Category: Philosophical

My mother was watching “The Biggest Loser” the other night while I was exercising on the stationary bike. I remarked that it was hard for me to feel much sympathy for these grossly overweight people, much less give them a big pat on the back if and when they lost weight. After all, I said, isn’t that like giving someone a medal for ceasing to bang their head against a wall? I mean, it’s a good thing to lose weight, but aside from the rare thyroid condition or what have you, didn’t these people get fat in the first place because of ignorance and poor choices? Clearly, I wasn’t feeling much in the way of compassion for these people, and my mother got on me a bit, saying that not everybody is as disciplined as I am.

Now the first thing I thought to myself was “Shit — I’m always lamenting my LACK of discipline.” Then I really started to ponder about whether or not any of us really has a choice about such matters, whether or not we truly are responsible for our own misery and/or fulfillment. I’ve been operating on the premise that I, in fact, AM responsible for my own happiness, having seen time and again how I choose the dulling comfort of the status quo when faced with the possibility of deep personal change. So, naturally I assume most other adults choose a life of relative ignorance and suffer the consequences accordingly.

This way of thinking though, does let one off the hook when it comes to feeling compassion, which might be an indicator something is amiss. After all, isn’t compassion supposed to spring naturally and effortlessly from the state of spiritual wakefulness?

Anyway, later on I went upstairs and finished the book The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, and came across the following:

It is misleading to say that somebody “chose” a dysfunctional relationship or any other negative situation in his or her life. Choice implies consciousness – a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind.

This makes a lot of sense to me, as did about ninety-nine percent of what Tolle had to say throughout the rest of the book. Apparently, Oprah liked the book as well, and her stamp of approval put the book in millions of hands. Basically, Tolle subscribes to the notion that the main barrier to spiritual enlightenment is our identification with the mind or ego. He advocates a practice of focusing awareness and attention on present moment experience, particularly the felt sense of the body, as a means of breaking our attachment to thought forms and thus realizing our true, transpersonal nature.

His basic view of enlightenment fits quite well with my own experience, and I appreciate his keen ability to express subtleties of spiritual inquiry in simple, direct language. In fact, he expresses his views in a pretty radical fashion, and it surprises me that so many people read his book. I wonder how many people really “bought” it. It struck me that if one REALLY believed what this guy was saying, the implications would be staggering in terms of how one goes about living one’s life. This certainly has been the case for me, although I’ve been struggling to integrate my transpersonal realizations into my daily life for many years now, long before I came across Tolle’s book.

For the most part, The Power of Now struck me as an articulate expression of what I already know to be true in my experience, at least as I understand it presently. However, I can’t endorse it a hundred percent. At times Tolle slips out of his clear, direct, experience-based language and makes bold, dogmatic metaphysical claims. For instance, he made reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and claimed one needed a certain degree of consciousness while dying in order to realize “conscious immortality,” or else be subject to “another round of birth and death.” This strikes me as nutty. How in the bloody hell does he know what happens at biological death? And he also equates women’s premenstrual tension with “the awakening of the collective female pain-body” — as if we’re just supposed to take his word for it. Again, this is kinda nutty, and would be quite enough for many to reject everything else he says. And that would be a shame.

I’ll close with another quote from the book that I dig. By “practicing surrender” Tolle is talking about accepting the present moment as it is, which means letting go of thought forms and becoming deeply present to the flow of experience as it felt in the body:

Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is something you read about, talk about, get excited about, write books about, think about, believe in – or don’t, as the case may be. It makes no difference. Not until you surrender does it become a living reality in your life.

There’s an interesting discussion going on at the Progressive Buddhism blog under the heading “The difficulty helping people.”

A commenter named Bill shared the following Taoist story, which I like a lot:

There’s an old Taoist story about a man whose horse ran away. When it happened, all his neighbors came over and said “Gee, it’s really awful that your horse ran away and so forth…” And the man said, “Maybe, maybe not.” The next day the horse came back and brought twenty really nice wild horses with it. And all the neighbors came and observed how really great it was that this guy now had all these new horses- and the man said, “Maybe, maybe not.” The next day the man’s son was out trying to break one of the horses, and got thrown off and broke his leg. All the neighbors came over and talked about how awful that was and so forth, and the man said, “Maybe, maybe not.”

So finally, the next day the army came by conscripting young men to go fight in some war, and they didn’t take the man’s son because he had a broken leg.

Blogger ~C4Chaos continues the Integral-Atheism discussion:

“Excellent discussion guys. allow me to address both your points with a link to a debate between Sam Harris and Scott Atran (post-Beyond Belief 2006 conference).

i do like Sam Harris, but i think Scott Atran had the upper-hand in this exchange due to Atran’s field experience and his implied approach of meeting people where they’re at, in short, Atran’s arguments is more “integral” than Harris’s arguments, especially when it comes to the discussion of sacred values.”

My response:

I’ve written about this many times before, but it always amazes me when highly intelligent people disagree. What does it say about reason that we can support almost any claim? That’s a whole other discussion, I know.

I must have some bias for Sam Harris’s way of thinking, because I always seem to agree with him. He has a real knack for cutting to the quick:

“The point is not that all religious people are bad; it is not that all bad things are done in the name of religion; and it is not that scientists are never bad, or wrong, or self-deceived. The point is this: intellectual honesty is better (more enlightened, more useful, less dangerous, more in touch with reality, etc. ) than dogmatism. The degree to which science is committed to the former, and religion to the latter remains one of the most salient and appalling disparities to be found in human discourse.”

Ironically (as a supposed, pro-evidence guy), what I didn’t like about Atran’s essay is his continual referencing of social science studies. Whenever someone says “Studies show…”, I get very skeptical. Without the study in front of me, I have only the author’s interpretation to rely on, an interpretation which I may or may not agree with. I’ve always preferred common sense arguments to “Studies show” arguments. Working in the mental health field as long as I have, I’ve seen first hand how economic, political, and personal agendas can distort the process of scientific research. This too, is another discussion, although I’m surprised religious-minded folk don’t use this argument more when railing against a science-based society. Scientific conclusions are often not nearly as objective as people might think.

Wilber is a master at stretching the “Studies show” spiel to support a conclusion that he undoubtedly arrived at long before digging up the research. Look how much mileage he’s gotten out of Taylor’s TM study. I’d be more impressed with AQAL if Wilber came right out and said “I just came up with this shit, because it makes so much sense” — instead of trying to make it look like a model built from the ground up through careful examination of empirical evidence.

With that, I’m WAY off topic and revealing to myself (and probably to all of you) what MY not-so-hidden agenda in all this must be, namely to shoot down Ken Wilber and to prop up Sam Harris. WHY I’m compelled to do this, only semi-consciously, I’m not sure. I’ll have to sit with that a bit.

So, I’m sitting here trying to revision the concept of “spirituality,” strip it of all religious baggage, and make it accessible to reasonable, critical thinkers for all time. Unfortunately, my knee is aching a bit, so I’ll have to knock this out in the next ten minutes or so. Well, shit, I may as well just Google it then, as I’m sure someone has already figured the whole thing out…

No way! Somebody DID figure it out. And that somebody was ME! Sort of. About seven or eight years ago my friend Steve asked me to write an essay for a book he was editing about the “Spirit of Generation X.” I tried my best to distill my twenty-something wisdom down to its essence, and what I came up with was the concept of “Radical Authenticity.” Basically, that’s my life project, in a nutshell. To be as fully myself as possible, to realize my potential as a human being, to wake the fuck up. So, I Googled the phrase “Radical Authenticity” and lo and behold I made three — count ’em three — amazing discoveries. First, my essay has recently been re-published on some “Integral” website. “How embarrassing!” was my first thought, as my writing style was pathetically imitative back then (it still is to some degree). I even used the word “alas” at one point, which is straight up Ken Wilber at his most pompous. Second, some dude from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology wrote an entire dissertation on the concept of “Radical Authenticity” and created Radical Authenticity.com. Now I’ll look like a poser for using the phrase, although it seems I coined it first. Lastly, that man-weasel cult leader Andrew Cohen has apparently become fond of using the phrase in recent years (again, post my essay), making it even more difficult for me to reclaim and re-tool the concept.

Okay, maybe “man-weasel” is a little harsh. And although Cohen does strike me as an ego-maniacal cult leader freak, I must admit I like the way he unpacks the concept of Radical Authenticity. Here’s what he says:
[From “The Challenge of Radical Authenticity“]:

There is a battle to be fought between the ego’s investment in image and falsehood and the authentic self’s passion for truth and transparency. Most of us do not have the courage to aspire for true integrity of self and soul. Even those who have deep and powerful experiences of higher states of consciousness, of profound emptiness and intoxicating joy, usually remain terrified of radical authenticity. But if evolution is to occur in a way that is stable and meaningful, radical authenticity is the most important part of the path. The power of your own potential transformation ultimately rests on how deeply authentic you are capable of being, at a soul level, as a human being. Radical authenticity is the ultimate threat to falsehood.

And that other dude really goes all-out in his definition [From RadicalAuthenticity.com]:

The word authenticity comes from two Greek words, “autos,” meaning self, and “entea,” meaning tool or instrument. The word radical comes from the Latin word “radix,” meaning root that goes to the source or center of something’s life (Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged, 1979.). Consequently, used together, the phrase connotes that a person is the very best tool or instrument one can be in the world to the extent that one’s actions and very mode of being flow from one’s center, or Source of being.

Additionally, for me there is another key implication in the phrase: Assuming that we all come from the one same Source—and that this is a benevolent and congruent Source—it follows that to the extent that one is radically authentic, i.e., whose actions flow from the very Source of who one is, then the result of those actions serve not only the individual but also all those impacted by those actions . . . at least in the long term, if not the short.

God bless Google. I can hit the sack now that my work is done here. I’ll keep thinking about this tomorrow. Maybe I need a new phrase. Integral Authenticity? Nah, too Wilberian. How about Head the gong? No… Too idiosyncratic (and too cool to pimp out for such purposes).

More on this later…

Over the past few months I’ve become acutely aware of my relationship to the various forms of media and technology clamoring for my attention. It used to irk me when my more “progressive” friends would seemingly brag about how they didn’t watch (or sometimes even own a) television. My (internal) response was usually “F-you, you f-ing f-hole.” After all, who doesn’t watch a little television every now and again, to wind down? Oh yeah, YOU don’t. I forgot. F- hole.

Of course, these same folks might spend hours on the internet watching YouTube videos, or reading novels or listening to music. Distraction is distraction, and it’s how one relates to various forms of media that determines whether or not it opens one up or shuts one down. I have to admit though, most of the time when I watch television I may as well be shooting crack into my eyeballs. There are exceptions of course, like the entire five seasons of Six Feet Under, but for the most part my relationship to the media is like that of junkie to dealer.

This week has been one of those exceptions, as I’ve enjoyed hours of video from the so-called “New Atheists” (Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens). I was also blown away by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-muslim refugee from Somalia, whose story is as compelling as her stunning beauty. I watched hours and hours of discourse on religion and atheism, all on Google-video or YouTube, and not one moment of it was characterized by the passive trance and drool dripping stupor of my typical viewing experience. On the contrary, I was left inspired and energized, and certainly inclined to think about my own position vis-à-vis matters of faith and reason.

While I’ve championed Sam Harris on this blog before, cheering from the sidelines you might say, I’ve avoided getting too deep into the issues at hand. I’ve enjoyed the various talks and debates vicariously, passively, unclear as to what the implications might be on my own life and process of inquiry. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s point about the implied activism involved in rejecting dogmatism really hit home. Quite often I am dismayed when friends and relatives read a profound book, say they “enjoyed it,” yet seem utterly unaffected by it, uninspired to explore the implications of the new ideas and insights, how they might impact their day to day lives. I’ve been guilty of the same thing myself, many times, and my failure to really explore the implications of the “New Atheist” movement is a prime example.

I am with Sam Harris all the way in rejecting the label “atheist” altogether. In fact, much of the problem with having productive dialogues about such things lies in our sloppy use of language and lazy reliance on unclear terms. The question “Do you believe in God?”, when answered with a simple “yes” or “no”, leads to zero increase in mutual understanding. Like the word “atheist,” such a question is nothing more than a trap, in the form of a conceptual maze, within which true dialogue, true understanding, cannot exist. If I’m against anything it’s these closed thought loops, the displays of distorted and downright piss-poor thinking that characterize much of the discourse about religion and spirituality.

Ranting aside, here’s what I’m thinking at the moment: The only remedy for what ails us all is a radical shift in consciousness. Such shifts are normally understood as “spiritual experiences,” which have typically been explored within the contexts of various religions. Unfortunately, most religious thinking is riddled with dogma and the egregious misuse of reason, thus the spiritual gold is, for the most part, left unmined, too often replaced with either blissful ignorance or dangerously unconscious behavior. Even the word “spiritual” is a hindrance, so I’m going to throw it on the fire next to “atheism.” “Transpersonal” is a much better word, and there is no reason why experiences of self-transcendence cannot be studied and explored within a broadly scientific context, shorn of the superstition and bogus metaphysical deadweight of religion.

Transpersonal Psychology seemed to hold so much promise when it was envisioned by the likes of Abraham Maslow. Like many great ideas of the 1960’s, Transpersonal Psychology has — as far as I can tell — gotten too bogged down in sloppy New Age thinking to significantly impact mainstream academic inquiry. I wonder if it isn’t too late to resuscitate the field, freeing it from the New Age horse-shit so that it might provide a suitable refuge for the clear-minded exploration of our deepest experiences.

I will do some thinking about all this.

Preamble:
Holy shit, was this essay a head-trip — and a head-ache! I so wanted to walk the talk like Hokai did, or launch into a spontaneous riff that would convey the essence of my perspective melodically, embodying the very Integrative Spirit I so long to embrace…

However…

Breakfast at Tiffany’s:
Last night I picked up my guitar and inexplicably broke into “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the mid-nineties hit from Deep Blue Something. I was killing time waiting for my wife to finish brushing her teeth and whatnot. She heard my rendition and started to sing along. Next thing you know we’re in the way-back machine, trying to remember that Blues Traveler song, you know, the one that was such a big hit. “No, not the ‘Hook’ song, the other one, the one that came out before that.” It was right on the tip of my tongue, and I’d only just begun to wrack my brain for the answer when my wife said, “Hold on, I’ll just Google it.” Ten seconds later, the issue was settled, but I wasn’t. It occurred to me that my reliance on Google was messing with my ability to access my long-term memory. Hec, in twenty years I might have to Google my own name to remember who’s looking back at me in the mirror.

This experience is just the latest reminder that everything I do has an impact on the way I am, and that the way I am places limits on what I’m able to do, and then round and round I go forming a pattern that becomes my way of life. Come to think of it, it’s pretty mind-blowing to fathom, that something as seemingly trivial as Googling can, overtime, literally change the structure of my brain. Use it or lose it baby, and no matter if we’re talking muscle, bone, vision, hearing, or cortical neural networks, there’s no doubt that how we live literally changes who we are. It’s downright freaky, the sheer sense of responsibility.

The understanding here is that human beings, like all forms of life, are functionally malleable. That is to say, we continually adapt to the givens of our environmental situation, which for us includes a cultural dimension. The plasticity of our organisms, especially our central nervous systems, allows for the possibility, the inevitability really, of continual change as we flex and flow in dynamic relationship with ourselves, culture and nature. What’s also unbelievably mind-blowing to me is how this simple, commonsense understanding of the somatic foundations of personal transformation is so conspicuously absent from contemporary discourse in fields as far-reaching and diverse as medicine, psychology, and spirituality. That, in a nutshell, is my intention here, to show how a functional, somatic, experiential perspective can give an Integrative Spirituality some ground to stand on.

Who’s gonna do what now?
In the discussion following his amazing post, Hokai cut right to the chase by asking: “What is it that we integrate in integrative spirituality?” The question presupposes a dis-integration or lack of unity, a state of fragmentation or at least chaotic differentiation. For me, the integral impulse is primarily a movement toward the direct experience of integrity, a movement from a sense of alienation and disconnect to one of authenticity, conviviality and freedom. It’s about moving from developmental arrest to realization of our full potential as humans.

The rubber meets the road in the immediacy of my directly felt experience, right now, and integrity is embodied, lived out, expressed in my actions on a daily basis. Julian mentioned yesterday that “so far the theme of the symposium is turning out to be the importance of practice as a way to ground spirituality in reality…” This practical dimension is, in fact, what interests me most, and I will get to the nitty-gritty of my practice shortly. However, since I ground my understanding of integrative spirituality in terms of embodiment, somatic awareness, and movement, I need to be clear on some theoretical issues, lest I get buried in an avalanche of AQAL objections.

For my money, an integrative spirituality is a transformative spirituality, and as such it must get to the roots of our being. Wilber has consistently claimed that the centaur level — where “mind and body are experienced as an integrated self” – is the jumping off place from the realm of the personal to the transpersonal. In Sex Ecology Spirituality, he went as far as to herald the centaur as “the next major stage of leading-edge global transformation.” I agree with this completely, and would add that an integrative spirituality can be neither grounded nor optimally transformative without presupposing a firm centauric foundation, i.e. a certain degree of bodymind integrity.

As to the question “What transforms?” in the process of personal transformation, I’d say, well, “the person,” which at the centaur stage can be thought of as the bodymind or organism. This is a philosophical rabbit-hole I’d rather not go down here, but I should add an important caveat from Alan Watts: “Man is not so much an organism in an environment as an organism-environment relationship. The relationship is, as it were, more real than its two terms, somewhat as the inner unity of a stick is more solid than the difference of its two ends.” So, more precisely, I would say that personal transformation is about transforming one’s way of life, the mode from which a person experiences and participates in life. The point of all this being that most of us cannot continue to grow optimally or live fully without first and foremost understanding, accepting and effectively responding to the reality of dissociation and alienation. Of course, maybe I’m the only one with unfinished dissociative business to clear up, but I doubt it. In any event, there’s not much point in building more and more stories onto a building if the foundation is not properly in place.

It is the lack of a smoothly integrated, firm foundation — in our ways of thinking, acting and in the very cores our being – that, in my opinion, accounts for the confusion and inadequacy that characterizes so much of contemporary spiritual discourse. I stress the notion of embodiment because I think it is too often glossed over that we experience life in, through and as embodied organisms, bodyminds that are typically plagued with habitual patterns of constriction. These constrictions are embedded in the very structure of our bodies and nervous systems, giving rise to a sense of dissociation and alienation, which in turn gets expressed in distorted perception, thought and action.

Given the right conditions, development happens of its own accord. An acorn will rather effortlessly become an oak tree, so long as there’s rich soil, adequate water and light, and so on. Throw an acorn in your closet, however, and it will only dry up and crumble into dust. I see human development in much the same light. It requires a healthy relationship with our environment, which for human beings has both natural and cultural dimensions. In fact, as Watts reminded us, this relationship is as much “what we are” as anything.

Enter the somatic perspective, my understanding of which is grounded in the work of my mentors in the field, Don Hanlon Johnson and Thomas Hanna.

Alienation vs. authenticity:
Johnson describes how the dissociative fabric of contemporary culture is sewn into individual lives through a “technology of alienation,” whereby beliefs and non-verbal body-shaping techniques are etched into our brains and bodies. This process leaves us cut off from the sources of knowing necessary for full living and continued growth. Since we respond to all situations as embodied beings, losing touch with the immediacy of felt experience will render us unable to perceive the subtle changes that allow us to sense whether a situation is likely to enhance or diminish the quality of our lives. To the degree we lack a firm sense of embodiment, we are ignorant of how to live situations in an authentic way.

Authenticity, as Johnson points, originally meant “to have a sense that one’s actions and feelings are one’s own.” When one is firmly grounded in the integrated centaur, one has access to a “sensual authority,” a mode of awareness and expression rooted in the self-directing, self-regulatory capacities of the healthy, non-constricted organism. It is the technology of alienation that arrests further development, keeping us stuck with a sense of void between my “mind” and my “body,” between “me” and “the world.” Lacking contact with our sensual authority, we look outside ourselves for some basis on how to live our lives. We give doctors authority over our bodies, psychologist authority over our minds, and religious leaders authority over our spirits. Unfortunately, the current discourse in all those fields mostly perpetuates the status quo of an unnecessarily pathological degree of dissociation and alienation. The shift from alienation to authenticity requires that we develop our impoverished self-sensing capacities and that we learn to check the dictates of outside authorities against this growing base of awareness.

Practice, practice, practice…
The processes that work to shape people into alignment with societal agendas, that lead to experiences of bodymind dissociation, influence people’s lives only to the extent that human beings are, like I mentioned above, functionally malleable. In contrast to the technology of alienation, which takes advantage of this malleability to undermine people’s sensual authority, Johnson described another way of integrating techniques, one that encourages people to develop and connect to their unique store of embodied wisdom. Johnson calls this alternative “the technology of authenticity”.

The many technologies of authenticity (including experiential psychotherapy, Gendlin’s “focusing” process, various somatic approaches, and many forms of mindfulness meditation) are practical strategies that: (1) facilitate the recovery and further development of an individual’s inherent self-sensing capacities (i.e. one’s sense of embodied authority), and (2) provide an environment or context where authentic expression of this newly expanded awareness can be explored, supported and encouraged.

Hokai delivered a great quote from Wilber’s One Taste: “There are four major stages of spiritual unfolding: belief, faith, direct experience, and permanent adaptation: you can believe in Spirit, you can have faith in Spirit, you can directly experience Spirit, you can become Spirit…. If you are interested in genuine transformative spirituality, find an authentic spiritual teacher and begin practice. Without practice, you will never move beyond the phases of belief, faith, and random peak experiences. You will never evolve into plateau experiences, nor from there into permanent adaptation. You will remain, at best, a brief visitor in the territory of your own higher estate, a tourist of you own true Self.”

This is a brilliant way to frame the process of personal transformation, I think. My own core practices [the specifics of which I’ll save for another conversation] stem from a set of principles that I apply to as many life situations as possible. This is a slightly different take on the concept of Integral Life Practice, in that instead of gathering a variety of existing approaches and techniques together for the purposes of “cross-training” or “exercising” various levels of my being and whatnot, my approach has been to explore, understand and experiment with the essential principles that seem to be operative during any and all my transformative or peak experiences, regardless of the context. I like the distinction Don Hanlon Johnson makes between principles and techniques. Whereas an emphasis on particular techniques can encourage imitation, repetition, and an over-reliance on those considered to be experts, principles are fundamental sources of discovery that encourage open-ended inquiry and can generate creative strategies for approaching unique situations.

Principles of personal transformation:
Alan Watts said: “The way in which we interpret mystical experience must be plausible. That is to say, it must fit in with and/or throw light upon the best available knowledge about life and the universe.” Understanding and incorporating the somatic dimension does not mean that all we need to do is bodywork or focus on our feelings. We do, I think, need to understand how all aspects of life and culture play out on a somatic level, simply because the living body, in its structural and functional aspects, is fundamental to transformation as it unfolds on deeper (or more significant, in Wilber’s scheme) levels, such as the psychological and spiritual.

Here’s how I understand the relationships, in a nutshell [and I am now forced, due to the onset of bedtime, to rely on a previous piece Julian forced out of me called The Embodiment of Freedom, which explicates the somatic/experiential perspective in much more detail than space here will allow]: If we want to ground our understanding of transformation in the living body, we can start with the most fundamental aspect of the central nervous system — the division between sensory and motor processes. Our perceptions of the world outside our bodies, as well as our perceptions of our internal bodily states, come into the brain via sensory nerves. And every action we express, every movement we make in the world and inside our selves flows out from our brain and down through the spine by way of motor nerves. This structural division is functionally integrated within a single neural system, the brain integrating the incoming sensory information with outgoing commands to the motor system.

The continual interplay of sensory information and motor guidance is referred to in contemporary neuroscience as a feedback system which operates in loops. As Hanna describes it, “the sensory nerves ‘feedback’ information to the motor nerves, whose response ‘loops back’ with the movement commands along the motor nerves. As movement takes place, the motor nerves ‘feedback’ new information to the sensory nerves.” Hanna argues that many of the problems afflicting people today are not about bodies or minds breaking down, but about individuals who have lost conscious control of their somatic functions. These functional problems are ones in which the person suffers from a loss of memory: the memory of what it feels like to move in certain ways, and the memory of how to go about moving in certain ways. This type of memory loss is what Hanna calls sensory-motor amnesia, a state of diminished self-awareness that is quite reversible–that is to say, a state that can be transformed.

Hanna describes the loss of conscious volitional control as sensori-motor amnesia so as to emphasize two essential facts: 1) habituated, involuntary responses, like all somatic processes, are a reflection of sensori-motor functioning, and 2) what becomes unconscious, forgotten, or unlearned, can become conscious again, remembered, and re-learned. Thus, sensori-motor amnesia can be reversed by somatic learning.

Somatic learning is a process that results in the expansion of an organism’s range of volitional consciousness. This process takes advantage of the feedback/loop nature of the sensori-motor system and is described by Hanna in the following way: “If one focuses one’s awareness on an unconscious, forgotten area of the soma, one can begin to perceive a minimal sensation that is just sufficient to direct a minimal movement, and this, in turn, gives new sensory feedback of that area which, again, gives a new clarity of movement, etc. This sensory feedback associates with adjacent sensory neurons, further clarifying the synergy that is possible with the associated motor neurons. This makes the next motor effort inclusive of a wider range of associated voluntary neurons, thus broadening and enhancing the motor action and, thereby, further enhancing the sensory feedback. This back-and-forth motor procedure gradually ‘wedges’ the amnesic area back into the range of volitional control: the unknown becomes known and the forgotten becomes relearned.”

So it is that a diminished state of self-awareness and a diminished range of conscious responsiveness can expand and transform at the basic level of sensor-motor functioning. It is my contention that effective psychotherapy and transformative spiritual practices, as processes necessarily rooted in the central nervous system of the organism, are effective only to the degree they take advantage of the organism’s capacity for somatic learning. Psychologists from Carl Rogers to Eugine Gendlin have discovered as much, as have mindfulness meditation advocates like Alan Watts and Jon Kabat-Zinn.

The crux of the matter is thus: personal transformation is the movement that springs from authentic relationship, from embodied encounter. Transformation is the movement from alienation to authenticity; the movement toward progressively deeper and expanded levels of awareness and authentic expression. On the level of sensorimotor functioning we understand this transformation as the movement from sensorimotor amnesia to somatic learning. From a psychological perspective this transformation is the movement from psychological dis-ease to psychological growth and self-actualization, or from unconsciousness to consciousness, or from pathology to health. In terms of ecology we’re talking about the movement from ecological crisis to ecological balance in relation to the human species. Spiritual seekers might call it the movement from suffering to inner harmony and peace, or dissociation to integration, or ignorance to enlightenment. In all contexts, the same principles can be applied, and these principles can be understood to underlie a wide range of somatic/experiential practices designed to facilitate personal transformation, each understood in terms of particular contexts of relationship.

Deadlines and Deadends:
Thank you Julian for inviting me to carry this inquiry forward a little. Unless I’m responding to another person, in dialogue or with a set deadline, I seem incapable of doing this kind of thing. Death is the ultimate deadline, I suppose. Perhaps I need to meditate on that a while to motivate me to write the book that’s been rattling around in my head for years now.

Basically, this whole inquiry began when I became fascinated by my peak experiences. There seemed to be a quality about them that was not dependent on content or context. In other words I felt like the same process was happening regardless of what I was doing. I got the funny feeling that I was peaking or “peeking” into the same place, or entering the same state of consciousness, whether I was hitting a groove on the guitar, entering “the zone” on the athletic field, writing a poem or a song, having great sex, communing with nature on a hike, or getting showered with insight during meditation.

There is a way to live that opens me up and a way that shuts me down. For me, the whole process comes down to this: When I’m open (whether through luck, effort or grace), and I have the guts and faith needed to allow whatever form of self-expression that arises to unfold, then I open up more and feel more alive and connected. In my experience, this is the fundamental attitude that is a prerequisite for spiritual growth. On the other hand, when I choose, consciously or unconsciously, to inhibit this movement in favor of a habitual, conditioned response, I feel more and more cut off, and I contract again back into an unfulfilling daze.

Coda:
“My ego is a marriage between my (necessarily false) image or concept of myself, and the chronic muscular tension which a child learns in trying to do things which must happen spontaneously: to love, to sleep, to attend, to have bowel movements, and to control crying, pouting, or blushing. But muscular tension does not necessarily assist neural efficiency, for it hinders rather than helps when we strain our eyes to see and furrow our brows to concentrate. Yet we are forever scratching our heads, clenching our fists and jaws, holding our breath, and tightening our rectal muscles in order to will or to keep control of our feelings, and the vague persistence of this tension becomes the substantial referent of the word “I,” and the image the emotional and conceptual referent. A futility married to an illusion!” –Alan Watts