Tag: objective

What can we know?

barryh1 Comment

What can we know about life? Start with what we might all agree on.

Look inside. I am a conscious subject.

Look outside. There appears to be an objective material world in which I experience. I have a body that operates in this external world.

There also appear to be in this world other conscious subjects, including those who conditioned me from birth, and including animals and other creatures. I recognise their interiority.

Much of that interiority is shared across humans (at least) – my surrounding culture.

Summary. Basic dualities.

Basic dualities
  • Interior/exterior or subject/object or conscious/material.
  • Individual/collective or me/society + culture.

Quadrants

We can express this as four quadrants; none is reducible to the others.

Wilber quadrants

These are the Four Quadrants of Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology, and Ken and others have done a great job of mapping all human knowledge onto these four quadrants. See for example his Integral Psychology or his magnum opus Sex, Ecology and Spirituality.

For example,

  • modern science belongs on the right, as it is concerned with objectivity and, axiomatically, excludes the subject.
  • psychology and spirituality belong on the left, although scientific psychology and institutional religion attempt to reduce this to the right, or control it from the right.
  • culture belongs in the bottom left, and social and government systems in the bottom right.
Huber quadrants

These are also the four quadrants of the modern astrological birth chart. Astrology and astrological psychology have long encompassed all aspects of our being in the world. See for example Bruno & Louise Huber’s The Astrological Houses or Life Clock.

Limitations

Remember that the quadrants are an analytical breakdown, and can only represent suggestive truth. In reality we know that all is interconnected; models such as this may help, but always have their limitations.

What this does imply is that one-dimensional approaches to life cannot work. Materialism is a dead end; it cannot deal with interiors and ends up being inhuman. Control of people’s innermost thoughts through religious or political systems is another dead end; it cannot effectively deal with exteriors through science. Humanity has tried all of these through history.

We just have to embrace the complexity, and ultimately the mystery, of life.

Featured image licensed via Shutterstock.

Restoring the natural order

barryh4 Comments

Once, we human beings were immersed in the dreaming of the world, just as the plants and animals. Our brains had two hemispheres, which were equally immersed, equally perceptive of and involved in our interconnected world.

Then, we created language and the ability to reflect. Gradually, the left side of our brain began to specialise, to separate out and lose contact with our livingness, an ability which was retained in the right brain. The right brain was grounded in the body and sensing the world; the left brain increasingly concentrated on abstraction and manipulation of the world. Being interconnected, they formed a wonderful partnership, but it was the right brain that was grounded in living, was the Master, served by the left brain.

But the left brain became ever more powerful in its schemes and manipulations. It invented science and technology and the duality of subject and object. The subjective was ‘in here’, and the objective was ‘out there’, and the latter could be measured and manipulated by science.

The problem was, the left brain began to think it was more important – than the connectedness, the beautiful, the moral, the intuition grounded in right brain experience. What was important was the re-presentation of the world, not the actual experience. Even that, subjectivity itself, would eventually be explained away by materialist models. Art was just about concepts, not beauty. Justice was about laws and punishment, not what was right. Might was right in the politics of ‘interests’, which even purported to justify obscene warfare. Money was the supreme value. Science could be directed without making space for inspiration. Education was to prepare for making money. Intelligence was an abstraction that could be mechanised.

Yet still the right brain was there, belittled, but grounding and connecting. The denied connection with nature as it was slowly and systematically debased, exploited, polluted. The failed left brain dominance was showing its true colours as climate breakdown and pollution got a grip, species began to disappear, a stream of plagues burst forth on the earth. It was time for the right brain to take charge again, a new interconnectedness, a new caring for nature and others. The science and the money became once again harnessed to the good of all, no longer driven by the fearful band of rich and powerful left brains who almost destroyed it all. Education aimed once again to uncover the destiny of this particular soul on earth.

What made this happen? Well it was the natural order of things. The over-specialised left brain could not in the end cover up the effect of its own defects. The mass tragedies stirred the human soul, and the balance changed.

Inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s books The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things.

Inside out

barryh1 Comment

Looking at myself I see an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’, dualism. Similarly I see this in my dog, perceiving the ‘inner’ reflected in the dog’s ‘outer’. I have no reason to believe this does not apply to every living being, and even to beings that we would not regard as ‘living’ according to certain criteria.

I can call this ‘inner’ mind or soul or spirit or elan vital or etc. The ‘outer’ is what I perceive through the senses – which is the subject matter of empirical science. So there it is for each of us to see – two aspects to reality, subjective and objective.

I understand that this ‘ontology’ (idea of the nature of reality) was common among advanced thinkers in medieval times, such as Roger Bacon in 12/13C. It was also common in the East, such as the Indian Vedanta.

Then came the Renaissance, Reformation and establishment of Science. In the early days of science, pioneers such as Newton and Kepler shared the same dualistic ontology. Somewhere along the way, in the development of science, some of its exponents began to identify that which was the ‘outer’ domain as the true reality, measured by mathematical models, dismissing the ‘inner’ as something science would eventually explain in terms of the ‘outer’, without any justification. This was the ontology of materialism. Of course, the great thinkers such as Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger… knew better.

The materialistic ontology succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its proponents because mathematics gave the tools to control the ‘outer’ of nature – and there was no recognition of the ‘inner’ of nature. It also, incidentally gave the tools to manage people, in ways that did not need to take account of ‘inner’ factors such as justice, sanctity of life, beauty, goodness and truth even. The result is before our eyes, the ‘inner’ screaming for recognition as never before.

Yet it’s all ideas that are clearly not valid, if you just look at your self and your dog (or other living being).

Time to go back inward, individually and collectively to refind that beauty, goodness and truth.

With thanks to Maylinno’s post on the mind body connection
and Harald Walach’s paper on Inner Experience – Direct Access to Reality