Letter to Ron (brother-in-law) re: "What I have begun to explore"

Ron,

I actually started a letter to you before I got your email but was pleased that you were able to identify the source of your memory and provide me a starting point to write to you.   I had done a bit of research and discovered that there was an author by the name of Sandra Perl who wrote a book called Felt Sense.   I don’t know why, but there are only a few copies of her book available, and they are “first edition prints” that are going for hundreds of dollars.   Apparently, her book is about how to get to a deeper meaning in creative writing.   An article about Sandra pointed me to Eugene Gendlin, who, as you know was the originator of the notion that our felt experience underlies both the conscious and unconscious aspects of our psyche.  I saw that Gendlin had two major books, Focusing, the one that you mentioned that was more of a therapeutic “how to” guide, and another book he wrote sixteen years earlier, in 1962, called Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning.  I opted to get this “more philosophical” tome and have been slowly reading and, when possible, digesting it.  Let’s just say it’s not an easy read.

As I mentioned when we last talked, I’m also reading a couple books by, or about, Carl Jung.   Memories, Dreams, Reflections is basically a biography in which Jung commissioned an editor, Aniela Jaffe, but ended up writing several chapters himself.  The other book has two of his smaller essays, “The Undiscovered Self,” and “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams.”  Jung mixes his childhood memories with dreams he’s had throughout his life and with his experiences, both professional and personal.   For me, the gist of Jung is that we should not ignore the two-thirds or more of that portion of our psyche that is unconscious when attempting to understand human beings and their behavior.  The thin façade of logical thinking is but a recent evolutionary development, and while it plays a role in human behavior and the emergence of the human mind, it is not the whole or even primary part of the enchilada, so to speak. 

When I studied psychology in the later sixties and through the seventies, the emphasis was on how our primitive limbic system functions were brought under control by a higher order logical-symbol- processor, the cortex.  No matter what we say about the human brain, it will be an understatement, but clearly what I gathered in my earlier psych training was overly simplistic. 

I did my masters thesis with a man named Robert Stutz, who was, with several others in the field of psychobiology, attempting to demonstrate that pleasure was a deep non-differentiated well that our brains drew upon to strengthen logical associations, regardless of the particular “drive system” that was being reinforced.  Sexual pleasure, satiation for hunger and thirst, relief from painful external events, all were ultimately reinforced from a nexus of brain stem and limbic structures having a particular biochemical arrangement.  Once triggered, the reward system operated to reinforce patterns of behavior that would be repeated again and again.  If things were short – circuited, if the reward system could be stimulated more directly by drugs like cocaine or by direct electrical stimulation of the areas that released the necessary endogenous chemicals, then the normal  adaptive behaviors could be subverted and addictions would result, locking individuals into persistent maladaptive patterns. 

It’s hard to cross over from physiology to mind.  To make the leap from a biological system to the psyche.  What are the fundamental attributes of the biological system that, when met, allow for the emergence of the psyche?  Emergence in general is a difficult concept.  Jochen Fromm gives, what he says is a common definition of an emergence:  a property of a system is emergent if it is not a property of any fundamental element, and emergence is the appearance of emergent properties and structures on a higher level of organization or complexity.” 

Another definition defines emergent properties as unpredictable and irreducible: “a property of a complex system is said to be “emergent” just in case, although it arises out of the properties and relations characterizing its simpler constituents, it is neither predictable from , nor reducible to, these lower-level characteristics.” 

Neither of these definitions really satisfies me. I am not even sure I understand them.   The closest I can come to a metaphor for emergence is something like a magnetic field emerging from a flow of electricity in a wire wrapped around an iron core.   What steps exist between the moving electrons and the emergent magnetic field?    I suppose emergence demands that there be some mystery.  

And that is precisely what Jung believes we are missing when we describe the world using only logical symbolism.   Religious experience, not the dogma or creed of a religion, but the experience of seeing a burning bush that does not extinguish, of seeing Jesus walk on water, on experiencing  the red sea opening to let the Jews flee the army of the Egyptian Pharaoh.  These are what Jung believes are the true experiences of humans that we ignore at our peril.   Our minds evolved over millennia, the innate wiring and biochemistry of the brain, the feelings and emotions we experience are at the root of a system that has been forged by the selection pressures of evolution.   They hold truths about us, about our interactions with one another and with the world around us that must be experienced.  At least, that’s what I think Jung’s saying.

While the symbolism of religious experience or dreams are true felt experiences, their imagery does not readily equate to a shared external reality.  What does it even mean that we can share an experience, and does sharing such an experience necessarily validate that our belief about the experience is somehow more true, more real?

Distinguishing between felt experience and logic and, at times, giving more credence to one over the other is fundamental to an internal process of negotiation that our mind employs to manage what are often dissimilar representations of our personal reality. 

Take illusions as an example.  Visual illusions in particular can be very vivid experiences where our conscious awareness dictates a very cogent and persuasive felt experience.  That is, until we are presented with another perspective, or we identify some logical inconsistency that makes us question our felt experience.  Once we can change our focus or perspective and see alternative possible “realities” we can no longer rely solely on our own felt experience.  Even for very strong and persistent illusions, once we know there is “a man behind the curtain performing magic tricks” as it were, we develop a wariness as to what we see before our very eyes.  Even when the illusion will not dissipate with an extra effort of focused mental energy to see it “the other way we have seen it in the past”, it will often persist.  Our memory and/or knowledge of its improbability now creates a feeling about our felt experience or modifies the memory of our original feeling.  It is no longer just a simple felt experience, but one that now includes doubt and uncertainty.  We can no longer depend upon that earlier feeling of vivid reality to give us the certainty of what we are experiencing as the truth. 

 

Descartes, in considering the erection of a firm and permanent scientific structure considered the need to “withdraw trust from the senses, on the grounds that they have sometimes deceived him.”  “Whatever I have up to now accepted as most true, I have received either from the senses, or through the senses; however I have sometimes found these to deceive; and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.”

Descartes and Jung thus, collectively, express the duality of what humans rely upon for establishing  what is real and true, felt experience and symbolic reasoning, where the latter is characterized by symbolic representations of strands of thoughts which require a certain consistency to fundamental rules of logic for them to be believed as, if not true, then at least possible.  Thus, neither felt experience nor symbolic reasoning provide unequivocal truth, but only the possibility of what may be true. 

Our personal reality is built upon these foundational elements, and our individuality, our psyche and the outward expression of who we are, our personality, are to a large extent the product of how felt experience and analytical modes of thinking are reconciled , or, if not reconciled, then managed to allow us to operate in a world that would otherwise be filled with doubt and ambiguity. 

Okay, so this is the beginning.  This is what I have begun to explore.  Maybe we can talk about this in a future Zoom call. 

We are also probably past due for a “cocktail hour” call with a larger group. 

Current circumstances continue to make it clear how fortunate I am to be where I am, and to be connected in meaningful ways with others.   Hope you, Marti and all your kids and connections are equally fortunate.

Lee

(circa May, 2020)

Ruminations on Context

Surely, if nothing else, the growth and development of information technologies and the social and societal reorganization they have engendered have taught us that some quantum of information neither guarantees that truth has been discovered nor that a lie has been spoken. Bits of information are nothing more than the dots of an image made from halftones.  

Even larger chunks of it are nothing more than shape shifting patterns, illusions that flip, like a Necker cube, from one perspective to another.  An old women or a young one?  A gun or a map of the United States?  Context and perspective, what is figure and what is background, the internal focus of your minds eye, these are what determine how any element of information is interpreted. 

The circumstances of a momentary perception are but a drop in the stream of incoming sensory data.  Add to this the notion that our memory is a huge interconnected and tessellated hierarchy of overlapping patterns — think of those Persian geometric designs on the walls and ceilings of tombs and temples,

or of Escher prints where figure and ground shift and fantastical images are seen that appear to defy gravity or the basics of three dimensionality itself. 

Now, expand these limited examples, scale them up to the size and capacity of an individuals memory, all of their felt experience, all of the boundaries, patterns merged and patterns differentiated, all of this, like the astronomers night sky, available for inspection, the breadth or narrowness of your unconscious mind’s focus a key element in the search for a match, for some recognition of where to look, what contexts, what patterns to hone in on.  Your mind continuously performing an interior galactic search for what is figure, what is ground, …what is meaningful. 

Astrology was one of the earliest known attempts to try and organize the night sky into meaningful aggregates of information.  Symbolic representations of earthly forms such as people and animals where used to connect the dots into patterns.  

Astronomers subsequently recorded the apparent movements of the stars and planets, creating from
these observations a theory of the heavens. First, a theory in which the perspective hinged on seeing everything as if the earth  were at the center, the heavenly objects rotating around it.  

Later, a more heuristic theory evolved which allowed for more accurate predictions of the movements of these heavenly bodies.  This theory placed the earth in orbit around the sun and the sun, in time, was seen in the context of a galaxy of star systems. 

That the sun rises in the eastern sky and sets in the west did not change. But the context in which this information was viewed was essential to its interpretation. Our experience is steeped in the contexts provided to us.  First by our our parents, who themselves interpreted their experience using contexts framed by their parents; and then by the cultures we live in and communicate with,  a history of cultural transmission over distances and across time.  Information not in a vacuum, but embedded within a rich and varied kaleidoscope of contexts.  At the time and place of our birth and throughout our lives, nothing we experience is isolated from, or independent of, context; context which is used to interpret our experience, give it meaning, and create future expectations for our current and future selves.