Privacy versus openness

I have noticed many times that when I (and, of course, others) attempt to raise an important or sensitive issue to discuss a graveyard silence starts to prevail throughout, especially when communicating with people from the West. I have not inquired deeply into this particular issue yet, but I tentatively connect it to a Western tradition of privacy, with its explicit and implicit cultural agreements. In Russia there is considerably less sense of mental boundaries and rational taboos (taboos and boundaries are multiple but more premental-rational).

By being a creature of a postcommunist country sometimes I realize that the notion of capitalist/individualist privacy seems to avoid my immediate conscious grasp. And sometimes I am just left astounded by the fact that my Western friends and partners in communication suddenly become silent or say a very superficial remark to a question that I am wondering about as of crucial and related straight to the matters of life and death, even if psychological. At times like this I am left thinking, "Oh shit, did I again address an issue too directly?" Also, I start to feel some kind of sorrow regarding the fact that this particular intersubjective space somehow self-contracted and closed from being dialogical.

And now I am perplexed in regards to one question: where does a sense of authentic privacy ends and a cunning mechanism of self-defense against the truth, the truthfulness, and the goodness starts? In therapy when a therapist addresses a sensitive trauma-related issue, the client does everything to build up resistance and avoid looking and feeling into the issue and recognizing it as one. He or she invents numerous ways of escaping the cruel reality. One of the ways to defend oneself is to simply ignore the therapist's provocations and invitations to exploration of transferential systems.

There is a striking drive in a person who was brought up in the West not to get involved and to keep distance. "This is not my business." "I have lots of, lots of things to do, no time for discussing this." In some cases it seems to result in an impulsive/compulsive reaction of building excessive boundaries and closing one's own eyes with one's own hands so as to keep ignoring a delicate but important issue; especially in the cases that require making a (even if workable) value judgment regarding, e.g., other person or community and so on.

What somehow relates to this is my increasingly growing awareness that the idea that one has first to take care of one's own backyard before doing the global work is utterly failing in the context of the global crisis. Among some of American conservatives there is an idea that USA should withdraw from any involvement with the world problems, conserve itself, solve its own problems, and only then go to take care for the world. (The same basic view, a kind of "we should take care of our asses first," is widespread around the world.) There is an important part of the whole picture in this point of view: when taking into consideration an integral picture and doing integral action one is ought to take oneself into account; if one secludes oneself from one's care, it may lead to a catastrophe or at least significantly diminish the effectiveness of actions.

But if one actually forces this idea of self-conservation into reality as the only means to fight against the crisis, this will actually lead to serious consequences. The world is highly interweaved nowadays; and one's attempts to seclude oneself from global action will not succeed; for instance, most Americans consume products manufactured in China; and this is one of the world powers to dialogically come to terms with (and we do not to mention here lesser powers such as Somalian pirates imprisoning American cargo ships or Russian leaders not being able to take care of the weapon-grade plutonium waste lying near Ural mountains in huge amounts—enough to destroy the entire world several times in a row).

There is no way to avoid the world and to become autistic and private again; there is no way for America or any other country to retreat into its previous monological autism... We are all too interconnected now. No freaking way you can take care of your own backyard before you take care of the planet; you have to do it simultaneously with setting priorities that are actually global (and highly sophisticated), otherwise everything built without a necessary awareness will fall apart (in a sense, your backyard is a part of the global backyard called the Earth). It especially relates to the US because it became so dominant in the world in the second half of the 20th century; there is just no way to regress back into the cave after Americans have engulfed the entire world with their capitalistic system, worldview, and action.

(I would add here that one of the examples of everything falling apart is contemporary Russia which is said to be reigned, as Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, somewhat biliously formulated, by a "bunch of cowboys," the cowboys, I would add, who are basically incapable of single-handedly tackling the complex societal issues; hence, the suffering of the entire nation and a demise of an important, if neglected, sociocultural part of the European civilization. It will probably take the entire world to rebuild Russia and re-integrate its people into the global community; and now I sense that Russia is predominantly seen as a mean but persistent distraction and disturbance to the Western rationalistic plans for global peace and paradise. So much attention is paid to Africa now; but doesn't Russia deserve an equal amount of attention—or even more attention, given its difficult history, its influence in the world, and the multiple ways it is still being marginalized/ignored/oppressed both by the West and the East? I remind you that statistically and qualitatively Russia is probably not in a better shape than Nigeria; right now people are suffering in both places enormously—more than any human being in the world deserves—even if they are suppressing the suffering into the personal and collective unconscious and making themselves numb to and detached from their own pains.)

The global economic crisis as well as the global climatic change as well as many other global issues are positively not the national-level issues. They may have causes in each country's poor and imbalanced choice of politics and strategy over a certain period in history, but the systemic resolution of the global economic crisis requires a paradigm of global actions. Global climate change, or in general a worsening of environmental conditions due to industrialization and natural disasters that is undeniably occurring, is a vivid example of why taking care of one's own backyard first doesn't work: there is no point of trying to save your attachment to your home if the entire world is going to collapse. You can take care of grass in your backyard but the acid rain or radioactive waste will prove all your private efforts futile.

We ought to let go of being so much obsessed with privacy.

Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experientia fallax, judicium difficile

It is striking how ignorant you can be about the nature of your relationships with others. Especially with those who are close to you in some way. You can be in a very friendly relationship with somebody, a relationship that seems okay both to you and seemingly this other person, and yet, as, for instance, Freud noted, there is much more hidden beneath the surface of water; and the visible tip of the iceberg is just a partial and misleading appearance. Once you go deeper, once you dig up archeological remains of your past that resides in your life here and now and then, once you understand and appreciate yours and others' early traumas, you become both fascinated and terrified by what you have blindly denied, projected, swept under a carpet of your defenses.

In the early years life seems simple. There is Good, there is Evil, however you name it. The system you are identified with seems good to you, anything else is bad. People around can be good to you or bad to you. You define people through their relationship with you and your relationship to them. Psychoanalysis says it starts with the Mother: a caring Mother is the image of a Good Mother; a non-caring Mother is the image of a Bad Mother. The same mother manifests to you as two different persons: the one that is Good and satisfies all your needs, and the one that is Bad and doesn't. Sometimes this dichotomy seems to be able to follow you through life, perhaps dividing it into black & white stripes similar to a piano's keyboard.

Later in life the understanding emerges that not everything is about you, and your judgments are just judgments that can be right or wrong to some extent—or both, or neither. Some people are definitely more kind to you than others; some have a more negative attitude toward you; and most just don't give a shit about you. You look around yourself and can find no good, no evil in its absolute form. You still try to make judgment calls, but they don't seem solid to you. Everything looks relative, and you know you can be wrong, and you may even choose to look at things positively, to expect good from other people, and to blind yourself toward evil. This naivete can be very strong, until there is a crisis in your paradigm, the crisis of accumulated awareness regarding anomalies that don't match your expectations of being with others.

Everything looks relative, and yet there is human drama. There are no bad people, and yet the deeds of some of them are terrifying. In many ways, Hollywood has simplified it all extensively. Life is not a Hollywood movie, it is more like a Greek tragedy, it is more like the greatest play that could have ever been written by Shakespeare. In real life, in true everyday drama it is never obvious who your enemy is, for there are no villains with the letters E-V-I-L carved on their foreheads. (Well, some can have swastikas there… but this is just a sign; and the rest relies upon the one who interprets. Most are simply not fluent in psychopaths' language.) You can hardly make a definite judgment about the essence of a person, for human personality is so complex, paradoxical, and multifaceted. And yet once in a while your life depends upon your making a judgment call. It is not easy to know who are false prophets in your living, however "by their fruit you will recognize them." And, as I recently discovered, there is more to that advice than I thought before.

There would be no human drama, if everything were evident. If there were only the good, the bad, and the ugly, you would always know whom to shoot. But there aren't; and you don't. It is impossible for your enemy to betray you, you would expect that; and it would make no sense to call thy enemy's deeds "betrayal." In fact with an enemy you speak in terms of war, not betrayal. It's all quite sincere and straightforward. The very definition of betrayal is that it is done by those from whom you would never expect that. All human drama that directly involves you is created by thy neighbors. Look at the people who surround you. You would never see that coming, that is the point. Look in the mirror. Oedipus killed his own father and fucked his own mother, unknowingly. Stop fucking people close to you—or if you think you can't stop, at least do it consciously, sincerely, without deceiving yourself.

The very art of deception is in making you deceived. People are naturally two-faced, they tend to have many faces. Id, ego, and superego are just three of the most known subpersonalities. There have always been large amounts of data in clinical psychology on so-called manipulative and exploiting types of personality. All their life, from the early childhood (when this could have been important so as to adapt to a pathological social environment) these people have been trained to deceive others, to show them false appearances, to appear before you in sheep's clothing, to be your greatest friend, and to exploit you. In the field of human drama these are professionals. Such people consciously and unconsciously find your weak spots and use them, and one of the basic mechanisms for this is exploitation of transferential/countertransferential dynamics.

If one, for example, has an especially pathological narcissistic personality, that person will easily find ways how to make others serve him or her. Sometimes they do it unconsciously for their egos; in many cases, they learn how to manipulate their unconscious so as to create extensive networks of lies. They can build cults and/or businesses around it by being a "charismatic" leader and making other people do hard work for them through finding weak spots in their personalities. The transference-based deception may last forever, especially if you yourself have serious unsolved issues (such as victim patterns); but when you become aware of the transferential phenomena and break up the pattern, this person will instantaneously recognize the danger you bring to his or her system's stability; and you will be immediately discarded from it by the narcissism's immune system, without any mercy and self-doubt whatsoever. Furthermore, if that person, in addition to being narcissistic, is also highly dissociative, he or she may as well simply dissociate the entire narcissistic schemata, rationalize a sudden loss of a close one, and eventually maintain a good self-image (or at least persona).

How to recognize such a person? Look at the deeds of the overall self, not just the words of his or her persona or social mask. Look both closely and from distance. Look into yourself as well. See the relationship dynamics between you and the other, especially it relates to those who are most important to you. Feel into the body sensations and gestures that you engage in. Hear the words and the inner dialogue spoken. And finally awake to the pattern.

Losev's dialectical phenomenology

Here is why you have got to love Aleksei Losev. A section from a book on the history of Russian philosophy (it's a very nice section, even though the book itself totally transcends the meaning of the term outdated in that it says that Losev's fate remains "wholly unknown"):

"Husserl", [Losev] writes, "went only halfway; he has no relational eidetics. <…> I must admit that there are points at which my methods will never tally with those of pure phenomenology <…>; I consider the purely dialectical method my principal method. <…> "Meaning" must be explained in its own semantic relations, in the structural interconnection and self-generation of meaning."

These last words express the point of departure of Losev's theoretical constructions, and his basic intuition, very well. For him the "meanings" which are revealed in phenomenological analysis are connected in a kind of semantic unity; it seems likely that this basic intuition is a reflection of Solovyov's doctrine of "total-unity". Losev, like Frank and Karsavin, is guided in his reflections by an intuition of "total-unity", he is profoundly convinced that "dialectic is the sole method capable of grasping living reality as a whole." This primordial perception of reality as a "whole" is not itself derivable from the "phenomenological reduction". And it is prior to the dialectical method, i. e. it is not derived from dialectic but, on the contrary, this "interconnection and self-generation of meaning is presupposed in dialectic itself. <…> Losev, however, supplements phenomenology with dialectic because he is a metaphysician prior to any "strict" method. Such in essence is the meaning of Losev's assertion that "dialectic is a genuine realism, the only possible philosophic realism." <...> [B]ut, of course, Losev is speaking not of the purely empirical "realism" which is sanctified by the doctrine of Neo-Marxism. The following words are characteristic in this connection: "Immediacy alone [i.e. purely empirical material] is not enough." (Zenkovsky V. V., 2003 [The rest of the section can be read in Google Books.])

In the previous post I have written on the importance of the immediacy in communication; and what I meant was this kind of phenomenology supported with dialectical analysis. My own experience tells that immediacy alone is not enough, for in the phenomenological stream the importance of an opening towards authentic encounter tends to fade away when consciousness gets flooded with secondary material (such as psychodynamic transferential systems that distort communication to a great extent), especially when the structure of consciousness is not capable of simultracking both constant phenomenological and dialectical/structural flows of reality co-enactment.

Beautiful moment, do not pass away!

This magic moment
So different and so new
Was like any other
Until I met you
And then it happened
It took me by surprise
I knew that you felt it too
I could see it by the look in your eyes...
— "This magic moment" by Lou Reed 

This fleeting moment of the few seconds when you encounter a particular person for the first time is evasive. And yet such a moment seems to convey much more information on the potentials of your relationship with that person than we used to think. In fact, it seems likely that the first moment you encounter a person is the most telling (and precious) one, given the unconscious way we follow through most of our social life. I would argue that it might be a source for holographic representation (proconstruction and prognosis, to be more precise) of that person and his or her current & hidden potentials (and dangers), at least in terms of the multilevel space that you share with the individual. And, luckily enough, the potentials of the first encounter can be unleashed in enhanced states of consciousness through certain kinds of integrated awareness training, which makes this notion a very useful and powerful tool in communication.

Two months ago I stumbled upon a book that supported my longterm intuition that in many cases the power of the first impression, the moment of first seeing the face of the other, looking into her or his eyes, hearing the voice, touching the skin provided all the necessary information so as to predict the generalized trajectory of the relationship with that individual. The book I'm speaking about is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; and it is quite a short account that explores different aspects of rapid cognition, "the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye." One might agree or disagree with certain interpretations that are given by the author, but for me the book was a treasure of anecdotal and experimental evidence for finally letting myself into a more conscious applying of this fleeting (holographic and dialectic) rapid cognition. In my opinion, this is a kind of intuition one is definitely advised to exercise and find practical application in everyday life.

And, of course, there are some dangers of misinterpreting culturally- and biologically-conditioned biases for genuine rapid cognition that provides accurate first impressions. The moment of authentic encounter, which seems to require being in stillness for accessing it, is very fleeting; and the conditioned reflexes are quick to jump in. Moreover, the way we ordinarily interact with each other tends to belong to a very limited band of the spectrum of consciousness that we have access to; instead of multidimensional communication we are usually confined to a very narrow kind of everyday awareness that reduces the quality of our intersubjective modes of being indefinitely. The less we are aware of the communication that we are open to, the more it is that we talk to mannequins instead of people; and the easier it is for (conscious and unconscious) tricksters to manipulate us into situations we would normally avoid being involved with.

In my own experience, I found that one of the common and widespread traps in everyday living that activates our unconscious reactivity (rather than responsibility) seems to be psychodynamic transferential & countertransferential communication loops. Freud fairly believed that unsolved transferences seem to be the phenomenon that permeates all human relationships; and sometimes a relationship among people can be limited to that ancient and dusty transferential/countertransferential struggle. It is important to train awareness of transferential relationships in one's own life so as to therapeutically resolve them and bring forth more mature and integrated modes of being.

By the way, in the very first paragraph of this post I used the term holographic as a metaphor in order to evoke a certain attitude of perceiving the world as vast integrated networks of interconnected and dynamically-unfolding occasions (and perspectives on those occasions as well). Another useful metaphor for the potential of the holographic immediacy is the notion of the Indra's net, which is described by Francis Harold Cook as following:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring. (Cook F. H., 1977)

 Image created by Charles Gunn of the Technische Universität Berlin. It is a still from the movie Not Knot!, published by A K Peters Ltd. (Source)

Interestingly enough, the perspective on the moment of encounter to be a source of multidimensional potentials that can be tapped into in enhanced modes of being and awareness seems to be that of a dialectic, if nondual, perspective on the nature of the Kosmos as it is, which is reflected in the kosmology of Ancient Greeks. Aleksei Losev, who becomes one of my favorite philosophers to quote, in his philosophical study (dated 1927) of the ancient views on the Kosmos and their relationship to the contemporary science describes the first basic foundation of a dialectic formulation in the antique kosmology:

First basic foundation. The Kosmos is indivisible, i. e. it has a becoming, or continually changing, intensity of itself as of a oneness of some kind. <...> The first basic foundation of the antique Kosmos maintains that, however much you divide the Kosmos, the smallest part you would get could be in turn divided into as many parts as one wishes. If the Kosmos, taken as a whole, consists of the infinite amount of parts, then any part of it also consists of the infinite amount of parts, and in this regard the entire Kosmos and any part of it are absolutely identical. <...> This means that the Kosmos is both divisible, for any parts of it are possible to exist, and indivisible, for in every part of it the Kosmos is manifested in its entirety, and, again, one could divide it as much as one wishes. (Losev A. F. Antichniy kosmos i sovremennaya nauka [Ancient Kosmos and the contemporary science], 1927)

I find that this paragraph functions as a very solid formulation to illustrate how the realities in question may be grounded in a dialectical perspective on the Kosmos. I would note that it might be important to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to at least partially ensure the validity and reliability of both theoretical and empirical accounts; and, also, the feeling of resonance with some of the greatest minds in the history of mankind (such as the greatest of Greeks) is inspiring.