on humanism and environmental crisis

Archive for the ‘Meditation’ Category

Reason for life versus meaning of life

Instead of thinking and brooding about the unanswerable “meaning of life”, much better, more immediate, and urgent should be (is?)”reason for life”.

It is much more dynamic and useful too. I like “reason”- the tools, equipment, and mechanisms are clearly stated  -the reason is the system that can, should, and ought to produce the answer. I like “for” instead of “of”. It implies that life requires, and needs action, that what is, is not satisfactory, but you are in just the right place and time to exert effort toward better. It is almost like in that brilliant question is a very positive and natural beginning, budding of an answer! In contrast, the eternal “meaning of ” smells of linguistic masturbation, wallowing in self-invented doubts, not leading anywhere. It looks to me that, again, in the question of the meaning of life the answer “there is none” is there already.

Or, which means the same: “God” or “know thyself”. It (this question) questions the natural feeling about life. As “it is not it”. You have, it almost demands, invent a new language to name the meaning beyond yourself, like you, as you are now, are not good enough. Like “there is no point in doing anything until you’ll be better, wiser, knowing something more.” But the dimensions of those changes are permanently and immanently beyond you.  Hence: “God”.

Reason for life is so humanistic and encouraging. It retains the philosophical generalization, but by pointing toward “reason”- the tool you are familiar with and toward a big thing-“life” -it suggests a matryoshka doll structure of the answer. There is no one answer, there are many projects inside bigger and bigger goals and directions. You can start right away, today, and know that you can enfold them (the projects) as life unfolds. And as Desiderata says “it unfolds as it should”.

Category:

Evolutionary Reality, human nature, Humanism, Meditation

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Recommended cycle of study

   Making  of the modern sage.

   

   Recommended cycle of study:

                                       SELF

                           ->                          ->

          WORLDVIEW                                  COMPLEXITY

           ->                                                                  ->

INDIVIDUALITY                                                           EVOLUTION

     <-                                                                                 ->

HUMANISM                                                           EVOLUTION OF NERVOUS SYSTEM

           <-                                                                   <-

          HUMAN NATURE     <-       SOCIAL ANIMALS

 

The transition from studying self (like, growing up) to the concept of complexity is the most difficult and revolutionary.

It is like a deep, narrow, rocky canyon filled with the cacti of self doubt. And at the bottom run wild rivers of cosmology, neuroscience, epistemology and ontology.

Some trying to hang the bridge of second order cybernetics, some-recently- bring predictive coding -bloody sheets of phenomenology and neo-Kantian tied end to end.

I am offering my own bridge : the theory of evolutionary reality.

But, when you get to complexity- further steps roll smoothly and naturally.

You can actually stick with studying complexity and treat all the step as the examples of  increasing complexity.

Everybody writes about the human nature but it remains a nebulous subject ( like: who? me??)

You do not need individuality to have a worldview, everybody has one or more, but I mean, working on the explicit worldview.

“Accidentally” – no, not accidentally at all, the level of explicitness of communication follows the same circle of progression.

Some steps will be your favorites, some – slippery and yucky like pickled okra, but if you miss one step you inevitably will get stuck, the chi of wisdom needs to flow, not spurt like a broken fossett.

Of course when you get back to “self” – good luck- we need to start again .

Category:

Evolutionary Reality, Explicit and implicit worldview, free will, human nature, Humanism, Meditation, nature of reality, phenomenology, Worldview Owner's Manual

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Johanna Oksala-Femme Fatale of Neoliberalism

Since humans invented our civilization, the desperate struggle for power has been going on. Many different divisions and alliances were made, along the kinship lines, tribal, national, racial, religious and recently- class lines. And of course, at last, but not at least along the gender divide- this one literally started from Adam and Eve.
Michel Foucault, a historian, a sociologist and a philosopher of the second half of 20th century, analyses forces of the government and discipline in a society mixing phenomenological and postmodernist stances. He sees the members of society as experiencing their subjectivity in Husserlian way, but the society changes for him in an impersonal, mechanistic and post-modernistic way. The phenomenological intentional arc leads him to “biosociality”- the societal forces influencing and disciplining human bodies, trying to subdue them into “docile” bodies.
The early feminist movement uses Foucault to point to the exploitation of women by the male dominating capitalism. Partly for the economic reasons, and partly as the response to feminism and the general human rights movement, the capitalism, late in 20th century, morphed into seemingly gentler, kinder and more enlightened form- neoliberalism. It was also supposed to be an antidote to the powerful ideas involving class relationships- as in socialism, marxism and communism. Many feminists, like Eisenstein and Walby, oppose neoliberalism as leading to more economic and social inequalities. They want to improve neoliberalism by helping women ( and other social groups with limited power-minorities, children, gays, handicapped people) by giving them more equal rights, better pay, better social status.
Johanna Oksala sees deeper problems with the neoliberalism, she uses Foucault arguments to point into neoliberalism as a creator of a new feminine subject. “This implies that women are now also governed and subjected through new mechanisms, namely through the harnessing of their economic interests. It is significant that normative femininity has become firmly attached to economic gains in a new way. Women are increasingly rationalizing their participation in the normative habits of femininity in terms of their own economic interests, not in terms of men’s interests”
Oksala believes the mechanism of power has been transformed from “the subtle mechanisms of discipline described by Bartky — a system of social sanctions and rewards such as shame and sexual admiration”.And she explains: ”We must recognize that the personal freedom and choice that neoliberal governmentality entails is an integral aspect of this technique of power. The idea of personal choice effectively masks the systemic aspects of power — domination, social hierarchies, economic exploitation — by relegating to subjects the freedom to choose between different options whilst denying them any real possibility for defining or shaping those options. This excessive focus on free choice has been perhaps the most insidious aspect of neoliberal governmentality for the subject of feminism.” J. Oksala, Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality.(2013) Foucault Studies.,(p? This is from the online version of this article)
The choices this system gives to a woman are not liberating , they are pushing her deeper and deeper into “docile”- (again!) member of the economic system, a cog in the well-lubricated machine. It is why Oksala calls for the revolution: “we have to transform not only our political or economic institutions but more fundamentally, our way of life and even ourselves. We need a politics of ourselves that acknowledges that it is through us, through the reshaping of our subjectivity, that neoliberal governmentality is able to function”. ibid.,p. 135.
I couldn’t find any clear answer as to what exactly this new way of life should look like. Is it a meditation in the modern “mindfulness” monastery? A matriarchal, Amazons- like system?
Personally, I am afraid, there is not enough time for these posturings of our civilization. I am afraid that the ecological crisis, with all well-known evils, will limit our women and men choices to simple survival mode. And I doubt the technological miracle ( or any other miracle, for this matter) will hack it.

We’ll have to stop fighting  and be really, really good….. or die.

Category:

Explicit and implicit worldview, human nature, Meditation, phenomenology

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Big Question #1: How did the universe begin?

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” — attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Subquestions and everyday relevance

  • Where does it all come from? Does the World seem very old?How does Your World begin?
  • Do things in your life begin all the time? Popping out from nowhere?
  • Do things in your life, in the World , as you see it, just circle round and round?
  • The scientists think the new things are “emergent”. Are they really?

Since the beginning of life, we are constructed, the genes and the beliefs, to organize the things around the birth and death, beginning and the end, the days, the seasons, the projects and the cosmos. Every time you breathe deeply, every time you reflect,  automatically you position yourself, according to your gut feeling, somewhere along these beginnings and ends.

In our version of the set of Big Questions, four of them deal with the beginning, the change, and the trend. The three of them explore the beginning of the Universe (#1), the fate of the mankind (#13) and the business of dying (#11) and they are old and primeval as the mankind itself. We always bury and mourn the dead, gaze the stars and worry about the future.  Heraclitus of Ephesus  said famously: “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”. After he thought for a while he added: “there is nothing permanent except change”. The fourth one is (surprise!) about the role of evolution.

Jacob Bronowski about the beginnings (a paraphrase) :” The science is a systematic attempt to establish the closed system, one after another. The scientific discovery opens the system again.

Every act of imagination (new connections, new symbolism, new language, new formulae) is the discovery of likeness between two things which were thought unlike- like Newton’s apple and the Moon.”

How to work on the answer to the Question #1

When confronted with the task of answering these Big Questions, I was not sure if I should try to find some deep truth of Universe ( like Heraclitus?) or say something that would be personal, uniquely mine, important to me. One can also answer ”Big Bang” and be done with…(still much better than “how the Hell I would know?”, which is again better than not being here with us at all)

 This is my advice, but as it is your worldview, take it or leave it. If some universal truth feels interesting and helpful, go for it, but if the personal insight sounds more like you to you, that will be more beneficial. As it happens, I believe, that both worlds-  the Big One out there and my personal world are the same, but most people do not. So here you are.

View answers on Philozophy.com

An example: (my answer) “My Universe began with my conception. As I am learning from others and my experiences, my world shifts, gets bigger and more complex.  Where my understanding ends, on that edge, reversing the arrow of time, there and then the Universe begins.”

Psychotherapy

Working with the Question #1 is especially useful for anxiety, depression and procrastination, that include just about all of us. It sounds like the excerpts from the Dr. Bach’s Herbal Remedies :“Mustard- good for the unexplained dark cloud”, but you will be surprised by the effectiveness of the process. Remember, the benefits increase exponentially with the every edit, starting after the third one.

An Essay

For me, the question of the beginning is absolutely associated with my mother. Biologically I obviously grew in her belly according to her and my father’s genetic blueprint. Then, as an infant, I began to build my world, with the identity still merged with my mom. The baby’s initial world is created with the very little activity of the prefrontal lobes, mostly it is sensory combined directly with the emotional and instinctual behaviors. It is wired in the old, mammalian parts of the brain, the humanness present mainly as a capacity, possibility, and preferences. These were the emotional and the personality beginnings that stayed with me until today. Then I learned , mostly from my mother and the family (aunt Mary, the Granny, there was not much of the father) the human ways of the world. I was curious and more curious, and trying to understand, I was cautious, but ambitious explorer, I was selfish, but I was shown how to love and cooperate.

 Now, 72 years old, during the meditation I talk to my Mom often. I asked her about her beginning.

I: “ You bore three sons. Each one was a beginning, wasn’t it?”

Mom: “ Not really. Every beginning is nothing more, than the phase of the process, when the situation requires a switch of the dimension, or as you say in America nowadays “the conversation”, when the old way of seeing just would not do… With my first son Christopher, it was as always – the struggle to extend the relationship with Edwin, your father. He was a strange genius, complex and far away, in his own world, the poet, and the philosopher… and a healer. He was tormented by the generations- long inability to commit and love- I was trying to help him, help us, go deeper into love…

And we succeeded and failed to sustain the success, as always, and with Peter, my second son, it was the beginning… of the end. Then it was the war.  It ruined our lives, the families, and careers. But I would not give up, against all odds, you, Tommy, were conceived and born. When the communication failed, when the raw sense cried “no!”, the biology and, I guess, subconscious commitment did the job. It was the most strange beginning in my life….

I: “the end of beginnings?”

Mom: “Yes, now I see it, as an investment.”

I: “Mom, but we in Poland did know anything about the investments”.

Mom:”No, Tomeczku, this beginning was not an investment in the material things, like in America. I had to invest fiercely in my life principles. It was a terrible choice between reinventing myself to follow the love to the very imperfect man, against  my family and the faith or to throw away the love. I did the later and now it is the ” Dr. Zofia’s Myth of Beginning”.

I: “And you followed Jesus. I remember you in the mornings, up before anybody else, busy in the kitchen, already back from the shop with the fresh bread,  before going to the Clinic and visiting the Church on the way.”

Mom: “yes, I loved these mornings.. and the evenings,  kneeling at the bed  and thanking Jesus for the another day with God.”

I: ” Thank you,  Mom, thank you for the myth, thank you for the lesson, I will talk to you soon.

Same Time, same Space.”

Category:

Evolutionary Reality, Humanism, Meditation, The Worldview Internet Game, Worldview Owner's Manual

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Meditation 2014

The meditation becoming a delightful tool of my intellectual journey.

Most people, I think, see meditation as a spiritual practice, but I do not.

It allows me to be more mindful and more grateful.

It gives me peace of mind, new perspectives and new insights.

It is a lot.. and no signs of spirituality ( don’t you need to deal with Spirits???)

It helps me to demystify my mental functions, to see different shades of this function under the arbitrarily made subcategories- now  I am using my intellect, now the memory, now intent or soul or ego…

The meditation helped with my worldview, recently with the new name : intellicentrism.  It puts the reality upside- down and inside out, with meditating I feel that I am ok with it.

Category:

Evolutionary Reality, Meditation, Uncategorized

Meditation

Meditation is an important part of my intellectual journey these days. Is it also a spiritual journey?

I am not sure. I think spirituality involves the relationship  with somebody non-material.

I do not think I am there yet…

I do daily sitting, breathing , trying to be mindful and curious. This is very interesting and I wish everybody would do it.

Meditation (me and you)

I sit quietly. I sigh. Then I listen and observe my breathing. In-breath, out-breath, in breath, out-breath. It is almost automatic, but it is so easy to make it intentional.  Then , when I breathe in, I can feel cool air entering my nostrils. I imagine molecules of oxygen spreading furiously through my whole body, like advancing troops searching for the King in the deserted Castle. Where is he? They are finding Me everywhere. My chest is expanding, there is more and more Me. Forward! This is manly, heroic time. This is Yang. Here I am. My intent meeting my awareness. And it happens everywhere, in every cell of my body. There are No worries, no past, no future, just Me. Here and now, but it is really beyond an eastern guru’s cliche’. I am closer then here, closer than my brain or heart, beyond the dimension of space, everywhere, beyond the borders. Time? I am breathing in, this is more than now. Now is, but i am becoming! What a moment of Truth….
Almost. Deeply down, I always knew, this is not a whole truth… So I breathe in harder, desperate. The diamonds change  into ashes. The expansion into abyss. Where am I really? Nowhere?
And then You come.
I breathe out. An Escape, I am safe again. Did I lose, or is it just “letting go”?
The Mystery of Me was solved just as I was giving it up. The body relaxes in the luxurious exhalation. This is the Yin phase, accepting and female. This is the time of harvest. I will think of what made me, of the ancestors and of causes. Yes,yes the solution of the puzzle is You. You have millions of faces. There is you philosophical, where the subjectivists see the nature of the Universe as a relationship between people, the religious You, of course, you of the compassion and the you of the jealousy…
And there is the simplest You: my Mother and my Father, literally my origin and my cause, also their Mothers and Fathers, endless generations..  My teachers and my teachers’ teachers, my creators and the creators’ creators, literally and metaphorically , I am through them, by them , I see through their eyes their world.
Everything which is not Me is You, my body, the memories, the brain is made of you.
I breathe out and feel my body, the whole body. My senses talk to me about my maybe sore muscle,  they feel through my skin, I hear sounds, I think thoughts.  You, different you’s  are responsible for the nature of these experiences. As the causes, as goals, as people I love and as people I am grateful for everything I have. And as Me had no borders,no history, now You can also be raw and huge. You are in my skin and my brain and farther and farther…wherever I look – only You, you, you.
I am gone, lost.  So I am wallowing in the nothingness and ask “what is this for” and “why’. Nihilism. I am breathing out and out and into despair.
And in the last moment- like the Big Bang- Inhalation! I am found, again.

Well, as usual in my writings there is the nonchalance mixed with seriousness. My new blog is http://www.Evolutionandmeandyou.com . Me and You is the structure of my daily meditation, it feels natural, often I drop the words but I keep the meaning – me and you. I believe that  this metaphor- me and you, in my every breath, has several layers of meaning. Probably the most important is that if we want to survive this crazy times , it would help if we notice that Me and You are inseparable as breathing in and breathing out. Also, as in this meditation,  our relationship and the nature of me and of you are ultimately same.  We need to see people one by one as the single You, like I am single Me. Instead, when we see US, automatically, we create THEM and it is so difficult to reach across this divide…
So I breathe in- Me, and breathe -out, You….
Yes, You.

Category:

Meditation

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