Category: Psyber

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Relational Thinking

There are two really crucial ideas that are relatively new in the therapy field, that anyone in a relationship needs to know. They make up the the systemic, relational paradigm shift that for all its value, and having been around for decades, could be missed! To miss it would be like missing out the penicillin and micro-organism knowledge if you had an infection when that was just taking hold a ninety years ago. To embrace this relational paradigm is more important than the exact approach one uses, though it needs to be a relational one. Imago, Psychodrama, Non Violent Communication and many other approaches are systemic and relational, or at least not actively opposed.

One is that the right here, now, in the relationship is the solution to the relationship problem. How to get there might be painful and hard, you will need to learn skills, make effort, but individual therapy or leaving, or searching for a better mate has all those problems and will lead to similar relationship problems, or to no relationship at all.

The second is that it takes only one person in the relationship to commit to really working on it. In fact the ability or desire to take that role is never even and equal, so it is never quite fair.

These ideas seem straight forward to me now, but they fly in the face of much more prevalent notions, ones I was actively taught, and took on board as wisdom, and have had to unlearn: That it is good to sort yourself out before you have a relationship, and that each person needs to commit to doing their share, that it is 50/50.

Al Turtle puts all these things very well. Great to find his site today.

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Wastes of Asphodel

I like the sound of it: Wastes of Asphodel in the poem in the last post. It is a deep dark place somewhere that I think of as cyberspace, removed yet connected to the world. As more and more people do their banking and blog about their day and so on, as cyberspace becomes more mundane with blinking banners urging us to buy, will these wastes become malls?

Sort of. But not quite. Land is land and dreams are dreams. For all the pixilated neon, it remains virtual. There is a dream world. In Dreams in Late Antiquity By Patricia Cox Miller (Google Amazon) shows how it is the other world, the world of dreams.

A passage from the book follows.

Continue reading “Wastes of Asphodel”

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Cyberspace is a group of the living and the dead.

We can communicate with the living online, but their words live on after they die. There are stories of email groups where people reply quite consciously and deliberately to the posts from someone who is dead. Through such services as project Guttenberg the dead poets and novelists have come back with their text more alive than ever as we search, and cut and paste their words into newer living documents.

The last book of the Odyssey begins with an epiphany of Hermes, which may poetically bring to life something of the experience of being in a mind rather than a body space:

Meanwhile the suitors’ ghosts were called away by Hermes of Kyllene, bearing the golden wand with which he charms the eyes of men or wakens whom he wills.

He waved them on, all squeaking
as bats will in a cavern’s underworld,
all flitting, flitting criss-cross in the dark
if one falls and the rock-hung chain is broken.
So with faint cries the shades trailed after
Hermes, pure Deliverer.

He led them down dank ways, over gray
Ocean tides, the Snowy Rock past shores
of Dream and narrows of the sunset,
in swift flight to where the Dead inhabit
wastes of asphodel at the world’s end.

From the section “The Hermes of the Odyssey” in Hermes Guide of Souls by Karl Kerényi (1942)

We can see how Hermes connects with the disdain for cyberspace we have discussed. The realm can be a Hades, and in our disembodiment we become ghosts.
The idea of ‘archive’ is often used for storing old records. On the net everything at the moment of its birth is archived and thus the latest pop song is as easily accessed as the ideas of people long dead re-published on the Net.

Here is my essay – this one section from it.

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Pscience

I just made a new Category for my blog. Pscienc. There are heaps of posts back in the past that will need to be categorised.

Psychology and science as a unified field.

I wonder if anyone else has used the name? Plenty, but none that use it in this way. Political science, and there is a band.

Here is the first post I’ll add Murray Gell-Mann

~

Here are some pscientific questions:

What can we learn about binary stars by doing intentional dialogues with a life-partner?

Should we use the term gravity or will Eros do?

Is there such a thing as psychic energy? Libido? In psychology is energy a metaphor? What if it were a metaphor in physics as well?

Was Jung right to think the law of thermo-dynamics applies to psychic energy?

What can Moreno’s “social atom” for the smallest social unit needed for survival teach us about the structure of the atom in physics? And vice versa.

Is a social dyad like a quantum phenomena in that once observed the phenomena is transformed?

Does isomorphy, i.e self-similarity, work all the way from the big-bang to a synapse in our brain?

Ideas, stories and metaphors impact on on the world. They are real in their consequences. Therefore God is real.

Proof in maths is different from proof in physics. How do you prove you love someone? What if we applied standards of proof from one context in another? We already do: The theorem is true because it is elegant.

More?

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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.

Click to play, right click to download
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.

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iReading

This blog is not called Psyberspace for nothing. I have all sorts of phases of enthusiasm, and they wax and wane, but “exploring the psyche in cyberspace” is always present. My sense if that the iPhone has enabled a shift in the “space”. The Palm initially untethered me from the PC, but the iPhone makes good where Palm lost the plot. I have had my phone for a few days but feel very liberated… esp in the reading dept. I am writing this on the PC, I can’t do it on a phone, but reading is another story, it is great, and I do it in bed, in cafes, waiting in lines.

The net is adapting to the phone in a way that is quite remarkeable, surfing on the palm was almost impossible, and very wew sites optimised for Palms. But with this new gadget it is different! Cyberspace is making a shift, perhaps not quite everting, but moving from the mud onto land.

I find myself reading the following all optimised for the iPhone in some way, I will post more specific reading reviews, partly to get more familiar with the various, sometimes complex processes to get stuff on the phone.

  • Books
  • Blogs in a feed reader
  • iWPhoned WordPress blogs
  • Wikipedia via an app
  • Amazon, optimised automatically, good for reading reviews.
  • Web Pages optimised through Instapaper

All in all it is pretty good! I could add Twitter & Facebook, though that is not really reading, but they work well!

PS Imagemaking is also liberated with a touch screen, I will write that up in an iSketch category on my Art Blog.

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How I manage Podcasts on my iPod

I don’t like the iTunes subscription system as I get too many episodes that I don’t want. Also it is tricky to manage when to keep and when to delete, the iPod (now iPhone) seems to fool me every time just as I trust it.

Here is my way, I like it.

I subscribe to podcast sites via Google Reader, and then download only the episodes I want. Yes, I manually choose my listening. They go to my download folder. I copy them into Itunes. Sort them by Date added (that field needs to be set up as visible in iTunes) I make them all genre = podcast in iTunes.

I sync the mobile. They go into the iPod where they show up in an ordinary Smart Playlist I have set up in iTunes and set up to sync – called “0 Podcasts”.

The way I manage them on the iPod is to have two more Smart Playlists, based on star ratings:

* Podcasts
** Podcasts

the first is for delete, the other one is for the odd podcast I want to save.

After a sync, in iTunes I sort by rating and delete all items with one star.
I move & save items I want to keep off the iPod.

Try it, it is great! But I am open to hearing about improvements on that.

How do you manage podcasts on the iPod/iPhone?

Here is my Google Reader list of Podcasts I sub to..

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Murray Gell-Mann

Wikipedia

Murray_Gell-Mann: Home

book Amazon

book 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.

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Anthropology

Thanks Dan for the link! It helps me feel not so bad about my podcasts! Like I need to move through the awkward phase.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU&hl=en&fs=1]

And for good measure here is the song from the movie (again)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqzsdgyxUUQ&hl=en&fs=1]

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