There has been much idle chatter about "paradigm shifts" since the 1960s - when Thomas Kuhn wrote his influential study about the way that science advances: in inspirational jumps and revolutions, rather than through the pedestrian, painstaking, over-logicked fashion that people used to pretend.
With all the chatter, an essential jump that has been sitting there waiting to be jumped (so to speak) has been largely overlooked. It is a failure to follow up on the revolutionary discoveries of Sigmund Freud at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries - in his bizarre attempt to chart the "unconscious mind". Actually, Freud's is a mind-boggling and fruitless theory that has damaged at least as many lives as it has helped. It is based on a fundamental mistake: the fallacy that an individual mind has existence or integrity in its own right - that it can be mapped, diagnosed and "treated" effectively by appropriate scientific methods. Freud and his followers discount almost entirely the situation which the individual is living out in real time. The whole approach is deeply mistaken, even though the concept of unconscious wishes and motivations is radical and important.
The jump we have to make, is to recognize our unfolding pattern of human life as essentially a co-production. So the relevant "unconscious" is about actual moves within the co-production, within the space of interactions wherein all our verbal and non-verbal messages are being exchanged. It is within this interactive space, that the hopes, dreams, promises, betrayals, self-deceptions, and redemptions - the whole set of hidden agendas that enrich our lives - are actually embodied.
It follows, that the relevant "analysis" has to be in terms of this pattern of interactions, and not in some alleged private mental space of each separate individual. Such an analysis is already going on - but we don't recognize it as that - for instance in the more intelligent film scripts, the interactive patterns are an essential ingredient in driving the plot. We see this in such films as "Groundhog Day", "Casablanca", "As Good As It Gets", "Rebel Without a Cause", "Chinatown", "Overboard" and ten thousand others.
This is also known as the world of the sub-text. And the reference to drama and screenplay also points up another key feature in what I call "the psycho-analysis of situations". Whatever is uncovered in the reflective or analytic process needs to be able to feed back in at the level of action, without interfering with the spontaneity of our co-creation on the ground. At their best, the insights we derive from analysis (from the films we have watched, the novels we have read, and our reflections on the adventures we ourselves have had) - all of these are keys for recognizing alternative pathways, that we had been unaware of in the earler run-through of that situation.
Through the sense of real choices, previously unrecognized, our participation in future situations becomes more adroit and more wise. And since this participation is a collective thing, we can give essential clues to each other, the better to weave our new and better story together.
This is simply a way of describing the field
of interactions - amongst co-present human beings, and between us
humans and our material environment. We are attempting a description - and a practice - that truly acknowledges the essential future-pacing which is the matrix
of all our relationship and all our activity. This future-pacing is
everywhere operative: whenever (as nearly always) we meet the world
with desires, intentions and commitments. These are the teleological
aspects that we bring to our encounter with reality. The material world
is disclosed to us in terms of whatever teleological aspects we may
import into every encounter.
It has been a bizarre side-effect of the era of scientific discovery that, at
the same time as it has progressively enhanced our powers of
manipulation, our emphasis upon material causality within the practical
domain has obscured the very desires, intentions and commitments that
have always and everywhere animated this scientific practice. The concept of "teleological
field" enables us to restore an essential aspect of self-awareness in
action: we can realize once again that our desires, intentions and
commitments are at the root of our engagement with everything. So we
shall restore our capacity to measure and integrate our impact on the
world around us - both the immediate personal environment, and the
wider social and material eco-systems.
The practical and
theoretical approaches I am inaugurating here offer a new opportunity to
start to address this strange disparity that has haunted the modern era
- the practical power science has given us, combined with the loss of
power to understand what we are doing. Now we have the chance to pursue
this life-saving enquiry in a progressive and systematic manner.
Yes, the term "abundance" is often
grossly misused. Sometimes it is the mindless acceptance of privilege
within the world global economy. (Yet, simultaneously, it is the denial
of the fact of privilege.) Sometimes it is
the pseudo-spiritual pretense that if we will "only believe" then the
universe will transform itself for us, into a cornucopia of good
things.
There is, however, another factor
in our relationship with the material world: the care and the
intelligence we are able to bring to our plant, animal and mineral
husbandry. There is, correspondingly, a hidden factor of abundance, in
the enhanced communication and rapport we can bring to our inter-human
contact, which can then be reflected across the human-nature interface.
This is the factor I refer to as "relational abundance".
Human beings are goal-seeking creatures, whose goals are often
surprisingly lacking in practical wisdom, and can also be severely
unco-ordinated. The failure of co-ordination is often in play within
our own mind-set as much as in the collective mind-set we create
through relationship activity in concert.
At the practical level, we are working with the
essential question: how can we give our wholehearted attention to our
interactions in the here and now, with honest recognition of what we
ourselves are contributing, and a commitment to being open to what is
being contributed by the other people present? This points to a different
quality of awareness from the prevailing scattered, semi-coherent
emotional and cognitive landscape we so often put up with - to give a
much higher level of coherence and effective synergy.
On another level, it
is an effective integration of multiple theoretical strands - that
includes the definitive reconciliation of current scientific method
with the "teleological" principles that were better
understood by Aristotle and the pre-socratic and mediaeval scholastic
philosophers. These principles, unfortunately, came to be radically mis-understood throughout the era of human endeavour that has bequeathed to us the modern methods of
science and technology. A seriously mistaken ideology undermined our capacity to understand what we were actually doing... with the powers unleashed by our progressively enhanced analytic and manipulative methods.
The seeming drabness of a lot of everyday interaction is a consequence of how much we are scattered, or self-divided, in the present moment. We dissipate our animal energy - either in a listless failure to find any real focus, or as energy that we fritter away in internal argument. And when we gather this energy, wholeheartedly, within a real-time focus we have the opposite effect: our person comes into sharp relief, as a presence, and a force to be reckoned with, for any of the other people in the field who are alert to this quality. This happens in emergency situations such as disaster or war; it is facilitated by the adrenalin of stage performance, be it dramatic or musical; and it also happens when people fall spontaneously in love.
One of our research strands is going to be a school for cultivating charisma - based on the principle that a small group can provide subtle feedback and steering to its various members, that makes it far easier to enter the Zone. So there is a mental gathering of forces and attention into the present moment, and we radically enhance the quality of our communication and connection. So we won't have to seek out a disaster, a war, or a romance that will shoe-horn us into the charismatic state: the complex pattern of our spontaneous energies within the small group can open up an alternative route, provided we deal sensitively and intelligently with the energies we are arousing.
With all the chatter, an essential jump that has been sitting there waiting to be jumped (so to speak) has been largely overlooked. It is a failure to follow up on the revolutionary discoveries of Sigmund Freud at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries - in his bizarre attempt to chart the "unconscious mind". Actually, Freud's is a mind-boggling and fruitless theory that has damaged at least as many lives as it has helped. It is based on a fundamental mistake: the fallacy that an individual mind has existence or integrity in its own right - that it can be mapped, diagnosed and "treated" effectively by appropriate scientific methods. Freud and his followers discount almost entirely the situation which the individual is living out in real time. The whole approach is deeply mistaken, even though the concept of unconscious wishes and motivations is radical and important.
It follows, that the relevant "analysis" has to be in terms of this pattern of interactions, and not in some alleged private mental space of each separate individual. Such an analysis is already going on - but we don't recognize it as that - for instance in the more intelligent film scripts, the interactive patterns are an essential ingredient in driving the plot. We see this in such films as "Groundhog Day", "Casablanca", "As Good As It Gets", "Rebel Without a Cause", "Chinatown", "Overboard" and ten thousand others.
The concept of "teleological
field" enables us to restore an essential aspect of self-awareness in
action: we can realize once again that our desires, intentions and
commitments are at the root of our engagement with everything. So we
shall restore our capacity to measure and integrate our impact on the
world around us - both the immediate personal environment, and the
wider social and material eco-systems.
The practical and
theoretical approaches I am inaugurating here offer a new opportunity to
start to address this strange disparity that has haunted the modern era
- the practical power science has given us, combined with the loss of
power to understand what we are doing. Now we have the chance to pursue
this life-saving enquiry in a progressive and systematic manner.