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.

Andrew Lloyd Webber & JCS

Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar is one of the most beautiful and touching modern prayers that I know of.

Bosques de mi mente

Very beautiful, inspiring music video.

The musician whose music is featured in the video offers all his albums to download for free under the Creative Commons license.

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.)

Happy New Year!

Brian Eno, "How Many Worlds"

Thinking of a world and the light of the sun

And all the many lives that were ever begun,

Ever begun.

Our little world turning in the blue

As each day goes there's another one new,

Another one new.

How many people will we feed today,

How many lips will we kiss today,

If we wake up?

How many worlds will we ever see,

And how many people can we ever be,

If we wake up?

Thinking of a world in the light of the sun

And all the many lives that were ever begun,

Ever begun.

Interiors of consciousness are engaging exteriors

Even though this blog is presumably devoted to explorations of interiors of consciousness, at some point the so-called "interiors" start to include pretty much everything, for the phenomena in the exterior world start to touch something deep inside you. It happens when your self-identity transcends an exclusionary identification with a more limited perspective on yourself and the world and goes beyond into the worldcentric and even Kosmocentric kingdom of perspectives.

You spontaneously begin to discover universals that are shared among all human beings of any race, ethnicity, creed, sex, faith, and so on. You begin to realize that all sentient beings share the same basic taste of duḥkha—or uneasiness, disquietness, anxiety, soreness—which is the Buddhist term for the basic sliding condition of one's unknowingness about one's own exclusive preconscious attachments to certain subjects-and-objects interrelations in the overall stream of phenomena that flows through all domains of the experiential matrix. All experiences and all perspectives are impermanent in that they actually seem to be vibrating and dynamically changing currents of dialoging aspects of the Kosmos. And even the most stable ones, such as certain physical laws of the universe, are considered by such brilliant folks as Charles Peirce to be more or less stabilized habits evolved through aeons of cosmic evolution:

For Peirce, the entire universe and everything in it is an evolutionary product. Indeed, he conceived that even the most firmly entrenched of nature's habits (for example, even those habits typically called “natural laws”) have themselves evolved, and accordingly can and should be subjects of philosophical an scientific inquiry. One can sensibly seek, in Peirce's view, evolutionary explanations of the existence of particular natural laws. For Peirce, then, the entire phaneron (the world of appearances), as well as all the ongoing processes of its interpretation through mental significations, has evolved and is evolving. ("Charles Sanders Pierce" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

If you are unaware of the sliding nature of the phaneron (as we naturally are more or less most of the time), then you tend to attach yourself to this or that experiential leaf that is being carried by the seemingly chaotic current in the ever-pervading ocean of global awareness. You are preconsciously attaching yourself to the plenitude of your adaptive personae, to your constructions about your own identity, to your intuitions about what it is like to be your own self, to your current state (or dynamic systems of states) of embeddedness with this or that whirlpool in the great matrix (mātṝkās); and when this or that aspect, or perspective, on reality transmutates, with you being unable to consciously follow its transformation by transforming yourself, you experience dying and suffering and soreness and pain and grievance—and you might even become attached to this newly-formed state of condition once again, indefinitely.

But when you become increasingly aware of the sliding nature of the world of appearances, you cannot help but start experiencing profound compassion and care for each and every aspect of it, for each one of them is so aesthetically perfect, so ethically tender (cf. the meaning of sawubona), so structurally unstable that even a slightest glance at a phenomenon makes it move beyond itself into the next stage of transformation. Compassion is the foundational artistic tool with which the superconscious artist constantly paints new panoramic snapshots of being. It helps to preserve, to cherish, to nourish, and to prepare for further stages of transformation.

That's the thoughts that emerged during my acquaintance with the recent story of Aleksey Dymovskiy, a detective officer of Russian militia, who has single-handedly attempted to voice (to cry out loud, actually) his concern regarding corruption and catastrophic condition in one of the local law enforcement units of the Department of Internal Affairs by courageously posting two videos on YouTube in which he stated that he just "had enough" of local corruption, fabricated cases, and working in an extremely stressful environment without holidays, without being paid, and without any health care. (See also a Times Online article.)

Even though Dymovskiy spoke about the state of art in the local unit, it is no secret to anyone who lives in Russia that precisely the same points apply to virtually all the departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and militia (militsiya) in general. In St. Petersburg alone there has recently been numerous cases when militsiya members (of very high ranks) were caught at doing serious crimes (involved robbery and serial murders, not to mention the common practice of bribery that is widespread everywhere and became a cultural norm long ago). For instance, last year there was the notorious case of "black realtors" when some high-rank members of local militsiya were involved in murdering dozens of lonely people so as to sell their apartments (real estate prices in the major Russian cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow are extremely high—dozens and in many cases even hundreds times higher than the average income of an average Russian). In another case a criminal investigation department was found guilty of creating a widespread system of drug trafficking and distribution (which seems to be a common practice in Russia; the pandemic is systemic). Their name is Legion, for they are many.

Sadly enough, long time ago law enforcement system became the most feared seat of uncontrolled criminal pathology in the post-Soviet societies. Every day thousands of people all over Russia get abused, beaten, and killed in the streets by local patrolling militsiya whose vertical center of gravity seems to generally revolve around the opportunistic stage in ego development theory; red (power-driven) stage in Spiral Dynamics/Clare Graves's theory of values development; and preconventional stage of Kohlberg's moral development. In the psyche of a common Russian, any communication with militsiya is fulfilled with the fear for potential massive abuse. And all of it is just one, if all-pervasive, aspect of the ongoing sociocultural catastrophe in the Russian Federation and some other post-Soviet states.

Inland Empire

David Lynch is my favorite movie director; and INLAND EMPIRE is the only movie I've watched for a good dozen of times, always finding something that my consciousness had previously missed, always constructing new meanings, always challenging my own mind to attend to perfection of this and every moment.

This is the rare masterpiece that engages you as a spectator in the process of intersubjective co-creation of meaning and meaningfullness with a Rorschach blot test of seemingly chaotic kaleidoscope of primordial consciousness in background. It is an art of finding the ever-present Witness in the labyrinths of the individual soul, a kind of dialectical art that is worth silencing your ego for three hours. This movie dialogues with you; and you had better be its equal in the dialogue.

If you consider yourself aesthetically gifted, use this movie as a test; and the result of it will tell what's the actual worth of your aesthetics. Out of the dozen times of watching INLAND EMPIRE, I have watched it in a cinema for 4 times. Every time a half of the audience left the cinema after the first hour; and the other half stayed till the end, enthralled by irrational visions and joyfully crying because of the genuine hope and liberation the story unfolds.

I dare you to watch INLAND EMPIRE. If you're among those who prefer to keep boundaries between your ego and the art you observe, you will probably not make it to the end of the movie. You won't have an intimate encounter with the beauty, and you will miss one of the profoundest experiences you can ever enjoy in life. It is not a simple walk, it is a challenge (just as life is not all joy and pleasure), but successfully confronting this challenge bears fruits of self-liberation.

Chrysta Bell – Polish Poem

from the INLAND EMPIRE Original Soundtrack

I sing this poem to you...

On the other side, I see…

Shall you wait, glowing?

It’s far away, far away from me,

I can see that —

I can see that —

the wind blows outside and I have no breath,

I breathe again and know I’ll have to live

To forget my world is ending.

I have to live…

I hear my heart beat,

Fluttering in pain, saying something,

Tears are coming to my eyes —

I cry… I cry…

I cannot feel the warmth of the sun

I cannot hear the laughter

Choking with every thought,

I see the faces,

My hands are tied as I wish —

But no one comes,

No one comes,

Where are you?

Where are you?

What will make me want to live?

What will make me want to love?

Tell me… tell me…

I sing this poem to you… to you…

Is this mystery unfolding

As a wind floating?

Something is coming true —

The dream of an innocent child…

Something is happening —

Something is happening…