusses early on is emancipatory writing--writing, whether theoretical, spiritual, literary, etc. that helps to liberate the reader from a range of subtle ills, like feelings of meaninglessness, shallowness, narrow-minded-ness, the list goes on. In an entry on the life of the late novelist Christopher Isherwood, himself a liberator for Wilber, he lists similar figures like Jiddu Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Thomas Mann (all of whom were connected with the Los Angeles branch of the Vedanta Society in the mid-20th century.

Reading Wilber himself has been and still is liberating, for many reasons. An important one is that he has provided me, and many others, with a theoretical framework of the world's knowledge and experience that is profoundly embracing. In the words of Jack Crittenden, in his lucid foreword to Wilber's Eye of Spirit (1997):

The general idea [of Wilber's philosophical system] is straightforward. It is not which theorist is right and which is wrong. His idea is that everyone is basically right, and he wants to figure out how that can be so. "I don't believe," Wilber says, "that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error. So instead of asking which approach is right and which is wrong, we assume each approach is true but partial, and then try to figure out how to fit these partial truths together, how to integrate them--not how to pick one and get rid of the others."

Philosophy's true purpose is to improve one's way of living, and the philosophical attitude Wilber adopts has improved not only my critical and theoretical capacities, but my everyday living. Taking the attitude that "everyone is right" has opened me up to the world in so many ways, and has instilled in me a commitment to finding the truth in every voice, no matter how offensive or inferior I consider a particular perspective or point of view. It also supports my conviction that truth can be found in human voices from anywhere and anywhen, from the ancients to today. Conversely, and this is important for me because my critical faculties have always been on the weak side, I am able to criticize in a more penetrating manner, by acknowledging that every perspective is partial. So from this fundamental attitude, Wilber has outlined a vast yet cogent system in his books, from 1977 to the present, and each one I read further opens my mind and soul, and liberates me in ways that I sometimes don't even think about consciously, but which I notice after reading and digesting his works.

Digestion, pt. 2

Some additional thoughts related to this post:

From Ken Wilber's Spectrum of Consciousness (1977):

Freud built his entire psychoanalytic system around . . . the insight that men and women have needs or motivations of which they are unconscious. Now because these needs or instincts are unconscious, we are not fully aware of them, and thus we can never act upon them to gain satisfaction. In short, humans don't know what they want; their real desires are unconscious and therefore never adequately satisfied. Neuroses and "mental illness" result, just as if you were completely unconscious of your desire to eat, you would never know you were hungry, and consequently you would never eat, which would indeed make you quite ill. Now this is a superlative idea, the essence of which has been confirmed again and again in clinical observations. The problem, however, is that although everybody agrees that humans have unconscious needs, nobody agrees as to what these needs are.

1.  Again, the usefulness of comparing the psychology to physiology--the mechanisms of hunger, in this case. I often think that the typical human situation is that one's physiology operates fairly harmoniously--one's body generally knows how to digest, and one can correctly interpret the body's signals when there is a problem with digestion--but one's psychology lacks this smoothness and integrity. The various forms of psychotherapy can be seen as seeking this wholeness, bringing one's psyche to the same attunement as one's muscular or digestive systems.

2. The importance of interpretation. When my stomach growls and my head feels light, I know that I am hungry. How do I know? I interpret my body's signals accurately. The system works properly--signal leads to correct interpretation leads to corresponding action (feeding myself). The process is more complex with the psyche (as Wilber points out, there are many opinions as to what our needs are), and the wide range of pathologies are often connected with some glitch in the process of interpreting signals from the psyche. Again, the process of projection, as I mentioned briefly here. A feeling of intense envy is the signal, but my interpretation is one of contempt for the people I envy, so the corresponding action is a disdain for those people, and a feeling of dissatisfaction (just as if I were hungry but I chose to go for a walk instead of feeding myself). The envy is unsatisfied, and my contempt remains and worsens, eventually leading to an increasingly negative psychological state.

Where is my soul?

"As an unintelligent man seeks for the abode of music in the body of the lute, so does he look for a soul within the skandhas (the material and psychic aggregates, of which the individual mind-body is composed)."

--quoted in Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945), perhaps Gautama Buddha?

One view of the ego

The conventional "self" or "person" is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost the more real "me" than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is!

--Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (1957)

Spiritual experiments

Nothing in our every-day experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly nothing in our every-day experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when the mind is subjected to certain rather drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest, not only to the mind itself, but also, by its reflection in its external behavior, to other minds. It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities. In the ordinary circumstances of average sensual life, these potentialities of the mind remain latent and unmanifested. If we would realize them, we must fulfill certain conditions and obey certain rules, which experience has shown empirically to be valid.

--Aldous Huxley, Introduction to The Perennial Philosophy (1962)

Huxley's analogy between discovering the nature of water and the nature of the human being seems far-fetched at first, but upon further reflection his point is well taken.

1. This is a useful analogy for the idea that just because something is not revealed or apparent in the ordinary state of consciousness does not mean that it is false or invalid.

2. Also useful in understanding the many ways of altering consciousness that have been used for religious purposes--fasting, chanting, asceticism, drumming, meditating, etc.

3. He also notes an important connection between science and religion--the empirical validity of certain "experiments" that lead to a certain knowledge of the human being. Ken Wilber discusses this in detail, particularly in The Marriage of Soul and Sense: Integrating Science and Religion. The principle is that the scientific method is not just applicable to physical science, or even psychological science. It is applicable to spiritual matters, in that humans have developed empirically verifiable methods (not unlike the methods necessary to deduce that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen) over time to discover or realize the true nature of the human being.

The office and the servant

After reading Ram Dass' exuberant set of lectures, The Only Dance There Is, I decided to check out his guide to meditation, Journey of Awakening, before jumping into his classic Be Here Now. Within the first few pages, I was struck by the following passage:

We may ask how we could survive without our ego. Don't worry--it doesn't disappear. We can learn to venture beyond it, though. The ego is there, as our servant. Our room is there. We can always go in and use it like an office when we need to be efficient. But the door can be left open so that we can always walk out.

The ego is something that I (as an ego) think about a lot, and there are many different ways to describe it and interpret it. But this one in particular really illuminated something for me--the possibility of developing to a point where I could use my rationally reflecting, problem-solving, chattering ego, to step into the office to do some work, when I wanted to, and to leave it aside when I didn't want to be chattering away in my own head. It reminds me of what you sometimes hear Zen masters say: when you are eating, eat, when you are walking, walk. When I first encountered this image, I thought it impossible. How I could just stop thinking? But the point seems to be not that I stop thinking, but that I can use this particular kind of thinking as a tool or servant, rather than as my given way of experiencing the world.

I practice this now in different situations. Today while riding the subway, I told my ego-thinking that we could resume taking care of the issues that were pressing at my head when we got to work, but for now, we are meditating and those thoughts are going to pass just as the stations are through the windows of the train. It was fascinating watching myself try to keep restarting different trains of thought, only to be shuffled along. I enjoy this practice very much, so perhaps I will be able to step aside from the "office" with greater ease as the practice deepens.

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.

Imagine you are a tree

Imagine you are a tree. You have been growing steadily from seed through sapling through mature tree, and all this time you have been under the impression that you are moving. You are moving upwards towards the sky, then outwards with your branches. But at one point you are up and out enough to look down at the base of your trunk and see the roots firmly planted in the earth. You are confused—haven’t I been moving? You mean, I’m stuck here? And then you turn around and look at all the other plants around you, stuck in the ground, immobile. This is a turning point.

Alan Watts: “By the same law of reversed effort, we discover the ‘infinite’ and the ‘absolute,’ not by straining to escape from the finite and relative world, but by the complete acceptance of its limitations.” (Wisdom of Insecurity, p. 27)

At the realization that you are immobile, you have a choice—to accept it or not. You can’t change it. Sorry. You just can’t. So you are either going to identify then with the highest twig on the tree and say “Well, I’ll just keep going higher and higher, and no one’s going to tell me otherwise.” Or you can keep moving up and out, while still accepting that you’re not actually going anywhere. This is a parallel to the development of the human ego, if we are to accept the convention of the ego. The ego wants to uproot itself and walk. It wants to be infinite, unlimited. But it cannot be. It just can’t. It is simply part of a much larger organism, that is firmly planted in the earth. The ego's limitations are intrinsic to its existence. But there is more to the human organism than the ego.

The rest of the tree is like the unconscious—both ontogenetically and phylogenetically (see Ken Wilber's Up From Eden)—and the attitude towards this trunk of the tree can become one of love, because it is me. I am simply an outgrowth of it—my ego is simply the tip of one tiny twig among billions. And to think that I have the degree of control over my/the life that I am used to thinking I have, is to believe that the twig is controlling the tree.

The ego is not infinite and boundless. It is inherently concerned with itself, because it does not want to die (Some would point to the fear of death as an impetus for the ego's creation in the first place--an entity that need not die because it can survive the body, in memory, artistic output, etc.). The ego can only do so much, but it certainly cannot, no matter how hard it tries, lift itself out of the ground.

It is significant that the moment I mentioned above is a turning point. Before this point, it is necessary for the twig to separate from the branch and follow its own path determinedly, believing that it is much more important and self-directed than it actually is.

And the really hard part for me is looking at another person and overriding the usual sensation that they are a separate person (as a twig may interpret looking at another twig a few feet away) with the remembrance ("Do this in remembrance of Me") that the other person and myself are both outgrowths of the same tree.

The body and the present moment

I am constantly seeking ways to cultivate the ability of living in the present. In one sense this is paradoxical, as we are always in the present moment; but we are probably familiar with the difficulty of this way of living, and how it seems to elude one’s efforts to live in this way. I have received helpful instruction from different writers—Alan Watts (particularly his Wisdom of Insecurity), Ram Dass, Maurice Nicoll, and others. Philosopher Ken Wilber, in his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977), provides some insight into this issue. Before giving an example, I will quickly introduce his fundamental distinction between two "modes of knowing." As he points out, many philosophical, psychological, and religious traditions have noted these two distinct approaches to the world, but here is a succinct description from the psychologist William James: 

There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Although such things as the white paper before your eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically. 

For example, the only way to "know" truly what an apple tastes like, is to taste it. No amount of words (symbols) no matter how skillfully or poetically combined, can truly convey the experience of tasting an apple. Both modes of knowing, of course, have their purpose, but it is important to note that the rational mind is fundamentally occupied with symbolic/representative knowledge. And it is the opinion of many religious traditions that there is a significant difference between "knowing" the Ultimate Reality through symbols, and knowing it nondually, immediately, and without representation.

So, in describing the present moment, Wilber discusses what he terms organismic awareness, which is opposed to the awareness of the conscious ego, which uses the symbolic/linear mode of knowing:

Organismic awareness is what we--on the Ego Level--ordinarily, but clumsily, refer to as seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing. But in its very purest form, this "sensual awareness" is non-symbolic, non-conceptual, momentary consciousness. Organismic awareness is awareness of the Present only--you can't taste the past, smell the past, see the past, touch the past, or hear the past [italics mine]. Neither can you taste, smell, see, touch, or hear the future. In other words, organismic consciousness is properly timeless, and being timeless, it is necessarily spaceless. Just as organismic awareness knows no past or future, it knows no inside or outside, no self or other.

In other words, the body as conscious organism only lives in the present. Though I won't discuss it here, there are many examples of the body holding "traces" of the past, which can be uncovered in certain psychosomatic therapies like Rolfing. But the body still retains these traces in the present. It becomes clear that the mind is largely responsible for the sensation most of us feel in our daily life, of not being fully present HERE, but occupied with issues of the past and the future. And it is that same mind that can be trained to rest more completely in the present.

Digestion

I have been practicing lately treating my mind as I do my digestive system. My conscious mind, my ego, is involved in the process of eating up to the point of swallowing the food—I plan when to eat, choose what to eat (and this choice is partly influenced by previous communication with the rest of my body). But once I have swallowed, my conscious mind can do very little. My body takes over. And this is for good reason—my conscious mind is not designed to accomplish the intricacies of the digestive system (okay villi, now do your thing, now you secrete some gastric juices, move this here, now here, etc.). In a similar way I am beginning to treat the flow of experience in the same way—as a constant process of, mainly unconscious, digestion. And this alleviates, for me, so much worry. Am I doing the right thing? Am I processing this experience properly? Am I reflecting enough? Just as my digestive system knows much more what to do with my food than my ego does, my Self, my bodymind, knows much more what to do with any experience that passes through me. It knows how to extract what is good and to eliminate what is bad. And different experiences take different time to digest. But again, my body knows what to do as far as digestion goes. And when it is unhappy about something, it communicates that to me through pain, indigestion, nausea, etc. Emotional states, in particular, I have begun to treat this way. Emotions can move through me, as everything must move through me. And even in the darkest emotional states, my Self is extracting what it needs to extract and eliminate what it needs to eliminate.

Reading provides a clear illustration of this process. There was a point right after I graduated college when I read much of Ken Wilber’s oeuvre, and I noticed after devouring several of his dense books that I would feel different in the weeks following. I would reflect on them consciously, but not to a great extent. I would still think about a lot of other things. But I noticed that as my conscious mind read and understood the long strings of words, they would vanish into my larger Mind, and go to work on tensions and issues that I was often unaware of, and largely apart from my control. In other words, my conscious mind would do the work of selecting the book, focusing attention on the text and trying to understand it, similar to the process of arriving at a meal, but after swallowing word after word, the substance of the text would be digested by processes largely untouched by my conscious mind. And any conscious reflection on the texts would come naturally—I never felt a need to remind myself or force myself to reflect. It would be as natural as the passage of food through my gut.

Conscious, rational reflection has its place, and reading Robert C. Solomon's The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion has offered much insight into the relation between reflection and the emotions. And I am treating rational reflection more and more as a tool, instead of my master or the best way to handle a situation. Reflection has its limitations just like anything else.

In meditation lately this has been my goal--to place my conscious, rational mode of thinking more in the position of a servant, rather than the master (terminology introduced to me through reading Ram Dass). My rational mind is usually on autopilot, and even when I don't feel like reflecting, it just keeps finding more and more things to think about. But, as it says in the Book of Ecclesiastes says, there is a time to speak and a time to be silent, and this applies particularly to my rational mind. The more I direct my meditation towards this end, the better I am able to use rational reflection as a tool.

Ideas as tools

“…for everyone thinks, and only can think, from the ideas he possesses.”

--Maurice Nicoll, The Mark

Because thinking is both a conscious and unconscious act, the ideas that we think with can be both conscious and unconscious. Unconscious ideas, or beliefs, are usually called assumptions.

Ideas can be likened to tools. Different tools are suited to different tasks. If we are faced with a river to cross, would we rather have a raft or a hammer? Thus the importance of introducing new concepts, to be grasped and used consciously. The process of acquiring conscious concepts.

But we can also become aware of, and remove if necessary, unconscious assumptions. For, faced with the river, we may need to leave behind the ropes that helped us climb the mountain a few miles back as much as we need to build a raft. Also, different ideas are useful for different situations, and we are always faced with new situations (though, perhaps Nietzsche would say that we are faced with similar patterns of situations, in his idea of eternal return). This is why ideas cannot always be clung to, especially as life constantly carries us into new situations.

Schumacher and assumptions

In Guide for the Perplexed, Schumacher quotes scientist G.N.M. Tyrrell's book Grades of Significance (1931):

A book, we will suppose, has fallen into the hands of intelligent beings who know nothing of what writing and printing mean, but they are accustomed to dealing with the external relationships of things. They try to find out the "laws" of the book, which for them mean the principles governing the order in which the letters are arranged. . . . They will think they have discovered the laws of the book when they have formulated certain rules governing the external relationships of the letters. That each word and each sentence expresses a meaning will never dawn [what interesting choice of word, dawn--as in the light of recognition] on them because their background of thought is made up of concepts which deal only with external relationships, and explanation to them means solving the puzzle of these external relationships. . . . Their methods will never reach the grade [of significance] which contains the idea of meanings.

(What interesting choice of word, "dawn"--as in the light of recognition)

Schumacher's comments:

The intelligent beings of Tyrrell’s allegory lacked adaequatio with regard to the book because they based themselves on the assumption that the ‘external relationships of the letters’ were all that mattered. They were what we should call scientific materialists, whose faith is that objective reality [i.e. anything that can be an object of knowledge] is limited to that which can be actually observed and who are ruled by a methodical aversion to the recognition of higher levels or grades of significance.

Important here, the role of assumption. Assumptions create walls or boundaries, or foundations, which can be useful in apprehending knowledge, but these boundaries can also clog, as it were, certain organs or parts of organs, limiting the capability of reception. It as if one put in earplugs and tried to listen to music—the experience, the reception, would be diminished. Certain assumptions can accomplish this limitation, such as the one Schumacher discusses here, the assumption of the scientific materialists.

I have experienced this emotionally. First recognizing and then removing certain assumptions about experience has altered my ability to receive certain experiences, and often the power and force with which the experience can enter me. And I have changed destructive emotional habits by recognizing and altering their underlying assumptions. Assumptions, beliefs, presuppositions can also be likened to the contraction or relaxation of muscles—whether it is the esophagus or the anus, the state of muscle tension can determine the receptivity of the cavity, and the receptivity to experience. Of course, the matter is rarely as simple as this "tube" analogy--our beliefs and assumptions contort and structure our subjective worlds in quite complex ways. But an example: if I assume that I am somehow intellectually superior than someone speaking to me, an assumption I have made many times in my life, than I am not going to receive what they have to say nearly as openly or fully as if I assumed that we are on the same level.

But still, life often forces itself down our throats. We each have a degree of control over what we “eat,” but we will all face things that we don’t want to swallow, but are forced down. In these situations, we may try to spit it back up (denial). But we can open our throats (often through removing certain assumptions), and let the experience run its course. This is an inward process, in reaction to an outward experience.

In hardly be taken as an unreasonable act of faith when people accept the testimony of prophets, sages, and saints who, in different languages but with virtually one voice, declare that the book of this world is not merely a colored shape but an expression of meaning; that there are Levels of Being above that of humanity; and that man can reach these higher levels provided he allows his reason to be guided by faith.

P.D. Ouspensky, in his Tertium Organum, gives an example of a candle and a coin. To a two-dimensional creature (and I recognize the possibility that as a human, there are higher dimensions than the one I routinely move around in), a candle and a coin both appear as circles. The creature cannot see the three-dimensional extension, cannot see the different appearance of these two objects, and further cannot deduce the meaning of these two objects, as it is defined by humans.

The physical senses are designed to accomplish certain tasks, but there are aspects of reality that they are not designed to apprehend. In a similar way, ordinary waking consciousness is designed to accomplish certain tasks, but not others. This is a fundamental law—the more refined and sophisticated an instrument is, the more narrow its focus.

The physical senses are designed to distinguish—that is, to recognize differences, to classify. The evolutionary advantage is obvious. In order to move around successfully in the world, to survive, we need to be able to distinguish between helps and harms, safeties and dangers. Science as we know it today is a technique born from the observations provided by the senses and takes as its fundamental assumption the distinctness of everything in the physical world. It deals, essentially, with surfaces. And on the surface, everything appears distinct. And nothing possesses meaning at this level, because meaning accompanies the recognition of relationship, and the inner dimensions of the world. Meaning is provided by the interior of the organism, from the most basic level of recognizing a plant as food, to seeing the face of God. For example, just because we have ears does not mean we can hear music. Our ears are designed to hear, or distinguish, sound. But music is composed of a complex web of relationships, and our ears alone cannot hear relationships. Most of us possess some capacity to hear music when we are born, and this capacity can be cultivated and developed.