Eyes and ears

"For a long time we have been accustomed to the compartmentalization of religion and science as if they were two quite different and basically unrelated ways of seeing the world. I do not believe that this state of doublethink can last. It must eventually be replaced by a view of the world which is neither religious nor scientific but simply our view of the world. More exactly, it must become a view of the world in which the reports of science and religion are as concordant as those of the eyes and the ears."

---Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology (1962)

I am a musician, so I naturally like metaphors that refer to sound (concordance, harmonization, etc.) I think think about this quote frequently, and not just with regard to connecting science and religion (it seems that today we are much closer to the concordance Watts speaks of than in 1962). When I encounter differing worldviews and opinions, whether on the cultural scale or the personal scale, I return to this image of the world as one body; and just as our ears and eyes do not fight with each other over who is right, but work together to present a richer, more complex manifestation of the world, this is my goal wherever I can spot discordancy. At least I'd like it to be.

I also take this attitude towards my psyche. I assume that my psyche is not nearly as harmonious as the rest of my body (even though the psyche is not separate from the body), that there are many conflicting I's running around, and so I seek the same concordance the rest of my body possesses--each part knowing its function and status. A lot of G.I. Gurdjieff's work speaks to this process of psychological harmonization.

Part of this process is understanding the purpose of many parts of my psyche, particularly the ones that I perceive as negative. I am still perplexed by a lot of what goes on in my mind, and I think part of this confusion is an ignorance of purpose. Robert Solomon's book on emotions, The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion, has been an enormous aid to sorting out the purpose of my emotions, and has helped me uncover and distinguish certain emotions that were buried beneath other emotions, which are especially troubling to me. I've recently become aware of how much envy I have been holding onto for years, mainly unaware. I remember a similar breakthrough with shame about a year ago.

Yes, discovering the purpose of something in my psyche helps enormously in harmonization (or integration, or Jung's term "individuation").