The Horns of Integral Pragmatics

What I propose and emphasize by constantly returning to integral pragmatics is the possibility for co-enacting a “new” mode of intimacy with the utterances we make.

The Walls of Jericho

I put the word new in the quotation marks because I believe that this mode is old enough to have seen the first geniuses of both a spoken word and a written word in the history of humankind. I, nevertheless, say “new” because it seems we either lost our connection with this mode or haven’t found it yet. For some reason we tend to distance ourselves from the embodiment of our Logos or Word; and yet we shall always remind ourselves: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

In the alchemical lab of our Imagination the seed of the Word manifests as God’s will and energy. Through becoming one with the Word we re-unite with the miracle of Oneness with the Spirit as it manifests inseparably from reality. The Word uttered always brings aliveness to our being; and instead of looking straight at things we stare into the abyss in front of us and our consciousness embarks on a journey through the realms of the living and the dead, following the footsteps of infinity, swimming in the clouds of timelessness, and reaching out to express as non-locality.

The sacred way of speaking the Word is totally different from the profane way of speaking words. Peter Kingsley explains the difference between “talking about” and “talking from” in the magnificent article “Raven’s Appearance”:

There is the profane way of talking, which is to talk about things. And if you care to notice, you will see that in the modern Western world we always talk about something. There is the word; then there is the point of reference for the word, which is always separate from the word itself. And this, of course, is the basis for nearly all modern linguistics.

But according to people such as Parmenides there is another way of talking. This other way is that instead of talking about, you talk from. If you sense oneness you talk from oneness; and that oneness is communicated through the magic of the word in a way that our minds may find incomprehensible but that, even so, fascinates and endlessly obsesses them. For these people were magicians. The founders of logic and science in the West were sorcerers. They knew what they were doing even if, now, no one knows what they did.

If we intuit the infinite, if we intuit the eternal, if we intuit the timeless, the transcendent, the Divine, we are bound to wake up in the echoing thunder of silence. This silence is the original face of our selfhood; and it quietly floats in our Hearts. The silence explodes with ecstasy, and when it does, the Word manifests. You see, the Word is inseparable from the silence, the Word is connected to the silence, the Word is silence revealed itself.

We can spend years and decades talking about words but unless we talk from the Word we never reach the realm of profound pragmatics. We can infinitely chase our own tail of signifiers and signifieds but no matter what we do unless we open our minds and hearts wide enough to courageously embody the Word, our talking will always remain talking about philosophy instead of being philosophy, talking about poetry instead of being poetry, talking about science instead of being science, talking about art instead of being art. Philosophy is the Love of Wisdom; in its pragmatics it’s the Word uttered itself to itself and echoed in the Hall of sentient Mirrors.

I have always intuitively sensed the appearance of the intimacy with the Word in the writings of Ken Wilber. The striking difference between him and his philosophy and those who talk about Wilber and his philosophy is in the embodiment of the Word—Logos. The seed of this vision of integral pragmatics that I want to convey to you has been sown by a little and seemingly evanescent utterance of profound importance, the utterance delineating Integral Semiotics in Wilber’s Integral Spirituality (pp. 286-287):

James was a genius and a pioneer in so many ways, and the fact that he took states of consciousness as seriously as he did was extraordinary; but monological is monological, and in that instance he merely extended the imperialism of the philosophy of the subject. Fortunately, James’s sheer genius pushes him beyond his own self-imposed limitations. His empiricism is always open to hermeneutics, the representational paradigm is supplemented with Peircean pragmatics, and—above all—his is a soul in which Truth and Goodness and Beauty are still a holy and unbreakable trinity.

But radical empiricism is still empiricism. That is, radical empiricism is radical monologicalism. Stages in zone #2 and the constitutive nature of zone #4 are alien to him. Had he availed himself of more of the work of his contemporary James Mark Baldwin, how different it all might have been. This imperialistic empiricism is the worm in the core of this otherwise extraordinary work.

It’s interesting to note that, in fact, Charles Peirce himself criticized James for exactly this central problem. James and Peirce were lifelong friends, despite their little tiff over James’s appropriation of the term “pragmatism” from Peirce, who coined it. (Peirce subsequently changed the name of his philosophy to “pragmaticism,” which was “a term,” he said, “so ugly as to discourage theft.”) Despite their friendship, Peirce felt James’s approach of “pure empiricism” was deeply flawed. Peirce—who, as noted, is generally regarded as America’s greatest philosophical genius—nailed James with a simple sentence: Perception is semiotic.

I want to pause here for a moment, take a deep breath and state that for the last two years I have been a semiotician to the marrow of my bones. Semiotics is a way to recognize the almost religious reverence for the Word that manifests as a movement of the unmoving, as a birth of the unborn. The entire universe after the Big Bang represents the Word extended through time and space. Now, having said so, I shall continue this magnificent quotation:

In other words, perception is always already an interpretation. At least in part. Failing to see this is the common mistake of naïve phenomenology and naïve empiricism in all their forms. Understanding this also let Peirce point out two further problems, which people simply will not understand if they don’t get the first problem with monological empiricism itself. Namely, it let Peirce say of James, “Of course, he is materialistic to the core.” And further: “He inclines toward Cartesian dualism.” Whenever I mention this to fans of James, they usually express shock, which tells me that they haven’t gotten the postmodern revolution, because otherwise it makes perfect sense. But for those who fail to understand this, James is even seen as somebody who overcame materialism and dualism, whereas he merely embodied their subtler monological forms. Peirce went on to humorously say of James’s implicit materialism that this is so “in a methodological sense, but not religiously, since he does not deny a separable soul nor a future life; for materialism is that form of philosophy which leaves the universe as incomprehensible as it finds it.” What Peirce means is, what monological delivers is incomprehensible; perception itself is actually semiotic.

Now we come closer to the part which is most important to our reasoning. Let’s take a look:

We can also see, further, why James—as well as virtually all meditation and phenomenology—is, as often noted, modernist in essence, and why Peirce was a great postmodernist about a century ahead of his time (who else could see natural laws as natural habits, without falling into magenta magic?). Peirce maintained that all perception is already an interpretation, and interpretation is triadic in structure: it demands a sign, an object (referent), and an interpretant. You can see the similarity with Ferdinand de Saussure, who maintained that the sign is composed of a signifier and signified in a system of interpreted differences. Peirce coined the term “semiotics”; Saussure called what he was doing “semiology.” AQAL has drawn on both of them: there is a sign (signifier plus signified), referent, semantic, syntax, and pragmatics.

Here we have to look at the bottom of the page to find a short footnote with the utterance that forever changed my relation to the Word as it is written or spoken or read or done:

To give a quadratic view: the sign is composed of UR-signifier and UL-signified (and yes, à la postmodernism, there are often huge gaps between them, resulting in deferral of meaning). Integral Theory defines a sign as “any aspect of reality that signifies another, to another.” Signs exist in systems of semantics (LL) and syntax (LR), held together by pragmatics (whose telos is to integrate the 4 quadrants of any semiotic occasion: and all occasions are semiotic, although only higher animals have linguistic forms of semiotics: the 4 quadrants go all the way down, taking semiotics with them). . . .

Ever since I have read this footnote my life has never been the same. As I was reading the words “signs exist in systems of semantics (LL) and syntax (LR), held together by pragmatics (whose telos is to integrate the 4 quadrants of any semiotic occasion . . .)” the subtle tingling in my body and the space of clarity in my mind signified that the treasure is found.

I have expressed elsewhere my point of view that the third tier of development and evolution of consciousness described in the Integral developmental theory is the first truly Pragmatic Tier. In a gesture of connecting the dots I have linked Wilber’s testimony that the AQAL framework itself is a product of the Indigo stage of consciousness (a third-tier stage) with the statement that pragmatics’ telos is to integrate the four quadrants of any semiotic occasion. This means that the true nature of the four quadrants, the true nature of these primordial perspectives reveals itself only as an embodiment of the Word coming through a third-tier structure of consciousness.

Indigo is the first stage of consciousness which in its utterances, the utterances that manifest not just as a verbal-linguistic activity but as a kosmocentric activity, is able to hold the four quadrants in a single gesture of integration. Before that stage, every utterance we make is bound to be a fragmented aspect of a text within text within text within the boundaries of one dimension of consciousness. To understand and grok and grasp the difficult transverbal reality beneath these words I want to extend my philosophical hand so as to reach Vasily Nalimov, a truly unsung hero of our time. Vasily Nalimov understood consciousness as essentially a text reading phenomenon. He intuited very well the power of Logos—the power of the Word—and spoke from the silence and timelessness. The grand narrative of our life is a holarchy of semiotic occasions that forms the scripture with the Holy text breathing within and without.

I emphasize integral pragmatics but my words sometimes are misinterpreted as utterances of an isolated theorizing mind—but I am not a Pharisee and not interested in a book knowledge and in talking about. When I reach the space of clarity through which I can reconnect with integral pragmatics I see that human beings are lost in massive textbooks of their own minds. The dissociation of the words and actions is being established. The intuition of the immediacy of the Spirit-in-action’s tetra-manifestation becomes forsaken. A seed of integral intentionality which has the potentiality to reach a luminous mindbody becomes lost in the swamps of smaller vortexes of karma. The Integral Word instead of being spoken is being stuck at the throat chakra level of incessant mumbling; and the energy never reaches the forehead and the crown chakras (and often lower chakras as well). The micro-orbit is never fully completed. The Beauty fades away. The hopes get broken. Alienation insists. The Word is forgotten. The Man isolates himself in the web of texts he created.

My task is to do my best to bring the message which reveals the possibility for a passionate embodiment of the Word—the Word that has the sound of the Horns of Jericho. It shakes your destiny and frees your throat and liberates your fate. The influx of authentic pragmatics results.

In defense of integral reading

“In Defense of Naïve Reading” by Robert Pippin is a pretty interesting integrative article on literary postmodernism published at the New York Times website. Reading it was as if the surfaces of the Red Postmodern Sea were parted and the depth of self-consciousness revealed itself. At least for a moment a silent green beam of hope shined. To quote,

“[L]iterature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or ‘researched’ by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of ‘first level,’ an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more ‘sideways on’ or third-person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the ‘arts.’”

For me, literature has always been a source of deep wisdom that fosters one’s greater maturity. As a brilliant Russian thinker Vasily Nalimov argues in his books, consciousness is a text-reading phenomenon (in the broadest sense of the word). In my opinion, narrative brings meaningful & very subtle structures to one’s personal development; and Ken Wilber has pointed out the importance of the world greatest religious narratives as developmental conveyor belts for preconventional & conventional worldspaces in his book Integral Spirituality.

To continue quoting this wonderful article,

“Likewise—and this is a much more controversial thesis—such works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge—exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the [Phronēsis]) or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l’esprit géometrique and l’esprit de finesse—is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for ‘naïve’ reading, teaching and writing—an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy.”

Definitely, aesthetically-built literary narratives seem to have the capacity of constructing experiential frameworks for conveying certain domains of tacit knowledge (necessary for action learning in the pragmatic sector). To additionally contribute to this statement about the importance of aesthetics in our narratives, I would quote the famous Russian writer Anton Chekhov who said, “The writer’s function is only to describe by whom, how, and under what conditions… The artist must be only an impartial witness of his characters and what they said, not their judge.” (I borrowed the quotation from another interesting article by Nina Schuyler.)

Here are some of the questions worth pondering. Why reading comprehensive literature is so important for our development? Why do I think that in order for us to contribute to humanity probably the best thing we can do is to calm our minds enough to be able to actually have read Dostoevsky’s passionate reflections on universal conscience and self-liberation? Why do stories and their archetypal images have played such an important role for our humanity’s evolution for millennia? Why good 1st-person storytelling is so important not just for narrow marketing and cheap sales pitches but for a wide range of dimensions of life that involve communication and knowledge sharing?

One of the many perspectives that I find increasingly important when contemplating the matrix of these questions is the mind-blowing neuroscientific discovery of mirror neurons: 

“In multiple reports published in the Sept. 19 issue of Current Biology, neuroscientists provide evidence that mirror neurons are multimodal—they are activated by not just by watching actions, but also by hearing and reading about them.

An effort led by Lisa Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, found that the brain’s premotor cortex shows the same activity when subjects observe an action as when they read words describing it.” (“Mirror Neurons Also Respond to Language and Sound,” September 21, 2006)

Hence, we are witnessing the capacity of comprehensive narratives to evoke altered states of consciousness and deeper modes of knowing and appreciating life which are important for the emergence of a more sophisticated pragmatics of our being-in-the-world. Science cannot replace art and morals—Habermas, Wilber and others have proved it convincingly; but if science, morals, and art are in a complementary relationship with each other their synergy will most definitely bring forth powerful results.

What about the day we stop slaughtering our finest impulses?

A beautiful quotation I read a few minutes ago in the blog of one of my favorite fiction writers and magicians Johnathan Carroll. Carroll quotes Henry Miller who said,

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

In my observations we most certainly do slaughter our finest impulses on a day-to-day basis. It doesn't necessarily refer to writing a poem or painting something beautiful. The finest impulses that we suppress may include the things we want to say, the moves we want to perform, the feelings we want to express. In some cases it emerges as a blockage in the throat, as if you were about to say something but then started to clear your throat and remained silent. In many cases we don't claim the destiny for greatness that belongs to us and settle due to our damaged self-esteem, an attachment to a false self for a lesser path or a path that is alien to us.

I hope an occasion will emerge to write extensively about Jonathan Carroll's magical novels that  helped me to rediscover my soul and make my soul presence stronger. His books have been very influential in my life—and I'm speaking of the magnitude of influence that at some point equals to that which, for instance, Ken Wilber's ideas have had on me (which is huge). Incidentally, in one of the older blogs Carroll writes about Wilber the following:

I was listening to a lecture by Ken Wilber about consciousness. He mentioned something I had never thought about. Yet as soon as I heard it, my mind jumped on its horse and rode off in all sorts of interesting directions. Wilber said one of the profound differences between mankind centuries ago and today was that in the past because a person was born, raised and usually died in one community and rarely left, their exposure to religious/spiritual ideas was limited to what was taught or believed only in that community. In modern times, particularly now with the ubiquity, width and breadth of the internet, a child in a remote community in, say, Mali, can learn in an instant about Buddhism, Christian Science, or Zoroastrianism. Sure, in the past missionaries from the various religions were sent out to the four corners of the earth to try and convert the heathen. But they were only individuals here and there. Now all that's needed is a computer and a modem and huge numbers of people can have their most fundamental beliefs challenged or changed—in an instant. I have always been fascinated by the idea of what we might be or have been if we were simply exposed to it. We would have been firm Catholics if we'd learned about that belief when we were most receptive to religious teaching. Or a great chess player if someone had only taught us how to play as children. How about a world class baker if we hadn't had a Mom who hated to cook and anything to do with the kitchen. Wilber extends that idea way way out—to God. Never in a million years would I (says the person in Mali, for example) have thought God or religion could be conceived in ways that contrast so hugely with my own. But now that I have learned about some of them, my world view and life could change profoundly (June 28, 2009).

I remember how amused I was when I accidentally opened Carroll's blog and found this post. I even spontaneously wrote him an email expressing my gratitude for his books and a joy that he, too, is getting somehow influenced by integral ideas as expressed by Wilber. Don't know if the email ever reached him though for I haven't received a reply (probably, it got lost among the tons of other fan mail). Let me quote most parts of it here:

Dear Jonathan Carroll:

I'm clinical psychology student from Russia (if I manage not to drop out on my senior year, of course). But that's not the point of this letter. The point is rather different. I'm in love with your books. I read everything I could find translated in Russian… and I'm waiting for an opportunity to buy your English books and re-read everything once again. It also happens that I'm scholar of Ken Wilber's works. It also happens that my life, my dreams, my soul, and the fabric of whatever happens in my world seems to me as being closely interlinked with the things I read. And I still can't quite figure out whose works influenced my today's consciousness more -- yours, Ken's or Neil Gaiman's. (Sorry, but I gotta admit that I'm a big fan of Neil's works, too.)

Anyway, during these two weeks, among other things, I finished reading three books. Your Bones of the Moon, Neil's InterWorld (actually, finished reading it just an hour ago), and Ken's One Taste and The Marriage of Sense and Soul (it was the first time I read those in English [and I read the former some years ago in Russian]). Freaky enough, I find that the taste of all these books is somewhat similar. I have that bad habit of immersing into whatever I read and attempting to intuit the possibilities towards greater and deeper dimensions of psyche and consciousness in it. For instance, I always sense a lot of transpersonal and transrational stuff (which doesn't look prerational to me) going on in your books, not to mention the play of Jungian-like archetypes and so on; and when I read your books, Neil's books, and Ken's books there's that unmistakable state of deeper translucence that makes all the dimensions of dream-and-reality dialogically interpenetrate—at least in my worldspace. For me your stories are keyless gates to deeper, broader states of consciousness. Believe it or not, this unmistakable recognition of the great story narrative supportive towards awakening of one's own deeper potentials is what I have always found as striking features in both your, Neil's and Ken's books. And it's even that I have been wondering whether it is possible that the art you're all working on is essentially of the same transcendental and transformational nature, pointing towards deeper dimensions and depths of the soul.

I am pretty sure that what both you and Neil are doing as artists is what can be called a contemporary transcendental art, transcendental because it transcends and integrates fragments of realities, be it the realities of waking & dreaming or realities of persona & shadow or realities of ordinary and transordinary. Ken Wilber, when speaking of integral art (you can find an essay on art here and there; see also two beautiful chapters in his The Eye of Spirit), said an interesting formula: Bad Art Copies, Good Art Creates, Great Art Transcends. Alex Grey, a famous integral artist (whose paintings have been of guidance for me), writes:

Ken has stated numerous times, and I agree, that art is an essentialized worldview, or as Bachelard called it, "a metaphysics in a moment." Over the millenia, culture has embodied worldviews that both express and guide the attitudes of the people. As artists, we need to be conscious of and responsible for the views we transmit through our work. We need to use all the tools available to re-invent and invigorate our field, and to my mind, Ken provides the amazing tool of a worldview that makes peace between the quarrelsome territories of science, art and religion. After the dissociation and alienation of artists and their communities over the past 120 years, Wilber's integrative approach holds much promise. He has lead the way beyond current post-modern thinking toward an integral approach to art, toward an art of the soul.

I would say that your art has done exactly that to my injured Russian soul that wanders in the wastelands of a collapsed country which has been experiencing a cultural disaster for more than 100 years. Your stories have been very helpful in terms of healing my soul and awakening it towards the deepest potentialities of its individuality. I remember thinking: there's gotta be something in common among these guys, I feel it with my heart, now what I need is evidence that I'm not making this up... So it was quite a surprise to read your CarrollBlog 6.28, in which you mention "listening to a lecture by Ken Wilber about consciousness." I was very delighted, because synchronicities play a very profound role in my life stream. It was "an accident" that I decided to browse your website (which I usually don't do), after reading that Neil's book in the period where everything I do is closely intertwined with Ken Wilber's philosophy. This is no accident that Ken calls himself not a philosopher... but a storyteller, a Kosmic storyteller. And I think of the universes you unfold in your stories as of the Kosmic stories as well; for me, they are visionary stories that open doors to something which is ready to emerge but is not yet here. . . .

I hope this email reaches you; and you'll have time to read it and perhaps even to respond, if it touches you. As for myself, I'm relieved, for I knew that I'm not crazy in sensing that what you do isn't simply an art confined into its own boundaries, and what Ken does isn't simply a cognitive philosophy confined to its own boundaries... everything becomes fluid, dialectical, and translucent. Which is groovy, indeed! Whenever I get your book or Neil's book or Ken's book, they always and instantaneously become my top priority in reading list; and I basically stop doing everything else besides reading, because these stories always offer gems of a deeper awareness. This is why I'm very grateful for being able to enjoy the brilliance and writing genius of all of you.

Kind regards,
Eugene Pustoshkin

Now I'd like to come back to the first point about slaughtering our finest impulses. After I posted what you have hopefully read above I went on reading Carroll's blog. There is one post that he wrote that I find right on money, so I am going to quote it:

I was reading an issue of MEN'S JOURNAL magazine. The lead article was "100 Things To Do Before You Die." On the list were things like climb Mt. Everest, parachute from a plane, hand feed a shark, etcetera. I skimmed the other things they suggested should be on everyone's list. I had no desire to do even one of them. So then I thought is there anything I'd like to do before I die that I haven't done yet? Hypothetically if someone is living fully, they're doing what matters (or is important) to them whenever and however they can. There's something pathetic about having to make lists of tasks to do before you die so you can be sure that by doing them, you will have really "lived." The Japanese say "live every day as if your hair was on fire" and within realistic bounds, that sounds just about right. Most of the time we know almost as soon as a situation arises whether we will later regret not doing it. We also know most of the time that despite the many fearful, well behaved inner voices telling us not to do something, that we should ignore those voices and just go ahead and do it. Because when we do it and it works, it makes us bigger and life richer. If it fails, we hurt for a while but generally then heal and move on. You don't need to climb Mt. Everest to have led a fulfilled life. You only have to have the courage, and usually it is only small courage, to say yes. Say yes and do something when your first, second and third instincts may be to say no because that frightens me (March 18, 2010).

Indeed.

The writer's block?

In the mandala of our consciousness we are all in a sense artists. This is something that Alex Grey has recognized in his famous "The Vast Expanse" psalm:

Create perfection wherever you go with your awareness. That is why this teaching is admired by artists—they sense the correctness of the response to life as creative. Life is infinite creative play. Enjoyment and participation in this creative play is the artists profound joy. We co-author every moment with universal creativity. . . .

Artistic response (rather than conditioned reaction) to life is at least one-third of what we are as human beings. Integral philosopher Ken Wilber points out that virtually every greatest thinker in the history of humankind (from Plato to Kant to Habermas) acknowledged the Big Three, the triumvirate of perspectives—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the philosophy of Plato, for instance—to be the essential dimensions of our being-in-the-world.

Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the oughts and shoulds of what must be done by us so as to fulfill our destinies (moral). Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the truths and facts of coming to terms with the cruel reality—and not escaping from it into the vertigo of fantasies and illusions and false hopes (knowledge). But, as Kant argues in his concluding Critique of Judgment, without a cornerstone dimension of aesthetic response to life these other dimensions remain detached from each other. To embody our life as a play of creativity (as a form of art), as I see it, is a foundational component of a healthy and integrated existence.

Playfully writing one's own narrative of life and transcending a writer's block, the blockage that leads to copy&pasting of an old habitual storyline that we learned at some point and that makes us non-existent to ourselves, always looking for new ways of self-expression in the seemingly limited context of our life's framework, constantly searching for new tools for transcending that frame and finding new perspectives to it seems to be a way to balance the Big Three in one's own life. If I deny myself of this courageous creative response to life, I deny myself of life itself.

It is important to embody the Spirit's creativity in a canvas of the individual levels of our being, including the Soul, the ego, the adaptive personae, and the body. It is important to trust one's own artistic feeling that arises in the depths of the Heart. It is important to learn in action how to be a better artist of life than the moment before, to keep searching for new curves and touches in life, to keep looking for novel ways of self-expressing perfection while always already being a manifestation of the ultimate Stillness.

Otherwise life becomes a dull and in/efficient affair of a robot-like human mechanism that keeps self-replicating old constellations of patterns and occasionally passes the Turing test strictly by an accident.

And, as Elizabeth Gilbert wonderfully points out, when undertaking any form of art it is crucial to recognize that one's own creativity is not a private property or a selfish achievement, it manifests rather like a gift of Spirit. Even if your art is your life story (and it always is) the same writer's block rule still works; and you can get stuck, as we all do. Your life as a work of art doesn't belong strictly to your individual being, most certainly not to your personae or ego or even Soul, even though the latter comes closer to the essential Source. You can't force it, you have to let it grow.

P.S. And if you are forgetting both the dignity of being an artist and the humility of being a work of art by falling, e.g., into the dominance of either shoulds or facts I ought to wake you up by asking a simple question, the question that highlights the importance of your qualia or subjective joy of being:

"Why so serious?"

(A still from a highly recommended movie on the topic, The Dark Knight.)

Architectonics of the Self

If the sky were to suddenly open up... there would be no law... there would be no rule. There would only be you and your memories... the choices you've made and the people you've touched. The life that has been carved out from your subconscious is the only evidence by which you will be judged... by which you must judge yourself. Because when this world ends, there will only be you and him... and no one else.
— Donnie Darko (2001)

Who am I? There are always many ways to be answering this question. Every moment in life I am this or that, such and such, that's me, that's not me, this is mine, and this is not. Everywhere I go the sense of self follows my footsteps closely and generates the I-ness and the me-ness and the mine-ness of my being-in-the-world. The sense of identity can be very concrete for some people and it can be quite fleeting for others, but even when that which I am identified with changes rapidly there is always an intimate self-sense present to the sacrament of life, however big or small, strong or fluid, convenient or unconvincing, conscious or unconscious, personal or depersonalized and so on. It can be very dynamic, flaky even, and yet it undeniably exists.

The overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness looking from the outside can be called personality (in a somewhat narrow meaning of this term); the overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness objectively looking inside can be called self-system. The total kaleidoscope of fluctuating identities and self-perspectives I would call architectonics of the self, and it is a penetrating look into the mystery of the architectonics of the self that could bring forth a first glimpse for a satisfying answer to the question of self-identity. This is even more evident if one encounters the complexity dilemma of simple, however experientially grounded, answer "there is no I" being as much unsatisfactory as defining the self-sense in a reductionistic static way as something concrete—indeed, as some thing at all.

When one attempts to speak of the architectonics of the self, it is absolutely crucial, in my opinion, to mention the name of Vasily Vasilyevich Nalimov (1910-1997), a truly unsung hero of our time. In his numerous works, published in Russian, English, and German, Nalimov was tackling different issues all related to the basic question of science, existence, personality, and consciousness. A member of a Moscow mystical anarchist circle back in 1920s, ex-prisoner of Stalin's concentration camps, the last and lonely knight of the Eastern wing of Templars; a renowned mainstream mathematician and a physicists who worked in the laboratory of A. Kolmogorov; an influential transpersonal philosopher, a gnostic, and a truth-seeker, he shined throughout his life with profound intelligence, adamant will, and a commitment to knowledge, honesty, and freedom. In 1970s and 1980s, many years before Soviet people were able to learn about the West and its recent cultural trends, he was writing about such transpersonal authors as C. Castaneda, S. Grof, Ch. Tart, and K. Wilber; in a thoroughly fundamentalistic-atheistic society he was openly asking the questions of meaning, life, God,  the universe, and the Ultimate Reality—something that had long been forbidden in the USSR and, probably, is still unprecedented in the Post-Soviet countries. (For more information on Nalimov see, e.g., Wikipedia article, Eugene Garfield's web page, and Thompson, 1993.)

In his book The Spontaneity of Consciousness (Спонтанность сознания [Spontannost' soznaniya], 1st Russian ed., 1989/2nd Russian ed., 2007), Nalimov attempted to draw what he called  architectonics of personality or self. Now, in the Russian language the word personality (личность [lichnost']) has many meanings; and it can be translated to English basically both as a personality and as Self (in its broadest sense). Most certainly, Nalimov's probabilistic vision of language would require taking into account the total variability of the word's semantics.

Nalimov writes the following about the intention of the book in question:

In this work we want to focus on the problem of architectonics of the Self with the hope that this way the nature of the Self will appear before us as an ultimately accessible manifestation of reality—the manifestation in which reality discloses itself through ourselves. First of all, we will consider the Self to be a carrier of meanings, thus exploring its linguistic (semantic) nature.

We fully recognize that any attempt to build such a model of the Self includes not only and mainly knowing but rather not-knowing. The deeper and clearer we are drawing an image of the Self, the clearer the patterns of that which we do not know appear. Not-knowing is always richer than our knowing. Not-knowing—the not-knowing contours of which we can delineate—provokes us, makes us seek, makes us look at the World and our own being with wonder. In this wonder life becomes full of meaning. That which modern psychiatrists tend to call existential emptiness disappears.

Before we continue I should note that it is always very hard to describe views of a thinker of such high altitude and magnitude as V. Nalimov in a short essay. He was a strong proponent of postformal thinking (which he called a probabilistic vision); he was a founding father of the field of scientometrics; he developed a probabilistic view of language that includes both discrete and continual aspects; he tried to create a postformal panoramic view of the universe and consciousness so as to find meaning in the fact that there is something rather than nothing. In his writings he was dialoguing through books with Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Buddha, Christ, St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Popper (with Sir Karl Popper he actually exchanged correspondence), early Ken Wilber, and so on. In an oppressive state of the Soviet Union he was a liberated thinker, a free soul whose transtemporal and transspatial flight couldn't be held by physical or social restrictions and boundaries.

In my opinion, the best of his approach that we can take may not be the concrete ideas themselves but the span and the depths of the questions and problems he inquires into. In The Spontaneity of Consciousness he quotes Maeterlinck: "The greatness of a human being is measured according to the greatness of mysteries that perplex him or that make him surrender." (I didn't find the quotation as it is translated in English, so I translated it from Russian; the phrase in original Maeterlinck's language and the way it is translated to English can differ significantly.)

When contemplating such complex subject as what the actual meaning and structure of the Self is, I believe, it is absolutely crucial to adopt the most panoramic and integral vision one can, otherwise the attempts of knowing would be childish and reductionistic. In the spirit of this approach facing reality means facing its ultimate mystery and pure silent not-knowing which is the ultimate knowledge itself. Immanuel Kant said: "Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." Gazing at the stars and contemplating the depth within can bring nothing else but the state of profound awe and not-knowing, not-knowing that is self-liberating. I resonate a lot with this stance of Nalimov and most mystics, the perspective that sees and feels the universe as a constant unfolding of the Mystery.

The first Mystery that we encounter is the mystery of our own existence. Most people in the world go on in their lives ritualistically thinking and perpetuating the thought that what they think is what they are. In fact, as long as they continue ritualistically doing whatever they are doing without asking this profound question of who am I and what does it all mean in some ways they don't even exist. By saying that they don't even exist of course I don't say that they are zombies without consciousness, what I am saying is that they are not fully aware of their existence. Most of our adult lives we are running away from the very fact that we are here, from the fact that there is the starry sky above us and the moral law within us, we are numbing ourselves to our being. We constantly dissolve ourselves in our personalized me on, which is Greek for non-being, by habitually pursuing the games we learned to play and telling each others limited stories we learned to narrate.

The most obvious example of this running from one's own authenticity can be encountered in a therapist office (and actually in any occasion where there is an opportunity for a field of intersubjective resonance to arise). Sigmund Freud was one of the first to show that we are not what we rationally think of ourselves or even how we feel about ourselves, that there is much more in our personalities, in our selves hidden beneath the iceberg of that which we are used to be aware of. Further advancements in the science of therapy and healing demonstrated that most of our lives we live according to a matrix of experience that has been forming during the early and not-so-early years of our lives. In fact, our life is grounded in the illusory feeling of knowing, in a feeling that we know what our life is about with all its upsides and downsides. We think that this—whatever this that happens to be entering our conscious awareness—is what life is about. We constantly run in circles in the self-built corridors of our "known life" and recreate on multiple levels the limited story that we learned about ourselves and the world; and there is no space for not-knowing in this story. The basic mystery of existence is something that shatters our house made of cards and brings terror to our life because in our selves we are used to identify with a limited range of possibilities and experiential realities.

And then suddenly it strikes us that we are getting divorced three times in a row, that we keep losing friends and alienating people, that our beloved children don't want to talk to us, that we have cancer, that we are going to die today—and then, at the moments like this, we look into the face in front of us with awe and not-knowing-ness: who is this person in front of me, whom I have always thought I have known? At whom does this face look? Who am I, really?

Something else can happen that will disclose this basic gap between our conscious self and the overall self, between the relationships that we picture in our minds and actual totality of processes happening around us, involving us as participants and transforming us constantly, every minute, every second, every moment of Kosmic existence. A policeman takes a gun and kills ten innocent people in a supermarket; a schoolboy does the same at school. Anomaly arises in our minds; something tells us that we are not seeing a crucial aspect of reality and it is killing us or makes us anxious and we desperately want to wake up. As we are gradually waking up we look in astonishment at the unconscious processes, scripts, stories, and scenarios we were so used to follow, the patterns that constantly recreate and magnify suffering in us and others. The emerging sense of amazement and wonder brings us closer to the determination to become truly liberated, truly conscious, truly wise so as to participate fully in the festival of life and co-creation.

Every human being has a profound depth hidden in his or her consciousness and self. An old homeless person taking care of her pushchair with bandboxes and empty bottles that for months has been her last resort. An imprisoned oligarch who declined to leave the country because of his pride and dignity. A president who looks sicker and sicker with every year he is in power. A young university teacher who keeps wondering about her life while living in a dry academic environment. A psychiatrist who suffers more than some of his patients. A schoolboy who passionately fell in love with the Goddess for the first time. A detective who ruins his career because he can't stand corruption anymore...

The architectonics of the Self that I am talking about includes not only what we think of ourselves in our minds. We ourselves are a mystery. We are what we eat, we are what we talk, we are what we think, we are what we see, we are how we move, we are what we feel, we are the scripts we play, we are the light we shine, we are the darkness we emit, we are everything that happens in this particular manifestation of our individual being-in-the-world. Our self includes everything, from the birth to the death; it goes through time and space; it weaves together aspects of  Kosmic being and experience like wind gathers together clouds in the sky. We are the Witness and the Witnessed in its many ways of manifestation and interconnectedness.

Catching really big fish

If it were not for various states of heightened creativity and flow, there would be no underlying reason for starting this blog. In fact, this journal is rooted in altered states of consciousness. The very process of writing brings you into a different pattern of being and dialoguing with reality. If searching for heightened states in some ways can be likened to fishing, then this blog is devoted to catching really big fish. (For those interested in further exploration of this metaphor, I recommend a beautiful book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch.)

The big fish of this blog is any states of profound appreciation and curiosity for whatever is arising moment to moment in the ocean of experience. The states in question correlate with radical deepening of one's own capacity to make sense of existence. Whether existence makes sense or not seems to depend upon qualitative features of the state of consciousness you are currently in. It is not just that an altered state helps you look at the same situation from a different angle, thus bringing, say, insight instead of despair; it is more likely that a change in functioning of consciousness helps to (partially) construct a different occasion as it literally enacts a new worldspace. A worldspace always has an array of features attached to it; and one of those features can be a degree of whether (and how much) I feel my existence makes sense or not.

This is not simply a shift in subjective (mental or emotional) processes of assessing the world, for (as it became clear in the 20th century) dynamics in consciousness corresponds with dynamics in the objective brain and behavior. Any shift in the pattern of subjective functioning correlates with some change in the objective brain state and other components of the overall organism system (such as endocrine regulation and so on). Furthermore, as shown by research, if plugging into an altered state is done repeatedly over a long course of time (e.g. in longterm meditation training), this may even lead to morphological change in the brain structure (in case of meditation there is evidence for increased cortical thickness [Lazar S. W. et al, 2005]).

Thus, there is something intrinsically and crucially real to the very fact that we can cultivate a habit of plugging into (and co-creating) certain domains of experience (by tapping into various states of consciousness). If we habitually tap into meaningful modes of being, we actually affect our biology. (And our subjective attitudes can do both good and harm; for instance, a recent study [O’Donovan A. et al., 2008] has shown that dispositional pessimism may contribute to telomere shortening, which increases risk for disease and early mortality in post-menopausal women.) This also influences the quality of our interaction with others, thus helping to engage in a more healthy kind of relationships with our sociocultural environment.

Epistemologically, in the course of perceptual microgenesis we, the subjects, do not just reflect a pregiven world, the objects; in broad terms, we actually co-construct the stream of objects while similtaneously being co-constructed ourselves (through, for instance, self-reflection, our relationships with others, and even food that we eat) as we're naturally immersed into the vast fields of our sociocultural environment. It is worth mentioning that Ken Wilber speaks of this construction process as of tetra-construction, because such a process always involves a matrix of subjective, objective, (intersubjective) cultural, and (interobjective) socioenvironmental dimensions—and not just the good 'ole pure subject and object dichotomy. (Of course, these constructed matrices seem to behave as resonating fields of various degrees of complexity, flexibility, and structure that may be more or less crystallized through conditioning and reinforcement.)

Ironically, by the 21st century we've become extremely adept at both individually and collectively deconstructing our flows of experience into the sense of dullness and despair. In some sense, these socially-reinforced habits of deconstruction, depersonalization, and derealization are our constructions, too; this understanding makes them objects of our awareness, which is important in order to use those as a means to fulfilling our dreams rather than enforcing nightmares. This might be a propitious time for bringing more mindfulness to the patterns of being that we construct in the dynamic multilevel system of our existence so as to enable a space of more creative ways to making sense of whatever it is that we are.