{Note: Here is a further introduction to the “Cointegrative” concept. It was written for a online group before I hand coined that word (“I used the word “integrative” for a while), but I have gone through and updated the wording as well as making a few other changes and additions--I-P}
I want to say something, as conversation opener, about Motivation and Intention
In Healthy Culture (and in Cointegrative Science, the name I am giving to the part of healthy Culture that deals more or less with the mind, with Cosmology, Logic, Meaning etc..) there is the assumption of the primary togetherness of Subject and Object, of Inner and Outer, of Self and World. This assumption of fundamental togetherness has some surprising implications since it actually suggests that Both the idea of changing the world first and then perhaps changing oneself (the "political" idea) as well as the other Idea of first changing oneself and then the world (the "spiritual" idea) are both misconceived objectives. From the point of view of fundamental togetherness, it is only possible to change and heal the inner and the outer together, at the same time; because that is the fundamental way they exist at all.
What this means in practice is that,in taking the political idea as primary, the goals of one-sidedly outward activism will inherently be distorted, and sabotaged by the degree to which the unattended inner wounds and fear-based inner issues are distorting the political diagnosis and action. In such a case the impulse to such one-sided extroversion can be understood as something motivated by those very ignored inner issues themselves as a way of self protection, the ego being, after all, nothing if not one-sided. But the nemesis to the fear-based hubris implied in such one-sided activism can only be the ultimate failure of an agenda that was misconceived and falsely motivated from the start (though unfortunately none of this might ever be admitted by those involved).
This is because, even considering that someone or some group has success outwardly, and acquires some degree of power or influence, its not really that person who even has the power its the persons “shit”,( their egoic sick culture) that has it because, (owning to being unacknowledged and/or neglected) its the shit that “has” the person who has the power. This phenomenon is the source of all the corruption that makes whatever was genuine and healthy in seemingly well meaning political movements unsustainable over time and that assures some eventual reversion to a variation on the theme of the original status quo of sick culture (Consider the current state of South Africa after Mandela or modern India after Gandhi--to mention two of the most heart breaking aftermaths of political/social "success" ) There can be no sustainable justice, socially or ecologically without dealing with ones shit both inwardly and outwardly as the primary motivating intention behind any action.
This is essentially because Justice is basically a dynamic in which everybody is dealing with their own inner and outer shit (their own version of our shared, collective shit). When I am not acknowledging and dealing with my sick culture somebody else has to deal with it (as well as dealing with their own if they are trying to be in recovery) and this usually proves to be too much, so that what happens is that the shit get passed down stream literally and figuratively with the ultimate result that Gaia ends up having to deal with it (and with us). Given the fact (well, my belief) that "dealing with ones shit" (the positive way to say this would be something like "learning, growing and maturing as an Individual-Person") is really the whole point of our being in the world, and so the only source of real Meaning and Joy, the current situation it not only unjust, but, like all evil, really really Stupid.
There might still be an objection that "Their" shit is so much worse that "Ours" as to belie any comparison, so that what I am saying here is just ridiculous. There are many replies to this. One is that it seems to me that all the sick culture works together; that it is "synentropic" (if you will excuse a neologism); how would Hitler have faired for example if every body in Germany and elsewhere were concientiously dealing with their sick culture? Obviously the "cultural immune system" must have be very weak to succumb to such simplistic rhetoric. In such a case the untreated and seemingly harmless forms of sick culture in the people at large; forms of sick culture like, naiveté, nationalism, genderism, conformity, etc all worked together "synentropically" to produce the war and the Holocaust. Connected with this idea is the understanding that there is "Sick-Culture of Omission" as well as "Sick Culture of Commission", and that the former, though relatively invisible contributes directly to the latter and is arguably even more important.
Having, I think been pretty persuasive about the one-sided outward orientations, I do not want to be misleading and vindicate equally onesided "inwardness". Exposing the false dichotomy of the usual attitude equally implies that the other form of onesideness; the illusion that political quietism or private "healing" is really even possible let alone Spiritual, is just as often an equally fear-based retreat from the truth; a "crime of omission" against the world and one of commission (essentially Fraud) against ourselves. There is no way of avoiding being implicated in the destruction of the world around us and I am not sure there is any good reason for wanting to be unless such personal "innocence" would be efficacious in stopping it from happening. It needs once and for all to be realized that dissociated "private", and comodifiable conceptions of "Health and Spirituality" (such as proliferate both in mainstream and alternative new age medicine and culture) represent both Sick conceptions of Health and Spiritless conceptions of Spirituality.
Of course I don't mean here to advocate some integration of the blaming, one-sided, phony sort of politics prevalent in our sick culture as a remedy for this quietistic "Spiritual" illusion; two forms of one-sidedness do not equal balance anymore than sticking ones head in the oven and ones feet in the freezer amount to a temperate and balanced body temperature. Simply alternating the freezer and the oven doesn't make sense either since in the case that one tries to alternate the "spiritual" with the "political", the false separation of the two cannot but lead to situations in which, just when ones attention should be 90% focused on oneself and ones own shit, it is focused to that degree on the shit of world, and visa versa; just when I should be emphasizing some relatively civil or local responsibility implying a more extroverted orientation, fear will distract the attention toward some perfectionistic introverted search for perfect “self-mastery” or something...the ego, monkey-mind, or what ever you want to call it, really is just like that...
From this point of view then, the whole the issue needs to be become something like: "what gesture can I make both in this moment and in the future, to catalyze my own healing together-with that of others and the world?". On might also phrase the issue as how can I be "Soulfully Political" and "Politically Spiritual" (I actually prefer the word "soulful" in this context, since being "Spiritual" has too much of an air of having "arrived", which to me is basically laughable for anyone who is still hanging around in this dimension). Still another take on the problem would be how to be "Political" without being "Phony" and how to be "Spiritual" or "Soulful" with out being alienated and irresponsible, or (put positively) how to move toward an authentic and responsible Individual-Personhood?
To call such an intention (the intention to effect and realize both Inner and Outer healing), an "objective" would be misleading, since the idea of an Objective implies a fundamental separation--if not necessarily of the subject from the "object" (the inner from the outer)--at least of the future from the present, and past (and eternity too for that matter). To call it "Integrative", as I have done in the past still seems too onesided and doesn't imply the paradoxical inner/outer essence of the intention. So instead of talking about the above mentioned intention as an objective or an integrative, I call it a "Cointegrative" (pronounced "Co-in-TEG-ra-tive").
Since intentions of inner/outer healing (and I am asserting that this is what one should mean by having truly "Good" Intentions) naturally imply an admission of inner as well as outer sickness, being involved in Cointegrative Science and Healthy Culture, means being involved in an ongoing process of experiment, hypothesis and theory regarding how best to understand and "treat" ones own sickness in terms of the tentatively normative assumptions of healthy culture. Of course this must involve some idea (at least a theory) of ones own subjective individuality, including ones "shit" and Phoniness; ones own subjective sick culture. It also means some idea as well about how that fits into and the outer sick culture that is around one, this then implying some idea of how to act so as to increasingly challenge both these things in the same gesture (which would then be the experiment).
Cointegrative Scientists (Individual-Persons involved in the experimental “cultural pilot project” of healthy culture) are thus also Recovering Alienated-Phonies ("Alienation" being the opposite of "Personhood" a "Phoniness" being the Opposite of authentic "Individuality"), and are trying to sustain a Cointegrative intention by definition. But though its true that, in some ways, the overall outline of this situation is the same for everyone so involved, the practical, Individual details of the recovery process is something that must take into account the details of each individual-persons inner and outer situation and story, and so deal also the variations on the common theme of healing sick culture inwardly and outwardly together.
For example, how do I as a Myers-Briggs INTJ, as an enneagram 5, (I could add many other ways of tentatively understanding and talking about my subjective situation) successfully challenge my tendency to withdrawal and, judge--and conceal judgment, (all in inappropriate and unhealthy ways), how do I challenge this IN SUCH A WAY THAT the outer world is also maximally moved toward Healthy Culture? My whole life (at least the deliberate intentional part) is my reply, my experiment, regarding that question. This post itself is part of that experiment for me. For by sharing this blog, I hope that I am making a gesture toward moving out of enneagram 5-like secrecy, and seclusion in a way that will hopefully lead me towards a somewhat more 8-like role in the world generally, which (if my assessment of my own personality and Cointegrative path has not itself been distorted by my own sick culture) seems to be the path of healing for me.
For obvious reasons, having a Cointegrative is not something that is particularly flattering to the competitive, one-sided ego any more the growth and maturity of any kind are. Self-righteously focusing on what one thinks of as ones "piece of the Truth" and rather then ones "piece of the Lie" is certainly more fun at least superficially. All the bonding and blaming (you might even call it “Blame-Bonding”) of what is normally called “Solidarity” is involved in such an attitude. And even the self-deprecation, and shame/guilt of focusing only on ones "piece of the Lie" (with the guru or the psychiatrist) seems to be preferable (i suppose because it feels more secure and simple) than the more dynamic, paradoxical attitude that having a cointegrative intention and understanding involves. But such preferences are born only from inexperience (and from too much experience of unhealthy rigid, either/or thinking and feeling) ; it is just the presence of both the Lie and the Truth in all of us, in ever changing proportions, each one of the two manifesting unexpectedly to different degrees at different times, that make us all essentially equal and (when acknowledged) capable of a kind of real Friendship, Compassion and Togetherness that would not be possible otherwise.
But I want to say more about solidarity since I know that the lack of solidarity evinced by the political Left is often seen as the main reason for its ineffectiveness against the more organized Right wing. What I have said already implies that I think such factional solidarity cannot produce a sustainable society because it separates acknowledging and dealing with shared individual and collective inner shit from acknowledging and dealing with shared outer shit (really of acknowledging the existence of shared outer shit). What I want to say now (and in future posts) is that it is not only unsustainable but unnecessary. A healthy "Cultural Twelve Step Program”, in which we help each other in recovering from Alienated-Phoniness will necessarily involve actively helping each other live up to both our inner and outer (“vertical” and “horizontal”) responsibilities as Individual-Persons and in a way that will challenge and educate the dominant culture like nothing else will. But this is something I will show in a future post.
Before I close , I do want to mention that the Cointegrative Intention and understanding I am describing here is the centerpiece of a kind of “Coinferential” (Conferential) Logic and discourse which is part of the cosmology and ritual of Healthy Culture. Suffice to say here that the intention behind any form of discourse, Logical or otherwise, in large part determines its form and constitution, and that the dominant Logic and discourse is unconsciously formed by its alienated and exclusive intention and understanding. The kind of Cointegratively Conferential logic and discourse I intend to describe proceeds from different, non-alienated assumptions, understandings and intentions, and represents a collaborative rather than competitive or collusive way of talking, thinking, and being that will certainly play its part in any experimental ritual of healthy culture. But again, more of this in a future post.
For now, I want all of the above to serve as prolog to is the question of what you think the details of your own Cointegrative may be. In the light of what you know and believe about healthy Culture, how do you think you might further your own healing together with my own, And that of the world outside of us? How can we increasingly befriend (listen to, support, consider and challenge) each other, ourselves and the world in such a way that healing will come from it? Can participation in this group even lead to that?
Since, we don’t really even know each other much yet even virtually, I don’t necessarily expect any answers at the moment (although I would appreciate comments and questions). For now I just want to explain this idea of the Cointegrative as my intention and motivation for starting this tribe and ask if you think you could share in it--if only experimentally.
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