Category: Uncategorized

I have been listening to Bishop Spong on New Dimensions. This link may still work briefly. His message is crisp and clear and he is a humanist. That makes a lot more sense than being a literal fundamentalist. His Christian humanism makes sense. BUT, I think he leaves something right out of the picture. The phrase he uses “emerging apes not fallen angels” bought that home to me.

His words arrive as I am in the middle of reflections about teleology – see the several items below on this theme. Somewhere there I reflect on the idea of fractals, that a segment of coast line can reflect the pattern of the whole coast. That is really no different from us being able to see trends – these things are often described using graphs and so on and they isolate one factor that can be measured. Holistic mapping is more complex. Numbers don’t do it.

OK, imagine a graph from ape to human… where does it go? That is not a steady curve, it is exponential! Where does it reach to? Fallen angel… angel sums it up in a way that emerging ape does not.

We have that image in our mind, that archetype of a divine being which somehow reflects not just the existential pain of being conscious creatures, but the sense of where it is leading – even if it is a metaphor to describe that sense. Angels may not be literally there, but they are religious art. We have that Angel Art in the movie “Wings of Desire”, why does he need to throw out the art with the bath water of fundamentalism?

Perhaps I am judging him too harshly on this one phrase. I liked what he said about Christ – whose image he does not kill off. Of course his social and political values are fine too.

I have a page on my website related to the item below.

There was surprisingly little in a search on Google with the phrase. The power
of role role reversal as Moreno developed it is close to the
idea of "walking a mile in another's moccasins".
It is crucial to be able to be fully human and yet it remains an
obscure idea. I found one good reference to the idea:

http://psychodrama.org/introduction/

I reproduce the item here, which I hope is ok.

Psychodrama, invented 80 years ago by Jacob Levy
Moreno, is "the encounter in role
reversal":

"A meeting of two: eye to eye, face to face. And when
you are near I will tear your eyes out and place them instead
of mine, and you will tear my eyes out and will place them
instead of yours then I will look at you with your eyes ..
and you will look at me with mine."

A creative way "to find the truth through acting",
to revive or anticipate imagined or real events: "the
second time is the setting free of the first time". (By
Dr. J. L. Moreno). Supported by the group and a leader you
can learn to know your-self and others better, building up a
new network of engaged people from all professions and to
experiment with different possibilities of new role models.
This can lead to new inspiration and personal insight.
Through the act of experiencing new roles and perspectives
through the role changes in the public space of a group,
personal concerns, deeply burried fears, traumas, wishes and
dreams can be expressed, reflected and seen in a different
light through the creative act of dramatisation. Your self
concept about yourself will be widend and a new insight of
your personal capacities, ressources and strengths is
developing.

you are welcome to read more on psychodrama:
history and theory.

Jacob Levy Moreno, 1889-1978, born in rumany, was physician
in vienna and directed an improvisation theatre evolving it
to a combination with paedagogy and group-psychotherapy.

Cringely’s current column is onto an interesting expose of Microsoft’s cheating. I am interested in how he ties this into email culture:

That’s where the second factor comes into play. It’s that e-mail culture. Bill and Steve lead primarily by edict. Most Microsoft employees never see them, many will never meet them. So the kids are trying to follow a standard that is set by the tone of e-mails. But e-mail is not reality. E-mail is a world of distorted values where it is easy to go too far, and easier still to read things wrong and go even further.

Does email really influence for the worse the way we do things? I’m not ruling it out. I think buildings and all manner of physical objects have been starting to look a certain way because it suited the way computer graphics are done. I think organisations structures in companies are following a sort of hierarchical structure that mirrors the folders on the hard drive. Are we creating a world in the image of our machines? Maybe. But to blame MS morality on the mouse is to ignore capitalism’s imperative to dominate or die which bigger even than or Bill’s influence one way or the other.

I am reading the
Playboy interview again. I am returning to it to explore two
hypothesis. One is that McLuhan is doing
psychology of a social phenomena. The other
that he identified cyberspace, though did not
name it as such. It is easy to see from these two hypothesis how
if there is one guru, mentor, theorist my explorations here that
it is McLuhan.

Because of today's terrific speed-up of information moving,
we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the
environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of
our own destinies. The new extensions of man and the environment
they generate are the central manifestations of the evolutionary
process, and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion
that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it
does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the
technological idiot. It's to escape this Narcissus trance
that I've tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on
man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present.

predict and influence the environmental forces
shaping us

That there are such forces shaping implies a sort of collective
unconscious. He is a brave man to think we can move out of that
Narcissus trance, yet that is his mission – becoming conscious of
the environment we are in.

The new extensions of man and the environment they
generate

Media generates an environmental force we live in a new
world – this is what we would now call cyberspace.

Here is another passage from about half way through the interview:

The electronically induced technological extensions of our
central nervous systems, which I spoke of earlier, are immersing
us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling
man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. The
aloof and dissociated role of the literate man of the Western
world is succumbing to the new, intense depth participation
engendered by the electronic media and bringing us back in touch
with ourselves as well as with one another. But the instant
nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing —
rather than enlarging — the family of man into a new state of
multitudinous tribal existences. Particularly in countries where
literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly
traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual
culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis
of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous
violence — violence that is simply an identity quest, private
or corporate, social or commercial.

immersing us in a world-pool of information
movement

So we are in a new world we are IN it. But what an interesting and
paradoxical line follows: "incorporate within himself
the whole of mankind" We are both absorbed by the new
environment and at the same time we become, what we can now call a
node in a hologram, each one of us is also the whole. This is very
like the sense we have of the unconscious and collective
unconscious, we seem to be both in it and it is in us. Soul has the
same feel to it, it is not just my soul nor is it all out there. I
love, how in this fairly sober interview McLuhan captures this idea
poetically and emphatically with the word: world-pool…
world-pool, it is just a quirk of history that
this was not the word we use for cyberspace.

I think he is talking about cyberspace and doing
psychology. That is not to say that all that he says seems right.
That is not the point. His approach to the world-pool is what gives
him his real significance as a thinker.

One aspects that is worth probing is the
place of the virtual.

He had not come across the concept of 'virtual' life as we
know it today. He is making a clear distinction between the
mechanical world of Gutenberg and the new electronic era. And
there is a qualitative shift there. The "literate" phase
is distinct from this electronic age of "intense depth
participation". He also speaks of it as going from the tribal
oral culture, through a literate visual more fragmented culture, to
the new return to tribal aural culture. That may be quite right,
but the real qualitative shift comes with the first symbol,
somewhere we move into a very slow moving virtual realm that
intensifies but is in fact cyberspace from the word go.

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diarist.net:

Welcome to Diarist.Net, a comprehensive starting-point for both writers and readers of online journals. Whether you call us diarists, journalers, or bloggers, we’ve got everything you need to know all about the people who tell all.

I am exploring this.

“I like to violate copyright everyday.” writes Annalee Newitz, AlterNet:

I know it’s sentimental of me, but I think of creative works as if they were somehow human, as if they had lives of their own

Cinematherapy:

Cinema therapy can be a powerful catalyst for healing and growth for anybody who is open to learning how movies affect us and to watching certain films with conscious awareness. Cinema therapy allows us to use the effect of imagery, plot, music, etc. in films on our psyche for insight, inspiration, emotional release or relief and natural change. Used as part of psychotherapy, cinema therapy is an innovative method based on traditional therapeutic principles. Even outside a therapist’s office, following certain guidelines for choosing films and watching them consciously can support personal and spiritual growth. In the case of long-standing psychological problems this is only recommended in the context of psychotherapy.

Using movies in therapy has been something i have done for many years, but I never thought of it as Movie therapy. I might need to add it to the list of Approaches I use.