Of Music, Memory and Imagination

Press play please.





Its a little balmy in L.A. - and my office is in an area of the apartment that gets no ventilation and little light, so it's warm, dim and moist as I sit down to write. The strains of Phillip Glass' soundtrack to The Hours trickle and swell through from my bedroom, where the light is brighter, the breeze cooler and the music louder. Glass' geometric  motifs and the images I have associated with them from repeated viewings of the movie swirl through my mind, as if evoking ghostly presences in the hallway behind me and the empty living room and bedroom.

It’s this way, only different, with Peter Gabriel's Passion, Music for The Last Temptation of Christ, by Scorcese (not Mad Mel’s S&M autoerotic slasher-piece, The Passion of the Christ  - that is a martyr of a different slice.)

I have gotten so involved in the evocative power of that music over the last 15 or so years. Having used it for yoga, bodywork, breathwork, love-making, dance, writing, and just plain I-wanna-be-in-a-soulful-space-at-home-soundtrack, it has been fascinating to return again and again to the movie and be reminded of the peculiar Middle Eastern Zero C.E. period-piece quality that prevails through the bulk of it. Even as Harvey Keitel portrays his Brooklyn-infused Judas:

 Wassamadda wid yew!? Huh? First you say you wanna bring a sword, now you say you want peace… I should kill you myself!

 (Grabs the side of Willem Defoe's Jesus-throat-and-face, glaring intently into his eyes.)

But the Glass soundtrack is more explicitly evocative in some ways - the music so closely related to the interwoven narratives and perspectives of The Hours. Passion is more indirectly evocative, or perhaps more adaptive to whatever space with which it interacts. The Hours’ music carries a specific meaning, a mournful story of the bittersweet transient nature of life and love, of the ineffability of art and the constrictions of social convention - and loneliness, tragic loneliness.

Passion perhaps is more postmodern, in that the story of the Last Temptation of Christ intentionally turns the myth on it's humanistic head and the music (which Gabriel spent 5 years crafting after the film was completely in the can) is the first truly cross-cultural, timeless, electronic meets indigenous, East meets West soundtrack ever created. For Christ's sake, (literally!) it introduced Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn to the West - who Jeff Buckley (before he martyred himself) would later say was "his Elvis.."





Z4: Caught Between Scylla and Charybdis

I have enjoyed reading all four pieces on display so far. I cannot know them in and of themselves (if there even is such a thing with the written word)- I know them only through the mediation of my own mind, my own interpretations and associations, my own biases and intuitions, my own misunderstandings and desires...Yet we can converse, we can discuss, we can debate, and to some extent this is a tremendously satisfying and revelatory process!

BY the same token, I cannot know any of the presenters or comment-makers in-and-of-themselves. You are each icons to me, avatars – projections of self into cyberspace. Known only through typed words on a screen. Words that do indeed represent something; thoughts, confusions, feelings , reactions, ideologies, defenses...

I am all for embodied experience. So important. This is where we live. This is what we are. For me, the body is the beginning and the end. We live, we love, and we die, and yes - we enact perspectives. Ironic to be exploring the topic of embodied cognition via an internet symposium!

I am all for Ken Wilber's grand taxonomical project. For me it has been a lens, a framework, a way of making sense of the world and understanding why I think what I think, how my intuitive sense of the accuracy or wrong-headedness about certain ideas and beliefs maps out pretty consistently along the lines of certain key principles and distinctions. Yet I find I disagree with some of his, and certainly many of other’s, application of the system. Fascinating!

I am not that familiar with Varela, but reading some interviews online and getting most of the way through The Embodied Mind has been really fun, stimulating and satisfying.

I will assume that those who’ve traveled thus far with us have looked at both Bruce and Matt’s symposium offerings and therefore are pretty familiar with at least a basic sense of Enactivism.

What I found the most interesting about The Embodied Mind, the primary source for my limited knowledge of Enactivism is the proposal of incorporating a first person experiential methodology like Buddhist mindfulness practice into cognitive science as a way to fill in the blind spot of what in Integral terms would be called an excessive Upper Right quadrant focus. What an important observation. Of course Wilber counters somewhat by saying that autopoesis is really still the inside of the outside, because it is “mired in the sensorimotor…” hmmm.

I was very taken with the elegant and precise writing style and the fascination with the interdependent, co-enacted relationships between subject and object, organism and environment, as well as the stunning overview of schools of thought in cognitive research, artificial intelligence, evolutionary theory etc.

Clearly these are passionate and engaged thinkers - scientists, philosophers, researchers, and above all, intellectuals. I found myself relatively unconvinced by their arguments though, and had the odd experience of finding the “naïve representationlist” counter-arguments they were presenting as a foil to actually be more plausible than some of the more extreme positions they appeared to be taking. 





Cue The Police’s Wrapped Around Your Finger. Listen for the line in the first verse about Scylla and Charybdis:




So here we are, caught between the rock of objectivism and the whirlpool of subjectivism. Enactivism is an attempt to find the middle way between these extremes. (Or so we are led to believe..)

In Integral terms Enactivism is attempting to relate (when speaking of cognition) the Upper Left and Upper Right hand quadrants and (when speaking of evolution) perhaps the Upper Right and Lower Right, while taking the Upper Left seriously. To some extent the contructivist implications of the ideas presented also evoke the specter of the Lower Left Quadrant. So we have an obviously thoughtful, complex and integrative exploration on our hands. Cool!

I felt I could go a certain distance with their ideas, and really enjoy them, but that what was being called for was a kind of radical revolution in thinking – and one I didn’t find that well-evidenced or that compelling. It's as if there were some fascinating new ideas and observations about how cognition functioned, about how evolution may occur, about the necessity of acknowledging subjectivity and the mutual interactions of organism and environment and then suddenly I was expected to go along with this information as implying/supporting a grand theory that appeared in many ways to over-reach itself.

Minds are embodied. Subject and object exert influence on each-other. Organism and environment co-evolve. The sensori-motor apparatus that an organism is working with will determine the worldspace it is capable of experiencing – and so to an extent we have enactment, and the fascinating conundrum as to whether or not there is any world separate from our capacity to perceive it…

What a beautiful and elegant observation – the organism brings forth a world via its sensorimotor functioning.

Therefore: there is no pre-given world that the organism evolves to better adapt to, nor is there any pre-given world that cognition – as an expression of evolution, seeks to better represent?

None whatsoever, really?

Huh?!

At times I found myself wondering – what are they actually saying, would it be a gross misinterpretation to see this as another form of solipsistic idealism or radical constructivism, or  - of course these observations are important, but where do they draw the line?

I want to present of few of the examples that were given in a moment, but first let me return to the voice in which I began.


Wilber and My Form of 21st Century Spirituality

It’s evening now. My office is much cooler, I have returned to the Phillip Glass soundtrack, mostly because I found my Radiohead compilation too distracting. I have the piano and strings coming straight at me from my iTunes application, don’t want to disturb my neighbors by blasting it from the bedroom. It’s different, more in my face. If I had more hair I would picture it whooshing back a little. But would it really?

I am thinking about why I love yoga and (to a lesser extent, it must be admitted) meditation. Thinking about the holistic process of bodywork, physical and somato-emotional healing, and organ cleansing. How these all go together. Thinking about my respect for good psychotherapeutic method and for beautiful art that is emotionally evocative and intellectually insightful.

I am thinking about the old Greek chestnuts of truth, beauty and goodness – about the different value-spheres and their validity-claims. Wilber puts truth in both the right hand quadrants – what is empirically provable, hard science gives us “Truth.” He puts beauty in the upper left hand quadrant. “Beauty,” he says, is in the “I” of the beholder. He associates beauty with art, with contemplation, with subjectivity, with interior meaning. “Goodness,” he says, belongs to the lower left, the inter-subjective realm. When we ask “what is good?” we are speaking of morals, ethics, what is good for an “us.”

In my daily work I invite people into a “we-space.” Together we evoke a sacred space – a domain enacted for a community of inner work. I ask participants to imagine two circles:  one around themselves, and one around the entire group - to simultaneously hold the sense of our shared humanity and our personal subjectivity. I suggest that that the “group-energy” supports each of us in being as we each are personally  - that the large circle contains a living mandala of the human experience and that we take turns holding different qualities: grief, joy, numbness, ecstatic opening, stuck-ness, cynicism, compassion, judgment, jadedness, novelty, hope etc.. I suggest that there is nothing we can experience individually that is alien to that living mandala, and that we each live our uniquely individual life story against the backdrop of that universal human experience.

Within that context, I am encouraging participants to take a journey under the surface, into their own mind-body process, into a kind of moment-by-moment present attention to sensation, emotion, color, image, metaphor, intuition, words – whatever may emerge. We use yoga postures and breath and music and sometimes dance or singing or drumming to enter this deeply embodied state of shared yet personal inquiry. What emerges is a kind of truth, or perhaps truthfulness.

Along the way there are landmarks: moments of insight regarding habitual thought patterns or identifications/projections, moments of recognizing a particular emotion or psychological conflict as being related to a physical tension – and observing the release of that tension as related to the conscious feeling of that emotion or conflict, the transcendence of limited individula identifications as archetypal forces and qualities emerge, the deep surrender into both primal, instinctive bodily experience as well as exquisitely subtle, refined, deeply compassionate and nuanced mind-body states.

Muscle and bone, blood and guts, nervous system energy, brain chemistry, hormones, endorphins, neurotransmitters, oxygen and carbon dioxide, interior meaning, an inter-subjective space in which we enact a supportive embrace of that which is ordinarily carried in the collective shadow, heightened states of consciousness, embodied presence, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, courage cultivated in the face of difficulty, creative responsiveness..


Mind-Body Reductionism and Magical Thinking

I am a big proponent of embodied awareness, and of inquiring into the mental/psychological meaning inherent in bodily experience. But I am careful here. I think there are two big mistakes too easily made; one is to jump to the conclusion that every bodily tension or symptom is psychological in nature (which is just the flipside of thinking that there is zero psychological influence on the mechanistic activity of the body), the other is to buy into an oversimplified set of concrete correspondences: oh! You have conjunctivitis - Aha! What are you afraid to see?! Sore throat - must be something you are not saying. Cancer of the bladder – well, aren’t you pissed off? Knees hurt – clearly you’re afraid to move forward in life. This doesn't work for me.

I am cautious to remind people that meaning emerges out of process and that, while there may be interesting information to learn or fairly accurate generalizations to apply, there is no substitute for inquiry. But then of course we get into the other easy mistake to make; that of questioning absolutely everything in the name of inquiry. How do you know that its not an evil spirit that made me have the car accident – aren’t we supposed to be in inquiry? Well, maybe 8/8/08 really was the day that the celestial beings from another dimension finally began communicating with us – and it’s just the judging mind that stops you from hearing!

Or my recent favorite: Who are we to say that writing my name on a piece of paper and placing it into the shoe of a departed “saint” might no be the cure for chronic illness? (In this specific case my literal answer should have been – who are we? Well, you are a Phd. psychoanalyst who should know better and I am someone who can use my own experience, thought process and Occam’s razor to make an assessment as to the probability of such a thing being true.)

This is where critical thinking comes in, along with a good dose of the kind of distinction making that wonderful Integral tools like the four quadrants, pre/trans fallacy, three modes of knowing make possible. The point is that spirituality should not be a) dissociated from reason and science, or b) reduced to surface interpretations that leave out depth-oriented inquiry-based process or c) equated with prerational concretizations and externalizations of interior expereince.

Let’s return to Varela.


Of Kitties, Color, Bumblebees, The Lack of Both Ground and Self, and Cartesian Anxiety

The first point I want to make is that I was extraordinarily sympathetic to a lot of the ideas in The Embodied Mind. I found it an extremely worthwhile, humbling and engaging book and learned a lot from it. I think it is important to note that the first few chapters of the book are about models of cognition, some of which are based on computer processing – and as such the observations about the breakdown of representational models of cognition were fascinating. By the same token, the ways in which the authors revealed blind spots and weaknesses in both classical evolutionary theory and objectivist science was breathtaking and made me want to keep digging into those fields.

At key points in their narrative, the authors offer up contrary explanations as a foil to their hypothesis. One such example is on page 180 in the section titled “Retreat into Natural Selection,” but this strategy is employed at least once if not twice more. The arguments presented as foils actually sounded like more of a “middle way” than what was being alluded to in the ideology being constructed. I also didn’t find the counter-arguments and examples able to cash the check being written as to a complete annihilation of the Myth of the Given or naïve representationalism.

Kittens in Rickshaws
Page 174
A group of kittens was raised in the dark and exposed to light only under controlled circumstances. Half the group was allowed to move about freely. The other half were drawn passively in little carts attached to the mobile kitties. They call this experiment “beautiful” because of what it proves about cognition as embodied action. When finally released into the world – surprise, surprise, the kittens who had been developing their sensory and motor skills concurrently were able to move through the environment more effectively, whilst the passive kitties were complete spazzes who fell off and bumped into just about whatever they came across.

Perhaps this is what Wilber is referring to in his critique cited above. Where is the groundbreaking revelation here about consciousness, evolution or coenactment?

The study does indeed prove that the ability to effectively use the feedback loop of sensory and motor apparatus in a given environment depends on embodied action. But cognition? Thinking?

I have two words for you: Stephen Hawking.


Uber-cognition sans motor function - about as close as we can get to a disembodied brain (i said brain not mind!) Seems to function cognitively and map outrageous aspects of reality pretty darn well...


The Mystery of Color
Page 157
Likewise for the wonderful and fascinating color examples given at great length. What an absorbing technical exploration of the nature of color and vision, cognitive labeling and social conditioning. Color is not merely “out there,” not merely a function of accurately perceiving differences in frequency or surface reflectance, but is an experience made up of complex relationships between visual apparatus, brain processing, what is seen and how we are taught to label it. Beautiful.

The tricky part is that this does not necessarily translate into things like say, the sharpness of a knife, the viability of a mate, the steepness of a cliff or the dangerousness of a T. Rex, right? Color is has none of the embodied consequences that accurately perceiving, interpreting and responding to other features of what is indeed pre-given about the world and our relationship to it might demonstrably have.

Ultraviolet Reflectance Patterns (I just like the sound of that..)
Page 201
Similarly we move on to the cool example about bees and flowers and ultraviolet reflectance patterns. Bees and flowers appear to have co-evolved(bees in their visual spectra and flowers in their ultraviolet reflectance patterns)  so as to be more successful and harmonious at achieving their evolutionary imperatives to survive and procreate. Awesome. Mind-blowing. Ummm, but both are organisms. They are in a symbiotic co-enacting relationship within an environment that perhaps provides for certain pre-given characteristics like temperature, rain-fall, a type of soil and other factors without which their organismic co-evolution would not be possible. Are we suggesting here that the flowers are merely the environment and not themselves organisms? If not, where is the revelation here – the radical departure from classical evolutionary theory?

It is awe-inspiring to consider the various worldspaces that reveal themselves given the differing sensory and motor apparatus of different organisms. Uniquely, human beings can conceive of such things. We can create microscopes and sonar and we can map the different types of vision possible via different types of eye structures.

We do this not through some easy-to-strawman "denial of the subject's influence" but through the sophisticated cognitive ability to be able to put our limited subjectivity temporarily aside and (to the best of our ability and prodigious imagination) take other perspectives and attempt neutral interpretations of data - we do this much better than most spiritual people convinced of supernatural phenomena, magical causation or otherwordly realities would like to admit!

We can understand that different creatures perceive things that we are unaware of but are nonetheless there – and we can include these things in a map of a world that is indeed out there – though there is this fascinating phenomenon that what we perceive and interact with is a function of our limited abilities. Does this mean there is absolutely no pre-given world? I am as yet unconvinced.


Boiling Down the Sauce

My sense is that there is a world out there, but that we enact various versions of the world via a complex of variables that have to do with sensory and motor apparatus, social conditioning, worldview, cognitive development and various skill sets that have or haven’t been developed, things like communication, empathy, critical thinking, mindfulness etc…

But I remain pretty confident of three things: a) as we continue applying a broad scientific method across all three domains of knowing, we continue to find out what reality is*, was and what it can continue evolving along with us towards and b) that higher stages of development reveal more depth and more accuracy as to our ability to relate to reality and c) that we can understand wrong-turns, pathology and misinterpretations of data by contrast to this evolving depth and accuracy in relating of subject and object, organism and environment, interior and exterior realities.

This is true in Piaget’s developmental stages of cognition, Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, Gebser’s worldviews and so on. Whether personal or collective, each stage transcends the misperceptions and errors of the previous stage while including the necessary, useful and accurate lessons learned and moving forward into deeper, more nuanced and more accurate perceptions and interpretations. This is demonstrable through scientific method in all four quadrants.

Call this a defense against Cartesian Anxiety if you like, but I don’t buy it. Sure the ground is shifting, sure what was certain today will be replaced by something more elegant tomorrow, sure the notion of a fixed self is receding into a fantasy as we examine the insights of both contemplative meditation and cognitive science. But this is all congruent with an open-ended scientific method and I am not proposing anything unreasonably fixed and solid – nor am I buying into anything unreasonably undefined.

Meditate all you want (I've tried it - a lot), gravity still apllies - whatever name you call me for saying so! Shift through multiple perspectives faster than you can say integral Methodological Pluralism and HIV (not a curse from the witchdoctor) still causes AIDS, and while organism and environent co-determine one another it appears that there actually was a "chicken" environment in which no presence of the "egg" of organismic consiousness existed at some point - and I ain't buying the round peg in a square hole self-referential hypothesis that rocks and supernovas must have some form of interiority or rudimentary consciousness. Consciousness is apparently pretty deeply related to complex organic structures and no amount of Tibetan, Maori, Native American or Abrahamic mythic or pantheistic assertions to the contrary will subvert this fact - until it is proven otherwise.

There is a self that we experience. It is a kind of mind-body interior hologram made up of the functioning of multiple systems accruing experience, mental and emotional meaning, associations, preferences and survival strategies – and this self is plagued by anxieties, repressions, reactivity, grasping and aversion. Good then to enter contemplative and psychoanalytic and embodied self-development activities that help optimize and ultimately relax around that useful yet often confused illusion.

There is a world out there (unless we are firm solipsists), we experience it through the lens of our conditioning and the limitations of our organic apparatus. Learning more about the world, taking multiple perspectives, weighing and contrasting and following effective methodologies makes it possible to suggest the most likely interpretation of our knowledge of the world. This is why the more open-edned non-repressive structures of modern and posrmodern society are not only demonstrably better in terms of the life experience of the individual than premodern traditional scoiety, but also more effective at engaging the world out there on it's own terms. Think medicine, natural disasters, roads and telecommunications for a start...


Two Final Examples

Consider the example of Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered that hand-washing would limit the incidence of fatal purpureal fever in women undergoing childbirth. Turned out the interns were bringing cadaverous material in on their hands from their performance of autopsies and infecting the mothers to be. Now, these women were dying of something that we did not know about, but there it was, doing what it did at a microscopic bacterial level, (in a sense) waiting to be understood and perceived before we could respond to it adequately.

I am not suggesting that Enactivism would have a problem with this, rather that if we take the dismissal of a pre-given world too far, and if we then ill-advisedly cross-over into things like Wilber’s Altitudinal map of social development and try (as many relativist Integralites do) to suggest that Wilber V means that there is no pre-given truth whatsoever only what is true in the worldspace of each altitudinal stage – then we are in trouble, because this is interesting up to a point, beyond which it becomes absolute nonsense, and unless we are clear about where that point is (and I think applying good quadrant seperation is helpful here as well as of course applying PTF) we open the door to all manner of silliness that corrupts both the legitimacy and intelligence of the system.

Take for example that other ill-fated kitty - Shrodinger’s Cat in a box. I bring it up because with Enactivism, it is easy to get into leaps of reasoning (or faith) regarding the influence of the observer. Most people who like to cite this thought-experiment (that’s right it has not and could not actually be performed outside the mind) are unaware that it is the result of Einstein and Schrodinger’s conversations about the bizarre and untenable implications of quantum theory and how they still had much more work to do!

Schrodinger:

“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks..”

Einstein:

“You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality—if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation..”

(Note that no charge of gunpowder is mentioned in Schrödinger's set-up, which uses a Geiger counter as an amplifier and hydrocyanic poison instead of gunpowder; the gunpowder was only mentioned in Einstein's original suggestion to Schrödinger 15 years before.)

Conclusion

Please press play.




So, after that circuitous fugue, I emerge into Weird Fishes. So sublime. The bassline toward the end of the song playing it’s repeated rhythmic and melodic motifs, the swirl of Thom Yorke's sampled vocal layers, the driving yet silky drum figures. I have the vaguely yellow light on in my office, even though it is daytime, because I needed to read the un-illuminated words on pages as well as those held in the complex mystery of the computer screen. My lunch awaits me, tasty and green and a vegan, raw strawberry mousse tort as a reward for this hard work.

Life is good, and my body works, my mind is stimulated and my heart seeks the fearful tenderness of intimacy and love, creativity surrounds and infuses my life and I remain drawn to the possibilities of truth, beauty and goodness – not as rigidly fixed, unmoving attributes of a pre-given world, but as qualities that are universal, that emerge that prove themselves via experience and method and that continue evolving and surprising (within limits) the more we look into them and they look into us.


* (from above) this does not mean that we do not influence or co-enact our worldspace or perceptions, but that I think the fact that we make progress in our ability to effectively interact with multiple layers and aspects of reality represents a de facto improvement in our being able to know what it is. (Bear in mind: A stronger argument than calling this the merely naive representationalist paradigm from a lower stage of development will be required to overturn this assertion!)

As promised the logical scalpel of love, the reasonable heart of rational analysis and the humanistic eye of the beyolder have been turned on our symposium subject - better late than never for the konnectivist himself: Adam!

A wonderful addition to the already elegant and brilliant pieces presented so far

Go and see.

I will get my remarks up somtime tomorrow before 3 pm!

Well, three of our seven presenters have their pieces up in what is proving to be a fascinating and rich symposium!

In what has been an opening three days plagued by technical difficulties, Gaia-gremlins, bad astrology, Mac conspiracy, and mis-calibrated magical intentions, the first two presenters ended up having to post about 8 hours later than anticipated, the third has yet to post and the prolific and prodigious Matt Segall has posted three days early!

Once again our symposium ine-up is sweeping the boards on Gaia's hottest blog post listings on the homepage. We (meaning Bruce, James and Matt) hold all three of the automatically listed positions. In a community made up of close to a quarter million people this is a fun and exciting achievement!

Here's a snapshot for posterity:


(Anyone who knows how to fix James' text so that it doesn't show up as the above html craziness on the homepage, even though it looks perfect on his blog, will win a special symposium honor....)

Bruce and James' excellent posts and their miles deep conversation in the comments section (I think the most prolific comment spree in zymposium history!) are linked below.

Here is Matt's remarkable and brilliant piece (I expected nothing less).

Adam's contrapuntal German hammer blow of love should be descending any minute now.... :O)
Thanks for your participation!

~Julian

The second piece in our late running symposium is up!

It's an excellent step forward in the conversation.... go see!

Adam please break the pattern tomorrow.

The first installment of our symposium is up.

Go and see - it's phenomenal!

Bruce has been trying to get me to consider some of the ideas he so beautifully expresses here for at least two years - and i for one am thrilled to be able to dig deeper and see the relationship/concepts he has been referring to in such lucid detail...

Its Symposium time again!

We kick off Z4: Enactivism, Integral Theory and 21st Century Spirituality this Wednesday August 13.




We'll go three days this week, take a break for the weekend and then start the dialog again Monday August 18 for the remaining four presenters.

These symposia (Zymposia in the "Zaadz" days..) were something I initiated to create an online conference-type experience. Seven presenters take turns over the seven days presenting a paper on the topic and then host a conversation in the comments section of their blogpost. The other presenters participate in a panel discussion of sorts, but the discussion is open to all readers! Its a way of focusing the conversation on a topic that has been emerging in the less formalized discussions here on Gaia in our little integrally-influenced community.

Previous symposia have garnered a readership in the thousands and created a forum for long, respectful, feisty and deep conversation  amongst participants and readers.

Check out Z1: Integrative Spirituality

Z2: Riding the Kundalini Dragon

Z3: Eco Business

I am excited for Z4!

Largely at the prompting of Bruce and Matt, two of my favorite intellectual online-buddies and jousting partners - we have decided to organize this session around the relationships between Franciso Varela's philosophy of Enactivism, Ken WIlber's Integral Theory and what I somewhat grandiosely (and hopefully tentatively) call 21st Century Spirituality.

Z3 was largely something I produced and promoted (I did not contribute a written piece) to give some of the most knowledgeable voices on Gaia a chance to discuss their ideas about Eco Business and Conscious Capitalism,  but for Z1 and Z2 I chose the topic and led off the presentations - largely focusing on areas in which I felt very strong and upon which I was excited to expound.

For Z4, given that Enactivism is a fairly new (yet exciting and elegant) philosophical subject for me, I am am bowing to the superior knowledge of some of my fellow presenters - and placing myself close to the middle of the proceedings. The order has been arranged to allow for contrast and provide the most illuminating, interesting give and take between differing worldviews and interpretations of the material...

Please check out the profiles linked below and join us for what promises to be an amazing seven days!

The presentation order will be as follows:


wed aug 13:  Balder (Bruce)
thurs 14: James
fri 15: Adam

(Break)

mon 18: Buddhacious (Matt)
tues 19: Julian
weds 20: Crouching Tiger (Erin)
thurs 21: Marmalade (Ben)

Thoughts?

By what criteria shall we assess these claims?

Besides he obvious philosophical and empirical analysis - which this kind of stuff can't stnd up to for a second, perhaps I will quote myself here viz understanding why this is NOT an example of  transrational spiritual insight:

"Prerational spirituality  will include (instead of transcend):

* fantastical beliefs
* unscientific views of reality
* confusions between inner and outer reality and their relationships (category/quadrant errors), and very often
* various kinds of metaphysical denial structures around suffering, trauma, injustice, and the randomness of the world at large.

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..

On the other hand the transrational worldview is in no way at odds with reasonable perceptions and interpretations of reality - it just takes them deeper, develops them further. There is a choice-less awareness of the reality of suffering and injustice - without the ironically linear attempt to make spiritual sense of these things via metaphysics. The transrational worldview is deeply compassionate and insightful, discerning and realistic. It encapsulates reality as it is and sees the sacred awe-inspiring nature of life without denying any of it's horror or meaninglessness."

(On a purely psychological/existential note: notice the tone of completely transcending suffering and basically all that's wrong with the world being set right by the magic numbers, cosmic rays etc.. this is classic wishful thinking and soothing fantasy as a defense against reality...)

Some have criticized this, but I maintain that viz the spiritual line of development, the beliefs and assertions must not violate basic rational standards in order to pass the first qualifier for being genuinely transrational. I am confident that this basic premise is rock solid - and challenge anyone to come up with a plausible  example to the contrary.

Surely it is clear that the above "information" fails to do this and that this is enough to identify it is prerational mumbo jumbo?!

To quote Wilber from the same piece:

""The mystical state is often beyond words. It is trans-rational because you have access to rationality but it's temporarily suspended. A 6-month-old infant, for instance, is in a pre-rational state, whereas the mystic is in a trans-rational state. Unfortunately, "pre" and "trans" get confused. So some theorists say the infant is in a mystical state."

"The rational scientist looks at all the pre-rational stuff as nonsense -- fairies and ghosts and goblins -- and lumps it together with the trans-rational stuff and says, "That's nonrational. I don't want anything to do with it."

Though some of my friends here find th above quote problematic or oversimplified - I find it straightforward and to the point - it needn't be any more complicated. I am using this 8.8.8. video as an example of the reasoning above - it is not an example of transrational insight or cognition or spirituality precisely because it is so easily debunked by simple rational analysis. It so clearly commits quadrant errors, logical fallacies and is based in magical thinking. Genuinely transrational material would commit none of these obvious errors, while still expanding beyond simply rational awareness. Again, I am confident of this being a consistently verifiable principle.

The point: There is a difference between violating the laws of science and reason in an erroneous way and expanding them in a healthy way. Prerational defensive magical thinking-based spirituality does the former, contemporary transrational, expansive, discerning, practice-based spirituality does the latter. Period.

The video is an example of how pre and trans get confused - with the added New Age twist of pseudoscience and odd OCD mathematical, geometric meaningless formulas.... This stuff actually impresses a lot of people in the spiritual community and even several prominent persons in the "Integral" community.

As soon as this is not such a ubiquitous confusion I will stop harping on it!

I can hardly wait - maybe 8.8.08 will be the turning point...if I only believe!

SPIRITUAL PASSION: THE MAGIC OF THE REAL






THE PREDICAMENT

This is not what I intended.

i am passionate about so much - about the body and the heart, the psyche and the mind, about reality and its genuine, discoverable magic. About initiation, energy, consciousness, the hard-won truths of practice, inquiry, healing and growth. Creativity, intuition and yes, the beautiful gift of reason.

Yet I have become a lone mouthpiece for reason, when reason is for me but the springboard into depth, or perhaps one (essential and often missing) side of an equation that to be balanced must perhaps integrate reason, intuition, emotion, and sensate experience.

But this is a written medium, and reason is oddly offensive to the popular spiritual temperament. ( Sword-of-discernment-wielding Buddhist archetype Manjusri, pictured above, notwithstanding...).

I have become the voice of  - what i had imagined would be to many - the obvious.  Alas,  the obvious is anathema in a subculture that wants more than anything else to "believe." To believe in unreasonable things and call that belief a hallmark of "being spiritual," or "open-minded." A subculture in which the biggest taboo appears to be common sense, precisely because common sense is seen as closing the door on this "being spiritual" - when it rather demands that being spiritual get real - and perhaps that reality itself be penetrated more deeply to reveal it's spiritual core, even with its obvious limitations and imperfections - even though we all die at the end.

I remain unwilling to back down on what for me are the basic premises of a conversation about  reality-based spirituality, a practice-based commitment to substance and depth, discernment and genuine compassion that stands in contrast to superstition, child-like defensiveness against death and suffering and the search for magic and mystery in some imaginary other world. This has to my surprised frustration, made those basic premises the centerpiece of a debate I find a little embarrassing.

Said basic premises are merely a kind of reason-sieve - a filtering mechanism that clarifies the difference between superstition and spiritual depth, narcissistic magical thinking and ego-surrendered expansion. Or they are just the designs on the curtain that hangs in front of the doorway into wonder. Real wonder. Grown-up awe.


A LEFT TURN (sort of)

So here goes:





I am passionate about embodied experience: a direct awakening into energy at it's most primal, physiological and sophisticated psychological level. Through daily work in both my personal practice  and professional role via yoga, touch, meditation, free-from dance, work with multiple breathing techniques, exploration of the discovered meaning inherent in both "stuck energy" and the ecstasy of coming unstuck and activating the body in ways that evoke Rumi, Whitman and Blake at their most ardent:

"Energy is eternal delight" - Blake.

 "I sing the body electric,"

"I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
seeing, hearing and feeling are miracles
and every part and tag of me
is a miracle too.

Divine am I inside and out and I make holy whatever
I touch or am touched from,
the scent of these armpits is aroma fner than prayer,
this head more than churches or bibles or creeds,
if I worship anny particular thing
it shall be the sum of the spread of my body.." - Whtiman.

"The body is a screen that hides, but also reveals the light blazing inside your presence."

"Not Christian or Buddhist, Hindu or Zen...... first, last, outer and inner, I am just this breath-breathing human being." -  Rumi

(Did I mention my love of poetry - the language of the soul?!)



ECSTATIC DANCE

Sunday morning, wood floors, high, high ceilings, world music, people of all ages, colors, shapes and sizes in comfortable clothing, respectful, playful, sexy, sacred. Dancing in free-form interplay, alive to the spontaneous Brownian motion as bodies weave around one-another, as the space between us effortlessly absorbs our moving shapes, our fluid gestures of curiosity and sensuality and generous embrace, our embodiment of shadow hostility, competitiveness, fear and insecurity, our shared opening into group-mind tribal ecstasy in which the dance is doing you and there is no separation and self-consciousness disappears in the radiant recognition of our shared humanity, our vulnerability our fierce magnificent mortality.

Fleeting, gorgeous, fragile, adamantine.

The music fades and we drip in the silence of ceiling fans and barefeet on floorboards, some standing still, some still moving to the internal rhythm, some in sweet embrace. Spontaneously, voices rise - half-harmonizing, wordless, dissonant, beautiful...

"We have fallen into the place where everything is music.."  - Rumi


YOGA

Sweating profusely in the shared choreography of flow yoga, bending and twisting and balancing and breathing and reaching and moment-by-moment transforming, literally transforming, tissue and energy and consciousness as we ride the wave of inhale, exhale, endorphins, neurotransmitters, brain-states, mind-body revelations - ah! I hold my grief in that place in my neck, oh! my jaw is biting back the rage i feel, wow! when i let the self-criticism go energy swirls down my legs and my chest lifts another 1/2 inch...

And then everyone settling into the stillness after all of that movement, the rest after all of that hard work, the sweet nectar of cultivated (sacred, mysterious, quantifiable in bliss-ohms..) chemistry in brain and body as we invite meditative, aware relaxation..

And still we are part of the privileged few with the time and resources to engage in such activities, and still we might miss the here-and-now living tradition of initiatory possibilities if we get too caught up in the coolness of sanskrit, special teachers and traditions, social climbing and spiritual posturing.


BODYWORK

Both giving and receiving the true magic of intentional touch, the sensate dialog with muscle and bone (sacred architecture!) with nerve and fascia (electric webbing of life!), the intuitive dialog with layered meaning in the gristle and grit, the blood and guts, how the story of the life is written in the body and can be accessed, not through slavish reliance on some cookie-cutter correspondences, some paint-by-numbers reductionism, but through the surrendered allowing of an emergent process. A process that the ego is not controlling and that sounds it's truth like a great resonant, radiant, pulsing gong at the center of Being itself.

The moment of unbridled catharsis, the moment of quiet revelatory release, the wide-grinning unmistakeable rapture,  grace and ecstasy of the kundalini waveform, the timeless expanse of hypnagogic rest as electric nerves pulsate, luminous blood circulates, marvelous bones settle into their new places, and the mind is enveloped in dream-fueling music.




And still a herniated disc might necessitate surgery.


LOVE-MAKING

In the throes of passionate sexual embrace, the moment of eye contact, the melting of boundaries, the delicate animal grace of carnal give-and-take, the velvet heat, the explosive, expanding waves of pleasure that say '"this is what you are, this is what you were made for, this is the most at home, alive and connected to another human being you have ever felt and it is fleeting yet foundational - celebrate it, let it blow you open into tears and laughter and unadulterated animal passion, run through with spiritual awe and tender compassionate gratitude. You are all men, you are all women, you are all life yearning and grunting and sighing and swooning and fucking the Kosmos itself into existence."


Knowing now what before was only imagined, discovering the new country of intimacy, non-verbal communication, the essential treasures revealed through the doorway of THIS pairing - the unique details of a universal activity.

And none of this makes death less real.


BREATHWORK

On the Holotropic Breathing mat: waves of powerful unwinding, the body regressing into infantile experience, archetypal imagery: death, birth, murder, innocence, love, powerful waves of an emotional intensity otherwise barely imagined. Longing, grief, ecstasy,  timeless truths arrived at in real-time revelation. The Divine Mother pushing me smile-grimacing from her cavernous conch-shell womb, Jesus weeping, howling, powerless on the relentless cross of space-time, the Buddha's silence enveloping and transfixing me, the Phoenix of my almost-mortally wounded soul rising into the sky as the Dark Night draws to a close and the Morning Star announces a New Day.




And none of this implies anything supernatural.


PSYCHO-SPIRITUAL INQUIRY

I am passionate about psychological depth: the moment in psychotherapy when layers of meaning reveal themselves, when intuitive connections and emotional associations bring forth core issues and their powerful meaning - right before the dam bursts and the heart breaks open into torrential grief or shouts it's anguished outrage. The moment in vipassana meditation when one crosses the threshold of profound internal opening - a world abuzz with sensation, color, feeling, holographic memories and archetypal meanings. The sense of bittersweet beauty, tragedy, grace and finally - acceptance.

And none of this abdicates critical thinking.


MYTHOLOGY

I am passionate about world mythology and what it reveals about the relationships between, self, society, geography and the perennial existential struggles of the human psyche. That humans both personally and collectively can dream-up elaborate, beautiful, multi-layered stories, creatures, cycles and dynamics of symbolic meaning that describe the universal stages of an internal journey is absolutely mind-blowing! Much more mind-blowing than the superficial  need to concretize any of the details of these metaphorical masterpieces into literal other worlds and entities - and then evoke "faith" as a tool to facilitate "belief" in the fantasy being "real" in way that not only robs it of it's meaning but also of it's very raison de etre..


MEDITATION

I am passionate about contemplative experience: The moment of mystic revelation a la the Buddha's heart sutra, Najarjuna's verses from the center, Maharshi's witnessing self-inquiry - in which subject and object distinctions dissolve, spacious clarity arises and the pulsating, luminous present reveals itself as the only place I have ever been - utterly familiar, patently unknowable, entirely obvious, mind-blowingly mysterious. Self-evident, esoteric, unimportant, essential. The mythic "mask of god" falls away or indeed becomes "transparent to transcendence" and what happens next cannot even be spoken...



"Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath , this sitting here, this opening to life we have refused again and again, until now. Until now..." - David Whyte

And still there is madness, delusion, the trickery of politics, state-legislated torture, an unjust war, boy soldiers undergoing amputation, rape, social inequality, religious terrorism, spiritual charlatanism, and still the world goes on and I live nowhere else..


INTEGRATIVE SPIRITUALITY

I am passionate about the evolutionary impulse and how it expresses itself in personal, collective, exterior and interior development - about the urge toward freedom and love and truth, beauty and goodness and integration. That beautiful and good truths that matter are discoverable via multiple methodologies - and that in the words of Mohandas Ghandi "There is no God but truth..."




I am passionate about spirituality. Even though there has never been a miracle, a virgin birth, a messiah, a personal god who grants prayers to the lucky few, or a universal harness-able intentional force that helps you beat the other suckers out of parking spaces. Even though quantum physics does not imply anything along the lines of thought-created reality and brilliant postmodern insights do not mean that Hummer SUV's will not make roadkill of tribesman, scientist and mystic alike - regardless of their worldview, value system, metaphysics, co-enacted worldspace, or Kosmic address! Even though Integral Theory does not mean that patent pseudoscience quackery  should be included in a genuinely holistic medicine - for their "partial truths," or that goofy paranoid fantasies about ancient Mayan prophecy and contemporary conspiracy theories should somehow not be debunked.

Because reason, discernment and critical thinking are the noble and valuable indispensable allies of intuition, creativity, ecstatic embodiment, emotional open-ness and spiritual practice.

Here's to integration.

In Love,

~Julian

Helen Fisher has done extraordinary research into the neuroscience and endocrine chemistry of the experience of love.

I highly recommend her book Why We Love.

This talk is  a great introduction to her work:



if this gets you going, here is another great talk of hers on love, lust and antidepressants:

Hi everyone!

I have been experimenting with shifting my tone and really speaking more from my heart about my work.

After doing the video blog below to create more context for my bodywork demonstration video, I wondered if it was missing something essential - and if the tone was right...

This is the new final version I just finished - please let me know if it succeeds in:

 a) creating better context for understanding the energetic phenomena in the demonstrations and
b) conveying my heartfelt love for the work and sense of privilege in getting to be a part of such a beautiful and meaningful process in the lives of others..

Namaste
~Julian







www.julianwalkeryoga.com for more info