Metacognition: Thinking About
Thinking
Lecture 6B: MORE ABOUT SPIRITUALITY
AND AN OVERVIEW-SUMMARY
Adam Blatner, M.D.
November 4, 2013: This is a supplement to the last lecture
of a six-lecture series on "Thinking About Thinking" given to
the Fall Session of the Senior
University Georgetown.
A Changing World
This lecture series has been looking at the way we think in
our changing world. We used to take thinking for granted and
attended instead to the kinds of science that explored what was
objective, out there. Now we are attending more to subjectivity,
what’s in here, and working towards sharpening our capacity to
notice and use the various types of illusion.
Some kinds of images and ideas are really just fine, as are some
myths, fairy tales, constructs we create for ourselves. I think
we’re approaching a time when people can explicitly know—be
aware—that we are making these myths up. It’s like pretending.
The point here is that we don’t have to pretend that we’re not
pretending in order to enjoy whatever we’re pretending. We can
know we’ve chosen to imagine various images, roles, etc. If they
work most of the time, fine. On the occasion they don’t work,
not having repressed our creativity allows us to shift gears.
It’s sort of like driving. We can assume that if all cues are
okay when we’re driving, we’re okay, but we’re alert to some
cues being danger signals, and even if they occur only 1% of the
time, we can rouse ourselves to respond with a move towards
safety. There are some jobs like this, too, hours and hours of
boredom interspersed with moments of terror—airplane pilots,
anesthesiologists, military guards. They’re trained for wise
responses in this 1% range.
But having an awareness that there are these 1% problems can be
very invigorating, keeping us awake rather than letting us slip
into hypnosis or slumber. That’s the next step in
consciousness-raising. Not to believe nothing—that’s too
worrisome; nor to believe uncritically—that’s too gullible. To
know that believing is a convenience—that’s something our
culture hasn’t recognized as necessary.
Multi-Modal
I noted in this series that thinking in its larger sense
includes feeling, intuition, imagining. These combine with
myths, popular ideas, your own thinking, to generate not only
some orientation to your world, but also your sense of self and
meaning. Indeed, meaning for most people bridges over into
spirituality.
So having talked about illusion, effective thinking, creativity
and play, social embedded-ness, and language, in this final talk
I’ll address spirituality.
ticulated fully.
Not that we need stop exploring. There are a million frontiers
of ignorance, and there’s no harm in pursuing this or that idea
and making breakthroughs. There is no harm in testing these and
finding that some are flat wrong, some are true only within
certain parameters. But the future continues to open up new
horizons we hadn’t anticipated, and that in turn throws all our
knowledge into the category of possibly relative or partial.
It’s okay. We’ve always done this opening to new horizons, and
as far as I can tell, we always will.
What’s foolish, now that we have expanded our research base in a
thousand ways, is the assumption that any philosophy, any truth,
any idea will be found to be ultimately, finally so—not likely
in our own lifetime or the lifetimes of many generations. We’ve
discovered as we open new horizons that for every door opened,
we discover a handful of other, often more basic questions.
This throws into a highlight the idea that we think we’re clever
in relation to how we used to think, but are unable to imagine
how folks might think about our clever thinking a century or so
in the future. On reflection, we’ve always done this; kids do
this about their younger years; but we now can realize that the
dream of ultimacy may be well beyond our capacity to know.
Psychology—the study of the mind—is faced with a number of
paradigms we have little knowledge of:
- what are dreams about? Does it make sense to dismiss
them as illusions of the mind?
- but then why do they seem so telling to that part of us
that wants to understand more?
- and even if they reflect the power of the unconscious
to generate meaning where there is only the experience of random
events, what then does that mean about our unconscious mind?
- From where do inspirations come? Great music, poetry,
scientific insights, mystical visions?
- What is the value in dismissing these if they can
better be put to use in our lives?
So, too, there are many frontiers of psychology that involve
positive expectations, faith, trust, opening to inspiration or
re-visioning—and the way these activities bear fruit, or seem
to! What’s going on here?
Is there such a thing as value in too much skepticism psychology
is so multi-dimensional that it fails to be able to be subjected
strictly to scientific methodology. Science is not the only way
to assess a towards this rapprochement between the pretensions
of scientific psychology and mystical religion.
The illusion from the last century is that science and religion
are two so-called magisteria, realms of discourse about what
topic. There’s politics, economics, pragmatics—how useful it
is—anthropology—and the ology means only study, not a
determination of whether something exists or not. The criterion
of measurability and tangibility is a very weak one, though for
a while popular in the 20th century.
Still for a while science in many people’s minds seemed opposed
to religion, but again that was when both were perhaps more
extreme in their claims. Many have since attempted to and felt
they had bridged the gap. This talk aims right in the middle and
assumes no necessary either-or conclusion must be drawn.
Converging Factors
In the 1950s through the 1980s many factors were
converging: First, in the early 1970s psychoanalysis was
declining and in the 1960s many, many schools of psychotherapy
sprang up. By the late 1970s there were hundreds of alternative
types of psychotherapy. See my papers about this history. There
were also offshoots that to varying degrees integrated spiritual
endeavors.
Second, there have been elements in psychiatry throughout that
have been more sensitive to spirituality, infusing chaplains’
training in the late 1960s, integrating more psychology
during that era, bridging over to Jung’s analytical psychology.
Jung broke with Freud around 1914. Jung considered mystical and
psychic experiences were certainly worth attending to, not just
dismissing. Freud wasn’t able to see that this was not just
giving in to what he called "the mud of occultism," but Jung had
a point: what is the occult other than depths of subtle
experiences that were similar to depths of the sub-microscopic
realm, or the astronomical realm, or electronic realm, or other
realms not immediately observable by the unaided senses. That’s
really all occult means—hidden. There’s a difference between
inaccessible to ordinary sensation and the judgment of
non-existence. Alas, early on Jung didn’t really build an
organization the way Freud did, nor make efforts to ensure
orthodoxy. But he did explore the interface between the uncanny
and the ordinary, and he respected spirituality.
Another influence that grew in the mid-20th century was the
influx of Eastern thought—yoga, Zen Buddhism, and other
religions, many of which were really more psychologies than
religion, in terms of the core teachings. When immigration rules
shifted in the later 1960, this culture accelerated.
Meanwhile, there were analysts and Christian clerics interested
in what the East had to offer, and they wrote books. Others were
more philosophical and looked for meaning as an organizing
construct, such as Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi
concentration camps. We’ll return to meaning further on.
Now should we underestimate the influence of LSD and other
psychedelic agents and the writings that were associated with
these experiences—this too contributed. Indeed, Jung’s
psychology—but not Freud’s—was the only one near able to explain
people’s experiences on LSD or other drugs. This continues to
grow slowly as a responsible trend, slightly, but the pressure
stays on.
All these met in the1960s along with Humanistic Psychology,
which examined not what rats or monkeys or babies may have done,
but what adult humans were capable of.
Reductionism, as I pointed out before, is the assumption that
more complex systems can be understood by first understanding
more simple systems. Reductionism tends to say thing like
nothing -but. Mind is nothing but nerves firing off. It doesn’t
realize that systems have their own qualities at every level
besides those on the lower level—so systems theory has tended to
replace reductionism.
As a result, in this last century, and more in the last
half-century, there has been an acceleration of the opening of
mind. The more different voices are heard, the more dialogue,
the more stimulation, the more creativity. The expansion has
been more than just additive, straight line, it has beeen
logarithmic, more like an upward sweeping curve—which I think
makes for a symbol for the time we are lucky enough to be living
through.
In fact, thinking blurs off into other categories, such as
social psychology and sociology, as I talked about in the 4th
lecture, or language, in the 5th lecture, or religion, in this
lecture. And as culture gets exposed to more different kinds of
religion what rises to the surface goes beyond the particulars
of the religion, but begins to reflect on themes they all have
in common. So let me offer some definitions here:
Besides cultural forms, religion tends to go through a number of
cultural filters that are problematical. First is the emergence
of consciousness, the way people think. Dare we recognize that
people thought in terms of paradigms that are two or three
stages back from today, but we still preserve their writings as
adequate if not sacred?
There’s also the way people of lesser consciousness tend to take
messages from higher consciousness and interpret them at their
own level of consciousness. A pickpocket at a conference of
saints will only see their pockets. So many teachings that are
meant allegorical are taken literally, for example. We must
recognize that people promoted to high rank and status and
sainthood may have been so promoted for political reasons,
because the people promoted were judged to be loyal to the ones
designating the promotion. It’s not unheard of. If that were so,
not all people thought of as holy or sainted or high status were
spiritually enlightened. Dare I say that? Just maybe.
The point is that religion may obscure or distort spirituality,
and as more forms of spirituality are entering into the
conversation, more people are reaching for what is common to
them all.
This ends up blurring over into psychology, sociology, language,
all the stuff we’re talking about and then again much more
beyond our conversation. Although we could say that psychology
extends to and interpenetrates everything, in terms of how we
interpret stuff, paradigms, world-views.
Trans-personal Psychology
Building on this historical perspective, it is notable that
a branch of psychology emerged that not only acknowledged
spirituality, but sought to make it a fulcrum for personal
development and, to some degree, psychotherapy itself. Around
1950 humanistic psychology emerged from the earlier tension
between behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Both earlier theories
were based on reductionism—if we can understand babies and
little children—in the case of psychoanalysis----or rats and
monkeys—in the case of behaviorism—maybe we can understand
people. Humanistic psychology started from the top down: No,
what if we recognize that humans are profoundly more complex and
we work with that complexity: what can humans do that babies or
children or animals do not do? Such as explore the
frontiers of art, poetry, meaning-making, even mysticism.
From this by 1960more people began to explore spirituality,
though most tried to transcend the prejudices of the religion of
their birth. From this came an interesting compromise. Even as
atheism was hitting its peak in some ways, so a balancing
cultural force of exploring something vaguely religious,
meditation. The influx of the influence of Yoga and Zen and
other Eastern religions is relevant here. First, let me say that
Eastern spiritualities are much more psychological and much less
dogmatic. Second, smart people could relate to or at least be
curious about these trends. Anyway, it’s a complex mix but out
of humanistic psychology came transpersonal psychology, the idea
that the mind participates in more than just reason. It promoted
intuition. It wove in a fair amount of Jung’s work, which had
been somewhat pushed to the margins by 1950s.
The psychedelic revolution helped bring Jung back, though,
because Jungian type psychology was the only psychology that
even half-explained the experiences a lot of folks were having
on LSD. Freudian and other psychologies had almost nothing of
value to offer. So a whole sub-field of psychology,
trans-personal psychology, opened up, starting around 1968. I
was at one of their planning meetings. I was just a resident and
in that sense, I was at the fringes of the cutting edge.
At the time, then general intellectual current enjoyed the
illusion of becoming illusion-free, as if that were possible. We
now know it is not. There’s a story about this on the internet.
One can seek to realize the illusory nature of this or that idea
only to fall into the illusion that one can live without
illusions. I’ve been thinking about this for some time and doubt
that anyone has achieved this, or that it is actually
achievable.
One can become increasingly aware, however, about the
co-existence of ideas, fantasies, thoughts, opinions, beliefs,
and the idea that they are all yet tentative, based on our
evolutionary understanding, limited by our minds. We can realize
that no truth that is beyond the trivial can be ar
Feminism
At this point I want to mention a very deep shift in
spirituality, especially in Western cultures: It has tended to
be assumed that God and holiness is male and then certain
allowances are made for the cult of Mary, but she better confirm
to the roles given. On the other hand, some esoteric workers
past and present say that at a certain age, past child-bearing,
there’s an increasing process of re-incorporating and
re-balancing male and female qualities in people of both
genders. Men need to stop being warriors and become more tender.
Women need to be less nurturing and be able to balance male
qualities. And so forth. It’s really quite complex and further
needs to be expressed through the near infinite variety of
individuality.
But the very idea of empowerment for women has been tearing up
mainstream religions, causing schisms, and so forth, and let’s
acknowledge that this re-balancing speaks to both psychology and
spirituality as well as sociology.
What’s going on here is that often women pick up on spiritual
truths in ways that are potentially useful to our species’
growing understanding, and men need to listen rather than try to
assert their own status by virtue of their genitalia. We’re
talking about a level of consciousness development that
surpasses gender. From Stanza 22 of the Gnostic Gospel of
Thomas, discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945—the same time
the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered to the northeast—:
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when
you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner,
and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female
into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the
female be female ... then you will enter [the kingdom]."
Jung had talked about this inner holy marriage of male and
female, and many people are writing about the need for a need
for the blurring or even elimination of the deeply-held sharp
distinctions of what men do and what women do. These
distinctions fit with language, with mind, with deeply held
paradigms.
Paradigm Shift
A paradigm refers to a rather deeply held and far-reaching
assumption in a culture or an era. It’s not a simple local
theory, but a world-view. Competitiveness is a pervasive
paradigm in contemporary culture, applying to school work as
well as to economics. It applies, alas, to international
relations. In a way the triumph of the West over Two World Wars
was good in some ways—being a loyal American and all, and hating
especially the Nazi persecutions and so forth—but it did
reinforce for a good long while that good guys win, even though
we almost lost, even though it was the sheer weight of our
productivity, manpower, the old general’s reply to how he won
battles—get there first with the most! But no, we
attributed our victories to merit: We deserved to win because,
well, because we were the good guys.
This was comforting, if not objectively true. It fits the mind’s
tendency to validate after the fact, to valorize, to make into
heroes, those who won. But the coming world as we are living
through it is requiring ever-more that we learn to be
diplomatic, to negotiate, that war is a thousand times more
expensive in every way than peace, that we can no longer afford
war.. Not that the powers that be will agree to this, but the
paradigm is shifting, that’s the point, and many many factors
feed into this.
This historical point again, like society and spirituality,
overlaps with thinking. Returning to the theme of spirituality
as psychological, we are recognizing many aspects of mind
besides the merely rational or conventionally scientific. Poetry
and mysticism is not entirely rational, but neither is it
childish. That’s the point.
So this last lecture in this series opens to the unconscious in
a new way, considers the possibility of experiences that are not
recognized as real by mainstream Western culture, but are
accepted as being of course real by much of the rest of the
world. Let us not be too quick to think that we are all that
civilized just because we’ve invented weaponry.
Mahatma Gandhi—Mahatma means great soul—was asked in the 1930s
by some reporter what he thought of Western Civilization, and
Gandhi-ji replied, “I think it would be a good thing.”
Civilization as it aspires to be is hardly what it is. It’s a
little bit more than two centuries ago, but not much. It’s our
terrible conceit and lack of humility that points to our
achievements with more pride than they deserve. Yes, they are
achievements. No, they are yet very far from what thinkers call
civilization. Indeed, some forms of world-view are strikingly
lacking, such as the modern view that we are indeed separate in
a meaningless universe, so might as well get what you can while
the going is good. There’s no sense of interdependence, that
we’re all in this together, you know, the stuff Yeshua ben Yusuf
—also known as Jesus—talked about.
I’m not talking about religion, except that there are many, many
forms of religion that have grown out of the deep sense that
there’s more to life than just getting what you can. But
religions are the products of people trying to get organized and
that process sometimes degrades what is believed so that the
lowest common denominator can participate. The recent move of
emboldened atheists challenge the worst abuses of religion, but
there are within and beyond religions many whose experiences
have taught them that there is more, yet. This more, yet is then
clothed in ideas, beliefs, rituals that are understandable to
the individual.
The Chakras
Anyway, in the olden days, in the mid-20th century—,
science was here and spirituality in the form of religion was
there and never the twain should meet—unless you were either a
fundamentalist or from south Asian Indian, in which case, duh,
they were never apart. Now that our ethnocentricity has softened
and people from India are not just viewed as all non-Europeans
as benighted, people are growing to recognize that their culture
has been thinking of the problem of mind as a non-divided
phenomenon for over twenty-five hundred years.
Much of religion in India is a folk religion, a religion of the
people, simple, for uneducated souls. But some of it is highly
refined, as in the best schools of theology in the West today,
only it’s been going on with them at the highly refined level
for two thousand years, and there’s like ten times the amount of
sophisticated writings than there are in the so-called
enlightened West.
With this preamble what I’m getting at is that when it comes to
mind they’re far in advance of us in many ways. They call it
yoga, and it’s about the mind and soul as much as the body. One
of their systems for thinking about this is kundalini yoga which
proposes seven centers of consciousness that can roughly be
associated with different nervous plexuses along the spine—and
these are called the chakras.
I don’t want to introduce foreign words and concepts but I have
to because in the West we don’t have any equivalents. We
have a rough equivalent for the lower chakras, but no
recognition of the existence of the higher ones. I’m building up
to a psychology of spirituality here. It's by no means the only
map of the journey, but it offers some interesting
perspectives:.
The first chakra at the base of the spine was associated with
behaviorism, conditioning, the recognition only one or two
centuries ago that there are these things called basic
motivationss, hunger, thirst, having to go to the bathroom,
stuff like that.
The second chakra reflects what I talked about in the fourth
lecture, that humans are deeply social, herd animals, like cows,
not loners like some few animals. So sex is channeled into
family and romance, and birth is channeled into belonging and
bonding of mother and child, and Freud began to explore these,
and others extended it.
The third chakra involves doing and the feeling of competence.
Alfred Adler noticed this. We not only want to be related, we
want to feel competent. We waver between feelings of
inferiority—it was Adler who introduced the term inferiority
complex—and try to over-compensate by proving how we’re
superior. The ideal, by the way, is to be helpful, to belong, to
be identified not with the self but the community—which
bridges over to the next higher state.
Moving up from the base of the spine towards the crown of the
head, the fourth chakra is the principle of inclusiveness.
It’s the recognition of the duty to kindness as extended to all
people and many animals. It’s what Paul meant by If ye have not
charity—love —ye are as a tinkling bell.
In spite of Gandhi’s message, a
distortion of this inclusiveness is what all the feel-good
do-gooders are trying to affirm by threatening to bomb
Syria—very third chakra—because they’re not inclusive enough and
mildly genocidal bad guys.
Now my point is that in the West we have imposed a gap between
love and God and we must then submit to God as to king, with
blind obedience. It is heresy to recognize that we too can
partake of God. Well, we have allowed some mystics to say this
and condemned other mystics to heresy, excommunication, and
sometimes death by being burned at the stake—which should be
recognized as torture, please note—for saying this. Nor were
Christians the only ones to do this—Muslims and others in
history have also persecuted visionaries—but it’s been
documented so much more in the West.
But south Asian Indians knew that there were higher levels of
consciousnes and built that into their spirituality—about which
there is so much and I am so relatively knowledgeable and also
ignorant that I will say little, except this:
There’s a level of consciousness that involves letting go of
conscious thinking. A really inspired preacher does this, lets
the spirit think through him. Charismatic worshippers also let
the spirit run free—there were a few Jewish tzaddiks—holy
men—who did this, but it’s more known as sub-cults within both
Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. It happens in some Muslim
sects too.
What is this dynamic of true inspiration—letting the spirit
speak? Mediums in South America, shamans in many
indigenous cultures, and also musicians, artists, dramatic
improvisers, all know this letting it flow.
You actually do this yourself when you loosen up and get
spontaneous. Sometimes a little alcohol helps.
On the whole, though, the West has been uptight, has valued
self-control, has insisted on everyone being on the same page—we
call it orthodoxy. It’s an old tradition. In India it’s expected
that everyone work it out—if they’re so inclined—most are
not—but there’s no heresy, either. Indeed, Hinduism as we call
it is not a single religion but innumerable ways of practicing
spiritual upliftment, with this guru or that, following more
this manifestation of divine unfoldment—this god—or that one,
sort of the way people in the west follow saints or
denominations.
But yoga has been the intellectual edge that has contemplated it
all—and not just with the head, but also with the heart, body,
etc. The west has separated soul-mind and non-soul body, which
is folly—but they haven’t made that barrier there.
Anyway, they recognize inspiration—that’s the point here. And
they recognize that cultivating inspiration is a worthy activity
for those who like that sort of thing. And there’s a growing
number of people who do in the west—these are the folks who are
wanting religion to be “relevant,” who want it to transform them
personally, and who are not satisfied with just going
through the motions and feeling the pleasure of belonging in the
camp of the righteous—which is just fine for most folks.
The Higher Chakras
I confess I know a little about these, but not well. I have
only lightly touched into 6th chakra, which for me was moments
of letting go, surrendering, not trying to know what I know.
Seventh chakra, I suspect, is beyond me in this lifetime, and my
own destiny or dharma is to help people get to 4th and 5th
chakras. If I could make a tiny contribution to that end, that
would be wonderful. If all I do is stimulate you, or stimulate
you to validate your grandkid, that's cool too.
Summary
So there’s a reaching, but it’s not clear what to reach
for. As God becomes more distant as space is recognized as being
a zillion times bigger than we used to think, the god within
becomes an interesting though vaguely heretical idea.
I’m saying that we’re living in a time when the psychology of
spirituality is quickly becoming a matter of fact as much as the
psychology of social bonding, the psychology of creativity,
the psychology of play. We’ve known about the psychology
of disease in a rather crude way, and have come to recognize the
psychology of folly, of the combination of ignorance andi
illusion—but these others are also psychologies and that’s what
this lecture series is about.
References:
Johnson, Kurt and Ord, D.R. (2012). The coming
interspiritual age. Vancouver: Namaste.
Kallen, Horace M. (1927). Why religion: New York: Boni &
Liveright.
Buildson William James. Varieties. Henri Bergson
ReManning, R. (Ed.)(2011). 30-Second Religion: the 50 most
thought-provoking religious beliefs, each explained in half a
minute. New York: Metro Books / Sterling / Ivy Press (UK)..
Smith, Huston. Why religion matters: the fate of the human
spirit in an age of disbelief. 2001. New York: Harper Collins.
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For comments, suggestions for revision or additions, email me: adam@blatner.com
