Category: Psyber

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Psyberspace

The psyche, like love is not to be defined. We know a few things about it & even that is presumptuous. There is no science of soul, or love.

So poetry is one way to speak about these things.

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

This passage from Blake touches on my central experience of psyche. I have often quoted it.

Little Picture <-> Big picture

This is on my mind as I reflect on the parallel process in groups and is supervision in psychotherapy. Patterns repeat within the sessions, and within the psyche. In groups we all learn as one person explores a story in depth. We learn as that story relates to our own srories and we move beyond content to process. Once the process is understood then it is as if we tune in with a law of human nature. (I shle bring in an example but they are hard to describe. I have on in my paper: The Future of Knowing. Also in my Psychodrama thesis The group and the Protagonist.

This phenomena must have been at the heart of astrology. As above so below… yet (for all the value astrology may have) this is not credible to me in the way parallel process is, which is simply experienced, known, self evident.

Plato also saw the connection between the psyche and the larger picture, he related it to our knowledge of social justice.

The Isomorphism Between Social and Psychic Justice
… to construct the definition of psychic justice, he relics on (1) the full definition of social justice he constructed earlier, and the unusual idea that (2) a just city and a just man do not differ at all with respect to justice.

Gerasimos Xenophon Santas Goodness and justice: Plato, Aristotle, and the moderns

Plato makes all sorts of strange arguments based on isoprphy, however the phrase “a just city and a just man do not differ at all with respect to justice.” with respect to process rings true. Almost tautologically. Justice is an abstract idea that know no holon so to speak.

All this is of interest after watching Tom Atlee on a TED talk.
Tom Atlee, the author of “The Tao of Democracy,” gave a TEDx talk in Warwick in England on “Collective Intelligence in a Time of Global Crisis.”

The small group process is seen as a better representation of the peoples will than individual expressions of opinion. This is central to decision making about such things as climate change etc.

It becomes interesting when we see the holons line up:

Individual psyche <-> dialogue <-> Group Process <-> social justice

Understanding & making a shift in any one of these can impact the others. None of it is mystical or automatic. Some ways of working with process are better than others. Facilitation of process is essential.

This image from the N.Y. Times is to the point.

image

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Systems thinking, Gaia and the Hot Age

I am reading James Lovelock’s The Vanishing Face of Gaia. I like his phrase the “Hot Age”. It may or may not come but it is more evocative than “global warming”. But that is not really what I want to raise here. His main thesis, that the earth is a living thing, an organism, that has self regulatory systems is not so much a mystical idea and a metaphor, but the basis of ecology, of systems, a science. The failure to see systemically is at the core of so much reductive scientific inability to see clearly. I see it in mental health, but here he puts it all beautifully as it relates to the planet, and science as a whole, the problem is that …

as the consequence of most American scientists, in their straightforward successful and reductionist way, seeing the Earth as something that they could improve or manage; they seemed to see it as no more than a ball of rock moistened by the oceans and sitting within a tenuous sphere of air… They do not yet see the Earth as a live planet that regulates itself.

They tail to see that because the Earth was colonized by life at least three and a half billion years ago, its temperature and surface composition have been set by the preferences of whatever organisms
made up the biosphere. This was true in the cold of the ice ages, it is true now, and will be true in the heat of the hot age soon due. Of course the physics and chemistry of the air are important in the
understanding of climate, but the manager of climates is and has always been Gaia, the Earth system of which the biosphere is a part. The disastrous mistake of twentieth century science was to assume
that all we need to know about the climate can come from modelling the physics and chemistry ofthe air in ever more powerful computers, and then assuming that the biosphere merely responds passively to
change instead of realizing it was in the driving seat. Because we acknowledged the leadership of America in science, most of the world took its mistaken view as true.

Page 14 in the 2009 penguin edition.

It is interesting that he sees computer modeling as a problem as well. It has led to us not trusting scientists. The small bits of data they can “prove” has impact means forfeiting seeing the whole.

He is thinking Earth, Gaia, but I am much more familiar with looking at systems such as groups and the psyche. Being able to see repeating patterns in the various holons is an art that is not easily proved, but the basis for the science from the inside.

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Definition of TV

A television is a screen with a couch in front of it.

I have been watching Ted Talks on my iPhone.

(Go to iTunes app, search TED talks, tap More Podcasts, & there they are, tap one to play live, no need to download)

I have found this OK, but prefer to download the audio, as I can then listen as I walk around. I have little use for the video… until I got the connector to watch it on TV.

Now I can watch them when I need to recline.

AND with company, no longer in solitude.

The iPhone opens the door to TV, something I have not watched for years because I NEED to time-shift & I CAN’T watch ads.

You Tube, Ted Talks, the ABC (Australian) Talking Heads… I can go to the couch & bob out… just like the old days.

What is worth watching?

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Sex & soul on the internet

Is this a valid proposition (see item below).  That virtual worlds promote sexuality.  Perhaps.  The trouble is that almost all the discussion about psychology on the net is focussed on sexuality, crime and addition.  It is as if psychologists and media can’t see beyond sex drugs and rock’n’roll (“piracy”). 

In my own work as a psychotherapist online the work is more about relationships, and deep work in the psyche with a focus dreams and uncovering layers of unconscious.  I am not alone!  The media encourages reflection and writing.  Seeing ones words mirrored is one way of relating to the self. 

That type of work on the net is just not news!  Not sexy.  It is soulful, never a headline grabber.  (What do you make of my headline for this post!)

British Psychologists Analyze Sex and Morality in Second Life – Pixels and Policy:

Anyone spending any amount of time in Second Life takes notice of its fantasy elements. Perfectly staid and buttoned-down people turn into sexual deviants in oversized animal outfits in the relative freedom and anonymity of the Metaverse. Now Garry Young of Nottingham University asks why we act how we do in the virtual world.

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