Philosophy

November 14, 2008September 5, 2021

Creativity, spontaneity and something Blake said

I have linked to this quote before, I just noticed it again & saw it in a new light. In relationship to Moreno’s Canon of Creativity. I think the word “attention” is wonderful. Eastern traditions use attention in meditation, but what is attention? A Buddhist friend of mine said it is simply love. It is a mystery alright! I can put my attention where I will! Attention is intentional. Right now it is on the blinking cursor. A moment later on the song playing on the radio downstairs.

Attention & blessing are all forms of warm-up?

Continue reading “Creativity, spontaneity and something Blake said”

October 22, 2008

Synchronicity

There is a strange synchronicity at work! I have become more reflective about my work as a psychotherapist. The new posts here may reflect that. The couple dialogues I facilitate are powerful and impact me as well as the clients.

What are the exact roles that are involved in those dialogues, and the place of language in those roles? The ideas of Hendrix and Rosenberg are important to me. Are they really right that only one partner needs to make a commitment to dialogue?

I return to my roots in Psychodrama. I am doing that in many ways. One is that I will be a trainer in the CITP next year, and also furthering my own training as a Trainer, Educator and Practitioner. I mean roots! What is the nature of the method? The psyche, the drama, roles, and mostly what is the sociometric method. What is the place of healing. I am such a thinker. I have previously written about sociometric criteria for group explorations. See Moreno in Wikipedia for a good summary.

I was inspired listening to Richard Moore, and “Dynamic Facilitation” which they distinguish from Bohmian Dialogue.

And then Pscience, which leads to Bohm via another route, though I had forgotten he even exists.

And Bohm, leads to creativity. He is vitally interested in that subject, like Moreno. He wrote several books on creativity. Which makes me feel like my passion for art is tied in with this larger project. I am so pleased with my couple of years of intensity in that dept!

I am delighted by the unity in my work, the coming together of threads. Even my old interest in politics is included.

So, more on all this will follow.

October 16, 2008

Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman is a novelist, essayist, physicist, and educator. Currently, he is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I got interested listening to him being interviewed, with the first part of the interview mainly about the relationship between art & science.

Kim Hill last week

Heartening because he & Kim were able to broach this interrelationship at all. That is what makes this such a treat to listen to. He is a writer & a scientist. He is married to a painter.

Frustrating because he sees a gap between the sciences and the arts, creativity, that need not be there at all. I am thinking of the science that Moreno advocates, and I write about in my paper, see this post & link here.

He speaks about how the idea is more important in science than the presentation. But is it? Beauty & truth are more interrelated than that. Also the expression about the world is always a map, the nature of the correspondence between the map & the territory is varied but at this level e=mc2 is a map in much the same way as the Mona Lisa.

True, the terms are defined in scientific language. But language itself is also defined, with more fuzzy, and hence often more effective rules. Science has not learned the sociometric method yet. Just wait till it hits the world! The sociometric revolution is yet to come.

August 20, 2008

Murray Gell-Mann

Wikipedia

Murray_Gell-Mann: Home

Amazon

I want to quote one review from Amazon:

4.0 out of 5 stars The True Meaning of this Book, November 11, 2000
By Leonardo Motta
I decided to write this review because I thought none of the reviews really mentioned the main focus of this book. This is not a book about Quantum Mechanics, nor molecular biology, nor neurobiology. In this book, the great Gell-Mann exposes his ideas of why all subjects of science (from physics, to chemistry, to biology, to psychology) must be studied together, why they are related and also he shows models of how to do this unified study. He defends that reductionism is not the only way of doing science, in opposition of the philosophical ideas of Steven Weinberg and Richard Feynman. This book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, because there aren’t many books that are against pure reductionism written by reductionism defenders. Gell-Mann is not against reductionism, but against PURE reductionism; he think its nice to explain a complex phenomenon based on the theory of its contents but its also important to study the phenomenon in his actual level, studying the way that the complex works. Not only the simple. Thats the origin of the name: Quark, the simple, and the Jaguar, the complex.

August 20, 2008

Beauty is Truth

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Ode on a Grecian Urn – John Keats

I just listened to a

TED talk by Murray Gell-Mann

He is eloquent about how beauty works in the investigation of truth in science. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, there is pattern in nature, there is symmetry and self symmetry.

Why this is such a great talk for me is that it ties in with an essay I wrote a few years ago (and it is still under construction) about practice based evidence in psychotherapy. I write about a profound knowing that happens in psychotherapy that is scientific, and not at all like the physical sciences. Nor is it part of the social research that looks scientific but is just pseudo science.

Psychotherapy & Science

especially the section on Alice that concludes:

Finding repeating patterns in what might at first glance appear to be unrelated material is very like the scientific endeavour in the physical world. Once a pattern is clearly seen then we have established a law of nature. To think of the work with Alice – which is typical of our psychotherapeutic work – as a form of research requires a shift of perspective, but it is clearly in a similar realm.

The dynamics that repeat independently of the content are understood through a visceral experience, tears and laughter. When yet another instance of the pattern is spotted it corroborates and often extends the understanding. When the dynamic is evident, though in a minor way in the psychotherapy itself it is a full experiential knowing that is shared in the psychotherapy space. Both the psychotherapist and the client can easily use such words as knowing, understanding which are the very things that scientific research aims for.

August 20, 2008November 5, 2012

Formal and colloquial NVC

I am excited ant the distinction between Formal and colloquial NVC (Dan mentioned it tody over lunch) & I have followed up on it.

I get into the bind about the formal stuff I teach in the Intentional Dialogue. Of course it can be used colloquially, ionfomally.

I think though that the formal dialogue is needed, perhaps as a guide to a mopre integrated clean communication.

The dialogue is a discipline and I think the psyche needs that structure to go deep. To go fast.

August 19, 2008November 5, 2012

Language!

The medium is the message, and language is foul! Marshall Rosenberg calls it Jackal language. Cognitive Behaviour therapy and Rational Emotive therapy, Imago as well as Marshall Rosenberg’s NVC non violent Communication all focus on what I am calling Clean Speech. Both in sending & receiving.

Embedded in our language are the forces of domination! It makes sense. The power structures of domination build a system of ideology to support them and the place for thoise controls to hide are in the cultue in many ways – and almost invisibly in the language. Changing language is potent!

Being non-exclusive in language has made a difference. Look at how we had to deal with the way he meant she in English, I say had, but the fight is not over, but we have come a long way.

Not so with language of love… all day in my work as a relationship therapist I listen to language that attributes blame to the other. The dicipline of the Imago dialogue is great, it handles a lot of it, but there is lots more to develop. This is a science.

What I have not heard anyone say, though they may have, is that “clean speech” is another road to the unconscious. So often the CBT and RET schools deny the efficacy of the relationship as a tool for healing and of the power of the unconscious. Clean speech is essentially to speak from experience, and to uncover its layers. To make the unconscious conscious… in a relationship! Clean speech is a way of working with the transference & counter transference.

Wikipedia

Rosenberg Naturally Nonviolent

QUESTION: What is nonviolent communication?

ANSWER: It’s the way of thinking, communicating and using power that helps us connect to one another in a way that we enjoy contributing to one another’s well-being. It’s an attempt to live in harmony with certain values. But since we’ve been educated for about 8,000 years in domination structures, that does not make contributing to one another’s well-being easy.

Great interview with Marshall Rosenberg http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=837

If I’m in conflict with people, I try to hear what needs they have. Now, “needs,” as we define the term, are universal; all human beings have the same needs. So if I connect to what people are needing, I’m one with them. I care about their needs. At the moment that they sense that I am as interested in their needs as my own, we can find a way to get everybody’s needs met.

So more concretely, what would that look like? This man might say, “Our work is not going to harm the environment. Our tests have demonstrated that this is not going to harm the environment.” So, this person shares the same needs that I have. I want to protect the environment. Apparently, he’s concerned about the environment also.

Now, where we might differ is in our ways of measuring whether something is harmful to the environment. But notice our needs are not in conflict. This person doesn’t want to destroy someone’s habitat, and he doesn’t want to be a menace. You see?

More excerpts follow.

Continue reading “Language!”

November 16, 2007

Matthew Collings, deep and shallow

I listened to a podcast today for the second time – Kim Hill interviewing Matthew Collings. I realised I had blogged it before in Thousand Sketches, and there is a link there too – I recommend it.

If this is an age of shallowness then it is sort of deep to be shallow. Kim: “Shallow is the new deep”.

I don’t buy that though. It is an age where we are more conscious than ever and we flee. There are oceans of depth and we flee to the shallow. But not everyone. The “long tail” comes into play. At the top of the zeitgeist it may be shallow, ironical & tabloid, but down the tail it gets more interesting, there are activists, thinkers, and people having real relationships.

Anyway, it was a good listen even for the second time, happened cause I was cleaning up after re-installing a backup.

September 21, 2007

Layout back to normal.

But what it looked like was something like the Socio site. My image, also on Thousand Sketches is used as the masthead.

The encounter symbol. Nice. It does draw my attention to the difference between up and down as opposed to left & right. Horizontal implies equality, or perhaps more neutrally, it implies similarity. The up/down in this encounter symbol seems like different entities interacting.

Up /down has some power implications, or is that just cultural? Maybe it is OK! Maybe it is always good to know, who is earthy, who is airy. Maybe every encounter is a meeting of earth & sky. The “masculine” aspect is the top one it would seem, but the overvaluing of that is probably cultural.

September 8, 2006

Great podcasts – Friendship

BBC – Radio 4 In Our Time – Philosophy Archive

This is a treasure page. I have to be in the mood for this rather heavy stuff, but they are worth the effort. I have subbed to them and have a back log on my player. Unfortunately they are only streaming them there at the moment – Total Recorder would get them though. I particularly enjoyed the history of friendhip one today.

Friendship

It seems that with Imago we have a philosophy and a practice of love, built on all the traditions before it, and still those old traditions, even on friendhip, can amplify our notions of love.