A reply to an associate...
I'm getting your emails. I'm just deeply buried in New Job Changeover Syndrome. Alas, I haven't communicated much with my beloved family, other than Lisa, in weeks.
Regarding our non-profit group, the participants are older activists, and one retired Director of Administration from Bayer. Each grew too weary of essential social change initiatives breaking down before their promise was realized due to lack of attention to the group's process and failure to practice conflict as an art. Our process is: to be together regularly and tend to the way we relate. Sometimes we have felt more faithful to that than others. We seek ways to build the process arts as a field that recognizes itself as such so that it may take up its obligation to work overtly and collectively toward peace. We have engaged in projects when willing and able, and would like to support other people (with our 501c3 and existing finance tracking infrastructure) to do the same. We often struggle with identity issues because our available energy, pace, and needs vary widely, but I am most often proud of us for continuing in community (when it feels warm and close and even more when it doesn't) for as long as we have. Now it is ABC which provides my community building services to Aiki Extensions as their Executive Director.
I've also delayed my response because, especially over email, it may become difficult to really get to a place of deep exchange. I've been trying to figure out a way to explore that without either writing all day or exposing you to the vast and foggy terrain of my private online work area and dissertation writing (my "work in progress" wiki) which is afflicted with my baroque prose style and definitely not a quick read.
I suppose the dilemma (and fascination of learning from each other, should we decide to) is in what seems like it might be our primary point of departure - the kind of hope we practice. Getting at what I mean might take a minute and I hope you'll forgive me if my way of approach is a bit inaccessible. I'm working to refine that.
The legacy of the historical surge of monotheism (singular divinity and truth) is a kind of literalism that costumes itself as perfection. Perfectionism is not friendly to humanity and makes humanity unfriendly to itself and the soul of the world. This takes shape in the fantasy that absolute precision is possible and therefore absolute power in sufficient applied rationality. Absolutes of this kind have always belonged to divinity in the human experience. As a result, Science is imagined and followed religiously as revealing The Truth rather than supporting one method of inquiry, and the mechanistic metaphors of industrialism (efficiency, progress, development, etc.) comprise a new and overpowering fantasy of divinity, rather than an essential subcategory in a larger idea of meaning.
Psychology emerged alongside the global transition to industrial domination and is firmly shaped by the scientistic imagination of perfection (health) believed in by medical doctors who were its first practitioners. As psychology became ubiquitous in the 20th century its hypothetical and imaginative jargon ("obsessive-compulsive", "The Unconscious", "well-adjusted") was transformed into literalistic diagnoses as though they were proven facts and became everyday words. With these reductionistic explanations for the utterly mysterious firmly fixed as lenses in the frames of perception, contemporary people are almost entirely estranged from the making of meaning through sympathy for and understanding of story, soul, and sorrow. The mechanistic/medical fantasy of health continues to reform what began as "depth" psychology (and healing itself) such that learning how to live, suffer and celebrate the making of meaning, and then die well have fallen beneath the hooves of stampeding ego-psychology. "Progress" is now equivalent with Good and "Self Help" has become the ultimate aim.
I hope we will learn to prefer to cultivate sympathy and understanding for the vast realm of experience that the self cannot help, is painful, Other, and therefore rejected as illegitimate. It is what we refuse to consider deeply and end up denying that causes "failure of imagination" that precludes honest preparation for real suffering. This also leads to ineffective action that virtually abets painfully obvious stock villains bombing other people's children to gain control "essential to our national interests and security". The remedy for this I call "martial nonviolence" - that use of shared power that insists on practicing arts of peace, defined as conflict done well such that all participants in a given system get support to secure what every human needs and have repeated chances to get some of what they want as well.
In the industrial mind it is obligatory to expect to never be sick, never suffer from pain, fulfill all your dreams, and live to an endlessly postponed (more cryo-frozen and botoxic than ripe) old age, but that is not balanced and appropriate for being human. I hope to be sick and suffer legitimately but as briefly as possible, relate to my dreams as though they are invitations to an autonomous realm wherein my capacity for wonder and understanding may become more sophisticated, and live to an age at which I may be at least a bit excited at the prospect of dying well and meeting whatever might or might not come next.
I lost my child with no reason given in December of 2006. Holding my suddenly and inexplicably dead first-born in my arms removed all doubt about the fantasy that it is possible never to suffer. The experience did not damage me so that I cannot love life and adopt a darker view to match my inner loss. Rather, it stripped away a natural privilege of childhood - the illusion which insists on enthroning simplistic Hope for an endlessly sunny future in the legitimate place of powerlessness and sorrow. Hope, like all the other gods, is only a usurper when it insists it reigns alone.
Re-reading this it becomes clear that I have gone on too long and abstrusely, as I feared. I hope this finds you in a patient frame of mind and that you will forgive me my excesses.
Brandon
P.S. I haven't read the book you mention but would like hear what you think of it. If you'd like to read someone who says what I mean much more accessibly you might read Thomas Moore, or more precisely - James Hillman.
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I'm getting your emails. I'm just deeply buried in New Job Changeover Syndrome. Alas, I haven't communicated much with my beloved family, other than Lisa, in weeks.
Regarding our non-profit group, the participants are older activists, and one retired Director of Administration from Bayer. Each grew too weary of essential social change initiatives breaking down before their promise was realized due to lack of attention to the group's process and failure to practice conflict as an art. Our process is: to be together regularly and tend to the way we relate. Sometimes we have felt more faithful to that than others. We seek ways to build the process arts as a field that recognizes itself as such so that it may take up its obligation to work overtly and collectively toward peace. We have engaged in projects when willing and able, and would like to support other people (with our 501c3 and existing finance tracking infrastructure) to do the same. We often struggle with identity issues because our available energy, pace, and needs vary widely, but I am most often proud of us for continuing in community (when it feels warm and close and even more when it doesn't) for as long as we have. Now it is ABC which provides my community building services to Aiki Extensions as their Executive Director.
I've also delayed my response because, especially over email, it may become difficult to really get to a place of deep exchange. I've been trying to figure out a way to explore that without either writing all day or exposing you to the vast and foggy terrain of my private online work area and dissertation writing (my "work in progress" wiki) which is afflicted with my baroque prose style and definitely not a quick read.
I suppose the dilemma (and fascination of learning from each other, should we decide to) is in what seems like it might be our primary point of departure - the kind of hope we practice. Getting at what I mean might take a minute and I hope you'll forgive me if my way of approach is a bit inaccessible. I'm working to refine that.
The legacy of the historical surge of monotheism (singular divinity and truth) is a kind of literalism that costumes itself as perfection. Perfectionism is not friendly to humanity and makes humanity unfriendly to itself and the soul of the world. This takes shape in the fantasy that absolute precision is possible and therefore absolute power in sufficient applied rationality. Absolutes of this kind have always belonged to divinity in the human experience. As a result, Science is imagined and followed religiously as revealing The Truth rather than supporting one method of inquiry, and the mechanistic metaphors of industrialism (efficiency, progress, development, etc.) comprise a new and overpowering fantasy of divinity, rather than an essential subcategory in a larger idea of meaning.
Psychology emerged alongside the global transition to industrial domination and is firmly shaped by the scientistic imagination of perfection (health) believed in by medical doctors who were its first practitioners. As psychology became ubiquitous in the 20th century its hypothetical and imaginative jargon ("obsessive-compulsive", "The Unconscious", "well-adjusted") was transformed into literalistic diagnoses as though they were proven facts and became everyday words. With these reductionistic explanations for the utterly mysterious firmly fixed as lenses in the frames of perception, contemporary people are almost entirely estranged from the making of meaning through sympathy for and understanding of story, soul, and sorrow. The mechanistic/medical fantasy of health continues to reform what began as "depth" psychology (and healing itself) such that learning how to live, suffer and celebrate the making of meaning, and then die well have fallen beneath the hooves of stampeding ego-psychology. "Progress" is now equivalent with Good and "Self Help" has become the ultimate aim.
I hope we will learn to prefer to cultivate sympathy and understanding for the vast realm of experience that the self cannot help, is painful, Other, and therefore rejected as illegitimate. It is what we refuse to consider deeply and end up denying that causes "failure of imagination" that precludes honest preparation for real suffering. This also leads to ineffective action that virtually abets painfully obvious stock villains bombing other people's children to gain control "essential to our national interests and security". The remedy for this I call "martial nonviolence" - that use of shared power that insists on practicing arts of peace, defined as conflict done well such that all participants in a given system get support to secure what every human needs and have repeated chances to get some of what they want as well.
In the industrial mind it is obligatory to expect to never be sick, never suffer from pain, fulfill all your dreams, and live to an endlessly postponed (more cryo-frozen and botoxic than ripe) old age, but that is not balanced and appropriate for being human. I hope to be sick and suffer legitimately but as briefly as possible, relate to my dreams as though they are invitations to an autonomous realm wherein my capacity for wonder and understanding may become more sophisticated, and live to an age at which I may be at least a bit excited at the prospect of dying well and meeting whatever might or might not come next.
I lost my child with no reason given in December of 2006. Holding my suddenly and inexplicably dead first-born in my arms removed all doubt about the fantasy that it is possible never to suffer. The experience did not damage me so that I cannot love life and adopt a darker view to match my inner loss. Rather, it stripped away a natural privilege of childhood - the illusion which insists on enthroning simplistic Hope for an endlessly sunny future in the legitimate place of powerlessness and sorrow. Hope, like all the other gods, is only a usurper when it insists it reigns alone.
Re-reading this it becomes clear that I have gone on too long and abstrusely, as I feared. I hope this finds you in a patient frame of mind and that you will forgive me my excesses.
Brandon
P.S. I haven't read the book you mention but would like hear what you think of it. If you'd like to read someone who says what I mean much more accessibly you might read Thomas Moore, or more precisely - James Hillman.
Labels: daily
| posted by Unknown @ 7/29/2008 07:01:00 PM
