Good Sense and the Meaning of Life

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Whether or not we choose to accept it, we are all Philosophers and have some working hypothesis regarding the Meaning of Life that, however unconsciously, guides our actions. To regard Life as "meaningless" is as much a philosophical and even religious position as any other on the subject. To say that the question is unimportant is to make a value judgment that is guided by some conception of Truth, importance, reality, and meaning. Perhaps we avoid going into the matter because of the dread that our working answers to such questions of ultimate meaning are not substantial or sturdy enough to withstand much scrutiny and that the real Truth about the matter (which we all think we "know" at some level) is unbearable. And perhaps some eschew or abandon conscious inquiry because an intuitive despair of finding an answer that would make any difference or do any good. But, as we will see, Cointegrative Science, involves a theory as to this question of the Meaning of Life that is not only intuitively, emotionally, and empirically obvious, but surprisingly has much potential for making a difference and doing some good.

"When the shoes fit, the foot is forgotten; when the belt fits, the belly is forgotten. The essence of this observation by the Taoist sage Chang Tzu, when translated into the cognitive idiom of the West, is the concept of "Wholesthesia" or "the relative silence of health". As with the shoes and the belt, so with a well "fitting" or functioning organ, muscle, or cell in a living human being. The conscious awareness or sensation of any such parts of ourselves is usually (though not always) a sign of some relative problem or malfunction in that area, where as our relative forgetfulness of them is generally a sign of their healthy functioning.  All of this is a fact or every day experience.

Why not call this state of affairs "Homeostasis" as modern medicine does, and drop the neologism? Because the phenomenological approach of the concept of "Wholesthesia" points up, in its logical implications, profound and until now, collectively unconscious truths that the other terminology obscures. The word "wholesthesia", which has the etymological meaning of "complete" ("holos") sense perception ("aesthetikos") reveals, like some proof of socio-psychoanalysis, the Freudian –or perhaps I should say "Jungian"—slip of our collective unconscious involved in the currency and use of word "anesthesia". This word has the etymological meaning of "without" ("an") "sense perception" and relates to what might be called the "relative silence of sickness." This is because the lack of feedback involved is, far from being a sign of health, usually a suppression of information to the contrary.

What can we make of these concepts and how can we relate these two phenomena? Well, in modern medicine there is the recognized (though of course dreaded) progression of local anesthesia to general anesthesia and possibly leading to coma and even to death as numbness and the chemicals inducing it, is made or mistakenly allowed to effect progressively deeper levels of the organism. This, of course, is a dynamic of disintegration.

It is possible though, through recourse to the "opposing" concept of Wholesthesia, to map out a dynamic or process of cointegration in the opposite direction through a kind of inverse analogy:

The phrase "Local Wholesthesia," to begin this analogy, is meant to describe the relative silence of health, as it exists in all of us, as described above, in those local and relatively circumscribable areas of our bodies of which we are relatively unconscious. A relatively healthy liver, for example.

From local wholesthesia we can infer the possibility of "General Wholesthesia". This refers to a general state of physical "Lightness" and effortless functioning that begins to involve the whole of the physical organism in a more inclusive way. To be sure, the experience of this rare state in comparison to a previous one of less than healthy functioning will be very noticeable at first. However this awareness and appreciation is up held more by memory and imagination, and by its alterations with local Wholesthesia, than by any essentially "positive" quality of the state of being itself, and my be expected to pass after a given time.

Just as the application of General Anesthesia can go awry, so that the patient in an operation slips into coma or "sleep", so can the state of General Wholesthesia, as it penetrates more deeply into the nervous system, lead to what may be called "Phenomenesthesia" or "Awakening." I infer this state to be sense of the totality of phenomena from a center, which has ceased to be the relatively unconscious one of the "ego" and to have become the relatively conscious one of the Soul (am tempted to speak of ego-body and Soul-Body here because I am anxious that neither of these words be understood in a pure psychological or subjective sense; both Ego and Soul are meant be understood as expression of the Mind-Body and not just the "Mind").
But to extending our inverse analogy; the chief difference between coma and Death is that coma is a possibly reversible state of affairs whereas Death by definition is not. Precisely the same distinction can be made between Phenomenesthesia (or "Awakening") and Numinesthesia (or "Life"). The experience of awakening can be temporary. The individual may fall back into a closed unconcious state and forget his or her Soul-Nature almost completely. But the conscious experience of Life is understood as an abiding sense of the Numinous "Whatness" of Being that is somehow permanent and irreversible. To be Alive is to be in the presence of The Ultimate, The Holy, in a conscious way. A state of mystical awareness is being experienced by that is paradoxically consistent with the limitations of everyday life. This is to Live out of in ones Soul.

And does the process end there? The state of conscious awareness of Spirit, of the Presence of "God" is not the same as Union with that Presence. Soul is not the same as Self-Nature and even this is not quite Freedom or Spirit. In this manifestation of SelfNature, embodied soul is presumably fully realized and transcended leaving only that which is purely Self and so also Purely Nature and which is the individuation of the Tao, the Great Mystery, The Freedom which transcends Identity and even entity. Freedom is arbitrarily predicable and it is unpredictable and yet Freedom and Life are the "strange attractors" and final cause of all evolution and of the world itself. And to say even this about it is perhaps to say too much.

To summarize so far: just as there is a progression from local Anesthesia, to General Anesthesia, to Coma, to Death, so also is there a progression from Local Wholesthesia to General Wholesthesia to Awakening (Phenomenesthesia) to Life (Numinesthesia). And beyond (as well as within) all this there is Freedom or Spirit as something like the immanent/transcendent final cause and ultimate source of all of the above. To experience mostly only ego is to be only unconsciously aware of all of this. To be in any given moment consciously aware of all of this is to be, relatively speaking, in ones awakened Soul. To be stabilized in this Soul-Nature is to be Alive. To progress in ones Soul-nature is to progressively realize (or be realized by) SelfNature, which is the Door to Spirit or Freedom itself.

GOOD SENSE

In the light of all this we might regard our normal state of being as manifestly somnambulant amnesia, dissociation and only rudimentary consciousness. We exist for the most part in an unhealthy and unconscious "synthesis" of the "thesis" of anesthesia and "antithesis" of wholesthesia, which is, not stable synthesis but rather a dialectic of progressive degeneration. To become conscious and sensible of this condition is already to partially transcend it and enter a dynamic of cointegrative, conscious, and healing synthesis, which is nevertheless also of both wholesthesia and anesthesia. This sensibility intuits, feels, and understands the reality of Life and Freedom as ultimate goals as well as their reality in the here and now of a specific situation. It is a progressive intellectual moral and physical reorientation and an indwelling confirmation of Healthy Knowledge. This sensibility and understanding is the opening of the ego-body to the Soul-nature that is none other than the Good Sense of our title.

If Anesthesia is "Nonsense" and Wholesthesia is "Complete Sense", than "Good Sense" (tentatively "Enaesthesia"), is that sensibility that recognizes and welcomes them both and yet distinguishes them from each other. It does this in the context of what we have said of their ultimate implications all well as in the context of everyday life. It is the innate understanding of the Soul active  even in the ego in each real and definite everyday situation. Good Sense  does not exclude nonsense (anesthesia), which it intuitively understands as a necessary and even essential aspect of what is recognized to be the beings evolution toward Spirit. It is the healthy instinct/intuition to aim for an overall predominance of wholesthesia over anesthesia in the context of the peculiarities of the individual Soul-nature and situation. Abstractly and morally, the intention is to move toward greater wholesthesia and Life. Practically and ethically the dynamic is more sophisticated and evolves a kind of "beating to windward"; a balancing of exigent "weaknesses" and limitations against strengths and possibilities in an ultimately progressive way.

This more sophisticated existential dynamic involves the coordination and balancing of attention to the future, the past, and the eternal with and in the present moment. It is an improvisational sensibility that makes good use even of mistakes, which are in fact indispensable to its manifestation. For without the recognition of the redeeming complementarity and preexistent paradoxical synthesis of nonsense (anesthesia) and complete sense (wholesthesia) in real experience, Awakening, Life, and Freedom would be Meaningless even as ideal orienting types, because one "could not get there from here". Good Sense is this sense of the mutuality and presence of the remembering of Healthy Knowledge even within our forgetfulness of it, and as such it is the most indispensable of sensibilities.

And of course, as with all the Theories of Cointegrative Science, I think we all really already know all of this, at least deep down in our souls we do. That is just the point. Nevertheless, we seem to need a more formal reminder every now and then, hence this post.

The relatively unconscious, relatively anesthetic ("Mal-aesthetic" really) nature of the modern/post-modern science, diet, medicine, architecture, -- of the modern/post-modern world in general-- is too much to go into in a brief essay. But the prescription for all of these disintegrating fields of activity is the same; it is that of Good Sense in the light of Cointegrative Science. Again, by such Good Sense I mean the sense, not only of the current numbness under which the jewels of Life and Freedom are buried but also the equally strong sense of the very real presence of the jewels there nevertheless (And be assured that they are there, for if they were not within us at some deep level then we would literally be dead.) and the gratitude and resolve that come with this. And by such Good Sense I mean a consciousness and embracing of our our sick culture that can only be effected by truly Healthy Culture. Such Good sense, is the sense of Togetherness; the balanced, paradoxical dance of the awareness; the inclusive welcoming of both realities in the service of progressive healing and aliveness.

And such Good Sense also implies Good Taste, the taste or sensibility of such paradoxical togetherness and the ability to discern the relatively beautiful, healthy, and appropriate in the context of Mutuality and of Ultimate as well as more immediate truth.

And it implies Good Will, the cointegrative, willed affirmation and acknowledgment of essential Togetherness and the intention toward its increasing realization both inwardly and in outward practical and world affairs.; a will to inner and outer Life and Freedom in the light of Life Truth that implies conscious understanding and moral commitment to the great Theme of our collective existence as well as its variations in cultural and individual manifestation.

And it implies Good Faith, a Living Faith in Togetherness, which (because it is alive) involves a constant checking of any Belief (including the theories of Integral Science) against the inner consensus of ones intuition, heart, mind and body as to its Living Truth and value, with an eye to either its reformulation or its replacement with something else. It is faith in the existence of some healing and useful shared understanding of reality and a commitment to critical participation in the best that we have yet found.


The role of Death in evolution is to provoke individuals and species toward Life and Freedom. We are going to die anyway but be are not going to "Live" anyway, in the present (new and also very old) sense of the word. To seek death is to be in a state of unconsciousness that is not worthy of our humanity—it is to seek nothing at all. To seek Life and Freedom with humility, humor, wonder, and gratitude is our common privilege as beings that are going to die. Whether or not we succeed in taking advantage of this opportunity is ultimately not in our hands but to make the attempt is the only gesture that is consistent with sapience, with true happiness, and with Good Sense.

P.S.

I shared the above post with someone (a self described "Philosopher") who labeled it as "new age", I guess because of so much mention of things like "soul" and Spirit. I think if I had avoided such simple words and used only the long winded neologisms I came up with, the whole thing would have got a better review. People who think the distant past is a total nightmare tend to get spooked by such old fashioned language.  On the other hand people with the opposite inclination might be put off by my high sounding greek-based inventions. Since most things are both simple and complicated however, and since a big part of the intention behind these writings is to reconcile and transcend both the traditional and "modern"/postmodern, it doesn't really do to ignore either aspect of reality and use just one set of terms. I think I have done a little more than simply update some generalized version of traditional understanding, but I think I have done quite a bit less than discover something that is complete new and untranslatable into vernacular language. If that language bothers you because its not fancy enough, just focus on the fancy words and/or just the basic argument. If on the other hand my made-up words seem pretentious to you, reformulate the whole thing without them. 

Supplement:

Wholesthesia and Shared SelfNature (Shared Nature/Self)

The preceeding post was written for my old blog perhaps 10 years ago. The Concept of Shared SelfNature (which I briefly outlined in my last post about Healthy Culture in general was not yet born in my head then, so I want to use this space to try to relate the two Ideas. Most especially, I would like to explore the implication of the "Shared" part of the idea of Shared SelfNature (as well as the shared part of the idea of the "Shared Ego", a concept which I have also just barely introduced in the previous post.

Clearly "Wholesthesia" is "Local" Shared SelfNature since the presence of this "relative silence of health" can certainly be understood to be shared among everyone who is (usually unconsciously) experiencing it; that is, everyone who exists. The ground of our existance and health in other words, is in a  shared SelfNature that  is tied up with the existence of a "Shared Nature" of clean air and water the general health of Gaia, the Sun and everything generally to some degree anyway and so perhaps it can be understood to be a local experience reflecting a kind of Latent  and prexistant inner/outer harmony that we can chose to cultivate once we are conscious of it.The inner part of this harmony would be the "yin" or subjective part of Shared SelfNature  (the "Shared Mind" or "Shared Self") which would be the implicit subjectivity or consciousness inherent in everything.

Here its necessary to pause for an important clarification. The kind of implicit togetherness that exists between yin and yang also exists between Self and Nature but this kind of togetherness has, I think, been generally misunderstood. I think that a neglected implication of the familiar YinYang symbol, in which the white/yang dot  is placed in the black/yin area and visa versa, is a kind of "fractal" situation, in which, within that little white/yang dot, there is necessarily a little black/yin area and within that a white, and so forth indefinitely. If thats the case, then it is a pretty one-sided and kind violent dissociation to speak of "yin" by itself or "yang" by itself at all. There is no "pure" yin or "pure" yang but only relative yin/yang. Moreover  as implied in the title of the "book of changes", the relative amounts of these correlatives is understood to be constantly changing. I suppose one could suggest that much in the symbol by making the black and white dots (and the corresponding white and black areas around them) different but mutually compensating sizes, (thus suggesting dynamism). Perhaps this was done is some places,  but the usually static symbol is I think misleading. At any rate, whether or not the above is really the sense of the YinYang symbol, its certainly the sense in which I speak of Shared SelfNature/NatureSelf. This means that talking about the "Shared Self", however necessary, is very misleading in that it suggests a really impossible seperation of Self from Nature ("Consciousness" from the "Universe"). Here we are at the edge where language does some violence to the truth, (unless one is amenable to paradox-friendly logic such as the Logic of Coidentity, which I will introduce in another post.)

So much for that clarification.

The correspondence of wholesthesia to Shared SelfNature suggests a correspondence of "Anesthesia" to the "Shared Ego" and "Callesthesia" (good sense) to the Shared Soul (and  I mean both the term "Ego" and the term "Soul" in a kind of Phenomenological sense that includes "body" as well as "mind") . The Shared Ego and the Shared Soul must also be understood as somehow latent in all being, at least as a potential. The subtlty of this consideration has to do with the fact that the Shared Soul can be decribed as  the healing dynamic that connects the Shared Ego to shared Self Nature and to what I am calling "Spirit", thus manifesting a evolutionary rather than devolutionary dynamic.)


All of these thoughts lend themselves to a great many interesting conjectures. I'll mention just a few here.

For instance there seems to be an implied critique of the Hindu concept of the Self which is similar to that of certain forms of Buddhism; from our point of view there is no pure absolute "Self" but only a shared SelfNature. On the other hand, the idea of the Shared SelfNature and the Shared Soul and the Shared Ego seems to  challenge the conception of private individual merit or private individual enlightenment or private delusion. Even the idea of  being a Bodhisattva is challenged in that, though that idea does imply a kind of "everyone or no-one" conception of spiritual progress, this is presented as the choice of a supposedly superior individual, while the implication here is that there is no such choice and no such thing. At best one could say that the "Boddhisatva Spirit" (the Shared Soul) has been activated and the reality of Shared NatureSelf percieved by someone, at least for the moment. In general the very subtle, paradoxical, and dynamically phenomenological nature of this present notion challenges the rigid hierarchies of organized religion and spirituality, including those of Buddism and Hinduism. Presumably, (in the east at least) the rankings and merits emerged as an a tempt to motivate the ego to undertake the discipline of yoga or meditation practice, but this is a mistake I think, since action taken under the illusion of primary seperateness can only strengthen that illusion leading ultimately to delusional inflated egos. Unless the motive and understanding are cointegrative from the first, neither the process nor the result of practice will be. Indeed I think that the nature of the practice itself must change in order to reflect the present cointegrative understanding.


There are many more interesting and suggestive implications of this
understanding vis-a-vis not only Buddhism and Hinduism but all the known religions, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, "Animism", as well as the religion we now call "Science". Whether or not one wants to see any of these as monolithic entities, I am willing to suggest that, on a case by case, historical as well as empirical basis, all of these cosmologies/cultures can be shown, in the light of this understanding and that of healthy culture generally, to have both their "piece of the lie and piece of the truth", like any individual culture or person. Given that we live in a sick culture, however, its reasonable to expect more often then not, the latter more actively manifest than the former.

Of course "Cointegrative Science" is no different. It presumably also has its "piece of the Lie and Piece of the Truth". The aspects of the sick culture that may be involved, (or may become involved) in the understanding that I have just shared are at the moment unclear to me. But I can say that Cointegrative Scientific "Truth" cannot be the static result of competitive argument, one-sided interrogation, or one-sided exposition, but is rather the living  co-created result of inclusive, collaborative, and cointegrative conference. This cointegrative conference (technically "Co-inference") is the "scientific method" of Cointegrative Science; a method aimed at inner/outer healing, Inner/Outer consensus, dynamic balance and communion rather then, "final Truth", victory or control. All that can be said then regarding a text such as this (or any others in any of my blogs),  is that it is meant as conversation opener; a preliminary sharing of views in the hopeful anticipation of a conference in which a (necessarily tentative) inner and outer consensus can be reached, as a basis for further collaboration.

Still, by ordinary criteria, what I have written above about the meaning of Life does seem to have both direct and circumstantial evidence; it "looks like a duck, quacks like a duck", etc..., and if I didn't regard "ordinary criteria" and purely one-sided verbal written exposition as such intrinsically "lame ducks" themselves, (in so far as being sufficient generating real Living Truth goes), it would certainly have my vote. As it stands I can only offer it as the most promising conversation opener I have ever come across (if I do say so myself).

--I-P
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More on Healthy Culture

{Note: its probably a good idea at this point to back up a bit and elaborate on the idea of healthy culture itself, since cointegrative science is in a sense, only the cosmological aspect of this aspect of this more incompasing dynamic. What follows is an edited post from my older blog in which I tried to describe better what I mean by Culture and by Healthy and Sick Culture--I-P}

Culture

"There are really only two kinds of music; good music and bad music"--Louie Armstrong (paraphrased)


By "Culture" I mean Cosmology or WorldView, Identity (meaning who am I and who everyone else is in the context of the story that is the Cosmology), Ritual (by which I mean any repeated actions that reinforce the Cosmology and the Identity-Politics), and Infrastructure (by which I mean the specific way space-time is arranged and altered so as to support and facilitate the Cosmology, Identity, and Ritual).

Its worth noting that such a 4-fold conception of culture as outlined above can apply as much to individuals as to groups to the extent that meaningful distinctions can be made between, for example, my own cosmology, identity-politics, rituals, and infrastructure and that of another individual, even within the context of the greater similarities of culture that we might share.

On the other hand, the conception of culture I am offering here is normative, as the phrases "Healthy Culture" and "Sick Culture" imply. The Idea is that the two main types of culture (these are in some sense "Ideal Types"), are a Culture of Apartness and a Culture of Togetherness.

In a Culture of Apartness Cosmologies and Logics (Logic is understood here as part of the Cosmology) of exclusion and dissociation are priviledged, factional Identity-Politics of seperation and alienation correspond with the cosmology, Rituals of Inner and Out dissociation and exclusion support the Cosmology and Identity-Politics and the fragmented and dissociated infrastructures facilitate the all of the above.

In a Culture of Togetherness on the contrary,  a Cosmology and Logic of inclusion and living wholeness is priviledged, the prevailing Identity politics is an inclusive "Us-and-Us" identity-politcs rather than an exclusive "us-and-them" and all of this is supported by conscious rituals and Infrastructure.

Note that the theory of Cointegrative Science and its "Co-inferential" Logic is itself meant to describe the (always tentative) content of the Cosmology of Healthy Culture, so I am not making any pretense of the possibility of neutrality in any of these ideas. Such a pretense would represent a presumptive dissociation of Fact and Value which (if viewed as primary) would only mark the idea as itself part of Sick Culture and the cosmology of dissociation.

Now there is a sense in which in reality every culture, say the culture of the Catholic Church at a given time and place or of Jazz musicians in New York or of a given individual living  in Cincinnati Ohio in 2012, are all combinations of both sick and healthy culture even if the cosmology of togetherness involved is only latent and unconcious. (I merely assert these things now I will show them later). Yet at the same time, though both kinds of culture are present in any actual situation, it is nevertheless the case that one form of culture is primary at any given time, so that the culture of apartness is either busy excluding and repressing the culture of togetherness or the culture of Togetherness is busy acknowledging and healing the culture of Apartness within it. 

This conception of Culture is not exactly meant to be strictly anthropological and, since the Cointegrative Cosmology involves things like Cosmology, Identity, Ritual and Infrastructure, at least three of which seem to apply solely to human beings, this of course is very odd but like much else will be explained later as a circumstance flowing naturally from the normative assumptions behind the whole idea of Healthy Culture.

These and other explicitly normative assumptions implicitly as well as explicitly challenge the “dominant culture” as transmitted through various kinds of education. Education is the transmission of culture, and if there is something fundamentally wrong with your culture than there is likely to be something fundamentally wrong with your education, including your education about culture. At the moment the dominant culture seems to be presenting a kind of dichotomy between conservative ethnocentrism and liberal or progressive multiculturalism as the terms of the debate. But to take sides in this debate is already to surrender to the dominant cultures way of thinking about and discussing the issue. It is to make the (in my opinion) ethnocentric presumption that the dominant cultures treatment of, and approach to, the whole subject is the correct or best one. If that were so one would have only to take one or another of the offered positions on the the nature of culture and fight it out—kind of like with the party system

This is the kind of situation that one can only be escaped through what amounts to creativity and insight rather than purely rational or reactionary response. It requires thinking outside the box of the whole dominant paradigm. My creative response is to propose the above different way of thinking about both culture as an aspect of an equally different way of thinking about everything else,so that what you are reading is meant to be both a description, and a gesture of Healthy Culture.

Next I want to treat in a little more detail each of the 4 aspects of Culture I have listed above, focusing for the most part on the Healthy variant though this will unavoidably involve making comparisons to current unhealthy practice. Future Posts will go into each of these, and much else in much more Detail. 

Cosmology

Of Course the Cosmology of Togetherness, the general world-view and fundamental cognitive orientation of Healthy Culture is some version or other of Cointegrative Science and its Logic of Cointegrative Coinference, Or ,put another way, Cointegrative Science and Logic are meant to be the "modern" version of that perennial, primal, and universally human world-view that assumes, as a starting place for reason, the fundamental Togetherness of Subject and Object, of self and other, of the vertical and the horizontal of the above and the below, and even of Togetherness and Apartness.

Such a cosmology of Togetherness, which I want to repeat, also implies and correspondingly nonalienated form of Logic and discourse,  is not, in a healthy culture, segregated from the Identity, the Ritual, and the Infrastructure of which it is such an integral part, but rather is transmitted with them as a part of a healthy Education (and by "Education" I mean exactly the "Transmission of Culture across generations", whether sick or healthy; a transmission inclusive of Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure).

The absence of such a conscious Cosmology and Logic of Togetherness necessarily leaves us with an unconscious cosmology and Logic of Apart-ness which puts the accent on alienation and estrangement inwardly and outwardly and between the inner and the outer themselves. This kind of cosmology and "cosmologic"--and the modern scientific cosmology is certainly of this kind for the most part, as are many ancient ones--is inherently rigid and dissociated in that the accent on apartness is not a completely optional, volitional choice that can be reversed at will but rather something stemming from unconsciousness,  historical and biographical trauma, and lack of experience of any alternative. One could say that the now dominant Cosmology of Apartness, and the Culture of Apartness of which it is a cardinal aspect, constitute a kind of culmination or confluence of the global Cultural erosion which we ordinarily describe as world history.

Of course, like I said, it is not so simple as that. Healthy Culture and Sick Culture always coexist within any actual culture, so that calling a culture "sick" means that sick culture is primary in it for the time being, so that there is general denial and suppression real consciousness of its own pathology, while a healthy culture is, for the time being, acknowledging and engaging its core sickness in a progressive and evolutionary way. Thus, every culture, like every individual-person, has both its ""Piece of the Lie" and its "piece of the Truth" and invidious comparisons between cultures are not in order.

Various aspects of Contegrative Cosmology include "Life-Logic" ( or "Cointegrative Coinference", the Coordinating Cognitive Archetypes and Moral Compass that I call the Spirit Matrix, the concepts of Dysmutuality, Wholesthesia, Cointegrative Virtue, Inner Consensus, Consensuality, and very many others. I will post a fairly extensive glossary of Cointegrative terms and concepts

Identity 
 
The situation with Identity is of course the same as that with culture. The framing of the terms of the debate—the very creation of both the Debate and its terms by the dominant culture seems to me unquestioningly accepted by those in its thrall. Our culture tells us our history in terms of the competition between various factions ("us’s" and "thems") between which we are then obliged to choose and take sides. The dynamic is the same whether the antagonists are described as male and female, black and white, 1st world and 3rd world, north and south. And to say, for example, that it was the northern white European males that brought about and maintain this fragmented and factional way of looking at things, is only to assume the very thing that is at issue and betray the imprint of the dominant fragmented cosmology and its related myths of both Identity and causality; it reveals one as already under the spell of the dominant culture, having made a primary Identification in its terms and in its spirit.

The Factionalisms of Race, Sex, Nationality, Profession, Religion, and other identity politics in their negative manifestations are thus wholly a symptoms of the dominant Culture of Apart-ness and of our compliance with it in accepting such factional Identities as primary. The creative response to such fragmentation is again, not simply to take sides in the endless warfare that our culture wants us to understand as our essential history, so that we each dutifully wear (sometimes exchanging) the identity uniforms that fate, physiology, and "education" seem to have given us. A creative adaptation to the array of roles and identities that the dominant sick culture foists upon us is possible and in this case in is embodied in the Identity (actually the Coidentity) of Individual-Personhood.

This identity-politics, (described in detail in a previous post) is not factional at all. Everyone is an Individual-Person by the mere fact of their existence; by their very existence everyone has a “Familial’ association (even if only with his or her self and immediate environment. Everyone is likewise somebody’s Neighbor, somebody’s fellow “Citizen-of-the-World”, everyone has a subjectivity (psyche or soul) with some relationship to ultimate things. And, what is distinguishable from all this, everyone has an inimitable authentic individuality that is manifest to some degree in any given gesture or act. To affirm Individual-Personhood as ones primary identity then is in some sense to assert something obvious (at least when pointed out) and perhaps even commonplace.

But to affirm individual-Personhood as ones primary Identity is also, in the context of Healthy Culture, to consciously accept the right/responsibility of Coming-Together for Consensus in the inner and outer venues it describes. For this inner-and-outer coming-together is what real Health and real Living means. Real Living, as opposed to the unconscious, fear-based, surviving imposed by the dominant culture, happens when we engage in the Healthy Personal Culture of inner-and-outer togetherness, when we proactively and ritually affirm the primacy of the common Theme of Individual-living-Personhood, seeing Gender, Race, and other roles and identities as subordinate variations on this Theme at best, adjectives to this main noun (adverbs to this main verb). Real Living happens when I am being myself, becoming ever more myself, but in conscious and responsible relationship with others.

The opposite of an Individual-Person is a Phony-Alien (or as I prefer to say, and Alienated Phony, and this I also claim to be (though I guess not so loudly).  Cultivating Individual-Personhood (trying to manifest Individual-Personhood is more or less the same thing as being in a kind of Alienated Phonies Anonymous group and the two kind of identities are really just two sides of the same identity-politics...

In is important to introduce here the related concept of Shared SelfNature or NatureSelf that is a kind of Identity-Politics implicit (to a certain extent in the cointegrative assumption of the fundamental togetherness of the subjective and objective worlds and of fundamental Togetherness generally. Its easy to substitute the word Nature for the "objective world" and to not that nature is intrinsically shared, our own bodies being the part of this shared nature that we are and experience most directly. The Idea of The Shared Self mirrors this understanding in terms of a Subjective experience considered to be ontologic equal and coimplicated with Objective Experience (The fundamental togetherness and mutual definition of the inner and outer, the subjective and objective is after all, the primary datum of experience, is arguably experience itself. Thus the theory is that, just as the individual body is the part of shared nature that we are most directly, so the individual mind it the part of the Shared Mind (or the Shared Self) the we experience most directly. Moreover, just as the dissociation of Mind and Body is not warranted in the context of healthy culture, (hence the expressions like "Mind-Body" and "Body-Mind"), so this separation is not warranted between Shared Nature and Shared Self; hence the concept of SelfNature or NatureSelf. The identity of the "Shared Ego" has the same relationship to Shared SelfNature as that of the Alienated Phony has to the Individual-Person. This will all be explained later.

Finally the concepts of Identity mentioned here are derive from the "Law of Coidentity" which forms a part of the Conferencial ("Co-inferential") Logic of Cointegrative Science which I only just mentioned above in the Cosmology Section of this post. A future post on this topic is forthcoming.

Ritual

Just as in the case of Cosmology, we can distinguish Rituals of inner and outer Togetherness and Rituals of inner and outer separation or Apart-ness ( Again, By “rituals”, I mean repeated action or patterns of behavior in individuals and groups related to and reinforcing a consciously or unconsciously shared cosmology).

By "Rituals of Apart-ness" I mean acts of numbing and of dissociation that separate us from aspects of our own wholeness and relatedness. Some behaviors dissociate us primarily from our own bodies, such as the regular consumption of drugs and overly processed food for example. Others primarily separate us from our hearts--such as the repeated practice of vivisection in certain university laboratories, or of hours of bureaucratic office work. Some seem primarily to separate us from our minds or souls, like watching television often does. And by "Rituals of Apart-ness" I also mean rituals that isolate and inhibit us from coming together outwardly, with others, in meetings in different venues. These include such habits as that of using private transportation, or of simply always being busy. Many of these rituals require or are supported by their own technological and/or legal infrastructure. And all of them are inter-connected as “syn-entropic” rituals within a culture of inner and outer apart-ness. By this I mean that rituals of outer apart-ness reinforce and even imply rituals of inner apart-ness and visa versa.

As rituals of inner and outer Togetherness, I can sight the vision quest and various rituals of initiation. I can also sight things like “co-counseling”, Open Space Technology, or healthy Tantra,Kerreza,  Breema, Chi Gung, Yoga, Elimination Timing, Alexander Technique, Gormans, Learning Methods, Consensus Facilitation,  as, if not, in my view quite achieving really healing Togetherness, at least have potential for this kind of thing though at present tthe truly healing potential of such practices is for the most part lost in its translation into the dominant socioeconomic idiom of sick culture. These kinds of things at their best, informed by a Healthy Cosmology and Identity Politics and supported by Healthy Infrastructure, could be examples of real community and communion wherein the individuals come together in a way that encourages both inner as well as outer consensus. Eating mostly unprocessed and natural foods together, in a conscious way can foster both inner and outer communion and is not like the false communion of coming-together outwardly around substances that numb and estrange us from ourselves inwardly. Other rituals of Togetherness include the Personhood ritual and, the Life-Dance Party, the Four-fold Seasons Breath, Cointegrative Coinference, The Vision Dance, the Life-Dance Walk, The Welcoming Gesture and various other experimental practices (the word "dance" in the name of many of the rituals is basically metaphorical) . These rituals constitute experiments in Cointegrative Science and they will be described primarily in my other blog Healthy Culture; (Lifedancelog.blogspot.com).


Infrastructure

By "Infrastructure" I basically mean everything relate to how the way space-time is arranged so as to support either sick or healthy culture. This includes things like art, technology, architecture, zoning, as well as intellectuals tools like the calender and the alphabet. Like the other three aspects of Culture, the infrastructure is continuous with and shades into each of the other aspects so that it can really only be relatively distinquished. My own preoccupations in the context of infrastructure are presently centered around what we now call agriculture and architecture as well as the infrastructure relavent to various experiments in cointegrative economics and politics.

Currently I like to think in terms of transitioning from "infrastructures of Control" to "infrastructures of Communion" (what I mean really is that there is a continuum between Control and Communion generally and that the proper order of things it that the former should exist only to the extent that it can supports and enable the latter). Anyway, various ideas and examples of what I mean will be shared in forthcoming posts. Here I will just list some original theories and experiments in cointegrative science as well as some already existing consepts and structures (structures  that, perhaps with a little tweaking, seem to assimilable as part of Healthy Infrastructure.

Among the former I can mention "The Tree of Life" conception of optimal human demographics, the plan and outline WildWard Farm as a part of that, The Check-in Tray and similar entities, Experimental Calenders, the design of Life-Fair Grounds and forms of Cointegrative Media among other things. As for the latter, I think both the Natural Farm of Masenobo Fukuoka, and indigenous technologies speak of communion rather than control based way of relating to the land,  I also think there is a great deal that is explicit and latent in the work of Christopher Alexander and also in Galen Crantz that is relevant to the idea of cointegrative architecture and infrastructure, though again this is at least equally so for very many forms of indigenous and traditional architecture.

...

Conclusion

To reiterate:

This way of thinking about  Culture generally avoids the pitfalls of ethnocentrism on the one hand and those of a nihilistic cultural relativity on the other. But it only avoids a kind of simplistic dualism if its remembered that the two kinds of ritual process it describes are always Both present in any real culture or individual, that the essential thing that distinguishes a relatively healthy ritual from an unhealthy one is whether Conscious, healthy rituals are acknowledging, integrating, and healing the unconscious ones or not, and that one kind of ritual can change into the other with surprising ease as inner and outer circumstances change.

Having said this, it is still true that when and where the cultural soil-building of conscious healthy ritual is not happening then the cultural erosion of unconscious ritual is. And, though the distinction might still be seen as a dualism, it is a dynamic and sophisticated, rather than a simplistic and rigid dualism because it posits a dynamic but potentially unstable balance that can always reverse itself in either direction (both in collectively and in individuals) and so inherently advises neither complacency nor despair. In fact, the presence of either of these attitudes is a good sign that the balance is already shifting to the side of sickness and disintegration. This is not only the case for ritual but for all aspects of culture

The problem that all this raises then is the extent to which we, you and I, collectively and individually still primarily practice an unhealthy alienated and phony culture that does not foster, and makes it difficult to even conceive of, the dance of inner/outer coming-together that is consistent with true healing. It is the extent to which we primarily practice and learn the concepts and rituals of fear, alienation, anesthetization, and inner and outer dissociation that constitute our most active cultural heritage. We are all already initiated into the identities, rituals, and the cosmology of apart-ness and consciously and unconsciously proceed to likewise initiate the next generation. In our society the “conscious” initiation is called formal education and the unconscious one would, I suppose, simply be called "growing up".

Because of all this, the overwhelming tendency of people and organizations trying to manifest a really different kind of culture is a kind cultural backsliding (perhaps it really a kind of Post-system stress disorder) wherein supposedly new and radical institutions and practices are created which really just recreate with unimportant variations the very culture to which they aspire to transform. I can’t think of any political movement other than the (as yet unmanifest) one I’ve just described that is an exception to this. I think what all this means for activists, progressives and anyone who would be a part of a transformative and healing culture is that the co-creation of healthy culture means the creation and  practice of healthy culture; the practice of rituals of inner-and-outer coming-together, on the part of its members as individuals and as groups that affirm Healthy Cosmology, Healthy Identity, and Healthy Infrastructure. And it means establishing institutions or associations that encourage that practice. This means that within those groups and individuals, Rituals, Identities, Cosmologies and Infrastructures of inner/outer Togetherness need to be established and privileged while the present rituals and identities of Apart-ness--of dissociation--inwardly and outwardly, need to be acknowledged, understood, engaged, and progressively healed.

Ultimately, no real cultural alternative will exist within the so-called progressive or radical movements if the individuals in them do not own up to our own rituals and identities of inner and out apart-ness and if we are not sincerely trying to befriend or world, each other and ourselves (and our "enemies") through our own Rituals, Identities, and Cosmology, of inner and outer Togetherness. This, of course, means subordinating the “Us-and-them” meme that so effectively distracts us from our own “shit” and our own compromisedness, and that is so central to the culture of Apart-ness. It means, by beginning the process of fully understanding and acknowledging our own individual and collective wounds, inaugurating an individual as well as group in the cointegrative project of catalyzing our own healing together-with that of other people and the world in an affirmation of inherent mutuality. And It means confronting in the context of a Healthy Cultural Pilot Project our education in the current culture of Apart-ness, the Identities, concepts, Cosmology, and practices that we have internalized and that undermine our attempts to embrace (and sometimes to even conceive of) truly Healthy Culture.

Such education would be replaced by a cosmology and practice that facilitates the integration ones own healing with that of other people and the world. It would be a cosmology and practice that assumes the primacy of Togetherness and so is capable of fostering its nurturing and progressive manifestation as culture, Identity and Ritual. Of course I call this cosmology and Practice Cointegrative Science and the Dance of Living Individual Personhood and Living Friendship, which I am calling the Life-Dance is the primary ritual experiment of this science. You are welcome to join me in these experiments in this Dance, and Indeed this, all of the above, and the whole of these two weblogs, only justifies itself as a elaborate form of Individual-Personal Invitation to a Life-Dance, a of Healthy, Culture, Living-Friendship, and Goodwill. For more information about the Healthy Culture, the Life-Dance and Integral Science, e-mail me at individualperson1@gmail.com
I-P Kerren Odori  (a.k.a. Kevin Thompson)
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