Author Archives: ravinathan

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PAL – Freedom and Awakening

What does J.B’s process philosophy have to say with respect to human emancipation and enlightenment?  The following extracts traces the argument as he moves from the original subject object split to the dualism of autonomy and wholeness that pervade our lives.  
J.B.  begins with a discussion of the original split and resulting dualisms:
P.78
“The initial separation into subject and object is the ground of further oppositions, yet the whole is found, not in their later synthesis, which is a coming together of parts, but in uncovering our oppositions to disclose a more profound unity.”

Object arises out of the subject:
“The division of the primordial subject into a subjective and an objective portion replicates the pattern of mitosis in a single cell, as an iterated fission or parcellation gives from within a proliferation of object forms.  As the object separates a subject appears.  The world of the breast is exchanged for that of the mother’s smile.  Over time, a self arises within the subject as the inner world articulates.”

What is freedom in this context?
“Freedom obtains in the opposition to objects, thus the attempt to control them, but only a self that feels itself in the object is genuinely free.”

The Fall! P.79:
“The loss of wholeness in the rupture of subject and object, then the individuation of self, is the price of freedom, as freedom is the consolation of autonomy.”

“Mind disowns its objects as it progresses to greater autonomy in a sequestration of the self from its own experiential products.  Years later in withdrawal, in fusion or in embrace, the self will still be striving for the wholeness that was shattered when the subject first appeared.  The self may seek to reclaim or drown in its objects.  Mystical, meditative and trance states are paths to the whole.  But wholeness is elusive, perhaps beyond life experience.”  

Oh dear, doesn’t sound promising for one’s meditative projects!

P.80
“The world is the outer half of the subject.  Through the inner half, the subject exists, through the outer half the subject is able to survive, not merely because the world is a source of nourishment.  If the world should disappear, even for a second, as happens in the case of brain damage, the self would vanish with it.  The continuity of the self requires a repeatable world, as the continuity of the world requires a repeatable self.”

How then do we live in this dualistic world?:
“The creative spirit moves freely fro one pole to another, from a lonely solitude at the peaks of conscious individuality to an absorption at the inward recesses of the unconscious where inspiration has its home.  A settling in at the inner of outer pole points to an habitual recurrence.  A focus at either phase is a sign of an unhealthy completeness.  A tension, a longing for the unrealized polarity, is a sign of creative imbalance.  We are neither oceans nor islands.  An excess of autonomy is the sickness of our times.  It isolates the feeling of being from that of becoming, separates the public self from its own internal process, as well as from tat of others, while an excess of the inward pole threatens oblivion and loss of contact.”

“Is “self forgetfulness” the loss of the self we crave?  Forgetting the self is having the self as process rather than as memory, with individuality not lost but nested in the whole.  The birth of the self is attended by conflict and apartness, but only a self can love, reflect, enjoy, endure.  What is left of personhood without a self?  Is a state of self-forgettng a regression to a sub-human consciousness?”

“But it is not the oneness of an animal consciousness that we desire rather, that of the seeker who at last achieves the goal of self forgetting, or denial in Buddhist thought, but retains the potential for enlightenment.  The self is essential to knowing the goal and acquiring the means to its satisfaction, but it is also an obstruction, like a skill that has outlived its usefulness but cannot be forgotten.”

P. 87
“Genuine freedom lies not in the delusion of autonomy and control, which are ordinary enslavements to illusion and brute impulse, but in accepting the world as a mode of self-realization or representation.  But if autonomy permits a sham agency in disowning the world, how does reclaiming the world endow with greater freedom”

J.B answers the question and simultaneously answers critics of his idealism:  

P.88
The result of perceiving the world as an extension of self, instead of a populated vastness with which the self makes contact, is that the self acts for the other as it would for its own needs.  Idealism need not ignore the other or take a solipsistic turn, it can encircle the other in its orbit.  Self realization is a criterion of value in the world for its own sake or for the sake of conscious beings.”

“Without insight, the urge to self-realization achieves a token insularity in its drive to autonomy.  True self expression is the realization through the will of nature as it moves outward in the actualization of human ideals.”  

Not mine Will but thine as we surrender to the process of nature – to Life.

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PAE – Chapter 1

Fact and Value

“The effort is to undertake a process theory of value in relation to ethics.  I consider it a strength of the theory that it begins outside ethics and moves into it, rather than starting with an analysis of ethical concepts and attempting to build a coherent system.  The complexity is so great that no general rule or single principle can be singled out as an explanation or a guide for moral conduct. “
P. 23
“Scientific facts begin as values or beliefs, or so I would argue, and gradually become independent through verification and data.  The data are objectified values, the verification is consensual judgment that allows fact to be distinguished from opinion, from value, from religious or other beliefs.”  

P.25
The question I would ask is whether the main lines of the process of speciation are analogous to those in solitary organisms in the individuation of potential to intrinsic aim.  Is speciation in the process of evolution analogous to specification in an act of cognition?  Is the process through which species are formed related in some way to the struggle and adaptation that every entity goes through in order to become what it is at any given moment?

“If so, we could say that the evolutionary process of survival and diversification is the outer, large-scale or macroscopic expression of an inner, small-scale microscopic process of self realization.  

“It is usually maintained that value appears for the first time in humans as a product of experience and culture, that it is not present in the material world, perhaps not even in sub-human organisms, except as something projected onto the world by the human mind, and even then not as an innate disposition in the person, but as a result of learning.”

“This is the ordinary concept of value, but it is a narrow one.  it does not ask where value itself comes from, but how it is elaborated, whether it is present in sub-human organisms, and, if so, how far down the evolutionary scale it descends even to its possible sources in non-cognitive material nature.  Clearly the human mind creates value, but value also deposits the human mind, and its antecedents.”  

P.26
“The insight that led to a rethinking of the evolutionary sources of value came with the realization that energic processes in the becoming of physical entities are the origin, by way of an expansion from within, of will, desire and value in complex organisms.”

“ What this means is that the gradual evolution of value lies in the process of value creation itself, not in the diverse forms it deposits, nor in the increasing ability to assign a different value to independent objects.”

“The same process that creates a brain brings a particle into existence.  We should not be surprised that what is most profound in nature is what is most universal and thus imperceptible owing to its uniformity.”  

P.27
“ The specification of an occasion in nature, in mind or in social life, is the product of constraints at the extreme of an explosive or chaotic creativity on one side, and a stagnant repetition on the other.  In every recurrence there is a compromise of iteration and innovation.”

“We see novelty in temporal objects, such as music, not in spatial ones such as trees.  The novelty in a repeatable object like a tree is overlooked precisely because its recurrence is tightly constrained.  Over time we see that something has happened, but we cannot see it happening.  

“The persistence of an entity does not consist of its enduring in a static unchanging form, but in its recurrence as a near facsimile of its immediate prior state.  Persistence is continuous replacement.”

P. 28
“.. a category is a potential for the becoming of temporal parts out of timeless wholes.”

“ The relation of category and process or whole and part to being and becoming is the “deep structure’ of the process of evolution.  Exuberance and sculpting in evolutionary process magnify the microtemporal process through which categories generate instances that either perish or, as subordinate categories, undergo further transformation.  This is a fundamental “law” of change.  

“The first value is the existence of the object.  Realness and feeling appear later. What we perceive in the visual field, what we choose to look at, to notice, even unconsciously , is interest, thus valuation.  What we think about or imagine is an implicit choice that occurs against a background of thoughts not selected.  Every act leaves every other possible act unborn. “  

P.30
Facts or values arise in a context of self realization.  Over time, a personal value or experience becomes an impersonal fact.”

“States of affairs begin as intuitions, then personal beliefs permeated by values, and grow into experiential or scientific facts.”  

Fact and Value

“The effort is to undertake a process theory of value in relation to ethics.  I consider it a strength of the theory that it begins outside ethics and moves into it, rather than starting with an analysis of ethical concepts and attempting to build a coherent system.  The complexity is so great that no general rule or single principle can be singled out as an explanation or a guide for moral conduct. “
P. 23
“Scientific facts begin as values or beliefs, or so I would argue, and gradually become independent through verification and data.  The data are objectified values, the verification is consensual judgment that allows fact to be distinguished from opinion, from value, from religious or other beliefs.”  

P.25
The question I would ask is whether the main lines of the process of speciation are analogous to those in solitary organisms in the individuation of potential to intrinsic aim.  Is speciation in the process of evolution analogous to specification in an act of cognition?  Is the process through which species are formed related in some way to the struggle and adaptation that every entity goes through in order to become what it is at any given moment?

“If so, we could say that the evolutionary process of survival and diversification is the outer, large-scale or macroscopic expression of an inner, small-scale microscopic process of self realization.  

“It is usually maintained that value appears for the first time in humans as a product of experience and culture, that it is not present in the material world, perhaps not even in sub-human organisms, except as something projected onto the world by the human mind, and even then not as an innate disposition in the person, but as a result of learning.”

“This is the ordinary concept of value, but it is a narrow one.  it does not ask where value itself comes from, but how it is elaborated, whether it is present in sub-human organisms, and, if so, how far down the evolutionary scale it descends even to its possible sources in non-cognitive material nature.  Clearly the human mind creates value, but value also deposits the human mind, and its antecedents.”  

P.26
“The insight that led to a rethinking of the evolutionary sources of value came with the realization that energic processes in the becoming of physical entities are the origin, by way of an expansion from within, of will, desire and value in complex organisms.”

“ What this means is that the gradual evolution of value lies in the process of value creation itself, not in the diverse forms it deposits, nor in the increasing ability to assign a different value to independent objects.”

“The same process that creates a brain brings a particle into existence.  We should not be surprised that what is most profound in nature is what is most universal and thus imperceptible owing to its uniformity.”  

P.27
“ The specification of an occasion in nature, in mind or in social life, is the product of constraints at the extreme of an explosive or chaotic creativity on one side, and a stagnant repetition on the other.  In every recurrence there is a compromise of iteration and innovation.”

“We see novelty in temporal objects, such as music, not in spatial ones such as trees.  The novelty in a repeatable object like a tree is overlooked precisely because its recurrence is tightly constrained.  Over time we see that something has happened, but we cannot see it happening.  

“The persistence of an entity does not consist of its enduring in a static unchanging form, but in its recurrence as a near facsimile of its immediate prior state.  Persistence is continuous replacement.”

P. 28
“.. a category is a potential for the becoming of temporal parts out of timeless wholes.”

“ The relation of category and process or whole and part to being and becoming is the “deep structure’ of the process of evolution.  Exuberance and sculpting in evolutionary process magnify the microtemporal process through which categories generate instances that either perish or, as subordinate categories, undergo further transformation.  This is a fundamental “law” of change.  

“The first value is the existence of the object.  Realness and feeling appear later. What we perceive in the visual field, what we choose to look at, to notice, even unconsciously , is interest, thus valuation.  What we think about or imagine is an implicit choice that occurs against a background of thoughts not selected.  Every act leaves every other possible act unborn. “  

P.30
Facts or values arise in a context of self realization.  Over time, a personal value or experience becomes an impersonal fact.”

“States of affairs begin as intuitions, then personal beliefs permeated by values, and grow into experiential or scientific facts.”  

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JB Chap 5 and 6

“We are deceived into thinking that the objects we perceive are there for our enjoyment, deceived into thinking the self is a type of mental object, an ego with meaning and substance that effects actions on real objects in a world that matters.”

All to what end, to make the dream more real?  Or as Ramana Maharishi replied when asked why there is evil in the world; “to thicken the plot”.

On mental illness:

“The self cannot survive unaltered the various forms of object breakdown.  Disorders of object perception encroach on the self and it undergoes change.  In dementia, a progressive change in the self concept accompanies the object disorders”.  

“The deception of the conscious self is lost in psychosis.  The psychotic intuits the real situation in life.  There is a loss of will because he understands that will does not play a part in action”.  

Whoa there!  There is a thin line then between the ‘self realized’ one and the psychotic.  What’s the difference?  The psychotic “is traversed by the action, manipulated by individual strings”.  The realized one being free, has no will.  The psychotic is still wilful, “manipulated by individual strings”, deep down in consciousness and so is not free.  In other words, The Free have no Will’ the Wilful aren’t free.  

Chap 6:

“The self is not the subject but the ground of the introspection.  It is not the I in “I think” but the “I think” and not just the “I think” but the whole context of the mental state in which the “I think” is embedded.  All one can say is that thinking is going on and that everything, the I and the world, is thought up in the thinking”.  

A friend in Facebook posted, “ if the past is not real, how come so many people agree with me about what happened?”  Based on the previous quote, I assume JB would answer that you, me and the universe all arise in the moment, a creation of mind.  Others are no more real than me/you and it is not surprising that they agree with me/you about the past.  

“ The I is an invented self that does not correspond with the deep self that is generating the whole scenario in which I of the introspection appears.”

This deep self would then be identical for you and me.  Roy Bhaskar’s cosmic envelope.  In other words, you and I are none other than the deep self and not separate.  I feel an ease and deep love contemplating this; love is the universal solvent that dissolves this illusion of separation.  The challenge is to live this understanding, to act as if it were true especially when I am caught in the grip of the delusion of a separate self and remind myself (yet again) that love is the power.  


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JB Chapter 3 and 4

On Structure:
“The gross morphology of the brain a moment after death is identical to that during life but there is a momentous difference.  Structure is defined by active processes.  The real structure of the brain is not in the parts and circuitry but the configurations that dance over the living cellular elements.”

What then are these mysterious configurations that dance over cellular elements?  Mind?

“Structure therefore is the illusion of stability in a system in continuous transformation”

On change
“The change that takes place in the course of a year must take place in an hour or second.  The organism ages every second of its life.  Object and perceiver age in the course of that perception.”

I remember J. Krishnamurti visiting a dying friend saying, “lets die together for a while”.  In that moment I understood what it means to consciously die every moment given that it is the reality. This stable identity that I invest so much into, protect and fight over is an illusion.

“The present rides on the crest of a past that is resurgent, an ever expanding past, always in pursuit of a present that cannot be demarcated, a present that dissolves away the instant it appears.”

“The importance of change can be appreciated only by the intuition that the solidity of an object is a deception.  We cannot see change in a rock or table because mind stabilizes objects by creating durations within which the change is imperceptible.  The inability to perceive an object as a field of continuous activity reflects this immobilization.  This is because an object is an exteriorized concept, a mental solid growing out of change by virtue of intermediate concepts.”

“An object that changes quickly is a process.  A process that changes slowly is an object.”

Careful.  That does not mean that one can be reduced to the other.

On Novelty:

“There is a difference between change and novelty.  Novelty is not just change but the possibility of an ever changing present that even God could not predict.”

Novelty then is God constantly surprising itself with novel forms and creation.  And the universe exists for this purpose, God probing its own infinite depths to see whats there, to know itself?

“If change is the only reality, events are not situated at a point in objective time but are momentary durations in consciousness.  Events, rates and points in time are creations of mind. “
“Whitehead’s remark “the process is itself the actuality” points to the primacy of change not the phenomenal entities into which it is broken.”

“Evolution, development and mind are the byproducts of a single process, the creation of novel forms.  Structures created out of change are assigned to different time periods on the basis of their duration.  In actuality, a single process is reiterated and deposited by mind into three different times; the phylectic, the ontogenetic, and the microgenetic.”  

I see this entire book as an elaboration of Being as Process.  

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SEM, Chap 2 and 3

P.9
“Structure in the brain and correlated psychological events are entrained in the developing cognition in the order of their appearance in the evolutionary sequence.”

The self is recreated every moment. I remember reading recently about the experiments done on patients undergoing anaesthesia.  The sequence of neural elements shutting down as the patient slips into unconsciousness is precisely reversed in the waking up process.  In the theory of microgenesis the ‘waking up’ would retrace the evolutionary sequence.  

P10
“Evolution has millions of years to deliver the structure of behavior, ontogeny has only a few years to refine it. “

“Everything begins and ends in the mental state of the viewer, including the world the viewer perceives.”

P.11
Henri Bergson’s critique of the ‘logic of solid bodies’ or Whitehead’s (1929) fallacy of ‘misplaced concreteness’ refer to the artificial stasis of contents (objects, concepts etc.,) and the elaboration on their causal interactions as if the contents actually existed.  Of course some anchoring is needed to find one’s way in the flux of process.  The making of categories as anchors for thouht is what the mind does best.  But one must be alert.  Things are in constant change and it is the change not the constancy that is the key to understanding the thing itself.”

Roy Bhaskar emphasises this as well.  Without absence there can be no change and change is the essence of being.  Does Integral fall prey to the “absence of absence”? 

p.22
“For most of us there are two worlds, that of dream and that of wakefulness.  Could we say we live in two dreams, only one of which seems real?”

This is very similar to many of the advaitic pronouncements in the Upanishads where enlightentment is nothing else but waking up from the dream of existence.

P.23
“We apprehend a dream as unreal because on waking up we pass into intentional awareness where the dream content is given to reflection.  This is not the case in dream, although dream cognition weans its way through fragments of the preceding day.  Were it possible to reflect intentionally in dream on the contents of wakefulness, we might see clearly the delicate balance on which hangs the supposed reality of waking cognition.”

Interesting juxtaposition!  If the stages of meditation are about maintaining awareness in the waking state, dream state and deep sleep,  the suggestion that JB makes about reflecting on the waking state when in the dream state may actually be possible!

P.23
“MInd is not filled but shaped by experience to replicate one of many possible worlds.  Evolution delivers a mind that is prepared to replicate the world we live in.”

By design, we can inhabit multiple universes.  By choice this one!

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Time and suffering

Jason Brown Prologue- pp. xlv
“Death is a death of the final present.  We apprehend, dimly, the finality of death but scarcely notice the concrete finality of every present of our life.”

This reminds me of listening to J. Krishnamurti in India speaking about dying to each moment.  Thought as memory keeps the illusion of an egoic self in play – a continuity – kept alive due to the identification with a self.  

“The past that once existed is more real for having been a cause of the present than the future, which is the expectation, really, the hope, of an effect.  The present is most real as what exists at that moment but the objects of the present are past before we see them.  There is always a temporal lag.” (emphasis mine)

Spiritual teacher Byron Katie, who taught me the art of self inquiry, a deceptively simple western version of Ramana Maharshi, often says that it always already over.  When I notice that I am in pain, it is already “on its way out.” I understand that there is neurological evidence for this temporal lag.  If this is true then all psychological suffering relates to the past.  Fear then, is the projection of the past into the future.