Archive for October, 2006

Rational dialogue and human development

Published on October 29, 2006 in Philosophical. 4 Comments

Continuing the conversation with Sean regarding Atheists and Development:

Sam Harris is an advocate for the power of conversation, for rational dialogue, and this, more than anything, is what irks him about religious faith: Faith is a real conversation killer. Harris also does a nice job of exposing (then breaking) the taboo of criticizing religious faith. Why give religion a pass, Harris asks, when we demand a basic standard of reasonableness is every other area of our lives? I couldn’t agree more. I also agree with the notion, put forth eloquently by Ken Wilber, that many disagreements and impasses in communication between humans come down to issues of development. Anyone who deals with children or adolescents on a regular basis understands how crucial an understanding of development is for facilitating change. The situation gets trickier, however, when we talk about worldviews and mores and adult human development.

Hec, the majority of Developmental Psychology departments in American universities don’t even discuss adult development, and the few programs in “Life Span Development” posit no quantum changes in human cognition beyond rationality. And although Wilber may be right that development continues in a fundamental way throughout the lifespan, the question remains “How do we best facilitate change?” – whether we’re talking about changing someone’s mind (a change within the bounds of a rational developmental stage) or moving from one developmental stage to another.

Harris argues that certain beliefs eventually become marginalized in a culture when those beliefs are shown to be inconsistent or incompatible with the prevailing evidence. While there is still an active “Flat Earth Society” out there, espousing ludicrous conspiratorial arguments against the “hypothesis” of a round earth, most reasonable people not only refuse to take flat-earthers seriously, we also wouldn’t hesitate to point out the ridiculous, irrational nature of their lame arguments, thus keeping such beliefs on the fringes of society. So, why couldn’t this happen in regard to religious faith? Harris thinks it can, and I agree. And while we can think of the issue in terms of development, such a theoretical pirouette doesn’t weaken the argument that rational, evidence-based, open-ended dialogue is the best catalyst for change we have available to us.

I need only recall my own personal development to understand this. How did I change my mind about religious faith? Or if you prefer, How did I develop to a more inclusive worldview? The answer to both questions is the same in my case: I was exposed, over time, to series of thoughtful, rational, evidence-based perspectives that eventually made utterly transparent the silliness, ignorance, and self-limiting nature of religious dogma. And until integral or developmental theorists can demonstrate a more effective approach to this problem, or any other for that matter, I will have to go with what’s worked for me.

Parenthood

Published on October 28, 2006 in Personal and Waiting for the miracle. 0 Comments

My friend David Jon lit a fire this morning with his latest blogging on the transformative power of parenthood. He makes several interesting points, and I have no doubt that parenthood can be a profoundly deep, spiritual, humanizing, enlightening experience for everyone involved. Just saying this much, however, and I realize I’m in over my head here. I’m thirty-six years old, and neither my wife nor I have any intention (right now, at least) of having children. “Why not?” one might ask. Good question.

I love kids. Always have. At family gatherings I’m the one running around in the back yard with all the kids while the big people stand around like stiffs making idle conversation with each other. My own parents had always assumed I would be family man, and now they — along with my siblings — scratch their heads wondering why I persist in being so self-centered. This is when I get pissed off a little. Because unlike David Jon, I have spent my life surrounded by people who hold parenthood up as the ultimate spiritual experience, at least in the sense that Paul Tillich used the term “spiritual,” i.e. whatever matters most to a person. However you slice it, where I come from, raising children is assumed to be the highest purpose in life. And yet growing up, I never met a single adult who seemed radiantly happy and fulfilled, at least not in the way I yearned to be. And I never heard anyone talk about having and raising children in the way that David Jon talks about it. On the contrary, I was always left with the impression that most people had kids or wanted kids for the most self-centered reasons imaginable, i.e. to keep up with the Jones’s, to pass on their genes, to keep their family name going, to mold little beings in their own image, or to justify continued misery at a soul-sapping job. Where I come from, everyone gets married, has kids, and works at least forty-hours a week. In fact, to this day I know very few people who choose to be childless. If having kids, in and of itself, is such a transformative, life affirming experience, one would expect widespread peace and love instead of widespread misery and ignorance.

When I was a younger man getting ready to take on the “real world,” it seemed that adulthood promised to be, for the most part, a period of gradual physical, psychological and spiritual decline. It just made sense for me to rebel against the status quo. Hec, I never thought I would get married, but here I am. And I may yet decide to have children. If ever I am a father, I have no doubt that it will be a wonderful, spiritual experience like none I’ve ever known. But why should parenthood be any different than loving relationships in general, in that the depth of the experience depends on how open, awake and unfettered I am in my capacity to relate to others and to be alive?

I’ve worked with kids whose parents pimped them out for crack money, or used them as punching bags to vent their endless frustrations. I also have a friend who says he’s discovered what it means to be human through caring for his sons. Any experience can help to free us from our spiritual prison of self-centeredness. Maybe parenthood is uniquely suited for this. I wouldn’t know, I guess.

Keeping it real

Published on October 27, 2006 in Personal. 0 Comments

So, I spent my precious days off this week at a counselor training workshop type thingy. And yeah, the lack of me-time has left me a bit cranky, but I did manage to learn a few things. For instance, the way I instinctively relate to my clients is consistent with what the state of Kentucky considers to be the “best counseling practices.” Truth be told, the two workshops I’ve attended this month constitute the only official training I’ve received in counseling techniques, despite the fact I’ve been counseling patients in various settings for a dozen years. My bachelor’s degree in Psychology trained me to be a scientist, and my master’s degree was entirely self-help oriented. I learned to be a counselor by counseling. It was a “trial by fire” deal. So, here I am at this seminar and the facilitator is telling me what all the latest research shows and what everyone already knows – that the patient’s perception of his or her relationship with the therapist is far and away the most significant predictor of positive change. Counseling techniques and schools of thought make almost no difference in outcome studies. It’s all about the sense of connection the patient feels with the therapist. It’s all about keeping it real.

For years I’ve considered authentic relationship to be the driving force of positive personal transformation in my life. I even wrote an entire master’s thesis unpacking this concept and using it to articulate some basic principles of personal transformation, principles which I believe are operative across many disciplines. Even yesterday, as I pondered the pros and cons of posting my caustic diatribe, I kept coming back to my commitment to keeping it real, even when doing so might lead to conflict and discomfort. It’s a slippery slope sometimes. In the end, I tempered my reaction to Stu’s blog quite a bit, editing out some pretty harsh comments. I’m still not sure this was the right thing to do. Nor am I sure it was a good idea to post at all, edits or otherwise. Who did it benefit? Was it just a way to make me feel better? Was it unnecessarily hurtful?

These are the types of judgment calls we all have to make everyday, and certainly I have to make them several times a day in my role as therapist. So far, I’ve always gone with my gut, and all in all that’s worked out fairly well. What else can we do?

Cranky, mean-spirited reaction to Stuart Davis’s blog

Published on October 26, 2006 in Philosophical. 1 Comment

Maybe it’s because he dissed my man Sam Harris. Or it might be I’m just subconsciously jealous of his relative fame and success. Shit, maybe I’m just cranky because I haven’t had a day off from work lately. Who knows, but for whatever reason Stuart Davis has managed to get under my skin. I used to love this guy’s irreverent, no-holds-barred commentary on everything under the sun, but lately he sounds more and more like a lackey for Ken Wilber and Integral Institute. Stu’s blog, like that of his mentor, has become little more than a hub of shameless self-promotion. In his latest infomercial for Wilber Incorporated entitled Open letter to rational pundits, Davis bellows (yet again) that he is fed up with so-called flatlanders. This time it’s Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who get bitch-slapped, as Davis gets his panties all bunched up railing against the futility of rationalism and the supposed refusal of rationalists to acknowledge the reality of human development.

Davis begins with this tired and absurd claim that the likes of Dawkins and Harris cannot “simply recognize” that “PEOPLE DEVELOP,” then he condescendingly chastises these two “rationalists” for attempting to reason with the vast majority of humanity who, according to Davis, lacks the developmental depth of consciousness to understand a word of the argument. Of course, Stu then tries to convince us first-tier boneheads to embrace his own pet theory, i.e. the brainchild of uberman Wilber, using nothing but rational arguments, doing precisely what he says he cannot stomach from Dawkins and Harris.

Gimme a break Stu. You had your chance to take Harris to task when you interviewed him for Integral Naked, but I seriously doubt you raised your empty objections then. I can’t say for sure, because long ago I stopped listening to those Integral Institute advertisements and mutual masturbation sessions you call “dialogues.” Had you raised your little “it’s development, stupid” argument to Harris, he undoubtedly would have disabused you long before you could spit your spiel about “all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types, and all other stuff.”

Furthermore, you’re just flat, flat, flat-out full of shit when you parrot Wilber’s smoke and mirrors “solution” to the world’s problems, which amounts to little more than beseeching people to translate everything into the terms of his dubious “theory of everything.” You rag on rational dialogue and offer in its place a rational monologue about how we “simply” need to acknowledge the obvious fact of development and then… and then what, Stu? Ask how people develop? Ask how five year-olds move from one worldview to another? Ask how twenty-seven year-olds who act like five year-olds move from lower to higher worldviews? Seriously dude, should we “simply” wait until George Bush and Osama Bin Laden evolve to “second tier consciousness,” the whole notion of which is highly dubious and at best scantily supported by empirical evidence? Should we convince them to buy Integral Institute’s latest multi-media package? Get ‘em into weightlifting? Ask ‘em to talk to “big mind?” Are you meaning to imply that you, Stuart Davis, are more highly developed than Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins?

No, you will not convert them with your transpersonal blather. They cannot hear you. You will not persuade or convince them. And not because you’re at some higher altitude, but because your rational argument is “simply” not compelling enough. So nyaah.

One bad day

Published on October 22, 2006 in Personal and Waiting for the miracle. 0 Comments

For all the ballyhoo about psychospiritual growth and seizing the day and whatnot that finds its way into this blog, it’s incredible — and downright discouraging — to discover that one bad day can seemingly negate months of perceived progress. I know it’s only a feeling, and “this too shall pass” and all that shit, but it took literally one crappy experience at work for me to consider changing careers. Hec, I was ready to move out of the country after my train-wreck of a discussion group yesterday evening. I gave the kids (patients on the Adolescent Chemical Dependency Unit) an assignment, asking them to write down the one person (could be living, dead, family member, celebrity, whoever) who they considered to be “the bomb” or the coolest person ever, then give me five reasons why. I was trying to get a discussion going about values and about what we can learn about ourselves by thinking deeply about who we look up to and who we despise. By the end of the group I felt as disconnected from these kids as I do from suicide bombers.

The majority of the kids espoused a core value system on par with a bad gangsta rap song, presenting the most abject vision of vacuous materialism, criminality and self-centeredness one could possibly imagine. To say I was discouraged would be putting it mildly. I felt utterly powerless to even plant the tiniest seed of positive change in these kids. “They’re too far gone,” is all I could think. And while I know that many of them will grow out of these self-limiting beliefs in time, I can’t help but recoil at the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they are too far gone. Maybe we all are.

Studies don’t show jack

Published on October 20, 2006 in Philosophical. 1 Comment

My friend Shawn raised a concern over on his blog that big-picture theorist Ken Wilber is being a wee bit disingenuous about the allegedly empirical basis of his ideas. I’m concerned too, but this kind of philosophical sleight of hand is not unique to Wilber. On the contrary, it’s positively pandemic, as the phrase “research shows” is fast becoming the secular version of “the Bible says.”

I’ve read most of Wilber’s work, and it seems to me that his theories are based on his own brilliant creative intuition and not — as he would like us to believe — on research of any kind. The theory comes first, then any relevant research is brought in to buttress his ideas. Nothing wrong with that approach, if one is honest about it. But because “empiricism” is such a fundamental aspect of the theory itself, I think Wilber feels pressure to ground his ideas in empirical data, even when the ground is pretty shaky. But just as reason itself can be twisted to fit just about any agenda, so too can so-called “research” be cited to support any number of bogus claims. In fact, the way research itself is presently conducted in our profit-driven culture –with political and economic concerns coloring the process at every stage– one would have to be naive in the extreme to accept any claim on face value. Consider this Washington Post article from earlier this year, in which we learn that: “Every psychiatric expert involved in writing the standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses…”

So, it’s no small wonder that “research shows” depression and other mood disorders to be chemical imbalances best treated with certain drugs. Gimme a freakin’ break. Every day, thousands of publications fill their pages with bogus conclusions drawn from this or that bogus study, and every day millions of ignorant people mistake these fictions for facts.

Of course, there is solid research out there, and empiricism — in the broad sense of basing our knowledge on experiment, direct experience and clear thinking — might be the best tool we have to test our intuitions. And we can all learn to separate the wheat from the chaff for ourselves, if we care to take the time.

The Birth of the Universe

Published on October 20, 2006 in Personal. 0 Comments

Fun with Stewie and Osama

Published on October 19, 2006 in Personal. 0 Comments

It all comes down to this, huh? Well, shit – I haven’t felt very inspired to do much this week. My job has sucked me dry, and all I could do last night was watch clips of The Family Guy on YouTube. I don’t have cable TV, and I’ve only managed to see a few episodes of the show over the years. I didn’t realize how fucking hilarious it is. I found this bit particularly side-splitting:

Pants on fire

Published on October 17, 2006 in Personal. 0 Comments

Kids… What can you say, except that they’re a bunch of lying little shit-heads.

One of my patients left the Adolescent Chemical Dependency Unit today, moving on to a long-term treatment center and leaving behind a trail of bold-faced, stone-cold lies. This kid lied about everything, from having a child to losing his buddies in a car accident to being beaten up by gang members. Of course, I’m used to being lied to, as anyone would be who deals with drug abusers and criminals. But sometimes it can be a bit much.

My wife has been dealing with this too, teaching her first ever class at the university. Several students have forged doctors’ excuses to account for absences, and a few have blatantly plagiarized papers from the internet. I have no sympathy whatsoever for these kids. They’ve probably been getting over on their parents for years and have never developed a sense of responsibility or had to face the logical consequences of their behavior. These kids seem to expect authority figures to look the other way, or at worst proffer a slap on the wrist. As far as I’m concerned, this just robs them of an opportunity to learn the rules of the big game.

Last night I gave my now former patient a little assignment. I asked him to write me a one-page paper on “What life would be like if you always told the truth?” He was supposed to turn it in to me when I came in this morning, but when I asked him for it, he said it was “too hard.” Maybe it was, but now he has another six to twelve months to think about it. I will too.

Achtung!

Published on October 15, 2006 in Philosophical. 0 Comments

I’ve always been baffled by the differing ways people use the terms attention, consciousness and awareness. In conversations having to do with psychology or spirituality, one gets the impression that consciousness (and/or awareness) is the summum bonum. What I’m curious about right now though, is the biological/neurological basis of attending. I read somewhere that attention is an exclusionary biological function, whereby there is an active inhibition of sensory and motor neurons in all areas other than the area (let’s say, my tongue) to which I’m attending. Whatever the case, I wonder how the basic neuroscience fits with all the psychospiritual yahoo about the primacy of attention/consciousness/awareness. Here’s how I’m understanding the distinctions at the moment. Attention is a function of the central nervous system, an everything-but-this inhibitory process that leads to greater sensory awareness and motor control. Consciousness is the total functional repertoire of which we can be aware, at any given moment. Or is it the other way around… we can be conscious of that which we pay attention to… we are aware of the…

Wait a minute….E = mc2? No, hold on now…I think therefore I am? No no…I am that I am.

I am what I am and that’s all that i am! Got it.