Dan Siegel, author of ‘Mindsight’, here offers a scientifically precise take on integration, and on the kind of view of the mind that is needed to make sense of integration. This is well worth a view if you are interested in understanding the working of integration more clearly. We’re not just talking vague psychobabble here, but something that can be understood quite precisely both in terms of brains and in terms of experience. There is also an interesting transcribed interview with him here.
All posts by Robert M Ellis
2014 talk on archetypes
Here is the latest edited talk and discussion from the 2014 summer retreat – this time on archetypes. This is a more detailed and complete talk on the topic than the briefer 2013 one.
Riding the greenwave
An earthquake appears to be afflicting the politics of the UK at the moment, somewhat like the radical changes occurring in Greece and elsewhere. As we run up to a General Election in May, parties that were formerly marginalised by the First Past the Post electoral system – UKIP and the Greens – are now polling about 10% each and threatening the main parties from both the left and the right. Yesterday the Green Party’s membership passed 50,000 – one of which is me from when I joined a few days ago. It’s a good time to reassess one’s view of politics, and indeed of the place politics plays in one’s personal life. Old certainties are slipping, and the biggest personal dogma held by many up until now – that what we do will make no difference to an entrenched system – is the biggest one to slip. I think it is primarily the personal recognition of this responsibility that has made me act at last to join a party, for the first time since my brief previous involvement with the Green Party in 1985 or so.
I continue to think that the Middle Way itself implies no one particular political ideology or party – not because it is neutral, but because it begins with individual judgement, and the conditions affecting each judgement in each situation are varied. There are, I am convinced, better and worse ways to go politically from wherever you start now, not just equally indifferent options. I can tell you about my experience and the conditions that impel me in one direction, but I cannot prescribe that direction for you. The better direction will be the one that addresses conditions better, from wherever you start, and that avoids dogmatic ideological assumptions and thus reduces impediments to awareness. That will be so whether the ideologies that most tempt you involve socialist caring and equality, conservative rootedness and scepticism, liberal love of freedom or Green concern for the wider environment. You are unlikely to be able to find that direction without dogma unless you really try to understand the alternatives.
For me, however that direction has recently become a lot clearer, and apparently that has also become the case for many others too. I do not agree with every detail of Green Party policy, but my recent process of thought about the acute limitations of growth economics (see previous blog) and reading Tim Jackson’s book ‘Prosperity without Growth’ made the importance of the general direction the Greens are going in doubly important. It is not an easy direction. There is much that is not seriously worked out yet about how a society without growth can work, and how we can navigate the transition to it, but the important point is that this is the only direction that addresses key basic conditions of human society which no other political movements seem to be addressing. If you think creating a sustainable society is difficult, try continuing to live in an unsustainable society for another hundred years or so.
This central requirement is far more important to me than the various reservations I have about the occasional appearance of Green metaphysics. No, I don’t believe in ‘nature’, or holism, or any of these other big dogmatic Green ideas that involve appeals to ultimates. I expect that I will occasionally encounter thinking based on such absolutised abstractions in Green circles as elsewhere, and disagree with it. However, that need not stop me working with those who are largely going in the same direction, and seem to be largely motivated, not by dogmas, but by pressing conditions.
Of course, the Green party also wants other things, such as a citizen’s income, loosening and eventually opening of migration, and abolition of nuclear weapons and big cuts in defence spending. All of these seem to me like obvious ways to address conditions. Above all, if one wants integration in society and the world just as in the individual, one does not achieve this by building walls: whether these are the social walls that exclude benefit claimants from decent compassionate treatment, the walls of fortress Europe that are vainly trying to keep out the African poor, or the walls of nuclear ‘deterrence’. These are walls of repression, not only in the world but in the psyches of those who build them.
More of the same – more tactical voting for parties that will maintain the unsustainable mainstream consensus – is no longer an option for me. That’s not because there’s no case for tactical voting, but just because the reasons for doing so are no longer so important compared to wider conditions. Whatever your political habits at present, I urge you just to think critically about those habits, not just in terms of one or two issues but in terms of the widest possible context of conditions. Whoever you vote for, vote for the Big Picture.
Sceptics: The Movie
This little silent movie, by Danish philosopher Kasper Johansen, rather nicely captures the spirit of Pyrrhonian scepticism – living in the Middle Way of confident uncertainty.
A Middle Way Meditation Practice
How can we put the Middle Way into practice on a daily basis? I have been recommending various already established practices for the integration of desire, meaning and belief, but a practice may also be needed to bind them together and provide a constant reflective reminder of the Middle Way as a framework. It is that recognition that has led me to develop this Middle Way Meditation Practice. As yet this practice has not been extensively trialled (only by me), so I’d like to invite you to try it out and feed back to me how you get on. The weekend retreat on meditation in June should be a further opportunity to improve on this practice.
This practice is loosely inspired by Buddhist vipassana practices, with one important difference: whilst vipassana practices involve trying to bring oneself into alignment with some ‘truth’ that is the subject of the meditation, in this one, one works only through the process of balancing and integrating desires, meanings and beliefs that one finds in one’s own experience. The goals are open ended, and only the general integrative direction is prescribed by the practice.
This practice is intended to start from a base of mindfulness meditation. I would recommend at least five or ten minutes of preparatory mindfulness practice (e.g. consolidating posture, following the breath, body scanning, just sitting and accepting whatever experiences come up) to help ensure that the following practice is done in a state of sufficient overall awareness. If you have never done any kind of mindfulness practice, I suggest that you learn to do one (and become familiar with how to sit in meditation) before attempting this practice.
After the mindfulness warm-up, the practice is divided into four stages: desire, meaning, belief and absorption. These could be done in variable amounts of time, but I would suggest at least 5 minutes for each stage. If you find there is too much content here, it could potentially be broken up into separate meditations so that desire, meaning and belief were reviewed individually, each preceded by mindfulness practice and ended with the absorption stage.
1. Mindfulness warm-up
2. Desire stage
- Balance your body and become aware of physical sensations of balance in your posture
- Reflect on ‘sticky’ desires you may encounter in current or recent experience, whether these are emerging as thoughts or feelings. They may have emerged as hindrances to practice during the mindfulness preparation stage – for example, distracting sexual feelings, or anxiety about a forthcoming event.
- Reflect on the contrary desires that make these ‘sticky’ desires problematic (e.g. your desire to meditate and be free of anxiety)
- Return to your awareness of physical balance
- Reflect on an integrated fulfilment for these opposing desires. How could these best both be fulfilled? If you’re not sure, keep reviewing each and imagine it being fulfilled, then become sympathetically aware of the contrary desire, until a resolution presents itself.
3. Meaning stage
- Return to the sense of balance in your bodily awareness
- Reflect on conflicting meanings in your present or recent experience. For example, this might be a person you don’t understand, or an area of study you are finding it difficult to engage with.
- Return to your awareness of physical balance
- Reflect on the ways that you could integrate meaning in this case of conflict, by tolerating ambiguity or clarifying a model. For example, if it is a person you don’t understand, try to accept that uncertainty and recognise that they have meanings beyond the ones you recognise.
4. Belief stage
- Return to the sense of balance in your bodily awareness
- Reflect on conflicting beliefs in your present or recent experience (whether implicit or explicit). For example, you may have behaved inconsistently or experienced ‘weakness of will’, or you may have had a disagreement with someone. Get clear about what the two conflicting beliefs involved are by putting them in the form ‘the belief that…’.
- Return to your awareness of physical balance
- Reflect on the integrable and non-integrable (or experiential and metaphysical) elements of these two beliefs and try to separate them.
- Leaving aside the metaphysical beliefs, reflect on how the experiential elements could be integrated in a wider and more adequate belief. Clearly formulate the new and more adequate belief to yourself.
5. Absorption stage
- Return to body awareness and try to sit with open awareness for at least 5 minutes, noting whatever comes up but then letting it pass. Allow yourself to absorb the meditation and give time for unconscious processing.
- Before you rise, finally reflect on any outward actions that you have resolved upon as a result of the meditation. It may also be useful to note these down and to review them before starting your next meditation.
My initial experience with this practice suggests that one potential issue is overlaps between the stages, and another is that one might find it easier to engage with the same conflicts through one type of integration than another. Neither of these is worth worrying about, and the practice needs to be pursued flexibly in relation to whatever conflicts it turns up. For example, if you turn up three desire conflicts but no meaning or belief conflicts, that’s fine – just focus on the desire conflicts. In this case, though, you might also find it helpful to consider the same conflicts from the standpoint of meaning or belief. The use of the three types of integration needs to be taken more as a prompt than as a rigid structure.
My own experience so far is that this practice can be very helpful, despite the fact that the conflicts I alight upon may have been ones that I was considering outside meditation in any case. By putting them in this framework I am obliged to consider them in an integrative way, which should lead to better judgement.