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poetry
October 2009 
Soul, Self, & SelfNature (soul post)
Posted on Dec 25th, 2008
by 
I-P
I-P
Soul Post
So you might remember that there is such a thing as a healthy culture ritual called the " Individual-Personal check-in" which involves 5 "reports" by each participant (one in each of the 5 venues of Individual-personhood) on what happens to be up in those venues--in the sense of what degree of sick or healthy culture is going on in each of them. The ritual is Ideally one in which at least two people participate but for demonstration and other purposes, I also seem to have adopted that form in certain blog posts here and elsewhere. My last post here in this vein was a "neighbor post' in which I reported sharing some thoughts about "gender and adulthood" at a community meeting here at Twin Oaks.
Another venue of Individual-Personhood is something I describe as the "Soul" or "Social-Religious venue", which has to do with healthy coming-together with others in terms of world-views in general and "Ultimate things" in particular. "Ultimate things" here relates equally to philosophies such as atheism (in which case the ultimate thing is physical death, and "soulful" relating to another means relating to them in the light of that presumed finality) and to any other philosophic or religious assumptions or beliefs. The Idea is to try to engage with others around such topics in a way that facilitates mutual respect, learning, growth and perhaps even some degree of tentative consensus. In practice, this kind of thing requires at least some degree of an "everybody has a piece of the Lie and the Truth" attitude , as this allows folks both to uninhibitedly engage disagreement and at the same time avoid competitiveness and rigid dogmatism. Such a mood is of course rather difficult to reach maintain in practice, which I am sure is one of the reasons people tend to avoid engaging each other around such subjects.
But the vital necessity of learning how to have such a discussion in this venue, is clear for me in the general fact that people maneuver in, and order their world based on their world-views (whether or not their real view is always the same as what they publicly profess) and to the extent to which we live in a shared world, radical disagreements about ultimate things are either going to be constructively engaged in a way that can lead to greater understanding and real cooperation, or they just become the motives for coercion, manipulation, or outright wars of one form or another..
So I happen to be engaged in such a "Soul" dialog with a person called Samatman who I met when he was visiting Twin Oaks. Samatman is very interested in founding a community based on the idea of what he calls the "Shared Self" and on what he calls "Shared Self Practice" which, in my experience of it, focuses on a certain breathing practice. His world-view seems to be inspired in large part by his understanding of physics as well as by his encounters with the teachings and person of Meher Baba and others.
Anyway, we have been engaging in discussions with the Idea of possibly finding some common ground in our world views as a basis for perhaps founding a community together based on some co-created synthesis of his shared self Idea and my whole "healthy culture" thing.
Immediately into our discussions of these issues though, we ran into the difference between his Idea and emphasis on "Self" and my own idea of "SelfNature", as a conception of Ultimate Identity. SelfNature (which it is sometimes more useful to refer to as "NatureSelf") is for me the ultimate "fruit" of which "Individual-Personhood" is the "Flower" (the "Tree of Life" being in some sense the rest of the "plant"). For me the Idea of SelfNature expresses the fundamental togetherness of the subjective (Self) and the objective (Nature), in the way that the idea of Self does not, and so the sticking point in Samatman's and my dialogs seems to stem chiefly on this issue of identity a lot of the time.
Recently samatman lent me the book "God Speaks" by Meher Baba, as a way of facilitating our mutual understanding of each other and I wrote the following to him in response to reading the first 4 chapters:
To Samatman,
so I don't see that it is true (good, beautiful, alive) to believe that "the evolving consciousness of the soul attains its full development in human form" as Meher Baba says, since I think it is precisely through the transcendence of the "human form" and "Human Identity" (and of "species-identity" in general as a separative Identity-Politics), and its replacement with something like Individual-Personhood, that the process of true "development" or "evolution" can begin. I think the whole of "human exceptionalism" and "pride" in the human form, even in the relative sense implied in the "Great Chain of Being" idea, involves a form of separative inegalitarian alienation that prevents living friendship and healthy mutuality between relatively distinct variations on the Theme of SelfNature.
I think that the sense of species hierarchy itself is something that comes from a failure to realize and affirm the ultimate togetherness of SelfNature , since it would seem to imply that that which seems closer to "Nature" is somehow further from some form of "Self" conceived as other and superior (to Nature). I think this assumption of separation and superiority (even, as sometimes happens, when the accent and superiority is given to "Nature" rather than "Self") is actually a conceit of the separative ego which has no real understanding or conscious experience of anything but primary alienation and apartness. It is this egoistic alienation, this mispercieved impression of primary apartness, that is projected on inner/outer experience and leads to the kind of "ranked distinctions" involved in the so called "Traditional view" (which view is, I think, more a function of relatively recent agricultural and in-egalitarian mutations of human culture and cognition than anything truly normative in human culture).
It occurs to me that perhaps another way of saying this (in terms closer to Baba's) is that the "souls" perceptual association with/as a given form of existance is different from the the egos cognitive one-sided attachment to a factional identity. The Soul (or, to be more consistant, the "Soul-Body") in a certain sense "delights in" (and in a certain sense "is") the full continuum between the particular and the general, between the "variation" of particular body and the "Theme" of SelfNature. The Soul is, in other words, fond of togetherness and of the paradoxical togetherness of togetherness and apartness. It likes both Self and Nature, and likes (and in a way ,is) both multiplicity and unity equally because its ultimate consciousness and longing is for the Spirit that manifests through and beyond both multiplicity and unity, beyond even SelfNature/NatureSelf. This delight of the Soul in the means as well as the end is because it knows that it is only such paradoxical delight that will ultimately attract That which is equally beyond both Means and End. it is almost the essense of what the soul is. It is the dissociated (disembodied) ego, on the other hand, that is the "sourpuss" that is always trying to rigidly impose one-sidedness and permanently subordinate one side of a coin to the other. Such a one-sided ego can't dance (by "dance" I mean something like "negotiate paradox"), while the soul is almost the joy of dance itself.
Any way without a paradox-embracing soulfull life-logical form of cognition, the ego must rule and apartness, apartheid, caste must emerge as primary (both in religion and in social order) in a way that they never would if the true paradoxical togetherness of Self and Nature (of SelfNature/NatureSelf) were perceived, conceived, affirmed and realized. What I suspect has happened in India as well as in other "civilizations" is that prevalence of the trauma of factional, war-induced hierarchical social conditions of caste and rank (over any preexisting conditions of "primitive" equality or community) is echoed in a cosmology and Identity politics that at least strongly lends itself to misinterpretation in terms of alienation, estrangement and onesidedness...I think such one-sidedness is implied in the concept of unilateral identity relation in which the Metaphysical Self "absorbs" or includes Nature in a way that subordinates the later (the same onesidedness is of course equally manifest when this condition is held, as in some forms of materialism for example, to be reversed).
SelfNature can only manifest in Entity-Experience when Entity-Experience reaches the "genericly-specific" and so paradoxical level of Identity that I would describe, not as "humanity" but as "Individual-Personhood" (or something very like it). I think the Identity-politics of Individual-Personhood is an example of the kind of paradoxical, togetherness that is in harmony with Soul (perhaps I should say with "World-Soul") and in terms of which this Soul as the Entity-Experience of connected individuality can best ultimately Manifest SelfNature and find its ultimate consummation (and perhaps rebirth) in its trans-formative encounter with Spirit and Ultimate Freedom (which I contend transcends, SelfNature, Entity-Experience and Identity Itself). Well was a bit of a mouthful, but I hope it is at least not a misleading mouthful. Probably, gesturing at Spirit with words is always going to be misleading...
So, for these and more reasons, regarding self and other primarily (or even secondarily) in terms relatively factional identities, as defined by species, kingdom, gender etc, seems precisely the opposite of what is needed to make room for the realization of our Shared SelfNature as Individual-Persons...Putting "Self" (no matter how allegedly different from "self" or ego) as the top of such a one-sided hierarchy is part of what facilitates the one-sidedness and the Hierarchy. The Idea of SelfNature avoids this and, without completely rejecting hierarchy, allows for its paradoxical subordination to equality and mutuality in a way that makes real Friendship and Community between and within all Being(s) possible...
Having said all of this, I think it at least possible that Meher Baba would agree with this interpretation of things and that his presentation of the situation is just a result of his dealing as best he could with the language and tradition which he inheireted. I base this in part on his statement that "God cannot be discussed, explained etc..but only "lived". I feel almost exactly the same about "Spirit". Perhaps we could commune on that level and come to terms about the map leading to that Living experience by filtering out the alienating biases of sick culture in various parts of the world. At any rate, I havent read the rest of the book, so perhaps I'll be the one who ends up changing their language and/or understanding...so far though, this is where I am at with it...
Looking forward to discussion,
I-P
I haven't got a formal reply to this by Samatman but the point for this post is just to report on the nature and quality of how the conversation is being conducted. From this point of view I thinks it is going very well in that, whether or not we will ever fully agree on these things, we seem to be becoming friends and learning and growing as a result of our engagement with each other.
This is probably due in some part to the fact that be are not only sharing world-views but also rituals. In our last meeting, for example, Samatman shared with me his "Shared Self Breathing Practice". The fact that I could not help but immediately modify it into a Shared SelfNature breathing practice" didn't seem to bother him and it certainly didn't prevent me from being very grateful for his helping to engender what will probably become a new ritual of Healthy Culture. Far from being frustrating, I think the whole experience lead to each of us understanding the others ideas and experience better. Similarly, in our meeting before this,I shared with Samatman the non-virtual version of the Individual-Personal check-in ritual, which he participated in and which I think like-wise began to stir up ideas in his mind about how to adapt that ritual to his own assumptions about Self.
So far, my engagement with Samatman as a Soul,that is in the context of worldviews and considerations of ultimate things (but also as a whole Individual-Person), seems to be going well. I think it's progress probably depends on the extent to which we can continue regard ourselves and each other in terms of what we share (or what we believe we share) rather than in terms of what we do not. This is tricky because the identity we believe we ultimately share is not the same identity! Still, my hope is that something (namely "Friendship") is happening as a result of our encounters that transcends dogma, and that will eventually help heal whatever rigidities and fear-based motives and (mis)understandings that exist within and between us.
We'll see...Listening...considering...
PS..
"Considering" has recently joined "Listening", "Supporting", and "Challenging" as a "co-implicated" aspect of the relating dynamic i call "Living Friendship", which I now consider a four-fold rather than a three-fold thing..,hopefully more on this in another post...
So you might remember that there is such a thing as a healthy culture ritual called the " Individual-Personal check-in" which involves 5 "reports" by each participant (one in each of the 5 venues of Individual-personhood) on what happens to be up in those venues--in the sense of what degree of sick or healthy culture is going on in each of them. The ritual is Ideally one in which at least two people participate but for demonstration and other purposes, I also seem to have adopted that form in certain blog posts here and elsewhere. My last post here in this vein was a "neighbor post' in which I reported sharing some thoughts about "gender and adulthood" at a community meeting here at Twin Oaks.
Another venue of Individual-Personhood is something I describe as the "Soul" or "Social-Religious venue", which has to do with healthy coming-together with others in terms of world-views in general and "Ultimate things" in particular. "Ultimate things" here relates equally to philosophies such as atheism (in which case the ultimate thing is physical death, and "soulful" relating to another means relating to them in the light of that presumed finality) and to any other philosophic or religious assumptions or beliefs. The Idea is to try to engage with others around such topics in a way that facilitates mutual respect, learning, growth and perhaps even some degree of tentative consensus. In practice, this kind of thing requires at least some degree of an "everybody has a piece of the Lie and the Truth" attitude , as this allows folks both to uninhibitedly engage disagreement and at the same time avoid competitiveness and rigid dogmatism. Such a mood is of course rather difficult to reach maintain in practice, which I am sure is one of the reasons people tend to avoid engaging each other around such subjects.
But the vital necessity of learning how to have such a discussion in this venue, is clear for me in the general fact that people maneuver in, and order their world based on their world-views (whether or not their real view is always the same as what they publicly profess) and to the extent to which we live in a shared world, radical disagreements about ultimate things are either going to be constructively engaged in a way that can lead to greater understanding and real cooperation, or they just become the motives for coercion, manipulation, or outright wars of one form or another..
So I happen to be engaged in such a "Soul" dialog with a person called Samatman who I met when he was visiting Twin Oaks. Samatman is very interested in founding a community based on the idea of what he calls the "Shared Self" and on what he calls "Shared Self Practice" which, in my experience of it, focuses on a certain breathing practice. His world-view seems to be inspired in large part by his understanding of physics as well as by his encounters with the teachings and person of Meher Baba and others.
Anyway, we have been engaging in discussions with the Idea of possibly finding some common ground in our world views as a basis for perhaps founding a community together based on some co-created synthesis of his shared self Idea and my whole "healthy culture" thing.
Immediately into our discussions of these issues though, we ran into the difference between his Idea and emphasis on "Self" and my own idea of "SelfNature", as a conception of Ultimate Identity. SelfNature (which it is sometimes more useful to refer to as "NatureSelf") is for me the ultimate "fruit" of which "Individual-Personhood" is the "Flower" (the "Tree of Life" being in some sense the rest of the "plant"). For me the Idea of SelfNature expresses the fundamental togetherness of the subjective (Self) and the objective (Nature), in the way that the idea of Self does not, and so the sticking point in Samatman's and my dialogs seems to stem chiefly on this issue of identity a lot of the time.
Recently samatman lent me the book "God Speaks" by Meher Baba, as a way of facilitating our mutual understanding of each other and I wrote the following to him in response to reading the first 4 chapters:
To Samatman,
so I don't see that it is true (good, beautiful, alive) to believe that "the evolving consciousness of the soul attains its full development in human form" as Meher Baba says, since I think it is precisely through the transcendence of the "human form" and "Human Identity" (and of "species-identity" in general as a separative Identity-Politics), and its replacement with something like Individual-Personhood, that the process of true "development" or "evolution" can begin. I think the whole of "human exceptionalism" and "pride" in the human form, even in the relative sense implied in the "Great Chain of Being" idea, involves a form of separative inegalitarian alienation that prevents living friendship and healthy mutuality between relatively distinct variations on the Theme of SelfNature.
I think that the sense of species hierarchy itself is something that comes from a failure to realize and affirm the ultimate togetherness of SelfNature , since it would seem to imply that that which seems closer to "Nature" is somehow further from some form of "Self" conceived as other and superior (to Nature). I think this assumption of separation and superiority (even, as sometimes happens, when the accent and superiority is given to "Nature" rather than "Self") is actually a conceit of the separative ego which has no real understanding or conscious experience of anything but primary alienation and apartness. It is this egoistic alienation, this mispercieved impression of primary apartness, that is projected on inner/outer experience and leads to the kind of "ranked distinctions" involved in the so called "Traditional view" (which view is, I think, more a function of relatively recent agricultural and in-egalitarian mutations of human culture and cognition than anything truly normative in human culture).
It occurs to me that perhaps another way of saying this (in terms closer to Baba's) is that the "souls" perceptual association with/as a given form of existance is different from the the egos cognitive one-sided attachment to a factional identity. The Soul (or, to be more consistant, the "Soul-Body") in a certain sense "delights in" (and in a certain sense "is") the full continuum between the particular and the general, between the "variation" of particular body and the "Theme" of SelfNature. The Soul is, in other words, fond of togetherness and of the paradoxical togetherness of togetherness and apartness. It likes both Self and Nature, and likes (and in a way ,is) both multiplicity and unity equally because its ultimate consciousness and longing is for the Spirit that manifests through and beyond both multiplicity and unity, beyond even SelfNature/NatureSelf. This delight of the Soul in the means as well as the end is because it knows that it is only such paradoxical delight that will ultimately attract That which is equally beyond both Means and End. it is almost the essense of what the soul is. It is the dissociated (disembodied) ego, on the other hand, that is the "sourpuss" that is always trying to rigidly impose one-sidedness and permanently subordinate one side of a coin to the other. Such a one-sided ego can't dance (by "dance" I mean something like "negotiate paradox"), while the soul is almost the joy of dance itself.
Any way without a paradox-embracing soulfull life-logical form of cognition, the ego must rule and apartness, apartheid, caste must emerge as primary (both in religion and in social order) in a way that they never would if the true paradoxical togetherness of Self and Nature (of SelfNature/NatureSelf) were perceived, conceived, affirmed and realized. What I suspect has happened in India as well as in other "civilizations" is that prevalence of the trauma of factional, war-induced hierarchical social conditions of caste and rank (over any preexisting conditions of "primitive" equality or community) is echoed in a cosmology and Identity politics that at least strongly lends itself to misinterpretation in terms of alienation, estrangement and onesidedness...I think such one-sidedness is implied in the concept of unilateral identity relation in which the Metaphysical Self "absorbs" or includes Nature in a way that subordinates the later (the same onesidedness is of course equally manifest when this condition is held, as in some forms of materialism for example, to be reversed).
SelfNature can only manifest in Entity-Experience when Entity-Experience reaches the "genericly-specific" and so paradoxical level of Identity that I would describe, not as "humanity" but as "Individual-Personhood" (or something very like it). I think the Identity-politics of Individual-Personhood is an example of the kind of paradoxical, togetherness that is in harmony with Soul (perhaps I should say with "World-Soul") and in terms of which this Soul as the Entity-Experience of connected individuality can best ultimately Manifest SelfNature and find its ultimate consummation (and perhaps rebirth) in its trans-formative encounter with Spirit and Ultimate Freedom (which I contend transcends, SelfNature, Entity-Experience and Identity Itself). Well was a bit of a mouthful, but I hope it is at least not a misleading mouthful. Probably, gesturing at Spirit with words is always going to be misleading...
So, for these and more reasons, regarding self and other primarily (or even secondarily) in terms relatively factional identities, as defined by species, kingdom, gender etc, seems precisely the opposite of what is needed to make room for the realization of our Shared SelfNature as Individual-Persons...Putting "Self" (no matter how allegedly different from "self" or ego) as the top of such a one-sided hierarchy is part of what facilitates the one-sidedness and the Hierarchy. The Idea of SelfNature avoids this and, without completely rejecting hierarchy, allows for its paradoxical subordination to equality and mutuality in a way that makes real Friendship and Community between and within all Being(s) possible...
Having said all of this, I think it at least possible that Meher Baba would agree with this interpretation of things and that his presentation of the situation is just a result of his dealing as best he could with the language and tradition which he inheireted. I base this in part on his statement that "God cannot be discussed, explained etc..but only "lived". I feel almost exactly the same about "Spirit". Perhaps we could commune on that level and come to terms about the map leading to that Living experience by filtering out the alienating biases of sick culture in various parts of the world. At any rate, I havent read the rest of the book, so perhaps I'll be the one who ends up changing their language and/or understanding...so far though, this is where I am at with it...
Looking forward to discussion,
I-P
I haven't got a formal reply to this by Samatman but the point for this post is just to report on the nature and quality of how the conversation is being conducted. From this point of view I thinks it is going very well in that, whether or not we will ever fully agree on these things, we seem to be becoming friends and learning and growing as a result of our engagement with each other.
This is probably due in some part to the fact that be are not only sharing world-views but also rituals. In our last meeting, for example, Samatman shared with me his "Shared Self Breathing Practice". The fact that I could not help but immediately modify it into a Shared SelfNature breathing practice" didn't seem to bother him and it certainly didn't prevent me from being very grateful for his helping to engender what will probably become a new ritual of Healthy Culture. Far from being frustrating, I think the whole experience lead to each of us understanding the others ideas and experience better. Similarly, in our meeting before this,I shared with Samatman the non-virtual version of the Individual-Personal check-in ritual, which he participated in and which I think like-wise began to stir up ideas in his mind about how to adapt that ritual to his own assumptions about Self.
So far, my engagement with Samatman as a Soul,that is in the context of worldviews and considerations of ultimate things (but also as a whole Individual-Person), seems to be going well. I think it's progress probably depends on the extent to which we can continue regard ourselves and each other in terms of what we share (or what we believe we share) rather than in terms of what we do not. This is tricky because the identity we believe we ultimately share is not the same identity! Still, my hope is that something (namely "Friendship") is happening as a result of our encounters that transcends dogma, and that will eventually help heal whatever rigidities and fear-based motives and (mis)understandings that exist within and between us.
We'll see...Listening...considering...
PS..
"Considering" has recently joined "Listening", "Supporting", and "Challenging" as a "co-implicated" aspect of the relating dynamic i call "Living Friendship", which I now consider a four-fold rather than a three-fold thing..,hopefully more on this in another post...
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