Tag Archives: feeling

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GD. Goethean Experimental Observations for 12/06/2012

(noticing the phenomena of sounds arising from within);

Prelude: I have relocated to a big old house near the beach, with a forest across the road. To honour the occasion, we had a fire ceremony at the beach on the evening of the 12th June. After enjoying the beautiful starlit evening we returned to the house, after I have settled my son I settle into sitting meditation on the mat in front of the altar.

I sound the singing bowl, chant Aum and then sit with my double dorje in my hands, contemplating the energetic nexus that it represents, and creatively imagining the dynamic structure which it represents the underpinnings of.

 

I begin to feel the arising of kundalini shakti, gently undulating through my subtle energetic system and up my spine, out through the top of my head with a tingling sensation and into the familiar fountain-like pattern of return to the overflowing pool at the base chakra where the flow continues up the central channel and back out my head. After sitting like this for some time I feel the need to surrender into savasana (corpse pose) however I am also feeling chilled as it is mid winter so I take my body to bed and continue my meditation there.

At this point my body begins to tremble and shake, to vibrate from a deep-down-phenomenon of silent sound arising in the very core of every atom and cell. I note my heart rate increasing, and breathing deepening and lengthening. I am surrendered, all action taking place now is spontaneously arising of its own accord, I am remaining in lucid awareness and observing.

With the deepening of the breath I note an expansion of the abdomen, accompanied by deep creaking and groaning sounds, my chest and throat are also expanding to the sounds of cartilage creaking. My vertebrae are aligning and stretching apart. From a place deep within my skull a secretion of cool, sweet liquid begins to flow into my throat and upper nasal passages. This flow of (?) seems to precipitate an intensification of the phenomenon.

 

I begin to feel pressure stretching me from the inside like a balloon being filled, the air flowing into my lungs seems to penetrate every organ, membrane and cell of my physical body beyond their capacity to contain it in their present shape. I feel like I am being tickled from within, I am laughing intermittently and potent “chemical” tears are streaming from my eyes. My hands move to hover over my sacral and solar plexus chakras, the hands are moving in rapid circles counter rotational to each other, the chakras feel like ‘solid’ balls of whirling energy. The trembling in my body intensifies, my heart rate is still accelerating and my breathing seems to have stopped at a full in-breath. Part of my mind is cautioning me about the possibility of having a heart attack or brain anurism because of the unusual conditions. I consciously make the decision to surrender and trust the experience, even if it means I do in fact die as a result (!).

At this point an impossibly bright yet cool light erupts in both my heart and head (witnessed in the third eye) which expands out to include my whole body. Now all my physical bodily components seem to completely liquify, there is a sensation of dissolving and (hard to describe what) I imagine being like a chrysalis undergoing the metamorphic process. The level of inner sound which is accompanying this event is tremendous yet also very difficult to describe, something like a howling storm perhaps (I will try to find an approximation on mp3 somewhere). My inner eye is registering myriad complex fluidic geometric structures dynamically interacting and energised by seemingly liquid light throughout my field of awareness, all emanating from the core of my being. My physical body feels like it is a writhing mass of system interactions from the cellular level through to the level of organs, tissues and bones. This is a full spectrum immersive experience of something extraordinary!

The complex “body of light” which it appears to my inner eye that I have become is expanding to fill the room, expanding out across the forest, across the ocean and encompassing the whole planet, the expansion continues, waves of energetic intensification continue, I now contain the whole galaxy, and continue to expand and absorb greater and greater spheres of (?) perhaps awareness of consciousness – I am the universal essence in all its forms for a ‘moment’ – it is almost totally overwhelming. I am not breathing and my heart seems to be stuck on full throttle.

Sound begins to emit from my expansive throat, a deep moaning nameless sound. The observational part of my mind is still restless and registering cautions about the possibilities of damage to the physical vehicle. I decide that I need to ‘ground’ the experience and that I can Aum with it as a means of fully embodying that which is flowing through me (rather than becoming fully disembodied by its raw power). So I begin to Aum, low and deep into the lower chakra triad, and then a higher tone, into the heart, and higher again into the upper chakra triad. I slowly begin to reintegrate and re-inhabit my physical vehicle. The toning is re-establishing a breathing rhythm, my heart rate begins to decelerate somewhat.

I find myself glowing and buzzing, it is as if I have just been born, My body feels like a fresh new organism, weightless for a while, tingling and throbbing with light and sound – I seem to be in psychic contact with every mind I have ever contacted, all of you are right here with me, I hear your voices and feel you in me. We are all connected to this vast and fathomless energy source which is still flowing through me, as me (and everything and everyone). My subtle sensitivities appear to have been enhanced, yet so has my capacity to accept being in such a state.

At the time of writing, 5 days later, I am still in this ‘renewed’ state. Speaking with the Goethe track group (16/06/2012) helped me ground the experience a bit more, thank God for these eminently qualified comrades. Many of the images which have sprung unbidden to my mind over the last 20 years are now relating to each other in my mind in ways that they have not done before – so many symbols of a pre-cognised experience which only now is unfolding – the whole concept of time and space is so plastic. And underpinning the whole experiential context – the sound which arises from within – what a revelation.

Conclusion: No amount of theory can adequately describe a knowing which only direct experience can deliver.

The lucid contemplative reflections continue….

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Flow.

Following up on my conversation with John Davis this morning, I have this to offer.

When I am learning at my best, it is like a flowing river. Receiving, effortless, gifting, nourishing, relational, with a source and a destination which are connected and continuous. The river itself has no agenda.

I have reflected upon the nature of flow before and this is what came through;

 

Energy flows in both directions at once.

Both out from the source as a result of the process of creation and back to the source from all that is created as a result of the centered, focused attention upon the source of the peripheral manifestations of its creation.

This Flow is the the underlying reason for the “all that is” coming into manifestation and for its going ‘out’ of manifestation again (as far as we can ascertain from our perspective).

When we become aware of the Flow, then we can become aligned with its nature and realise ourselves in relation to it, it flows through us, that is how we come to ‘be’.

In just being and allowing the Flow to move us we find that all is as it is meant to be, we can relax and enjoy life without struggling to adapt to each new thing that crosses our path.

We can become more open to spontaneous responses to the flow of events rather than seeking to control the situation, we realise that we are not in control and that it is not possible to be in control.

All events are a result of the dynamic process of the Flow, eternally interacting and creating us and all that we can perceive (and all that we can not perceive as well).

from Cybershaman

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Sound – water.

Sitting in the canyon just absorbing the sounds of the crystal clear water echoing off the rocks and trees, and reflecting upon the elements as they arise as “me”.

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PAL. Chapter 17. Luck and the Pursuit of Happiness. Pp457-483.

 

In utilitarian ethics, happiness is an impersonal measure of the quantity of the pleasure in the greatest number of people, though personal happiness is pleasure in the free exercise of personality. … Virtue is a quality, happiness is a state.

An obligation that has not been assimilated as a personal value is not a genuine desire. To the extent it is not internalised, it is felt as coercive and according to the degree of resistance, it is an obstacle to happiness.

Virtuous actions that strive for the greatest good may elicit resistance or punitive action, nor do they necessarily lead to happiness or satisfaction, which probably depends less on one’s accomplishments in the world, or for others, than on the intimate rewards and pleasures of daily life.

… individual agency is diluted in the “group mind”.

The calculus of the utilitarian is closer to the morality of states than an ethics of character.

One can ordain a homogeneity of goods, but not of desires.

The more impersonal the perspective, the more axiomatic the rule, the more artificial the methodology … , and the more the morality becomes a meta psychological attitude distinct from its affective base.

A detached perspective reduces self-interest and should increase the moral value of an action, but it is engagement, not detachment, that aligns moral feeling with right conduct. Self-denial and detachment are an insufficient foundation for happiness and no warrant for moral conduct.

The move from intrinsic to extrinsic relations is the shift from personal value, which is qualitative, to impersonal fact as a quantity.

Those who do not struggle to survive are more prone to depression and more likely to kill themselves. In this regard, even illness and disability are not barriers to happiness.

Happiness consists in the ability and opportunity to seek that which one desires. It is the enjoyment of a subjective aim, an alignment with the forward-going process of life, a finding that contrasts sharply with the Buddhist concept of desire as the source of suffering and the extinction of desire as the source of happiness.

Even if one accepts that fairness or generosity is a pre-requisite for moral conduct, the appeal to common sense rather than argumentation exposes gaps in the analysis that are fatal to the principle. A philosophy that avoids psychology by positing givens just when psychological explanation is required may constitute an edifice that is logically consistent all the way down, until it arrives at its own foundations.

We cannot derive a feeling from a rational argument.

A person can have immense pleasure on hearing a new piece of music for which he has not yet developed a desire. Even solitude is a source of inestimable pleasure. Such observations raise questions for any theory of pleasure that depends on the value of its objects.

A moral duty or rule as a guide to conduct is inadequate, and inorganic, in that it attempts, by fiat rather than by example, to induce people to share in what is a spontaneous impulse of innate empathy.

Feelings are tributaries of drive that transition will into action in combination with object-concepts.

An action cannot be severed from the private states of those involved, but engages character intrinsically at all phases, not as a subjective quality added to an objective fact. Specifically, the principle of greater happiness cannot implant an obligation in an agent irrespective of his private states when the effect of his conduct is assessed by an appeal to the private states of others.

The concept of luck, contingency and probability relate to objects in the world, not psychic events. The concepts of agency, certainty and choice relate to processes in the mind, not events in the world. Fate is an overarching concept that removes agency in a way that luck does not.

The fact that the present, as it becomes past, can be revised from a future perspective undermines the stability of an outcome-centered moral theory. We use our best judgement with the knowledge at hand, but a good act can be reinterpreted as a bad one, and the reverse, as conditions change. Luck is also like this.

The genetics of constitution and the accidents of parenting are a bit like karmic transmission, though displaced later in maturation, where one is a product of an ancestral complex, yet posses some degree of freedom for self-betterment or the capacity for degeneration. That intrinsic constitutive luck is essential to character would seem inarguable, since the installation of exocentric values depends so heavily on experience in childhood and on the moral instruction and example of parents.

For the individual, self-justification is primary, moral or rational. Ideally, he should be his own judge and jury, though an appraisal by others is essential for punishment, as well as to modulate the self-serving effects of denial, forgetting and rationalisation.

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PAL. Chapter 15. Moral Conflict. pp.407-430

 

From an external standpoint, an obligation is independent of what the subject wants to do, but for the subject, there is no felt obligation if it is concordant with his desire. When the ought and the want coincide, the ought drops out. The conflict between the ought and the want is part of the sense of obligation, which is the feeling that one should or must do something for the self or for another person that is contrary to one’s desires.

The ‘good’ thing to do may be consistent with character, but it may not be the ‘right’ thing to do. The good is centered in character, the right in conduct. The good is closer to intentions, the right to outcomes. If the immediate outcome is good, and its subsequent repercussions bad, the decision might have been good, i.e. based on good intentions, yet the action might have been wrongly chosen. In contrast, a decision based on value stems from character. It is what is considered the right and natural thing to do regardless of the outcome, regardless of whether it is “objectively right”, assuming that could be determined at the time of the action.

If the moral logic of a computer could be programmed in advance with a hierarchy of valuations, and could calculate the probability of the most favourable outcome rather than the antecedents of choice, motivation or personal repercussion, would this help the individual decide what to do? And does this mode of thought have anything in common with human cognition?

… from a biological point of view, the prospective direction of responsibility to a child, which is the forward direction of evolution, outweighs the retrospective direction to parents, who are irrelevant from an evolutionary, i.e. reproductive, standpoint.

If moral statements are neither true nor false, true statements do not lead to moral obligations. A statement of truth is itself al kind of action, a verbal act, and does not lead to another motor or verbal action. Action is not the outcome of truth, but a means to clarify uncertainty. It aids in the closure on indecision. In this respect, an action is itself a test of the truth of a statement, thus it is a kind of truth, or a search for truth. One could also say that the finality, irrevocability and definiteness of an action add a new truth to what previously existed.

There is much to be said for the notion that the most fundamental facts are errors that enjoy their truth from the limits of our capacity to refute them. Science attempts to test a belief for its truth, though a profound truth, as Niels Bohr once remarked, may not contrast with an error or a falsehood but with another profound truth.

Subjectivism is neither impersonal nor egocentric. Social adaptation sees to that. Impersonality is achieved, not by objectivity or rationality, but through empathy, self-denial and acts of “imaginative fusion”.

Morality is, finally, an obligation to one’s ideal self or the best of one’s character.

Logical arguments are an uncertain guide to the thought process, as are the choices that emerge from them. We tend not to sound a position too deeply or rationally, but rather take it on a ‘gut’ feeling and then seek arguments to support it. William James wrote that philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than reason, the reason coming afterwards as a justification.

… the masses absorb and tacitly condone the values responsible for their own shame or subjugation.

The obligations of convention have the force of moral duties precisely because they are internalised in character, even if they are independent of knowledge or agency at the time the action occurs. …

A person is ultimately responsible for his own character regardless of the choices available when he acts, and he should be held accountable for that character even if he denies responsibility.

Self-examination involves a scrutiny, so far as possible, of the unconscious values driving conduct. The goal of a moral education is to instil values that are life enhancing and humanitarian, that preserve individualism and at the same time enlarge the self-concept with other-directed concerns.

A desire is intentional. The self is antecedent to and directed toward an object. Desire is the feeling of a relation of need or want that is directed from the self toward an object or to the concept of the object. … An obligation differs from a desire in having the self for its object. The self feels an obligation, but it is the self that is obligated. The object of the obligation is not the action the self is obliged to perform, but is directed to the self.

Desire and obligation arise in the self, but their actualisation-bias has a different course. Desire corresponds to the agentive or voluntary feeling of an action, obligation to the passive or receptive feeling of a perception. … A loyalty is some combination of the two, namely an obligation that feels like a desire, in which the self has a commitment to the obligation. In loyalty, the self feels as much an agent as an object.

 

The compulsion of obligation is linked to an external, perceptual and impersonal object. The agency of loyalty is linked to an internal, active and personal act. This reflects a bias to perceptions that exteriorise and become independent, or a bias to actions that are self-realisations.

There is a continuous transition in the feeling of outer and inner in relation to the structure of agency, from enforced to compassion, from obligation to desire, from the duty to serve out of necessity to the wish to please out of love. The ought becomes the want as extrinsic constraints on egoism internalise as voluntary commitments.

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PAL. Chapter 13. From Intention to Obligation. pp.359-381.

 

There are many ways to trace the transition from self to world, or from the subjective to the objective pole of the mental life, such as from dispositions and implicit beliefs through concepts to objects, from dreamless sleep through dream to perception, from the first budding of a thought to a concrete action, from a personal value to an impersonal duty.

The continuum from personal responsibility to guilt over a broken promise, to moral outrage and a demand for punishment over an unfulfilled obligation, is as much an illustration of the transition from self to world as that from value and intention to conduct and coercion.

One can say that the transition from a disposition, to an intention or resolution, to a promise with an obligation involves an increasing objectification of the will. Specifically there is a progressive surrender of agency from an intrapsychic to an extrapersonal locus. One could also say that the exo-centric values depositing in an object carry with them a feeling of agency that is transferred from the self to the other. In this way, intention objectifies in the other as obligation.

Take the resolution of the arhat to achieve personal salvation versus the obligation of the bodhisattva to strive for the salvation of others. Both are dedicated, but in the latter this dedication is referred outward as a social responsibility. … the transition from self-betterment as a good in itself, to self-betterment as a means to the good of others, i.e. a subtle bias in object-concepts or means/end relations, seems less important than the fact that the ends and means are both expressions of character.

A biding promise may be carried out reluctantly, with little resolve, or be broken, while a resolution that approaches a vow can have considerable force. A moment of resolve can re-define a life.

There are situations in which the moral thing to do is withdraw a promise to a person who is later exposed as unworthy, or if the conditions that motivated the promise no longer apply; for example, an oath to defend one’s country in a war of conquest, a promise to give financial aid to a person who comes into a fortune etc.

The many ways of extracting promises from people, or placing them under an obligation, are the fabric of a society woven together by a trust that obligations will be respected. An abuse of trust is exploitation. … A contract is only as good as the good will of the parties that honour it.

The admonition, to thine own self be true, entails that we avoid making a promise that conflicts with the best of our values. Then the keeping of the promise will not do violence to one’s character. The same is true for the breaking of a promise that is impetuous or foolish.

In a sense, there are three selves in a promise, one representing personal advantage or egoist desires, which may or may not be concordant with the agreement, the other, empathy, compassion, loyalty or obligation, the exocentric values, where the needs of the other are represented, and a third that represents the ideal self, the ideal for that individual, which may or may not be of high ethical quality. The ideal self represents the individual’s idea of what sort of person he would like to be, a construct of aspiration in the dispositional matrix of the core self. The guilt over a bad promise kept, or a good one broken, is the friction of these discordant voices.

From an evolutionary perspective, punishment of social reprobates is comparable to the elimination of the unfit in animal populations. Society takes the place of the physical environment and eliminates organisms who exceed some conventionally accepted deviation from the norm. Ideally, a person who commits a crime should accept, even welcome just punishment, though in the highly individualistic, hedonic and egocentric societies of the west, it is rare that a person accepts responsibility for his actions, still more rare that he accepts the punishment that goes with the verdict.

Threats and rewards, as expectations, are the psychic equivalent of dangers and opportunities. A threat places egoist and other-centered values in a precarious balance, while reward is mainly bound up with self-centered ones.

Praise and punishment, success and failure, are equilibria of self and other that arise in psychological constructs central to character, identity and trust.

As time goes by, the objectivity of the constructual element in the promise may replace the subjectivity of loving.

Customs are implicit accords of values shared in a group over some portion of its history. … It is an implicit agreement by the subject to act in conformity with the culture to encourage closeness in feeling and conduct, and discourage separation and divisiveness.

A promise that is based on virtue, for example giving to charity, donating blood, food, clothing, helping the sick, can and should become so customary that an obligation is unnecessary. In contrast, an unusual custom that is inconsistent with egoist desires, e.g. revenge for a neighbour’s injury, an unjust bequest , may require a promise for its execution. For some , these are major distinctions. To me, they are the shadings of core values that differ in the degree to which obligations – for self and other – are instilled early or acquired late, the degree to which assents are unique or shared, an their extent of publicity, compulsion and enforcement.

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PAL. Chapter 9. Autonomy and Compassion. pp.243-274

A coherent theory of value and its impact on moral conduct con only develop on the intrinsic relationality of all objects in the observers mind.

A person in my visual field is an image correlated with brain activity, and an inference based on belief. That is not to say the person does not deserve to be treated as an independent, parallel instance of consciousness. Subjectivism does not imply the non-existence of an external world, only the lack of direct or immediate knowledge of that world. How could the richness of the world be conjured up in my experience were the world itself not its inspiration? This argument, by the way, is as close to a ‘proof’ of an external world as one can get.

We are brains encased in helmets that generate a virtual reality which, by the sole fact of our survival, must conform to what is out there. (!!)

Bonnie’s comments in blue (per permission from GD):

This is where I think JB trips himself up. He makes what I call the Kantian “correspondence theory” fallacy — which has its current form in the correspondence theory of cognition, which basically states that whatever happens in cognition, is somehow completely independent of the objective world, but also somehow there is a one-to-one correspondence to the world. Kant imagined that there were transcendentalia (like the rules of math and logics) that could trans-literate through this type of correspondence, a scientific version of “the world out there” without ever really being able to know the a prior “out there.” 

Here is a little sidebar history to compare and contrast the view(s) that are operating in western philosophy:

On the left we have Humean Idealism, where the world exists out there, forever unknowable. This is carried forward in the philosophy of perspectivalism, where the world exists as a construction of a human collectivity (we-space) – this is the epistemic fallacy that Critical Realism levies against Integral Theory- as Bhaskar notes, wrongly equating “the real world” with “the known world” and gives rise to the many-worlds version when the human collectives exist at different altitudes (different we-spaces, world-spaces, developmental-levels, etc…)

Along comes Kant and ushers in the modern era of scientific rationality based on transcendentalia in the human rational mind:

There is still a gap between the epistemic, known world, and the a prior, real world “out there” – but Kant allows for transcendentalia (and the proper uses of them) to transliterate or modulate scientific versions or maps that correspond to the real world out there (which itself remains unknowable). We learn to manipulate signifiers like mathematical equations, and through experiment and feedback, these signifiers have causal connection to outcomes — but we really do not know why/how the other side of the black box is working, and have no ability to touch the real.

In the above passage of JB, he seems to substitute the transcendentalia with the mocrogenetic wave that somehow “goes out to touch the real” — so this is an improvement, but there is still a gap. There is still a subtle suggestion of the “substance pluralism” problem – how do two substances interface?

Bohm comes along and says, there is only one substance — and its not a substance, its a process — the holomovement — and looks like this:

So the “transcendentally real” is now a different order — more densely enfolded order — of the explicit, object world. This gives rise to the notion that information precedes existence — the higher enfolded orders are higher orders in the informational field. This is better, but Bohm requires an infinite regression of ever-more higher orders of enfoldment– so there has to be structure, before process … which can be problematic, and is somewhat in-elegant, as it speaks to substance monism a la Leibnitz (instead of a process monism).

Given that JB is interested in neuro-cognition, and not metaphysics, he has to settle for his version of the story. But if you extend his process thinking based on process monism (single process, many substances(structures) – then you can come up with a kind of view that sees both cognitive and actual occasions as processes that infold reality — so the real is not an enfolded order, but open, vast, empty of structure or information, and that as it processes (enfolds on itself– like my piece of paper) it creates structures (processural centers) that then go on to generate sub-processes that interfere with other processes, and transforming the whole — into both cognitive and actual occasions.

So this is a process monism version.

 

 

 

 

There is only the substrate “consciousness” which has neither subjective nor objective quality (because those are structurations in the process field). The horizontal levels show different types of structuration, black microgenies are cognitive types, red mocrogenies are actual occasions of various types (structured as R1, R2, R3) — the R series representing the stratification of reality (as Bhaskar says) on an intrinsic (i.e. onto-genetic) scale. When cognitive ocassions interfere with actual ocassions, the processes that inteface become “world” with a subjective and objective pole at different interface points, creating different types of phenomena available  for creating structures at higher levels of order (more and more densely enfolded-

And since each of the interfaces presupposes both an onto-genetic (prior) content, enfolded within each process proceeding from each living center (and attenuating back to source), then the enfoldments get increasingly more dense — and create something that is experienced as a prior (a- priori) layering of information in an implicit field — yet process monism has the advantage of not positing any metaphysical structures …

These illustrations of course, are not meant to be representations of anything “real” in and of themselves, but just useful to give meaning to the languaging of alternative ways of thinking about “reality.”

The real is imputed from the relation to appearance, and appearance is related to some term in addition to the subject.

If feeling is not real, reality is beyond our grasp, since feeling is the experience of process, process is reality and feeling as process is common ground with the process-life of all existence.

All the exists for the observer, and all that can be described with assurance, is given in the present.

We are images or ideas in a whole that is greater than all of us. The superficial (perpetual) bonds we share at the surface of the mental life are ripples in the same pond.

But the way back to the other, for solipsism and egoism, lies in a surrender of autonomy to adaptation, community and wholeness.

The self-realisation of the will can be directed toward any object, an idea, a meal, an illness, but when the will is directed toward another person, given that the other is part of the self, the self is most fully realised.

… genuine compassion is a true feeling of community that arises with a reclamation of other in the relinquishing and renewal of self.

The instinctual basis of genuine compassion suggests an origin antecedent to conscious empathy. This runs deep in the psychic life, even to the subtle pattern in organic nature, a quiet orchestration in which elements in a field are subordinate to the whole, bee hives, termitaries. We see this tacit choreography at work in a flight of birds, a school of fish, even in a grove of palms.

Asked who am I, the person should reply with sincerity, a human being like you. That is the primary identification to which all others – family, origins, religion, state, etc. – are or should be subordinate.

Only when such awareness is palpably entrenched in the psyche, or when we revive the positive in an ‘enlightened’ animism, will a dedication to the greater good of humanity arise out of the sense of being one with living nature.

In susceptible individuals, the perception of suffering elicits personal unhappiness as an empathic residue. In sum the exportation of subjective feeling into an objective state of suffering accentuates a subjective residue of value that leaves behind a trail of affect in the form of pity or compassion. The identification with the other can be attributed to an early phase in the individuation of the affect stream that accompanies a primitive (animistic) mentality.

The inference of pain or suffering, or the compassion for it in others, exports feeling for an into the other in a transit trough the mind of the observer. In compassion, the other’s pain is in fact ones own.

With the assumption of another perspective, or with empathic fusion, especially as an intuition of the commonality of separate individuals, values flow into objects as fluid extensions of the self. One could say that self and other do not achieve full separation and autonomy. An object of compassion is not a piece of flotsam in a sea of indifferent humanity, it is an object of value and signification.

Only in the act of loving does the self love, only in the act of caring is the self compassionate.

Object value or worth does not obligate compassion, but it does underlie whatever compassion is felt. In cases where one recognises a person as worthy but has no interest in his fate, or when a person considers life to be sacred and gives value to the life of others but still does not show compassion when life is endangered, autonomy has proceeded so far that action and feeling are no longer informed by innate empathy. But if one does feel compassion, this feeling can only arise for a person or object felt to have value. All objects have intrinsic value, though some are assigned more worth than others. From the subjective standpoint, compassion arises when the outgoing stream of object-feeling evokes emotions in the self that are congruent with those of the other even before it objectifies.

To feel pity and do nothing is only slightly better than to feel nothing at all. The former is a moral indulgence that is only mildly offensive, while indifference is a severe pathology of character.

Above all, the sense of shared vulnerability evokes an image of a continuum from one mind to another, thus, the primordial unity of subject-object, self and other.

From the standpoint of an individual cognition, empathy and the sense of community are fragmentary glimpses into an unconscious core that makes its way into conscious life. So also, one could say, is the madness of crowds, mob violence and submission to authority.

The identification or fusion of compassion relinquishes the autonomy that has been achieved through a long evolutionary and maturational struggle. The explosion of parts out of wholes in the analytic trend of though gives way to a lapsing of parts back into primordial wholes. The person dissolves in the other and reclaims a wholeness of engagement prior to partition.

To be compassionate, and authentically so, is for self-realisation to actively engage the realisation of the other, to merge self and other as best one can in this world. The mark of the superior soul is the resolution of self and other in conduct sensitive to the potential out of which we all, each moment, arise, undivided by arbitrary boundaries created in the inevitable loss of potential and the continuous vanishing of concrete actualities.

In any symbiosis, the distinction between constituents, and the rivalry of autonomies, is as much delineated as blurred by mutual need, is the slave … less close to selfhood than the master … ?

One is defined by service, the other by need. To the extent the master grows dependent on the slave, he abandons positive selfhood. To the extent the slave resists – or accepts – the conditions of service, to that extent does he find positive selfhood. In humans, selfhood is denied only to those oblivious to circumstance.

Dependency is the need that underlies compassion from the standpoint of the other. Deference to power of wisdom is essential. Those in need must accept the aid (and implicit dominance) of others. The subject who feels compassion may not be aware of this dominance, but that is not true for the person who accepts assistance from another. … Fear and necessity are the handmaids of empathy.

The urge to fight or dominate is not conducive to compassion, which requires a shared sense of vulnerability.

… just as compassion requires that we assume the perspective of the other, so aesthetic perception requires that we assume the perspective of the artist or the artwork.

… it is the self’s own constructs that infuse subjectivity in the work.

Empathy is the revisiting of parts in antecedent wholes, the regression of objects to concepts, individuals to social organisms, a withdrawal to what is deep and abiding from what is transient and accidental.

A critical difference between desire and worth is that desire feels processual and subjective, worth feels objective and substantial.

When the oneness with others is regained, there is no guarantee that individuation will return the parties to their original equilibrium.

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PAL Chapter 5. A World of Value. pp.147-168

 

…value is drawn into the object as it individuates. … Worth deposits with the object as an expressive feature of the conceptual and affective life. The human mind/brain generates worth through the distribution of affect tonality into the object-field.

The world does not begin outside the skull. If there is a boundary, it is with brain process, not physical entities screened by perceptual images. … Self and object are part of the being of the subject. Value and feeling are the becoming of the object. Being is the momentary category of self and object. Becoming is the process of self-and object-creation on which the category of being depends.

A concept transforms to an object. The self within a subject actualises objects in a world. This world is a realisation of conceptual feeling, the object being the final phase in the objectification of a cycle of process.

All objects in perception, and the derivation that carries them there, constitute the one enormous object that is the world. … The loci of the self, objects and mental contents can be compared to “strange attractors” in a chaos model, which lure feelings to a particular segment of intra or extra psychic space. A given segment attracts affective interest. There is similarity with a hypothesis of “dominant focus” proposed by Kinsbourne (1998). The distribution of feeling in mind and world, or where the value-stream settles in a given state, determines the relative intensity of value-interest for that state, and thus, the nature of self and world for that moment.

An object such as a self or a tree, like the object, brain, is a perception. The inferred entity of a tree, like the entity, brain, is part of physical nature. The mental stream of object rides the same process as the physical stream of entities. The intrinsic value of the former is inaccessible to observation. Feeling is only felt in the subject. Yet, the conceptual feeling in the mind/brain of an observer may “build upon” the physical feeling of the entity corresponding with the object that is perceived.

To ask what is the origin of value in a non-cognitive entity not conceived as a projection of the human mind is to presume a ‘life’ within the entity, and a history independent of human cognition.

Whether an object is a process of modelling, an assembly of elements, a direct perception, a projection, or, as in microgenetic theory, a set of contrasts that sculpt endogenous form, an excitation emanating from a physical entity other than the perceivers brain e.g. a physical rock or another person can only import intrinsic value into its perception by the inheritance in that perception of the physical feelings of entities aroused in an act of cognition. The intrinsic value of entities is not conveyed from the entity by a physical impression e.g. light or sound, but arises, if it does, in the arising of the entity out of the same ground as brain process.

(this speaks to the uncut paper Bonnitta ^)

The search for the self that is so much an expression of the anxiety of our times owes partly to the machine culture in which we live, the problem of identity and, consequently, of authenticity that so dominates life, art and science. But it also derives from the conflict of duty and freedom, especially the realisation that behaviour is adaptive, constrained and delimited by obligations, responsibilities and lack of opportunity.

The self generates values and extends them into the other. Those values generate self and other, which the other, to be regenerated, must reinforce.

(I find much of his treatment of love in this chapter to be somewhat autistic and even a little corrosive for my sensibilities.)

… love is conceptual feeling at depth of personality that engages the self in an exceptional degree of wholeness. The beliefs, experiential memories and values that constitute the self – its dispositions, configurations or neuronal biases – determine the nature of self- and object-worth and account for the equilibrium of commitment and sacrifice that is achieved in the feelings that are exchanged between lovers.

The other is a piece of the self, a satisfaction of its wants, a fragment of its emptiness, split off and embodied in another person. To gove birth and to love a child is a literal expression of this division of feeling, a process replicated covertly in the love of one adult for another.

… art as much as love is a product of the subjects imagination.

Love and art are self-realisations into personal objects or concepts. They differ from other realisations in that an intensity of feeling accompanies an image of great personal value. … The beauty of the beloved is as much an aesthetic creation of the lover as the artwork is a loving creation of the artist.

Self is fully invested in the image of the beloved or the artwork. In love as in art, the outcome – artistic or romantic feeling – is authentic when it reveals the “whole person” at a depth and fullness of personality.

Art is concrete representation of feeling in the imagination, as romantic love “makes real” the felt intensities of loving. In the generation of a loved object or artwork, the content is subordinate to the process. Loving keeps the lover alive, as the artist lives for his art.

The person who is perceived by a lover, like an art object perceived by an aesthete, is a construct in the imagination.

by

PAL Chapter 2 – Self, Subject and Subjectivity pp.73-97

Of the many dualisms that bedevil philosophy, none are so fundamental and pervasive as that of subject and object.

The history of philosophy is a conversation on how the self and its objects are partitioned.

An object that is conceived as a presentation in consciousness is penetrated by subjectivity, indeed it is part os a fully cognised world. But is objects are presentations or images, how does it come about that they are felt to exist in a world outside and independent of the observer? A world that is an extension of the self does not feel like a self creation. Indeed, the self feels very much like a creation of the world in which it matures. So, if the world is a mental image or an elaboration of the self, what explains the illusion of externality? The force of this illusion is precisely what process theory has to explain, and overcome.

A perception of space without action in that space does not give a functional world. Time awareness is also a subjective experience. Time arises in the now as a relation of past to present that hinges on the revival of past events. A duration lacks felt extension without the availability of remembered objects.

We percieve space as an emptiness between things, each thing in space having its own separate history. External space is the home we build to live in, experiential time is the change and stability that give life to that home. The spatio-temporal world of experience has to be ‘re-built’ in every perceptual act. The process is effortless. The activity of mind in generating the world is unfelt, invisible. We only feel that the world is self-generated on such occasions as vertigo, dream or hallucination when the attachment or thread of mind that connects the self to its objects becomes noticeable.

The spatial and temporal fields are conceived in science as quantifiable, measurable, and infinitely divisible.

(only to the planks scale which is not an infinite quanta)

However, subjectivity does not require mind or consciousness, except that mind as intuition is required to conceive the subjectivity of its own experience.

The separation of subject and object creates an inner and outer pole, actually, in the human mid/brain, a centre and a circumference, with an arising at the inner pole and a perishing at the outer one, and a qualitative difference between the initial arising and the final perishing phases.

… in non-cognitive nature there is no inner and outer, only categorical parts embraced by ever enlarging wholes.

The appearance of subject announces a world, but the appearance of the owrld is necessary to individuate the subject.

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 the oppositions to disclose a more profound unity.

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. Agency is first in thought, before it is in the world.

Agency does not determine the object, rather, the object development determines the feeling of agency.

The feeling of will going toward an object is the inner experience of self-realisation. As the self needs an object for the feeling of agency, so too the quality of intentional feeling depends on the degree of object realisation.

The creative spirit moves freely form one pole to another, from a lonely solitude at the oeaks of conscious individuality to an absorption at the inward recesses of the unconscious where inspiration has its home. A settling-in at the inner or outer pole points to an habitual recurrence. A focus at either phase is a sign of unhealthy completeness. A tension, a longing for the unrealised 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 processes, as well as from that of others, while an excess at the inward pole threatens oblivion and loss of contact.

Reflection differs from perception as a voluntary action differs form one that is automatic. To reflect is to step back from the act of perceiving. … The shift from perception to reflection is a shift from reproductive to productive thinking, the productivity relating to the potential for conceptual branching prior to a fixation in objects.

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?

(emphasis mine)

The identity which is blocked by an analytic attitude of the intellect, of reason, reflection or self-consciousness, is the holistic unity of man and nature in an all-embracing divinity. We have all had such moments when, in the compresence of self, subject and subjectivity, the self, infused with feeling, dissolves from the cares of life and an interest in discrete objects to a conscious awareness of the All in All, the momentary and the universal, the where and when of self in nature, a oneness in which the self is neither lost nor known but fells by intuition that it is the living centre of all creation.

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.

The self that stops with the interior and takes its own ideas as the limits of its activity lacks an awareness that it is an engine for the totality of the world.

The aim for the entity is the completion of what it is, the full realisation of the becoming that constitutes the process of its creation. This process deposits in the being of a momentary existence. Being is the aim of becoming, the becoming of what one is. A non-cognitive entity in nature, or an act of cognition.

(italics mine)

(Page 85 has so much good stuff I want to quote it all, however, I respect the limits of this exercise…)

Subjectivity, as the becoming of substance, does not arise form substance but is replaced by another wave of becoming.

… the possibility of creating a world somewhere between sheer imagination and full objectivity reminds us of possibilities in self-realisation that are ordinarily concealed beneath the dead surface of its representations.

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. … Self-realisation is a criterion of value in the world, for its own sake or for the sake of conscious beings (Chakravati, 1966). The world has the nature of a self, an idea that is realised in human thought and action. Without insight, the urge to self-realisation achieves a token insularity in its drive to autonomy. True self expression is the realisation through the individual of the will of nature as it moves outwards in the actualisation of human ideals.

…realism has [the] obligation to explain how subjectivity appears in the physical universe.

The retreat over time from a perception to a dream is really an uncovering of the original process in which buried primary process cognition is shaped to reality, as unconscious memories become conscious perceptions. … there is experimental evidence that primary process thought is not bypassed in the growth of rational thinking, but it is entrained (early) in every act of cognition (Deglin and Kinsbourne, 1996).

Whatever is thought, perceived, felt, apprehended, whether vague or clear, its conscious appearance and unconscious antecedents are identical with brain process, though is has to be conceded that some phenomena, such as the span of the present, may be non-reducible.

There is no escape from some form of idealism or monism. The self cannot go beyond the world it elaborates to a ‘real’ world outside its perceptions, nor delve beneath them to the incipient phases in the unconscious. However, there is an asymmetry of the self and its objects in relation to their physical or noumenal precursors.

…we presume that an object points outward to a real entity in the material world, while the self points inward, to an origin in physiology, archetypes or the absolute. The depth of self-origination leads to the intuition of a world in which all selves are potentialities. In sum, an object has subjective and objective phases. The objective phase points to an external entity that is conceived as synchronic with its appearance. The self, lacking an outer reference, has only a subjective phase and points diachronically to the limits of unconscious mind.

We can give no account of ‘real’ nature beyond human experience, for the mind is engaged in every observation or measurement, direct or mediated. If we seek to understand nature beyond its realisation in mind, or brain process, it is not the perception but its ancestry that is the locus of scientific interest. Perhaps for this reason Novalis wrote that “nature is living antiquity” an epigram that captures and endorses the impossibility of personal access to, much less intersubjective agreement upon, the thing-in-itself, though from a theoretical standpoint we scarcely do this with the objects of ordinary science.

The claim that events in perception refer to non-cognitive entities, i.e. that the object in perception is, or is an exact replica of, the thing-in-itself, has the consequence of a reduction from an object to the entity it refers to.

What, then, is the basis of the dichotomy of mind and brain (nature) if the brain is conceived as a complex node in a nature that is ultimately unknowable? This is a comparison of immediate data in consciousness with in hypothesis about the real entities the data point to, namely a comparison of the purely phenomenal with the non-experiential,

It is inarguable that any attempt to reduce the mind to physical nature must begin with the brain events that underly behaviour, and only secondarily with the entities in nature to which those events refer.. For mind to truly ‘know’ nature, it would first have to know the brain, which is the most immediate instance of physical nature to which mind relates.

What begins inside as a conceptual feeling of intense, immediate and felt experience dissipates as it travels outwards to de-conceptualise objects in which feelings and beliefs have to be inferred. What begins with a disposition charged with personal belief and value terminates in a concrete actuality to which values and beliefs seem to be applied.

An account that preserves the subjectivity by deepening yet relaxing its definition, i.e. by not equating subjectivity with consciousness, leads to an idealism that is a species of naturalism (process monism) not merely a solipsistic dream.

Admittedly, this way of thinking rests on a series of inferences. It begins with the argument that subjective experience is the legitimate starting point for metaphysics, while rejecting solipsism on a pragmatic basis. The inference that patterns of breakdown in cognition illustrate patterns in its realisation gives licence to the claim that patterns in mind correspond to those in brain process. This permits an extension of the theory to processual life in lower organisms and, finally, to the ultimate basis of all processes in the becoming-to-being that generates existence and feeling in physical matter.

A subjective naturalism must seek to explain the transmutation of will into intention and desire. Thought and reason seem to transcend natural process to establish aims by which action is guided. This is the decisive issue.