Category Archives: Cognitive science

Sparrows, Wendell Berry, Stanley Kunitz, and Paul Tillich

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I often perseverate. Just a few days ago I was perusing my library and pulled out two copies of the work of poet/essayist Wendell Berry and shared a couple of thoughts here. But this casual, even random perusal of my books has done what literature should do, it has stimulated me along a certain vein of thought. Thus my current “perseveration” which will lead me soon to even an heavy-duty German/American theologian of the 20th century, Paul Tillich. But first, from yesterday the notion of a sparrow being but “organized energy” has really grabbed me, as I realized that some similar “organized energy” grabbed me at birth…and even before…and is still here today. This is some vestige of primordial will operating through me which has led me to this phase of my life in which I bring emphasis to the metaphorical dimension of life. And there is no escape from this central entelechy in one’s body and soul, only modification so that we might more or less fit in which the entelechy that is guiding our species. Let me illustrated with the wisdom of poet Stanley Kunitz who once said in a poem entitled, “Layers” that, “I have walked through many lives, some of them my own. I am not the one I was though some remnant of being remains from which I struggle not to stray.” That “remnant of being” is a way of describing the very core of our soul, a primal energy that has been “harnessed” as is with the sparrow so to bring us to this moment in our life. The same could be said of our species.

This indomitable, irrepressible will, in my daily “perseveration’ in life, has brought me this morning to the aforementioned kindred spirit of mine, Paul Tillich. My next post, if this current flow of “perseveration” continues with me, will be his observation about human will and the complexities of “harnessing” it.

“Oops!”

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Hannah Arendt’s work has emboldened me recently to “assail” reality, blessed with some dimension of her “internal dialogue”. Taking a critical stance toward reality is a dangerous endeavor as the attempt to “view” reality entails an assumption that one is separate from it.  That very assumption can easily lead to sheer madness as it implicitly gives one the temptation to think with delight, “Oh boy, I’ve got it!  Lay down world and take it! I’m special, having a word from ‘on high’ that you need to listen to.”  The imperious attitude that one has achieved objectivity is the very same peril that I’m so “arrogantly” hoping to not share here.

The alienation that I labor with always brings to mind the quip from Emily Dickinson, “Life is over there…on a shelf” as if it was a book or a curio on a shelf.  That “blessing/curse” gifted us with the brilliant poetry of Dickinson though I have achieved only a critical viewpoint that I share here occasionally. “Reality” is a set of assumptions and biases that we live by, a body of “givens” that is necessary to be able to wake up in the morning without the task of “making sense” of our world all over again.  When we awaken in the morning, the implicitly agreed upon worldview will still be with us and we will again be able to put our pants on one leg at a time.  BUT, as this “reality” unfolds over the passing of time, it accrues sinister notions that need to be addressed.  In my life, that has involved disavowing, for example, that women are to be submissive to their husbands, that persons of color are inferior to we honkies, and that my spiritual tradition did not have toxic dimensions.  When critical thinking begins to set in, it can leave one with a sense of having become unmoored.  It is frightening to have the insipid experience that, “I don’t see things as I was taught to see them.” But I am today coming to accept this “internal dialogue” that insists that I have something to offer…but only to “offer” and not a view point that I can wield like a hammer.  Remember the old adage, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail?”

I like to describe “reality” as a mere “dog-and-pony show” to which we are taught to subscribe.  Shakespeare described it with the cryptic observation that it was “a tale told by an idiot.” His insight makes me cringe at times when I recall the many times this has been the case with me, and inevitably still is! But the humility of this insight makes it easier for me to utter the famous wisdom of Senator Ted Cruz when I am wrong, “Oops!”

Fritz Perls, “Let Go of Your Mind and Come to Your Senses.”

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The story of my life has been one of discovering my own body.  That is a silly or inane thing to even say from the perspective of my background; for, “what is more apparent than our body?” I would have asked back then. But my life experiences and clinical practice, not to mention explorations of the gamut of human sciences, has led me to realize the wisdom of the quip by Fritz Perls in the 1960’s, “Let go of your mind and come to your senses.”  Perls realized just our disconnected Western culture teaches us to be from our “senses” and the affective or “feeling” dimension of life.  Carl Jung had a relevant point, noting two kinds of thinking…a)directed thinking which is designed have us fit in with the social milieu we are born into; b) and imaginative thinking which allows us to find a bit of “free-play” with this necessary “directed thinking” so that we can avoid being an ideologue.

This “dis-embodied” thinking is very much related to the Western attitude that we are separate and distinct from mother nature, this wonderful earth, and see it as something to satisfy our ravenous appetites.  But disembodied thought is dangerous.  I’m reminded of a line from the poet W. B. Yeats, “O God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  He who sings a lasting song thinks in the marrow bone.”

Just this morning I ran across a relevant thought from D.H. Lawrence about this alienation from our earthly or earthy roots:

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox.  This is what is the matter with us.  We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.  D.H. Lawrence

 

Symbolic Communication and Susan K. Deri

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Susan K. Deri has been a profound influence in my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life.  I only discovered her two years ago with her book, “Symbolization and Creativity.”  In this riveting book, Deri explored the creation of the symbol as it emerges from instinctual energy which has a built-in capacity for creation of this “symbol.” It is the creation of the symbol that is necessary for “symbolic communication” in which primitive, old-brain “jabberings” (Carl Sandburg term) are shaped into what we know as “language” which is the means of “symbolic communication.”  Without this facility we would still be in the stage of grunts, moans, screams, et al which precedes our ability to “wrap a word” around our wishes, including the ability to “name an object”; anthropologically this is very much related to the Old Testament accomplishment of “naming the beasts of the field.”

One critical dimension of this creation of symbols is “distance” or detachment.  We start life inside an uroboric state in which we are not separate and distinct from what the Buddhists call “the world of 10,000 things.”  We can’t “see” a rock because we are not differentiated from it, we can’t “see” a tree because we are not differentiated from it, we can’t “see” momma’s breast because we are not separate from it.  “Close up everything becomes a blur,” declares Deri.  “There must be some separation between perceiver and perceived.  Symbols, in contradistinction to signs, provide this distance.”

But the creation of this “distance” is primeval; it is the “fall” from Edenic bliss into the limitation of form and the “fall” is so painful that we are insulated from the pain by repression.  This is the “loss” that led T.S. Eliot to declare, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” which is why we cling so desperately to our symbols, even if in doing so we disallow the symbol to accomplish its function of bridging the gap between instinctual experience and symbol.

Here I wish to introduce a relevant poem by a Mississippi poet, Edgar Simmons, who related this to an experience with the Divine:

THE MAGNETIC FIELD

Distance…which by definition
Indicates a separation from self
Is the healing poultice of metaphor,
Is the night-lighting of poetry.
As we allot to elements their weights
So to metaphor we need assign the
Weight of the ghost of distance.
Stars are stars to us
Because of distance: it is in the
Nothingness which clings us them
That we glory, tremble, and bow.
O what weight and glory lie abalance
In the stretch of vacant fields:
Metaphor: the hymn and hum of separation.

“Defining Yellow”…and Our Political Mess

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Japanese author, Haruki Murakami, has offered wisdom to this moment in United States history.  He notes that regardless of how high we build the walls, that which lies beyond artificial structures will still be present and a “danger” to the illusory safety found within. W. H. Auden offered a hint at the dark side of life within walls that are too tight, declaring, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  (Yes, all walls and boundaries are “artificial.”)

Boundary issues arise from the simple phenomenon of definition.  The definition of anything includes the exclusion of “everything else” so that a particular “thing” can be given attention, can have an identity.  For example, a blogging friend of mine has entitled her blog, “Defining Yellow.”  This young woman appears to understand that even a simple phenomenon as a color requires the ability to distinguish it from the rest of the color spectrum.  From the “ancient” memory of my own youth, I want to cry out, “Why hell, yellow cannot be defined! It simply is and attempting to define it is crazy!”  But yellow would not exist without the “supporting cast,” of the rest of the color spectrum which our conscious mind is able to shut out. To illustrate, imagine that everything in the world was yellow.  If that were the case, then yellow would not “exist”; for, the very word, “exist” means to “stand out” from a context.  (The word “exist” comes from the Latin terms “ex” and “stere,” “ex” meaning to stand out of and “stere” that which means, “pure.”)  If everything in our world was yellow, we would not be able to recognize yellow as it would be taken for granted.

Murakami explained the subtle peril of definition in this historical political moment we live in:

…no matter how high a wall we build to keep intruders out, no matter how strictly we exclude outsiders, no matter how much we rewrite history to suit us, we just end up damaging and hurting ourselves… just as all people have shadows, every society and nation, too, has shadows, (and) if there are bright, shining aspects, there will definitely be a counterbalancing dark side. If there’s a positive, there will surely be a negative on the reverse side…at times we tend to avert our eyes from the shadow, those negative parts. Or else try to forcibly eliminate those aspects. Because people want to avoid, as much as possible, looking at their own dark sides, their negative qualities. But in order for a statue to appear solid and three-dimensional, you need to have shadows. Do away with shadows and all you end up with is a flat illusion. Light that doesn’t generate shadows is not true light. You have to patiently learn to live together with your shadow and carefully observe the darkness that resides within you. Sometimes in a dark tunnel you have to confront your own dark side.

NOTE:  See “Defining Yellow” blog at—https://definingyellow.com/

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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Ego Integrity Amidst Constant Change

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Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me
Gabriel Marcel

This French philosopher echoes Shakespeare who assured us that “There is a divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.” It is easier to a linear-thinking mind to extrapolate from this the presence of “mind” (i.e. “god”) who is calling all the shots. I understand that line of thinking but I think it reduces God to finite terms. But I like the idea of being “rough hewn” and having the hope that there is some “method to the madness” of what I’ve called, and do call, my life which is working out the loose ends. And I really like Marcel’s description of “a mysterious principle which is ‘in connivance’ with me.” I like the idea of having a hand in my fate, being in “conniving” with this “mysterious principle” which I still like to call “God.”

A similar theme as presented here was put into words by the poet Stanley Kunitz in his poem “The Layers” when he posited the notion that through the vortex of changes that characterize our life there is some “remnant of being from which I struggle not to stray.” Psychologists call this consistency “ego integrity.”

BY STANLEY KUNITZ
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.

Here is a link to the entirety of “The Layers”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/54897)

Post-modernism and Consciousness

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Hamlet lamented in a famous soliloquy, “Thus conscience (i.e. consciousness) doeth make cowards of us all.” Shakespeare demonstrated in his plays and sonnets a profound grasp of the human condition and beautifully illustrated our foibles in various characters such as the Prince of Denmark.  Hamlet, as well as many Shakespearean characters, portray for us a soul tortured by consciousness and Hamlet noted in this same soliloquy that such “awareness” can stymie one into inaction.  In clinical lore of recent decades, I have often run across the “Hamlet Syndrome,” the plague of many young men…usually not women…who are so conflicted they have trouble making decisions, thus their many dreams and fancies, “lose the name of action.”

Another theme of Shakespeare was madness and his understanding of this common human malady was not unrelated to his insights about consciousness.  For, there is a “common-sense” consciousness that one is given by his community and one’s lot is to be immersed in it fully; and to step outside of this comfort zone for even a moment and become aware of “consciousness” is not unrelated to madness. Asking one to take this meta-cognitive leap is like asking a fish to see water. For this leap into meta-cognition for someone who has never doubted his way of looking at the world, i.e. his conscious grasp of the world, will find the sudden dawn of a perspective on his perspective frightening.  As philosopher Paul Ricoeur noted, “To have a perspective on one’s perspective is to somehow escape it” and this escape, or even its temptation is terrifying.  The terror of this leap is so threatening that most people live their entire life comfortably ensconced in the narrow view of the world they were given by their tribe, usually deemed as decreed valid by the gods/God.

But, awareness of this issue does not relieve one from the onslaught of unconscious influences. Consciousness flows from the depths of the heart and to be conscious is to realize that the depths of the heart are endless so that one can never bask in the comfort of thinking he has arrived with a wholly “conscious” grasp of the world.  The best one hope of doing is to own a very skewed view of the world and hope that as he continues to age his “skewing” might be more amenable to other viewpoints, leaving one free of the hubris of “objectivity.”

But damn it, it was so much easier in my youth when I mindlessly and dutifully imbibed of what the Apostle Paul described as “the wisdom of this world.”  Yes, in my case doubt was always there nagging at me but I always returned to my script and just doubled-down on unexamined truth, not yet willing to acknowledge that I was merely demonstrating the “bad faith” noted by Jean Paul Sartre. But this post-modern view of the world is, and will continue to be, totally incomprehensible to those who are still comfortably ensconced in a linear view of the world.  I grew up in that linear world and remember viewing askance what was then labeled as “relativism”, often affirming brazenly, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

But most of the people who still live in that mind-set are not bad people nor is their view of the world.  I’m sure an equal number of “bad people” see the world as I do.  “Badness” is not a function of our world view but of how much we are under its tyranny.  The more rigidly certain that our way is the “right way” the more liberty will we feel that to impose our will upon other people, even under the name of God!

Semiotics, Language, Meaning, & Politics

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Words do have meaning.  They have value.  I do not think it is trivial that in the Judaeo-Christian tradition we have been presented with the notion of Jesus being “the Word made flesh” though this notion is much deeper and more meaningful than I understood as a child.  I have been immersed in linguistics, semiotics and philosophy for the past 20 years or so and now understand that language is much more than meets the “eye.”  Language, i.e. “the Word”, is a gut-level dimension of our experience and its value extends deeply into this “gut”, or heart, what some label the unconscious.  Words not only extend into this subterranean dimension of our lives but they arise from those depths and are essentially what makes us human.  (See Sandburg poem at conclusion)

Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst who was one of the earliest figures in my venture into this heart-realm argued that our very identity, on some level, is basically a verbal structure which I think provides further understanding of the admonishment of Jesus, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”  Our words reveal who we are, or as someone said, “Our words become us” and as the Bible teaches us, “As a man thinketh, so is he.”

But the value of words is multi-dimensional.  There is the very superficial dimension which allows us to perfunctorily live in our culture and offer a “convincing performance” each day of our life.  Without this level of verbal experience, any culture would collapse because the hidden dimension of language, that of “meaning”, would be too intense for most people.  In the words of T. S. Eliot, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  Yet in this superficial level of experience, “common sense reality”, language even then must be offered respect.  Words do matter including the context in which they are used.  The example the contextual issue is often put on the table with is the observation that though one might have free speech, he does not have the right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater.  Words do convey “fact” in some respect even though some of us pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals admittedly like to question things like “fact!”  But the “factual” world must be respected if a social body is to cohere in a meaningful fashion.  If our political leaders start to play fast and easy with facts, i.e. with truth, then the very fabric of society is threatened.

And, you might have guessed, this brings me to Trumpism.  I will offer a link to a story in the Washington Post which addresses this verbal disintegration that threatens us.  Trump has ushered in what is being called a “fact free” world in which people can say anything without anything to back it up and will get by with it.  People will not be held accountable for their words, which was so pointedly demonstrated with Mr. Trump during the campaign when he said the most outrageous things and his followers completely overlooked them.  Even now as he is preparing for inauguration he and his transition team and continuing to demonstrate “fast and easy” use of language and now even trying to justify it.  Words do not matter to them.

This is relevant to an earlier point that words emerge from the depths of our heart.  In Trump’s heart there is grave “porosity of boundaries” so that he speaks and lives with disdain for common sensibilities and decorum, paralleling his life-style.  He was right when he declared months ago in the campaign the campaign that “I could shoot someone in the streets of Manhattan” and not suffer at the polls.  He was exactly right.  He early in life discovered that no one would set limits for him and could steam-roll over any obstacle before him.  The American electorate has been steam-rolled and he is still being propped up by his supporters, many of whom continue to claim that God “has raised him up” to Make America Great Again.  And I can’t help but wonder if Trump is the mouth-piece for some heavily repressed dimension of his supporter’s heart

For perspective on this emerging fact-free zone, read the following (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-post-truth-world-of-the-trump-administration-is-scarier-than-you-think/2016/12/02/ebda952a-b897-11e6-b994-f45a208f7a73_story.html?utm_term=.cffac584016f)

A great poem by Carl Sandburg about our words rising out of our hidden depths.  (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/jabberers/ http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/jabberers/)

Thinking “Deeply” Out of the Box

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One of my followers on this blog, and a personal friend, shed interesting light on this notion of “thinking outside of the box.”

“It seems likely to me that thinking outside the box is impossible without then thinking from inside a larger box which contains that previous box. So what we encounter is a collection of telescoping boxes. The most we can hope for is that with each escape from a box that holds us captive, we are then held captive in a more liberating box.”

This gentleman’s observation and the subject matter I’ve put on the table here brought to my mind the Christian notion of “the fall” and the resulting fate of being able to only “see through a glass darkly.”  For, this “fall”, if one deigns to approach it from a metaphorical/mythical dimension, was our expulsion from the blissful of unity with all things, i.e. the Garden of Eden, into the realm of symbolic form.  That Divine spark with which we are born, that “Christ child,” needs to enter into the world of form so that we can experience the joy, and the frustration, of the human enterprise.  Aesychlus, thousands of years ago, referred to this event as “having been banished thought-ward” as he began his heroic journey.

But becoming a “thinking human being” is both a joy and a curse.  We can have the joy of human consciousness as we revel in the incredible mystery of our brief sojourn through this time-space continuum.  But the “curse” is always a temptation, that mistake of taking our thoughts too seriously and falling into the delusion that with them we have captured reality.  This makes me think of a bumper sticker I saw recently, “Don’t believe everything you are thinking.”

My reader is very astute.  We never can escape “the box” but with awareness of our confinement to human form for this brief moment we can allow our reality to be more fluid and can be less obnoxious about our view point.  And, alas and alack, this even applies to me as I discourse here and even, occasionally in real time!

This makes me think of a verse from W. H. Auden:

In the desert of my heart,

Let the healing fountain start.

In this prison of my days,

Teach this poor man how to praise.

 

Epistemology and Trumpism

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A friend recently quipped, “Get the behind me thoughts,” a play on the famous words of Jesus when under temptation from his nemesis said, “Get the behind me Satan.”  But the quip contains great wisdom for our thoughts are more powerful than we can ever imagine and, yes, are usually the way in which dark forces penetrate our reality. A New Age guru Mike Dooley quips, “Thoughts are things.  Choose the good ones.”  Dooley recognizes that we have the built-in capacity to take pause with the thoughts that flow through our mind and provide a “reality check” to them.  But it is easier to never question them and be merely carried along by the current of our ideological pre-conceptions without ever bothering to subject any of them to scrutiny.  Most of us do this in the subtleties of our heart, in our “pre-conscious” so that some things that pass through our mind to say are filtered out in the interest of social appropriateness and wisdom. Persons who have Tourette’s Syndrome demonstrate what happens when that filter is gravely impaired.

And Donald Trump gives us another example of someone with an impaired filter.  For example, having been taunted about the size of his penis by Senator Mark Rubio, Trump disregarded all decorum and propriety and reassured the American population that “there is no problem there.”  And Tony Schwartz, the ghost writer of his book, “The Art of the Deal” has described Trump as not having a filter, having only a stream of consciousness reality and a penchant for saying things without any understanding of how they will appear to the public.  And with this impaired cognitive filter and his shoot-from-the hips style, Trump has routinely tossed ideas out which needed to be presented more thoughtfully or not at all.  But with this impaired judgment, he has appeared to his base as somebody who “tells it like it is” or “tells the truth” and is not like the more polished politician, “Crooked Hillary.”  Therefore, his speeches have been a font of red meat which has impassioned his base even to the point of hinting at violence should he not be elected.

Trump is the classic ideologue and is now the standard bearer for a political party which has at its base millions of people that fall into the same category.  They are ensconced in a morass of unquestioned assumptions, assumptions which are now under assault by the relentless grind of modernity. But their response, when threatened, is like that of Trump, merely to double down and shout their dogma even more loudly.  Ideologues are trapped inside a self-referential world consisting only of carefully selected ideas which buttress their preconceptions.  When they are subjected to a critical interview, they cannot handle it and often appear ridiculous in their response.  I have Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas in mind here.  But there are others.  .

But, I must issue a caveat in closing.  Most of my country and my world are concrete thinkers and if they suddenly were “enlightened” into a post-modern world, our entire world would immediately collapse!  The entire spectrum of human cognition has a place though at some point each vein of thought on either extreme, if unchecked, can easily cross into sheer lunacy.  And most concrete thinkers, and what Trump called “my uneducated voters”, are very good people and in a sense the backbone of any tribe.  I know.  I was raised in a culture of concrete thinking people and those people were very good people and I’m very grateful to them.  But what has happened in my country is that the economic and political elites have ruthlessly exploited this base of their party and have manipulated them into giving them their political support even while wielding the reins of the government for the primary purpose of amassing and concentrating power and wealth