Body Wisdom

Cogito Ergo Sum

kenbausch — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:48:15 +0000

He arrived at his standpoint when he wracked his mind for some statement to get his project off the ground, some statement that he could not doubt, a bootstrap to pull on to lift himself to solid ground. He found it in his thinking. While he was thinking, (he reasoned) he had no doubt that he was doing the thinking. Thus his immortal dictum: Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore, I am). He had severed the thinker from the body and from the world, but no one at that time noticed the beheading.
We have all drawn the usual depiction of the Cartesian man; that is a thinker with minimal connection with his body. We have drawn the stick man. The stick man is all head and practically no body. It is an extreme picture of what Kohut calls the upright man. It is also a classic depiction of ecto consciousness.
The power of a good paradigm (rigorous method and singleness of viewpoint) is proclaimed by the fantastic success of the natural sciences. The Cartesian method and viewpoint transformed the world. Not only did they unlock nature’s secrets, they also gave us power over our environment.

New Copernican Revolution

kenbausch — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:36:36 +0000

The proper standpoint for gaining perspective on psychological matters exists within the body, the heart, and the unconscious, which ideas are shown to be basically the same (chapters one, six, and nine). Freud declared this when he called his emphasis on unconscious knowledge “a new Copernican revolution” on the grounds that the unconscious pushes man as ego out of his position as imagined center of the universe. The preferred thinking mode for human science is the endo, empathic one. The method of choice is phenomenology.
Viewing human reality from the heart, with endo vision, and operating with the phenomenological method, it is easy to see and formulate the essential nature of: I-feelings, boundaries, ego, the unconscious, the self, self-estrangement, and psychological strange attractors. In so doing we gain perspective for understanding visions, hallucinations, dreams, perception, imagination, religion, God, objective reality, the real world, and death.

Transcendencee – The Heart

kenbausch — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:24:14 +0000

The heart is the traditional seat of unconscious knowledge. It is the symbolic, essential, and sensitive center of the body. To be precise, the heart is the home and reality of Subject3 because it is both unconscious and individual, being not two/not one, just as we are. The heart is where we focus our Faith (F) and contact the total meaning of the moment (0). The heart offers us the wisdom of our bodies and of the universe, but it functions in a world that is dark, wet, and tumultuously still.

What is the view from the heart? It is glimmerings and glows of light in a dark unconscious ocean. The unconscious knows all and knows nothing because knowledge only really happens when it becomes conscious. The heart is the locus where the unconscious reaches consciousness. We decide and create the content of the unconscious by the attention and symbolism of our F. By our Faith, we chaotically attract what we need from it.

Being both One and Many the heart has access to universal and particular reality. It does not, of course, know everything and that for several reasons. First, everything is not yet unfolded in our indeterminate universe. Second, reality is infinitely vast, vaster by far, for example, than the infinite Mandelbrot set of fractal geometry. Third, each of us is a unique gingerbread man specialized by our bodies whose microcosm freely incarnates the macrocosm. The knowledge of the heart as activated by our Faith is intensely personal. Fourth, the grand design prescribes that each of us concentrate on our own microcosm. In this way the macrocosm experiences fully-individuated replicas of itself in magnificent, chaotic harmony.

Our spatially, temporally, environmentally, and personally defined bodies know what is important. We can attend to them with Faith and bring their wisdom to conscious awareness. In a crucial sense our hearts do not know until our ecto and meso minds interpret their messages. This interpretation is our symbolic representation of otherwise misty inchoate heart truths into meso and ecto arenas. Without this symbolizing, the treasures of our bodies are unknown to us in any practical sense. Truth is embedded in our bodies, but it is born into our human world by our symbolizing Faith.

Fractal Grandeur

kenbausch — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:04:04 +0000

Picking any spot on the gingerbread man we can enlarge it 100 times mathematically and find a design of jeweled splendor having elegance surpassing seashells and sea horses. Again enlarging this portion 100 times we find elegant designs by the same jeweler. Repeating the process we find equally detailed but unique beauty by the same jeweler, etc. The Mandelbrot set has infinite depth.
Searching within this beauty, geometers have found reproductions of the original gingerbread man exact in every detail, with infinite depth just like the original.
One is reminded of the biblical phrase, “God’s only begotten son,” but in a depth that says he is begotten again and again infinitely. One is tempted to mimic the style of John Lennon singing about the walrus:

God is the Gingerbread Man.
Jesus is the Gingerbread Man.
We are the Gingerbread Men.
Again, the One and the Many.
Again, not two/not one.
Again, infinite freedom and depth
In infinite elegant order
Randomly generated.
God writing straight with crooked lines.

The Strange Attractors of Chaos Theory

kenbausch — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:51:00 +0000

Chaos theory provides a rationale for the random exquisiteness of the universe and my free participation in its creation. The strange attractors of chaos are both natural processes and equations. They generate harmony by chaotic processes. They exhibit remarkable characteristics. When their equations are graphed, for example, they often generate beauty of infinite depth and variety. They do this in unpredictable ways that do not seem to coerce the freedom of individual atoms or points.
A non-mathematical demonstration of a strange attractor at work is provided by the rise of cigarette smoke in a still room. The smoke rises but each individual atom within it is free to go wherever it will as each atom is indeterminate (free). The smoke gracefully rises curling at some point into two beautiful plumes which then separate into four m plumes, thence to eight and eventual chaos. No two plumes are ever the same, but they maintain remarkable fractal [see below] similarity.
Thousands of processes in fields as diverse as biology and electronics follow this same process as they progress from regular to periodic to chaotic.

Scientific Analogies – The Holoverse

kenbausch — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:47:42 +0000

The high-tech, laser, three-dimensional photographs called holograms give sensual confirmation to our sense of being not two/not one. They demonstrate the relationship of the microcosm and the macrocosm, the age-old theory that the universe is reflected in its every part.
If you take an ordinary photograph of your face and tear off the part containing your chin, you will have two pieces; one will picture your chin; the other will show the rest of your face.
Not so with the hologram. If you take a hologram picturing your face and break off the chin part you again have two pieces, but each one is a picture of your whole face. Break both pieces into two and you then have four complete pictures of your face, and so on. The whole is completely present in each of its parts. Regarding any two pieces resulting from breaking the hologram of your face, it is true to say, “These two are not two.”
David Bohm, the physicist, was the first to widely propound the idea that the universe is constructed on a model similar to that of the hologram. Many writers following his lead have proceeded to describe that universe which is dubbed the holoverse. Karl Pribram applied the same holoverse concept to the structure of the brain
Our interest in this theory is its portrayal of ourselves as identical to the whole, yet separate. The whole of the universe is encoded into its every part. This is similar to the way that our body is encoded in the DNA of its every cell. What this means in our context is that our bodies are the universe. What we are is what the universe is and vice versa. These properties of hologram give background to the clinical observations that we are identical with the world and yet distinct. We embody a logical contradiction.

The Will to Power

kenbausch — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:20:41 +0000

Nietzsche saw in the “will to power,” the basic “truth” of life, its affirmation. He valued a style of facing life that loved its randomness. His term for this fascination with unpredictability was amor fati (love of fate). His hero, for this robust lust for life, was Dionysus, the god of exuberant living, dying, and birthing. He proposed as a model:

A Dionysian Yes-saying to the world as it is, without deduction, exception and selection. …It is the highest attitude that a philosopher can reach: to stand Dionysiacally toward existence: my formula is amor fati (in Pfeffer p. 185).

For Nietzsche, the will to truth was the most spiritual will to power, but the truth he sought was the truth prior to the ego’s creation. He looked for a way to “shatter the principium individuationis (the ideal of a self-contained individual).” The path to truth that he advocated was intuition. This was his “new road to a ‘Yes’…a philosophy which does not negate any more. It wants to achieve the opposite…to say Yes to the world as it is: my word for it is “amor fati” (in Pfeffer p. 194).

Heidegger followed Nietzsche in this and advocated the thinking style of the Pre-Socratic philosophers who functioned quite well without Socratic and Aristotelian logic. He described the “thinker’s thinking” (endo) in this famous quotation.

Whereas scientific thinking, figuratively speaking, always runs along a line and can continue from the place where it stopped earlier, a thinker’s thinking must in advance make a leap into the whole for each step it takes and collect itself in the center of a circle (Heidegger, 1987, p. 12).

Nietzsche the Prophet

kenbausch — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:45:44 +0000

For millennia we had split ourselves into a psychic layer cake of body-mind-spirit. This split helped us develop philosophy, science, and our ideas of spirituality. It was an icon of our consciousness, a religious triptych devoutly honored by theist and atheist alike. By the end of the 19th century, thinking people began to question this Platonic-Christian worldview. At that time, Nietzsche recognized the obvious and stated it in dramatic language, “God is dead.”
The trouble with the Platonic conception is that it postulates a metaphysical realm that is totally separate from the world of living things. This realm is supposed to be more real than our experience. From this postulated realm, it decrees how things are and how we are to behave. We do not really believe in that realm anymore nor can we believe in the God that inhabits it. Thus, “God is dead.”
Nietzsche realized that this was not an easy to digest. He commented sardonically, “The time has come when we have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years. We lose the support which gave meaning to our lives.” (Unpublished notes quoted from Pfeffer, pp.78-79). He realized that we would not easily part with a myth system that has sustained us for so long. He said it this way, “God is dead; but as is the way with human beings, there will perhaps be thousands of years yet in which his shadow will be seen in caves” (Nietzsche, 1974, p. 167).

The Body is the Mind

kenbausch — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:32:30 +0000

We misunderstand the concepts of body, mind, and spirit when we presuppose that they refer to separate distinct things. We pluck these names out of the river of our living experience to identify aspects of who we are. We are badly mistaken when we think of these separate ideas as separate realities that are opposed to each other. “Body,” “mind,” and “spirit” are all names that refer to our whole self. When we make those concepts separate entities we create enormous confusion. Our culture wallows in that confusion today. It is time to get back to basics.
Merleau-Ponty situates the relations between bodies and souls best. For him, body and soul are terms that make sense only in relation with each other. Body is prior to soul. Soul is a higher degree of organization of body. The process is an ascending one. For the body as a mass of chemical components in interaction, the organism is soul. For the organism, the living body interacting with its biological and social milieu is soul. At the next level, the body as social subject in its group is soul. The process is a dialectic one of creative contradiction where the body transcends itself as soul while not losing its bodily reality. In short, “The body in general is an ensemble of paths already traced, of powers already constituted; the body is the acquired dialectical ground upon which a higher ‘formation’ is accomplished, and the soul is the meaning which is then established” (1963, p. 210).

Freud’s Grandson’s Birth of Ego

kenbausch — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:19:17 +0000

Freud and Lacan offer an enchanting account of how Freud’s grandson started to appropriate language (described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, pp. 14-15). The boy was in his crib playing with a spool that was attached to a string. As he lowered the spool below the side of the crib where he could not see it he cooed “o-o-o- o-o”; when he raised it back to where he could see it he said “Da.” Freud perceived that the boy was trying to vocalize the words “Fort” and “Da” which are the German words for “Gone” and “Here.”

The boy was just at the age where he had to cope with the fact that his mother would not always be there when he cried. Freud saw that the boy was dealing with his separation from his mother as he played his game over and over. He had learned to cope symbolically with the absence of the toy (and, by implication, his mother) by making it disappear and reappear while expressing absence and presence. In doing this, he was able to possess his mother’s presence symbolically, even when she was absent. This exercise made him content and allowed him to let his mother go away without protesting.

Lacan points out what a momentous occurrence this Fort/Da experience was. The child did not only possess his mother symbolically with language; he also became a separate entity (an ego). While he coped with his frustrated desire for his mother in this way, he now had desire in a more articulated sense: He could now express her absence and demand her presence with language. The original unity between mother and child was broken. Lacan (1977) says, the moment “in which desire becomes human is also that in which the child is born into language” (p. 103).

In the Fort/Da symbolization (or its equivalent) and all later speech, I gave birth to my individuality by using the universal subtle reality of language. In symbolizing and languaging, I nested my individuality in its broader reality. For this progress I pay the price of desire. My deepest longing is for the intense unity I experienced as an infant (before language). This longing expresses itself in sexual yearnings among other things. I also have an intense desire to be an individual. Life is the working out of these two, conflicting drives.