{sorry if you read this post in its barely first draft form (I posted it accidentally). While it is true that I tend to post things in a raw state and edit them more later (I do this because having posted them is the only thing that really motivates me--I suppose through a kind of shame really--to edit them at all, rather than just abandon them un-posted after having gotten whatever it was off my chest), but I didn't mean to post something that raw. Hopefully this version is a lot more ready for public perusal.}
So I have come to the conclusion that posting an elaborate thing about Life-Logic presented all at one time would be overwhelming and counter productive. I think its better to present the concepts separately, (sometimes by way of clarifying points relative to actual issues that are up with me), in relatively short blog posts like this one. Then, probably, when all the relevant ideas are adequately introduced and illustrated, I will tie the whole thing together in a more official "Life-Logic Part Two". In addition to keeping the reader from being too overwhelmed by a super-long blog post with a lot of new Ideas and language, this method works for me because It frees me up to post stuff that is more currently up with me as long as I can integrate a few Life-Logical Concepts into the mix.
These days I have been thinking about Conscience and Science, though I mean both words in a specific sense.
If Conscience is "knowing together"(and this is the etymological meaning of the word as well as the one that reflects the sense in which I mean it here), then "Science" is "Knowing-apart", knowing by separation, knowing in isolation. Though this certainly still seems to describe Modern Science as we know it (that is, "systems thinking" notwithstanding, each of the various sciences as well as the scientific method in general), I am here going to call "science" any kind of dissociated Knowing, or dissociated "way of knowing", and thus include more or less every sort of extant "discipline" in the contemporary world and any historical disciplines as well. Don't therefor, think I exclude things like Theology or any Art from being "sciences" in this special cultural sense of the term. Also, and necessarily because of the mutual arising of the outer and the inner, by "science", I also include any dissociated inner subjective of knowing/being that facilitates, and is facilitated by the, outer dissociated, disoriented, and uncoordinated state of outer affairs.
In a similar way, I am not using the term "Conscience" to denote any exclusively moral, ethical, religious, or even subjective concept or state of affairs, but rather to denote the phenomenon and faculty of inner-and-outer "knowing-together" in a given manifestation of culture, whether on an individual or collective scale.
Translated into the (now hopefully familiar) context of Individual-Personhood, Conscience would be an inner process of knowing-together as an individual (with the mind, heart, body, and intuition all in uninhibited, inclusive, and equalitarian mutual communication), but (also and simultaneously) Conscience involves authentic (outer) communication (as a Person), with ones fellow beings in each of the (Civil, Neighborly, Familial, and "Religious") venues of social "Personhood". In other words Conscience (as I am here using the term) is inclusive and healthy knowing-together inwardly in a way that facilitates inclusive and healthy knowing-together outwardly. At the same time, Conscience is inclusive and healthy knowing-together outwardly in a way that facilitates inclusive and healthy knowing-together inwardly.
After all, if I am dissociating, repressing, and censoring aspects of myself as an individual I will be, in effect, alienated from parts of myself and what | say to myself inwardly, as well as outwardly to you will at best be a kind of phony denial-laden "propaganda". And why should I engage in such inner dissociation and repression and phoniness if equally alienated "dyspersonal") competitive, hostile, social conditions were not provoking and sustaining such an artificial posture? What but the living Truth of the matter can be the first casualty of such an inner and outer "War"?
So again, to underline the difference between this conception of conscience and the normal one, here is an example: The situation of being five years old (or 10 or whatever) and being forced to sit in a chair for long periods of time is almost always an offense against conscience, as the process of knowing-together requires that the body as well as the mind, heart, and intuition be free to express themselves unless there is "inner consensus" for the temporary repression of a given function under special circumstances. If, in other words, the child had an understanding and feeling that this limited mobility was warranted (as well as the intuited faith in its warrant as justified by, for example the impression that the experience was a necessary part of a process which manifestly ends in a healthy world of happy free adult people) then conscience would not be violated by acquiescing to such an imposition, at least as long is it was very temporary. As it stands however, there is no intuitive, intellectual, or positive emotional justification for being forced into such a repressive mode vis-a-vis ones own body for long periods of time. To experience this kind of thing repeatedly, with no motivation for conforming to such a demand but fear, is to damage, not just ones body but ones conscience, it is to be forced out of a sense of the totality of who one is, and to be "broken" as an individual, much in the way horses and elephants are broken.*Such an habitual--indeed unconscious and compulsive "knowing-apart" is the likely experience of every "educated person" and was shared equally by someone like St. Augustine or Galileo, or Simone De Beauvoir, Mary Baker Eddy or you or me. Moreover, since informal education usually involves similar acts of unjustified and misguided impositions (always involving but not always focused on, the physical body), the faculty of conscience is basically crippled in everyone.
This example was chosen to show that conscience, as I mean the term, is equally inclusive of the knowing/sensing/moving of the body as of the knowing/thinking of the mind, the knowing/feeling of the heart, and and the knowing/intuiting of the intuition, though of course conscience itself does not privilege sense-knowing over that of the other three. It would not do, for example, to reintegrate the body in a way that did not equally include and educate the mind, heart, or intuition, nor is a seemingly healthy body in any way a sign of a conscience manifesting in this or that individual-Person. The point is that the faculty of conscience is damaged to the extent that any of these modes of knowing is chronically excluded from expression and from communication with the others. Now putting things this way has the danger of seeming to imply that such exclusion is really possible, since it implies that the functions in question are really separate. This would would be wrong (its difficult to get this kind of thing into words sometimes). The ways of knowing in question all intrinsically coexist and codistinguish each other just like north, south, east and west do; they are codeterminant. Thus conscience or knowing-together is actually just the experience/process that reflects consciousness and cognitive comprehension of the primary reality of existing together or Coexistence. Obviously, as the example above shows, this consciousness and cognition, can be, and usually is, damaged in a way that effects all its aspects. It may be damaged to some extent even before the kindergarden age of the above example, in which case such miseducation would serve to add insult to injury and, along with many other aspects of "socialization" into a sick culture, help to further suppress the inherent Individual-Personhood of the child.
In this way, once the "axial" (inner, individual) aspect of Knowing-together is sufficiently damaged generally, a kind of reinforcing entropy begins to be at work, so that, in the absence of outer (social, personal) support for healing, this state of inner (Individual) alienation, dissociation, and disorientation, is very likely to become our default experience of ourselves. And, once this relatively conscienceless state of affairs has been established in us, the reflex of knowing-apart (of dissociated knowing based on coerced but eventually internalized habits of self censorship and exclusion) has also been established, and the person in question is open to identification with any kind of dissociated "science", in which compulsively isolated problems are "solved" in isolation, such that they generate new problems in other areas of life etc. By this time we feel ourselves and our entire lives as dissociated problems and, being exiled from our full experience of our selves and each other as Individuals, and from the full extent of our relationships/responsibilities as Persons; we have become Alienated-Phonies seemingly trapped in an artificial Alienated and Phony world in which denial is the most salient characteristic....
I feel the need here to balance this account--which seems to accent the subjective, Individual side of things with a similar sketch of what is going on outwardly ("objectively" "intersubjectively", "Personally"Politically") at the same time as this individual dissociation is happening. What is happening is that Personal Venues (the Civil, the Local, the Familial, the "Religious/Philosophical") are likewise both increasingly dissociated from each other and increasing dissociated and fragmented within themselves. Facilitated largely through the fear-induced and malignant meme of a dissociated and falsely dichotomous Logic/Rhetoric of Argument and Identification (Rather than one of Coinference and Coidentification), the Outer world will be experienced, not as a coordinated fabric of coexistent and interwoven scales of association, relationship and responsibility, into which the thread of ones own authentic Individual coexistence is intrinsically woven, both sustaining and being sustained by the whole, but as panic-ridden, alienated and mutually contending collection of factional and mutally dissociated "uses" and "thems", "here's" and "theres".
This is "history" really; "Civilizations" really being Pseudo Civilizations (arising from pseudo-locales), in which the "Civil" venue of Personhood ,which in my model represents a concern with and respect for The Stranger as Codistinct with the Neighbor, the Family member, and the fellow "Soul,"--or Creature (a fellow Being considered in terms of ultimate things), has been distorted, dissociated, and deformed to the same extent as the local, familial, and religious aspects of the culture with which it corresponds. I suppose you can think of such "civilizations" in terms of a full blown "cultural auto-immune disorder" (I think of the fist line of Stanley Diamonds, "In search of the Primitive": "Civilization begins with Oppression at home and Conquest abroad"...or words to that effect**). One can also think the dynamic as a kind of "Cultural Metastasis"; as the cumulative effect of the ongoing Traumas of Pubic and Private Violence (roughly War and domestic violence--including Child Abuse), on a given (already malignant) situation, combined with suitable external conditions for the expansion of culture in question. One can see how the Civil in my sense is itself lost in such "Civilization" at the same time as a the truly Local and Neighborly sensibility is lost through the cultures internal social stratifications and dissociations. I imagine this manifesting Locally as an Alienated Provincialism in some places and times (in which a "hypo-civil", alienated and phony local "we" tends to dominate) and in others as an equally "delocalized", "hyper-civil" Techo-globalized Suburbia of alienated Strangers pretending to be neighbors (or pretending not to be neighbors) prevails***. And of course all such developments should be understood as the the more external aspects of a disease which has concurrently less visible Familial, Spiritual symptoms.
You may be looking for causality at this point, ie; does the mutation of the Local culture cause the corruption of the civil impulse, or visa versa--or do both originate in mutations in Familial or Religous dynamics (which I have not gone into yet)? As I will explain later, the logic of causality (when considered as primary anyway) is one of the psychological wounds given and nursed by the very ongoing traumas responsible for the cultural malignancy in question; it is part of the problem. A Healthy Logic is a logic of Mutuality rather than Causality (but, as I say, more of this later). What I want to get across now is that the the general disorientation or "Dysmutuality" that manifests "subjectively" as a damaged process of inner Knowing-Together, is not separate from an outer world which is equally confused fragmented and at odds with itself.
I could go on talking about this outer "Personal" aspect of things, giving a paragraph each to how the general pathology of sick culture and a damaged faculty of "knowing-together" might manifest in the Familial and "Spiritual" venues of Personhood respectively, but then I will probably have lost the balance- of-Personal-to-Individual Considerations which I was trying to gain by adding these few paragraphs on the personal side of knowing together--only I will I have lost it in the other direction. Suffice to say that neither a healthy Familial Venue (which cannot be even exclusively human, much less nuclear) nor a similarly healthy Spiritual/Religious venue can exist outside of each ones coordination with the other two aspects of Personhood. This is because, to reiterate; the very Existence each aspect of Personhood is really its Coexistence, its Coidentification, and so its consciously dynamic coordination, with the others as a necessary aspect of an Individual-Personal order of things. Without such Conscious "Personal" state of Socio-economic Coexistence, our Individualized-Personhood is obscured, hidden, and in a way prevented by "Privatized-Publicness" and by the host of factional and Phony "we's" that populate the Public-Private "Life". At the same time, the lack of an inner ("Individual") sense of Coexistence (our inner relationship between Mind, Heart, Body, and Intuition) is equally dissociated, disoriented and fragmented due to a damaged faculty of Individual Conscience and Cognition. So what I am saying is that the false-"we" is cocreated with an equally alienated and equally phony false-"I" through the same wound of fear induced betrayal, a betrayal of Shared SelfNature which can be seen as a Public/Private betrayal from the outside (the "Shared-Nature" side) and as Alienated and Phony from the inside (the "Shared-Self" side), but which amounts to a kind of initiation into the same Sick Culture of Fear, Dissociation and Denial--a culture in which, among many other things, Conscience is crippled in its subordination to "Science" and its pseudo imperatives of competition between falsely conceived, and falsely identified and dissociated selves and others.
A version of a previously introduced table might be helpful in "grocking" much of the above:
{Note: the above table will have to do for now, but I wanted to try to make a sort of spherical diagram to illustrate this whole thing. For now you can imagine a kind of Sphere of coexistence in which the "northern hemisphere is divided into the 4 Personal quadrants/coordinates of Civil, Local etc and the "southern hemisphere" correspondingly represents the 4 Individual quadrants of Thinking, Feeling etc). In such a diagram the sphere as a whole would represent our Shared SelfNature...Though it might be misleading in some ways as well, I think such an image would be an improvement on the above table, as there would be more of a gestalt sense of the necessary wholeness of the conceptual model.... specifically one might better intuit how the derangement and stress in one part as a symptom of the derangement of the whole field...}
Now so far I have presented this idea of Conscience only as an ideal, indeed I have even tried to show that it is something we have all likely never fully experienced in a conscious, undistorted way because of formal and informal education (education being, roughly, the transmission of culture across the generations). Still, like the various other ideals I have introduced earlier (Wholesthesia, Good Sense, Common Sense, Consciousness, Comprehension, etc including the ideal of Healthy Culture itself) I nevertheless understand Conscience to be in some sense actual-though-latent, both in our selves and even in many of our institutions--at least in the same way that health is, in some sense and on some level, present-though-latent even in a sick body (or else the body would be dead already). What is needed then is some process or practice that can amplify and further facilitate the manifestation of this latent conscience in us. Cointegrative Conference is one experimental ritual of healthy culture among others, that is meant to awaken, rediscover, cultivate, nurture, and well "recover" this latent Conscience in ourselves and our institutions, and involves a progressive and ongoing process of inner and outer (Individual and Personal/Social) coordination and healing.
Basically it involves a regular "check-in" in and "checking-out" vis-a-vis each participants project of recovery from Alienated Phoniness in the four social venues of Personhood (relatively outer relationship) and the "fifth" or "Central venue" of (of relatively inner/intra relationship). The checking-in phase is meant to inspire and coordinate collaborative joint experimental project in inspiring and co-creating, coordinating and sustaining a culture of recovery in each these venues, and of challenging the culture of alienated and phony denial that prevails in all of them in the current state of affairs. Of course there is a lot more to this conference process, including the shared life-logical understanding informing and structuring the whole practice, but I only feel up to saying few other things about it before closing.
The words "Coductive and Codictive", in the above diagram, are very relevant to the Life-Logic that is used in Cointegrative Conference (I am not sure "used" is the right word since Cointegrative Conference is so essentially a Life-Logical process and Life-Logic so essentially Cointegrative and Conferential, that I am not so sure that it would be so misleading to regard them as two ways of describing the same process). They refer to the "axial" or polar aspects of cointegration that conscientious conference "co-facilitates" and coordinates. (I know, the preceeding way too abstract and vague a statement. Suffice to say that the Codictive Process is the aspect of Coinference meant to make make a gap in alienated interia of Public-Private Discourse in which Personal Communication is possible and the Coductive Process makes makes a gap in Alienated-Phoniness inwardly so as to make authentic Individual Communication possible. Obviously the Coductive and Codictive are Really complementary aspects of true Process conference. But there will be more about these two aspects of Conscientious, Life-Logical, Cointegrative Conference, and about other aspects as well, in future posts.
Though it still may be a bit hard to comprehend at this point, I do want to reiterate that Conscience means not just inclusive just inner knowing but also inclusive outer knowing; it is not just Individual-but also Personal (personal, social, collective, political). What follows from this (in the light of the paradoxical bright side of things explained above) is that there is at least as much latent, health in ones (admittedly stricken) personal venue (whatever and where ever you are), to allow for whatever state of conscience is present but manifest (really just unrecognized) within you and your surroundings. Even though you many indeed be surrounded by alienated-phonies and basically moving from one alienated and phony environment to another in the course of your day (which would be extremely normal), there is nevertheless a real potential for inner and outer belonging and personhood there in as much as you are at least in the present moment able to name, acknowledge challenge that very outer normative denial and degeneration (as well as the inner one). In other words, the "glass" of your personal environment may be (or seem) a great deal more then half empty, but it cant be completely empty; there is at least something (maybe just the sky and the trees-- though there is almost certainly more) in your outer personal venue that is nourishing latent conscience in you, and the responsibility then is to try to nourish and increase and nourish those things in your turn.
In general, the requirements for participation in any experimental ritual of cultural recovery, specifically the one I am calling cointegrative conference, is the presence of enough manifest conscience to realize and accept, not only the outer "broken-ness" of our social, economic, and political institutions, but that Public-Private brokeness together with ones own corresponding inner "Alienated and Phony" broken-ness. It means being able to do this while simultaneously realizing that the part of us that is capable of sincerely holding such a realization, (as a necessary preliminary to a serious practical engagement with sick culture inside as well as outside), is nothing less then the previously latent, now awakening and manifesting Conscience within us, the very quality without which any hope is just disguised denial anyway. In other words, it is the very piece of the Truth in us that is responsible for our acknowledgement of the piece of the Lie in us, and that is responsible for our being able to acknowledge the need for help ourselves and the need to help each other--if "help" is actually the right word--in the process of inner/outer healing. The main kind of mutual help I mean here is that which involves helping each other, though various experiments in Cointegrative Conference, to realize when we are channeling our piece of the Lie (our sick culture) or our piece of the Truth (a process which incidentally is very much facilitated by associating with others who have different blind spots--different patterns of damage and denial--than oneself). Anyway, Conscience means knowing all of this and so it means, not a sense of despair but an awakening of the heart and of a sense of inner and outer responsibly; the responsibility to seek and commit to this path of inner/outer Recovery....
Cointegrative Conference then, is something one comes to in an absolutely non-competitive, absolutely non-exclusive spirit of recovery,or recovery as recovery "alienated phonies" sharing an outer world which is now recovering (if only to a very small extent at present) from Public-Privateness, hoping to be helped by others as well to help others in a kind of cultural "twelve-step program" intent on healing this broken-ness inwardly as well, in a progressive and coordinated way. Recovery and Healing are paradoxical concepts implying, as they do, the coexistence of "opposites", of both sickness and health in this case, in the same process (which explains any difficulty in understanding them on the part of minds informed by the either/or panic logic--and the related endemic scientific "knowing-apart" of the dominant culture). For such Shared Recovery/Healing to happen then, we most abandon that logic for one that can sustain the motivation to engage in such a practice at all, that can support not only acknowledgment/admission of the presence of bad/damaged conscience, of incomprehension, and of nonsense with in us, but also the acknowledgment and realization of the latent presence of that very Conscience, Comprehension, and Common Sense that the practice and process of healing exists to further cultivate. This paradoxical acknowledgment of a latent "original virtue" as well as what might be metaphorically called "original sin", is one of the things that seems to make a RAP Group (that is a group of Recovering, Alienated, Phonies in regular Cointegrative Conference), rather different from other kinds of recovery groups. Other, perhaps more basic differences are that Cointegrative Conference is neither single issue oriented nor, politically or economically neutral in the way such meetings, (as well as things like psychotherapy) tend to be. There are many more differences I won't go into here.
Suffice to say that what I am trying to do with these blog posts (besides just stay in recovery myself by responding as best I can to the fact that, as an Individual-Person, I have, among other things, an intrinsic relationship and responsibility to my fellow Citizens of the world--including the Human ones) is to attract those who have a strong enough latent conscience (and consciousness) to see that there is really nothing else to do but come together in such an experiment in inner and outer cultural recovery, since to do nothing (which is to say; to do anything else) is really just to strengthen the entropic, inner and outer denial, and ongoing alienated phoniness involved in all of this compulsive, "knowing-apart"; this crazy and unsustainable effort to solve falsely dissociated and falsely isolated "problems".
So then: my email is individualperson1@gmail.com. If you want to contact me and discuss all of this in some other format. Or you could just start a discussion via making a comment.
umm...thats all for now...
I-P
Ps: like always, I am sure that there are a few type-o's in the above but I don't think there are any important ones. I'll come back and fix things by and by.
*I think I might need to underline, in this example of one aspect of our shared education into a sick culture, that what is "broken" ("damaged" is a better word) is the totality of the Individual rather then just the "body". I'll try to do this by using the informal language for the various aspects of "Individual" coexistence ( ie; "inner elder, inner animal, etc) reintroduced in the above table. One can then liken the imposition described as a kind of "home invasion" in which the "Child" of the house (Feeling function) is forced (for whatever misguided and or perverse reasons on the part of the intruder) to punish the Family Pet (Inner Animal/Sensation). In such a situation the same fear that makes the child obey will be making the "Parents" (Inner Adult) intellectually connive at or Rationalize away what is happening. The Grandparents (Inner Elder) would also eventually dissociate from the whole thing via some version of fear-inspired "metaphysic"(whether Scientific, Religious, or "Spiritual") that amounts to choice of voluntary senility. Of course to be more accurate in our analogy, we must imagine this coercive imposition to be, not just a one-time "invasion", but more like the repeated, ongoing one that our education (and the way of life it prepares us for) constitutes. Nevertheless, the point here is that everything that is happening is a function of each "family-members" dysfunctional response to the same fear, and that the damage being done is being done to the "whole household" (or "Family System") and not just to the Inner Animal (ie "Sensing") and the Inner Child (ie "Feeling") parts of the Individual. All of this helps to show how, in a sick culture, education (both formal and informal) tends to amount to some form or another of child abuse--but more on this in another post.
***The above language of the "Hypo-Civil" and the "Hyper-Civil" can be misleading as well as useful; I don't want to privilege either the Civil or Local (or Familial or "Spiritual/Religious/Philosophical) visa-vis each other, since the whole point is that, like North, South, East, and West, they intrinsically coexist and "co-orient" and codetermine each other.
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So I have come to the conclusion that posting an elaborate thing about Life-Logic presented all at one time would be overwhelming and counter productive. I think its better to present the concepts separately, (sometimes by way of clarifying points relative to actual issues that are up with me), in relatively short blog posts like this one. Then, probably, when all the relevant ideas are adequately introduced and illustrated, I will tie the whole thing together in a more official "Life-Logic Part Two". In addition to keeping the reader from being too overwhelmed by a super-long blog post with a lot of new Ideas and language, this method works for me because It frees me up to post stuff that is more currently up with me as long as I can integrate a few Life-Logical Concepts into the mix.
These days I have been thinking about Conscience and Science, though I mean both words in a specific sense.
If Conscience is "knowing together"(and this is the etymological meaning of the word as well as the one that reflects the sense in which I mean it here), then "Science" is "Knowing-apart", knowing by separation, knowing in isolation. Though this certainly still seems to describe Modern Science as we know it (that is, "systems thinking" notwithstanding, each of the various sciences as well as the scientific method in general), I am here going to call "science" any kind of dissociated Knowing, or dissociated "way of knowing", and thus include more or less every sort of extant "discipline" in the contemporary world and any historical disciplines as well. Don't therefor, think I exclude things like Theology or any Art from being "sciences" in this special cultural sense of the term. Also, and necessarily because of the mutual arising of the outer and the inner, by "science", I also include any dissociated inner subjective of knowing/being that facilitates, and is facilitated by the, outer dissociated, disoriented, and uncoordinated state of outer affairs.
In a similar way, I am not using the term "Conscience" to denote any exclusively moral, ethical, religious, or even subjective concept or state of affairs, but rather to denote the phenomenon and faculty of inner-and-outer "knowing-together" in a given manifestation of culture, whether on an individual or collective scale.
Translated into the (now hopefully familiar) context of Individual-Personhood, Conscience would be an inner process of knowing-together as an individual (with the mind, heart, body, and intuition all in uninhibited, inclusive, and equalitarian mutual communication), but (also and simultaneously) Conscience involves authentic (outer) communication (as a Person), with ones fellow beings in each of the (Civil, Neighborly, Familial, and "Religious") venues of social "Personhood". In other words Conscience (as I am here using the term) is inclusive and healthy knowing-together inwardly in a way that facilitates inclusive and healthy knowing-together outwardly. At the same time, Conscience is inclusive and healthy knowing-together outwardly in a way that facilitates inclusive and healthy knowing-together inwardly.
After all, if I am dissociating, repressing, and censoring aspects of myself as an individual I will be, in effect, alienated from parts of myself and what | say to myself inwardly, as well as outwardly to you will at best be a kind of phony denial-laden "propaganda". And why should I engage in such inner dissociation and repression and phoniness if equally alienated "dyspersonal") competitive, hostile, social conditions were not provoking and sustaining such an artificial posture? What but the living Truth of the matter can be the first casualty of such an inner and outer "War"?
So again, to underline the difference between this conception of conscience and the normal one, here is an example: The situation of being five years old (or 10 or whatever) and being forced to sit in a chair for long periods of time is almost always an offense against conscience, as the process of knowing-together requires that the body as well as the mind, heart, and intuition be free to express themselves unless there is "inner consensus" for the temporary repression of a given function under special circumstances. If, in other words, the child had an understanding and feeling that this limited mobility was warranted (as well as the intuited faith in its warrant as justified by, for example the impression that the experience was a necessary part of a process which manifestly ends in a healthy world of happy free adult people) then conscience would not be violated by acquiescing to such an imposition, at least as long is it was very temporary. As it stands however, there is no intuitive, intellectual, or positive emotional justification for being forced into such a repressive mode vis-a-vis ones own body for long periods of time. To experience this kind of thing repeatedly, with no motivation for conforming to such a demand but fear, is to damage, not just ones body but ones conscience, it is to be forced out of a sense of the totality of who one is, and to be "broken" as an individual, much in the way horses and elephants are broken.*Such an habitual--indeed unconscious and compulsive "knowing-apart" is the likely experience of every "educated person" and was shared equally by someone like St. Augustine or Galileo, or Simone De Beauvoir, Mary Baker Eddy or you or me. Moreover, since informal education usually involves similar acts of unjustified and misguided impositions (always involving but not always focused on, the physical body), the faculty of conscience is basically crippled in everyone.
This example was chosen to show that conscience, as I mean the term, is equally inclusive of the knowing/sensing/moving of the body as of the knowing/thinking of the mind, the knowing/feeling of the heart, and and the knowing/intuiting of the intuition, though of course conscience itself does not privilege sense-knowing over that of the other three. It would not do, for example, to reintegrate the body in a way that did not equally include and educate the mind, heart, or intuition, nor is a seemingly healthy body in any way a sign of a conscience manifesting in this or that individual-Person. The point is that the faculty of conscience is damaged to the extent that any of these modes of knowing is chronically excluded from expression and from communication with the others. Now putting things this way has the danger of seeming to imply that such exclusion is really possible, since it implies that the functions in question are really separate. This would would be wrong (its difficult to get this kind of thing into words sometimes). The ways of knowing in question all intrinsically coexist and codistinguish each other just like north, south, east and west do; they are codeterminant. Thus conscience or knowing-together is actually just the experience/process that reflects consciousness and cognitive comprehension of the primary reality of existing together or Coexistence. Obviously, as the example above shows, this consciousness and cognition, can be, and usually is, damaged in a way that effects all its aspects. It may be damaged to some extent even before the kindergarden age of the above example, in which case such miseducation would serve to add insult to injury and, along with many other aspects of "socialization" into a sick culture, help to further suppress the inherent Individual-Personhood of the child.
In this way, once the "axial" (inner, individual) aspect of Knowing-together is sufficiently damaged generally, a kind of reinforcing entropy begins to be at work, so that, in the absence of outer (social, personal) support for healing, this state of inner (Individual) alienation, dissociation, and disorientation, is very likely to become our default experience of ourselves. And, once this relatively conscienceless state of affairs has been established in us, the reflex of knowing-apart (of dissociated knowing based on coerced but eventually internalized habits of self censorship and exclusion) has also been established, and the person in question is open to identification with any kind of dissociated "science", in which compulsively isolated problems are "solved" in isolation, such that they generate new problems in other areas of life etc. By this time we feel ourselves and our entire lives as dissociated problems and, being exiled from our full experience of our selves and each other as Individuals, and from the full extent of our relationships/responsibilities as Persons; we have become Alienated-Phonies seemingly trapped in an artificial Alienated and Phony world in which denial is the most salient characteristic....
I feel the need here to balance this account--which seems to accent the subjective, Individual side of things with a similar sketch of what is going on outwardly ("objectively" "intersubjectively", "Personally"Politically") at the same time as this individual dissociation is happening. What is happening is that Personal Venues (the Civil, the Local, the Familial, the "Religious/Philosophical") are likewise both increasingly dissociated from each other and increasing dissociated and fragmented within themselves. Facilitated largely through the fear-induced and malignant meme of a dissociated and falsely dichotomous Logic/Rhetoric of Argument and Identification (Rather than one of Coinference and Coidentification), the Outer world will be experienced, not as a coordinated fabric of coexistent and interwoven scales of association, relationship and responsibility, into which the thread of ones own authentic Individual coexistence is intrinsically woven, both sustaining and being sustained by the whole, but as panic-ridden, alienated and mutually contending collection of factional and mutally dissociated "uses" and "thems", "here's" and "theres".
This is "history" really; "Civilizations" really being Pseudo Civilizations (arising from pseudo-locales), in which the "Civil" venue of Personhood ,which in my model represents a concern with and respect for The Stranger as Codistinct with the Neighbor, the Family member, and the fellow "Soul,"--or Creature (a fellow Being considered in terms of ultimate things), has been distorted, dissociated, and deformed to the same extent as the local, familial, and religious aspects of the culture with which it corresponds. I suppose you can think of such "civilizations" in terms of a full blown "cultural auto-immune disorder" (I think of the fist line of Stanley Diamonds, "In search of the Primitive": "Civilization begins with Oppression at home and Conquest abroad"...or words to that effect**). One can also think the dynamic as a kind of "Cultural Metastasis"; as the cumulative effect of the ongoing Traumas of Pubic and Private Violence (roughly War and domestic violence--including Child Abuse), on a given (already malignant) situation, combined with suitable external conditions for the expansion of culture in question. One can see how the Civil in my sense is itself lost in such "Civilization" at the same time as a the truly Local and Neighborly sensibility is lost through the cultures internal social stratifications and dissociations. I imagine this manifesting Locally as an Alienated Provincialism in some places and times (in which a "hypo-civil", alienated and phony local "we" tends to dominate) and in others as an equally "delocalized", "hyper-civil" Techo-globalized Suburbia of alienated Strangers pretending to be neighbors (or pretending not to be neighbors) prevails***. And of course all such developments should be understood as the the more external aspects of a disease which has concurrently less visible Familial, Spiritual symptoms.
You may be looking for causality at this point, ie; does the mutation of the Local culture cause the corruption of the civil impulse, or visa versa--or do both originate in mutations in Familial or Religous dynamics (which I have not gone into yet)? As I will explain later, the logic of causality (when considered as primary anyway) is one of the psychological wounds given and nursed by the very ongoing traumas responsible for the cultural malignancy in question; it is part of the problem. A Healthy Logic is a logic of Mutuality rather than Causality (but, as I say, more of this later). What I want to get across now is that the the general disorientation or "Dysmutuality" that manifests "subjectively" as a damaged process of inner Knowing-Together, is not separate from an outer world which is equally confused fragmented and at odds with itself.
I could go on talking about this outer "Personal" aspect of things, giving a paragraph each to how the general pathology of sick culture and a damaged faculty of "knowing-together" might manifest in the Familial and "Spiritual" venues of Personhood respectively, but then I will probably have lost the balance- of-Personal-to-Individual Considerations which I was trying to gain by adding these few paragraphs on the personal side of knowing together--only I will I have lost it in the other direction. Suffice to say that neither a healthy Familial Venue (which cannot be even exclusively human, much less nuclear) nor a similarly healthy Spiritual/Religious venue can exist outside of each ones coordination with the other two aspects of Personhood. This is because, to reiterate; the very Existence each aspect of Personhood is really its Coexistence, its Coidentification, and so its consciously dynamic coordination, with the others as a necessary aspect of an Individual-Personal order of things. Without such Conscious "Personal" state of Socio-economic Coexistence, our Individualized-Personhood is obscured, hidden, and in a way prevented by "Privatized-Publicness" and by the host of factional and Phony "we's" that populate the Public-Private "Life". At the same time, the lack of an inner ("Individual") sense of Coexistence (our inner relationship between Mind, Heart, Body, and Intuition) is equally dissociated, disoriented and fragmented due to a damaged faculty of Individual Conscience and Cognition. So what I am saying is that the false-"we" is cocreated with an equally alienated and equally phony false-"I" through the same wound of fear induced betrayal, a betrayal of Shared SelfNature which can be seen as a Public/Private betrayal from the outside (the "Shared-Nature" side) and as Alienated and Phony from the inside (the "Shared-Self" side), but which amounts to a kind of initiation into the same Sick Culture of Fear, Dissociation and Denial--a culture in which, among many other things, Conscience is crippled in its subordination to "Science" and its pseudo imperatives of competition between falsely conceived, and falsely identified and dissociated selves and others.
A version of a previously introduced table might be helpful in "grocking" much of the above:
Coexistence as Shared Self-Nature
|
|
Structure of the Shared-Self (Our Shared Inner
Relationship) Individual:
|
Structure of Shared-Nature ( Our Shared Outer
Relationship): Personal:
|
Intuition (“Inner
Elder”)
|
Religio/Philosopic
Venue
|
Thinking (“Inner
Adult”)
|
Civil Venue
|
Feeling (“Inner
Child”)
|
Local Venue
|
Sensation (“Inner
Animal”)
|
Familial Venue
|
Now so far I have presented this idea of Conscience only as an ideal, indeed I have even tried to show that it is something we have all likely never fully experienced in a conscious, undistorted way because of formal and informal education (education being, roughly, the transmission of culture across the generations). Still, like the various other ideals I have introduced earlier (Wholesthesia, Good Sense, Common Sense, Consciousness, Comprehension, etc including the ideal of Healthy Culture itself) I nevertheless understand Conscience to be in some sense actual-though-latent, both in our selves and even in many of our institutions--at least in the same way that health is, in some sense and on some level, present-though-latent even in a sick body (or else the body would be dead already). What is needed then is some process or practice that can amplify and further facilitate the manifestation of this latent conscience in us. Cointegrative Conference is one experimental ritual of healthy culture among others, that is meant to awaken, rediscover, cultivate, nurture, and well "recover" this latent Conscience in ourselves and our institutions, and involves a progressive and ongoing process of inner and outer (Individual and Personal/Social) coordination and healing.
Basically it involves a regular "check-in" in and "checking-out" vis-a-vis each participants project of recovery from Alienated Phoniness in the four social venues of Personhood (relatively outer relationship) and the "fifth" or "Central venue" of (of relatively inner/intra relationship). The checking-in phase is meant to inspire and coordinate collaborative joint experimental project in inspiring and co-creating, coordinating and sustaining a culture of recovery in each these venues, and of challenging the culture of alienated and phony denial that prevails in all of them in the current state of affairs. Of course there is a lot more to this conference process, including the shared life-logical understanding informing and structuring the whole practice, but I only feel up to saying few other things about it before closing.
The words "Coductive and Codictive", in the above diagram, are very relevant to the Life-Logic that is used in Cointegrative Conference (I am not sure "used" is the right word since Cointegrative Conference is so essentially a Life-Logical process and Life-Logic so essentially Cointegrative and Conferential, that I am not so sure that it would be so misleading to regard them as two ways of describing the same process). They refer to the "axial" or polar aspects of cointegration that conscientious conference "co-facilitates" and coordinates. (I know, the preceeding way too abstract and vague a statement. Suffice to say that the Codictive Process is the aspect of Coinference meant to make make a gap in alienated interia of Public-Private Discourse in which Personal Communication is possible and the Coductive Process makes makes a gap in Alienated-Phoniness inwardly so as to make authentic Individual Communication possible. Obviously the Coductive and Codictive are Really complementary aspects of true Process conference. But there will be more about these two aspects of Conscientious, Life-Logical, Cointegrative Conference, and about other aspects as well, in future posts.
Though it still may be a bit hard to comprehend at this point, I do want to reiterate that Conscience means not just inclusive just inner knowing but also inclusive outer knowing; it is not just Individual-but also Personal (personal, social, collective, political). What follows from this (in the light of the paradoxical bright side of things explained above) is that there is at least as much latent, health in ones (admittedly stricken) personal venue (whatever and where ever you are), to allow for whatever state of conscience is present but manifest (really just unrecognized) within you and your surroundings. Even though you many indeed be surrounded by alienated-phonies and basically moving from one alienated and phony environment to another in the course of your day (which would be extremely normal), there is nevertheless a real potential for inner and outer belonging and personhood there in as much as you are at least in the present moment able to name, acknowledge challenge that very outer normative denial and degeneration (as well as the inner one). In other words, the "glass" of your personal environment may be (or seem) a great deal more then half empty, but it cant be completely empty; there is at least something (maybe just the sky and the trees-- though there is almost certainly more) in your outer personal venue that is nourishing latent conscience in you, and the responsibility then is to try to nourish and increase and nourish those things in your turn.
In general, the requirements for participation in any experimental ritual of cultural recovery, specifically the one I am calling cointegrative conference, is the presence of enough manifest conscience to realize and accept, not only the outer "broken-ness" of our social, economic, and political institutions, but that Public-Private brokeness together with ones own corresponding inner "Alienated and Phony" broken-ness. It means being able to do this while simultaneously realizing that the part of us that is capable of sincerely holding such a realization, (as a necessary preliminary to a serious practical engagement with sick culture inside as well as outside), is nothing less then the previously latent, now awakening and manifesting Conscience within us, the very quality without which any hope is just disguised denial anyway. In other words, it is the very piece of the Truth in us that is responsible for our acknowledgement of the piece of the Lie in us, and that is responsible for our being able to acknowledge the need for help ourselves and the need to help each other--if "help" is actually the right word--in the process of inner/outer healing. The main kind of mutual help I mean here is that which involves helping each other, though various experiments in Cointegrative Conference, to realize when we are channeling our piece of the Lie (our sick culture) or our piece of the Truth (a process which incidentally is very much facilitated by associating with others who have different blind spots--different patterns of damage and denial--than oneself). Anyway, Conscience means knowing all of this and so it means, not a sense of despair but an awakening of the heart and of a sense of inner and outer responsibly; the responsibility to seek and commit to this path of inner/outer Recovery....
Cointegrative Conference then, is something one comes to in an absolutely non-competitive, absolutely non-exclusive spirit of recovery,or recovery as recovery "alienated phonies" sharing an outer world which is now recovering (if only to a very small extent at present) from Public-Privateness, hoping to be helped by others as well to help others in a kind of cultural "twelve-step program" intent on healing this broken-ness inwardly as well, in a progressive and coordinated way. Recovery and Healing are paradoxical concepts implying, as they do, the coexistence of "opposites", of both sickness and health in this case, in the same process (which explains any difficulty in understanding them on the part of minds informed by the either/or panic logic--and the related endemic scientific "knowing-apart" of the dominant culture). For such Shared Recovery/Healing to happen then, we most abandon that logic for one that can sustain the motivation to engage in such a practice at all, that can support not only acknowledgment/admission of the presence of bad/damaged conscience, of incomprehension, and of nonsense with in us, but also the acknowledgment and realization of the latent presence of that very Conscience, Comprehension, and Common Sense that the practice and process of healing exists to further cultivate. This paradoxical acknowledgment of a latent "original virtue" as well as what might be metaphorically called "original sin", is one of the things that seems to make a RAP Group (that is a group of Recovering, Alienated, Phonies in regular Cointegrative Conference), rather different from other kinds of recovery groups. Other, perhaps more basic differences are that Cointegrative Conference is neither single issue oriented nor, politically or economically neutral in the way such meetings, (as well as things like psychotherapy) tend to be. There are many more differences I won't go into here.
Suffice to say that what I am trying to do with these blog posts (besides just stay in recovery myself by responding as best I can to the fact that, as an Individual-Person, I have, among other things, an intrinsic relationship and responsibility to my fellow Citizens of the world--including the Human ones) is to attract those who have a strong enough latent conscience (and consciousness) to see that there is really nothing else to do but come together in such an experiment in inner and outer cultural recovery, since to do nothing (which is to say; to do anything else) is really just to strengthen the entropic, inner and outer denial, and ongoing alienated phoniness involved in all of this compulsive, "knowing-apart"; this crazy and unsustainable effort to solve falsely dissociated and falsely isolated "problems".
So then: my email is individualperson1@gmail.com. If you want to contact me and discuss all of this in some other format. Or you could just start a discussion via making a comment.
umm...thats all for now...
I-P
Ps: like always, I am sure that there are a few type-o's in the above but I don't think there are any important ones. I'll come back and fix things by and by.
*I think I might need to underline, in this example of one aspect of our shared education into a sick culture, that what is "broken" ("damaged" is a better word) is the totality of the Individual rather then just the "body". I'll try to do this by using the informal language for the various aspects of "Individual" coexistence ( ie; "inner elder, inner animal, etc) reintroduced in the above table. One can then liken the imposition described as a kind of "home invasion" in which the "Child" of the house (Feeling function) is forced (for whatever misguided and or perverse reasons on the part of the intruder) to punish the Family Pet (Inner Animal/Sensation). In such a situation the same fear that makes the child obey will be making the "Parents" (Inner Adult) intellectually connive at or Rationalize away what is happening. The Grandparents (Inner Elder) would also eventually dissociate from the whole thing via some version of fear-inspired "metaphysic"(whether Scientific, Religious, or "Spiritual") that amounts to choice of voluntary senility. Of course to be more accurate in our analogy, we must imagine this coercive imposition to be, not just a one-time "invasion", but more like the repeated, ongoing one that our education (and the way of life it prepares us for) constitutes. Nevertheless, the point here is that everything that is happening is a function of each "family-members" dysfunctional response to the same fear, and that the damage being done is being done to the "whole household" (or "Family System") and not just to the Inner Animal (ie "Sensing") and the Inner Child (ie "Feeling") parts of the Individual. All of this helps to show how, in a sick culture, education (both formal and informal) tends to amount to some form or another of child abuse--but more on this in another post.
**When I think about it, this phrase "oppression at home and conquest abroad" is a pretty good description of Private/Public Alienated-Phoniness at any scale. You'd have to modify the word "conquest" and say "attempts at conquest; ie competition", but that is not much of a modification. Part of the general dynamic of competition is that it inevitably encourages inner censorship, inner oppression, inner betrayal, in order to "win" (actually, even to acquire and maintain membership in good standing in ones own "Team"). And of course, if acquired in either context, such outwardly confirmed "success" or "superiority" will of course be as phony as it is temporary, since betrayal of ones wholeness as an Individual was the price, not only of the success, but even of admission into the game. In which case, who exactly is it who has won? I want to point out that, in such contests "losers" as much as "winners" participate in the same self-betrayal and phoniness, though perhaps the former will have lost just because they were at least unconsciously healthy and self-respecting enough to put at least some limits on "oppression at home" (that is on self-oppression), implicitly leaving the "palm" of "Success" to those unlucky enough to have had a more effective mechanism of self oppression--a more effective inner tyranny--imposed on them through fear-based education. It doesn't strike me that this will always have been the case, however and I don't mean to make invidious comparisons or "shame" the "winner". Recourse to that kind of irony is of very limited use and often means that the ironist is still suffering unconsciously from some kind of alienated and competitive way of looking at things...
***The above language of the "Hypo-Civil" and the "Hyper-Civil" can be misleading as well as useful; I don't want to privilege either the Civil or Local (or Familial or "Spiritual/Religious/Philosophical) visa-vis each other, since the whole point is that, like North, South, East, and West, they intrinsically coexist and "co-orient" and codetermine each other.
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