Integral Options Cafe offers a place to discuss all things related to a Buddhist, integral worldview. While theory is important (Buddhism, Ken Wilber, Spiral Dynamics, psychology, and Integral Theory), so is politics, art & poetry, human values, popular culture, and humor. I invite comments, different points of view, and anything that can add to a civil discussion of living in an integral world.
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Labels: books, change, reviews
I think it is important that people in the spiritual and personal growth communities know about this issue - I have never liked Bill Harris and I think his holosync stuff is a load of crap. Anyone associated with The Secret is suspect at best.
The Secret Fails Harris, Threatens to Sue McDuffee
written by Eric Schiller on December 28th, 2009
On December 22, Duff McDuffee received an email message from Bill Harris, the founder of “Holo-sync” and the “CenterPointe Institute” claiming that he had been served with a cease and desist letter regarding the post titled “The Hollow Sink of Push-Button Enlightenment.” Harris claims that he intends to file suit against Duff for “defamation” in federal court. As of today (December, 28), Duff has received no such cease and desist letter. In response to Harris’ email, Duff revised the post to insure no defamatory statements exist within it, and that it is clear that everything contained therein is his opinion. This effort itself was mainly done to in good-will, as we do not actually believe that anything in the original post was defamatory simply because it was clear that the post itself was an opinion piece on a variety of intangible and unprovable subjects.
First off, I want to make a few things clear about what we do here on Beyond Growth. We are not a news organization, and as such do not claim to offer any sort of “objective” reporting therefore all of our articles are critical, subjective, and opinion based. While many of our contributors share similar views, each of the opinions expressed in our articles solely represent their authors and no one else. Thus far, we have found this to be quite implicit that these are our opinions, nothing more. We generally use forms of literary and critical analysis, of which do not imply nor suggest we are making statements of objective fact.
With that in mind, I will take this opportunity to express my supreme disappointment with Bill Harris’ behavior on this matter. Harris is a man who claims to be enlightened, and as such I would think the frivolous and childish threat of a “federal lawsuit” directed at small time blogger would be quite beneath him. Unfortunately it appears that this is not the case. He has made no effort to speak to us about this matter before jumping the gun and threatening a lawsuit. In his email message, Harris effectively threatens to ruin Duff’s life:
Perhaps you do not realize the severity of the consequences for the defamatory statements you have made and how a Federal lawsuit to enforce those rights would work. The costs of such a suit will be huge, both financially and also in terms of time and stress. Legal fees for such a lawsuit can be, at minimum, over $150,000, the time commitment will be extensive, and the stress will be enormous. It will change your life in a way I suspect you will not like.
What Bill Harris does not realize is that Duff McDuffee (and I for that matter) have zero monetary assets to speak of. Additionally, if Harris does actually bring suit against Duff, we will do everything in our power to make it as public as possible. This publicity would negate the whole point of a defamation lawsuit in the first place, the preservation of the “public image” that Harris’ seemingly holds so near and dear. Finally, Harris will have to prove in the court of law that he does not use manipulative marketing techniques and that his “holosync” program does exactly what he says it does. We are confident that Harris would not be able to prove either of these things in any manner enough to satisfy a federal judge.
Shouldn’t an arahat be able to handle a little criticism without threatening lawsuits? Threatening to sue Duff in order to maintain a positive public opinion seems to be nothing more than bullying via the courts, in a manner that is quite reminiscent of the legal behavior of the Church of Scientology:
In my mind this is not the way an enlightened being should be behaving. If anything this action by Bill Harris indicates that we are doing something very right on Beyond Growth. Expect more in the coming days.Critics state that the ultimate aim of Scientology lawsuits is to destroy church opponents by forcing them into bankruptcy or submission, using its resources to pursue frivolous lawsuits at considerable cost to defendants. In doing so, they draw particular attention to certain controversial statements made by the church’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Labels: Enlightenment, ethics, gurus, Spirituality
Nice article from David Disalvo at Brainspin.
Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About
Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife
Several great psychology and neuroscience studies were published in 2009. Below I’ve chosen 10 that I think are among the most noteworthy, not just because they’re interesting, but useful as well.
1. If you have to choose between buying something or spending the money on a memorable experience, go with the experience. According to a study conducted at San Francisco State University, the things you own can’t make you as happy as the things you do. One reason is adaptation: we adapt to all things material in our lives in a matter of weeks, no matter how infatuated we were with the coveted possession the day we got it. Another reason is that experience, unlike possession, generally involves other people, and fosters or strengthens relationships that are more edifying over time than owning something.
2. First impressions are all about value. A study in the journal Nature Neuroscience identified two areas of the brain that show significant activity during the coding of impression-relevant information: the amygdala, which previous research has linked to emotional learning about inanimate objects and social evaluations of trust; and the posterior cingulate cortex, which has been linked to economic decision-making and valuation of rewards. The implication is that we’re all hardcore value processors even before “Hello” comes out of our mouths. The subjective evaluation we make when meeting someone new includes–to put it bluntly–what’s in it for us.
3. The “money illusion”—the tendency to allow the nominal value of money (amount of currency) to interfere with the real value (value of goods the money can buy)—is all in your head. No, really, it’s in your head—in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to be exact. Here’s how it works: you get a 2% pay raise at the same time that the rate of inflation jumps to 4%. Nominally, you earn 2% more money, but really you’re 2% in the hole. An fMRI study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified reward circuitry in the brain that corresponds to the money illusion. You can’t change the wiring, but you can remember to check your willingness to accept nominal value. Think about what you can buy with your bucks, not just how many you have in your wallet.
4. Playing video games could be an unlikely cure for psychological trauma. Researchers at Oxford University hypothesized that playing Tetris after witnessing violence would sap some of the cognitive resources the brain would normally rely on to form memories. A well-structured study in the journal PLoS One confirmed the finding–Tetris acted like a ‘cognitive vaccine’ against traumatic memory. Memory research suggests that there’s about a 6-hour window immediately after witnessing trauma during which memory formation can be disrupted. The results of this study indicate that if you happen to have Tetris or a game like it handy during those six hours, it’s the cure for what ails you.
5. All of us spend time riding the moral self-regulation see saw. If you ever find yourself walking through the lighting section at a Home Depot and suddenly feel compelled to buy energy efficient light bulbs, stop and ask yourself if you’re compensating for something. For example, do you recycle? If not, maybe you’re buying those bulbs to offset a perceived moral deficit from throwing plastic water bottles in the trash can. A study published in the journal Psychological Science found that feelings of negative self-worth can predispose us to acting morally in an effort to fill up the self-worth bank account. If the account is already full, we might be predisposed to choosing not to act morally, or just not act at all.
6. If you’re preparing for a specific challenge, make sure you prep for that challenge and not just ones like it. A study published in the journal Cognitive Science found that chess players who practice specific moves in preparation for a match—as opposed to practicing general chess skills—not only performed better in the match, but actually performed better than they were expected to given their general skill level. In other words, specialization trumped general problem solving and made the players better than anyone thought they were.
7. If someone is trying to sell you something, be extra careful to keep your psychological distance. A study in the journal Psychological Science tested the hypothesis that emotional mimicry—the tendency to mirror the emotions of someone we’re interacting with—makes it difficult to identify liars. Nonmimickers were significantly better at identifying liars than mimickers, and thus were harder to fool with the old flim flam sales routine. The reason is that mimicry reduces psychological distance and lowers defenses. Even if someone probably isn’t lying to you, it’s best to keep the cushion in place just in case.
8. Turns out, saying you’re sorry really is important—and not just to you. A study discussed at the Child Psychology Research Blog found that receiving an apology makes the recipient feel better by affecting his or her perception of the wrongdoer’s emotions. In other words, people who received an apology felt better afterward because the apology indicated that the other person felt bad about what he or she did. Sounds simple enough, but the researchers think it goes a bit deeper: knowing that the other person agrees that what he/she did was the wrong thing to do reaffirms our view of the world as just and predictable, since the other’s sadness tells us that people in general don’t do things like this. Whether that explanation is true or not, just suck it up and say you’re sorry.
9. We can become bored with just about anything, but there may be a way to reverse the habituation blues. Researchers reporting in the Journal of Consumer Research think the trick is overcoming “variety amnesia”—our tendency to forget that we’ve been exposed to a variety of great things, be they people, food, music, movies, home furnishings or other—and instead focus our attention on the singular thing that no longer gives us the tingles. To shake ourselves free from this negative trap, we must “dishabituate” by forcing ourselves to remember the variety of things we’ve experienced. So, for example, let’s say that you’ve become bored with a particular musical group you once couldn’t listen to enough. This research suggests that what you need to do it recall the variety of other songs from other musical groups that you’ve listened to since the last time you listened to your once-favorite band, and by doing so you’ll revive appreciation for your fave.
10. If you’re a man and find yourself in an argument with your significant other, choose your words very carefully. Not only do they affect the other person, but research in the journal Health Psychology suggests that they can also significantly impact your health. In the heat of stressful conflict, your brain is commanding the release of a stress-chemical cocktail comprised of proteins called cytokines–produced by cells in the immune system to help the body mount an immune response during infection. Abnormally high levels of these proteins are linked to cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes, arthritis and some cancers. This study suggests that how rational or emotional your communication is directly corresponds with the levels of those chemicals in your body and the damage they can do. Thing is, the same rules don’t apply to men and women—levels of cytokines in men show an increase over time, but in women they don’t. Why? Women may just be better at communication, or just luckier in this particular biological lottery.
Labels: Psychology, research
Michael Bauwens and the P2P Foundation have been posting some great material lately - here is another interesting article. If we want to be the change we wish to see (paraphrasing the popular Gandhi quote), it is crucial we actually do something.
Derrick Jensen on the Decolonizing of our Minds and the New Subjectivities of Change
28th December 20093 contributions on the individual aspects of social change efforts.
1.“Do Something”
Derrick Jensen on the subjective necessities for social change:
In other words: What do you need to do?
Derrick Jensen:
“A lot of the indigenous people with whom I’ve worked have said to me that the first and most important thing any of us needs to do is decolonize our hearts and minds. Decolonization is the process of breaking your identity with and loyalty to this culture—industrial capitalism specifically, and more broadly civilization—and remembering your identification with and loyalty to the real physical world, including the land where you live. It means re-examining premises and stories this culture handed down to you. It means seeing the harm this culture does to other cultures, and to the planet. It means recognizing that we are living on stolen land. It means recognizing that the luxuries of this way of life do not come free, but rather are paid for by other humans, by nonhumans, by the whole world. It means recognizing that we do not live in a functioning democracy, but rather in a corporate plutocracy, a government by, for, and of corporations. Decolonization means recognizing that neither technological progress nor increased GNP is good for the planet. It means recognizing that this culture is not good for the planet. Decolonization means internalizing the implications of the fact that this culture is killing the planet. It means determining that we will stop this culture from doing that. It means determining that we will not fail.
And this is just the absolute beginning of decolonizing. It is internal work that doesn’t accomplish anything in the real world, but it makes all further steps more likely, more feasible, and in many ways more strictly technical.
Next, ask yourself what are the largest, most pressing problems you can help to solve using the gifts that are unique to you in all the universe. People sometimes ask why I write instead of blowing up dams, to which I reply that my only D in college was in quantitative analysis chemistry lab, meaning you don’t want me anywhere near explosives. Some people have said I should be an organizer instead of a writer. These people have never seen my work space; if I can’t keep track of my pens, how would I possibly keep track of anything more complex? Likewise, I’ve filed dozens of timber sale appeals, but it was a very laborious process for me; it took me twelve hours to do what others could do in two. And I write terrible press releases. I can, however, write books. Harness your gifts, and put them in the service of your landbase.
My third suggestion is to ask yourself: what do I get off on? One reason I don’t burn out as an activist is that I love what I’m doing. I was out one day with a wetlands specialist. We were trying to stop a developer from ruining a forest. The specialist dug into the soil, rubbed some between his fingers, and compared the color to a chart, which would help him determine if these were wetlands. I asked, “Do you get off on this?” He laughed and said digging in dirt was his second favorite thing to do after playing with his dogs. I laughed too and said I wouldn’t like to do that work. I, on the other hand, have condemned myself to a life of homework: I get off on trying to figure out, for example, the relationship between perceived entitlement, exploitation, and atrocity.
My next suggestion is to make protecting the land where you live—and by extension the rest of the natural world, since protecting the land where you live will be insufficient to protect anadromous fish, migratory songbirds, or anyone in a world being burned alive by global climate change—the most important thing in your life. That may sound drastic, but we’re talking about life on the planet here. There can be nothing more important than this.
So, Derrick, what exactly do you want us to do?
I want you to make the time to find what or whom you love—whether it’s salmon, sturgeon, a patch of forest, survivors of domestic violence, your own indigenous tradition, migratory songbirds, coral reefs, or Appalachian mountaintops—and I want you to dig in and defend your beloved with your life, and, if necessary, with your death. I want for your actions to positively contribute to the health and defense of the planet. I want for you to figure out how to make it so the world—the real, physical world—is a better place because you were born, and because you lived here.
All of this leads to the point, which is, put simply, to do something. Several years ago I was giving a talk to several hundred people about bringing down civilization. The audience was excited. The atmosphere was like a rock concert. I suddenly stopped and asked, “How many of you have ever filed a timber-sale appeal?” Four or five. “How many have worked on a rape crisis hotline?” Ten women. “How many have done indigenous support work?” Three or four. And so on. It’s all well and good to talk about the Great Glorious Revolution, but what are you doing right now?
The big dividing line is not and has never been between those who advocate more or less militant forms of resistance, or between mainstream and grassroots activists. The dividing line is between those who do something and those who do nothing.
Do something.
That’s what I want you to do. That’s what the anadromous fish and the Appalachian mountaintops want you to do too.”
2. Do what you should do ‘anyway’!
But what exactly should that “do something” entail??
Sharon Astyk has an interesting take, the Theory of Anyway, inspired by Pat Meadows:
“My friend Pat Meadows, a very, very smart woman, has a wonderful idea she calls “The Theory of Anyway.” What it entails is this – she argues that 95% of what is needed to resolve the coming crisis in energy depletion, or climate change, or whatever is what we should do anyway, and when in doubt about how to change, we should change our lives to reflect what we should be doing “Anyway.” Living more simply, more frugally, using less, leaving reserves for others, reconnecting with our food and our community, these are things we should be doing because they are the right thing to do on many levels. That they also have the potential to save our lives is merely a side benefit (a big one, though).
This is, I think, a deeply powerful way of thinking because it is a deeply moral way of thinking – we would like to think of ourselves as moral people, but we tend to think of moral questions as the obvious ones “should I steal or pay?” “Should I hit or talk?” But the real and most essential moral questions of our lives are the questions we rarely ask of the things we do every day, “Should I eat this?” “Where should I live and how?” “What should I wear?” “How should I keep warm/cool?” We think of these questions as foregone conclusions – I should keep warm X way because that’s the kind of furnace I have, or I should eat this because that’s what’s in the grocery store. Pat’s Theory of Anyway turns this around, and points out that what we do, the way we live, must pass ethical muster first – we must always ask the question “Is this contributing to the repair of the world, or its destruction.”
So if you told me that tomorrow, peak oil had been resolved, I’d still keep gardening, hanging my laundry, cutting back and trying to find a way to make do with less. Because even if we found enough oil to power our society for a thousand years, there would still be climate change, and it would be *wrong* of me to choose my own convenience over the security and safety of my children and other people’s children. And if you told me tomorrow that we’d fixed climate change, that we could power our lives forever with renewables, I would still keep gardening and living frugally. Because our agriculture is premised on depleted soil and aquifers, and we’re facing a future in which many people don’t have enough food and water if we keep eating this way. To allow that to happen would be a betrayal of what I believe is right. And if you told me that we’d fixed that problem too, that we were no longer depleting our aquifers and expanding the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, I’d still keep gardening and telling others to do the same, because our reliance on food from other nations, and our economy impoverishes and starves millions, even billions of poor people and creates massive economic inequities that do tremendous harm. And if you told me that globalization was over, and that we were going to create a just economic system, and we’d fixed all the other problems, and that I didn’t have to worry anymore, would I then stop gardening?
No. Because the nurture of my piece of land would still be the right thing to do. Doing things with no more waste than is absolutely necessary would still be the right thing to do. The creation of a fertile, sustainable, lasting place of beauty would still be my right work in the world. I would still be a Jew, obligated by G-d to Tikkun Olam, to “the repair of the world.” I would still be obligated to live in way that prevented wildlife from being run to extinction and poisons contaminating the earth. I would still be obligated to make the most of what I have and reduce my needs so they represent a fair share of what the earth has to offer. I would still be obligated to treat poor people as my siblings, and you do not live comfortably when your siblings suffer or have less. I am obligated to live rightly, in part because of what living rightly gives me – integrity, honor, joy, a better relationship with my diety of choice, peace.
There are people out there who are prepared to step forward and give up their cars, start growing their own food, stop consuming so much and stop burning fossil fuels…just as soon as peak oil, or climate change, or government rationing, or some external force makes them. But that, I believe is the wrong way to think about this. We can’t wait for others to tell us, or the disaster to befall us. We have to do now, do today, do with all our hearts, the things we should have been doing “Anyway” all along.”
3. Develop a sense of deep time!
Joanna Macy:
“People of today relate to time in a way that is surely unique in our history. The technologies and economic forces unleased by the Industrial Growth Society radically alter our experience of time. It is like being trapped in an ever-shrinking box, in which we race on a treadmill. The economy and its technologies depend on decisions made at lightning speed for short-term goals, cutting us off from nature’s rhythms and from the past and the future, as well. Marooned in the present, we are progressively blinded to the sheer ongoingness of time. Both the company of our ancestors and the claims of our descendants become less and less real to us.
This peculiar relation to time is inherently destructive of the quality and value of our lives, and of the living body of Earth. And it will intensify because the Industrial Growth Society is, in systems’ terms, on exponential “runaway”–accelerating toward its own collapse.
Even as we see its consequences, we must remember that this relation to time is not innate in us. As humans we have the capacity and the birthright to experience time in a saner fashion. Throughout history, men and women have labored at great personal cost to bequeath to future generations monuments of art and learning, to endure far beyond their individual lives. And they have honored through ritual and story those who came before
To make the transition to a life-sustaining society, we must retrieve that ancestral capacity–in other words, act like ancestors. We need to attune to longer, ecological rhythms and nourish a strong, felt connection with past and future generations. For us as agents of change, this isn’t easy, because to intervene in the political and legislative decisions of the Industrial Growth Society, we fall by necessity into its tempo. We race to find and pull the levers before it is too late to save this forest, or stop that weapons program. Nonetheless, we can learn again to drink at deeper wells.
Both the progressive destruction of our world and our capacity to slow down and stop that destruction can be understood as a function of our experience of time.
We members of post-industrial societies in the closing years of the twentieth century have an idiosyncratic and probably unprecedented experience of time. It can be likened to an ever-shrinking box, in which we race on a treadmill at increasingly frenetic speeds. Cutting us off from other rhythms of life, this box cuts us off from the past and future as well. It blocks our perceptual field of time while allowing only the briefest experience of time.
Until we break out of this temporal trap, we will not be able to fully perceive or adequately address the crisis we have created for ourselves and the generations to come. Yet reflections on our relationship to time and some promising new approaches for changing it suggest that we may be able to inhabit time in a healthier, saner fashion. By opening up our experience of time in organic, ecological, and even geological terms and in revitalizing relationship with other species, other eras–we can allow life to continue on Earth.”
Labels: change, culture, responsibility, society
Cool.
The philosophy of good intentions
Listen Now - 26122009 |Download Audio - 26122009 [Play]
GuestsReading the minds of others can be darned hard. Are their intentions good, bad or indifferent? Whether we hold people accountable for their behaviour depends on the answer. Scientists probe questions like this through experiments. Philosophers traditionally appeal to intuition and argument. But now a young band of experimental philosophers are taking armchair philosophy to task, and digging for data.
Joshua Knobe
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/Edouard Machery
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Pittsburgh
Resident Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science
Member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
http://www.pitt.edu/~machery/Further Information
Join the discussion on the All in the Mind blog
Lots of thought provoking comments from All in the Mind listeners on this one!Experimental philosophy anthem on Youtube
...complete with a burning armchair.Video on experimental philosophy
Comedian Eugene Mirman explaining Joshua Knobe's experiment.Online experiments from the concept of intentional action - have a go!
Joshua Knobe invites you to participate with this question: "What do people mean when they say that a behavior was performed intentionally? This series of experiments was designed to help address that question. At times, the results are surprising".Intentional Action and Asperger Syndrome
Posted by Edouard Machery on the Psychology Today blog, and he asks: "How do we think about the intentional nature of actions? And how do people with an impaired mindreading capacity think about it?". Try the test yourself.Experimental philosophy blog
Written by the experimental philosophy community, worldwide.The New New Philosophy (New York Times, December 2007)
Article by Kwame Anthony AppiahThe X-Philes - Philosophy Meets the Real World (Slate, March 2006)
Against Intuition (The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 2008)
"Experimental philosophers emerge from the shadows, but skeptics still ask: Is this philosophy?"
Article by Christopher SheaMore on the experimental philosophy movement
Compiled by Joshua Knobe, includes critiques.Publications
Title: The Folk Concept of Intentional Action: Philosophical and Experimental Issues
Author: Edouard Machery
Publisher: Mind & Language, 23, 165-189, 2008
URL: http://www.pitt.edu/~machery/papers/The%20folk%20concept%20of%20intentionality_machery.pdfTitle: Philosophy of Psychology
Author: Edouard Machery In F. Allhoff (Ed.), Philosophy of the Special Sciences.
Publisher: Philosophy of Psychology, SUNY Press (forthcoming).
URL: http://www.pitt.edu/~machery/papers/Psychology_machery.pdfTitle: The Concept of Intentional Action:A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psychology.
Author: Joshua Knobe
Publisher: Philosophical Studies. 130: 203-231, 2006.
URL: http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/PhilStudies.pdfTitle: Acting intentionally and the side-effect effect: Theory of mind and moral judgment
Author: Alan M. Leslie, Joshua Knobe, Adam Cohen
Publisher: Psychological Science, 17, 421-427, 2006.
URL: http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/LeslieKnobeCohen.pdfTitle: Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language
Author: Joshua Knobe
Publisher: Analysis, 63, 190-193, 2003
URL: http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/side-effects.htmlTitle: Theory of Mind and Moral Cognition: Exploring the concepts
Author: Joshua Knobe
Publisher: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 357-359, 2005
URL: http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/tics.pdfTitle: Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions
Author: Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe
Publisher: Nous, 41, 663-685 (forthcoming)
URL: http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/Nichols-Knobe.pdfTitle: Intuitions about Consciousness: Experimental Studies
Author: Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz
Publisher: Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, forthcoming.
URL: http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/consciousness.pdfPresenter
Natasha Mitchell
Labels: intention, mind, Philosophy, Psychology
For those of you who make sincere New Year's resolutions each year, then fail to follow through, this article may be of use to you.
OK, so that is the foundation - and yes, it was long.Kegan is suggesting that as babies grow into adults, they develop progressively more objective and accurate appreciations of the social world they inhabit. They do this by progressing through five or more states or periods of development which he labeled as follows:
Incorporative
Impulsive
Imperial
Interpersonal
Institutional
In their beginnings, babies are all subjective and have really no appreciation of anything objective at all, and therefore no real self-awareness. This is to say, at first, babies have little idea how to interpret anything, and the only perspective they have with which to interpret things is their own scarcely developed perspective. They can recognize parent's faces and the like, but this sort of recognition should not be confused with babies being able to appreciate that parents are separate creatures with their own needs. This key recognition doesn't occur for years.
Kegan describes this earliest period as Incorporative. The sense of self is not developed at this point in time. There is no self to speak of because there is no distinction occurring yet between self and other. To the baby, there is not any reason to ask the question, "who am I" because the baby's mind is nothing more and nothing less than the experience of its senses as it moves about. In an important sense, the baby is embedded in its sensory experience and has no other awareness.
Babies practice using their senses and reflexes a lot and thus develop mental representations of those reflexes. At some point it occurs to the baby that it has reflexes that it can use and senses that it can experience. Reflex and sensation are thus the first mental objects; the first things that are understood to be distinct components of the self. The sense of self emerges from the knowledge that there are things in the world that aren't self (like reflexes and senses); things that I am not. To quote Kegan,
"Rather than literally being my reflexes, I now have them, and "I" am something other. "I" am that which coordinates or mediates the reflexes..."Kegan correspondingly refers to this second period of social appreciation development as Impulsive, to suggest that the child is now embedded in impulses – which are those things that coordinate reflexes. The sense of self at this stage of life would be comfortable saying something like, "hungry", or "sleepy", being fully identified with these hungers. Though babies are now aware that they can take action to fulfill a need, they still are not clear that other people exist yet as independent creatures. From the perspective of the Impulsive mind, a parent is merely another reflex that can be brought to bear to satisfy impulses.
The objectification of what was previously subjective experience continues as development continues. Kegan's next developmental leap is known as the Imperial self. The child as "little dictator" is born. In the prior impulsive self, the self literally is nothing more and nothing less than a set of needs. There isn't anyone "there" having those needs yet. The needs alone are all that exists. As awareness continues to rise, the child now starts to become aware that "it" is the very thing that has the needs. Because the child is now aware that it has needs (rather than is needs), it also starts to become aware that it can consciously manipulate things to get its needs satisfied. The impulsive child was also manipulative, perhaps, but in a more unaware animal manner. The imperial child is not yet aware that other people have needs too. It only knows at this stage that it has needs, and it doesn't hesitate to express them.
The Interpersonal period that follows next starts with the first moment when the child comes to understand that there are actually other people out there in the world whose needs need to be taken into account along side their own. The appreciation of the otherness of other people comes about, as always by a process of expanding perspectives. The child's perspective in this case expands from its own only to later include both its own and those of other important people around it. It is the child's increasingly sophisticated understanding of the idea that people have needs itself which cause the leap to occur. To quote Kegan again,
"I" no longer am my needs (no longer the imperial I); rather I have them. In having them I can now coordinate, or integrate, one need system with another, and in so doing, I bring into being that need-mediating reality which we refer to when we speak of mutuality."In English then, the interpersonal child becomes aware that "not only do I have needs, other people do too!" This moment in time is where conscience is born and the potential for guilt and shame arises, as well as the potential for empathy. Prior to this moment, these important aspects of adult mental life don't exist except as potentials.
The interpersonal child is aware that other people have needs which it needs to be taken into account if it is to best satisfy its own needs. There is no guiding principle that helps the interpersonal child to determine which set of needs is most important – its own, or those of the other people. Some children will conclude that their own needs are most important to satisfy, while others will conclude that other's needs should be prioritized, and some children will move back and forth between the two positions like a crazy monkey.
As the child's sense of self continues to develop, at some point it becomes aware that a guiding principle can be established which helps determine which set of needs should take precedence under particular circumstances. This is the first moment that the child can be said to have values, or commitments to ideas and beliefs and principles which are larger and more permanent than its own passing whims and fears. Kegan refers to this new realization of and commitment to values as the Institutional period, noting that in this period, the child's idea of self becomes something which can be, for the first time, described in terms of institutionalized values, such as being honest. "I'm an honest person. I try to be fair. I strive to be brave." are the sorts of things an institutional mind might say. Values, such as the Golden Rule (e.g., "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"), start to guide the child's appreciation of how to be a member of the family and of society. The moral, ethical and legal foundations of society follow from this basic achievement of an Institutional self. Further, children (or adults) who achieve this level of social maturity understand the need for laws and for ethical codes that work to govern everyone's behavior. Less socially mature individuals won't grasp why these things are important and cannot and should not simply be disregarded when they are inconvenient.
For many people, social maturity seems to stop here at the Institutional stage. Kegan himself writes that this stage is the stage of conventional adult maturity; one that many (but not all) adults reach, and beyond which most do not progress. However, the potential for continued development continues onwards and upwards.
The next evolution of self understanding occurs when the child (by now probably an adult) starts to realize that there is more than one way of being "fair" or "honest" or "brave" in the world. Whereas before, in the interpersonal mindset, there is only one possible right way to interpret a social event (e.g., in accordance with one's own value system), a newly developed InterIndivdiual mindset starts to recognize a diversity of ways that someone might act and still be acting in accordance with a coherent value system (though not necessarily one's own value system).
For example, let's consider how someone with an Institutional mindset and someone with an InterIndividual mindset might judge someone who has become a "draft dodger" so as to avoid military duty. There are precisely two ways that an Institutionally minded person might look at such an action. If he or she is of the mainstream institutional mindset, draft dodging is a non-religious sort of heresy and a crime which should be punishable. If, on the other hand, he or she is of a counter-cultural institutional mindset, then judgements are reversed and draft dodging is seen as a brave action which demonstrates individual courage in the face of massive peer pressure to conform. An institutionally minded person can hold one or the other of these perspectives but not both, because he or she is literally embedded in one or the other of those perspectives and cannot appreciate the other except as something alien and evil.
A person who has achieved InterIndividual social maturity is able to hold both mainstream and counter-cultural value systems in mind at the same time, and to see the problem of draft dodging from both perspectives. This sort of dual-vision will appear to be the worst kind of wishy-washiness and flip-floppery to someone stuck in a conventional Institutional mindset and maturity level. However, if you are following the progression of social maturity states, and how one states' embedded subjective view becomes something which is seem objectively alongside other points of view as social maturity progresses, you will see that such dual-vision is indeed the logical next step; what a more socially mature sort of human being might look like.
Kegan thinks of the achievement of InterIndividual social maturity, what might be considered "post-maturity", as a dubious thing. In a wonderful interview published by "What is Enlightenment Magazine " and available online here , Kegan comments on the danger that this state poses:
I'm not going to comment on whether or not Kegan's social maturity theory is accurate. Whether or not it is accurate, it is still a very useful and interesting way of thinking about how social maturity develops. If we can agree to accept this theory as basically correct, for a moment, a whole lot of mental problems and disorders that are otherwise difficult to talk about suddenly start to make some sense; start to "click into place."
"... you have to think about what it means to actually be more complex than what your culture is currently demanding. You have to have a name for that, too. It's almost something beyond maturity, and it's usually a very risky state to be in. I mean, we loved Jesus, Socrates, and Gandhi—after we murdered them. While they were alive, they were a tremendous pain in the ass. Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr.—these people died relatively young. You don't often live a long life being too far out ahead of your culture."
Competing commitments cause valued employees to behave in ways that seem inexplicable and irremediable, and this is enormously frustrating to managers. Take the case of John, a talented manager at a software company. (Like all examples in this article, John’s experiences are real, although we have altered identifying features. In some cases,we’ve constructed composite examples.) John was a big believer in open communication and valued close working relationships, yet his caustic sense of humor consistently kept colleagues at a distance. And though he wanted to move up in the organization, his personal style was holding him back.Repeatedly, John was counseled on his behavior, and he readily agreed that he needed to change the way he interacted with others in the organization. But time after time, he reverted to his old patterns. Why, his boss wondered, did John continue to undermine his own advancement?The book is filled with many similar examples. Each story serves to demonstrate how the model works, but each one also shows how challenging it can be to get to our hidden competing commitments.
As it happened, John was a person of color working as part of an otherwise all-white executive team. When he went through an exercise designed to help him unearth his competing commitments, he made a surprising discovery about himself. Underneath it all, John believed that if he became too well integrated with the team, it would threaten his sense of loyalty to his own racial group. Moving too close to the mainstream made him feel very uncomfortable, as if he were becoming “one of them”and betraying his family and friends. So when people gathered around his ideas and suggestions, he’d tear down their support with sarcasm, inevitably (and effectively) returning himself to the margins, where he was more at ease. In short, while John was genuinely committed to working well with his colleagues, he had an equally powerful competing commitment to keeping his distance.(2001)
Obviously, you'll need a bigger version to work with, but you can make on in Word, or Excel, or many other programs. The key is what goes in each of the columns.Step 1:That is the basic process - there are a lot of fine points to doing this that make owning the book worthwhile. It's easy to think we have uncovered competing commitments and big assumptions when really we haven't gone deep enough to affect change.
The first step of the exercise is to identify a commitment that is “important and insufficiently accomplished.”
What is the most important thing that you need to get better at, or should change in order to make progress towards your goal of ___________________________ (fill in the blank with a goal). Now, frame this as a commitment and write it in Column 1.
Criteria for the commitment:
• It should feel genuine.
• It should be clear how this commitment relates directly to the stated goal.
• It should not yet be fully realized, meaning that there is plenty of room for improvement and future growth.
• It should implicate you as an individual.
• It should feel important to you.
• It should be stated as a positive, not as a negative (not as, "I want stop being mean" - better to say, "I want to be kind and compassionate").
Step 2:
In Step 2, recognize your counterproductive behaviors.
What are you doing, or not doing, that is keeping your commitment from being more fully realized? Write a brainstormed list in Column 2.
Guidelines:
• Keep the list to specific behaviors.
• Refrain from listing reasons about why you engage in these behaviors.
• List only those behaviors that undermine or work against your commitment.
• List any behavior in which you engage that prevents your goal from being realized.
You may feel inclined to want to attack this list of behaviors, but without deeper exploration, it will be very difficult to change them. As you continue the exercise you’ll begin to uncover what is keeping these behaviors in place.
Step 3:
In step three, you identify your competing commitment(s).
Start by imagining what it would be like to do the exact opposite of the behaviors you listed in Column 2. What do you think would happen? What are your fears? Write these fears in Column 3.
The fears that surface ought to point you towards a competing commitment. This may not be a commitment that you are aware of. In contrast to the first-column commitment, which is the sort of commitment you “have,” the competing commitment is the sort of commitment that “has you.”
Draw a line underneath the list of fears and write what you think may be your competing commitment. You might have more than one.
Criteria:
• This commitment should make you feel uncomfortable—in other words, it isn’t something you would want put on a plaque.
• It should be clear how this commitment is self-protecting.
• It should show how your countering behaviors make perfect sense.
Once you’re finished, you can draw two arrows that connect the first and third columns. These arrows represent the countervailing commitments that cancel each other out and keep you stuck and “immune to change.”
Step 4:
In Step 4, identifying the big assumption that is underlying your competing commitment.
Your big assumption is a kind of rule or prediction about what will happen if you act in certain ways. To identify it, you take your competing commitment, reverse it, and replace the words “I am committed to…” with “I assume that if...” Next add a “then…” and complete the sentence.
The big assumption should…
• Show why the 3rd Column Commitment feels absolutely necessary.
• End calamitously.
• Display a constricted world.
• Overall, it should make your stomachs tighten…that’s a good sign!
Step 5:
The final step of the exercise is to determine how best to move forward—that is, how to take steps towards change in your life.
In order to move forward, you might:
• Observe the big assumption in action.
• Stay alert to challenge the big assumption.
• Design a test of your big assumption.
• Run the test and discuss the data openly.
I then ordered their latest work, (2009) Immunity to Change. How To Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization and read through it in anticipation of being able to apply what further insights it might have in a two day consulting assignment. While the concepts of subject object relations and adult development are rich in their descriptive power, the question still remained for me: how can they be successfully applied in practice?Read The Ethics of Promoting and Assigning Adult Developmental Exercises: A Critical Analysis of the Immunity to Change Process by Sofia Kjellström (Integral Review, Vol. 5, No. 2).
In this article I will present a description of my experience starting to answer this question. First, however, I present an overview of Immunity to Change. My goal here is not to review the book in a traditional sense, but to provide a quick summary of its core points as context for those not yet familiar with the book or Kegan and Lahey’s, or Kegan’s earlier work. From there I will describe my experience of testing out the work in the two contexts mentioned.
Abstract: The Immunity to Change (ITC) process devised by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey is promoted as an influential technique for creating individual andI want to add one last comment to this whole, way-too-long post. The idea of hidden assumptions and competing commitments really is nothing new for some of us - those who have been doing parts (subpersonalities) work for more than just a little while.
organizational change. A critical analysis of the ITC process applied in university settings and organizational contexts show that an unintended result is the unwillingness and inability of some participants to participate adequately. Significant theoretical and ethical implications arise in the interplay between three interrelated variables (a) the role and competence of the facilitator, (b) expectations and capabilities of the participants, and (c) the mental demands and assumptions of the process. The inquiry illustrate that the ITC process is probably built upon an implicit assumption that change into greater mental complexity is always good and right, and its inherent structure creates demands that can put participants “in over their heads.” The main conclusion is that developmentallyaware, ethical approaches to using transformational practices such as the ITC should meet at least three demands: they should be conducted as voluntary activities on the part of well-informed participants, they should integrate an adult developmental perspective into the process itself, and they should openly allow the possibility that it is the organizations that may also need to change.
Labels: books, change, Psychology, shadow work, therapy, transformation
It seems that Integrative Spirituality is back and posting new material. Good to have them back. Here is a new article, which is a little more optimistic than I am. But hope is good.
A NEW YEAR FOR HUMANITY, A ‘UNISANCE’ THAT INFORMS AN EMERGING WORLDVIEW, by N. English and L. Wollersheim
How do we GLOBALLY accelerate and capture the momentum of what is already emerging in terms of the growing awareness amongst political, corporate, and grass root leaders? How do we most effectively inform a global movement that is ensured to have success in reaching the critical mass that is necessary to tip the scale for massive collective change? We are at the beginning of a new UNISANCE, a renaissance of new thought and awakened collective consciousness that is understanding and reverencing the miracle of our beingness in the universe.
We have arrived at a CRITICAL PATH in human history where it is prudent and necessary to expand our collective metaphors,’ that informs our values and ethics. We must look beyond our current cultural, political, economical partial views and perspectives. It is due time to facilitate a new framework of metaphors’ that informs and habituates a sustainable global culture that includes and celebrates all our collective partial views of the past, and is more appropriately framed in alignment with what we are coming to know about ourselves and our universe.
A ‘UNISANCE’ THAT INFORMS AN EMERGING WORLDVIEW
Know Thy Universe! It may not only be one of the best ways to "know thy self" and to "know Ultimate Reality." It probably is the most direct and accurate way of knowing self and Ultimate Reality that can also be shared --- because of the testable observation of physical reality. As the fruit must reflect the seed, the physical universe must reflect the seed which initiated it. L.Wollersheim
For the first time in human history we now have available to us a universal framework that embraces and reflects a much wider sense of individual and collective identity. This universal framework is informed by known visible, relevant, and reality tested patterns and principles in our meta, macro, micro, meso, nano universe. These patterns and principals have given life and momentum to our rich biodiversity, technology, and life as we have come to know it.
We have learned that these patterns and principals are reality congruent and time tested through 13. 7 billion years of known evolution. Through education humanity will collectively experience a deepening in connection to each other as this inherent universal wisdom is taught and disseminated into our shared collective. These patterns and principals will facilitate a universal celebration of our cultural and biological rich diversity. We are at the beginning of a new UNISANCE, a renaissance of new thought and awakened collective consciousness, which includes a collective reverence and understanding of the miracle of our emergence in context to the known universe.
All political, economic, religious, social, legal and philosophic systems are as only as good as the
fundamental interpretations, processes and facts about life in the real universe upon which they were initially based (and/or upon which they are currently updated and aligned.) No where are the actual interpretations, processes and facts about life expressed more accurately than at the cutting edge of today's cosmological and progressive evolutionary sciences. As they exist today, all human cultural systems will continue to produce far less effective results in solving humanity's greatest common challenges until they are more accurately science-aligned first with the empirical facts about our progressive evolutionary life and existence. Until then, all current cultural systems will continue to be a significant invisible causative or contributively component to the very challenges of humanity that they seek to resolve!This new universe worldview (a cosmological science-informed and progressive evolution informed worldview) is the single emerging new worldview that is big enough, inclusive enough and capable enough to effectively solve every challenge now facing humanity. This is uniquely true because of its global consensus building ability to help rationally align or realign all existing human cultural systems (including even religion,) with the most accurate realities of the universe's evolutionary life systems. Where there is alignment there is agreement and, where there is agreement all efforts and resources can be coordinated and utilized to resolve all manner of global challenges.
We now have within our grasp the fundamental deep patterns of the universe as they are continuously informing and sharing the consequential and differential feedback with us through our sciences. Our survival depends on our adaptability, cooperation and organization in response to what they are communicating. These feedback loops are communicating, informing, and synthesizing new probabilities within our individual and collective interior, which includes and transcendence the past, reflecting and evolving us into deeper alignment with the WHOLE.
Our current chaos, dissonance, systemic pain, suffering, death and destruction are seemingly ‘obstacles’ (i.e. in our environment, politics, and financial systems of exchange) as we have yet to learn to differentiate all the nuances, values, patterns, and sub patterns they are communicating and informing. These qualities are the symptomatic feedback between polarities. They are ripples of energetic vibrations and fluctuations, a dynamic, DIRECTIONAL, creative evolutionary impulse, and mechanism of feedback. These polarities are necessary and they will continue to inspire humanity to participate in the process of evolving new cultural frameworks and structures, that is congruent with the deep patterns and principals, as they are individually and collectively systemically sustainable.
We must continue to look boldly into matter, and boldly into the nature of our consciousness, as they are the visible reflection of the history of the universe and the cosmic sphere and the beyond. Our perspectives of what we are will continue to expand qualitatively as we explore quantitatively. We are just in the infancy of our particular kind of awareness in form. Could it be that THE COSMIC MYSTERY has conspired for our individual and collective greater good and learning?? We are undoubtedly stardust that is awakening in the illuminated playground of matter. Our future is open with probabilities.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
For more information about these patterns and principals click on the link below
http://www.integrativespirituality.org/postnuke/html/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=571For more information about the organization that facilitated this Article Integrative Spirituality, click here.
Labels: globalization, identity, Spirituality, sustainability
Really? Nah . . . . Are you sure?
An important but not well-appreciated dietary change has been the substantial increase in the amount of dietary fructose consumption from high intake of sucrose and high fructose corn syrup, a common sweetener used in the food industry. A high flux of fructose to the liver, the main organ capable of metabolizing this simple carbohydrate, perturbs glucose metabolism and glucose uptake pathways, and leads to a significantly enhanced rate of de novo lipogenesis and triglyceride (TG) synthesis, driven by the high flux of glycerol and acyl portions of TG molecules from fructose catabolism. These metabolic disturbances appear to underlie the induction of insulin resistance commonly observed with high fructose feeding in both humans and animal models. Fructose-induced insulin resistant states are commonly characterized by a profound metabolic dyslipidemia, which appears to result from hepatic and intestinal overproduction of atherogenic lipoprotein particles. Thus, emerging evidence from recent epidemiological and biochemical studies clearly suggests that the high dietary intake of fructose has rapidly become an important causative factor in the development of the metabolic syndrome. There is an urgent need for increased public awareness of the risks associated with high fructose consumption and greater efforts should be made to curb the supplementation of packaged foods with high fructose additives. The present review will discuss the trends in fructose consumption, the metabolic consequences of increased fructose intake, and the molecular mechanisms leading to fructose-induced lipogenesis, insulin resistance and metabolic dyslipidemia.It is crucial to note that the real issue is not with whole fruit, but with fruit juices and concentrated fructose used as a sweetener. Whole fruit contains vital nutrients and fiber that mitigate the poor digestion of fructose sugar.
High Fructose Corn Syrup Proven to Cause Human Obesity
A new study indicates that high fructose corn syrup may be the cause of the huge upswing in childhood obesity and diabetes.You've heard it before: a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. If people are fat, it's their own fault for eating too much.
These words are usually spouted by PR hacks for the corn refiner's association – or the dietitians paid by them. They may not, as it turns out, be true.
We finally have the smoking corn cob, as it were: the study processed-food foes have been waiting for, indicating that high fructose corn syrup may be the cause of the huge upswing in childhood obesity and diabetes.
American consumption of all sugars is much higher than it should be for our health, but high fructose corn syrup has become a larger share of our sugar consumption due to the fact that much of our ingestion of this super cheap, highly processed sugar is involuntary. That's because it's not just used as a sweetener in cookies and sodas but as a food additive in things like bread, ketchup and other condiments, pasta sauce and coatings for frozen fried foods.
Why is it used so liberally? It increases shelf life and has other characteristics that food processors like. The reason it's really cheap is because the government subsidizes corn so heavily (and if you've read your Michael Pollan you already know this so I'll shut up now).
The rise in childhood diabetes and obesity roughly corresponds to the period of time in which food processors started using high fructose corn syrup with such prevalence. That's why so many scientists have been trying to determine if there's a link between the two.
Depending on whom you ask, Americans consume anywhere from 45 to 60 pounds of the syrup a year. Scientists and food activists have long thought that the body metabolizes the high fructose corn syrup differently than regular sugar and that it is therefore a big problem for our health.
But the corn refiner industry has been spending a lot of money debunking this hypothesis. Over the past few years, ads have flooded the web, print and TV. Consumers were encouraged to get “the truth” at Sweetsurprise.com.
The ads make assertions that directly address the many criticisms of high fructose corn syrup:
"Many dietitians agree that high fructose corn syrup, like any sugar, can be part of a balanced diet. Doctors have concluded that high fructose corn syrup doesn't appear to contribute to obesity any more than other sweeteners."
But this new finding is the first involving humans, and its results point to a different truth: high fructose corn syrup can actually damage human metabolism.
In a study conducted by University of California researchers, 16 volunteers were given a strictly controlled diet including very high levels of fructose. Another group was given the same diet but with high levels of glucose (regular sugar) replacing the fructose. Over 10 weeks, the volunteers that were given fructose produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. The control group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems.
People in both groups did put on a similar amount of weight, but researchers thought the levels of weight gain among the fructose consumers would be greater over the long term.
Here's what happens: Fructose seems to bypass the digestive process that breaks down other forms of sugar. It arrives intact in the liver where it causes a variety of reactions. One of the results is a metabolic change that keeps the body from burning fat normally.
This was a small study and it was the first one done on humans, but 10 weeks? That's some pretty fast acting syrup, if you ask me.
I look forward to seeing how this plays out, but in the meantime, I'll leave you with this rather gruesome video done by New York City's anti-soda campaign.
Interesting study, though I'm not sure it is ever a goof thing for one partner to "sculpt" another. On the other hand, we all try to be our best selves with our partners, or at least we should.
New Study Shows That Partners Sculpt Each Other To Achieve Their Ideal Selves
Is that really Bob? You've seen him hundreds of mornings for the last 10 years at local coffee shops. Since he started dating Sara, he looks you in the eye -- and smiles. Sara takes every opportunity to let coffee shop cronies know that Bob is her guy and to gush about how funny he is. And he is. Who knew?
Think of Sara like Michelangelo chipping away at a block of marble to release the ideal figure slumbering within.
A new international review of seven papers on "the Michelangelo phenomenon" shows that when close partners affirm and support each other's ideal selves, they and the relationship benefit greatly.
"To the degree that the sculpting process has gone well, that you have helped mold me toward my ideal self, the relationship functions better and both partners are happier. And over the long term, I more or less come to reflect what my partner sees and elicits from me," said Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.
Finkel co-authored the review with Caryl E. Rusbult, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Madoka Kumashiro, Goldsmiths, University of London. "The Michelangelo Phenomenon" appears in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
The Michelangelo effect is not simply about supporting your partner, nor is it about promoting what you think your partner's ideal self should be. "Even if partners treat us in perfectly loving, supportive ways, if the treatment is not consistent with the person we dream of becoming, we have to pay attention to those red flags," Finkel warned. "Is that the person you want to be married to 10 years down the road?"
The Michelangelo studies show that close partners sculpt one another's traits and skills and promote, versus inhibit, one another's goal achievement. "It's not just that you treat me positively," Finkel said. "You treat me in particular ways that dovetail with my ideal self."
That's how Sara, an outgoing person with a great social network, brought Bob's best out in him. Sara made Bob more comfortable being the person he wanted to be. With Sara celebrating his ideal self, he became much funnier.
Just as the sculptor chisels, carves and polishes away flaws in the stone to reveal the ideal form, so do skillful partners support their loved ones' dreams, aspirations and the traits they hope to develop, such as completing medical school or becoming more fluent in a second language or more sociable.
Supporting a partner's image of his ideal self, whether it is a vague yearning or a clearly articulated mental representation, helps the loved one reduce the discrepancy between the actual self and the ideal self.
Sara consciously may interpret the disparities between Bob's actual self and ideal self in a benevolent way. She may help Bob become more sociable at a dinner party, for example, by subtly directing him to tell one of his most charming stories.
Conversely, a relationship can run into trouble when an individual emphasizes attributes that are peripheral to the core elements of what a partner ideally wishes to become. Take Mary, a leading researcher and a beauty. If she prizes her scholarly accomplishments above her physical virtues, she will feel disaffirmed when her partner affectionately refers to her as his "Colorado cutie." What that term of endearment represents could ultimately doom the relationship.
Some people such as Sara, who is so warm and empathic, are better sculptors than others and are particularly adept at bringing out others' ideal selves. Some individuals may be on the verge of achieving great personal growth and be open to any number of people who could help them. And others, the studies show, may have a much more difficult time bringing out someone's ideal self or be much more resistant to the Michelangelo effect.
The studies reviewed in the journal article used longitudinal procedures to examine how people grow toward their ideal selves over time as a result of how their partners treat them. At the beginning of the studies, individuals reported on their actual and their ideal selves, and their partners reported on how they view the individuals. To gain an external perspective, some studies incorporated the perspective of the individuals' friends. Across studies, individuals were especially likely to grow toward their ideal selves when their partners viewed them in line with this ideal. The process ultimately promoted both relational and personal well-being for both partners.
"When deciding on a life partner, we consider many factors," Finkel observed. "But we frequently neglect to think about whether the person I hope to be in 10 years is consistent with the person you want me to be in 10 years. When our partners can chisel and polish us in a way that helps us to achieve our ideal self, that's a wonderful thing."
Source: Pat Vaughan Tremmel
Northwestern University
Labels: Psychology, relationships
I blogged recently about the narrative self in cultural psychology. The narrative self is a crucial element in how we construct a sense of self, so its use in therapy seems somewhat obvious, yet it has only been recently that therapies have been consciously integrating what we know about this element of our selves to do therapeutic work.
How do we understand ourselves?
Helping a patient make order out of chaos makes him feel better. When a client creates a story, particularly his own story, an internal organization takes place. This organization helps him to understand his schemas: his mental set or representation. An emotional schema is a way in which we perceive others. Many experts such as Lachmann and Beebe argue that the infant's early caregivers form the basis of emotional schemas. That is, if the patient had a responsive caregiver as a baby, then he is likely to expect the world to meet his needs. Likewise, if his caretaker was insensitive or self-centered, then he is likely to believe that there is very little love in the world, and that most people are just out for themselves. Osofsky suggests that part of the therapeutic task is to "help the patient discover that not everyone in the world is as unreliable as the models of parental figures that they have built and come to expect as a result of their experience. " In other words, by helping the patient look at his narrative, he can then question his experience of disappointments. Eventually, he can learn to trust. Eventually, he can learn to love.
Narratives also help the patient verbalize internal states and differentiate emotions. Once the emotions are differentiated, the patient can break down the unmanageable emotions into smaller manageable entities which the patient can master. Narratives promote thinking which can reduce anxiety by making links between different aspects of the patient's life. Helping a patient make a narrative about cause and effect within relationships enables the patient to master the ping-pong of hurts and disappointments. The narrative introduces the patient to his internal world and as such, the patient begins to separate internal from external. When the internal world is the stressor, he can learn to create a new internal narrative. When the external world is the stressor, he can learn how to create an internal story which helps him deal with his external perturbations
Personal storytelling creates internal representation. The job of the therapist is to help the patient create a private memoir in which the patient has both experienced his life and reflected on it. The layers of experience and reflection creates a depth of personality which enables the patient to experience other people in a deeper way. When a patient learns to experience his internal narrative he is then more interested in the personal stories of others. This is why many patients are inspired to become psychotherapists. This process is like learning French and then desperately wanting to go to France to try out your new skills. The excitement about learning a new way of thinking is in and of itself invigorating.
Narratives encourage fantasy and fantasy encourages an expansion of thinking, a play in the mind. As therapists, we privilege psychic reality over historical fact and as such, the patient is free to construct his story. Since the medium of psychotherapy is an exchange of ideas, the transmission of this "play" can involve tones of voice, expressions and hand actions. In so doing, a deep communication takes place. This deep communication is both between the patient and the therapist but also between the patient and himself. There is action and there is interaction. In the interaction, there is understanding. In the understanding there is integration. In the integration, there is inner peace.
Labels: narrative, Psychology, Self, therapy
My first eBook, Essential10 Behaviors for Coping with a Crisis (Dealing with Change), is now available at the Essential10 bookstore - it will soon be available for the Kindle, and hopefully in the near future for the iPhone/iTouch (they're still working that out). It's only $2.99.
Labels: books, change, personal growth, Psychology
There is a faction of the transhumanist camp that is absolutely convinced we will one day upload our conscious sense of self into a computer network and become seemingly immortal (barring a power failure).
You'll be able to upload your mind--your thoughts, memories, and personality--to a computer. And once you've reduced your consciousness to patterns of electrons, others will be able to copy it, edit it, sell it, or pirate it. It might be bundled with other electronic minds. And, of course, it could be deleted.Sounds great, huh? Eternal life, no disease, and no pesky body issues like shaving or menstruation. The Singularity folks are even more convinced that this is possible, and not only possible but desirable - and inevitable.That's quite a scenario, considering that at the moment, nobody really knows exactly what consciousness is. Pressed for a pithy definition, we might call it the ineffable and enigmatic inner life of the mind. But that hardly captures the whirl of thought and sensation that blossoms when you see a loved one after a long absence, hear an exquisite violin solo, or relish an incredible meal. Some of the most brilliant minds in human history have pondered consciousness, and after a few thousand years we still can't say for sure if it is an intangible phenomenon or maybe even a kind of substance different from matter. We know it arises in the brain, but we don't know how or where in the brain. We don't even know if it requires specialized brain cells (or neurons) or some sort of special circuit arrangement of them.
Nevertheless, some in the singularity crowd are confident that we are within a few decades of building a computer, a simulacrum, that can experience the color red, savor the smell of a rose, feel pain and pleasure, and fall in love. It might be a robot with a ”body.” Or it might just be software--a huge, ever-changing cloud of bits that inhabit an immensely complicated and elaborately constructed virtual domain.
We are among the few neuroscientists who have devoted a substantial part of their careers to studying consciousness. Our work has given us a unique perspective on what is arguably the most momentous issue in all of technology: whether consciousness will ever be artificially created.
We think it will--eventually. But perhaps not in the way that the most popular scenarios have envisioned it.
Consciousness is part of the natural world. It depends, we believe, only on mathematics and logic and on the imperfectly known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology; it does not arise from some magical or otherworldly quality. That's good news, because it means there's no reason why consciousness can't be reproduced in a machine--in theory, anyway.
The most commonly mentioned is probably Artificial Intelligence, but there are others: direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation.[Emphasis added.] Computer emulation sounds harmless, but the idea has other names that are more revealing, such as mind uploading, the idea that we can, as mentioned above, upload human consciousness into a computer.
The idea that this is possible is based in computational neuroscience, a version of cognitive neuroscience that contends - as Dan Dennet has spent a career trying to prove (see Consciousness Explained) - that there is really no such thing as consciousness, and that all neural function can be reduced to mathematical formulas. People in this field see no reason that we cannot, eventually, create a computer-based neural net that is fully conscious in every way that a human being is conscious.Mind uploading or whole brain emulation (sometimes called mind transfer or electronic transcendence) is the hypothetical process of scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device. The computer runs a simulation model so faithful to the original that it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain, or for all practical purposes, indistinguishably.[1]
Whole brain emulation is discussed as a logical endpoint[1] of the topical computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics fields, both about brain simulation for medical research purposes. It is discussed in artificial intelligence research publications[2] as an approach to strong AI. Among futurists and within the transhumanist movement it is an important proposed life extension technology, originally suggested in biomedical literature in 1971[3]. It is a central conceptual feature of numerous science fiction novels and films.
Whole brain simulation is considered by some scientists as a theoretical and futuristic but possible technology[1], although mainstream research funders remain skeptical. Several contradictory and already passed attempts have been made during the years to predict when whole human brain simulation can come true. Substantial mainstream research and development are however being done in relevant areas including development of faster super computers, virtual reality, brain-computer interfaces, animal brain mapping and simulation, and information extraction from dynamically functioning brains[4]. The question whether an emulated brain can be a human mind is debated by philosophers, and is contradicted by the dualistic view of the human mind that is common in many religions.
The term mind transfer also aims at the transfer of the state of a brain to another biological brain. No current research or development activities are reported in this area.
[Dennet] defends a theory known by some as Neural Darwinism. He also presents an argument against qualia; he argues that the concept is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism.Qualia, for those not versed in consciousness theory, is defined as the subjective quality of conscious experience. From Wikipedia:
The importance of qualia in philosophy of mind comes largely from the fact that they are often seen as posing a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the mind-body problem. Much of the debate over their existence hinges on the definition of the term that is used, as various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain properties.At the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference, held here in Tucson every other year, researchers devote entire presentations to attempting to define how and why qualia arise in consciousness. This is no small issue.
1. Human consciousness, as demonstrated by Antonio Damasio and others (Alva Noe, for example), is not confined to the brain but is deeply dependent on the body.I'll start with Damasio, who has revolutionized our understanding of the mind-body problem, and who I blogged about just the other day. Here is some of what I wrote in the earlier post:
2. Human consciousness, particularly the experience of self, is socially and culturally embedded and cannot exist as we know it without this interpersonal context - this view is expressed by both interpersonal neurobiology and cultural psychology.
Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens contends that consciousness is not merely a by-product of brain activity, but is a necessary function of the body as a whole, including the brain.In his model, which has gained wide acceptance, Damasio suggests that the greatest portion of our consciousness occurs below the level of our individual awareness, in the neural self, which then may or may not rise to the level of the core self.
As an aside, he proposes at least four levels of self, from least complex to most complex:1. Neural Self (or proto-self) - a short term collection of neural patterns of activity which represent the current state of the organismIn Damasio's view, one which I share, emotions are body states that then are interpreted by the brain to assign a label based on memory and previous learning. The classic example of this was demonstrated years before Damasio wrote his book. In the study, (Schachter & Singer, 1962) researchers gave epinephrine to subjects (telling them it was a vitamin), half of which were told what to expect and half were told nothing or given false information. All subjects were left with a confederate who either acted euphoric or angry. Those told what to expect attributed their arrousal to the injection. Those who were given no information or false information labeled their own experience in line with the behavior of the confederate, not having any other information on which to base their feelings. The researches suggest that emotion is based on arousal + cognition, on the assumption that most emotions share similar body-states.
2. Core Self - a second-order entity which maps the state of the proto-self in rather the same way the proto-self maps the current state of the body: whenever an encounter with an object impinges on the proto-self, the change is registered by activity in the core self
3. Autobiographical Self - draws on permanent (though modifiable) memories instead of just the immediate experiences which power the core self. At this point, there is a real, though still pre-linguistic, sense of self. Damasio thinks chimpanzees and probably dogs enjoy this level of consciousness
4. Reflective Self - greater use of longer-term memory, delivers the kind of foresighted, reflective consciousness which we typically associate with human beings
In general, then, the autobiographical self, or narrative self, creates a story to explain body states based on either environmental cues or previous experience.
Overview of Interpersonal Neurobiology: "Interpersonal Neurobiology, a term coined by Dr. Dan Siegel, studies the way the brain grows and is influenced by personal relationships. Recent studies have discovered that brain growth occurs throughout the lifespan. IPNB explores the potential for healing trauma by using positive and secure influences on the brain. Conditions once thought to be permanent now have the bright potential for healing and growth. IPNB has broad applications that are useful for parenting, mental health, addictions, education, health care, business professionals, and more." ~ Excerpt from Vanguard in Action
"Interpersonal Neurobiology, developed by Dr. Daniel Siegel, studies what occurs in the brain as a result of significant life experiences and how the therapeutic relationship can be used to actually change the brain and neurological system. It was once believed that neurological development ceased by late adolescence, but Dr Sigiel's research has determined that neurogenesis and neuroplasticity--the creation of new neurons and new neuronal connections--continue throughout our life spans. MRI's and PET scans, scientific devices that allow us to peer into the workings of the body and brain, verify that meditation, mindfulness, and emotional attachment significantly influence the body where new neuronal pathways are created. Experience alters the brain, even as we age. Whenever we learn something new, including new attitudes, perspectives, or behaviors, we are changing the physical structure of the brain." ~ Excerpt from Familyprocess.org
While the mission of Siegel and others (especially Schore, Fosha, and Cozolino) is to find ways to use IPNB in the consulting room, especially in the treatment of trauma, the technology of IPNB serves as sharp reminder that Selves are not created in a vacuum.
Their basic assumption, which is the foundation of attachment theory (the most important development to come out of the neo-Freudian psychoanalytic school of psychology, the origins can be read about here) is that the human mind and human consciousness arises as the unique combination of inborn neuro-capacities (nature) and interpersonal bonding (nurture) with the attachment figure (generally the mother, though not necessarily). An example of how crucial this early bonding experience is to human development can be seen in the rare, but educational, occurrence of feral children (Genie is the most well documented example of how torture and social isolation in the earliest period of life and prevent the acquisition of "human" capabilities and traits). We need interpersonal, body-based experience to grow a mind.
Here is Dan Siegel's conception of mind and its development:
The Mind:
A Definition – The mind can be defined as an embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information. Regulation is at the heart of mental life, and helping others with this regulatory balance is central to understanding how the mind can change. The brain has selfregulatory circuits that may directly contribute to enhancing how the mind regulates the flow of its two elements, energy and information.
Mind Emergence – The mind emerges in the transaction of at least neurobiological and interpersonal processes. Energy and information can flow within one brain, or between brains. Naturally other features of our world, nature and our technological environment, can also impact on how the mind emerges. Within psychotherapy, we can see that relationships with another person profoundly shape the flow of energy and information between two people, and within each person.
Mind Development – The mind develops across the lifespan as the genetically programmed maturation of the nervous system is shaped by ongoing experience. We now know that about one third of our genome directly shapes the connections within our brains (4). Though genes are extremely important in development, we also know that experience shapes our neural connections as well. When neurons become active they have the potential to stimulate the growth of new connections among each other. With one hundred billion neurons and an average of ten thousand synaptic connections linking one neuron to others, we have trillions of connections within our brains. These synaptic linkages are created by both genes and by experience. Nature needs nurture. Experience shapes new connections among neurons by how genes are activated, proteins produced, and interconnections established within our spider-web like neural system.
Mental Well-Being – An interpersonal neurobiology view of well-being states that the complex, non-linear system of the mind achieves states of self-organization by balancing the two opposing processes of differentiation and linkage. When separated areas of the brain are allowed to specialize in their function and then to become linked together, the system is said to be integrated. Integration brings with it a special state of functioning of the whole which has the acronym of FACES: Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized, and Stable. This coherent flow (5) is bounded on one side by chaos and on the other by rigidity (6). In this manner we can envision a flow or river of well-being, with the two banks being chaos on the one side, rigidity on the other. One way of viewing the symptoms of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (7) for psychiatric diagnoses is as manifestations of rigidity or of chaos. This flow of well being can be seen to reveal the correlations among an empathic relationship, a coherent mind, and an integrated brain as three points on a triangle depicting well-being.
In this view, the interpersonal is an integral and integrated part of what we call mind, or consciousness. We do not have a mind - as we conceive of it - without the interpersonal context. In essence, we are socially and culturally embedded beings. This is something that we can never upload into a computer.
This view is very similar to that of the cultural psychologists. While IPNB looks specifically at the way mind arises and is shaped by interpersonal experience (between individuals), CP looks at the way mind arises as a result of the interaction between unique neural systems (a very cognitive neuroscience approach) and the environmental and cultural context in which that system exists.
I recently blogged about (here and here) the 2001 book from Ciarán Benson, The Cultural Psychology of the Self. Here is the central thesis of that book:
In this book I want to explore the idea that a primary function of the psychological system which is commonly called ‘self’ is to locate or position the person for themselves in relation to others. I want to suggest that self is a locative system with both evolutionary and cultural antecedents.
We cannot imagine being nowhere. We can visualise ourselves being lost, but that is to be somewhere unfamiliar to us, possibly without the means of getting back to a place we know. Where and when, place and time, are the conditions of existence. Being nowhere is quite simply a contradiction in terms. Without being placed or located I would not be, and where I find myself implaced influences not just the fact of my being but also its nature. Where, when and who are mutually constitutive. Lives, selves, identities are threaded across times and places. Who you are is a function of where you are, of where you have been and of where you hope to arrive. There cannot be a ‘here’ without a ‘you’ or an ‘I’ or a ‘now’. Self, acts of self-location and locations are inextricably linked and mutually constructive.
‘Self’ functions primarily as a locative system, a means of reference and orientation in worlds of space–time (perceptual worlds) and in worlds of meaning and place–time (cultural worlds). This understanding of self as an ongoing, living process of constant auto-referred locating recognises the centrality both of the body and of social relations. The antecedents of bodily location are well understood in evolutionary terms, whereas those of personal location among other persons are best understood culturally.
Selfhood and mentality are the most sophisticated synthetic achievements of body and culture in the universe known to human beings. In addition, as Jerome Bruner reminds us, ‘Perhaps the single most universal thing about human experience is the phenomenon of “Self”.’ (pg. 3-4)
In this view, the Self is essentially a relational system, a process and not a thing. It is constantly in flux. Here is a little more on the autobiographical self (a notion we also found in Damasio).
Since a cultural psychological conception favours an understanding of self as a continuously self-integrating process negotiating its stability through all the changes of location and demand that make up a human life, it should come as no surprise that this problem of achieving stability of self should present itself as a core problem for psychology.Clearly then, although narratives can incorporate and encompass multiple realms (biological, psychological, cultural, and social), the perspective taken is inherently subjective (a 3rd-person presentation of a 1st-person experience) - ultimately, it is a personal story with an unreliable narrator (to use a term from literary criticism) in that we all have blind spots or unconscious motivations that will impact the content of the narrative. More importantly, however, constructing a narrative and being able to tell it to others requires a certain degree of self-reflexive consciousness - being conscious of being conscious.
William James formulated this with his metaphor of consciousness as a stream. How do I know I am the same self today as I was yesterday? I have after all lost consciousness for about eight hours between then and now while I slept. And what about the links between me as I am now and me as I was twenty years ago? What is the nature of that linkage? As we have seen, James thought that this had to do with each present thought appropriating its predecessor, owning it, as it were, and blending it into the ongoing flow of consciousness. In this way the stream has the subjective quality of being all of a piece, of being a single stream, my stream.
Bruner identifies this problem as lying at the heart of the psychology of autobiography. Notwithstanding what he calls the ‘robustness’ of selves over time, they also exhibit an instability when observed over extended periods. Selves change. Sameness and change must both be accounted for. The universal changes of ordinary human development (infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood and old age), the particular changes of individual lives (personal successes and failures, griefs and joys), and the structural changes of the societies to which people belong (periods of peace and stability, war and terror and dispossession, growths and collapses of economic/ moral/religious systems) must all be accounted for in an adequate psychology of autobiography. (pg 50)
Originally introduced by Vygotsky and championed by his widening circle of admirers, the new position is that cultural products, like language and other symbolic systems, mediate thought and place their stamp on our representations of reality.[3] In its latest version, it takes the name, after John Seely Brown and Allan Collins, of "distributed intelligence."[4] An individual's working intelligence is never "solo." It cannot be understood without taking into account his or her reference books, notes, computer programs and data bases, or most important of all, the network of friends, colleagues, or mentors on whom one leans for help and advice. (Bruner, pg. 3)Anything less than this will be less than human.
Labels: body, consciousness, humanity, mind, Transhumanism
Interesting article from Michel Bauwens at the P2P Foundation. I am intrigued by the discussion, and strangely for me, have no solid opinion either way this morning.
26th December 2009= should a P2P metaphysics move away from conceptions of oneness/wholeness and instead opt for a manifoldness?
This contribution by Mushin shows how conversation by social media, including Twitter, can lead to collective insights into complex philosophical matters.
So his contribution is of interest both regarding content and form.
See also the comments for an elaboration of a discussion relating this poly-theistic worldview to Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of the morphic fields.
Mushin:
“Here is the thing: A great many people on the front of the new social movements are 'spiritually’ – and by that I mean the way they are making sense of (their) life, reality and everything – influenced by ideas that center around wholeness, Oneness, unity, a fundamental truth and similar notions or ‘philosopies’ or ‘myths’.
Some of them we’ll be encountering as we look at people’s responses on Twitter and elsewhere to a tweet I sent one evening after contemplating reality as it presents itself to me:
What if there is no unity connecting all and everyone but “polithy”? What if it’s not Wholeness but Manifoldness? What if fantasy is more fundamental than reality? What if we aren’t here to grow but to bloom? What if we’re not here to learn but to deepen?
The word “polithy” I’m using in that tweet derives from the Greek ‘poly’, as in Polytheism – the belief in many gods, which stands over against monotheism, the belief in one supreme deity – or ‘Polyverse’, which in my mind stands over against universe, the one or singular cosmos that is thought to be our basic reality.
A first response came from my friend Matej Forman:
To grow brings the question where to, to what extend. To bloom brings the answer: to full beauty. That’s what makes sense to me.
And then Christy brought up this:
What if it’s both, always and inseparably? The One manifesting as the Many, the Many rooted always in the One?
This required a longer answer than Twitter allows so I answered using Posterous:
I’m saying that the One without an outside is an egoic or heroic invention that dominates our culture. I’m saying that this One is not fact but an imagination, a repressing image or concept or - and I’ve experienced it’s reality first hand often - a dominating myth. It is positioning itself as the One beneath it all that everything and everyone is rooted in. This is the conviction that it comes with. And I am saying that, really, we live in a Polyverse that does NOT require or have an underlying unity. And that I feel that this is good, beautiful and true.
I was happy that Christy didn’t let me get away with this so easy, and she responded:
I think I still don’t quite understand - it seems to me that the gorgeous Polyverse, where we all live, is composed of parts that must remain separate parts - though in some kind of relationship perhaps - if their belonging together, arising from singularity, is denied. Is this not the reductionist perspective? The viewpoint of current conventional science that says that the universe is composed of parts? My experience is shaped by working for years within the Taoist perspective, beholding each arising phenomenon (the 10,000 things) as a unique expression of a single whole.
Again, happy that Chrissy gave me the opportunity to delve in deeper along the lines she indicated I came up with this response....
Read the whole article.
Labels: P2P, social networking, Spirituality
"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thought. With our thoughts, we make our world." ~The Buddha
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