Tag Archives: inner

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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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Goethean insights.

Goethe, Science, and Sensory Experience. (Hensel)

… more is required for the perception of the essential features of the qualitative realm than just the physical sense organs. A more subtle perceptual capacity includes the emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual aspects of sensory qualities.

The endpoint of the discursive-conceptual analysis can become the starting point of the suprarational realm of qualities by means of an imaginative experience.

 

“Whatever great, beautiful, or significant experiences have come our way must not be recalled again form without and recaptured, as it were; they must rather become part of the tissue of our inner life from the outset, creating a new and better self within us, continuing forever as active agents in out Bildung. (formative development)” – Goethe.

 

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The Birth of Isaac Babel

a listening homage to Richard Chadek sharing Nicole Krauss – in dialog.

I was there that day; the dark day Isaac Babel was executed. His crime was silence, and they could not bear it – I could not bear it.  He dared to confront us with our own emptiness through his private fascination with his private interiority. For days he would stare at pages of prose and poetry and music. He did nothing.  He made no contribution.  He did not move.  He did not act.  He shuffled through empty pages as though they meant everything.  As though this blankness was all important. People would ask him questions and his silence would only confront them with their own impotent ignorance.  His listening revealed us for who we were.  We hated him for it.

I was glad when they arrested him and tried him and eventually sentenced him to the ultimate silence that he seemed to love so dearly. It seemed fitting to rid this world of one who was so noisy in his quietude.  So I volunteered. I volunteered to shoulder the rifle, to chamber the round, to aim, to feel the pull of the trigger and the recoil in my shoulders as the bullets flew  from the barrels of our guns true and straight into the heart of Isaac Babel.  And then I fled like a wild animal in response to what I had done.

It was only after he was gone that I began to regret something that had gone missing in my life but was now returned. I realized that Isaac Babel had been reborn and resurrected in my own heart in ways I could never imagine.  I was incarnate in a way I had not been before.  I found that his silence was somehow my own silence that had gone so long unrecognized and so disowned.  And while I could not share his dedication to this discipline, neither could I avoid it entirely.  I found I was shrouded in mystery beyond words.

I was lost, but had been reborn – reborn as Isaac Babel.  This was an atonement – a redemption – a revelation.  And in that birth, the emptiness burned away and I found I had traded the darkness of my mind for the Star of the Age.

when you are lost
you climb to the firing range
without a lantern in your life
but the star of the age
and in the bright flash
an emptiness burns away
you trade the darkness of your mind
for the star of the age
surging away from the tower’s embrace
you race like a tiger
relentlessly lashing the days
and leave, in the wake of our wandering lives
the signs we are aging
the houses we drowned in the lake
while the shining world
believes that, inside of days
all the darkness of our lives
will meet the star of the age
while buildings fall
in silence and reverie
among the islands of our minds
among the stars of the age
oh shining world!
where nothing is happening
but what is in our minds:
the swelling stars of the age
but still, my love
the only relieving light
in the spinning darkness of our lives
is when I see you again
in the moonlight
in the starlight
in the sunlight
and I believe it again.

Shearwater, Star of the Age from Animal Life

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PAL.Chapter 21. The Moral Dimensions of Aesthetic Experience. pp.554-577

 

Mind is the sole self-intelligible thing, and therefore it is entitled to be considered the fountain of existence. - C.S. Peirce

An ordinary object is an encounter, an artwork is an experience. … Ordinary objects can become works of art when perceived from a certain point of view. The difference is one of emphasis, not kind. How this difference is understood depends on a theory of perception.

The belief in an inner and outer world and the springs of behaviour that stem from such a belief are implicit, covert, and deeply ingrained in the psyche.

Are the neocortical zones the standard model loci of initial processing, or do they mediate endpoints of perception as postulated in microgenetic theory?

For microgenetic theory, the quarrel is with the standard model of perception, not action, for perception is interpreted in the same way as production, as an expressive activity that goes out to the world. … The point is that objects take on aesthetic value not by an addition of psychic qualities, but by an accentuation of those qualities as segments prior to their objectification.

From a temporal standpoint, the object includes, as part of what it is, all the phases traversed in its perception, including the subject. That is, the object “out there” has a microtemporal structure that includes earlier phases that lay down the subject. We speak of subject and object, but to be more precise, they are subjective and objective segments in the same act of cognition.

People are quicker to note differences than similarities. However, instead of demarcating and analysing, one finds if one looks more closely that what appear to be distinct nodes in a category, or separate domains of function, are gradations with indistinct borders that are constantly changing and merging.

Value is the bridge form aesthetics to ethics. Central to the continuum is the concept that value is allocated at different segments and in different proportions to the transition form self to object, from drive and intrapersonal desire as one polarity, to attention, then realness and extrapersonal worth at the other. In the compromise of other-centered self-denial and drive-based egoism, the subjectivity of conceptual feeling, in art or ethics, confronts the objectivity of custom and/or approval.

A perception is an adaptive model of the world. The stability of this model is due to its recurrence.

The object is more alive when the life of the artist or observer is engaged.

The timeless objects of aesthetic contemplation become actual through the observers emotions and ideas, while the living things that have our moral attention incite a timeless obligation to protect and trust.

The saint embodies in his acts the ideal of goodness, genius embodies in its works the ideal of beauty. In art, self-realisation trumps obligation, in ethics, in the saintly or compassionate person, they are aligned.

Language tends to fractionate feeling and dispel it over time, art concentrates feeling with greater immediacy. Unlike art, which has been increasingly liberated from mimicry, even tradition and communicability, language cannot escape realism without becoming incoherent or ejaculato.

The attribution of mentality to an artwork or natural object, i.e. the presence in the object of the creative power of a genius or a god, is a species of animistic thought, but it is the first step in a transition from aesthetic to moral concepts.

In that beauty is contemplative and goodness is instrumental, the relation of beauty to morality is like that of perceptual commitment to conceptual obligation. In this respect, there is a comparison of philosophy to life, or theory to behaviour, which is the relation of thought to action, choice to decision, need to satisfaction.

Universality is sameness over difference, in space, time or context. However there are no exact repeatables. Each entity individuates a relational whole, so supra-ordinate or categorical universals are as fictitious as isolated particulars. The idea of an absolute repeatable is motivated by a desire to introduce conceptual stability into a world of change.

The enduring self in relation to the succession of acts is a relation of a category to instance, perhaps it is even the nucleus of the idea of universal and particular.

The concept of a generic category opposed to a particular instance arises as a whole/part relation in time consciousness. The temporal incrementation of spatial wholes, or the elaboration of succession out of simultaneity, is the creation of time order out of non-temporal wholes.

… consistent with the microgenetic account of the sculpting that occurs in every act of cognition. The process of specification leaves the category behind as the part individuates.

The relation of the good to good and bad acts, like that of perfection to genius or corruption, is also a relation of the ‘timeless’ to the temporal.

A population is not involuntarily subjugated by rulers that arise within its ranks. Its beliefs and values create the conditions in which the corruption and oppression flourish.

Ultimately, ethics and aesthetics fuse in a life of self-realisation. What is at stake is authenticity of character.

Microgenetic theory is the basis of an account of ethical conduct and aesthetic feeling in the recurrent specification of acts and objects out of the self, i.e. as self-realisations of character and personality. … The starting point is the description of the mind/brain as a process of self-realisation.

From a process standpoint, art and conduct move from subjective wholes to objective parts. In both, the subject feels the centrality of personal value and motivation. However, the subjective is revived in recreating an artwork, which is vetted fro its power to induce this revival in others and the depth of feeling evoked. Conduct is also vetted by those who revive the act in the imagination according to their valuations, but unlike an artwork, conduct is not revived concretely, only a judgement of its context and consequences. This leads to external judgements in conduct, internal ones in art.

 

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PAL.Chapter 11. What is a good act? pp.301-334

Morality lies in the capacity to choose and the responsibility that comes with decision, but choice depends on values embedded in character. Desire and conflict are manifestations of such valuations, while the final moral act is an adaptation of the psychic to a social world of duty and commitment.

… the tendency in moral philosophy has been to slice off psychology, eliminate the psychic precursors of action and focus on conduct, its context and justification. Psychology is individual covert, inferential, messy and complex, while action for the most part is clear and explicit.

Certainly, for a moral subjectivism, the antecedents of an action are fundamental.

The goal of a moral philosophy is a human psychology that incorporates a personal judgement of one’s acts and aspirations, ideally, a self-realisation of the better portion of one’s character.

Intentions are primary to resolve or disambiguate values and choices.

Choice is central to moral action, but there are desires without (explicit) choices, choices without acts, and acts without choice, though there is an implicit choice in every thought and act.

There is a qualitative difference in form between thinking a thing and saying or doing it.

Each moment, action resolves a mix of personal values, past experience, present conditions and future expectations, even if the person is revealed to be someone he himself does not admire.

It has to be conceded that “free will” comes at a price; once confronted with indecision, one is already in trouble, the more so if choices have equal weight. The greater the menu of options, the multitude of perspectives, the detachment, the less a person is likely to commit to a single path of action. The openness obligated by reason becomes a sanctuary for moral retreat. Reason confronts options exposed in the suspension of action and a withdrawal from objects.

We can begin by putting reason aside, for it does not help us to act. Knowledge is essential in providing conceptual alternatives, but it must be implanted in values for the right act to arise. … An emotional push is necessary for choice.

… the failure to search for error, a too hasty leap to the truth, or an easy acceptance of dogma – scientific, philosophical or religious – are marks of intellectual dishonesty and an attack on truth itself.

To act with an internalised social conscience is to be morally scrupulous. Darkness should remind us of light, the Buddhists say, and in the same sense the knowledge of life’s gifts ought to be tinged with a melancholy for their loss, for oneself and for others.

… detachment is less the assumption of another perspective than the capacity to entertain multiple perspectives, as in a dialectic, in which personal interest is neutralised by deference to alternative points of view. Ambiguity is the antidote to dogma and error. This entails a categorical perspective that does not capitulate to rival attitudes but surrounds them.

… conscious knowledge of right and wrong is not so much a prescription for action as a justification for actions motivated by the values through which knowledge was installed by the experience. … The idea that the knowledge of right and wrong can tell one what to do is sheer causistry.

Goodness may derive from a sense of duty or responsibility, but most people think it ought to flow naturally from character. … Goodness as obligation uncouples feeling from action when the impulse to self-interest is overcome.

Duty as motivation exacts a response by way of values; but duty as mere obligation is coercive and thus intrapsychically inert.

With the primacy of action, agency, thought and desire are subordinate to conduct. What them becomes of moral theory if the feeling of passivity to a thought, say in obsession, or that of agency in voluntary action, turn out to be phenomenal by-products of act- and object -realisation, not measures of actual control?

(good question!)

Even in the best of people, the examined life cannot fail to discover traces of moral corruption. We must account for our acts, and injuries to others, but it is the inner life that calls us to judgement.

The problem for subjectivism is to import greater significance to the psychic precursors of action, and to bring action back into the mind of the subject where it arises, rather than displace it into the world where it has its effects.

I think the ought of duty or obligation will continue to be a confound for a naturalist theory of value unless the necessity in virtue can be shown to be grounded in the is of natural process. Duties must be conceived as psychological constructs, values in ones character, not motives or brakes on conduct.

Goodness of character is to rightness of conduct as potential to actual, not universal to particular.

In mathematics, the numerical concept of ‘one’ has a formal identity across applications … This is not true for a real entity, which does not remain unaltered when it is separated from its context in order to compare it to similar entities in other minds or the same mind at different times. Every actuality actualises a unique qualitative ground.

The right becomes the good when conduct recedes from the objective surface of the mind to its sources in subjectivity.

Authenticity points to the unconscious moral tendencies of the individual that actualise valuations in the self-concept. Morality applies to the resolution of character and choice, the reconciliation of an authentic yet unconscious self with the decision and freedom to choose that are necessary to informed moral conduct.

What gives a person pleasure or makes one happy is not necessarily good in a moral or aesthetic sense. The dissociation of pleasure, desirability and the good is such as to vitiate theories of pleasure, happiness and desirability on the basis of goodness.

Desire is a conceptual feeling that arises in the “drive-representations” that lay down the self and its conceptual feelings or value categories. Desirability is desire that moves value outward from self to object. Desire specifies value in the desirability of the object. Desirability is the desire for an object of worth, since not all objects of worth are desired. Desirability straddles the subject/object transition. Because of its greater proximity to the object, desirability relates more to preference or taste that to desire, which is closer to drive-based affects.

The passage of what is desired, to what is desirable, to what ought to be desired corresponds to a shift from the subjectivity of desire to an intermediate phase of desirability, and then to an objective valuation of the act or object. The ought begins in the extraction of desire form drive, and continues in a progression toward the object, in desirability, which is “half way” from desire to worth, then concludes with its full objectification in the valuation of external objects.

The objectivity of object value, the feeling of obligation as (usually) external and the subjectivity of desire are interpreted as reversible and interactive, whereas subjectivity objectifies in a unidirectional becoming.

… the self is anything but rational, reason being an endpoint in the passage from meanings to words. For most people, rationality is a rare achievement. … The residual value in abstract and “affect-free” concepts must then be looked for in the value underlying the so-called pure reason.

Naturalism does not equate the good with hedonism, which is antithetical to morals, nor does it appeal to social ecology, or the behavior of sub-human primates, or the imperatives of “selfish genes”. Self-preservation does not translate to pleasure-seeking as the expense of others. The self goes out into the world and fills it with value; it does not accrue value for its own needs.

(emphasis mine)

Loyalty is an affective bias; goodness is impartial. A preference based on kinship, affection, tribe, ethnicity, is rational from the standpoint of self-interest but counter to moral logic.

Truth has empirical and logical grounds, these grounds are thought to be the basis of conviction, but the certainty of truth, i.e a belief that the truth is true, requires the subjectivity of belief to impact on the presumes objectivity of fact.

Beauty differs from truth and goodness in that it may arouse neural configurations that respond to balance, averaging or whole/part relations. This may explain the immediacy of the perception of the beautiful.

As to the association of the ideal good with reason, the good is reinforce by logic but not dependent on it. … In logic, thought retreats from the particular to the idea behind it, or the re4altions between ideas. Logic cannot instruct us how to act in a given circumstance. Logic does not usually tell us what we do not already know. … It is better at refutation than assertion.

The relation of the individual to society might correspond to the part/whole relation in beauty, but individual good is often achieved as the cost of much suffering, while the good of the many demands the sacrifice of the few. At least in this way, the part/whole relation of beauty differs from the one/many relation in society.

The universal is immanent in every particular.

(emphasis mine)

The aha experience, the sudden apprehension of a profound truth, the awareness of time and space in the perception of nature, the apprehension of deep order, symmetry and perfection that gives the experience of the sublime, for truth or for beauty, do not occur with the recognition of the good. Nor is there the same degree of cynicism. Because the good is a secondary construction, a good act raises questions of intent that do not occur for truth and beauty.

Goodness is conceived as the whole of its relations. If objects are relational there is no demarcation of object an property. The bundle of properties that constitutes an act of goodness is a complex of relations. The idea of the good as an object with properties rests on the distinction of substance and quality, or subject and predicate, for the property has to be a property of some object.

The good is not a natural, physiological (culture-independent) category like beauty or colour, or a consensual fact-based category like truth.

… the perception of colour, though subjective, is independent of personality, whereas goodness is directly related to character.

Any property is a category of sub-types, but this is especially so with goodness where the property has both a subjective and an objective aspect.

Even the most obvious property of goodness needs to be contextually decontaminated. An unselfish parent can ruin a child, generosity can degrade the feeling of self-worth, etc. As with truth or beauty, the good is illustrated and taught by examples, but the category of the good rests more precariously than truth and beauty on its concrete illustrations.

The presence of covert emotion in reason, or the ability to rationalise feeling, implies that reason itself has an affective tone. The ideal develops out of the conceptual feeling as an experience of the pre-object category. Put differently, ideals are created out of categories as rational aims that can supplant the affective aims of desire. When an ideal becomes the goal of a desire, the affective element dissolves in an object into which it can discharge, while the rational element reatins the meaning in a concept that is unspecified as to content and intention.

It is not a simple matter to desire a generality, a universality or an ideal that is not accented by some instance of possibility.

… the desire for the category is more like a yearning or a longing, which is a waiting for the object to clarify, while a desire directed to an object embodies the wish to have it: it excludes similar objects and suffers the fear of its loss. Just as we generalise an ideal from the particular in the good objects of desire, we seek an ideal love or in life the particular in the category.

The good is not a natural category, like beauty, nor a logical one like truth, which enfold instances of their expression, but an artifice derived from its examples. … Goodness is a conventional category abstracted from its examples not prior to them.

As an ideal self, the good is a subjective possibility that aims at self-realisation. That is, the categories that specify the particulars of conduct can themselves be idealised at subjective or objective polarity. … On this view, one’s moral duty is not to conform one’s conduct to the ideal good, but to realise in all acts the ideal self.

(emphasis mine)

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PAL Chapter 6. From Drive to Desire. pp.173-192

To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy, and when thus seen they will be seen to be … as events are in history, in a moving, growing, never finished process. ~ John Dewey (1925)

Process and form refer to the dynamic and static aspects of every entity, including the mind/brain state. The dynamic and static, the phasic and tonic, are unified in the relation of quality and quantity, or becoming and being.

Brain morphology is not a collection of anatomical parts that discharge functions or house them, but the specious stability of frozen process. The wave-like spread of configurations laying down the mind-brain state is, myriad patterns of configurations over distributed areas that sweep from archaic to recent formations laying down behaviour or cognition. Behaviour is four dimensional structure as process actualises into form.

(emphasis mine)

The shift from an extrinsic series to a simultaneous arising, from an exogenous to an endogenous development, and the nesting of this pattern in multi-tiered lamination of phase-transitions, forms the essential ‘structure’ of an act of cognition, i.e. the mind/brain state.

In microgenetic theory, cognition is wholly endogenous, the role of experience (social, environmental) being to “fine tune” the specification. Innate dispositions are carved by learning to knowledge, which is derived to concepts of greater specificity. Concepts are formulated with greater precision. The specification by constraints on the cognitive process corresponds to the specification of anatomical and functional connectivity, in maturation, by elimination or inhibition. Learning influences anatomy and physiology by enhancing or impeding endogenous trends, not by an addition to an existing repertoire.

For microgenesis, affect and idea are dependent phenomena. Feeling (quality, becoming) creates and is enfolded by representation or category (quantity, being).

Values that reflect self-interest arise out of drives that ensure survival. Every drop of self interest can be traced to an unconscious pool of self-preservation. Every occasion of genuine empathy can be traced to – but not reduced to – innate constructs relating to patterns of infant care, social hierarchy and deference to others.

All entities have the aim of becoming what they are, and all organisms seek what they need to survive, but it is a long way to go from subjective aim and incipient purposefulness to full fledged human intention.

As mind issues from, and creates, the manifold of the world, the self distributes an array of psychic contents.

Value is realised in the action-stream as self-realisation, but the will can also be channelled in to the perception-stream as an outward derivation of feeling into objects. Generally, manifestation is the action of will, which is primarily egoistic, while perception is the vehicle by which the other is realised.

(emphasis mine)

Desire actualises at successive points in the realisation of acts, percepts and their linguistic derivations. Object development carries a desire outward, as worth, into other objects, whereas act development realises desire in wither selfish or unselfish pursuits.

When an aim becomes an idea, the seeking of it becomes an intention. Intention is a bridge from self to object or idea.

 

Instinctual Drive (lower mammals) >> Object existence

Instinctual Drive (higher mammals) >> Proto-desire >> Object Value

Instinctual Drive (humans) >> Self >> Desire >> Object Worth

The value in a physical entity, or a perceptual object in the world, arises spontaneously with feeling, as existence, expanding desire to object worth. In this expansion, the innate inheritance is continuous with instilled values. The branching of acquired values accentuates a growth trend obscured by the uniqueness of the human mode of valuation and its obvious cultural determinants. We are the source of feeling and object value because we are entities of value-creation. We create objects of value but we are also products of the value-stream that carries value outward, first into the self, then its desires, finally into its objects. The value of objects is forecast in the worth we give to private images, such as dreams and thoughts.

A psychological distance and a relation of contrast are necessary across segments in the mind/brain for desire to be directed to a target of worth. The self is the source of desire. Its concepts, especially in choice, are the repository of agency, its objects, the principle locus of value.

Yet there are moments when the self is consumed with passion or its objects overflow with value, when love or hate usurp the subjective pole, when objects disappear as the self is overcome with feeling, or objects become so wonderful or detestable that, for the moment at least, nothing else matters.

With a splitting of concepts at the inner or subjective pole, ideas may become so remote from their emotional root that they are valued purely for their rationality. The analysis of conceptual feeling is carried to such an extreme that barely a trickle of personal feeling invades the endpoints of conceptualisation. The idea is a mental object comparable to an object in perception. Such ideas, like objects, seem to have a life of their own, independent of feeling, though the intensity of belief and passion of argument betray a covert subjectivity latent in the idea. With an excessive discrimination of self or world, feeling withers in its objects, which are emptied of affect to become mechanical, even worthless.

The person who argues too passionately for a belief he takes to be rational reveals that his concepts are not logical instruments which persuade by their truth, but derivatives of unconscious presuppositions imbued with feeling.

There are also times when the unconscious pool of magical thought surfaces to a pre-analytic endpoint, and the whole of perception is blanketed with an intense emotion. Then, a certain balance of inner and outer prevails and everything shines with a deep radiance, … At such times we sense the life of feeling in a world of creation and we wonder if we have given this feeling to the world or if the world, including ourselves, is animated by a single feeling that flows from nature through all of us.

Valuations in the self lay down force lines or habits that determine consecutive states. When beliefs and values are habitual or unquestioned, the thoughts and actions of an individual have a limited scope. … receptiveness and openness to novelty are bridges to interest and precursors of valuation. Custom may be the lord of ethics, but it can also be an antidote to desire, just as spontaneous or authentic moral feeling can be dulled by a sense of duty.

The physicist Richard Feynman (1998) wrote, “what looks still to our crude eyes is a wild and dynamic dance.” He was referring to non-cognitive entities, but the dance also occurs in perceptual objects in the mind of the observer, for the apparent stability and independence of the object conceals the minds activity within it.

An object of marginal interest becomes the target of a consuming desire as unconscious phases in the perception are activated. The unconscious source that first inclines the focus of interest in the direction of the object is the basis of a growth in its value. Worth is not a judgement in the sense of a conscious decision, as something is judged to be true or false, but an unconscious feeling that urges the subject to a conscious explanation. When someone is desirable, we give reasons why this occurs … but these reasons alone do not suffice to make [them] desirable, for they could be applied to another person for whom one has no particular interest.

 

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PAL Chapter 3 – Affect and Idea. pp.101-121

 

… the common distinction of emotion and idea, [is] that emotions are the transformation of chemical or physical energy, while thought involves the transformation of information.

If emotion is the antithesis of conceptual thinking, feeling and concept must come together in some way to give context to feelings and impetus to ideas, though just how this might occur is uncertain.

Energetic theory of emotion has survived not only because it appeals to common sense, but because it is grounded on evolution. Energy in inorganic mater is the basis of emotion in higher organisms. My thesis here is that emotion begins as energy, eg. the wave-form of a basic entity, where it is ‘contained’ in basic packets or particles. At this stage, energy has a momentum but not a stable direction, certainly not an aim. The energy and its boundedness are the existence and nature of the entity. Put differently, the entity consist of a packet of temporal extensibility over the duration of its existence, a duration that is, at least conceptually, isotropic or time-reversible. In the evolution of organic life, energy tkes on an aim or direction over its duration and becomes anisotropic or time-irreversible. The phase transition has a before and after. With directionality, energy is transformed to feeling. The shift from bi-directional to uni-directional feeling, as with all natural advances in organic systems, occurs within the duration of the entity, i.e. within the temporal extension of each occurrence.

Once there is feeling, an ‘idea’ goes to satisfaction. This ‘idea’ is the category (duration) over which the feeling develops. As energy is the seed of emotion, duration is the seed of idea. Energy becomes feeling, duration becomes category. Or, put differently, becoming (process) is feeling, being (state) is idea. The category that encloses a feeling is also its aim, since the category does not exist until an epoch of feeling terminates. A complete cycle of feeling establishes the boundaries of the duration, and thus fulfils the aim or idea of the category that up until them has been virtual but, through the cycle of feeling, becomes actual just as it perishes.

(emphasis mine)

One can say that feeling is felt process in simpler organisms – it is the dynamic of their unreflective lives – while emotion is the experience of process in higher ones. A simple organism is its feeling, but complex (human, but perhaps lower) organisms have emotions. In emotion, we experience the life-animating process that actualises the person that we are.

The inner and outer world that are created in perception are created for those who, themselves, are created by feeling.

When feeling goes immediately in to action, the body receives all the feeling that might otherwise have been allocated to objects, and the self and its body are then more intensely alive.

The impression is strong that ideas are free of affect, and feelings are free of ideational content, with the awareness of an emotion being the result of a judgement. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

Thus we arrive at the conclusion that emotion or feeling is the process-experience of becoming, while the feeling or emotion that is experienced, the designation of that experience, or its fixation in an object or idea, is the object-experience of being. As being gives existence to becoming, so without becoming, being would not exist. Objects are created by feelings as enclosures, but feeling is what makes objects real existents.

Thought expresses feelings, minimally in what a person chooses to think about, so just thinking about something entails an affective (evaluative) quality.

A mood does not seem to have an object, rather, it affects all objects and it poses difficulty to a theory of affect as the inner dynamic of ideation. Yet we occasionally have ideas that are also pervasive, and it may be that what such ideas and moods have in common is their relation to pre-object categories, where neither the concept nor the feeling has individuated with sufficient clarity.

In ongoing perception, feeling intensifies when interest collapses on a single object, for example when we perceive an object with fear or love. It is not surprising that this also occurs in memory, which is attenuated perception. Feeling is heightened with absorption in the memory. In creative writing, one attempts to reclaim a certain mood and recapture the idea or inspiration of the work, not just any mood, but one which is specific to the generative idea. The mood corresponds to the idea even if the idea cannot be articulated. At such moments, one wants to be saturated with the idea, to get into the mood and stay there, to bring its latent content to awareness. … The creative mood with its inchoate idea suggests that ordinary moods like depression are also associated with an unconscious ideation.

Depending on the context, feeling grows or fades. These observations indicate that feeling and idea are part of the same complex, but their unity is fluid not quantal. The apparent liberation of affect from idea that occurs in the derivation of drive to conceptual feeling is equally a liberation of the idea from its affective tone. Affect and idea are not fixed for all subsequent revivals. Even in drive, a given idea (construct, category) is not inextricably woven with a given affect. The shifting relations between feelings and memory, or feeling and idea (object, event), depend on the current mood, the passage of time, depth and context and the momentary focus of attention.

Affect is a part of the process-life of the present. The past-quality of feeling is derived secondarily from reminiscence. Whatever there is of pastness in feeling comes from the memorial-quality of the idea. In contrast, a memory that is experienced as a present event would be an hallucination.

The emotional response to a past event, more than the memory of the event, depends on the current state of mind. This is also true for perception. … The affective tone of the moment colours the feeling of the event. The affective tonality of memory is determined by the current state, which includes the embedded memory.

This union of feeling and object (concept), closer to memory than perception, closer to archaic structures of the limbic formation than to the recency of neocortex, closer to the past than the present, allied to magical and creative thinking, abides just beneath the surface of everyday thought.

In human thought, feeling and idea – the dynamic and static of cognition – are indivisible. Ideas are deposited as categories out of the incessant throb of feeling, both within the organism and in its world. This is not the view of most philosophers, nor of psychoanalysts.

(emphasis mine)

… an object individuates in the course of self-realisation from an intrapersonal phase of dispositions, values and implicit beliefs through one of experiential memory, object-concepts and imagery, to a thing in the world.

The conceptual portion of an external object is its object-category, its affective portion is realness and worth.

Feeling marks a development within the realisation of the object of a dynamic that was not previously noted. This development is attributed to knowledge or experience, which is another way of saying there is a deeper exploration of the infrastructure of the perception, of an inner layer of memory and subjective feeling just beneath the outer rim of objects.

When we gaze at an object of interest, its value grows with an expansion of submerged residues in the underpinnings of the object. One line of expansion leads to growth in object- and lexical-concepts. These develop into objects and propositions that are relatively free of affect. The other line of expansion leads to a growth in experiential memory, which is relatively independent of lexical- and object-concepts. The former is governed by the regularities of rational thought, the latter by feeling and metaphoric thinking.

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.