The Transformative Power of Development: A Three-Part Distinction

Hi, Julian,

Happy 4th!  And nice post.

I am on my way out the door for some July 4th doings, but I wanted to make a couple comments and will return later to expound on them if necessary.

One, the passage from Salon.com you quoted is one I recently highlighted (and somewhat critically assessed) on my blog.  I don't think you're referring to my comments when you talk about how amazing it is that people can be critical of Wilber's remarks, but just in case, I'll clear up where I'm coming from.  I believe Wilber was probably just talking in loose, abbreviated terms for the sake of his audience (or else he was thinking of his Wilber-3 or Wilber-4 model at the time).  I'm not saying he's being “mean” or too strict in his observation; I'm saying he's actually not being stringent enough, according to his latest model.  If rationality begins with 3p, and transratonality begins at 5p (or expanded 4p), then it just isn't correct to call a temporary state experience at a rational level (3p) transrational.  Because transrational is a structural designation, not a state designation.

Concerning your last comment – “Though some of the interior meaning that magic and myth were unconsciously fumbling toward may be included in it's deeper unfoldment in transrational awareness, none of the literalism, narcissism, magical thinking or pseudo science lasts a nano-second in the crystal clear, diamond like perception of reality as it is” – I believe this is potentially problematic, if you are saying that the view you are presenting, or the view that modern science and psychology currently describe, is “reality as it is.”  That is essentially a modernist – a pre-postmodern – way of framing things.  A post-postmodern way to frame it might be something like, “…none of the literalism, narcissism, magical thinking or pseudo science lasts a nano-second in the context of truly rational or transrational perspectives.”  This latter view allows you to critically assess inadquate earlier views without assuming that you've arrived at an interpretation-free, altitude-independent view.

Best wishes,

Balder

Julian,

Do you own a copy of Geber's Origin? If you do, read chapter 4, part 3, called “Temporics.” It talks about causality, as well as the relation of the various structures of consciousenss to one another, which I feel the need to discuss again here (I just posted a comment on your prior blog about it).

I think what you have done, rather successfully, in this and many of your blogs, is defend an attitude (in an emotional, moral sense) that you feel one ought to take towards “spiritual” matters. You are saying, correct me if I am wrong, that we need to grow up and stop wishing for and believing in impossibilities. I do not at all disagree with this sentiment. Where I am having trouble is with some of the finer metaphysical details that you seem to be tacking onto this important moral realization.

Specifically, as I mentioned in my prior comment, I am concerned about rejecting the literalisms of the magic and mythic structures only to replace them with the literalisms of the rational. I know you are well aware of this mistake, but nonetheless, when you say,

“The shift from prerational to rational is an absolute revolution. New software comes on-line. Cause and effect becomes apparent and the place-holder of magical causation becomes less plausible.”

I fear you may be literalizing the mechanistic notion of cause and effect within which the rational structure is at home (or rather, within which it feels quite homeless!). The mental-rational structure is no more a reflection of objective reality than any of the prior structures, though of course it does make use of the shortcomings of each prior structure in developing its own response.

So I don't think it is so much that magical analogies and mythic narratives become less plausible in light of the mental structure. After all, by definition, anything outside the rationalist worldview is implausible, if by plausible we mean “reasonable.” Saying non-rational worldviews are implausible is basically a tautology. Rather, I think the aperspectivalism offered us by the integral structure allows us to see through the deficiencies of all prior structures, magic, mythic, and mental-rational.

I defer to Gebser (p. 358-9): “The new world reality [integral structure], which is at the same time also a world unreality, is to a great extent free of causality. Its reality is encompassed by the whole. In rational terms, it appears now as the cause, now as the effect. Although this hampers our understanding, it proportionally increases our 'verition' [as is explained here, verition refers to the sense in which 'statements about truth are superseded by statements as truth… verition, not description, is what we experience and know… philosophy is replaced by eteology; that is, the eteon, or being-in-truth']. The separation of entities from becoming is a conceptual systematization; in the universe and on the earth the originary manifests itself as a transient effect, but also as an effectuator, albeit only in the universe and in man to the extent that he is bound by space-time. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the unique plentitude and transparency (diaphaneity) visible in the new mutation touches all phenomena and makes them perceptible. The confusion that could be elicited by the wealth and intensity of the terms we have used to describe the theme of the mutation [from mental to integral consciousness] is all the more comprehensible since it is not restricted to what is conceivable to the mental consciousness. We must not forget that in our era, which is now coming to a close, we are accustomed to considering the validity and necessity of everything from a mental standpoint. But the mental is not even adequate to 'comprehend' the mythical, not to mention the magic. We have conceded the status of reality to only an extremely limited world, one which is barely one-third of what consitutes us and the world as a whole. The new integral structure, on the other hand, requires us to recognize all 'preceding' structures and the irrevocable efficient actualities which they integrate and make perceptible.”

When Gebser says, “the mental is not…adequate to 'comprehend' the mythic/magic,” I think he is speaking to what I was trying to get at above, that we should not attempt to interpret prior structures in terms of the mental-rational, such that they come to seem somehow inadequate. Each structure is plenty adequate for the people who adopt it. Integral consciousness seems to be about realizing that the process of growth is not about getting better at defining reality, or about throwing out past structures, but rather about becoming one with the process of reality as a whole, about integrating the structures such that the adequacies of each are recognized and cherished just as they are.

I know this might all seem a bit nit-picky, and as I said I wholeheartedly agree with the emotional sentiment I sense behind your message. I am just having trouble with some of the content. Let me know how all this sounds to you…

-Matt

Balder, I appreciated what you said here:
“If rationality begins with 3p, and transratonality begins at 5p (or expanded 4p), then it just isn't correct to call a temporary state experience at a rational level (3p) transrational.  Because transrational is a structural designation, not a state designation.”

I'm starting to understand the importance of separating states and stages.  So, if transrational is a structural designation, then does that mean the pre/trans fallacy doesn't apply to stage designations?  If transrational isn't the correct label for a temporary state, then what is?

I really liked C4Chaos' blog about some of the limitations of our brain and science.
There is plenty more than can be said on those subjects.

But I don't think it's necessary, because those of us who understand these things don't need to hear it, and I doubt that you are any more open to the possibility of being wrong today than you were nearly two years ago when I first started reading your blogs and posts to the Integral pod on zaadz. You're very bright, funny and interesting but this tendency to discard anything you view as not rational creates an enormous and crippling blind spot for you.

I don't imagine I have all the answers as a theist who believes in some things you sneer at as “mythic”. However, I do know this: the following is true of every human being alive and will always be true nor matter how much we learn and grow:
Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Act 1. Scene VThere are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

New-Age Narcissism and “fuzzy” philosophy is a major problem within the spiritual community, and your direct opposition against it is not only understandable, but well merited.

But, it must also be taken into consideration the atmopshere of confusion that the New-Age movement arose from; loads of misunderstood information from an amalagam of diffrent (often Non-Western) spiritual schools jumbled together to create a smorgasboard of beliefs, approached with a Western perspective, is just that: a misunderstanding.

Equating a legitimate school, practice, or 'concept' with its watered-down New-Age analogue, is a major error, and I feel you have a tendency of doing this, namely with your  habit of immediately calling “superstition” on anything outside the realm of gross-body rationalism (save energywork, which is your field, and depth psychology). As human beings we're not only composed of gross-bodies, but subtle and causal as well, and each creates their corresponding realms. None of these realms are essentially “separate” from one another, but vary in degree of subtly, depth, and causality. To assume that any system that works too deeply in metaphor with subtle and causal reality is automatically 'prerational' tribal thinking is a Pre/Trans fallacy, and I see this same mistake arise in Wilber's work as well.

Speaking from years of experience, most 'magical' experiences and practices are not pre-rational, but trans-rational. Granted, most magical 'entities', 'angels', 'demons', 'hungry ghosts', and so forth do have their roots in the 'mind', however through these experiences and practices, the insights gained drastically alter ones personal definition of “mind”. Subtle-body and energetic awareness, sharp, keen intuition, perception of causality, synchronicity, and contact with entities from other realms are not mere superstition, but plausibly reproducible. Angels and Demons may all be in your 'head', but that doesn't mean they aren't real. And, it certaintly doesn't mean they don't effect the quality of ones life, and the unfolding of (both personal and collective) history.

The reality of these sorts things are not only mentioned, but expounded upon within the great nondual (and Trans-Rational) wisdom traditions and higher tantric schools –

Within Buddhism, there is the doctrine of the 6 samsaric realms; of naraks (hell beings), pretas (hungry-ghosts), animals, humans, asuras (demi-gods), and devas (god-forms, bliss pride beings), which not only have their psychological correlates within the human sphere, but their own *autonomous* existance, just like you and I. A similar map exists within the Hindu and Tantric Hindu systems, within the Qabbalistic framework (with an extensive demonology and explanation of the Qlippoth), within the Sufi map, and the Western Esoteric schools as well.

Not only are these spoken of, but, especially within the Western schools, extensive reproducible practices exist for contact with entities from these realms, and for dealing with the interference of (malevolent) naraks and pretas. All of these notions, practices, and experiences are far more complicated and empirical than their New-Age baseless misinterpretations, but this does not make it Pre-Rational thinking.

I think the biggest factor that negates the label of 'pre-rational' on these aspects of Spiritual Practice, is the fact that belief is not necessary for experience and contact with these entities. Reproducing the process (ritual), and proper Intent  is enough to produce results.

I personally am no longer a 'practicing magician' by the conventional sense of the title. At this point in my life, I have dedicated myself completely to the aim of Waking Up, and my ever-deepening practice and study of Zen Buddhism. However, unlike most people who became “turned on” to deeper layers of experience via entheogenic drugs, my “turn on” was experimentation, turned into consistent practice of Western (High) Magic. This is what broke me out of my hardlined-rationalist shell, and it was through this that I grew up, matured, did the tremendous amount energy-work and psychological healing that brought me to where I am today.

The bases of all these practices and experiences: intution, depth, synchronicity, and causality are far from just pre-rational tribal lore, but very pertinent aspects of our precious human experience.

*Also* I'd want to add that coming towards the end of his life, Jung started to regard Archetypes not only as aspects or forces passed down through nerugenetic memory (collective unconscious), but also as transpersonal 'entities' (if they can be called that) with their own autonomous will and existence. This, and his study of synchronicity formed the groundwork for his (I don't think completed) work on Astrology.

I'll post more on that later, I'm actually rushing out now for Zazenkai.


Peace,
Julian

Great post, Julian. I love the clarity you bring to this stuff.

Julian: Generally there is a narcissistic tone - one of specialness, being at the center of the universe, being chosen, having angels, spirit guides and special intentional powers etc..

I think it's great to put a spotlight on narcicism. Are there any particular sort of developmental issues that lead to narcisism, or can they all one way or another?

I love your list, inquiry-based practice and such. But you know, KW says that the one thing that has been proven to help people develop is sitting meditation. What do you think about that? Why not sitting-meditation-based practice? Or when you say inquiry-based does that include sitting? It seems to me that one can make a good argument for inquiry, but at the same time sitting still seems essential.

Julian: Suffering is real

I don't dispute that, but how about a little horizontal-awakening dharma as a brain teaser? From One Taste:

“This is why Ramana Maharshi said, “That which is not present in deep dreamless sleep is not real.” The Real must be present in all three states, including deep dreamless sleep, and the only thing that is prsent in all three states is the formless self or pure consciousness. And each night you die to the separate-self sense, die to the ego, and are plunged back into the ocean of infinity that is your Original Face… . The ultimate “spiritual test,” then, is simply your relation to death.” [December 29]


Bruce: “If you are saying that the view you are presenting, or the view that modern science and psychology currently describe, is “reality as it is.”  That is essentially a modernist - a pre-postmodern - way of framing things.  A post-postmodern way to frame it might be something like, “…none of the literalism, narcissism, magical thinking or pseudo science lasts a nano-second in the context of truly rational or transrational perspectives.”  This latter view allows you to critically assess inadquate earlier views without assuming that you've arrived at an interpretation-free, altitude-independent view.”


Cool!  

:)

David

Julian,

Let me reemphasize that I do not disagree with the sentiment, but I see a few details that I want to engage you further about.

You say:
is there more? absolutely thats what transrational is….
does this more conflict with reality as it is revealed by broad science and reason? absolutely not!
might it someday expand the scientific worldview?
yes, with good evidence, solid methodology and critical thinking intact….
but that's a big, big (did i mention BIG?) deal and would be massive news all over the world were it repeatable, provable etc….

There are Vedic texts written before 8,000 BC that refer to the Sun as the center of the solar system. The Pythagoreans, in the 5th century, also took it as a matter of course that the Earth was round and orbited the Sun. Each had mathematical reasons behind their ideas. If one learned their methods, one would have been forced to agree with their conclusions. But because of “common sense,” heliocentrism wasn't generally accepted until around the 16th century. 

In regards to what you have said, Julian, I think it is key that we understand what is meant by “broad science.” When we expand the narrow science of Galileo, Descartes, and the rest of the Enlightenment, we are changing more than merely a method. We are transforming an entire worldview. Good evidence and solid methodology cannot be dispensed with, I agree with you there. But the meaning of “good” and “solid” will need to undergo total reconstructive surgery. The method itself can remain largely unchanged, but for the minor loosening of what is meant by empiricism, such that not only sensory but psychological experience is admited to be “real.” But the background assumptions about the nature of reality must be radically reconsidered. The easy split between subject and object must be called into question. Really, this split is already done away with when we broaded the concept of empiricism (by “done away with,” I don't mean we cannot draw useful distinctions between subject and object, just that they are useful shorthands, not opposed ends of an ontological chasm in reality itself). This doesn't mean there really are monsters under the bed, but it does mean we cannot attempt to know reality as though knower and known were not deeply related.

You say:
this is the great gift of rational and of scientific method - they are not merely relative perspectives - they are testable provable truths everywhere and everywhen on planet earth - regardless of your worldview, philosophy or hairstyle!

I don't consider the scientific method to be a perspective/worldview, in the sense that it can, of itself, provide a community of subjects with all that they need to lead meaningful, coherent, full lives. It is only a method, after all.  It is a way of getting something. But before you try to get it, you need to know what it is you're reaching for. That's what a perspective/worldview gives you. A “postmodern” science (and I'm not talking about the deconstructionist kind of postmodernism… that school is better termed 'hypermodernist,' where everything becomes merely relative, the whole world reduced to the ideas of a Cartesian subject who can think up and manipulate reality into whatever form it pleases) is a science that doesn't assume a materialist (or idealist) ontology, but that takes experience as it comes. But we still need a background structure to fill in the gaps between the experiments we perform. I personally prefer a panexperientialist ontology, as it jives better with the findings of contemporary physics, biology, and psychology. But regardless, I do not think it is legitimate to see the scientific methodology (broad or narrow) as all a person or society needs to function.

Furthermore, it is not evidence that ushers in new paradigms, but transformations of background assumptions. What counts as evidence depends on the perspective you take. It took thousands of years for the general population to accept that the Earth went round the Sun because not until the telescope was invented could the layman (non-mathematician) experience the proof (which even to this day runs contrary to our earthly perception of the rising and setting Sun). And even then, unless one was ready to have the mythic give birth to the mental structure (which involves far more than just admitting the sky is not what you thought), they would deny the evidence because they simply wouldn't understand it. A recent Gallup poll showed that nearly 1/5 of Americans still think the Sun goes around the Earth.

So just to reiterate the point of my first comment, I am only trying to emphasize that the “scientific method” as practiced by most non-integrally informed scientists has many background assumptions built into it. One of which is that mechanical causality is the only reality. Now, broading science such that this background is transcended and included doesn't mean we put gravity on the same plane as “the law of attraction.” But it does mean we recognize that the mechanistic understanding of reality is metaphorical, and not meant to be taken literally. It is useful at times, though at others it does quite a bit of violence. We must use it wisely, being careful not to view the whole of nature through its lens as though anything else were merely wishful thinking. This would be bad science, in the broadened, integral sense.
 
-Matt

I agree I am treading a fine line, Julian. Other very scientifically literate people have told me exactly what you have said here. So I'm aware I need to be careful. But I think it is worth paying very close attention to how we frame these issues, whether we lean more in my direction or in yours.

I just watched Michael Dowd on Lou Dobbs. What do you think of the message he is spreading? I am encouraged by it, so I'm curious to get your reading on the issue.

Thanks, Julian. You provide a great space for inquiry here. I also like your comments on inquiry/meditation.

Julian: * rational awareness gives us access to the objective world in the most complete way possible - so far.

When we say “rational,” generally, we are talking about Orange cognition, right? If that's not what we mean I think we should be more precise with language. I think everyone here would argue, for example, that integral gives us “access to the objective world” in a far more complete way than Orange rationality. Orange rationality, after all, is a rather cramped, dogmatic space. It is the level just above Amber, and they're just about as narrow and stubborn as Amber only in a materialistic way. So surely we mean “integral awareness” in this sentence I quoted, right? Which we could also call post-post rational?


Julian: * transrational doesn't  change or really even add very much to this - transrational has much, much more to do with the interior, subjective experience .

It sounds like you might be confusing states and stages here. If integral adds much to rationality (which I think we all agree it does), then transrational, which adds more perspectives still (as well as construct awareness, ego awareness, better intuition, ethics, etc.), would add even more. AQAL, after all, is not a product of rational or even integral but transrational, at least by Wilber IV and probably by Wilber III as well.

When you say that transrational has more to do with interior subjective experience, it sounds like you are saying that transrational is about zone #1, or perhaps about feelings or something. But transrational can take any of the perspectives in IMP, and way more perspectives than rational, so surely it would add a lot to the way we view and interpret the gross realm, the dream-state realm, and the causal realm. It sounds like you're referring to state training there.

Julian: * that is why to access transrationality one HAS to engage in practices of internal development…

Yes, but of course with vertical transformation (which includes the transrational stages) there is also a correlate emergence in the upper-right quadrant. Someone can have an experience of the nondual state, however, without new emergences in the upper quadrants or even “attain” a state plateau—be considered a meditation “master” of sorts—with a first-tier worldview. I think it's peak experiences and state plateaus that you have in mind when you talk about “transrational” being much more about the interior and not adding anything to rationality rather than the transrational vertical structure.

So, just to help out with the language, I think we could say we have vertical development (referring to the vertical axis on the WC Lattice) and horizontal awakening (referring to the horizontal axis on the WC Lattice). And then transrational (referring to vertical development and the vertical axis only) and also (continuing to use the prefix trans to help differentiate between the two) trans-waking, trans-dreaming, and trans-causal (referring to horizontal awakening and the horizontal axis). The former (transrational) adds an awful lot to rationality (as integral does), but the latter (horizontal awakening) adds very little and is much more about interior subjective experience, though it can speed vertical development (as well as inhibit it profoundly in some cases because of its ability to make some people more certain of the worldview they already hold).

Horizontal awakening and vertical development do converge in third tier, and I will address that soon in a blog.


David

David:  It sounds like you might be confusing states and stages here. If integral adds much to rationality (which I think we all agree it does), then transrational, which adds more perspectives still (as well as construct awareness, ego awareness, better intuition, ethics, etc.), would add even more. AQAL, after all, is not a product of rational or even integral but transrational, at least by Wilber IV and probably by Wilber III as well.

When you say that transrational has more to do with interior subjective experience, it sounds like you are saying that transrational is about zone #1, or perhaps about feelings or something. But transrational can take any of the perspectives in IMP, and way more perspectives than rational, so surely it would add a lot to the way we view and interpret the gross realm, the dream-state realm, and the causal realm. It sounds like you're referring to state training there.

Yes, this is something I remarked on as well in my recent blog on the W-C Lattice and the Pre/Trans Fallacy.  As I suggested then, Julian, you may be overly confining “transrational” to a type of UL state experience, rather than treating it as the stage that it actually is within Wilber's model.

Yes, I understand; my emphasis was not on UL but on state-experience.  I think you are using transrational to refer to states (including state plateaus) rather than the structure-stages (4p-expanded, 5p, or beyond) that actually constitute the transrational band of vertical interior development in the models of Wilber and Cook-Greuter.

Cognition is also just one aspect of this. Motivation is another. We could also say personal (rather than rational) and transpersonal (rather than transrational). The personal tends to be motivated by personal interests. The worldview changes as we go up to Turquoise, but Turquoise still tends to be focused on the personal self and the evolution of this personal self.  With the transpersonal stages, however, one is no longer motivated so personally, and one tries to live from beyond the personal self. Turquoise is into self-actualization, Indigo and above into self-transcendence . One is motivated more and more purely by the evolutionary impulse, and one's actions are more and more for everyone or geared more toward some genuine contribution than the personal needs of the individual (safety, security, prestige, sex, comfort, etc.). The individual becomes more and more subtle and less and less needy. It becomes more of a giver than a taker.


David

Hi, Julian,

As a stage of cognitive development, as I also argued in a previous discussion, transrationality should not be limited or “bracketed out of objective discourse” in the ways that you might similarly wish to limit or bracket out an altered state experience.  Transrationality, as it is currently being used in Wilber's model, represents a way of interacting with the world – a way (5p) which incorporates and builds on rationality (3p).  So, when you write in your post that transrationality is mostly a private, interior development and doesn't have much to do with how we see, understand, or interact with the objective world, I do not believe this is correct. 

Best wishes,

Balder

Hey Julian, Balder,

Now this is a conversation I'd just love to jump into…. I'm not entirely apathetic about God-talk, but it is not something I think much about. The implications of transrationality (Gebser's term “arational” may be more appropriate, as it is misleading to see this new structure as somehow “better” than rationality; it's just different, not opposed to, but other than) for scientific thought and objectivity, though, are really the core of my interests and studies. So make what you can out of the following speculations…

I agree with what you are pointing to, Balder, but I think Julian is justified in his unease. We need to really specify what arationality might mean in relation to the rational objective/subjective dichotomy, as we don't want to open the door to a shallow New Age egotism where subjectivity completely subsumes the objective world.

Julian: it does not alter our understanding of the objective world in anything like the way that does the transition from prerational to rational. the growth from prerational to rational allows us to interpret objective reality with more accuracy, less distortion, less wishful thinking and delusion

I think arationality does alter our understanding of the objective world in quite a profound way, actually. And keep in mind that for the prerational structure, there really isn't any objective world as rationality understands it. Transformations between structures should not be flattened out and seen only from the rational perspective, such that we speak of them as though they are merely changes in how subjectivity relates to objectivity. This is one criticism I'd make of Wilber's AQAL map, that it may falsely concretize an ontological gap between subject and object that is actually an abstraction which arises out of the rational structure's perspective. As McLuhan said, though, the medium is the message. Anything in print or on a Cartesian grid necessarily reflects the subject/object ontology of the rational structure. I'm sure Wilber is aware of this, and I know he is quite interested in Maturana and Varela's models of enactive cognition, wherein the subject/object ontology is bracketed (ie, science can still go on “as if” it were a true reflection of reality) in favor of a more relational/transactional ontology. Enactivism does not imply that the mind creates reality. It completely deconstructs the Cartesian duality and replaces it with the “middle way” offered by Madhyamaka Buddhism.


In their book The Tree of Knowledge (definitely worth reading), Maturana and Varela offer this description of the goal of their project:

“confront the problem of understanding how our existence-the praxis of our living- is coupled to a surrounding world which appears filled with regularities that are at every instant the result of our biological and social histories…. to find a via media: to understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at every moment, but without any point of reference independent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assertions. Indeed the whole mechanism of generating ourselves, as describers and observers tells us that our world, as the world which we bring forth in our coexistence with others, will always have precisely that mixture of regularity and mutability, that combination of solidity and shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close.” [Tree of Knowledge, pg. 241]

So the arational structure is not an entirely interior transformation. Indeed, it does not sharply divide inside from outside as does the rational. It is equally a shift in how we relate to the world out there (including other people). What science has taught us about reality does not become obsolete, not by any means. But it does become re-contextualized as a thoroughly socially embedded activity rather than some transcendental perspective with access to reality itself. It remains the best method for developing shared, experience-based truths.

Let me know what ya'll think,

Matt

Hi, Julian, Matt,

I appreciate both of your perspectives.  Matt, I have to say that I completely agree with what you are saying; that is my view exactly.  I certainly do share Julian's concerns about how descriptions of “transrationality” might appear to give support to certain faulty interpretations which are actually pre-rational.  I am not at all meaning to discount that.  I am just concerned that, in his concern to protect against that, Julian may be downplaying or incompletely acknowledging the nature and scope of perspectival shift that actually takes place with the emergence of a- or trans-rationality.

Julian, please correct me if I've misread you, but it appears to me that you are suggesting that the description of the world, as disclosed by rational-level science, is identical to reality-as-it-is, rather than itself being a certain perspectival enactment.  To use Matt's turn of phrase here, my concern is that you are arguing that rational-level science offers a “transcendental perspective with access to reality itself,” and that anything disclosed from a transrational perspective will not, and cannot, contradict this immutable reality. 

The change being discussed here is a subtle one.  I am in no way suggesting that the shift to transrational negates the law of gravity or changes the chemical composition of my computer or suddenly opens the door to “a hodge-podge of naive beliefs around psychics, pseudo science, astrology, prophecy, conspiracy theories,” etc.  It is true that we create, or co-create, reality – meaning, our experiential, tetra-enacted worldspaces – but while the language may appear to parallel certain magical beliefs, what is being suggested is not the same as the egocentric, subjectivistic worldview of The Secret.

Matt, you describe a potential limitation of the AQAL model, in that it appears to overly solidify or reify the “gap” between subjective and objective – a gap which is challenged in subtle but profound ways with the transition to transrational.  I agree with this, but I think the introduction of the enactive paradigm, and in the Integral context, the language of tetra-enactment in conjunction with the oprationalizing of AQAL via Integral Methodological Pluralism, can help to counteract this … especially to the degree that construct-awareness allows the co-enactment of subjective and objective to be more clearly apprehended.  The quadrants of AQAL become an ongoing flowering, not a static map of isolated, independent dimensions or realms.

Best wishes,

Balder

Thanks Balder. I agree with you that the enactive paradigm is not lost to the AQAL map so long as we have a deeper sense of its transrational meaning (ie, so long as we can understand it as a flat, 2D representation of a 4D reality, and not take it as a literal reflection of the structure of reality). This is why I emphasized the degree to which the medium is the message. We simply cannot codify integral insights into text-based arguments and graphics without flattening them into rationalist representations. This is not a hinderance, though, so long as we are aware of what happens when an experiential, transpersonal truth is written down.

“while the rational/scientific method may not ever be able to say that it finally definitively reveals ‘reality as it is” - what we perhaps can say is that it reveals the aspects of what reality certainly isnt - namely the many prerational misrepresentations. yes?”

Exactly.

while the rational/scientific method may not ever be able to say that it finally definitively reveals 'reality as it is” - what we perhaps can say is that it reveals the aspects of what reality certainly isnt - namely the many prerational misrepresentations. yes?

I'd say that's about right. Scientific theories are falsifiable, but they cannot be proven right (as in, shown to be perfect reflections of reality).

i would  ask you bruce to explain if you think transrational changes objective reality rather than just some aspects of how we think about objective reality.

No, when you realize a transrational perspective, objective reality doesn't suddenly change into something else – if by that you mean some objective object, which “really was” made of atoms, suddenly physically transforming so that it now exists in a new, spiritual state.

The problem with the above understanding is that it fails to recognize the interdependence of subjective and objective poles.  It assumes that the object really existed in a particular form, and once our mind changes, then it too responds – coming to really exist in some new form.  But this is not what is implied by the notion of enactment.  According to the notion of enactment, whatever we take to be “real” at any given moment – any perception we may have – is already, in part, shaped by our understanding, by our prior embodied experience, by our particular sensory and cognitive apparatuses. 

In some earlier posts, I talked about a change in how objects in a given worldspace ex-ist, but I am using this convention to try to capture the nature of enactment – where ex-ist emphasizes how an object “stands-out” or shows up, perceptually and meaningfully, in a given observer's worldspace.

So…yes, what changes is how we think about objective reality, but the important point of enactment is that you cannot isolate and pinpoint “objective reality” in itself, independently of us, such that you could stand outside the world to perceive and describe it as it really is.  The world disclosed by rational consciousness is the-word-disclosed-by-rational-consciousness: an enactment.  Transrational consciousness will enact the world differently.  But no “magical transformations” are involved.

Best wishes,

B.

Hi Everyone

In this wonderful discussion, this comment from Matt stood out for me, specifically the final sentence - my underlining:
“So the arational structure is not an entirely interior transformation. Indeed, it does not sharply divide inside from outside as does the rational. It is equally a shift in how we relate to the world out there (including other people). What science has taught us about reality does not become obsolete, not by any means. But it does become re-contextualized as a thoroughly socially embedded activity rather than some transcendental perspective with access to reality itself. It remains the best method for developing shared, experience-based truths”

Just to clarify Matt, by “it” in the final sentence you mean rational science, right?

James

James, yes. More specifically, I mean the scientific method.

Thanks Matt

I have been visiting many integrally informed discussions about  “enacted perspectives” on Gaia and elsewhere, and I find your comment to be a great help and of great significance.

Along with well-argued and clear examples of the (partial) truth of this position, I have seen this perspectivism ( or is it aperspectivism?!) taken to a curious extreme in some cases, whereby the rational element involved in the scientific method is dismissed as being some foolish descartian concoction rather than, as you say, still the best method for developing shared, experience based truths.

Some comments I came across seemed to suggest that ultimately we all live in our own enacted perspectives, and that  we actually share very little if anything as fellow human beings. I found such comments to be indicative of  a mindset possibly showing a type of avoidance behaviour, using crisp, clean perspectival arguments to keep the great unwashed of humanity at arms length.

I found such views and comments quite disconcerting, so for me your statement was a refreshing clarification.

Thank You

James,

The rational/Cartesian paradigm of science was an important step beyond the medieval sense in which a person was constantly at risk of being possessed by demons. It separated the mind from the world, creating a “buffered self” in Charles Taylor's words. This was exactly what mythic consciousness needed. But I think as we transition from the mental/rational structure into the integral/aperspectival, we see Descartes' dualism as a nifty heuristic rather than a fact about reality itself. As safe and secure as the buffered self is, it can also become tremendously alienated from others and from nature. Other people become indistinguishable (logico-empirically, at least) from machines (especially when Descartes' system is secularized and the divine spark (soul) is explained away). The living, breathing depth of the natural world becomes but a show of surfaces. In many ways, it is the deficient phase of the mental structure that has caused many of the ecological and social problems associated with industrialization and the global economy.

Let me clarify exactly what I was saying remains the best method for developing shared, experience-based truths. Not Cartesian science, as from this perspective nothing is shared; you are an individual thinking subject cut off from the world and other people, even from your own emotions, senses, imagination, etc. It is the spirit behind the notion of basing truth on experience (rather than traditional dogma) that can be shared with others that is the most appropriate method for garnering truth. I was going to say truth “about” reality. But this sort of nudges us back into the subject/object dichotomy again. Truth in the aperspectival sense is a “being-in” truth, not a “knowledge about” truth.

Enactivism does suggest that our ability to know and experience depends largely on our biological structure/organization. But we humans are nearly identical in this respect. So we share far more than we differ in. And certainly, consciousness begins as a “unified field” of intersubjective relation, only afterwords, as we develop, differentiating itself into a more autonomous selfhood (which ideally also deepens our relation to the community of other autonomous selves).

Thanks for your response James, I've got to run! Let me know what you think of this attempt at clarification/expansion of what I said earlier.

Be well,
Matt

Julian, you didn't respond to my clarification, which you had requested.  Any thoughts? 

Oh!  I did read it, but I didn't think it was a response to my post, which is why I asked for your thoughts.

I'll read it again… :-)

Julian - When I read your comments, I'm not entirely sure what your worldview is.  Are you familiar with paranormal research?  From my readings, there seems to be growing evidence that thoughts do effect the world (ie magical thinking).  Do you think the research is insufficient or misleading?

Julian, can you possibly describe your understanding of the enactive paradigm that informs Wilber V, and that Matt and I have both been talking about?  From what you've written, it doesn't appear that you fully grasp it, or else you think it is essentially trivial.  It seems as if you are saying that, in the past, we saw things – we enacted things – that weren't real, but now we see things as they are.  Perhaps people in the past enacted different loopy and misguided worldspaces, but now we, via the scientific method, have finally been enabled to see reality as it really is.

Is this essentially what you are saying?

Best wishes,

Balder

J!  what a jewel…here is where the diamond got a little rough for my understanding…

The simple equation here is that the more disadvantageous the trauma/resource ratio is and the greater the concomitant gulf between critical thinking and spiritual longing, the more likely one will be to misperceive a regression to childhood magic and myth as the next stage of development beyond rational.

is there any way to make this statement clearer?

you lost me there, and i had to reread it several times…but still not clear on it…will go back now and try and finish reading what was posted after this…anyways…i think in this post…your 'new' language is in a sense forming within your own awareness and understanding…itself…good job!

Okay, I can respond to you more directly – but I asked you first!  I asked you for a direct response to my previous post, because it would help me understand where you stand if you actually let me know what you agree with or disagree with in what I said.  One reason why I ask is because your recent post could be read without a “bump” through an Orange lens, so I'm still unclear where you stand with regard to postmodern / enactive contributions to Integral.

Balder made a similiar point in his blog about transrationality.
PTFs

Hi Julian,

I agree that we should “give the rational scientific method it's due.”  In mentioning paranormal research, I wasn't thinking about integral theory at all, or any other theory.  I was merely thinking about results of scientific research.  We need to determine whether the evidence is valid before we even worry about theorizing. 

So, I'm speaking about enacting a rational perspective as a way of clarifying the issues about the paranormal, but I'm not necessarily speaking about enacting rationality as an overarching paradigm.  The extent to which the universe itself is rational isn't something I'm keen about trying to figure out in a discussion like this… and its not directly important in ascertaining the validity of paranormal research.

Anywho… scientifically speaking, all that you said makes rational sense.  I don't disagree with any of the examples you used.  However, the paranormal also makes rational sense to the extent that research shows evidence for it… which is the crux of the matter.  The problem is that evidence is one thing and interpretation of that evidence is a whole other can o' worms.  Of course, just based on the evidence, there is no inherent conflict between the paranormal and such things as evolution.  Conflict only arises when we try to enact a coherent worldview that unifies all of the evidence.

Until I know your opinion about the research, I don't think there is any more that I can say that will further the discussion.

I've only had a casual interest in paranormal research and so I've never studied it to a great extent.  There is a century of research, but the most notable researcher was Rhine.  I know of many books that go into the details of paranormal research, but I'm not sure where on the web a good resource might be.  Let me look around and I'll get back to you. 

The reason this was on my mind recently is because I was reading the book The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen.  I bought the book because its about the Trickster archetype and not because of the paranormal research, but it is the most interesting book on paranormal research that I've come across.  He has been personally involved in paranormal research and he is interested in the difficulties with the field.  Its a good introduction to the field as he gives a detailed survey of the development of paranormal research and how this fits into the larger development of culture itself.

Hi, Julian,

I have been persistent in pursuing this question – I guess we all have our pet topics! – but I'm sorry you've experienced it as “hammering.”  I just think it's an important distinction to communicate in Integral discussions.

Concerning the post you asked me and Marmalade to respond to, I do not have any disagreement with the examples you provided.  I do not think the adoption of the enactive paradigm would lead to or lend support to any of the faulty conclusions you outlined in your post.  To the extent that folks “enamored of Wilber V” might take issue with some of what you have written, it would not be for the reasons you have suggested; I seriously doubt anyone who understands the implications of Wilber V would argue in support of the abdication of reason or the abandonment of logic, empirical observation, and the scientific method.  But the understanding of what we are doing when we employ the scientific method would change (in subtle but significant ways).

You wrote:  as i have said several times - the insights of postmodernism apply to the left quads in powerful ways - especially in wilber v terms - zone 2 and 4. while an enactivist paradgim suggests that we co-create the reality that we call forth with our consciousness i think we should be very careful in unpacking what this really means and not encouraging the commission of  serious quadrant errors viz seeming to support a position in which external reality has now been reduced to an entirely relative and self/society-generated solopsistic illusion.

Yes, I hear you here, and I share your concerns.  I do not think that either Wilber V or the enactive paradigm involves commitment to, or leads to the adoption of, a solipsistic relativism, and people who use these paradigms to support such a perspective are, in my view, misusing them.  However, I think we need to get very clear on what you mean when you say that postmodern insights apply only to the left quadrants.  If you mean that we can bracket out the UL and LL and view reality exclusively through UR and LR lenses, such that we are able to achieve a privileged, wholly objective understanding of reality as it is, then I think this is incorrect and misses the dynamic of tetra-enactivism.  One of the important insights of postmodernism is that it is not possible for us to have privileged access to the world as it is, independent of our cognitive and perceptual mechanisms.  This does not mean that reality is pure illusion or that individuals are generating worlds randomly and arbitrarily, out of nothing or on a whim, without any “objective” constraints.  But it does mean that we cannot talk about right-quadrant objects and processes as if they are neatly and hermetically sealed from the left – as if we could stand outside the interdependent, co-creative matrix of mind/body/world and see the “real thing” in itself, independent of our interpretive and conceptual faculties.  In this sense, the rational/scientific worldview is as much a “construction” as earlier worldviews.

Best wishes,

Balder

P.S.  Do you recall a conversation awhile back in which I argued that a form of defensiveness and repression can be involved just as much in holding to the “firmness” of a rationalist/objectivist worldview as to a pre-rational, magical one?  It is a different level of defensiveness - not the “same problem,” or same level of problem, as you are diagnosing in your critiques of the New Age, for instance - but a real issue nonetheless, and one that becomes apparent as you cross through existential and cross into higher stages of development.  Well, the other day I was reading an essay by David Loy called Avoiding the Void, and found that he touched on this issue in a clear way.  So, I'm copying an excerpt of that essay here, in case you are interested:

~*~

“Our discussions of guilt and anxiety need to be supplemented by

some reference to their objectifications: projection and transference.

The apparently-objective world is unconsciously structured

by the ways we seek to secure ourselves within it. We meet again

the unfortunate paradox that precisely this attempt to ground myself

in the world is what separates me from it.

In The Ego and the Id, Freud observes that the dynamically unconscious

repressed is not capable of becoming conscious in the

ordinary way, and suggests that “anything arising from within that

seeks to become conscious must try to transform itself into external

perceptions” (Freud, 1923/1989, pp. 12-13). That insight is now

taken for granted, yet the way Freud expresses it also takes for

granted our commonsense bifurcation between subject and object

even as the phenomena he refers to-projection and transference challenge

it. Such formulations assume that the locus of the unconscious

is some place within me and that the objective world is what

it appears to be, something external to me. Like most of us all the

time and perhaps all of us most of the time, Freud takes for granted

the objectivity of the world-yet this is a dangerous assumption,

given Kant's Copernican Revolution and the more recent discoveries

of quantum physics and cognitive psychology. It is also a

difficult assumption to become aware of, if we constitute the world

in a manner which conceals the fact that we have constituted it:

Perhaps the most potent defense of all [against death-anxiety] is simply

reality as it is experienced-that is, the appearance of things….

appearances enter the service of denial: we constitute the world in such

a way that it appears independent of our constitution. To constitute the

world as an empirical world means to constitute it as something

independent of ourselves (Yalom,1980, p. 222).

Why is this such a potent defense against anxiety? Why do we

forget that we (for it is a social construction: we learn to perceive

the world the way others do) have constituted the world? Yalom

relates this to a repressed fear of groundlessness, which makes us

try to secure ourselves by stabilizing the world we are in. We need

a world of dependable, self-existing things, fixable in objective

time and space and interacting in ways we can learn to manipulate.

Once a predictable world has been automatized, we can concentrate

on achieving our ends within that world. However, there is

another reason for “forgetting” if the sense-of-self which is in that

world is itself constituted at the same time: in that case these acts of

constitution cannot be accessible to self-consciousness because

they are also the foundations of self-consciousness. Then to repress

the fact that my objective world is constituted is also to repress the

fact that1am constituted.”

I hope you have a fruitful weekend, Julian.  I actually have a number of things to accomplish this weekend too and probably shouldn't be online right now, but I wanted to just add a few extra comments to clarify what I wrote above – and hopefully to better relate it to (my understanding of) your concerns.

Given that in your work, a lot of your focus is on helping people connect more deeply with themselves and, in particular, surrending what often turn out to be fairly naive and even escapist spiritual beliefs and (magical/mythical) consolations, it is understandable that you would emphasize a fairly strongly rational, realist, critically reflective approach.  I expect that for a number of your clients, while they are likely capable of taking 3p perspectives and thinking logically, there may be areas of their lives which they have bracketed off and in which they still cling to various consoling pre-rational ideas.  As I see it, while you understand and are using an Integral frame, your work may often consist of deconstructing your clients' prerational structures and helping them to move into a healthy, essentially Orange form of spirituality.

I might be wrong about this – and I'm sure you work with people with a range of needs, at a number of different levels of development – but if it is the case that much of your focus is on helping people transition out of essentially prerational beliefs, then it makes sense that the place to focus on is developing a solid Orange foundation, in order to open the way for eventually developing healthy existential and Integral perspectives.

In your essays here, where you address people in the New Age and Integral communities who are embracing pre-rational ideas out of Green desires to be inclusive or apparently non-judging and uncritical, it also makes sense to emphasize essential rational perspectives and critical thinking skills. 

So, in my comments above, I'm not faulting you for having an Orange flavor to some of your arguments, especially given your particular aims.  I'm aware of the observation that Green will sometimes mistake Integral arguments for Orange, but I do not believe I am actually speaking here from a Green perspective myself; nor do I think you're only speaking from Orange.  I think you have a good understanding of Integral and are an excellent Integral writer and apologist.  But my sense is that your two areas of focus may have led you to “skip over” some of the more sophisticated, subtle perspectives that Green can positively contribute to a robust Integral theory. 

The issue of Integral folks endorsing certain prerational beliefs out of a Green spirit of pluralistic tolerance is somewhat complicated, because in my view a person who solidly grasps postmodern critical theory (cognitively Green) is not going to be one who uncritically engages in magical thinking.  Here, we have to differentiate between certain values associated with postmodern culture and the actual cognitive critical thinking skills that may be developed at this level.  So, pre-rational spiritual beliefs are obviously not themselves the direct products of postmodern critical thinking, but are rather pre-Green concepts that Green values may be used to defend.

I understand and appreciate what you are trying to do – why you are emphasizing rational thinking, the scientific method, and certain existential themes.  But just as you are concerned about how Integral may be undermined by an uncritical embrace of certain prerational spiritual beliefs (a tendency which may be supported or reinforced by a commitment to some form of pluralistic relativism), I am concerned also about the potential effects on Integral discourse and theory that may follow from commitment to a rationalism and objectivism that hasn't really digested the lessons of postmodern critical thought (particularly enactivism, constructivism, even deconstructionism).

We're focusing on different issues, but I think they're both important – and in our Gaia discussions here, I'm focusing on one as a counterbalance to yours.

Best wishes,

Balder

Julian,

I am one reader who is very glad you chose to use this place to pursue “intellectual inquiry” in the manner in which you explain above.

There are others, like me, who feel rather like nomads seeking a welcoming circle between the worlds of new age, science and religion.

I think of Richard Dawkins during an interview(s) perplexed that it is okay to examine, analyze and apply critical thinking to nearly any topic - BUT religion (including in my eyes, the way some practice a variety of “new age” as a religion).

Looking forward to your next blog posting.
 
~ Erin

I just got home from work and haven't yet looked for some web resources about paranormal research, but I wanted to chime in.  I really like the direction this discussion is heading.  I'm starting to see how different ideas fit together… in particular the postmodern critical thought that Bruce mentioned.  I was pointing out Hansen's book because of his explanation of postmodernism and other approaches, and how they relate to scientific research.

Bruce, I enjoyed the quotes from that David Loy essay.  Its very clearly written.

I'm in :)

Julian, yes, I'd be up for doing a symposium too.  Great idea – since bringing multiple voices together in a concentrated way may be the best way to really do justice to the issues involved.

Julian,

Symposium? Count me in! I just returned home from a trip to the left coast and still have some unpacking to do, but I wanted to let you all know I am still here, have been reading, and will be posting a more in depth response in regards to enactive science, etc.

Quickly, though: Varela's approach to understanding human cognition (which for Varela is synonymous with the process of living) is thoroughly grounded in human neurology/biology, more so than any representational/Cartesian view of the mind (which typically ignore biology and the body and treat the brain as a computer). Further, enactivism is anything but solipsistic. It is actually an attempt to get us out of the solipsism implied by representational approaches. I'll unpack this more in a comment later tonight or tomorrow.

I'm looking forward to a symposium or a blog diving futher into the significance of enactivism…

-Matt

Julian,

I'll try and tell you what I agree with in your long response above, and what I may need to qualify.

Yes, disease is often related to real live microrganisms taking up residence in your body. But we need to be careful when talking about cause and effect. As you pointed out, there are very powerful psychosomatic influences that play a role in our health. This is not to say that believing you have HIV is, on its own, enough to literally create the virus in your bloodstream. Of course not. But I think there is plenty of evidence which suggests that the quality of a person's mental state has an effect, positive or negative, on the development of any number of sicknesses. Remember that traditional science denies any connection between mind and body. To take seriously the idea that psychological dynamics exist along a continuum with bodily health is already to begin to adopt the enactive approach.

Before his death, Varela was exploring the degree to which it may be appropriate to consider the immune system as a self-organizing cognitive system capable of reading and reacting to perturbances in a way strikingly similar to the brain. His research suggests that our immune systems operate by distinguishing self from non-self. Auto-immune disease represents a malfunctioning in this self-awareness (a kind of immunopsychosis, if you will). In Varela's opinion, the immune system is misunderstood by the prevailiing metaphor of military defense against invaders. It is more appropriate, in his eyes, to see it as the system responsible for maintaining the physiological identity of the body.

That was a bit of a tangent… back to the discussion at hand. You like to talk about the rational structure as offering a more accurate picture of reality than the prerational. In a sense, I agree. But it is somewhat misleading, from the enactive perspective, to talk about human understanding as though it were representational in nature. The nervous system doesn't operate by trying to mirror the objective, external world. It operates by engaging its environment, by acting in it, such that “perception” becomes a bit of a misnomer (the word implies that our awareness of the world is passively received ready-made from a pre-existing environment). Varela and Maturana talk about the co-emergence of observer and observed. But don't conflate co-emergence with observer created reality (like in The Secret). The observer for Varela and Maturana is a biological system that has a history of structual coupling with its environment. So the emergence of the observed world isn't the result of a lone observer deciding or desiring here and now for some particular set of circumstances to prevail. Rather, it is the result of millions, if not billions of years of close evolutionary development between organism and environment. Now, when the biological system in question is a human being, culture and language can certainly speed up this process of co-emergence quite a bit. Groups of people can enact all kinds of realities through intersubjecting and collective world-making, restricted only by the similarity of all human nervous systems and the regularity of the behavior of nature. It isn't the structure of the natural world that changes as a result of this cultural enaction, but the way in which nature's organization is interpreted.

The scientific enterprise is one way in which groups of people can bring forth certain views of the world. But what happens when we ask a question like whether the scientific view is “more accurate” than, say, the world brought forth by the Hopi tribe? I know, Julian, that this is probably the crux of your concern. As has already been mentioned, asking questions about the accuracy of a world picture is not appropriate outside the representational/Cartesian view of the human mind, which enactivism is a strong criticism of. But let's go along with the question and see where it leads. We first need to ask what exactly we mean by “the scientific view.” If we mean mechanistic materialism, then my answer to the previous question would be that the scientific view is just as much a relative construction of the technocentric scientists as the Hopi view is a construction of their earthcentric traditions.

But if by science we mean that method of knowing where direct experience counts more than authority and where strict attention is paid to the internal coherence of ideas, then I might be more inclinded to adopt said method than to naively accept views of reality arrived at by other means. But I think it is probably more appropriate to see this method as the basis of all healthy human engagement with the world, rather than narrowly defining it as “science.” The Hopi have no doubt enacted their world because it coheres with their experience of reality. This doesn't mean that they could not learn something from modern medicine or astronomy, but it is my opinion that suggesting the Hopi cosmology is “less accurate” or even “wrong” in comparison to what Western academia says the cosmos is all about would be to engage in a kind of epistemological violence.

The mythic structure of consciousness enacts a certain view of the world that doesn't all the sudden become “wrong” in light of the mental structure. The mental structure certainly recontextualizes the mythic, but a recontextualization is not an overturning. It is only the deficient stage of the mental structure (Gebser called it the rational stage) that sees every other structure as nothing more than “bad science,” or childish attempts to come to terms with reality. The deficient mental/rational structure reduces all other structures to itself, viewing the worlds enacted therein through its narrow mechanized/materialistic lens. This is not doing justice to healthy forms of mythic consciousness. Mythic knowing is not simply bad rational knowing. Mythic knowing is mythic knowing. It cannot be reduced to that form of consciousness brought forth by the mental structure.

Now would be a good time for an example… A Hopi elder might suggest that our current ecological crisis is the result of (ie, caused by) human selfishness and a lack of respect for the spirit of the earth. A thoroughly materialist/mechanistic scientist would reply that, “no, it is the result of a change in the composition of the atmosphere,” or some other material cause. Who is right?

The glory of the integral structure is that it allows us to hold both of these structures in view at once, without being caught by either of them in particular. There is much in the mental stucture that deepens what was known by mythic peoples, but we should be careful not to totalize the mental and see all other structures as poor attempts at doing the same thing the mental tries to do. To shift to states of consciousness rather than structures for the sake of an example, judging all other structures only in light of the mental would be like saying dreaming is really just a poor attempt at being awake. Does this really help us understand dreaming any better?

A lot has been said here, and I'm sure you will take issue with some of it. I hope that is the case, actually, as I'd prefer we understand each other rather than just paying lip service. Agreeing is boring, anyways!

Look forward to your diagnosis of my descriptions,
Matt

Nice analysis, Matt; very well said.

I love this discussion. Thanks to everyone for contributing.

I agree completely with Matt when he says:
”If we mean mechanistic materialism, then my answer to the previous question would be that the scientific view is just as much a relative construction of the technocentric scientists as the Hopi view is a construction of their earthcentric traditions.”

And when Matt says this…
”A Hopi elder might suggest that our current ecological crisis is the result of (ie, caused by) human selfishness and a lack of respect for the spirit of the earth. A thoroughly materialist/mechanistic scientist would reply that, “no, it is the result of a change in the composition of the atmosphere,” or some other material cause. Who is right?…”
then I completely understand his questioning here, and my own answer is “both…and…”

So far so good.

But I found myself completely disagreeing with this:
 “it is my opinion that suggesting the Hopi cosmology is “less accurate” or even “wrong” in comparison to what Western academia says the cosmos is all about would be to engage in a kind of epistemological violence.”

And anyways, like you said Matt, agreeing is boring!
 
I like the way you use examples Matt - so here’s an interesting one. If it’s not too big a leap from Hopi cosmology, there are historical examples of communities in China believing that a solar eclipse is the result of a dragon eating the sun, and so engaged in mass drumming and clanging of bells in order to drive the dragon away. I would wholeheartedly argue that this understanding  IS a less accurate understanding of the universe around them than a world view that says the moon is passing between the earth and the sun.

Even though I recognize that the scientific world view that says the moon is passing between the sun and the earth is yet another human enacted perspective, it IS a more developed perspective than the purely mythic one, and no doubt even more developed human perspectives are being or will be enacted in the future.

It is healthy to be aware that any world view that we adhere to is just that – a world view, an enacted perspective. But since we are all human and operate on the human scale, I think it is incumbent upon us to find and work with the enacted perspective that best allows for the reduction of suffering. As Matt said earlier: ”Enactivism does suggest that our ability to know and experience depends largely on our biological structure/organization. But we humans are nearly identical in this respect. So we share far more than we differ in.” Absolutely.

My concern is that those so inclined, after pointing out the genuine shortcomings of the mechanistic materialistic scientific world view, than take enactivism in an extreme direction that ends up saying “Well it’s all just perspectives, how do we know there isn’t a dragon eating the sun!” Well we know because of scientific method.

(It is a whole other question as to the incredible coincidence that the moon is exactly the right distance away from the earth to match the exact diameter of the sun to an earthly observer…. oops sorry, magical thinking creeping in there!)

Here’s another example: Imagine that a rural community is in need of water. If  a mythic world view predominates then it is more likely that prayers will be offered up to a rain god in order to end the drought. Whereas a community with a more developed understanding of the scientific method and technology, and knowledge of the water table, would select a location to successfully dig a new well. In this example, it is not the prayers, nor indeed the ability to hold multiple perspectives that results in the reduction of suffering, but the helpful application of the scientific perspective.

Apart from Don Beck now working on SD with Elza Malouf in Palestine, I would love to have someone point out to me the practical, shared human benefits of the development of both integral thinking and “enactivism”. In what ways is it helpful?

And before anyone answers with “Ah yes James but your desire to help and reduce suffering is just an enacted perspective….”- er, I know.

All The Best,

James

P.S. I have been pondering a blog post with the title :

“So now I can hold multiple perspectives. So f***ing what?”

 I think you can sense my frustration :-) Please, help me see the practical benefits of all the theorising.

P.P.S. How many postmodern integralites does it take to enact the changing of a light bulb?

James,

I knew exactly which of my claims would be troublesome to you (and Julian), and it was the one you picked out:

“it is my opinion that suggesting the Hopi cosmology is “less accurate” or even “wrong” in comparison to what Western academia says the cosmos is all about would be to engage in a kind of epistemological violence.”

Leaping from Hopi myths to ancient Chinese myths is no problem at all. You said this community believed that a:

“solar eclipse is the result of a dragon eating the sun, and so engaged in mass drumming and clanging of bells in order to drive the dragon away. I would wholeheartedly argue that this understanding IS a less accurate understanding of the universe around them than a world view that says the moon is passing between the earth and the sun.”

Let me explain why it is that I make the claim that mythic modes of relating to the cosmos are not made obsolete by the mental structure's more conceptualized, so-called “scientific” view of things. The mythic structure is concerned first and foremost with understanding the meaning of the world. The Chinese people who experienced solar eclipses as a dragon eating the sun were not making a claim about the world as it exists objectively, as distinct from their subjective minds. Obviously not, for they couldn't even conceive of such an abstract dualism between mind and matter. We educated Westerners with our rational, discursive way of thinking find it all too easy to see the Chinese myth as an early attempt to explain the natural world in scientific terms, albeit bad scientific terms. In doing so, we conflate the difference between meaningful relation to the world and abstract description/measurement of matter/energy.

What we normally consider to be the modern scientific method is not a means of procuring meaning from the world in which human beings call home. It is, rather, a means of measuring reality in order that we may manipulate it with some degree of certainty as to how it will respond. In this way, we gain a degree of material control over reality and are able to psychologically distance ourselves from the “other” called by us “nature,” or “physical reality,” etc.

But to find meaning in the world, we modern rational people still must resort to myth. We can't get our meaning from the dry, abstract descriptions of positivist science. Now, it goes without saying that the mental structure, with is ability to distinguish between meaning and matter (myth and science), is a positive development in the history of human consciousness. We are better off because of it. But when we start to use language which suggests the rational understanding of reality is “more accurate” than the mythic, I think we fall into a trap. As Gebser understood the evolution of consciousness (and Wilber agrees), we do not pass out of mythic consciousness and into mental consciousness as though passing from one room into the next. Rather, mental consciousness is born out of mythic, and remains related to it and dependent upon it in much the same way that the branches of a tree are dependent upon the trunk. Wilber describes this, as I'm sure you all know, with the phrase “transcend and include.”

I think it would be appropriate to describe the mental structure (though again, any talk of the mental is necessarily also talk of every structure underlying it) as deeper than the mythic, but not as “more accurate.” This is because the whole notion of “accurate correspondence of ideas with reality” is a fundamentally rationalistic notion (a result of what Gebser calls the deficient phase of the mental structure) that does not apply to mythic, magic, or archaic structures (nor to the integral). We can only apply this understanding of knowledge to these other structures by violently forcing them into the hegemonic dichotomies of rational thought, at which point they would become truly unrecognizable to the ancient people who practiced them. Talking as though knowledge were only about correspondence between ideas and reality may seem innocent enough, but it actually carries with it a whole series of metaphysical implications about what the human mind is and how it relates (or doesn't relate) to the material world (think Descartes, Locke, Kant, etc.).

So to sum up: Myths are about finding ways to meaningfully participate in the habits of nature, which of necessity involves the human imagination in the creative enterprise of storytelling. Rationality/science is about finding ways to measure and manipulate the material world, which of necessity involves the human intellect in the conceptual enterprise of technological invention and discursive description. You can go back in time and find examples of myth without science (as when the dragon eats the sun), but never science without myth. The reason for this should be obvious: the spiral carries us toward an ever deeper appreciation for the complexity and awesomeness of Spirit. Mythic people didn't have the perspective that we do, but having gained it, we do not then dispense with the meaning they found for us in the world. What would the impetus for technological achievement be, for instance, without the myth of progress and a utopian promised land brought forth by our scientific prowess? Why explore space or land on the moon? Why toil over sparse fossil records in an attempt to piece together a coherent story for the origins of Homo sapiens? (A great read about the mythopoeic aspect of scientific investigation is William Irwin Thompson's The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture).

That's all for now, hope that clarifies more than it obscures! I'm really looking forward to this symposium.

-Matt

P.S. - Keep in mind that there is certainly a distinction to be made between healthy myth-making and unhealthty (or deficient) myth-making, just as there is a similar distinction to be made between healthy and unhealthy phases of the mental structure. We can go into more depth in regards to these distinctions in the symposium, I hope. 

When I read Matt's previous post, the one I complimented, I had expected the exact same snag – though I'd expected the objection to come from Julian.  :-)

James asked:  “So now I can hold multiple perspectives. So f***ing what?”

The theoretical conversations we hold here may not amount to much, beyond our own entertainment, but the development of increased perspective-taking capacity is understood to be the driver behind moral and cognitive development.  Being able to take third- and fourth-person perspectives is what has allowed for many of the advances of what we consider the “modern world.”  For instance, the transition to 3p allows for the development of formal operational thinking; and then with 4p, we can take a perspective on systems and this allows for the development of things like general systems theory.

Formal operational thinking and systemic thinking have had a number of practical benefits in the world, no?

Balder, James,

Practical applications? I think Balder is on to something when he says that these discussions help to develop our ability to see from multiple perspectives at once, which in turn deepens our moral and especially our cognitive foundations.

I also think it is important to embrace the whole spectrum of consciousness, as if we are too quick to see every structure only in terms of the mental structure, we end up with exactly the kind of flattened out, meaningless universe we are trying to enact our way beyond!

Embracing the whole spectrum means coming to the realization that an integral human being is one who functions healthily through each structure, whether it be ecstatic union with origin through the archaic/integral structures (archaic is undifferentiated union, while integral is awareness as union), or vital-emotional liveliness through the magic, or imaginative mythopoeic participation through the mythic, or technoscientific conceptualization through the mental. Each structure is an integral part of being fully human (at least as full as evolution has so far unfolded through us).

Another thing to remember is that the quick and easy separation between theory and practice that holds water in our rationalist, predominantly Greek intellectual tradition may not be the final, or only legitimate, say. Part of what enactivism offers is a deconstruction of the dichotomy between knowledge and action. As Varela and Maturana put it, “all knowing is doing, and all doing is knowing.”

-Matt

Julian,

I will wait for your next blog, or perhaps until the symposium depending on how quickly it materializes, to respond at length to your comments above. It seems that we are re-treading the same territory, but at least the propositions of contention have been clearly demarcated.

We need to, 1) delve into the complexities surrounding the degree to which the charge of “lack of accuracy” can be attributed to structures preceding the mental/rational. That this is a complex issue should be appreciated, I think. Whenever we aim to discuss our relationship to “reality,” it is no little thing. The question, I imagine, leads us into the kind of exploration I tried to lay out above, where I described how mythic consciousness may not be best understood in terms of its ability to line up statements of fact with states of reality. Keep in mind that modern Biblical literalists, and other religious fundamentalists, have adopted much of the deficient rational structure's tendency to reify text (albeit of their Holy Book instead of a scientific journal) by literalizing the spatial categories of the printed word, and so they don't represent, at least in my opinion, an example of healthy mythic consciousness (which is based predominantly in oral culture). Better examples of the mythic structure operating in our contemporary age may be the effects of film's like Lucas' Star Wars or the Wackowski brothers' The Matrix on the popular culture; or perhaps, as I mentioned above, the effects of the myth of progress which plays such an important role in the political ideologies passed down to us from the Founding Fathers, or the myth of Redemption which plays a similar role in our obsession with technology.

It may also be fruitful to, 2) engage the question of causality, as it has always seemed to me that the nature of causation has become more troublesome and philosophically subtle over the past few centuries than at any prior point in the history of human thought, despite our tremendous technoscientific achievements. Aristotle was far more certain of himself when it came to classifying the various kinds of causes 2,000+ years ago than most philosophers/scientists are today. Quantum physics has something to do with this, but again, I must emphasize the complexity of the conundrum. Just because someone trying to sort out a mature 21st century spirituality brings up the uncertainty principle or the EPR experiment doesn't necessarily mean they are using it as a shallow proof of some kind of magic.

We should also, 3) explore the enactive theory of cognition as it exists independently of Wilber's or integral theory's use of it. I think some kind of appropriation by integral theory/practice of enactivism would benefit both schools of thought/ways of life, but we should be sure of exactly what Maturana, Varela, Evan Thompson, et al have in mind before we go throwing their terminology around, whether we do so critically or in praise.

There is certainly much else that we can and should explore, but I thought I'd lay out these issues as a kind of starting place. Feel free to bring up how you would re-word, add, or delete any of the issues of contention I've raised.

I hope we can bring forth a productive symposium that leaves us all with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the importance and complexity of these issues!

Until we type again,
Matt

Julian, Matt, James, et al,

I'm looking forward to this symposium, too.  I think it will be a good way to explore these complex and subtle issues.

Just a very brief comment this morning:  Julian, you like to emphasize critical thinking in your writings and your work.  I think that is quite valuable.  So, related to your comment that we need to better understand cause and effect and to develop a rational ego, I think it is important to point out that the healthy but challenging aspects of enactivism and postmodernism are actually the fruits of rigorous critical thinking and deepened understanding of “cause and effect,” among other things, rather than an abdication of these things.  Yes, the insights of these traditions can be misunderstood or misapplied, but that is a different issue (which we can also explore).  My point here is that these perspectives involve rigorous use of the exact things you often call for:  deep inquiry and critical thinking.  Some of the insights challenge rational-level (Orange) thinking, and I think that's one of the “issues” we're working with here, but they are not therefore pre-rational, regressive, or “fuzzy” because of a lack of rigor.

Best wishes,

B.

In regards to “reality,” I wanted to bring up the degree to which enactivism is an attempt to lead us Westerners into rather uncertain ontological territory. We are used to thinking about reality as that thing “out there” made up of some kind of firm foundation which we come to know through honest, empirical study. We imagine a pre-existing world that we as observers are parachuted into from outside, and we understand it to be the task of science to help us come to know the essence of it. We believe that, given enough time, we will arrive at some final and incontrovertible description that will be true for all people at all times.

Enactivism is a very frank rejection of this story. The ontology adopted instead has far more in common with the Buddhist cosmos than with the Cartesian. Instead of understanding reality to be made up of essentially two separate and indeed conflicting substances, mind and matter, enactivism posits that the basic essence of reality is the in between and ungrounded give-and-take of ongoing relationship. So instead of talking about reality as though we needed to convince our mental stuff to see through the childish emotionalism and narcissism hardwired into the body so that we might gain knowledge of the harsh truth of the physical world, enactivism talks about coming to relate to the body/world that is always already part of a single unified (though differentiated) history of evolutionary development. Our mind is embodied, and there can be no such thing as “objective knowledge” of a reality which exists independent of said mind. Mind and matter have co-emerged through vast spans of evolutionary time.

I stumbled upon a very relevant quote this morning from Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore that I'd like to share:

We can make truth ours by actively modulating its inter-relations. This is the work of art; for reality is not based in the substance of things but in the principle of relationship. Truth is the infinite pursued by metaphysics; fact is the infinite pursued by science, while reality is the definition of the infinite which relates truth to the person. Reality is human; it is what we are conscious of, by which we are affected, that which we express.

Hope this helps shed more light on where I am coming from and how I interpret the agenda of enactivism.

-Matt

Well said, Matt – from the point of view you're trying to express.  But I can identify a number of comments that will be “sticking points,” if my past conversations about this subject are any guide.  Julian and I have discussed this before, and I've made similar arguments to the ones you're presenting now, but there still has been something of a communicative impasse – which I hope can be resolved through the upcoming symposium. 

In anticipation of that, I'm holding my tongue for now.

Best wishes,

B.

Balder,

Yeah, all this talk of relationship as foundational does sound a bit greenish, and I'm sure the temptation is there to diagnosis me with Boomeritis. I personally think I have been innoculated against it by having grown up in the household of two boomer parents, at least one of whom's narcissism and unhealthy relativistic “anything goes” (unless he happens not to like it on this particular day) morality has vicariously taught me much about what doesn't fly. But then again, denying the disease is exactly what you would expect the diseased to do! Oh well. Guess we'll have to ask the experts… which are who, exactly?

I think a lot of the mean green meme is the result of insufficient development in the cognitive/intellectual domain, which seems required in order to differentiate between how, say, quantum physics and systems theory have changed the nature and scope of science and how they hasn't. The degree to which green embraces a relational ontology, though, seems highly significant and not at all a sign of imbalance or disorder. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the over the top, “the world is my imaginary playground” kind of New Age belief system, but sometimes I wonder how much of this is just more of the same old spiritual one-upmanship dressed in fancy new integral jargon. Labeling someone as inferior in order to dispense with their arguments never seemed quite fair, and it is one of the real qualms I have with Wilber's personality (though as a thinker, I have much respect).

When can we get this symposium up and running?!

-Matt

I think we definitely need a fifth person, so we can have a week-long event.  Crouching Tiger had mentioned wanting to participate.  I'll wait for Tiger to chime in, otherwise I'll try to round up someone else…

Once we decide on the number of people, we can do like we did last time and post announcements on our blogs in anticipation of the symposium… 

Sure.  If there were enough interested people, we could do it for seven days instead of five and make it a real week-long event…

We also need to zero in on the theme a bit more clearly.  I'll be back with some ideas… in a hurry at work at the moment …

Hi Balder

I definitely take your points here:

“Yes, the insights of these traditions can be misunderstood or misapplied, but that is a different issue (which we can also explore).  My point here is that these perspectives involve rigorous use of the exact things you often call for:  deep inquiry and critical thinking. “

And while recognsising that “aspects of enactivism and postmodernism are actually the fruits of rigorous critical thinking” ,  my concern is still with those apparent misunderstandings or misapplications.

Equally I am aware of the crucial nature of Matt's point when he says that “we should be sure of exactly what Maturana, Varela, Evan Thompson, et al have in mind before we go throwing their terminology around, whether we do so critically or in praise. ” Time for me to do some reading!

Thanks for your input.

Julian, I hope we can go forward with this conversation without putting each other down or condescending to each other!  I respect where you're coming from and do not intend in any way to be dismissive.

I expect I did argue that I thought you might not be understanding something I said, but I think I did provide something of substance too!  I'll try to do better this time…

James, are you up for participating in the symposium?

What do you all think about the overall theme?  Integral, Enactivism, and Postmetaphysical (or 21st Century) Spirituality?  Something like that?

Ah, Julian, that sucks! I've learned to copy the text periodically when I write directly into the thread. The same thing has happened to me more times than I care to recall.

I may have my work cut out for me, but one of the lines of thought I've been working with quite recently is the degree to which attributing the label of “literalist myth” to ancient peoples who did not yet distinguish between the literal and the figural may be misguided. The mutation into the mental structure that opened up the space for such distinctions obviously deepened our appreciation of and relation to reality, but I think the deficient rationalist phase may have torn up this open space, leaving behind only a fractured dichotomy where the gray area between fact and metaphor was reduced to a treacherous chasm, with scientific positivists standing on the one side and religious fundamentalists on the other.

This is where postmodern deconstruction is so insightful, as we come to see the way in which white, first world scientists unconsciously project their own beliefs onto their study of primates, for instance (a great read about this would be Donna Haraway's Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science). Deconstruction is not enough, though, and can be quite destructive in its own right (obviously). But there is hope in what we might call the post-postmodern movement. It isn't quite fair to reject all claims of truth by reducing them to mere power grabs based on relativistic values without turning to reflect on this very claim itself. We CAN know about the nature of nature, but it will require far more self-reflection and open-minded investigation than what has past for science in the past (it may even be more appropriate to return to the tradition of natural philosophy as the study of nature, rather than “science” as the methods of Bacon, Descartes, and others came to be called).

An example would be the blossoming field of biosemiotics, which is breaking down the impermeable membrane (though still maintaining a distinction) between facts and metaphors, showing how even the non-human natural world, from molecules to mitochondria, communicates by exchanging signs and interpreting signals. This is all a move toward an ontology based more on relationship, rather than opposition (between mind and matter, left- and righthand quadrants, etc), as I discussed above. There is a difference between the figural and the literal, and between the left- and righthand quadrants, but not an ontological divide. Cosmos and psyche are related, not opposed. I think we learn a similar lesson from quantum physics. The observer doesn't collapse an objective wavefunction, or literally create reality; but observation most certainly does have a role to play in the forms which are observed.

Enactivism's rejection of the Cartesian and/or mechanistic ontology isn't to suggest that we cannot gain true knowledge of reality. What it says is that this knowledge is gained by way of the practices we employ and the intersubjective agreements we come to about what those practices reveal about the world. Medicine's contemporary understanding of microrganisms and the functioning of the body was brought forth by years of shared investigation and study, and is constitued not by a set of abstract facts about reality independent of human existence, but by the human methods and institutions which have grown up around it. Modern medicine is a way of seeing and interacting with other organisms, the human body, and their shared environment. I think it is misguided to say that premodern people “hypothesized” that their illnesses were caused by various personifications of nature. The concept of a hypothesis wasn't even in circulation until the 17th century, and is largely an invention of the Scientific Revolution. To attribute such a systematic way of thinking to premodern people is inappropriate. They didn't hypothesize that the Moon Goddess was seeking revenge by making them ill, they felt it in their bones. Or at least that is what it seems to me!

-M

Julian, I'm sorry I haven't responded sooner about the parapsychology research.  As I said, I'm only moderately familiar with the field and so I spent the last couple of days looking at various info on the web.  In an earlier comment, I said:

I agree that we should “give the rational scientific method it's due.”  In mentioning paranormal research, I wasn't thinking about integral theory at all, or any other theory.  I was merely thinking about results of scientific research.  We need to determine whether the evidence is valid before we even worry about theorizing.

One thing I wanted to clarify is that in saying this I wasn't seeking a debate about the evidence per se.  I was actually more just curious how familiar you were with the field.  Nonetheless, specific research is very important, but I know from reading Hansen that its a complicated field.  I was trying to figure out what research to bring up and how to present it in the way that it can lead to interesting discussion.  Hansen brings up much theoretical ideas from various fields outside of parapsychology and so I have a larger context in mind as I'm thinking about this.  I plan to blog about this sometime in the near future, but for right now I'll ignore that larger context.

Let's focus on some specific research.  As I was looking around, the ganzfeld research looks the most promising for the matter at hand as I could find quite a bit of info about it and since its a research methodology that has been used for some time.  I don't fully understand all of this and I don't have a conclusive opinion at the moment (if I ever will), but I think the evidence is intriguing as it appears to be in some cases to be pointing towards something other than random chance.

Here are some links to get things started which only serve to prove how complicated the issue is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2320/is_n3_v57/ai_15383541

http://skepdic.com/ganzfeld.html

http://www.opensourcescience.net/index.php?title=Talk:OSS_Peer_Review:Ganzfeld

http://dbem.ws/ganzfeld.html

http://www.psychiceducation.com/experiments/g1/symbolgame/Rhinedesc.asp

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=25404

Marmalade,

I think I'll have a look at those links myself. I took a course on parapsychology in college, and just the fact that there is a course of study in an academic environment suggests there must be something worth investigating. There are plenty of methodologically sound studies that show deviations in randomness when subjects are told to focus their attention on altering random number generators and such. I have not heard of the Ganzfeld experiment, though.

Balder,

” Integral, Enactivism, and Postmetaphysical (or 21st Century) Spirituality? ” Sounds good to me, but just for aesthetic reasons, might we change it to ” Integral, Enactive, and Postmetaphysical (or 21st Century) Spirituality? ”

Just a thought ; )

That's a possible approach, but I didn't intend for all of them to be modifiers of the term, “spirituality.”  I meant something more along the lines of the following (to spell it out):  “Integral Theory, Enactivism, and 21st Century Spirituality” – looking at the intersection of these three basic ideas or approaches.

But I'm open to other (related) constellations of ideas, or to other ways of framing the concerns we're exploring here.

Gotchya.

Any variation on that theme sounds great to me.

You've been accusing me of ivory-towerism in several posts now, Julian.  I don't think that's really fair, but let's wait till the symposium.  I'll keep your concerns and questions in mind.  Since I will probably be the one starting off, let me know if you have any other particular questions/issues you want me to tackle in my opening essay.

Best wishes,

B.

P.S.  When you wrote this, I'm guessing you were thinking of me?  “using these cool postmodern ideas in a very ungrounded, sometimes fanciful and ivory tower-ish way…”

just because something may seem unreasonable today, does not neccessariy mean that it will not be proved reasonable tomorrow…

Hello all!

I've been driving the last few days…but I am back in Colorado (home) tonight and looking forward to chiming in here tomorrow.  Gotta/wanna catch up on all the postings above first.

Still room in here? 

Erin

Hi, Erin,

If you're referring to “room” in the symposium we're planning, yes, there is!  We were hoping you'd get back in time to let us know whether or not you were interested in participating.

If you do, my suggestion for the order of participants, based on Julian's list, is as follows:

bruce, matt, james, erin, julian

Assuming James wants to participate…  I am suggesting that Julian go last because this debate/discussion is inspired by him, so I'd like to give him the opportunity to have the “last word.”

Best wishes,

Balder (Bruce)

Yes, I could wait.  I don't want us to lose steam / interest, but also don't want us to go into this unprepared….

How about everyone else?

Looks like the symposium is going to happen.

In the meantime, more questions & comments from me!

Matt: Bruce replied to me: “Formal operational thinking and systemic thinking have had a number of practical benefits in the world, no?”

Yes you're starting to win me over here Bruce. But to be clearer the development to formop is something that happens with or without the integral movement, so I'm left wondering since this is supposedly the cutting edge 1% of 1% of the population blah blah, what it is that integral has to offer other than websites, conferences and chat forums for other intergalites, valuable and entertaining as they are!

Thank you!  I'm glad to be a part of this.

August 11 works for me; I'd like to be best prepared, too.  Looking forward to it.

In the meantime, few thoughts and questions up shortly…

Hmm, I'll be flying all day August 11th. I'm moving from Florida to San Francisco for graduate school. I'm not sure how this symposium works exactly, though. Does each person post their piece on consecutive days? If that's the case, I should be able to find time to type mine up on Tuesday the 12th (or prepare something over the next 2 weeks and upload it then). I will be able to read entries on the 11th from my phone, but I can't upload my own piece that way. Let me know what the format is. If I'm not due to upload mine until Tuesday, I could swing that. It would be even better if I could swap places with someone to do it Wednesday or Thursday, to give me more time to get settled in my new place.

Thanks all,
Matt

Both August 11th and next week work for me.

In the meantime…. the Gaian gremlins ate this earlier:

Matt said: “Yeah, all this talk of relationship as foundational does sound a bit greenish”.

Actually I thought your observations were spot on!

Is anyone who comes later in the week willing to switch places with Matt, assuming we will be doing this the week of the 11th?

Here is how the symposium will work:  On the morning of each day of the week, the person assigned to that day will post their contribution.  All other participants will make an effort to read and respond to that contribution on that day (and anytime afterwards, of course).  As Julian first conceived of these symposiums, the idea was to make an effort to generate enough traffic on our respective blog posts to be able to be visible on Gaia's “Hottest blogs” page, in order to generate wider interest and discussion in the Gaia community.  In each of our blog posts, we will link to the posts of other members, in order to help readers navigate through all of the contributions.

Before the symposium starts (one or several days before), we might also want to post a teaser blog, announcing the upcoming event.

Best wishes,

Balder

J, Yeah! Starting the 12th would definitely help. When we get the date and order finalized, I'll not only post a heads up on my blog here at Gaia, but I'll make a video over on YouTube. There's plenty of dead weight on that website, but also many really bright and spiritually-minded folks who I am sure would love to read along, if not actually join Gaia and participate.

I'm reading that interview of Varela now. I hadn't seen that one before. There is also some great material about Varela (as well as another interview) over on edge.org: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/varela/varela_index.html

j…where have you been?  pigs can too fly…just not firstclass…lol

I'd be happy to switch with Matt and start on 11th if that helps.

if the ganzfield experiment is the leading edge we are still very far from any kind of satisfying evidence for psi, right?

As I see it, parapsychology research in general brings up more questions than answers.  Still, the questions it brings up are quite intriguing.  I must admit that I don't feel confident in my understanding of any of this.  I've never been involved in any kind of scientific research, I've never studied scientific methodology, and I'm entirely clueless about statistical analysis.  Basically, I really don't know what to make of much of it, but I am curious. 

I'm sure that much of the criticisms are valid, but I appreciate the context that Hansen provides in his book.  Hansen thinks that the paranormal by its very nature can't be scientifically proven and will always be marginal, and he is critical of scientists such as Dean Radin.  He isn't saying that research can't or shouldn't be done, but rather it will never be accepted by mainstream sceintists.  The budget for paranormal research and the numbers of profesionals involved is miniscule, and its amazing that any research at all is done.  Paranormal research could only make any headway (whether in proving or disproving) if it actually had some funding which Hansen says will never happen. 

So, Hansen's criticism simultaneously points out the limits of the paranormal and the limits of mainstream science.  To answer your question, yes, the limited evidence of paranormal research is disatsfying.  But the limits of science in general are disatisfying to someone who wishes to find conclusive meaning about life.

There are reasons why paranormal research is still important.  Relative to other scientific fields, very little research has been done on the paranormal, and very little of it done on a largescale.  So, its not fair to judge a field that is still in its infancy.  Even though there isn't any scientific consensus about the paranormal, much has been learned from the research.  Parapsychology reearchers have refined their methodologies over time.  Its hard to control for something which has many unknown factors.  They have to be more careful about their controls (partly because of potential deceipt and self-deception) than is necessary for most scientists.  So, the refinements of methodology are helpful for all researchers in all fields.  There is a history of inadequate methodology in parapsychology research, but to its credit these inadequacies are continuously being resolved.  Its a slow process, though, since there is very little funding or institutionalized support.  In some ways, research has shown more about what the paranormal isn't than what it is.

One of the subjects I find the most interesting (in Hansen's book) is the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK).  Scientists in this field study other scientists.  Two interesting aspects are the problems with the replication of scientific experiments and experimenter effect (the corollary to the placebo effect which complicates the situation further).  The research into the experimenter effect was pioneered by Rosenthal (who so happened to have some interest in parapsychology) who demonstrated that the bias of a researcher alters the results.  He also studied teachers and how their expectations influence the success or failure of students.  Interestingly, he also helped to develop the use of meta-analysis… maybe because of the problems he discovered with individual experiments.  Experimenter effect can be controlled by double-blinds, and yet according to this paper double-blinds aren't as commonly used as one would hope.  Parapsychologists take double-blinds more seriously because of the increased complexity of experimenter effects.  The problem with studying the paranormal is that it by definition challenges the very basis of the scientific paradigm, and that is why Hansen is so pessimistic about the future of parapsychology research.

  BTW Hansen is especially critical of skpetics especially on the debunking end of the scale.  In his book, he focuses on the enmeshed relationship between parapsychologists and skeptics, and brings up some important insights.  His analysis of Martin Gardner is very detailed.  At his site he has several online articles about skeptics:  

CSICOP and the Skeptics: An Overview.  Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 86, No. 1, January 1992, pp. 19-63.

The Elusive Agenda: Dissuading as Debunking in Ray Hyman's The Elusive Quarry.  Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 85, No. 2, April 1991, pp. 193-203.

Review of Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction by Charles M. Wynn and Arthur W. Wiggins. Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 66, No. 3, September 2002, Pp. 321-324.

Review of The Encyclopedia of the Paranomal edited by Gordon Stein.  Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 90, Nos. 3-4,  July-October, 2000,  pp. 181-189.

I am really loving the “dialog on leadership” interview with Varela. I'm not done reading it yet, but this part really caught my attention:

“

COS: Yes, that makes absolute sense. Probably it's also true that without the other, the experience of the other, you could never perceive your self.

Francisco Varela: Absolutely. So this is a very important antidote to the myth or the belief or the dogma that anything that has to do with introspection or meditation or phenomenological work is something that people do in their little corners. That really is a mistaken angle on the whole thing. Although there are some reasons that it is a very common mistake. This is perhaps the greatest difficulty within science. The first reaction people have is that [the first person is] just a personal thing. That it's private. But the notion that the first person is private is a disaster. The first-person access is as public as the third person, okay? When you have a third-person point of view, clearly you need a first person who does the measurement and does the writing, etc., but [provides] a social network to which it is going to be addressed. So a key point is that it's really not very meaningful to speak about consciousness or experiences being private. There is a quality to experience where you need a mode of access that you might want to call the first-person access. That doesn't make it private. It's just as social as everything else. And that's something it took me a long time to discover. I had a blind spot on that like everybody else.

”

This is the aspect of the enactive view that explodes the traditional Cartesian view of the mind as a private soul brooding over its own personal experiences and attempting to know reality with certainty by way of its own pure and distinct ideas. Instead, the mind is embodied, not only by its own flesh, but by its community, and its knowing is done with others.

I had wanted to give Julian the last spot, but going on the possibility of Julain and Matt trading places, here's a tentative schedule:

bruce (8/11), julian(8/12), james(8/13), erin(8/14), matt (8/15)

Alternatively, if Matt and James trade places, it could be:

bruce (8/11), james(8/12), matt (8/13), erin (8/14), julian (8/15)

Whatever works for everyone…

I would be fine with this line up: bruce (8/11), james (8/12), matt (8/13), erin (8/14), julian (8/15)

I will be able to join in on the comments below your post on the 11th Bruce, but not until late Monday or overnight Monday/Tuesday. Wednesday gives me plenty of time to get my post up, though.

Everyone else on board with this schedule?

Matt and Bruce

I think I have to apologise for the use of the word “Cartesian” in one of my very early replies to Matt. This, along with my apparent insistence on practical applications, seems to have resulted in my comments  being mistaken for those of a dyed in the wool Newtonian orange mechanistic materialist scientist! :-)

If this is the case then allow me to clarify that my own thinking is very close to this quote from Matt: “enactivism talks about coming to relate to the body/world that is always already part of a single unified (though differentiated) history of evolutionary development. Our mind is embodied, and there can be no such thing as “objective knowledge” of a reality which exists independent of said mind. Mind and matter have co-emerged through vast spans of evolutionary time.”

Here here! We will always view “the real world” through whatever lense our evolution has provided us with at any given time.

But here’s where I’m getting stuck. Matt said: ”Groups of people can enact all kinds of realities through intersubjecting and collective world-making, restricted only by the similarity of all human nervous systems and the regularity of the behavior of nature. It isn't the structure of the natural world that changes as a result of this cultural enaction, but the way in which nature's organization is interpreted.” (My underlining)

So it seems we all agree that there is a part of “reality” that doesn’t change, regardless of whatever cultural enaction is going on. For want of a better phrase, let’s go with Matt and call it ”the natural world”. And just to be clear here’s what I mean by that:

There is a large range of hills outside my window called The Long Mynd. I was walking on it today with friends visiting from Los Angeles. You can see it on Google Earth. It has been there for a very long time, before there were any forms of human embodied observers to witness it.

To an iron age settler it was a safe location to build forts, to an Orange geologist it might be just examples of igneous intrusions, to a Shinto priest it might be revered as kami-sama, to a Green reader of James Lovelock it might be all of the above as well as being an expression of Mother Earth. But whatever names or meanings we attribute to it, and however clearly we can see that all these different names and meanings will vary depending on the nature of our evolutionary conditions, and however aware we are that our observations of it can never be totally separated from our own subjective condition,  on the human scale and on the basis of shared human experience are we in agreement that there exists an actual physical object located in “the natural world” that is generally referred to in 21st century english as “a hill”?

 Sorry if this sounds like really a stupid question, and I’m not being facetious here, but Matt also said this: asking questions about the accuracy of a world picture is not appropriate outside the representational/Cartesian view of the human mind, which enactivism is a strong criticism of.”  Are you saying Matt that anyone with a perspective other than of the Cartesian view has no business asking questions about the accuracy of world views, or rather that the concept of accuracy only has  any real meaning within the Cartesian world view but not outside it?  This question also carries on from my earlier one about the dragon eating the sun scenario.  I don’t believe my own world view is restricted to a purely Cartesian view, yet I also feel it totally natural to compare world views in terms of their accuracy in relation to “the natural world”. 

 I’m hoping the symposium and further reading will help me get clearer on this issue. I am currently also reading an abridged version of The Embodied Mind courtesy of  an earlier link from Julian.

Great questions, James. I need to clear up some of the things I said in prior posts.

Yes, we agree that there is something about nature that does not change when the socially enacted worldspaces that bring it forth develop. Each of our minds exist within/as a very real biological entity called a body. The body constrains the kind of world that we can become aware of and interact with. Our minds and the worlds they enact cannot make hills disappear without massive amounts of real live TNT. It is easy to confuse enactivism with something like the caricature of quantum physics popularized by the movie What the Bleep do we know?!? where an observer literally collapses an everywhere-at-once wavefunction into a physical object, where before there had been nothing but pure potentiality. This is New Age narcissism at its finest, and I'm right with Julian when it comes to putting this nonsense in its place.

The difference between what enactivism is suggesting and what What the Bleep suggests is subtle, but not that subtle. While it is obvious that nature obeys regular habits (hills don't just get up and walk away), it is misleading to think of physical reality as though it comes first (before experiential reality), or provides some kind of foundation for us to rest all our knowledge on. This is why I am uneasy about the word “accuracy.” It implies that there is something out there independent of the mind for us to measure up to. Being that measurements are themselves inventions of the mind, I just don't see how this idea holds up once we've gotten over the tremendous amount of pride associated with the Cartesian view of the cosmos. Certainly, this pride was originally intended to be a rather healthy dose of dignity, but alas, mechanistic science became rather full of itself. Kant kept Descartes' dualism, but said this better than I, pointing out that because:

“the object is external to me, and the knowledge is in me, I can only judge whether my knowledge of the object agrees with my knowledge of the object.” (from Kant's Introduction to Logic)

So even if we remain with both feet firmly planted in the Cartesian view of the cosmos, the notion of our representations accurately matching up with reality is logically incoherent. Descartes himself realized this, but had faith that God wouldn't deceive us.

I personally have adopted a panexperientialist position, such that matter and experience have co-emerged since the very first photon escaped from the big bang. Wilber flirts with this position, but I'm not really sure what he thinks, as I've heard him qualify his understanding of exactly when interiority began too much. As for Varela, I have not read anything that suggests an opinion either way on this matter. But he has said this:

“[my work] has nothing to do with the current hype about quantum mechanics and the brain. That stuff is perhaps an interesting hypothesis to entertain, but it has no scientific evidence behind it. On the other hand, I'm talking about thirty years' worth of results in cognitive science. I'd go one step further and dispute the typical physicist, who believes that he or she is dealing with fundamental reality. A physicist will say that we're made of atoms. Such statements, while true, are irrelevant. There is a reality of life and death, which affects us directly and is on a different level from the abstractions. We have to abandon the enormous deadweight of the materialism of the Western tradition, and turn to a more planetary way of thinking.”

Hope this adequately answers some of your concerns, James.

-Matt

Hokai's critique was poignant. I bookmarked his blog : ), and I'm very glad you linked us all too it, especially considering it was critical of your essay, b/c that takes a lot of honestly and openness on your part. I think in the end, what was exchanged in the comments was most telling, though. Julian, you expressed how your essay on development above was more geared toward those who think spirituality is inherently anti-rational, and was not really meant to be a contribution to integral scholarship. I always figured this was the case, and in that sense I think you're doing something very important here at Gaia. I don't live in a very New Agey area, so I have not experienced the same spiritual shallowness that you have come across so often in your work “on the ground in lala land” (lol). I experience far more materialist shallowness, which may explain why we come to the issues discussed here with slightly different emphases.

I'm good with the line-up.  I'm good if you need to switch it around, too.

You know that question people ask about which famous person or people, alive or dead, you'd love to invite for dinner and conversation?  One of mine would be Carl Sagan…

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges near, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.” Carl Sagan

“…very simple and straightforward pieces…” are like lights shining through the fog.

An interview with Sheldrake where he mentions Varela:

Robert: Have there been any interesting attempts at disproof?

Rupert: Well, my book and this theory have been attacked quite a lot, but none of the attacks have actually struck at the heart of the argument. No one has actually claimed that what I'm saying is impossible or that it's illogical or that it couldn't occur on any kind of basis. The attacks have mostly been along the line that this theory is completely unnecessary because regular biology, given time, will solve all the problems along conventional lines, that I'm either being too impatient or misleading the public. But so far there has been nothing of scientific substance.

The only experiment which at least claims to disprove the hypothesis is one done by Francisco Varela, the neurophysiologist. He assumed that this hypothesis applied to computers, and he did an experiment where a computer did an iterated operation many times over and over again. He measured the time taken for this operation to see whether it speeded up. And it didn't. He regards this as a refutation of the hypothesis, but I don't because I never claimed that the hypothesis applied to computers in the first place. I think of it as applying to self-organizing systems like cells, molecules, and crystals, but not to artificial machines.

Robert: There's no opportunity for the computer to change its speed of operation.

Rupert: No. He didn't take that point into account. He thought that there might be an increase in the rate with which the silicon chip responded.

Oh, get real!

Good luck with that, Julian. I am curious to see how you tackle it. The word reality seems to have much in common with the word God, in that it is so general and can refer to almost anything. So long as we use it with plenty of context to imply our specific meaning, I don't see much of an issue. But we can only learn from exploring how the word might be used more practically.

I think Balder was just trying to get a laugh : ), he got one from me, anyways.

I just remembered something that might be relevant here: the Sanskrit word “sattva” as in bodhisattva, can be roughly translated as “reality,” but also, and more significantly, as “balance, equilibrium, purity” (bodhisattva meaning one with pure knowledge of reality).

Might help us come to terms with the term “reality” a bit better.

oh but “real” according to whose perspective and kosmic address?


Exactly!

hmmm “how real things are” -  “embodied for what it is” - “what one really is…” now if i used these sorts of statements how would they go over? :O)

Honestly, I think some of us would cut you more slack if you used such words or phrases in the context of arguments that sounded more sensitive to the view he is espousing and less closely resembling a basic, modern rationalist one.  :-)

My prediction:  If you start sounding more like Varela, you'll probably get less “beef” over some of your vocabulary choices … even if you keep the same words!

Julian, right. Varela is not talking about HIV patients believing themselves out of their infection, nor about stopping Hummers psychokinetically. He is talking about the way human knowing emerges from our shared pursuit of a reality that is always on the move.

For Varela, the process of living is where the conceptual gap between subject and object is bridged and made “real” (ie, concrete). So while he does talk explicitly about meditation in some of this interview (which is an internal affair), he does so in order to illuminate how our knowledge of the external world is constituted by way of the constant transaction between personal, impersonal, and interpersonal spheres.

I think the lesson to learn here is that both pure subjectivity and pure objectivity are abstractions. This doesn't mean that getting hit and killed by a car somehow lacks concreteness. We are dealing with what it means to know here, not what it means to be (Varela sidesteps the metaphysical issue of what causes the movement of reality in the same spirit that Buddhism seeks to remove the arrow before speculating about who shot it and why).

I'll quote Varela again:

“…this is a very important antidote to the myth or the belief or the dogma that anything that has to do with introspection or meditation or phenomenological work is something that people do in their little corners. That really is a mistaken angle on the whole thing. Although there are some reasons that it is a very common mistake. This is perhaps the greatest difficulty within science. The first reaction people have is that [the first person is] just a personal thing. That it's private. But the notion that the first person is private is a disaster. The first-person access is as public as the third person, okay? When you have a third-person point of view, clearly you need a first person who does the measurement and does the writing, etc., but [provides] a social network to which it is going to be addressed. So a key point is that it's really not very meaningful to speak about consciousness or experiences being private. There is a quality to experience where you need a mode of access that you might want to call the first-person access. That doesn't make it private. It's just as social as everything else. And that's something it took me a long time to discover. I had a blind spot on that like everybody else.”

The claim that “truth exists independently of perception” is true in that an individual subject's perception of reality is often limited and misleading. But the point with enactivism is that no such thing as an individual subject really exists when you go looking for it, whether the method of looking is introspection/meditation or neuroscience. Truth is something arrived at intersubjectively through the tireless collaboration of many generations of scientists and their techniques. You often seem to imply, Julian, that truth is ready-made waiting for us to find, that our methods of knowing play no role in shaping how those truths unfold. It isn't at all controversial even within the most down to earth academic circles to recognize that truth is at least partially constructed. This was essentially Kuhn's great contribution to the philosophy of science.

None of this is to say that the methods of broad science (radical empiricism, logical coherence, and peer review) are not the best methods we have for bringing forth REAL knowledge about the world. It is just to say that REAL here does not mean independent of human collaborative perception. The cosmos we know will always be a human cosmos.

what about using the term 'our true condition'?  this reaches everyone on their own
level, no matter what they are dealing with as a body, voice, and mind…who can deny
that they have a body, a mind, and a voice/energy?  i realize that
it is simple, but are not the most simple things the most profound?

it is not original, yet does it not cause one to examine what is real by examing where
you are as a body, mind, and voice?  maybe kinda brings it all back down to earth…yet
still allows you to have your head in the clouds(using your imagination), but your feet
are firmly on the ground…where they are…

I just uploaded a very preliminary description of and invitation to the symposium on my YouTube channel. Watch it, if you like. It was completely impromptu, just some personal reflections really, but I will post a more formal announcement next week with all the specific details we decide on.

starlight,

do you mean to focus more on embodying “our true condition” instead of “accurately representing reality”?

well as it relates to integrating our true condition…body, mind, and spirit…within the context of representing reality…

Indeed, all of these should be integrated. It is important to remember that the medium we are using to communicate predisposes us to discuss the issues we're exploring in a rather abstract way. The printed word is the road upon which the rational mind rides. The fact that these words are also digital and electronically distributed around the planet at the speed of light for all to read takes us into a greener, more open web of inclusion. But to really be integral, we need more than words on a screen! 

But to really be integral, we need more than words on a screen! 

yes, but J's work is all about that…this is,  or imho, should be, just a continuation of that…but that is just my perspective…and sporadic ideas as i was reading the back and forth between J and Bolder…concerning 'what is real'…etc…

'our true condition', of body, mind, and spirit, might just be a common ground on which to build…a foundation that 'all' would have to agree on…yes?

yes. a common ground. we share many common connections already.

Julian's work is exactly what integralism offers that abstract philsophizing alone cannot.

I've been kinda quiet the last few days.  When I got back from the Northeast earlier this week, I moved into a different place out here than where I lived before I left so I've been unpacking and getting (re)settled.  (And hey, temps in the high 90s (no a/c) have added an interesting element to my physical practices, which I am finding I like quite a lot.)

But you bet I'll be ready for the symposium!  And I'll be back questioning and commenting in this space early am tomorrow…

See you all soon, Erin

Matt, nice video teaser.  I've been meaning to post something on Youtube for awhile now.  I've got some topics I'd like to discuss – I just need to pick up a camera!

I agree that we need to narrow the focus a bit, possibly set a goal.  In the last symposiums, the intention primarily has just been to bring together several perspectives on a topic of interest, and possibly through dialogue in relation to the entries to arrive at a general consensus.  In our separate entries, we also tried to remain mindful of the other contributions (to date) and to take the current issues/concerns into account in our own contributions.

Here are some general questions that we might address in this symposium (since they've continually arisen in past discussions of these issues):

What do enactivism and the post-metaphysical orientation of Wilber-V bring to modern Integral spirituality and philosophy?  What are the strengths of these perspectives – practical as well as philosophical?  What are their weaknesses?  How to differentiate these perspectives from New Age and postmodern ideas which sound similar (on the surface), and how to make sure that these perspectives don't get appropriated and used in support of problematic trends in “Boomer spirituality”? 

There are other possible questions as well (please feel free to add them!), but these are a few of the common ones that have driven previous discussions of these things.

Best wishes,

B.

Thanks, Bruce. Be sure to let me know when you upload to YouTube, as I'd love to hear what you've got to say. The video format is certainly different from textual discussion, though I'm still trying to work out exactly what is gained and what is lost.

The questions you've raised are a great place to start. Obviously, we don't want to tie down the potential of the symposium too much by restricting it to an overly narrow focus. We should leave room for creative co-emergence, of course! I'm sure it will all come together quite nicely.

In other news…

I've just uploaded a two part video series to my blog wherein transclassical systems theory is discussed as a possible third way beyond the dichotomy between the teleological argument from design and the argument that valid scientific knowledge must be objective (ie, observer independent and value free). It was given by Markus-Ekkehard Locker at a Metanexus conference last year. It could be perceived as a bit ivory towerish, but it is also comprehensive and a good introduction to the potential of systems theory for healing the fractured worldview we've inherited from the disastrous fall out of the Enlightenment. Not that Modernity is all bad – of course not! But neither is it unambiguously good. We are trying to find a ”middle way,” as Varela so often points out in The Embodied Mind.

I hope the lecture is of use.

-Matt

I've been reading about the work of critical theorist/feminist Donna Haraway, and it came to my attention that something I said in an earlier comment may have been short-sighted. I said:

None of this is to say that the methods of broad science (radical empiricism, logical coherence, and peer review) are not the best methods we have for bringing forth REAL knowledge about the world. It is just to say that REAL here does not mean independent of human collaborative perception. The cosmos we know will always be a human cosmos.

Haraway's current work focuses on exploring the relationships that human beings have with companion species, specifically dogs. Her contention is that human trainers and their canine friends are capable of bringing forth genuine knowledge about reality in their pursuits of common goals (like learning how to run an obstacle course together).

The implication is that “our” knowledge is not just human knowledge, but knowledge enacted with all of the other species we share this planet with. There are plenty of distinctions to be made between human forms of knowing (through language and advanced technology) and forms of knowing shared with our non-human significant others; but neither is essentially different from the other. The difference is one of degree, not kind.

By restricting “real” knowledge to human-to-human collaborations, I may have been objectifying animals in such a way that marginalizes their contributions to the worlds that we inhabit together. So we (“we” being the living earth community) actually do have access to more than just a human cosmos.

This may not have much to do with the main thread of our discussions here, but I wanted to correct myself. And who knows, maybe one of you will find this twist interesting and feel the need to respond.

Liked the teaser teaser, Matt!  Nice job.

Now the moving dust has settled, I'm back and fully present.  Also, working on a few suggested questions here, too…  (Nice ones, Bruce.)  Has the focus been refined?

Julian, I firmly share your (less popular) perspective of The Secret, What The Bleep…  From my experience and observation on a practical level, the misinterpretations and lack of “pesky critical thinking” embraced by (too) many result in unnecessary emotional and spiritual harm and damage to at least as many who have suffered needlessly at the hands of religion.  Less popular a view, sure, but I think it's also one of the most important ones to explore…(Bruce's last suggested question seems almost enough for a separate discussion.)

I'd like to address your comment:  ”my sense is that a strong and healthy combination (nested) of rational and transrational makes prerational perspectives and interpretive lenses appear extraordinarily flimsy, superstitious and childish in comparison with genuinely transrational worldspaces and their perspectives…”

You'll let me know if I'm misunderstanding what you wrote :) 

I can see how this could make prerational perspectives appear in such a way.  I can also see how it is imporant to make a clear distinction between prerational, rational and transrational especially in the context of the suffering misinterprations can create.  However, can we make clear, simple distinctions and yet retain the value of the prerational?  How can we include the value of what seems childish or superstitious into a more mature, rational or transrational perspective?  Without losing its essence to shallow, narcissistic interpretations and subsequent magical, The Secret, kind of thinking?  How can a level 2 “we” quadrant, level 4 “I” perceive of a level 7 “Its” (maybe some would argue level 4-6) quadrant understanding?  Consciously?  And if not consciously, it seems an example of the potential of enactivism.  But “knowing” without the education to understand.

Let me offer two examples:

-  A Lakota spiritual leader (popular culture would call him a medicine man) taught me much of their culture.  Tribal, early nation, mythic, magic and rife with animal totems.  Yet, one of the fundamental teachings is that we are all connected within the web of life - extending to and through the cosmos.  Mitakuye Oyasin - All My Relatives.  And relatives includes people, animals, trees, rocks, stars, galaxies, the breath of life, spirit, all that Is, etc.  But also holding sacred ceremonies and honoring spirit guides.  Is this not a prerational expression of a transrational perspective?  Would integral spirituality allow for the inclusing of an unsophisticated comprehension expressing a transrational reality / truth?

- Their culture is not as heavily dependent on dreams as other indigenous nations, but dreams are a significant part of their culture.  Their spiritual man interpreted this dream ->  A woman often dreamt of running through the desert, carefree, happy, ecstatic.  She wondered how could she acheive this feeling in her conscious life.  The spiritual leader explained the happiness, ecstacy and freedom she felt was already within her, if she would accept who she was (reality/truth) and Be who she Is.  My perception is that could be an example of enactivism - expressed in a pre-modern manner, interpreted at a higher level.  If so, how can we include the seemingly pre-modern expression of the higher level?

I have observed the devastating effects religious fundamentalists and new age narcissim have caused in some people's lives.  Where I live now, even the native culture is perverted and distorted by wannabees and some new agers exploiting and corrupting the culture to the extent that I have met a lot of The Secret advocates misappropriating the cultural histories and twisting the mythologies.  It is tempting to chuck it off as too primitive or misunderstood and certainly the danger of that misunderstanding is too often realized. 

Yet, while the expressions and practices appear childish and superstitious, I wonder how can we include the value of these prerational perspectives and practices?  Should we?

Erin, Julian,

Glad you both liked the teaser.

Erin said:
Yet, while the expressions and practices appear childish and superstitious, I wonder how can we include the value of these prerational perspectives and practices?  Should we?

I wanted to ask a similar question after reading Julian's last comment. It is clear that some contemporary interpretations of magic and mythic consciousness structures (I don't like to call them “perspectives,” because only the mental structure is perspectival) have completely misappropriated ancient wisdom by packaging and selling it, claiming it offers genuine enlightenment right out of the box. But we should be careful not to confuse these (post)modern misappropriations for the structures as they existed for the ancient people that lived by them, not as a regression, but as a full expression of their own potential at that time. We should also remember that one does not develop through each structure by leaving the prior structures in the past. Integrating archaic, magic, mythic, and mental structures is necessary. I'm not sure if Julian was suggesting this, but if we jettison prerational structures because rationality makes them seem flimsy or childish, haven't we failed to integrate the entire spectrum? This would be like skipping birth, childhood, and adolescence just because they were not yet adulthood. It would mean trying to live as an adult without having healthily appropriated each layer of development. Even adults firmly rooted in the rational structure, to be whole, must have a proper relationship with the archaic, magic, and mythic structures of consciousness. Rationality doesn't allow us to dispense with these other ways of being  conscious, it just contextualizes them. To even be rational at all, I need to rest upon a secure foundation built by each of the prior structures. So rather then equate the hyper-rational me generation's distortions of magic and mythic stuctures with those structures themselves, I think we should try to define what a healthy relationship to prerational structures would be. Because relate to them and through them we must.

Julian, what do you think of this change to what you wrote?:

my sense is that a strong and healthy combination (nested) of prerational, rational and transrational makes unhealthy and regressive prerational perspectives and interpretive lenses appear extraordinarily flimsy, superstitious and childish in comparison with the potential of genuinely transrational worldspaces and their perspectives, where transrational means a balanced integration of all prior structures…

Now I quite agree with it ; )

i like that…that way you don't lose that childlike imagination and wonder, it just 'grows up'…when it is integrated into the healthy whole realistically…

Julian,

I appreciate your distinction between UL and LL quadrants. In our individual development, we transcend preoperational cognition and/or preconventional morality, even while we remain capable of understanding (taking the view of) those still at lower levels. But as soon as we begin talking about the consciousness of others, we've already moved out of UL and into LL. None of us exist in a vacuum, and so our development is always related to the people around us. And as soon as we start talking about how we relate to the people around us, the UR and LR quadrants come into play, as everything we do runs through some kind of material/informational system of exchange. I am very uneasy about approaching these issues by breaking up quadrants into separate domains. They aren't separate, they all co-emerge. We can make useful distinctions, but they are nothing more than convenient simplifications, the map and not the territory (if you'll excuse the cliche metaphor).

Something I was trying to get at in my prior post was that even we healthy, rational adults make use of prerational consciousness all the time. An example is our exchange of money. The magical structure is primarily about analogical thinking, and when it comes to a $100 bill, we handle and spend it very much as though the worthless piece of paper it was printed on was worth something quite valuable indeed. And it IS worth something quite valuable! Now, we can rationalize it and say it is all just an agreement between people and that the bill in and of itself means nothing. But lets be serious… we do not handle our money as though this were the case. If this deeply rooted magical habit were to collapse due to inflation or some other economic disaster, society would most likely begin to collapse rather quickly. So there are forms of magical thinking that are very important to the way we live our lives, even as rational adults.

The problem, I think, with your suspicion about seeing all structures as equally important is that you are looking at this only from the rational perspective, where all that counts is “accurate representation of reality.” This is a subtle form of reductionism, because, for instance, the magic structure has nothing to do with representing reality, it has to do with securing our basic, biological needs, with knowing how to wield power effectively. Similarly, the mythic structure has to do with imagining meanings that give our life a purpose, not with carefully measuring the material world.

Where I completely agree with you is that the mental structure can better enable us to secure our biological needs and create meaning for our lives. But it cannot do these things all on its own. It does so only through the other structures. And of course, any and all of these structures can become pathological, which is something everybody needs to look out for, whether they fancy themselves as entirely within the mental/rational structure or not.

Gebser discusses in Origin how, just prior to a widespread transformation of consciousness, society becomes rather fractured and begins misappropriating and confusing the various structures of conscious it has so far developed. This seems to be what many of us are going through today. There is no doubt in my mind that the people who buy into The Secret are emotionally imbalanced and experiencing a tremendous amount of suffering and uncertainty in their lives. This must be the case, because I would think all these people are educated enough to understand cognitively that a literal and totalzing belief in the law of attraction (as in, “the people killed at VT must have brought it upon themselves”) is irrational. I'm not trying to make excuses for these people, I'm just saying there are larger forces at work here. This is how evolution seems to progress. As you're so fond of saying, Julian: reality bites, reality chews. People are suffering tremendously – despite all our material progress – because we live in spiritually bankrupt times.

I've grown tired of relativism as much as you have, and I'm not trying to enforce some kind of all-embracing tolerance. I am really just trying to point out how we cannot just see each structure of consciousness as another attempt at a “rational perspective.” The mental/rational structure does something very specific for us, and the same goes for each prior structure. You wouldn't ask your stomach or your heart to accurately represent reality for you, right? No, you'd expect that only from your brain.

Much of what passes for New Age spirituality today is not a result of anything inherent to these structures, but more so of the uncertainty and instability of the world we all currently inhabit. That's my two cents, at least.

brilliantly put Matt…

Julian,

1) have i sounded only like a basic rational modernist in the symposia so far, in my critique of the secret and offering of an alternative depth oriented approach that includes meditation and shadow work as well as that pesky critical thinking, in my depth psychology analysis of pan's labyrinth and in my descriptions of how i work with energy, trauma and mind-body integration?

No, I haven't said that.  But a number of the arguments you've made do appear to presuppose a fairly standard rationalist, representational paradigm.  So, hopefully this symposium will be an opportunity for us to explore these questions in more depth.

2) is (clearly not-so-) basic modern rationalism not the foundation of transrational and at least a major part of the litmus test for discerning prerational, prescientific beliefs and worldspaces from transrational?

I wouldn't say that basic modern rationalism is the foundation of the transrational perspective, but rather that it is part of the spectrum of perspectives on which the transrational is built.  Matt commented earlier that he doesn't think we should speak of “perspectives” when discussing pre-mental (magic, mythic) worldviews, and I understand this argument; but looking at this in the light of Cook-Greuter's model, for instance, where ego development is traced from 1p (impulsive, narcissistic) to 3p (mental/rational) to 5p (transrational), then I think it is legitimate to speak of the transrational transcending and including pre-mental and mental (1p, 2p, 3p) perspectives.

Here is what Cook-Greuter says about 3p:

By most modern Western expectations, fully functional adults see and treat reality as something preexistent and external to themselves made up of permanent, well-defined objects that can be analyzed, investigated, and controlled for our benefit. This view is based on a maximal separation between subject and object, thinker and thought. It epitomizes the traditional scientific frame of mind that is concerned with control, measurement, and prediction. It also represents the goal of much of Western socialization. Most adults have little or no insight into the basic arbitrariness of defining the objects and are completely unaware that according to Koplowitz “the process of naming or measuring pulls that which is named out of reality, which itself is not nameable or measurable.”3 They operate under the assumption that subject and object are distinct, and that by analyzing the parts one can figure out the whole. From the conventional Western perspective, the acquisition of this scientific, rational mindframe (or formal operations in Piaget's model) is seen as the goal of socialization and defines what it means to be a fully grown adult.

I understand why you emphasize the 3p perspective, given your particular pedagogical aims, but sometimes you also seem to take it as more of a solid ground than it actually is understood to be from a 4p or 5p perspective.

Best wishes,

Balder

As luck would have it, Larry King had all the New Age characters on his show tonight. Dean Radin, Fred Alan Wolf (aka “Dr. Quantum”), JZ Knight, and Candace Pert where interviewed.

JZ Knight (who runs the Ramatha Center for Enlightenment and claims to channel the teachings of a 35,000 year old Lemurian warrior) at one point was asked by King if she thought cancer was the result of negative thinking. She said absolutely, it was. She also went on about how thoughts create DNA and are responsible for protein synthesis. 

Candance Pert (who has a PHD in pharmacology and is responsible for discovering the opiate receptor) quickly stepped in and said that environmental toxins have a much greater role to play in the development of cancerous cells than human thought does, though clearly there is plenty of evidence that our emotional state and our immune system are tightly coupled. Pert was the only real voice of sanity throughout the show.

Knight, btw, convinced her (now dead) husband not to seek treatment for his HIV because Ramatha could heal him.

My feeling about most of what I heard from these people is that Julian has his work cut out for him. Watching this show was a good reminder to me just how much some people are willing to distort and sensationalize what are really pretty simple, down to earth truths, like that we can intend to be happier or foster personal growth by being mindful. Positive thinking and attention training aren't miracles and they don't require exaggerating the implications of quantum physics to make sense.

The emphasis from all of these characters is always “more happiness for me,” “more power for me,” “more of what I want, when I want it.” Never is there any talk of what I would consider the basis of genuine spiritual practice, which is knowing how to relate to and bring forth positive environments with others. There is a great deal of narcissism in these circles, Julian is sure right about that.

Julian, in case you are wondering, I completely agree with what Matt said above!  When I critique a “rationalist, representational paradigm” in a conversation like this, I am not doing so in defense of the sort of misguided teachings Matt mentioned above.  As I'm sure we will discuss, the entanglement of subject and object implied by enactivism / postmetaphysics is not on the level physical causality.  That view, ironically, is how such ideas might be interpreted within a 3p, mental-level worldspace.

I'm off to B & N to do some reading. 

Enjoying the conversations,
Erin

Hi Bruce

You said: “the entanglement of subject and object implied by enactivism / postmetaphysics is not on the level physical causality. ”

On what level would you say this “entanglement” occurs? A big question I know! Can you give a kind of  “in a nutshell” response or should I wait till the symposium?

All The Best

James

James, I will talk about that in my piece for the symposium.  I actually have to start writing it now – maybe tonight. This weekend is the Integral Theory conference at JFKU and I may not have much time at all to do any writing then….

Best wishes,

B.

if the symposium starts on the 11th, i'd be able to contribute later that week as i'm back from travelling (again) on the 12th and free and online on the 11th. no sweat if the lineup is set.

best

adam

I'm looking forward to the symposum.  I can see many different directions one could go with this.  I've been researching about enactivism this past week.  There are many different ideas and people related to it.  Its definitely a useful concept to integral theory.

There's no reason this symposium couldn't go six or seven days instead of five.  If either Adam or Marmalade want to participate as a contributor, I have no objections.  I'd welcome both!

What does contributing to the symposium consist of?

The problem right now for me is that my computer is non-functional at the moment.  I'm presently using a coffeehouse computer near my house, but it isn't as convenient.  I could still participate.  I just don't know if I could put a blog together as well as I'd like.

i'm up for it if you guys are. it'd be a pleasure.

and talking about development…

i may be projecting, but i have the feeling that significant concensus on a very exciting new philosophy is being synthesised between us all which is considerably more inspiring and integrated than the implementations of integral theory that have been manifested thus far. all those accusations of over-heady left-brain rationalist blogging have been missing the point - i've seen tremendous transformative development in all of us over the many moons.

is it possible that we've had enough wrestling, and that we're ready to get to the point? or is this the point? oh shit, i probably am projecting ; )

best

a

I'm happy to do 13, 14 ,15 or 18. Please go ahead and line me up on any of these 4 dates that suit best with everyone else's availability.

( Will be busy on 19th preparing to work here. )

The 18 or 19 is best for me, but I'm flexible.

I'm at the Integral Theory conference and have been fretting about how I was going to complete my essay by Monday, with all that's going on this weekend, so I'm happy to delay a few days.  I'm happy to go on the 13th, but don't mind going later either if someone else wants to do the opening entry.

kewl wit me!

perfect.

good :)

lovely!

lock and load

All good.  As the title, I suggest, “Enactivism, Integral Theory, and 21st Century Spirituality,” with maybe subheadings that say more about our own take on the topic.

Okay, that sounds good to me.  That should give me plenty of time to work on it.

Yes!  And many of us have done our announcement blogs, brother J.  Where is yours??  :-)

The Integral conference has been very enjoyable.  But my brain is on overload, so I'm glad I still have a few days before the symposium begins!

Best wishes,

B.

affirmative. u guys r powering the train!