Thursday, April 23, 2009
ON SPIRITUALITY
.........................by Stanley
....For most people ‘spirituality’ simply means the opposite of ‘materialism’. If asked for further clarification they might say that there is more to life than money and possessions; pressed further, they might say it means making room for realities that we don’t understand. A sense of spirituality, they might say, does not allow that kind of scientistic dogmatism that wants to tie everything down, leaving no room for mystery. Spirituality is the sense that there is something invisible beyond our mundane, everyday existence that is, at the same time, vital to sustaining it.
....Such a view has a very long history going back to Greek thought that was later used to formulate Christian theology. This view divides the whole of reality into just two substances or essences. One is ‘mind’ and the other is ‘matter’. Spirituality is just another word for the ‘mind’ category. Basically it means that you are a soul in a body, a ‘the ghost in the machine’.
....Perhaps the value for us moderns is that ‘spirituality’ provides a shelter for all we don’t know, for our sense of the great wonder and mystery of life. And perhaps we need that room where we can house our vast sense of ignorance. That very sense is one of our most important intellectual qualities. Without it a person is a pig-headed and ignorant know-all. With that sense of the unknown one can be truly humble and blessed with curiosity. So maybe the value of the notion of spirituality is that it provides a safe-haven for this most wonderful gift: the knowledge of our ignorance and room for the many-sidedness of life.
....Of course, the question arises: safe-haven from what? I have already suggested: safe from the rising tide of one-eyed scientists, technocrats and know-alls; and for us caregivers of the soul it is a bastion against the behavioural sciences and drug-happy psychiatrists. A sense of the spiritual saves us from falling into the crass materialism that seems to be enveloping our modern helping professions.
....But the idea of spirituality as a defence mechanism undermines the very notion itself. It sets us up as against so-called ‘materialism’; at the same time validating the existence of what we argue against – as all defence mechanisms do.
....The truth is that we are shit-scared of science. It seems to want to turn everything into mechanisms, locking us into a mechanical universe where there is no room for imagination and freedom. We are afraid of materialism. What this fails to understand is that, underpinning science is always a philosophy; and philosophy can always be talked about and questioned deeply. I don’t mean questioning the facts that science has discovered, like physics or evolution, but what at a deeper level they mean or further imply. As Daniel Dennett says, ‘There is no such thing as philosophy-free science’.
....We shouldn’t really run scared. How about being brave enough to consider the universe as one single substance. What would this mean? It would mean that we don’t need the distinction between spirit and matter, between the supernatural and the natural, between science and soul. It would mean that we don’t need a special separate realm to house the unknown. It would mean that the known universe and all that we don’t know is one single continuum.
....Even neuroscience is leaving behind the idea that the body is a machine. Randolph Nesse says that our genetic knowledge now reveals ‘that our central metaphor for the body is fundamentally flawed. The body is not a machine. It is something very different, a soma shaped by (natural) selection with systems unlike anything an engineer would design. Replacing the machine metaphor with a more biological view of the body will change biology in fundamental ways.’ But, he goes on, although the body is indescribably complex this ‘implies nothing supernatural. Bodies and their origins are purely physical.’
....Without actually saying it, all he means by ‘purely physical’ is simply that we do not need another separate supernatural realm to account for it. This is being brave enough to think of the universe as a single continuum.
....In this light ‘physical’ doesn’t have any meaning; any more than ‘spiritual’. They are really superfluous and misleading labels, well past their use by date.
....As an aside, in ancestral times, as in primitive societies today, there was no distinction between spirituality and science. Their science was eminently practical.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
INSTINCT AND THE FELT-SENSE
...................by Stanley
Let’s start with a simple observation. There is a difference between our ‘head-take’ on a situation and our ‘body-take’ of the same situation. Put very simply, our head-take is how we ‘think’ about a problem; our body-take is how we ‘feel’ about it. Quite often the two are distinctly different. We often say colloquially, ‘my head tells me one thing and my heart something else.
....I am going to use the term ‘head-sense’ to stand for our, analytical, cognitive, thinking mind; and ‘body-sense’ for what we have come to know as the ‘felt-sense’. ‘Body-sense’ and ‘felt-sense’ I shall use interchangeably – they are the same thing.
....Lets clear the deck first. When I speak of the body-sense I do not mean ‘the unconscious’. You can have a direct and immediate awareness of your body-sense; this is not what is classically meant by ‘the unconscious’. Psychoanalysis has its place, but not here. I want to link two other disciplines: the psychology of focusing and evolutionary psychology. I want to examine how the felt-sense may have evolved during our long history.
....In therapy we focus on the felt-sense to discover our feelings on any issue. But we have to clearly distinguish between the felt-sense and the practice of focusing on it.
....Focusing is a deliberate, intentional action. The felt-sense is not intentional, but rather the body’s instinctive, immediate perception of any situation. It works whether you like or not. This body-sense must have been an adaptation that was slowly developed over millions of years and it is always active.
....Here’s something that’s fairly obvious. Our body-sense is something we are born with. Being hungry or fearful or sexy are bodily reactions that are instinctual. We don’t have to learn how to feel these things; we are all born with the capacity to react in these ways. As we say, they are hard-wired. Like the felt-sense they are universal, meaning they come with our genetic makeup, our human nature.
....Our head-sense seems to be different. We imbibe the logic of our culture, our language, our ways of thinking and our family dynamics. These are not universals. Different family – different way of thinking; different culture – different head sense.
....Our animal nature evolved according to Darwinian natural selection. 98% of our genes are the same as those of the chimpanzees. Six million years ago there was a speciation divergence that led to homo sapiens. What we call our body-sense is a gradual adaptation developed since then. During most of this time our survival depended upon skills that were non-linguistic, our mammalian body senses that were non-analytical non-cognitive, but highly effective.
....For any organism awareness of what is going on in the environment is vital for survival. I am suggesting that the felt-sense is our basic animal awareness of the environment primarily geared for survival in the broadest sense. It was developed over those millions of years of our early history and is now hard-wired and an inherited characteristic.
....An organism is only connected to life in ways that are useful to it – that is, ways that promote survival. Purely as an organism it is not important for us to know that earth revolves around the sun or to perceive the molecular structure of a meat pie before we eat it. The smell of a pie, yes. We are biologically hardwired to be put off by the smell of bad meat. That has always been important to avoid.
....So there is a difference between the kind of environment we were originally adapted to and the one we live in today. But for the felt-sense there isn’t as hard and fast a difference between these two worlds as one would expect. This is a curious and puzzling fact and it leads us to ask: has the felt-sense also adaptively evolved?
....What we call our ‘environment’ is what is useful for us to perceive. I am suggesting that what we call our ‘felt-sense’ is a wholesale but biased perception of our environment that reacts to it instinctively. This sense helps us in the close encounters of the everyday kind as it did for our pre-human ancestors. But, as an organism, our relationship to the environment didn’t stop with the beginning of civilization; and maybe at the organismic level there have been evolutionary changes in what we call the felt-sense. For example, we know that the body-sense is very sensitive to being understood. We know very precisely that the felt-sense will reject any description of how it feels that doesn’t fit. You say, ‘I am angry… No, that’s not it. (consulting your body-sense) I am irritated. That’s it. I am IRRITATED !’ We are the only animals on the planet that have developed such a high degree of organismic sophistication; yet this body-sense is still anchored in its original holistic pre-cognitive nature.
....This would clearly suggest that the body-sense has evolved enough to grasped language as part of its environment. In other words at organismic level of functioning we also now have a very refined feeling for language. Even more remarkably, we can also have a feeling for science, a feeling that is different from the scientific mode of conceptual thinking. A scientist reports that the solution to a chemical problem about carbon rings came to him in a dream or the answer to a mathematical equation came to her in the toilet. But it seems that the body-sense still doesn’t think analytically – it retains its original ability for holistic survival sensitivity and for flashes of insight that are instantaneous.
....We know that the bodily felt-sense can somehow synthesise a new idea in an abstract field. Any scientist will tell you that discovery sometimes comes in a flash that doesn’t follow a rational step by step process - that comes afterwards as a confirmation. The body-sense can solve logical or theoretical puzzle by leaping, as we say, outside the square. Just how it does this is difficult to say. Of course, such a solution could not arise without the head-sense’s grasp of the theoretical problem in the first place. But what is clear is that the organism, as a bodily sense, contributed something vital. On the question of this cooperation between different parts of the self, evolutionary biologist Nicholas Humphries says:
What makes the parts of an oak tree belong together – the branches, roots, leaves, acorns ? They share a common interest in the tree’s survival… Then, here’s the question: What makes the parts of a person belong together – if and when they do? The clear answer has to be that the parts will and do belong together just in so far as they are involved in the common project of creating that person’s life… they are engaged in one and the same enterprise: the enterprise of steering me – body and soul – through the physical and social world.
....There is a good evolutionary reason why women generally are more in touch with the body-sense. Multitasking has always been necessary for the woman because of the nature of her tasks. The ability to multitask using intuition and instant response to novel situations is an attribute of the body-sense. For our ancestors, men had to be concentrated on specific tasks like hunting, building and defense. As a consequence, men may have adapted by developing a larger and more dominant head-sense that can more effectively concentrate.
....It might even be profitable to conceive that the head-sense is built on top of the body-sense as a continuous evolutionary adaptation. Yet still, we actually experience the body-sense as quite a different mode of being.
....In therapy we discover that our felt-sense shows us the immediate step in any situation – always in a life enhancing direction. Not a logical line forward – but the next step necessary. When we stop and focus on a problem we consult this body-sense; but we are not given an awareness of simply what is going on. The body-sense does not just give us raw data and leave it to our everyday head-sense to work out how to use it. The ‘take’ of the body-sense is not unselective. Precisely the opposite, it is slanted; it is always relevant to survival. In any situation not any move we could make will be appropriate. The body-sense always produces the next step – and that step is geared toward the broadest goal of survival: well-being, furtherance and aliveness – not only for oneself, but for those upon whom we depend. Indeed, this simple and pronounced bias is often missing in our head-sense of a situation. The head-sense can be so enmeshed in ridiculous cultural ideas that it often fails to cut through the crap. Much of the head-stuff we harbour are culturally transmitted viruses (memes) , such as toxic religions that are quite inimical to survival; and every culture is swimming in lesser adverse absurdities that compete to fill our heads.
....The felt-sense is there whether we turn our attention towards it or not. It is there because it is an inherited, instinctual part of our nature. The deliberate action of turning towards it is what we call ‘focusing’. This psychological ability is not instinctual, but acquired; and, as we know, individually acquired characteristics are not inherited. We don’t come equipped with a built-in ability to psychologically focus.
....Our environment is no longer merely the natural world as it was. We have developed an external environment that is structured and symbolic and our head-sense is part of that world. But make no mistake, this created world has been a crucial, perhaps the crucial factor, in our survival as a species. But at the same time, it can put us out of sync with our instinctive nature which was adapted to a quite different natural environment. Our instinctive survival nature – our felt-sense – has its own ‘take’ on this new environment and it is not so hemmed in by arbitrary and fixed rules and injunctions and thus it is more simple, creative and original.
....There are negative cultural factors that can fill our head-sense and divorce us from the bodies. The overblown work ethic and achievement fantasies of modern society are not helpful; neither is our education system that’s geared to promoting academic concentration that tends to sever our vital connections. There are also family cultures that are openly hostile to any manifestation of intuition and imagination and that fail to nurture the body-sense.
....We know that some people are well tuned-in to their body-sense and can make immediate survival decisions. Even such fortunate people have areas where their natural good sense, their felt-sense, has no input into their lives. They have to be shown how to focus on these areas so that their body-sense can help them take the necessary steps to go forward in living.
....We should not be dismayed by the idea that some of our basic psychological qualities are biologically inherited. Evolutionary psychology has done a great deal of interesting and valuable work that makes a lot of sense, extending enormously our idea of ‘history’ and what makes us tick. I’ve tried to show here how the relatively new conceptions of psychological focusing might be more understandable when looked at from the evolutionary perspective.
[1] Humphrey, Nicholas. One Self: a meditation on the unity of consciousness. Social Research,
67, no. 4, 32-39, 2000.
[1] Dawkins, Richard. Viruses of the Mind. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html
Let’s start with a simple observation. There is a difference between our ‘head-take’ on a situation and our ‘body-take’ of the same situation. Put very simply, our head-take is how we ‘think’ about a problem; our body-take is how we ‘feel’ about it. Quite often the two are distinctly different. We often say colloquially, ‘my head tells me one thing and my heart something else.
....I am going to use the term ‘head-sense’ to stand for our, analytical, cognitive, thinking mind; and ‘body-sense’ for what we have come to know as the ‘felt-sense’. ‘Body-sense’ and ‘felt-sense’ I shall use interchangeably – they are the same thing.
....Lets clear the deck first. When I speak of the body-sense I do not mean ‘the unconscious’. You can have a direct and immediate awareness of your body-sense; this is not what is classically meant by ‘the unconscious’. Psychoanalysis has its place, but not here. I want to link two other disciplines: the psychology of focusing and evolutionary psychology. I want to examine how the felt-sense may have evolved during our long history.
....In therapy we focus on the felt-sense to discover our feelings on any issue. But we have to clearly distinguish between the felt-sense and the practice of focusing on it.
....Focusing is a deliberate, intentional action. The felt-sense is not intentional, but rather the body’s instinctive, immediate perception of any situation. It works whether you like or not. This body-sense must have been an adaptation that was slowly developed over millions of years and it is always active.
....Here’s something that’s fairly obvious. Our body-sense is something we are born with. Being hungry or fearful or sexy are bodily reactions that are instinctual. We don’t have to learn how to feel these things; we are all born with the capacity to react in these ways. As we say, they are hard-wired. Like the felt-sense they are universal, meaning they come with our genetic makeup, our human nature.
....Our head-sense seems to be different. We imbibe the logic of our culture, our language, our ways of thinking and our family dynamics. These are not universals. Different family – different way of thinking; different culture – different head sense.
....Our animal nature evolved according to Darwinian natural selection. 98% of our genes are the same as those of the chimpanzees. Six million years ago there was a speciation divergence that led to homo sapiens. What we call our body-sense is a gradual adaptation developed since then. During most of this time our survival depended upon skills that were non-linguistic, our mammalian body senses that were non-analytical non-cognitive, but highly effective.
....For any organism awareness of what is going on in the environment is vital for survival. I am suggesting that the felt-sense is our basic animal awareness of the environment primarily geared for survival in the broadest sense. It was developed over those millions of years of our early history and is now hard-wired and an inherited characteristic.
....An organism is only connected to life in ways that are useful to it – that is, ways that promote survival. Purely as an organism it is not important for us to know that earth revolves around the sun or to perceive the molecular structure of a meat pie before we eat it. The smell of a pie, yes. We are biologically hardwired to be put off by the smell of bad meat. That has always been important to avoid.
....So there is a difference between the kind of environment we were originally adapted to and the one we live in today. But for the felt-sense there isn’t as hard and fast a difference between these two worlds as one would expect. This is a curious and puzzling fact and it leads us to ask: has the felt-sense also adaptively evolved?
....What we call our ‘environment’ is what is useful for us to perceive. I am suggesting that what we call our ‘felt-sense’ is a wholesale but biased perception of our environment that reacts to it instinctively. This sense helps us in the close encounters of the everyday kind as it did for our pre-human ancestors. But, as an organism, our relationship to the environment didn’t stop with the beginning of civilization; and maybe at the organismic level there have been evolutionary changes in what we call the felt-sense. For example, we know that the body-sense is very sensitive to being understood. We know very precisely that the felt-sense will reject any description of how it feels that doesn’t fit. You say, ‘I am angry… No, that’s not it. (consulting your body-sense) I am irritated. That’s it. I am IRRITATED !’ We are the only animals on the planet that have developed such a high degree of organismic sophistication; yet this body-sense is still anchored in its original holistic pre-cognitive nature.
....This would clearly suggest that the body-sense has evolved enough to grasped language as part of its environment. In other words at organismic level of functioning we also now have a very refined feeling for language. Even more remarkably, we can also have a feeling for science, a feeling that is different from the scientific mode of conceptual thinking. A scientist reports that the solution to a chemical problem about carbon rings came to him in a dream or the answer to a mathematical equation came to her in the toilet. But it seems that the body-sense still doesn’t think analytically – it retains its original ability for holistic survival sensitivity and for flashes of insight that are instantaneous.
....We know that the bodily felt-sense can somehow synthesise a new idea in an abstract field. Any scientist will tell you that discovery sometimes comes in a flash that doesn’t follow a rational step by step process - that comes afterwards as a confirmation. The body-sense can solve logical or theoretical puzzle by leaping, as we say, outside the square. Just how it does this is difficult to say. Of course, such a solution could not arise without the head-sense’s grasp of the theoretical problem in the first place. But what is clear is that the organism, as a bodily sense, contributed something vital. On the question of this cooperation between different parts of the self, evolutionary biologist Nicholas Humphries says:
What makes the parts of an oak tree belong together – the branches, roots, leaves, acorns ? They share a common interest in the tree’s survival… Then, here’s the question: What makes the parts of a person belong together – if and when they do? The clear answer has to be that the parts will and do belong together just in so far as they are involved in the common project of creating that person’s life… they are engaged in one and the same enterprise: the enterprise of steering me – body and soul – through the physical and social world.
....There is a good evolutionary reason why women generally are more in touch with the body-sense. Multitasking has always been necessary for the woman because of the nature of her tasks. The ability to multitask using intuition and instant response to novel situations is an attribute of the body-sense. For our ancestors, men had to be concentrated on specific tasks like hunting, building and defense. As a consequence, men may have adapted by developing a larger and more dominant head-sense that can more effectively concentrate.
....It might even be profitable to conceive that the head-sense is built on top of the body-sense as a continuous evolutionary adaptation. Yet still, we actually experience the body-sense as quite a different mode of being.
....In therapy we discover that our felt-sense shows us the immediate step in any situation – always in a life enhancing direction. Not a logical line forward – but the next step necessary. When we stop and focus on a problem we consult this body-sense; but we are not given an awareness of simply what is going on. The body-sense does not just give us raw data and leave it to our everyday head-sense to work out how to use it. The ‘take’ of the body-sense is not unselective. Precisely the opposite, it is slanted; it is always relevant to survival. In any situation not any move we could make will be appropriate. The body-sense always produces the next step – and that step is geared toward the broadest goal of survival: well-being, furtherance and aliveness – not only for oneself, but for those upon whom we depend. Indeed, this simple and pronounced bias is often missing in our head-sense of a situation. The head-sense can be so enmeshed in ridiculous cultural ideas that it often fails to cut through the crap. Much of the head-stuff we harbour are culturally transmitted viruses (memes) , such as toxic religions that are quite inimical to survival; and every culture is swimming in lesser adverse absurdities that compete to fill our heads.
....The felt-sense is there whether we turn our attention towards it or not. It is there because it is an inherited, instinctual part of our nature. The deliberate action of turning towards it is what we call ‘focusing’. This psychological ability is not instinctual, but acquired; and, as we know, individually acquired characteristics are not inherited. We don’t come equipped with a built-in ability to psychologically focus.
....Our environment is no longer merely the natural world as it was. We have developed an external environment that is structured and symbolic and our head-sense is part of that world. But make no mistake, this created world has been a crucial, perhaps the crucial factor, in our survival as a species. But at the same time, it can put us out of sync with our instinctive nature which was adapted to a quite different natural environment. Our instinctive survival nature – our felt-sense – has its own ‘take’ on this new environment and it is not so hemmed in by arbitrary and fixed rules and injunctions and thus it is more simple, creative and original.
....There are negative cultural factors that can fill our head-sense and divorce us from the bodies. The overblown work ethic and achievement fantasies of modern society are not helpful; neither is our education system that’s geared to promoting academic concentration that tends to sever our vital connections. There are also family cultures that are openly hostile to any manifestation of intuition and imagination and that fail to nurture the body-sense.
....We know that some people are well tuned-in to their body-sense and can make immediate survival decisions. Even such fortunate people have areas where their natural good sense, their felt-sense, has no input into their lives. They have to be shown how to focus on these areas so that their body-sense can help them take the necessary steps to go forward in living.
....We should not be dismayed by the idea that some of our basic psychological qualities are biologically inherited. Evolutionary psychology has done a great deal of interesting and valuable work that makes a lot of sense, extending enormously our idea of ‘history’ and what makes us tick. I’ve tried to show here how the relatively new conceptions of psychological focusing might be more understandable when looked at from the evolutionary perspective.
[1] Humphrey, Nicholas. One Self: a meditation on the unity of consciousness. Social Research,
67, no. 4, 32-39, 2000.
[1] Dawkins, Richard. Viruses of the Mind. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html
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