Immediate recognition here. You describe roughly the right hemispheric way of being in the world, being part of the place. Your six observations ring very true to me. This stood out: Endless complexity of thought seems grounded in a more stable configuration of feeling spaces. I don't think it is proto in the sense of primitive though. T…
Immediate recognition here. You describe roughly the right hemispheric way of being in the world, being part of the place. Your six observations ring very true to me. This stood out: Endless complexity of thought seems grounded in a more stable configuration of feeling spaces. I don't think it is proto in the sense of primitive though. To me it is the embracing, larger communication that permeates the place.
The word precise leaps at me as too easily translated as a form of focus. I feel the opposite is happening; a relaxing of focus that allows to come closer, allows more intimacy through large surface openness, not narrow, precise attention. In practice, precision is about proximation, not the theory of exactness. Hope this doesn't sound as a total paradox. Words are not suited for this.....
One more thing, I wondered if you have experimented with people drawing, painting, expressing their feeling in other ways than words? Colour, texture, sound, size, shape, movement....
Thank you for your reflections, Bertus! Responding from the bottom up…
Very definitely, various forms of artistic expression do express feeling in ways that go beyond words. One way I support that in fieldwork is for people to draw the state spaces they have described, and when they go into the drawing, more is revealed about the nature of that state. Another process I enjoy is improvising movement, sound & music, and theater. The key in both of these is to relinquish the hold of the thought processing and to enter the space of being the state, allowing it to express itself through your full embodiment of the drawing, the sound, the movement. I’m guessing in some ways this is what you are facilitating when you teach art, yes?
Now, about precision. Interesting how you became quite precise in your description, “a relaxing of focus that allows to come closer, allows more intimacy through large surface openness.” Here you have brought a clarity to describing a particular state of being that is very different from the state that comes to your mind with the word “precise.” Fieldwork is about bringing a precision to the reflexive observation of states of being such that these distinctions can be made more easily. We can observe with high resolution those states that are infinitely expansive just as easily as those that confine themselves to a grain of sand. This precision supports us in becoming aware of those grains of sand, for example, and inviting them to reveal their broader identities as well. Any state can be included in the process, all states are welcome, and it is this giving “voice” to a state that supports its restoration to a way of being that integrates with our whole self.
(And yes, words are ridiculously inadequate for the job of describing all of this. <sigh>)
Now, about right brain and proto. In fieldwork, we very definitely are shifting right-brain awareness to the foreground and employing left-brain precision as its servant, as Iain McGilchrist so thoroughly advocates in his books. As for what we are revealing when we inquire into the virtual materiality of our experience of feeling, I suspect this may be a feature of consciousness that far precedes the neocortex. Your articulation of the “embracing, larger communication that permeates the place” speaks to a fundamental being-ness that we modern humans have largely become distracted from. Robert Wolff’s Original Wisdom describes it well as it lives in the aboriginal peoples of Malaysia.
What fieldwork does and psychotopology integrates is to examine the inner structures of all ways of being including the full spectrum from the most cerebral to the most mystical and beyond in all directions. In examining how these experiences take shape, we get to learn more about how to be more skilled in moving toward those ways of being that call most provocatively to our souls. Lots more coming here about all of that. Thanks for being here!
Immediate recognition here. You describe roughly the right hemispheric way of being in the world, being part of the place. Your six observations ring very true to me. This stood out: Endless complexity of thought seems grounded in a more stable configuration of feeling spaces. I don't think it is proto in the sense of primitive though. To me it is the embracing, larger communication that permeates the place.
The word precise leaps at me as too easily translated as a form of focus. I feel the opposite is happening; a relaxing of focus that allows to come closer, allows more intimacy through large surface openness, not narrow, precise attention. In practice, precision is about proximation, not the theory of exactness. Hope this doesn't sound as a total paradox. Words are not suited for this.....
One more thing, I wondered if you have experimented with people drawing, painting, expressing their feeling in other ways than words? Colour, texture, sound, size, shape, movement....
Thank you for your reflections, Bertus! Responding from the bottom up…
Very definitely, various forms of artistic expression do express feeling in ways that go beyond words. One way I support that in fieldwork is for people to draw the state spaces they have described, and when they go into the drawing, more is revealed about the nature of that state. Another process I enjoy is improvising movement, sound & music, and theater. The key in both of these is to relinquish the hold of the thought processing and to enter the space of being the state, allowing it to express itself through your full embodiment of the drawing, the sound, the movement. I’m guessing in some ways this is what you are facilitating when you teach art, yes?
Now, about precision. Interesting how you became quite precise in your description, “a relaxing of focus that allows to come closer, allows more intimacy through large surface openness.” Here you have brought a clarity to describing a particular state of being that is very different from the state that comes to your mind with the word “precise.” Fieldwork is about bringing a precision to the reflexive observation of states of being such that these distinctions can be made more easily. We can observe with high resolution those states that are infinitely expansive just as easily as those that confine themselves to a grain of sand. This precision supports us in becoming aware of those grains of sand, for example, and inviting them to reveal their broader identities as well. Any state can be included in the process, all states are welcome, and it is this giving “voice” to a state that supports its restoration to a way of being that integrates with our whole self.
(And yes, words are ridiculously inadequate for the job of describing all of this. <sigh>)
Now, about right brain and proto. In fieldwork, we very definitely are shifting right-brain awareness to the foreground and employing left-brain precision as its servant, as Iain McGilchrist so thoroughly advocates in his books. As for what we are revealing when we inquire into the virtual materiality of our experience of feeling, I suspect this may be a feature of consciousness that far precedes the neocortex. Your articulation of the “embracing, larger communication that permeates the place” speaks to a fundamental being-ness that we modern humans have largely become distracted from. Robert Wolff’s Original Wisdom describes it well as it lives in the aboriginal peoples of Malaysia.
What fieldwork does and psychotopology integrates is to examine the inner structures of all ways of being including the full spectrum from the most cerebral to the most mystical and beyond in all directions. In examining how these experiences take shape, we get to learn more about how to be more skilled in moving toward those ways of being that call most provocatively to our souls. Lots more coming here about all of that. Thanks for being here!