Healthy Culture Tables

So I made some tables recently that I thought I'd post with a bit of commentary. The tables represent some of the implications of a philosophical view that I call "Coexistentialism" (though "Correlativism" might also do as a name). It assumes, among other things, that the impression given by lived experience, namely, that the experience of the external world and of the internal world are mutually defining and correlative, is true and valid, so that reducing one to the other is like trying to reduce one side of a coin to the other,  or  to reduce Up to Down, when what is primary is obviously the verticality which implies both.  The tables reflect the Cosmological aspect of Healthy Culture ("Culture" remember, is here defined as comprising Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, Infrastructure, and the Logic and runs through them all). As such the tables are meant to be of use in the experimental design of the rituals, infrastructure, etc of a culture of Recovery that is ontologically biased toward Coexistence over Existence,  Co-order over Order, the Correlative over either the Absolute, or the Relative, and an accenting of Togetherness over Apartness"generally. None of this implies that the former term negates that latter totally, but rather that the latter is in the service of the former rather than the other way around .

General Healthy Culture Table (Some Cognitive Coordinates):

Vernacular	Psychological	Philosophical	Prosocial		Phenomenological
Itness	Conception	Indefinite	inner adult	civil venue	when	where
Thatness	Perception	Finite	Inner child	local venue	then	there
Thisness	Sensation	Definite	inner animal	familial venue	now	here
Whatness	Apprehension	Infinite	inner elder	religious venue	always,never	Everywhere, nowhere
Insideness	Intention	Subjective	Individual		Time
Outsideness	Attention	Objective	Person		Space
Togetherness	Coawareness	Correlative	Individual-person		Space-Time

The archetype or model for these coordinates is of course the set of orienting directions (north, east, south, west, up, down and Center from top to bottom in the above columns). I would have put the directions in the table itself but didn't think about it at the time. With the last two columns I have seen fit to divide the the first four cells into two, each side representing the four zones "above" and "below" the central "equator". The first 3 columns in the table could also have been divided this way (Inner Itness/outer Itness", etc) but this would be less useful here. 

Sometimes I find it useful, when using a term like "the Finite" from this table in the correlative (not absolute or relative) sense, to add the prefix "Co", as in "Cofinite", "Coinfinite" etc, so that its clear that I am not speaking of the "The Finite" or "the Infinite" in a reified, absolute, dissociated, or totally abstract and disembodied, manner. Its a bit awkward but less potentially misleading. I try to only use such neologisms when I think that otherwise, the sense of what I am saying will tend to get lost in its translation in to the very paradigm its trying to replace. 

Here I want to point out three other things from this table. One is that, from the point of view of the Correlative (third column), the shared "Objective World" of what we call "Nature" is the other side of the coin of a shared "Subjective World" which I call the Shared Self (though you might also call it "Consciousness"). I call this Correlative reality "SharedSelfNature". This implies that both "Nature" considered as some fundamentally separate thing from Consciousness and Consciousness considered as fundamentally separate from Nature, are both myths. The second point is that, correlatively speaking, modern mathematics is involved in a categorical confusion regarding the infinite (or more meaningfully, our culture is involved in a cognitive confusion regarding mathematics). Mathematics as we understand it is basically Indefinite and it would be better to apply that name ("The Indefinite") to the concept and symbol that we now call "Infinity". Confusing "Itness" with "Whatness" is like confusing north with west, a sign of being generally lost. Finally; the togetherness or correlativity of Subject and Object opens the door to the possibility of a kind of Recovery Dialectic between them, a dialogical practice in pursuit of inner and outer consensus as to the Honest Truth. This is not to be confused with the dialectic of either Socrates or Hegel, which both seem to me dialectics of Denial. I will hopefully have time to develop all of these points individually here or elsewhere....

Inegalitarian Reaction Table (Reactive Antisocializing):

	Coreactive	Counterreactive
Hype-notized	Coreactive Hype-notized	Counterreactive Hype-notized
Gaslit	Coreactive Gaslit	Counterreactive Gaslit

I have discovered that Reactivity (which i think is ultimately an aspect of biopsychosocial and ecological trauma resulting in distorted and diminished coawareness and thus confusion) has two types or aspects, just as Inequality has both the view from the assumed "better than" and the view from the assumed "worse than". In the state of cultural "dysmutuality" coinciding with conquest and its aftermath for example, one can find those who accept coreactively the imposed hierarchy and those who challenge it counterreactively. However  reactive acceptance or reactive challenge, manifest differently depending on whether one is the conquering or the conquered. The former is likely to be "Hype-notized", taking for granted the superiority of their culture in the spirit of "Might is Right", (which I debunked in a previous post). The conquered, on the other hand, are likely to be correspondingly "Gaslit" about their own culture and traditions, at least to the extent that they consciously or unconsciously have the same belief about might and right. Of course one can be both gaslit towards higher ups and "hype-notized" vis-a-vis ones employees or whatever.

In 1076 in England for example, a Norman Lord would likely simply (and coreactively)  think the Saxons fit for only serving the Normans, while his son might, on the contrary argue (counterreactively)  that any Saxon raised properly in the Norman culture from childhood would be as good and decent a person and any other Norman. Notice that no-one is questioning the superiority of Norman culture in this case, (by for example suggesting that there is good and evil, health and sickness in every culture), so both the Lord and his son can be regarded as Hype-notized, the one Coreactively and the other Counterreactively. By the same token, but among the Gaslit conquered, you would likely find obedient servants who, believe in their own inferiority just as much as the lord does, and who find just as much security in "every one knowing their place" (I believe there is an illustrative stereotype of this involving Butlers). One the other hand, the counter reactive gaslit, (Saxons), are likely to consider themselves to be as superior to the Normans as the Norman Lord thinks himself to them, and thus rail and conspire against the injustice of being the oppressed and not the oppressor. As regards to this latter countereactive group, there can also be talk of "equality" rather than counter claims of superiority, but this version of equality never seems to be one informed by the sense of coawareness illustrated in the last of these tables. You seldom, in other words find people fighting for the right (and responsibility) to "deal with our shit while you deal with yours", or anything like that.  

This tendency to dissociate, (to lie by omission to oneself and others) regarding the coexistence of ones own "piece of the Truth", with ones "piece of the Lie", facilitates the same delusion in others of ones group (which either "Hype-notizes" or Gaslights the group as a whole), and is part of what I call "anti-socializing".

Egalitarian Cointeraction Table (Interactive Prosocializing):

Inner egalitarian interaction (Inclusive, Individual Listening)	Outer Egalitarian Interaction (Inclusive, Personal Listening)
Inner Elder (Honoring Healing)	Outer Religious Venue (Honoring Healing)
Inner Adult (Honoring Healing)	Outer Civil Venue (Honoring Healing)
Inner Child (Honoring Healing)	Outer Local Venue (Honoring Healing)
Inner Animal (Honoring Healing)	Outer Familial Venue (Honoring Healing)

If I called "Egalitarian Cointeraction" "Egalitarian Interaction" instead, there would be a danger of the reader thinking only of interactions between two "Persons" (outwardly viewed) and not the inner individual egalitarian interaction within each Individual (first column) happening simultaneously with the more "horizontal" outwardly engaged Personhood.

To the extent that there is vertical, inner dissociation exclusion, censorship, there is Alienation from ones own experience. This means one is not able to be an authentically manifest Individual (even to oneself). Not being able to honor include, connect to, and so express all of oneself inwardly means one cannot, honor, do justice to or be oneself to others in any of the four outer venues of Personhood. In other words, being Alienated inwardly means being Phony outwardly. 

"Honoring" here means listening to and including into the whole (so "healing"). Its interesting that the word "honor" is related to both the world "listen" and the word "honesty", since not listening to each aspect of ones subjective experience (having neither an "inner quorum" nor an "inner consensus) means that ones outer response to a given situation cannot be a really honest or authentic response.  Egalitarian honoring and including (inwardly and outwardly) is what is Prosocial about the whole thing. Of course one has to be Aware of things being dissociated, oppressed, and neglected (both inwardly and outwardly and in real time) to include and heal them.

Generally what inhibits this process, and so facilitates alienated phoniness, is the kind of antisocial framing I will elaborate on to below.

Prosocial Framing (The Nexus of Coawareness--Co-ordered, Correlative, Coexistential Awareness):

Outer Sickness Awareness	Outer Health  Awareness
Inner Sickness Awareness	Inner Health Awareness

Inner and outer healing requires inner and outer awareness of both our shared Individual-Personhood and our shared Alienated-Phoniness. There is obviously some degree of health in the outer world, however sick it is, or we would all be dead already. Similarly, there must be some health, authenticity and "cointegrity" in each individual for the same reason. Coawareness of all aspects of this inner/outer reality implies a Prosocial Framing of experience that reveals by its contrast the Antisocial Framing (dominant in a sick culture). In the antisocial framing one typically keeps one or more of the four quadrants out of frame (excluding for example, any acknowledgement or consideration of ones own sick culture (or that of ones group). This is usually in order to indulge in an attack on some other who is correspondingly misframed as having no healthy culture worth considering. At the same time as something like this is happening, the mutual influence of the Outer Culture (both sick and healthy) on both the self and other is also usually out of frame, all facilitating the above mentioned reactive "Self-Hypenosis" and/or "Gaslighting".

Of course, on the face of it (as well as after deep and thorough scrutiny), such a skewed framing of any situation is preposterous.

 The equal size of the four quadrants of coawareness as presented does not obviate the fact that in our current situation the sick outer culture of Phoniness is reinforcing our sick inner culture of Alienation against the Health of both sides (individual and personal), of our the shared world. The table is static but the reality it represents is certainly not. In fact, it would probably be clearer to make the table/nexus more like a wheel which can be thought of as either rolling to the left (in which case inner and outer healthy culture is acknowledging and engaging (because it is aware of) inner and outer Sick culture (this would be a dynamic of Prosocial Recovery), or one the other hand, to the right, (in which case Inner and outer sick culture , being unaware of its own existence as such) is unconsciously diminishing the very inner and outer wholeness which can alone facilitate the healing of real but unacknowledged alienation and phoniness. This direction of the wheel would symbolize a dynamic of Antisocial Denial. Nor is there any reason to think that the wheel cannot reverse itself at any time.

Still, the equal size of quadrants of coaware (and so "coframed") experience honors the existence of unknown and changing depths in all of the four quadrants. In other words, at any given time, things could be much better (outwardly or inwardly or both) than we know. Or, on the other hand, they could be (outwardly or inwardly or both) much worse. Moreover any such temporary situation would be liable to change for the better or worse and back again in an ongoing unpredictable way, such that the ideal here cannot be  to be "recovered", as this would only amount, (given the eternal reality, of not only of the "unknown" but of the "unknown unknown") to a cocky return to denial. 

The emergency of the dominant sick culture implies, like the emergency of a house on fire, the presence, not only of the outer "flames" (outer sick culture") but the "inner smoke" (inner sick culture) and thus the need for a shared ongoing awareness of both. Even if we were to somehow become immune to some form of "smoke", in the ongoing process, something new is sure to start burning, not to mention the inevitability of a multitude of other unexpected and/or unnoticed events. Of course, like in any emergency, the opposite extreme to that of cockiness, namely, panic or despair, is equally unwarranted. What such a situation requires is a normalized "balancing feedback orientation", something like the inclusive but calm alertness advocated in what is called "defensive driving", rather than any kind of "reinforcing feedback" dynamic inherent in self-righteous egotism or panicked despair. The recovery dynamic cannot be closed, static and rigid, because Life is not a closed and static state but an open and dynamic, mysterious process, the very openness of which makes any kind of absolute or rigid "taking for granted" of things like ones own  "correctness" (moral or otherwise) obviously inappropriate. Again however, the required balanced humility is  not the same thing as Shame, since shame implies a denial and unawareness of both ones own part of shared healthy culture, and everyone else's part of shared sick culture. Coawareness and its conscientious prosocial framing, allows us to avoid ether of these extremes

 Thus the end as well as the means of the cultural recovery process is to cultivate, sustain and expand, with the help, among other things, of the above shared understanding (and the experimental rituals derivable from it; see future posts) an increasingly coordinated dynamic of inner and outer healing at all levels of scale. Given the antisocial nature of the dominant culture of denial, this will likely begin as a kind of "Recovery Underground", but the idea is that, as a critical mass of recovering alienated-phonies is reached, cultural changes in civil institutions (evinced by enabling legislation among other things) would begin to facilitate corresponding changes, in local, familial, and religious/spiritual institutions and venues. But this would really be a non-linear process--not just a top down process scale-wise, since what would really be happening is a simultaneous transition from a shared culture of  Private Alienation the corresponding Public Phoniness to one of Individual and Personal recovery in the context to True Community.

 

{I am going to stop here because my elder is reminding my inner adult that my inner child and animal are tired of typing and sitting, and I am happy enough with this edit for now}

 

cheers,

--I-P

Ps. I will probably change my moniker soon to "R/RA-PH" (pronounced "rayf", rhymes with "waif"). This is an acronym standing for Recovering/Relapsing Alienated-Phony (or if you prefer "Relapsing/Recovering Alienated-Phoney". You may laugh, but remember not being a R/RA-PH mean being an "APHID" (an "Alienated Phony In Denial")! At least its not clear to me that there are any other real choices...

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

 

Healthy Culture Quotes and Proverbs

 

Water and Earth (A thawing of Frost)

 by I-P

Some say the world will begin with Water

Some say with Earth

From what I know of Compassion's Daughter

I hold with those who wager Water

But if there were to be a Second Birth

I think I know enough of laughter

Of humble, kind, good-natured mirth

To say that for creation Earth

Is of equal worth

If it does come after...

 

 

 

 

So. Long time no posts. I guess I lost faith in the written/virtual word as a medium for finding "Healthy Culture Nerds" to collaborate in a "cultural pilot project", possibly in the form of an intentional community*.Not sure I have really regained it, but I do have the urge to post, in no particular order, the following fairly representative quotes of myself together with some made-up "proverbs" related to Healthy Culture as I understand it these days. I will probably add to, and perhaps modify) them in the future and--if I get really inspired-- elaborate on each one (or just some of them) in future posts.--I-P

 

 

""Science", the faculty of "knowing-apart"; "Conscience", the faculty of knowing-together"...

 

"A culture, just as much as an individual, without a healthy functioning conscience, can be called "Sociopathic" and its form of self-replication (its educational process), "Sociopathogenic"...

 

Against a rapist epistemology:

"If might is right, rapists have the right to rape children because the rapists are presumably “mightier". Might is not Right nor (contra Bacon and Hobbes) is  “Knowledge" (presumably “Right Knowledge”) ,“Power” (presumably “Power-Over”--ie "Might”).  Right Knowledge is not Might: Right Knowledge is Communion, as the majority of cells in your body must know very  well, else you wouldn’t be  alive reading this…"

 

"People seem to think that they are trying to "enjoy Life" but "Life" is not what is happening; what is happening is the rape of the planet. People are trying to enjoy the rape of the planet..."

 

"Local Anesthesia, General Anesthesia, Coma, Death you think will release ya

but Local Wholesthesia, General Wholesthesia, Awakening, and Life is what will ease ya

'cause if the shoe fit, you don't feel it; if ya stomachs working right ya don't think of it:

Wholesthesia is the silence of Health, (check it out, dig it your self)

 

--From the song "Its Not Life" 

Anesthesia is "Nonsense", "Wholesthesia"?, thats "Complete Sense", "Euaesthesia" is "Good Sense", I'm wishing you "Good Sense"...

 

--From the song "Good Sense"

"War is the Denial of Life, "Peace" is the Denial of Death; Justice is not the Denial of Anything..."

"Justice is the situation of people acknowledging and resolving to treat their own individual symptoms of our shared sick culture, rather than projecting them onto each other individually or onto other groups collectively. It is a group of people helping each other do this. Justice is Shared Recovery."

"The context of this Shared Recovery is True Community"

 

 "True community is not just the "human community", (which ecologically speaking is just one population in a given place and not a community at all), but rather the the whole diversity of beings in a given place considered as fellow Individual-Persons with which to share recovery.

 

"If the land does not recover, the people cannot recover"

 

"While the people do not recover, the land cannot recover"

 

 "Justice is "Justice for All"

"Justice begins at Home: Be fair with Yourself...."

 

"Rhetoric, Logic and other forms of argument and persuasion implicitly separate Honesty (subjective reality) from Truth (objective reality), and so tend to involve both Dishonest Truth (misleading "facts", Lying by Omission, etc) and False Honesty (unconsciously excluded/censored "feeling/sensations/thoughts, etc). This is because in any such argument, the possibility that both parties could be wrong, and that, moreover the whole topic of discussion could be a red herring relative to a much more vital topic which is being ignored, is connived at by both participants, setting the whole discussion on an alienated and dishonest foundation to begin with.."

 

The expression of Righteousness is always an example of both of Dishonest Truth and False Honesty. Of  Dishonest Truth in as much as it is an arbitrary singling out and condemnation of one or another symptom of sick culture in another (while ignoring in ones self, the many, perhaps different but equally important symptoms of that same disease) Such symptoms can be expressed in terms of "crimes of omission" or "crimes of commission". Such righteousness is an example of  False Honesty in as much as subjective anesthesia/amnesia are behind ones ability to do this ignoring.

At the same time, Shame is always equally an example of this same Dishonest Truth/False Honesty, as such shame implies an equal amnesia and numbness regarding, in this case, ones of own past and present "virtues of omission" and "virtues of commission", ie; the share of healthy culture that is also present, even if unrecognized and cultivated.

Thus, when and wherever there is Righteousness or Shame (or Praise or Blame, or Reward or Punishment) of oneself or others, there is False Honesty/Dishonest Truth (ie; Alienated Phoniness and "Antisocializing"). Of course this is just something to know and try to heal, not to be ashamed about, such Shame just being a sign that the denial process is still the default one...

 

And, what happens in the absence of the dominance of these things in our shared culture? Cultural Recovery, Inner and Outer Healing is what happens, that is, if Coawareness, True Community, and Good Sense have taken their place. For there is a dimension perpendicular to the false dichotomies of Righteousness/Shame etc, a dimension across which there is a (relatively) true dichotomy. That dimension is that of Recovery or Denial which go in opposite directions along the same slanted and usually winding road. In one direction one takes progressively less and less for granted, becoming less and less self important and more and more awake alive and interactive, and in the other...well the opposite.

 

Even so, the reason I say the dichotomy is only relative and not absolute is because people in cultural recovery are always Relapsing into denial (and helping each other to Recover from such relapses). Given the nature of the situation (ie; that we were all born into, suffer from and are still surrounded by, sick culture) relapses are to be expected (though not courted), as just a part of the Shared Recovery Process. As such, they are just treated as sources of information relevant to improving that process (ideally anyway). Such relapses, once they are seen, acknowledged, and collaboratively "treated" as such, are in no way  a part of the denial dynamic and Laughing about them afterwards is part of what I was trying to get at in the " good natured" and "humble" Laughter of my poem.

Only from such an unpretentious Recovery dynamic, and from a Logic that correlates in principle (and cultivates in practice) both Honesty and Truth, can we expect to approach either Honest Truth outwardly expressed or True Honesty inwardly experienced. Such a Logic is 'Life-Logic" ie; Correlative Logic, or the logic of Coawareness, of Recovery as opposed to the prevailing logic of Denial".

"Everybody has a piece of the Truth; Everybody has a piece of the Lie"

"Basically, the house is on fire and those not being burned alive tend to be stupefied by the smoke."

 

"Evil is just Glamorized Stupidity"

 

 "The opposite of stupidity is not Cleverness; the opposite of stupidity is Awareness ("Coawareness" actually)"

 

Coawareness is the joint awareness of the "fire and smoke" outwardly in the world And equally of their effects inwardly in oneself. It is simultaneously the awareness of the existence also of some necessary degree of "non-fire" and "non-smoke" both inwardly and outwardly (otherwise we and the world would be dead already). This Coawareness results in realization of the necessity to coordinate inner and outer healing.

Recovery Culture chooses Compassion over Lies,

Denial Culture chooses Lies over Compassion...

* This is because the essence of healthy culture is likely to be lost in its translation into the cognitive idiom  of the dominant sick culture. Healthy culture communications are always directed to the Intelligence of the Heart (which is notably closer to the gut and arms and legs--that is to compassionate and courageous interactivity-- then the pseudo intelligence of the head alone). The dissociated left-brained attention of the dominant culture is likely to exclude the essence of what is being said in the very act of isolating,  "mastering", (or even just being able to superficially understand and repeat) the concepts. Such "power-over the letter" being mistaken for true "communion-with the spirit" of what one is trying to communicate can only be expected from those unconsciously  infected with a "power-over epistemology"...(I exclude myself from this only to the extent that I am Conscious that I share this infection with  you and everyone else in this culture and so am in ongoing self-imposed experimental treatment for it, which I call Recovery)...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

"Science", "Conscience", and "Conference"

{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:

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

{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...}

But I need to add one thing to complete my sketch of the both the faculty of Conscience and of what it means for it to be damaged, something that I hinted at above and that I think brightens the bleak situation described above considerably. This is that the inclusive coordinated "knowing-together" that is Conscience must include and engage the inner and outer "Knowing-apart" that is Science. How else, after all could it be real knowing-together if it dissociated and ignored its opposite (or perhaps you might say its "wound"?) It is Science that dissociates, excludes and ignores, not Conscience. Because of this, the inner and outer dynamic of conscience is the only dynamic that can (and must if it is to be real conscience) acknowledge, include and heal, inner and outer Science. Conscience is therefor not against Science but for Sciences healing integration into (basically its subordination to and to some extent transformation by) itself. Relative "Knowing-Apart" is sometimes necessary after all, it is just that only a primary  and ongoing process of knowing-together is going to be able to determine when where and for how long such relatively dissociated work or thinking is necessary or useful. Left to itself, any specialized science or "profession" can only be expected to become more and more blinkered, myopic, subdivided within itself as well as more alienated from and competitive with, other such "disciplines, to the ultimate detriment to any kind of common good, or any manifest common sense...

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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