Ending Your Internal Civil War

[Lou Gold]

I honestly don't know if this belongs here or in the Metaphysical Arts section but it seems so relevant to the extremes of our modern world and so relevant to the coming publication of Bernardo's book on Jung that I'm placing it here. Alan Watts, who does the reading, considers it as possibly Jung's greatest short treatise.

[Eugene I]

This is good, but to me this approach is still very personal and religiously biased. I personally found a different way of dealing with these issues. A while ago when I was a religious person I was struggling with these things - forgiveness, acceptance, personal judgements, blame, guilt, sin, evil etc. But I found that those all are mostly rooted in looking at things and taking them too personally. Over time my science/engineering profession taught me to take a different perspective and look at things objectively and impersonally. I love my engineering projects but they are not personal for me and my attitude towards them is objective - I do not care to forgive or blame, condemn or accept them if they don't work as expected, but I do get very critical towards them and exercise objective judgements, evaluate their merits and drawbacks, find the problems and fix them. It's always a challenge, but it is always rewarding to bring the ideas and inventions to products and to perfection, it's an art of creativity. So, over time I learnt to deal with people and life situations in a similar non-personal way. I have no problem making judgements as long as I stay non-personal and objective. In addition, with dispelling the illusion of separate self, Buddhism helped me to free from most of the personal and egoic emotional content when dealing with people and inter-personal situations.

But the bottom line is - there are two approaches to life in a broad sense, in both spiritual and practical perspective: the dualistic/self-oriented and non-dualistic/non-self-oriented. Accordingly, there are spiritual traditions, views and consciousness structures that fall into one of those categories. For example, Christianity is a self-oriented tradition, wile Buddhism is not. It would be wrong to say that the self-oriented way is flawed or doomed (as some people tend to think). Is just a specific way and specific path of the development of consciousness with its own problems and struggles and with its own insights, experiences, learning and achievements. The non-self-oriented way similarly has its own issues and merits. For example, one of the differences between them is the strong personal attitude of the self-oriented way that brings a plethora of issues such as mental suffering and personal relationship problems. But, as Jung and other self-oriented thinkers and religious traditions suggest, there is a way to deal with these problems and there is a path leading to a more integrated trans-personal states where those issues become less acute and resolved to a certain extent. I'm still convinced that as long as the self-orientation remains, these issues will never be fully resolved. Yet most people still find this self-oriented life journey to be worth taking as it brings a rich variety of emotional experiences. On the other hand, non-self-oriented path is more sterile and lacks most of the personal emotional content, but instead brings a lot of different kind of emotional experiences related to intellectual, aesthetic and creative facets of life. It's less personal and less passionate, it is more refined and subtle, yet many people (me included) find it more satisfying. But at the end, it's all a matter of personal choice. Also, I think these path may converge at some point when the self-oriented path leads to such a degree of transpersonal state that it cease to be self-oriented anymore. But we can not generalize here since every individual path is unique and some may lead to complete dissolution of self-centeredness while others may not.

[Ben Iscatus]

Good stuff, Eugene!

[AshvinP]

This is good, but to me this approach is still very personal and religiously biased. I personally found a different way of dealing with these issues. A while ago when I was a religious person I was struggling with these things - forgiveness, acceptance, personal judgements, blame, guilt, sin, evil etc. But I found that those all are mostly rooted in looking at things and taking them too personally. Over time my science/engineering profession taught me to take a different perspective and look at things objectively and impersonally. I love my engineering projects but they are not personal for me and my attitude towards them is objective - I do not care to forgive or blame, condemn or accept them if they don't work as expected, but I do get very critical towards them and exercise objective judgements, evaluate their merits and drawbacks, find the problems and fix them. It's always a challenge, but it is always rewarding to bring the ideas and inventions to products and to perfection, it's an art of creativity. So, over time I learnt to deal with people and life situations in a similar non-personal way. I have no problem making judgements as long as I stay non-personal and objective. In addition, with dispelling the illusion of separate self, Buddhism helped me to free from most of the personal and egoic emotional content when dealing with people and inter-personal situations.

Can we really ever look at things objectively and impersonally? It seems to me that one of the main factors hampering the imagination of science for the last few hundred years has been the illusion that subjects can remain detached from the objects of their study. That illusion served a vital purpose and made possible all of modern technology, but as long as we hold onto it, there will remain an unbridgeable gulf between the domain of science and the domain of spirituality; the world of 'facts' and the world of meaning/values. We are at a time now when those domains need to be reconciled for science to progress in any responsible manner.

[Lou Gold]

This is good, but to me this approach is still very personal and religiously biased. I personally found a different way of dealing with these issues. A while ago when I was a religious person I was struggling with these things - forgiveness, acceptance, personal judgements, blame, guilt, sin, evil etc. But I found that those all are mostly rooted in looking at things and taking them too personally. Over time my science/engineering profession taught me to take a different perspective and look at things objectively and impersonally. I love my engineering projects but they are not personal for me and my attitude towards them is objective - I do not care to forgive or blame, condemn or accept them if they don't work as expected, but I do get very critical towards them and exercise objective judgements, evaluate their merits and drawbacks, find the problems and fix them. It's always a challenge, but it is always rewarding to bring the ideas and inventions to products and to perfection, it's an art of creativity. So, over time I learnt to deal with people and life situations in a similar non-personal way. I have no problem making judgements as long as I stay non-personal and objective. In addition, with dispelling the illusion of separate self, Buddhism helped me to free from most of the personal and egoic emotional content when dealing with people and inter-personal situations.

Can we really ever look at things objectively and impersonally? It seems to me that one of the main factors hampering the imagination of science for the last few hundred years has been the illusion that subjects can remain detached from the objects of their study. That illusion served a vital purpose and made possible all of modern technology, but as long as we hold onto it, there will remain an unbridgeable gulf between the domain of science and the domain of spirituality; the world of 'facts' and the world of meaning/values. We are at a time now when those domains need to be reconciled for science to progress in any responsible manner.

Eugene and Ashvin,

I really enjoy these exchanges between you two and learn much from them. My metaphorical take is that there are many paths and portals into the great mansion and, once inside, the sense of separation vanishes. Poof(!) and these either/or questions make no sense. Indeed, it may be that the lack of any sense of separation is the single best indicator of having arrived inside the mansion-or-hut.

YES, it a wonderful and necessary effort to find ways to bridge the science/spirit facts/values gap. My way would entail mutual respect, appreciation and devotion for each other.

[Eugene I]

It seems to me that one of the main factors hampering the imagination of science for the last few hundred years has been the illusion that subjects can remain detached from the objects of their study.

Exactly, subject-object detachment is a hallmark of dualistic science. And since science over the last centuries have developed within the framework of dualistic, and even more narrow - materialistic paradigm, it became associated with subject-object detachment. But it does not have to be that way, there can be perfect science without any reference to the subject-object detachment, but that would require re-defining the scientific method and that's a very different topic.

Can we really ever look at things objectively and impersonally?

I believe we can, although it is not easy for the things that are relevant to our individualities. We as humans definitely bear emotional patterns biasing (and often forcing) us to look at things subjectively, but this is where our innate freedom and ability to be non-conditioned by the content comes into play.

[AshvinP]

Can we really ever look at things objectively and impersonally?

I believe we can, although it is not easy for the things that are relevant to our individualities. We as humans definitely bear emotional patterns biasing (and often forcing) us to look at things subjectively, but this is where our innate freedom and ability to be non-conditioned by the content comes into play.

Are you not implying a duality if you can study an aspect of Nature without influencing it? Which is not to say we should stop studying Nature, of course, but that we should become aware of our participatory role in constructing the appearances of Nature when we study them.

[Eugene I]

Are you not implying a duality if you can study an aspect of Nature without influencing it? Which is not to say we should stop studying Nature, of course, but that we should become aware of our participatory role in constructing the appearances of Nature when we study them.

Study without influencing is an outdated formulation of the scientific method. What science really studies is the correlations and patterns in the phenomena of conscious experience and then, for the purpose of simplification, it abstracts the patterns under the study from the experiences and from the phenomena which influences are less significant. The phenomena of nature and their interdependences are so complex that we typically can not recognize and study the patterns without performing the abstraction and without neglecting the less significant influences of certain phenomena. But this is only an epistemological tool in the scientific method that bears no metaphysical significance, and it has nothing to do with metaphysical subject-object dichotomy.

[AshvinP]

Are you not implying a duality if you can study an aspect of Nature without influencing it? Which is not to say we should stop studying Nature, of course, but that we should become aware of our participatory role in constructing the appearances of Nature when we study them.

Study without influencing is an outdated formulation of the scientific method. What science really studies is the correlations and patterns in the phenomena of conscious experience and then, for the purpose of simplification, it abstracts the patterns under the study from the experiences and from the phenomena which influences are less significant. The phenomena of nature and their interdependences are so complex that we typically can not recognize and study the patterns without performing the abstraction and without neglecting the less significant influences of certain phenomena. But this is only an epistemological tool in the scientific method that bears no metaphysical significance, and it has nothing to do with metaphysical subject-object dichotomy.

That's why I am wondering why you claimed we can study the phenomenon of conscious experience "objectively and impersonally". We are always entangling our consciousness with the appearances when we study them. Surely science cannot be done in a no-self trance state.

[Eugene I]

That's why I am wondering why you claimed we can study the phenomenon of conscious experience "objectively and impersonally". We are always entangling our consciousness with the appearances when we study them. Surely science cannot be done in a no-self trance state.

Ashvin, I think you misunderstood what I was saying, and it is because these terms are indeed confusing. Entangling global consciousness into our worldview (which is one of the hallmarks of the non-dual way) has nothing to do with personal perspective. Conscious-centered does not mean personal-centered (although they are often confused with each other). For example, if you take a Buddhist position, it's entirely non-personal, yet it is conscious-centered and idealistic. Personal means self-centered - it's when we interpret and deal with things on the basis of their relevance to the perception of our "personal and separate self". Non-personal is not self-centered. But both standpoints can be materialistic or idealistic, and in the materialistic case objective and non-personal also means disregarding consciousness and its content. The term "objective" now becomes really confusing, because if one is conscious-centered, his position should be called "subjective" rather than "objective", yet in a way it is also "objective" as the opposite to "personally subjective". It's a terminological mess because the traditional meanings of these words in the semiotics of Western languages are no longer relevant to the new paradigms.