In the last two days I came down with a cold and lay in bed listening to some podcast from Krista Tippets radio show On Being from American Public Radio. I listened to interviews with the philosopher Alain De Bottom, the neuroscientist David Eagleman, the chief Jewish Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and his holiness the Dalai Lama. My fever helped me develop these translational or interdisciplinary ideas.
In his interview David Eagleman shared how our brain systems and networks behave like competing teams of rivals. Our brains’ multiple parallel systems conflict and compete to construct a view of reality. Our mind negotiates with the different parties to create a coherent experience, narrative, and explanation for our experiences. The brain is like a representative democracy with a lot of different parties or neuronal networks competing for power and control. The final vote of the parliament determines which party will control your action i.e. indulging in a craving and eating chocolate ice cream (some parts of our brains have evolve to crave the rich energy source of sugar) or to abstain from it because you are concerned about the negative consequences for your health. There are two main parties dominating the debate, the rational or long term rewards and emotional or short term gratification systems.
He continued to explain how our brain experiences the world through the lenses of multiple parallel systems and hubs of neuronal networks (e.g. emotional, rational systems, right/left brain, two different memory systems). The various hubs include parallel simultaneous realities of for example wanting to eat chocolate ice cream and forgoing the craving for the sake of our health.
The German biologist Jakop von Uexküll in the early twenties century observed how various animals pick up different signals from their environment. Bats rely on a different set of signals than a tick or a knifefish. He found that the surrounding physical environment is much bigger than the individual internal experiential world. Similarly we humans do not see or perceive the entire electromagnetic spectrum but only a narrow section of it. Uexküll defined the term Umwelt for our perceived reality based on our own sensory functions and limited perceptual capacity. Umgebung is the bigger reality or field that escapes our normal senses and ability to make sense of. We perceive only a small spectrum of the larger electromagnetic field and construct our own reality. We have many blind spots or very limited ways of perceiving reality. As individuals we experience different realities. A congenitally blind person won’t experience her blindness as blackness as we who see would imagine but as her own specific experience of the world. A synesthete hears colors or tastes shapes but to her this is normal. A color blind person doesn’t miss seeing colors because she has no other experience to compare it with. Everyone lives in his or her own reality or world.
Normality is a construct of multiple realities that come together to create some coherence about the joint world experience. In some ways we agree that my experience of red somehow matches your experience of red even so I might not be able to see red at all. Without the construct of normality there would be confusion and disagreement and we would not be able to function in our every day endeavors. Nevertheless normality is an artificial construct that overlooks the multiple individual realities of everybody’s unique experience.
Jonathan Sacks tells that religions have asked us: Can we see the presence of God in the face of a stranger? Religions say we have to love the stranger because to her we are the stranger.
In my mind and with the knowledge of Arnold Mindell’s process-oriented psychology or Processwork this begins with our own inner diversity and strangeness. What we most fear is the stranger in ourselves and in others because we know that we have to constantly facilitate our own inner team of rivals and strangers as we have learned from David Eagleman. Religions and the Dalai Lama see virtue in our ability to overcome our own “negative” forces and to exhibit tolerance towards strangers.
I think that virtue is not only to combat or tolerate the marginalized party or team in ourselves and in the world outside, but to love them as part of our own wholeness. Only then can we open up to the mystery of the outer diversity and multiple experiential realities. Learning to embrace in a unifying dance the different polarities in ourselves will help us to open up to diversity in the outer world. On the other hand the biggest mystery lies within ourselves and the team of rivals and strangers of the various parties of our own inner parliamentary democracy.
God or our Processmind is bigger than our individual parts. This unifying or Unitarian mind is more than our consciousness or identity. It is the experience of a transpersonal or “spiritual” state that transcends the usual experience of combating parties, energies and forces. Arnold Mindell’s second training is a set of practices that allow us to develop our own unique unifying dance that embraces the diversity of both our inner world and the outer world.
From many conflict facilitation schools we know that the antidote to community or interpersonal violence is conversation and listening; in other words: relationship building. An antidote to inner violence or distress is as well relationship building between, this time, between the diverging fractions of our team of rivals in our brains and minds.